Every field, then, including the soft and hard sciences to one extent or another, has suffered this voiding of the center. But not only have the intellectual and aesthetic inventories and impulses been driven to the periphery, the entire culture has been blasted to the margins. Naturally, the postmodernist cannot see his responsibility for the reactionary radicalism that has overtaken Christianity, although the same detonation of the center is the cause. It is not simply a question of postmodernist 'secularism'. While evangelicalism describes itself as 'fundamental', with respect to the actualities of contemporary life and thought it is as anti-foundational as postmodernist 'art'. It may claim a central figure or a core belief, but reversion to a pre-modern dogma has neither sustaining force nor a legitimately assimilable theology. In spite of ecclesiastical attempts to revive it, classical dogma died at the threshold of the modern. Theology, like philosophy, necessarily lives in the reality of its time, or dies of inanition - whatever the 'eternal verities' it presumes to purvey.
            But as we have argued repeatedly here, with substantive evidence, the modern began with a legitimate embodiment of wholeness. The fact that much was tacit, or submerged in terms of overt or explicit expressions of the philosophical or spiritual grounds, the initial work itself bespeaks a fulness that postmodernism rejects. Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh, as well as Monet, Manet, Pissarro, Renoir, Sisley and the rest, all were foundationalists of the first order. They were not at the edge. They were at the center. That is, they recognized (at least through their art) that the culture had changed radically. In this sense, the revolution is always over before the revolution begins. 'The revolution was in the minds of the people', as Adams said. The fact that the revolution appears in a small coterie over against the apparently dominant culture is simply in the nature of history. The change, in essence, had already occurred.
            But now we have become addicted to an idea of revolution, and the idea has destroyed everything, for the time being, that the revolution actually stood for. Today, the dominant 'culture' is this utter perversion of the modern, a perversion that should not be allowed to preempt the first revolution even as part of its name.

            So now it is time for a second revolution of the modern, a revolution of the center.
            But the problem here is that our idea of revolution has produced an idea of revolutionary style, an idea of febrile, intellectual violence or force. We have become the heirs of the artificial techniques of pseudo-revolution. A friend has recently spoken to me of an 'artist' who has placed his feces in a jar as 'art'. Apparently no one is prepared to confront this 'artist' concerning his prepubescent psychological fixations. No indeed. If nothing else it's guerilla theater art: the radical statement of the obvious that has become one of the signature pranks of the postmodernist.
            But against this pseudo-violence and artificial insurrection, real art necessarily looks like a soft parade. The true intensity of art has never been necessarily obvious to contemporaries. If we see the peculiar strengths of Cézanne or the extraordinary cogency of Van Gogh, it is because we not only have the critical history that leads to our understanding, we have the totality of cultural history itself which has now embodied the specific transformations implicit in Cézanne and Van Gogh. The artificial force of the pseudo-revolutionary seems to partake of the same éclat as the art of these masters. But the similarity is the illusion of time. In a century, the shit in a jar will simply be shit in a jar: a suggestion of a disturbed mentality, perhaps, but not art.
            And I say this knowing the history of dada. And I will say that the strange objects produced primarily in Europe in the early 20th century not only have no intrinsic value as art, they have very little cultural value as well, except as expressions of this strange digression that has now dominated our culture. They are the cabbage-patch dolls of the culture claque, the beanie babies of the self-appointed cash sophisticates.
            If the pseudo-revolution is precisely that, a false lead followed into a cultural cul-de-sac, then the 'revolutionary' instruments become museum pieces in the backroom collections of the Smithsonian - peculiar anthropological artifacts from a primitive and largely forgotten society - and not the front and center pride of museums of art.

            But this success of the pseudo-revolution with its pseudo-revolutionary technique is now the standard by which we measure 'art'. The problem this creates is double-sided, both in the art and in the audience. That is, culturally, we have collectively learned to associate 'art' with a level of technical intensity that in fact precludes art. The audience has developed a learned expectation. And the 'art' has gone into the narrowing corner dictated by this expectation.
            To call it a 'salon' is only partially appropriate. Neo-classicism has its basis in the quasi-intellectual revolution of Renaissance humanism. But humanism was an organic and not strictly intellectual 'revolution'. The more we study it, the more we see the naturalism of the historical process that produced the Renaissance out of the Middle Ages. The change involved a legitimate 'revolution' in the educational system, since 'humanism', at its core, is precisely a supplanting of the trivium and quadrivium, taking the educational system away from the church.
            But the degenerate neo-classicism of the Salon that gives 'salon' its radical was the consequence of a legitimate process of cultural degeneration. Postmodernism, on the other hand, is intentional. And because postmodernism is an intentional idea, it is far narrower than the salon.

            But, as I say, we have all inherited the premise of the postmodern.
            My own journey through culture and philosophy arose precisely because my original inclination in the poetry was early modern. But my early modernism not only collided 'externally' with the dawning postmodernist era, it also collided 'internally' with the blossoming of a fully modern 'inspiration'. The spontaneous expression began to reflect the modernist tendencies. But when I went into the marketplace of ideas and demanded some explanation for what was happening to me, the early postmodernist responses that I got not only made no sense to me, they offended me at some deeply intuitive level.
            Nevertheless, my own struggle, for the last forty some years has been in part the struggle against the postmodernist tendencies imposed on me 'internally' by my intellectual and aesthetic heritage and education.
            As a consequence, I understand how profoundly our present culture and society have been distorted by postmodernism.

            As I suggested in my last post, postmodernism can only be explained, finally, in terms of addiction. But how does one heal a pervasive social addiction?
            In this case, of course, the only option is counter-revolution. But, then, how does one distinguish between counter-revolution and reaction?
            What we are advocating, here, is not a 'return' to the pre-modern, or even a return to modernism or early modernism. But the issue is a question of first of all recognizing what we have done to ourselves.
            The only alternative to an intellectual addiction is an intellectual revolution. And while the center is empty, and therefore a legitimately radical counter-revolution - a true revolution and not a 'reactionary' movement - should not only be relatively simple but also relatively easy, the addiction, as we have said, is precisely the addiction to the void at the center.
            Since the void has become the dictating principle of style, anything that abnegates the void will be, not only out of style, but positively uncool.

            More than half a century ago, Henry Miller asked, 'how bad does it have to get?' He was talking explicitly of the burgeoning corporate economy and the inhuman urban bourgeois culture it was producing. But, if we look carefully at postmodernism, we will notice that it is the ultimate bourgeois hijacking of modernism. The void center of bourgeois life is the same grand nihil that now stands at the center of 'culture' and 'art'.
            The 'egalitarianism' of postmodernism is not a legitimate equality, since it is not based on the potential fulness of the individual, but rather a pseudo-equality based on our false self-abnegation in face of the nihil, a false self-abnegation that allows us to hide - or think we have hidden - the boundless ego-mania that is the actual consequence of cultural nihilism; but an ego-mania grounded in meaninglessness.

            The revolution that is in the offing, then, is not in fact a 'counter-revolution'. It is the legitimate revolution of the modern brought back into the center of our cultural life.
            But, at its outset and in counter-distinction to postmodernism, it will look like reaction, since it not only returns to 'foundationalism', it also looks back from 'the edge' into the center as it was filled by early modern and modernist work.
            As I have said here, the 'deconstruction' that took place in the first half of the 20th century may have been a necessary process. It may have been necessary conclusion to the first cycle of the modern. But the orientation it leaves us with, a rejection of everything central, is a false orientation. Our only salvation now is the revolution of history and a return to the core of the self as a truly positive possibility.
            The 'hard edge' is no longer an option.