The Minimalist Impact of the Alien Perspective
December 2004
In his essay The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times, Christopher Lasch puts forth the diagnosis that the Minimalist Aesthetic in art and literature is a survival reaction. Reality is so fantastic, today, that “the writer’s imagination falters in the face of contemporary ‘actuality,’ which ‘is continually outdoing our talents.’” (Lasch 130) In crisis, the writer withdraws from the world and takes the self as subject: the “sheer fact of self, the vision of self as inviolate, powerful, and nervy, self as the only real thing in an unreal environment.” (Roth qtd. Lasch 130). The result is either an interior life devoid of any connection to reality or the depiction of a paranoid, conspiracy filled world. Lasch calls this survival.
“The mass media (tells) . . . us who and what we are, indeed to generate a spurious sense of national identity, but they do this by telling us what programs we like to watch, what products we like to buy, what political candidates we plan to vote for, how many of us will marry and get divorced, how long we will live, how many of us will die of cancer, how many of us will die in traffic accidents on a holiday weekend, how many of us will die in a nuclear war, how many of us will survive a nuclear war if adequate precautions are take. Demographic analysis is a poor substitute for reality” (Lasch 133-134)
Lasch supports his diagnosis with a thorough examination of contemporary literary theory. In fact, within the essay, he builds not only the diagnosis, but also the anecdote. Science, literature and spirituality hold the keys to the riddle that he fails to unlock. He fails to realize that he holds the answer within the pages of his text all along, remaining non-committal despite constructing a very thorough answer. The conclusion is that he too suffers from the fate that he is investigating, and so his journey through critical theory has a sense of being lost in the trees of the forest, unable to see the whole.
The most radical writers of the past century stand as prophets on the fringe of culture jumping up and down exclaiming that something is was wrong. William S. Burroughs “scanning pattern” view of reality describes the modern attention-deficit-disorder existence perfectly. Our world is crammed with more and more information and the mind has been trained to continually process flashes of information presented by the media. As the density of information in the reality scan increases, increases, the presented artistic vision relatively has more and more holes and so sets in motion the retreat away from the outer world of man in favor of the inner world or dystopia. Said another way, the density of the artistic experience no longer matches that of reality, and so the artist has retreated from the canvas.
“More and more our impressions of the world derive not from the observations we make as individuals and as members of a wider community but from elaborate systems of communication, which spew out information, much of it unbelievable, about events of which we seldom have any direct knowledge.” (Lasch 133)
The artist cannot compete with this world as it is presented to him. Not only does he have to match the absurdity of the world in order to snap people out of their day to day existence to witness art, but he also has to contend with an increasingly scientific grip upon their consciousness, their attention, and their own self worth, as driven by the capitalist marketing empire of the American economy.
Science
Throughout modern and ancient history, the same philosophers that pondered art and the nature of the sublime also pondered science as well. In fact, the paradigms used for scientific thought are often the same paradigms brought to art and aesthetics. Plato and Descartes stand as classical and renaissance examples of scientist philosophers. Marx, Darwin, Freud and Einstein, on the other hand, have defined the boundaries of our modern world. Science taught us that the world is round when it had once been flat, that gravity and inertia hold us in place, and in the last hundred years, that we are all plagued by a subconscious, be it Jungian, Freudian, scientific or religious. The dominant paradigms of science have always informed the psychology of man, man’s perspective on his place in the world, and how we perceive reality itself. And now science teaches us about the affairs of the heart.
In A General Theory of Love, Lewis, Amini, and Lannon, put forth that “from the beginning of the twentieth century to its end, influential accounts of love included no biology” (6) but these accounts all involve a healthy dose of psychology. “This prototype of the emotional mind contains familiar Freudian machinery: desire’s cauldron bubbling beneath the surface of awareness; the sunlit quotidian existence of the self, incognizant of lurking nether regions; and the healing power of insights into a sinister erotic past that, by definition, has to be there. This account of humanity’s heart binds love inextricably to sexual pleasure and perversion—indeed, it holds that love is but a convoluted representation of forbidden, repellent, incestuous urges.” (Lewis 7)
Lewis’ purpose, however, is not to examine the psychological construct of love, but instead to explore the biological basis of love, or more broadly, of all human interpersonal relationships. What element of these interactions is controlled and what element is biologically or instinctually based.
