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.

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.

If there ever was an alternative to modernity,

it could only have been a return to what preceded it. 

Instead, the postmodern attack on the legacy of the Enlightenment was formulated as a leap toward some vague transhumanism—which is really an attempt to reinvent religion as antireligion, alongside the attempt to reinvent art as antiart, the old impulse to worship the more-than-human turned into a desire to idolize the less-than-human.

The truly significant event of the modern era

is the desacralization of life and art. “Modernity” and “Postmodernity” are merely markers of the stages of that fateful event. 

With the disappearance in the West of the last vestige of the sacred, the triumph of materialism ushers a great inversion. The worship of the more than human is replaced by the worship of the less than human. Everything formerly sacrilegious, dishonorable, ignoble, ugly, monstrous becomes an object of cult veneration. 

As René Guénon observes in his essay, “On the Meaning of Carnivals,” (below) the “feast of fools” that was formerly a purgative ritual of strictly limited duration becomes in our era an everyday spectacle.

On the Meaning of Carnivals

In connection with a certain ‘theory of festivals’ formulated by a sociologist, we have pointed out that this theory has, among other deficiencies, the weakness of wanting to reduce all festivals to a single type, that of what may be called ‘carnival’ festivals, an expression which seems to us clear enough to be understood by everyone, as in fact carnival represents what is still left of festival today in the West; and we said at that time that this kind of festival raises questions which can call for a more thorough examination. In fact, the impression that emerges from them is always and above all else that of disorder, in the most complete sense of this word. How then does it happen that they are to be found, not only in our time, but also and even with a more ample development, in traditional civilisations with which they seem at first sight incompatible? If they pertained specifically to our own times, they could be considered simply as one of the numerous manifestations of the general disequilibrium.

We may as well give here some definite examples, and we will mention first certain truly strange festivals which were celebrated in the Middle Ages: the ‘feast of the ass’ where this animal, whose distinctly satanic symbolism is well known in all traditions, was even brought into the very choir of the church where it occupied the place of honour and received the most extraordinary tokens of veneration; also, the ‘feast of fools’, wherein the lower clergy gave themselves up to the worst improprieties, parodying both the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the liturgy itself. How is it possible to explain that in such a period things whose most evident characteristic is incontestably that of parody and even of sacrilege were not only tolerated but even given an as it were official sanction?

We will also mention the Roman Saturnalia from which, moreover, the modern carnival seems to have been directly derived, though in fact it is no longer anything but a very diminished vestige: during these festivals, the slaves ordered the masters about, and the masters served the slaves. One then had the image of a truly ‘upside down’ world, wherein everything was done in reverse of the normal order. Although it is commonly claimed that these festivals were a reminder of the ‘golden age’, this interpretation is clearly false: for there is no question here of any kind of ‘equality’ that could strictly be regarded as representing, insofar as is possible in present conditions, the primordial indifferentiation of social functions. It is a question of the reversal of hierarchies, which is something completely different; and such a reversal constitutes, generally speaking, one of the plainest characteristics of satanism. We must therefore see here something that relates much rather to the sinister aspect of Saturn, an aspect which certainly does not pertain to him as god of the ‘golden age’ but, on the contrary, insofar as he is now no more than the fallen god of a bygone and finished period.

