Modernism, Postmodernism and
Post-postmodernism
The
Re-enchantment of Art Suzi Gablik (Selections)
Maximilian
Karl Emil "Max" Weber (1864 – 1920)
In
Science as a Vocation (1918-1919),
Max Weber writes:
"The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization
and intellectualization and, above all, by the 'disenchantment of the
world'" (155).1
"disenchantment"
means "secularization" or “rationalization”
But
also the emphasis on the subjective experience
"the bearing of man has been disenchanted and denuded of its
mystical but inwardly genuine plasticity" (148).
Weber
is arguing that
1.
religion has been privatized
2.
society has been secularized
3.
(more importantly) the human condition in modern societies is characterized by
disenchantment at the personal as well as at the social level.
Rationalization
and intellectualization has profound consequences for:
1.
economic systems
2.
political organization of modern societies
3.
psychological organizations
4.
spiritual organization of the "modern self"
In
“Is disenchantment the end of religion?” Christopher Walton asks whether
disenchantment marks the end of religion in Weber's scheme, not only as a
significant institutional and social force, but as a personal reality as well. He argues that religion might well continue,
but only if it evolves into something more consistent with a modern secularized
society. One wonders, however, whether
that would merely be keeping the “trappings” of religion thought the
fundamental core is gone. (Think of the
British Monarchy.)
Weber's
analysis of modernity and rationalisation
significantly influenced the critical theory associated with the Frankfurt
School which later came to be very critical of the establishments of Western
Culture.
But
by the end of World War II the Utopian dreams of the 20th century were
seen (particularly in Europe) as “Ludicrous Flops” (To borrow a phrase from American Pragmatist
Richard Rorty)
“The facts which our senses present to us are socially performed
in two ways: through the historical character of the object perceived and
through the historical character of the perceiving organ. Both are not simply
natural; they are shaped by human activity, and yet the individual perceives
himself as receptive and passive in the act of perception.”[1]
Knowledge
is interpretation. The world is not fix
nor does the mind passively receive objective truth. Both the mind and the world of mutually
manipulating “flows.”
Theodor
W. Adorno (philosopher, sociologist, musicologist), in The Philosophy of Modern Music (1949), argues against beauty in
music. Beauty in music serves the
political ends of capitalist ideology and social domination he claims by making
it "aesthetically pleasing" and "agreeable". Instead he
advances avant-garde art and music which displays human suffering and despair
“What radical music perceives is the untransfigured
suffering of man [...] The seismographic registration of traumatic shock
becomes, at the same time, the technical structural law of music. It forbids
continuity and development. Musical language is polarized according to its
extreme; towards gestures of shock resembling bodily convulsions on the one
hand, and on the other towards a crystalline standstill of a human being whom
anxiety causes to freeze in her tracks [...] Modern music sees absolute
oblivion as its goal. It is the surviving message of despair from the
shipwrecked.[37] ”
This
(postmodern) view of modern art is characteristic of Adorno and the Frankfurt
School. Truth is only had via the
negation of traditional aesthetic values.
Beauty is regarded as the tool to ideological.
The Re-enchantment of Art[2] (Selections)
Suzi Gablik
She
is relating what she calls “my own psychic journey” and “changes in my thinking.” She also asks “What does it mean to be a
‘successful’ artist working in the world today?”
She
notes that we “live in a culture that has little capacity or appreciation for
meaningful ritual.” And that we “lack any cosmic, or transpersonal dimension.”
She
asks “Has Modernism Failed?”
As
an artist working contemporarily, she cites “a widely shared disenchantment
over the compulsive and oppressive consumeristic framework in which we do work,
and from which, it would seem, there is no escape.”
Whereas
Weber regarded “disenchantment” positively, Gablik
sees it as a kind of pathology of the spirit.
The plight of artists working today reflects what she sees as widespread
and deeply engrained societal ills: a de-sensitivity to spiritual dimensions of
reality.
Ironically
she notes:
“The question is no longer how did we get here, but, where can we
possibly go, and how?”
So
the book is her attempt “to look at what changes are necessary or desirable,
how we might achieve them, and what the role of art and artists might be in
accelerating this process.”
Quotes
from Feinstein, Sartre, Connolly, Wilson characterizing the present age:
In
Personal
Mythology, David Feinstein writes:
“We need new myths; we need them urgently and desperately....
Times are changing so fast that we cannot afford to stay set in our ways. We
need to become exquisitely skilled engineers of change in our mythologies.”
For
Jean-Paul Sartre, the basic truth of the human situation was its contingency,
man’s sense that he does not belong—is not necessary—to the universe. Since
life was arbitrary, meaningless and without intrinsic value, Sartre advised
that we must all learn to live without hope.
