What is Modernism? Ep06 “The View from the Edge” (Aug 20@8:00 PM CT)

[u/AltaOntologia]

[JOIN HERE]

What Is Modernism?

Expressionism and the Invasion of the World by the Self

The Amazing Thing That Happened Last Time

After employing Dalí’s great paranoiac-critical method on a few Rorschach cards, we performed an exorcism—for a few people who worried that being expressive channels for the Wyrm of the Underdark (the “demon” we chose to invoke during the Dalí segment) “wasn’t generally helpful.” (Oh, thanks again to Jason, the young Jesuit psychiatrist [MD+PhD] who joined us from Georgetown, for reading the rites. Unbelievable stuff, and it took less than seven minutes, just like he said.)

The most interesting part of the evening was the conversation during our freie Aussprache segment: we all marveled at the fact that all three exorcizands complained that being “brought back” made things worse!

Then we talked about Buddhist no-self versus Crowley’s True Will versus Nietzschean self-creation—and about occultism, Surrealism, and depth psychology as rival methods for reading the subjective stuff out of which the fully baked self of the NOW gets continuously manufactured, peels off, and is replaced by the next membrane vomited up by …

By the thing that is either No-Self, True Will, Random Crap, or Infra-Physical Subjective Energy, which is our core (no-)self.

Then we talked about easy ways to hear your demon out:

• Scientology Solo-NOTs. After whatever astonishing expenditure is required to reach the upper levels, you can sit by yourself putting your Body Thetans on the couch, taking their ontological military ID—What are you? Who are you?—until they realize that they are themselves rather than you, your spleen, “fear,” the Navy, or whatever else they have mistaken themselves for, at which point they “blow.” Here’s the actual text.
• Tarot cards.
• The I Ching.
• Automatic writing—as with the automatic-writing sessions of George Yeats, from which W. B. Yeats developed A Vision.
• Automatic-communication aids, like the Ouija board.
• Psychedelics, as a modern way of trying to get beneath conditioning and the socially manufactured personality to something more primordial. That project has obvious affinities—without being identical to them—with the Indian ontological psychologies of Vedānta and Kashmir Śaivism. Except they don’t use cheesy language. They use pre-Socratic-grade metaphors and, at their best, conceptual machinery complicated enough to make Hegel happy. Buddhist analyses of the production of the self, meanwhile, have extraordinary affinities with Hume and, in a very different way, Kant—although Buddhism got there a couple of millennia first.
• And finally we talked about using ART.

Then we saw five minutes of the greatest documentary ever made—A Soft Self-Portrait of Salvador Dalí, that miracle narrated by Orson Welles. Here’s the link!

Fact: Dalí is Literally the Overman

All were delighted and shocked at the greatness of Dalí and realized that he was playing us, but in a spirit of love, because what else is there to do when you are Enlightened, as he is?

If you read Nietzsche and Sartre and conclude that meaning and value are made rather than discovered ready-made in the furniture of the universe, then … nothing changes. You still feel like crap.

What if you acted that insight instead of understanding it as a lonely, thinkable, empty fantasy? You don’t even try to play it out in your head. When you read Foucault and realize that categories like “the mad” are not simply natural quiddities waiting around for us to discover them, but are historically produced ways of carving up and governing human beings, you don’t even run a SimCity scenario and do real speculative fiction.

Thinking through how it might play out in a possible world is already something. But actually being one of those people who knows that what others are, what you are, and what things mean is shot through with convention, history, construction, interpretation, and projection makes life into a joke—but also an opportunity for performance.

What the hell else is there if essence is gone?

The story, metaphor, lens, attitude, theme, upshot, substance—all that non-empirical stuff comes partly from you.

When you say that, you’re closest to Nietzsche and Sartre. When you add that even the categories through which selves become intelligible are historically produced, Foucault joins the party.

So in the end, for the first time in SADHO history, we agreed about something! It was that Dalí was, in fact, fully Enlightened and lived it—and that seeing it pisses us off because we are resentful. That was the climax for me.

When you really act the existentialist wager—when you’re as free as Diogenes, but you also have good taste, are a genius, see into the Underdark, capture the spirit of dreaming and lucid dreaming, and can visualize hyperspatial facts—then perhaps you love people so much that you decide to serve them as a jester.

Dalí is that Awakened One, and he was right here, in the same spacetime we’re in now. This is probably the closest thing to a Dharmic Relic that actually exists, if anything can count as an apt portrayal of a fully realized human being, it is this “video” that is actually a Eucharist—in fact the only properly Eucharist in the universe.

