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Elements of Gnosticism in Dialectical Materialism (Soviet Marxism) cont

2. The Relationship between Gnosticism and Dialectical Materialism

The domination of magic praxis over scientific theory is strongly reminiscent of Gnostic doctrines that recognized the mastery of the transformative Cosmic praxis as a unique brand of wisdom, because all other forms of knowledge suffered from having arisen under the conditions of this world, which was created by an evil world creator. They are, according to the Gnostics, therefore tethered to this world, can describe only this world, and are already for this reason fundamentally deficient and unworthy. The only type of knowledge that is needed is not of this world. This knowledge would not describe or comprehend the existing world but abolish and destroy it. “Gnosis is the remedy for disintegration and the means of reintegration, because it makes it possible to recognize humanity’s place within the totality and to see through what passes for knowledge in its arrogance—it puts false wisdom in its place.” Since the critique of ideology purports to confirm Descartes’s suspicion that the subjective self-evidence of consciousness could be simulated by the malin génie whose name is the “unconscious” or the “material base,” it sees it as its inescapable task to combat this evil genius at its “deep” level, instead of making a pact with it. Philosophy, as Marx demanded, turns into (magic) praxis.

The relationship between modern secular salvation movements on the one hand and Gnostic doctrines on the other was recognized relatively early and discussed in particular by Eric Voegelin. Thus, Voegelin interprets Hegel’s call “to contribute to bringing philosophy closer to the form of science—the goal of being able to cast off the name love of knowledge and become actual knowledge,” as a program of replacing philosophy with gnosis and the figure of the philosophos with that of the sophos, the gnostic. In both modern and ancient gnosis, the claim to exhaustive knowledge of the nature of the world that was formerly reserved for the gods or for God is subordinated to the aim of saving the world, or, more correctly, is precisely the knowledge of this salvation: “In modern gnosticism it [the possibility of deliverance] is accomplished through the assumption of an absolute spirit which in the dialectical unfolding of consciousness proceeds from alienation to consciousness of itself—or through the assumption of a dialectical-material process of nature which in its course leads from the alienation resulting from private property and belief in God to the freedom of a fully human existence.” The action leading to transformation of the world should precede any questioning of and reflection on it.

Voegelin sees the essential role of modern gnosis as the “prohibition of questioning.” Gnosis places thinking up “against the wall of being” by making the validity of theoretical inquiry dependent on “this world” and thus limiting it. Voegelin writes of this resistance to thought: “This resistance becomes truly radical and dangerous only when philosophical questioning is itself called into question, when doxa takes on the appearance of philosophy.”

It may be helpful at this point to turn to the extraordinarily astute remarks of Georges Bataille on the relationship between gnosis and dialectical materialism. Bataille begins by defining the latter as “the only kind of materialism that up to now in its development has escaped systematic abstraction,” and he continues: “materialism … necessarily is above all the obstinate negation of idealism, which amounts to saying, finally, of the very basis of all philosophy.” Bataille sees in classical gnosis both “one of materialism’s most virulent manifestations” as well as hostility to philosophy. Thus far, Bataille’s analysis is essentially consistent with that of Voegelin’s. This is also the case for his analysis of Gnostic morality, about which he writes: “If today we overtly abandon the idealistic point of view, as the Gnostics and Manicheans implicitly abandoned it, the attitude of those who see in their own lives an effect of the creative action of evil appears even radically optimistic.” However, Bataille’s analysis takes a very interesting turn when he then continues:

Thus it appears—all things considered—that Gnosticism, in its psychological process, is not so different from present-day [dialectical] materialism … For it is a question above all of not submitting oneself, and with oneself one’s reason, to whatever is more elevated, to whatever can give a borrowed authority to the being that I am, and to the reason that arms this being. This being and its reason can in fact only submit to what is lower, to what can never serve in any case to ape a given authority. I therefore submit entirely to what must be called matter, since that exists outside of myself and the idea, and I do not admit that my reason becomes the limit of what I have said, for if I proceeded in that way matter limited by my reason would soon take on the value of a superior principle.

