World War I, Wasily Kandinsky

A man like Kant can explain the beautiful in terms of a pure disinterested pleasure — such a knotted definition is not in itself surprising, nor is the kind of cynicism about the potential and limitations of life which is quite effectively communicated thereby. What is curious is that he in fact means to enhance the importance of artistic creation by converting the unsettling power of the artist into a kind of channel to a familiar universality. Is the beautiful not, then, grasped – but grasped in precisely at its most narrow and isolated state, through a transcendental enframing, even as an annihilation of life itself: as a kind of dazzling infinition which nonetheless does not interact with our conscious interest but with our immaterial, intangible “soul”?

There is even almost a kind of foundational axiom of psychoanalysis embedded in Kant’s definition (of course a paradox): there is no pleasure except in losing the possibility for pleasure — the glare of infinite Being when one has finally completely lost one’s identity, and dissolved oneself into the universal (father-mother)… The deep pessimism expressed in this kind of escape, this resentment of life which is by no means peculiar to Kant, is nevertheless quite clearly the pulsing thread underlying his patchwork labor in his “critiques” of the mournful becoming of things. We find in psychoanalysis as well such a stoic willingness to defend the infinite ‘metaphysical’ essence which refuses to escapes its container: and always he leaves open the possibility that human beings are indeed the receptacles of divine messages, channels of pure truth. Frames…

The various critiques in effect each pass through God: the divine body in each case codified, colonized, and contained according to a schema or matrix. Ancient diagrammatics: but religious prophecy and classical philosophy — which is perhaps to say a body without organs and its degenerate, parasitic outgrowths — allow such a convergence only through the quelling of a kind of very earthly subterranean enmity between the drives amounting to a kind of repressed hatred. For now they are neither and only pretending, which lodges us squarely in the endless hypocritical abyss of the subject: and finally this desire (and repeated failure) to escape, to dissolve and to disappear turns inwards and becomes a kind of holy resentment, a “stoic” pessimism. The way out is completely blocked, or rather the only path of escape is precisely through this divine sieve we thereby create: and is there not always a bizarre consciousness of self-division which takes place, a realization we are merely ‘acting,’ which suddenly seems almost to divide the Cosmos itself in order to produce the way out such vanity desperately and incessantly seeks? In short, perhaps Kant meant to be — an artist…?

If narcissism could in any sense be said to be the basis for a proto-aesthetics, a necessary condition for the production of any aesthetic intervention whatsoever — if not the outer eclipse of the primordial movement of creativity itself… Then this is because beauty captures, absorbs, exhumes. It fascinates. It opens up new distances, illuminates novel depths, original styles. It pierces a depth whose distance is infinite, the absolutely other. Beauty, what else? –but null futurity, the brutal light of the ultimate apocalypse.

Beauty is extinction.

Both a pure white emptiness and a heterogeneous black abyss: beauty, always a grotesque transfiguration. Without Da Vinci this uglier aspect of narcissism would have gone unnoticed even longer. The history of the theory of art has been about drawing this glittering, distracting line, ultimately proving it not indeed to be a line at all, certainly leading nowhere and anyways, not a thin line.

Nor a no-man’s-land.

But rather a discontinuous movement, a gesture: a non-linear, free, undetermined, anonymous gesture, a suffering and powerful movement of expressivity. (Perhaps even a foundational motion, genesis…?) This creation of an uninterruptible channel for the distribution and division of energies –Is beauty but the tool-building hominid’s dream of infinite celerity, of pure mobilities, that is, a total category of absolute transport?

A transcendence born from distance which already converges obscenely upon terror, stasis and death: the frozen beauty of absolute immobility, rapturous passivity, absolute domesticity, pure receptivity and com-placency. Again and again, the resurgence of the hidden narrative, the overstory of the understory: rupture and transcendence and return. but: exhumation, or resurrection?

Yes, transcendence is always a secret, because immanence is the pure singular truth. There’s nothing here that doesn’t belong. Yet the secret one, the secret line has no home, it unfolds and decomposes. It criminalizes itself. Style is not the secret but the edge of the abyss, the sharpened point, the “critical” distance which allows the flourish and spectacle.

