Late 15^th century anti-Semitic painting from Frankfurt-Main, accusing Jews of ritual murder, bestiality and associating with the devil. (Florida Holocaust Museum)

 The world of monsters goes underground in the emerging modern worldview. Here the Jew is a man almost like any other. (“Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions – fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons… warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is?” The Merchant of Venice III, i). Hooker (1996) notes that this worldview remaps the landscape, separating the human from its enmeshment with nature and spirit  “to privilege human beings and the uniquely human perspective….” As nature takes on a new configuration, identity and difference can be established, measured and positioned in a rational order that allows an extension of human rights to men at the very outskirts of humanity. Beyond these borders the inhuman (nature, slaves, animals, women) no longer threatens. It comes to exist as a world of disassociated objects that can be observed and exploited by man.

In the modern worldview, the making of monsters is replaced by taxonomies of difference. Species, race, gender and sexual difference function in every aspect of modern culture to establish and defend the borders of humanness, claiming and preserving it for those individual human subjects who operate as purposeful agents, consciously imposing their meanings upon the world. But the refused world that is other and inhuman to such subjects (including their own unconscious processes) proceeds apace, so that, as Horkheimer and Adorno observe, “the Enlightenment [becomes] its own dark other, its own grotesque myth; the role of reason encompasses the capitalist domination of nature, the imperialist eradication of the other, the fascist regression into the irrational (and now the potential extinction of us all)” (cited in Briton, 1996, p. 66).

The modern worldview with its secular humanism and notion of subjective agency has failed on many fronts, but perhaps nowhere has failed quite so spectacularly as in the realm of anti-Semitism. Sacks (2002) notes that when Jews were offered equal rights as citizens, “the promise was that the rule of reason would dispel the ancient mists of prejudice.”  He continues, “The failure of that dream is one of the most devastating chapters in European history. The depth of its failure is measured by this: that virtually all the great philosophers of modernity—Voltaire, Fichte, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Frege—made sharply anti-Semitic statements in the course of their work…. The greatest German philosopher of the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger, was an enthusiastic member of the Nazi Party who never, in the post-war years, recanted, atoned or apologized for his acts. Thus the Europe of reason, enlightenment and philosophy became the Europe of the Holocaust.”

Shakespeare’s meditations on the human and inhuman may have continuing relevance in the world of our butter ad. The play is still posed and performed as a masterpiece whose anti-Semitism may be (or is not at all) troubling, and whose humanism goes-without-saying (or is loudly proclaimed).[3] Are we still poised in this dilemma, caught between allegiance to a premodern world of nature and community (with its dark underside of fear and intolerance) and a modern world of humanity and freedom (with its barely-hidden legacy of objectifying, incarcerating and murdering the other)? Or can we transcend these choices by embracing a critical, postmodern worldview? Today monsters reappear as the schizoid consumers/producers of the catastrophe of history and the coming apocalypse. Monsters-R-Us.

The Wild Man, Bear or Hind from the Romance of Alexander, 14^th C., Oxford, Bodleian Library (Eco, 2002, p. 122)

Capital

The butter ad may refer to the corn-god, but it pays its real homage to the coin-god.

Under the rule of Mammon, consumer choice is the destiny and meaning of every image. Private buyers who obey an advertisement’s message appropriate the values and meanings an image communicates. Butter consumers can buy in to a simple, authentic life, in which people are connected with local values, place, work, community, nature and spirit. Through the joyful indulgence of natural appetite, the consumer can choose to dwell in a pre-modern critique of capital’s established order.

Gisbert Palmié. Rewards of Work. c. 1933, from Wells (2003). An example of art approved under National Socialism. Wells writes, “The idea of Volk - “folk and folkdom”- was a consistent theme (Adam 9).  Volk expressed the notion of a German people linked with nature and the simple, fine, pastoral life, and it was accompanied by a sense of nostalgia for an idyllic, natural community that hypothetically had once existed.  Volkisch sentiments were reflected in frequent illustrations of landscapes and the country life.”