Digging deeper into the nature of mind, Lewis tells us “that the human brain is comprised of three distinct sub-brains, each the product of a separate age in evolutionary history.” (21) “The oldest or reptilian brain … houses vital control centers—neurons that prompt breathing, swallowing, and heartbeat, and the visual tracking system a frog relies on to snap a dancing dragonfly out of the air. Steeped in the physiology of survival, the reptilian brain is the one still functioning in a person who is “brain-dead.” If the reptilian brain dies, the rest of the body will follow.” (22)
Survival is exactly the state that Lasch describes. Survival is at the core of the minimalist aesthetic, though Lasch is inconclusive about the reasons why. We care about Lasch’s observations because the artist is merely an articulate, creative representative of humanity; one that we hope has the gift of perception and abstract communication. The artist is trusted as beacon for the rest of mankind. Often, he is not trusted at all.
Consider the protagonist in Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer: “Somehow the realization that nothing was to be hoped for had a saluatory effect upon me. . .Walking toward Montparnasse I decided to let myself drift with the tide, to make not the least resistance to fate, no matter in what form it presented itself. . . .I made up my mind that henceforth I would live as an animal, a beast of prey, a plunderer. . . . If to live is the paramount thing, then I will live, even if I must become a cannibal. (Miller qtd. Lasch 135)
Miller is not a hero we want to model as our 20th century Everyman. Instead, he stands as either a plague victim of some as yet unknown ailment of modernity, or he is a crack. We have no choice, especially with hindsight, but to assume he is a herald for the coming century, perceiving something of the future that is a threat. His character suffers the loss of hope, vows to raise no objection to fate, to survive at all costs.
We should pause here to take note. Miller gives us one of the clearest character portrayals of all. His protagonist has walked away from the “straight life, ” as it were, and chosen day to day survival. He is reacting to something—some absurdity in his physical, social, or psychological environment, be it the depression that the world was lunged into, the culture of greed and excess that precipitated the economic collapse, the hangover of death and waste from the first world war, the opening drums of the next war that were already beating in Europe, or even the global struggle between Marxist and capitalist ideologies that would shape the next fifty years of history. We do not know the answer but we do know that the moment in history that Miller inhabits will shape the next hundred years. As we shall see, his protagonist has retreated from his higher, evolved self and lost all emotional attachments. He is operating as close to an animal as man can.
Miller’s protagonist has surrendered to the reptilian mind. Compare this with the scientific observation: “Reptiles don’t have an emotional life. The reptilian brain permits rudimentary interactions: displays of aggression and courtship, mating and territorial defense.” (Lewis 23) We do not know why the artist, and by foreshadowing, modern man has withdrawn into survival mode. The reptilian brain represents only the biologically functional core of man’s intelligence.
Wrapped around this core, Lewis describes, is the limbic brain. The limbic brain, evolving later in human history than the reptilian brain—finally, Darwin enters the world of psychology—is the emotional center of the self. This “new brain transformed not just the mechanics of reproduction but also the organismic orientation toward offspring. Detachment and disinterest mark the parental attitude of the typical reptile, while mammals can enter into subtle and elaborate interactions with their young.” (25)
The limbic brain is responsible for all of the subconscious love interactions between a parent and a child. Lewis offers vocal communication as example of this. “The limbic brain also permits mammals to sing to their children. Vocal communication between a mammal and offspring is universal. Remove a mother from her litter of kittens or puppies and they begin an incessant yowling—the separation cry . . . But take a baby Komodo dragon away from its scaly progenitor, and it stays quiet. Immature Komodos do not broadcast their presence because Komodo adults are avid cannibals.” (26) Consider for a moment that cannibalism is just the example that Miller used to illustrate his state of being!
The limbic brain, Lewis describes, is the core of what makes functioning well adjusted individuals. A good deal of A General Theory of Love discusses the practice and benefits of psychotherapy. It is relationship graduate school, they say. The real goal of therapy, as they describe it, is to create a human relationship, so that all of the issues and challenges that came up for the individual in their day to day life will also arise in the therapist-patient relationship. The therapist’s job, in response, is to be present for the individual, to model an interpersonal relationship, or more boldly, to re-imprint the individual with healthier limbic patterns. Much of the work of therapy is merely being present and attending to the person.
The presence of another being is critical for the limbic brain to regulate the emotional bodily functions. Indeed, as an open biological system, the limbic brain requires the presence of another person, or minimally, a pet, to regulate body rhythms.
