Texture in Life and Art Part 2: The Apple Store

In my last column I discussed the texture of John Cheever's art in prose. Now we shall proceed from art to life and deal with texture in architecture.

When we deal with matters in real life aesthetically, we shall deal with them in the same sense that we would when dealing with non-real representations in prose, poetry or images in art.

The first impression of the Apple store is that it might appear to lack texture since the entire point of it is to embody the disembodied, sometimes fanatical spiritualism of the Internet age. Since it lacks all depth and color, since it is all airy and light, and above all transparent, the Apple store has the texture of a society that wants to be finally done with texture.

 In the neoPlatonist view, recently reinvigorated by the late great James Hillman, spirit, body and soul, are the three parts of human life that each have specific and separable needs. Soul is always in the middle and is meant to prevent the extremes of bodily grossness at the bottom and spiritual purity at the top.

I know the Apple store is beloved but it is a textbook case of an environment that lacks soul. I don't mean this in the vernacular sense that the word "soul" is usually used. I don't mean that it cold or ugly, for example. Indeed I will concede that there is a certain beauty to the Apple store. Yet something is missing, and not as an oversight but willfully missing. I mean something technically specific.

Hillman noticed that there is a tendency in cultures at certain times to get overtly spiritual and lose a sense of soul. This usually happens when a society or a culture gets the idea of banishing certain human habits and traits, especially those that are comforting and dense or rich, all such refusal being in the interest of a kind of excess purification.

Is the Apple store an expression similar to the tendency Hillman noted? It sure feels like it. For example, I don't recommend that anybody with vertigo climb the design genius that is that glass staircase. You really do feel weightless, as if walking in midair. Initially, the most dogmatic of Modernists were worried about the sin of ornamentation. The Apple store has not only dispensed with comfort and coziness and the appearance and pretense of design but has also dispensed with any affection or conviviality for our physical selves. Like the computer itself, the store is a dream, a grand dream of a world without tensions, without genders, without limits: ageless and free from all burdens of a physical and human world.

This fact about the Apple store was made most apparent when I watched a celebrity interview with the great R&B supergroup Earth Wind and Fire that was held at Apple. Against such an environment the three musicians stood in great relief. Verdine White, the bass player, wore exotic, custom made embroidered denim trousers. Their whole career has been an expression of color - of soul in the vernacular and musical sense. The band's way of speaking and presence seemed to call out for another kind of architecture entirely: something that would be highly textured, with patterns and color. They looked as if they had the (mis)fortune to play a gig in an airline terminal.

The reason why the Apple store was designed the way it was was that it appeals to the anxieties and desires of the current moment. Ever since the Watergate scandal in the 1970s, there has been for the following forty-plus years a craving for transparency and a paranoid suspicion of privacy. Designs are expressions of beliefs and world views as all styles are. Any design that appears too solid or too colorful, that implies separation or privacy, or that seems too much like an object is a design that is implicitly guilty. We have learned to associate heavy with stodgy and hierarchy. The Apple store feels as it does because a part of us longs to leave Earth and body behind and evolve to something that is thought to be higher. There is no other way to account for the almost parodic fidelity with which it embraces a certain Modernism that one would have thought now to have been less strict in its hold upon us.

One of the dogmas of the current moment is that no behavior should seem unnatural or inauthentic. What could be less pernicious, many feel, than a design that hides nothing. In its way, however commercial the Apple company may be it is an expression of a certain spirituality as strict and austere as any traditional monastic religion. Of course, what people look at on the Internet are representations of all of the confused and diverse human mess of the previous century. The Apple store stand as a reminder that people would rather have none of that challenge in their actual, real life, however.

The first photo shows the starkest contrast between two very different buildings and the two very different worlds that created them. Note the soulful and heavy solidity of the stone in the building across the street, especially the elegance of the front doors with the arched tops. That building was an expression of certain human drives of its time. Then you can look at the Apple store and note its airy lightness and see some of the drives of our time.

Of course there are many ways to look at buildings and my comments are not meant to ignore issues of economy and budget, changing aesthetic taste, and so on. One would have to be very blind indeed to not see some of what I suggest here. For a building, like a piece of prose, or anything humans make, makes meaning and is not only for utility alone.

The Conceptualization of America

“Conception is a secondary process, not indispensable to life. It presupposes perception, which is self-sufficing, as all lower creatures, in whom conscious life goes on by reflex adaptations, show.”

