PART
ONE: ESSAYS
*
A
FEUDAL PROTOTYPE
It is difficult to see
how trees could possibly be popular with Social Transcendentalists, as we may
call people with a socially transcendent view of life. For a tree mirrors, on earth, the
galactic-world-order of governing star, minor stars, and planets, which is to
say, the tyranny of both major and minor stars over planets. With a tree, the trunk is equivalent to the
governing star of the Galaxy, the branches are
equivalent to the peripheral stars there, and the leaves equivalent to the
planets. The leaves serve both the
branches and trunk of a tree by drawing moisture, sunlight, etc., into
themselves, which is then transferred to the tree-proper. We need not doubt that this procedure mirrors
the galactic arrangement further down the ladder of evolution, whereby the
planets serve the stars by keeping them in some kind of galactic order and
thereby enable individual stars to rule over particular solar systems to their
own lasting advantage (given that a fixed star is better off than a shooting
one, if for no other reason than it isn't likely to collide with other stars
and has a recognizable status in its powerful fixity).
So much for the galactic and natural levels of evolution! Let us now apply this arrangement to human
affairs, where it will be found that the pattern of a tree is imitated whenever
human society stems from natural dominion, whether absolutely, as in a pagan
age, or relatively, as in a Christian one, when a transcendental dimension
necessarily dilutes the commitment of that society to naturalistic
criteria. In the first instance, we find
an absolute monarchy presiding over a feudal system. In the second instance, a
constitutional monarchy presiding over a capitalist system. The monarch is equivalent, in a feudal
society, to the trunk of a tree, the nobility are
equivalent to its branches, and the peasantry equivalent to its leaves. Now in this natural arrangement the latter
serve the former, either directly vis-à-vis the nobility or indirectly
vis-à-vis the monarch. With the extension
of feudalism into a capitalist phase of evolution this arrangement to some
extent still applies, except that where formerly the nobles and monarch were
the sole rulers being served by the peasantry, the rise of the bourgeoisie
ensures that they, too, are served in some measure by ... if not the peasantry
then their urban equivalents - the industrial proletariat.
Thus, when all this is taken into account, it is difficult to
see how a tree (a plant which served as a blueprint, as it were, for feudal and
capitalist societies) could possibly be popular with Socialists, never mind
Social Transcendentalists, since they relate to an artificial arrangement of
society in which the exploitation of man by man, or peasants by nobles, no
longer applies, and the proletariat, that antithetical equivalent of the
peasantry, are served by a bureaucracy who, antithetically equivalent to the
nobility, take their directives from the reigning president, the antithetical
equivalent of the feudal monarch.
Although, contrary to popular notions, a socialist society is
not classless (no more than was the feudal society which preceded the
compromise epoch of bourgeois capitalism), it is nevertheless one in which the
bulk of humanity are served rather than exploited, and cannot bear any
resemblance, in consequence, to that society stemming from the naturalistic
pattern of the tyranny of trunk and branches over leaves, which we equate with
feudalism. The distinction between
strong and weak, as between a tree and its leaves or a nobility and its
peasants, does not apply to a socialist society, where, by contrast, the only
distinction is between a more ideologically-motivated bureaucracy and a less
ideologically-motivated proletariat, a fact which calls forth not tyranny but
the service of the latter by the former.
Clearly a day will come when trees, no less than monarchs and
nobles, are banished from a society tending towards the omega supernatural from
an artificial base. We see this process
in action wherever the city has come to supplant nature, and it can only become
more absolute with the passing of time.
Doubtless oxygen will be produced artificially to a much greater extent
in the future than at present, thereby enabling man to dispense with trees and
spend more time indoors, to the lasting advantage of his spiritual life. An omega-oriented absolute society can only
be interiorized, not partial to a dualistic oscillation between internal and
external environments, like a relative society.
And a socialist society, properly considered, should be anything but
relative!
There are, however, two types of what may be called post-atomic
societies, and we can define them as relative and absolute respectively. A relatively post-atomic society, such as
exists in the United States, will tolerate trees in public places, whereas an
absolutely post-atomic society that was also civilized would find trees
objectionable, if on none other than ideological grounds, and accordingly seek
to curtail their numbers and distribution as much as possible.
By contrast, a pre-atomic society would be more likely to
worship or fear trees, as in fact used to be the case wherever pagan criteria
prevailed, and this same tendency would have been refined upon, to a point of
respect, with the ensuing development of atomic society, where trees were
cultivated as much for their perceived natural beauty as for the various
utilitarian uses to which they could be put - industrial, social,
environmental, or whatever. Such respect,
while still applying wherever atomic criteria survives, would become
transmuted, with the development of post-atomic society, into tolerance, a
tolerance probably attaching far more importance to utilitarian than to
aesthetic considerations, though falling short of outright antipathy, such as can
only be expected from an absolutely post-atomic society moving towards, if not
already in, a Social Transcendentalist and, hence, fully civilized status.
SEXUAL
EVOLUTION
Before men and women acquired
a distinct social status with the development of atomic civilization - the
sexes balancing each other in a relationship sanctified and legalized by
marriage - they were submerged in a kind of pre-sexist society which, in
effect, rendered them Superwomen and quasi-Superwomen respectively - a pagan
society that culminated in the city states of the ancient Greeks and Romans, to
name but two representative pagan peoples.
In this society the sartorial norm for Superwomen was a long,
ankle-length dress or robe, while their inferior counterparts, the
quasi-Superwomen, were obliged to wear a short or, more correctly, less lengthy
dress or robe, such as accorded with their inferior social status.
The development of Christianity in the West changed all that,
though only very gradually, in line with the progress of civilization away from
nature towards more artificial attainments, so that, by the seventeenth
century, a sexist distinction between women on the one hand, and men on the
other ... had emerged to replace the old 'lesbian' pre-atomic unisexual society
with one partial to properly heterosexual atomic distinctions. Gradually women came to wear shorter
skirts/dresses, and men ... to dress exclusively in trousers, not in stockings
partly covered by a skirt-like tunic such as had prevailed throughout the
Middle Ages when, though nominally distinct from women, they continued to think
and behave more like quasi-Superwomen vis-à-vis Superwomen or, in relatively
more evolved terms, as submen vis-à-vis pseudo-Superwomen.
With the twentieth century, however, a trend the converse of
the pre-atomic began to develop, in which women increasingly came to dress in
still shorter skirts/dresses, indicative of a more modest vaginal status, and
even to abandon them altogether for trousers of one description or another,
though never or rarely completely so. We
may equate this bourgeois/proletarian age with a transition between the atomic
and the post-atomic, Christian and transcendental criteria, in which liberated
females (subwomen) and free males (pseudo-supermen)
tend to be its chief representatives, particularly in the
However, if the twentieth century signified a transition to a
post-atomic transcendental age, we need not doubt that the twenty-first century
will witness the beginnings of an actual post-atomic civilization, absolute as
opposed to relative, and dedicated, in consequence, to transcending all sexist
dichotomies. Instead of subwomen and pseudo-Supermen, or liberated females and free
males, this transcendental civilization will encourage the emergence of a
relative distinction between quasi-Supermen and Supermen, as between what, in
earlier works, I have alternatively described as female and male Supermen - the
reformed proletarian females and the bona fide proletarian males
respectively, each category newly civilized.
Thus, whereas in bourgeois civilization an absolute distinction
existed between men and women, in the coming civilization both alike will have
been 'overcome' (to use a Nietzschean expression),
their evolutionary successors being unisexually
superhuman because appertaining to a post-atomic stage of civilization, a stage
leading to the ultimate overcoming of human beings in the first phase of the
post-Human Millennium, when relatively superhuman Transcendentalists will have
been superseded by the absolute Supermen who, as brain collectivizations
artificially supported and sustained, will be partial to a contemplation, via
synthetic hallucinogens like LSD, of the artificially-induced visions of their
new brains - given, in other words, to a kind of quasi-Supernaturalism
preceding the ultimate Supernaturalism of the hypermeditating
Superbeings who, as new-brain collectivizations,
will constitute the ultimate life form on earth ... prior to the elevation of
evolving life to total salvation in the post-Millennial Beyond, with the
attainment to transcendence, and consequent escape of electrons from the
remaining atomicity of individual new-brain collectivizations.
