deja lu

A New York Times Bookends dialogue: James Parker and Pankaj Mishra ask "Why Do We Keep Resurrecting the Same Literary Literary Characters?", in reference to Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, Hercule Poirot, Doctor Who.

Parker: "Are we caught in a diminishing loop of derivative creativity, some kind of stranglehold of the secondhand? Have we wandered deeper into Eliot’s Waste Land — the fragmented panoramas, the “heap of broken images,” only now with more zombies — than the poet himself could have foreseen? Can it be that our highest form of cultural expression is the YouTube mash-up?"  He recognises the likes of  J.J. Abrams and Steven Moffat (Doctor Who since 2009, the Benedict Cumberbatch-Martin Freeman Sherlock Holmes)  as  "zanily gifted reorganizers and rewirers of material" but says that "the material, for the most part, is not theirs. They work in tropes, memes, brands, jingles, known quantities, canned reactions, market-tested flavors, whatever you want to call them."  

Mishra, after explaining what Sherlock and Bond signified in their original era in terms of British social-political consciousness, argues that "shorn of their historical context, sequels and remakes today seem no more than rebranding exercises in an age of socioeconomic crisis, widespread uncertainty and creative stasis. Unlike most novelists, those refurbishing James Bond or Philip Marlowe can count on a ready-made store of readerly understanding and good will....  Such tickling of the mass unconscious can be remunerativet too: Unfocused nostalgia has a powerful lure in postindustrial cultures that seem to have a recurrent present but few clear traces of the past nor an avid anticipation of the future."

They might have mentioned The Secret Life of Walter Shitty too, as much an inside-out travesty of the original as those terrible Sherlock Holmes movies. (The TV series is enjoyable enough).

“It’s 2013: I think we’ve come to grips with the fact that it’s damn near impossible to come up with anything new. I’ll be unabashedly clear that a lot of what I do is reconfigurations of older ideas put together into a more modern framework, but beyond all that, it’s really just about pleasing myself”--25-year-old producer Phil Canty, aka Morri$ - interviewed at FACT

I'm always startled when an actual young person comes right out and says something like this. Because I'm not sure even I believe that "it's damn near impossible to come up with anything new", I'm more concerned that a bunch of conditions and megatrends have converged to make that occurrence less likely, a situation made worse by intellectual fashions ("combinatorial creativity") that erode the will to do anything new, while assuaging any anxiety or guilt about recycling and parasitism.  So when an actual young person says something like that (c.f. the Amanda Brown quotes about post-creation) and without any handwringing or tone of despair, just more or less "that's how it is, that's how we be"  ...   wow.

But if there's anything that history shows, it's that all phases are temporary.... epistemes fade away or crumble quickly, they're displaced by emerging formations of sensibility....  This long moment of archivally saturated paralysis will break, surely...  It will, won't it?