A Very Brief (and Partial) Defense Of Shallowness

We live in a world of appearances. This is not only a matter of habit or choice in culture. Perceptual relations make up a great deal of human life, whatever the beliefs of the society concerning appearance. The Republic of Iran may have felt they were banning the hairstyle dubbed "the mullet" for complex spiritual and cultural reasons, but you can be sure there was something visually unappealing in the extreme about that particular hairstyle to warrant such litigation. However much we may speculate about the most interior, intimate contents about others' brain, however accurate our channelers and mystics may claim to be on the content of the brains, or rather, souls of the deceased, and however people may claim to be so clairvoyant as to know others in some privileged manner - in some exotic concoction of non- verbal and body language reading, or in energy and mind reading - we can never be totally sure about other's mental states.

However, we can be very sure about their state of hygiene, and we can never escape the raiment in which they have chosen to clad themselves: such raiment never stops talking to (or more likely yelling at) us, however verbally silent the wearer. Every mind numbing and repetitive article of cheap sportswear will dwarf the little bit of eyes and ears left of their human frames.

And, increasingly, if the scientists are to be believed, there is so much more of them for us to have to accomodate, both in terms of bodily weight and in terms of population density. The world can be a noisome, overwhelming place when we act as if we don't occupy a world of three dimensions, of volume and mass. Whatever we may think, we are are NOT disembodied brains floating in the ethers. The world is nothing like the Internet, however much we may think we can make the world over in that most recent of images.

And the buildings in which we inhabit seem permanently here. We cannot escape their shadows as we navigate from one interior to the next. The 21st century is littered with reminders of architectural decisions made remotely in the past: these are buildings by planners and architects with the most inhuman and obtuse of theories, and buildings from which we ought to, in many cases, recoil in embarassment and even depression. Our buildings, whether commercial or cannot so easily be escaped unless we opt out of modernity altogether and decide to live as anarcho-primitivists claim we should live.

I mention these remarks at a most crucial moment in human history. The world appears to be ending, at least as we know it, especially if Jim Kunstler's peak oil theory is accurate, and, also given the dire geographical trauma that will follow from warmer temparatures. Oh the earth will most likely go on, of course, but life on it will more likely resemble something out of Cormac McCarthy's THE ROAD than anything that humans have acclimated themselves to for at least over a century.

Since we are living in a kind of end of sorts it would be most prudent to ask ourselves why we have laid waste to the visible surface of our lives, our environment. (It is too intemperate and indelicate to ask why we increasingly dress as we do, or why we try and achieve a monotonous sameness in our gym manufactured bodies)

All of us are taught from the beginning that it is what is inside that counts. We are taught to be suspicious about our world of appearances. This has deep roots in monotheistic faiths and other general doctrines that have circulated for millennia. It is fairly clear that two things will follow from such advice. One consequence is that our surface lives can become increasingly unattractive and ugly since we have deemed such things as appearance as unimportant.

The second consequence is a kind of reverse of the first one. We will pursue our surfaces in a compulsive and manic way as if mania and excess were the revenge of Aphrodite herself upon us for taking too seriously all of this talk about our invisible interiors. We will become absorbed in plastic surgery and modes of existence in which the surface or our lives is an obsessive and above all CONFORMIST project. (In, for example, some narrow and Platonic ideal of thinness).

But one doesn't have to be a Freudian to see that we are insiting on the importance of something precisely because we never fully respected it to begin with. That is, we insist upon most dogmatically that which we don't truly or fully possess. We commit plastic surgery, we value others solely for their visual appearance, and we wear ugly clothes and live and work in ugly buildings because our heart was never in the surface to begin with. We remain unconsciously guilt ridden that we are not paying adequate attention to this all important interior we possess, as if some secret would be revealed there that would tell us finally who and what we are all.

If we were more, rather than less, shallow, by satisfying the claims made upon us of our external world, we would find we have a deepened life.

We often conceive of individual, human life as like an onion. In peel after peel, and layer after layer we feel we are that much more special, important, and intimate. This is a spatial metaphor.

Yet I would argue that we are more temporal, rather than spatial creatures. Our depths, if we want to call it that, can reveal themselves in the fullness of time.

What if the Jungians are correct and Aphrodite is a real entity and she is exacting revenge upon us for not taking her seriously enough, for ignoring Her needs, both in the form of sick and false forms of beauty and in plain ugliness?

Of course one doesn't have to be a Jungian, let alone a Pagan pantheist, to understand that beauty is its own value, with its own place in our lives.

As Oscar Wilde remarked:

"It is only superficial people who do not judge by appearances. The mystery of the world is in the visible, not the invisible".

Art As Perceptual: a case of architecture

Recently I experienced the new APPLE store on Boylston street in Boston, and, as always I was struck by the new fashions and conventions espoused, preached, and in the worst cases, built by our architects. I remember psychologist James Hillman, that great interpreter of Jung, (Hillman who, unlike Campbell and company almost rescues us from Jung's more unsavory and wrongheaded aspects, no small feat) calling contemporary architecture ANOREXIC. That was around twenty years ago and he is now more right than ever.

