Stasis, saturación cultural, pérdida de presencia

Abstract

We propose a comparison between two authors: philosopher and film theorist Stanley Cavell, and musicologist and philosopher Leonard B. Meyer. Both reflect from similar perspectives on recent general cultural transformations such as the atomization and saturation of cultural space, caused by the productive and classificatory activity performed upon it, as well as the degradation of interpersonal relationships. They relate them to a loss in intensity of the link of the Western civilization to its own present, cornered by an ever more dense past and by an ever more motionless future. The recent cultural and artistic productions manifest these effects. The coincidences and discrepancies between both authors show the distance between an “integrated” aesthete (Meyer) and an “apocalyptic” moralist (Cavell).