Ezra Pound's Dialectical Vortex

'When Pound abandoned Imagism, around 1914, he did so noisily, and in the name of another doctrine, which he (along with Wyndham Lewis) named Vorticism. The trope in a Vorticist poem is the Vortex—although, as Moody rightly says, a Vortex is just an Image by another name. The key notion now is energy. (Pound and Lewis had very much in mind Filippo Marinetti’s Futurism, an artistic and literary movement that had a vogue in England shortly before the war. They affected to despise Marinetti as a showman, but they were, stylistically, his imitators.) “The vortex is the point of maximum energy,” Pound explained in BLAST, the magazine that he and Lewis produced, and that ran for two issues. “All experience rushes into this vortex. . . . All the past that is vital, all the past that is capable of living into the future, is pregnant in the vortex, NOW.” The cluster of associations triggered by the apparition of the faces—Odysseus’ descent into Hades, Dante’s visit to the Inferno, Persephone and Demeter—is present in the twentieth-century subway, but only for those who can see. “Swift perception of relations, hallmark of genius,” Pound wrote.'

(Louis Menand, "The Pound Error" from 6/9/08 issue of The New Yorker)

"The dialectical [vortex] is a [vortex] that emerges suddenly, in a flash. What has been is to be held fast--as an image flashing up in the now of its recognizability. The rescue that is carried out by these means--and only by these--can operate solely for the sake of what in the next moment is already irretrievably lost."

(Walter Benjamin, fragment from "On the Theory of Knowledge Theory of Progress", The Arcades Project)

The Caveman is You

"But the one thing you should not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY."

(Ezra Pound)

"Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century."

(Marshall McLuhan)

"The transition from capitalism to socialism means, according to Marx, 'the ending of pre-history' - the transition from the uncontrolled to the fully conscious development of mankind. To understand society in its final capitalist phase one needs a precise insight into the causality and interrelationships between the growth of the material productive forces and the social relations of production."

(Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labor: A Critique of Epistemology)

"We are saddled with a culture that hasn't advanced as far as science."

(Michelangelo Antonioni)

These ads are a biting and perceptive commentary. They are precise portraits of what is here called "postmodern living": the persistence of the pre-modern in the modern, of the pre-historic within history.