Performance and Abstraction

In a recent conversation the American writer Walt Bismarck asked me to reflect on my essay “The Paglian Right.” The argument of this piece was that, in distinction to the queer and experimental cultural movements of recent decades, which have tended to focus on inclusion, safe-spaces, tolerance, and diversity – in short, “leveling down to the lowest common denominator” – it would also be totally possible to have queer and experimental spaces that embrace and accept human differences without trying to overcome them, and which are explicitly oriented towards the production of beauty and excellence. 

Although this piece was framed in terms of the political dyad, Right and Left, I have come to wonder if a more appropriate dyad would be Performance and Abstraction. Such a framing moves us away from petty political debates, while still providing a vocabulary with which to analyze deep cultural and political currents.

Abstraction accounts for the movement away from particular bodies, moments and places, towards general principles, laws, ideals and universals. Etymologically, it comes from Latin “ab+trahere”, to drag or draw away from. It is the function that enables us to generalize, map, model and reason – to practice logos and science – negating the particular moments of worldly life in search of solid and unchanging truths. 

Performance, by contrast, invokes life displayed for an audience, beauty, intelligence and wit given animating force by particular people at a particular point in time and space. It comes again from Latin, “per+formare”, meaning to shape or form through, or to shape or form thoroughly. This is the function that enables us to celebrate and sanctify, through shared rituals, ceremonies and artworks, giving us shared visions of ourselves, mythos, enlivening worldly life with danger, eroticism and fascination. 

Despite notable exceptions, the prevailing current for centuries has been Abstraction, celebrated in the fabled “Enlightenment”, Age of Reason and Science, as well as in Protestant and post-Protestant Individualism, skeptical of the pomp and glamor of overly pagan Catholic worship. While Romantic and Esoteric currents have resisted this drive towards Abstraction, the overwhelming tendency, whether in Idealist Philosophy, Empiricist Science, and Materialist Politics, has been a pull away from the world, towards Universal Ideas, Scientific Laws, and Human Rights and Equalities. 

This is not to say that Performance has not had its due, whether in the Dramas of Richard Wagner, the Golden Era Hollywood Cinema, and 20th century Pop music, to give but a few examples. Abstraction has nevertheless remained the driving force, with Performance increasingly experienced as distraction and escapism from a materialistic work-life, rather than ensoulment and spiritualisation of bodies that yearn for beauty.

Our dominant political forces, especially after the World Wars, have been liberalism and socialism. Both are skeptical of life as it is in the flesh. Liberalism, emerging as a critique of the age of Aristocratic despotism, focuses on negative freedoms and limits to human power, as well as the scientific logics of capital and efficiency. It enshrines the Abstraction “Freedom”, though telling us nothing about what can or should be done with this Freedom. Its triumph can be seen in Peter Thiel’s observation that today, financiers, lawyers and consultants are apex predators, people whose job it is to solve the technical problems of other people who own capital, rather than the people who put capital to use to create new things. In the Abstract world of Liberalism, humans exist to serve the Great Laws of Capital and Freedom, and anyone who dares to draw lines and limits is seen as a tyrant. 

Socialism and Communism attempt to address the issues inherent to Liberalism, but with a similarly Abstract orientation. Interestingly, the early socialists were far more interested in the earthly sphere, with the practical needs and concerns of newly urbanised peasants of the 18th and 19th centuries taking precedent. But with Marxism, what emerges is a high-theoretic form of socialism, a Universal Idea moving through the particular sufferings and struggles of workers and other oppressed peoples, towards a future where this human Universal exists consciously in and for itself. 

As the 20th and 21st century have progressed, this Universal Idea has been widened to include women, blacks, gays, queers and others, an ever expanding Church of Universal Humanity who are denied full existence by the powers that be. At core is the belief in Abstract Justice and Equality, which supercedes the particularities of race, sex, intelligence, agency, capacity, and civilisation. 

