This project tests and evaluates the critical and aesthetic implications of the ‘picturing’ or ‘visualisation’ of philosophical and political ideas as art.
Six sets of digital images will be posted on this site between the 1st March and 1st July, picturing the following philosophical ideas: Leibniz/Deleuze’s notion of the Monad, Karl Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism and Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence. A final image will be produced as a synthesis of these three. Your feedback gratefully received.
Research questions are:
1. How can philosophical and political ideas be ‘visualised’ or ‘pictured’ using computer generated imagery?
2. How might the contemporary virtuality and dematerialisation of the image and mutability of digital form relate to the ‘virtual’ nature of philosophical ideas?
3. How can these representations of ‘ideas’ as images be described in relation to existing theories of ‘mental imagery’ and the ‘picturing affects’ of language?
4. If images of ideas are combined visually, can this produce ‘new’ ideas? How can we judge the status and performance of these images as ‘ideas’ and as ‘art’?
These images are only first attempts but I am posting them up as they are otherwise I will never get started. Some are based on previous work, others are ‘speculative’. I would be grateful for any feedback on images or theoretical concerns suggested above, as well as descriptions or examples of other images (including drawings, sketches, lecture illustrations etc). Either by posting on this website, or by email j.a.russell@reading.ac.uk
1: Commodity Fetishism. Abstraction of Labour Time [Click to enlarge]
Brief notes:
Call Centre Worker as an example of ‘contemporary labour’/abstraction of labour. With reference to Marx, Karl. Capital. Volume 1. Penguin Books, 1990.
Marx writes: ‘A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.’ (Marx, Capital 163). And he continues:
"A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men's labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses." (164-5)
The demonic dimension of the commodity (and in this respect Marx describes commodities as ‘possessed by the devil’) (302) resides in the fact that the value-relation between commodities has nothing to do with the physical properties of the materials from which they are made but rather with the social relations involved in their production and exchange. The fetishism of commodities arises from the social character of the labour which produces them and which is ‘congealed’ in them. It is only by being exchanged that the products of labour acquire uniformity of values (abstract labour time) distinct from their utility-producing or physical properties. Thus man-made material goods are artificially given a ‘life’ of their own, a value seemingly inherent in them.
In the first 80 pages of Capital, Marx breathes this life into inanimate objects, in his descriptions of the bewitching or animating capacity of commodity form. Objects come to life like the brooms and buckets in Walt Disney’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice sequence. For instance his description of an ordinary table, transformed into a commodity and evolving ‘out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than “table turning.”’ (163). Or his suggestion that:
‘Could commodities themselves speak, they would say: Our use-value may be a thing that interests men. It is no part of us as objects. What, however, does belong to us as objects, is our value. Our natural intercourse as commodities proves it. In the eyes of each other we are nothing but exchange-values.’ (163)
2: Eternal Recurrence [Click to enlarge]
Brief notes:
Image draws on the melodramtic format of public murals (I was thinking, in part, of community murals, like the one on the Brixton Academy, South London (below).
Eternal recurrence pictured as a particular moment of lived 'experience' as affirmation - ‘Yes to life’ - as opposed, for instance, to ‘a pure effort of thought’ or as ‘a test’ (Allison, The New Nietzsche, 28), or ‘thought experiment’ (Ridley, Nietzsche on Art, 103).
With reference to:
‘…the ideal of the most exuberant, most living and most world-affirming man, who has not only learned to compromise and treat with all that was and is but who wants to have it again as it was and is to all eternity, insatiably calling out da capo not only to himself but to the whole piece and play …” (F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, New York: Penguin: 82.)
‘the complex of causes in which I am entangled will recur – it will create me again! … I shall return, with this sun, with this earth, with this eagle … - not to a new life or a better life or a similar life [but] to this identical and self-same life, in the greatest things and the smallest.'
(F. Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, New York: Penguin Books, 1978: III: 2/2.)
3: Leibniz/Deleuze’s: Monad [Click to enlarge]
Brief notes:
I’m having trouble with the Monad direct from Liebniz’s Monadology - in part because of the complexity of the system he describes. Currently looking at Deleuze's version in The Fold: Liebniz and the Baroque. The image above is a 'hunch': images of catalogue models as 'archetypes', in relation to the idea of Monads as 'entelechies' (Aristotelian/Medieval idea: the becoming actual or achievement of a potential).
