Walter Benjamin's Aesthetics of Redemption.

It is still not possible to post images, since they continue to be blocked. I hope someday to be able to do so again. Meanwhile, I like this movie image (a link appears below) from an eighties' romantic comedy. I'll let the reader make the necessary associations between that image and this text. I regret that obstructions and efforts to frustrate my communications, make it impossible for me to share these images and thoughts in the form that I would like. Someday, we'll have real freedom of expression on-line. According to my security system, my most frequent attacker is 217.160.255.99, since 6-21-06 there have been 24 intrusion attempts on my system. Perhaps this is only a coincidence.

http://www.gagarinreport.com/images/lloyd.jpg (If the link is blocked from this page, simply Google it on your own.)

Picture a hunchback, wandering through the old streets of Paris, looking into antique shops and flea markets. He comes upon a display containing many old broaches and pieces of jewelry, and finds a dusty old cameo. He cleans the antique artifact, discovering a portrait of an eighteenth century woman. She is beautiful. With a little cleaning, the colors suddenly come to life in this miniature work of art. The hunchback is entranced. He researches this work in order to discover the identity of the sitter, so beautifully "seen" by the painter. Who was the painter? What did he feel for this woman? Who was the woman in the portrait?

Eventually -- through painstaking research -- an identification is possible. A romance is suspected between the painter (maybe Fragonard? Watteau?) and this mysterious woman. Their story is kept alive by the hunchback. They are returned to us, somehow, as a result of this rediscovery and retelling. They are seen again. For them to be "seen" is to be placed within the evolving narrative of an artistic and political tradition.

Miniatures were meant to be carried by loved-ones, usually men, to war. Perhaps the dreamy quality in her eyes, the love in those eyes, was meant for this man in her life, who may have perished in those wars. Who carried this portrait? What happened to him? What were their names? Shall we give them new names? Do we have the power or right to name them? Do we have their permission to do so, now that they are gone?

Walter Benjamin is an enigmatic figure in twentieth century philosophy. He is a Marxist and a mystic, a proponent of mass culture and its critic, writing of hashish and revolution as well as Talmudic interpretation. Like Ernst Bloch, he may be thought of as a "theologian of revolution." His life was brief and tragic. Dying in 1940, as he fled the Nazis, he felt that his work was incomplete. His books are curiously enigmatic and resonate for readers today, even for readers whose enthusiasm for all forms of Marxism has now waned or disappeared entirely.

For Benjamin, the world is a city of ruins bearing witness to a meaning which has fled and must be reconstructed. Each of us is like that forgotten artifact found by the hunchback. We are immersed in the half-forgotten history and abandoned intellectual tradition in which we find ourselves -- and perhaps in something more, call it an ancient cosmic narrative that we make or discover? -- which alone can provide us with meaning and truth. There are obvious associations with the work of contemporary philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, especially his arguments in After Virtue.

To find the "truth" about that miniature work of art is to place it within a history, an artistic tradition, a trajectory in time and culture, an artistic vocabulary, perhaps, even a spiritual tradition, most of all within a narrative of reconstruction. Does the work suggest an association with Christian iconography? Is the woman in the painting hinting at an identification with, say, Mary Magdalene? There is no possible meaning for such objects -- or the persons associated with them -- outside of an aesthetic community and a shared journey in time. Taken from its context, removed to another planet, the art work is literally meaningless. To know what the object is, it is necessary to rebuild its world, so as to place it in a community.

Each piece of rubble or ruin in Benjamin's imaginary city is, therefore, a clue to a lost and not yet rediscovered paradise. For Benjamin, "everything present testifies to an absent truth and offers itself to the critical eye as a sign to be interpreted." Richard Kearney comments:

... everything real points to a surreal level of meaning beyond itself. "Allegory displaces authenticity in all things," writes Benjamin, in characteristically cryptic fashion. The world can no longer be taken for granted as a universal given; it is now exposed as an allegory with a complex of meanings open to a wide range of implicitly related readings. Benjamin never forgot the cabalistic teaching that there are at least forty-nine levels of meaning to everything!

