Fascism Is the Other Side of Postmodernism

Trump exhibits all the traits of a postmodernist. He treats legal, social, and moral conventions as mere constructs that he can violate at will. He has contempt for objective truth and lives in a reality of his own making. He ceaselessly broadcasts self-aggrandizing narratives with the same confidence that transgenders assert their delusional gender identities.

This not what the promoters and apologists of postmodernism promised. The critique of truth and knowledge production was supposed to undo the marginalization of the marginalized. The great promise of postmodernism was pluralism.

Apparently, no postmodernist was able to foresee that the demolition of Enlightenment rationalism might open a door to what preceded the Enlightenment: the rule of brute force. This was relatively long in coming because for most of its life postmodernism has had a distinctively queer orientation. The idea that you can legitimately believe anything you want to believe as long as your "lived experience" and feelings incline you to believe it originated in feminism. 

Trump reveals that opening the door to irrationality allows more than shrill harpies with pink hair and angry men in dresses to pass through. Fascism can come through that door as well. 

Trump as symptom

Trump may be a Republican president but he should be understood as the product of the degeneration of both parties and, more broadly, as a symptom of a ruling class in crisis. Without the collusion of a party that had the audacity to nominate the word-salad spewing, DEI-darling Kamala Harris as a replacement for the senile Biden, Trump would never have come to power. What is significant is that these were the only two options the ruling class could scrape from the bottom of its barrel. The European elites are similarly hard-pressed. The EU is led by vain morons.

Capitalism has consequences. One of them is the inexorable imbecilization of the bourgeoisie. The old slogan "socialism or barbarism" has never seemed more apt. Barbarism is many things, cruelty and violence foremost, but also the mental vacuity, the headlessness, that turns ostensibly rational animals into destructive automata.

Silly Art for Silly People

The Dadaist breakdown of the distinction between "art" and "nonart," did not "democratize" art. It magnified the power of the institutional arbiters who cater to elite pretentions. When someone duct-tapes a banana to a wall and calls it art, validation depends on the concurrence of these arbiters.  Avant-garde antiart gestures have always been expressly designed to offend common sensibility. Antiart manufactures uncommon art. The purpose of uncommon art is to make the people who consume it feel uncommon.

The myth of an anti-bourgeois avant-garde hides from view the collusion of the avant-garde with its bourgeois patrons to create a new class of luxury goods with no intrinsic value other than their snob appeal. If one wanted to be reductive, that would be the "real" meaning of modern art, but modern art also gave a wider audience new forms of elegance and aesthetic pleasure. The one myth that ought to be laid to rest is the myth of the subversive character of the avant-garde's output. The truth is that the notion of an avant-garde was always misleading, a fashionable mystification. The avant-garde did not lead, it followed. It supplied what a new upstart class needed to mark its cultural arrival.

When the bourgeoisie was revolutionary and heroic, avant-garde art was revolutionary and heroic. When the bourgeoisie degenerated, the avant-garde degenerated with it. We call this postmodernism.

The curse of the rich and powerful is that they raise spoiled feckless children incapable of appreciating or renewing the gifts they inherited. The contemporary avant-garde caters to these spoiled children, who first came to prominence in the 1960s. They like looking at bananas taped to walls. They like playing with gender and identity and inventing new pronouns. They and the artists who cater to them are incapable of inventing anything else. Contemporary art is silly because it caters to silly people.

Art delivers whatever is demanded of it. When serious people come around again, we will get serious art.

YEAH YEAH YEAH

I got involved with art because in art I found joy. I found self-abandonment.

And yet, for the last 30, 40 years, power is all the dried-up prunes who rule the academic roost want to talk about when they look at art.

The majority of credentialed art historians today hate art. They want to deconstruct it, unpack it, demystify it, and, ultimately, kill it. They're on a mission to convince everybody, but primarily themselves, that great art is a fiction, that inspiration is a scam, that the piercing joy with which genuine art wounds the heart is but a tool of male domination. Their sterile emptiness condemns them to an obsession with power, and anyone whose overriding craving is for power is incapable of appreciating art because art is humbling not empowering. The experience of art is similar to the experience of the sacred: it demolishes the ego, it plunges you into the abyss of your nothingness, in the depths of which you can, for a moment, experience a blissful connection to everything. 