In short, beauty is approached in style only through the distances produced by varieties of interconnectivity. Through becoming other, through becoming a machine, the sharpened point opens onto a new order, a new genre of possibilities. The smoothness of the proto-narrative space is an unground, a native battleground for all varietes of possible forms of expression, an auto-transcendentalizing matrix which is open to countless potential assemblages.

Within it things learn to dream.

Beauty is beyond harmony and chaos, underneath horror and grace. To speak like a psychologist: without our hearts, beauty would still be real, for insofar as it attains towards transcendence of the human, it names the real, the discontinuous event, the line which cannot be obscured, the disintegration of organizations…

Surrealism is pure unconscious violence, a naive violence we’re still not sophisticated enough to understand. Which is also to say, to unleash! And yet, it is strange to think — without hearts, beauty would have never even been contemplated. We would shield ourselves from beauty just as surely if we did not feel it as strongly we do now. Beauty feeds upon itself: it is an autoparasite.

The real behind appearances is always suffering and power, tragic, sublime and transfigured: for even the heartless can fall victim to pity, to the dazzling lure of beauty within ugliness. The real is ungrounded when it encounters the beautiful: beauty is the abominable unground, horror beyond horror, the unlife beyond life, the inert decaying matter feeding swarms of parasites. Not the abyss but concoursing flies, vectors of disorganization, dense congregations of insects pressing in the gaps, eternally unearthing. Pullulating herds of larval awareness.

Digging. Into the ground. (Do we not all remember digging? Are we not digging still?) Unearth, unground: this structured or ethical suspension of reason, this dis-engagement of feelings, is in fact the classical basis of philosophy — in it, not only images but our very feelings are rejected as nothing but sick animals feeding upon our brokenness, upon our finitude, upon our imperfection, guilt and suffering. But, one might rejoin, are they not learning? Learning thereby from our pain, as it were, from our mistakes? Even from our terror? From our moments of distraction and weakness and despair? From our recurring convalescence?

It is in this manner that association becomes a true rival for abstraction. Learning and regeneration: in this way repetition becomes creativity and association becomes intuition. Learning is organic, cosmic, libidinal: but always a parasitic organization. Knowledge infests. It is a noise. The intervention, noise, comes first, before the channel, before the signal. The sign arrives only much later, an instrument of the one, the one which instructs the reorganizers. There is a whole geography of knowledge beyond signs.

There is yet an intervening milieu (which is not organized, not itself semiotic) which deserves investigation. The abyss, the interface, the field of intensity: names for structures the modality of intervention. Philosophy cannot escape the twin problems of distance and style. They relate intimately to speaking, to knowing, to writing, to thinking. We can touch the noise before we hear the sound.

We can feel the terror of decay before we feel its squirming multiple births. We cannot listen to noise. But we have to be able to learn. It is a perhaps a bit like dying: transubstantiation, depersonalization, molecular disorganization. Dispersal, becoming pure intensity, pure sound, pure light. God, the ocean of light, no more than a romantic fantasy: a lantern to guide us through the abyss. Just bright enough to illuminate the depth of our horror, the misery of our position. But, and yet… somehow, impossibly, the brilliant positivity of the world, of the earth and what is beneath the earth… of the fractured lines of light, cracks of awareness opening onto the future…

Improvisation (Kandinsky)

“I owe to you the most beautiful dream of my life.”
- Nietzsche, [from a letter to Lou Salome]

I cannot help but admire Nietzsche when he writes in Twilight of the Idols that there is nothing beautiful but man. For Nietzsche, vanity is ‘the first truth of aesthetics.’ He even supplies a corollary: ugliness is precisely the ‘degeneration of the human.’ Here Nietzsche method allows us to see possibility for new forms of humanity, but he skirts dangerously close to anthropomorphisizing the entire universe as isomorphic to our social spectacle. Is beauty a vain preoccupation — or an elevation of the human to the cosmic? What is left of beauty, human or otherwise — outside of what we customarily associate with it?

