Representation and beyond

Philosophy and art

 

“With a prudence which makes us think rather of a somnambulist than of a philosophic seeker, Descartes directs his doubts precisely to that truth which no one can deny. And over this he cries victory: proofs can conquer the most radical doubt; therefore, we have at our disposal sufficient means to attain truth. But he should have reasoned otherwise: I do not have at my disposal any proofs of my own existence, But I have no need of them; consequently, certain truths, very important truths, manage completely without proofs. Descartes would not then perhaps have become the “father of a new philosophy”, but he would have attained something much more important than the right to take his place in the Pantheon of great men.” (Shestov, Athens and Jerusalem, 291.)

It is a common characteristic of much post-modern and contemporary philosophy that it attempts to grasp all that came before in terms of representation. “Because classical philosophy grasped everything in terms of representation, it could not get to ‘the real’.” All of philosophy was concerned with images, empty concepts, representations of transcendent entities from the realm of fantasy. Heidegger too, tries to grasp Descartes in terms of representation, yet the Cogito has nothing to do with representation whatsoever. Post-structuralist philosophy widens the scope, philosophy has always been caught within an image of thought defined by representation. Perhaps only the French spiritualist school is wise enough to see that modern philosophy was founded on a pre-representative and immediate apperception. Immanence is not a project for a future philosophy, it is what everything was always based on. In the arts it is the same story. But, obsessed with ‘going beyond representation’, one throws away all that was ever represented, and one tends to end up with no force at all. 

Thought, restricted in its powers by representation and concept, can never grasp the ‘real’. And hence, the task to find a new way of thinking. A third kind of knowing, an intuitive knowledge that is opposed to the scientific and logical thought that grasps its objects by casting the net of representation, and that immediately grasp ‘durée’ or ‘Being’. A thought that does not under-stand being, but stands in the midst of it. 

Funnily enough, where has it led to? What has one found, ‘beyond representation’? Beyond all the familiar concepts through which classical philosophy has mapped reality? A void, really. Not a deeper knowledge of self, but impersonal and abstract flows. Not a deeper connection to ‘Being’, but a state akin to dissociation. 

Could it be, that the ‘representations’ of the past, had nothing to do with representation at all? Could it be that, going beyond representation, one does not encounter a void, but precisely a fullness, where one re-encounters a Self, and where one is driven by Ideas? 

One wants to go beyond representation. But what is found there? Entirely abstract and impersonal flows and energies, lines of individuation. But certainly never such a thing as a self, let alone a community. Although equally misguided in reading Greek philosophy as strangled by ‘representation’, Michel Henry’s value lies in showing once and for all that this self which philosophy has always sought to know is entirely beyond representation. And as such the commandment to ‘know thyself’ is perfectly in line with the post-modern project of immanence and going ‘beyond representation.’ 

And so is community, and so is God. When thoughts thinks at full speed, it does not end up in an indeterminate abyss, but re-discovers what it first attempted to go beyond. But this time strengthened in its belief by proof. After doubting the self, the Self is discovered as certain. It cannot be doubted, for it is known with an immediacy which knows not of representation. It cannot be ‘re’-presented, for it is always present. Question all representation, please do. And you will only find that the most valued ‘representations’ of classical philosophy are not representations at all. Ever since Kant there is this idea that we must be more critical, and that if philosophy truly takes on its role as critique, all past illusions will be shattered. One can not see that at the other end of critique lies certainty. When thought thinks at full speed, it does not break down. Rather, it finally catches up to itself. One is confronted with oneself, and all those things which one thought it was possible to deny or to push aside as so many illusions are rediscovered. 

It is the same with such grand concepts as ‘Ideas’. What is beauty? It is certainly not symmetry, for it can also be found in the non-symmetrical. It is certainly not in the unity of parts, for the simplicity of the Sun’s light is beautiful too. So, what is beauty? If it is not to be found in all these particular representations through which beauty appears? It is itself and nothing else. For even if I cannot get a hold of beauty, catch it with thought, or represent it to myself in a clear definition, beauty still is. At least for those for whom the being of a thing can still be considered proof of its being. How it appears is a question, but that Beauty is, this is certain. And this is all that the Idea of Beauty ever meant.

For what other ‘concepts’ can we say this?  

Wanting to go ‘beyond the regime of representation’, one fails to understand that this regime was never based on representations to begin with. And even if Plato created the concept, men were driven by Ideas long before him.

Before I speak of a nation, with borders, a constitution, customs, and so on, I know a people. Such things are never representations. 