The limbic brain is an evolutionary strength for mammals but also holds a hidden weakness. It is an open system and as such, it creates a dependency for interaction with other mammals. The mutual tugging that exists between all mammals in love and in play is what regulates the limbic brain. This is at the core of the popular science which declares that married people live longer, and other such claims. “Nurturance social communion, communication, and play have their home in limbic territory . . . even the slightest limbic damage devastates (a mother hamster’s) maternal abilities. Limbic lesions in monkeys can obliterate the entire awareness of others.” (Lewis 32)
Now, let us consider the context of modern man before we move on. Children of the last 60 years were increasingly raised in households of nuclear family, single parent, or working parents’ households, or some other environment where there was less day to day interaction with family members. Children of the past 40 years were increasingly raised in front of a television set or with the aid of prescription drugs. Children of the past 30 years were increasingly raised by electronic video games, gadgets, and computers.
The digital age has reached the point where the devices and services that are competing for the consumers’ attention are being modeled on limbic behaviors and their success is measured by the degree to which they can supplant other limbic regulators for the individual. Consider Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), Instant Messaging, Customer Relationship Management websites, digital pets, and electronic dating as just a few examples.
What trauma disrupted the limbic mind of Miller’s hero? We have no answer, but a fair guess might be the devastation of the First World War and the many maimed beings that were left in its wake. These individuals are a string presence in Tropic of Cancer, and being set in Paris, it is also much closer to the human, geographic, and political fallout of the war.
The third brain is the neocortex. It wraps around the other two brains in two hemispheres and in humans, is both the largest and the most recent to evolve. The neocortex is reading this! The functions of the evolutionary older, reptilian and limbic brains, Lewis explains, are involuntary. “While the neocortex may not supply a simple push button for free will, small neocortical lesions can produce specific control deficits—the inability to move an arm, to speak, even to focus attention.” (Lewis 29)
Another gift that the neocortex bestows is the skill of abstraction: every task that calls for symbolic representation, strategy, planning, or problem-solving has its headquarters in the neocortical brain. . . . In humans, the neocortical capacity for thought can easily obscure other, more occult mental activities” and “opens the way to a pancognitive fallacy: I think, therefore everything I am is thinking.” (Lewis 29, 30, 32)
Disrupting the reptilian brain results in death. Disruption of the neocortex results in a very uninteresting literary character though one could imagine visual art of some quality as a consequence. It is through disruption of the limbic brain that the minimalist aesthetic is rendered. The detached, withdrawn, isolationist is most conflicted over his relations with other individuals, with family, and with society. If man has become paranoid and ultimately, enslaved by some force such as the market forces of American economy, it is through the limbic self that he has been compromised. And the limbic self is not the conscious part of the self, so it is not a willful surrender. It is instead, a victimization.
If there is an anecdote, it is perhaps in re-imprinting the limbic self with healthy relationships, as in therapy. Another option might be in the self-regulation of the limbic brain, by the neocortex, through meditation and religion. And most importantly, as we shall see, it is through transcending the neocortex and touching the limbic brain directly, that art makes its impact, regardless of whether or not man is enslaved, damaged, or renders man’s enslavement a moot point.
Lasch has given us a challenge in his observation of the artistic expression of the Minimalist Aesthetic and Science has helped us to gain a better understanding of the people and characters that are part of this world. Our next challenge is to try and understand, a bit better, the context that all of this is happening within. Particularly, what changed in the American identity during the last century, and as America’s global power continually expands, what are the forces that are pushing upon other cultures.
Enslavement
“In 1886, the Supreme Court determined that corporations were entitled to the rights of citizenship under the Constitution. Since then, the Corporation has developed into the worst kind of Citizen: one that claims all the rights but shirks the responsibilities of citizenship.” (Hinkley qtd. Cooper 5) Something that we have given all the rights of man, including citizenship, and yet when cut, it does not bleed. It grows in power among us each day. It renders the rest of humanity a servile commodity. If anything in our world can fairly be called an alien, it is the corporation.
