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The order established to institute stability in life situations, based on redundant forms of good design, often conceals a misjudgement of extraordinary, unregulated vital impulses. Social cohesion is secured through the commodification of symbolic/monetary gifts. This concept of wealth assumes a (primary) regulatory function for social events, despite not being an authentic cultural concept based on emotions. This fosters alienating situations. Here artists could also be pop stars. And so on.
After regulating the utopian ideal through purification, the only intensification that remains is dissolution into the cyclical per se, the religious or the ideological.
Everything social is symbolic.
The discovery that we are not necessary affects us all. It is this freedom (of not being necessary) that causes our fear. Human beings live with this contingency and freedom – one can see it this way or that!
Humans are more like metaphysicians than nihilists, that much is certain. We are (to varying degrees) incapable of renouncing the concept of meaning. Sociability and being social is a help (to varying degrees), a bridge over the meaninglessness of existence. Being social instead of merely existing. Otherwise Beckett would not have presented us with a couple En Attendant Godot.
The evolution of culture, specialisation and art, is a luxury that runs counter to the futility of existence.
The question of meaning remains. In art, which emerged from cults,¹ I call the meaning of a thing its discount. What you think, feel and sense about a thing – meaning included. You don’t have to find it yourself!
But it’s a little more complicated than that. What I meant was this: Now you can no longer find it yourself. Summa summarum, we have happily achieved this incapacity.
The tragicomic defence against this situation in which you and all of us find ourselves consists of self-imposed resistances that functions as objects of pleasure.
This contingency is a kind of reason based on chance. Where the concept of fear opens up the possibility of the possibility of choice, the invention of purpose closes off any real future by imposing predetermined meaning. But contingency is not deterministic. Philosophical (and therefore also artistic) questions are never answered. They have no such meaning. Instead of being answered, they must disappear, and their disappearance is the answer.
And fear? Fear does not disappear. Uncertainty about what is the possible contrasts with the certainty of what is impossible.² On this subject, see Bataille³: “The game of fear is always the same: People desire the greatest fear, fear unto death, so that in the end, beyond death and destruction, they may find the overcoming of fear”.⁴
But that’s the way it is. Excellent. The most important phenomenon is sociality. The formation of world, symbols, and images from “love”. Through these formations, we arrive at something significantly social, because we can understand each other only through each other. The world is a mediator. And the vastness of the world is our network of certainties and responsibilities.
Rule of thumb: The finer the mesh of the net, the smaller the fish.
The concept of “love”, as it relates to the origin of images, hardly means the ancient Greek Eros or its variant of sexually objectified desire, but rather the urge to create worlds; a love of creation itself and of what has been created. Creativity as a concept (a grasping and appropriating) of emotional freedom.
In socio-economic cultures, this relationship leads to the staging of productive work and to outright cultural battles between competing world symbols/symbolic worlds. The created object (symbol, image, world) is thereby aestheticized, and the love relationship changes into something that reactively seeks to overcome the evaluated/exploited and thus devalued object. For the individual, individuation becomes a commodity amidst the collective.
The creation of the world is a social project, not a civilizational one.
Compensation for a guilty conscience.
The constant threat of losing my freedom through the object I appropriate causes disquiet. Productive work constitutes personification and independence in a kind of spellbound state in which alienation never completely disappears and actively maintains interpersonal dispositions/constructs. There can never be a culture in which the socialisation of the means of production can completely eradicate the danger of alienation from the dialectic of life and human relationships.⁵
Symbols are products of an intentional act of future orientation. Desire also plays a part in future-oriented commitment, forming a connection to the imagined and the pictorial.
We are surrounded by structures of man-made guilt.
I wonder whether the dialectically sought balance towards alienation doesn’t generate a guilty conscience that breaks free in the commercial staging of entertainment cultures as a whole.