It can be seen by these examples that there is invariably a sinister and even satanic element in such festivals; and it should be noted in particular that this very element is precisely what pleases the mob and excites its gaiety. There is something here, in fact, that is very apt-and even more so than anything else to satisfy the tendencies of fallen man, insofar as these tendencies push him to develop the lowest possibilities of his nature. Now it is just in this that the real point of such festivals lies: it is a question of somehow ‘channeling’ these tendencies, and of thus making them as inoffensive as possible by giving them an opportunity to manifest themselves, but only during very brief periods and in very well defined circumstances, and by thus enclosing this manifestation within narrow limits which it is not allowed to overstep. Otherwise these same tendencies, for want of the minimum satisfaction required by the present condition of humanity, would be at risk of exploding, so to speak,and of spreading their effects everywhere, collectively as well as individually, causing thereby a disorder far more serious than that which is produced only during some few days specially reserved for this purpose, and which is all the less to be feared for being thus ‘regularised’. For on the one hand these days are placed outside the normal course of things, so as not to exert any appreciable influence upon it, while, on the other hand, the fact that there is nothing unforeseen in these festivals ‘normalises’ as it were the disorder itself and integrates it into the total order. Apart from this general explanation, which no one who is prepared to think about it can fail to understand, it will be as well to say something in particular about the ‘masquerades’ which play an important part in carnivals themselves, and in other more or less similar festivals; and what we have to say will confirm still further what we have just said. In fact, carnival masks are generally hideous and most often evoke animal or demonic forms so that they are like a figurative ‘materialisation’ of the inferior and even infernal tendencies, which are allowed to come to the surface on these occasions. Besides, each one will quite naturally choose from among these masks, without being fully aware of it, the one that best suits him, that is, the one which represents what is most in conformity with his own lower tendencies-so much so that one could say that the mask which is supposed to hide the true face of the individual, on the contrary reveals to the eyes of everyone that which he really carries within himself but which he is habitually obliged to dissimulate. It is well to note, for this throws further light on the masks, that we have here a kind of parody of the ‘reversal’ which, as we have explained elsewhere, takes place at a certain degree of initiatic development; a parody, we say, and a truly satanic counterfeit, for here the reversal is an exteriorization, not of the beings spirituality but, on the contrary, of its lowest possibilities.

To end this survey, we will add that if the festivals of this kind are more and more rare and if they even seem hardly able any longer to arouse the interest of the crowd, it is because, in a time such as our own, they have become truly pointless. In fact, how can there still be any question of ‘circumscribing’ disorder and of containing it within rigorously defined limits, when it has spread everywhere and is manifested constantly in all domains of human activity? Thus although, considering only externals and from a purely ‘aesthetic’ point of view, one might be tempted to welcome, on account of their inevitable garb of ugliness, the almost complete disappearance of these festivals, this disappearance can on the contrary be seen, by going to the roots of the matter, as an exceedingly unreassuring symptom, because it bears witness to the irruption of disorder into the whole course of existence and to its having become generalised to such a point that we could really be said to live in a sinister ‘perpetual carnival.’

Per Rudolf Otto,

Maurizio Cattelan, L.O.V.E. (2010). Courtesy of Ralf Steinberger.

the Sacred is the “Wholly Other” and thus outside of the scope of discursive understanding and accessible only to a cognitive faculty open to revelation. In traditional societies, artistic forms are symbolic representations of what cannot actually be seen. In the modern era, sacred knowledge is dismissed as superstition, and art, now discnnected from the sacred, becomes Art, an object of purely aesthetic veneration. Early modernists like Rilke and Mallarme could still sense the presence of the sacred in art. The glow was faint but still there.

“Postmodernism” is the triumph of banality, the total subjugation of art to materialism. This is why what floats to the surface in this period is the idea of art as anti-art, art as the spectacle of its own self-degradation. The concept of art is retained strictly for the sake of its abuse.

In the ancient caste systems (which were not exclusive to India), the merchant classes always came third, after the priestly class and the warrior class (the nobility). The merchant class had its place but was not ever considered fit to rule. The revolutions of the modern era undid this sacred order and gave the top spot to the bourgeoisie. The cultural consequences did not show themselves immediately because the rich legacy of the pre-democratic age and its aristocratic standards briefly outlived the passing of the aristocratic age. Today, however, we cannot escape or contain those consequences. We are subjected to the collapse of all boundaries and distinctions inherited from the old world and the monstrosities that proliferate when money overtakes nobility.

Modernism attempts to resacralize art by elevating art itself to a religion. It fails because art is meant to serve the sacred not mimic it. The beauty of sacred art resides in its pious humility, in the fact that it does not advance itself as something more important than the symbol it embodies. Form is a nullity when all it conveys is a will to form. And ultimately, that is the most that modern art can express, a will to form.

Hatred of religion

shows up in modern art as hatred of “illusionism.” Paradoxically, this hatred of illusionism drives modern art toward abstraction and a fixation on the materiality of the signifier.

But art can never become totally materialist, can never be reduced to objecthood, because if it is, it ceases to have a symbolic function and without symbolic function, it ceases to be art and becomes indistinguishable from every other object. 