What both Liberalism and Socialism fail to reckon with is the limits of their Abstractions, the fact that people do not live in Equality and Justice, Law and Efficiency. People live in hunger, love, lust, beauty and frustration. They live via shared rituals, art, food, celebration, religion, culture and sexuality with people similar to them. The total domination of Abstraction is reflected in the fact that today’s middle classes, when confronted with the masses’ complaints about their ways of life being washed away by big business, corporate LGBTQ+ parades and immigration, can only reply “deal with it”, “take advantage of it”, “stop being a bigot, they’re people too”, etc. Universal Ideas and Laws are at work, and woe befall the philistines who dare to resist them. 

The defenders of traditional ways of life, by contrast, are defenders of a Performance of Being through its particular localities, contexts and biogeographical histories. Such ways of life express beauty, love, excitement, communal joy and friendship, as well as providing shared ways to process sorrow, misery, depravity and hardship. These may look nonsensical and superstitious to the Great Abstract Men, who live lonely, solitary lives in service of Career, Capital, Liberty, Freedom and Equality, but they are the soul of life for the millions who keep things moving. 

With the victory over Fascism, Performance has been treated with the same skepticism and cold shoulder as Plato gave to poets. The idea of a “Spirited Culture”, of soul moving through form, is immediately written off as dangerous, and precedence is given instead to “Aspirational Culture”, where wealth moves through form as effectively as possible. We should be honest in claiming that yes, Fascism did spot the holes in Abstract Liberalism and Socialism, by emphasizing that bodies, places and myths matter to people, while also criticising the way Hitler and Mussolini attempted to conduct their entire politics on the basis of the superiority of their bodies, places and myths. 

Health and Spirit, in Art and in Culture, is achieved when Abstraction and Performance go hand in hand. The generalizations of Abstraction allow for higher alliances and communal politics, with the dark gods of clan and tribe ceding authority to the clean formalisations of law, contract and right. Furthermore, Performance without Abstraction quickly becomes superficial, decorational and dead, as in Art and Ceremony that merely mimics old forms and ideas, without attempting to speak and express directly to the shared living spirit of the contemporary moment. Yet Performance brings soul and beauty into life, whether in a Grand Ceremonial Mass or in the simple meal cooked reverently by a Grandmother on a Sunday afternoon. Performance nourishes a particular way of life, creating bonds of trust, love and forgiveness between people which exist more dynamically than any Abstract Justice ever could. Abstraction without Performance thus becomes dead, cold and cruel, eroding the trust and and social fabric that makes life rich and meaningful for earthly creatures. It is this Abstraction without Performance that great mystics from Hildegard von Bingen to William Blake have opposed, cold logic sweeping above and over life with regard only for its own inner consistency and not for creation itself. 

Much to the frustration of the Religious and the Scientifically minded, it is only in the embrace of Art and Philosophy where Performance and Abstraction are justly united. As Oscar Wilde and Nietzsche remind us, the best critics are also artists, and the best artists are themselves critics. Thought discovers and expresses universal ideas which are then given flesh and form in music, poetry, dance, food, pleasure and love, further inspiring new thought about the particularities of worldly existence and the profound truths encased therein. Artists become trivial when not versed in the depths of knowledge, while Thinkers becomes sterile when not dancing to the drumbeat of life. Here we see to why Richard Wagner could claim the Tragic Theater to be a higher sacrament than a Religious Mass – the Theatre affirms life and death in this world, whereas the Mass looks to a life beyond and behind this one. 

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Our queer and experimental lineages have today, in the 21st century, swayed too far towards the pole of Abstraction and away from their roots in Performance. The best ecstatic and transgressive spaces are not so in order that people might feel safe, but so in order to infuse flesh with excitement and new meaning. Beauty, Eroticism and Seduction, the dance of form and force, are the lifeblood of such spaces – not Equality and Freedom from oppression. This is not to say that Equality and Freedom do not have their place, but it is to say – unless animated by a love for Life, Beauty, Strength, Confidence and Valor – Equality and Freedom are wasted and meaningless.

