[Note: I thought that my posting this essay I wrote in 2020 inspired by Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and the Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. would be a good follow up to the last two posts here and here. Although McGilchrist does not reference Kristeva or Baudrillard, he is saying very much the same thing in a more readable way. In Part 1 of Master he’s talking about about genotext and phenotext in neurological terms, and in Part 2, he is making the same argument that Baudrillard does about the shrinking of consciousness since the Renaissance. For a good ten-minute introduction to his work, watch this RSA Animate YouTube. I strongly recommend watching this in connection with this essay, even if you’ve seen it before.
These arguments in turn support Fredric Jameson’s 1984 assertion that Postmodernism is the logic of late capitalism, which is the argument that Stuart Jeffries riffs on in Everything, All the Time, Everywhere: How We Became Postmodern about which I spoke in the third Cathedral lecture. All of these are the bases for my argument that the Techno-Capitalist Matrix is progressively sealing human beings off from reality in an historically unprecedeneted way by alienating us from our bodies, one another, and the deep mystery of Being.
The solution as I see it lies in the recovery of a robust use of genotext, and the site for that is in art—not any art, but truly ‘original’ art, and this essay is an attempt toI lay out what I think that is. By ‘art’ I mean the creation of genotextual symbolic forms in language, image, music, and their combinations.
BTW, I’m happy to respond to emails ([email protected]) if you have questions or if you need clarification.]
[George] Steiner’s mot , that ‘originality is antithetical to novelty’ … puts its finger on a huge problem for the willed, self-conscious nature of modernist art, and art since modernism. For there is no polarity between the tradition and originality. In fact originality as an artist (as opposed to as a celebrity or a showman) can only exist within a tradition, not for the facile reason that it must have something by ‘contrast’ with which to be original, but because the roots of any work of art have to be intuitive, implicit, still coming out of the body and the imagination, not starting in (though they may perhaps later avail themselves of) individualistic cerebral striving.
…There’s a fear that without novelty there is only banality; but the pay-off is that it is precisely the striving for novelty that leads to banality. We confuse novelty with newness. No one ever decided not to fall in love because it’s been done before, or because its expressions are banal. They are both as old as the hills and completely fresh in every case of genuine love. Spiritual texts present the same problem, that they can use only banalities, which mean something totally different from the inside of the experience. Language makes the uncommon common. It can never create experience of something we do not know–only release something in us that is already there.
Iain McGilchrist,The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World,Yale University Press, 2007. [All excerpts in this post come from Chapter 12: “The Modern and the Post-Modern Worlds”.]
This quote goes to what I was writing in “On Archetypes and Zeitgeists”. What matters is not whether there’s something cleverly new in of artistic technique, but whether in whether the technique uncovers something in Being that in its uncovering releases transformative cognitive energy. The purpose of great art is to awaken something dormant in us. In the Archetypes essay I make the case that archetypes are what carry that energy, and I argue that creative moments in culture are moments when positive archetypes are active, and decadent periods are when the Chaos archetype reigns because there is no positive, creative archetype to counterbalance it. And so here we are.
I realize this kind of thinking about history is, to say the least, odd, but my guess is that at least with some readers it resonates, and while it might seem idle fancy to indulge such thinking, I’d argue that it provides a lens that is useful in reading the signs of the times in a hopeful way at a time when there’s not much reason to feel hope. The solutions lie buried within us, and I remain hopeful that enough people will do the work that will uncover them.
So in this essay I attempt to ground this archetypal approach by linking it to McGilchrist’s work because I think he’s making the same argument I’m making but in a way that is grounded in neurological research about the divided brain.
I doubt McGilchrist would be comfortable with the following excerpt from an essay I wrote some years ago about how Florentine Neoplatonism inspired the art in the late 1400s. But I see what I say here as simply providing a metaphysical imaginary that correlates with his ideas about the sources of originality. There was a time when thinking along these lines was normal, and I believe that someday it will become normal again—
The Renaissance Neoplatonists, particularly the Florentine artists influenced by Ficino, came to understand that the mind of God was not something that you ascend to by escaping from matter, but rather something that you find embedded in matter. There is a shift at this time in the imagination of the the task for both philosophy and art. The goal was no longer to ascend up the Great Chain of Being to a realm of pure intelligence outside time and space, but rather to uncover the presence of the Divine Intelligence incarnated but lying undisclosed, i.e., unseen, in the created world.
