Modernity

киберпанк, который мы заслужили [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

— басбустед багет (@sugarbaget) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

>demonize masculinity
>deconstruct masculinity
>dissect masculinity
>commodify masculinity
>sell it to non-masculine men in bits and pieces for a premium
>profit [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

— Josef Bosch (@josefusbosch) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

I wonder if a boy has ever starved himself for 8 hours before a night out so he is at his maximum level of skinny??? Who’s the weaker sex again

— Elizabeth (@ElizaOReilly) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Cuddihy, John wrote:

Sublimation "is what Nietzsche calls the transformation of coarse drives into refined ones," writes Karl Jaspers. But sublimation can take place only as a result of inhibition, Nietzsche argued, and "this provides a clue to the explanation of the paradox that precisely in Europe's Christian period...the sex drive became love (amour-passion) as a result of sublimation" this is the bone that stuck in Freud's throat. Christian Europe, the goyim, had a corner on "romance".

The Ordeal of Civility

McGilchrist, Iain wrote:

 The specificity of the date she gives for the beginning of the modern era, of the era of Modern-ism – for it is to that self-proclaiming consciousness of radical change that she refers – is designed to suggest not so much the swiftness of the transition, as the abruptness of the disjunction, between what had gone before and what was to come after. As I hope to show later, that disjunction was not as great as it might appear. The change had already been long in process: what was sudden was the revelation of the consequences. It was less an avalanche after unexpected snow than a landslide following years of erosion.
The changes were, right enough, though, changes that affected all aspects of life: as she says, not just art, but the ways in which we conceived the world in which we lived, related to one another, and even saw ourselves in relation to the cosmos at large. Modernity was marked by a process of social disintegration which clearly derived from the effects of the Industrial Revolution, but which could also be seen to have its roots in Comte's vision of society as an aggregation of essentially atomistic individuals. The drift from rural to urban life, again both a consequence of the realities of industrial expansion and of the Enlightenment quest for an ideal society untrammelled by the fetters of the past, led to a breakdown of familiar social orders, and the loss of a sense of belonging, with far-reaching effects on the life of the mind. The advances of scientific materialism, on the one hand, and of bureaucracy on the other, helped to produce what Weber called the disenchanted world. Capitalism and consumerism, ways of conceiving human relationships based on little more than utility, greed, and competition, came to supplant those based on felt connection and cultural continuity. The state, the representative of the organising, categorising and subjugating forces of systematic conformity, was beginning to show itself to be an overweening presence even in democracies. And there were worrying signs that the combination of an adulation of power and material force with the desire, and power (through technological advance) to subjugate, would lead to the abandonment of any form of democracy, and the rise of totalitarianism.
The effects of abstraction, bureaucratisation and social dislocation on personal identity have been themes of sociology since Max Weber and Émile Durkheim, and their effects on consciousness in modernity have been explored in works such as The Homeless Mind, by Peter Berger and colleagues. Pervasive rationalistic, technical and bureaucratic ways of thinking have emptied life of meaning by destroying what Berger calls the ‘sacred canopy’ of meanings reflecting collective beliefs about life, death and the world in which we live. The resultant anomie, or loss of all bearings, the demise of any shared structure of values, leads to a sort of existential angst.

The Master and His Emissary

 

McGilchrist, Iain wrote:

The changes that characterise modernism, the culture of modernity, then, are far deeper and wider than their manifestation in art. They represent, I believe, a world increasingly dominated by the left hemisphere, and increasingly antagonistic to what the right hemisphere might afford.

McGilchrist, Iain wrote:

