John David Ebert on Postmetaphysical Art

[Balder]

John David Ebert, a well-known interpreter of Sloterdijk's writings, has a new book out:  Art After Metaphysics.

Here's an excerpt:

Art, then, after metaphysics. . .

The metaphysical age was an invention of Heidegger’s that spans a chasm of European intellectual history from Plato to Nietzsche in which all the West’s grand metaphysical narratives were constructed but which, from about the time of Nietzsche’s annunciation of the death of God, began to collapse and disintegrate like Valhalla at the end of Wagner’s opera Gotterdammerung. Heidegger saw himself as a sort of epilogue or appendix to this grand age of metaphysical certainties, for with the replacement of Being by technological enframing, all that he saw remaining as the “task of thinking” for contemporary philosophers was varying degrees ofaletheia-type “truth-making,” in which entities brought into the clearing are, from henceforth, like the blurred photographs on the canvases of Gerhard Richter; that is to say, lacking the pristine clarity of absolute Truth, such entities could only hope to attain to one or another degree of truth.[i]

But then, before the metaphysical age that Heidegger saw beginning with Plato’s divorce of Being from Becoming, there was a long, long stretch of myths, religions and ideas which the contemporary philosopher Peter Sloterdijk has demarcated as the pre-metaphysical age, an age in which being-in-the-world meant to be in the body of the Great Mother.[ii] Hence the conception of the earth in the times of the Mesopotamians and the Egyptians as a sort of embryo surrounded by the amniotic fluid of a vast world ocean and enclosed – at least in Egypt – by a sky goddess whose belly was full of stars (Nut, for instance; or later, Hathor, the cow goddess of the daytime sky). The pre-metaphysical age had an immanental, rather than a transcendental, understanding of Being, and correspondingly all religious journeys through the cosmos had a decidedly downward tendency, from Inanna’s prototypical journey to the underworld of Irkalla to the fate of the soul in the various afterlife scenarios of the Egyptian underworlds presided over by the mummified god-king Osiris.

But then, according to Sloterdijk, being-in-the-world during the metaphysical age was a being-in-the-Father, and so it is precisely during this epoch that the concept of the paternal womb comes into being as an attempt to appropriate the birth-giving powers of the Great Mother by a whole horde of Father demiurges and progenitors: Zeus, for example, giving birth to Athena, or God the Father giving birth to the Logos from out of the uterine depths of his own mind (Mary is only the chosen biological vessel of this dual-substance being, for her task is now limited to creating the physical body of the already pre-existent Logos-being). It is during this period of the great metaphysical age that all religious journeys, from the myth of Plato’s cave to the ascenionist literature of the church fathers, have an upwardvalency, for the old midden heap of underworlds left over from the previous pre-metaphysical age have lost all their appeal and become associated with the realm of carnality and physicality. Osiris, for instance, was the god of the constructed physical body, whereas Christ becomes the lord of the spiritual body, and all must now follow in the wake of the paths broken by him through the heavens.

In the post-metaphysical age that begins with Heidegger, however, being-in-the-world now means a being-thrown into the world, in which, as Sloterdijk points out, a real outside now appears for the first time[iii]: the individual finds himself thrown into the world in a sort of horizontal direction, full of angst and care, and unprotected by any overarching metaphysical immune system (hence, perhaps, the significance of Edvard Munch’s 1895 painting The Scream). There are neither journeys upward, nor any downward to make, for the individual must now crawl about the surface of the earth in quest of drastic solutions to the crisis of shell-lessness. (Artificial substitutes for Transcendenz now begin to appear: drugs or sex, for instance, which are designed to replicate the ecstasies of the ancient transcendent journeys which, once upon a time, were part of the very fabric of the metaphysical age).