Now, Nietzsche says that concepts are not merely given, but the object of creation. It is the very last thing that occurs to philosophers, he says, that the concepts which they use had once to be created. The genealogical perspective enters here. Concepts are not given for the philosopher to contemplate, but are to be created. This is what the philosopher’s activity consists of. To critique opinions, to shame people for their un-founded beliefs, and to put concepts in their place. What separates the proper philosophical concept from an opinion in this case, is whether or not it is grounded. Concerning beauty. One can say, beauty is found when something tells a story, has a narrative, or points to a deeper moral lesson. But this is unfounded, for there are also abstract and simple things, like the light of the sun, that are beautiful. Beauty is, but it cannot be grasped by any of its particular representations. And this is why the Idea of Beauty is the true ground of beauty, for here beauty is defined by itself and by nothing else. And hence the Platonic idea; Beauty is never represented, but it can shine through certain representations. And this is what the philosophical concept tries to do; it grasps a reality that lies beyond representation, a reality that exists but that cannot be accounted for entirely by the various ways through which it is represented. The Idea of Beauty is not an idea in the overly cognitive sense, something in our minds. It is something very real, that cannot be grasped by our finite minds through definitions (beauty = symmetry, beauty = harmony, beauty = narrative, and so on.). Trying to understand these Ideas as a representation misses the mark entirely. Rather, the Idea is a solution to thought’s inability to grasp what lies beyond visual and cognitive representation.  So, what is beautiful then? That in which Beauty is present. When Beauty is present, something is beautiful. When something is beautiful, it is beautiful. The proof that it is so, is in the end the very presence of beauty. A presence which can only be said to be present because it is present to us, present in a very intimate way, to be sure. So, again, life is the proof. When I feel beauty, there is beauty. But not all lives are beautiful. 

The concept is like a pair of glasses or the lens of a camera, it focuses vision in a particular way, shapes it in a certain way. And the question is what lenses we need to capture the shot. But before Plato’s ‘Ideas’ allowed us to focus our vision on ideas, and allowed us to see the world through this concept, the action was already there.

In the same way the Cogito is a concept signed Descartes. But to take this as all that it is, a concept first represented in the mind of René Descartes, is to make all philosophy impossible. The concept exists in reference to a problem, or an entire mess of problems. And in many ways, the more problems are given an answer to by the concept, the more powerful the concept. More powerful, that is, the more it allows us to think, the more it allows us to see. With Plato, the problem of definition —‘what is the beautiful?’—, and the problem of selection —who is the real statesman? Who is the real philosopher? 

Different concepts give answers to similar problems. As Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’ too attempts to solve the problem of selection. How to find a criterium for difference and hierarchy, in a world without transcendent criteria? How to think difference in an entirely immanent way, without recourse to some transcendent and self-identical Idea? How to think hierarchy in a world where no hierarchy is given? It is the viewpoint of genesis. 

Interesting to note is that both Nietzsche’s and Plato’s answer is remarkably similar, be it voiced in different ways. When Plato says that one man is more courageous than the other because he lives in closer proximity to the Idea of courage, he is only saying that one man is more courageous because he lives in closer proximity to this very real thing that we call courage. I.e., he shows more courage, he is more courageous. But it would be absurd to say that this man’s courage in this instance presents to us all there is to know about courage. This would be absurd because there are many other ways in which courage has showed itself, and in which it can potentially show itself. One wouldn’t want to deny courage to these different cases. 

Are you willing to deny the reality of courage? For this is all that the Idea is. The Idea is a means of selection. How is it that this man is more courageous than the other? Because he is closer to the Idea of Courage. That is, because Courage is expressed more intensely in him than in the other. That is, because he is more courageous. In any case, the fact that courage is present as lived is the proof. So one could say, with the Idea, Plato creates a transcendent concept to differentiate people, as opposed to merely basing the difference on natural differences. But Idea or not, the idea is exactly the same. And the Idea is only an expression of something very real. Only when we lose touch with this very real experience of courage, can we come to believe that the ‘Idea of Courage’ is solely some transcendent concept, entirely disconnected from the real world we live through. 

With Descartes’ ‘I think’, we can assume the problem of truth. Not ‘what is?’, but ‘what is true?’ In any case, why would anyone be interested in what is? What is is what is, that is all there is to it. What is more interesting is what is true, what is truly true, what is worthy of our attention. Wondering at being is all fine, but only idiots spend their time wondering about everything, just because it is. It is not enough to wonder, one has to learn how to wonder about what is worth wondering about. Selection, again. In one of the first writings of Descartes, he tells us the question that haunted his mind from the very beginning: “What path shall I take in life?’” I can become a soldier, a farmer, a chemist, an engineer, a mathematician, a philosopher. All these activities will bring me truths. But what is most important to know? And what life is most important to live? What is most correct, most noble? This is Descartes’ question. And the answer is simple; it is most important to know what is most important, i.e., it is most important to cultivate common sense —the ability to know what is most important in each situation that life throws at us. Concerning Plato, Werner Jaeger writes: 

“The only science which is valuable is the science of choice, which enables us to make the right decision. […] The greatest danger for each of us is that he may choose the wrong life —or, as the philosopher would explain it, the wrong pattern of life, the wrong ideal. Therefore he must seek out the knowledge which enable him to choose the right life, and neglect all others.” (Jaeger, Paideia, II, 370)

In many ways, philosophy is nothing but this science of choice, the science of selection that judges lives. But by what criteria do we judge lives? This is the philosophical question. 

Descartes’ problem is also the problem of deception, and the paranoid yearning for certainty. Who to trust? ‘The world wants to be deceived’, this is Descartes’ problem. And it is ours too. 