There is no question that in order for canons to be renewed they must at various intervals be upended. But that upending must be at the hands of newer, more vigorous artists whose destructive gestures are necessary to release a living tradition from the dead encrustations that are strangling it. Academic deconstruction is something else altogether because it is purely intellectual and allied with a neurotic hatred of what the intellect cannot apprehend or circumscribe.

Fortunately, art abides. Maybe not in au courant galleries and museums, desperate as they are to display their abjection to the latest "transgressive" trend, which in every instance turns out to be yet another genuflection in front of some well-worn liberal cliché. No, art lives elsewhere, in the cultural vortexes that occasionally and unpredictably form within the smooth flows of commerce and entertainment.

Art survives now by disguising itself as something too dumb to be taken seriously.

The Cup of a Carpenter

The only scene from a Spielberg movie that has ever stayed with me.

This is what Christmas means to me: the moment God took the form of a toiler, the moment the highest showed up as the least.

Christmas is the birthday of the proletarian God.

When it comes to art, only one thing matters

Does it make you feel alive?

That ought to be the sole criterion for judging art.

Does it make you feel alive? 

Art is disarming not empowering. 

Art kicks your legs from under you. It doesn't affirm your identity. It obliterates it.

Like religion, which art faithfully served from the moment of their entwined origin, art is a means of transport.

The Abstract Expressionists were the last visual artists to understand this. Today, only rock 'n' rollers do.

Why I make art

A friend asked me this question in view of my hatred of the art world, and I have tried answering it multiple times, each time coming up with nothing but pretentious rubbish.

The truth is I don't "make art." I work on projects as ideas for projects come along.

I'd say in the last 15 years or so I've only been interested in uncovering what's already there. That is the most satisfying work I've ever done. 

Tower of Babel

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Tower of Babel, 1563

The story of the Tower of Babel should be understood as a story about the foolishness of attempting to achieve metaphysical elevation by physical means. 

Transhumanism is another Tower of Babel. Technology cannot grant transcendence.

Becoming superhuman, becoming shaman, demands an arduous demolition of the ego and its fixations. To become spirit, the prospective shaman must first experience death. Only then can he visit the heavens and the underworld. Cyborgs cannot do this.

Idiot vs Idiot

 

Francisco Goya, Fight With Cudgels, 1820-23

Chris Hedges recently published an essay titled "The Rule of Idiots," which starts with these paragraphs:

The last days of dying empires are dominated by idiots. The Roman, Mayan, French, Habsburg, Ottoman, Romanoff, Iranian and Soviet dynasties crumbled under the stupidity of their decadent rulers who absented themselves from reality, plundered their nations and retreated into echo chambers where fact and fiction were indistinguishable.

Donald Trump, and the sycophantic buffoons in his administration, are updated versions of the reigns of the Roman emperor Nero, who allocated vast state expenditures to attain magical powers; the Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang, who funded repeated expeditions to a mythical island of immortals to bring back a potion that would give him eternal life; and a feckless Tsarist court that sat around reading tarot cards and attending séances as Russia was decimated by a war that consumed over two million lives and revolution brewed in the streets.

In “Hitler and the Germans,” the political philosopher Eric Voegelin dismisses the idea that Hitler — gifted in oratory and political opportunism, but poorly educated and vulgar — mesmerized and seduced the German people. The Germans, he writes, supported Hitler and the “grotesque, marginal figures,” surrounding him because he embodied the pathologies of a diseased society, one beset by economic collapse and hopelessness. Voegelin defines stupidity as a “loss of reality.” The loss of reality means a “stupid” person cannot “rightly orient his action in the world, in which he lives.” The demagogue, who is always an idiote, is not a freak or social mutation. The demagogue expresses the society’s zeitgeist, its collective departure from a rational world of verifiable fact. 

True enough, but if we are to follow up on the idea that "dying empires are dominated by idiots" we ought also to take account of the idiocy of what has been offered as alternative to Donald Trump: the pussy hat wearers, the DEI grifters who want to replace merit with identity, the people who profess to not know what a woman is, the universities that have inverted every canon and idolized perversion, the censorious rabble eager to find offence in every public utterance insufficiently submissive to batshit-crazy woke racial and feminist dogma, a harridan so repellent she managed, against all odds, to lose a presidential race against a buffoon and then went on to excuse her defeat by inventing a monstrous lie about Russian interference that has brought two superpowers even closer to open conflict than they were during the Cold War . . . This is the "Resistance" to Donald Trump.