Thus, Gnostics are proud of submitting to what is lower than themselves and hence does not command the allegiance of their reason. In this way, they become the “toys” of a process that, because it is absurd, does not wound their pride. Thus, they also cease to have any actual need for salvation and thus do not call the Gnostic promise into question or measure it against the possibility of its fulfillment. In this way, gnosis becomes perfect and irrefutable. Bataille discovers the symptoms of this consciousness in modern art: “The interest of this juxtaposition is augmented by the fact that the specific reactions of Gnosticism led to the representation of forms radically contrary to the ancient academic style, to the representation of forms in which it is possible to see the image of this base matter.” (i chose both are equally real)

While Bataille here still operates with the ontological hierarchy that distinguishes between the various levels of matter, a fully developed materialism means appropriating and instrumentalizing the “higher” forms within a total materialist praxis that leads to using the ancient art forms in new social and political constellations, as occurred, for example, in socialist realism. A rigorous, unswerving materialism does not lead to abolishing ideology, reason, morality, etc., but to include them in the dialectically conceived total praxis, in which they are primarily employed as means of education, mobilization, and of stabilizing the already realized “accomplishments,” so that they become actually quite capable of playing a constructive role in the transformation of reality.

#marxist leninist #marxism #lenin #marxist- leninist #marxism-leninism #personal #ussr #communism #genshin impact #plutarch #boris groys #Issue #127 Elements of Gnosticism in Dialectical Materialism (Soviet Marxism)#Elements of Gnosticism in Dialectical Materialism (Soviet Marxism)#low taper fade

Boris Groys on the difference between the museum public and the internet public.

#boris groys #images

Whether yours or something you've read, what's the best definition of art/a work of art?

If definitions come in descriptive and normative forms—descriptive: finding the essence of all the disparate phenomena we do or could call art; normative: deciding what unites the limited set of phenomena that deserve the name of art—then I believe a descriptive definition may be impossible.

Art could be almost any practice or object, because any practice can be done and any object made artfully. Whole lives have been described as works of art, as have casual gestures of the hand. Art may just refer to some latent potential for shaped gratuitous interest (i.e., beauty) in the whole human-made world—except that some believe animals capable too, as the birds and the whales do sing, while monkeys and elephants have been taught to paint. Art may just be life transcending itself, reflecting itself, working on itself: the final secret of whatever is the principle of vitality, "the force that through the green fuse drives the flower." "The art itself is nature."

All very psychedelic, but we like to make judgments, too, and even need to do so, because we have only so many hours in the day, only so much room in the gallery, only so many weeks on the syllabus. We need, therefore, a normative definition. Most of the modern ones since Kant have fixed on art as "uselessness," which partially inspired my word "gratuitous" above, i.e., art is whatever is not practical, whatever exceeds and therefore both redeems and judges the prevailing utilitarianism of the modern world. As Gautier's original l'art pour l'art manifesto quips, elevating art over use, "The most useful room in the house is the lavatory."

Contemporary theorist Boris Groys has historicized this idea with his slogan "art emerges as the death of design." In other words, before the modern period, art was reduced to its use, largely as propaganda: it ornamented and inculcated the ideas of the ruling classes, from the bard celebrating aristocratic heroes in epic song to the builder fashioning cathedrals to cow the illiterate parishioner on behalf of the Catholic Church to the painter making portrait after portrait of the old regime's elite. Art, therefore, was no more than design, a constrained set of protocols for elaborating and augmenting social power. Art in the modern sense of the gloriously inutile was only invented with the French Revolution, when the radicals, instead of destroying the design of the old regime—throwing the portraits on a bonfire; smashing the altarpieces with a hammer—put them into museums, to be admired for their beauty (complexity, intricacy, intelligence...in short, for their "gratuitous" humanity) now that their inequitable social function had been stripped from them. Art, then, is whatever's left over after the propagandistic element of a piece of design has drained away, which is why we still take pleasure, for example, in Dante, though we don't share his views—and I don't just mean his social attitudes (homophobic, Islamophobic, etc.), but even his understanding of biology or cosmology.