What else, then, is beauty, besides an inborn addiction to custom, which finally becomes natural grace? He is certainly right that beauty, after all, is reckoned by an imaginary yardstick! Whereas, on the contrary, ugliness accompanies — and even establishes — the moral or customary exercise of power. Nietzsche precedes Artaud here in demonstrating every action is (a) cruelty. Thus if our power cannot express itself through action, it turns inward: “All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward… thus it was that man first developed what was later called his ’soul” (Genealogy of Morals)

Yet as we become part of the human story, we become increasingly beautiful. And only if we give ourselves up completely to custom, from our heart out and from the earliest years of our life, can we ever hope to grow beautiful — by losing our instincts for self-preservation. Our power for violent self-assertion assuredly degenerates from non-use, just as our ability to defend ourselves slackens when we commit ourselves to symbolic rituals and social custom. And it is certain that over time we tend to make ourselves into these kinds of totalized subjects given over entirely to social processes, to a given sequence of cultural practices.

Thus we grow in beauty (or equivalently: vanity) when we do not pass through the tiresome struggle for power and surivival, processes which inevitably leave marks upon our bodies, rip our youth from us, criss-cross our human beauty with lines of resistance, deposit genealogical traces of vital affirmations. Intense engagements never fail to leave their mark; sometimes they can even become the truth of our entire existence.

So what is the beauty of a dream, of a woman? Is it truly a form of degeneration — an abstinence from the exercise of power, from the cruelty of activity? Or is it a much more cunning malice still? Supposing woman is the truth — is her beauty degenerate, or is the degeneration of (“humanity’s”) truth itself beautiful? There is a non-dialectical evolution of beauty from weakness, as of society from custom or of truth from error. The degeneration of survival instincts is at once a becoming-beautiful: “This is why the old baboon is uglier than the young one, and why the young female baboon most closely resembles man: is the most beautiful baboon, that is to say.”

The conflict between ugliness and beauty is no contradiction, but a steady evolution of characteristic forms of cultural becomings. The structure of culture works itself into the symmetry of faces; we now recognize symmetry as the fact of entropy, of decline — pure symmetry is a degeneration (of the human) into a total chaos. The pure beauty of total symmetry, of total chaos, is opposed from the beginning of time to organization, biological and otherwise. All organs struggle to survive within and upon the bodies they parasite. The will to power is a metaphor, and it is not.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Form of Time and Chronotope in the Novel.” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Austin: UTP, 1981. 84-258.

I apologize ahead of time for the informality of this post, but “Form of Time and Chronotope in the Novel” is an incredible piece of theory, and it’s a shame that it’s size will prevent many readers from engaging with it fully. Thus the need for some hardcore notes.

Bakhtin’s chronotope is all about the relations and implications of space-time. For Bakhtin, the chronotope “defines genre and generic distinctions,” which may explain his approach throughout the essay as well as Todorov’s own interest in Bakhtin (84-85). If we can think Bakhtin with Bergson, the chronotope can be considered a material assemblage of images with a duration that contracts them into a volume. Analyzing the various forms of chronotope leads to producing a problematics of narrative types.

Bakhtin begins by analyzing the Greek romance, which he argues “utilized and fused together in its structure almost all genres of ancient literature” (89).

For Bakhtin, time is specifically significant in this genre because it never effects change for the hero: “in it there is a sharp hiatus between two moments of biographical time, a hiatus that leaves no trace in the life of the heroes or in their personalities” (90). Bakhtin labels this “adventure-time,” which is “highly intensified but undifferentiated” (90).

In this form, “a logic of random disjunctions” seems to be at work: events occurring a moment “earlier” or “later” is what serves to progress the action of the novel. With all of the “suddenlys” that pervade this literature, Bakhtin seizes on the heart of matters when he writes: “Moments of adventuristic time occur when…the normal…sequence of life’s events is interrupted. These points provide an opening for the intrusion of nonhuman forces” (95). There are superhuman and subhuman chronotopes that impinge upon and interact with our specifically human durations.