I always get vertigo when I walk up those stairs in the APPLE store. They are not stairs in the traditional sense since, without handrails of any kind and made almost entirely of transparent and translucent materials, one gets the feeling of not being grounded on any solid surface but floating through air. For me it is quite dizzying. The whole thing seemed designed to induce VERTIGO. Most modern airports are like this as well. Why is our architecture so opposed to solidity? Why does it have a fear of anything denoting traditional notions of boundaries, of privacy and separate rooms? Why this mania for transparent glass and this rejection of all ornamentation? The new ICA on the waterfront is of the same mode: all thin metallic structures where the ceilings and floors and walls all seem to look into one another and dissolve their separation. At times there is a quaintness to it as it resembles an attempt to update THE JETSONS.

The new ICA IS a beautiful building and works for its purposes. But most buildings in a similar mode are anything but beautiful.

But back to my questions: why these new modes and not others? Surely it cannot be a mere ECONOMIC motive as if we cannot afford wood or upholstery and fabric or doors. Perhaps it is the latest mania for "smart" buildings as these seem more ecological. Maybe for buildings to be "green" they must be of this style.

As in my previous post we can look at this as an opportunity to read the world as a text or artwork. Let us look at the meaning.

Like the PC and other computers, what these buildings express is the following: we want our buildings to deny separations between people. We want ultimate transparency, and most of all we want a feelings of lightness and weightlessness, as if we want not to be oppressed by the usual walls and boundaries. Just as the cubicle creates a false sense of egalitarianism and eclipsed the older closed spaces, contemporary architecture has illusions that it can help further democracy along and social justice.

This architecture is like the internet. It is devoted to spiritualistic (rather than spiritual, that is, a dogmatic craving for spirit as opposed to the body) denial of shadows and darkness, a denial of color, and a denial of any separation between male and female. It conceives of a place that has transcended place. It is an architecture that wants to recreate the sense that we aren't in any particular place as if our greatest dream is to disavow and disown our own physical bodies and be instead but weightless spirits who can travel anywhere and are beholden to nobody.

That old stone, brick and mortar and wood reminds us of what we want to leave behind. Too many bad men did unspeakable things in those upholstered, comfortable rooms with closed doors. How much better, so the naive reaction goes, to dismantle the hierarchical hidden world of private separations, and put in its place the realization of a dream of public unity and transparency. In the formulation of Hillman's school of psychology it plays out a division between soul and spirit where we wish to flee the downward darkness of soul (which is associated with limits, the earth, nostalgia for the past, and slowness) for the idealized upwards lightness of spirit (which is associated with speed and the ethers etc.) In this conception the soul is the middle term, the in-between, and has its own unique needs and claims upon us. Soul is in the "vales" and "depths", whereas spirit is in the heights and strives for a frictionless (and boundaryless) unity. I am reminded of the Hancock Tower since it was an early expression of this mode.

It is not a coincidence or accident that in a time when we crave androgyny, when male and female relations seem a burden, when we feel overwhelmed with fear by the earth's response to our various sins that waste its resources, we should seek an expression of the drive to ascend and become lighter and purer and freer from the heaviness and darkness of old modes and styles, with all of their connotations of hierarchies, and secrets, and past debts and inconveniences. We don't BELIEVE in such things anymore. We don't want to be entangled and in the depths and shadows; rather, we wish to come into the light, in some sense ASCEND. (It is no coincidence that there are books, for example, on Gnostic architecture).

Lest I be misunderstood, there IS a beauty to some of these structures, but it is a beauty that just as often reveals an ugliness by the things it excludes: things like slowness, mysterious darkness, and what philosopher Habermas, after Weber, calls the "differentiation of spheres".

Looked at in this way, a lot of these newer buildings suffer from some of the same problems as did International Modernism except, now they are more attractive in their rejection of the monolith of cold, heavy cement and in their accommodation to human scale. In its stead we have a clean, light glass. We are still reacting against the heavy and overstuffed materials 19th century with the thin and austere materials of today. Like the internet it an attempt to escape the temporal and spatial limitations that seem to be burdensome side effects of our embodiment. We used to carry our bodies great distances, always closing and shutting doors, in order to get to that library to research a topic. Now as the contemporary cliche has it, it is but a mouse click away and we perhaps many of us feel like winners as we have defeated space and time. Now some of our scientists even boast of immortality being around the corner.

Architecture is unusual among the arts in that it is seemingly around forever. In the sense that people are forced to look at it, especially as they often have little or no choice than to face buildings as part of work, need, and survival, architects frankly have more responsibility to the less educated and general public than do other artists. In this sense one could argue that architecture has less room to be as experimental and radical as other arts because architects create environments that hold permanent and real consequences in a most utilitarian sense, something quite different from a poem or even electronically transmitted images.

This is an irony because what much of the architecture about which I have been complaining is really guilty of is a kind of Moralism. It is curious that, in its mania to be "smart" and "green" and responsible, current architecture is most irresponsible towards some of our human needs. In saying this I am not, with Prince Charles, saying that all all buildings must have pitched roofs and columns, and right angles. There are even many works of modernism that I admire. But in the main, the architecture of close to the last 75 years has been a kind of failure. It continues to place abstract theories over human needs and even often gets so lost in a theory that it has been blind to fundamentals of human perception and the human need for things like Beauty and, heaven forbid, COMFORT.