The artist’s gift is to render what he saw in its translucency translucent to us, if we have the eyes to see it. The goal is to see what’s there, but what is there is far more than what we are usually aware of in ordinary states of filtered consciousness. The artist assumed at this time the status of more than a craftsman but of a creative, visionary genius because in inspired states of mind he saw what others mostly did not, and through his craft was able to render a likeness through which we can see what he saw.
The quality of genius in great art was measured by its inspired, disclosive power, which was to reveal the inner life of a thing in its translucency, i.e., the goodness and beauty that lies opaquely hidden or at best filtered in the world around us. In other words, great art discloses the immanence of the Divine Mind in creation, but this isn’t possible unless the artist’s mind is somehow suffused with the creative energies that flow from a visionary encounter with that Mind. The greatness of all great art is commensurate with its disclosive power and its ability to help us who encounter it to see or recognize something that before was not visible to us or seen as through a fuzzy lens. Originality was primarily about revealing the ‘origin’ of the subject in the Divine Mind.
In other words, the encounter with the Divine Mind awakens what is already in us, which is the innate but nascent image and likeness in us of the Divine Mind. “Innate” does not mean realized, but rather a potential that needs to be realized. It is like a seed, but its germination and cultivation is not just an individual project; it is a cultural one.
The scope of possibility in such a task is largely enabled–or thwarted–by the constraints of one’s culture. Some cultures provide richer soil for such a a seed to grow and develop; others provide rather poor soil. One might ask why the genius of the Florentine painters in the 1400s or Beethoven or Mozart in the 1700s developed and was recognized and appreciated in their lifetimes, and then why no such geniuses with such creative scope and depth have emerged in the period since WWII? one hundred years. Theirs was a culture in which such genius could ripen; ours is not.
We are a culture that accepts novelty as a poor substitute for originality. True originality requires a return to the origins. We have lost any sense of the origins because our TCM-dominated culture has all but sealed us off from it. Sealed off from it as we are, we have come to believe that there is no Deep Living Real, only surfaces. Who among us in our mainstream cultural life draws from the origins in a way that has anything like the vitality of the Romantics or the great Renaissance artists?
The best we can say about creative people these days is that they do something clever or entertaining or psychologically insightful, but few in the mainstream are producing work that comes from the origins. Yes, there are artists who produce work that has Dionysian energies, but that is not the same thing. The Dionysian is raw, roiling, chaos whose fundamental force is purely destructive until it comes in contact with the formative power whose archetypal energies originate in the human mind as it participates in the Divine Mind. This is the way Christian Neoplatonists like me think about it, anyway.
Sealed off as we are from the origins, it’s hard for us to appreciate how the encounter with Plato in the late 1400s was so central to their awakening to their artistic and scientific task. You shouldn’t read Plato to understand his doctrine or theories, but rather to awaken in yourselves what you already know innately. Some people are primed for that; others are not. The Renaissance artists were primed.
Most people in late modern culture are not primed. They read Plato or Plotinus and find only dry abstractions because such texts make no sense in a culture dominated by the presuppositions of the TCM. Whatever is in us capable of responding to such texts is deeply buried. The Renaissance artists and the English Romantics1 encountered Plato and Neoplatonism as an awakening of the innate divine mind in them. And it provided a framework that inspired their plunge into the mystery in the world around them. This was a world whose origins they believed participated in the mind of God,2 the hidden infrastructure of the created world. The Divine Mind for them was not a static abstraction; its apprehension was accompanied by creative inspiration, what Ficino called ‘divine furuore‘, or divine frenzy. Their art originated in heightened states of consciousness.
The artist’s or philosopher’s task was to open himself up the depths of Being where the sleeping creative energies of the Divine Mind could be encountered, and in such an encounter to have one’s mind awakened–i.e., to be transformatively energized. This was a step toward realizing its own inner potentiality to become more “like” the Divine Mind. In this sense the human being co-creates the world by bringing dimensions of it about which he is unconscious into consciousness. This idea is picked up later by Schelling, Hegel, and even Heidegger. The human being is where Being becomes conscious of itself; the human is the clearing in the forest of Being.
