In the early days, William and I, and sometimes Antonio, would try to thrash out the reasons why our own understanding of the arts seemed to gain no traction in the marketplace. Tony tended to step away from the question. 'Just show the work', he would say. I was probably the instigator. William registered Tony's mastery at some direct level, and was able to enter the aesthetic without any hesitation. But I had had to struggle for it. And, if the truth be told, it is only now, with the relative completion of a cycle of work that establishes the background I wish I had had when I was twenty-five years old, that I feel fully confident in my aesthetics with respect to the poetry, as well as culturally in terms of philosophy and scholarship.
            But, because I have had to delve so deeply into the philosophical and cultural questions at the ground of the disjunction between my own understanding and the accepted understanding in the society today, the question has been paramount for me from the beginning. While William can obviously speak for himself, I assume that his encounters with the marketplace, beginning with his initial attempts to present Tony's work - prior to taking up the brush himself - are primarily what opened him up to the strange difficulty of our position.
            Hence this blog.
            But while I can obviously articulate what is wrong with the culture, for anyone who cares to listen, what has hovered at the back of my consciousness throughout the developmental process of this critique is the question of why those who oppose us not only cling so tenaciously to something that denies the real pleasures of aesthetics and the intellect, but why they hold obsessively to an outright denial of value: why are they addicted to the nihil? That is, what is it about the denial of value that causes them not only to cling to it, but also to espouse and express it as if it were a supreme virtue?

            But, of course, one cannot ask the question and expect a viable response. The pure sign of the nihil, as it stands today, is the absence of the center. And, of course, the absence of the center is the dominant 'positive' statement of 'postmodernism'. In one historical thread, I suppose, it begins with the mid 20th century analytical philosophers, who set up 'monism' as the great negative shibboleth, the ultimate buzzword attack that would end all argument. Accuse someone of monism, and they are instantly silenced, their philosophy eviscerated.
            Now the word, of course, is 'foundationalism'. If a philosophy can be shown to be 'foundational', it is instantly anathema. Historical philosophies, of course, harbored this great curse of the foundational presumption, the idea that perhaps we could make, if not sweeping generalizations, at least a more or less systematic and embracing description or aetiology for the way things are. But foundationalism is now considered such an outrageous prepossession, that we can dismiss altogether the foundational core of any philosopher who fell prey to this 'delusion', and we can redefine their philosophy according to our own interpretation of the residue.

            But this gives us our first clue to the peculiar attraction of the nihil. If we can blow away the center, then all that is left is commentary. And, as commentators, we are equal to the greats. If we can point out the foundational errors of a Kant or Hegel, then we, as individuals, are the equals of Kant and Hegel. And since the basis of this anti-foundationalism is now being taught to freshman and sophomores, we are immediately initiated into the region of the greats. Certainly, our judgments are as good as theirs. The possibility of a qualitative shift in the nature and value of judgment is no longer credible or necessary. There is, in fact, no difference in the functional basis of the judgment of the freshman and the judgment of the seasoned scholar, apart from fact.
            But, then, of course, this anti-foundationalism becomes a paradox. On the one side, it feeds the ego absolutely. As a sophomore, as soon as I understand the gross error of Hegel's monism, I stand above Hegel. But, then, so does everyone else in my introductory course in the history of philosophy. If 'initiation' is only 'fact', anyone with the fact is my equal. So, theoretically, anti-foundationalism is equally ego-deflating.

            The fad of recovery in the 80s - a fad that apparently only continues among public figures caught in foolish or criminal acts - has created the downside inherent in all fads. But, as much as I hesitate to cite Jung, Jung's assessment of Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, as perhaps 'the most important social architect of the 20th century', has an enduring validity. The addiction model is probably the most important empirical discovery, in the last century, concerning human behavior. The downside of the fad now places addictive profiles and dysfunctional family models under the label of 'pop psychology'. But pop psychology they are not. The dysfunctional model, it turns out, applies in all social situations. And addiction is a core premise for our present mode of consciousness. Self-awareness constitutes a baseline addiction to the self.
            But addiction is not simply an obsessive and compulsive behavior, not simply a peremptory desire that contravenes all volitional attempts to interdict it. It is also inherently self-destructive; and not simply self-destructive, but an overt and incontrovertible self-hatred. 
            When one applies this model to the core compulsion of the anti-foundational, one is immediately reminded of Dostoevski's 'underground man', with his extraordinarily vituperative self-hatred and equally compulsive expression. But here, in the anti-foundational, we have the same rationalization of the insurrectionary bureaucrat - the ultimate post-modernist - but the anti-foundational man (or woman) has apparently made the self-hatred a part of the formal or 'objective' 'positive' value of his (or her) position.
            What we have done, then, is project an addictive model into the spheres of the pure intellect as a 'positive' abstraction, but an 'abstraction' we live out in the functional dimensions of our intellectual and aesthetic careers.