Capitalism is frightening. It rips people from their roots, alienates them from their work, and dissolves languages and cultures in a tendency to globalization. It is always seeking the lowest wage and the highest profit. It undermines traditional communities and promotes individualism as it brings workers into competition with each other. Like Shylock, capitalism would excise the heart of man. As a system it is devoid of morality and unimpressed with social values. Money is the motive force.

But capitalism is also inviting. When an economy operates without particular reference to family, faith, gender and location, it admits the dream of freedom. As Shakespeare explores, the world of the marketplace allows for intense interactions between complex personalities. Marx himself observes that capital “creates the material elements for the development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption” (1973, p. 325). As capital neutralizes difference and brings all things under the law of the interchangeable (Lyotard, 1978, p. 13), equivalence suggests the option of equality. When traditional lifeways are destroyed, there is a gap where gender fluidity and chosen family become imaginable. Individual autonomy, social equity, gender fluidity and global community are always-broken promises inside the capitalist system. Today advertising (following art, philosophy and politics in recent centuries) is a key space in which these promises are pledged. And sure enough, our butter ad offers another layer of meanings and values through which viewers can contend with capitalism’s “sorcery of the social relation [and]… challenge to society” (Baudrillard, 1988). Exercising one’s unique individuality through the free choice of butter, one can imagine the human community as an aggregate of similarly empowered individuals, all as capable of choosing this freedom.

Celebrating corn and butter, the ad references and confirms a premodern worldview that links consumers with nature and a simple life. Celebrating the autonomous individual at the supermarket, the ad references and confirms a modern worldview, with its associated philosophies of secular humanism, the subjugation of nature by science, and progressive enlightenment. In both premodern and modern worldviews we can discern a critique of capitalism; consumption is posed as a place of rebellion against its hegemony. Yet this critique is also characterized by its postmodern superficiality. The ad offers a dream of freedom with the proviso that “Since there is no underlying purpose or meaning in life, the only recourse is to take pleasure in this newly discovered freedom” (Quigley, 2001). It offers a dream of nature and community with the footnote that since these options have been eliminated on a social scale, the only recourse is to recuperate them through personal appetites. Here life, like art, signifies nothing anymore, yet all the same it signifies, bearing witness to an irreparable void (Baudrillard, 1993, p. 13).

Gender

This contextual view of the butter ad makes obvious its clear, albeit unstable, references to sex and gender. Butler (1990) writes “Gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which ‘sexed nature’ or a ‘natural sex’ is produced and established as ‘prediscursive,’ prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts.” (p. 7). The slogan “Natural attraction” and the phallic corncob take up residence in this domain, promoting the joys of heterosexuality and a reproductive male/female binary in which the erect corncob strains towards the viscous feminine butter – the essence of (mother’s) milk.

In the newly emerging corporate states of the High Middle Ages, patriarchal forms of social organization gain new power and legitimacy, and sexism and intolerance become enforceable on a gigantic scale. State-sponsored pogroms and the Inquisition’s pursuit, torture and murder of witches and sodomites comprise the seething social background to the cultural change described by Merchant (1989), who writes of the displacement of a premodern image of nature as a nurturing and raging mother by a modern image of nature – and of women – as observable, describable, and controllable through rational understanding and scientific method.  Foucault comments, “empirical knowledge that covered the things of the world and transcribed them into the ordering of an indefinite discourse that observes, describes and establishes the ‘facts’ (at a time when the western world was beginning the economic and political conquest of the same world) had its operating model no doubt in the Inquisition….” (1977, p. 16). Merchant also observes that as the new science of nature that emerged in the context of a hotly debated controversy over women’s “natural” roles and the prosecutorial murder of witches used the Inquisition as a model for inquiry that was explicitly cited by Francis Bacon and others.