Over the past century, the science of the corporation: economics applied to automation, marketing, trade and capital; has worked to create a perfect economy for enslavement of the consumer. No single individual stands as leader of the corporate enslavement of man—there is no conspiracy theory to uncover, but a coincidence theory, perhaps, an alignment of capitalist principles and amoral profit motive, the self-honing economy of capitalism, much like a reptile that learns to better hunt its prey, has slowly enslaved man. The job of a corporation “is simply to use their best efforts to pursue profit on behalf of the shareholders. Human rights, social justice, and the environment don’t factor into that equation—at least not directly.” (Hinkley qtd. Cooper 5)
What is the science of capitalism? “Ballard proposes, in effect, a theory of feedback even more nihilistic and paranoid in its implications than Burroughs’s. Images control people, he suggests, not merely by exploiting their addictions but by eliciting responses that are themselves recorded, photographed, X-rayed, measured, and minutely analyzed with an eye to the production of new images more precisely predictable in their effects. According to Ballard, dispassionate scientific studies—opinion surveys, polls, questionnaires, interviews, market research, psychological tests—serve the same purpose by giving people a choice of fantasies and thus making it possible for them to participate in the manufacture of the images best adapted to the regulation of their own emotional needs.” (Lasch 140)
In 1932, Aldous Huxley presented a dystopian vision not unlike corporate enslavement in Brave New World. Time is dated AF, After (Henry) Ford, the father of the assembly line. Humans are commoditized, raised and controlled by machines, and it is only through their savage selves that the controller’s lock on the limbic self is disrupted.
Similarly, in George Orwell’s 1984, Winston lives in fear of the Thought Police. His crime is an interior monologue, a diary. The same tact taken by modern artists, a retreat from the recognizable world into the paranoid.
Mammals require nurturing. And people are the highest form of mammals. This leaves them vulnerable. The mode of operation for the modern corporation is to nurture the mammal in the same way that another mammal might. This nurturing is refined by the science of capitalism until the mammal’s primary relationship and sense of worth comes from the machine. By the time we get to DeLillo’s White Noise, we can see that the role of the “tugging,” the affection and play that regulates the limbic brain, has been completely subsumed by the aliens, so much so that man sides with machine, rather than with another man.
“In the morning I walked to the bank. I went to the automated teller machine to check my balance. I inserted my card, entered my secret code, tapped out my request. The figure on the screen roughly corresponded to my independent estimate, feebly arrived at after long searches through documents, tormented arithmetic. Waves of relief and gratitude flowed over me. The system had blessed my life. I felt its support and approval. The system hardware, the mainframe sitting ina locked room in some distant city. What a pleasing interaction. I sensed that something of deep personal value, but not money, not that at all, had been authenticated and confirmed. A deranged person was escorted from the bank by two armed guards. The system was invisible, which made it all the more impressive, all the more disquieting to deal with. But we were in accord, at least for now. The networks, the circuits, the streams, the harmonies.” (46)
“Who hasn’t felt the twinge of loyalty to an old car. . . or to a pair of jeans past their prime? Like Lorenz’s goslings, people sometimes bond to objects incapable of reciprocating. Detached from human relationships, limbic proclivities can hobble. If a person’s brain targets an emotionally inert would-be partner, attachment needs can propel him into contact with what cannot satisfy him, like a moth battering its wings against a streetlamp on a soft summer night. Mammals can see a deceptive light inside the inanimate, a false attachment wherein the inferred give-and-take never materializes.
“Today’s most treacherous false attachment springs up between human beings and corporations. In this era of downsizing and its euphemistic equivalents, the tale of the dedicated worker abruptly terminated after years of loyal service has become archetypal. Behind the stark outlines of the tale are thousands of people who pour their hearts into jobs, give beyond their monetary recompense out of team spirit, and later are unceremoniously dumped. Many such people are waylaid by the attachment mechanisms that should promote [self] well-being but trap them instead. (Lewis 215)
We do not think of ourselves as slaves of corporations. We insist with our last breath that we are free men. That notion is programmed into us from birth. The hubris that felled the protagonists of ancient Greek tragedy also condemns modern man. Man is unwilling to recognize a higher power, be it God, the notion of fate, or the domination by aliens.
Domination by aliens is not as extreme a statement as it may seem. Consider first that in the corporation, we are perhaps witnessing the equivalent of a new life form that feeds upon the wage-slave. In the same way that the cells of the body do not understand walk, “hello!” or love, why would man be expected to intuitively understand and recognize the corporation as life form? Robert Pirsig’s Lila: An Inquiry into Morals lays the argument out in excruciating detail that basically says that each lower form of life cannot hope to understand the higher value form of life for which its parts sum to a greater whole.
