"After all, aesthetics is nothing but a kind of applied physiology."[1]
In his critique of Richard Wagner, Nietzsche identifies the composer with his era. He is unequalled in "the realm of suffering, depressed and tortured souls, at giving language to mute misery…and the colors of late fall." He is "the Orpheus of all secret misery" who "prefers to sit quietly in the nooks of collapsed houses."[2] These praises anticipate the anguish of "A Postcard from the Volcano" written fifty years later, a poem describing a soul amid the ruins of life and anticipating not only its death but misunderstanding by future generations.[3] Apropos this poem, Nietzsche, who saw his age as a threshold to apocalypse, an "entr'acte, as a reaction within reaction" wrote in critical, meditative prose about Europe as "a ruined house in a gutted world." He was keenly attuned to the shadows that were spreading over Europe and that would "envelop it…in the coming century."[4] The sense of apocalypse made Orpheus a frequent subject of Symbolist art, his decapitated head represented the beautiful image detached from its cultural body and the destruction of them both.
The sense that Wagner's music, his deformation of music in Nietzsche's view, heralds the end of a cultural period, even of a culture, that it represents a physiological regression accords with my thesis about the nature and stages of image-work, the drive to idealize identity and re-present it as an image of icon. This impulse was central to ancient Greece and expressed in its fascination with metamorphoses. The drive to idealize complex or disturbing personal or cultural experience was heightened by the Greco-roman appropriation of Hebraic values and teachings. The resulting hybrid, a mismatch between an iconic sensibility and one which forbids image-worship, between a tragic and comedic worldview, between fatalism and a view of history's purposeful, providential unfolding created a fissionable culture at war with and in flight from essential aspects of itself.
Image-work consists of three stages the first two of which include high degrees of rapture and dissolution of consciousness in a mystical communion often centered on an idealized fiction. At first, the striving wounded or irritated hybrid-self envisions an ideal image and begins to transfer its identity to it. This magic, the etymological root of image and imagine is an idyll, a vacation of self-distancing and doubling. It leads to increasing separation of the image from the individual or cultural body and the displacement of the original by the image. This is a source of myths and fears of demonic possession as dramatized, for example in "Christabel." Distancing of the image, the idealized identity, idemptitas or clone causes terror; it is an apocalyptic triumph of the image, of the unreal or virtual that precludes certainty and reason. As the source is diminished, the image goes through a stage of glittering petrifaction. Finally, deprived of the root and host that generated it and on which it fed, the image itself breaks up and an elegiac mood ends the process with memorials, grieving, and cultural collapse. Further idealization of what was lost may re-start the cycle. The apocalypse of image-work is the process that Nietzsche in effect recognized in Wagner as an epitome of the Symbolist or early Modern period.
Transferring the self to its image is an aesthetic process that may represent the meiotic origins of life. More than in biology, image-work is a doubling in which the ideal reflects, absorbs and displaces the original. Rather than duplication and eventual elaboration there is possession. Poiesis also drives toward fusion as the source-generator joins with other image-workers in adoration of the image. This idyll of communion demands a sacrifice of consciousness and another, perhaps to represent the alienation of self as identity is transferred to the image, god or "demon lover." Christian communion is an echo of Dionysiac and other rites of this kind. Again, it is an aesthetic as well as a social and 'psychological' drama. One could argue that not only drama but all poiesis is essentially transformative, at least, but not only in Western culture and that a rejection of image-work, as in Judaism is an exception to a human norm. It is, essentially antithetical to the rapture of Indo-Greek pantheism and to its magical, metamorphic impulse.[5] In this basic respect, as in others, Israel indeed is "a nation that dwells apart."
Rapturous communion in adoration of the image develops a cult and ritual. It includes apocalyptic and elegiac phases as the image demands its sacrifice (a representation of the image-generating 'host'); the sense of unity organized by the icon or artifice breaks down as the result of routine biological cycles, irrepressible individual differences (soul), demonstrable inconsistencies in the ritual or imperfections in the image. On the social level, a priesthood and eventually a secular State enforces the mystique of its image but this too breaks down so long as the mystique is based on alienation and idealization rather than sanctification of the everyday and demonstrably real. Thus, Schopenhauer speaks of the idealism and pessimism of Buddhism and Christianity, contrasting them to the "realism and optimism of Judaism," preconditions to theism, he writes.[6] Image-work's final elegiac phase, which in a major culture marks the end of an historical era, generates increased State control of the cult, aggressive 'foreign policy' to expand its audience and prestige and to distract from its trains, and an increasing heterodoxy in society before a new state (of perception and governance) emerges.
The irrational and euphoric aspects of Christianity generated increasing tension and exhibited increasing decay as rationalism became widespread in the West. This process, which one might describe as the enduring resurgent vigor of Jewish sensibility has met with increasing attempts of the West to protect its image by purging itself of Jews and diluting or ghettoizing what remains of Judaism. Schopenhauer wonders "how Paul can seriously represent as God incarnate and as one with the Creator of the world a man who has died so recently that many of his contemporaries are still alive," adding that "this could be an argument against the genuineness of Paul's epistles generally."[7] That 'the man' might never have lived was beyond his residual Christian thought. In any case, it is among those principles of dogma, like the existence and power of "the Devil" that "rationalists try to expunge…and lead Christianity back to a prosaic, egoistic and optimistic Judaism."[8] The rationalizing aspects of 18th – 20th century Christian apologetics have been noted by many. If a culture matures, fictions eventually will be known for what they are; illusions will dissipate or change their facades. One must recognize that this "disenchantment" produces countervailing and multi-faceted attacks on the Jewish roots of the West expressed today mainly, if not only in geopolitics.
A postulate with which Schopenhauer closes his aphorisms also has drawn abundant commentary: that is, as discussed above, the dominant image cult, a cult of aesthetics in which religion makes itself art and then art displaces religion includes a pure or extreme generation and veneration of imagery, the West's narcotic[9] with "theatre and music the means to produce intoxication…in our so-called 'higher culture." As art and religion merged around secularized and universalized forms of rapture, facilitated by the diversions transmitted by electronic mass media the "regression" that Nietzsche notes in Wagner and the early modern West becomes more overt, for example, in the "decadent" movement of the late 19th century and its related "art for art's sake" sequel, an attempt to guard the cult of the image by withdrawing from a society organized around production and impatient with illusions, except economizing, an attempt to preserve energy and, perhaps the image cult itself: an organic defense. Thus Schopenhauer writes that "the reason civilization is at its highest point among Christian peoples is … that Christianity is dead and no longer exercises much influence."[10] One adds the caveat that religion as spectacle, always a major part of its power and kinship with image-work continues to exercise great influence: it looks good on TV and plays well in sound bytes.
This exhaustion of a dominant aesthetic-cultic mode informs the idiom of Nietzsche's critique of Wagner's music as a sign of physiological exhaustion that is the "sweet misery" of Orpheus. The singer, as Symbolist painters repeatedly showed was torn apart and decapitated for separating / segregating his image from passion (the maenads).[11] The core of his critique is Wagner's subordination of music and its natural rhythms that invite walking and dancing to feelings of rapturous "floating, swimming" and in due course, drowning. Critically extending Wagner's claim that "the drama is the end, the music always a mere means," Nietzsche argues that both music and drama are subordinated at Bayreuth to an art of glamorous poses; the actors become icons that "appeal to the senses" in a way that "unhinges the mind," subverts consciousness and embeds the individual in the mass. "One leaves oneself at home when one goes to Bayreuth." The meters and impulse of dance have been displaced by iconic gestures based on "infinite melody" that breaks time, dulls the senses and in a "complete degeneration of rhythmic feeling [puts] chaos in its place." This indicates a cultural "swan song," a "reanimation of Scandinavian monsters with a thirst [both] for ecstatic sensuality and de-sensualization"; Nietzsche here describes a paradox of Christian rapture, the extreme sensuality of its ritual and myths of loving possession and its ascetic bias. These are key dogmas for maintaining the cult by its promise of the perfected, eternal idyll of fusion with the image: Bernini's statue of St. Theresa neatly captures the paradox. The muses are figures of possession, intoxication and rapture.[12] Following this emotional-aesthetic pattern, music and theatre become forms of intoxication and "floating" based on gestures, or icons, eidolon for "the mass, the immature, the blasé, the sick," etc. This, he concludes, is "music without a future"[13] and like many writers since his time judges his culture as exhausted, at and end: behind all the joyous 'onward and upward' slogans lies the lascivious voice of death urging us to make haste." And further in describing modern music, Kundera, forgetting Nietzsche adds "no one ever dreamed the end was so near. Schonberg…was legitimately proud of having chosen the only path that led 'onward.'[14]
Immersed in the Symbolist period his entire life, more painfully clear-sighted than Kundera, Nietzsche sees the end as a process of reversion and exhaustion, indeed, more consistently than Kundera, Huxley, Orwell, Burgess, Spengler and many others, he sees "progress" as a form of egoism, alienation, and selfhood that invites Caesarism. Thus he hears the destruction of melody that had been the "cheerful, enthusiastic, tender, enamored spirit of Mozart" in the German language itself; changes in its tone toward curt scornfulness he heard as part of "contempt for melody…an atrophy of the melodic sense in Germany" such that "Germans are becoming militarized in the sound of their language." He further linked this development to "attempts to rise into sublimity," to imitate pagan Greek mythology.[15] He viewed the arts of his day as being forms of intoxication and evidence of spiritual fatigue. Despite his classicism he was a connoisseur of intense and unique experience and despised and feared hypnotic possession and communal rapture as forms of disease and feminization. He never saw this latter aspect as hardwired into Hellenic sensibility as epitomized, for example in the myths of the origin of Aphrodite, a transformative possession and displacement of the male by a goddess.
So despite his criticisms of modern arts Nietzsche wrote that it "gives us the ability to turn ourselves into an aesthetic phenomenon" and that "as an aesthetic phenomenon, existence is still bearable to us."[16] This resembles Rousseau's discussion in his Confessions of how 'true' identity and truth are constructed in a kind of editorial process. It also is a precise statement of the idyllic promise of image-work as it recognizes the threat of its apocalyptic and elegiac phases, the stages of exhaustion that most compelled Nietzsche's attention and writing though he remained ambivalent about the Dionysian impulse to the end; a true man of the West, his mixed feelings about aesthetics and their relation to identity no doubt hastened his own breakdown even as he analyzed that of his culture. Keenly attuned to contradictions, he frequently criticized sensuality in the arts while retaining a strong animus against the Judeo-Christian concept of sin as undermining the passions the Greeks loved and idealized, treating them with "tragic dignity" rarely found in Scripture with its pervasive comedic sensibility.[17]
As noted, what he admires is intensity, honesty and the embrace of life. Thus, the "chaos of rhythm" he heard in Wagner, the loss of individual judgment and striving for effects and iconic poses prompted disgust because of the loss of vigor they implied. For Nietzsche, Dionysian impulses less involve rapture or mute reverence than the ability to embrace "the terrible deed, the questionable…and negation."[18] A true Romantic, he revered intensity of genuine feeling and insight never quite accommodating this to his respect for the Hebrew Scriptures, worldview and gravitas.
The dissolution of melody and its physiologic counterparts, walking and dancing with their keen sense of timing and rhythm Nietzsche thus associates with social collapse into oceanic harmonies, a-temporality, loss of intellectual discrimination and integral individuality into communal trances focused by iconic gestures. The emergence of this profound, multi-faceted criticism is part of the fragmentation of the Christian rapture cult which, with its counter-movements, increasingly distinguishes the post-Medieval world. It is "music without a future" from a culture without a future except in those shadows whose spread Nietzsche foretold[19] and which themselves are clouds of images, ideologies and icons generated in an attempt to save the State or, more prosaically to distract people from the 'twilight of their idols,' the apocalypse of the image project whose terrors usher in the elegiac stage of a culture and the opening of its conceptual and geographic borders to others. The collapse of borders is the death of the cell/nation as it strains to maintain belief in an absurdity and to enforce this belief. This pervasive cultural apocalypse is the twilight of the West. The priesthood that runs the machine, however, continues to refine and, via the media and economy enforce the replacement fictions by which image-work proceeds in sports, news, and violent films. "The slavery of poses: that is the end."[20] The "peace process" is a perfect example employing a worldwide cast of poseurs.
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