More Notes on Cultural Revival
In my previous post, I mentioned the significance of the Japanese Kokugaku movement to decolonisation. But it is part of a broader picture of cultural revival, a process which arrests the decline of institutions and the deracination and atomisation of communities, and rescues memory and tradition, training it onto the trellis of contemporary society. Today, I am dealing with it in relation to aesthetics, with an emphasis on architecture. The aim of the revival is to provide a sense of home, and a sens of achievement and upliftment. Revival is always a reaction to the erosion and erasure that professional elite skepticism, nihilism and novelty fetishism produces, but it cannot simply resuscitate dead things, nor endlessly repeat the parochial traditions of the past. It must find a way to bring out a continuity between the roots and the grand canopy of high culture.
What is now classical music (whether Western, Jazz, Indian, Carnatic, etc), always has certain lesser roots from which it draws influence and continuity. These are simple folk traditions, courtly traditions and religious ones. Commerce can also amplify certain aspects, but these are ephemeral. While many of my compatriots in the days of the rebirth of decolonial ethics and aesthetics at UCT attempted to return to black and African traditions, one ingredient they lacked was discipline. Embracing the European dichotomy imposed on our knowledge ecosystem by the Rousseau left-wing romance of the noble savage, they have emphasised passion and sponteneity over form and discipline.
While passion and emotion are essential and indispensible in the production of art, in order to create and preserve traditions, rules and styles, institutionalisation is essential. And for this, forms must be codified. There is a balance that must be struck, between the stuffy, reverent, jukebox formalism which has been ossifying the Western Classical tradition for the past century and a half, and the "just feel the music maaan" simplicity of those who mimic the hedonism and abandon of hippy spiritualism and reggae cannabis worship. This things will pass like any fashion, and many old traditions become vulnerable to erasure under modern conditions. What must be done, is to inject passion, fluidity and organic influence back into formalised structures, and to formalise and elaborate on lay traditions, with an eye to building a home for local traditions that aspires to higher, more developed forms. In this fashion, great and new art is created, which lasts in recognised currents, and survives by adapting to change.
Recently, there has been a turning happening in the West in this vein, and it is most visible in the discussion of its architecture. For almost a century, the prevailing trajectory of architectural taste was to attempt to create the most unusual and original shapes, and to run away as fast as possible from anything resembling tradition. After the Second World War, this impulse became so strong that no school would teach traditional building styles or materials, and the countries of Europe embarked on an aggressive destruction of their architectural heritage, destroying over twice as much of their inheritance as had been lost in the bombing raids.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtTaOEUH53Y
But starting under the recent Tory government in the UK, and under Donald Trump in the US, there has been a move towards attempting the reparation of a tradition of architecture which is not ugly. Trump has issued an executive order establishing aesthetic guidelines for federal buildings requiring that they be constructed in the neoclassical tradition. The Conservative government of the UK employed for a while the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton as an advisor on public housing - he firmly believed that it was ordinary people's right, not just to have a roof over their heads, but to live in something beautiful.
The Continent has also begun to return to traditional styles, as this Facebook group catalogs. This follows the rebellious return to tradition led of the Luxembourgian architect Leon Krier, the designer of Poundbury, a town in England designed from the ground up in traditional vernacular architecture, mixing residential, commercial and public spaces in an organic and community-centric fashion. As the link shows, even that awful leftist rag the Guardian is forced to recognise the benefits of Prince Charles's project.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ELqK7Smqig
While many people have learned to instinctively shun anything resembling tradition, on the grounds that it might resemble a nostalgia for a past they have been taught is irredeemably evil, the irony is that modern architectural aesthetics are largely the product of totalitarianism. The odd plastic, concrete, glass and steel monstrosities of the modern city, hated everywhere by everyone in equal measure except for architecture students, corporate managers and progressive elites, draw most of their foundational aesthetic ideas from Albert Speer, the Nazi architect, and La Corbusier, a French fascist whose works are some of the most aggressively ugly creations in the history of humanity, though nobody could accuse him of being unoriginal. This was a two-flank movement, by the fashionable anti-memory bureaucrats and the fact-fact-fact school of industrial design, enjoying an ugly utilitarian continuity from the Coketown Charles Dickens to the modern obscenity of Chinese megacities.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XopSDJq6w8E
A greater irony is that the people who shun tradition tend to be environmentalists - the new manner of constructing homes and office buildings, with its overabundance of concrete, its short shelf-life and the failure to generate any attachment or affection from those who inhabit these structures, leads to an unimaginable quantity of waste and expense. Traditional materials and techniques are far cheaper and far more durable, as the left wing Western elites are now pretending to have discovered for themselves (of course, the article still only uses examples of brutally cold and ugly modernisms, but one step at a time).