This older idea of the mission of art has become unbelievable for sealed-off, alienated, buffered moderns, but I believe it’s retrievable. Isn’t this really the Heideggerian project?3 It certainly seems to be McGilchrist’s. I know that neither would frame it in the Neoplatonic way that I am doing, but the similarities are more significant than the differences.
But first we need to understand the nature of our alienation of the origins. McG goes on to talk about how art itself has become something so self-conscious and left-brained that it has become inoculated from divine frenzy:
The Aesthetes’ creed of ‘art for art’s sake’, while it sounds like an elevation of the value of art, in that it denies that it should have an ulterior purpose beyond itself – so far, so good – is also a devaluation of art, in that it marginalises its relationship with life. In other words it sacrifices the betweenness of art with life, instead allowing art to become self-reflexively fulfilled. There is a difference between the forlorn business of creating ‘art for art’s sake’, and art nonetheless having to be judged solely ‘as art’, not as for another purpose.
By “betweenness” he means that the art object as symbolic representation lies between and mediates something beyond it to the human being who encounters it. And, of course, art should never be subordinated to politics or economic interests. It has its own mission, which is to open up undisclosed dimensions of Being. But this is different from art that becomes self-consciously self-referential. It doesn’t open up; it closes off.
In the process of creation, the artist’s plane of focus needs to be somewhere beyond and through the work of art, not just on its being art, otherwise it becomes less than art. In viewing the art work, we too are carried beyond the work of art, precisely because the artist was not focussed on the art as such, but in something beyond it; and that is part of its greatness, by which, as it might seem paradoxically, we come to judge the work of art solely on its merits as a work of art–not, in other words, for some ulterior purpose for which art is being used. We come to see not the work of art, but the world according to the art work, as Merleau-Ponty says, necessitating that it is neither opaque nor wholly transparent, but ‘semi-transparent’.
I’d go further than McG seems willing to do by saying that the semi-transparency of the work of art when it works as great art is in some degree revealing or disclosing the originary energies of the immanent presence of the Divine Mind–whether it is recognized as such or not.
And this is where the Neoplatonic idea of the immanence of the Divine Mind in creation overlaps with the use of archetypes in stories, whether fairy tales or in Shakespeare. Because the human mind, when it is at its most creative is most disclosive of the Divine Mind because the human mind is the image and likeness of the Divine Mind. in other words, what is deepest and most transformatively creative in the human mind is reflective of its participation in the Divine Mind.
Great works of art are impossible without tradition or culture to provide a language and a symbol system as a pre-conscious meaning matrix, but this matrix is not a textual prison as Lacan, Derrida, and their followers seem to think.4Language–symbol systems in general–can be, maybe most often are in our everyday experience, closed systems, but they need not be. They can instead function as portals through which something from beyond enters into awareness.
So truly great art opens us up, helps us to see through it into dimensions of reality that transcend the semiotic/phenotextual5 systems inherited by tradition and acculturation. We are indeed acculturated linguistic beings, but the idea that we are completely sealed in by culture and language is a prejudice of left-hemispheric, postmodern thinking and the quasi-pathological smugness that governs the TCM.
The heart of McG’s book is to explain why contemporary elites’ experience of language feels like a closed system because of the tendency of their hyper-self-consciousness to operate within a hall of mirrors. They experience the world as a domain fundamentally alienated from the life world of the Deep Real–where the originary archetypes of the Divine Mind sleep waiting for us to wake them and in our doing so to awaken what in our soul is capable of cognizing them.
The problem for buffered moderns is that in their left-hemispheric, overly meta-self-consciousness, they’ve all but lost the capacity for experiencing the givenness of the world with even a degree of “naïveté”. This has led to an experience of the world that is borderline psychopathic:
This coded-message model, which ‘has very much the status of an axiom in most versions of structuralism’, is the perfect expression of the left hemisphere trying to understand right-hemisphere language [genotext]. Aware that there is more going on here than meets the eye, the left hemisphere sets about making things explicit, in an attempt to discover what it is; but meanwhile is not really aware of the ‘thisness’ of the work of art, in which the real ‘meaning’ lies, at all.
This is the crucial point. The left-hemisphere–the part of our minds that focuses, abstracts, and makes explicit–can only work with what is given to it implicitly in raw experience from the right hemisphere. But if the left hemisphere excludes a priori huge swaths of experience because they are not measurable, testable, or just too subjective, then it closes the experience off or de-legitimizes the experiences that are the most important in making us human. And so for this reason we often have profound experiences but no framework to adequately understand their meaning. We only accept scientific explanations as the only ones that have legitimacy, and if it doesn’t fit scientific presuppositions, we dismiss important experiences as subjective and fanciful.