Returning to history, we have, then, the suggestion of two
sexual extremes either side of a heterosexual balance - the first, or
'lesbian', extreme signifying a pagan stage of human evolution, when men had
not really acquired a separate social identity from women but were equivalent to
quasi-Superwomen and/or submen; the second, or
'homosexual', extreme signifying a transcendental stage of human evolution,
when women have ceased to retain a separate social identity from men and become
quasi-Supermen in a post-sexist society.
In between, as already noted, a social balance, submen having in the meantime become men, to drag
Superwomen or, rather, pseudo-Superwomen down to an atomic level, as women,
beside themselves.
If any of this is true - and there seems to be no reason to
assume the contrary - how, one may well wonder, is one to explain 'homosexual'
behaviour among the ancients, for instance the Greeks and Romans, who
apparently lived in a lesbian age? And
how, by a similar token, does one explain the 'lesbian' activity which seems to
have developed among women as never before in what appears to be a homosexual
if not yet unisexual age? The situation
in each case appears to involve a paradox, to constitute an inexplicable
enigma, until we look a little closer into each age and come to realize that in
pre-atomic civilization men weren't really men but either quasi-Superwomen or submen, and therefore more disposed than later generations
of penis-wielders to regard one another in a quasi-feminine light.
Consequently, their seemingly homosexual behaviour acquires a
lesbian character which sets it apart from contemporary homosexual behaviour
among free men in an incipiently post-atomic society. One might describe it as quasi-lesbian, the
converse of latter-day seemingly lesbian behaviour among females which, on
account of the increasing masculinization of women
and their gradual elevation towards a post-atomic status, we can describe as
quasi-homosexual, involving either liberated females or their proletarian
counterparts.
Whereas the character of quasi-lesbian activity among
quasi-Superwomen in ancient civilization would have been reactive, in
accordance with their 'feminine' status in an overwhelmingly proton age, the
character of most contemporary quasi-homosexual activity between quasi-Supermen
or their near equivalents in contemporary civilization will be attractive, in
conformity with their 'masculine' status in an increasingly electron-biased
age. Such a paradoxical situation would
in each case parallel the genuine lesbian and homosexual behaviour appropriate
to each civilization, as well, of course, as co-exist with a degree of
heterosexual behaviour more suited, on the whole, to an atomic age than to
either of the civilized extremes.
I do not wish to leave the reader with the impression that the
future will be literally homosexual in the sense generally understood by that
term, as implying sexual contact between only males. Such a concrete sexuality appertains solely
to a bourgeois/proletarian stage of post-atomic civilization, is the
materialistic alternative to pornographic indulgence, which accords, by
contrast, with a spiritual predilection.
It is the pseudo-electron side of a relatively post-atomic civilization,
an objectively inferior form of sexual indulgence than the free-electron
equivalent ... of pornography.
No, the transcendental civilization will not encourage concrete
homosexual behaviour between Supermen, or its lesser equivalent in
quasi-homosexuality ('lesbianism') ... as affecting quasi-Supermen, the
reformed proletarian females. It will
encourage, on the contrary, a more absolute type of pornography, a type that,
utilizing computers, will be found to stem from the higher type of
petty-bourgeois magazine pornography, as involving a focus on the sex organ of
the participating models rather than, as with lower types of pornography, a
more diffused perspective which inevitably emphasizes female beauty, that bête
noir from any truth-oriented absolute standpoint. If such soft-core pornography may be equated
with Post-Painterly Abstraction, that quintessentially American form of
Abstract Impressionism, then the more vaginally exclusive hard-core pornography
can be regarded as being on the evolutionary level of the highest type of light
art, necessarily spiritualistic in design and content.
Thus, as spiritualistic light art is destined to be superseded
in an absolute civilization by abstract holography, we should have no qualms in
contending that relative hard-core pornography will likewise be superseded, in
that same civilization, by absolute hard-core pornography, in accordance with
the more transcendental criteria of a quintessentially unisexual stage of
civilized evolution. In all probability
quasi-Supermen would be more inclined to a male-based absolute pornography, their
bona
fide counterparts to the female variety.
Either way, the pornography, or erotica, in question would be beyond
both sublimated beauty-mongering, that sexual cynosure of soft-core
pornography, and the sexist relativity of relative hard-core pornography. It would be the ultimate pornography,
relevant to the final civilization in the historical evolution of man from
femininely superhuman beginnings to masculinely
superhuman endings via bourgeois humanism.
A
ZIGZAGGING PROGRESSION
No less than politics,
art has a way of evolving from a barbarous to a civilized phase within any
given cultural tradition, whether contemporary American or European, and it
does so within the compass of the creative integrity of any given class. Take the early petty-bourgeoisie, those
stemming from a bourgeois stage of creative endeavour who
yet rebelled against bourgeois precedent to create an anti-art, if by 'art' we
mean bourgeois representational painting.
They are divisible, as in any relative civilization, into materialistic
and spiritualistic camps, those on the one side producing Expressionism, those
on the other side ... Impressionism, the first fundamentally Austro-German, the
second ... Franco-American. In both
cases, one might describe the art produced as non-representational, either
applying to a distortion or a mere impression of the representational, whether
natural or artificial, though particularly the former. Non-representational art is not abstract; it
is the negative, barbarous forerunner of the abstract.
Which brings us to the higher, or civilized, phase in the
creative evolution of the early petty-bourgeoisie, with particular reference to
Abstract Expressionism on the one hand and to Abstract Impressionism or (as it
is more usually called in America) Post-Painterly Abstraction on the other
hand, the one materialistic or, rather, pseudo-spiritualistic, the other
spiritualistic. By now, both Austria and
France have been left behind, their petty-bourgeois successors having blossomed
into a civilized phase of creative evolution, America most especially so,
thanks to its wealth, power, and geographical isolation from Nazi
persecution. Certainly such art as we
are now discussing can be described as abstract, since there is not even a
negative connection with the representational but, rather, a positive
intimation of higher abstract possibilities or trends - what one might term a
pro-light art status, to distinguish it from the anti-art (bourgeois
representational framed-painting) status of its 'barbarous' forerunner.
So much for the evolution of modern art in
its mainstream petty-bourgeois manifestations, as applicable, in the main, to
Which brings us to the distinction between the barbarous and
the civilized phases of light art, the former phase paralleling the civilized
phase of avant-garde painting, the latter phase overhauling and surpassing it;
the first phase symptomatic of a lower type of late petty-bourgeois art, the
second phase symptomatic of a higher type - a positive as opposed to a negative
type. And just as the
non-representational painting of the anti-artists, whether materialistic or
spiritualistic, was a revolt against civilized bourgeois painting, so we may
contend that the sculptural light art of the anti-modernists (as we may
alternatively call the lower type of late petty-bourgeoisie) was in large
measure a revolt against civilized petty-bourgeois painting, an expression of
the reaction of a new art form against formal precedent, one leading, in due
course, to the development of civilized light art, as symptomatic of a higher
type of late petty-bourgeois/early proletarian creativity, and suggestive, at
least on the spiritualistic side, of a pro-holographic status, since intimating
of a purer abstraction than abstract painting - one completely free of material
surrounds. Such an art form as abstract
light art can only point the way towards the ultimate art, which would be
virtually formless.
No such formlessness can accrue, however, to petty-bourgeois
art, not even in its highest phase, since petty-bourgeois criteria are forever
relative. Just as with avant-garde
painting, so with light art (both in its barbarous and civilized
manifestations), a distinction exists between the materialistic and the
spiritualistic, the abstract expressionist and the abstract impressionist, and
we may believe that if the spiritualistic side intimates, in its highest
manifestation, of abstract holographic possibilities ahead, then the
materialistic side indirectly intimates of a representational holography
consonant with its expressive bias, a holography that is indeed furthered
within the confines of bourgeois/proletarian civilization, and which may be
equated with the barbarous phase of a proletarian class integrity ...
co-existing with civilized light art and indicating, in its revolt against that
art form's abstraction, an anti-light art status commensurate with a higher
spiritual embodiment of representational form.
The coming of abstract holography will of course eclipse the barbarous
with the civilized, but it may have to wait the dawn of a transcendental civilization
to gain in universal momentum.
If, then, the progress of art follows a kind of zigzagging
course in the revolt of a lower phase of a superior art form against the higher
phase of an inferior art form and does so, moreover, on both materialistic and
spiritualistic terms, we need not doubt that this process mirrors distinct
class stages within any given relative civilization, the ultimate development
being a sort of proletarian revolt within bourgeois/proletarian civilization
against civilized late petty-bourgeois art that takes the form of
representational holography, an art form which will co-exist with
abstract-impressionist light art until such time as bourgeois/proletarian
civilization is democratically overthrown and/or reformed.