Benjamin sees himself as the hunchback living in the "interstices" (see the work of Miami philosopher and artist, Alfredo Triff) of his imaginary city. See Alfredo Triff, Art and The Interstice (Florida; Saeta ed./Nosti Press, 1991), pp. 71-74. He often signed his letters "the hunchback." Professor Arendt says: "In his writings and also in conversation he used to speak about the 'little hunchback,' ... a German fairy tale figure out of Des Knaben Wunderhorn, the famous collection of German folk poetry." Benjamin is the collector, the hunchback, who redeems objects from utilitarian routine.

How much more necessary is this act of redemption when it comes to persons in our world? The receptionist who longs to be seen as a person, in her uniqueness and pain at being stared at every day; the mailcarrier who is not seen but only sought for what he brings, whose conversation interests us for a moment and in whom we express human concern -- both of these persons become friends in exchange for our concern. So many people in large cities stare at strangers and scream, silently, that they wish to be seen.

In a similar way, the woman you see as a sexual object -- a thing to be used and discarded -- I see as a person. Her beauty is more powerful and true, as it fades -- fades only physically -- with the passage of time, becoming something more private, spiritual and more truly ours, becoming a much greater (because it is non-physical) beauty for me, because I love her. Loving someone is the ultimate act of redemption, of "seeing" that person, in all of her complexity and contradictions. "I see the beauty inside and that makes you beautiful on the outside."

Hannah Arendt summarizes Benjamin's stance in her introduction to Illuminations: "Collecting is the redemption of things which is to complement the redemption of man." The hunchback, thus, also becomes an object of redemption, a person who is in turn "collected" or seen aesthetically and morally, in something akin to a dream state. In the first Surrealist Manifesto, Andre Breton writes: "Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association heretofore neglected, in the omnipotence of the dream, and in the disinterested play of thought." In Benjamin's mutual process of redemption, the "power to name" is highly significant:

Things have no proper name, writes Benjamin, except in God. For in his creative word, God called them into being, calling them by their proper names. In the language of men, however, they are overnamed. There is in the relation of human languages to that of things, something that can be approximately described as overnaming: overnaming as the deepest linguistic reason for all melancholy ... It is certain that the language of art can be understood only in the deepest relationship to the language of signs.

Recall my discussion of the constitutive power of naming. To provide you with a name, is to constitute you as a subject. Hence, the power of epithets, but also of titles. Naming is the ultimate freedom in construction by way of language, so that a name that we are forced to impose upon another is also an imposition on us. No one knows my name, except the person who loves me.

Choice is everything with language use, as with morals and love. You must choose my name and I must choose to accept it. A distinction is drawn, then, between symbol and allegory: "For symbolism the divine is imminent; for allegory it is radically transcendent, a perpetual absence, [maybe a refusal to presume to name what cannot be named?] a Deus Absconditus."

For Benjamin, redemption is possible only with a turning of the modernist and Capitalist conception of time inside out: no longer linear, time becomes a spiral or mandala, making all times present, all moments now. Think of Borges in El Aleph or William Blake's "infinity in one hour."

Benjamin counsels a messianic form of Marxism or socialism that fights to redeem the forgotten past. Those ghostly values are all round us, implied in our art and religions, in the aspirations and struggles of our fathers and mothers. Redemption is a restoration of what was broken and lost in other lives, in our own individual lives too. In the film Amistad, the African hero calls upon his ancestors at a moment of crisis and refuses a "slave name." Similarly, by acquiring an entry into the philosophical project of humanity, we call upon our ancestors in our daily struggle with these questions of meaning, purpose and tragedy. This brings Benjamin to an engagement with memory and Jung's "collective subconscious."

This act of naming and constructing is a rescuing of what has always been sought or yearned for, of what is found in our practices and institutions, the gold at the bottom of the well. Think again of American Constitutional hermeneutics. What is it that we are always trying to get right in Constitutional interpretation? It is at this point that Benjamin's project may be brought into a useful relation with Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutics of freedom. Richard Wolin writes:

In all of these respects, it is clear that the vitalist fascination with archaic images, the unconscious, dreams, shocks, collective forms of experience, and states of ecstasy in which the unity of the self dissolves, represented for Benjamin an important complement to what he found of value in the profane illuminations of the surrealists. Reactionary thought, too, contained "energies of intoxication" that needed to be won over for the revolution. But in this case, it would not be a ... (a revolution from the right).