Let me briefly recap. In cases where the right hemisphere is damaged, we see a range of clinically similar problems to those found in schizophrenia. In either group, subjects find it difficult to understand context, and therefore have problems with pragmatics, and with appreciating the ‘discourse elements’ of communication. They have similar problems in understanding tone, interpreting facial expressions, expressing and interpreting emotion, and understanding the presuppositions that lie behind another's point of view. They have similar problems with Gestalt perception and the understanding and grasping of wholes. They have similar problems with intuitive processing, and similar deficits in understanding metaphor. Both exhibit problems with appreciating narrative, and both tend to lose a sense of the natural flow of time, which becomes substituted by a succession of moments of stasis. Both report experiencing the related Zeitraffer phenomenon in visual perception (something that can sometimes be seen represented in the art works of schizophrenic subjects). Both appear to have a deficient sense of the reality or substantiality of experience (‘it's all play-acting’), as well as of the uniqueness of an event, object or person. Perhaps most significantly they have a similar lack of what might be called common sense. In both there is a loss of the stabilising, coherence-giving, framework-building role that the right hemisphere fulfils in normal individuals. Both exhibit a reduction in pre-attentive processing and an increase in narrowly focussed attention, which is particularistic, over-intellectualising and inappropriately deliberate in approach. Both rely on piecemeal decontextualised analysis, rather than on an intuitive, spontaneous or global mode of apprehension. Both tend to schematise – for example, to scrutinise the behaviour of others, rather as a visitor from another culture might, to discover the ‘rules’ which explain their behaviour. The living become machine-like: as if to confirm the primacy of the left hemisphere's view of the world, one schizophrenic patient described by Sass reported that ‘the world consists of tools, and … everything that we glance at has some utilization’. From neuroimaging, too, there is evidence that schizophrenics show abnormal patterns of brain activation, often showing excessive left-hemisphere activation in situations where one would expect more activation of the right hemisphere.
This goes across a whole range of activities: for example, even the sense of smell appears to be abnormally lateralised. There is a decrease in expected right-hemisphere activation in limbic connections to the rhinencephalon (smell brain) and right orbitofrontal cortex, and an increase in left hemisphere activity during olfaction. When one considers how critical the sense of smell is for infant–mother bonding, and social bonding of all kinds, and the part it plays in grounding our world in intuition and the body, one appreciates that, tiny as this piece of the jigsaw may be, it is not insignificant. The right hemisphere is not functioning normally, and the left hemisphere takes its place. And, as it happens, drugs that help stabilise schizophrenia act to reduce dopaminergic activity, a form of neurotransmission on which the left hemisphere is dependent to a greater extent than the right.

[The Master and His Emissary]

McGilchrist, Iain wrote:

MODERNISM AND SCHIZOPHRENIA: THE CORE PHENOMENOLOGY

The influential psychologist Louis Sass has written widely about the culture of modernism, its art, its writings and its philosophy, in connection with the phenomenology of schizophrenia. In The Paradoxes of Delusion: Wittgenstein, Schreber, and the Schizophrenic Mind, Sass considers the parallels between the role of detached, introspective observation in philosophy, as discussed by Wittgenstein, and the reports of Daniel Paul Schreber, a provincial German judge who in middle age developed psychotic symptoms which he recorded in his Memoirs of My Nervous Illness.16 The importance of Sass's work is that it demonstrates how the nature of attention alters what it finds; and specifically that when we cease to act, to be involved, spontaneous and intuitive, and instead become passive, disengaged, self-conscious, and stare in an ‘objective’ fashion at the world around us, it becomes bizarre, alien, frightening – and curiously similar to the mental world of the schizophrenic.
Sass explores the idea that ‘madness … is the end-point of the trajectory [that] consciousness follows when it separates from the body and the passions, and from the social and practical world, and turns in upon itself’. For Sass, as for Wittgenstein, there is a close relation between philosophy and madness. The philosopher's ‘predilection for abstraction and alienation – for detachment from body, world and community’, can produce a type of seeing and experiencing which is, in a literal sense, pathological.

[The Master and His Emissary]

McGilchrist, Iain wrote:

In his ground-breaking work Madness and Modernism, Sass goes on to draw a multitude of closely argued parallels between the reported experiences of schizophrenics and the world picture of modernism and post-modernism. His purpose is not to pass a value judgment, simply to point out the parallels, in the literature, the visual arts and the critical discourse about art of this era, with every aspect of the core phenomenology of schizophrenia. His argument is compelling and illuminating, but it has a fascinating broader significance. What Sass picks up in modern culture and identifies with schizophrenia may in fact be the over-reliance on the left hemisphere in the West, which I believe has accelerated in the last hundred years. In fact Sass himself discusses this possibility (along with several others) in an appendix called ‘Neurobiological Considerations’.
Although the phenomenology of schizophrenia comprises an array of symptoms and experiences, these relate to a group of core disturbances in the relationship between the self and the world.
Perhaps the single most important one is what Sass calls hyperconsciousness. Elements of the self and of experience which normally remain, and need to remain, intuitive, unconscious, become the objects of a detached, alienating attention; and levels of consciousness multiply, so that there is an awareness of one's own awareness, and so on.

