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?

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 First Shaman

Certain legends explain the present decadence of shamans by the pride of the "first shaman," who is believed to have entered into competition with God. According to the Buryat version, the first shaman, Khara-Gyrgän, having declared that his power was boundless, God put him to the test. God took a girl's soul and shut it up in a bottle. To make sure that it would not escape, God put his finger into the neck of the bottle. The shaman flew through the sky, sitting on his drum, discovered the girl's soul and to set it free, changed into a spider and stung God in the face. God instantly pulled out his finger and the girl's soul escaped. Furious, God curtailed Khara-Gyrgän's power, and after that the magical abilities of shamans markedly diminished.

— Mircea Eliade, Shamanism

I notice there is a huge interest in associating shamanism with psychedelics. 

Sledgehammer

The metallurgist, like the blacksmith and, before him, the potter, is a "master of fire." It is by means of fire that he brings about the passage of the material from one state to another. As for the metallurgist, he accelerates the "growth" of ores, he makes them "ripe" in a miraculously short time. Smelting proves to be the means of "acting faster" but also of acting to make a different thing from what already existed in nature. This is why, in archaic societies, smelters and smiths are held to be masters of fire, along with shamans, medicine men, and magicians. But the ambivalent character of metal—laden with powers at once sacred and demonic—is transferred to metallurgists and smiths: they are highly esteemed but are also feared, segregated, or even scorned.

In many mythologies the divine smiths forge the weapons of the gods, thus insuring them victory over dragons or other monstrous beings. In the Canaanite myth, Koshar-wa-Hasis (literally, "Adroit-and-Clever") forges for Baal the two clubs with which he will kill Yam, lord of the seas and underground waters. In the Egyptian version of the myth, Ptah (the potter god) forges the weapons that enable Horus to conquer Seth. Similarly, the divine smith Tvashtr makes Indra's weapons for his battle with Vritra; Hephaestus forges the thunderbolt that will enable Zeus to triumph over Typhon. But the cooperation between the divine smith and the gods is not confined to his help in the final combat for sovereignty over the world. The smith is also the architect and artisan of the gods, supervises the construction of Baal's palace, and equips the sanctuaries of the other divinities. In addition, this godsmith has connections with music and song, just as in a number of societies the smiths and braziers are also musicians, poets, healers, and magicians. It seems, then, that on different levels of culture (an indication of great antiquity) there is an intimate connection between the art of the smith, occult techniques (shamanism, magic, healing, etc.), and the arts of song, of the dance, and of poetry.

 —Mircea Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas

 

Numerous sources are lamenting

the end of "deep" reading.

What exactly is being published today that requires "deep reading"?

The Masculine Triad

As men begat both sons and daughters, and as the former were much more desired than the latter, it was natural that a reason for this should be sought so that, if possible, the sex of the offspring could be controlled. As the phallus was the great object of veneration, it was, no doubt, carefully scrutinized and closely examined in all its peculiarities; but no marked difference of size, form, or condition was found that would account for the difference of begetting sons in one case, and daughters in another. It was observed, however, that men who had diminutive testicles, as a rule, lacked in virility, and that those who had none naturally—or who had lost them—were unable to become fathers. This was a revelation that the tests performed an important part in generation; and hence led to closer observation of their peculiarities. A marked and uniform difference was easily discovered. The right test is the more prominent, and hangs at a lower level than its smaller and less pronounced fellow on the left. The dimmest traditions of the remotest past, therefore, brings us the theory that the larger right testicle has the honor of giving the world its men; while the lesser one on the left has the minor distinction of being responsible for the weaker sex—a belief which is quite general at the present time in nearly every civilization.