I am persuaded by Groys's historicized normative judgment that art is the death of design, though it does create a paradoxical choice for the modern artist: you can either make a work of design, i.e., propaganda, in the knowledge that only what exceeds its propaganda function will finally matter, or you can try to make a work that has no propaganda function at all. The first choice leads to the slight air of bad faith that always hangs around even the very best social and political art, the double sense that an urgent problem is being exploited and that art itself is being betrayed; while the second choice leads to the purity spiral of art without content, all those blank canvasses and boxes piled on the floor that, as someone once joked, must come pre-installed in the modern art museum.

There is no solution to this dilemma, no way out of this paradox. (Groys: "only self-contradictory practices are true in a deeper sense of the word.") As the French Revolution and surrounding developments made it possible for art to emerge as the death of design, so I expect present and future historical or technological circumstances to alter the terms of art once again. We will just have to see what opportunities and challenges arise. Groys believes we currently live in a period of total aestheticization, due in part to technology's total replacement of nature, and that this total aestheticization makes art totally revolutionary since no regime or status quo can stabilize itself with its being instantly relegated to a state of defunctionalized design under our aesthetic gaze—another way of explaining why irony is now all-pervasive and inescapable, since every value now exists under the sign of its own inherent potential to become just one more piece in the museum.

Finally, though, and to escape whatever is deadening in Groys's admittedly persuasive celebration of art's apocalyptic triumph as absolute irony, I come back to older ideas, even at the risk of what a sophisticate like Groys would see as romantic kitsch, to Socrates instructing the ephebe that poetry can only be divine madness, to Emerson lecturing the practical 19th-century that the poet travels in divine realms, above all to The Birth of Tragedy and the vision of art elaborated there: art, said our mad philosopher back when he was a mild academic, is the articulation in a still and ordered image of the tearing, ferocious, violent flux at the heart of life: Apollo's temporary arrest of Dionysius. Art can be anything, and is now everything, but art that does not aspire to this impossibility—art that does not wrestle with this awful angel—does not deserve the name.

#boris groys #friedrich nietzsche #art #aesthetics #philosophy

Who is the reader, or who is the spectator of the Internet itself? It cannot be a human being, because a human being’s gaze does not have the capacity to grasp the whole of the Internet. But it also must not be God, because the divine gaze is infinite – and the Internet is finite. Often enough we think about the Internet in terms of infinite data flows that transcend the limits of individual control. But in fact, the Internet is not a place of data flows, it is a machine for stopping and reversing data flows. The medium of the Internet is electricity, and the supply of electricity is finite. Therefore, the Internet cannot support infinite data flows. The Internet runs on a finite number of cables, terminals, computers, mobile phones, and other equipment units.

The efficiency of the Internet is based precisely on its finiteness and, therefore, on its observability. Search engines such as Google demonstrate this. Nowadays, one hears a lot about the growing degree of surveillance – especially through the Internet. But surveillance is not something external to the Internet, or some specific technical use of the Internet. The Internet is by its essence a machine of surveillance. It divides the flow of data into small, traceable and reversible operations, and thus exposes every user to its surveillance – real or possible. The gaze that reads the Internet is the algorithmic gaze. And, at least potentially, this algorithmic gaze can see and read everything that has ever been put on the Internet.

Boris Groys, In the Flow.

#boris groys #readings #tech #surveillance #mine

Whereas modernity, on the one hand, destroyed all traditional foundations because all of them turned out to be too finite, too instable, and too fragile, modernity, on the other hand, also provided a much more stable foundation for cultural values—namely, suspicion as such.

#Dragon Ball Z Kakarot #boris groys #under suspicion