So a rebalancing is called for, but, McG argues, postmodern cultural elites have swung the pendulum too far in the other direction in rejecting objectivity and rationality, and in doing so have created worse problems–
The post-modern revolt against the silent, static, contrived, lifeless world displayed in the fresco on the wall is not because of its artificiality–the fact that it is untrue to the living world outside–but because of its ‘pretence’ that there exists a world outside to be true to. The contrast is not between the fixity of the artificial and the fluidity of the real, but between the fixity and the chaos of two kinds of artificiality. Post-modern indeterminacy affirms not that there is a reality, towards which we must carefully, tentatively, patiently struggle; it does not posit a truth which is nonetheless real because it defies the determinacy imposed on it by the self-conscious left-hemisphere interpreter (and the only structures available to it). On the contrary, it affirms that there is no reality, no truth to interpret or determine.
And then he points to the kind of ‘unknowing’ that postmodern unknowing parodies:
The contrast here is like the difference between the ‘unknowing’ of a believer and the ‘unknowing’ of an atheist. Both believer and atheist may quite coherently hold the position that any assertion about God will be untrue; but their reasons are diametrically opposed. The difference is not in what is said, but in the disposition each holds toward the world. The right hemisphere’s disposition is tentative, always reaching painfully (with ‘care’) towards something which it knows is beyond itself. It tries to open itself (not to say ‘no’) to something that language can allow only by subterfuge, to something that reason can reach only in transcending itself; not, be it noted, by the abandonment of language and reason, but rather through and beyond them.
I spent quite a lot of time talking about the ecstasy of chaos in my previous post, and also in that post I made the point that it’s precisely the smugness of the nihilistic ‘unknowing’ that must be overcome with second naïveté. McG is describing here a believing something that cannot be proved but which can be apprehended and spoken about with confidence, even if always provisionally and incompletely.
If it is possible to say true or untrue, good or bad, better or worse, there has to be a spectrum that enables us to judge which is which. What defines this spectrum? I’d argue that the more ecstatically present the Divine Mind is in an experience, the truer and the better. The more the ecstasy of chaos is present, the worse. The trick is to know the difference, and for that you need a human being with an integrated center. And such people develop more frequently in a culture that has a sapiential tradition that has developed proven capabilities to discern one from the other.
So Ficino’s divine frenzy and the ecstatic Dionysian frenzy of chaos are not the same thing. They define polarities in the human psyche, which must be held in a kind of tension, but the long-term human project is to integrate chaos and its energies into the the living flame of the Divine Mind. We do that by gradually awakening that flame in our own minds–or hearts, which are the same thing.
Thomas Taylor’s translations of Plato, Plotinus, the Hermetica, etc., into English in the late 1700s early 1800s had an impact on figures such as Blake, Coleridge, Shelley, Wordsworth, Emerson, and others very similar the the impact Ficino’s translations of the same works had on the great Florentine artists of the late 1400s. During the modern period, Plato, despite his caricature as an uber-rationalist, has always made more sense to artists than to philosophers and scientists—although post-quantum theory Physics opens up possibilities for an integration of transcendental philosophy with science.
This idea that the earth was shot through with the divine was not original with the Florentine Neoplatonists. It was a commonplace during the middle ages, but as I discuss elsewhere, the influence of Nominalism and Voluntarism in the 1300s displaced the participatory ontology and epistemology that had its grand synthesis in Thomas Aquinas. After Scotus and Ockham, the earth was imagined as detached from the divine—it was emptied of the divine and became just neutral stuff to be molded to meet human needs.
Ideas matter. The way we think influences the way we experience and work in the world, and the way we experience and work in the world influences the way we think, which in turn influences the way we work in the world, and the next thing you know, we’re in a techno-capitalist dystopia. This non-participatory ontology/epistemology that became prominent in the 1300s was mostly adopted by the Protestant reformers and provided the necessary presuppositions that allowed for the scientific revolution, capitalism, and transhumanism that would otherwise be impossible to imagine. As I point out in Note 1, after the Florentine Neoplatonists, Plato and the Christian-Neoplatonist participative ontology/epistemology remains interesting for poets and artists, but for not scientists and philosophers.