The
English critic Cyril Connolly wrote these legendary comments: “It is closing
time in the gardens of the West. From now on an artist will be judged only by
the resonance of his solitude and the quality of his despair.”
Cohn
Wilson, in The New Existentialism, refers to all this as the “futility
hypothesis” of life—the nothingness, estrangement and alienation that have
formed a considerable part of the picture we have of our selves.
Gablik suggests that this view has been widely accepted by artists (and
more broadly by “Modernity”) and it now eclipses alternative views of the aims
of art. This is further exacerbated by
the individualism and psychological isolation of artists/ contemporary society.
“To highly individualistic artists, trained to think in this way,
the idea that creative activity might be directed toward answering a collective
cultural need rather than a personal desire for self-expression is likely to
appear irrelevant, or even presumptuous.”
She
is, nevertheless, somewhat optimistic:
“But I believe there is a new, evolving relationship between
personal creativity and social responsibility, as old modernist patterns of
alienation and confrontation give way to new ones of mutualism and the
development of an active and practical dialogue with the environment.
(My
observation) I am not sure I have seen this.
But I am not a working artist.
However, I agree there is a philosophical conflict between these diametrically
opposed account of the connection between arts and value. (See quote below.)
“The necessity for art to transform its goals and become
accountable in the planetary whole is incompatible with aesthetic attitudes
still predicated on the late-modernist assumption that art has no “useful” role
to play in the larger sphere of things.”
But
she cautions that it is easy to demand a change in consciousness; it is hard to
construct an new vision to replace the old.
Gablik cites David Michael Levin (Northwestern University) as giving
some hints as a useful direction to take art.
“the opening of vision and
the cultivation of the listening self, as principles for a new and more
feminine mode of Being based on interdependence and the intertwining of self
and other,”
She
suggests that “reenchanting” culture is a collective task and herself to be
working in concert with others and traces our “present dilemmas” to the
“disenchantment of the world.” She takes
the remedy to be a “transition into a different stream of experience.”
By
“Reenchantment,” she means”
“stepping beyond the modern traditions of mechanism, positivism,
empiricism, rationalism, materialism, secularism and scientism—the whole
objectifying consciousness of the Enlightenment—in a way that allows for a
return of soul.”
I
take this to be the Neo-Romantic rejection of the neo-Enlightenment hyper-rationality
of Modernism. There is both an
“theoretical” aspect to “enchanted” world views (e.g. There are spirits dwelling
with us/ mystical forces at work in the world…etc.) and an emotional or experiential
side to enchanted world views. (Feelings of the holy or the sacred: Otto’s
Numinous Experience, Mircea Eliade’s The
Sacred and the Profane). While the
Enlightenment convinced us to reject the former, we unwittingly lost our
vehicle for the latter. This, I think is
what Romantics are pining for.
Gablik claims that, “Overcoming the crisis of disenchantment has become
the greatest need of our culture at this time. “
She
vows to “…act as if what I do makes a difference. “ (As William James
suggests.)
Two
features characterize artists and modern culture today, she thinks,
1.
No cultural expression would be outside the commodity system.
2.
Adoption is Jean-Francois Lyotard suggestion of “active nihilism” which does
not merely recognize but seeks to accelerate the deconstruction of all values.
Again
she displays the conflict between competing world views and the possibility of
Hope:
“between those who continue to aspire to transforming our
dysfunctional culture, and those who believe such a hope is naive or deluded.”
She
takes herself to be part of the Postmodern movement. But rather than a nihilist destroyer of values,
she sees herself as a Reconstructivist, one who, like
the more visible deconstructivists seeks “to make the
transition from Eurocentric, patriarchal thinking and the “dominator” model.” But unlike the decontrutivists,
she seeks to offer an alternative: an aesthetics of interconnectedness, social
responsibility and ecological attunement.
“If there is any bond among the elements of this ‘counter
culture,’ it is the notion of recovery of our bodies, our health, our
sexuality, our natural environment, our archaic traditions, our unconscious
mind, our rootedness in the land, our sense of community, and our connectedness
to one another.” (Morris Berman, The Reenchantment of the World)
She
claims that
“… those who believe they can do something and those who believe
they can’t, are both right.”
Decrying
the easy, fashionable cynicism of her fellow artists she states
“When
we see cynicism even in our art, it reinforces our belief in a negative,
cynical reality.”
But
hope is indispensable for her work. Or
we might say, in the face of the contemporary challenges to hope. To “hope
against hope. She notes that the “precondition
for any human effort is optimism, the leap of faith that William James saw as
rooted in life itself.”