A sketch of the series "From Modernity to After-Modernity” (1)

A few weeks ago my friend Titus Hora (Facebook, Pinterest), and I, entered a conversation relating to art which is also the core subject of this blog. I wrote a sketch of a summary about my series of posts titled “From Modernity to After-Modernity” that I wanted to share with him and I post it here for the readers of this blog who might be interested.

After formatting the series I got some 1500 book pages that I’ll further edit and gradually publish within the coming months or years. This text is the first of two posts that sketch a summary, in 10 pages, of that series (1 page summary for every 150 pages in book format).

Art suffers, in Late-Modernity, from a loss of meaning that weighs heavily on the mental sanity of visual artists and it also participates in the weakening of the cohesion of the societal fabric. Looking around at contemporary works exhibited in art galleries, museums, and art fairs one is overwhelmed by a feeling of nausea which explains why most of the people just stay clear of those places. As a thinker and a painter this makes me feel as if I was being plunged into what can only be described as an abyss of incoherence. Art has ended nowadays in the uncomfortable place of being whatever a person who calls herself an artist says it is. In other words we live in an era that inflates the self to the point of equating it to the whole of reality. But art as ‘whatever’ at the hands of egomaniacs is sickening to say the least. This explains why, for the sake of my own mental sanity, I experience a deeply felt urge to clarify the meaning of what art is all about. And in my mind this question can’t find a valid answer by stirring in the details of the present practice of the arts.

To possibly reach the kind of dept and significance I’m after the object of my inquiry, art, has be be firmly situated in the context of the ‘whole’ story of reality that is available to our perception. By that I mean that it has to be situated in the context of the principle of life that materialized in the emerging and evolving biology of species and later further develops along the path of their societal evolution. Anything less would be dabbling in the insignificance of the details of a sick contemporary life in Late-Modernity.

living species inherit an aesthetics of life From Biological evolution

The realm of biological evolution is made of an incalculable number of successive biological mutations that are registered in the DNA-RNA code inscribed in the double helix present in all living cells. We can thus say that the biology, or the body, of each individual composing a living species is the result of such a near infinity of biological mutations. If we learned something from big data it is the power that resides in big numbers. The bigger the amount of data the more precise and exact is the knowledge that we can extract. In light of this I intuit that the mutations registered in the DNA-RNA code of biological cells are a great source of knowledge indeed. Will humanity ever be able to extract this knowledge? Fact is that, by digging in the genome and in epigenetics, science is already starting to give us a peek into our past. But how far will our species venture, in the acquisition of knowledge from our biology, is unknown.

The knowledge residing in biological cells relates to the history of biological mutations and is the subject of study of various branches of science. What interests me here is a different kind of knowledge. A mutation is the successful outcome of one proposition bringing order in a chaotic context that was initially addressed by multiple propositions. What this means is that the replicability of a biological mutation consecrates the success of one proposition while all the other propositions end up as failures. At a deeper level we observe that a successful proposition giving way to a replicable mutation is synonymous to life itself while all the other propositions ending up in failure are synonymous to death. When transposing such a state of affairs to the field of human psychology we discover that success fosters a ‘high’ and positive mood that results in happiness and satisfaction while failure fosters a ‘low’ and negative mood that results in sadness and dissatisfaction.

What does all this imply?

It does not take a big leap of imagination to observe that our being here today is the result of a near infinite sequence of successful propositions that transformed chaos into order to ensure mutation replicability. In other words the complexification of life is an outcome of long sequences of successful and replicable mutations. Human psychology implies that successful mutations conduct to ‘high’ and positive moods that result in happiness and satisfaction. Something of a same nature, minus awareness, is assuredly at work at the level of biological cells. When mutations are being reproduced over very long sequences of successful outcomes such ‘feelings’, or whatever it is that cells are ticking for, must be de-multiplied. And so the intensity of the ‘feelings’ resulting from successful mutation processes, that repeat nearly infinitely, somehow end up inscribing these feelings in the code of life. The total sum of such inscriptions then acts as a fuzzy guide that inspires the individuals of all species to act in ways that work, in ways that result in success, in other words in ways that appear to be beautiful.

What about the eventual application of big data algorithms to such long sequences of mutations? It makes no doubt in my mind that they would necessarily detect the different patterns characterizing the lines, forms, colors, smells, sounds and other characteristics of ways that work that result in success and procure ‘high’ and positive moods, happiness and satisfaction.