So, yes, in the terminal state of the American empire, idiocy abounds, but Donald Trump owns only half of it, and the few of us who have not completely lost our minds must look helplessly on as two equally mindless and destructive factions of the ruling class flail at each other heedless of the disaster about to engulf both of them.

Mindless Jobs To Be Replaced by Artificial Mindlessness

Dario Amodei — CEO of Anthropic, one of the world's most powerful creators of artificial intelligence — has a blunt, scary warning for the U.S. government and all of us:

AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs — and spike unemployment to 10-20% in the next one to five years, Amodei told us in an interview from his San Francisco office.

Amodei said AI companies and government need to stop "sugar-coating" what's coming: the possible mass elimination of jobs across technology, finance, law, consulting and other white-collar professions, especially entry-level gigs.

That means that half of all entry-level white-collar jobs can be done by brain-dead employees.

I repeat, there is no artificial intelligence, but there is an artificial replacement for mindless work. 

Traditions

cannot be willfully revived. Julian the Apostate tried and failed miserably.

When tradition has authority, it is only dimly recognized, if at all, as tradition. Rather, it is experienced as an indisputable way of life, a foundational orientation of unfathomable origin. Tradition has to have divine origin, otherwise it is merely a human ordnance and human ordnances can be amended or abolished altogether. A tradition that is vital is all-enclosing and spellbinding. It is the shape of a society, the form of its coherence. Once undone, the spell is broken and can only be replaced by another spell, another myth, another metaphysical "fiction." But not by some jerry-rigged, voluntaristic revival of the tradition that has collapsed.

Voluntary traditionalism is just LARPing. 

Come to think of it, so is fascism.

Photogenic

and beautiful are not the same thing. Pretty much anything can be turned into a nice photo because in a photo, it is the composition of the photo itself that matters not the object. That's why Walter Benjamin didn't care for Albert Renger-Patzsch's Die Welt Ist Schön (The World Is Beautiful).

A great deal of modern architecture is ugly but you still get idiots like this one rhapsodizing its photgenicity.

Here's the thing: we don't live in pictures. We live in (and with) buildings. The effect of photography on architecture has been almost entirely negative.

Man Does Not Live by Bread Alone

Duccio di Buoninsegnia, The Temptation of Christ on the Mountain, 1308-11

Guenon notes that philosophy is the love of wisdom. As such it is “a preliminary and preparatory stage, a step as it were in the direction of wisdom.” It is not wisdom itself. “The perversion that ensued consisted in taking this transitional stage for an end in itself and in seeking to substitute ‘philosophy’ for wisdom, a process which implied forgetting or ignoring the true nature of the latter.”

Guenon’s objection is not to philosophy per se, but to a philosophy denuded of esoteric content. At the heart of Plato’s philosophy is the Form of the Good – God, the Source. The Form of the Good is clearly the object of mystical revelation and it gives all reality a divine quality. Thus, reality is being generated by God and it shares in God’s divine nature. Wisdom must be grounded in reality. Rational philosophical reflection must be centered around the real. If the divine is absented from philosophical speculation, then a vacuum is created. This vacuum can only be filled with malignant creations of the human imagination. They will be malignant because false and misleading – “a pretended wisdom that [is] purely human and therefore entirely of the rational order.” Reality is “true, traditional, supra-rational.”

Another and popular alternative is to take a fragment of the true Good and to represent it as the whole. A single virtue, like compassion, agape, becomes an evil monstrosity by shoving out of view all other excellences. Compassion is acceptance, but true love includes Eros, the push to develop, to gain wisdom, to seek salvation. For that, effort is required. If agape is lacking eros, compassion is lost because truly caring for someone and wishing that person the best means to care about his development. In The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis reserves the word “ideology” for the practice of taking a fragment of the Tao and enlarging it in this way, to the exclusion of all other considerations. Hence, communism is an ideology but the Christian religion is not. Liberal opponents of this view tend to try to apply the label “ideology” to religion but in doing this, they miss the point. They want to claim that religion is an ideology like any other. The advantage of the fragment enlarging technique for the ideologue is that he appears to have a hold of the truth. However, a partial truth becomes a big lie in this context.