The mass uniformity and aggressive scale of fascist architecture, and the concrete-dominate fortresses of brutalism with the governments of the Soviet Union has created a certain unconscious aesthetic that everybody recognises as "evil", something that can be seen on the sets of dystopian sci-fi films and the sub-reddit "evil buildings". When you want to make something look hideous and inhuman, take from the 20th century. But in order to abandon the past as fast as possible, progressives have embraced the aesthetic of soullessness, plastic toys and evil fortresses. Of course, there has yet been nothing so ugly as the architecture of the European Union.
This was only part of a broader pattern of modernisation. Westernised academics tend to assume that the march of progress is linear (especially those who claim to be aware of and skeptical of this assumption), and consists of an abandonment of any tradition or art form older than 1945 (unless its exotic). Observing the extravagance of expense and the fragility of modern architecture, the superficiality and disposability of modern music, and the eschewing of anything permanent or eternal in morality or epistemics, one could be forgiven for likening the modern West with the desperate party binge of a suicidal musician in his declining years. It's a mass movement of cultural suicide, or perhaps a suicide orgy - the party life preceding self-sterilisation and a leap into the arms of oblivion. Of course, the West is in two minds about this, and slowly, a number of its people have been sobering up and realising the damage as the hangover dawns. In the English-speaking world Roger Scruton, Alasdair MacIntyre, Theodore Dalrymple and Peter Hitchens have provided a grand account of the immense deliberate vandalism of Western culture and institutions by its self-serving elites over the past 100 years.
While many people see them as being on the opposite side of the fence, I am thoroughly convinced that they are the same sort of people as the decolonialists - only they are not trapped in the pathological assumptions of Marxism, and have a long and detailed cultural history to draw from, whereas African (specifically Bantu) traditions struggle with the fact that modernism has eroded their traditions and their absence of a written language makes the well of culture they have to draw from for revival much shallower. Nevertheless, South Africa has produced several organic aesthetic traditions which some have used to expand on, and some which have drawn special efforts of preservation, usually most successful when hybridising colonial and native elements.
Ignoring for a moment the vast corruption involved, Jacob Zuma's opulent mansion in Nkandla is an interesting example of South African architectural revival. It brings together disparate elements, from traditional Zulu rondavels, to the middle-class "Portuguese-style" yellow-brick swimming pool areas, and touches of Victorian cast-iron railwork and Transvaal hunting lodge aesthetics. Designed around a cattle kraal, but with luxury amenities based on the aspirations of middle-class white South Africans, it becomes a truly indigenous phenomenon. Perfect, it is not, but it is nonetheless a fascinating example of something which has yet to come into its own.
Bolivia under Morales has seen a particularly interesting revival of native culture. What the revival entails, there as elsewhere, is in finding a place for ancient traditions and local aesthetics in the middle of institutions adapted to modern technology and economics. The most striking example, as usual, is the architectural. The Neo-Andean style of Freddy Mamani Sylvestre is unlike anything I have ever seen, at once opulent and mystical, and immediately recognisable as native in its aesthetics, fluent in its combination of Andean colour and geometry with the more decorative features of 19th century colonial interiors.
