Continuing with Fredric Jameson on the chasm between Earth and World, from "The Synoptic Chandler".

Heidegger's deployment of this opposition at the moment he touches on the art object as such points a way out of this dilemma. It is the materiality of the object, he tells us, the sonority of the language, the smoothness of the marble, or the slick density of the oil paint, that marks the part of Earth in it; while it is the semiotic features of the work, the meanings and meaningfulness - what is paraphrasable in the verse, the functions of the building, the object imitated by the painting - that indicate the part of World. What seems crucial here - and specifically Heideggerian — is that the opposition between Earth and World be understood as irreducible in the last instance, no matter how much each becomes implicated in the other, no matter how crushing the preponderance of one term in their struggle. Thus, the work of art itself, exhibited in that worldly place that is the museum, and drawn into a web of social and worldly relationships — those of sale and investment, interpretation and evaluation, pedagogy, tradition, sacred reference — must always somehow scandalously exceed all those worldly relationships by the ultimate and irreducible materiality of its earthly element, which cannot become social: there is a colour that cannot be made altogether human. In the same way, clearly, the work's emergence as a kind of aerolith in sheer space – a meteor from the void, taking a place, being measurable, weighing, being accessible to the physical senses — can never quite entitle it to full inert status as a thing among other things. Allegorically, indeed, this primal opposition in Heidegger’s aesthetic can be read as a refusal of fundamental philosophical dualisms while acknowledging the inevitability of their existence and persistence. The meanings of world suggest any number of idealisms in which reality is thought to have been successfully assimilated to Mind once and for all, while the resistance or Earth marks the resurgence of the various materialisms that try to stage their sense of the fragility of meanings in physical reality by way of meaningful words. The ontology that wishes to escape ideological imprisonment in either idealism or materialism can then only do so by foretelling the inevitable temptations of both and using them against each other in a permanent tension that cannot be resolved.

I will suggest, then, that world, from the Heideggerian perspective, be understood in different terms as History itself, that is to say, as the ensemble of acts and efforts whereby human beings have attempted, since the dawn of a human age, to bring meanings out of the limits and constraints of their surroundings. Earth, meanwhile, is everything meaningless in those surroundings and what betrays the resistance and inertia of sheer Matter as such and extends as far as what human beings have named as death, contingency, accident, bad luck, or finitude. What is distinctive about Heidegger’s proposal is the insistence not merely that these two 'dimensions' of reality are radically incommensurable with each other, and somehow unrelatable in terms of either, but also that philosophy, and following it, aesthetics, and perhaps even politics as well, must now find its specific vocation, not in the attempt to paper over the difference or to mystify it and theorize it away, so much as to exacerbate and hold it open as an ultimate situation of unresolvable tension. (I avoid the word 'contradiction', since it is so often wrongly felt to promise its own resolution in idealist fashion.)

This is the perspective from which the work of art emerges, not to heal this rift or even to assuage what is seen as an incurable wound in our very being, this gap between History and Matter, or World and Earth. Rather, the great or authentic works (for Heidegger's aesthetic, like aesthetic systems as such, necessarily includes a normative moment) are those whose vocation consists in holding the two incommensurable dimensions apart and in allowing us thereby to glimpse them simultaneously in all their scandalous irreconcilability: to grasp Earth or Matter in all its irreducible materiality, even and particularly there where we have been thinking about it in terms of meaning and human and social events: and to grasp World or History in its most fundamental historicities even where we have been assuming it to be inert nature or nonsocial landscape. Although its aesthetic relevance would have been utterly alien and repugnant to him, Adorno aptly captured the spirit of this alternation-in-tension when in another context he recommended that we constantly defamiliarize our philosophies of human history by rethinking them in terms of natural history, and demystify our positivistic impressions of natural history by thinking them through again in historicist and social ways. But in Heidegger, at least in these privileged instances among which the work of art is numbered, the alternation becomes a blinding simultaneity, both dimensions now momentarily coexisting.

Pp. 48-50

  ¶ 12:40 PM