That can change, and it must change if we are going to find our way to a healthy culture in the future. I hope you agree with me that culture matters to us as individuals—it provides the soil in which our souls develop and mature. Cultures with rich soils grow great souls and celebrate them for their depth and originary power; cultures with poor soil grow little souls and celebrate them for their entertainment value.
Modern societies, especially those since WWII, do not produce great souls because they neither provide the soil in which they can grow nor a trellis on which that growth can be directed. That’s why we are wandering in the wilderness where true human flourishing, true human greatness is not possible, and why so many people today are so self-absorbed, anxious, and unhappy. All we can do is put one foot in front of the other, and trust that at some point we’ll arrive at a place where the terrain opens up better possibilities for human flourishing and communion.
I think there’s something interesting in what Dreyfus and Kelly, drawing on Heidegger, have to say about how art works in a particular society. They make a distinction between or cultural works that articulate or reconfigure a society. Articulating cultural works are the—
Temples, cathedrals, epics, plays, and other works of art focus and hold up to a culture what counts as a life worth aspiring to. Works of art in this sense do not represent something else—the way a photograph of one’s children represents them. Indeed, Heidegger says explicitly that the temple “portrays nothing.” Rather, works of art work; they gather practices together to focus and manifest a way of life. When works of art shine, they illuminate and glamorize a way of life, and all other things shine in their light. A work of art embodies the truth of its world. (All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age, pp. 101-2. )
So what can art be then in the Techno-Capitalist matrix except a celebration of its nihilism, materialism, and Social Darwinism. In other works, a typical evening of TV on HBO.
Is there any cotemporary art subversive of the TCM? Yes. It’s in some science fiction and magical realism where some artists are struggling to find a way to break open our the materialst constraints of the TCM. The problem with a lot of this is that we consume it as entertainment, and so trivialize what its makers are trying to make available. We eat it and excrete it.
As far as reconfiguring cultural figures, Dreyfus and Kelly describe them as those who—
change a culture so radically that they cannot count on an already established language and shared practices to make themselves intelligible. As a result, reconfigurers are essentially incomprehensible to the people of their culture. Indeed, they are barely intelligible to themselves. Reconfigurers are either gods or madmen. But which of these is only determined in retrospect. If the new god actually works to reconfigure the world, and the practices organize themselves around its way of life, then the god becomes an exemplar of a whole new understanding of everything that matters and of how to act. (p. 103).
They say that in the history of the West there are only two figures who were reconfigurers—
They are an odd pair: Jesus and Descartes. Jesus as presented in the Gospels is a successful reconfigurer who sets up the Christian World in which there can be a savior as well as saints and sinners; Descartes sets up our Modern World in which people and things become subjects and objects.(p. 105).
The description in the paragraphs above suggests that the reconfigurer is someone who has no significant continuty with the culture out of which he arose, which is clearly not true for either Jesus or Descartes. But it’s clear that they are both figures at the beginning of a profound historical disruption. But Jesus makes no sense if you don’t understand his coming out of the Jewish historical context. And as far as Descartes goes, while I don’t dispute that Modernity is deeply discontinuous with Premodernity, I’m not sure Descartes qualifies as a reconfigurer—people like Scotus, Ockham, Luther, Copernicus, Bacon, and Galileo are equally if not more important as disrupters of the old Premodern configuration. But that’s a debate for another time.
The point here is that most art today insofar as it articulates the zeitgeist of the TCM is all about its Social Darwinist presuppositions, its market value, i.e., its novelty and entertainment value—not about its disclosive originary power. The question for me is whether we are ripe for a new reconfiguration.
As I wrote here, I think there is a difference between what Derrida is actually up to and how he is often interpreted. Lacan, though a Freudian, had a very different idea of the unconscious than Freud did. As I understand it (he’s hard to understand) he saw it as structured or coded the way a computer’s CPU is, and as for the computer humans are incapable of extra-linguistic experience. So while there is this sense in Lacan that the human being is a prisoner of language, he did allow for the extra-linguistic in jouissance.
To make sure the correlations are clear, left-brain thinking correlates with what Baudrillard calls the semiotic and Kristeva the phenotextual. All these are essential functions for thinking. The prolem lies in that they often operate independently rather than in partnership with the right brain, the symbolic, or the genotextual.
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