The individuals, composing a living species, must thus inherit an unconscious fuzzy sensation of the exceptional character of such patterns in the fabric of biological evolution. We humans, since very early on in our history, have been using the words ‘beauty’ or ‘aesthetics’ to characterize that subconscious fuzzy sensation. But because we are not consciously aware of that sensation we constantly end up debating about what these concepts are all about without ever possibly reaching a consensus. Each epoch fashions its culture as being the sum total of all ideas and actions at a given time in a given society. Culture is a fleeting societal reality but it is paramount in the individuals’ minds and so it obscures the deeper influences, from biological and from societal origins, that drive human behaviors over the long haul. This is why the discussions around the concepts of beauty and aesthetics may appear so vain indeed.

What moves visual artists in the rendition of their works is primarily the urge that overwhelms them to solve problems in their visual representations and the tickling provoked by their unconscious fuzzy sensation of beauty is what drives their problem solving. Every new born is endowed with such a fuzzy sensation but during a childhood of domestication most are unfortunately losing this faculty. Their minds are indeed being made captive of the fleeting culture of the moment. Some rare individuals never lose touch with this unconscious fuzzy sensation of beauty. They are the real artists who succeed to accommodate their unconscious sensation of beauty to the fleeting forms of culture in their times.

Societies use visual signs to share knowledge

The principle of life emerges as single celled species which further develop into more complex species made of an assembling of multiple cells. In other words the principle of life takes the form of living species.

After reaching a certain threshold of biological evolution all living species manage their affairs along the lines of what appears to be a universal principle. I mean the inter-play between their polarities :

1. on one side we have the individuals who are acting their creative and forward looking parts and are thus the drivers of ever more complexity
2. on the other side we have societies which are acting their conservation and inward looking parts and are thus the drivers of the reproduction of the species over the long haul

The functions of these polarities are similarly fundamental to the principle of life. And the loss, for whatever reason, of the functions of one of them necessarily results in the weakening health of the species. As such the loss by a species, of the functions of its polarities, constitutes a direct threat of extinction1.

While ensuring the survival and the reproduction of the species over the generations the interactive play between the individuals and their society generates the energy that powers societal change which is the hallmark of complexification. Seen from a long haul perspective societal changes appear to crystallize at given moments and thus form societal nodes along the path of societal evolution. Societal nodes correspond to moments of successful cultural evolution that result in the transfer of replicable memes in the societal worldview2 which thus itself slowly evolves under the pulling effect of a society’s changing culture.

One can visualize such an evolution of worldviews in the realm of civilizations as it slowly gives rise to separate nation-states. Let’s take as example the Western civilization. It’s worldview is Christianity. Initially, after being imposed as the official religion of the Roman empire during the 4th century AD, the Christian creed was unified. But gradually local cultural expressions started to differentiate the creed. By the middle of the 11th century East and West had completely separated. By the 15-16th century Western Christianity fragmented between Catholics, protestants and Anglicans. And by the 17-18th centuries this Christian fragmentation started to be assaulted by philosophic rationalism and its functional instruments, I mean, science and technology which gradually erased the Christian worldview from the minds of the citizens of all Western societies. Science did nevertheless not succeed to become the new worldview for the good reason that it does not offer a grand narrative about what reality is all about. And as a result the citizens of Western societies don’t share any longer a common worldview and the cohesion of their societies thus invariably withers away.

Worldviews are the glues that keep societies from fragmenting along the lines of the special interest of groups of individuals. Without the presence of a strong worldview capable of gluing the minds of its citizens around a common foundational narrative trust between them evaporates. And the society then loses its drive to reproduce over the long haul which is the symptom that the species contracted a sickness affecting one of its parts. In Western countries, today in Late-Modernity, the withering of cohesion has reached the highest possible level that is referenced as societal atomization. This is when worldviews have completely lost their power to glue the individual minds and as a result the minds drift along their own course. From the long haul perspective of a species atomized societies are basically dead branches that the force of inertia keeps momentarily going till the last drop of energy is used up. In this sense the present Western experience of ‘art as whatever’ should be viewed as the canary in the coal mine that informs us of an impending regression into the collapse of Western societies.

The societal evolutionary path of humanity started with the emergence of tribes. What this means is that the societal process of knowledge formation, and its sharing with the citizens in the form of a worldview, dates back some 300,000 years at the least3. And from its inception the sharing of societal knowledge among all citizens was realized by means of visual signs. This practice was used throughout the entire history of tribal societies and started to be adopted by empires and kingdoms some 5,000 years ago to share religious creeds or philosophies with their citizens.

In Early-Modernity, starting with the 14-15th centuries, newly rich long distant merchants adopted the same technique of image making to share their new vision about reality and the values that accompany that vision. By the 16th century the technique was so successful that it participated in unleashing a whole new historical era called the Renaissance. Being so successful the technique was ‘sanctified’ and given the name “art”.