Bronze amulet, woman wielding a triple phallus, 9^th Century England (Rawson, 1970)

The new humanism, positivism and colonialism all scrutinized nature with extraordinary vigilance. Taxonomies of plants and animals, theories of natural man and “The Decyte of Women” (Anonymously published, 1560), became essential ingredients of the new world order. Lyotard (1978) writes of the relationship between pre-modern and modern worldviews: “masculine imperialism gets along well with nocturnal delirium, pastoral dances, and the consumption of raw animal flesh. For the empire needs a border and these provide such a border. In the face of the ‘irrational,’ the master-warrior-speaker is reinstated in his pedagogical task: he needs a frontier to conquer and savages to civilize” (p. 14). Just as the inhuman is a necessary constitutive of the human, unreason lurks menacingly at the border of reason and evokes the authority of its opposite. So do female and feminized stand with undiscovered nature in the silent, secret realm of the yet-to-be described by (masculine) thought.

Bordieu (1992) points out that such oppositions organize every our every thought and practice. When we say culture/nature, we are not so far from saying man/woman, subject/object, human/inhuman, rational/irrational, spiritual/material, controllable/uncontrollable…. Bordieu complains that these oppositions “think in our place” (p. 40). They “function as the most absolute system of censure, since they are … the things which structure what is thought, and therefore they are themselves very difficult to think” (p. 39). These oppositions form a Mobius strip on which we march, like Escher’s ants, forever traveling between seeming reversals.

At least in the realm of gender, the oppositions that think us are subverted and destabilized by our postmodern butter ad. The corncob is at once a phallic object inserted into a phallocracy, and a reversal of the phallus’ imputed masculinity. The butter consumer is likely female. (“Women continue to do the majority of food purchasing, preparation and cleanup” according to Reynolds-Zayak, 2004.) The ad assumes a mischievous relationship with gender; its hypothetical audience is invited to laugh at the straining phallus, and perhaps even to employ it as a sex toy in a subversion of gender binaries. Like The Merchant of Venice, the butter ad allows us to glimpse a world in which male and female are inadequate but still-enjoyable signifiers detached from evident meanings. Gender is consigned to a realm of playfulness in which such categories are upended, only to be employed – a queer world that is almost unimaginable because it exceeds the oppositions at the heart of thought.

The Death of Nature 

According to Desmond (1997), Heidegger made only one statement on the Holocaust, in 1949, and it speaks to the very meanings referenced by our butter ad: “Agriculture is now a mechanized food industry; in essence it is no different than the production of corpses in the gas chambers and the death camps, the embargoes and food reductions to starving countries, the making of hydrogen bombs.” Jameson (1991) also reminds us, “the underside of culture is blood, torture, death and terror” (p. 5), and the butter ad inevitably refers us to the murder of nature. Contemporary agriculture employs vast amounts of herbicides, pesticides, and river-draining irrigation to produce corn crops. Most corn is used to feed farm animals, and so the corn, like the butter, refers us to the terrible suffering of animals under practices employed on contemporary factory farms. In the ad, corn and butter symbolize both nature and culture in a “Hades of simulation” such as Baudrillard (1988) describes: “Every form of power, every situation speaks of itself by denial, in order to attempt to escape, by simulation of its death, its real agony” (p. 7, 8).

© Sue Coe, 1989, Machine Cow( Barter and Mochon, 1993).

The National Socialist promise of a German people linked with nature and the simple, pastoral life twists to reveal its continuity with an opposite underside: the mechanized murder of stigmatized others. Culture’s evocation of “the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of ripening corn” (Heidegger on Van Gogh, cited in Jameson, 1991, p. 8) twists to reveal its continuity with a mechanized agriculture that enacts the utter end to this yearned-for world of green and growing things. Moreover, contemporary relations of market-driven agricultural production normalize the inequality of food distribution and the deprivation of starving people. The world of man-in-nature twists to reveal its continuity with the murderous antithesis of its cultural imaginary; Heidegger equates contemporary agriculture with the production of hydrogen bombs. In the cornfields, as elsewhere, “the Enlightenment has become its own dark other….” (Horkheimer and Adorno, cited in Briton, p. 66).

