Art and Pluralism
Our pluralistic societies celebrate the arts in their open-ended diversity. We celebrate the manifold forms of expression making up the wealth of a world that has domesticated truth and reason, both God and Man, turning them both into eminently useful and thus safe means to confirm the glory of our pluralistic “ways and orders,” as Machiavelli would call them. We are raised to aspire to contributing our five cents to the all-inclusive society of diversity, where “the more the better,” even if—or rather, especially assuming that—there is no way of telling if or when our free society converts into a prison outlawing all real freedom.
How are we to tell if or when pluralism in the arts amounts to anarchy, or the worst form of tyranny? Why is anarchy tyrannical? Simply insofar as it rejects all meaningful principles, exposing us to violence or unbound compulsion. Anarchy tells us that our very roots are free-floating, essentially contingent, and thereby altogether expendable. “Everything goes,” announces the radical pluralist, “provided, of course, that everything feed into the everything-goes society.” And yet, pluralism’s balance of powers proves to be radically unstable, just as man is declared to be contingent. Both stand radically exposed to the possibility of their being “cancelled,” if only by being used as nominal façade for tyrannical intransigence, or the abolition of whatever may be dangerous in life, but above all, love and thought.
What motivates our faith in our pluralism? Probably our lack of faith in alternatives, but especially in the God and Man of the past: in both divine law and natural reason, but primarily in the latter. For once we abdicate natural reason, law can mean just about anything to us. Once natural reason is abandoned in favor of an instrumental or mechanical reason, law is whatever form succeeds in limiting questions aimed at the roots or principles of our way and order of life. Where laws are defined as the form limiting all challenges to the regime, indeed the very status quo we abide by as a majority, what is to distinguish laws from the bars of a vast prison cell, not to say of hell itself? Where law is divested of all inherently positive import—where it is defined in merely negative terms as a means to keep us “safe,” rather than as an image of truth itself—how are we to distinguish law from the most formidable instrument of tyrannical subjugation?
In falling back on the notion that pluralism in the arts entails the flourishing of our creativity as individuals, we blind ourselves to the form of our creativity, or to what informs our activity. For the pluralistic individual creates always and necessarily in response to compulsions defined by the pluralistic marketplace. Human nature’s irreducibility to pluralism’s mercenary dictates does not tell us that as pluralists we are free to live as we please; it merely reminds us that we need not remain deluded into believing that we are free in doing the biddings of our marketplace. Human resilience does not, in other words, tell us we should be pluralists, but that pluralism is at best a regime allowing us to survive as sub-human beings, beings who live in strict accordance with dominant mercantile demands. Human nature tells us not that pluralism is good, but that it constitutes a state of captivity we should aspire to transcend, primarily because it is our very nature to transcend it.
If we are not naturally or essentially pluralistic beings; if our nature is not confinable within the open-ended flatbed of a pluralistic regime; then our reason, our very freedom cannot be at home in the pluralistic stream of ephemeral audiovisual bits. Our voice, our o-ratio, will not fit in the “moment” it is allotted by a regime that shuns substantive permanence as a fatal evil. Our voice will seek the very permanence that risks at every moment to subvert the pluralistic order of things by exposing its unnatural or obscurantist character.
While our pluralistic regime is supposed to set us free, to propel us onto the path of freedom, it frames our freedom within strictures that we cannot but aspire to burst out of. What happens, however, where the promise of freedom that propels us has distracted us from a proper education to freedom and so, too, to ends? What would happen if we were handed a gun without our being guided to learn, not merely about our enemies (now, apparently, all doubters of pluralism), but also and most importantly about our positive end? What do we really know about the nature of the pluralistic order we abide by? Does our freedom involve a journey of discovery of the truth about pluralism, or does it distract us from that truth? Does our freedom entail the obscuring of any investigation of the truth about pluralism? Are we by nature Kantians? Or is there no irreducible necessity to a nature impervious to any Kantian imperative?