Taking a birds’ eye view of humanity’s history it appears without any possible doubt that what we ended up calling art, not so long ago, is nothing else than:

1. the sharing of meaning through visual signs. Meaning relates to the values, the foundational narrative about reality, that are the ideological substance that end up being shared, often unconsciously by all the citizens of a society from the start of a historical era.
2. to succeed in sharing meaning visual signs must absolutely maximize their capacity to attract eyeballs. The eyes and the mind are naturally attracted by beauty and repulsed by ugliness. And that’s how this unconscious fuzzy sensation of the aesthetics of life that we inherited from biological evolution was integrated in image making since the earliest days of Homo-sapien societies.

This conception of what art is all about was adopted by humanity starting at least 300,000 years ago4 when the brains of Homo-sapiens were approaching their present size. An increased brain-power allowed them to produce abstract knowledge which helped them to increase their productivity and this allowed to feed larger populations which, in turn, called for a new model of societal governance. Along this path of societal transformation image making helped to realize the necessary sharing of knowledge between all the members of the group. This glued the minds around a common vision of life which resulted in high levels of cohesion without which the organization of larger populations under the new tribal model would never possibly have emerged..

Following the emergence of the tribal model of governance such a conception of image making and art became the normal practice of all societies on earth which opens the question of the relation between art and propaganda5. Only very recently, around 1900, has this conception of art been abandoned. It was the Modernist avant-garde that rejected all past worldviews and ways of making images. The implications of what I just write here are enormous. It means indeed that Homo-sapiens subscribed to that particular vision of ‘what art is all about; during 99.95% of the timespan of its existence as a specie.

Wow! How comes nobody talks about that?

The question that arises now, in the grand scheme of things, is “ what is the significance of what artists produced after 1900 ? ”.

In the footsteps of philosophic rationalism big capital holders had unleashed the genie of science and technology and as a result, in the 19th century, Western Europe entered an era of tremendous societal changes:

• rationalism was weakening the power of attraction of Christianity
• science was enlarging the horizons of human perception 
• moving from point A to point B was speeding up drastically. 
• communication at a distance was breaking the barriers of distance 
• fossil fuel and electricity multiplied the energy available to power the production of material stuff 
• and so on...

The visual art avant-garde was mesmerized by the intensity and the depth of these societal changes and pondered what all this meant for image making. They rapidly rejected all that had been done in the past and made it their task to depict reality, at what they felt needed to be, a deeper level than what they perceived had been until then a superficial first dimension of what projects on the retina. In other words what they were after was no longer the image that projects on the retina but a visualization of the interpretation by the brain of this image. Modernism was thus fundamentally a search to actualize the societal worldview to the context of rapidly changing times. As such Modernism was unmistakably a truly noble cause. But there is a BUT indeed.

The members of the Modernist avant-garde were painters and as such they had been trained to represent the images that project on the retina but they had not been equipped with the necessary knowledge to understand how the brain interprets such images nor had they been equipped to understand the changes in the realities of daily life that occurred everywhere around them. This flaw would necessarily haunt their research and it finally impeached them to reach valid visions of what was occurring.

In tribal societies, starting very slowly some 300,000 years ago, visual signs were produced by the men of knowledge (him)herself. There was thus no division of labor between knowledge acquisition and the representation of knowledge in visual signs. Some 5000 years ago, at the earliest, empires and kingdoms started to displace tribal societies and recoursed to religions or philosophies to glue the minds of their citizens. During that new societal era there was a separation between knowledge acquisition and the representation of knowledge in visual signs. The priests were in charge of knowledge acquisition and the image makers were in charge of “illustrating” the knowledge of the priests. This division of labor relegated the image makers at the bottom of the societal ladder. In the 14-15th centuries, in Early-Modernity, the newly rich Western European long distance merchants started to call on the image makers working for the church to illustrate – the new vision of reality that they had discovered as resulting from the reason that is at work within capital, – and the values of individualism, material possessions, and so on that they derived from that vision. But this was the time of the inquisition and the church was burning suspicious people at the stake. Working for new rich merchants was thus a risky business for image makers. Taking such a risk would only have been tolerable in exchange for a very high monetary reward. And this explains how the societal status of image makers suddenly exploded. Their fortunes increased and they became respected citizens.

The separation of knowledge acquisition and the representation of knowledge in visual signs gave way to the specialization of image making which emerged sometimes around 5000 years ago and lasted till sometime before 1900. With this knowledge in mind it looks evident that the avant-garde visual artists, who put an end to this specialization in image making, were pre-ordained to fail in their mission to give valid visual signs of the interpretation by the brain of the images that project on the retina. This does not mean that the task that they had set for themselves was wrong. I’m firmly convinced that they were right about the necessity for a new worldview in their times. And there is no doubt in my mind that this necessity has continued to amplify up to this very day.