[The Master and His Emissary]

McGilchrist, Iain wrote:

Associated with this is what Sass calls a loss of ‘ipseity’, a loss in other words of the prereflective, grounding sense of the self. The self has to be constructed ‘after the fact’ from the products of observation, and its very existence comes into doubt. This gives rise to a reflexivity, whereby attention is focussed on the self and its body, so that parts of the self come to appear alien.
There is a loss of the pre-reflective sense of the body as something living and lived, a loss of the immediate physical and emotional experience which grounds us in the world, since bodily states and feelings fall under the spotlight of awareness, and are deprived of their normal compelling immediacy and intimacy. Emotions lose their normal directedness towards action, towards other beings, arising from a personal past and directed towards a personal future, in a coherent world of other beings.
There is a veering between two apparently opposite positions which are in reality aspects of the same position: omnipotence and impotence. Either there is no self; or all that the observing eye sees is in fact part of the self, with the corollary that there is no world apart from the self. Whether there is no self, or everything is embraced in the self, the result is the same, since both conditions lack the normal sense we have of ourselves as defined by an awareness that there exists something apart from ourselves. This position is associated, in schizophrenia, with a subjectivisation of experience: a withdrawal from the external world and a turning of attention inward towards a realm of fantasy. The world comes to lack those characteristics – the ultimate unknowability of aspects of the world that exceed our grasp, and the recalcitrance of a realm separate from our fantasy – that suggest a reality that exists apart from our will. At the same time, the world and other people in it are objectified, become objects. In a term borrowed from Heidegger, Sass sees an ‘unworlding’ of the world: a loss of the sense of the overarching context that gives coherence to the world, which becomes fragmented and lacking in meaning.

[The Master and His Emissary]

McGilchrist, Iain wrote:

The effect of hyperconsciousness is to produce a flight from the body and from its attendant emotions. Schizophrenics describe an emptying out of meaning – each word ‘an envelope emptied of content’, as one patient puts it, with thought become so abstract as to attain a sort of ineffable vacuity.
They may feel themselves entirely emptied of emotion, except for a pervasive feeling of anxiety or nausea in the face of the sheer existence of things. Bizarre, shocking and painful ideas or actions may be welcomed as a way of trying to relieve this state of numbed isolation. So it is, too, in modernism:
Sass compares Antonin Artaud (who himself suffered from schizophrenia): ‘I can't even find anything that would correspond to feelings’, and suggests that the ‘theatre of cruelty’, which Artaud originated, was a response to this devitalised condition. ‘I wanted a theatre’, he told Anaïs Nin, ‘that would be like a shock treatment, galvanise, shock people into feeling.’ These sentiments are reminiscent of the explanations given by patients who harm themselves, so as to relieve the numbness of no-feeling.
The patient etherised upon a table in the opening of ‘Prufrock’ seems prophetic of the anaesthetised state of modernism, in which everything physical and emotional is cut off.

[The Master and His Emissary]

McGilchrist, Iain wrote:

In modernism the disruption of narrative, with formal devices drawing attention away from the inherent temporality of language, empties human action and intention of the meaning they have in a world to which we respond, and which responds to us. According to Heidegger, ‘care’ is only possible within temporality, in which we are directed towards our own future, and that of others who share our mortality, a care which is grounded in a coherent past. All of this, coupled with the forcible alienation caused by the bringing into awareness of what is required to remain latent, results in a detachment and irony that are inimical to pathos, a subversive disengagement and spirit of mockery towards life and art.

[The Master and His Emissary]

McGilchrist, Iain wrote:

If one had to sum up these features of modernism they could probably be reduced to these: an excess of consciousness and an over-explicitness in relation to what needs to remain intuitive and implicit; depersonalisation and alienation from the body and empathic feeling; disruption of context; fragmentation of experience; and the loss of ‘betweenness’. Each of these is in fact to some degree implied in each of the others; and there is a simple reason for that. They are aspects of a single world: not just the world of the schizophrenic, but, as may by now be clear, the world according to the left hemisphere.
The problem of an unstable alternation between subjectivism and objectivism that Sass identifies in modernism (either polarity being at odds with a world in which there is still what I call betweenness) is associated with a derealisation and ‘unworlding of the world’, just as it is in schizophrenia. The world is either robbed of its substantiality, its ‘otherness’, its ontological status as an entity having any independence from the perceiving subject; or alternatively seen as alien, devoid of human resonance or significance. In either case the ego is passivised. In the one case it is little more than an impotent observer of inner experiences, sensations, images, and so on (derealisation); in the other it is transformed into a machine-like entity in a world of static neutral objects (unworlding). Instead of one consistent inhabited viewpoint, there arises an obvious perspectivism, or relativism, an uncertainty and multiplicity of points of view. This has the effect of either, on the one hand, drawing attention to the presence of a particular perspective, thereby displaying a recognition of its limitedness, or alternatively attempting to transcend such limits by inhabiting a variety of perspectives. This goes with the belief that there is no true world, because everything is, as Nietzsche famously said, but ‘a perspectival appearance whose origin lies in us’.31 Though this is something
Nietzsche recognised in the modern mind, he did not welcome it: in fact he dreaded its consequences, speaking of that ‘great blood-sucker, the spider scepticism’ and warning that our excessive selfconsciousness will destroy us. We are the ‘Don Juans of cognition’, he said, whose ‘knowledge will take its revenge on us, as ignorance exacted its revenge in the Middle Ages.’

