The importance of the Subjective/Objective relationship, the Master/Salve is one of avoiding eyes, and the medium of the light. To remain inconspicuous, in the dark shadows, so as to escape fate, or to avoid being witnessed by another which would diminish our social effect, and would expose us to a reality we are hiding from. Remaining in the Subjective is a way of dismissing all judgements that do not agree with it; it is the avoidance of an indifferent, harsh Objectivity.
No Objective world is permitted from where the judgement, based on it, and in it, can assault the Modern's self-perceptions. With no Objective world there is no way to decide whose Subjective interpretations are more valid. The uncertainty becomes a pleasure, rather than a stress.
The individual avoids being seen. His Subjective world remains unaffected, safe. He is “too complex”, mysterious, and mystical – he has become God-like. Both mystical and a creator of his own world, which, ironically, remains detached from reality so as to not be restricted by any otherness except by the rule that imposes a limit upon his fantasies so as to preserve them in a world denied. The desire to not be seen is the desire to remain noetic (mind without body, where body is a choice, an accessory), and to cease being a phenomenon, part of what is apparent. As a noumenon you can imagine yourself eternal, immortal, infinite. It's a way of self-preserving self within a community of selves, leading to a schism between the private and the public: character/personality.
Denying race, sex, beauty an objective meaning is an expression of this rejection of the other's awareness. The individual chooses his face, his clothes, and with them his identity. He is unbound, freed from the immutable past, and from a vicious, unjust nature. He is other than his appearance, and so other than his past/nature. He can be anything, using any word.
All is about taste, relating to pleasure, and pleasure is subjective. Please relating to pleasure; pleasure for its own sake.
No objective standard of perceiving dysfunction, unfitness, illness, is allowed. To be ill is to deny this unstated agreement to keep all illness, all lies, a secret. Again, reversals.
The healthy are ill, and the ill are healthy; the liars are honest, and the honest lie. To discriminate is to be closed-minded, to be unaware of divergence, except as a quirky meaningless expression of a similarity – and this last is to be open-minded. The perception of similarity does not proceed from divergence, as its simplification/generalization, but, like love, value, consciousness, being, it pre-exists divergence, exposing divergence as a universal joke, illusion, a test, a sin to make amends for. The individual flees exposure. He flees the world inward. If he is to be judged he is to be judged by an Absolute One, within which all are included, eliminating all personal imperfections (sins).
The secular flees into subjectivity. There is no objective standard to judge him, to evaluate him, he is his own God. The anxiety of being perceived is the rejection of your own appearance; a hidden personal, private, self-hatred. Death-wish turned into an obsession with pleasure, as the only antidote to the experience of (inter)activity, as need/suffering. The other appears to be better, but he is not, and not because you can find flaws, objectively, but only because he is other, and he lives in his own subjective world not affecting your own.
_________________ γνῶθι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
"The composition of the Greek term, cosmopolis, already indicates this unsolved tension: cosmos, a natural universal order, is related to polis, society’s variable order."
So cosmopolitanism to the ancient greeks was an ever fluid, constant questioning of the best political arrangement to realize the "harmony" [best fitting] of the universe down to earth... Finding the laws and the logic governing the 'regular' movement of the stars, etc.
Cosmopolitanism was not one "world community",,,, but "one world" community; all before the same reality.
"The enlargement of a social sphere leads to greater interaction, and this interaction in turn leads to specialization, com- plementary relations, and structural differentiation. The most obvious model is an economic enterprise, in which specialization and structural differentiation are responses to the change in scale. But in culture the increase in interaction, owing to the breakdown of segmented societies or of parochial cultures, leads to syncretism -—the mingling of strange gods, as in the time of Constantine, or the melange of cultural artifacts in modern art (or even in the living rooms of middle-class professional families). Syncretism is the jumbling of styles in modern art, which absorbs African masks or Japanese prints into its modes of depicting spatial perceptions; or the merging of Oriental and Western religions, detached from their histories, in a modern meditative consciousness.
Modern culture is defined by this extraordinary freedom to ran- sack the world storehouse and to engorge any and every style it comes upon. Such freedom comes from the fact that the axial prin- ciple of modern culture is the expression and remaking of the "self" in order to achieve self-realization and self-fulfillment.
It is a reaching out for all experience; nothing is forbidden, all is to be explored.
The fundamental assumption of modernity, the thread that has run through Western civilization since the sixteenth century, is that the social unit of society is not the group, the guild, the tribe, or the city, but the person. The Western ideal was the autonomous man who, in becoming self-determining, would achieve freedom. W ith this "new man" there was a repudiation of institutions (the striking result of the Reformation, which installed individual conscience as the source of judgment); the opening of new geographical and so- cial frontiers; the desire, and the growing ability, to master nature and to make of oneself what one can, and even, in discarding old roots, to remake oneself altogether. W hat began to count was not the past but the future.
For the artist, the restless vanity of the untrammeled self is best expressed by Byron, whose impetuous romanticism imprinted itself on an age:
"The great object of life is Sensation—to feel that we exist—even though in pain—it is this 'craving void' which drives us to Gaming—to Battle—to Travel—to intemperate but keenly felt pursuits of every description whose principal attraction is the agitation inseparable from their accomplishment."
Modernism has thus been the seducer. Its power derived from the idolatry of the self. Its appeal stemmed from the idea that life itself should be a work of art, and that art could only express itself against the conventions of society, particularly bourgeois society. When tied to politics, as it has sometimes been, modernism became sub- versive of contemporary society, whether in the rage of men of the right, such as Wyndham Lewis, or the japes of men of the left, such as Breton and the surrealists.
Today modernism is exhausted.There is no tension. The creative impulses have gone slack. It has become an empty vessel. The impulse to rebellion has been institutionalized by the "cultural mass" and its experimental forms have become the syntax and semiotics of advertising and haute couture. As a cultural style, it exists as radical chic, which allows the cultural mass the luxury of "freer" life-styles while holding comfortable jobs within an economic system that has itself been transformed in its motivations." [The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism]
"Modernity is, distinctively, a break with the past as past, catapulting it into the present. De Tocqueville said that aristocracy made a chain of all members of the community from king to peasant; democracy breaks the chain, severing every one of its links. As a result, de Tocqueville went on, democracy "makes every man forget his ancestors"—an attractive idea to men like Whitman, who declared that the "enemy" was the word "Culture," and a literature "smelling of prince's favors . . . and built entirely [upon] the idea of caste." For de Tocqueville, the characteristic aspect of modernity was the fact that "the woof of time is every instant broken, and the track of generations effaced." [Capitalism]