Bakhtin identifies certain themes of the chronotope in “the motif of meeting” and parting, and also the motif of travel on the road (98). He suggests that

The nature of a given place does not figure as a component in the event…All adventures in the Greek romance are thus governed by an interchangeability in space…The adventure chronotope is thus characterized by a technical, abstract connection between space and time, by the reversibility of moments in a temporal sequence, and by their interchangeability in space” (100).

Because of this, the world of the heroes is alien to them, and thus “they can only experience random contingency” (101). Because heroes do not change or evolve during their adventures in this type of narrative, Bakhtin argues that

Greek romance reveals its strong ties with a folklore that predates class distinctions, assimilating one of the essential elements in the folkloric concepts of a man, one that survives to the present in various aspects of folklore, especially in folktales (105).

This is an interesting assertion—does Bakhtin here mean that because heroes do not change or evolve during or after the narrative there is a homogeneity of social relations? On the other hand, because space and time are abstractly connected (reversibility in time + interchangeability in space) there is no sense in which events occur at a local evental site—instead they are surface effects which produce no illogical rupture.

Bakhtin moves next to Apuleius and Petronius. The Golden Ass, for Bakhtin, differs from Greek romance because:

the course of Lucius’ life [is] given to us sheathed in the context of a ‘metamorphosis,’ and…the course of his life…somehow correspond[s] to an actual course of travel, to the wanderings of Lucius throughout the world in the shape of an ass (111).

The type of transformation that occurs in this genre “unfolds not so much in a straight line as spasmodically, a line with ‘knots’ in it, one that therefore constitutes a distinctive type of temporal sequence” (113). Bakhtin continues,

Metamorphosis serves as the basis for a method of portraying the whole of an individual’s life in its more important moments of crisis: for showing how an individual becomes other than what he was (115).

This time is one that is full of the unusual moments of life and so is not the same as biographical time. The difference in this genre and Greek romance is that, while the events of Greek romance occur by pure chance whose origins are beyond the hero’s power, the events that occur to the hero clearly indicate him as the source, and thus the weight is on him to change the present structure of things (116-117).

Bakhtin describes this as a simple cycle: guilt–>punishment–> redemption–>blessedness (118).

Thus,

the temporal sequence is an integrated and irreversible whole. And as a consequence, the abstractness so characteristic of Greek adventure-time falls away. Quite the contrary, this new temporal sequence demands precisely concreteness of expression (119).

Space becomes meaningful as time becomes endowed with the power to bring change (120). Prior to this, location had no figuration as a component in temporal events, meaning that the chronotope was still amorphous.

Because of Lucius’ transformation into an ass, he has the ability to spy on people, thus turning the private into the public. Bakhtin writes, “The criminal act is a moment of private life that becomes, as it were, involuntarily public” (122). Also, “A contradiction developed between the public nature of the literary form and the private nature of its content. The process of working out private genres began” (123). Moreover, the crisis of the individual is always already prefigured publicly by the hierophants and their oracle readings—but, on the other hand, the folly or criminality of the individual has to be handled in moderation in contrast with public virtue. The crisis as a turning point forms a torsion of space-time that breaks with the possibilities of the past.

Bakhtin next moves to the biography and autobiography, most notably Plato’s works of which he writes, “This type, involving an individual’s autobiographical self-consciousness, is related to the stricter forms of metamorphosis as found in mythology. At its heart lies the chronotope of ‘the life course of one seeking true knowledge’” (130). The public square and agora are the prime figures of this genre, and thus Bakhtin writes, “An individual’s unity and his self-consciousness were exclusively public. Man was completely on the surface, in the most literal sense of the word” (131, 133). Bakhtin later writes, “A man was utterly exteriorized, but within a human element, in the human medium of his own people. Therefore, the unity of a man’s externalized wholeness was of a public nature” (135).

Dialogism functions in the biography as well:

The point of view that ‘another’ takes toward us—which we take into account, and by which we evaluate ourselves—functions as the source of vanity, vain pride, or as the source of offense. It clouds our self-consciousness and our powers of self-evaluation; we must free ourselves from it (145).

