The complete series totals 6 volumes :
Volume 0 : Synthesis
Volume 1 : The continuum of the cultural field
Volume 2 : Modernity
Volume 3 : The societal formation of knowledge
Volume 4 : The essence of the arts is societal and not individual
Volume 5 : Societal evolution
Check the foreword to the book reproduced here under
and if interested download the PDF
___________
Foreword
As someone who has been painting, for more than 50
years, I have been feeling increasingly distressed by the
lack of societal function in the act of painting. This is why I
started writing. It is my contention that the arts, in this
Late-Modernity, have lost their the societal function which
had been the reason for their emergence in the first place.
My hope is to clarify, in my own mind, why humanity was always feeling attracted to what the Western Renaissance called "the arts" and what purpose, if any, are the arts meant to fulfill. In nature there is always a good reason for the existence of everything. Being part of nature humanity, over the long haul, has shown no patience for anything without use. Art goes back to the dawn of human society.
It must thus necessarily have a hidden function that humanity found useful to cultivate but that we have forgotten. I’m writing to rediscover this function.
Writing and painting have become complementary to me ; thinking about what is reality, writing about that thinking, and painting with all that in mind. Painting has become an extension of thinking and writing. It helps me to clarify my ideas. While in my thinking I delve into something I'm conscious about my painting is more like a subconscious exploration that expands that thinking in areas unknown.
The subconscious contains the potential to set our minds free from all the stop signs to knowledge that we have accumulated along the path of our domestication and personal self re-enforcement. It lets us see outside of this closed box that forms the conscious mind. It contains an innate potential to liberate the gift of universal meaning that is stored in the biochemistry of our individual bodies from which stems our awareness.
Discovering subconscious visions is not at all complicated.
We all encounter such visions. But to make sense out of them is another matter. We have indeed to learn the process by which we can reconcile these visions with the certainties of our conscious minds. Without such a reconciliation these subconscious visions are forever bound to remain incomprehensible gibberish. The key to learn how to practice this gift of nature resides in the confrontation of these visions to our conscious certainties.
By confronting one's conscious certainties with one's subconscious visions one gets, eventually, to reconcile them in a unified conscious whole that gets boosted at a higher level. This supplement of consciousness is then integrated within the scope of one's conscious certainties.
Mastering such a process fixes and automates it in the mind as an unstoppable quest for ever higher levels of consciousness. This is the path of the traditional animist (wo)man of knowledge that opens one's vision to what is emerging, here and now, as the substance of the future.
Once this process is mastered the subconscious starts to play with the substance of the future, that is emerging in the present, for the conscious mind to make sense out of it. And as our ancestors discovered, in the dawn of time, visual signs are the easiest tools at our disposal — to make sense of stuff that we still have not conceptualized — and to share the meaning of that stuff with others.
It was thus only natural that visual signs imposed themselves to me in order to make sense of the visions that I encounter in my subconscious journeys. I practice a form of automatic painting which means that I let the brush follow its own path. The only conscious aspect in my painting concerns the balancing of its forms : lines, masses, colors, and rhythm. The subject of my painting, and of my digital variations, originates in my subconscious but my conscious mind needs time to grasp their meaning.
I discovered that writing frees the meaning contained in my visual works. And I'm often baffled by its unknown character in the words I'm typing. Amazingly that unknown is always sensical. Most often the meaning relates to the sprouting of the seeds of what comes in "After-Modernity". In this sense my painting is a subconscious exploration that visualizes today’s sown seeds that will sprout and grow into what comes after Modernity and my writing is my conscious interpretation of that subconscious visualization.
While thinking a text becomes available and a question popped up in my mind "should I keep it solely, as reference, for myself?". I decided to share the product of my writing on my website. A few years down the road, when terminated, the series “From Modernity to After-Modernity” will total over 4,000 pages. I don’t expect, in these twitter times, that many will have the time, nor the patience, to navigate so many pages. This synthesis is a short-cut to their substance.
My hope is to clarify, in my own mind, why humanity was always feeling attracted to what the Western Renaissance called "the arts" and what purpose, if any, are the arts meant to fulfill. In nature there is always a good reason for the existence of everything. Being part of nature humanity, over the long haul, has shown no patience for anything without use. Art goes back to the dawn of human society.
It must thus necessarily have a hidden function that humanity found useful to cultivate but that we have forgotten. I’m writing to rediscover this function.
Writing and painting have become complementary to me ; thinking about what is reality, writing about that thinking, and painting with all that in mind. Painting has become an extension of thinking and writing. It helps me to clarify my ideas. While in my thinking I delve into something I'm conscious about my painting is more like a subconscious exploration that expands that thinking in areas unknown.
The subconscious contains the potential to set our minds free from all the stop signs to knowledge that we have accumulated along the path of our domestication and personal self re-enforcement. It lets us see outside of this closed box that forms the conscious mind. It contains an innate potential to liberate the gift of universal meaning that is stored in the biochemistry of our individual bodies from which stems our awareness.
Discovering subconscious visions is not at all complicated.
We all encounter such visions. But to make sense out of them is another matter. We have indeed to learn the process by which we can reconcile these visions with the certainties of our conscious minds. Without such a reconciliation these subconscious visions are forever bound to remain incomprehensible gibberish. The key to learn how to practice this gift of nature resides in the confrontation of these visions to our conscious certainties.
By confronting one's conscious certainties with one's subconscious visions one gets, eventually, to reconcile them in a unified conscious whole that gets boosted at a higher level. This supplement of consciousness is then integrated within the scope of one's conscious certainties.
Mastering such a process fixes and automates it in the mind as an unstoppable quest for ever higher levels of consciousness. This is the path of the traditional animist (wo)man of knowledge that opens one's vision to what is emerging, here and now, as the substance of the future.
Once this process is mastered the subconscious starts to play with the substance of the future, that is emerging in the present, for the conscious mind to make sense out of it. And as our ancestors discovered, in the dawn of time, visual signs are the easiest tools at our disposal — to make sense of stuff that we still have not conceptualized — and to share the meaning of that stuff with others.
It was thus only natural that visual signs imposed themselves to me in order to make sense of the visions that I encounter in my subconscious journeys. I practice a form of automatic painting which means that I let the brush follow its own path. The only conscious aspect in my painting concerns the balancing of its forms : lines, masses, colors, and rhythm. The subject of my painting, and of my digital variations, originates in my subconscious but my conscious mind needs time to grasp their meaning.
I discovered that writing frees the meaning contained in my visual works. And I'm often baffled by its unknown character in the words I'm typing. Amazingly that unknown is always sensical. Most often the meaning relates to the sprouting of the seeds of what comes in "After-Modernity". In this sense my painting is a subconscious exploration that visualizes today’s sown seeds that will sprout and grow into what comes after Modernity and my writing is my conscious interpretation of that subconscious visualization.
While thinking a text becomes available and a question popped up in my mind "should I keep it solely, as reference, for myself?". I decided to share the product of my writing on my website. A few years down the road, when terminated, the series “From Modernity to After-Modernity” will total over 4,000 pages. I don’t expect, in these twitter times, that many will have the time, nor the patience, to navigate so many pages. This synthesis is a short-cut to their substance.
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