Benjamin's answer is a theory of dream consciousness:

His theory of dream consciousness has much in common with Bloch's notion of "dreaming towards the future." It is precisely in this sense that he employs Michelet's saying, "Every epoch dreams its successor," as a motto to introduce his central statement of method[.] The allegory-laden, commodity utopias of the nineteenth century engendered a proliferation of dream- and wish-images, a phantasmagoria, that humanity would be able to possess in reality only if it becomes conscious of it." Benjamin associated the act of "becoming conscious" with the moment of awakening from the dream; [by understanding its meaning?] it was an act that at the same time, entailed a realization of the utopian potential contained in the dream.

We look around us and see what our obscene collection of objects and commodities are hinting at, as the "dream" of our time and place: an idealized or fantasy image of community and perfection. These trinkets bearing price tags are all about the hope for love and community that is displaced into a single act in our society, which is economic consumption. We will never be satisfied or fulfilled by consuming. Our human relations are mediated by money, including sexual relations, which become the simulacra of intimacy. We get to buy things and people, when what we really want is to find love and meaning in relationships that are freely chosen. For Benjamin, the objects themselves -- even the humblest of them -- can be redeemed for this true human project, and thereby made meaningful through the rediscovery of their beauty.

This project cannot be separated from the religious aspirations of humanity. Its dual aspect may be suggested by the frequent self-identification of Jesus, for example, as both "the son of man" and "the son of God," a realization of our spiritual natures in this material world, here and now. This is a cabalistic (we are "pierced vessels") and gnostic ambition, connecting Judaism and Christianity, but even more it is at the center of the universal mythical imagination of humanity. This achievement of full humanity is what Joseph Campbell describes as the purpose of the "hero's journey."

This is not simply a utopian aspiration, since as Karl Marx said: "Humanity only sets itself tasks that it can solve." It is only made to seem impossible by the logic of a system that wishes to program us into roles as docile consumers. We are hampsters on the running wheel of endless commercial activity in our consumer society. Accordingly, hope becomes dangerous and those who create or seek beauty, those who dare to "imagine," must be ostracized and dismissed as fools or dreamers. This imagining is a very American activity, where commercial rewards are really incidental to achievement, though they are often mistaken for achievement itself.

Benjamin anticipated all of this, insisting that we must continue to hope, however desperate our situation may be, since "hope was only created for those without hope."

Why Terry Eagleton Hates Americans.

Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), $18.95. (This is one of the best, though also one of most difficult books dealing with aesthetics that I have come accross.)
Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), $12.95.

Christopher Hitchens, "England Made Them," in Vanity Fair, January, 2008, at p. 118. (Christopher Hitchens, who is known as the epitome of normality, writes of English oddballs.)

I like Terry Eagleton. He does not like me because I am one of those frightful, uncouth Americans, who are destroying the planet with their hamburgers and action movies. Maybe it's Roger Scruton who feels that way about us. Probably both of them do, since disdain for Americans is one of the few things on which everyone agrees in Britain.

We like Brits who remind us that we are morons because they do it in such lovely accents. Plus, they may be right. In any case, we are happy to contribute to unity in Britain on the basis of a strong dislike for Americans, though not necessarily for our tourist dollars or our support of the British film industry. ("Hey, there's a new English movie and they're all wearing those great clothes from the nineteenth century and having tea!")

Poor Mr. Blair may have been too closely associated with Americans, notably Crawford's "man of the hour," George W. Bush, resulting in his departure from number 10 Downing Street. I think he's going to work for "Virgin" megastores in the DVD Department where a section is reserved for "fun-filled classics."

Terry Eagleton is a "good guy," who is proudly working class (except that he went to Cambridge and teaches or taught at Oxford), a Marxist, who is into the whole "Lit-Crit" thing. I have recently learned of the association of the term "guy" (an Americanism meaning roughly the same as "bloke") with "Guy Fawkes" and the gunpowder plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament, which sounds like fun. We have our own Daniel Shays in U.S. history and a noble tradition of proletarian dissent which is often not appreciated in Europe.