What alternative readings of art are on the table? Let us concentrate on painting insofar as it represents the hottest subject of dispute when it comes to aesthetic judgment, which is to say value-judgment pertaining to phenomena as such. Today, two main camps oppose, yet feed into a mercantile reading. On the one hand we have those who privilege representation or the illustrative aspect of painting; on the other hand, we have heralds of the primacy of the decorative, of the effect of painting, including the feelings that painting might engender or evoke.[1]
The distinction at hand is modern insofar as it coincides with the Cartesian one between subject and object. The subject consists of the spiritual, living dimension of surfaces; the subject is the depth, genesis or history of a surface. The decorative dimension of painting amounts to the inner life or temporal aspect of painting. For the subject is time. Not accidentally does Heidegger dedicate tomes to the nexus time-Dasein. For, as Husserl had already shown, the modern or Cartesian-like subject is, at its core, “temporal consciousness.”
The formal counterpart of the temporal dimension of the painting is space, the domain of the illustrative. Now, in appealing to a history indifferent to the classical distinction between sacred and profane, modernity shows to be fundamentally an attempt to establish a synthesis of the two factors of subjective-time and objective-space, as of depth and surface: the temporal, as history, becomes crucial for the establishment of space. Space and so geography is not confronted as a bodily shadow of the place of eternal forms—an “infinite space” defined by a pure intellective act. Rather, space is now conceived as a reflection of its history, of depths. By mastering the subject or sentiment—and this is done through special techniques—we can establish the object, the surface. Temporal depth is no longer conceived Platonically as image of eternity, or shadow of what does not change. The history or story of things becomes a sentiment defined objectively by technical parameters. The story of phenomena is conceived in terms of data to be integrated in a machine, rather than in terms of a discourse or logos mirroring the living logic of eternal Being. In this respect, system replaces eternal life.
What we face today is a crisis of system, which is at once a crisis of modern rationalism as of a mechanical approach to reason, an approach to reason based on a mechanistic or materialistic ontology (conception of being-in-itself). Modern rationalism attempts to resolve the tension between time and space in a system, an integrated (from in-tangere) whole, a whole that misses none of its parts. In a system, all internal contradictions are resolved and, in our present case, the disparity between time and space yields to a spatial-temporal continuum, or a self-realizing evolutionary being: what for Hegel is History is fully actualized as Spirit or Geist.
Evidently, classical antiquity or ancient rationalism knows something about system, but it is modernity that invents a system of space and time, and that thereupon tries to realize that system. Why did pre-modernity appeal to no such evolutionary system? Why is progressivism an essentially modern invention? The reason is illuminated by reflection upon the character of consciousness and its temporal self-appropriation (where before and after are necessary points of reference for man’s incarnated presence, his being-somewhere) for pre-modern, or even simply non-modern man: the temporal does not originally beg for a spatial solution, or for a final revelation, but for a restoration within the realm of hiddeness, of intimacy, of what, in his Convivio, Dante called the most secret recesses (secretissimo) of the divine mind.[2] Non-modern man or man as he finds himself—rather than as he is found by God—begs for restoration in God, as opposed to integration in a system-order based on technique, a world in which art functions autonomously of any concrete reference to divine providential agency.
Classical antiquity’s systems integrate human action in discrete wholes or disciplines, but they do not integrate agency itself; the systems may also integrate the respective discrete contents of disciplines, with the understanding that the systems do not embrace their ground. Pre-modern man does not try to reduce nature to or within a system; whence the old myths told about the physical universe, mysterious, pre-scientific stories, stories that depict the mysterious ground of our everyday life experience without ever pretending to translate that ground in empirically verifiable terms.[3]
Classical (pre-modern) representation is consistently alien from the modern tendency to express human consciousness, our genetic-consciousness, our sense of time. For pre-modern man the end of time is a divine gift resolved in eternity and so “in the beginning,” or in terms of a restoration of an original blessing, as opposed to any departure or progress from it. The modern shift from “the illustrative” to “the decorative,” or from figuration to expression is misleading insofar as it substantively involves an expression of the figurative, an elevation of an illustrative surface to sublime heights. Temporal depth or sentiment in painting is not simply to replace spatial surfaces; rather, time is to become space—the subject is to become objective. Hence the importance that the 19th century gives to the sublime, which not accidentally finds its primary exemplification in music, rather than in painting. For painting is primordially bound to the immutable, whereas music pertains characteristically to mutation and since modern man aims at attaining to a spatial resolution of subjective-temporal consciousness, music will tend for him to be a preferred vehicle of sublimity. Through music, modern man will seek the elevation of “internal time-consciousness” (to borrow Husserl’s expression) to full visibility, or the translation of diachronic progress in terms of synchronic expansion. Modern music will then incarnate an attempt to fulfill “subjectivity,” to liberate it in terms of a display of possibilities. The aim is an empirical resolution or geometricizing of the inherence of the world in finite modes of consciousness—whence the tendency of modern music to compel dance. Modern music as such remains a failed attempt to represent the way the world inheres in an incarnated mind, an attempt begging for the complementarity of dance while tending ultimately to an exhausting or suicidal frenzy, ultimate consummation of feeling.