Consider also that the as the rules of science change, our worldview slowly evolves. The paradigms of science—Darwinian, Marxian, Freudian, as example—always reshape the form and content of art. From the time of the ancient Greeks, science and art have been inextricably linked. That we do not implicitly understand the decades old paradigms of Einstein, of quantum mechanics, or the very recent revisions of string theory stands as evidence that we do not understand the world in which we live.
While we have internalized the sciences of Descartes, Newton, Freud, Darwin, Marx, and Jung we can also expect that our world view will eventually encompass the paradigms of Einstein and others to follow. The process of incorporation o fthese paradigms of thought into the subconscious is a slow on, and holds promise for more change and evolution of man, thought, and art, for the future.
In the preface to his eminently readable book, The Elegant Universe, Brian Greene says as much. “It’s no exaggeration to say that relativity and quantum mechanics rewrote the previously conceived rules of reality, and that, while more speculative, superstring theory is now generating major revisions once again. It is little wonder that artists, writers, composers, and filmmakers are finding resonance between their work and these scientific challenges to the status quo. … Integrating the discoveries of physics into our collective worldview is a slow process. Even today, nearly a century later, most people have yet to appreciate fully the experimentally confirmed lessons coming from Einstein or those of the quantum” (xi)
Of Ballard’s Love and Napalm, Lasch says “What distinguishes [it] from earlier English attempts to capture the speed, frenzy, and menace of American life is the complete absence of the imperial ego, the endlessly acquisitive conquerer and pioneer that formerly played such a large part in this particular story.” (137) The imperial ego, conquerer and pioneer: Lasch is speaking of freedom. In Love and Napalm, this is missing. Enslaved beings are not offered a free will. And yet we, as readers, cling to the notion that we are free despite all evidence to the contrary.
Instead, we are slaves: slaves to images, slaves to marketing, slaves to corporations and capitalism; as was predicted by Marx 150 years ago. We are commoditized by images of our own choosing. “‘Images—millions of images—that’s what I eat.’. . . The postmodern, postromatic artist sees them as ‘mind screen movies,’ instruments of surveillance and control. … Burroughs takes as his subject not the imperial self of an earlier literary tradition but the beleaguered, controlled, and programmed self. ‘I am primarily concerned wit the question of survival,’” (Burroughs qtd. Lasch 136)
For a corporation, there is no morality other than profit. “Corporations operate outside attachment, as surely as armies do. Misdeeds—even savagery—are inevitable.” (Lewis 215)
Our freedom has been compromised in the most sinister way. Not only do we think that we profit from it, we work harder to make it more efficient. In a monetized society, all intangible values are discarded in favor of hard commodities. Among the intangible values that have been lost are out identity, our freedom, and our sense of place in the world. We have also compromised our spiritual grounding. If there exists a Judeo-Chritian-Islamic God and a corresponding Devil of any sort, the Devil would surely be called science.
Throughout The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times, Lasch argues the case for alien enslavement without accepting the fact that people are now subdominant to corporations. This state of power is never stated explicitly, but the evidence to support it exists pervasively in our culture, the machine-shaped ideals of modern art, and the reactionary, survivalist literature.
“The scientist and artist both speak to the turmoil that comes from having a triune brain. A person cannot direct his emotional life in the way he bids his motor system to reach for a cup. He cannot will himself to want the right thing, or to love the right person, or to be happy after a disappointment, or even to be happy in happy times. . . . Emotional life cannot be commanded.” (Lewis 33)
Free Will
Like the writers and artists that he makes reference to, Lasch clings to the notion of free will. Certainly, there is no free will for a person who has been enslaved, there is only survival. In mammals, survival is controlled by the reptilian brain, not by free will. Emotional attachment is controlled by the limbic brain, not free will. The neocortex, perhaps, controls free will. It is also responsible for abstraction. Perhaps the concept of free will is just an abstraction, perhaps it is a reptilian driven action of the neocortex that is designed to regulate the limbic system in situations that demand a sense of survival.
In order to escape, however, the person must first realize the nature of the bondage. Lasch supports the argument that many writers take the self—the sheer fact of the self—as the only real thing (p130). But what is the self? Free will? An interior monologue? The ability to recognize the thin consensual boundary that separates the individual from the bit stream of an oversaturated reality? In A General Theory of Love, Lewis makes the argument that the self is not exactly what we may have imagined. And Greene, in The Elegant Universe, makes the argument that everything is not what it seems. These pieces provide an additional foundation for us to view the art of the last 100 years, and into the future. Essentially, the artist is a more sensitive preceptor of social conditions than the scientist is at unraveling the underlying causes, so in terms of foundation and theory, we are playing catch up.