This is evident in vulgarisation and dumbing down, deliberate deskilling of culturally proven craftsmanship and specialized expertise. Is the continuous advancement of historiographical records by hand and head, with staying power, now deliberately misunderstood as subcultural pop songs and popular kitsch in a crossover of dissolved disciplines? Techniques that no longer want to be techniques. Research without the organon of art, and art without philosophical clarity.
Guilty conscience is a consequence of compensatory behaviour related to feelings of alienation.
Positive alienation would be a shift towards a desire for the world and a desire for art. An expansion and opening up from the suppression of fear, as described in art historiography. A truly real metaphysical investment. And a condensate that traces/predicts the direction and course of ethical goals.⁶
Creating images out of love?
It is of central importance that love is a cultural asset whose availability has a constitutive effect on society and within social existence. Zoon politikon – the symbolic is virtually the origin of the human race.⁷ Time, space, and world (the symbolic apparatus of society with its images of society, art, and ethics) have no meaning beyond the symbolic.
Yet the ability to remember in time brings with it a corresponding responsibility. To possess a memory means nothing less than to take responsibility for images, symbols, and the world of representative culture in time. Historiography is part of this endeavour, as is the entire civilisational project, which is oriented towards the future. Utopia today is orientation towards the future. The fleeting moment fleets into integrable history. This is like a baptism of the unknown,⁸ complete with promises and responsibilities. In this way, we sapiens extend our own moment, prolonging ourselves pictorially beyond the time we own into time that does not belong to us at all. This is the real formation of something new, in mediatisation.
It has been this way for quite some time now; at least 30,000 years.
&
Once responsibility exists, it cannot be dissolved.
→ Principle of responsibility preservation
¹ Art emerged with cult, originally sometimes as the utopian element, or folded into form as a template, following ritual. The utopian element in cult is found in its moments of origin and the still vague, active formulation of the cultic concern before it is then transferred into ritual.
² Cf. Robert die Pauli Gruber, Andromeda – The Origin of Anxiety, gottrekorder e.v., Graz 2016.
³ George Bataille, Die Erotik, Berlin: (Matthes & Seitz, 2020; original title: L´Érotisme, 1957), 123. (Translation from the German by J.U.)
⁴ The fact that Christians have always known only symbolic sacrifice, in contrast to their Jewish “forefathers”, has made the churches thus formed into mainstream popular religions. The desire to create worlds is probably related to a drive to simulate, which is related to the urge to ritualize.
The question remains whether religion (and every forming of anxiety into specific fears) is a phenomenon of anxiety.
It is phenotypical here that the possibility of diversity is repudiated as a menace in favour of a readjusted set of regulations preaching guardedness, rigour and fear.
Thus whether and how anxiety can be an experience that leads, via perception, into a set of regulations and into a weltanschauung.
Anxiety remains. It is constant – albeit in the beyond. In: Robert die Pauli Gruber, Andromeda – The Origin of Anxiety, gottrekorder e.v., Graz 2016)
⁵ Umberto Eco, Das offene Kunstwerk (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2019; original title: Opera aperta, 1962), 243f.
⁶ “Antiquity was not as distant from the Renaissance and Classicism as from the Middle Ages, even though it was chronologically further back.” Ernst Bloch, Experimentum Mundi (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1975; translated by J.U.), 92. It is clear that this time shift has sociological grounds.
⁷ Cf. André Leroi-Gourhan, Hand und Wort. Die Evolution von Technik, Sprache und Kunst, (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1988; original title: Le geste et la parole, 1964–1965), 387.
⁸ Creating the world is not just about turning “the unknown into the known”. That’s just a trick anyway. The unknown remains unknown, even if it is given a name. The god-equivalent of naming is always a bluff. It is one of the great tricks of civilisation, necessary in order to make initial decisions about organisation within groups and the environment and to set goals. Future orientation.
D.S.
R.G. für gottrekorder e.v., Wien, 31.08.2025.
Translated by Jonathan Uhlaner.