For instance: 'All simple substances or created Monads might be called Entelechies, for they have in them a certain perfection (echousi to enteles); they have a certain self-sufficiency (autarkeia) which makes them the sources of their internal activities and, so to speak, incorporeal automata. From Leibniz, Monadology (1714), in Philosophical Papers: A Selection, Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1969, sec. 18.
A few perfunctory comments on entelechy and monadism to hopefully initiate some discussions relevant to your project:
ReplyDeleteEntelechy is among those scholastic concepts (along with substantial forms) which in the transition to modern science were abandoned because they posed hindrances to the mathematization of nature. However, I believe despite this elimination, certain ideas attached to the concept of entelechy have been pivotal in the development of a formal theory of differential calculus. One of these ideas which Leibniz uses for the construction of his calculus is the idea of (dis-)continuity in regard to entelechies and monads. You see one of the main problems for Leibniz – as Deleuze addresses in The Fold – was the problem of singularities and their distribution in the universe. For Leibniz singularities 'exist' from the beginning, so they have a pre-established ontological position. Therefore the important problem for Leibniz was not really the ontological aspect of singularities but a way to explain the movements / shifts between different singularities. In other words, Leibniz was more interested to know how one singularity can depart from its path and move toward another singularity (the question of dynamism as related to differently distributed singularities). In order to tackle with this metaphysical problem, Leibniz uses the Aristotelian / Scholastic concept of entelechy. The reason for this recourse to the concept of enetelechia lies in the ideas of continuity and discontinuity in regard to entelechies. Enetelechies are discontinuous to their environment yet they can form universes or continua. They don't have appendages (or windows) but they can build universes with other entelechies. Probably a good example to explain this is the classic question of line and points: 'Points have no parts or joints; then how can they combine to form a line?' Here, in this context, points can represent entelechies or singularities.
Now, the question is why can entelechies be models of discontinuity? Or in other words, what kind of (dis-)continuity do the entelechies represent?
The general (Aristotelian) concept of entelechy is a 'perfect act' or 'having the end within itself'. What constitutes this autarkic perfectness or entelechia? Scholastics addressed this perfect-ness as a particular alignment or relation to the end. In the scholastic context, something becomes perfect when it sets an end (telos) within itself, an end to which its existence is aligned and by which it can be mapped 'only' within itself. Therefore, perfect-ness or entelechia marks a particular relationship to the end which results in inexchangeability with the outside – an inflected alignment with the telos by which the entity is cut from the outside and the teleonomic affect of the environment is foreclosed. To put it differently, the perfect-ness of entelechy is its closure to the outside because nothing – neither a property nor a force from the environment – can or should change it. Therefore, entelechy suggests the realization of potentials in regard to an inflected (folded-inside) relation with the telos which terminates the influence of the outside forces or environment. This means that that the perfect-ness or entelechia of a monad manifests in its complicatio (coming-together of folds) or the intensive movement of the entity in the direction of its ideal or telos. Scholastics considered this movement as an intensive realization of potencies – as opposed to an extensive or outward realization by which the entity is realized according to an ideal or telos which has been extensively deployed outside of it. So monad is a 'complicatio' since it bespeaks of realization of potencies according to an intensive state and along an inward vector toward the ideal or the telos. Therefore, monad is the affirmation of potencies according to an intensive state (inward and internal correlation with the telos) but in order to remain in such an intensive state, the monad must perpetually negate anything outside of itself i.e. be extensively negative. This extensive negativity ensures that the monad remains perfectly closed to its environment: if the monad is influenced by the outside, its perfection will be affected i.e. it becomes imperfect and loses its entelechy.
For this reason, entelechy makes monad an entity that cannot be brought to the logic of the environment. The monad can not be expressed or realized by external conditions which are generally required for the realization of potencies and emergence of actualities. In fact, the resistance of the monad toward extensive realization or its refusal to say yes to (affirm) the environment is what makes monad completely autarkic. In short, extensive closure for the sake of an intensive openness toward the internal ideal or telos makes entelechy perfect. This means monad is only closed to things outside of it. The absence of a window for a monad can only make sense from an architectural perspective outside of the monad itself. For a monad, the realization of potencies is only effectuated intensively and inwardly, or in other words in a monad the correlation between possibilities and actualities are inward and rigidly closed to the outside. This is another way to say that for its environment, the monad is an impossibility, a rigid resistance of possibilities toward realization according to an extensive or environmental state. This state of the impossibility (for the world outside of a monad) can be expressed in terms of discontinuity. The monad enforces the logic of discontinuity because it disrupts the continuity of correlations between possibilities and actualities: the intensive realization of possibilities in a monad can only happen in the presence of a negativity or closure toward the extensive conditions of realization / actualization. By extensive, I mean outward or situated outside of the entelechy's internal correlation with its ideal or telos. Now, if monads or entelechies manifest as impossibilities and register as discontinuities then how can we make a possible or continuous world out of them?
