Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (92 page)

97.
Adorno (1997: 29) says “radicalism itself must pay the price that it is no longer radical…. The more art expels the preestablished, the more it is thrown back on what purports to get by, as it were, without borrowing from what has become distant and foreign.” But it is not the loss of fashionableness that matters, or the danger of relying on the validity of earlier art traditions. There is no reason great artists cannot make great art in any tradition, whether abstractionism, expressionism, or whatever. But with the elimination of
Art itself,
no artists can make art, no matter what their style or fashion.

98.
The vast majority of contemporary non-European poets writing in Europeanized traditions have abandoned the traditional connection between poetry and music that still exists in their own cultures. For example, it is now normal to hear Modern verse in Chinese read like prose—a truly unaesthetic experience. The genuine Chinese poetry of the past was chanted, and still is by a few traditionalists. The same goes for Persian and Japanese poetry, but although in those cultures the chanting tradition is still very much alive for
classical
poetry, modern verse is read and typically sounds just as pitiful as it usually does in English. It is quite logical and appropriate to read most
Modern
verse as prose—that is really what most of it is—but this then entirely vacates the world of genuine poetry for our own time. The practice of reading poetry has been extended to pre-Modern verse as well, thus destroying even the traditional art in those cultures where it still exists. If some poets prefer to write prose disguised as poetry, that is fine, but one would hope that some other poets would notice and begin writing, and even chanting, genuine poetry once again to fill the gap. The fact that some Modern writers, such as Ezra Pound and Carl Sandburg, advocated singing or chanting poetry, or actually went so far as to attempt such performances, with embarrassing results, is irrelevant. Modern poetry had already become completely divorced from an accepted musical tradition and neither they nor anyone else could reconnect the two.

99.
After Strauss backed away from further movement toward atonality, he produced his greatest opera,
Der Rosenkavalier.
Szegedy-Maszák (2001: 250) rightly remarks, “Subversiveness or conservatism is a matter of perspective. The composer of
Elektra
was an avant-garde musician; that of
Vier letzte Lieder
was a conservative artist.” Yet from the point of view of the “big picture,” it does not really matter that
Elektra
was progressive, while
Der Rosenkavalier
was conservative; after all, both operas are marked by considerable musical innovation and Strauss’s unique, brilliant sound. What is significant is that he recognized and rejected Modernism per se, the movement that culminated in the destruction of the Western art-music tradition during his own lifetime. That is why Strauss is one of the few composers who succeeded in writing great art music in the twentieth century.

100.
“The failure of modernism in music vis-à-vis the public is perhaps unique with respect to twentieth-century modernism in general. Unlike modernism in architecture, painting, and literature, musical modernism did not experience any form of generalization or imitation in mass culture owing to its failure to win the allegiance of any of the traditional audiences of high culture” (Botstein 1998: 259). Botstein’s statement is not really true for domestic architecture, where the public frequently can exercise some choice over its visual environment. In general domestic architecture has seen only a simplification of style and the increasingly vapid imitation of old forms. Also, with respect to the success of Modernism in painting and literature, the “generalization or imitation” mentioned by Botstein was rather superficial, with the exception of a few early works that were canonized soon after their production, such as T. S. Eliot’s
The Waste Land.

101.
It is notable that in its music and program
The Rite of Spring
appears to be in part imitative of a then forgotten ballet by the Baroque composer Jean-Féry Rebel (1666–1747),
The Elements,
which begins with a scene, “Chaos,” dominated by highly dissonant polychords. The ballet had been performed in Russia in Rebel’s day. Stravinsky was deeply interested in Baroque music literature and very likely knew the composition. Ironically, one of the most remarkable developments in art music in the latter half of the twentieth century was the great popularity of Baroque music.