I believe that the world famous independence and wit of the British working class can be found in Shakespeare's grave digger in Hamlet, or even earlier in literary history. We tend to forget that British aristocrats are not the only people living in those islands who have ancestors. From Shakespeare's grave digger to John Lennon and Julie Burchill (who is always welcome to have her way with me!), there is a direct line.

Terry is not averse to an occasional beer at a local pub, along with philosophical chats afterwards -- as we urinate on the sidewalk -- while standing shoulder-to-shoulder, as it were, awaiting the arrival of the vanguard of the revolution or the police, whoever gets there first. Come to think of it, Terry may be the vanguard of the revolution. So he claims anyway.

When the revolution reaches Notting Hill and the Upper West Side, it is Terry who will be leading it. And I may join him. Terry is also brilliant, insightful and adept as a critic and theorist. I have read several of his books, including his guide to literary theory, his treatise on aesthetics (possibly the best in English) and the recent After Theory. He is amazingly prolific, churning out dense volumes of theory as well as a novel, and a memoir during his lunch breaks.

Although Terry's familiarity with Continental theory is impressive, he is also a superb writer, who makes himself understood, even by ignorant students (like me), sometimes surprising the reader with an arresting image that fixes a philosophical insight in the mind. What I especially admire about Terry -- you can't refer to him as "Professor" or "Mr.," not after reading a lot of his work, because he becomes a friend -- is his refusal to abandon common sense in order to get tenure. My familiarity in speaking of him should be understood as not only a further indication of my American crudeness, but as an expression of genuine friendship for a Marxist thinker whose work I admire even in disagreement.

Terry is quite certain that there is a real world which contains such items as bathrooms and evil Americans. He is also certain that some things are right and others wrong. There is no lack of clarity and no bullshit with Terry. The reader must admit that, among philosophers and professors, these are rare qualities. Consider the following paragraph:

People who see truth as dogmatic, and so want no truck with it, are rather like people who call themselves immoralists because they believe that morality just means forbidding people to go to bed with each other. Such people are inverted puritans. Like the puritan, they equate morality with repression; to live a moral life is to have a terrible time. But whereas the puritan thinks that having a terrible time is an excellent thing, and remarkably character-building to boot, these people do not, and so reject morality altogether. Similarly, those who do not believe in truth are quite often inverted dogmatists. They reject an idea of truth that no reasonable person would defend in the first place.

I spent months saying exactly this to a fairly typical pack of Internet morons in a discussion group. These (mostly) liberal imbeciles were incapable of grasping this point and still are. Many are probably in the U.S. Congress or Senate, right Mr. Menendez?

That [ethical] truths of this kind are absolute is of no great moment. It simply means that if a statement is true, then the opposite of it can't be true at the same time, or true from another point of view. It can't be the case that the fish is both a bit off and not a bit off. It can't be fresh for you and putrid for me, even if putrid is the way I like it. This does not rule out the possibility of doubt or ambiguity. Maybe I am not sure whether the fish is off or not. But if I am not sure, it is absolutely true that I am not sure. I can't be sure and not sure at the same time. It can't be that I am sure from my point of view but not from yours. Maybe the fish was fine two hours ago and is now distinctly dubious. In that case, what was absolutely true two hours ago is no longer true now. And the fact that it is not true now is just as absolute.

As we say in America, here's "the bottom line":

If it is true that racism is an evil, then it is not just true for those who happen to be its victims. They are not just expressing how they feel; they are making a statement about how things are.

I concur, with the proviso that "how they feel" is also a question of fact as to which there is both truth and falsehood.

Now, as for Terry's anti-Americanism, we must remember that he is British. There is a long and honorable tradition of British eccentricity and anti-Americanism. This is because Americans are seen, by our British cousins, as similar to that embarassing member of the family who likes to keep an eye out for UFO attack vessels, votes for Conservatives in every election, and invariably displays urine stains on his trousers, refusing to read any books because he has figured everything out ("it's all the fault of the Rockerfellers!"), and who is always getting into fist fights. Unfortunately, since he is a family member, this often means that one must come to the rescue and prevent strange, shaven-headed hoodlums in a tavern from beating his brains out.

