Subject: Dissertation Proposal-second attempt
From: Klaus Ottmann (ko@thing.net)
Date: Wed Jan 19 2000 - 18:47:28 CST
Klaus Ottmann
Dissertation Proposal (January 20, 2000)
The I of the Artist:
The Aesthetic Decision in the Age of Communication
"Kierkegaard has that passion for the 'I,' for that 'I' experience, like
Abraham in his Fear and Trembling.... It is the 'I' that I myself experience
every day."
--Mark Rothko
"The human being is this night, this empty nothing, that contains everything
in its simplicity--an unending wealth of many representations, images, of
which none happens to him--or which are not present. This night, the inner
of nature, that exists here--pure self--in phantasmagorical presentations,
is night all around it, in which here shoots a bloody head--there another
white shape, suddenly before it, and just so disappears. One catches sight
of this night when one looks human beings in the eye--into a night that
becomes awful."
--Hegel, "Jenaer Realphilosophie"
Heidegger saw the emergence of the "world picture" as the fundamental event
of the modern age. In the modern age, which begins for Heidegger with
Descartes, man has become "subject." No longer is the world conceived as
"ens creatum," observed from the outside by God, such as the Creator-God on
the outer panels of Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights looking
down at the world hovering inside a crystalline globe on the third day of
creation. Rather, in the modern age the world is presented from within by
the human self-consciousness. Modern science is for Heidegger the foremost
manifestation of man's being as subject.
Hegel's famous description of the "night of the world," which Slavoj Zizek
reads as "the madness as a philosophical notion inherent in the very concept
of subjectivity," can also be taken as a look into the inner sanctum of the
Artist's mind. There, within the I of the Artist lies a dark world, but a
world picture nevertheless. The Artist creates world pictures, almost by
definition. What happens when the night of the world is brought out into by
the daylight by the Artist? Is the aesthetic decision the work of a solitary
genius (a singularity), or is it a shared event (a plurality)? How is one to
explain the "extraordinary quality" produced by Rembrandt, Picasso, or
Rothko? (The notion of the solitary genius has recently been revived by
Simon Schama's controversial new biography, "Rembrandt's Eyes").
My task will be to attempt to redefine the philosophical discourse of the
aesthetic Self and the notion of the singular moment within the aesthetic
decision in the Age of Communication.
As Jean-Luc Nancy rightly pointed out in The Experience of Freedom, Western
philosophy has led itself to the limit of the ontology of Subjectivity
(Zizek call this "the ticklish subject"): "Philosophy can no longer
represent its own beginning as the originary unity of a
Subject-of-philosophy appearing to itself in its freedom, or a
Subject-of-freedom appearing to itself as philosophy." Likewise, art can no
longer represent its beginning as the originary unity of a Subject-of-art
appearing to itself in its freedom.
The notion of community as a sense of belonging originally posed by
Heidegger in "Sein und Zeit" (Time and Being) has since lost its credulity
and, out of the experience of the Holocaust, has rightly been dismissed by
Jabes and Derrida .
More recently, Nancy has attempted a rehabilitation of the notion of
community, primarily in "The Experience of Freedom," framing it in terms of
Heidegger's distinction between "Mitsein" (Being-With) and "Dasein" (Being).
Nancy sees the primary mode of Being as "shared," in the sense of
Heidegger's "Mitsein" (Being-With).
Rather than following Nancy's rehabilitation of Heidegger's Being-With, I
propose a different path, following a suggestion by Fred Ulfers, that 1.
defines the aesthetic Self in terms of Nietzsche's notion of the 'Ureine" as
the Self-that-is-not-One, (that is One AND Other but not One WITH Other) and
2. replaces the notion of "community" with the postmodern "communication."
(It will also be tempting to discuss Nietzsche's "Ureine" against
Schelling's "imperfect Ground of Existence," that contains Evil, the Other,
as potentiality. Zizek speaks of this in his introduction to Schelling's
"Ages of the World," suggesting even that Schelling's "subjectivity is, in
its most basic dimension, in an unheard-of way, 'feminine.'")
I like Nietzsche because, unlike most philosophers, who view aesthetics as
a little more than an inconvenience, Nietzsche's philosophy is fundamentally
aesthetical and therefore his "Ureine" can be seen as an aesthetic Self.
(Another philosopher for whom aesthetics is essential to, if not identical
with philosophy, would be Kierkegaard).
Unlike Heidegger's Being-With, which still relies on external relations,
Nietzsche's "Ureine" has only internal relations; it is always already One
and Other but never identical. The absolute selfishness that Nietzsche
propagated is the aesthetic Self-that-is-not-One-the I of the Artist-an
active selfishness evolving out of the "Ureine." It is always already in
relation and therefore inherently, or structurally, an ethical Self. Thus,
the Artist is always already condemned to be ethical.
Nancy requires us to acknowledge that "philosophy and its freedom do not
coincide in a subjective presence and that every philosophical decision ...
is delivered to itself by something that, unknown to it, has already been
raised into thinking." He continues to say that "thinking [thus, aesthetic
decision] does not appear to itself in a subject, but receives (itself) from
a freedom that is not present to it."
But if Nietzsche's "Ureine" always already carries within its Self the
presence of freedom, albeit unknown to it (it is at once absent and
present-"Fort!Da!" as Lacan would say), until it is called upon in it the
selfish act of communication (which is not a contradiction, as Nietzsche's
Self is not a unitary self), then it receives itself from a freedom that is
absent yet present-- from within the "Ureine" that is One and not One.
