[I'm posting this anew, but it is in part a response to questions from Tobias and Anthony on the previous post.]

No sooner did I abandon this topic than I picked up Arendt's The Human Condition, wherein there is, in chapter 6, an all too brief reflection on novelty (of precisely that form of philosophy of modernity that Tobias articulates as the main domain of this activity). The chapter announces that the three great events that define the character of the modern world are America (its discovery), the Reformation (and counter-reformation) and the telescope of Galileo. At this point Arendt says:

"The names we connect with them, Galileo Galilei and Martin Luther and the great seafarers, explorers and adventurers in the age of discovery, still belong to the premodern world. Moreover, the strange pathos of novelty, the almost violent insistence of nearly all the great authors, scientists and philosophers since the seventeenth century that they saw things never seen before, thought thoughts never thought before, can be found in none of them, not even in Galileo."

There follows a footnote on novelty, the emergence of the term scienza nuova, a reference to Alexandre Koyre and a bit on the work of Karl Jaspers (from whom Arendt borrows the term "pathos of novelty"), specifically Japers' essay on Descartes. Her basic point seems to be that these great events that characterize modernity are not continuous with the past, but nor is it possible to say that they occurred because Luther or Galileo or the seafarers were seeking something new. Rather they were ensconced in their own conceptual scheme (to foreshadow the likes of Kuhn and Davidson) in which novelty was not so important, but out of which emerged a new scheme with novelty as its key value. Nothing new about this, as we say.

Now, on the one hand, this is undoubtedly reassuring, to see novelty explicitly marked out as a value which radically increased in stature with the rise of modernity, modern philosophy and science, and around which we all turn with a faithfulness that we rarely question. On the other hand, it is a version of things that re-introduces an epochal break (a form of novelty about which we have been taught to be suspicious around here), and which Tobias very nicely articulated in his comment. Surely novelty is not itself new, and from here we can have a rich, but ultimately fruitless discussion about modernity and the philosophy of history.

So at this point I would echo Anthony's comment on the previous post that there is reason to be careful about the referent of novelty--no novelty as such, but always the novelty of some thing. Novelty always modifies a claim. However, this requires more clarification, so let me propose this distinction:

1) the question of novelty as a claim about something: is it new or not? Can one define a set of parameters (a mode of veridiction, even) that allow novelty to be claimed convincingly in some cases and not others. Does this claim vary with the kinds of objects in play: art, scientific 'discoveries', corporate product design, fashion, political causes, etc.

2) the question of novelty as one value among others, and often the most important one: it is more important to be new than certain, true, effective, flourishy, just, human etc. Or to refine this, all other values are subordinated to novelty: it may be more effective, more just, more certain than something else, but we should value it because this makes it new. It strikes me that classical conservatism is the only stance that actively resists this version of novelty (i.e. "Just because something is new, doesn't mean it is better." See for example, "The Relentless Cult of Novelty" by Solzhenitsyn).

and related to this,

2a) the question of novelty as marker of priority, and a kind of bureacratic mechanism for managing the distribution of credit, resources and accolades or in the case of fraud, accusations. Novelty-as-firstness.

It strikes me that we anthropologists of the contemporary can safely hold hands, sing "If I Had a Hammer" and reject (1), in favor of emergence, or non-epochal thinking, or of difference and motion. I think there is a path out of that kind of obsessive concern with the new (and I do think assemblage-apparatus-problematization a useful starting place for that).

However, I think it is extremely difficult to reject (2) or (2a). We can be cynical about them; we can see them as a problem of "some kind of rhetoric of authority as well as entrepreneurship" (Paul's comment); we can probably tie it to the economic and financial imperatives that drive knowledge production today; we can tie (2a) to the "university-ification" of culture (not the corporatization of the university), or perhaps to the "responsibilization" of individuals who must now all represent themselves as entrepreneurs, scientists, each with something new to offer. In any case, I would argue that (2) and (2a) are forms of novelty-as-experience which are central to self-fashioning in the contemporary. When there are perfectly recognizable reasons to do something--something that will enhance flourishing or justice or even certainty--and yet it is impossible to do so unless it can also be made new, preferably cutting edge, then this form of novelty (or whatever it is) is at work.