I appreciate the genuine concerns expressed by Terry about American foreign policy. Along with many of my fellow citizens, I share those concerns. I also share in a sense of outrage and anger at the people who have placed bombs in London, KILLING many civilians. I felt sad and pained at the murder of London commuters in July of this year, just as I did for the victims on 9/11. I feel the same frustration and sadness for people dying in Iraq and Lebanon now. Murder is not how we like to resolve philosophical and political disagreements in the English-speaking world. This is not because we are all "homosexual Communists." Violence is not a very efficient means of distinguishing better from worse philosophical theories or political opinions.

Brits and Americans often disagree about many things. Let's be honest about some of the things that we happen to agree on. We all know that there are people in this country who see Americans and Brits as roughly the same, except that they "talk funny." There are people in the U.S. (I am one of them) who feel a profound affection and gratitude for the residents of those islands -- for their culture, especially their gifts to humanity of political liberty and the greatest literature in the world, by far -- and we feel their pains as if they were our own.

We recognize the values that we share with the British people which, sadly, still makes us part of a small minority on the planet, a minority willing to recognize, at least when their politicians are forced to do so, something called "human rights and dignity," including freedom of speech and the inviolability of the choice to be different.

Any honest person will also admit that terrorists are a real threat in today's world and -- for whatever reasons -- see British and American citizens (and soon, others) -- as legitimate targets, even if we disagree with the policies of our governments, since (strangely enough) we tend to object to being murdered with our families.

If the choice comes down to those who threaten our families and want to kill people to prove that they are right about something, and those of us who welcome the opportunity to read a book by Terry Eagleton -- even if much of it will displease us or be critical of our government -- then, I suspect, the British people will always side with those dreadful Americans, who are willing to agree to disagree.

We ignorant Americans will certainly stand with Britain in a dangerous world, a world that always has a fresh supply of bigots and dictators, terrorists and maniacs, who are more than willing to murder children to get a point across. Killing 73 innocent people on an airplane is not O.K. because you hate Communists. ("American Hypocrisy and Luis Posada Carriles.")

A lesson to be learned from history by "friend and foe alike" is that, peaceful protest or civil disobedience may persuade the British government that it is mistaken (Ghandi) and negotiations will usually win concessions from the U.S. or Britain, but you cannot threaten either the U.S. or U.K. -- or any nation with an ancient and proud history, like Israel -- into doing what you wish or abandoning principles fashioned over centuries. This includes China, Mr. Wieseltier. It ain't gonna happen, folks. And it shouldn't. I suspect that this is also Cuba's position as an independent nation. ("Time to End the Embargo Against Cuba.")

A final anecdote to give a sense of the British character -- and, perhaps, of an important quality shared with Americans -- concerns the first World Cup games that were played after the Second World War. The British played the Germans and lost a close game. The German team captain approached his British counterpart, who offered his hand to the winner. The German refused to shake that hand and said: "We have defeated you in your national game."

In perfect German, the British athlete responded: "Yes, sir. And last year, we defeated you in yours."

An apology followed from the German, who then offered his hand. The British player, graciously, accepted it. You can understand something important about the British people, inherited by their American cousins, from that one episode in sports history.

I know, I know ... friends say my sense of British people comes mostly from literature and films. I've met quite a few Brits in New York, not one was stupid or socially awkward. Maybe my perspective is slanted, but I like the people of those islands. To the extent that there is such a thing as a national character, then I think there is a tendency to self-deprecating irony, wit and understated intelligence -- also firmness of purpose -- in British people that I admire and find attractive. It's Shakespeare's long shadow and all that literature acquired from infancy that is, unfairly, a big part of British culture.

Brits should be required to share their great writers, because they have so many, with the rest of the world. Oh, they have, haven't they? (I'm ending my sentence with a question in a very British way.) Bin Laden is an asshole, isn't he? Why, yes ... he is. Any nation whose government includes a "Ministry of Funny Walks" has earned our loyalty.

Oh, and don't forget to see the new Harry Potter movie. I hear it's awesome. I'm going to the Sherlock Holmes movie with semi-Brit, Robert Downey, Jr.

Beauty and Goodness.