Our butter ad concurs with this tragedy, but here it evokes no tears. The death of nature is a stage-managed production that supports a particular relationship between subject and object, body and landscape, the individual (consumer) and the practice of freedom. By keeping alive (in dead/devalued form) the meaning and yearning for meaning of the premodern and modern world within the postmodern, this meaning loses its value, but keeps its life (Barthes, 1973). While the world of man-in-nature hurtles towards its fiery end, we can whole-heartedly indulge in artery-clogging pleasures that allow us to commune with nature, confirm our freedom and valorize our unique individualities. In traditional harvest rites the corn-god had to die to renew the energies of nature. Baudrillard (1988) writes that today “Power can stage its own murder to rediscover a glimmer of existence and legitimacy… In the olden days the king (also the god) had to die – that was his strength. Today he does his miserable utmost to pretend to die, so as to preserve the blessing of power. But even this is gone.”

Approaches

What if there is no real progress from the premodern to the postmodern? What if decisive transformations in knowledge and thought have profoundly failed to occur, and the notion of a progressive transition in worldviews is only another form of thinking that keeps us trapped in oppositions that think in our place? Our butter ad suggests that premodern, modern and postmodern worldviews all persist in woozy tension.[4] Rather than describing an historical progression, we might better identify three separable trajectories of knowledge and inquiry. To these three trajectories we can add a fourth, which has been described as a “postmodernism of resistance” (Lather, 1991). Following Lather’s useful lead, I have prepared a table contrasting these approaches (see Table 1, Approaches) and exploring their implications for understanding particular issues that arise in our present ecological crises.

Table 1: Approaches

When labels characterize approaches as premodern, modern, and postmodern, the additional category of “postmodernism-of-resistance” appears, deus ex machina, to save us from the error in all prior forms of thought. If instead we can characterize these approaches as symbolic, heroic, critical and catalytic, we can see that each trajectory of inquiry has its allure and usefulness as well as its ugly underbelly. Rather than confining ourselves to interminably traversing a mobius strip of seeming oppositions with the aim of progress, we can be informed by an image of the double helix, whose strands coil in an anti-parallel, open-ended arrangement that is continually unzipped, replicated, and terminated.

The double helix contains unique information through which each individual being is distinguished from every other, while also containing sequences that prove our simple kinship with virus, fungus and raccoon. Guided by this image, we can develop a practice of “catalytic inquiry” by employing various approaches for their emancipatory effects. Rather than pursuing the question of whether a particular approach to knowledge allows us to better understand the Truth, we can understand with Lyotard (1978) how “the search for a constituting order that gives meaning to the world, society and discourse” (p. 14) is the West’s peculiar madness, and that “men in all their claims to construct meaning, to speak the Truth, are themselves only a minority in a patchwork where it becomes impossible to establish and validly determine any major order” (p. 15-16). Patchwork, as Johanson (Kelley, 2005) identifies, a very useful metaphor for project design. We can use patient stitches to connect remnant scraps in unexpected statements that are both useful and sustaining. We can ask, “Does this work give voice and presence to the inhuman, allowing it to live beyond the human imagination of its life?”

Lather (1991) proposes the notion of “catalytic validity,” suggesting that inquiry can be evaluated by the extent to which it empowers people by enhancing self-understanding and showing them the possibilities of transformation. Foucault (1970) invites us to imagine “How can man be that life whose web, pulsations, and buried energy constantly exceed the experience he is immediately given of them?” (p. 323). He suggests a cogito that traverses the space between thought and non-thought with constantly renewed interrogations, so that “I think” is embedded in and animating the unthought/ unconscious/materiality/other in which “I am.” Merchant (2004) exhorts us to employ forms of knowledge and discourse that are cooperative rather than explanatory, and to use models drawn from conflict resolution and women’s experience to encourage opening, listening, and making space for all aspects of nature to be heard. Jungian psychology speaks of withdrawing our shadow projections and integrating the other, the inhuman, and the unlived life with our own self-knowledge.