However, unlike the relative arts, abstract holography, the
ultimate and therefore truly civilized proletarian art form, would not co-exist
with a barbarous art form or intimate of a superior abstraction to come or be
divided into a materialistic and a spiritualistic camp, the one contracting the
material while the other seemingly expands the spiritual. Abstract holography would be absolute in
every sense, the sole civilized art of a transcendental civilization, complete
in itself and yet intimating, more convincingly than any previous art form, of
transcendent spirit, of the Divine Omega which lies beyond man as the goal of
evolutionary striving.
Whereas relative art, whether avant-garde painting or abstract
light art, could be said to intimate of both a higher abstract possibility in
the development of art and the Divine Omega on terms relative to its
particular class stage of aesthetic evolution, absolute art, being complete in
itself as the ultimate manifestation of aesthetic development, would intimate,
on the most pure terms, only of the Divine Omega, the ultimate impression of
spiritual transcendence. Art, as we have
traditionally understood it, would attain to a spiritual climax here, though
the process of revolt against a contemporary civilized art would continue,
taking the form, with the onset of a post-Human Millennium, of recourse to
synthetic hallucinogens like LSD, which would constitute the next, or
barbarous, phase in the zigzagging evolution of art and life towards the goal
of evolution in ultimate divinity, what one might describe as an anti-hologram
'representational' phase.
Strictly speaking, LSD trips could not be described as an art
but, rather, as the successor to art, an antithesis to dreams, which, however, preceded
the inception of art in the sculptural monuments of the ancients. Just as dreams are beneath art, a
pseudo-phenomenon of the old brain which the subconscious is obliged to witness
during sleep, so trips would be above it, a quasi-noumenon
of the new brain which the superconscious can
contemplate in the interests of expanded consciousness.
This barbarous phase of the post-Human Millennium will be
superseded, in due course, by its ultra-civilized phase, a phase during which
the new-brain collectivizations of the Superbeings will experience hypermeditation
and thus directly cultivate their superconscious
rather than, as with the brain collectivizations of
the Supermen in the preceding phase, indirectly do so ... through the medium of
LSD visions. This direct cultivation of
pure spirit will constitute the ultimate spiritual abstraction, an
ultra-positive successor to the quasi-positive 'representational' phase of
millennial evolution, and such a procedure will inexorably culminate in
transcendence, or the attainment of pure spirit to space, in which setting it
will converge towards and expand into other such transcendences en route, as it were, to the ultimate spiritual
oneness of the Omega Point, the culmination, in de Chardinesque
terminology, of all heavenly evolution.
Such a culmination is what the abstract holography of the next
civilization will intimate of, but it is not something that the highest art
will achieve; for that must be left to what transcends art through the most
pure contemplation of the Superbeings in the highest
phase of the post-Human Millennium. Even
the contemplation of LSD-induced visions will be relative and, therefore,
impure in relation to that, a quasi-barbarism leading to the more than
civilized - namely the supercivilized
self-contemplation of the ultimate life form, pro-transcendental rather than
anti-holographic.
FROM
THE BARBAROUS TO THE CIVILIZED
If art is not fine it
is crude, if not civilized then ... barbarous.
In the twentieth century, art continued to exist on both levels, though
in a more complex and divergent way than ever before. Moreover, a new type of folk art arose - a
militant or politically propagandist form of barbarism called Socialist
Realism. It is distinguishable from
other types of folk art by being absolute in status and character, existing
within (formerly) Marxist-Leninist countries independently of civilized art and
on thematic terms which never vary. No
other kind of painting could be officially created or admired within the
Within the West, on the other hand, barbarous art was generally
relative, co-existent with fine art and comparatively free from ideological
fastidiousness - in short, a-political.
It was free to adopt varied subject-matter and, within limits endemic to
its folksy status, to treat what it had adopted in a variety of ways, both
technically and conceptually; though this is only clearly apparent to anyone
who takes an evolutionary or comprehensive view of such art, and thus perceives
it as passing through a spectrum of ongoing development from Naive-Primitive painting
at the lower end, to Pop Art at the upper end via Modern Realism.
For within each type or stage of folk art there is certainly a
distinct formal and conceptual bias, which appears stronger at the lower end
and in the middle, so to speak, than at the top, where, in response to
evolutionary pressures, technique and treatment of more varied subject-matter
varies quite dramatically from artist to artist, while still permitting a
barbarous integrity to shine through.
For, despite its greater freedom than earlier types of modern crude art,
Pop Art was still recognizably folksy and bore no resemblance whatsoever to the
civilized art with which it was more or less contemporary - namely, light art.
Before Pop Art arose, however, there was another type of art,
distinct from civilized petty-bourgeois precedent and co-existent with light
art, though not on that account a folk art.
This was Op Art, which strove to create an impression of movement and
light relative to optical variations induced, in the viewer's mind, by the wavy
lines or small circles or tiny dots or whatever of the particular Op work. As a form of abstract art, there could be no
question of one's considering such work as a more sophisticated type of folk
art since, by definition, folk art is formally and conceptually anachronistic,
existing as a law unto itself on a creative level very much beneath the
technical and/or conceptual requirements of that civilized art with which,
superficially at least, it is contemporary.
No, and neither could this art be
described as a higher kind of abstraction, one, say, post-Mondrianesque
and therefore bringing art to an all-time abstract climax. For in the European West, abstract art had
attained to a climax with Neo-Plasticism, a
materialistic development beyond Cubism, just as spiritualistic art had
attained to a similar climax with Surrealism, that illusory art beyond
(realistic) Symbolism, a climax indicative of a progression from lower/early
petty-bourgeois art to higher/early petty-bourgeois art, which had a mainstream
counterpart - mainly relative to Germany and America - in the distinctions
between Expressionism and Abstract Expressionism on the materialistic side and,
by contrast, Impressionism and Post-Painterly Abstraction (Abstract
Impressionism) on the spiritualistic side, after which time painterly art was
destined to be transcended with the development of light art from
lower/relative to higher/absolute levels.
But if this late petty-bourgeois development was mainly
relative, once again, to mainstream petty-bourgeois culture within the broadly
bourgeois/proletarian
civilization of contemporary America, then the fundamentally bourgeois nations,
such as Britain, France, Holland, and Belgium, were less disposed to such a
radical break with the past and more disposed, in consequence of their more
conservative natures, to create a type of light art employing painterly means,
which resulted in the paradoxical phenomenon of Op Art, neither strictly
painting nor strictly light art but a sort of chimerical compromise between the
two and, if I'm not mistaken, the more civilized abstract successor to
sculptural Op or, as it is better known, Kinetic Art. If Op is materialistic in character, a
bourgeois equivalent to tubular light art, then its spiritualistic counterpart,
equivalent to non-tubular or free light art, must surely be Minimalist Art,
which provides the mere outlines of a representational image, and is thus
closer in conception to a comic book than to a magazine.
As for sculpture-proper, which is the earliest fine art known
to man and one not susceptible, in consequence of its ancient lineage, to
extension beyond an early petty-bourgeois age, we are dealing with an art the
basis of which is form and the essence of which is tactility. From being representational, sculpture has
this century become non-representational (biomorphic) but remains, at least in
theory and in spite of its relative formlessness, fundamentally tactile.
On the other hand, sculptural light art, though often having
the appearance of a type of modern sculpture, should not be confounded with
sculpture, since there can be no tactility with white-hot electric or neon
tubes and, as a rule, very little form!
As a mainstream lower/late petty-bourgeois development, this relatively
civilized art signifies a step beyond abstract painting in the overall
evolution of art from sculptural beginnings towards a holographic climax. Consequently there can be no question of its
signifying a higher type of sculpture, since no sculpture can extend into a
post-painterly epoch, but simply a lower type of light art, one 'sculptural' in
appearance, and thus the logical precursor of a totally abstract and
'painterly' kind of light art such as usually employs slender neon tubing in
adherence to a higher materialistic integrity.
By contrast, spiritualistic light art has its inception in
'architectural' light art, or the use of spotlights and other such powerful
beams of electric light trained on the night sky according to a specific
pattern, and became in the course of (post-Nazi) time more refined and
absolute, culminating, we may assume, in such indoor laser shows as the
Americans in particular have developed.