“When we substitute concepts for percepts, we substitute their relations also. But since the relations are of static comparison only, it is impossible to substitute them for the dynamic relations with which the perceptual flux is filled.” (WILLIAM JAMES, RADICAL EMPIRICISM,)

Kant said it best when he exhorted us to "dare to (or have the courage to) use your own reason", in his seminal work, WHAT IS ENLIGHTENMENT. Socrates of course told us to examine our life lest it be found wanting in qualities sufficient to justify even living. Many sages have found ways to encourage us and help us to see in new ways, to beat our own drums and newer rhythms, as in Thoreau, to make it new.

To a developing mind, say, in high school or college, this is heady stuff indeed. But the trouble remains, especially in our current cultural moment, that we take these encouragements and motivations in exactly the wrong way. Because, in a culture dominated by a facile and obscurantist war between science and religion, or between "Athens and Jeruselum", what gets covered over, obscured by TROMPE L'OEIL and ruse, is the nature of experience itself: we easily forget that both science and religion are guilty of the same problems, though perhaps they may be in a sort of funhouse mirror opposition to one another.

In religion the chief problem is the problem of literalism, "the great sin of the age" according to, rightly to my eye, Thomas More. That is, we take a religious text not as poetry designed for reflection and wisdom, but as a series of how-to manuals, often plagued by the basest or most world denying moralISM (as opposed to genuine morality, which is often much simpler and narrower a province than moralism). Moralism gets worked up over what we may or may not do with our sexual organs, or what thoughts we have in the course of a day, or all sorts of arbitrary displays of belittling power.

Genuine morality is as clear as light from the sun and is rather like the instinct healthily minded people feel at unnecessary pain inflicted on the other (say in forcing ourselves upon an other's body without their consent).

Of course to a literalist - and by literalist I don't mean here someone who is unable to read the latent or symbolic content of a religious book , but rather someone who reads religious texts as a kind of message or manual - to claim the great religions as works of poetry as James Carse rightly says they are, is to insult and demean religion because religion is like journalism and nonfiction and poetry is lesser stuff that is made up by fallen humans. But actually secular poetry has all of the truths you could ever want. Emily Dickinson describes how the brain works with an almost scientific accuracy. Wordsworth shows us how children are especially valuable in works like ODE and MICHAEL. And Sylvia Plath makes us feel how men hurt women and its consequences in DADDY.

Religion, when it is no longer read as poetry but instead as a kind of journalist's nonfiction also creates claims and assertions which inevitably alienate somebody else elsewhere: someone with different interests and claims. In this sense all religion runs the risk of exclusivity either implicitly or explicitly, a point made beautifully clear in Stephen Prothero's new GOD IS NOT ONE.

Look at how such claims create real estate disputes and have plagued the Middle East since the establishment of Israeli nationhood. Land is fetishized by both sides with accumulating claims and counterclaims until finally an explosion of rocks thrown, guns and missiles fired, and at the worst, suicidal bombs exploded: this makes the whole war a moot point since it becomes an orgy of self destruction.

The current Pope is so awful a figure, so tied to scripture as literal guidance, that he considers abortions and gays living together as the "greatest dangers" posed to the world today, as if global warming and terrorism (and the pedophilia in his own overweening, overrated and bloated institution) were but side issues when compared to the sanctity of legal contracts and the fetish for fetus. (In Gore Vidal's formulation).

This is the world when it becomes a great how-to manual; this is self help as totalitarian self abasement.

Now having said all of this you might suppose that I have some progressivist notions about the superiority of science.

Yet the other side, the secular, is little better. Ironically this is the side that purports to save us from the ills of the religions, chiefly by telling us what really exists and what has been proven as opposed to that which is imaginary. But science has been thoroughly intertwined with SCIENTISM, defined as the inappropriate application to a narrow scientific method to all understanding in all the different domains of knowledge, and the view that science reveals but one truth. We are bombarded by a plethora of nonfiction - indeed unimaginative and literalist non fiction must be the greatest disease of published writing in prose today - all of it desperate to explain once and for all why we mate, why we like music, how playing music is but an elaborate means to get laid, how and why we should be happy, the science of morality and the science of religion. It is surely enough to tempt the most rational soul to consider creationist doctrine just for the sheer drama and meaning it contains when up against the lifeless and relentlessly materialist reductionism of today's science. In essence questions of even philosophy are to be replaced by cognitive neuroscience.

Questions of deep value become beside the point: they get read as but quaint relics from a time when Gilbert Ryle's "ghost in the machine" was the dominant view. Perhaps we secualr Moderns are no longer haunted by the ghost but are stuck with the machine.

