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If you’re interested in writing about it, we’d be thrilled to feature your Substack post on our project’s resource page. Let us know what you think!
Heidegger refers to something usually translated as "the rift" (Der Risse ie the cracks), which is a fundamental (ahem) break between traditional culture and modernity, in "The Question Concerning Technology". His attempts to expose it and to revive culture are twofold: to expose the original meanings of terms that we use today eg that poetics meant "making" rather than subjectivity (and so he's out to "destroy" Kantian distinctions of thought and being); and furthermore, his etymological archaeology - or "excavated poetics" as you suggest - seeks to reveal the places where the deeper wound (or rift) between gods and men are reconciled. Do he sees poetics as ways of making visible again the "fourfold" character of Being, which includes visible and invisible dimensions and beings. Ultimately, he concluded that there was an inevitable "strife between earth and world", because humans focus their energies evermore upon materialism ie the false aesthetics of making pseudo-transcendence (eg money, and modern energy that is de-situated, "stored up energy" - ie technology). Rather than recognising the essentially poetic character of Being itself - since, as he suggests in various essays in the collection Poetry, Language, Thought, citing Hölderlin evocatively, "full of merit yet/poetically man dwells."
My understanding of this derives from my time as a graduate student in the department of architecture at Cambridge in the 1990s, where my teachers Dalibor Vesely and Peter Carl wrote at length about such problems as "Architecture and the Question Concerning Technology" (DV). Their work, and ours, was oriented more or less towards the potential revival of the remains of an ethical ontology of poetics; focused upon the fragmentary character of modern poetics, not only as a metaphor, but in terms of the actual ruins of urbanity where philosophical and architectural concern with ideas (eidos?) such as justice and difference might re-emerge from the chaos of the modernist rift-landscape - in the mind as much as in our cities and countryside: in the hope that the deeper dimensions of making might emerge again.
So, I feel as if we are somewhat circling the same break or rift! If you are at all intrigued by this I could direct you to some writing about this topic that emerged from Trumpington Street and Scroope Terrace - there are still some voices there that speak the old language eg Dr Tao Dafour, Sofia Singler. It's just 200m from Corpus. I've belatedly realised that the architecture school should have made common cause with Divinity decades ago, as we were both excavating a similar civic poetics I think. Not too late now perhaps? Never Too Late?
You might also be more directly aware of Romano Guardini's writing on Sacred Signs - plus his laments about modernity The End of the Modern World, and Letters from Lake Como? I don't believe he and Heidegger ever met, the latter abandoned The Church in favour of some kind of pantheistic pre-Christian Hellenism perhaps.
Anyway, you're onto something I think, and there was a lot of it about after WWI. Rowan Williams gets it I think, Catherine Pickstock too.
The other voice that Dylan Thomas is echoing is Edward Thomas I think eg resonances of The Glory in parts of the reverend's poesis...?
"Jones’s circle were discussing ‘the Break’ in the twenties and thirties, it probably having begun with the First World War (and been consolidated and completed with the Second)."
Yet Jones himself in the passage you cite situates its beginnings around a century earlier, being around the time Nietszche was considering what to do now that God is dead.
Modernity in the arts and as a way of thinking was certainly helped along by the carnage of the First World War and all the subsequent horrors, but was already well in place before then. The famous French Academy expo of 1910 featuring Cubists and the simultaneous premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring as well as Jarry's Ubu Roi signify a kind of official birth of modernism.
It's only in sleepy old England and Wales, as Wyndam Lewis lamented, that the Break with traditional culture seems much later.
But once it's understood that God is Dead (in the sociological sense more than anything, one's spiritual beliefs may remain unaffected) there's no turning back from modernism, whatever Cardinal Ratzinger might have thought.
For my money Under Milk Wood remains the greatest Welsh poetry in the English language (lamentably I don't know the Welsh tongue at all).
Attention all book lovers!