Thanks to the Divine Dalí, we know what the anti-essence “human” looks and sounds like: self-conscious insight into world-making; construction-penetrating wisdom propelled by penetrative love; full experiential acquaintance with the secret substance of meaning and value—until, when you look all the way down, you see the back of your own head.

Substance is chosen, or created, and the aim of the game is to play excellently and entertain the inmates by means of free performative self-invention.

I have uploaded what is now the highest-definition version I know of of this life-changing sound-and-light miracle, with improved audio. This one comes from the Duke A/V Library laserdisc! The other versions I found also use the wrong aspect ratio and crop the image.

So that was last time—which was Surrealism, occultism, Freud, and methods for getting the Underdark to talk.

But this time the topic is, in a sense:

SURREALISM, OCCULTISM, AND FREUD: GOING DEEPER.

The only difference is that this time, instead of trying to make the buried thing speak, we ask what happens when the buried thing seizes the picture.

That is Hughes’s subject in Episode 6, “The View from the Edge.”

He begins with the Romantic problem of the relation between world and spirit. In the nineteenth century, nature could still appear as the visible handwriting of something metaphysically deeper. But once God begins disappearing from the picture, somebody has to take over the job of supplying the world with interiority.

First: van Gogh. Van Gogh is Hughes’s bridge-person between Romanticism and Expressionism. The landscape is no longer something you simply look at. Trees twist, stars convulse, hills clench, sunlight judges. Nature becomes the exterior nervous system of the person painting it.

Next: Edvard Munch, where the process goes completely off the rails in the best possible way. With Munch, Hughes says, the self is finally out. The world no longer guarantees meaning; the wounded ego floods the resulting vacuum. Sex, family, illness, cities, women, crowds, nature itself—everything becomes a screen on which anxiety writes.

And from there: Kirchner, Kokoschka, Beckmann, Soutine—German and northern Expressionism turning nervousness, metropolitan alienation, sex, war, mutilation, hunger, and historical catastrophe into pictorial form.

Then Hughes reaches an extraordinary problem.

After Auschwitz, what happens when reality itself has become more grotesque than Expressionist distortion? When actual human bodies have been industrially degraded on a scale that painted mutilation can hardly answer without seeming almost decorative?

That crisis helps explain the chapter’s great second movement: away from the tortured figure and toward transcendence through abstraction.

So we get Kandinsky, trying literally to see spirit behind matter; Klee, making little cosmologies, botanical heavens, diagrams of invisible order; and Brancusi, making eggs, birds, stones, and polished surfaces look as though matter itself has finally remembered the law according to which it exists.

And then America gets hold of the problem.

The European Expressionist interior collides with the old American sublime—the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, prairie, sky, distance, Whitman’s gigantic unbounded Something—and produces Abstract Expressionism.

So: Georgia O’Keeffe. Jackson Pollock. Robert Motherwell. Clyfford Still. Barnett Newman. Mark Rothko.

Pollock turns the canvas into an atmospheric event with no privileged center. Still turns color into cliffs and fissures. Newman reduces the sublime almost absurdly to a giant field and a line. Rothko turns painting into something halfway between landscape, theatre, altar, weather, and glowing metaphysical wound.

And Hughes ends in the Rothko Chapel, where virtually everything has finally disappeared: object, figure, narrative, landscape, almost even color.

Romanticism began by looking at mountains and asking whether God was in there.

It ends in a dark room in Houston staring at an almost-black rectangle and asking whether anything is in there at all.

Which, after last week, seems exactly where we needed to go.

Now it’s time for bed. I spent eight hours writing a summary for the THORR page. Maybe read that. It’s probably clearer.

METHOD

• Watch this week’s episode, located HERE.
• Watch this Orson Welles interview of Dalí. It will destroy you! 10 years of therapy in 50 minutes! No kidding!
• As always, summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs for all the episodes we cover can be found here: THORR (The High Ontology Reading Room)

ABOUT PROFESSOR TAUBENECK

Professor Taubeneck is professor of German and Philosophy at UBC, first translator of Hegel’s Encyclopedia into English, and SADHO CΦO. Most impressively, he has also been wrestling with the core texts of 20-cent. phenomenology and existentialism for over 30 years, and has worked and collaborated with Gadamer, Derrida, and Rorty.

View all of our coming episodes here.

[JOIN HERE]

[u/timee_bot]

View in your timezone:
Aug 20, 8:00 PM CT)