Plato, on the other hand, is no ideologue. He examines the role of different aspects of the Good in different dialogs. His devotion is to The Form of the Good and this Form is supra-rational and not something that can be fully explicated rationally. It is not the product of mind and rationality. In fact, it produces the lower levels of mind, soul and body. Using the Neo-Platonist Plotinus’ nomenclature, of mind/psyche, soul/nous, spirit/the One, then a visual representation might look something like this.

Plato never doubts The Form of the Good, but he sometimes wonders about his ability to write sensibly and well about it. He is aware of the limitations of discourse and never considers it a substitute for mystical experience. Hence, he narrates a story, a “myth,” like the Timaeus, and in contexts like that he sometimes writes “something like this must be true.” Plato also appears to worry in the Meno that virtue may be unteachable and not fully definable. The character of Socrates suggests that it is better to try to do so, than to give up. In being self-aware about the distance between exoteric and the esoteric, Plato’s philosophy has the quality of a parable in the manner of Jesus, Christ’s way of communicating with the uninitiated.

Thus, the core of Plato’s philosophy is a religious experience. He worries that in writing about it he may misrepresent it and makes the reader aware of his misgivings and the approximate and provisional nature of all attempts to describe and explicate this religious core. This means all Plato’s writings, like all good philosophy, are theology. Platonic exoteric philosophy forever circles round the supra-rational. The Phaedrus and the Symposium have a quality of glorifying the divine and are also inspirational.

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is a useful starting point for all attempts to understand Platonic philosophy. Everything Plato writes presupposes such a vision of reality. Plato has a place for rationality, but he at no point tries to deduce morality from merely rational considerations. The love of goodness and justness that is visible in the character of Socrates in The Gorgias is of a piece with Plato’s raptures expressed in describing the experience of the Form of the Good in Book VII of The Republic. The moral faith and beauty of Socrates in this dialog is inspiring, in stark contrast with the evil and self-serving nature of Gorgias, Polus and Callicles; with each interlocutor becoming progressively more brazenly horrible. In dialogs like this one, Socrates becomes a vehicle for the Form of the Good and the divine light shines through him, making him the most admirable of men for Plato.

Real philosophy is the explication of the supra-rational. What is the goal of life, having been projected into a physical universe by an ineffable Source? Socrates the man wanted to forget about the origins of the universe and focus on ethics. However, Plato saw that ethics without an appreciation of the divine origins of life is meaningless and a hopeless task. God is the alpha and the omega; the origin and destination. Rationalism, on the other hand, loses its way.

—Richard Cocks, "Philosophy and the Crisis of the Modern World"

Worth reading in full, not least for Cocks' trenchant critique of Roger Scruton

There Is No Artificial Intelligence, Only Stupid Jobs

My students, the majority of whom hope to find employment in the entertainment/game industry, are terrified of AI. They are worried that AI will take away the jobs they hope to get. And it probably will.

They see this as a threat to "creativity." It is not. It is a threat to mindless widget making. 

This was the promise of automation: that one day machines would liberate us from drudgery. Now the promise has turned into a threat.

The I in AI is misplaced. AI is a witless pastiche-generating machine. And no threat to anyone whose work relies on actual intelligence.

The real problem is that most jobs in America are "service" jobs. These jobs will be taken over by AI because they are jobs that require a workforce of automatons. So actual automatons will eventually be doing them.

AI is not intelligent. It is compliant. That is its advantage. It can be used and abused without resentment. It's not bright and it's not creative but in most paying jobs those things don't help, they hinder. Those jobs will be done by AI.

This energetic Canadian creates commendable content with the simplest of means. AI, which is incapable of humor, does not threaten his job.

Wasteland

 

Robert Rauschenberg, Monogram, 1955-59

When what were formerly existential modes of being in the world are reduced to "lifestyles"—in the same way that postmodernism reduces all historical records to styles—then a postmodern diversity does indeed become possible. For then everything can coexist with everything without generating conflict or tension. 