In the next section, Bakhtin again fixates on time:

we might say that a thing that could and in fact must only be realized exclusively in the future is here portrayed as something out of the past, a thing that is in no sense part of the past’s reality, but a thing that is in its essence a purpose, an obligation (147).

He continues,

this ‘inversion’ of time typical of mythological and artistic modes of thought in various eras of human development, is characterized by a special concept of time, and in particular of future time. The present and even more the past are enriched at the expense of the future (147).

Next, with the chivalric romance, Bakhtin writes, “In contrast to the heroes of Greek romance, the heroes of chivalric romance are individualized, yet at the same time symbolic” (153). Again, “Strictly speaking these are not heroes of individual novels…what we get is heroes of cycles” (153).

Speaking of time and the fairy tale, he writes,

hours are dragged out, days are compressed into moments, it becomes possible to bewitch time itself. Time begins to be influenced by dreams; that is, we begin to see the peculiar distortion of temporal perspectives characteristic of dreams (154).

On the contrary, “Antiquity treated time with great respect…and did not permit itself the liberty of any subjective playing around with time” (155).

Bakhtin next highlights the rogue because it “influenced the positioning of the author himself with the novel (and of his image, if he himself is somehow embedded in the novel), as well as the author’s point of view” (160). Bakhtin elaborates, “The novelist stands in need of some essential formal and generic mask that could serve to define the position from which he views life, as well as the position from which he makes that life public” (161). Bakhtin also writes, “the clown and the fool represent the metamorphosis of tsar and god—but the transformed figures are located in the nether world, in death” (161). The rogue is important, moreover, because

They grant the right not to understand, the right to confuse, to tease, to hyperbolize life; the right to parody others while talking, the right to not be taken literally, not ‘to be oneself’; the right to live a life in the chronotope of the entr’acte, the chronotope of theatrical space, the right to act life as a comedy and to treat others as actors, the right to rip off masks, the right to rage at others with a primeval (almost cultic) rage—and finally, the right to betray to the public a personal life, down to its most private and prurient little secrets (163).

Finally, “It is characteristic that internal man—pure ‘natural’ subjectivity—could be laid bare only with the help of the clown and the fool, since an adequate, direct (that is, from the point of view of practical life, not allegorical) means for expressing his life was not available” (164).

Bakhtin moves to Rabelais, whose works present an interesting form of the chronotope: “This special relationship we will designate as the adequacy, the direct proportionality, of degrees of quality (‘value’) to spatial and temporal quantities (dimension)…This means that everything of value, everything that is valorized positively, must achieve its full potential in temporal and spatial terms; it must spread out as far and as wide as possible, and it is necessary that everything of significant value be provided with the power to expand spatially and temporally” (167).

Focusing on the “agricultural labor cycle,” Bakhtin writes,

And here we get, in the oldest motifs and plots, a reflection of such a time consolidated in language for the first time, a reflection of the temporal relationships of growth to the temporal contiguity of phenomena having widely differing characteristics (206).

Moreover,

This is the time of productive growth. It is a time of growth, blossoming, fruit-bearing, ripening, fruitful increase, issue. The passage of time does not destroy or diminish but rather multiplies and increases the quantity of valuable things (207).

Again, Bakhtin further elucidates this form:

The mark of cyclicity, and consequently of cyclical repetitiveness, is imprinted on all events occurring in this type of time. Time’s forward impulse is limited by the cycle. For this reason even growth does not achieve an authentic ‘becoming’ (210).

Because of this unity of time, Bakhtin writes, “it is inevitable that such phenomena as copulation and death (the seeding of the earth, conception), the grave and the fertile female mons, food and drink (the fruits of the earth) together with death and copulation and so forth turn up in the growth-and-fertility category, in direct contiguity with each other” (210). With the gradual differentiation of the means of production, “there come into being such phenomena as ritualistic violations and, later, ritualistic laughter, ritualistic parody and clownishness” (212).