Such spaces are best understood as training grounds for a Priesthood, whose job it is to watch over the ordinary Men and Women, advising and enthusing when necessary, and stepping back into silence when not needed. New syntheses of culture, race, sex and man-machine are possible in these spaces, but their transmissions must be spread carefully and slowly throughout the wider population. Queers attempting to force utopian sexualities on the masses are as cruel as Stalinists who attempt to force the Great Revolution to happen today. There is no patience, love, or joy in it, only a violent and resentful war waged against reality. 

We might learn from the Hindus, who keep their shamanic and androgynous populations by and large in cults, accepted and respected by the population, but also kept at a safe distance. Thus the proper rituals and rites for the gods can be Performed, with the darker and more transgressive rites Performed by those who have devoted themselves to that task, so the ordinary need not trouble themselves with such offerings. They call them the Hijra, perhaps we may name our own Qijra. 

Already, it is interesting to watch the emergence of “spooky queers” around the Ethel Cainosphere. Where the last decades of queers have sought acceptance and solace in the Big Cities – to put it brutally, to be celebrated by unprincipled digital marketing yuppies – the new generation are coming from, and remaining in, the small towns and the hinterlands, where religion and taboo are still living forces. This mimics the situation in the East, where the cults often gather around sacred mountains, rivers and forests, rather than major metropoles. Ultimately, what weird kids need is not ordinary adults who pretend to accept and understand them, but safe passage out into the wilderness and instruction by teachers who can show them how to wield their powers. Fortunately, the internet provides this far more than any HR Diversity program. 

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To correct the Abstracting tendency of recent times, we inevitably have to lean into the Romantic lineages, which resisted the Rationalist and Empiricist currents already in the 19th century. Freud, Nietzsche and their associated schools pave the way for us into the 20th and 21st centuries, but we should also be mindful of popular ways in which their influence becomes waylaid. 

Much leading thought is interested in the Hegelian idea that history is the movement of the concept itself, as well as Lacanian framing of the unconscious structured like a language. Unfortunately, for all the powerful insight into ideology that this analysis gives us, it remains wrong, and therefore incapable of inspiring Artistic Ceremony and Performance. Put simply, the unconscious is not structured like a language, and human creativity is driven by more than conceptual linguistics. Camille Paglia nails this simply, by pointing out that at Art School, she teaches students who major in dance, ceramics, fashion, and other disciplines. There is no way these people think or express themselves with priority given to concepts and language. Artistic genius, rather, is directed by a strange voice and possession by personae that seems to come from without. It can and should be refined, honed and practiced with reasoned interventions and conceptual analysis, but if it begins there, it suffocates. 

Art is rather motivated by the seduction of reality, of patterns glimpsed in the textures and movements of materials that promise catharsis and beauty. The classical Muse is feminine for this reason; like Salome, she dances, and we are pulled towards her, lusting for her, seeking the pleasure beneath her veils. The tantric and Western esoteric traditions preserve this in their phenomenologically erotic descriptions of reality, a heresy which is repressed from the mainline Abrahamic traditions which prefer cold Abstract masculine teaching. This same repression is carried forwards into much supposedly psychoanalytical thinking, which takes the maxim “Woman does not exist” far too literally and refuses to grant any spiritual efficacy or magic to the body. A much better formulation would be to add a Bardian “Woman subsists”, which is to say, the fantasy of the feminine is an ongoing potential expressed in form which by measure delights and disappoints, an eternal striptease which calls us forwards towards the stage. 

The authentic Performance is to charge as a phallic force into this Art and Eroticism, shrouding oneself in the veils and working up into an ecstatic trance, possessed by archetypes, angels and demons and channeling their intensities into the inert world of matter. God might be dead, but the shaman is a necromancer and sometimes we must speak to ghosts. 

