by Elin Brimheim Heinesen
God according to Michelangelo
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” That is how it began according to John 1:1 in the Bible. And therein lies a deep truth. For without words, one cannot tell a story. Without words or signs, there would be no awareness of a story, as there would most likely not exist any reflective consciousness that describes reality using a symbolic language and creates history – and thereby itself. This is necessarily how it must be when the unspeakable becomes sayable and intertwines in mutual dependence, becoming the starting point for our understanding of the world around us.
Consciousness – referred to as ‘consciousness’ because it recognizes space and time (and what lies between them) and reflects upon it – was at least conceived. More is not known about it. The question of how conscious awareness arose has puzzled mankind and led to various ideas about its own origin. Where all rational, logical thinking falls short, only emptiness remains – or ‘God’ – depending on what one prefers to believe.
Perhaps the world is a story that ‘God’ tells. Or that we tell – if it makes any difference. Maybe we have not ‘really’ progressed beyond the present moment. Perhaps it is only through words – the stories of language in a broad sense – that it is possible to move forward on the journey through time and space and create a world or a world history.
Language is a tool for naming the reality that surrounds us, which we use to bring order to chaos. It originated from a need: a cry that seeks to reach out, grasp, and unite, to question, explain, and understand. The language’s curious ‘why’ demands its ‘therefore’. This drive is the ‘nature’ of language. Language asks and answers and creates arguments; it legitimizes itself by demonstrating or claiming causal relationships. The more language seeks to explain, the more it stylizes and structures reality. The more it presents itself by putting more and more words on reality, the more it distances itself from the reality it aims to describe.
The Narrative and Its Play with Reality
Language creates its own rationality and subjugates us to the conception of ‘history’ – that the world evolves and connects as a continuous string of events. It makes us believe that the world behaves like stories – akin to closed narrative systems: a novella or a novel, where things and beings, dead or alive, are protagonists or power centres around which the action unfolds, where the interaction between them is the driving force and causal links the development in history. The story is perceived over time as more and more “real” – more real than reality itself.
In the universe of narratives, it is the value hierarchy – the tension between two polar opposites, black and white – that reproduces the story and gives it life. Every argumentative, progressive form of language, guided by communicative rationality, behaves in the same way. It has precisely the same logical structure as any other narrative. It is narrative. This narrative logic seems – with or without an “epistemic dimension” (which I will delve into later) – to have unleashed a fantastic communicative creativity that has challenged human brain activity and possibly even advanced human intelligence. But it has also made it harder to distinguish between fiction and reality.
An immense arsenal of stories about the world has accumulated since historical times began. Mythologies, religions, ideologies, natural and human scientific theories, philosophy, and especially the arts. What I am writing here, as you are reading now. All sign constructions that crystallize through the fascination inherent in the euphoria and magic of creating an ‘explanation’, an ‘understanding’, to ‘penetrate’ things. To break out of individual isolation and reach out to others in an attempt to form and share a collective consciousness of reality.
History is Language History is Power History.
Structuralism and semiotics raised a philosophical question: How do language and reality influence each other? What is their relationship?
“Is it the human who uses the language, or is it rather the language that, when spoken, is called a human?”
This is how Peter Kemp formulates the issue in the introduction to Paul Ricoeur’s book ‘Philosophy of Language’ (1) and touches on something significant. Does the world consist of anything other than narratives? These are questions that can only be asked from a point where language is separated from human beings and reality.
Per Aage Brandt has philosophized in a short article about the inseparable connection between life, the world, and the narratives. About what could be called the magic of storytelling. It might in a way provide an answer (2):
“What is narratology? It is what can be said about stories, without considering what they are about, or who they are told to, or who is telling them. Is there anything left? Strangely enough, most of what makes our knees tremble or our hair stand on end – there is always something that rises when we hear someone tell – namely the very concise form of what is told, that which binds a series of imagined events together and forms a world.”