Generally speaking, whilst
To return to painting, it should be evident to the reader by
now that any painterly art with a pretence of being
civilized can only be anachronistic in an age of late petty-bourgeois/early
proletarian art, in which the focus of creative endeavour has switched from
abstract painting to light art. Frankly,
painterly art is now passé, and those who still indulge in any form of
civilized painting, be it non-representational or abstract, are living behind
the times in a kind of petty-bourgeois dream world of their own imagination.
Probably artists in the older European countries like
But as the highest criterion of what is truly contemporary can
only be derived from the leading Western nations, it follows that those who
scorn this or are not in a psychological position to adopt it will continue to
work in an obsolescent context, producing art of an inferior quality and status
- novels and classical music no less than painting and sculpture. Although such passé work could not be
described as folk art, it is certainly less than truly civilized, if by 'civilized'
we mean what is in the forefront of creative evolution. Some of it may even be of less value than
contemporary folk art, the mention of which brings me back to the distinction
between the fine and the crude, where we began this essay.
Since barbarous art must be categorized as an absolutely
anachronistic type of art, bearing no resemblance whatsoever to contemporary
civilized trends, we shall see that the current production of civilized art
which is less than contemporary, like Abstract Expressionism or Abstract
Impressionism in relation to light art, can only be regarded as comparatively
civilized. Certainly it is civilized
compared with any folk art of the present century, including Pop Art. But it is less civilized than those truly
contemporary civilized arts which are in the vanguard of creative
evolution. We may prefer it to the
genuinely barbarous, but if we are on the side of creative progress we will
hesitate to regard it with the same respect as we reserve for higher
developments. And after light art, what
higher development is possible if not representational holography, which I
regard, in this context, as a relatively civilized art preceding the attainment
of holography to an absolutely civilized status in total abstraction, both of
which phases (of holographic evolution) should be relevant to the proletariat
within the context of a transcendental civilization, such as I hope will
presently arise in Ireland, a country with a long tradition of theocratic
allegiance.
If Pop Art is co-existent with light art within the overall
context of bourgeois/proletarian civilization, then with the progression to an
absolute civilization no such co-existence would be acceptable, the people
having become or in the process of becoming civilized, and therefore entitled
to the appreciation of a relatively civilized art. In such a society the age-old dichotomy
between the fine and the crude will be transcended, leading to an exclusive
production of fine art of the highest quality.
Whereas relative civilization tolerated barbarism, an absolute
civilization would be dedicated to civilizing the People. Only thus will they come into their own as
worthy inheritors of the highest cultural legacy - one stemming from
contemporary bourgeois/proletarian civilization yet, at the same time,
completely transcending it.
TOWARDS
AN ABSOLUTELY FREE-ELECTRON LITERATURE
Bourgeois writers,
appertaining to an atomic stage of evolution, tend to write in a way that gives
as much importance to form as to content, to technique as to theory, whereas petty-bourgeois
writers, appertaining to a relatively post-atomic stage of evolution, tend to
write in a way that attaches more importance to content than to form, to theory
than to technique, which results, as a rule, in a more spontaneous,
improvisational kind of literature - one predominantly concerned with what is being said rather
than the way in which it is being said.
Instead of being balanced between appearance and essence in a
dualistic compromise, these more contemporary writers are lopsided on the side
of essence, dedicated to the inner world of truth as opposed to the outer world
of fact. Their work partakes of the
improvisational character of modern art, not to mention modern jazz, in a bias
for spiritual freedom, wrapped-up in the interior world rather than enslaved to
external appearances to the extent of, say, a bourgeois. One might argue that they are intimating,
consciously or unconsciously, of a future literary goal in total interiorization, a completely abstract literature such as I
envisage taking the guise of computerized poetry. For in writing 'on the wing', they are
exposed, as bourgeois authors rarely were, to grammatical laxities and
eccentricities - a situation which a pedant would necessarily regard with
dismay but which, so one imagines, these modernistic authors are really quite
proud of, insofar as it attests to a growing freedom from grammatical
constraints, a tugging of the electron equivalent (of words) at the
proton/neutron leash (of emotions/meanings), with the promise of a complete
departure from that leash in due course.
Few are the petty-bourgeois authors who do actually depart from
the leash; indeed, strictly speaking, none of them can, since such a degree of
abstract absolutism as I envisage being relevant to a free-electron literature
would be incompatible with extreme relativistic criteria, even where
experimental literature in the guise of a predominantly abstract poetry was
concerned! If such a materialistic
poetry, chiefly pertaining to mainstream petty-bourgeois civilization, is
absolute or very nearly absolute in itself, it is still relative to the extent
of being published in separate volumes, traditionally, of poetry rather than in
an anthological format. There is something
of a quasi-electron equivalent about it, in contrast to the relatively
free-electron status of such petty-bourgeois spiritualistic poetry as is
usually represented by a predominating concern with the metaphysical, though
one still published, as a rule, in separate editions under the name of a given
poet, who may or may not acquire a degree of fame in consequence.
By contrast, proletarian anthological poetry transcends the
individual in the collective, and thereby signifies a progression from the
relative to the absolute, even when, as is generally the case these days, such
anthologies tend to contain material of a less than absolute status. So we may regard them as relatively
civilized, with a quasi-electron status germane to their comparatively materialistic
integrity. They appear as a kind of
outsiders' threat to civilized petty-bourgeois precedent, scorned by all but
their authors or those who, through working-class intuition or affiliation,
naturally gravitate towards new developments.
No matter! A time will
come when, with the development of People’s civilization from relative to
absolute levels, such quasi-electron poetry is succeeded by the absolutely
free-electron and truly civilized poetry of a non-readerly
abstraction, which, availing itself of computer discs, should bring literature
to a transcendental climax on a par with abstract holography, pure jazz, and hypermeditation, to name but a few compatible modes of
free-electron absolutism. We are
probably closer to that time now than we realize!
If the late-twentieth century was essentially a late petty-
bourgeois/early proletarian epoch, then it was also on that account an epoch of
either experimental or metaphysical poetry - in short, a quintessentially
poetical age. Chronologically speaking,
this poetry, relative in the main to countries like
But if anthological poetry and representational holography are
essentially outsiders in the contemporary Western context, this is not to say that
they, or some derivative from them, won't become insiders in a society
dedicated to the establishment and furtherance of People’s civilization, a
Social Transcendentalist society such as I envisage being relevant to Ireland
and other such theocratically-biased countries in the
near future. There, by contrast, they
would become the accepted norm, rendering all types and degrees of
petty-bourgeois literature and art anachronistic, and consequently subject to
curtailment.
People's civilization cannot be furthered on the basis of
half-measures. There must be a
wholehearted commitment to cultural progress and a no-less wholehearted
opposition to cultural traditions, whether indigenous or foreign. While relative civilization protects and
admires past cultural achievements, even when they pertain to an earlier
civilization, the absolute civilization of the future must rigorously proscribe
and/or remove all cultural achievements irrelevant to itself. Instead of being conservationist, an
Neither fiction-writing nor painting nor classical composing
would be encouraged in a Social Transcendental
So, of course, would Socialist Realism and more relative types
of folk art, which pertain to a barbarous integrity - the former directed
against Western civilization from a state socialist base, the latter existing within
Western civilization and testifying to the comparatively uncivilized status of
the masses vis-à-vis the bourgeoisie.
Barbarisms, whether militant or urbane, external or internal, should no
more find encouragement in a Social Transcendental
So an
A poetry that is computerized and on route,
as it were, to total abstraction.
An omega literature, placing maximum emphasis on content, on the
literary truth of free-electron words, freed from proton and/or neutron-biased
grammatical constraints and therefore intimating of the omega absolutes, those
unified electrons of pure spirit such as should one day stem from the highest
of the millennial life forms - the superbeingful
new-brain collectivizations of the ultimate classless
society. Certainly one would look in
vain for concessions to appearance in this absolute literature!
TOWARDS
AN ABSOLUTE ARCHITECTURE
It is probable that,
with the development of a Social Transcendentalist civilization, all forms of bourgeois
and petty-bourgeois architecture would be demolished to make way for the
uniquely proletarian forms in due course.
Already, since the late-twentieth century, the mould of proletarian
architecture has been established, at least in its rudimentary form, and we
need not doubt that such a mould - collective and transcendent - will be
further developed and/or remodelled in the future, so that apartment blocks
will become more the architectural rule than, as at present, the architectural
exception.