There is much disagreement in Western philosophy concerning the role and importance of art in a full or rich human life. I think that this debate is worth considering for a moment, since I have been engaged in discussions of literature and aesthetics over the past several days.

It should not be forgotten that every philosophical topic or issue that I discuss in one of these eletronic journal entries merits much greater analysis and exploration than I can possibly provide in this setting. As Santayana would say, I am merely "dipping my finger in the pie." No Freudian observations please.

Nothing would please me more than to encourage people interested by something that I say, in any one of these posts, to read a book by one of my heros (or heroines): Harold Bloom, Peter Ackroyd, George Steiner, Terry Eagleton (when he is not abusing Americans), Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis, Gore Vidal (we must bow when speaking his name), Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, Iris Murdoch, Alison Lurie, Germaine Greer, John Updike, Jonathan Franzen, Jose Marti, Carlos Fuentes, Erica Jong, James Baldwin, Cornel West and Marina Warner are among the names that will turn up in these discussions, sooner or later. All of them know more than I do about most things and are better writers. My goal is only to interest you in the issues.

So is there a connection between art and ethics, beauty and goodness?

I would like to think so. On the other hand, after the Holocaust, I am not so sure that we can say so with great confidence. Theodor Adorno's question hangs in the air: "How can one write poetry after Auschwitz?"

I think that we must write poetry after Auschwitz if we are to retain our sanity or preserve such ability to cope with evil as we may possess. The two polarized positions may be characterized, very roughly, as the views that: 1) there is no connection between the degree of a person's civilization or artistic sensitivity and awareness, that is, education in the arts and what that person will do in extreme circumstances; or 2) the claim that there is such a connection, so that great art makes us better persons.

George Steiner comments on the man who listens to Bach in the evening, reads Goethe in the morning, and then goes to his job in a concentration camp. Iris Murdoch and others -- including George Santayana, in an earlier generation -- speak of the capacity of all great art to direct human attention towards the "mysterium" of love and goodness. In the tradition derived from Plato, by way of Kant and the Romantics, "art elevates the spirit to the contemplation of lofty things, allowing us to achieve a transcendence of our particularities." All of this sounds like Oxford armchair stuff these days, especially to the millions coping with hunger and plague in the Third World, or even in the inner cities of the United States.

For Marxists, art is ambiguous. It may serve the purpose of, for example, a gift of candy to an injured child, distracting that child from the injustices to which he or she is subjected; or it may be a form of resistance when it becomes part of the social struggle for liberation. But this is to ignore the ways in which some of the best art is concerned with a spiritual liberation and not with transforming the world through revolution or altering the material conditions of people's lives.

I continue to believe, perhaps childishly, that the best art can heal and serve as a balm for our wounds in life, that there is a kind of catharsis in aesthetic experience. Both the artist and recipient of the work of art are enriched and healed by artistic communication. They are made better persons. I cannot say exactly how this happens, but I believe that it does.

It may be that art helps to cultivate or develop feelings in people. The capacity to accept and learn from emotional responses is crucial to a sane life or to wisdom. In America, especially in legal circles, feelings are feared as "subjective" and not amenable to "rational analysis or discussion," usually based on an archaic bit of moral epistemology that distinguishes sharply between facts and values, emotions and rationality. Many of these distinctions and antinomies are due for re-examination. Also, one cannot "bill" for one's "feelings," usually, which lawyers find distressing. I am sure that some lawyers manage to bill for their feelings, so that their compassion is only an "extra charge" at the end of the month. Law and the sexual services industries have so much in common.

I will leave the reader today with the words of two of my teachers and ask you to reflect on them. First, Santayana:

In what might be called classical philosophy, art meant command over instrumentalities and methods: it might be abused, but it was a moralist's duty to watch over it and see that it was directed towards the ultimate and harmonious service of the soul. Beauty, on the other hand, was one side of the ultimate good. Art was called fine or beautiful, in so far as it was directed towards this good: but a material work of art, or a method, had to be judged not only on this ground, but in view of all its effects. A beautiful work of art might be evil in that it flattered falsehood or vice; but to a truly refined taste only that could be wholy beautiful which was wholly attuned to the health of human nature. Now-a-days all this has been confused and lost sight of. In radical quarters beauty is not regarded as a good, but art is respected as expression -- but expression of what? You say of feeling. Swearing then would be art. [And much worse too.] ... "art," in the modern world, is a pure affectation and self-indulgence on the part of a group of ill-educated persons, who have no discernment of the good in any form, but only a certain irritability and impatience to put their finger in the pie.