I think, the problem of discontinuity / impossibility harbored by the intensive realization of potencies / possibilities in monads poses certain challenges in regard to 'visualization of the idea of the monad' (which is part of your project). However, if the idea of mathesis universalis and differential calculus can resolve the problem of the monad's discontinuity, then is it possible to have a visual realization or synthesis which would be the equivalent of differential calculus – a method to build visual continuities out of ideas which enforce discontinuities?
Thanks for that Reza. With reference to two comments you make in the last paragraph:
ReplyDelete1. ‘… If monads or entelechies manifest as impossibilities and register as discontinuities then how can we make a possible or continuous world out of them?’
2. ‘... If the idea of mathesis universalis and differential calculus can resolve the problem of the monad's discontinuity, then is it possible to have a visual realization or synthesis which would be the equivalent of differential calculus – a method to build visual continuities out of ideas which enforce discontinuities?’
With reference to point 1, in the last two paragraphs you describe how the monad is:
‘...the affirmation of potencies according to an intensive state.’ And ‘…extensive closure for the sake of an intensive openness toward the internal ideal or telos makes entelechy perfect. This means monad is only closed to things outside of it. The absence of a window for a monad can only make sense from an architectural perspective outside of the monad itself. For a monad, the realization of potencies is only effectuated intensively and inwardly, or in other words in a monad the correlation between possibilities and actualities are inward and rigidly closed to the outside. This is another way to say that for its environment, the monad is an impossibility, a rigid resistance of possibilities toward realization according to an extensive or environmental state.’
In particular, in the section where you write, ‘[t]he absence of a window for a monad can only make sense from an architectural perspective outside of the monad itself,’ you seem to be suggesting there is no perspective or viewpoint (or space) from which the monad, or the idea of the monad, can be 'seen'*. For instance where/how would the perspective/viewpoint be to 'see' the monad from the outside? And does it make sense to imagine an image of a monad from the outside?**
This connects with reading I have been doing recently around ideas of ‘mental imagery.’ For instance, the spatial dimensions of the imagination are discussed in relation to linguistic and literary theory by G. Currie (‘The Nature of Fiction’ 1990), K Walton (‘Mimesis as Make-Believe’ 1990), H.P.Grice (‘Utterer’s Meaning and Intentions, 1989’) and J Levison (‘Emotion in Response to Art: A survey of the Terrain’, 1977). Walton describes how we can imagine ‘centrally’ and ‘acentrally’. For example: you can imagine yourself (centrally) scoring a goal in a football stadium, but you can also imagine yourself (acentrally) scoring a goal from the perspective of a spectator. There is also the possibility of imagining from no perspective. Here Walton is referring in part to Berkeley’s conundrum: “Imagine an unseen tree”, i.e.: if you are centrally imagining a tree you are part of the scene but if you acentrally imagine a tree - you imagine a tree from no perspective. If you are not imagining seeing a tree, then you are imagining a tree, that is unseen.
The question is suggested: how can you see an unseen (or unseeable) idea? And if an idea’s logic excludes the possibility of a viewpoint, from where it can be ‘seen’ – and what does this look like?
The idea of perspective or viewpoint is particularly complex in the case of Deleuze (and Guattari) given that they are sort of neo-empiricists who want to revive the idea of mind independent entities (a universe in which the event is materially contingent). This, as I understand it, is where there interest in the idea of ‘singularities’ develops. For instance, their famous soap bubble which forms itself in accordance with the minimum possible surface tension: the singularity of soap is to move towards minimum surface tension. Therefore singularities inhabit matter and give matter tendencies, challenging the idea that matter is inert and subject to laws which are imposed from the outside. The existence of a particular soap bubble is not inevitable, it is rather the result of a self-organising system which produces a soap bubble. The problem is therefore that the empirical view breaks down as soon as things in the physical world go beyond or below human scale. Obviously most ‘real’ (mind independent) objects are not visible (electrons, D N A, black holes &c) and because they elude observation they are generally regarded as representations, constructs. So the positivist would say that a drawing of double helix is not a representation of mind-independent reality it is just a description from which predictions can follow.***
So I guess on a wider level it can be asked whether/how Deleuze’s ideas can be ‘seen’ (and ‘visulaised’) only when they inhabit or inhere within/on events and occurrences (incorporeal sense etc)? And what does an ‘unseen’ idea looks like?