Reality turns into stories and vice versa. History creates itself. It spins itself out and into time and space. Morten Kyndrup says (3):
“The “history” is and will never be anything other than our fiction about what has happened and what will happen. (…) ‘History’ is always something that exists in the present, a living and highly significant phenomenon, because through the regulation of what has happened, it easily becomes guiding for what will happen. (…) We are constantly, voluntarily or involuntarily, contributing to ‘history’ and the stories.”
Since ‘we’ can only manifest ourselves in reality through language (in a broad sense as all signs) – ‘we’ are, so to speak, language – every development or history therefore becomes a history of language, of signs and symbolization.
According to Baudrillard, reality is never externally given in relation to human production of meaning – cultural patterns of interpretation produce ‘realities’ or simulacra, if you will. History must thus be read ‘semiologically’ (4). He points out that the traditionally divided levels in society, the economic, political, ideological, etc., are penetrated by the same structuring of signs. In connection with a critique of power, Baudrillard has analyzed the organization of signs throughout history. In Western societies, this fundamental organization has shifted towards an increasing depletion of signs’ reference along with a growing instrumentalization and control of all social relations (5).
Power is founded and consists in the symbolization of the real, in signifying, which in turn establishes discourses that determine our reality. An example of the manifestation of power is the communication forms of bureaucracy, its seizure of information, its physical and institutional programs. Power maintains itself through exchange, reversibility. If there is no exchange, i.e. if it doesn’t find an opposite pole to play against, it dissolves. An example is the battle of the sexes. Feminism has, so to speak, ‘defeated’ the masculine totalization by only responding with an empty echo. Simply by not ‘being’ according to the directive, the masculine imaginarily determined symbolization of its identity (6).
From Historical Ignorance to History
Primitive societies organize themselves through ritual symbolic exchanges. “An imaginary symbolization of the real can generally be described as the subject’s totalizing existential ambition” (7). Symbolicity is codified in ritualized behavioral patterns. The symbolic is meant to dissolve the real and the subject’s separation. Baudrillard formulates it as follows (8):
“The symbolic is neither a concept, an instance, a category, nor a structure – it is an act of exchange and a social relationship that brings the real to an end, dissolving the real and at the same moment the opposition between the real and the imaginary (…) The reality effect is always only the structural effect of a disjunction between two terms, and our renowned principle of reality is, with all its normativity and repression, nothing but the generalization of this disjunctive code at all levels (…) (The symbolic) is the utopia that concludes the topics of soul and body, human and nature, the real and non-real, birth and death. In the symbolic operation, the two terms lose their principle of reality.” (Jean Baudrillard: “The Symbolic Exchange and Death”, p. 204-5)
In the story “Brodie’s Report,” Borges has fantasized about a language-poor and almost history-less primitive tribe (but not without culture), whose different perception of reality, in ‘our sense,’ lacks almost any perspective in time and space. Interesting reading in this regard, which is recommended. (9)
As a result of the accumulation of the produced reality effect, which is cemented and structured more and more, there is a transition from the history-less to the historical society. Up until the Middle Ages, signs are limited and binding. In the hierarchical and static society, language functions as a social ordering form. Signifiant and signifie are not separated, do not exist, because the world of objects is – as of yet – not objectified. Thus, one is cut off from thinking beyond the system, which therefore remains static.
Power cements itself by installing itself in a permanent giving position, subjugating the masses by turning them into recipients. It thus constitutes the masses by creating distance from them. Power dispenses ordinances, creates norms, and gives itself symbolic being. This transformation of symbolization heralds the era of metaphysics, the rise of modernity and logocentrism. The Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment. What Baudrillard calls the first order of simulacra.