Later on, Bakhtin writes generally about his present project,

What interests us is the form of time, only insofar as it is the basis for possible narratives (and narrative matrices) in subsequent life. The folkloric form of time we have characterized above undergoes essential changes (214).

For example, “As a result of this severance from the producing life of the whole and from the collective struggle with nature, their real links with the life of nature are weakened—if not severed altogether” (215).

Again,

The motif of death undergoes a profound transformation in the temporally sealed-off sequence of an individual life. Here this motif takes on the meaning of an ultimate end. And the more sealed-off the individual life-sequence becomes, the more it is severed from the life of the social whole, the loftier and more ultimate becomes its significance (216).

Finally,

metaphors, comparisons and in general tropes in the style of Homer have not yet utterly lost their unmediated meaning, they do not yet serve the purposes of sublimation. Thus an image selected for comparison is worth just as much as the other member of the comparison, it has its own independently viable significance and reality; thus a comparison becomes almost a dual episode, a digression (218).

The Rabelais section that seemed so superfluous for our project can be summarized by the next two quotations:

We should emphasize the extraordinary concision and therefore compactness of this whole series of motifs. The elements of the ancient complex are present in one unmediated and tightly packed matrix; pressed up against one another so that they almost cover each other up—they are not separated by any sideplots or detours in the narrative, nor by any lengthy discourses, nor by lyrical digressions, nor by any metaphorical sublimations that might destroy the unity of the drily realistic surface of the story (222).

And,

The realistic image is structured here as a special type, one that could arise only on a folkloric base. It is difficult to find an adequate terminology for it. We are compelled to speak of something like a realistic emblematic. The total makeup of the image itself remains thoroughly realistic, but concentrated and compacted in it are so many essential and major aspects of life that its meaning far outstrips all spatial, temporal and sociohistorical limits—outstrips them without, however, severing itself from the concrete sociohistorical base from which it sprang (223).

Bakhtin moves on to the role of the idyll in the novel: “The unity of the life of generations (in general, the life of men) in an idyll is in most instances primarily defined by the unity of place, by the age-old rooting of the life of generations to a single place, from which this life, in all its events, is inseparable. This unity of place in the life of generations weakens and renders less distinct all the temporal boundaries between individual lives and between various phases of one and the same life. The unity of place brings together and even fuses the cradle and the grave (the same little corner, the same earth), and brings together as well childhood and old age (the same grove, stream, the same lime trees, the same house), the life of the various generations who had also lived in that same place, under the same conditions, and who had seen the same things. This blurring of all temporal boundaries made possible by a unity of place also contributes in an essential way to the creation of the cyclic rhythmicalness of time so characteristic of the idyll” (225). I wonder what this implies for our highly mobile society.

Bakhtin goes on to write, “Anything that has the appearance of common everyday life, when compared with the central unrepeatable events of biography and history, here begins to look precisely like the most important things in life” (226). Again, “agricultural labor transforms all the events of everyday life, stripping them of that private petty character obtaining when man is nothing but consumer; what happens rather is that they are turned into essential life events” (227).

–Taylor Adkins

In sections 4 and 5 of Human All Too Human, Nietzsche develops a non-linear train of thought that attempts to analyze and reconstruct the experiences and concepts of religion, art and science. There are developmental factors and connections among these three, for “art raises its head when religion relaxes its hold,” and the “scientific man is the further evolution of the artistic” (150; 223). Poets, for example, construct bridges to distant ages and dying religions, creating metaphysical alleviations that only serve to quell the truly revolutionary energy flowing beneath the surface of the social body (148). Also, artists are the notorious “glorifiers of the religious and philosophical errors of mankind,” and even though this has granted us the signification of a beautiful world, we have to ask ourselves the question: if Nietzsche tells of the death throes of art and religion, what does science inherit from these projects and how can their insights and creations be carried on in an affirmative project for the creation of necessary rings of a universal culture of free spirits (220)?