102.
Though Adorno’s book includes many brilliant flashes of insight, it also includes statements such as the claim that “modern art that laid claim to dignity would be pitilessly ideological. To act dignified it would have to put on airs, strike a pose, claim to be other than what it can be. It is precisely its seriousness that compels modern art to lay aside pretensions long since hopelessly compromised by the Wagnerian art religion. A solemn tone would condemn artworks to ridiculousness, just as would the gestures of grandeur and might…. Radical art today is synonymous with dark art; its primary color is black. Much contemporary production is irrelevant because it takes no note of this and childishly delights in color…. The injustice committed by all cheerful art, especially by entertainment, is probably an injustice to the dead; to accumulated, speechless pain” (Adorno 1997: 39–40). Adorno’s intent—to make an aesthetics of art from the inside out—is as remarkable as his passion for art, but it really has nothing to do with the production of art itself. The basic problem is Modernism, which remains in place unchanged.

103.
The only examination of Modernism so far is from the inside—that is, there are Modernist or crypto-Modernist analyses of Modernism, which hardly make much sense, but no others. So-called Postmodernist criticism and theory, which is in fact simply hyper-Modernism, is even less examined. The points raised here are to be distinguished from the traditional conflict between the Ancients and the Moderns, as in many works of literature and criticism going back many centuries. “William Ockham’s work was, of course, only one factor in the crisis of medieval thought and culture, manifested on the intellectual side in the widespread triumph of the
via moderna
over Thomists, Scotists, and others, whose doctrines were lumped together under the label of the
via antiqua”
(Fairweather 1970: 372). Similarly, “Swift compared the Ancients to bees and the Moderns to spiders, using the opposition between productive and parasitic beings to suggest a distinction between creative originality and derivativeness, and went as far as emphasizing that ‘the Moderns were much the more ancient of the two,’ in a work published in 1704 and entitled ‘A Full and True Account of the Battel Fought last Friday, Between the Ancient and the Modern Books in St. James’s Library’ “ (Szegedy-Maszák 2001: 61). The tension between the two tendencies referred to in the above quotations was on the whole beneficial in the creation of art. Artists agreed on the goal—Art—and on the ideal of Beauty (however defined); they only disagreed on how the two were to be achieved.

104.
Some rock musicians have made laudable attempts to raise the artistic level of their music, but resurrecting old pre-Modern models or attempting to turn the negative Modern model into a positive one has not worked. Frank Zappa is perhaps the best-known artist who introduced Modern elements into his music. Many trained musicians have a high appreciation for his work, but despite the humor and intellect in Zappa’s work, his Modern harmonies and melodic lines actually alienated many listeners. If he had gone a little further in that direction he would have lost more or less all of them, just as Modern art composers have, for the same reasons. It is necessary to accept the new music and work at improving it from within; trying to make it into something else will cause it to lose its essence, just as classical art music did. The object of artists’ creative attentions must be treated gently, nurtured, and raised with careful regard to the cultivation of refinement and taste. It is necessary to raise the artistic level of rock or popular music while still following, essentially, its own rules and traditions. Renaissance musicians did just that, taking popular dance and song tunes and playing them more artistically, applying Renaissance polyphony to them, and so on, taking what was good and making it a little better, until classical music was born.

105.
The section on Chinese terminology in the epilogue largely repeats an argument presented in a conference paper, “The Concept of the ‘Barbarian’ in Chinese Historiography and Western Sinology: Rhetoric and the Creation of Fourth World Nations in Inner Asia,” which was given in a symposium at the Association for Asian Studies in Boston, 1987. The long-promised symposium volume never materialized, and by the time that fact became official I was interested in other topics. Unfortunately, the paper was written on a Bronze Age computer and at the time of writing I no longer have my own copy, though others evidently do. (It has circulated in samizdat ever since, and despite the exhortation emblazoned on it not to cite it without permission of the author, it has been cited nevertheless.) I have written the argument completely anew here.