2. Is this what you mean when you write ‘…a method to build visual continuities out of ideas which enforce discontinuities?’
P.S. I have just read an interesting text by Annamaria Carusi [Oxford e-Research Centre, Oxford University], 'Scientific visualisations and aesthetic grounds for trust,' where she describes how the collaborative ‘Big Science’ approach prevalent in physics during the mid- and late-20th century, is often computationally mediated, and how these collaborations ‘challenge researchers’ trust practices’. To quote: ‘focusing on the visualisations that are often at the heart of this form of scientific practice, the paper proposes that the aesthetic aspects of these visualisations are themselves a way of securing trust. Kant’s account of aesthetic judgements in the Third Critique is drawn upon in order to show that the image-building capability of imagination, and the sensus communis, both of which are integral parts of aesthetic experience, play an important role in building and sustaining community in these forms of science.”
The interesting thing is that these visualisations are ‘those which are used for in silico experiments, distinguishable from other forms of images which are representations of ‘actual’ entities, such as things produced by microscopy’.
*Obviously, this not to ignore the fact that the idea of ‘mental imagery’ is problematic itself. For instance debates taking place in the fields of philosophy, cognitive science and experimental/gestalt psychology examining the role ‘imagery’ plays in memory, visuo-spatial reasoning and inventive and creative thought, that is, whether it plays a crucial role in all thought processes and provides the semantic grounding for language or whether the idea of mental imagery, or 'seeing with the minds eye' is merely ‘theoretical-folk’ habit-formed assumption, e.g. Wittgensteinian-style iconophobia – ‘imageless thought’ and proposals that language is the preeminent vehicle of thought etc etc etc.
**The visualisations I have found so far of monads tend to be reflective metallic spheres (see the last image in Miscellaneous Images –below)
*** Thanks to Steve Rushton for that last bit.
Yo John.
ReplyDeleteSome initial thoughts. I've been rereading the first section of Capital, as I've had the flu. Before I get started on reading section 4 on the fetishism of commodities, I'd flag a question about what you mean by 'abstract labour time'. It seems to there's an error if you are suggesting that 'abstract labour' has something to do with the type of concrete labour imaged as 'call centre work'. 'Abstract labour' is how Marx typifies the general quality of all labour, homogeneous and commensurable. This is mostly dealt with in section 2. It does not mean labour which manifests itself in types of concrete labour which do not have an evidently material product - what these days would be known under the trendy term 'immaterial labour'. Labour that is expended in a 'concrete' way is simply a particular form of labour, regardless of its output: "concrete labour becomes the form under which its opposite, abstract human labour, manifests itself."
This is clear when Marx states:
"The labour, however, that forms the substance of value, is homogeneous human labour, expenditure of one uniform labour power. The total labour power of society, which is embodied in the sum total of the values of all commodities produced by that society, counts here as one homogeneous mass of human labour power, composed though it be of innumerable individual units. Each of these units is the same as any other, so far as it has the character of the average labour power of society, and takes effect as such; that is, so far as it requires for producing a commodity, no more time than is needed on an average, no more than is socially necessary. The labour time socially necessary is that required to produce an article under the normal conditions of production, and with the average degree of skill and intensity prevalent at the time."
Your call centre workers should be in relation to some other form of labour, or indeed many forms of contemporary labour, for the image to be in some way equivalent to the first part of Capital.
As for immaterial labour, this is an over-promoted concept of the last decade, which the current recession should give cause to re-examine. Marx's understanding of the relation between labour and commodity, in the first chapter of Capital, is focussed on how labour transforms matter, and is embodied in the commodity. Thus the exhaustive discussion of linen and coats, weaving and tailoring. A coat is embodied labour because it transforms the matter of textile into the commodity of a coat. Similarly a yard of linen is the embodied labour of the transformation of flax into linen. Flax also is a commodity for the same reasons. All have relative exchange value to each other only because of their common characteristic as expressions of average labour time. Marx's discussion is here focussed on commodities and labour - 'immaterial labour' is partly a consequence of the modern satisfaction of commodity-based wants to a degree of social generalisation that was not present in Marx's day. But what we have succumbed to in the west is the fallacy of the 'post-material' economy - that somehow immaterial labour is a paradigm of productivity detached from the vulgar work of the production of commodities. in reality, as western capitalists are now surprised to discover, 'immaterial labour' was and is in no way independent on the development of society's productive capacity in the realm of real things, of commodities.