The ideologues of Late-Modernity, the thinkers of neo-liberalism and of post-modernism, will not agree with this idea that Western societies are in need of a worldview to be shared by all their citizens to enhance the cohesion of their societies. In the footsteps of Margaret Thatcher they peddle the myth that society does not exist and that the individual is all there is. Over the last 40 years their ideological constructions have served as the background ideation of Western political decision making. And there is no hiding any longer that the policies that were fostered have been utterly disastrous for 99% of the citizens of Western countries. Never in history have populations been so discontent and angry towards the members of the establishment in their countries and they let it be known. The yellow vests in France, the deplorable Trump voters, the brexiteers, and the growing ranks in all Western countries of anti-establishment parties are so many manifestations of that anger.

The fact is that Western societies are rapidly reaching the end of their present institutional arrangement. They presently are rolling forward by the sole energy of their inertia. But soon the last drop of that energy shall be used up. And this is when their institutional arrangement collapses and any remnants of civility among the individuals vanishes. It will not be the end of the world for sure. Collapse unleashes chaos but eventually chaos is overtaken by a new form of order. But in this chaos citizens will experience utter daily misery and it will not be long before they start to long for deep bonds of trust among themselves. From that need will spontaneously emerge a new worldview. The sharing of a common worldview is indeed what fosters trust. And that’s when societies will rediscover the importance of image making for sharing the new worldview with all.

In the interval, between now and the emergence of this new worldview, life will be very difficult in Western countries particularly for real artists. The societal function of art has completely vanished in Late-Modernity. This does not mean that art is dead as some have declared. But it certainly means that thinking artists have no other recourse any longer than to let go of will and desire and by meditating on what the promised future worldview will be looking like they’ll rediscover what it means for art to have a societal function. It is impossible to forecast the future with any degree of certainty but it is certainly possible to gain a ‘feel’ of the future context, or the air of the time, in which the new worldview will emerge. Such a feeling should be sufficient to ‘divine’ the organic nature of life that the new worldview, whose seeds are slowly starting to sprout all around us, will be sharing with all.

I personally approach this task by confronting the certainties of my conscious mind with my subconsciously emerging visions. This process absorbs nearly the entirety of my life. It is a kind of a meditation, without protection railing, that can on rare occasions be extremely rewarding. Subconscious visions are nearly always incomprehensible to our conscious certainties but meditation helps us to reconcile them. And such a reconciliation is a reward in itself. It procures indeed a boost in consciousness that registers as a supplement of awareness. I personally discover my unconsciously emerging visions mostly through painting and I manage, or ‘order’, my conscious thinking mostly through writing.

I also discovered that my visions of the future directly impact my thinking and in this sense my actions in the present are starting to adjust to my visions of the future. Applying the ideas expressed here above about ‘what is art all about’ it downs on me that my paintings, by subtly influencing the perceptions of its viewers, are also possibly amplifying the volume of present-day individual actions that adapt to such visions of the future.
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NOTES


1 Scientists inform us that all species living presently on earth represent less than 5% of all species that ever lived on earth. Extinction of living species is the sanction by the principle of life for the failure of a species to ensure the inter-play between its polarities. This is not a bug in the code of the principle of life. The figures here above suggest that all species are mortal. So the success or failure of a specie is thus not related to its eternal preservation of the inter-play between its polarities. It is more probably related to a successful increase in complexity that, at a certain threshold, opens the path for the emergence of a more advanced species or something along those lines.

2 When I write about culture it is culture in its largest sense meaning the sum of all ideas and behaviors in a given society (economic, social, cultural) at a given time. Worldviews correspond to a broader category that function as societal glues ensuring a society has sufficient levels of cohesion in order to possibly reproduce over the next generations. Worldviews act like the wall and roof structures of a societal house that are build on top of the foundations of a common civilization (civilizational axioms) and in this model culture acts like the paint or the decoration elements that cover the walls and roofs of the societal house.

3 A recent paper in Nature reports the discovery in Morocco of old skull fragments, from five Early Homo sapien individuals, that have been dated to about 315,000 years ago. These 5 individuals were the "earliest" Homo sapiens from whom we found traces so far. See Oldest Homo sapiens fossil claim rewrites our species' history.

4 Same as 2

5 The distinction between art and propaganda relates to the societal model of organization. When power imposes images that relay its vision of life and the world, to be served to the unsuspecting eyes of its subjects, it is without any possible doubt propaganda. When a group, that is not governing itself through power relations, shares images with its members it can’t be construed that these image are propaganda. The distinction, within such images, between the ones that are artworks and the ones that are not artworks depends on their satisfying or not of the 2 categories given here above: meaning and beauty.