Novelty: A History of the New

by Michael North

If art and science have one thing in common, it’s a hunger for the new—new ideas and innovations, new ways of seeing and depicting the world. But that desire for novelty carries with it a fundamental philosophical If everything has to come from something, how can anything truly new emerge? Is novelty even possible?In Novelty, Michael North takes us on a dazzling tour of more than two millennia of thinking about the problem of the new, from the puzzles of the pre-Socratics all the way up to the art world of the 1960s and ’70s. The terms of the debate, North shows, were established before Plato, and have changed very little novelty, philosophers argued, could only arise from either recurrence or recombination. The former, found in nature’s cycles of renewal, and the latter, seen most clearly in the workings of language, between them have accounted for nearly all the ways in which novelty has been conceived in Western history, taking in reformation, renaissance, invention, revolution, and even evolution. As he pursues this idea through centuries and across disciplines, North exhibits astonishing range, drawing on figures as diverse as Charles Darwin and Robert Smithson, Thomas Kuhn and Ezra Pound, Norbert Wiener and Andy Warhol, all of whom offer different ways of grappling with the idea of originality.Novelty, North demonstrates, remains a central problem of contemporary science and literature—an ever-receding target that, in its complexity and evasiveness, continues to inspire and propel the modern. A heady, ambitious intellectual feast, Novelty is rich with insight, a masterpiece of perceptive synthesis.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

265 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Michael North is a Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature, The Final Sculpture: Public Monuments and Modern Poets, Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern, The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, and Henry Green and the Writing of His Generation, as well as many articles on various aspects of twentieth-century literature.

Reviews

[Katja Vartiainen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book, which I read way too quickly for my art blog, is really, really interesting. Already the notion that we do not have a a big discourse on the idea of novelty is almost funny in its absurdity. As a visual artist, I got easily into the newness in art part. It was great the anecdote of how this came to be a definition for modern art. Reading the science section, I had to push myself a bit. I will probably read this again. It is interesting to realize, how much Christianity is in the basis of our paradigms, more so, than the ancient Greek philosophers, which are to be said the womb of all Western/Northern civilization. Also this book proves how we simplify history, when there is always contradictory views to the prevailing paradigm. A good look into Darwin's evolution theory, Thomas Kuhn, the idea of revolution and what not. I was going to object that Warhol's Brillo boxes were not the first ready-made in art, but it was the Bicycle Wheel created by Marcel Duchamp, not the Fountain-pissoir as many think - though one could argue that the Bicycle Wheel is more of a sculpture having two elements attached, buuut the Brillo boxes were first serial art.
What I was looking for is Adorno's statement that the new in capitalism is a Utopian desire. You want something new, but you can never have what you actually want, because the instant new appears, it is like the present moment, it becomes the past. And this idea of newness seems to rule our world. At the same time nothing would evolve without the utopian idea of new, nothing would be searched for in science or in art.
I recommend.

[Robert Loss · Rating 4 out of 5]

Novelty: A History of the New is a remarkable book. Not only does it cover a large history succinctly, it does so in writing that is always clear and precise--a challenge given the philosophies covered here, particularly when it comes to modernism. I want to make sure I rep this book and North's work because I cite it frequently in my own book about newness and contemporary music. It was extremely valuable to me for its breadth of subject matter. North's framework of newness from a historical perspective boils down to the concepts of recurrence and recombination: one about time, one about form. The opening chapters are dead-on regarding philosophers and poets like Parmenides and Lucretius, the influence of Christianity, the Renaissance, and the French Revolution. To be frank, I found the middle chapters on science less interesting, but there's no disputing that Darwin and Kuhn are crucial to understanding modern conceptions of newness. The modernism chapters are fascinating since they recount ideologies in which "the new" was paramount and then, by the end of the century, ideologies which suspect or abandon newness.

My critiques have more to do with who and what has been left out, but that speaks in part to the massive scope of the book's subject. Questions of newness were surprisingly fundamental to ancient philosophy and, less surprisingly, the long, long trajectory of aesthetics; I wish there had been more about everyone from Plato to Kant. In the modernism sections, there might have been more attention paid to the connections between aesthetic and political revolution. I remember being less interested in the contradictions re: Pound and "make it new" than I was in Pound's work and the work of other early 20th century writers. (I'm working from memory; I don't have my notes or the book nearby.) I also remember wishing there'd been more about film, television, and popular music (my bias there) since these art forms, the new technologies they relied upon, and their status as both art and commodity transformed how we perceive newness--or, more precisely, perhaps, what we expect of it.

But again, that demonstrates a point which the book itself demonstrates: the more you look, the more the concept of newness expands. It touches nearly everything. In my own research, I found that novelty, newness, "the new," or even a non-corporatized version of "innovation" are less often explicit concerns in our discourse about various subjects and most often subtextual concerns of great influence. The ways newness shows up conceptually in writing and criticism about art, history, politics, etc. are vast and overwhelming. Slightly older sources are quite idiosyncratic (for instance, Harold Rosenberg's The Tradition of the New, which is a collection of various essays). Where to begin? I didn't begin with this book, but I wish I had. The most valuable function of North's Novelty: A History of the New is its creation of a historical framework, a way of simply getting hold of the topic across time and disciplines of thought and practice. If, like me, you're intrigued by the concept of newness for whatever reason--and in regard to any field or discourse--then this book, while more than introduction, is an excellent place to begin.

[Michael Meeuwis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely fascinating--I'd recommend this to everyone. The book establishes that novelty has a history; then shows how scant and difficult-to-access real (or authentic or unimpeded) newness actually is within this history. There are, the book argues, only a few concepts of newness, which repeat over and over again. Often what is new is not new at all--for example, newness as the recombination of existing elements, which the book traces back to Parmenides and forward to art debates of the 1960s. Indeed, those arguing for newness are often reactionaries looking for a newness that is in fact a return to an older, better state. Ezra Pound's phrase "make it new," something I'd heard from high school on to describe modernism, gets what I can only imagine will be its definitive reading here: North traces it to Pound's erratic translation of a French translation of Chinese writing, in which the phrase adorned an emperor's washbasin. Through readings like this, the book becomes the sort of thing that blasts awareness of something we sort of take for granted out of the bedrock of our not thinking about it--I can't imagine taking the "new" for granted after reading this.