There is something symbolic about the vandalizing of famous art pieces by Just Stop Oil ‘environmentalist’ activists, two of whom were recently fined for causing criminal damage after gluing themselves to da Vinci’s Last Supper.
On the one hand, their actions speak to a certain hostility against traditional forms. Initially, no modern art was attacked, albeit it’s been remarked that this might be because pouring soup on an abstract piece would not leave its aesthetic profile particularly altered (granted, Andy Warhol has now also been targeted).
At the same time, Just Stop Oil is calling for governments to invest more in renewable technologies: if representational art (or those who travel to see it) is part of the problem, technology, it seems, is the solution.
To the activists, the attractive power of heritage—the vanity of an artistic canon weighed down by aesthetic standards and arbitrary culturally-specific symbols—is to be remedied by the purer, neutral truths of technical advancement.
This may be the result of that psychological habit that views coherent aesthetic wholes (old-fashioned art included) with suspicion, given that they elicit an admiring absorption that invites us to suspend our criticality, which can be quite destabilizing if we are overly identified with our mind’s reactive, problematizing mechanisms.
As Adorno writes, the point is to “demonstrate the disjointedness, the untruth, of totality,” and “totality is to be opposed by convicting it of nonidentity with itself:”
The totality of identical definitions would correspond to the wish-fulfillment picture of traditional philosophy: to the a priori structure and to its archaistic late form, ontology. Yet before any specific content, this structure … is spiritualized coercion.
(Any critique of Adorno would take us too far afield, but his “Negative Dialectics” provides the most coherent philosophical account of that ethos we see proliferating among the ‘activist’ type.)
The corresponding mental reflex to Adorno’s rejection of definitions—traditional philosophy and ontology—is a lashing out against beauty, coherence, wholesomeness as so many guises of ‘spiritualized coercion.’ We see it in the idiotic suspicion of ‘fascism’ with which the contemporary intellectual views beautiful art, stories with a moral, and the like. His instincts are jaded, his heart flaccid. The Adornian filter precludes seeing a (beautiful, coherent, wholesome) external form as independent of our problem-solving intellections.
We must intrude on it with impertinent skepticism, because, we are told, every form that presents itself as a whole also, for that reason, threatens to present itself as absolute truth and so to oppress whatever falls outside it. To avoid oppression, it must be engaged critically.
This leads to that spiral of puritan histrionics we see in contemporary militant activism. It must make beautiful things ugly with talk of political oppression, embedding them in the terrible context they supposedly perpetuate, imputing on them the guilt of lulling the masses into conformity and suppressing revolutionary consciousness.
Writes Herbert Marcuse, discussing opposition to “the representational art of Europe:”
This art represented the world as a world of things to be dominated and owned by men and thereby falsified it. The consequence: the task of art in this situation is to supplement and correct this false image—to portray the truth, but in a way that is possible for art and art alone … The rebellion against traditional art succeeded, [first] because this art was conformist; it remained under the spell of a world shaped by domination.
This characterization is close to the sort of ecologism that critiques most systems of thought as anthropocentric reductions of the “world as a world of things to be dominated and owned by men.” The targeting of representational art makes instinctive sense in this light.
Revolutionary art, in contrast, “must be shaped in such a manner that it reveals the negative system in its totality and, at the same time, the absolute necessity of liberation.”
This is of a piece with Adorno’s negative dialectics. Marcuse continues:
The work of art must, at its breaking point, expose the ultimate nakedness of man’s (and nature’s) existence, stripped of all the paraphernalia of monopolistic mass culture, completely and utterly alone, in the abyss of destruction, despair and freedom. The most revolutionary work of art will be, at the same time, the most esoteric, the most anti-collectivist one, for the goal of the revolution is the free individual.
If revolutionary art must reveal “nature’s existence … in the abyss of destruction, despair, and freedom” we may interpret the vandalizing of famous art pieces not only as an attention-grabbing stunt, but also as 1) a way to display that ecological “destruction” and 2) a transforming of the old canvas into abstract art fit for the revolution.
Marcuse sees the activist as presenting, in Freudian terms, a radical character structure in which the erotic overcomes thanatos. To summarize his thesis in Ecology and the Critique of Modern Society: the desire to return to the womb, to an existence free of pain, is not to be pursued through the Freudian “death drive,” the womb as tomb (a drive which, when externalized and directed at others, renders people violent rather than suicidal), but rather through eros, or the drive to care for things.