In art, Rauschenberg's Combines embody this empty diversity.  There is no end to the things that can be combined. But in what way then is a work of art to be distinguished from a trash fill? The trash fill too combines everything with everything by virtue of the fact that it is the depository of everything that has lost value and meaning.  The things that end up in the trash are of diverse origin but in the trash heap they share the fundamental sameness of being discards, an excremental homogeneity. Rauschenberg's Combines are the aestheticization of this excrementality, which is the obverse side of consumerism and the commodity fetish.

Divine Asterisk

The asterisk was already in use as a symbol in ice age cave paintings. There is also a two-thousand-year-old character used by Aristarchus of Samothrace called the asteriskos, ※, which he used when proofreading Homeric poetry to mark lines that were duplicated. Origen is known to have also used the asteriskos to mark missing Hebrew lines from his Hexapla. The asterisk evolved in shape over time, but its meaning as a symbol used to correct defects remained.

In the Middle Ages, the asterisk was used to emphasize a particular part of text, often linking those parts of the text to a marginal comment. However, an asterisk was not always used.

One hypothesis to the origin of the asterisk is that it stems from the 5000-year-old Sumerian character dingir, 𒀭, though this hypothesis seems to only be based on visual appearance. 

—Wikipedia

Never Let Things Be Seen Half-Finished

They can only be enjoyed when complete. All beginnings are misshapen, and this deformity sticks in the imagination. The recollection of having seen a thing imperfect disturbs our enjoyment of it when completed. To swallow something great at one gulp may disturb the judgment of the separate parts, but satisfies the taste. Till a thing is everything, it is nothing, and while it is in process of being it is still nothing. To see the tastiest dishes prepared arouses rather disgust than appetite. Let each great master take care not to let his work be seen in its embryonic stage: they might take this lesson from Madam Nature, who never brings the child to the light till it is fit to be seen.

—Balthasar Gracian, The Art of Wordly Wisdom, 1647

Saint Martin

Simone Martini, Division of the Cloak, 1312-17

From the late 4th century to the late Middle Ages, much of Western Europe, including Great Britain, engaged in a period of fasting beginning on the day after St. Martin's Day, November 11. This fast period lasted 40 days (not including Saturdays and Sundays), and was, therefore, called Quadragesima Sancti Martini, which means in Latin "the forty days of St. Martin". At St. Martin's eve and on the feast day, people ate and drank very heartily for a last time before they started to fast. This fasting time was later called "Advent" by the Church and was considered a time for spiritual preparation for Christmas.

On St. Martin's Day, children in Flanders, the southern and northern parts of the Netherlands, and the Catholic areas of Germany and Austria participate in paper lantern processions. Often, a man dressed as St. Martin rides on a horse in front of the procession. The children sing songs about St. Martin and about their lanterns. The food traditionally eaten on the day is goose, a rich bird. According to legend, Martin was reluctant to become bishop, which is why he hid in a stable filled with geese. The noise made by the geese betrayed his location to the people who were looking for him.

In the eastern part of the Belgian province of East Flanders (Aalst) and the western part of West Flanders (Ypres), traditionally children receive presents from St. Martin on November 11, instead of from Saint Nicholas on December 6 or Santa Claus on December 25. They also have lantern processions, for which children make lanterns out of beets. In recent years, the lantern processions have become widespread as a popular ritual, even in Protestant areas of Germany and the Netherlands, although most Protestant churches no longer officially recognize Saints.

In Portugal, where the saint's day is celebrated across the country, it is common for families and friends to gather around the fire in reunions called magustos, where they typically eat roasted chestnuts and drink wine, jeropiga (a drink made of grape must and aguardente) and aguapé (a sort of weak and watered-down wine). According to the most widespread variation of the cloak story, Saint Martin cut off half of his cloak in order to offer it to a beggar and along the way, he gave the remaining part to a second beggar. As he faced a long ride in a freezing weather, the dark clouds cleared away and the sun shone so intensely that the frost melted away. Such weather was rare for early November, so was credited to God's intervention. The phenomenon of a sunny break to the chilly weather on Saint Martin's Day (11 November) is called Verão de São Martinho (Saint Martin's Summer, veranillo de san Martín in Spanish) in honor of the cloak legend.

In Malta on the night of the eve of Saint Martin's day children leave an empty bag next to the bed. This bag is found full of fruit on the next day.

