The Anatomy of Art
- Introduction
- The Nightmares of the Western World
2.1. Cultural Neuroses: Art and the Dream Reflex
2.2. The Dionysian & Oedipus Complex
2.3. Homer’s Odyssey: The Birth of the Apollonian
2.4. Orientalism: The West’s Masterpiece
2.5. The Internet & the Culture of Supervision - Conclusion
Introduction: What Does “What Is Art?” Mean?
Usually, we use the word “art(s)” to mean two things: (1) to refer to painting, music, cinema, and other customary forms of creative expression, and (2) like a compliment to elevate a given work of art to the level of art. But these two uses of the word “art” have nothing to do with what we are looking for when asking the question “What is art?”
In reality, we are trying to solve the 2nd usage of the word; we are looking for a definition to help us distinguish the low from the high. Nowadays, we are tempted to reject the premise — democratically proclaiming that art is subjective and a matter of preference.
But I find this line of inquiry stifling. It is clear that art is much more than what this populist investigation cares to discover. How can we go about studying what the phenomenon of art actually is?
Everyone who tries to answer this question tries to do so with a definition. But what do definitions accomplish? Following the previous line of inquiry, we can define art as “creative expression”, but does it make it so? Can a bundle of words be ontologically binding? Have we discovered anything? Shouldn’t a real answer to the question “What is art?” identify a thing in reality?
The native circumscriptions of reality do not parallel those of language. Thus, if we excavated reality, we would probably not find one object that corresponds to “art”, possessing all the baggage we customarily associate with that one word. Then, rather than look for a thing, we should look for the mechanisms responsible for mankind’s ubiquitous aesthetic customs. Art is something that happens, not something that is. Thus, a proper ontological examination would consist in charting its logic.
But art is not empirically perceptible. How can we study something we cannot witness? Let’s ask Freud. Freud’s ontological portrait of the psyche made no use of definitions; instead, he used narratives and abstractions. This is without scientific merit, but it’s all we have; it is our only way of lifting the unintelligible into intelligibility. The unconscious is not real; however, who could dismiss its introspective usefulness? Even though it’s only an abstraction, it expresses what is tangible yet unintelligible.
Being similarly unknowable, art and the psyche must be examined using the same strategy: we must study art anatomically. My goal in this article is not to sequentially chart the whole body of art but to explore a few of its organs.
The Nightmares of the Western World
The beautiful appearance of the world of dreams, in whose creation each man is a complete artist, is the precondition of all plastic art […]
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of TragedyThe symbolic figures easily become nightmare silhouettes.
— Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization
Cultural Neuroses: Art and the Dream Reflex
Just as individuals can be neurotic, cultures can also be neurotic. They too can have neuroses — unresolved psychic knots resulting from their social, historical, and material conditions. And just as private neuroses are brought to the surface during our dreams — expressing in a symbolic spectacle the unresolved knots of our unconscious — cultural neuroses will surface in art, myths, narratives, public discourse, customs, and beliefs.
The music you enjoy tells a lot about who you are, but the scenarios that play in your head as you listen to a song you really like tell a much greater deal about who you are. These are symbolic incarnations of the feelings that lurk beneath consciousness; they are abstract windows into what is actually happening inside our minds — the wounds we repressed and the psychic dents left behind by our upbringing. Likewise, cultural products reveal in tangible form the unconscious content of the cultural spirit.
This might be the most fascinating ability of the human psyche — namely, the ability to bring into symbolic expression the sludge that rests beneath the flow of conscience. By honing in on the fumes of the unconscious, we humans are capable of generating symbols and narratives through which the emotion can rendered “thinkable”. The sentiment is made incarnate in a form, which allows it to be examined. The signified is made intelligible through an imperfect signifier. No formal incarnation is lossless; every symbolic consubstantiation compromises the original. But there, in a dream frame, a fact from the unconscious is lifted into consciousness.
By (1) taking a feeling, (2) articulating it in a symbolic representation, and (3) materially actualizing that symbolic construct in reality, you are using your dream reflex to translate your interiority into a product that can be expressed, shared, and shown to other humans. This is the circuit of art.
A certain musical emotional state comes first, and from this, with me, the poetic idea then follows.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
But the parallels between art and dreams do not stop at symbolization. Much like how dreams are like virtual exposure therapy — a simulation, a “making intelligible” of our unconscious knots for the brain to sort itself out — art too is a way for culture to behold its very own neuroses. Art can be a dream or a nightmare; it can commend just as it can slander the cherished.
The works of art that we remember fall into the first two categories: the uplifting and the demeaning.
— Roger Scruton, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction
And just like a dream, the function of art is to expose the tensions of the unconscious — the neuroses — through a signifier. A narrative can incarnate the sludge of our emotional depths so as to render it intelligible. But this translation of the signified to the signifier has a repressive function; it shows us the magma of our souls through a screen, protecting us from its infernal incandescence.
[…] the signifier is not supposed to ‘translate’ without concealing […]
— Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic
There, through the signifier, the conscious mind can process the material without fear of falling down the throat of its volcanoes. In dreams, the unconscious signified of the mind is displayed; in art, the unconscious signified of culture is displayed. In both, the spirit unfurls itself by raising the unconscious to the conscious through metaphorical signifiers. Through its intelligible form, we can gaze into the abyss — the buried signified. The symbolic construct allows us to acquaint ourselves with and dispel that disconcerting unconscious material, begging to be beheld and resolved.
In other articles (The Genealogy of Genius, On Aesthetic Pleasure), I discuss how art, by representing values and neuroses, serves as a bond between people. If culture is understood as the interplay of multiple minds, glued together by a common pathos/ethos, art is the bond. If someone shares a dream-expression out of their psyche and others recognize themselves in the aesthetic expression thereof, the aesthetic object serves as a totemic star around which bodies are bound into orbit. People who relate on this aesthetic basis share a deep connection at the root of their souls; they either resemble each other a great deal or, most likely, share an upbringing. We instinctually recognize this connection as an indicator of their viability as a cultural mate.
[…] the thrill that you feel is an endorsement of the things you observe […]
— Roger Scruton, Beauty: A Very Short IntroductionA Culture is Soul that has arrived at self-expression in sensible forms […]
— Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, Vol. 2
In this angle, art is the dream-expression of our being for the purpose of forming a value-bound community. The dream reflex allows the subjective spirit to transcend itself in an alien object that can reach another spirit. When successful, the work of art leads subjective spirits to rally around it. Culture is an objective spirit; a dialectical evolution of the subjective spirit; a fruit that blossoms from a seed as the fruition of its design. In the ability we have been discussing lies the promise of culture; the subjective contains the eventuality of an objective rendition. We are destined for culture.
But I spent enough time on this angle. Instead of belaboring the point of how art formalizes cultural neuroses and brings communities into existence, I want to focus on the first step of that process: the symbolic formalization of cultural neuroses. The signifiers that surface in dreams and art are reflective of the signified underneath. Just like we can learn a great deal about ourselves by intelligently analyzing our dreams, perhaps we can do the same by studying the nightmare signifiers of culture.
A theory posits that dragons — the most common mythical demon in history — are composites of the three most ferocious predators we faced throughout our evolutionary line: snakes, eagles, and leopards. Our ancestors survived by having evolved around these predators. It is to be expected that — through countless generations — we were transmitted with the shapeless anxieties that enabled their strategic survival against these foes.
This is crucial: men symbolically articulate the signified of their minds. The neurotic signified is lifted into the conscious mind where its tensions can be addressed or shared. The signifier allows the conscious mind to digest the signified. This signifier acquires cultural significance when it expresses the spirit of a multitude. Over time, the signifier will refine its symbols, and eventually we end up with a totem: an object of veneration that rallies and organizes social bodies. God is a symbolic expression of the spirit; His morphology (narrative, visual, personality, etc.) reflects the spirit of a given community at a given time.
Thus, we can see that the symbolic function is deeply enmeshed with the cultural instinct. We will spend the rest of the essay on this relationship.
The Dionysian & Oedipus Complex
In her book Caliban and the Witch (2004), Silvia Federici (b. 1942) explains how societies in the early stages of capitalism always develop misogynistic tendencies. Under the new economic system, both sexes are forcefully put in respective spheres of society (women in the reproductive sphere and men in the productive sphere).
As a result of these newly imposed sexual roles, the cultural view of women changes. Under these new cultural impositions, narratives of witches begin to appear — celibate women who desist from the rational world and threaten the reproductive order as well as male sexual potency.
It is significant that in England, most of the witch trials occurred in Essex, where by the 16th century the bulk of the land had been enclosed, while in those regions of the British Isles where land privatization had neither occurred nor was on the agenda we have no record of witch-hunting.
If we consider the historical context in which the witch-hunt occurred, the gender and class of the accused and the effects of the persecution, then we must conclude that witch-hunting in Europe was an attack on women’s resistance to the spread of capitalist relations and the power that women [now had over reproduction.]
[…] the witch-hunt was promoted by a political class that was preoccupied with population decline and motivated by the conviction that a large population is the wealth of the nation.
But the witch was not only the midwife, the woman who avoided maternity, or the beggar who eked out a living by stealing some wood or butter from her neighbor. She was also the loose, promiscuous woman — the prostitute or adulteress, and generally, the woman who exercised her sexuality outside the bonds of marriage and procreation.
— Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch
With this socio-historical context established, it is fairly easy to realize how the witch archetype is a symbolic aggregate of a people’s societal neuroses. The witch “looks” like what they fear; witches are “nightmarizations” of their historical predicament. The archetype is a symbolical composite that bears the particular details that caused anxiety: the reproductive autonomy of young women, paganism, irrationality, Dionysianism, common ownership, sexual freedom, abortions, anti-masculinity, and the rebellion of older women. The unconscious values of culture are beheld through the symbolic scheme that are witches; they are a nightmare picture of the cultural spirit.
In Madness and Civilization (1961), Michel Foucault (1926–1984) discusses how — much in the same vein — we begin to see the traces of a burgeoning neurosis concerning folly at the turn of the 16th century. Whereas folly was once homogeneously integrated within medieval society, representations of the ship of fools — where folly is ritualistically excluded from society — and the mass incarceration of the poor, the mad, the vagrant, the criminal, and all those irreconcilable to this nascent industrial order appear at the same time. Primitive accumulation brought with it new needs, values, and incentives in which irrationality and vagrancy became profane, contagious, and in need of purification. Madness — which had yet to be ontologically discerned as such — became scary; it had to — like witches — be dominated, mastered, purified, and made the object of art and narrative.
These kinds of nightmarizations are everywhere in culture. Some may have reservations about calling such things “art”, which is fair enough. However, let us remember our task — to chart the mechanisms of art. One can hardly argue that we are not engaging with what seems to be a central organ in the anatomy of art. Let’s run through a few other nightmarized cultural neuroses.
In Black Skin, White Masks (1952), then 27-year-old Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) showed how Europe nightmarized black men during and since the slave trade much in the same way that women were mythologized during early capitalism. To this day, racist = neuroses haunt our culture and reserve a place in our cultural spirit for an archetypal black man who is a hyper-virile brute with unlimited sexual potential.
In 2023, 4chan used early AI image generation to generate pictures that were critical of contemporary American “culture” all while following the style of the patriotic American painter Norman Rockwell (1894–1978).
The following image is one of them.
[The “Prospero Complex”] is defined as the sum of those unconscious neurotic tendencies that delineate at the same time the “picture” of the paternalist colonial and the portrait of “the racialist whose daughter has suffered an [imaginary] attempted rape at the hands of an inferior being.” […] Toward Caliban, Prospero assumes an attitude that is well known to Americans in the southern United States. Are they not forever saying that the niggers are just waiting for the chance to jump on white women?
[…] the father revolts because in his opinion the Negro will introduce his daughter into a sexual universe for which the father does not have the key, the weapons, or the attributes?
— Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks
The image is a perfect example of what we have been discussing up until now — it is a dream picture of a longstanding cultural neurosis surrounding black men and white girls. The image shows the neuroses of a community. Every element contributes to that effect, from their facial expression to their clothing (or lack thereof) and the visual style.
The girl’s blushing and his mindless stare; the milkshakes; the contrast; the father’s encouraging consent; the father’s right arm; etc. the image displays what is feared — it is a cultural nightmare. The visual style usually reserved for patriotic idealizations of America’s “golden age” is flipped on its head; it is used to represent something antithetical to the ethos of that “golden age” to those who are nostalgic for it. Form and content clash. Unresolvable tensions like these are commonplace in nightmarizations such as this one.
The fabric of a cultural spirit always contains weak points, and nightmare pictures reveal gaps, weaknesses, or mistakes in the cultural spirit so that we familiarize, resolve, solve, or make sense of them. Art is therapeutic, but this is not to say that it is soothing. Intrigued, we look, and our brain silently churns until, suddenly, the image has lost its thorns. Either our brain “solved” the matter, or maybe we intellectualized and overcame it.
[…] anti-Semitism reflects a panic about Jewish superiority, anti-Black racism reflects contempt for Black inferiority.
Jew is killed or sterilized. The black man, however, is castrated. The penis, symbol of virility, is eliminated […] The black man represents the biological danger; the Jew, the intellectual danger.
— Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks
In his seminal work Orientalism (1978), Edward Said (1935–2003) states that in media, the Arab “appears as an oversexed degenerate [who is] cleverly devious […] sadistic, treacherous, low”. However inappropriate this may be, we can note how the Arab combines the two dangers: intellectual and biological.
But, here, once again, we see a nightmare image whose expressed neurosis is perfectly explained by Fanon. But let us try to analyze it. What exactly is at stake in the previous image? What is bemoaned in the image?
The core sentiment is one of humiliation; the pristine Aryan specimen, robbed of his biological superiority and irrational innocence by the life-hating health regiment of an intellectually overpowering and biologically inferior (short, old, balding) people. Like a character, plucked from a naïve golden age, he has his blissful ways pathologized and subjected to an artificial, mechanical, and unspiritual rehabilitation program. Like a nightmare, that which is most cherished is being successfully degraded where it is most vulnerable.
We may even go so far as to interpret the unreadable font littering the background to “mean” that the man in the center is being prescribed a regiment of stressors that surpass his understanding. Obviously, these unintelligible letters are merely artifacts of a limited technology.
Coming back to our topic, it is interesting to note the parallels between the two neuroses (racism and misogyny). In both cases, the nightmare-figure is portrayed as a threat to male sexuality.
[…] the witch-hunt sanctify male supremacy, it also instigated men to fear women, and even to look at them as the destroyers of the male sex. […] A witch, presumably, could castrate men or make them impotent, either by freezing their generative forces or causing their penis to come out and draw back as she wished.
— Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch[…] when a white man hates black men, is he not yielding to a feeling of impotence or of sexual inferiority? […] is there not a phenomenon of diminution in relation to the Negro, who is viewed as a penis symbol? Is the lynching of the Negro not a sexual revenge?
— Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks
Pornography too serves a similar nightmarization function. We will note that many regions of the world owe their pornographic preferences to their particular historical and cultural neuroses. It is no wonder then that North Americans are most sexually perplexed by sexual content centering around the two groups that occupy the largest role in the cultural neuroses.
Different neuroses afflict different people, genders, cultures, communities, ethnic groups, religious groups, etc.; different conditions, pressures, gazes, and dynamics mold the neurotic content of a given spirit.
[…] a common story formula in josei pornography is one in which a shy and intelligent woman is transformed into a nymphomaniac or a sex slave.
— Wikipedia, Josei Manga
A more pronounced — and hopefully evident — similarity is that both women and Africans were subjected to a system of domination during the birth of capitalism. Both were enslaved under a respective regime of bondage. The master-slave dialectic was enacted.
With the rise of anti-racism and feminism, one may conclude that Hegel was right. The slave discovers himself under oppression and the master remains oblivious. But this naïve version of the master-slave dialectic is incorrect. When the oppressed revolts, they seem to start understanding themselves as the other — the antithesis.
I am the world! The white man wants the world; he wants it for himself. […] He enslaves it. His relationship with the world is one of appropriation.
— Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks
This notion of Hegelian self-discovery would sound familiar to those who read the article “Civilization and Its Destination”. A crisis of “being” arises, which de Beauvoir (1908–1986) discusses at length in The Second Sex (1949). Rather than leading to self-consciousness, the self-withdrawal induced by bondage causes people to lose sight of who they are. The slaves either rebel and define themselves as the opposite of whatever their traditional role was, they return to their traditional role for comfort, or they intellectualize the traditional role as radical and subversive, thus making that return acceptable to their new superego. The master knows himself through the alienation of his role, but the slave’s only available roles turn out to be either undesirable or empty once the fury of revolution subsides. The self is no emancipatory refuge; it is a cage that yearns for a role.
Federici would say that capitalism required the subjection of women (reproduction) and Africans (slavery), which led to the neuroses we have observed. Masters fear their slaves will exceed them, undermining the hierarchy that grounds the master’s role/being and cultural self-esteem.
While Federici’s theory is not wrong, it is not designed to answer the exact question we are asking. What is beheld in those nightmare images is no mere revolt of the oppressed, but a revolt against civilization itself. Both “witches” and “blacks” are regarded as evocative of pre-civilization.
Archetypes of pre-civilization can be seen all throughout Western history.
Nature on which no knowledge had yet worked, in which the walls of culture had still not been thrown up — that’s what the Greek saw in his satyr […] the satyr was the primordial image of man […] a perceptible image of the sexual omnipotence of nature […]
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of TragedyThe civilized white man retains an irrational nostalgia for the extraordinary times of sexual licentiousness, orgies, unpunished rapes, and unrepressed incest. In a sense, these fantasies correspond to Freud’s life instinct. Projecting his desires onto the black man, the white man behaves as if the black man actually had them. […] To have a phobia about black men is to be afraid of the biological.
— Franz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks
In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), 28-year-old Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) distinguishes between two aesthetic drives: Dionysian and Apollonian. The Dionysian can be understood as the “rave” — the pulse of life, music, dance, vitality, violence, sexuality, and savagery. The Apollonian can be understood as the “plastic arts” — the formalized, dream, poise, tradition, civility, and rationality. As implied in the previous citations, Nietzsche suggests that the Dionysian is a drive to savagery implicit in man — a Bacchic yearning for the primitive, for nature, lawlessness, and pre-civilization. Everywhere, humans have aesthetically enacted this Dionysian vitality.
In all quarters of the old world — setting aside here the newer worlds — from Rome to Babylon, we can confirm the existence of Dionysian celebrations, of a type, at best, related to the Greek type in much the same way as the bearded satyr, whose name and attributes are taken from the goat, is related to Dionysus himself. Almost everywhere, the central point of these celebrations consisted of an exuberant sexual promiscuity, whose waves flooded over all established family practices and its traditional laws.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
Now, in the middle of this section, we reach the peak of the mountain and see that the central neurosis of Western culture is the conflict between the civilizational and the primitive. Since the dawn of Western culture, it has been afflicted with nightmares of a Dionysian upheaval against precarious civilization and its rational order.
We will notice that the nightmarizations of women and “blacks” we have looked at were essentially Dionysian. The witch with her loose, pagan sexuality, her rituals, and her sabbath; the “blacks” with their sexual vitality and their irrational voodoo.
Nocturnal Sabbat appears as […] rebellion against the masters and the break-down of sexual roles. It also represents a use of space and time contrary to the new capitalist work-discipline. […] the witch was the living symbol of the world turned upside down.
— Silvia Federici, Caliban and the WitchBlack Magic, primitive mentality, animism, animal eroticism, it all floods over me. All of it is typical of peoples that have not kept pace with the evolution of the human race.
— Franz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks[…] the association is clearly made between the Orient and the freedom of licentious sex.
— Edward Said, Orientalism
Another core aspect of the Dionysian drive is the loss of individuality. In the primordial and orgiastic Bacchanal of the Dionysian drive made manifest, individuals are swept up in the whirlwind of Walpurgis night, swallowed in the remembrance of the Oedipal ocean of primitive existence.
[…] a surrender of individuality by the entry into a strange nature. And, in fact, this phenomenon breaks out like an epidemic; an entire horde feels itself enchanted in this way.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy[…] originally the ego includes everything, later it separates off an external world from itself. Our present ego-feeling is, therefore, only a shrunken residue of a much more inclusive — indeed, an all-embracing — feeling which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world about it.
— Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontent
The Dionysian is this instinctive drive for archetypal savagery — everlasting, lawless pleasure. Freud explains this desire using the Oedipus complex and the pleasure principle. The child undergoes a series of developmental stages in early childhood, and the most important one is the one where the child must learn to separate himself from the mother, from his desire to be completely dependent on her. The child must leave a second womb.
It is through the reality principle that the child becomes free. The reality principle is the drive of delayed gratification, driving the child toward painful and alienating activities to secure that which the mother originally provided. Lacan’s concept of the Phallus, Freud’s reality principle, and Marcuse’s derivative performance principle are concerned with the human orientation toward the external world — his dedication to titles, cultural sublimation, and labor. Sublimation means civilization.
The history of civilization is the history of the introversion of sacrifice — in other words, the history of renunciation.
— Theodor Adorno, The Dialectics of Enlightenment
It is this reality principle that makes society possible, and so culture is in some sense bound in its rejection of the Oedipal — the Dionysian dream. For this reason, the Oedipal-Dionysian haunts culture.
This Western neurosis concerning the pre-civilizational and the Dionysian is channeled in art through what Nietzsche calls the Apollonian — the counter-drive to the Dionysian. The goal of the Apollonian is to tame, subdue, master, sanitize, and civilize the Dionysian urges. These urges are defeated by being brought to consciousness under the veil of a dream signifier.
[…] here the illusion of culture was wiped away by the primordial image of man […] Schiller was also right about the start of tragic art: the chorus is a living wall against the pounding reality […] his Apollonian consciousness was, like a veil, merely covering the Dionysian world in front of him.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
Looking at these two AI-generated images, we will behold what we have been talking about up until now. The two pictures formalize, congeal, and sanitize the Dionysian pulse lingering underneath. In the first image on the left, the visual style and the scene of a 1950s family picnic clashes with the eating of insects, which is reminiscent of savagery, severe material poverty, and pre-civilization. Cherished civilization is threatened by the injection of savage customs into the Western body, like Dionysian pathogens infecting manners and bringing about civilizational regression from the inside. When people say this kind of image is racist, this is why: the fear of savagery, and the interpretation of foreign customs as threatening to civilization.
As for the image on the right, it is a bit more challenging to understand. Western culture has always been fearful of female autonomy; from Medea onward. It may be that women — in being associated with sexuality and the womb — are seen as pre-civilizational. Thus, women are not only regarded as a threat to civilization because they are abysses into which libidinal energy intended for cultural sublimation will be wasted on sexual pleasure through them but also because of our deep association with them and the Oedipal state — that aimless state of pleasure.
In that second picture, we behold woman, individualized from her maternal blueprint, enjoying aimless pleasure free from the performance principle. She has sworn off the civilizational order. She bathes in a Dionysian sea of surrogate children — animals free from the reality principle. In her symbolic composition, we behold anti-civilization. She is with them and not with us.
The female’s individuality, which he is acutely aware of, but which he doesn’t comprehend and isn’t capable of relating to or grasping emotionally, frightens and upsets him and fills him with envy.
— Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto
Female individuality is quite a neurotic topic for the Western spirit. Women are always represented as obscenely individual or mystically unindividual. They are nymphs or witches; either individually powerful or oceanically overwhelming (magical, irrational, sexual, cunning, maternal, etc.). They are the ocean and the womb; windows into a Dionysian regression.
More seductive are the fairies, mermaids, and nymphs who escape male domination; but their existence is dubious and barely individualized; they are involved in the human world without having their own destiny […]
— Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex[…] madness as the manifestation in man of an obscure and aquatic element, a dark disorder, a moving chaos, the seed and death of all things, which opposes the mind’s luminous and adult stability. […] the old union of water and madness […]
— Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization
The last four images do not depict civilizational victories over these fears, rather they congeal the neurosis in a symbolic cage that can be gazed into by the individual, who by engaging with the Apollonized captive, partakes in his own cultivation as a cultural member. In a meaningful way, the work of art congeals the gaze of the Other — the group — and sends it right back at the observer. The work of art gazes at the audience, who feels it when they look at the work and understand it. It is as if the work was looking right back at you, all-knowing, speaking atop a throne of eternal knowledge. As soon as the work of art leaves the artist’s hands, it assumes a totemic role; its voice becomes that of the Other. Even those non-nightmarization works of art reference, exemplify, and show the values of a people. The Other inhabits every corner of art. There, with a reassuring voice, it invites you into its Apollonian order against shared neuroses.
The totem was meant to represent a safe place of refuge where the soul is deposited in order to avoid the dangers which threaten it. After primitive man had housed his soul in his totem he himself became invulnerable […]
— Sigmund Freud, Totem and TabooThis picture is a trap for the gaze.
This is the pacifying, Apollonian effect of painting.
— Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis
In truth, art is not a cage but a home; a historico-material location — a point in space-time — where self-consciousness is elevated through mutual ties to tribe, race, people, culture, and civilization. The Apollonian order out of which the aesthetic emerges is the precondition of all cultural regimes.
Therein lies the civilizational function of art. The Apollonian dream reflex takes the unconscious — the Dionysian neurosis — and renders it visible to the gaze of an Other; it subjects the unsupervised to the supervisory gaze of cultural representation, tames it underneath a shared signifier, and declares victory through the invincibility of the resulting civil formation. Art allows for the formation of an Apollonian order.
It is to this register of the eye as made desperate by the gaze that we must go if we are to grasp the taming, civilizing and fascinating power of the function of the picture.
— Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis
Looking at the previous examples, we will note that they are all targeted expressions of fear. Witches, “blacks”, “Jews”, “savages”, all draw a strict boundary between those that belong to civilization, and those who don’t. We should not worry about selection bias either. The dream reflex both anticipates an Other and expresses what is feared and cherished. It seems like factionalism and Apollonianism are intrinsic to the dream reflex.
At its most potent, art discriminates, excludes, worships, and denounces. Therein lies its most effective civilizational operation: factionalism.
The practice of violence binds them together […] The groups recognize each other and the future nation is already indivisible. […] it throws them in one way and in one direction. […] introduces into each man’s consciousness the ideas of a common cause, of a national destiny, and of a collective history.
— Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the EarthBlack audiences and white audiences feel distinguishably different. Black audiences feel warmer, there is almost a musical rhythm, for me, even in their silent response.
— Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm XA genuine symbol can instill fear or can set free from fear […] The imitative side of the arts, on the contrary, stands closer to the real race-feelings of hate and love
— Oswald Spengler, Decline of the West, Vol. 1[…] it cannot be denied that nations continue to group themselves according to the friend and enemy antithesis […] The political entity presupposes the real existence of an enemy […]
— Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political
The Apollonian fears the loss of individuality. Like a rallying cry, it orders, like Mephistopheles to Faust during Walpurgis Night, “Keep close or we’ll be swept apart”. Thus, art is a well-adapted instrument to the task of warding us from the Dionysian; it is the totemic engine behind the formation of cultural bodies. To be swept apart is to get caught in the Oedipal whirlwind where — like a drop in the ocean — we melt into the undifferentiated. The Apollonian is essential to the formation of the ego — that veneer of being that affords communities with the possibility of society. By bringing the unconscious to the conscious, it allows thoughts to be exchangeable. The ego anticipates culture. Art thus exists at the junction between the ego and culture.
One might say that, since its inception, Western culture has been striving for a Protestant, Cartesian, and Faustian culmination. Ever since it contracted its civilizational anxiety for the Oedipal, Western culture was destined for a culture of ever-increasing individualism and expansionism.
When did the Western world contract this neurosis?
Homer’s Odyssey: The Birth of the Apollonian
[…] the highest effect of Apollonian culture, which always first has to overthrow the kingdom of the Titans and to kill monsters, and through powerfully deluding images and joyful illusions, has to emerge victorious over the horrific depth of what we observe in the world and the most sensitive capacity for suffering. […] how inexpressibly noble is Homer, who, as a single individual, was related to that Apollonian popular culture as the individual dream artist is to the people’s capacity to dream and to nature in general. Homeric “naivete” is only to be understood as the complete victory of the Apollonian illusion.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
Many intellectuals situate the birth of the Apollonian — the reality principle — with Homer (8th century BC). Art being civilizational in essence, it is no wonder then that a poet would inaugurate civilization. In his famous work Dialectics of Enlightenment (1947), Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) says it is in The Odyssey (8th century BC) that we first observe the subjective, rational, military man leaving the primordial womb of divinity to traverse a land of Dionysian savagery (lotus eaters, Circe, cyclops, underworld, etc.), which he triumphs over. The poem is a work of Apollonian reassurance; it shows the victory of civilization over pre-civilization; the victory of reason over myth. Inside The Odyssey, we see the shape of the Apollonian.
Remember, the founding work of literature of our civilization describes Odysseus’ decision to give up immortality and life with a goddess in order to travel across dangerous seas to his home.
— Sir Roger ScrutonIt is a yearning for the homeland which sets in motion the adventures by which subjectivity […] escapes the primeval world. Precipitated in the epic is the memory of an historical age in which nomadism gave way to settlement, the precondition of any homeland. […] Homeland is a state of having escaped.
— Theodor Adorno, The Dialectics of Enlightenment
While Sir Roger Scruton (1944–2020) and Adorno agree to some extent on the rudimentary goal of The Odyssey — namely, liberation from the womb into civilization — they do not agree on whether this “liberation” is a good thing.
Scruton regards civilization as a development of mankind; order, homeland, and institutions are the Hegelian realizations of what man always intended to be; it is the fruition of his design. Adorno, on the other hand, sees in the tale of Apollonian propaganda the birth of imperialism and what would later culminate in the Enlightenment and later fascism: the conquest of brutish myth through reason, which only re-established a more violent kind of myth.
Adorno treats the womb destroyed by Odysseus as the true home of man. Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) will later claim in Eros and Civilization (1942) that this proliferation of the reality principle away from the womb of history only seeks to secure its own contradiction; as Otto Rank (1884–1939) says in The Trauma of Birth (1929), “Every ‘comfort’ that civilization and technical knowledge continually strive to increase only tries to replace by durable substitutes the primal goal from which […] it becomes ever further removed […]”. In other words, capitalism’s regime of tensions and prohibitions exists to produce a level of prosperity that would eliminate the need for its existence. Hard work secures no work at all.
It is no wonder then that women are the central target of this Apollonian declaration of war. No other figure is more Apollonized than women in this work; they are fled (Calypso), resisted (Circe), coordinated (maternal spirits in the underworld), and murdered (the maidens of Ithaca). The Odyssey depicts a journey from the Oedipal to the civil renunciations of the reality principle. The central theme is the creation, illustration, and promotion of the reality principle — the escape from the Oedipal and its Dionysian embodiment. As such, it is no surprise that savagery and womanhood are put side by side as something that must be defeated, shown to be defeated, and praised in its conquered, Apollonized, and docile rendition.
The images which appear to the adventurer in the first visit to the Underworld are of matriarchal shades who have been banished by the religion of light: his own mother, before whom Odysseus forces himself to maintain a purposive patriarchal hardness, is followed by heroines from primeval times. The image of the mother, however, is powerless, blind, and speechless, a phantom […]
Circe seduces Odysseus’s men into abandoning themselves to instinct, with which the animal form assumed by the victims has always been associated […] because they were once men the civilizing epic cannot present their fate as anything other than a calamitous lapse […]
Book XXII of the Odyssey describes the punishment meted out by the son of the island’s king to the faithless maidservants who have sunk into harlotry. […] “For a little while their feet kicked our, but not for very long.” The exactitude of the description, which already exhibits the coldness of anatomy and vivisection, keeps a record […] of the twitching of the subjugated women, who, under the aegis of justice and law, are thrust down into the realm from which Odysseus the judge has escaped.
— Theodor Adorno, The Dialectics of Enlightenment
The book begins with a renunciation of the divine womb and concludes with the murder of the earthly womb. The germs of the witch hunts were already there in the aesthetic protoplasm of the Western Apollonian spirit. Violence, domination, colonialism, and subjugation are inherent in the rational; myth is not replaced by civilization, it is usurped in the conflagration of reason; rationality is myth led by the death drive.
Such language definitely simplifies Adorno’s thesis, however it remains that Adorno is not fond of the products of rationality (civility, Enlightenment, capitalism, and fascism). Adorno and Marcuse were firm believers in the importance of pleasure: the Orphic, the Eros, and the womb. When going over the episode on the lotus-eaters, Adorno describes Odysseus as a tyrannical Father, pulling mankind’s umbilical off against their will.
It is hardly an accident that the epic connects the idea of the life of idleness with the eating of flowers, [which] bears the promise of a state in which the reproduction of life is independent of conscious self-preservation, the bliss of satiety uncoupled from the utility of planned nutrition. The memory of the remote and ancient joy […] It points back to earliest prehistory. […] “So we left that country and sailed on sick at heart.”
Self-preserving reason cannot permit such an idyll-reminiscent of the bliss-induced by narcotics, by which subordinate classes have been made capable of enduring the unendurable in ossified social orders-among its own people. And indeed, it is only an illusion of bliss, a dull aimless vegetating, as impoverished as the life of animals.
— Theodor Adorno, The Dialectics of Enlightenment
This is reminiscent of David Foster Wallace’s (1962–2008) Infinite Jest (1996), which takes the symbols of 1990s America (technology, cinema, addiction, atomization) to nightmarize a Dionysian infection; a return to pleasure; a return to the womb. Wallace is not shy about drawing associations between the centerpiece of his novel — a movie so entertaining that anyone who watches it will watch it until they die — and the abyss of maternal embrace. The idea of a pleasure machine that masturbates, titillates, and pierces through the veil of civilized self-mastery, spreading like a pathogen inside civilization, reducing people to beasts or children at the breast, yearning for a more complete return to that unrecoverable nirvana at the other end of life — the beforelife — is a clear contemporary expression of the very same Oedipal neurosis Homer tried to overpower with his Apollonian spectacle.
In a 1997 interview with Charlie Rose (b. 1942), Wallace mockingly repeats an argument made by feminists about his book, describing it as a “phallus” that Wallace is imposing on the consciousness. But it is exactly that: a 1080-page-long book attempting to Apollonize the Dionysian, asserting its own reality principle against the Oedipal, thwarting its dependence on the inconsistent Mother by seeking the substitute signifier — the pasteboard mask bearing the marks of that very same abyss whose new signifier was meant to keep you from consummating. The perfect Phallic signifier is one where the signified is perfectly realized. Thus, the Ahabs of this world settle for nothing less than the depths of the sea: the perfect signifier.
With its clear Oedipal subtext, Infinite Jest is quite the textbook example of a Phallus; an alienating project whose maximalist ambition inadvertently molds the product into an approximation of the lost object. There, in the meticulous features of the transcendent work, we discern the Oedipal trauma, faintly glimmering through its material signifier.
Madame Psychosis as some kind of maternal instantiation of the archetypal figure Death, sitting naked, corporeally gorgeous, ravishing, hugely pregnant, her hideously deformed face either veiled or blanked out by undulating computer-generated squares of color […] sitting there nude, explaining in very simple childlike language to whomever the film’s camera represents that Death is always female, and that the female is always maternal. I.e. that the woman who kills you is always your next life’s mother.
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest[The mother] is also the death of everything that dies.
— Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand FacesThe mother is a big crocodile, and you find yourself in her mouth. You never know what may set her off suddenly, making those jaws clamp down. That is the mother’s desire. […] That is what we call the phallus. It is a roller which protects you, should the jaws suddenly close.
— Jacques Lacan, Seminar XVII (from the Lacanian Subject by Bruce Fink)
But Nietzsche would disagree with Adorno that this resistance to pleasure is truly repressive. A great vitalist even in his younger days — Nietzsche sees in the Homeric Apollonian effort a desire to affirm life rather than deny life; an attempt to salvage life — which Marx and Marcuse want to erase with the Oedipal bliss of post-capitalism — through Apollonian beautifications. While Infinite Jest is pessimistic and The Odyssey is optimistic, they both are deeply committed to ennobling life by an Apollonian taming of the Oedipal abyss.
The same impulse which summons art into life as the seductive replenishment for further living and the completion of existence also gave rise to the Olympian world, in which the Hellenic “Will” held before itself a transfiguring mirror. In this way, the gods justify the lives of men, because they themselves live it — that is the only satisfactory theodicy! Existence under the bright sunshine of such gods is experienced as worth striving for in itself […] in the Apollonian stage, the “Will” spontaneously demands to keep on living […]
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of TragedyAs tho’ to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence […]
— Alfred Tennyson, Ulysses
Does art promote or condemn the Dionysian? According to us, it condemns it — it tries to bring the unsupervised content of the unconscious into the gaze of cultural lucidity — but according to Marcuse and Adorno, art serves as a window into that Utopian, primeval world of freedom that the Odyssean reality principle has robbed us of. To Adorno, genuine art helps us see the contradictions afflicting our current stage of dialectical development — the destination being the recovery of that primeval world.
Marcuse too saw art as the anticipation of that Oedipal world. With the spirit of Romanticism coursing through his German veins, Marcuse saw aesthetics and rationality as homogeneous forces whose functions are to negate a congealed reality of domination. Rationality is an epistemological mode that evolves and art depicts the possibilities of a world beyond the reality principle.
Reason is the negation of the negative.
— Herbert Marcuse, Note on Dialectic[…] art contains the rationality of negation. In its advanced positions, it is the Great Refusal — the protest against that which is. The modes in which man and things are made to appear, to sing and sound and speak, are modes of refuting, breaking, and recreating their factual existence.
— Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man[…] behind the aesthetic form lies the repressed harmony of sensuousness and reason — the eternal protest against the organization of life by the logic of domination, the critique of the performance principle.
[…] there is no genuine work of art that does not reveal the archetypal content: the negation of unfreedom.
— Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization
Both Marcuse and Adorno see art as an Oedipal window — a horizon where can be glimpsed the Oedipal recovery that awaits us at the end of capitalism. Their theoretical framework tainted their analysis of art and turned it into a machine that is complicit in their ambition. Art is a character in their theoretical narrative.
Marcuse and Adorno’s idea that art is an anti-capitalist agent is all the more confusing when you think about it. Marcuse advocates for a recovery of pre-civilizational bliss through prosperity — beyond, not before, capitalism. He believes that, with enough prosperity, people will go back to the ways of pre-civilization without the material destitution that once accompanied it. But what exactly is the bliss of pre-civilization? This is where they happily admit that their ambition is for a world of Eros, in which people get to enjoy the free and unrestrained pleasures of life in an Edenic world where the need for labor has been eradicated.
What would such a world look like? It is as though we think people would return to churches or tend communal gardens if only they had the time and the wealth to do so. Those practices are not the most authentic and natural activities of mankind; they are the customary activities of a given people in a particular material context. In a prosperous world, we will no longer need those customs. So what will it look like? Prosperity will only bring more of what we currently have: alienation and secularism, not liberation.
The true bliss of pre-civilization is in the Apollonian myths that sustained groups and beautified reality. Prosperity condemns Apollonian masks as opiates that distract us from genuine emancipation; it wants to eradicate the need for the Apollonian drive. In this, prosperity is the enemy of art: it wants the womb. This is why Marcuse and Adorno are wrong: art does not condone the womb, it condemns it. Art wards it away with its totemic mechanism.
When Goethe said, “There is no surer way of evading the world than by Art; and no surer way of uniting with it than by Art.” he knew that art can both serve as a womb or a totem (an anti-womb). [Source] Art can either swallow your attention or it can call you. In today’s culture, we are trying to rid art of its former ties with transcendence, religion, tradition, and worship. We are trying to de-Apollonize art and transform it into one more instrument of our Oedipal project. In so doing, we are stripping art of its civilizational logic, voluntarily and enthusiastically calling forth the subjectivity of art as we lament atomization. For the bliss of the Oedipal, we tarnish the Homeric in favor of prosperity. Art consolidates; utility isolates.
Our need for beauty is not something that we could lack and still be fulfilled as people. It is a need arising from our metaphysical condition, as free individuals, seeking our place in a shared and public world. We can wander through this world, alienated, resentful, full of suspicion and distrust. Or we can find our home here, coming to rest in harmony with others and with ourselves. […] Desecration is a kind of defence against the sacred, an attempt to destroy its claims.
— Roger Scruton, Beauty: A Very Short IntroductionIts ideal was utility, and utility only. […] The rest was luxury, superstition, or barbarism. Now, this utility was utility conducive to the “happiness of the greatest number,” and this happiness consisted in not-doing […] The aim of mankind was held to consist in relieving the individual of as much of the work as possible […] Freedom from the “misery of wage-slavery,” equality in amusements and comforts and “enjoyment of art” […] In place of the honest religion of earlier times there was a shallow enthusiasm for […] progress in the technics of labour-saving and amusement-making. Of the soul, not one word.
— Oswald Spengler, Man and Technics
Orientalism: The West’s Masterpiece
Before closing the article, let us take a detour and study how the Apollonian is used outside the aesthetic context. We tend to think that art is limited to those situations and objects we use aesthetic language in/for. But the laws that govern aesthetics follow us outside the museum, and they far exceed the mere contemplative moment that marks our consumption of a given work of art. Art is a repressive mechanism, and its Apollonian mechanism can be observed unexpected situations — like witch hunts and orientalism.
In Orientalism (1978), Edward Said (1935–2003) discusses how our concept of the oriental world are reflections of the Western spirit. To use our terms, the “Orient” — just like native America — was narrativized into a dream picture; it was inscrutable, sexual, and irrational. The Orient was theorified into a nightmare-image — the anti-West. The “Orient” is in fact a wide diaspora of different cultures, flattened by the Western eye, eager to treat its own neuroses on the back of entire cultures. Orientalism is an Apollonian science, aesthetic, and epistemology; it is a Western discourse.
[Western literary pilgrims] found in the Orient a locale sympathetic to their private myths, obsessions, and requirements.
The Orient that appears in Orientalism, then, is a system of representations framed by a whole set of forces that brought the Orient into Western learning […]
The eccentricities of Oriental life, with its odd calendars, its exotic spatial configurations, its hopelessly strange languages, its seemingly perverse morality, were reduced considerably when they appeared as a series of detailed items presented in a normative European prose style.
— Edward Said, OrientalismThe regions of the unknown (desert, jungle, deep sea, alien land, etc.) are free fields for the projection of unconscious content. Incestuous libido and patricidal destrudo are thence reflected back against the individual and his society in forms suggesting threats of violence and fancied dangerous delight — not only as ogres but also as sirens of mysteriously seductive, nostalgic beauty.
— Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces
In the Oriental narrative, we see yet again the same neuroses surrounding witches and “blacks”. The Arabs are so numerous that their individualities melt into each other; they are devious, lascivious, lawless, and irrational; like the witches who dwell in labyrinthian forests, like the madmen who dwell in the madhouse or out at sea, and like the “blacks” who “live in the jungle”, the Arabs live in the oceanic expanses of the desert; and like native Americans who like in the vast gardens of an unspoiled arcadia, they are authentic, child-like, and noble.
The Oriental is irrational, depraved (fallen), childlike, “different”; thus the European is rational, virtuous, mature, “normal.”
— Edward Said, Orientalism
Once again, we can see a process of nightmarization being projected onto real people. Orientalism is the production and study of this nightmarization; the Orient is an Apollonization of the Western cultural spirit. It is quite easy to behold the Apollonized Dionysian in Orientalist art, music, literature, etc.; in the features, subjects, and representations, one can see Western neuroses attired in the signifiers of Oriental stereotypes. The Middle East was used as a receptive template on which the West projected its own neuroses.
Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul.
— Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
In his video on Orientalist Music, Iranian-born Quebec YouTuber Farya Faraji discusses the differences between Middle Eastern and Orientalist music. Orientalist music makes no use of Middle Eastern musical traditions; it relies on a narrow soundscape (Double Harmonic Major Scale played on second-rate digital versions of Middle Eastern instruments) and on stereotypical symbols (turbans, deserts, bazaars, pyramids, camels, etc.) to evoke pre-existing Orientalist representations. He describes Orientalist music as the musical equivalent of joining your fingers above your palm, talking about pizza in a high-pitched voice, and calling the performance “Italian”.
Orientalism is Apollonian in that it is like putting a wall between you and a tiger’s den and painting an angry tiger on that wall; it keeps the original object at a distance, repeating the original perception. The details of Middle Eastern musical traditions that are inscrutable to classical Western traditions (like microtonality) are repressed by Orientalist Apollonization. Orientalist literature, art, and music are Apollonian constructs intended for the Western spirit. Orientalism does not show the Middle East; it shows the Orient.
One of the most insidious ways the Western world narrativized the Orient is by reading into its societal composition a fallen people, descendants from the glorious men of antiquity. Great efforts were put into trying to revive the Orient into its former greatness.
The Oriental Arab was “civilized man fallen again into a savage state” […]
In the Orient one suddenly confronted unimaginable antiquity […]
— Edward Said, Orientalism
Many of the men who did this were empathetic, interested, and curious; they learned the language, lived with locals, admired their culture, converted to their religion, and deeply respected the “Orientals” — they were not raging racists. Still, the Orient was not consulted on this matter; they were forced into a frame that was not theirs. The project was not to help the Middle East; it was to help the Orient.
Witches, savages, the Orient, and other nightmarizations are not bad by default — they are bad when acted upon. In themselves, they are great opportunities to experience our own cultural neuroses. The Orient is unmistakably gorgeous, though it must not be mistaken for the Middle East. In his video, Farya Faraji at one point says that Orientalism robs Westerners from the opportunity to experience one of the richest cultures in the world. I disagree. The Middle East is assuredly replete with cultural wealth, but the Orient is replete with significance that resonates with my cultural spirit. I can learn about Middle Eastern culture and be wowed by how interesting, different, and rich it is, but it rarely will resonate with me as much as a great work of Orientalism. Of course, we must discern between a rich Orientalist work of art and a puddle of worn-out clichés nonetheless. But, in itself, the Orient is beautiful.
The iconoclast architecture of the Orient — unfathomable and inscrutable — evokes the same neurosis as 2001: A Space Odyssey’s black monolith. Both are transcendent, hostile to being solved or shackled by Apollonian reason, and evocative of a distant, lost, and overwhelming greatness that captivates with awe, sublimity, admiration, and fear. There, behind the triumphantly beautiful signifier, lurks neurotic wealth I would not find anywhere else. Orientalism is my culture, much to the legitimate dismay of a continent.
The Internet & the Culture of Supervision
[…] thousands of eyes posted everywhere, mobile attentions ever on the alert […]
[…] in a panopticism in which the vigilance of intersecting gazes was soon to render useless both the eagle and the sun.
— Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
The witch (subjected to the wrath of Christian justice and rational domination), the madman (irrational, undifferentiated, contained in the madhouse, explained by the clinic, and endlessly represented), the “black” (primitive, indiscriminately deindividualized, enslaved, Apollonized in nightmarizations and minstrel shows), the Oriental, the native American, etc. were all subject to violent scrutiny, study, and Apollonization. The need to solve them through discourse was at the core of their domination. The world must be made intelligible and beautiful; it must be understandable and in their image.
[…] that very ‘minimal beauty’ which is a permanent interest of rational beings, as they strive to achieve order in their surroundings and to be at home in their common world.
— Roger Scruton, Beauty: A Very Short IntroductionIn order to know these cultures, we no doubt had to, not only exclude them, not only scorn them, but also exploit them, conquer them, and in some sense through violence keep them silent. We silenced madness, and we learned about it. We silenced foreign cultures, and we learned about them. And perhaps we might say we had to wait for the great Puritanism of the 19th century to suppress sexuality for us to finally learn about it through [the psychological sciences].
— Michel Foucault, The Lost Interview
The Apollonian discourse is the strategy we use to resolve the anxiety we feel toward that which we cannot understand; we aesthetify, narrativize, explain, and subject that which is unknowable to the supervisory gaze of a discourse. Nothing terrifies us more than the unsupervised — the enemy of civilization. Nothing good happens behind closed doors — where the gaze cannot reach.
So far, we have discussed the Dionysian in very poetic terms. But we do not have to. What we have discussed up until now is still present in full vigor in today’s world. In this section — as we move further away from the contexts we would usually reserve the term “aesthetic” to describe — I want to go over the logic of the Apollonian discourse in today’s world.
The archetypes behind our qualification as social beings are numerous, but one stands out: the Other. Our mind is haunted with expectations of a crowd; the gaze of a million nameless eyes. Through this “Other”, a gaze is cast in between every member of society; like strings weaving a fabric whose tides civilization labors every day to stay afloat on top of. Demons dwell beneath the waves, and each requires the civil cooperation of the crew to be defeated, lest these creatures prevail and sink the ship and its men back into the primordial waters of chaos. The Other is the archetypal Eye; the ready-made expectation of moral supervision (God, group, king, etc.).
The gaze I encounter […] is, not a seen gaze, but a gaze imagined by me in the field of the Other.
— Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis
Our instinct for the Other has taken material shape in mass media and the Internet. When we say “the gaze”, it is easy to think of “the screen” and “the camera”, but it is more subtle than that. The gaze manifests in the desire to drink matcha lattes and go rollerblading in a pretty outfit on a summer day; it’s acting like a YouTuber or a live streamer; it’s the quotidianization of art; it’s when remakes, nostalgia-bait, and references to the real world we all know inundate the media landscape; it’s when you reform your personal behavior in response to the discourse to better integrate into the crew/Other.
Everything must have an acronym; everything must be shown and stylized. Activity is turned into participation as you drink hot cocoa while reading a book on a rainy Autumn day — an activity that is meant to be watched rather than done (but what conformist bliss we feel then!).
From the moment that this gaze appears, the subject tries to adapt himself to it, he becomes that punctiform object, that point of vanishing being with which the subject confuses his own failure.
What determines me, at the most profound level, in the visible, is the gaze that is outside.
— Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis
The discourse envelops all with an aura of Apollonian propriety and safety. We have incarnated the Other in a material form — religion in technology. And now that — as Wagner said — “It is reserved to art to salvage the kernel of religion”, art — devoid of transcendence and reduced to utility — is treated like an instrument of discourse and supervision. Art no longer transports you beyond this world; it corroborates, repeats, and affirms it through references and preaching (Examples: 1, 2, 3). Transcendence is dead.
The camera, the television broadcast, the Twitch commentator, the Twitter or Instagram discourse, etc. all together articulate the Other into existence; together, they weave a moral fabric and a code of behavior and being. Now, the one-on-one interactions of the pre-Internet days and the private events that are governed by a local morality feel unregulated and unsafe a sense of unregulated fear; they must be described, mocked, gazed at, or have the discourse injected into them. The door cannot be shut; the Other must be O.K. with what is happening.
The effect of not knowing whether you will be observed or not produces an introjection of the surveillance apparatus.
— Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism
It is no surprise that crime shows are so popular, and why videos of famous discourse representatives reacting to crime shows are so popular (as if we needed more than one Eye to fully dispel the Dionysian emanating from the unsupervised). Can you imagine being in the scenario of To Catch a Predator — in a house where a predator is meeting with an underage girl? witnessing the moral fabric silently allowing evil to happen without music, narration, visual interfaces, commentary, and discourse to subdue it? This is just what the Apollonian is for. Justice, T.V., and discourse reaction work together to throw light on unsupervised activities and regulate the audience by integrating them within that light.
Our culture is terrified of the unsupervised, and it desperately tries to shed light on everything; Apollonizing and discoursifying to ward off the sea and add more men to the crew. We will place a camera, an announcer, or a Twitter feed wherever we can to make sure reality is layered with the Eye; to ensure that the Other — the crowd and the discourse — are always there. Never should you have an isolated experience, unless it has been approved and discoursified (unless it has injected the discourse in your brain like a security camera, supervising you remotely). Events must be photographed, but most importantly, they must be photographable: adjusted, framed, and integrated into the aesthetic of the discourse. Things feel more “real” then. Alone, in a group, at an event, etc., we see people pledging allegiance to the group through conformity of discourse. One-on-one conversations must be mediated by an overarching gaze and a code of behavior. We bask under the gaze of the Other, reveling in the old familiar bliss of conformity.
Noting how controlling and inescapable the discourse is, it should now be clear just how futile it is for us to use it as an instrument of normalization. For a while now, we have been trying to normalize sex by talking about it, putting it in the open, and integrating it into the public sphere. The result, however, was not normalization but discoursification. We may notice that sex today is far stricter than it used to be. This is not altogether a bad thing, but it has definitely infiltrated the gaze in the most private and intimate part of our daily lives. Sexuality is more supervised today than it used to be. We have not accepted sex, we have simply created avenues for acceptable sex. Sex has become more free, so long as conversations and intercourse happen between individuals who have security cameras in their brains, supervising their words and acts.
[…] sex was taken charge of, tracked down as it were, by a discourse that aimed to allow it no obscurity, no respite.
[…] you will seek to transform your desire, your every desire, into discourse.
[…] we convince ourselves that we have never said enough on the subject […]
— Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1
Discourse is not acceptance; acceptance means allowing the unsupervised. Cultures that accept sex do not need to Apollonize it; they do not need to talk about it so much. We could simply let people’s sexuality happen and punish excesses when they happen, but in large populations, the Other is enlarged, and its gaze demands supervision. It enacts its prohibitional regime not through domination, but through the creation of a discourse.
The Internet is a stage where crowds of strangers tell each other how to act, live their lives, groom themselves, be romantic, be healthy, etc. It is a world of moral realism. It is a performative world full of rituals and confessions. It is a world of symbols, villains, discourse, totems, heroes, and narratives. It is a world of conformity and factions. The gaze is in every camera, every video, every conversation, every activity, every pursuit, every thought. It is a world where everyone is the Other: a member of the totem.
Conclusion
To see beauty as nothing more than a subjective preference or a source of transient pleasure, is to misunderstand the depth to which reason and value penetrate our lives.
— Roger Scruton, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction
All of this too is part of aesthetics — the totem, the gaze, the Apollonian, the discourse, the supervision, and the stylization of existence. We can thus see why the “subjectivization” of art is so reductive; it decouples art from its cultural and civilizational function. When Scruton talks about manners, reason, value, and nobility, he is not talking about aesthetics as it exists inside the work of art, but aesthetics as it exists outside the work of art — the precondition for the work of art. Aesthetics is the logic of society.
Hopefully, it is now clear that the Apollonian drive is a core element in art. One will not find it in every work of art — not even most — but it is clear that it is an element of the aesthetic — an organ in the anatomy of art. It may be separate from its digestive system, but it is a part of its nervous system.
Only by eschewing language and custom can we begin to see art as more than the museum, fine arts, “creative expression”, and paintings or music. The logic of aesthetics follows us everywhere. Now armed with this new perspective, our aesthetic inquiries are enriched with a larger pool of concepts and mechanisms to draw from.
If we take the movie Alien (1979), we can see the details of the era (the space race, 20th-century science-anxiety, the Darwininan/Copernican insecurity of man as an unspecial animal in the cosmos, etc.). The ocean — that infinite margin surrounding civilization — was coursing with monsters beyond human strength and intellect; they were the guardians of that dark, and untraversable world, a world we were intruding on and inferior to. The victory of man over this overwhelming, bestial adversary is the narrative reassurance we seek. Evolution gave us abstract enough archetypes to make us adaptable to changing settings, and so “space” and “ocean” both satisfied that same inherent neurosis, which Westerners digest through our Faustian anxiety for expansion.
Thus the sailors of the bold vessels of Columbus, breaking the horizon of the medieval mind — sailing, as they thought, into the boundless ocean of immortal being that surrounds the cosmos, like an endless mythological serpent biting its tail — had to be cozened and urged on like children, because of their fear of the fabled leviathans, mermaids, dragon kings, and other monsters of the deep.
— Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces
This may in part explain why reports of alien abduction not only appear but strike the human imagination: it is a modernized mythology, springing from our archetypal instincts. But it does not explain why such stories are so much more common or aesthetically impactful in the Western world. Stories about alien invasions and intergalactic societies tap into a deep cultural neurosis of the Western mind: the fear of being colonized, the fear of being reduced to animals, or the fear of strange people with even stranger customs stepping on our cherished civilization as though it were nothing, overpowering us at our own game, etc. Aliens are a nightmarization; a symbolic complex where our values are optimized to a grotesque degree; a foreigner with an intellect unfathomably superior to our own; an intergalactic Faustian civilization that considers us no superior than those we defined ourselves on transcending. Nightmarizations are not just “fears”, they are unresolved neuroses in the spirit of culture — they can be biologically, culturally, or historically induced.
Henry James’ Turn of the Screw, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, George Orwell’s 1984, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, H.G. Wells’ War of the World and The Island of Dr. Moreau, Franz Kafka’s The Trial, Citizen Kane, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Whiplash, etc. all tap into culturally, historically, or biologically conditioned neuroses: uncanny, Protestant fear of authority, self-destructive Phallic ambition, biological terror, fascism, the fall of man, man being humiliated and overpowered by the unfathomable or that which should be beneath us, the degradation of man, man asserting his existence and supremacy, etc. There, a pulse, a glimmer of unsolvable terror lurks through the Apollonian veil — a “living wall”, to quote Schiller.
This entire conversation about the Dionysian, civilization, and the Oedipal might seem esoteric and completely detached from our current day, but it is quite on-brand of our current historical predicament to detach ourselves from our history. We have inherited the neuroses of our past, and we can see the same fear of the Dionysian capturing the imaginary of the present. Not too long ago, culture was obsessed with zombies, and it would be hard to come up with a scenario as representative of the Dionysian as zombies.
They appear from the spread of an uncanny virus; they bring about the fall of civilization; they become lawless horde animals lacking any individuality; and they are cannibals. Cannibalism is one of the most common tropes of our Dionysian fear of pre-civilization; It reminds them of a time when poverty was so great a calamity that the demands of the stomach made the advantages of social unions impossible to attain.
These nations then seem to me to be so far barbarous, as having received but very little form and fashion from art and human invention, and consequently to be not much remote from their original simplicity.
— Michel de Montaigne, Of CannibalsThe threat of cannibalism was a central theme in the morphology of the Sabbat.
— Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch[…] ritual murder [is] rumored to take place, as well as ritual cannibalism, ritual sex orgies, and other non-Western practices. […] Whites were dragged from their cars, taken into a nearby Black restaurant, butchered, cooked, and eaten.
— William Luther Pierce, The Turner DiariesCannibalism was at one time practically universal; it has been found in nearly all primitive tribes […]
— Will Durant, The Story of Civilizations, Vol. 1: Our Oriental Heritage
Let us not forget Dracula, who combines the uncanny irrationality of the Orient, this trope of cannibalism, and sexual appetite for young, Christian women. These archetypes are glimpses into the Dionysian.
Zombies tap into our Dionysian fears while respecting our new moral ideas. Our dream reflex made use of material that was neither oriental nor racial; it nightmarizes the Dionysian individual without making the target either a savage or a woman, and it nightmarizes the Dionysian fallen empire without using antiquity. The superego must approve the nightmare scenario before it can serve its Apollonian, therapeutic function.
Ruins captivate the Western mind. In them, we see the fall of civilization, but that is only a part of it. Following the rediscovery of Greek texts, the Western world has been haunted by profound fantasies about the golden age of civilization that preceded Christianity. Thus, the fallen empire too has figured repeatedly as a trope in our nightmarizations concerning pre-civilization — a reverence for the paternal archetype of civilization inter-mingled with our instinct for ancestor worship. Ruins are replete with symbolic significance in the Western mind.
Since WWII, we have associated antiquity-worship with fascism. We recall Adorno’s thesis. Just as the rediscovery of classics led to Orientalism and just as the Reformation planted the seeds for Orwell’s (1903–1950) 1984 (1949), Nazism inculcated our cultural spirit with new neuroses. Today, these ruins tap into those new neuroses — like the corpse of a Homeric father. But still — from the precipice of historical distance — they bear the same constitution, the same terror, forever haunting the Western spirit: chaos.