Because the death drive is just that, a drive to end or escape life (multiplicity, dynamism, but also order, pattern), any ‘drive to care for things’ which has it as its underpinning will be entropic: a desire to undo differences, melt together, escape life together.
Such is the ecological movement, whose main problem (apart from social impediments to the development of its corresponding character structure) seems to be that its erotic drive does not externalize enough, so that its members are too focused on themselves (although Marcuse isn’t explicit on this point).
The Marcusian (and Heideggerian) critique of ideologies that reduce the world to a mere reservoir of resources is, up to a point, perfectly valid: but things go wrong when they reject the traditional idea of the world as manifesting stable truths, nature as a stage of icons, of totemic presences, images of transcendent archetypes, names of God. The distinction of entities and the patterns that give forms their place is not fundamentally legitimate according to this worldview, it does not have any deeper meaning.
If one is ideologically or emotionally incapable of resting in the wholesome beauty of a thing, then one cannot view nature as anything other than a volatile miasma of forces. This incapacity to rest is of a piece with the explicit ideological rejection of the concept of ‘wholes’ (Adorno’s ‘totality’ and ‘traditional philosophy’ with its ‘ontology’). The world is seen as mere flux; a mercurial, fickle entity we must appease, or, in our less accommodating moments, try to get under control.
Equivalently, if one’s caring for the world of nature is an externalized erotic drive to satisfy a desire to return to the womb, per Marcuse, one will organize that ‘care’ according to one’s anxieties and sentiments. Importantly, the pleasure-principle and desire to return to the womb is not a lucid state, and it will tend to steer us away from disciplined, organized action (precisely what Marcuse complains is lacking among activists) as well as from a genuinely spiritual regard for nature.
Whether on account of compulsive-criticality or the pleasure-principle, nature will appear to us as that terrible yet motherly goddess William Blake described as the “female will” to which Druids once made bloody offerings, and who Robert Graves so adored. As a necessary male counterpart, the promise of technology will loom larger in our imagination, inspiring us with visions of progress and control. I discuss this in “The Great God Pan is Dead.”
Concerning this latter, masculine cult of technology, we may see it, for example, in how the development of renewable energy is presented within a ‘packet’ that conspicuously includes high-tech systems of control (the so-called “Fourth Industrial Revolution”).
Contemporary environmentalismTM and its emotional seeking after nature’s ‘female will’ is, at the same time, a branding campaign for a complex of new ‘green’ sectors able to mobilize volumetric funds, mainly under the UN’s Agenda 2030, in the pursuit of its densely-ramified, data-intensive smart grids, and the like. Faux revolutionary, non-conformist militancy of the Just Stop Oil type is but one means to this end.
To summarize the argument above, according to much modern social critique and environmentalism:
- When a thing is beautiful, it implies that whatever is outside it is ugly (our starting point here is Adornian);
- It therefore implicitly justifies hierarchy (of beauty and ugly) and oppression (to conform the ugly to the beautiful);
- It is moral, therefore, to reject beauty; to be ever-critical of beauty;
- This moral rejection is the Freudian death drive, an inherent desire to escape hierarchy and oppression (and therefore beauty, life), for the unconsciousness of the womb;
- The most pleasurable way to express this drive is neither suicide nor murder, but ‘lovingly’ effacing the distinction between things, dissolving hierarchy, oppression, beauty, and ultimately all categories, until we are all one in womb-like, oceanic unconsciousness (this is the crux of a Marcusian environmentalism);
- Nature is thus ideally a common womb, a unifying entropy, not a system of distinct entities, which are mere accidents. We thus return to the ‘pagan’ (in a negative sense) idea of blood-thirsty mother-goddess of the wilderness, desirous of undoing life;
- The instinctive reaction to which will be a tyrannical father-god of the city, defined in a constant struggle against chaotic nature “out there.”
In contrast to all this, the green banner of environmentalism rightfully belongs to those who resist the ideology of entropy and dystopic uniformity—that global breakdown of every function and form, from borders to genders. Those who do not believe in either the parodic goddess of wilderness or god of the city, but in true transcendence.
A sane environmentalism based on asserting the coherence of entities rather than hysterically denying every whole, is urgently needed.
Conservatives (by whatever name) must raise the battle against hormone-altering chemicals, microplastics, cobalt-mining, mass-production, and so on, to prominence. This is of a piece with the resistance against the mutilation of children by ‘transgender’ ideologues, the homogenization of every human community under international institutions, and every other violation of sensical definitions, integral forms, and edifying limits we are witnessing.