We're working on a project called "Serendipity Ulysses," where we’re offering ad space within the text of "Ulysses" itself—a fun way to blend literature with digital media. We’d love for you to add your link and join in! Check it out: https://sulysses1.substack.com/p/serendipity-ulysses-in-a-nutshell
If you’re interested in writing about it, we’d be thrilled to feature your Substack post on our project’s resource page. Let us know what you think!
Heidegger refers to something usually translated as "the rift" (Der Risse ie the cracks), which is a fundamental (ahem) break between traditional culture and modernity, in "The Question Concerning Technology". His attempts to expose it and to revive culture are twofold: to expose the original meanings of terms that we use today eg that poetics meant "making" rather than subjectivity (and so he's out to "destroy" Kantian distinctions of thought and being); and furthermore, his etymological archaeology - or "excavated poetics" as you suggest - seeks to reveal the places where the deeper wound (or rift) between gods and men are reconciled. Do he sees poetics as ways of making visible again the "fourfold" character of Being, which includes visible and invisible dimensions and beings. Ultimately, he concluded that there was an inevitable "strife between earth and world", because humans focus their energies evermore upon materialism ie the false aesthetics of making pseudo-transcendence (eg money, and modern energy that is de-situated, "stored up energy" - ie technology). Rather than recognising the essentially poetic character of Being itself - since, as he suggests in various essays in the collection Poetry, Language, Thought, citing Hölderlin evocatively, "full of merit yet/poetically man dwells."
My understanding of this derives from my time as a graduate student in the department of architecture at Cambridge in the 1990s, where my teachers Dalibor Vesely and Peter Carl wrote at length about such problems as "Architecture and the Question Concerning Technology" (DV). Their work, and ours, was oriented more or less towards the potential revival of the remains of an ethical ontology of poetics; focused upon the fragmentary character of modern poetics, not only as a metaphor, but in terms of the actual ruins of urbanity where philosophical and architectural concern with ideas (eidos?) such as justice and difference might re-emerge from the chaos of the modernist rift-landscape - in the mind as much as in our cities and countryside: in the hope that the deeper dimensions of making might emerge again.
So, I feel as if we are somewhat circling the same break or rift! If you are at all intrigued by this I could direct you to some writing about this topic that emerged from Trumpington Street and Scroope Terrace - there are still some voices there that speak the old language eg Dr Tao Dafour, Sofia Singler. It's just 200m from Corpus. I've belatedly realised that the architecture school should have made common cause with Divinity decades ago, as we were both excavating a similar civic poetics I think. Not too late now perhaps? Never Too Late?
You might also be more directly aware of Romano Guardini's writing on Sacred Signs - plus his laments about modernity The End of the Modern World, and Letters from Lake Como? I don't believe he and Heidegger ever met, the latter abandoned The Church in favour of some kind of pantheistic pre-Christian Hellenism perhaps.
Anyway, you're onto something I think, and there was a lot of it about after WWI. Rowan Williams gets it I think, Catherine Pickstock too.
The other voice that Dylan Thomas is echoing is Edward Thomas I think eg resonances of The Glory in parts of the reverend's poesis...?
Keep up the good work R.
"Jones’s circle were discussing ‘the Break’ in the twenties and thirties, it probably having begun with the First World War (and been consolidated and completed with the Second)."
Yet Jones himself in the passage you cite situates its beginnings around a century earlier, being around the time Nietszche was considering what to do now that God is dead.
Modernity in the arts and as a way of thinking was certainly helped along by the carnage of the First World War and all the subsequent horrors, but was already well in place before then. The famous French Academy expo of 1910 featuring Cubists and the simultaneous premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring as well as Jarry's Ubu Roi signify a kind of official birth of modernism.
It's only in sleepy old England and Wales, as Wyndam Lewis lamented, that the Break with traditional culture seems much later.
But once it's understood that God is Dead (in the sociological sense more than anything, one's spiritual beliefs may remain unaffected) there's no turning back from modernism, whatever Cardinal Ratzinger might have thought.
For my money Under Milk Wood remains the greatest Welsh poetry in the English language (lamentably I don't know the Welsh tongue at all).