Realism, modernism, postmodernism and crealism - 4

 

by Momir Nikic

 

The environment of realism is neo-polis, industrial city (“of coal and steel”) and administrative conglomerate. Man has fallen from “divine state” (civitas dei) to the “earthly” one (civitas terrestris). The city is the factor of accumulation (of po­pulation, production, capital, power…) with infernal attributes (cloacae of merciless exploitation, crimes and misery). It is a metaphor for the center, cradle of mechanization, national integration, transports (railways, steamships…), a place full of life, success and unhappiness, incubator of political maturation and conf­rontation… Industrialization “transforms the man from farmer-shepherd to ma­nipulator of machines run by lifeless energy” (Hobsbawm); nation-state destroys burg (“city-state”) and transforms people into nation; urbanization substitutes ordinary man to bourgeois. This is also the end of previous institutions (medieval family, clan, social and manufactural castes…) and affirmation of new values, manifested in unprecedented individualism, secularization, sever competition, division of labor and specialization…

Though still maintaining that everybody is, by historical conditions, traveler (“live baggage”) in the train which, by the iron logic of development, rushes into the future… realist lacks the feeling of transition. He uses gloomy colors in painting the big fall in the hell of dehumanization, social underworld, suburbs, sa­na­toriums, jails, workers “caves”, markets and city periphery, scaffolds of civiliza­tion… Mechanization seals everything (men are mechanized in head and in heart as much as in hand – T. Carlyle). Time and space are functions of mechanical (not natural) processes, social (not individual) perceptions, they are changed and shortened but remain separate and objective (external) quantifications.

Modernism is affirmed in metropolis, the heart of monopoles and financial ca­pi­tal, the center of modernization, trade, banking, automated production… No more urbs aeterna but waste land (T. S. Eliot), kingdom of madness (Trakl), apocalypse and chthonic atmosphere, this center has traits of cosmopolis and magically attracts people of different cultures, languages, races, knowledge (it is natural to be a “stranger” or immigrant, as much as being “at home”). In metropolis exist both: the center (permanently dehumanized, with extremely developed bureau­cracy) and the periphery (people from colonies, unemployed, lumpen-proletariat, “bulvarnaya in­teligentia”…). Dominant technologies are: electricity, oil and its derivates, auto­mo­biles and air transportation, wire commu­nications (telephone, telegraph…), mechanized printing press (linotype), film… Modernist movements are internati­onal, developed in crossings of different influences (Paris, London, Chicago, New York, Zurich, Berlin, St. Petersburg…).

For a realist the city was a “raw material”. For modernist it is way of life. Accele­ration, transitivity, transformation of duration into tempo, haste, panic…all these are features of metropolis as well as modernist art. Time and space are interior­zed, becoming continuum (quantum physics), shortened or lengthened according to subjective perceptions. Insecurity, anxiety, instantism… syncope, permanent in­no­vations, experimentation, monographism, introspe­ction… are widespread ten­den­cies. Subjectivization enfolds the “real” image of the city (“the place as it is”) in fog of i-reality (urban life is essentially un-real and sur-real). The city concen­trates all frustrations caused or strengthened by destructions and confrontations, bankruptcy of scientific and social utopias (progress, reason, revo­lution, commu­nism…), devastations of totalitarian projects (fascism, Stalinism…), moral deba­cles of alternative solutions (“welfare state”), construction of new etatistic laby­rinth in which we are prey for the bureaucratic monster… Metropolitan man is neither pilgrim nor missionary of Romanticisms, nor inspector of neo-polis, but migrant, transmigrating person (generally from the world of periphery to “can­cerous centers”), motivated by economic, cultural or political needs. Swinging between two “sides”, countries, social environment… he deeply experiences the crisis of identity and time. But, being modern is inevitability and primary demand, inte­llectual herald (Rimbaud: Il faut être absolument moderne). Modernism is en­throned as “the only art appropriate to the modern man” (G. Stein).

Postmodernist environment is skeno-polis, stage on which everything is sceno­gra­phy, acting, spectacle and spectatorship…It is “fabricated”, simulated commu­nity (pseudo-polis). There is no centre, what remains is only periphery (subaltern, feminism, homosexuality…), marginal, suburbia, sub-cultural. The world is sha­ped by technologies of simulation, manipulation and persuasion (TV, radio, ad­vertising, commercials…). This is a ne­cro-polis where everything dies: man, rea­lity, change, work, production, society, sense, arts…

Skenopolis is the empire of the culture of death (Baudrillard) with its necropolises of civilization (archi­ves, museums, galleries…). Their “canonized” pseudo-philoso­phers sing requiem for humanity and perform massive rituals of exorcism, specu­lating that life is a crooked mirror (speculum) in which everything is distorted, mi­rage, the phan­tom in the cave (specus) of shadows. Artists are illu­sionists practicing theurgy, communicating with ghosts in spiritualistic ambiance where all measures and values, plans and standards… are mixed up… In this “city of illusions” all previ­ous relations and values are substituted by production of mirages and values of signs. The postmodern man is only “a grain of masse” and could move (volvo) only as a cell in the mob (volvox). That is not a real movement but vital akinesis, imaginary nomadism, the illusion of crawling without empirical travel (the term tourism is not in favorable), romancing without the aim, going nowhere. Actually this simulation of movement in pseudo-polis is conditional reflex of lost vitality, proof of conviction that everything is mental spinning (cyclism), renovation of myth of eternal return…Le néant (nothingness) is not perceived as the pulse of the world (as in modernist irony) but as the essence of hyper-reality and a pulse of the mind.

The world of crealism is auto-polis, which is community of free human beings, koine and neuropolis. In the age of global communication networks and noetic technologies (computers, Internet, mobile and satellite links, nuclear break­throu­ghs, genetics, nano-world…) the citizen of human city has need and freedom to live both in closer and larger communities (within nets of different levels and qualities of integration, starting from his local commune to the world Community). That man, for the first time ever, is entitled to have a choice, to be in the world even in most isolated places, to act simultaneously in his “little” culture and uni­versal human Culture. He is always in the center of his creative and created world. This is no longer neo-polis, monstrous mega-polis, nor pomo ske­no­polis, but invisible city where all sorts of experiences are to be met, combined and tasted, a junction of material and ideal existences, of real and virtual. Hu­ma­nism and creation should rely on all human potentials (holism). The crealist does not believe in pomo “nomadism” (aimless “wandering”) but in creative mona­dism and noema­dism, inquisitive adventure of cultural in-dividual (permanently mo­ving, end­le­ssly seeking and creating). Being in the world he knows very well his personal, individual res­pon­sibility and ability to create, maintain and develop his freedom and world.

Combining his and others (predecessors’ and contemporaries’) capacities and pro­ducts, he is aware that by creating “for others” he creates for himself (he is ne­ver the same before, during and after creation). His thirst for novelties force him to permanently research, hunt, chase, cruise in time (trough history) and space (vi­siting different cultures). His travels are physical, material (globe-tro­tter) or vir­tual (net-trotter). Always “on the road” he does not lose the starting point (in­herited values) and the target of his endeavor (newly created values). His life is an endless search. Knowing that human existence does not have meaning a priory, he broadens old and creates new horizons of meanings. His credo is not demiourgy (of realism), nor techneurgy (of modernism), nor semiourgy (of post­modernism) but fitourgy (constant and all pervasive creation).