The West has advanced its interests through the separation of nature from culture, and yet an organic, connected and symbolic universe still lives in art, advertising, dreams and nightmares. Religion, consumption, phobias and fundamentalisms bind us back to this world of magic affinities. Indeed, it can be said that the West has advanced its interests against a variety of refused others by way of communities and identities thus constituted. Today it can also be said that the West faces an enormous challenge to its hegemony that emerges from the lure of this “premodern” approach. Foucault (1984) writes that Western culture is notable for the distinctive elements of the growth of individual capacities and the struggle for freedom, only to show how the growth of individual capacities in modern societies is historically connected with “the capillary functioning of power.” Postmodern critiques describe the death of the individual subject and the end of agency. And yet dreams of freedom, individuality, the hero’s journey and the power to transform the world inspire scientific discourse, political allegiance and consumer confidence. These old ideas may even be the most powerful weapons in the arsenal of global capitalism and Western imperialism.

Through an approach that can be characterized as critical postmodernism (albeit elements of this approach can be identified in many premodern and modern works), we explore the question, “What are empowering approaches to generating knowledge?” According to Lather (1991): “Emancipatory knowledge increases awareness of the contradictions distorted or hidden by everyday understandings, and in so doing it directs attention to the possibilities for social transformation inherent in the present configuration of social processes” (p. 52). Jameson (1991) writes that postmodernism may fall upon its parasitic aims; it feeds off its critique of modernism and fails to announce (or give birth to) the new (p. xii). But perhaps it is this very aim of newness that must be fought. If we can eschew the lure of progress and the new, we may come to better understand how archaic, discredited or reactionary forms of thought persist with such tenacity and even seem to become increasingly compelling in contemporary political discourse. We may learn to employ more than one trajectory of inquiry simultaneously. If we can step outside the shaping effort to discredit the past, we may find ways to hear the ancestors’ voices. Lyotard (1990) urges us to the practice of memory outside the paradigm of progress. He writes: “to fight against forgetting means to fight to remember that one forgets as soon a one believes, draws conclusions, and holds for certain. It means to fight against forgetting the precariousness what has been established, of the re-established past; it is a fight for the sickness whose recovery is simulated.”

Benyus (2002) writes, “Quieting human cleverness is the first step, and then listening.” A catalytic approach may involve less thought and more silence. In silence we might begin listening to ancestors, animals and the earth. We might allow paradox, laughter, pleasure, impulse, and story. We might become acquainted with darkness, and integrate those at the margins of “humanity” who have historically been refused the authority of thought. We might sit at the feet of our biological elders, including bacteria, birds, plants and frogs, and memorize their patterns of survival (Benyus). In silence, we might begin to experience the inhuman as a world that we have failed to think, because it exists outside the oppositions that think in our place. In not-knowing nature and the self, we might inhabit world of resonant materialities that are inarticulable, but also ineluctable. And in this encounter, we might begin to find our way home. ۞

Text References

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Baudrillard, J. (1993). The aesthetic illusion. Parkett 37 13-15.

Benyus, J. (2004). “Jane Benyus: biomimicry. Bioneers Action Kit. Collective Heritage Institute. Retrieved online December 14, 2005 at http://www.biomimicry.net.

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Boswell, J. (1980). Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Stockholder, K. I was privileged to study Shakespeare with this teacher, and my analysis of The Merchant of Venice owes much to her public lectures in the 1980’s.

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Images

Barter, J. & A. Mochon (1993).  PORKOPOLIS: Sue Coe's Jungle (exhibition catalogue). Amherst, MA.: Mead Art Museum. Retrieved online November 11, 2005 at http://www.graphicwitness.org/coe/enter.htm

Butter ad photographed by the author on October 6, 2005, Highway 17 near Vancouver, B.C.

Delmar, M. (2000). Symbols of Astrology. New York: Assouline.

Eco, U., Ed. (Wells, V. (2003) Art Under National Socialism, Retrieved November 11, 2005 at http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~vweihs/

Florida Holocaust Museum, Virtual History Wing. Retrieved online November 1, 2005 at http://www.fholocaustmuseum.org

Rawson, P., Ed. (1973) Primitive Erotic Art. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons.

Wells, V. (2003) Art Under National Socialism, Retrieved November 11, 2005 at http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~vweihs/

Whitaker, Lyman. Sculptures of double helix forms retrieved online December 15, 2005