The complete series will total 5 volumes :
Volume 1 : The continuum of the cultural field
Volume 2 : From Early-Modernity to After-Modernity
Volume 3 : The societal formation of knowledge
Volume 4 : The essence of the arts is societal and not individual
Volume 5 : Societal evolution and societal governance
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Check the foreword to the book reproduced here under and if interested download the PDF.
Foreword
This series was first published in the form of blog posts over the span of 4 consecutive winters (2013-2014 to 2016-2017). These were first drafts that I formatted into a book series about the transition “From Modernity to After-Modernity”. The core of my argument is that humanity is entering into a transition toward a new societal era. Once fully formatted I left the material simmering in my subconscious while immersing myself in digital variations of my “Grand Project” paintings.
By December 2020 I had realized 10 collections of digital works and felt ready to edit the material of the first volume in this series.
My writing is an organic process.
What I mean to say is that, as a painter or as an image maker, I was confronted with an unsolved existential question that was troubling my mind. This question was “What is art all about ?”. Writing forced a higher level of consistency in the thinking about it.
I answer this question extensively in volume 4 of this series. But in the meantime solving this existential question has forced me on a journey that brought me back to the origins of our artistic practices which, in turn, opened my mind to their role in the evolution of “small groups” of hunter-gatherers into “tribal societies”. Once I had tackled the origin of the arts, I embarked on a journey back to the present and this forced me to watch the adventure of humanity along the path of societal evolution from tribal to “power societies”. Then I had the privilege of observing how Western Christian Europe engendered modernity which it then forced on all countries on earth.
I did not plan to write about these subjects. They imposed themselves to my mind. I also did not research the literature. I just followed the flow of my thinking’s meandering. I mean the conscious, or rational and logical, part of it as well as the subconscious hidden part of it. Journeying in the subconscious is indeed extraordinarily rewarding intellectually. I describe the process in Volume 3 of this series “The formation of knowledge”.
But it is the necessary reconciliation of the subconscious visions with the logical conscious mind that is the most rewarding phase, in this process of knowledge formation, because it opens the conscious mind to realities, past and present, that otherwise would have remained hidden. This whole process was organic in the sense that I never planned anything.
I added a writing aspect to the thinking for the good reason that writing forces you, not only to be logical, but also to order your ideas so as to inject coherence in your narrative.
Our contemporary world is undergoing rapid changes and among those the shifting of the center of gravity of the “economy-world” outside of the realm of the Western civilization is earth shattering indeed. But this shift to East-Asia comes amidst a complicating factor that I call “the great convergence of Late-Modernity” :
- The shift of the “economy-world” is destabilizing the Western built world-order and our “governance-world” is in crisis.
- Multiple side-effects of Modernity are converging and impulse feed-back loops among each other that are accelerating the speed at which the habitat of life gets damaged setting in motion a mass extinction.
- The effects of both 1 and 2 are abruptly intensifying in this Late-Modernity and complicating a reasoned approach to the predicament of humanity.
The great convergence of Late-Modernity announces, with a very high degree of probability that humanity is entering a radical societal transition from Modernity to After-Modernity that most probably will ‒ collapse our power-societies and civilizations ‒ and will probably open a historical transition to a new societal era.
I think and write, not for publishing, but to clarify my ideas. But what to do with the resulting text ? I decided to share it. And to make the ideas accessible to others I formatted the narrative in 5 volumes.
Good.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your help in understanding modern trends in history.