If we endeavour to categorize domestic architecture according
to class-evolutionary stages of development, or to stipulate the appropriate
domestic environment for any given class, beginning with the aristocracy, we
may arrive at conclusions similar to the following: a large country house
and/or castle for the aristocracy; a small country house for the early-stage
grand bourgeoisie; a detached suburban house for the late-stage grand
bourgeoisie; a semidetached suburban house for the bourgeoisie; a terraced
suburban house for the early-stage petty bourgeoisie; an apartment and/or bedsitter in a city tenement for the late-stage petty
bourgeoisie; and, finally, a small flat in a city block for the
proletariat. Such, rightly or wrongly,
is how I estimate approximate class stages of architectural evolution, and in
an open society which is advanced in years, having embraced a proletarian stage
of architectural development, one finds all earlier modes of architecture still
in existence, complete with their specific class owners.
Thus while proletarians ascend by lift to their flats on the
ninth or tenth floor of a communal high-rise in the city, aristocrats may still
be found climbing the wooden stairs of an ancient country house. While late-stage petty-bourgeois types
wake-up each morning in a cramped bedsitter,
early-stage grand-bourgeois types go to sleep each night in the spacious
bedroom of their quite affluent small country-house. Such is life in a relative civilization, with
its open-society distinctions not only between the rich and the poor, but also
between the country and the city.
Life in an absolute civilization of transcendental integrity
would, one fancies, have to be quite different from that - indeed, so different
as to attest to a uniformity of architectural styles and domestic
environments. A post-atomic closed
society would have no aristocrats in it for a start, and scarcely any
bourgeoisie, so that neither rural nor suburban modes of architecture would be
encouraged. The emphasis would be on
developing proletarian architecture within an urban environment, and this would
certainly entail the demolition of suburban and early urban modes of
architecture in order to make room for the inevitable spread of late urban
architecture as the city expanded, literally engulfing formerly petty-bourgeois
and bourgeois environments. So terraced
houses no less than semidetached and detached suburban houses would have to
make way for the urban blocks destined to supplant them. Eventually a proletarian uniformity of
architectural style within a uniform environment would arise, testifying to the
lower, or relative, phase of People’s civilization.
How 'relative', you may well wonder? Well, firstly to the extent that there would
be numerous blocks of flats in any given area, each block separate from its
nearest neighbours. But secondly in
terms of a materialistic style encasing a spiritualistic content, a rectangular
or square design housing proletarians, those absolutely electron equivalents in
relation to the proton- or neutron-biased classes stretching from the
aristocracy to the bourgeoisie. So the
rectangular, then, may be regarded as a materialistic form, a mechanistic
design stemming, in some degree, from the Diabolic Alpha, and this no less so
in a high-rise block of flats than in a country or suburban house. In early proletarian architecture, a
rectangular design is the norm. But this
could not be the case in late proletarian architecture, with the higher phase
of People’s civilization, since such a phase would be absolutely orientated
towards the Divine Omega. Consequently
an absolute mode of architecture would have to be developed, a mode curvilinear
in design, the circular a comparatively spiritual form intimating of divinity
conceived as transcendent spirit, with particular reference to the goal of
evolution in the post-Millennial Beyond.
So a curvilinear style of architecture, in
complete contrast to the aristocratic inception of architecture in palatial or
country-house rectilinear styles.
A truly absolute mode of architecture, the proletariat living in more
intensive collectivizations in a more extensive
communal setting than where the preceding relative mode ... was concerned, one
large circular tower comprising the equivalent to a residential sector of a
city, a kind of omega city, built in such a way that the maximum number of
people can be accommodated there in relative dignity, a central circular space
enabling the residents on the inner side to look out onto the space and/or
other half of the building some hundreds of yards away, while those on the
outer side looked out onto - well, why not another such curvilinear tower a few
hundred yards away?
Or, better still, why not the circular tower built in such a
way that it spirals out in a series of concentric circles, the residents on the
outer side of the central tower looking out onto the inner side of the adjacent
tower, while those on the far side of the second arm, as it were, of the spiral
would be looking out onto the inner side of its third arm, and so on, through
successive spirallings, until the entire population
of the area was accommodated in this omega city, replete with shops, cinemas,
etc., on the ground floor of each arm of the spiral?
Certainly this second suggestion involves a more absolute
approach to architecture, doing away with distinctions between one tower and
another in any given locale and establishing, in consequence, a more
homogeneous city, not simply an isolated block of flats in the country. We may also speculate that if Meditation
Centres were to be built into them, the best possible place would be in the
centre, from which spiritual cynosure the domestic arms of the spiral would
curve outwards in an ever-expanding arc.
Thus any given city would be complete in itself, on religious
no less than on commercial or domestic terms.
It should be possible, in addition, for people to get from one arm of
the spiral to another without having to venture out-of-doors, simply by
following a ground passageway which led from the outermost ring of the city
through each of the arms of the spiral to the Meditation Centre at its
heart. In this way people would be
spared contact with nature and enabled to maintain an intensely-interiorized
and highly-civilized lifestyle - in complete contrast to the aristocratic
inception of civilized evolution in the country.
Because proletarian civilization should be concerned with the
maximum interiorization of life, it follows that not
only access to the open country, but natural light must be minimized in order
to reduce contact with nature as much as possible. Although proletarian architecture would
appear comparatively lightweight and transcendental in construction, employing
synthetic materials, its glass-like outer casing should not be translucent but,
increasingly in the future, of an opaque constitution in order to preclude the
entry of natural light and necessitate recourse to artificial lighting,
preferably of a neon, i.e. electron-biased, type.
Likewise instead of air entering the interior of the buildings
from without, special air-conditioning filters linked to oxygen containers
should be employed in proletarian architecture not simply to reduce or exclude
contact with the natural but, more importantly, to condition man towards
greater dependence on the artificial, since that is a means to the
supernatural, and artificially produced oxygen would induce a clearer
consciousness in its recipients than naturally produced oxygen - trees having
largely become discredited phenomena, subject to destruction.
So a free humanity aspiring towards omega divinity would
necessarily require to be freed from dependence on natural light, which stems
from the sun, that component of the Diabolic Alpha, as well as from dependence
on natural air, which stems in large measure from trees, those offspring of the
Diabolic Alpha and mirrors of the galactic-world-order, serving, in some
degree, as the prototype for feudal society.
Obviously, anything akin to a feudal arrangement would be taboo in a
People’s civilization, and so one can take it as axiomatic that the artificial
production of oxygen, no less than of light, will become essential to the
psychological and moral well-being of the future proletariat.
As to the curvilinear style of advanced proletarian
architecture, one should add that a positive commitment to the Divine Omega
presupposes a defiance of the Diabolic Alpha, so that such architecture ought
really to taper down slightly at roof level in order to defy gravitational
force upwards, while at its lower end a slight tapering upwards in defiance of
gravitational force downwards would not be out-of-order. Quite possibly such curvilinear architecture
will be built, in any case, on raised inner platforms and/or outer pillars,
thereby being elevated above the ground in accordance with transcendental criteria
- the overall appearance suggestive of levitation. This is already true of certain advanced
petty-bourgeois skyscrapers in
Moreover, it is also possible that, rather than simply living
in high-rise blocks of flatlets raised on stilt-like
supports, people will eventually live in space in cosmic flatlets,
and within an architectural context not all that dissimilar from the one
outlined above, replete with permanent recourse - obligatory in space - to
artificial lighting and artificially produced oxygen, not to mention artificial
heating. Such space cities would certainly
constitute a more transcendental context than earth ones, enabling the
occupants to cultivate their spiritual potential to a degree impossible to
achieve on earth, where there is always so much gravitational force.
Could it be, I wonder, that the post-Human Millennium - a time
when human brains are artificially supported and sustained in communal contexts
- will be partly set in space in such curvilinear space cities? Why should not the post-Human Millennium,
particularly during its higher phase, be set in a context closer to the definitive
Beyond (of literal Heaven), where the goal of transcendence (of pure spirit
from the superbeingful new-brain collectivizations)
may well prove easier to achieve?
Ah, I should not allow my imagination to run away with me like
this! But I do not think it can be too
far off the mark. Certainly such space
cities would not preclude contact with the earth, nor need one suppose that
everyone would necessarily have to spend their entire lives in them. They would enable a more advanced life form
to conduct its intensely spiritual affairs at a transcendent remove from the
earth's gravity, and hence in a context appropriate, one feels, to an
exclusively omega-oriented aspiration.