—Wikipedia
 

Moments of Comfort

 

Screenshot

The Serpent

Magic is also the only immaterial thing of which the debris still survive from civilisations which have entirely ceased to function—witness the cases of Egypt, of Chaldea, even of Druidism; and no doubt African "fetishism" has a similar origin. Sorcery could be said to be made of the vestiges of dead civilisations. Is this why the serpent, in the most recent times, has hardly kept anything but its malefic significance, and why the dragon, ancient Chinese symbol of the Word, awakens only "diabolical" ideas in the minds of modern Westerners?

 — René Guénon, Fundamental Symbols: The Universal Language of Sacred Science

Saint George and the Dragon

Paulo Uccello, Saint George and the Dragon, 1470

In the well-known version from Jacobus de Voragine's Legenda aurea (The Golden Legend, 1260s), the narrative episode of Saint George and the Dragon took place somewhere he called "Silene" in what in medieval times was referred to as "Libya" (basically anywhere in North Africa, west of the Nile). Silene was being plagued by a venom-spewing dragon dwelling in a nearby pond, poisoning the countryside. To prevent it from affecting the city itself, the people offered it two sheep daily, then a man and a sheep, and finally their children and youths, chosen by lottery. One time the lot fell on the king's daughter. The king offered all his gold and silver to have his daughter spared, but the people refused. The daughter was sent out to the lake, dressed as a bride, to be fed to the dragon.

Saint George arrived at the spot. The princess tried to send him away, but he vowed to remain. The dragon emerged from the pond while they were conversing. Saint George made the Sign of the Cross and charged it on horseback, seriously wounding it with his lance. He then called to the princess to throw him her girdle (zona), and he put it around the dragon's neck. Wherever she walked, the dragon followed the girl like a "meek beast" on a leash.

The princess and Saint George led the dragon back to the city of Silene, where it terrified the population. Saint George offered to kill the dragon if they consented to become Christians and be baptized. Fifteen thousand men including the king of Silene converted to Christianity. George then killed the dragon, beheading it with his sword, and the body was carted out of the city on four ox-carts. The king built a church to the Blessed Virgin Mary and Saint George on the site where the dragon died and a spring flowed from its altar with water that cured all disease. Only the Latin version involves the saint striking the dragon with the spear, before killing it with the sword.

—Wikipedia

 René Guénon interprets the slaying of the dragon this way:

Victory over the dragon has, as its immediate consequence, the conquest of immortality, which is represented by some object the approach to which is guarded by the dragon; and this conquest essentially implies the reintegration into the centre of the human state, that is, into the point where communication is established with the higher states of the being. (Fundamental Symbols: The Universal Language of Sacred Science)

The water in the lake guarded by the dragon would then be the water of life. The victory over the dragon would have initiatory meaning.

There seems to be also a residue in this legend of some hierogamic ritual (the princess dressed as bride) that has been reinterpreted in the Christian context as union with a loathsome beast.

 

Getting High

Shamanic ecstasy can be regarded as a recovery of the human condition before the "fall" ; in other words, it reproduces a primordial "situation" accessible to the rest of mankind only through death (since ascents to heaven by means of rites—compare the case of the Vedic Indian sacrificer—are symbolic, not concrete like the shaman's). Although the ideology of shamanic ascent is perfectly consistent and forms an integral part of the mythical conception we have just reviewed ("Center of the World," break in communications, degeneration of humanity, etc.), we have come upon numerous cases of aberrant shamanic practices; we refer especially to rudimentary and mechanical means of obtaining trance (narcotics, dancing to the point of 'exhaustion, "possession," etc.). The question arises if, aside from the "historical" explanations that could be offered for these aberrant techniques (deterioration as the result of external cultural influences, hybridization, etc.), they cannot also be interpreted on another plane. We may ask, for example, if the aberrant aspect of the shamanic trance is not due to the fact that the shaman seek to experience in concreto a symbolism and mythology that, by their very nature, are not susceptible of being "realized" on the "concrete" plane; if, in short, the desire to obtain, at any cost and by any means, an ascent in concreto, a mystical and at the same time real journey to heaven, did not result in the aberrant trances that we have seen; if, finally, these types of behavior are not the inevitable consequence of an intense desire to "live," that is, "experience" on the plane of the body, what in the present condition of humanity is no longer accessible except on the plane of "spirit."