Modernity – the Liberation Project of Signs
The signs, like signifiers, have slowly begun to detach themselves from their signified, to simulate. They are anchored in a referential function, still representing an original, but oriented from a fixed point: an abstract God, a Reality, a Nature, a Reason. Power legitimizes itself through the grand references, the Law, Reason, Humanity. The signs assert a nature, an essence, a reality that exists only as an effect of themselves. Baudrillard says:
“Let us not forget that this perspectival space (in painting and architecture, as well as in politics or economics) is just a simulation model among others, and the only characteristic of it is that it allows for truth effects, for an objectivity that is unheard of and unknown in the other models. Perhaps it is just a mirage?” (12).
Thus, from the beginning, modernity is a fable.
In parallel with the rise of the bourgeois society, the second simulacrum order emerges, the era of antagonism, where the signs detach even further. The signification now refers to production. To the production of itself, its own becoming. The signs form equivalences, for example, use value versus exchange value. Whereas before the signs simulated commitment to a fixed overarching referent, they now simulate commitment to dualities, culture/nature, class/class, progression/reaction, individual/society, etc. Oppositions that inevitably form series, dialectics, and value hierarchies, where one side is considered positive and the other negative.
The desire for the ‘positive’ to ‘fairly’ triumph over and remove the ‘negative’ introduces emancipation, the great project of modernity’s liberation, which is meant to lead us all to Utopia. One defines oneself logocentrically, from a core towards a higher goal, legitimizing oneself morally, measuring oneself by how well or poorly one contributes to an overarching ‘rational’ goal. But the meanings waver. The “presupposed, established reality grounded in ideological or scientific discourses can be doubted and debated. Emancipation reveals itself as an accumulation of empty postulates.
The Postmodern Condition / The Ultimate Detachment of Signs
In the third order of simulacra, the simulation of signs is so total that they detach completely from ‘reality’, meaning any reference to overarching referentials. They primarily function as sociality and are only given in their differences from one another. They can no longer manage reality, and to maintain coherence, they must seek to reintroduce reality by simulating it – desperately clinging to an alleged reality, termed by Baudrillard: the hyperreal, i.e., the real that only unfolds on the level of the sign.
The signs produce a stylistic sociality where all substantive differentiations are blurred. For example, the distinction between work and non-work is neutralized, as both equally contribute to the production of sociality. Everything can be absorbed as elements in the simulation of sociality. Reality is something produced and staged like everything else. Media discusses media, television produces shows about itself, politicians mostly engage in narrative games following the motto: Let’s quickly bring out some contrasts so we can see who is on the right and who is on the left, allowing us to create stories about it.
The signs can be controlled and positioned to an unprecedented degree, as one desires. Publics and opinions mimic old realities, they are “produced or reproduced as simulated phenomena in a hall of mirrors without exit” (13). The symbolic register of signs cuts off in self-reflection and threatens to converge into emptiness. They lose their credibility and with them the “reality” they have (re)presented.
Power is slowly dissolving because it no longer has a foundation. “Only the symbolic play of desire can give its (power’s) material, its traces, validity in the real for its imaginary subjects” (14). Reality implodes in the hyperrealism of simulation.
And Then What?
This is the pervasive cultural situation called the postmodern condition. A state that requires immense conceptual clean-up and restructuring work, where intuition and sobriety must more than ever determine communication. The daunting question has been: Won’t there just be an empty void when all discourses collapse? Does it not end in chaos? Will there be anything left at all?
This anxiety stems from a traditional logocentric discursive thinking, where a sharp distinction is made between reality and fiction. Here, the fictional or imaginary is only seen as an epiphenomenon of the real. The imaginary forms of understanding are criticized as distortions derived from an inadequate grasping of reality itself.