So an art that seeks to eradicate all illusionism must eventually eradicate itself. And we get very close to this with the readymade. But not quite, because the readymade, whether considered as art or antiart art, still invokes the symbolic. Duchamp’s urinal is no longer just a urinal once it is “nominated” as art. This nomination bears uncanny resemblance to the sacralization of the profane object, which likewise may retain the external appearance of a quite ordinary object (stone, tree, pool, bread, wine, etc.) and yet be imbued with unearthly power. It is only in an art history dissociated from the larger history of human ritual that the invention of the readymade is assigned such disproportionate significance. The readymade is merely a parody of the consecrated object.

The readymade shares with the “literal” minimalist object the sleight of hand of invoking the metaphysical while pretending to abolish it. So I am in sympathy with Michael Fried’s rejection of literalism in “Art and Objecthood.” But Fried’s case against literalism it vitiated by the need to couch in formalist terms what could only be forcefully articulated in metaphysical terms. The idea that wants to come to the surface in that tortured and verbose essay is that art is art only to the extent that it serves a metaphysical purpose. Art is the transfiguration of matter into spiritual substance. And this and this alone is the reason why art cannot be reduced to a desacralized, profane object without ceasing to be art. Fried could not bring himself to state this and in failing to state it he revealed why formalism, which for a brief period served as a bulwark against the banalization of art, finally failed at its task and left the field to be trampled by postmodernists.

The peculiarity of capitalism

is that it is a system of production and consumption that has no equilibrium point. It is either expanding or in crisis. The regime of representation that the bourgeoisie instituted once it achieved power shares this instability.

Modernism, like capitalism, is self-subverting and novelty-obsessed. Contrary to what Clement Greenberg claimed, modernism was not an artistic refuge from the vulgarity of capitalism. It was a faithful reproduction in art of the alienating process that created the coommodity fetish by detaching value from labor and the set of social relations within which labor produces value. In the case of modernism, this process created the fiction of the autonomous work of art, which like the commodity fetish imbues the art object with magical "aesthetic" qualities derived entirely from within. 

More boadly, modernism supplied a bourgeoisie eager to burnish its progressive pretense a theatrical staging of nonconformity. It inaugurated an accelerated instability of style, the fetishization of unconventionality, the absolutism of fashion.

The impetus toward realism that we observe in early modernism is a naive effort at a democratic reform of the mimetic sign. The hope was that a more empirical, more democratic type of representation would escape the limitations of the old one. It was a short-lived hope that did not take into account the shallowness of the bourgeoisie’s purely pragmatic commitment to democracy and the fickleness of its tastes. Thus, as art became a commodity, realism gave way to a succession of other fugitive artistic trends, for the allure of the commodity requires the incessant refurbishment of its imaginary newness

The development of modernist abstraction is a product of the demystification of the sign. Once the sign is grasped as a convention, it is irreparably fissured and the signifier achieves independence. This is what the notion of “art for art’s sake” attempts to articulate. The material signifier (sound, color, mark, texture, gesture, etc.) is liberated from “meaning.” It is disburdened of its denotational (use) value and like the commodity becomes purely connotative, a screen for the projection of fantasies. Initially, it was indexical and symbolic signifiers that most readily lent themselves to this process of abstraction. However, the readymade and Pop art revealed that even the most iconic signs can be removed from denotational use and re-presented as pure, floating signifiers.

Modernism’s undoing, perhaps prophetic of the undoing of capitalism itself, is that the demolition of the sign pulverizes all difference and all possibility of aesthetic discrimination. Signifiers without meaning and without an assigned place in a symbolic hierarchy become “floating” signifiers, essentially floating wreckage. Modernism inaugurates a psychotic unquilting of the signifier. Liberal ideology tries to hide this impoverishment of the sign by repurposing signs into markers of identity. So Warhol’s Elvises and Marilyns are read as signs of their maker’s (and his complicit audience’s) "queerness." The old phallic signifiers are replaced by their inversions: one learns to idolize failure, flaccidity, and shabbiness as marks of a “transgressive” heroicized anti-heroism. In its fetishized form (as "identity") queerness hides from view the emptiness of a culture no longer capable of articulating any distinction save a distinction between jerry-rigged self-applied pronouns.