Ethiopia has also been returning to the vernacular, with several prominent architects like Fathi Bashier emphasising the aesthetic, environmental and ergonomic features of the old ways. Coptic Egypt has kept a vibrant autochthonous style intact while Western Protestants have descended into unbearably soulless modern dreck. Some nations need no political incentive to maintain traditions, and India still builds impressive classical structures into the 21st century. But some, who have had long periods of poorly defined modern identity (Bolivia), or cultural decline (England), often need to reinvent themselves. The history of European Revivalism is, much like other movements of cultural revival (eg, the British Folk Revival) a mixture of various trends. But foremost, to state the obvious, is the romantic attachment to heritage and history. National pride can end up coming hand in hand in genuine Restorative movements, like the first British Folk Revival, and the current Chinese Neo-traditionalism, but it appears to have a great deal of difficulty surviving in any environment of stigma. The second English Folk Music Revival in the postwar period had severe breaks put on it by the superstitious avoidance of anything that could be perceived to be excessive national pride. Consequently, it has been folded into American rock as a mere stylistic gloss, with deliberately shallow roots.
The reality of the West is that, in many spheres, the strongest cultural traditions, but they are American, and not European. There exceptions, like the mutated continuation of the ancient pagan solstice arc of Saturnalia surviving in the Christian Carnival traditions. Eastern Europe has on the other hand produced a revival centered on the Church, which has seen projects like the vaunted People's Salvation Church, which faces the usual accusations in the fight between secularists and large churches, which is the claim that the money is better spent now on the poor than on posterity. But at least in the East, posterity is starting to push back against "progress". Taking theological considerations to heart, the expenditure on extravagant religious art is not vanity but sacrifice - that money cannot be used for anything worldly, only the veneration of God.
The two sorts of cultural buffers which protect from the American cosmopolitan instance of Progress appear to be either the underdog status, or else a language barrier, which slows down the absorption of American cultural influence. England, being a former colonial power, and the dominant member in a multinational royal Union, has neither of these, and hence falls victim to the sorts of rampant cultural destruction which sound to most, utterly impossible. The ripping down of the Gothic architecture of Birmingham, and the annihilation of many splendors of old Exeter, detailed here in heartbreaking detail. And lest any lunatic show up to promote the spiteful hyper-rationalism of Le Corbusier, it is worth a reminder that such brutish plans gave rise to the destruction just described - and there are several angry responses to the effects of Corbusian high modernism.
However, at least in architecture, all is not lost. Traditionalists are still around, though they are fewer in number. Wikipedia interestingly offers a list of colleges which teach traditional architectural styles today, under the umbrella of "New Classical". The waning attachment to these styles was quite obviously the stigma attached to pride in tradition, and the zeal for "innovation" and "progress", probably nothing more complicated than that. The key to understanding these things, is that without institutions to pass on traditions, revivals remain mere fads. This accounts for the ephemeral flutter of the Edwardian revival, and the flurry of "movements" and isms of architecture and classical music in the 20th century, united only by the elusive notions of progress and innovation - the virtues of the Revolution. This dependence on institutions may well condemn the burst of hallucinogenic creativity of Sylvestre and Mamani in Bolivia to just such a fashionable, short life - the patronage of the ethnonationalist government of Evo Morales is over, replaced by a broad-spectrum coalition of more Western-minded politicians from Christian fundamentalists to trade-union socialists. The influence Neo-Andeanism shall or shan't have on the colleges of South America, only time can tell.
The simple recognition that perpetual revolution is not good or sustainable, might be all that is required to return to a loving affection for beauty and the past, or even just a more balanced and refined continuity with modern styles, which are not in themselves incapable of creating beauty, but have been consistently steered away from it because, to quote Gaetano Pesce; "In Germany, they were very close to defining beauty in the 1920s and 1930s, we were very close to the dark moment." His idea was to defend "individualism and difference", but in reality, ended up embracing the ugly, the cartoonish, and the unassimilable, born out of an allergic reaction to any high expression of objective beauty.
The slow eddies in the river of progress, which allow for venerable traditions to continue, seem to require a cultural buffer from American modernity. This is not the sort of thing that can occur in the Anglosphere. Attachment to architecture, musical and religious traditions which are fully rooted in the European tradition may well have a limited reach in the mixed polity of America. Bringing out widespread interest in and support for any high-cultural movement cannot rest as fully on European heritage as it can in Europe. England faces a similar, if more inescapable trouble - pride in native English culture always attracts accusations of sinister longing for the days of Empire. This is of course not true of the Scottish or Irish, whose rediscovery and maintenance of their heritage in the past century or so has met with no meaningful resentment or reluctance. Their air of underdog romance has in many ways defended them from accusations of chauvinism, much as it has for the development of a classical discipline in jazz.