How soon after the recognition of the phallus as creator—or as the instrument and representative of the Creator—that honor was divided with the less conspicuous, but equally necessary testicle appendages we have no means of definitely determining; certain it is, however, that the generative supremacy at first accorded to the phallus was in time divided with the tests—thus recognizing cooperation in the masuline organs of generation. The phallus was called Asher, which signifies to be "straight," "upright," "the erect one," "happiness," "unus cui membrum erectum est, vel fascinum ipsum"—"the erect virile member, charmed in the act of its proper function." Anu, probably from On, meaning "strength," "power"—especially "virile power," the male idea of creator, was the name given the right testicle, which, as the assistant in the generation of male children, was held next in rank to the phallus itself. This will readily explain why Jacob calls his son Benjamin—"son of my right side;" while the mother called him Benoni—" son of Anu," "son of my On." Hoa, or Hea,—while of obscure origin, and of doubtful meaning, is clearly feminine—and was the name applied to the third in rank—the left testicle.

The first sacred creative trinity, as recognized by the Assyrians, was, therefore, Asher, Anu, and Hoa—three distinct entities (principles or persons), each perfect in itself, each necessary to the other, working in harmony as one, towards one end—a veritable three in one—and one made up of three. In this—as in all subsequent trinities—and in fact, as in all polytheistic cults—the different organs, principles, or persons were of relative rank. One was the superior—even supreme—among the others. Their names, when spoken of or written together, were arranged in the order of their rank, beginning with the one considered as the Lord of the others—Lord of Lords. When they were spoken of as a whole, sometimes this trinity—again, like subsequent trinities—bore a name distinct from the three members, but frequently the collective unity was referred to under the name of the one recognized as highest in rank.

In comparatively later times the Jews knew and recognized this masculine triad, giving the testicles joint honor with the phallus; for their law made them sacred, so that even a profane touch was punished with death, and a man who had lost the one, or who was wounded in the other, "could not enter the congregation of the Lord." That is, a man whose creative triad was imperfect was an abomination. Even a descendant of Aaron could not be initiated as a priest if he was sexually imperfect. This rule was not confined to the benighted and licentious past, for, even in the present age of superior intelligence, one who is sexually mutilated, and, therefore, "not a man," cannot be consecrated as a priest, or promoted to a bishopric, much less, exalted to the Papal throne until an examination, both interrogative and occular—which is a part of every ceremony of ordination or promotion in the Catholic hierarchy— proves him—"a man—perfect in all his members."

—R. A. Campbell, Phallic Worship, 1887

Lares

Compared to Rome's major deities, Lares had limited scope and potency, but archaeological and literary evidence attests to their central role in Roman identity and religious life. By analogy, a homeward-bound Roman could be described as returning ad Larem (to the Lar). Despite official bans on non-Christian cults from the late fourth century AD onwards, unofficial cults to Lares persisted until at least the early fifth century AD.

Lifeforce

is verything.

Mesmerized by Chris Robinson in this video. I can't watch it enough. Recorded more than 30 years ago, and I only stumbled on it recently.

The gods reveal themselves

to poets and mystics, rarely, if ever, to philosophers. The hierophany may well be nothing more than a little disturbance in the ordinary, a glitch in the Matrix as it were. For Cavafy, the sight of a beautiful youth is enough.

One of Their Gods

When one of them moved through the marketplace of Selefkia
just as it was getting dark—
moved like a young man, tall, extremely handsome,
with the joy of being immortal in his eyes,
with his black and perfumed hair—
the people going by would gaze at him,
and one would ask the other if he knew him,
if he was a Greek from Syria, or a stranger.
But some who looked more carefully
would understand and step aside;
and as he disappeared under the arcades,
among the shadows and the evening lights,
going toward the quarter that lives
only at night, with orgies and debauchery,
with every kind of intoxication and desire,
they would wonder which of Them it could be,
and for what suspicious pleasure
he had come down into the streets of Selefkia
from the August Celestial Mansions. 

C. P. Cavafy

Whether God "exists"

or not is a triviality.

What matters is what kind of life and what kind of culture issue from faith and from faithlessness. Modernity supplies the answer. Without God as center, life and culture degenerate. Neurosis and madness proliferate. Freud did not sufficiently appreciate what he himself observed, that religion protects against neurosis. Like all moderns, he could not abide "illusions" and this blinded him to the fact that "fictions" and "illusions" are the stuff out of which culture is spun and are needed to protect human beings from the sterilizing effect of consciousness. 

