ETERNAL JOY

What can a contemporary gesamtkunstwerk entail? And why make one in the first place? Is that the thread to start with - but then why are we searching for an excuse in the first place? There is a sense that every little outlet ‘isn’t much’; take painting for example: what is the end goal? What can it really lead to? Or philosophy, you talk and think and write, but for what? The desire to bring together all different disparate threads of inquiry and creativity is I think born out of this sense of insufficiency of them all taken separately. Maybe there’s a point to connect this to Marx’s notion of alienation.

So we want to create a gesamtkunstwerk to fix the problem of modern subjectivity - it may seem naïve - but how can there be anything as vital as high flux co-mingling of all disparate faculties?

This is a line I’ve been on for a while, taking it with the alchemical notion of union of opposites, the alchemical work etc. - but lately I’ve felt more strongly the need to also emphasise division - or maybe more precisely: decision. Human brain lateralization has progressively been emphasised in recent evolutionary history: our becoming speaking and tool-making subjects has coincided with a separation of the left brains particular-syntactic activity and the right brains universal-semantic activity. Still, these faculties are not on the same plane as the cultural pursuits, and both pervade each fully. Maybe what this should tell us instead is discipline or make sharp the role of the rational and the intuitive in each pursuit- that severity is internal to a discipline.

But I digress - the point is however to find a form of gesamtkunstwerk which is not simply a hodgepodge blend of any and everything you can think to throw into it - and also not just an aesthetic repeated in different media. There are a lot of projects, or indeed franchises, that span media in this way but do not add up to anything, at least not in the way I am imagining.

There has to be an idea on the overarching level. However hollow and thin of an egg which envelops the activities with some degree of context, coordinating them according to system rather than only aesthetic. This system would inform decision in each activity, or it would translate the ends of one activity into a decision in another activity.

The egg is the completed (healed) subject, at least from one perspective. But do we not, to have this frame, have to have solved the problem before we can begin? Do we not in some way need to know what the completed subject looks like? This is the double bind if you will of the gesamtkunstwerk, and it seems to send of down paths of divination for it’s resolution. You can always name something, even an emptiness. What start out as a scrap of paper, flimsy in the wind, gets fleshed out and charged with meaning as activity progresses in it’s name.

SALVYON