Lacanian psychoanalysis alone becomes sterile, simply for the fact that it doesn’t give anywhere to go once the fantasy has been traversed. Paglia’s Nietzschean Sexual Personae, by contrast, creates an artistic praxis in the void left by the analyst's knife – witchcraft after the cut. For the analyst can Abstract his patient from any particular moral or cultural commitment, forcing him to reckon with the raw material of himself and decide for himself what to do about it. And yet, this material still yearns for expression in Performance, Performance which must be cultivated with love, skill, dedication and commitment to Beauty. This is an expression of the Unconscious which is definitely NOT linguistic, for Beauty can neither be framed as a coherent grammatical relationship nor a neverending series of sliding signifiers. 

Beauty is rather a matter of taste and attention to the non-cognitive codes and patterns whereby matter and mind interact. It is a matter for feeling, pathos, and the contemplations of bhakti yoga, rather than the analytical reasoning of logos and jnana. To use terms I owe to philosopher Dimitri Crooijmans, Beauty comes much more from a Voice than from a Concept. It is dialect, specific and historical, belonging to particular lineages of people at particular times. Yet for all this, it cannot be codified, which means Beauty is forever open-ended, always seducing us with a new promise and a new veil. Furthermore, besides Voice and Concept is Image, the curve and sway of matter, muscle and bone, the partial spirits that haunt physicality in what the CCRU theorists call “Gothic Materialism”. 

There is nothing to be learned from Music and Art - as Deleuze claims, authentic Art carries no information. And yet, to use the language of cybernetics, Art does contain differences that make a difference. This is the crucial paradox to grasp and the distinction between the post-Lacanian and post-Deleuzian approaches to culture - the former sees frustrated signifiers and barred subjects in Art, whereas the latter sees patterns and codes that follow their own inner logic, without concerning themselves with the reasoned abstractions of human thought. 

Music enables us to illustrate this. The researches into the overtone series and their extensions by Arnold Schoenberg allow us to simultaneously demolish any transcendental guarantee about musical tonality, while also grounding tonality in the real immanent properties of music itself. Put simply, the tones of a major triad are the first in a series of endlessly extending overtones that can be heard in harmonics when a single note is played. Schoenbergs insight is to show that tonality is therefore not a Platonic ideal, but an immanent property of vibrating mediums, which the skilful artist can use as part of his toolbox. In other words, there is an inner consistency to the beauty of music, but it is not a matter of grammar and signification. What this enables Schoenberg to do is decode the entire structure of Western music, while simultaneously saving it from the devastation of nihilistic postmodern critique. This clears music of humanistic prejudice, while simultaneously showing it to be a quasi intelligence that begins outside of human thought, inside the vibrations of plastic, wood and metal, - an important insight for an age of self learning machines. Similar applications could be found in the other arts, for example in Da Vincis studies of the human form and geometry. 

The current in contemporary thought that is comfortable in the unsatisfying void of linguistic signification, but flees from the immanent resonance of materials, ultimately ends up rejecting this world, in favour of a non-material world where Abstract Equality and Justice can be worked out. It thus turns away from the New Populist movements, viewing them as fascist reaction, rather than an authentic bottom-up spiritual revival, whereby the ordinary people of the West are resisting the great Imperialist Abstractions of Efficiency and Equality which have ravaged them for decades.

The meaning of the Dark Renaissance is to infuse the raw materials of life with Beauty and Drama, inspiring collectives that saturate themselves in Art and Religion while connecting to the great ideas of Science and Philosophy. No Abstraction is permitted which does not in itself affirm life, by celebrating what humans are, and are today. Similarly, no Performance is desired which is simply decorational, captivating for its own sake without calling forth higher visions of trust, love, heroism and communal existence. For Abstraction enables us to go beyond our particular circumstances, giving us the language and machines to create alliances between foreigners, but Performance gives eternal significance to our particular circumstances, allowing us to truly welcome and love the stranger as one of our own. Performance without Abstraction leads to senseless totem warfare, whereas Abstraction without Performance follows the logic fiat iustitia, pereat mundus – let there be justice, and let the world burn.