The eccentric exteriorizing or spreading out of human consciousness comes to obscure the concentric recollection of human consciousness in its principle of constitution: dissolution through margins distracts consciousness from gathering-into-centrality not to be misconstrued as centralization or the reduction of a whole to its center. For the gathering into centrality is originally or naturally the elevation of margins in their center: concrete participation in creative perfection.
Now, if representation does not resolve itself in expression, or if the illustrative is not resolved in the decorative, what is the proper trajectory of painting? The habit of conceiving the work of art as an object of enjoyment (individual or otherwise) distracts us from the nature of the problem addressed here. The fetishistic tendencies of our age of mechanical reproduction cannot but alienate us from the essence of the work of art, no less than from artistic agency, or human agency at its best.
Reading classical or traditional painting as aiming at a pleasing “perceptual equivalence,” to borrow Arthur Dante’s expression, is to turn away from the original sense of imitatio naturae (“imitation of nature”) as participation in meaningful generation, as opposed to the “copying” of what is mechanically ready-at-hand, or the translating of what lingers in a brute state into a refined object of easy consumption. On this latter reading, art remains truncated, bereft of a transcendent referent. The painting is no longer seen as mirror of what is hidden in nature, but as a pleasing replacement of “brute/primitive” nature: no longer as guide to spiritual conversion, but as means to satisfaction in the context of dissatisfaction, as to the feeling of meaning in the context of objective-material meaninglessness. Art, in short, is no longer supposed to elevate consciousness out of obscurantism, but within it, making obscurity bearable, or allowing us to cope with obscurity without questioning it and so without transcending it if not symbolically, as in a dream.
The ushering of a history of striving for meaningful-perceptual-equivalence into an open/universal pluralistic or hedonistic society is further supported by the notion that painting is true when it constitutes a system in which the illustrative is fully integrated in the decorative, or in which space has been, so to speak, fully temporalized, or redeemed as site of profoundly charming, aesthetic enjoyment. Such a notion cannot but feed into the modern mercification both of art and of our confrontation with it: the notion that a painting is true when it constitutes a system of temporal depth and spacial surface stands today as a stepping-stone for the reduction of the painting to material for mercenary sentimental consumption.[4]
Balance between space and time, or depth and surface being per se radically unstable, it requires a “transcendent” end, so that the “system” cannot but be a predicate, rather than an autonomous substance. What is a system of depth and surface a predicate of? What allows for depth and surface to harmonize in a painting, if not a movement that feeds into hedonism?
A classical alternative to system, here, entails natural teleology: harmony of time and space is sustainable as poetic sign or trace of a journey of return by which, far from seeking its apotheosis in space, time (“subjective consciousness”) turns centripetally to pure intelligibility as original place presupposed by all space. Painting and art more generically will be a fundamentally intellective endeavor; not, to be sure, in the modern ideological sense whereby ideas are imposed upon our imagination, but in the Platonic sense whereby imagination is a “fallen” movement begging for a return to its original condition as movement of thought carrying (creating/ordering) its contents within itself; so that the inner-life of the painting would not be that of sentiment, but of intellection presupposing sentiment’s conversion into an origin-bound reflective activity.
In the face of what Danto referred to as the End of Art, a harmony of representation and expression remains sustainable in a pre-modern/Cartesian sense whereby what is represented is the inner (intelligible) form of phenomena, while what is expressed is not any sentimental point of view, but a pointer-back to the inner form. In sum, painting would testify to the true nature of phenomena as contents of an unfettered mind or thought (non-predicative agency) presupposed by our own finite one.
