Heidegger made the fundamental discovery of a world that could also be called “the style of a culture”. It is normally invisible and silent, “behind” our reflections on life and yet determines just about everything to do with the way we live and our understand how we live. The style of a culture or its world is “[l]ike the illumination in the room, [it] normally functions best to let us see things when we don’t see it.”[1]
In Heidegger’s essay, The Origin of the Work of Art, he famously refers to van Gogh’s painting, A Pair of Shoes, as a work of art that, in their nature as equipment, reveal a world that is so pervasive, surrounding the peasant woman at all points, that for her, it remains invisible. She simply wears her shoes, without noticing or reflecting on their nature as equipment. But, because they are presented to Heidegger as art, he can begin to describe the existential world that informs and shapes the life of the peasant:[2] [3]
From out of the dark opening of the well-worn insides of the shoes the toil of the worker’s tread stares forth. In the crudely solid heaviness of the shoes accumulates the tenacity of the slow trudge through the far-stretching and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On the leather lies the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles slides the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. The shoes vibrate with the silent call of the earth, its silent gift of the ripening grain, its unexplained self-refusal in the wintry field. This equipment is pervaded by uncomplaining worry as to the certainty of bread, wordless joy at having once more withstood want, trembling before the impending birth, and shivering at the surrounding menace of death.
This vivid description highlights Heidegger’s understanding of the function of art to make manifest and articulate a world that is normally invisible and silent to those living in it, yet determined by it, through the routine, unreflective, daily use of the equipment (e.g. the peasant’s shoes) that appears in the first place only by virtue of this world. It is this world, brought to language by Heidegger’s existential phenomenology, that the peasant woman really lives in and is determined by, in all her conduct and ways of being.
So, what world do we really live in, in 2016?
I recently visited the Sydney 2016 Biennale:[4]
Its starting point is the question: if each era has a different view of reality, what is ours? With our growing dependence on the virtual world of the Internet, the distinction between that world and the physical one is becoming ever less defined. Many artists are attempting to access the ‘in-between’—the place where the virtual and the physical fold into one another.
As I entered the first floor to buy my ticket, I glanced over to the souvenir shop and saw a reproduction of a work of art by one of the Biennale presenters, Grayson Perry.[5] I must have been ready or primed to perceive this particular painting in a particular way, because in this illuminating moment, I shared Heidegger’s understanding of art as manifesting and articulating the ordinarily hidden world that gives rise to all the appearances that we simply accept unreflectingly as “things” or “equipment”, to be perceived or used by us in a meaningful and intelligent way, again, usually without thinking about such matters at all (c/f the peasant woman above).[6]
I was immediately struck by the array of modern ordinary equipment taken for granted and used by the occupants of this house, on a daily basis. The angel and the Annunciation, the central figures in the painting, are not equipmental at all, and therefore perhaps not even an appearance in this (so far undisclosed) modern world. No one notices or pays any attention to her. Since the angel is not a manifest appearance in the world i.e., to the inhabitants, it seems likely that she is the artist’s representation or personification of the world itself, its self-disclosure, to us, gazing at the artwork.
But let’s start with the equipment!
We can see all the ordinary items that we use intelligently to move about in the dominant style of our modern culture: cups, coffee maker, magazine, cushions, tea towels, technological devices, etc. If we look more closely at these items, another feature that we normally take completely for granted begins to stand out—the ubiquitous presence of labels— “bourgeois and proud”, “organic”, “local”, “plastic”, “Penguin Books” (on the mugs); “make tea, not war” (on the towel), etc. The angel’s body is portrayed as a cardboard cutout figure. She is pointing to portraits of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs that are hung on the wall. The iPad on the table is showing a news item, “Bakewell sells to Virgin for $270M.”
Labels or advertising messages saturate our minds throughout our days and nights. We hardly notice them any more but they are the angels of our times (angel = messenger, as in the angel of the annunciation, the title of the artwork.) What are they announcing to us, through the artwork, as the self-disclosure of our world or the style of our modern culture? Our senses are drawn to these labels involuntarily and we begin to think the thought of the label unconsciously. Of course the advertising industry knows how to exploit our involuntary attention to its own advantage, giving every effort to ensure we reach for a particular product over the competition. But all these efforts occur on the human level and, as such, belong to the appearances of the world, easily studied and articulated.
In thinking the thought of any label that pushes onto us, we human beings begin to think thoughts that are alien to any personal empirical experiences we might have. These alien thoughts bear a message from the concealed world that supports all these weird modern appearances. If you listen to interviews of the “man in the street”, asking for his political opinions for example, you hear only the thought of the mass media at work. After all, how could most people have any personal experience of the horrors of terrorism, or the devastation of tropical rainforests, etc.? Yet this alien thought (i.e., alien to the empirical lives of most of us) is determining the course of events in the empirical or physical world. The alien thought we unconsciously think by a kind of inductive process, belongs to another reality altogether—call it medial reality or what I will call, virtual reality.