            For me, the example that naturally jumps to mind is that of the latter day Marxists. I am just beginning to dip into the Frankfurt school, so my response, in terms of precise criticism, may be off the mark. But I have started to read Adorno, and if my interpretation is correct, what he is presenting is the oxymoron of a Marxist individualism. He is not altogether easy to assess, since he presents his theses in short bursts that move sideways. But this, of course, places him explicitly in the groundwork of present postmodernism: he is carefully avoiding any foundational statement.
            Marxism takes the force of history away from the individual and places it in the collectivity of the social, and specifically in the collective social responses to economics. Hence, Marx, as much as he owed to the Idealists, attacked Idealism with great violence. Much like the later Communists, he first attacks those nearest him.
            So Adorno makes his obligatory attacks on Idealism and idealism, with not a few sardonic, sideways remarks about individualism. But, in fact, the cumulative force of his argument seems to depend both on the cultivation of the individual and a (covert) elitism about the possibilities of individual development, both intellectually and aesthetically.
            But, of course, this is the intellectual equivalent of Leninism. And Leninism is an exact psychological and political outgrowth of Marxism, as much as it may finally betray the philosophical ground. Lenin wrote extensive critical interpretations of Marxist doctrine, all according to Hoyle in terms of Marxist philosophy. But, then, Lenin held that once the proletarian revolution began, all philosophical bets are off. The engaged proletarians are a revolutionary elite. And since the force of history is now in the collective and not in the individual, any action by the revolutionary proletarian elite is necessarily justified, no matter what theoretical basis it may seem to contradict.
            Obviously, this is a justification of raw political power without the least intellectual or ideological concern.

            In other words, anti-foundationalism clears the ground of all 'opposition', creating an anarchic field for the play of the ego. At the same time, the ego is ostensibly denied on the basis of serving a 'higher' collective force, but a force that cannot be defined by generalization or systematic statement.
            But the self-abnegation is not simply an addictive denial of the self to mask the actual subtending addiction to the ego. It is also a 'converted' mode of self-hatred, of actual self-abnegation. It has its value, since, when one is attacked for his or her 'ideology', one simply steps back into the void of the non-self, non-foundational that one supposedly embraces - and thus can embrace as tantamount to an 'absolute', even though it is in essence the nihil. But this nihil is also the abnegation of the creative impulse at the center of the self, if one espouses intellectual or aesthetic creativity.

            Adorno finds himself committed to this creativity - given his intellectual and aesthetic propensities. But the only way he can square it with his commitment to Marxist collectivism is through an anti-foundational or postmodernist approach.

            But this is only one minor vector in the wonderful array of vectors serving the addictive nihil. Every field not only has its own vector. Every field has its array of vectors, serving not just the Moloch of current ideas, but the grand nihil that stands behind it.

            What we are looking at is the ultimate rendering out of the self.
            As I have said, the self is inherently addictive. What we have failed to notice, as we forced ourselves to the intellectual rim of this anti-foundationalism is that, foundationally, the self as we now have it has a history. The explosion of the ego at the time of the Idealists - perhaps the dominant motif of Romanticism - is precisely the registration of this modern sense of the self. And modernism is founded in it.
            The contemporary intellectual and aesthetic attempts at the denial of the self are artificial ideological responses to this overwhelming historical moment.
            But there is a certain organic basis to it. The self was discovered in the midst of an equally recent development, the experience of objectivity. Our failure to understand the nature of objectivity - precisely that it is an experience, and therefore subjectivist and individualist at its core - is not only the basis of the contemporary addiction to the nihil, it is also the basis of the disasters of the last century, and particularly of the first half of the last century.
            Raw subjectivity and raw objectivity are thus two primitive leaves of the single seed. In effect, they are the same. The radicalization of both the arts and the intellect - which grounds and 'is' the modern - depends on this new mutuality of subject and object, based on the historical revelation of their radical separation, and radical sameness within that separation.
            This is the same place where legitimate 'elitism' has always resided, since it is the place where the radical - the qualitative - transformation of intellectual and aesthetic understanding becomes possible.
            Prior to the modern, it was intuitive. Now it has become overt.
            What the addiction to the nihil does is paint an artificial and abstract 'portrait' of this possibility, when, in fact, the only real possibility with respect to it is to live it.

- Jeremy