I have long regarded the postmodern, especially with respect to art, as a
combination of Irony and Ecstasy. The historical process, which is
generally equated with the concept of nihilism and the end of metaphysics,
namely the loss of meaning in the modern world, forms the common starting
point for both the modern and the postmodern. While the modern is
characterized by a nostalgia for lost meaning , the postmodern is marked by
irony and an affirmative ecstasy that resembles the "pessimism of strength,"
described by Nietzsche:
"Man no longer needs a 'justification of evil,' he loathes exactly the
'justifying': he enjoys the evil pure, cru, he finds the meaningless evil
the most interesting. If he needed a God before, he now delights in a
disorder of the world without God, a world of coincidence, of which the
horrid, ambiguous, seductive are intrinsic features."
If one reads Lacan's Mirror Stage--the infantile drama of the fragmentary
body and the "orthopedic" identity--as an allegory of the modern, then in
the postmodern, as Baudrillard proposes, the "deflecting television screen"
takes the place of the reflecting mirror, which is no longer the place of
the formation of the subject, but that of its disappearance. This
disappearance which, according to Baudrillard, can be understood as an
ironic strategy of the subject, is the ironic nothingness, to which
Kierkegaard assigns an active, maieutic meaning. Kierkegaard's "echo of
irony," which repeats, but not entirely reproduces, and the "rotation
method," the "art of remembering and forgetting," are traits of postmodern
art, which sees the world always as if for the first time. It forgets and
remembers, in the sense of Kierkegaard, in every moment. It is the eternal
child, that repeats each picture as if it comes into being for the first
time.
In connection with his studies on photography, Roland Barthes speaks of a
"photographic ecstasy," which is associated with a LOSS, insofar as the
photograph is a memory of something that no longer exists as such. The
mourning about this loss, however, is not nostalgic in the sense of Lyotard,
but is an affirmation of the loss, an "ecstatic nihilism," to use a term
from Nietzsche's "Will To Power." Barthes describes this loss, in "The
Pleasure of the Text," as the pleasure of the subject (the reader,
spectator, listener) in his disappearance, as "the site of the loss, the
seam, the cut, the deflation, the DISSOLVE which seizes the subject in the
midst of bliss."
It is the "ecstasy of the communication," of which again Baudrillard speaks,
with an ironical side-glance at Lacan: "We no longer participate of the
drama of alienation, but are in the ecstasy of communication." It is an
ecstasy, which becomes "obscene" in the infinity and the total transparency
of the media and computer-networks.
Gilles Deleuze has pointed to the central role of the opposition
"active-reaktiv" and the complicity of "action" and "affirmation" in
Nietzsche's philosophy:
"This distinction between two kinds of quality is of greatest importance and
it is always found at the center of Nietzsche's philosophy. There is a deep
affinity, a complicity, but never a confusion, between action and
affirmation, between reaction and negation. . . . Affirmation is not action
but the power of becoming active, becoming active personified. Negation is
not simple reaction but a becoming reactive. . . . Affirmation takes us into
the glorious world of Dionysos, the being of becoming and negation hurls us
down into the disquieting depths from which reactive forces emerge."
Nietzsche's affirmative, active aesthetics corresponds to his expanded
concept of art, which is understood as "metaphysical activity« and the
artist as the "preliminary stage" in a universal aesthetic will to power;
the artistic subject vanishes in the "work of art that gives birth to
itself":
"The work of art where it appears WITHOUT an artist . . .
As far as the artist is only a preliminary stage [Vorstufe]
. . .
The world as a work of art giving birth to itself."
Here, I believe, is the connection to the "Ureine." If we accept my earlier
assumption that task of the Artist is to create a picture of the world, then
the Self that-is-not-One (the 'Ureine" ), then the world as a work of art
(as a world picture) gives indeed birth to itself.
But what about the singularity, the "extraordinary quality" (never a
quantity), the attribute of the "genius"?
The singularity can perhaps be best described with what Nancy calls "Une
seule fois, celle-ci" (just once, this time):
"The singularity ... is immediately in relation, that is, it cuts itself off
from everything, but each time (fois) as a time (fois) ... opens itself as a
relation to other times.... Thus Mitsein, being-with, is rigorously
contemporaneous with Dasein and inscribed in it, because the essence of
Dasein is to exist 'each time just this once' as 'mine.' One could say: the
singular of "mine" is by itself a plural."
In general relativity theory a singularity is a point in space-time of
infinite density of mass or energy. General relativity predicts that such
singularities or singular moments are rather common throughout the universe.
Infinite density of matter creates a condition where equations (rules) are
no longer meaningful (not unlike the postmodern condition). It makes it
impossible to tell what happens before or after a "singular moment," which
means that the universe, like the postmodern, is in a constant state of
forgetting and remembering.
This example illustrates well the problem one faces when trying to describe
what happens at the precise moment of an "extraordinary" aesthetic decision.
Like quantum singularities, the aesthetic Self as a singularity that is
never One (The "Ureine") is infinite, making it impossible to tell what
happens before or after a "singular" moment within the aesthetic decision.
In its most infinite state, in the ecstasy of communication, the I of the
Artist is also its most singular.
[footnotes available upon request]
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