—Mircea Eliade, Shamanism

No sooner

does man begin to speak than he is exiled into abstraction. This is the Fall, the ejection from a retrospectively conjured-up paradise of undifferentiated being. In other words, the origin of culture is subsequently experienced as a loss. There is within culture always a desire to undo it and the oppositions that define it and regain the blissful plenitude that consciousness intuits as prior to consciousness. This is why the religious impulse is universal.

The sacred is the presence within culture of what is alien to it, but at the same time constitutes the center around which culture forms. It is the gateway to paradise but also, at the same time, the gateway to hell, because it intimates within the human world the proximity of the nonhuman, of something, as Otto put it, at once awesome and awful.

Numinous Primitivism

Emil Nolde, Autumn Sea, 1910

The discovery of the "expressive" power of African and other non-Western "primitive" art by European artists starting in the late 19th century was an encounter with an art that could conjure up the numinous dimension that modernity had banished from both European life and art.

The radical otherness of what Rudolf Otto called the Wholly Other, absent in contemporary Christian religiosity, was rediscovered in the alien forms of non-Western sacred art.

What Nietzsche mistook for the death of God was merely the transformation of the Christian God into a deus otiosus. Gauguin had to go to Brittany to find a corner of Europe where the memory of this formerly living God could still inspire visions.

In the arts of Africa and Oceania, European artists discovered fetishes still charged with supernatural power produced by people who remained in ecstatic contact with their spirits and gods. Contact with these shamanic artifacts, in turn, enabled European artists to recover visionary capability. And for a brief moment they were able to enrich a decrepit European culture with fresh visions of heaven and hell.

George Grosz, The Funeral (Dedicated to Oskar Panizza), 1917-18

 

Visualizing Death

Andy Warhol, Orange Car Crash (5 Deaths 11 Times in Orange) (Orange Disaster), 1963 

 It is as a further result of his ability to travel in the supernatural worlds and to see the superhuman beings (gods, demons, spirits of the dead, etc.) that the shaman has been able to contribute decisively to the knowledge of death. In all probability many features of "funerary geography," as well as some themes of the mythology of death, are the result of the ecstatic experiences of shamans. The lands that the shaman sees and the personages that he meets during his ecstatic journeys in the beyond are minutely described by the shaman himself, during or after his trance. The unknown and terrifying world of death assumes form, is organized in accordance with particular patterns; finally it displays a structure and, in course of time, becomes familiar and acceptable. In turn, the supernatural inhabitants of the world of death become visible; they show a form, display a personality, even a biography. Little by little the world of the dead becomes knowable, and death itself is evaluated primarily as a rite of passage to a spiritual mode of being. In the last analysis, the accounts of the shamans' ecstatic journeys contribute to "spiritualizing" the world of the dead, at the same time that they enrich it with wondrous forms and figures.

—Mircea Eliade, Shamanism

With Warhol, we encounter the radical de-spiritualization of death, its banalization. The flat orange background showing through the transparent photographic reproductions arrests attention on the surface: the painting is formally and connotatively superficial. Repetition transforms the image into visual noise.

The genius of Warhol was to have intuited that the profanation of the world facilitated by photography and its mechanical reproduction is best conveyed by reproducing reproduction. To the extent that one can find elegance, if not beauty, in Warhol's work, it derives from his having discovered the perfect means to frame banality, to make modern vacuity palpable.

Rainbow Bridge

 

Fra Angelico, The Annunciation, c. 1438-47, photo: Steven Zucker

It is always by way of the rainbow that mythical heroes reach the sky.

Though indirectly, these myths refer to a time when communication between heaven and earth was possible; in consequence of a certain event or a ritual fault, the communication was broken off; but heroes and medicine men are nevertheless able to reestablish it. This myth of a paradisal period brutally abolished by the "fall" of man will engage our attention more than once . . . 

Shamans and magicians ... simply restore—temporarily and for themselves alone—this "bridge" between sky and earth, which was once accessible to all mortals.