It is perhaps obvious that after such a long decline in the Anglophone West, serious revival sought by traditionalists faces an uphill battle. The influence of modern American culture is too strong - any investigation of the nature of music colleges displays this - the prestige of Jazz schools, and their development of a deep and complex rival Classic tradition which centres harmony around the concept of chord changes, and places a higher degree of focus on rhythm, is currently a strong rival to the system of European Classical music, which is currently losing ground to it in the academy. Its continued prestige among the upper-class general public demonstrates the reach of this 20th century tradition. Its strong theoretical and memetic ties to rock, blues and hip hop music promise a longevity for these plebeian forms of the new American tradition, long may it live.
In many ways, this forms a counterpart phenomenon to the common use of traditional European folk music as a rooted influence to many classic composers. Especially interesting for the parallel of this root-branches metaphor, is the interest of composers like David Bruce, in the influences of European folk and electronic music (without devolving into either), and the current trend for the integration of hiphop rhythms into contemporary jazz, even at the highest level of jazz elitism.
Strangely, the classical world, known for being a stuffy and reverent affair, was not always so. It was a place of improvisation and of humour and extravagant show. Some modern musicians are bringing these elements back, but they are unfortunately seen as novelty acts instead of being accorded the veneration they ought to for reinvigorating the richest tradition of music ever to exist. The inventiveness of performers like Igudesman and Joo in subverting the stereotype of the classical musician as glorified jukebox is unfortunately rather uncommon. Improvisational concerts like that of Robert Levin are rare as hen's teeth. Frank Zappa, genius of humorous, showy and avant-garde classic-jazz fusion, called for revival and reform in the classical tradition years ago, but fell on largely deaf ears, to the institution's detriment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zlp4RqHgoOU&fbclid=IwAR3_CYTtl8pHni7LiLhUN6J3fa1ko2Z-QJYBe_0A16dMptP8yLwVkre7c5Q
The absolute height of the revivalist approach to art which I favour in the West is the work of Mitch Griffiths. Progressive though he may be in his political sentiments, his work has adopted the conventions of romantic symbolism and pre-Raphealite painting to create grand tableaus highlighting the tragic degradation of modern British and American society. Getting ahead in the fine art world when you favour representative art is tremendously difficult, dominated as it is by the ugly, the stupid and the conceptual. There is nothing prohibiting the combination of serious craft and high concept, but concept and politics has so dominated the modern art world that it is almost all that is left, and the bulk of those people who buy art are now accountants diversifying their clients wealth by investing in art with resale value.
The problem here is not so much that there is nothing to draw from. The greatest challenge is in instilling a healthy attitude among the institutions of higher education, which enable the institutional replication of complex practices, and have the power to confer prestige in a way no other institution in modern society does. What we choose to celebrate and emphasise is going to determine what thrives and what withers, and unfortunately, we must rely on the mot venal element of society (the academics) to provide its highest good. With any luck, they will make these lively virtues their new vice.
On all fronts, there is a need for a synthesis, of parochial traditions and ways of life, and high-flown aesthetic ambitions. This combined urge is on fine display, I believe, in both Freddy Mamani Sylvestre, as much as in the brief resuscitation of English traditions in the Edwardian England, and the root-and-branches system I referenced in European and American classic music traditions. Though the flavour of all these projects are so very different, I think that the core of it maintains - a need for an organic feedback system between common, parochial experiments, and a tradition and theory-driven reincorporation into a high tradition, which always respect the lay contributions to art.
But all of this is assembled to provide a contrast to the aggressive project of erasure and hateful chauvinism seen so often in postcolonial thought. It arises mostly out of resentment, a jealousy of the sheer scale of the European heritage. But overcoming this is not possible through destruction - if you have nothing to replace or place atop the old structures, all you will have is rubble. And a casual glance at the dismal, commerce-oriented aesthetics dominating African vernacular art and architecture in the deep South should put us to shame, dominated as it is by tourist-appeasing trinkets and soulless modernist edifices of concrete and steel. We have fertile soil, there is no excuse to have nothing to contribute.