Man does not evolve in a few generations. The only difference between man, today, and man, one hundred fifty years ago is that we have surrendered the role of dominating settler that once brought order to the land. The same writers and artists that make Lasch’s arguments, that suffer the loss of the self cling to the notion that they are in control—that they have free will—despite all evidence to the contrary. The artist’s insistence on the self, regardless of definition, misunderstands the nature of art. It is ego they are clinging to in their refusal to recognize the loss of freedom. It is hubris. This clinging to the self is the loss of faith that leaves the artist struggling for survival, helpless.
Transcendence
Art does not rely upon the self, it transcends the self. Regardless of whether or not an artist has renounced the self, expressed an interior monologue, or a paranoid psyche, the artists are still creating sublime beauty. According to Schopenhauer, “the sublime that state of pure knowledge is only attained by a conscious and forcible breaking away from the relations of the same object to the will, …by a free and conscious transcending of the will and the knowledge related to it.” (Schopenhauer in Adams 480)
“When we say that a thing is beautiful, we thereby assert that it is an object of our aesthetic contemplation, and this has a double meaning; on the one hand it means that the sight of the thing makes us objective, that is to say, that in contemplating it we are no longer conscious of ourselves as individuals, . . . that we recognize in the object, not the particular thing, but an idea.” (Schopenhauer in Adams 480)
In losing the subjective viewpoint and contemplating something objectively, we are literally deconstructing the Subject-Verb-Object experience of reality. We are no longer contemplating the object as an extension of ourselves, and more subtle, we are no longer contemplating the object as a dependency of time. In witnessing the sublime, time stops. All verbs are implicitly and explicitly time dependent. When time is stopped, we no longer have a subject and an object within the moment; we have two objects with a subtle boundary separating the two. Consider a photograph, for example. Any verbs witnessed in a photograph are illusions of the neocortex, the very same neocortex that derives us into investing value in free will.
The essential element of a photograph is that time has been stopped on the canvas.
Shopenhauer states that “we recognize in the object, not the particular thing, but an idea; and this can only happen, so far as our contemplation of it … does not follow the relation of the object to anything outside it … but rests in the object itself.” (480) This very demand necessitates that all distinction of time vanishes at the moment of the sublime. To recognize the sublime, the individual must transcend the self. The art experience transcends the individual.
Jung goes a step further: “Art, it has been said, is beauty, and “a thing of beauty is a joy forever.” It needs no meaning, for meaning has nothing to do with art. Within the sphere of art, I must accept the truth of this statement.” (816) Jung argues that art is not representational; it is, therefore, not perceived and conceptualized by the neocortex; If the neocortex is the only piece of the mind that has even the illusion of free will, then art is beyond free will.
Whatever the self is, it is art. In his essay Ethical Criticism: Theory of Symbols, Northrop Frye builds an argument that says that the poem “holds the mirror up to nature: . . . the poem is not itself a mirror. It does not merely reproduce a shadow of nature; it causes nature to be reflected in its containing form.” (1125) The logical extension of this argument is that man is a poem of God. And so man—the self—is surely art. If the self remains rooted in the neocortex, then we have further suggestion that the notion of free will is a false conception, since we do not consciously decide, “art.”
Nietzche writes that the ritual of art frees man. “Now the slave emerges as a freeman—as though the veil of Maya (illusion) had been torn apart and there remained only shreds floating before the vision of the mystical oneness. Man now expresses himself through song and dance as a member of a higher community; he has forgotten how to walk, how to speak, and is on the brink of taking wing as he dances. …He feels himself to be godlike and strides with the same elation and ecstasy as the gods he has seen in his dreams. No longer the artist, he has himself become a work of art: the productive power of the whole universe is now manifest in his transport, of the glorious satisfaction of the primordial One.”(637-8)
In witnessing the artist as both artist and art, as man freed from the illusions of his life, made god, made one with everything, Nietzche is describing the moment when the verbs stop and all the world is viewed objectively. And with time stopped, man emerges godlike from a dream. Art is a liberating agency in the artist’s life, regardless of the state of the self. The perceived dissipation of the imperial ego renders art all the motre important and vital, even in its minimalist aesthetic state, because of its transcendent capacity.