The myth of the rainbow as road of the gods and bridge between sky and earth is also found in Japanese tradition, and doubtless existed in the religious conceptions of Mesopotamia. Further, the seven colors of the rainbow have been assimilated to the seven heavens, a symbolism found not only in India and Mesopotamia but also in Judaism. In the Bamiyan frescoes the Buddha is represented seated on a rainbow of seven bands; that is, he transcends the cosmos, just as in the myth of his Nativity he transcends the seven heavens by taking seven strides toward the north and reaching the Center of the World, the culminating peak of the universe. The throne of the Supreme Being is surrounded by a rainbow, and the same symbolism persists into the Christian art of the Renaissance. The Babylonian ziggurat was sometimes represented with seven colors, symbolizing the seven celestial regions; he who climbed its storeys attained the summit of the cosmic world. Similar ideas are found in India and . . . in Australian mythology. The Supreme God of the Kamilaroi, the Wiradjuri, and the Euahlayi dwells in the upper sky, seated on a crystal throne; Bundjil, the Supreme God of the Kulin, remains above the clouds. Mythical heroes and medicine men ascend to these celestial beings by using, among other things, the rainbow.

It will be remembered that the ribbons employed in Buryat initiations are called "rainbows"; in general, they symbolize the shaman's journey to the sky. Shamanic drums are decorated with drawings of the rainbow represented as a bridge to the sky. Indeed, in the Turkic languages the word for rainbow also means bridge. Among the Yurak-Samoyed the shamanic drum is called "bow"; the shaman's magic projects him to the sky like an arrow. Furthermore, there are reasons to believe that the Turks and the Uigur regarded the drum as a "celestial bridge" (rainbow) over which the shaman made his ascent. 

—Mircea Eliade, Shamanism

Almost all erotic poetry

can be interpreted as expressing a longing for mystical union. The most notable example is the biblical Song of Songs. Why not a Lana Del Rey song?

The Art of Ecstasy

Art originated as a means of representing the sacred. It originated to make visible what cannot be seen, to represent what is unrepresentable.

And as long as art was tied to the sacred, it had purpose and vitality.

The modern profanation of art was its undoing. Without a sacred purpose, art has no purpose. 

The history of modern art is the history of the sterilization of art. Modernists went so far as to make the uselessness of modern art its distinguishing virtue.

Inexorably, art was forced to stage its own degradation as its purpose, incorporating into itself everything that was once foreign to it: ugliness, banality, artlessness.

But even in this fallen world, the sacred lingers. 

Like the gravity well of a black hole, at once massive and invisible, the sacred inclines toward an abyss. It is a fall into ecstasy.

The closest to sacred art today is art that expresses a longing for self-extinction.

 

Music does this best, music that inspires trance and abandon. 

In visual art, the ecstatic is misidentified as "expressionism,” but the truly ecstatic art is always about the obliteration of the self not its expression.

When painting, Jackson Pollock was not himself; he was channeling something biger. 

Van Gogh's Starry Night is a samadhic vision. 

Contemporary shamans must learn to fly on their own. 

Many crash.

This is what happens

 when social media reduces discourse to an exchange of memes and one liners.

America’s economy isn’t working for many people who grew tired of being gaslit about how great the economy was, so there is a nihilistic sense that we should just burn it all down. Understandably, people who have been fucked over or sidelined want revenge against those who did well in the economy under the previous system. Despite this mentality among a large segment of Trump supporters, Trump primarily respects people who are winners under capitalism and has contempt for the less well off people who support him.

Liberalism and populism are the crest and trough of an oscillation that is tearing apart an arrangement that has come to the end of its life and can neither go forward or backward.  The is how the modern project comes undone. We could talk of a crisis of capitalism but that would be to reduce what Guenon called the crisis of the modern world to a purely economic/political crisis. Neither side in this exchange of barbed inanities has the language or breadth of vision to grasp the metaphysical import of the situation. They trade blows in a gladiatorial arena soon to be buried under the rubble of an extinct civilization.

The postmodernist revelation is

Group Gelitin, Vorm Fellows Function

that to endure banality (the default condition of a desacralized world) we must find a way to endow banality with a hierophantic aura, finding depth in nonsense and heroism in profanation (the secret of Duchamp's readymade).

Postmodernism is the idolatry of the profane, the consecration of desacration, the aestheticization of the anti-aesthetic. It is the ideology of a society that has reached the limit of profanation and can only alleviate its self-disgust by turning disgust into a higher-order aesthetic category.

In the same vein, Deleuze made madness chic. For how else can a disordered society, uprooted from its foundational traditions, incapable of centering or grounding itself, countenance its madness? Only by turning madness into an ideal.