If what directly stems from the Diabolic Alpha is rooted to the earth,
why shouldn't what may, one day, directly aspire towards the Divine Omega be
free from the earth's gravity in an almost heavenly context?
However, all this far-out futuristic speculation does not
invalidate the foregoing suggestions concerning proletarian architecture on
earth in the coming Social Transcendentalist civilization, and we need not
doubt that proletarian earth cities would have to precede space cities, which,
in any case, may well prove more applicable to absolutely post-human life forms
than to the ultimate stage of man's evolution.
EVOLUTIONARY
SPECTRA
There are those who
sing the praises of democracy, but they don't realize that, for all its
advantages, democracy is essentially a middle-class phenomenon which, like
novelistic fiction, canvas painting, and symphonic music, stretches from a
late-stage grand-bourgeois age to an early-stage petty-bourgeois one ... as a
kind of materialistic hybrid in between autocracy and theocracy, and that, with
the emergence of a late-stage petty-bourgeois age, it becomes effectively
anachronistic, though subject to extensive modification ... in the interests of
an attempt to bring it into line with an age of pseudo-democracy, that form of
democracy germane to state socialism, with its so-called People’s democracy.
For people's democracy, despite its proletarian implications,
is essentially a late-stage petty-bourgeois phenomenon, existing at the
tail-end of a democratic spectrum, beyond the pale of genuine democracy but
not, on that account, a chronologically inferior development! On the contrary, simply a more contemporary
one, relevant to the second-half of the twentieth century - like colour
photography, colour film, and rock music.
Pseudo-democracy is, in effect, the antithetical equivalent of Cromwellian dictatorship, a form of political dictatorship
posing as democracy, no less the end of the middle spectrum of social affairs
than Cromwell's dictatorship was its inception, back in the seventeenth
century, when the English bourgeoisie revolted against royalist autocracy. Socialism, by contrast, signifies a revolt
against democratic pluralism, with its capitalist base. However, capitalism and socialism are not,
contrary to what is commonly supposed, antithetical. Rather, socialism is the antithetical equivalent
of feudalism, with capitalism coming in-between.
However, the middle, or democratic, spectrum is flanked by two
others, which we may characterize as an autocratic spectrum beneath (if we
imagine these spectra of evolutionary development lying parallel to one another
in a horizontal course), and a theocratic spectrum above, the former beginning
in pagan antiquity under aristocratic auspices, and the latter beginning with
an early-stage grand-bourgeois epoch in Western Europe, the one manifesting in
authoritarian monarchism, the other in Roman Catholicism. Let us take each spectrum separately.
Beginning with the ancient kingdoms of rural antiquity,
authoritarian monarchism (royalism) signified worship
of the God-King, the nearest equivalent on earth to the Creator or, as
Christians prefer to say, the Father, whose status, at least in theory, was
omnipotent, the ultimate tribunal over life and death, the maker or breaker of
men. Gradually, as evolution progressed,
the powers of the monarch were curbed, and by the seventeenth century Cromwell
was able to lead a successful revolt in England against authoritarian
monarchism which resulted, albeit briefly, in the dethronement of autocracy and
its replacement by a democratic dictatorship.
Since then the powers of the monarchy have been further curbed
in all Western societies, with the result that it has become - where still
surviving - constitutional, or subject to parliamentary sanction, the reigning
monarch little more than a figurehead of state, bereft of independent power,
and consequently functioning in a pseudo-autocratic context. We may contend that constitutional monarchy
is the norm for those societies which have retained an autocratic spectrum
while being centred, as in Britain, on a democratic one, and that
pseudo-autocracy is, by and large, a late-nineteenth/early-twentieth century
phenomenon, the autocratic spectrum coming to an end with an early-stage
petty-bourgeois era, after which time the extension of the first or bottom
spectrum will take the form of a military dictatorship, as germane to a
late-stage petty-bourgeois era, and thus become quasi-fascist, as in so many
Third World countries since World War II.
Of course, where a constitutional monarchy is already deeply
entrenched, as in
Can one therefore speak of a military dictatorship as being
reactionary from a democratic point of view?
Certainly it signifies a reaction, very often, from the middle-spectrum
democratic traditions of the imperial power to the bottom spectrum of
autocratic tradition, though not on monarchic terms. Rather, military dictatorship is more
contemporary than democracy, a development paralleling the tail-end of the
middle spectrum in pseudo-democracy, as pertaining to Marxist-Leninist states,
both of which relate to late-stage petty-bourgeois criteria.
So, paradoxically, there is more progression than reaction to a
military dictatorship in recently-liberated
This brings me to a discussion of the third and highest
spectrum, namely the theocratic one, which began on early-stage grand-bourgeois
terms in the form of Roman Catholicism and was superseded, in those nations
destined for democracy, by Protestantism, that democratic religion, equivalent
to drawing in art and to the concerto in music.
Unfortunately, due to historical pressures, Roman Catholicism became
increasingly autocratic, a religious complement to authoritarian monarchy, and
was subject to a revolt by the bourgeoisie, whose Protestant triumph led to the
persecution of Catholics and their relegation to second-class citizenship
throughout the era of bourgeois hegemony, roughly from a late-stage
grand-bourgeois to an early-stage petty-bourgeois age, spanning the 17th-20th
centuries.
With the dawn of a late-stage petty-bourgeois era, however, Fascism
made its appearance on the top spectrum as the antithetical equivalent of Roman
Catholicism, a necessarily anti-democratic ideology with a religious mission,
though less one favouring the development of a True World Religion, the
successor to all old-world religions, than one partial to Roman Catholicism, if
more so in Italy than Germany, while retaining a quasi-religious status for
itself as vested in the dictator, who became an approximation, in effect, to
God. If Roman Catholicism found its aesthetic
equivalent in stained glass, then fascism had light art, that successor to
drawing on the penultimate section, as it were, of the top spectrum, the
section preceding holography, which would be relevant to the proletariat, and
no less so than Social Transcendentalism, the means to the True World Religion,
the successor to fascism and ideology, so far as I am concerned, of 'Kingdom
Come', necessarily hostile to both royalism and
military dictatorship, liberalism and socialism, Protestantism and fascism (considered
as a late-stage petty-bourgeois movement), because beyond and above all of
these, the principal exponent of truth!
Social Transcendentalism would be beyond antithetical
equivalents because extending the top spectrum into an absolute stage of evolution,
a stage antithetical, in constitution, to the authoritarian monarchism of the
bottom spectrum, before bourgeois relativity intervened in the form of
parliamentarianism. Beyond all bourgeois
relativity, no less than autocratic absolutism was beneath it, Social
Transcendentalism would open out towards the superhuman millennium and,
consequently, the eventual supersession of man by his
post-human successors, the only way towards definitive salvation, the only way
forward. No proletarian humanism, like
socialism, but a post-humanist concern with evolutionary progress towards
future transformations in advancing life, man being something that, in the Nietzschean dictum, 'should be overcome'.
Humanism pertains to the middle spectrum, not the third, which
has little respect for ethics once it reaches that stage, as with Social
Transcendentalism, where truth is attained to and systematically endorsed. Only the Protestant part of
the top spectrum kow-tows to ethics, as during the hegemony of the age of democratic
relativity. Social
Transcendentalism, even more than fascism, is 'beyond good and evil', those
antithetical attributes of the Christian civilization. Only that is 'good' which furthers truth, and
every act must be judged according to this criterion. Only in truth does man aspire towards the
Holy Spirit, only in the context of pure awareness.
The ethical good act has nothing to do with divinity,
considered in its ultimate sense.
Goodness pertains to Christ, the temporal divinity between the two
absolutes of alpha and omega, the strong and the true, the Creator and the
Ultimate Creation. Neither
strength, which pertains to the bottom spectrum, nor goodness, that
ethical compromise between the extremes, can have any place in the absolute
phase of the top spectrum. Neither a
worship of the Father nor an emulation of the Son will prevail in that society
dedicated to the realization of truth.
Only an aspiration towards the Holy Spirit can have any value there, and
only that which brings such an aspiration closer to ultimate realization is
'good'. We have lived long enough in the
world of the Strong and the Good. Now we
must live for the truth!