Virtual reality became possible as a concept when we began thinking reality exclusively in terms of the empirical senses i.e., the thought that everything we know about our reality comes from our senses. We call this reality empirical or physical reality. It is then only a small technical step to excite the senses directly with technologically generated information and call our subsequent experience “virtual reality” i.e. a reality is generated that is as close as possible in essence to empirical reality. The reality aspect to virtual reality reminds us that we are immersed in a real world (of alien thought—thinking that is induced in us via excitation of the senses and which we begin to think unconsciously). Importantly, we interpret this thought as kind of solid substance, like the appearances of empirical reality.[7]
At the same time we are physically surrounded by another real world. Let’s call this world the physical (empirical) world for a moment—a world that determines the appearances that we use routinely on a daily basis: cups, towels, computers etc.[8]
Perry’s artwork, then, is showing us an emerging new world. Two worlds, virtual and physical are chaotically colliding, conflating, interpenetrating, uniting, fusing, but how do we say the possible world that may be emerging from this linguistic chaos? Take one piece of equipment, a cup. The label on the cup in Perry’s artwork is an ad for a Penguin book. We are meant to think “Penguin Books” every time we lift up the cup to drink. What is the mode of being of such a piece of equipment? We are meant to think the cup in its ordinary status as equipment to satisfy thirst, enjoy companionship with another, sooth anxieties, kill time, etc. i.e., all those activities that disclose our modern style of culture, and at the same time, we are meant to think “Penguin Books”, a thinking completely alien to the common equipmental status of a physical cup. Perry shows this concatenation of disjunctive thinking throughout his painting and in so doing is disclosing a world to us—one that is normally concealed from us, in order for the appearances to appear as such e.g. an ordinary cup bearing a label.[9]
The cardboard angel of the Annunciation of the Virgin (the title of the work) is placed alongside an IPad announcing a sale to Virgin airlines, and she points to portraits of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Just underneath these portraits sits an ordinary mother and child—a new birth from out of our technological civilization? Is the angel announcing the birth of a new world, with its correlative appearances, cultural style, and practices? In Perry’s painting, virtual reality is chaotically showing up empirically. Virtual reality and empirical reality are no longer to be thought as separate domains of “reality”, in the way that fiction and science were once thought as quite separate domains of reality.
In one of my books, I describe an astounding video I found on YouTube.[10] The scene opens up with:[11]
Somewhere in a little town of Belgium
On a square where nothing really happens
We placed a button
And waited for someone to push it …
In the centre of the small town square is a pillar supporting a big red button. Dangling overhead is a sign: “Push to Add Drama”. A passer-by does so and a drama erupts! Ambulances, accident victims, collisions between cars and people, fights, police and gangster shoot-outs all vie with one another while the local people look on. Although it is easy to get absorbed in the dramatic action, it is quite instructive to also cast an eye on the locals who watched this advertisement for a TV station (as it turned out to be). Some were clearly shocked and then frightened. Others were nonplussed, uncertain, while still others became, in effect, the audience, enjoying the drama that exploded so unexpectedly into their lives “where nothing really happens”. A purely staged media event erupts into the empirical lives of ordinary people going about their business. It is striking to see how quickly some, if not most, understood what was happening and accepted it, even enjoying the “thrill” of it. This relatively quick adaptation to the incursion of drama into empirical life is reminiscent of earlier days when audiences at first fled the theatre as a cinematic train “rushed” towards them. Today we easily accept 3-D versions of these moving images, without thinking about the reality question at all. We merely enjoy the “thrill of the ride”.
This staged event in which virtual reality (or medial reality) conflates with empirical (or physical) reality is merely another, more spectacular, example of the kind of appearances that Perry is drawing our attention to, in his painting. You can see this conflation everywhere in our daily lives. One more example will suffice. Here in Sydney, Rugby League is very important. Watching a game on TV is like watching two hours of computer pop-ups. Labels literally cover the bodies of the athletes; computer-generated and painted ads cover the playing field; digitalized ads run incessantly around the fence bordering the game. And it is all accepted now. These are the new appearances. Grayson Perry’s artwork is an attempt by an artist to show us what world is being disclosed by these new appearances.
We can now return to the Sydney Biennale and the statement made by Stephanie Rosenthal:
With our growing dependence on the virtual world of the Internet, the distinction between that world and the physical one is becoming ever less defined. Many artists are attempting to access the ‘in-between’—the place where the virtual and the physical fold into one another.