Conclusion
We have a working theory of why the self, as witnessed in literature and society, appears to be eroding: Americans, and ever expanding American economy, have unwittingly sold themselves into the slavery of a corporate overlord. These overseers are not recognized in their role and so are actually protected from society’s backlash. The aliens are considered legally to be persons, though they bare closer resemblance to reptiles than mammals. They should be considered aliens despite the fact that they do not have antennae, green skin, and bulbous eyes. [Of course, if one were to imagine the skin of a corporation, it would be green, since their blood runs hot with the green dollar, and they do, in fact, have antennae, constantly broadcasting their programming to all manner of receivers. This may not be what Orson Wells imagined in War of the Worlds, but it is nearly much closer than anyone will admit to what George Orwell imagined in 1984, or Aldus Huxley, in Brave New World.
We are interested in the fate of the Imperial Self because the artist represents all of man. Schopenhauer’s words free the moment of art from the subjective self by transcending the self, rather than dependency on the self. And we have good reason to suspect that whatever is happening is beyond the artists and man’s control, and that the very notion of free will may be a fallacy. Lewis dissects the human brain, experimentally pushing the locus of free will into the neocortex, at best, and we know that the neocortex is also the part of the brain that hallucinates and creates abstraction. So that is not entirely reliable. If the self resides in an extra-body or spiritual self, then it seems even more likely that the physical body has been enslaved and that what we witness is the impact of the loss of freedom on the spirit of man.
Within Lasch’s essay, there is a great deal of evidence that can be shaped to support the notion that there is no free will, or than man has been enslaved. There is also strong ground for an argument that the antidote to the crisis lies in a Buddhist conception of the world. That argument, however, does not address the question of what has happened, merely how to transcend the current moment. Put another way, the Buddhist argument reduces the entirety of experience down to this single moment, the present, and speaks to the moment to moment transcendence of the being into the sublime, into art.
Robert Barry’s approach may be close to what is needed. Lasch describes his “early work . . . of photographs recording the invisible movement of gases released into the air,” [Barry] explained, ‘I try not to manipulate reality. . . What will happen, will happen. Let things be themselves.’” (Lasch 144)
Similarly, Lasch quotes the ‘earth artist,’ Robert Smithson’s work “as an attempt not to manipulate the physical environment but to allow the viewer to sink into it and experience a sense of timelessness and the ‘end of selfhood’” (Lasch 144) Smithson argues that the artist is more concerned with ego than art and blames this on the “existence of self.”
“A later generation has followed DuBuffet in his search for an impersonal art, though it has not shown much interest in his attempt to counter the Western tradition wit the ‘values of savagery: instinct, passion, mood, violence, madness.’ Passion, violence, and madness are exactly that the new art seeks to escape.” (Lasch 145)
“It seeks the antidote to romantic expressionism not in the ‘values of savagery’ but in Islamic ornamentation or Zen Buddhism.” (Lasch 145)
Islamic icons reduce figures to ‘formulas’ instead of mistakenly trying to make them look like ‘everyday people’—the humanistic heresy that came with the Renaissence.” (Reinhardt qtd. Lasch 146)
Rothko’s principles for the sublime: “no texture; no brushwork or calligraphy; no sketching or drawing; no forms, design, color, light, space, time, movement, size, or scale; ‘no object; no subject; no matter; no symbols, images, or signs; neither pleasure nor pain.” (Rothko qtd. Lasch 146-147) also approaches the Buddhist ideal very well.
“‘I posit that there is no tomorrow’ says Robert Smithson, ‘nothing but a gap, a yawning gap.’ With such a view of the future, it is no wonder that artists renounce the hope of permanence. Overwhelmed by a chaotic and overcrowded environment, by the endless succession of styles and avant-gardes; overwhelmed also by the turmoil within, which answers to the turmoil without and threatens to engulf anyone who looks too deeply into the human interior (as it engulfed the abstract expressionists, whose careers ended all too often in alcoholism, despair and suicide) the artists of the sixties and seventies felt the need to ‘narrow their operations,’ as Andre puts it, ‘to shut down a log of pointless art production [and] to concentrate on a line which was worthwhile.’”(Lasch 150)
What is missing here, from these Buddhist leaning points of view, is the embrace of the ‘emptiness’ as lovingly as the empty canvas, acknowledgement of the primacy of the current moment, and most importantly, compassion.
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