[The Master and His Emissary]

McGilchrist, Iain wrote:

SELF-REFERENTIALITY AND THE LOSS OF MEANING

Ultimately there is nothing less than an emptying out of meaning. The influential contemporary neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga has referred to the left hemisphere as ‘the interpreter’, the locus of self-consciousness, of conscious volition, and of rationality, which since the Enlightenment we have seen as being our defining qualities as human beings. An interpreter is not an originator, however, but a facilitator, and should be involved in mediating between parties. The more we rely on the left hemisphere alone, the more self-conscious we become; the intuitive, unconscious unspoken elements of experience are relatively discounted, and the interpreter begins to interpret – itself. The world it puts into words for us is the world that words themselves (the left hemisphere's building blocks) have created. Hence there is Nietzsche's ‘speech about speech’. The condition is a lonely, self-enwrapped one: ‘nothing speaks to him any more’. The left hemisphere, isolating itself from the ways of the right hemisphere, has lost access to the world beyond words, the world ‘beyond’ our selves. It is not just that it no longer sees through the two-dimensional surface of the canvas to the world behind, through the window to the world beyond the pane, focussing instead on the plane before its eyes: it no longer sees through the representation of the world that is left hemisphere ‘experience’ at all, to a world that is ‘Other’ than itself. Man himself keeps getting into the picture, as Heidegger says of the modern era.
The interpreter's task is to look for meaning. But that meaning can only come to the representational world by allowing a betweenness with the world it re-presents – as words need their real world referents to have meaning. Constantly searching for meaning, but not finding any, it is oppressed, as the schizophrenic is oppressed, by an unresolved and irresoluble sense of meaningfulness without a focus, a sense that ‘something is going on’. Everything, just as it is, seems to have meaning, but what it is is never clear. The more one stares at things the more one freights them with import. That man crossing his legs, that woman wearing that blouse – it can't just be accidental. It has a particular meaning, is intended to convey something; but I am not let in on the secret, which every one else seems to understand. Notice that the focus of paranoia is a loss of the normal betweenness – something that should be being conveyed from others to myself, is being kept from me. The world comes to appear threatening, disturbing, sinister.

[The Master and His Emissary]

McGilchrist, Iain wrote:

I would relate both the boredom and sense of devitalisation, and the associated demand for stimulation, to the needs of an ‘unplugged’ left hemisphere. Disconnected from the grounding effects of the right hemisphere, which could lead it out of itself and back to what I have called ‘the Other’, it can find nothing except what it already knows. Newness would come from the imagination, which reconnects us with whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves: all that is open to the left hemisphere acting alone is novelty (The Shock of the New should really have been entitled, were it not ambiguous, The Shock of the Novel). Crude sensationalism is its stock in trade. The left hemisphere, with its orientation towards what is lifeless and mechanical, appears desperate to shock us back to life, as if animating Frankenstein's corpse. When the Austrian experimental artist Hermann Nitsch crucifies a dead lamb, he reminds us that he is flogging a dead horse.
In Eric Fromm's study On Disobedience, he describes modern man as homo consumens: concerned with things more than people, property more than life, capital more than work. He sees this man as obsessed with the structures of things, and calls him ‘organisation man’, flourishing, if that is the right word, as much under the bureaucracy of communism as under capitalism. There is a close relationship between the mentality that results in bureaucratic organisation and the mentality of capitalism. Socialism and capitalism are both essentially materialist, just different ways of approaching the lifeless world of matter and deciding how to share the spoils. To that extent one might say that their antipathy represents little more than a farmyard scrap between two dogs over a bone. These preferences – for things more than people, status or property more than life, and so on – align with those of the left hemisphere, and what I want to explore here is the close relation between a concern for materiality and a simultaneous impulse towards abstraction.

[The Master and His Emissary]

McGilchrsit wrote:

Husserl, 1970, p. 290 (1962, p. 337), quoted in Levin, 1999, p. 61. Sass's thesis that modernism has many of the features of schizophrenia (discussed below, p. 393 ff.) makes an interesting
parallel, since he demonstrates that a key element in schizophrenia is not irrationality, but an excessive and misplaced rationalism.

Feyerabend wrote:

Schizophrenics very often hold beliefs which are as rigid, all-pervasive, and unconnected with reality, as are the best dogmatic philosophies. However, such beliefs come to them naturally whereas a “critical” philosopher may sometimes spend his whole life in attempting to find arguments which create a similar state of mind