What is important is that often the concept arises not just from a theoretical problem supposedly given through philosophy as a purely theoretical discourse. The problems philosophy engages with are problems of life, generated in a living environment and community, a problematic state of affairs, filled with fears and desires. A problematic environment in which the philosopher feels forced to think this problematic environment. And to do so, he is forced to think a concept into being. He feels the urge to think what presents itself, he looks around, but the vocabulary to think the problem at hand is not there to give an adequate response. How can I think the fact that some men are better than others? Well, isn’t it clear, look at how they behave in battle, some are clearly more courageous or wise and so on. But, how do we differentiate men now that we are all sitting here idly in the city, each an equal of the other, no longer having to prove ourselves like before? Proximity to an ‘Idea’. But how can I think this difference, if there are no Ideas in some transcendent realm? Will to power, again. And so on. 

Now, we are supposed to be concerned with the problem of representation. And the concept seeks to represent something that is nonetheless very real. People are differentiated, different, in respects of their powers and weaknesses. And no amount of critique of ideas can take this away. Which is, again, precisely the observation that leads to the concept of an Idea. I cannot define Beauty, I cannot represent it, but it still exists. I cannot tell precisely what it is that makes something beautiful and something else ugly, but still, some things are beautiful, and others are ugly. And therefore Beauty is an idea, therefore Beauty has real being. It survives the test of critique. I can critique all definitions of Beauty, but a beautiful face will still appear to me as beautiful, and an ugly one as ugly. I can critique all notions of the ‘self’, but I still exist.

So, this is what philosophical concepts do at their highest degree of power. They capture a state of affairs for which no particular representation gives an adequate explanation, but which is nonetheless very real. They grasp realities that survive the test of critique. And evidently, when things still exist after we have tried to critique them into oblivion, they exist.  

It is a terrible mistake to reduce the greatest concepts of classical philosophy — the Ideas from Plato to Kant, Leibniz’ monad, Descartes’ Cogito, and so on — to the level of mere ‘representations’. All of these ‘concepts’, they are not empty words, but ways to catch the pre-representative, because representation failed to give an explanation, but the ‘thing’ in question still exists. Am I a rational animal? No, because this presupposes knowledge of ‘rational’ and ‘animal’. Am I a body? No, because this presupposes knowledge of body. But I still am, despite the fact that I cannot say what I am by referring to anything but the fact that I am. I am that I am. I ‘think’, I am. Is beauty in symmetry? No, look at the beauty of the a-symmetrical. Is beauty in the composite? No, look at the beauty of a simple colour. Yet still, beauty exists, despite the fact that I cannot define beauty by referring to anything but beauty. Beauty exists above and beyond any particular representation of beauty.

The philosophical concept attempts to capture forces, very real and pure forces that escape representation. The study of language too is only the search for original forces and how they affected living beings. How being came to be re-presented, but what is present originally are only pure forces, intensities. 

In this way, all of philosophy, at its heights that is, lines up with the ‘post-modern’ obsession of going ‘beyond representation’,  to seek ‘immanence’, to be done with transcendent concepts and criteria of distinction. That is, criteria that have no grounding in what is real and actual. Although this pursuit was not always explicitly thematised as such. Read Damascius for example, and behind the glorious ‘Ineffable’ you will find a ‘second power of thought’ compared to which post-structuralism seems like the worst conservatism. 

But it is not enough to ‘go beyond’, one must also claim what one finds, plant a flag, sign one’s name, capture the forces in a concept or in a work of art. 

And this is the great mistake, in philosophy, in the arts, and everywhere else. Attempting to go beyond, one finds nothing. One doesn’t go far enough, and is stuck in a terrible limbo, where the concept in question is no longer there, but one is also not in possession of its real ground.

I think of Deleuze’s adaptation of the ‘beautiful soul’;

“There are many dangers to invoking pure differences, liberated from the identical, independent from the negative. The greatest danger is falling into the representations of the belle-âme: nothing but differences, reconcilable and united in their differences, supposedly free from bloody struggle. The belle-âme says: we are different, but not opposed... " (Deleuze, Différence et Répétition.) 

If Beauty is sometimes found in colour, sometimes in narrative, sometimes in symmetry, and so on, then beauty must be everywhere. Everything is beautiful! Or, nothing at all. Real differences are denied, and only the differences allowed by the concepts we use are to be affirmed.

Beyond representation lies the real, and this real is much more violent, hierarchical, painful, than any regime of representation could ever be. It is also much more beautiful. 

There is a line of thinking, entirely un-philosophical in that it does not believe in the power of the concept to grasp what is real, to be able to divine what is beyond representation. 

If you push through in “de-territorialization”, much is re-discovered. Asking for the pre-conditions of anything whatsoever, Kant found Ideas, & Descartes found himself. And searching for the blind physiological forces that shape our psyche, Freud found a family. Going even deeper, Jung was even able to recover the gods. And even when schizo-analysis and anti-psychiatry critiqued psychoanalysis for overlaying the unconscious with the representations of consciousness, it only multiplied the forces of the unconscious to encompass all of socio-political life. A blind and impersonal unconscious, but nonetheless populated by trade-unions and racial blood feuds.  

