Considering an Unsimplified New

26 Jul, 2026

“Make it new”: I long ago grew tired, not of the phrase itself, but of what felt like its celebratory militant insistence on busting through everything that had come before, leaving it in the dust and declaring adolescent victory over all previous, and hence inferior, thoughts and creations and the people who’d produced them. Ezra Pound’s adaptation(s) of a phrase found in a couple of ancient Chinese accounts took on understandings of renewal and resurrection more appropriate to interpretations grounded in Christian (and later fascist) thought, but he didn’t take credit for coming up with the imperative itself. It was only in the mid-twentieth century that critics and culture cognoscenti started running with the decontextualized demand, leading, as Michael North describes it, to “the nature of novelty itself [being] simplified.”¹ And there we have my irritation: that simplification that I always associate with belligerent poetry boys over-emoting their verses and declaring (as one bro at a reading had it), if you couldn’t handle his lines’ brave refusal to bullshit his audience, you shouldn’t even be here.

But another part of that simplified embrace of novelty is the scene from Garden State in which the perfect hipster girlfriend does a goofy dance and asserts it’s significant because no one else has done that particular thing in that particular moment, nor will it ever happen again. “I make a noise or I do something that no one has ever done before,” she says, “and then I can feel unique again even if it’s only for, like, a second.… you just witnessed a completely original moment in human history.” She then demands the love interest engage in his own performance, for no other purpose than to have his own purely unique, unrepeatable moment in history.²

I’ve been thinking about the new over the past couple of days thanks to Erich Kahler’s 1958 essay, “What Is Art?” (which incidentally came out about the time “make it new” started gaining currency as an easy way to refer to the work of the modernists). Among other things, Kahler is comparing how and why art and science engage in their respective searches for “the nature of reality,” science conducting its work within and with reference to “a directly apparent, unmediated, surface form of reality, i.e., factuality.” And this undertaking is “collective work, teamwork on a grand scale,” so that “the kind of knowledge produced by science is always on the move, advancing on a wide and uncontrolled front, always fragmentary, provisional, open to correction and even replacement; it is never at rest, it never reaches an even transient state of completion.”³

Art engages in this sort of endeavor, too, says Kahler, only art’s use of metaphor and symbol entails “an evolution of the nature and scope of reality rendered, and implicitly of the forms of rendering, the modes of expression. A newly detected reality involves new forms and techniques of expression,” and when art makes use of them, it “extends the scope, and changes the nature, of our consciousness, and by this means of reality itself.”⁴

“The search for the new,” in other words, is essential to both endeavors. Kahler goes on to focus on what that search means in art, and his initial argument raised my hackles; when he asserts that “it is this effort to express something heretofore inexpressible, to grasp and to shape something for the first time, it is this ‘for the first time’ that gives a work of art its lasting freshness and vitality.”⁵ Here we go, I thought: making it new, doing your little dance, asserting you’ve uncovered something no one else has been unable to uncover before. But not so fast; Kahler says we still see this quality in “ancient works, whose scopes and styles are by now utterly familiar to us and in one way or another left behind by the endeavors of our age”—they “are still fully alive” because “the immediacy of all primal creation” is still evident when we encounter them.⁶ Yes, there will be insanely creative pioneers who might singlehandedly allow us to see “reality that has not been raised into our consciousness before”—but as he clarifies in “Art and History,” “the creation of something not yet generally, not yet clearly seen,” frequently comes about thanks to “many gradual steps and variations, many different flashes of insight on the part of many different artists.”⁷ Something akin to the team-based nature of science Kahler described, something that doesn’t kick tradition or previous work into the gutter, but that brings it along into the present with new insights and visions and the ability to make them apparent.

Kahler’s thought is still too, ahem, new to me to feel that I’ve got a grasp on where he finally came down (if he ever did) on the role of newness in art. But there’s a key that’s important to the larger conversation, whether Kahler’s concerned or not: newness to me (or any individual), and/or a past newness that holds out through generations as people experience a painting or sonata or book for the first time. It’s this sort of newness—not the novelty of some original thing created right this moment that can’t be tied to anything that came before—that I’ve also been pondering as I’ve been getting reacquainted with the piano.