106.
The theory of Khazanov (1984) has been accepted by many, including specialists (e.g., Drompp 2005: 10–12; Di Cosmo 1999a), and taken to its logical extreme by nonspecialists, particularly Barfield (1989). Allsen (1989: 83) follows Khazanov’s theory “that the nomads’ economy is ‘non-autarkic’, that is, so specialized in pastoral production that many essentials are lacking.” More specifically, he claims that “pastoral nomads do not and cannot supply all their needs from domestic resources…. They regularly acquire necessary economic resources from the sedentary world and appropriate various aspects of sedentary culture” (Allsen 1997: 101). Khazanov, in choosing one mode of production (pastoral nomadism), insists that specialists in it should also be specialists in another mode of production or else they are “non-autarkic.” By this standard nearly everyone in every society is non-autarkic, including the Roman or Chinese agriculturalists, urbanites, and so on. It is surely doubtful that any people anywhere at any time, other than hunter-gatherers (and perhaps not even them) have ever been truly “autarkic.” Barfield goes much further, arguing that “the primary purpose of the Hsiung-nu central government was to extract resources from China in the form of booty and tribute or to compel trade on advantageous terms” (Barfield 1989: 83).

107.
Allsen (1997: 106) comments rightly, “The peoples of the steppe were not a premodern equivalent of United Parcel Service, disinterestedly conveying wares hither and yon between the centers of civilization. Their history and their priorities must be brought more fully into the discussion if we are to understand these important contacts between East and West.” His book concludes, “many of the commodities and ideas that successfully made the long journey across Eurasia from antiquity to early modern times did so because the intermediaries, ‘those who lived in felt-walled tents,’ and who in the best of times dressed in gold brocade, found them meaningful in the context of their own cultural traditions.”

108.
In another randomly chosen example of Barfield’s approach, he notes that Li Shih-min (T’ang T’ai-tsung), the son of the T’ang Dynasty’s founder, “himself had murdered two of his brothers and they had tried to poison him. He forced his own father from the throne” (Barfield 1989: 142). This sounds promising, but on further reading it transpires that Barfield is
not
arguing that the Chinese were just as bloody as the Turks could be, if not bloodier, but quite the contrary. He concludes, “The palace culture for which T’ang was justly famous in later times should not hide the fact that the early T’ang elite in the northwest was close enough to the frontier Turks in so many ways that Li Shih-min could become their kaghan without stepping out of character.” See the text for the underlying misconceptions here.

109.
"Nomadic imperial confederacies came into existence only in periods when it was possible to link themselves to the Chinese economy. The nomads employed a strategy of extortion to gain trade rights and subsidies from China. They raided the frontier and then negotiated a peace treaty with the Chinese court. Native dynasties in China were willing to pay the nomads off because this was cheaper than going to war with people who could avoid retaliation by moving out of range” (Barfield 1989: 9). Sinor (1978, 1990b: 4 et seq.) focuses on greed. Cf. Biran (2005: 14), Drompp (2005: 10 et seq.), and many others. Barfield (1989: 11), noting that the Mongols were an exception, makes the interesting distinction between “the nomads of Mongolia who established steppe empires that ruled the frontier successfully in tandem with China for centuries, and the nomads from Manchuria who established dynasties within China but never created powerful empires on the steppe.” The “Manchurians,” however, were mostly not nomads.

110.
In most, if not all, instances where sufficient sources exist to reveal the motivation for the attack (i.e., other than the bare fact that a “raid” on such and such a locality supposedly took place), they actually
were
armies. Di Cosmo’s (1999b: 23 et seq.) earlier view, according to which the nomadic empires, despite severely limited resources, had significant military power that the nomads used to extort wealth from peripheral states by raids and forced tribute, apparently derives from Khazanov (1984). People captured by Central Eurasians or by peripheral peoples in war generally ended up on the slave market far from their homelands, though some were kept locally as domestic slaves. The history of slavery in Central Eurasia is not yet well understood.

111.
It is remarkable that, like so much else in Iranian lore, thousands of volumes, or millions of verses, of Zoroastrian texts, supposedly in Avestan, are said to have once existed, but due to the evil deeds of one or another invading foreign nation the great libraries of the Persian kings were destroyed and all the books were lost. The dating of the texts is a highly contentious topic, but, textually speaking, any date that is earlier than the physically attested texts or their internal evidence, or specific external evidence such as quotations in dated texts, is hypothetical.