And in this sense, nothing is ever lost when one dares to question. Which is very much the founding idea of what I consider to be Western philosophy, critique does not destroy the realities most dear to us, it uncovers them. This is what separates philosophy from the superficial religious instinct, for which some things should not be touched. The danger of hubris and all that. And it is for this reason too that only philosophy truly shares in the movement of the divine. Away from itself, putting itself into question, and thereby gaining greater knowledge of itself. The religious instinct blocks the movements of the divine. In a beautiful text from Emile Bréhier, which tells us more about the nature of philosophy than his actual histoire de la philosophie, he considers philosophy to be a matter of problematisation. When things lose their self-evidence, when opinion becomes questioned, when everything becomes a problem, this is when thought begins. Aristotle says this too, when he claims that opinion is the nourishment that makes possible the positing of a problem. Dialectics starts by investigating problems. And where do these problems come from? These problems are problematisations of common opinions. For Aristotle, the problems worth investigating are generally given to us, in that the problems about which previous wise men thought should form the starting point for one’s own investigation. But it is the mere fact of things becoming problematic, whether they did so for wise men of old, or for you now, that is the important aspect. All philosophy starts in wonder, and so on. But the key idea is that when things are pushed to the edges of comprehensibility, when they become so problematic, this is when their true nature appears. I.e. , the solution is not given to the problem in a second movement of thought. Rather, there is one movement of thought —‘problematisation’ or questioning— and when pushed to the very limit, the ‘solution’ appears organically. Or rather, the realization of the purely problematic character of something is finally grasped as the answer. It is when no solution can be given to the question :‘what is the beautiful?” that beauty appears as itself and as nothing else.   

In Nietzsche, what is the criterium for selection, what establishes differences between different lives? Selection itself, a difference in degrees of power, itself created by a difference in degrees of power. And nothing else. What makes us different? Our differences. What guarantees difference? Difference, will to power, the will to differentiate, to overpower, the pathos of distance. And this pathos is itself nothing but difference in power. Living is evaluating, says Nietzsche. What ensures hierarchy, when hierarchy can no longer be established on the basis of transcendent criteria —proximity to Ideas, titles, etc?  Hierarchy itself. 

When critique is pushed to the very end, it comes full circle, and that problem which was to be solved with an answer appears as its own ground. 

Again, Kant is the most beautiful example. At the depths of reason, pure problems are discovered. Problems which are original realities that drive us on to seek an answer to them, to fulfil them. Plato’s ideas are similar. What is beauty? Beauty is an Idea which drives us on to seek & create images of beauty in the world. Kant identifies his own Problems of Pure Reason as Ideas, and he identifies Ideas as Problems. The Idea, say of Beauty, is an original and self-sufficient reality which drives us on to find and create beautiful things. But it is an open-ended problem, you can not see Beauty as such in this world, and no instance of beauty you see will give a final answer to what beauty is. It remains open, and it remains capable of producing ever new instances of beauty. It is not like one of those simple questions which can be solved with an equally simple answer: ‘where is Rome located?’. Rather it is an endlessly productive and open problem to which an infinitiy of answers can be generated. The Idea of Courage is an original and self-sufficient reality which drives us to act courageously. Is it because we act courageously, that courage presents itself? Or is it because courage is present, that we act courageously? These are, really, secondary problems. What is important is that courage is the problem, and that it exists as a problem. 

No one worth anything is interested in purely representative art. For if something would become pure representation, there’d be no opening for Beauty to shine through. We do not care about beautiful scenes, already condensed and weakened forms of so many forces and passions. We want to see power itself, courage itself, beauty itself. And this is why artists only seek to make use of those minimal representative elements necessary to bring forth these powers. A simple line, a simple colour, pure force. After a while one becomes more confident, dangerously so, and one thinks one can keep the opening even with more complex forms. I can sustain the tension, even in detail. After a while one goes too far, and the gap through which Beauty entered is closed off. A complex realistic painting, but no power. From here, one can only work backwards, destroy and cut away until something appears again.

In one of the only texts on art worth reading, Socrates tells us that the painter and sculptor should only be interested in expressing soul. And the means is representation. All the expressions on a face express the invisible soul that lies behind it. And the way in which the face is shaped, betrays a certain disposition of soul. Plotinus says that if you want to know what evil looks like, you should go and look at an ugly face. 

And this is why the artist can become a realist, and only because of this. Why would a sculptor be interested in anatomy? Because any man interested in the physical knows it is a precise map to the psychical. A certain type of soul has a certain type of posture. A certain muscle developed in a certain way betrays a certain interest of the soul. This is why, and for no other reason whatsoever. Certainly not to display one’s knowledge of anatomy or to be praised for one’s realist skills. In the 17th century, this time on Cartesian foundations, Charles Le Brun attempts to paint in such a way as to express the passions of the soul. Extensive study of physiognomy, anatomy, and an unparalleled realism become the artist’s tools of choice. But here it arises, the danger of going too far. Becoming too detailed, too representative, and thereby running the danger of closing off the opening through which beauty can shine forth. The image becomes too dense, and trying to express soul through increasingly complex representative means, the attention for the detail of the representation takes over the attention for soul. 

One represents the visible, because one wants to express the invisible. But in the end, because of excessive focus on the visible, the invisible disappears. And then, the task of ‘going beyond representation’ appears. Tired of all the fluff, modern art wants to return to the essence, and express solely that which matters —power, soul, the aesthetic sensibility itself, which is not quite the same as what is seen. 

This is, after all, what people like Kandinsky, Bacon, or a Rothko sought to do, each by different means. Pure forces, seeking to result in pure affections in the spectator. All visual experiments that seek to save the image from an excess of representation. To open the cracks again, to make beauty shine through again. It is also the drive of all avant-garde experiments of the past centuries.