An interesting outcome of this distinction is that (2) and (2a) becomes a problem for (1). As novelty-as-value and the need for widespread priority-ranking comes to dominate the scale of values, when they become the primary route to advancement, funding, access to power especially in knowledge-production, but beyond it is well, then this means people begin to propose, and to accept, ever more claims and things as novel in the sense of (1).

Think, for instance, of the proliferation of journals in academia. Combine a publish-or-perish imperative with a novelty-as-key-value, and the system will burst if people cannot find outlets which both allow them to publish and stamp it with a seal of approval ("Now with more novelty!"), and so the number of journals is growing at an exponential rate today. Obviously, a great deal that is published today (that vast sea of ignorance) is not new in absolute terms, but only new to some community of scholars that read that journal (Or in the worst case, only new in order to promote careers). Differentiation of knowledge production between a high-culture of novelty and a low-culture of novelty (or perhaps a Royal and a Minor domain of novelty) thus seems possible, so long as the two don't mingle. No longer does it seem so easy to denounce "pseudo-science" "bad science" or "alternative science" simply because there is an exponentially growing sea of grey areas between the royal science and the many minor sciences all around it.

So the claim that everything must be new is true only in the sense of (2) and (2a), not (1). It is clear, I think that everything cannot be new in the sense of (1), for whatever value of new. Novelty presumes ranking and priority. But that doesn't stop everyone from claiming novelty, regardless of the absolute truth of the matter. It is a bit of a Monadology: everything is new to some person or group, from some perspective, each living in different logoi, or within various, partially overlapping modernities. Obviously the differentiating, de-massifying power of the internet is crucial to this dynamic. At the same time that a thousand journals flourish, the top 10 most-read and most cited journals begin to matter more than ever before.

Anthony asked: is it not possible to be attentive to changes in degree and changes in kind? To which I would say with respect to (1), it is absolutely possible. This is afterall, bread and butter to scientists who read only Kuhn: puzzle solving is new in degree, paradigms are new in kind. However, with respect to (2) or (2a), I think it much harder. Every infinitesimal change in degree is accorded the status of novelty, because that is so much more important than other values. Or at least, one can increase funding, prestige, attention only be claiming that a change is new, to which all other values are subordinated. It is new because it is better, it is new because it is greener, it is new because it is more responsible, etc. What would a change in kind look like in terms of (2) or (2a)?

Consider what Jaspers says of novelty:

In the days when philosophy was metaphysics, a thinker lived in an enduring whole. Content with the philosophia perrenis in which he believed, he did not distinguish between the old and the new in his thoughts, for all of them were rooted in the whole. He judged ideas not by their novelty but by their authenticity. (Essay on Descartes, p. 132)

The characteristic feature of modern science therefore (and Jaspers excludes philosophy from this search for novelty, Descartes' New Method notwithstanding) is the image of rungs in an endless ladder. But what I think we see today is the endless proliferation of ladders, many of which cannot identify the ground they stand on, much less what they climb towards. Novelty, and the progress that is its justification, looks more like book-keeping from this perspective.

One last thing, Tobias' example of plasticity of the brain and its neurons is a lively one. In that same last section of the Human Condition, Arendt goes on at length (in unashamedly epochal terms) about the way Descartes' philosophy moved the Archimedean point from a place outside ourselves, even outside the earth, to the inside of our heads: "What men now have in common is not the world but the structure of their minds, and this they cannot have in common strictly speaking (283)" Neuroscience would be the apotheosis of this movement, and plasticity the introduction of doubt into the very claim that we have in minds in common.... all we have now are computers in common, and just barely that.