The question of whether immaterial labour is any different to labour which produces commodities is nevertheless a tricky one. Maybe a tailor could be seen as 'service-provider', though in Marx's terms, because the tailor effects a change in matter through his labour, this is necessarily commodity labour. But what about a fashion designer, or a call-centre worker? This comes back to the mobile and changeable nature of what is meant by 'utility', but also to whether labour which is expended in the production of a use can be commoditised. Marx doesn't care how humans determine what is useful to them, only that they should do so in a way that means that the utility is exchangeable. Use-value changes with the development of society. So now that, in the developed world, the satisfaction of basic wants is largely a given, the broad mass of people can engage in the complexification of use values that would have previouly been the privilege of the elite. The 'proletarianisation' of fashion, of interior design, of food culture, and of all other forms of leisure production and service production, are wonderful examples of the how use-value is transformed by the expansion and complexification of society's productive capacity. Bourgeois economic language tends to see things as 'goods' and 'services' but in Marx's terms, any labour that produces a use-value AND can be expressed in a some restricted form is still a commodity. This is however why, in the West, so much effort is now spent on packaging, delimiting, and licensing the products of 'immaterial' labour - patents, copyrights, branding etc.
As for your call-centre workers, there are other images of people at work. But that the nearest we get to an image of commodity production as labour is nowadays the picture of the fair-trade coffee picker on the side of the coffee pack in the fridge tells us something about the bizarre romantic delusions our current capitalist society invents to shield us from the great reality of universal commodity production.
xxJJ
**************************************************************
ReplyDeleteThanks to FIONN MURTAGH and ADAN GANZ for this:
Vizualising Texts: Determining Best Visual Metaphors (2009)
**************************************************************
JJ. Thanks for the response. I wasn’t suggesting that in his use of the term 'abstract labour' Marx was only referring to the type of concrete labour imaged as 'call centre work,' that is, ‘types of concrete labour which do not have an evidently material product’ [as in] ‘what these days would be known under the trendy term 'immaterial labour' [your description]. This is clear from the examples of labour/commodities he uses as examples in Section 2/Capital 1: weaving, tailoring etc and coal, linen, coffee, gold etc etc etc
ReplyDeleteAs you say: 'Abstract labour' is how Marx typifies the ‘general quality of all labour, homogeneous and commensurable,’ that is ‘the total labour power of society, which is embodied in the sum total of the values of all commodities produced by that society, […] one homogeneous mass of human labour power, composed though it be of innumerable individual units.’
So, again, as you suggest, this performance of equivalence would be better represented by the inclusion of other commodities/images of labour. The example you suggest is a good one, ‘the picture of the fair-trade coffee picker on the side of the coffee pack in the fridge’. An idealised image of labour which is implicit in/to its exchange value - that is to the consumption of ‘trade not aid’ feel-good ethics. This is similar to the images of ‘Call centre workers’ as smiling people with head-mikes, frozen mid-sentence, as used on corporate websites to represent companies as approachable, friendly, efficient and suggesting stress free interaction between company and consumer etc etc.
In fact I wasn’t mainly interested in what these representations ‘mean’ or whether they were false/deceptive or not but rather how they worked ‘visually’ as images of people [commodities] talking with reference to Marx’s description of commodities as social and animated – in particular commodities ‘talking’:
‘Could commodities themselves speak, they would say: Our use-value may be a thing that interests men. It is no part of us as objects. What, however, does belong to us as objects, is our value. Our natural intercourse as commodities proves it. In the eyes of each other we are nothing but exchange-values.’ (163)
The image/idea of a talking commodity talking.