And next, Germaine Greer:

As long as Shakespeare remains central to English cultural life, [English, but also American life?] will retain the values which make it unique in the world, namely tolerance, pluralism, the talent for visible compromise, and a profound commitment to that most wasteful form of social organization, democracy. To an outsider such lack of system may seem amorphous, disorganized, and even hypocritical; from within it is evident that such an inclusive mode can be no more inconsistent than life itself. The puzzle is to discover the intrinsic ordering principle in apparent disorder. Perhaps the reason the principle eludes so many is that they are searching in the wrong place; in the theatre of the beholder is the medium. The missing middle term in the Shakespearian proposition is our response. Without that there is and can be no argument.

Pierced Vessels.

Most of us are desperate for some meaningful human connection in our lives. There is so much loneliness in a big city, like New York. There is so much pain that is written on the faces of the strangers that I see in subway trains, or at a Deli ordering a sandwich, at a bookstore or coffee shop.

At times, I see so much yearning in people's eyes and a desperate hope for love that I can barely keep from crying. Other times, I sense a forlorn and lost condition in a person, who seems (spiritually) petrified, frozen and atrophied, stone-like, behind walls that will now never be scaled by another human being. So many have given up, choosing a kind of death-in-life. Too many of us in big cities have chosen to exist, defensively, "in splendid isolation" -- like the British during the Edwardian period.

I see people who have taken their hearts, placed them in a steel box, and buried them in a desert deep within themselves, turning into "cleverly constructed automatons" (Descartes), who only resemble the human beings that they once were. In the movie The Sixth Sense, the child actor who is the protagonist of the story says, "I see dead people." I wanted to shout in the movie theater: "I do too." The dead people are all around us. Worse, we are in danger of becoming one of them, without realizing it.

Community, real community, genuine social interaction is a necessity. I will say this again for those who came in late. We need other people and our relationships with them. Contrary to America's unspoken religion of "self-reliance," and to Dr. Phil, life is not about "being who you are" and "making yourself happy." That very American tendency to self-indulgence is a necessary way of coping with the pain resulting from the absence of meaningful relationships in life, something which is reaching epidemic proportions in America (along with the selfishness and lonelyness that this absence both causes and reflects). Individualism is necessary, but it is not enough for any of us.

This widespread suffering is partly due to moronic advice from "therapists" -- like Dr. Phil and even the much nicer Dr. Ruth ("use a cucumber!") -- but it is also the result of a confusion of the means to happiness, for happiness itself. Money, power, fame -- all run a distant second to love and beauty. You all know that, unless you are an imbecile ... in which case you would not be reading this, but would have entered politics long ago.

Yes, you need some money to survive, but why surive? What is it that makes that survival worthwhile? The look in someone's eyes who matters to you. We can accept this much from Freud: The reason why most men, anyway, do most things is to impress a woman -- one woman in particular. We laugh and hope, we dream and play, much more when there are children we love in our lives, children who speak -- usually without intending it -- to the child alive in us.

I have suggested that human connection is becoming more, not less difficult. There are many reasons for this and for the human misery that results because of it. Most of this misery has to do with the sheer idiocy of our therapists. Some of it is the result of how we live now. We are overworked, skeptical from coping with all the bullshit dispensed daily by politicians and advertisers, cynical about politics and everything else, way beyond a simplistic or literal religious belief, even when we claim that we believe. Nothing matters, people say. Everything is tainted by the banalizing power of the mass media, a power which must be reappropriated by and for us.

There is a terrible, bleak and cold emptiness inside people, inside us, and lethal boredom. Hence, the bandaids that are placed on the gaping wound of alienation. Indiscriminate sex, greed, trinkets, drugs, pursuit of power, all of the usual baubles that we seek in order to avoid facing both our sense of this nothingness or of something "missing," and the oh-so literal death that awaits all of us.