Two things happened instead:

1. Only force, but no direction. The uplifting, that which brings us higher, not many seemed to be interested. When Socrates urges the painter Parrhasius to paint the invisible forces that lie behind representation, he is clearly interested primarily in such noble things as courage, wisdom, or justice. It feels that one often believes instead that only the horrific and the violent, the un-hinged, has any force. And of course it does, when what were once considered the most powerful forces are only seen as fake and human-made concepts, mere representations. No one can imagine the invisible to have any stability, let alone any direction towards the good. For here is the dogma; when one goes beyond representation, there is only chaos, disorder, blind material drives, there is no form in immanence, order is always secondary and created. Look at Bacon, one at least feels something. But what? Are these the Ideas that lift one up to a higher state of being? No. One finds sexual deviancy and horror. Intensity, yes, but it is the intensity that remains when the soul is trapped and dispersed, lashing out. A drunk monad trapped in a bathhouse. 

Going beyond representation comes to mean going beyond that which representation ought to express. I would say, not deep enough. Bacon is an interesting case-study, in that he at least expresses something problematic and real, all the forces and intensities habitually stifled by the mundane. 

2. One could also forego one’s belief in anything beyond representation whatsoever. Has seeking for depth not become a cliché itself? Is it not old-fashioned to believe that there is a world beyond or underneath? Reality becomes flattened, and the work is not an expression of some deeper reality, but merely a signifier referring to other works. All can be art, because art has no privileged position of expressing anything that any other object would not be able to express too. All is a copy of a copy here. The simulacra universe of pop-art, kitsch, and objet-trouvé. Here, the belief that representation is all there is leads both to the blind worship of the realist, and to the complete foregoing of realism. Hyper-realistic concept art and nonsensical conceptual art are two sides of the same coin. Which is the coin of the loss of soul or power, the loss of a belief in depth. One goes beyond representation, and what does one find? Representations ad infinitum, no originary realities are ever encountered. This is the type of life incapable of going beyond entirely. Rationalism of the worst kind, entirely unaware of the power of Reason. Understanding-ism, bugman rationalism. 

As all philosophy is concerned with fighting self-evident appearance, in order to extract something from the powers that lay beyond, and catch them through concepts, so all art is concerned with the exact same thing, all be it through different means. Similar problems affect both fields. 

Art becomes a game of reference, where the cube of ice placed in a museum-context comes to represent the Green propaganda, and where the blow-up doll refers to media-culture. 

In describing the so-called decline of art, many like to point to Duchamp’s urinal. I am entirely uninterested. Duchamp was a jester, he wanted to have a laugh, and he succeeded. He mocked the curators, the gatekeepers of art as an institution, for good reason, and he succeeded. What is more interesting is how anyone ever even cared for his extravagances, and that you —critics and promoters of so-called ‘real art’— still do. Afraid of being outcompeted by a urinal, and you have been! 

I am much more interested in the horror called pop-art. When those soup-cans are displayed in the ghey colours of the female marketeer, it is a very clear message, a world-view that imposes itself. 

Duchamp says: look you decadent museum curators, I have tricked you into displaying a urinal. You are worth nothing. It is quite funny, and he was entirely right. 

Tired of making ‘art-cinema’ videos of men getting blowjobs, Warhol says: art used to make use of representation to express beauty, courage, melancholy, mapping the deepest affections of the human soul, confronting us with the essence of ourselves, teaching us of the greatness of which we are capable, but of the horrors too. But we no longer believe in art showing us anything ‘deeper’. There is nothing behind the image, except for another image. Here, the human soul reduced to a can of soup, a mere object, and an object for sale too. It is said with full conviction. It is the triumph of marketing over art. It is the triumph of the copy over the original expression. It is the triumph of representation over whatever lays beyond. And most of all, it is the shaming of the artist’s original drive to seek anything higher or deeper. And it lines up perfectly with the worship of ‘hyper-realism’ and so on. An attack on life’s drive to seek for what is deeper. 

There is much talk about AI taking over art, replacing the artist and so on. And as a recent debacle of art-fraud showed, many are eager to have the robots do the work for them. All this ‘AI will replace the artist’. Will AI replace art? Perhaps, but this question is entirely secondary to a different one: do you want AI to replace you? One would imagine the artist to be driven by this insatiable thirst to work and create, and one has to be suspicious of artists overly enthusiastic about new technological developments. 

After being spoken to by Socrates, the painter Parrhassius realises that he should not merely represent things, but should seek to express the invisible forces that lie dormant beyond representation. And this is what artists have been doing in an increasingly experimental manner. And you end up with something like a Pollock. Entirely abstract, pure forces on canvas. Whether you like the result or not, it is entirely in line with the artistic instinct to express the invisible. What is truly bad is the feeling of weariness that overtakes these experimenters after a while. What really is there to be found behind the material? Nothing at all, let’s give up, and resort to soup-cans. Or just give me a well-crafted realistic painting, a pretty face and a nice landscape, now that is what I call real art. But who says this? It is the man for whom there is nothing beyond the surface. Merely the conservative version of the pop-art brain. It is the same dead soul that lies behind both. Both lack depth, none of them cares about expressing anything higher. 

AI in itself is not a threat for art, what is a threat for art is AI in the hands of the pop-art brain & the life-less retvrner. It is a danger in the hands of those who lack any and all intensity and are only concerned with appearances. 

I was supposed to be talking about the cultural drift going too far beyond representation. But it appears to not be doing this at all. Rather, it is satisfied with pure surface. It is only in a superficial way that we are ‘too radical’ or too concerned with destroying boundaries. For the real radical knows that behind man-made categories there are natural categories. And behind man-made differences there are much more violent natural differences.  

In this context a thing can be said about the trans-gender as a symptom of a cultural drift. Which, as a general medicalized phenomenon, is really one of history’s more violent examples of life’s capacity for self-abuse. This life does not care about going deeper into its own soul to find a solution to its problem, it cares only about the modification of the external. And very often, driven by a copy instinct. How does one come to look like a man if one is not oneself a man? By imitating a certain male appearance one has seen on an internet forum, or by imitating one’s favourite cartoon character even. The trans-brain is the pop-art brain. Where an attempt is made to have the external —the body and its dispositions — not be an expression of the soul, but an expression of something external to it, a different body. It is often said that the trans-ideology is only the conclusion of a typically Western idea —the separation of body and soul. And, thinking itself a soul entirely separated from its body, the trans can choose which body he wants to inhabit. But I have trouble understanding this analysis. If the trans thought his soul to be entirely separated from the body, then why this intense need to inject hormones and cut off body parts? Why go through all this horror, if one is not even identified with the body? Why not accept this supposed difference between body and soul? It makes no sense to me. And in many ways, it seems more to be a case of a discontent with this (nominal or real) distinction between body and soul. One feels oneself not at home in one’s body, a condition as old as man itself, and instead of affirming this conflict natural to growing life, one seeks to be done with it. Not by working through it, but by fixing it through external means. One does not affirm the paradoxical nature of one’s humanity, as both soul, body, and unity of the two. Instead, one comes to see this nature as a problem to be solved. Life as a problem to be done with. Away with the depths of psychological turmoil, and towards a flattening, a desiring to be at one with the surface. All of this is surrounded by this horribly sterile and clinical atmosphere, and in this way the colours of this rainbow are quite deceptive. It is not a representation of the spectrum of human possibility, reminding one of the psychedelic and hippie eras, the idea of infinite human malleability and endless possibility. It is really a flattening of sexual differentiation and an annihilation of individuality. One pours all the different drugs together in one cup so that they counter-act each other’s effect, and the result is a blind and empty sedation. The colours conjure up this image of a creative schizophrenia, but the end of schizophrenia is a catatonic stupor where all one’s powers turn inwards towards self-annihilation, slowly eating away at itself.

Concerning art again. The problem is lack of depth, nothing more. You feel it or you don’t. This is no new problem, it is always the same problem. The boring vs the interesting. The deep vs the superficial. The cliché vs the original. Can one break through the screen of the mundane and capture something that lies beyond? If you break the screen entirely, you end up with a sterile void. And if you don’t break it at all, the result is equally stifling. 

Speaking in clichés as artists like to do, Francis Bacon says he never starts painting on a blank canvas. It might appear as white and empty. But really, he says, it is already filled with all sorts of things. All sorts of cliché-ideas fill his mind, all the habitual patterns of painting lie dormant in his muscles, waiting to fill the canvas with more of the same movements. And this is the painter’s problem, Bacon says, to get to a point where one can actually begin. Which is, a point where one has exorcised all the superficiality from oneself, and one can actually make a beginning. He had all sorts of techniques; throw paint randomly onto the canvas, get terribly drunk to make it impossible for his muscles to fall into habitual patterns of painting, and so on. His atelier was always a terrible mess, he liked it this way to stay in this head-space of dis-order, where the habitual and boring was always kept at bay, to keep a tension from which he could actually ‘begin.’ Of course I do not recommend any of these things. But if you do any of the above, I’d go with the drinking.  

The point is: attempt to break through the cliché, by all means necessary. Don’t allow what comes onto the canvas to be a mere copy, no, it must be an original expression, a veritable creation. 

It is this, or you give up and are satisfied with reproducing copy after copy. You can always justify you lack of depth later, this is an option widely accepted today.

One calls this the post-modern condition; no grand ideals, no great narratives, and so on. Nothing behind the appearances. Only copies of copies. No deeper meanings. Relativism and so on. All these boring concepts. The post-modern condition, yes. But for whom? It is only the condition of a certain type of life. For the pop-art brain, for the empty-headed, the golems of this world. 

All men of power know that when you question the appearances, you end up with something much more marvellous. If you seek for the beauty in the e-girl, you don’t end up a gooner looking at endless e-girls, no, you end up rising up to the Idea of Beauty. If you break through the surface of things, you end up in a world of forces for you to capture and express. You don’t ‘progress’ beyond this progression of the soul. 

‘We can no longer believe in grand ideals, in God, in …’ But since when are these things a question of ‘belief’? You encounter them and become driven by them. That is all there is to it. Who cares about ‘belief’ even, be more interested. Honestly, search for the essence of things, not in any disinterested and overly theoretical manner, but seek to dwell in the midst of things, inter-esse. That is all there is to it, ‘belief’ is terribly boring in comparison. 

It is again quite typical of thinking types. One is worn down by historical events, and in a period of recuperation where one’s powers are still exhausted, one takes this exhaustion, this incapacity to launch the arrow of life further again and set new goals, as a fact. 

In a beautiful story by Dostoevsky, a suicidal man has a dream. In the dream he encounters an intense feeling of power and love. And he re-discovers his love for life, the thought of suicide banished from his mind. He tells people about what happened, and they say: “yes very nice, but it was only a dream you know, it wasn’t real”. And he replies in the only way one should reply to such people:

“fuck you, it might have been a dream, but this dream gave me more life than all of your so-called reality ever gave me.” 

This man is like Descartes who, in the Passions of the Soul, says that I can dream, and in this dream I can feel love or any other passion in response to a certain event I am dreaming. And afterwards, I can doubt whether this event truly happened, because it was a dream and so on. But I cannot doubt that I actually felt love, that love was actually in my soul. And everything that is truly in the soul, has the power to change the soul. In many ways the soul is identical to the changes that are truly in it. 

The dreamer in Dostoevsky’s story, he is the anti-thesis to the author’s underground man. The latter asks; well, yes, but did you really see God? Maybe it was just neurons firing? And the dreamer replies: fuck you, I felt it, I know it. And that is all there is to it. Descartes is the same: fuck you, I exist. And that is all there is to it. I don’t need you to tell me whether I am a rational animal or anything else, and what is in my power to do. And I don’t need you to tell me that when I look into myself there are only changing feelings and sensation and memories and so on, but never a stable ‘I’ to encounter. If you don’t have a sense of self, don’t assume it is the same for me. It is life’s self-confidence , rising in defiance against all the questions that seek to hold men down. 

Your questions might be aimed at destroying all these grand notions and narratives. But the questions of others bring them deeper into the essence of things. You question what beauty is and end up with soup-cans. Plato asks what beauty is and he ends up with God. 

Who cares if it was a dream. Some can even find truth and life in dreams. What do you have to offer? Questions behind every question, ad infinitum. It is the cynical pop-art brain against the man of depth. 

It is worth thinking about this with advancements of AI and so on for art. What happens is entirely dependent on the type of life that makes use of this. And one can also ask: what type of life even wants to make use of this? What type of life is enamoured by chat-bots? Perhaps a great life can be. I don’t know. But I do have a hard time seeing how a great life could lay down its present work to start tingling with robots. 

Interestingly, in bad art there is always something of fraud. One has the feeling one is being conned, tricked into praising something that expresses nothing at all. Tricked into giving reality to something fake. Which is why you see people read the name next to a painting first in the museum, after which they can decide to act interested or not. And which is also why the entire industry and ‘theory’ surrounding these things is so important. One can only feel confident in praising some politically loaded objet-trouvé because of all the theorists that tell you it is ok to have bad taste, and that in fact it is even a virtue and a sign of intelligence. “All those who rely on instinct, don’t listen to them. A soup can is much more interesting than being affected by beauty and power.”  

When there is no ‘beyond’, everything is worth expressing. But this is the mistake. Proximity to the divine or to Ideas or anything else can be one manner of distinguishing the good from the bad, the interesting from the boring, and so on. But even if one doesn’t believe in a world beyond, the degree to which something expresses power is enough to distinguish things. This was Nietzsche’s idea: beyond good and evil does not mean beyond good and bad. Ideally, it is instinct that knows how to select. Only later Ideals aid us in selecting. Now, we have neither. And what will happen going forward is a quite barbaric re-affirmation of instinct. 

Plotinus’ treatise on beauty is instructive here. It starts with the basic phenomenological observation that some things appear as beautiful to us, and others as ugly. This is the fact of the matter. Beauty appears to us, whether we want to or not. It is only later in the treatise, attempting to give an explanation for how it is that beauty can appear to us, that there is all this talk about the Idea of Beauty and so on. But, stop believing in the Idea of Beauty, and things will still appear as beautiful to you, and other things as ugly. The same goes for other things such as courage, justice, wisdom, and so on. Instinct is first. 

Go beyond, question, break down all categories, but do so with enough vigour, and you will re-discover what you sought to destroy. But this time with that much more reality. Break down distinctions between people on the basis of arbitrary man-made criteria, and you will stumble upon the real criteria of distinction, the very fact that you are different —in degrees of power, in blood, in race, in intelligence, and so on. We can pretend to be the same in our proximity to some artificial law. But destroy the law, and the law of nature will show us how different we really are. Your choice. We can pretend that all of us communicate with God by grace of our common church. But destroy the church, and only the really divinely inspired will still be hearing God. Your choice. 

Do you see the dynamic at play? 

To go beyond representation, if one truly means it, is to come across realities that are that much more stable, forceful, and violent. And much more beautiful too. Of course, this is not the case for those who lack instinct and have to constantly rely on theory and concepts and representations and so on. And so, you can destroy the Idea of Courage, but courage remains, all be it now only for the courageous. 