NEW
BEGINNINGS/OLD ENDINGS
It was shortly after
the Second World War that late-stage petty-bourgeois civilization began to get
properly under way and a world arose which signified a break with the past, a
new beginning, an aspiration, one might say, towards absolute proletarian
criteria. For centuries men had lived with
paintings, novels, symphonies, wind-up watches, spectacles, carriages, ships,
universities, houses, books, acoustic guitars, and numerous other things which
it seems fair to associate with a period of history stretching from late-stage
grand-bourgeois to early-stage petty-bourgeois times, from approximately the
mid-seventeenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, though some of those things of
course date from even earlier times.
But then, with the acquirement of new technologies and a desire
to revolutionize life in some degree, all that changed, and post-war man,
particularly in his late-stage petty-bourgeois manifestation, began to turn
against the past and acclimatize himself to the ever-changing present. Of course, the old things - wind-up watches,
universities, novels, etc. - continued to exist, both in their historical and
more contemporary manifestations. But a
growing number of people were preferring the new and thus living within a more
civilized context, if by 'civilized' we mean artificial and transcendental.
To be sure, there was still a large number of people going to
universities, those traditional institutions of higher education, but there was
also a large number, probably more petty-bourgeois/proletarian in character,
who went to technical colleges, those late-stage petty-bourgeois successors to
universities. Admittedly, there were
still a considerable number of people who preferred wind-up watches to digital
ones. But, even so, the number of
digital wearers seemed to be on the increase.
If many people still read novels, there was also a more contemporary
body of people who preferred their fiction in a magazine or comic book, and who
went to the cinema as often as possible or, alternatively, sat at home and
watched a film on television.
The old and the new often overlapped, but there could be no
doubt that the new was gaining in importance and influence as time wore
on. Even people with old-world habits
and allegiances occasionally indulged in some form of contemporary activity or
identification, if on a comparatively low-key basis. A detailed investigation of people's
lifestyles would probably indicate that most of them were far from consistent
in terms of contemporary allegiance and behaviour, largely, one suspects,
through ignorance as to the class-status of any given pursuit or
identification, and possible ambivalence as to their own class-status in a
continuously changing world.
Hence the paradoxical and often amusing chimeras of, say,
university students in jeans - those late-stage petty-bourgeois successors to
trousers - or, conversely, of technical-college students in trousers - those
more traditional kinds of legwear. No-one is ultra-consistent, and I myself
occasionally wear cords and a button-up shirt instead of a tee-shirt. Nevertheless a methodology of homogeneous
living is possible and could be systematically pursued by anyone intelligent
enough to work out both his own class-status and the class-status of the things
or habits available to him in the contemporary world, should he decide to
harmonize the two in the interests of ideological perfection.
Here, for example, is a list of some old and new things which
might be of interest to anyone aspiring towards a more homogeneous lifestyle:-
universities technical
colleges
condoms the
pill
ships hovercraft
natural sex pornography
novels short
stories
plays/theatre films/cinema
books magazines/tapes
paintings posters
cameos photos
spectacles contact
lenses
trousers jeans
(denims/cords)
shirts tee-shirts
wind-up
watches digital
watches
houses flats
operas vocal
rock
symphonies instrumental
rock
concertos modern
jazz
ballroom
dancing disco
dancing
stained
glass light
art
drawing holography
sculpture kinetics
skirts/dresses slacks/boiler-suits
prayer transcendental
meditation
beer/cider cola/soda
writing typing
manual
washing-up washing-up
machine
hand washing machine
washing
outdoor
drying spin/heat
drying
open fire electric
fire
gas cooker electric
cooker
drying hair
manually hairdryer
feather bed water bed
hand shaving electric/battery
shaving
manual
toothbrush electric
toothbrush
woollen
blanket electric
blanket
liberal
democracy social
democracy
Protestantism Marxism
capitalism socialism
dildos vibrators
prostitutes masseuses
girlfriends inflatables
bombs missiles
truncheons plastic
bullets
handkerchiefs paper
tissues
candles torches
matches lighters
men's
bicycles motorbikes
women's
bicycles scooters
houses flats
natural
conversation telephone
conversation
manual games autonomous
games
potatoes chips
fish fishcakes/fingers
Catholicism Fascism
monarchs military
dictators
This isn't by any means
an exhaustive list, but it should indicate the nature of the distinction that
exists between traditional bourgeois civilization and contemporary petty-bourgeois/proletarian
civilization, the former preceding the Second World War and the latter
succeeding it, the two generally overlapping in such open societies as prevail
in the West at present, particularly in the more traditional societies of countries
like Britain and France, which have a longer history than the more contemporary
nations like Germany and the United States, not to mention Italy and Japan.
Indeed, it is in these more contemporary nations that
late-stage petty-bourgeois/proletarian civilization is more consistently upheld
and most clearly manifest, such aspects of it as apply to the older Western
countries often deriving from them. No
sooner does one think of America, for instance, than a veritable host of
contemporary things and practices leap to mind, including jeans, tee-shirts,
cola, cartoons, comic books, films, jazz, and basketball. If
Of course, this civilization is not the ultimate one, and I
personally have no doubt that another and better one will shortly emerge in
which specifically proletarian criteria will prevail, replacing most of the
contemporary things and attitudes which people in the West nowadays take for
granted. But, even so, the break with
tradition that followed World War II created the basis for any subsequent
evolutionary progress, and such progress as has still to be made will derive,
in large part, from what currently exists, whether in science or art, religion
or politics, society or sex.
Certainly it is difficult to see how the pill, contact lenses,
digital watches, hovercraft, and other such contemporary things could be
bettered, though profound changes will doubtless occur and, indeed, already are
occurring, as in the development of a new kind of pill, more long-term than the
old, and the burgeoning plethora of plastic digital watches in succession,
seemingly, to the older (and possibly more petty-bourgeois) metallic ones. Probably either a late phase of
petty-bourgeois civilization or an early phase of proletarian civilization is
already manifest in many of these changes, which herald an age of absolute criteria. Assuming they haven't been entirely eclipsed
by computers, magazines may continue to be published in a proletarian
civilization, but it is unlikely that they will be crammed full of adverts, as
in capitalist societies.
Other aspects of contemporary civilization, like photography
and film, jazz and rock, motorbikes and bicycles, kinetics and light
sculptures, short stories and posters, will undoubtedly die-out in the course
of time, evolutionary progress having rendered them obsolescent, knowledge having
placed them within a certain time-span relative to a given class-status and/or
kind of civilization, and history having sealed their fate in the process of
its inexorable unfolding. Not everything
contemporary is necessarily the blueprint for a higher development. Nevertheless a significant proportion of it
is, and in some cases that development has already been realized.
THE
RISE OF THEOCRATIC CENTRISM
Just as philosophy,
fiction, and poetry are three branches of literature corresponding, one could
argue, to three parallel spectra; and sculpture, painting, and drawing are
three branches of art likewise corresponding to three parallel spectra; and
ballet, the symphony, and the concerto are three branches of classical music
whose correspondence to three parallel spectra is no less evident, so
authoritarianism, parliamentarianism, and totalitarianism are three branches of
politics, as different from each other as any of the above-named branches but,
nevertheless, related by a common family tie, so to speak, to political
evolution. To return to our spectrum
analogy, one could speak of authoritarianism as autocratic, parliamentarianism
as democratic, and totalitarianism as theocratic, indicative, in their different
ways, of a progression from the Father to the Holy Spirit via the Son. Politics and religion are not entirely
separate, as might at first appear to be the case, but are really two aspects
of the same thing, politics being the practical application of a religious
premise, the ordering of human society according to the criteria of religious
precedent.
Thus in its first, or royalist, stage of evolution, politics is
autocratic, reflecting the 'divine order' of the Creator and His 'fallen
angels', establishing on earth an equivalent to the galactic-world-order, in
which the monarch functions as the human equivalent of the central star of the
Galaxy and thereby rules over both a nobility, corresponding to peripheral
stars, and a populace, corresponding to planets, who are enslaved to monarch
and nobility alike, owing allegiance to both, though particularly to the feudal
baron, lord, or whatever, who directly rules over them and thus holds them
within a solar system-like integrity. He
comes in-between the peasantry and their monarch, free to rule the former as he
thinks fit but owing direct allegiance to the latter, who rules by 'divine
right', the personification on earth of the Creator, less truly divine, in any
objectively omega-oriented (free-electron) sense, than archdiabolic,
a more powerful ruler than the myriads of nobles who only correspond to minor
stars, devil equivalents vis-à-vis a demonic populace.