Identity is a flimsy peg on which to hang a sign because identity is always out of step with itself. Contemporary identities are never more than the hope of their own achievement and their declaration is also at the same time a declaration of the distance from their achievement. Thus, every self-applied identity replicates rather than resolves the fatal gap that modernity opened between the signifier and the signified.

In its terminal “postmodernist” phase, cultural production oscillates between a psychotic emptying of the sign (i.e. the production of froth) and delusional efforts to recodify the signt by turning it into a token of some transient identity. The figure that seems to me to best represent this moment is the shape-shifting cyborg in Terminator 2: Judgment Day after  he/it falls into the pool of molten steel. As he liquefies, he frantically attempts to recompose himself, mutating rapidly through the forms he had at one time or another assumed until, finally, he is overcome, vomits himself, and dissolves. His special power had been the ability to metamorphose into anything. At the end, he metamorphoses into nothing. This is the immediate future of a desacralized Western culture.

The distinction between

premodern, modern, and postmodern can be expressed semiotically in terms of the relative stability of the sign.

As long as knowledge is grounded in sacred revelation, the sign is a sacred symbol.

After the post-Renaissance triumph of humanism, there follows a modern interregnum during which the signifier is dislocated from its metaphysical referent and the sign is reduced to a convention. In visual art this is most pointedly evident in Cubism and what  descends from it, collage in particular.  Symbolism, and later on, surrealism, discover the “poetic” potentiality of this semiotic disarray. The most banal, ubiquitous signifiers encountered in everyday life are then found to be charged with myriad repressed meanings. Signs become symptoms.

Postmodernity marks the full disintegration of the sign, a semiotic psychosis. The sign is reduced to the concrete signifier, at once hyperreal and mesmerizing but, like the glittering mirror panels that clad postmodern buildings, lacking depth or interiority. The signifier becomes a “floating signifier,” which as Frederic Jameson noted, absorbs rather than bestows meaning. It is stupefyingly blank, brazen in its banality, unsettling in its aggressive shallowness. In place of the modernist investment in the sign’s excessive meaning, postmodernism emphasizes the sign’s abject poverty. The violent contrasts that define the surrealist marvelous are replaced by an undifferentiated aggregation of dead signifiers. Henceforth, anything can mingle with anything else. This is heralded as a democratizing of the image, a demolition of the distinction between “high” and “low.” In reality, this levelling project is a means to give the banal its mirrored surface, turning emptiness into fulness. This is how the readymade becomes the paradigmatic postmodernist invention.

Current woke virtue signaling is a desperate effort to reinvest the sign with unambiguous meaning. Dead traditions are turned on their head and reinvented as liberal pieties. Lameness and imaginary blasphemy (directed at canons and traditions long extinct) become cherished signs of hallowed marginality.  This is not a novel phenomenon. In the words of Sophocles “evil appears as good in the minds of those whom god leads to destruction."

The consequences of the secularization of art

have taken some 700 years to reveal themselves to their fullest extent. It is only with the advent of postmodernism that the full meaning of art's dissociation from the sacred becomes manifest.

Modernism attempted to overcome relativism or, at least keep it at bay, by making a fetish of form. It failed because form only achieves real significance in service to the sacred not as an end in itself. By the late 1950s the exhaustion of a formalism devoid of symbolic content showed itself in the banality of the minimalist object and the equally sterile opticality of postpainterly abstraction.

After decades of Dadaist proclamations of the death of art, art's actual end seemed impending. It turned out however that the aesthetic frame could be separated from and made independent of aesthetic criteria.  This was the fundamental lesson of Pop art, and it became the foundational principle of postmodernism.  Art was saved from extinction by a sleight of hand that enabled it to persist as anti-art art.

Postmodernism is the formalization of formlessness. Aesthetic criteria persist in postmodernism in inverted form, as conventions to be ceaselessly invoked and willfully transgressed.  This explains why performance is so central to postmodernism, for ultimately postmodernism is but an endless carnival procession of displays of the violation of good form, a cult of flagrant ignobility.

If art will not serve the sacred, it will serve the unholy, but the unholy is parasitic, and to sustain itself it must keep conjuring the image of the sacred long after the sacred has ceased to have any real presence.