And so art, then, in a post-metaphysical age, is an art that has lost touch with Being, for Being now has degenerated into technological enframing, and consequently, no great meaning systems exist any longer for the art to realize and manifest. As Jacques Derrida pointed out in his early essay on “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” there is now an absent ontological center at the heart of the West’s understanding of Being which once used to be occupied by what he termed “transcendental signifieds”[iv] (basically the Kantian Ideas of the Reason: God, Soul, Freedom and Immortality). But with the death of God as pronounced by Nietzsche, the transcendental signifieds which once functioned to anchor and orient all the West’s signifiers (as made evident, for instance, in art) have crumbled and collapsed. They have been delegitimized and deconstructed, and so now there is only a semiotic vacancy where the grand signifieds once used to anchor and guarantee all systems of meaning and all philosophical narratives whatsoever. Philosophy, consequently, can no longer function with any kind of absolute metaphysical certainty, and art – contemporary art, in particular – now suffers from a crisis of meaning...

(Excerpt continued here.)

[Layman Pascal]

Yeccccch!

This passage reeks of the old academy. The plodding cerebromorphs recycling their eerily conformist narratives of about a supposed mutation-of-our-narratives!

Why, it's bad enough to hear someone taking Heidegger opinion of Heidegger's (borrowed) characterizations of Western History but how can any educated person justify being mute on the well-known fact that occult and yogic lineages have, for centuries, described the characteristic aeons of Isis, Osiris and Horus without any need to pervert this vision into a some supposed conversation between the radical ideas of contrasting "great thinkers". How could you belong any more to the dottering Father's Age of Metaphysics?

Do we really have to put up with yet another supercilious mention of Nietzsche's "death of God" pronouncement? As if pronouncement were relevant! But the worst part is that it moves on from here as if the main thing had been said... blithely ignoring the fact that Nietzsche's work was already the description of what comes next, already the articulation of Heidegger's vision and its pathways of solution, already a set of conclusions about how to go beyond the "semiotic vacancy" of the post-metaphysical age.

And WHEN did "substitutes for Transcendenz" like "sex and drugs" begin to appear? Sometime in the late 19th century as a response to the emergence of new philosophy? Or could it have been closer to... ALWAYS!

The deep nature of the emerging sensed shift, traced upon our artists, thinkers and cultures, is utterly overlooked -- buried in a flood of all-too-repeated university cliches about the contemporary age. Consequently the obvious roads forward -- which apply to spirituality as well as art -- are not even hinted at in the passage above.

And this:

"It is important to be able to recognize the transformed iconotypes as they reappeared in each epoch to perform different functions, but yet remained as the structural features holding together the very interior of each epoch."

Bah! I will say NO. It is NOT important to do this. Such impulses neither instructive nor revelatory. They are only a dull indulgence of literary predictability.

Ra-Hoor-Khu!

[Balder]

LOL, Layman.  Thanks.  I was ready to be bothered by your post, starting as it did with a vomiting sound, but I actually enjoyed it quite a bit more than the excerpt above.

[Layman Pascal]

Not as bothersome as the sound of vomit would lead you to anticipate?!

To quote Jose Chung, "I'll take that as a RAVE review..."

[Balder]

Well, I posted this as an item of interest, and the first response it received was projectile vomiting, so I had a mild expectation that your critique would "sting" a bit, but it was actually refreshing and I agreed with your spirited take-down (as I often do)...

[Layman Pascal]

Criticism must be an act of love. -- Andre Breton

This balancing act of fiestiness & appreciation is something which, I think, characterizes the future potential vitality of higher critique and meta-level creativity. We need to demand greater juiciness and a more intense, trans-academic degree of "thinking"... but we must make that demand precisely where we find minds sniffing in the right direction. We are always endangered by habit, complacency and conformity secretly afflicting our progressive intellectual efforts. And yet this danger stands out only where it is very close to doing the job properly.

I do not gag when my face is near a rock. I do gag when my face is near a steaming pile of shit. My throat is distressed by an uncanny resemblance to cooked meat. It is as if it thinks I might accidentally just gobble down the turd and so it clamps shut and revolts. I have encountered something which is the same enough to be different.

The subtle factors which make Led Zeppelin's Dazed and Confused different from the version Jimmy Page performed earlier with The Yardbirds makes all the difference in the world...

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee?