Modernism Ep06 ⟩ “The View from the Edge”

About this event

What Is Modernism? Expressionism and the Invasion of the World by the Self The Amazing Thing That Happened Last Time After employing Dalí’s great paranoiac-critical method on a few Rorschach cards, we performed an exorcism—for a few people who worried that being expressive channels for the Wyrm of the Underdark (the “demon” we chose to invoke during the Dalí segment) “wasn’t generally helpful.” (Oh, thanks again to Jason, the young Jesuit psychiatrist [MD+PhD] who joined us from Georgetown, for reading the rites. Unbelievable stuff, and it took less than seven minutes, just like he said.) The most interesting part of the evening was the conversation during our freie Aussprache segment: we all marveled at the fact that all three exorcizands complained that being “brought back” made things worse! Then we talked about Buddhist no-self versus Crowley’s True Will versus Nietzschean self-creation—and about occultism, Surrealism, and depth psychology as rival methods for reading the subjective stuff out of which the fully baked self of the NOW gets continuously manufactured, peels off, and is replaced by the next membrane vomited up by … By the thing that is either No-Self, True Will, Random Crap, or Infra-Physical Subjective Energy, which is our core (no-)self. Then we talked about easy ways to hear your demon out: • Scientology Solo-NOTs. After whatever astonishing expenditure is required to reach the upper levels, you can sit by yourself putting your Body Thetans on the couch, taking their ontological military ID—*What are you? Who are you?*—until they realize that they are themselves rather than you, your spleen, “fear,” the Navy, or whatever else they have mistaken themselves for, at which point they “blow.” Here’s the actual text (https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/NOTs/origins/corydon-messiah.html). • Tarot cards. • The I Ching. • Automatic writing—as with the automatic-writing sessions of George Yeats, from which W. B. Yeats developed A Vision. • Automatic-communication aids, like the Ouija board. • Psychedelics, as a modern way of trying to get beneath conditioning and the socially manufactured personality to something more primordial. That project has obvious affinities—without being identical to them—with the Indian ontological psychologies of Vedānta and Kashmir Śaivism. Except they don’t use cheesy language. They use pre-Socratic-grade metaphors and, at their best, conceptual machinery complicated enough to make Hegel happy. Buddhist analyses of the production of the self, meanwhile, have extraordinary affinities with Hume and, in a very different way, Kant—although Buddhism got there a couple of millennia first. • And finally we talked about using ART. Then we saw five minutes of the greatest documentary ever made—*A Soft Self-Portrait of Salvador Dalí*, that miracle narrated by Orson Welles. Here’s the link! (https://youtu.be/Bn8ou8B8zJM) Dalí is Literally the Overman All were delighted and shocked at the greatness of Dalí and realized that he was playing us, but in a spirit of love, because what else is there to do when you are Enlightened, as he is? If you read Nietzsche and Sartre and conclude that meaning and value are made rather than discovered ready-made in the furniture of the universe, then … nothing changes. You still feel like crap. What if you acted that insight instead of understanding it as a lonely, thinkable, empty fantasy? You don’t even try to play it out in your head. When you read Foucault and realize that categories like “the mad” are not simply natural quiddities waiting around for us to discover them, but are historically produced ways of carving up and governing human beings, you don’t even run a SimCity scenario and do real speculative fiction. Thinking through how it might play out in a possible world is already something. But actually being one of those people who knows that what others are, what you are, and what things mean is shot through with convention, history, construction, interp