Consciousness has to produce something that protects against its own death-dealing radiation. That is what produced religion.

Everything that needs saying has been said.

At this point, blogging or writing ought to be no more than the compiling of a commonplace. G.K. Chesterton is a particularly rich source.

We say that the most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men; my heart goes out to them. They accept the essential ideal of man; they merely seek it wrongly. Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it. But philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession. Bigamists respect marriage, or they would not go through the highly ceremonial and even ritualistic formality of bigamy. But philosophers despise marriage as marriage. Murderers respect human life; they merely wish to attain a greater fulness of human life in themselves by the sacrifice of what seems to them to be lesser lives. But philosophers hate life itself, their own as much as other people’s.—G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

If this was true in 1908, how much truer is it after 1968 and the intellectual ravages of deconstruction?

What is there poetical about being in revolt?

You might as well say that it is poetical to be sea-sick. Being sick is a revolt. Both being sick and being rebellious may be the wholesome thing on certain desperate occasions; but I'm hanged if I can see why they are poetical. Revolt in the abstract is—revolting. It's mere vomiting.—G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

In art, love of the law translates into two complimentary forms of piety: the piety of craft married to the piety of subject matter.

The piety of craft: because fundamental to craft is reverence for tradition. The modern devaluation of craft is a profanation.

Sacred time is circular. It is an incessant return to origins. Therefore, sacred art finds invention in the  retelling of the same stories, in the reverential recreation of the same forms. The modern striving for novelty is a profanation.

Praising the beautiful

is sufficient castigation of the ugly. 

Why so much energy

and invention in '60s music and so little in '60s art?

From the '60s onwards the nominal arts become of strictly academic interest.The contrast between the energy of the counterculture and the enervation of '60s institutionally sponsored art is striking. Just at the moment when things were heating up on streets, campuses, and music venues, things were cooling down in galleries.

The best thing that came out of modernism was so-called primitivism, but by the 1960s, primitivism in art was in abeyance. When it resurfaced in the '80s as Neo-expressionism, things weren't the same, probably because Neo-expressionism was the expressionism of artists who had learned about it in art school. Plus,  primitivism needed an ironic cover in order to be smuggled into institutional settings, so it came across as a simulacrum.

Fast forward to today and both art and music are equally boring.

 

I think of the counterculture

as something consumerism unintentionally produced. 

And then nullified.

The machinery of consumerism exists to incite dissatisfaction. Specifically, it is designed to create just enough dissatisfaction to make you crave the new thing but not so much that you become disillusioned with consumption altogether. 

In the '60s you had a generation that had grown up conditioned by this artificially induced appetite for something more, and I would say it was conditioned to the point where the appetite could not be satisfied by what consumerism had to offer. I would even say that at some point, consumerism produced a craving for the transcendent that threatened a complete generational rupture with the consumer economy. Hence the youthful indulgence in sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll, and esoteric non-Western spiritual practices. Young people were craving ecstatic experiences that exceeded, for a moment, what consumerism could bring to market.

Those moments of ecstasy and abandon were the beatific highlights of the counterculture.

But then the inevitable corruption set in, hastened by the internalization of that same consumerist conditioning that had incited a rebellion against consumerism. These '60s kids just couldn't kick the need for instant gratification. 

Glimpses of the transcendent are easy to come by. Music, drugs, sex offer glimpses. But to abide in the transcendent requires sacrifice, discipline, humility, and persistence, and the individuals capable of this were few. So it did not take very long for consumerism to reclaim the erstwhile rebels of the '60s.

Seeking the mystical death of the ego, many succumbed to actual self-destruction. The rest became consumers of "alternative" lifestyles dependent on alternative modes of consumption, which a consumer society was all too happy to accommodate, whether in the form of peasant blouses, beads, bell-bottoms or in the form of illicit but easily obtainable drugs.

The drugs were shortcuts to an altered state of consciousness that might have become mystical and genuinely life-changing had it been achieved with the proper techniques and proper attitude, that is, through prayer, self-discipline, and surrender to God's will. But the children of Madison Avenue did not have it in them to endure the hardships that spiritual purgation requires.

So instead of becoming ascetic mystics they became spoiled and whiny boomers.

But, yes, before the rot set in there were moments of great beauty in the '60s and most of them are to be found in the music.

Wisdom (Sophia)

lives in myth not philosophy.

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.

Because moderns are cut off

from both the spiritual faculty of apprehending the sacred and the ascetic techniques that enabled union or identification with it, they take pleasure instead in blasphemy. What is in vogue today, in lieu of worship, is the inversion of worship: vapid rebellion, deconstruction, demystification, demythification, critique. 

Unbeknownst to themselves, the blasphemers are the last remnant of the faithful.

The problem with

any materialist philosophy is that humans are not matter. There is something in them that extends beyond the material realm. What makes humans human is a sense of the sacred.

Marxism is remarkably obtuse to what is in plain view throughout history: the overwhelming influence of religious ideas on human conduct. It won’t do to dismiss religion as “ideology” because that implies that Marxism has privileged access to a truth beyond or above ideology, which would itself be a religious claim. Like all modern isms, Marxism is a self-contradicting irreligious religion.

One of G.K. Chesterton's profound insights

was that in the modern world, Christian orthodoxy has not been supplanted by reason, as the naïve advocates of enlightenment had hoped, but by diffuse forms of credulousness. In the Father Brown stories, the priest stands out for being the worldly one, dogged in his insistence on rational explanations for mysterious occurrences that others too hastily attribute to supernatural causes.

Skepticism could only injure faith not supplant it, and from that injury issued the half-baked paganism that defines modern "spirituality."

Saussure's contribution to the modern profanation

of the world is the denaturalization of language. He turns the Symbol into a sign and the sign into a convention. The idea of convention appeals to moderns because it redesignates everything once thought to be sacred as a "construct" amenable to being reassembled into something more democratic and equitable.

We need to be reminded that ancient traditions held words to be sacred in origin. As René Guénon explains in "Word and Symbol" 

The philosopher Berkeley was not wrong, therefore, when he said that the world is 'the language that the infinite Spirit speaks to finite spirits'; but he was wrong to believe that this language is only a collection of arbitrary signs, for in reality there is nothing arbitrary even in human language, every signification at the origin necessarily having its basis in some natural conformity or harmony between the sign and the signified. It is because Adam had received from God the knowledge of the nature of all living beings that he was able to give them their names (Genesis II: 19, 20); and all the ancient traditions are in agreement that the true name of a being is one with its nature or its very essence.

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.’

The world, as symbolic enclosure

that separates form from formlessness, comes into being always and everywhere as divine creation. This is a mythical recognition of the structural necessity of the symbolic order remaining beyond rational comprehension or questioning. God is the navel of the symbolic order, the omphalos, the ineffable ground. The worship of the gods, then, is not evidence of credulity or of some sort of "alienation," but an affirmation of what enables culture to function as a refuge from chaos. Culture becomes a construct when it is falling apart. Only then can it become an object for analysis. 

The fools are not the devout but the sociologists.

Bacon did not ignore any means

to tum us away from Plato’s philosophy, the human preface to the Scriptures, and praised, expounded, and propagated that of Democritus, that is to say, atomic philosophy, a desperate attempt of materialism pushed to extremes, which, being aware that matter escapes it and explains nothing, plunges into the infinitely small, seeking, so to speak, matter without matter and being completely happy even amid absurdities so long as it does not find intelligence.

In conformity with this system of philosophy, Bacon urges men to seek the cause of natural phenomena in the configuration of constituent atoms or molecules, the most false and gross idea ever to have stained the human understanding. And this is why the eighteenth century, which has always loved and praised men only for the evil they bear, made Bacon its god, while nevertheless refusing to give him justice for his good and even excellent qualities. It is quite wrong to believe that he forwarded the progress of science, for all the real scientific innovators preceded him or were ignorant of him. Bacon was a barometer who announced good weather, and because he announced it people believed that he had made it.

Joseph de Maistre, The Saint Petersburg Dialogues

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.

The desacralization of the sacred object,

Paul McCarthy, Complex Pile, 2007

which took the form of its transformation into art, gave art access to possibilities that could no be realized as long as art remained bound to tradition. The ability to exploit these possibilities appeared, initially, to inject new vigor into art. Untethered from its religious obligations, art became a source of novelties and sensations. 

It took a while for the consequences of this putative liberation to make themselves felt, but by the mid-twentieth century it had become readily apparent that in the pursuit of novelty, art had forged a path to banality. 

Art history has created a false image of continuity between the sacred object and the art object, subsuming both into the profane temporality of linear progression. It has forced them to share a history despite their being entirely different species. Indeed, the sacred object, as a symbol of the absolute and the eternal, only has meaning outside the flux of history. The profane art object is from its inception subject to the vapid exigencies of fashion. 

The emptying out of art, its diminution into mere cipher of exchange value, was for a time covered up by the supposed heroism of an avant-garde at war with outworn academic ideals.  But once the modernist moment was over, it was plain for all to see that the putative liberation of art from tradition was the prelude to its abjection.

Finally, with the advent of the readymade and the objects and attitudes it spawned, art dissolves in and becomes one with its commodity-glutted profane milieu. The appropriation of the banal does not close the gap between "art" and "life" because that gap was opened by modernity, when it replaced the masterful and sacralized production of everyday objects by industrial fabrication and artisans by coerced and alienated laborers. High and low were sundered when the High (the transcendent) was removed from the lives of the low. No purely artistic maneuver could restore that connection. The theatrics of the readymade do not overcome the disjunction of high and low, art and life. They merely reveal the insignificance and superfluity of art when it no longer has a sacred purpose and is reduced to making a spectacle out of its own debasement. 

Early modernists like Mallarmé did not envisage this. Art was supposed to redeem the squalor of modern life. Instead, it became part of it.

Rodchenko's monochromes proletarianize painting

by making the painting of a painting indistinguishable from the painting of a wall. And yet, with repetition, the meaning of this gesture, so radical in its implications, is inverted, and the monochrome becomes instead the sign of an extreme aestheticism. In this, I think one glimpses how modernism failed: it was meant to be a transitional aesthetic, a bridge to a future in which art would be reunited with everyday craft, as it had been in the preindustrial past. But this future never came and, with repetition, modernism’s radical gestures became mannerisms.

We might, no doubt,

find it a nuisance to count all the blades of grass or all the leaves of the trees; but this would not be because of our boldness or gaiety, but because of our lack of boldness and gaiety. The bore would go onward, bold and gay, and find the blades of grass as splendid as the swords of an army. The bore is stronger and more joyous than we are; he is a demi-god-nay, he is a god. For it is the gods who do not tire of the iteration of things; to them the nightfall is always new, and the last rose as red as the first.

G.K. Chesterton, “On Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Making the World Small“

All the towering materialism which dominates the modern mind rests ultimately upon one assumption; a false assumption. It is supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead; a piece of clockwork. People feel that if the universe was personal it would vary; if the sun were alive it would dance. This is a fallacy even in relation to known fact. For the variation in human affairs is generally brought into them, not by life, but by death; by the dying down or breaking off of their strength or desire. A man varies his movements because of some slight element of failure or fatigue. He gets into an omnibus because he is tired of walking; or he walks because he is tired of sitting still. But if his life and joy were so gigantic that he never tired of going to Islington, he might go to Islington as regularly as the Thames goes to Sheerness. The very speed and ecstacy of his life would have the stillness of death. The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning; but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction. Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical ENCORE. Heaven may ENCORE the bird who laid an egg. If the human being conceives and brings forth a human child instead of bringing forth a fish, or a bat, or a griffin, the reason may not be that we are fixed in an animal fate without life or purpose. It may be that our little tragedy has touched the gods, that they admire it from their starry galleries, and that at the end of every human drama man is called again and again before the curtain. Repetition may go on for millions of years, by mere choice, and at any instant it may stop. Man may stand on the earth generation after generation, and yet each birth be his positively last appearance.

G.K. Chesterton, “The Ethics of Elfland”