Old thoughts on the neverending New (and Neu!)

the shock of the new and the shock of the impossible are mysterious phenomena - because, you would think, simply by your experiencing it, the Newness would almost instantly evaporate - it would by definition be no longer new, it would seem increasingly familiar - something you were used to and had assimilated

likewise, simply by dint of existing, the quality of impossibility would immediately cancel itself out, becoming part of the realm of the possible and thinkable

but in fact that doesn't happen

the shock of the new can sustain itself quite a long time, through slightly differently inflected iterations of that newness

and moreover, even more mysteriously, if you hear something from the past that was once shocking newly / inconceivable / impossible, it still has that effect on a listener (or viewer or reader or...) even though all kinds of things have subsequently intervened and surpassed it - even though the art in question has been domesticated and become middlebrow or institutionalized

there's something about the breaking through into the unknown that permanently adheres to that work, continues to inhere to it

i really think it does and it's not an effect that relies on historical projection or mentally establishing the original context

it's a mysterious quality of the work itself

^^^^**********

 on Neu! imitators...

they can be entertaining enough, but at the end of the day, it's old Neu!s innit? 

whereas the original...

So how come alt-Neu! still sounds neu-er than nu-Neu?

The paradox of modernism - the Breakthrough, suspended for all time thanks to the 20th Century miracle of recording, recreates the original moment of emergence and insurgence each time you listen (or look, or read). Is somehow eternally new, like fresh-picked fruit flash-frozen.

Flaubert's Madame Bovary startled me awake, when I read it for the first time last year -  even though all its innovations have been long assimilated and rendered second-nature commonplaces in subsequent fiction.

(I also feel that the groups reactivating - if not quite reenacting  -  the breakthroughs made by other earliers, have evaded all the hard work that went into actually breaking through into the new / Neu!. Their undoubted youthful energy masks an idleness (an Idles-ness, even). They have started with the outcome of the process, rather than instigating an equivalent new-generative process themselves.