In our pluralistic or secular societies the art of painting is systematically conceived in technical terms—as a technical problem, rather than as a properly human one, which is to say, as an ethical problem inextricable from a divine (metaphysical/ontological) problem. Hence the habit of viewing the “painted world” as spatializing time, or bringing “surface” to life as self-contained, domesticated end ready for consumption. In this context, art cannot but be dead, in the sense that God was announced to be dead in the 19th century. Yet, the use we make of paintings does not alter the nature of painting, or what painting—primarily as activity—is in itself.
The painter’s journey does not end on an empowered or reenforced surface—in illusion or the feelings it compels. As a genetic element, the temporal/depth is not revealed in painting. Instead, the temporal is purged of its impurities (of the tempest of passions) on a surface that stands thereupon as mirror of eternity. But what is eternity, here? It is at once the absence and fulfillment of time or depths. Eternity as absolute, primordial revelation or disclosure of time: that in which time empties itself out. But this something is not the painting. Depths or genesis/birth empties itself out in its source. The final revelation is given “in the beginning” or en arche; in the root, principle, or head. The painting points back to the origin of its genetic depths, of its history or pre-history, of the painting’s “evolutionary background.”
Modern painting tries to appropriate that background to convert into an autonomous or technical system. On the other hand, classical Platonic painting limits itself to bear witness to the intelligibility of the principle/source of its genesis—to the Mind of God. The surface is to reflect divine intellection. This is possible only where we trust that the genesis of our work is inherently meaningful, or that our work is fundamentally moved by an unerring mind, as opposed by material forces that we are consequently compelled to integrate technically into a system.
In its essence, painting does not involve a “subjective” “autonomous” (in practical terms, secular) painter trying to integrate time and space into a system; the agent of the painting is rather both human and divine in the respect that the human is the image in which the divine intervenes into our “fallen world” of tempestuous senses to order them so that they may reflect their source. The painter produces mirrors of our world as it was/is prior to “the tempest” (the Fall)—mirrors that invite us to rise out of our fallen condition by orienting our lives to an order of things “predating” time or the fallenness or spilling of genesis/birth out of absolute order or pure intelligibility.
Presupposing our radical severing from an original blessing, modern discourse calls for an art compelled to exhaust its representational powers, thereby yielding to the exposure of an underlying conceptual structure. Thus will Arthur Danto, after Hegel, argue that art has emptied itself in philosophy by exposing philosophy as its essence (what painting had always if only unconsciously or mechanically striven to express): art has become “philosophy of art.” Yet, philosophy is here modern or ideological reason: a mechanical abstraction, or the ideological structure of technocracy (life devoid of all meaning beyond the compulsion to re-produce). Philosophy in its original sense is a logos/reason mediating painting (to reflect divine intellective agency or providence), not destroying it (resolving it in the Machine).
The End of History does not compel us to embrace the pluralistic construction of meaning defining our market of differences as of unique expressions of feelings; nor are we condemned to abide in particularized cells in the marketplace of ideas. There is no Idea of the Market in the sense of an essential Reason for the Market to be there. Why should there be pluralism to begin with? Because nature has evolved into it? But then nature could just as easily, or even more easily undo its product and alter its own trajectory to re-establish a creation overcoming pluralism altogether. Why not?
Pluralism’s proclamation of the overcoming, even destruction, of permanence consigns pluralism to radical impermanence, thereby exposing us to the concrete possibility of rising beyond pluralism, even of “cancelling” it. What remains to be seen is if our objection to pluralism will or will not rehearse the history that led to its crisis.
NOTES:
[1] For an extended introduction to the tension in question, see Paul Rhoads, “What is Art and Two Other Essays” Orguy, 2010.
[2] Convivio, 4.30.6.
[3] While the Hebrew Bible ties the present to “the beginning” (bereshit), it does not tie the beginning to the present. While the present is to be read in light of the beginning, the reverse does not hold true.
[4] On François Boucher as excelling in producing “true painting” as system of surface and depth, see Rhoads 54.
Related Posts