We see this same so-called 'divine order' at work in trees,
where a trunk, corresponding to central star/monarch, is served by the branches,
corresponding to peripheral stars/nobility, which in turn are served by the
leaves, those planet/peasant equivalents which have no option but to slave for
their differently-constituted masters, providing them with the nourishment they
require to survive. A pedant could argue
as to the exact solar/noble status of any given branch in the overall feudal
hierarchy of a tree, but we need not go into such trifling details here! Suffice it to say that most of the larger
branches would be equivalent to high-ranking nobles such as dukes and princes,
most of the smaller ones, or those not immediately stemming from the trunk,
equivalent to low-ranking nobles such as viscounts and barons. The eventual grading of nobles along more
complex and variegated lines was a development presupposing a higher degree of
civilization ... commensurate with a more advanced age, as the monarch moved
out of his castle into a palace, and the lesser royals and/or nobility in
general moved from their forts, or small castles, into country houses, or small
palaces. In a strictly pagan society,
this wouldn't have been possible or, indeed, credible. But with the rise of the Christian
bourgeoisie and the development of parliamentarianism at the expense of
authoritarianism, the status of the feudal classes was irrevocably changed, so
their freedom to rule in an autocratic manner was curbed, the monarchy in due
course becoming subject to greater constitutional constraint.
The emergence of parliamentarianism as a compromise, in effect,
between authoritarianism and totalitarianism, the Father and the Holy Ghost,
marked a shift from pseudo-pagan to properly Christian criteria, as democracy,
in large measure derived from Protestant teachings as to human equality,
supplanted autocracy, and the age of dualism, necessarily hostile to autocratic
Roman Catholicism, was ushered in, placing due emphasis on compromise between
disparate (in the main) bourgeois interests, and upholding the ethic of
self-enrichment through hard work.
Indeed, democracy was quintessentially ethical, concerned with the
general good, usually interpreted in a commercial or utilitarian way, and thus
was committed to human freedom, freedom, above all, from autocratic tyranny in
order to pursue the Good rather than remain enslaved, as with feudal societies,
to the Strong, whether natural or 'divine'.
Inevitably, democracy gave rise to industry and furthered the
growth of urbanization, which, at first, was highly ugly. Centred in the ethics of equality and a faith
in the ability of human effort to overcome natural obstacles, it necessarily
favoured the artificial, one might even say the transcendental; though the
theory and practical implementation of Christian teachings weren't always
consonant, the industrious bourgeois rarely averse to putting practice above
theory, private enrichment before the general good, and to an extent that the
former tended to eclipse the latter, making for a society where the toiling
masses, far from sharing in the general wealth, were exploited and oppressed by
their industrial masters to a degree not far short of the exploitation and
oppression experienced by peasants in the age of feudal enslavement.
The bourgeoisie may have acknowledged a transcendental
perspective, relative to Protestantism, but they remained firmly rooted in the
mundane and were, to a degree, sympathetic towards feudal precedent. There was no moral rebirth with them, no
clean break with the past, since capitalism is ever a mode of industrial feudalism,
an artificial as opposed to a natural form of exploitation. Just as Christ acknowledged the Father, so
parliamentarians acknowledge royals, democracy being a kind of diluted
autocracy, the bourgeoisie sharing power with the aristocracy, as symbolized by
the distinction in England between the House of Commons and the House of Lords,
the bourgeoisie themselves divisible between capitalist and socialist
interests, not to mention different shades of capitalism, as in the heyday of
Tory/Liberal confrontation in Victorian times.
As in Christ, so in parliamentarianism, everything must be divided,
divisible, and divisive! Compromise is
taken for the norm and, indeed, transformed into an ideal, not simply regarded
as the best way of dealing with divisions but considered sacrosanct in itself -
valid for all time!
Well, those who, as Bolshevik-styled communists, signify an
extension of democracy into absolute channels ... don't think so, even though
they pertain to the democratic spectrum and are themselves materialists,
concerned with the ethical application to society of a proletarian humanism
based on the teachings of Karl Marx, whose Communism is to pseudo-democracy
what Protestantism was to democracy proper - namely the theoretical foundation
for political action, Marx following on behind Christ as the Anti-Christ, state
socialism no less anti-democratic, in the bourgeois atomic sense, than
capitalism was pro-democratic, the means, one feels, to the overthrow of
liberal democracy.
Yet not, on that account, the means to Transcendentalism, which
appertains to the third and highest spectrum, the theocratic spectrum, as one
that would seem to have played only a very secondary role throughout the age of
parliamentarianism, theoretical influence notwithstanding, and only began to
take an independent line with the rise of Fascism, an ideology biased towards
Roman Catholicism but revolutionary and independent enough to signify, in the
person of the Leader, a crude approximation to the Second Coming, the basis of
a genuinely theocratic society in which religion becomes absolute, if on terms
diametrically antithetical to the absolutism of its inception in various
degrees and kinds of Creator-worship.
Does not the leader of a fascist state personify divinity on terms the
converse of the God-Kings of pagan antiquity?
Certainly, one would be hard-pressed to deny the divine status
of the Leader in a fascist society, even if, in the late-stage petty-bourgeois
context to which we are of course alluding, this status is less than a truly
objective intimation of the Holy Ghost and more like a representation of the
Father, given its quasi-autocratic implications. But fascism and royalism
are really antithetical, and if sovereignty is vested in the Monarch in an
autocratic society, the ruler equivalent to the Father there, then it is most
assuredly vested in the Leader in a theocratic society, who becomes the
personification of the Holy Spirit, the leading embodiment of truth, an
intimation of ultimate divinity. Only in
a democratic society is sovereignty vested in the People, who are entitled to
elect representatives to parliament who govern and/or serve on their behalf.
In
Early in the twentieth century, however, a further, even more
radical example of the same kind of revolution occurred in Russia and, bearing
in mind the progress of history towards an absolute age, it resulted in the
eventual emergence of a People’s republic, necessarily proletarian in character
and therefore beyond the bourgeois compromise of the French Revolution. Beyond a Soviet-type revolution history
cannot go on the middle, or democratic, spectrum, pseudo-democracy being the
ultimate form of democracy, where sovereignty is vested in the proletariat and
a sort of dictatorial democracy ... of the proletariat ... prevails, the
antithetical equivalent to the democratic dictatorship of the Cromwellian revolution.
The only way forward after this is Fascism and its ideological successor
in Social Transcendentalism, but this pertains to the top, or theocratic,
spectrum and can only be hostile towards republicans of whatever degree, as
sovereignty is vested in the Leader, who becomes dictator to the masses, a
no-less absolute figure than the autocratic monarch of royalist times, because
equivalent to God.
Thus a totalitarian society is inevitably anti-republican and
anti-democratic, the Leader alone responsible for determining the course of evolution,
and thereby leading from above, pulling the masses after him towards the
post-Human Millennium, that stage in time when man will have been completely
overcome and only the Supermen prevail, in the guise of brain collectivizations artificially supported and sustained,
though not without human supervision and assistance from qualified
technicians. Only in the second phase of
this post-Human Millennium, when the old brain has been surgically removed from
each Superman, would such technicians become superfluous, as the truly
classless, free society of the Superbeings, or
new-brain collectivizations, hypermeditated
towards transcendence and thus the attainment of pure spirit (free electrons)
to the post-Millennial Beyond.
All this is, of course, pertinent to Social Transcendentalism
and therefore to the ideology propounded by the closest approximation on earth
to the Second Coming. If Fascism was
petty bourgeois in character, the crude beginnings of a theocratic society,
then Social Transcendentalism is proletarian and, hence, absolute, the more
objective ideology of the Second Coming for a post-democratic age, an age when
real progress towards the post-Human Millennium can be made, as Social
Transcendentalism strives to extend the top spectrum towards a theocratic
absolutism, and thereby paves the way for universal civilization.
Pertaining to the tail-end of the middle spectrum, Communism
simply isn't qualified to further progress towards the post-Human
Millennium. Its concept of Millennialism
is necessarily subjective, envisaging not the supersession
of men by post-human life forms, but a kind of global equalitarian society
based on the ethics of proletarian humanism.
In short, it lacks a capacity for truth, being an extension of ethics
beyond bourgeois relativity to a kind of proletarian absolutism germane to
People’s democracy. But such a
relatively absolute phase of democracy cannot stretch into a genuinely
proletarian age. There is only one way
forward, and that is through Social Transcendentalism. For it is only the last
stretch of the top spectrum which is truly absolute in character. The age of People’s republics, no less than
that of bourgeois republics, will soon be a thing of the past. Tomorrow belongs to us!