Art’s expansion transforms religious sensations and expressions, lending them profundity and an increased capacity for articulating these sensations—and science (the Enlightenment) is responsible for the dispersion of religious feelings into other areas, even politics (150). But if art is dying, then we must posit that the transformations of these metaphysical and religious sensations through art must also become invested into a new sphere, namely science. This is true because, when one organ of culture has weakened, another organ “has to discharge not only its own function but another as well” (231). Science inherits from art its ability to “look upon life in any of its forms with interest and pleasure, and to educate our sensibilities so far that we at last cry: ‘life, however it may be, is good!’” and has even made this affirmation “an almighty requirement of knowledge” (222). Thus, we can give up art without losing the capacity and sensibility that art and religion has prepared for us.

Science has to cultivate these capacities and seize upon its true calling as the project of achieving an objective by the appropriate means (256). Nietzsche’s science, gifted with the premonition of the Eternal Return, will assert that “every action performed by a human being becomes in some way the cause of other actions, decisions, thoughts, that everything that happens is inextricably knotted to everything that will happen,” that motion is enveloped in an immortality that is the total union of all being (208). Science also must recognize that everyone is “determined by such systems and representatives of different cultures” in a necessary but alterable fashion (274). This power to alter our cultural “determinations” means that we are responsible for our experiences and life experiments, that these are to be fused into a “goal without remainder” that has as its aim the will to distinguish ourselves as forming “a necessary chain of rings of culture and from this necessity to recognize the necessity inherent in the course of culture in general” (292). We are cultural artifacts composing necessary links to a universal culture that, even if it exists only potentially, must be achieved by the labor of free spirits, the kind that seem “to be the opposite of that which is profitable to their country or class” (227). Of course, the dominant culture and the established authority will resist the required degeneration of its stability, but the development of a de-centered, non-hierarchical, universal culture can only begin through the process of weakening the fetters of state culture. This will allow for the generation of lines of flight for new social organizations and/or assemblages.

To conclude, there are three possible factors for the birth of a global culture: absolute music, the scientific analysis of symbolic gestures, and a new language for all. The first two are closely linked, and they require an understanding of how poetry produces a superimposition of immediate feelings in music to the point where the music itself is rendered immediately symbolic for our internal life (215). The development of absolute music for the social ear means that music’s symbolism is understood without further assistance—likewise, the science of cultural tones in vocal patterns that are indicative of mood, feelings and expressions will be necessary to uncovering the vastness of operations at work in unconscious modifications of body and voice. Furthermore, linguistics and philology, as the two dominant sciences of language, can then dedicate their study of the laws of individual languages to the forms of non-verbal thought in a synthesis that has as its goal the creation of a “new language for all—first as a commercial language, then as the language of intellectual intercourse in general” (267). Given that this is merely a preliminary overview of an undercurrent in Human All Too Human, the next step in continuing this line of thought has to navigate the role of the state, the relations of states among themselves, and the relations among the responsibilities that we all bare to our composition of immortal vibrations in the links of a universal cultural chain.

–Taylor Adkins

(c) Fractal Ontology, 2007

Perhaps the most subtle instant of artistic insight: knowing when the work is complete. Knowing a thing is done is always a decision, a superego injunction to believe, to accept; art lives precisely in this deception, that it is possible to be told what to believe, or put another way, that we can ever know what other people actually want from us. What is the terminating stroke if not precisely the final “cutting” of the art-work out of its particular mode of being into the “universal,” the work of art: a subtraction which makes whole. This point bears elaboration. From what is the sculpture subtracted? The raw materials of artistic production. From what is the work of art subtracted? From the artistic universal– and we can think this in two ways, either as the “sublime” moment of deep sensitivity to the beauty of the universe, or as the universal artistic indeal, that unabashedly subjective universal; in fact, we can also conceive of this “from-what” of the work of art as the “universe” of the painting, that non-existent/empty reality in which the inversions and distortions of the artistic presentation are finally placed into a bizarre-enough context to make sense. So the art work betrays a lack, a cut which would otherwise go unnoticed, precisely by disguising it; yet there is no lack at all. Art persists in this lie as a stain, a horizon: an untameable pulse oscillating in the deep empty void of an (otherwise) still and silent universe.