We are told so often and so relentlessly who we are, why we are here, what we are meant to do, what we are not meant to do, (this last comes in many radical ecological tracts that condemn civilization and urge us to go back to some ancient way allegedly more harmonious with our early days as a species). We speak the language of "appropriate" and "inappropriate" which is no improvement over the language of the old merciless preacher of the Puritans. Amazingly it is both less severe and more severe. To speak in terms of (in)appropriate appeals to notions of correctness, as if morality were a mathematical calculation, or worse some sort of majoritarian fashion rather than what morality had always been all alone: a deep claim upon our soul.

This is the world of pundits like Tom Friedman and Malcolm Gladwell, of books like THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON MUSIC and THE WISDOM OF CROWDS. It is a world of the New Atheism as if the old atheism were somehow insufficiently tough minded and incomplete. This is the world where daily we are told factoids about what foods cause cancer and how high the risk is to be married or unmarried, and happiness is thought to be as measurable like room temperature.

And if one raises any skepticism about this state of our public discourse one gets charged with nihilism on the one hand, or excessive credulity on the other.

Thus I find myself profoundly dissatisfied by both sides in the debate which share in what I call the general "conceptualization" of America. Drawing on William James' use of the terms percepts and concepts from his RADICAL EMPIRICISM, I would claim that, for about forty years or so, we have been dominated by concepts at the expense of percepts.

What gets lost in the process is this precious matter called EXPERIENCE. When religion colonizes experience, it literalizes it: that voice that I heard must be Jesus or Allah, every feeling I have I must first ask, does it come from God or the Devil?, is it good for me or bad? We don't regard experience as intrinsically valuable. We want to define it and know what it is. It is as if we feel there is something unseemly and undisciplined about savoring our lives. James Hillman put it best when he said that some Christians don't trust their own images and stories for the richness but want to know where it comes from and if it is any good for them. This is what leads certain religious groups to want to ban productions and readings of MACBETH in their communities.

A good poet needs to be as open as possible. They cherish their visitations. That is not to say they will not censor or edit, hopefully they will do just that, quite ruthlessly. But those omissions will be in the interest of formal excellence and yet ever more truth, not in the interest of fear.

Meanwhile our neuroscience crowd will tell us that experiences don't really exist: its all part of a "self regulating system", there is no I at home, just the random processing of neural networks. To make matters worse they will try and induct Buddhism as an ally, though the understanding of Buddhism is superficial.

How can we retain our sense of being more than machine, the ancient dignity of our human experience without getting caught in wedding our dignity to the specificity of our tribal blood pride, and our particular traditions?

One way is to let go of conception for brief periods and to dwell in perception. By this I DO not mean living like non human animals without any thoughts, dwelling only in reflex. Rather it is a way of being with our thoughts by working with them rather than being stuck IN them. Above all it is a way of being in our bodies and our senses and paying attention - to "being here now" as Ram Dass said it.

Sometimes religion at its best can do this, usually in so called "mystical" traditions. Art is all about this question of perception (I often get into arguments with conceptual artists when I tell them that their own work is not really valuable for the reasons they set out to do it: that is, to demonstrate or prove a point; when I tell them that the real value in their work resides in its perceptual qualities even when such merely appears to BEG for a propositional or symbolic understanding). Concepts have a fixed nature to them; they do interrupt the raw flow of experience, they do violence to the reality of temporality. Of course concepts are absolutely necessary in the function of life and culture. But, alas, concepts have overtaken other modes.

Interestingly I believe the first guilty party in the conceptualization phase was the human potential movement and newer psychologies of the 1970s: it was in this movement that we began to label with new jargon the most intimate details of life. New vogue words and phrases came into our language, and, eventually, our experience: vogue words like dysfuntional, codependency, inner child and so on. This way of looking at reality as the expression of a system or concept caused a sea change in human consciousness. People over time, with the help of mass media, began viewing their lives in these frames so that they began less and less to experience their individual lives in a spirit or ethic of SPECIALNESS. In America, a county predicated on unique individuality, this was quite a feat indeed, though something of our older small town conformity surely played a role.

I don't deny, a la social constructionist or a Michel Foucault, that there is truth to be gleamed from these concepts, only that they distort as much as they enlighten, and above all that consciousness has changed in radically different ways because of the rise of the concept.

Thus, in conclusion, we should examine our lives and dare to use our own reasons, but we should remember that the fact that we are able to dwell in experience is the most marvelous fact about us, and we may never be able to define it without doing some disservice to an essential feature of our humanity. If we do not examine our lives, someone else will be all too happy to do it for us for a fee.

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.