In a newer framework of understanding, the real is seen as an element whose dimensions (time, space, causality, etc.) depend on a symbolic logic, while the imaginary in a sense gets closer to the subject’s ‘true’ being, without attributing the imaginary either more or less facticity than the real, as they cannot be separated. Per Aage Brandt expresses it as follows (15):
“But when material is perceived as traces, it is no longer external to the subject. The real no longer precedes what is its rationality, nature, and humanity (logos). The real becomes truly impressive and respectable only when it is subjectively organized as space and time by a tracing. The logocentric epoch’s sharp distinction between reality and fiction, between factuality and fictiveness, therefore closely corresponds to the difference between (the context-free) sign and (the context-bound) trace as historically distinct modes of inscription. On one hand, the child learns to “write” (sign), on the other hand to “draw” (trace); it is not the image, but the written text alone that is understood as initiation into true sociality. In other societies, outside of this epoch, this sharp distinction does not necessarily appear, and reality does not confront the subject “from the outside” as a foreign, compelling figure. Like a “society”.”
And elsewhere (16):
“(Processes of symbolization) are objectless movements, a ‘structured unrest’, which continues to organize and reorganize the relationship between traces, language, and subject within our practical object formations.”
Therefore, an implosion of the meanings of symbols now does not necessarily mean, from this perspective, an implosion of existence as a whole, as many seem to fear. The process of symbolization continues albeit on a completely different basis and perhaps in entirely new forms, where the imaginary is pushed to the forefront.
In fact, it appears that the dimension of cognition, arts, and sciences are advancing in this process, as certain modernist positions are being relinquished. Modernity was upheld by dominant discourses that did not particularly seek understanding, but rather aimed to anchor every action in a justification of communicative and socially integrative nature, in other words: in manipulation.
In the current situation, the approach to the world seems less burdened and clouded by discourses and communicative censorship. We are becoming more open to a more direct, one could say ‘objective’ and aesthetic interaction with reality. Where discourses collapse, curiosity and cognition break through – language, thought, perception – since cognition, unlike the discourses’ tendency to anchor, is highly mobile. It is characterized by the ability to change languages, models, terms, mathematical approaches, etc., as it is not bound by discursive communication considerations.
Concrete manifestations include the fact that aesthetic and scientific issues are increasingly on the public agenda, while much else that used to occupy minds is lost in uninteresting repetition and self-mimicry. More than ever, ‘style’ is emphasised.
Art can no longer be considered as an isolated phenomenon, as it, along with knowledge, has been forced to assume authority, partly because other authorities are currently relinquishing it. Another reason not to view art in isolation is that the art institution dissolves itself – much like many other power structures – by absorbing everything. Art, so to speak, ‘flows out’ into its surrounding reality. Narrativity can no longer sustain the discourses, but language, art, and knowledge still flutter merrily about.
Art as Knowledge
Art becomes knowing when it functions as a kind of spontaneous cultural analysis. When art no longer sets itself the task of interpreting a subject, class or other discursive entity, it becomes, through its artistic working method, a kind of exploration process – a dimension that attempts to characterize: how it is, while the connected activity, knowledge, asks: how it could be that it is as it is, or: how could it be. Postmodern artists say they think rather than reproduce. As such, art and knowledge are related and necessary for each other. And as such, art becomes interesting and significant outside its own traditional sphere. In the modernist realistic discourse, stabilized value formations made the concrete concrete. The development in e.g. modern visual arts moved from the concrete, anchored, moored world – to the abstract, but never truly let go. Truth was still identified with meaning.
The new painting has a different relationship to reality, where it does not just see itself as an illustration of an existing discursively stabilized reality. Realities are explored and stabilized anew. Therefore, the new painting does not have much respect for the neighborhood between tendencies and -isms in history, as it in modernism almost obliged painters to have respect for continuous time because it set a continuous time itself. The new painting is not a provocation, but an opening towards a reality that is different from continuous time.
Thus, visual art raises a drama about our relationship to reality and, among other things, brings issues to the agenda – especially in the philosophical debate – in its new role as a carrier of authority.
“Time has become not a solution – but a new problem that belongs in the midst of a thinking that ‘paints itself forward’. Perhaps it will soon also begin to ‘write itself forward’. That will be when we get an intelligent art criticism! “
… says Per Aage Brandt. (17).