This is not to say immaterial labour (or its commodities) are different to any other sort of labour/commodity. I guess ‘immaterial labour’ is just an attempt to describe a new type of labour, rather than a new type of commodity. Issues of symbolic exchange, sign-value and/or the ‘fallacy of the 'post-material' economy [as opposed to] vulgar work of the production of commodities’ are not relevant. Because the interesting thing has already happened [as described by Marx] that is (as above, and to repeat yr point) the fetishism of commodities arises from the social character of the labour which produces them and which is ‘congealed’ in them. It is only by being exchanged that the products of labour acquire uniformity of values (abstract labour time) distinct from their utility-producing or physical properties.
This confusion regarding material/immaterial was also played out in art ideas of dematerialisation. For instance, when Lucy Lippard claimed that ‘since dealers cannot sell art-as-idea, economic materialism is denied along with physical materialism’. (‘Dematerialisation of Art’, 1968). These claims were/are obviously based on naive ideas of what a commodity is. That is, the idea that commodities are a particular type of object, and/or the idea that the value of the commodity resides in the properties of the object itself. When, in fact, economic value is only contingently related to the physical properties of the object and its value resides in the structures of recognition/relation (rather than in the object) in the same way that social relations make up the properties of the art object.
As Benjamin Buchloh writes the function of conceptual art (and dematerialisation) was to create a new commodity form and to expand the art market through the creation of new commodities. (Buchloh, ‘Conceptual Art 1962-1969 […]’. What the move towards ‘dematerialisation’ achieved was the limitless expansion of art-as-commodity. Everything can be art, including ‘non-art’ objects and everything can be a commodity.
Commodity form and art form therefore exist as an incorporeal sense of infinite connectivity and interrelation. And the art object/commodity object exists as an ideal form of exchange in the sense in which its infinite exchange-ability is its exchange value.
Apologies for coming late to this, I had forgotten all about it Interesting discussion so far; here are my two cents about Nietzsche's Notion of the Eternal Return.
ReplyDeleteI think the images displayed here, in line with the brief introductory comments, trivialise and undervalue this idea. This, in other words, is not what the idea of the Eternal Return looks like. Or so I think.
I consider ER to be a test, an ethical yardstick against which we measure our ethics and our practices.
As for ethics, Nietzsche's preoccupation with Ressentiment, the nihilistic rejection of life in favour of ascetic ideals, and sometimes just pettiness, needs to understood as the problem to which ER in a sense is the answer. We are called upon to ask ourselves this question: how much do we resent out lives? How much do we resent injustices and injuries committed against us? How often have we disappointed ourselves and not lived up to our values and ideals? Arguably, Kantian philosophy is an exercise in Ressentiment, as humankind is a pathetic failure, and our only hope is a moral perfection that we can never fully achieve. Nietzsche's notion of the ER is directed precisely against such a teleology, against a notion of life that can only be validated by its own goal, its own future. But God is dead, and therefore, no telos will redeem us, no God will give us justice. Instead, life, becoming, has to lived, explained, and justified without such recourse, and instead in the here and now. Becoming has to be justified as an aesthetic project, not deferred as a teleological one. Life, simply put, is all we have, and therefore, as it constitutes the very possibility of our being and becoming, we need to appreciate it without ressentiment.
This does not mean that for Nietzsche life has no purpose, and that we should withdraw from it. He left Schopenhauer behind fairly early on. Instead, life has to vindicate, affirm itself in the sublime moment, the one moment 'that makes it all worthwhile'. Exaltation, experience of the Sublime, those are the purposes of a life worth living. And as such, the past has to be appropriated, even revalorised as that what made this moment possible. So the here and now, the Moment, takes aesthetic control over both past and future, the one (re)valorised in terms of what it made possible, the latter in terms of what this Moment promises for it.
And here, ER also becomes a test or measure for our practices, testing, as Bonnie Honig writes, the self's relation to the actions it is about to perform. Are they affirming life and the desire for the next sublime Moment, or are they continuing the chain of resssentiment? Do they still seek justice from a deceased Deity, do they still demand redemption in a Beyond?
To be free of such ressentiment, to be willing to affirm life even in the face of tragedy, "an affirmation without reservation, of suffering even, of guilt, of all that is dubious and alien in life" (Ecce homo, V.2), to turn life into an aesthetic project, then becomes the central characteristic of the Übermensch, the man that can live without God.
I have a hard time visualising these, but as I wrote above, I don''t really see the Dionysian tragedy realised in these images... Oscar Wilde expresses such an ethos in the final sections of De Profundis, which I found rather striking. Perhaps his "Becoming Oscar Wilde" in Reading Goal can be depicted?