Many of us are attracted to art, to the wonders of the aesthetic encounter which provides clues to what we really want, ultimately, which is love and social transformation. You know who the authorities are at this point: Plato and Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin and Iris Murdoch, together with many others. And yes, for those who are not religious, there is also Jesus. Not the Jesus of the television evangelists, but Jesus the rabble rouser, fellow sufferer, rebel with a cause -- a postmodernist Jesus, who wears faded denims and a baseball cap. "Jesus," says an eloquent New York t-shirt, "is my homeboy."

For those who wish to be seen with impressive books everywhere, books that define you as an "intellectual" -- as you wait for your Mocha Frapuccino at Starbucks -- I suggest Professor Terry Eagleton's The Ideology of the Aesthetic, or anything by George Steiner or Richard Wolheim. Yes, I go to Starbucks and, occasionally, I even have a book in my pocket, but I NEVER order "Mocha Frapuccino." Not lately, anyway.

"You are a fucking Anglophile!" O.K., O.K., read Gore Vidal's essays and Norman Mailer's Advertisements for Myself. Susan Sontag or Jonathan Franzen won't kill you either. My point is that art, which is fun, may be the easiest access to the communal in a time and place intending to deny us communal experiences of any kind. Religious ceremonies are unlikely to make a come back among the hipsters in the East Village, while sports are "too corporate" and electoral politics is about big money and sound bites in America. But there is still art. In a democratic age, cinema rules.

I anticipate that there are some readers who are determined to twist anything I say into an insult or to provide a gratuitous psychobabble analysis, so I will try to be cautious. Best of all, for the hostile crowd, is to find an interpretation that makes an accusation of political incorrectness against me plausible, but the need to find the most dismissive and insulting, demeaning and basest interpretation of everything anyone says is also a sign of pathology. The Internet is the realm of insult and accusation in debate, almost like the U.S. Congress. The accusation of childishness directed at another, for instance, is a way of not facing the hunger for imaginative expression and connectedness in the accuser. Are you denying your own remaining child-like needs or hopes by accusing me of childishness?

Our aesthetic encounters provide a clue to the loving recognition for which we really yearn. Art is a revelation of the "unalienated relatedness" that makes life meaningful and good, that we know must exist somewhere -- like "Shangri-la" in Lost Horizon -- and it is the pointer to the love which redeems the human condition. These encounters are also politically significant now, because they expose the vicious injustices against which we struggle as we cope, and from which, we seek relief.

Some readers will doubtless find my use of the category [of the aesthetic] inadmissably loose and broad, not least when it comes at times to merge into the idea of bodily experience as such. But if the aesthetic returns with such persistence, it is partly because of a certain indeterminacy of definition which allows it to figure in a varied span of preoccupations: freedom and legality, spontaneity and necessity, self-determination, autonomy, particularity and universality, along with several others. My argument broadly speaking is that the category of the aesthetic assumes the importance that it does in Modern Europe [and America] because in speaking of art it speaks of these other matters too, which are at the heart of the middle class's struggle for hegemony. The construction of the modern notion of the aesthetic artefact is thus inseparable from the construction of the dominant ideological forms of modern class-society, and indeed from a whole new form of human subjectivity appropriate to that social order.

This paragraph is taken from Eagleton's treatise, but what follows is from Steiner's introduction to Iris Murdoch's collection of essays, Existentialism and Mystics:

[Dame Iris speaks of the art object as a "pierced object,"] Note the exact felicity of "pierced object" (would that Dame Iris had alluded to its source, which is the famous kabbalistic trope of the "pierced vessels" of divine creation). ...

Art is our supreme clue to morals (an arresting phrase). Both [art and morals] direct the spirit towards the MYSTERIUM of love. The program is [always] that mapped in Neo-Platonism, in Augustine and in Dante's PARADISO. ... Dame Iris argues for a morality of love, of individualised reciprocity whose foundations can, ought to be those of rational humanism. Or indeed, as a number of her most intricate fictions suggest, of a remembered paganism, of myth and allegory as metaphors of ethical possiblity.

Let us dream together of "ethical possibilities," for a little while ...