The “place” where the virtual and physical “fold into one another” is a poetic way of pointing to the concealed (implicit, non-linguistic) world that is “producing” these strange appearances (occurrents, equipment, as Heidegger would say) that we now take for granted. We are being shaped by this silent world as surely as van Gogh’s peasant was shaped by the world that gave rise to her mode of being and its equipment (the boots). Perry’s The Annunciation of the Virgin is one artist’s way of disclosing this world, and we can see in his painting that this new world is passing strange indeed.
Throughout the last few decades, one of the major themes of my books concerns the actual process of manifestation of worlds. For example, in my book, Manifesting Possible Futures, I describe four conditions for the disclosure of worlds:
- The individual effort of participation with an aspect of possible futures (the artist’s imagination);
- The enactment, by this individual, of his or her participation, thereby becoming a mouthpiece of this future (the artwork);
- The willingness on the part of others to make a move towards conceiving the world the same way the individual does (emerging shared language);
- The gradual congealing of that conception into the way the world is perceived, the world thus becoming, over time, “that way”, resulting in cultural forms that give expression to and strengthen that new reality.
When these conditions are met then we, as psychological beings, and the real world in which we live, transform. We end up living in that world, accepting the new appearances and getting shaped by them. It becomes really so!
These four conditions are succinctly outlined and examined in the following passage by Owen Barfield [12]:
Imagination is not, as some poets have thought, simply synonymous with good. It may be either good or evil. As long as art remained primarily mimetic, the evil which imagination could do was limited by nature . . . [b]ut . . . when the fact of the directionally creator relation is beginning to break through into consciousness, both the good and evil latent in the working of imagination begin to appear unlimited.… we could very well move forward into a chaotically empty or fantastically hideous world. . . . We should remember this, when appraising the aberrations of the formally representational arts. . . . in so far as they are genuine, they are genuine because the artist has in some way experienced the world he represents. And in so far as they are appreciated, they are appreciated by those who themselves are willing to make a move towards seeing the world in that way and, ultimately therefore, seeing that kind of world. We should remember this, when we see pictures of a dog with six legs emerging from a vegetable marrow or a woman with a motor-bicycle substituted for her left breast.
One last point! It does seem to me at this time that we are collectively moving towards the “chaotically empty or fantastically hideous” world of appearances that Barfield warns us about. But this is only one possible future for us. Much hangs on how we understand “virtual reality” or more generally “technology”. Can we avoid the truth that our technological civilization produces a set of appearances that has come about through the physicalizing of (positivized) pure thinking? A simple transistor, for example is the materialization of a mathematical process of integration of equations. In other words, we have positivized what is in truth negative reality, thereby giving us a way to create our technological civilization—a civilization of “materialized (positivized) thought”—the world Grayson Perry is disclosing to us.[13]
Another possible future may emerge if we understand virtual reality as a positivized manifestation of a negative reality—what I would call the living “objective” psyche.[14] With this understanding we may become attuned to those appearances made possible by an interpenetration of the negatively real psyche and empirical reality—an interpenetration that some contemporary art is hinting at.
My recent essays and my books are asking the question, what is the speech of this interpenetration, or this new birth—speech in Heidegger’s sense that the essence of language is poesis, a disclosing of new world that “shines” through the new appearances?[15]
We must, I believe, look to living language as the originating inception of new appearances and new cultural practices.
[1] Hubert Dreyfus. “Heidegger’s Ontology of Art” in A Companion to Heidegger. Dreyfus, R. & Wrathall, M. (eds).
[2] “The Origin of the Work of Art” in Off the Beaten Track. J. Young & K. Haynes (eds). Cambridge University Press, 14.
[3] PD-US, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3740793
[4] Stephanie Rosenthal, artistic director for the 20th Biennale, Sydney.
[5] http://www.mca.com.au/exhibition/grayson-perry/
[6] Heidegger calls “things” and equipment, in terms of their respective modes of being: the “occurrent” or “present-at-hand” and the “available” or “ready-to-hand”.
[7] That is, thought or the mind is positivized, substantiated, like external reality—hence virtual reality (virtually the same).
[8] Heidegger refines this reality as our technological world, to distinguish its appearances from that of previous historical epochs.
[9] As Dreyfus says through his metaphor of the illuminated room (see p. 2).
[10] The Coming Guest and the New Art Form
[11] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=316AzLYfAzw
[12] Owen Barfield (1957). Saving the Appearances, London: Faber and Faber, pp. 145-146.
[13] Thinking, like music, does not exist except as thought by us or performed by us, yet neither are products of our subjectivity. This is negative “objective” reality!
[14] “objective” in quotes because the reality of psyche is “pure” interiority or inwardness, i.e. beyond the inner/outer disjunction that has dominated our thinking and culture for thousands of years.