Nietzsche:

“Now for me, it is obvious that the real breeding-ground for the concept ‘good’ has been sought and located in the wrong place by this theory: the judgement ‘good’ does not emanate from those to whom goodness is shown! Instead it has been ‘the good’ themselves, meaning the noble, the mighty, the high-placed and the high-minded, who saw and judged themselves and their actions as good, I mean first-rate, in contrast to everything lowly, low-minded, common and plebeian. It was from this pathos of distance that they first claimed the right to create values and give these values names: usefulness was none of their concern!” (Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, I, §2) 

He is reacting against a utilitarian conception of morality here. None of which is my concern here. What I want to point to merely is this ‘genealogical’ view of the concept of ‘the good’. Here, for Nietzsche, ‘the good’ might be just a concept now, a transcendent thing created by man, a thing of language, but it has its origin in a very real experience, a state of being, a condition of life. Namely, the feeling of power that the noble feel in contrast to their environment. In the wake of Nietzsche, much critique of the transcendent concepts of philosophy takes as its end the destruction of these concepts. They are mere concepts, and so on. As an archetype for that which this critique seeks to destroy, one thinks of Plato’s Ideas. Be it the Idea of the Beautiful, Justice, Courage, Wisdom, or the Idea of the Good itself. In doing so, it is often forgotten that, as much as these things are posited as ideas by a conceptual mind, they are felt and lived as very real. If they weren’t, they would never be posited as Ideas. It is because these things; courage, wisdom, beauty, the self, god, and so on, first present themselves with the proof of life, that they can later be posited as ideas or concepts. It is because men are courageous, that philosophers start thinking about ‘Courage’. Let us take a look at a passage from Werner Jaeger’s Paideia, a history of the ideals of greek culture. Speaking about the concept of areté in Homeric Greece, Jaeger mentions the importance of ‘imitation’ for the Greek nobility. One is taught by being shown the examples of heroic men, presented as a model for imitation. Such was the purpose of Homeric poetry. Jaeger then writes: 

“If we remember that Plato’s whole philosophy is built on the conception of pattern, and that he describes the Ideas as ‘patterns established in the realm of Being’, we can easily see the origin of the category. The Idea of the ‘Good’, that universally applicable pattern, is directly descended from the models of heroic areté which were part of the old aristocratic code.” (Jaeger, Paideia, I, 34) 

The point is, Plato’s ‘Ideas’ are not to be conceived of as mere concepts, created by a mind too full of itself, losing itself in abstract reasoning, and drifting off to the worlds of fantasy. No, these Ideas, they are based on very real states of being. Before men imitate courage, there are men who act courageous. And before men imitate some ‘idea of beauty’, they feel beauty. Think again about Plotinus’ treatise on beauty. Before Plotinus goes on to explain the Idea of Beauty, he starts with the basic assumption of beauty, that beauty exists. Why? Because whether you want to or not, you experience some things as beautiful, and other things as ugly. Beyond a doubt. What is dubitable however, is that beauty = symmetry, or any other limiting identification.  Some people and actions appear to you as beautiful, and others as ugly. And it is starting from this very real thing, that Plotinus starts his discourse on the Idea of Beauty, to give a metaphysical grounding of beauty. One could say that phenomenology is always the starting point with these thinkers. 

Philosophy has been driven by this desire to critique all the so-called ‘representations’ of classical philosophy, both ancient and modern. Whether it be Ideas, God, and even the Self. A point is reached where even the usage of these ‘concepts’ is outlawed, because one cannot comprehend that they are not mere ‘concepts’, but expressions by the mind of very real experiences. 

A history appears: men act courageously, and men imitate men. The most creative among them decide to express courage as a concept. After a while, due to a myriad of circumstances, courage is nowhere to be seen as an experience, and one is only left with the concept. Now, the concept is critiqued, — for why believe in something which is merely a concept? — and we are left with no experience, and no concept to imitate. 

A simple evolution, yet nonetheless of utmost importance. It is the very same evolution that explains the mass of idiotic interpretations of Descartes engaged in by pretty much every philosopher after Descartes. The ‘Cogito’, thrown away as a stupid representation, an empty concept created by the mind. When all it means is the certainty we have of our feeling ourselves being alive. Are you going to doubt that? Apparently. 

Now here is the thing, if you allow me to engage in some science-fiction. Once, men felt God, they felt courage, beauty, wisdom, and so on. They knew these things were real, because they felt them to be so with the certainty that you have of the fact that you exist, the certainty of life. The most intelligent and creative among them turned these experiences into archetypal concepts to be imitated, so that the youth might too share in the deepest and most joyful of experiences. After a while, due to a myriad of causes, biology being not the least of them, men no longer experience God, courage, beauty and so on. All they have to fall back on are the concepts of prior geniuses. Again, the most intelligent and creative among these men lacking experience point to the fact that a concept is worth nothing if it does not refer to an actual experience. Why imitate something that is not real? One would be no different from those hurt children who identify themselves with cartoon characters and animals and cut off their testicles. And so, one no longer believes in Ideas, and not even in a Self. What you have then is a life which has no experience, and no concepts. Empty. And with no archetypal concepts or Ideas to be imitated, only those who can still feel the realities to which the concepts refer can enjoy their benefits. 

A natural distance between lives presents itself again. There are no Ideals to drag the worthless into nobility anymore. And all that can drive the individual is his own nature. And individuals are differentiated, no longer on the basis of the ideals they imitate, but on the basis of their very natures. True natural difference emerges again. When representations lose their might, they only lose reality for those for whom it were only concepts in the first place.