I began playing when I was six—but when I started moving around after college, relocating from one place to another thanks to grad schools or jobs, I could hardly drag an old upright along with me, and I had no love for synthesizers. So my practicing fell into long, long abeyance, until I realized a few months ago that I needed, on a deep existential level, to get back into it. It’s been a process of comeuppance, being faced with the fact that music I once played with ease is now discouragingly difficult, my short fingers unused to stretching themselves into near-impossible configurations. All the same, things are starting to limber up, and I’m frequently amazed by what, and after how long, muscle memory kicks ability right back into order.

One thing that’s new here is an appreciation for some of the grand masters my young self had been too hasty to dismiss as boring. Here, Handel and Bach are standing out, and the latter in particular. After sitting down to a little prelude that looked easy enough for me to handle (simply called “Prelude,” and I have no BMV number on it to help with identification), I was blown away by the depth its accessible technical requirements hide. A half-step transition from one measure to the next, the slightest chord change: Bach had to have known that only a careful listener would have heard and had their gut twisted by that sort of subtlety, and I want to believe he also knew that to have gone for something more apparent to the average listener (whatever that might have meant in his live-performance-only day) would have involved ditching the beautiful nuance for heavy-handed show. In this quiet little piece, there’s a sort of darkness floating around the edges, enough to keep something about this composition, after a couple of months of playing it, feeling still undiscovered. I wouldn’t be surprised, for example, if Mike Oldfield once heard the song, and then, having lodged for a while in the back of his mind, it exerted its influence on his "Tubular Bells."⁸ In other words, drawing tradition along not to be replaced, but to let it help you work, as Kahler said, “right at the forefront of the inexpressible.”⁹ Oldfield could make use of technologies and instruments not available to Bach, allowing the twentieth-century composer to express the new sound realities they made possible—and I’m guessing the venerable Baroque composer would have been just as interested in this recording from a then-teenager as anything written during his time for the harpsichord.

I don’t know how or whether this sort of continuation or through-line of old within and helping to produce the new relates to postmodernism’s tendency to collage or set on the same plane the products of different times and places. But it’s something other than what Simon Reynolds describes in Retromania: contemporary (at least as of 2011) culture’s tendency to borrow from all over the place, to recycle past work without really leading to anything identifiably “new” or unique—without, as Kahler might put it, leading us any further into the previously inexpressible and making even a bit of it newly communicable.¹⁰ So you might put some scratchiness on your digital recording to recall the onetime sense of listening to music on a record—but as a former boss told me when I confessed that I liked my jazz scratchy, you just wind up “festishizing” a once-living thing.

That way of repackaging the old described by Reynolds seems closely related to Meghan O’Gieblyn’s description of AI “ha[ving] distilled the most pedestrian, noncontroversial conventions of human expression.” For her, artificial intelligence “offers a baseline against which we can measure our own attempts to capture the inherently spontaneous and unpredictable nature of thought,” and to that degree, she finds interesting, if not unproblematic, possibilities in its output. Among other things, I’m not willing to expend shocking amounts of natural resources to check in with or against that baseline, but that’s a different question. What generative AI’s output seems to amount to is something less than the gradual and expansive sharing of artists and scientists that leads to new understandings or visions of reality, and more of our most pedestrian conventions rehashed over and over, feeding on themselves and our data as they’re recycled through new configurations that allow us to believe we’re considering a question or problem, but are really just watching a computer spin in circular variations while we shove off the hard work of plunging ourselves into our own individual forefronts of the inexpressible. As O’Gieblyn says, “It’s not that AI is an entirely novel risk. It simply accelerates our tendency to defer to formulaic templates in order to avoid the difficult work of thinking.”¹¹

Regardless of genre or field, what degree of our own thinking we do for ourselves (and hence, what can really be called our own) will surely complicate what we mean by the new in human creation, and how that understanding of the new leads (or doesn’t) to altered valuations of the so-called old. In the meantime I’ll be hanging out in old-fashioned embodiment, seeing what these middle-aged fingers can do this time around on the keyboard, discovering how my ears are hearing old tunes anew, and what a more mature heart and mind are taking from those sounds.

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