Post-Neo-Classical Aesthetics:
A Speculation on the European Importation of the Ancient Greek Aesthetics into Modernity, and Its Relevance Today
“Sorry, What?”
Yeah, I know. I know what your thinking. “Just, what are you even saying?” Yes, I am saying Post-Neo-Classical aesthetics, and I am here to try to provide a speculation which seeks to at least get a working meaning for something that may not even be a thing, in the very strict sense of a determinate entity at hand. After all, many studies in aesthetics are plagued by the ambiguities over the determining factors of the art object and what we call the aesthetic experience — in all humility, the case I am trying to pose is more so a playful gesture and observation on a trend in aesthetics today, and note some of its vague relationships to both ancient Greece and its various European appropriations of it. Particularly, that in an aesthetic era such as that following the Internet, which is characterized by nostalgia and remixes as art’s predominant productive repetitions.
In other words, we can meaningfully say in a variety of ways that there are differences between the aesthetic spirit of ancient Greece and what not, and the same about European modernity and its appropriations of Greek aesthetics, in just the same way that we can talk about the Internet’s dispersion of this loose thread that is distilled in instances such as this:
In Macintosh Plus’ artwork and alternative artwork for Floral Shoppe (2011), for example, I cannot help but just notice the slow distillation of ancient Greek aesthetics all the way into the digital age. But it is important that as vaporwave, Macintosh Plus reminds us of its relation to nostalgia and the remixing of the culture industry. The repetitive forms of production inherent in capitalism — especially in the times of an immaterial form of production characteristic of its neoliberalist double downing on these practices — nevertheless pertain the uncanny production of reality. We see this every time that Full House comes back, or whenever Star Wars is revived, we see the same again building off of itself. And Star Wars is a great example of this in-between space between neo-classicism and post-neo-classicism — as Lindsey Ellis on YouTube has quite nicely explored in part the question Star Wars relationship to German aesthetics through diluted signs from the Third Reich, we may say that in turn this has been influenced by German revivals of the Spirit.
In a sense, this is what shows the more problematic aspects of how these aesthetics have figured their way into philosophy, such as in the case of Martin Heidegger (a known 20th century philosopher and notable Nazi supporter). Heidegger’s broader project tries to revive the Spirit of his time from alienating modernity by retrieving what he calls The Foundational Question of Being rather than merely get caught up with every one thing merely at hand — that is too regional and partial a view, not foundational enough. By that, Heidegger means that we have lost the original meaning of the word “being” in translation, and he attempts to recover it from pre-Socratic times and in conversation with Socratic figures as well as the current contemporary situations around Heidegger’s time. In short, we can at least say that Heidegger is a big nostalgic nerd for Greek stuff, that he decided to revive it for another season, because it would add some more life to this whole alienation thing.
And this is relevant to the extent that we see a thread of revivalist attempts at granting authenticity to their own times by the attempt at retrieving something original — Germany revivals of ancient Greece in art, philosophy, and politics, all of which attempt to secure the present and the future by way of the past. (see note 1)
Of course, these revivals of ancient Greece comes by way of idiosyncratic fantasies over the classical period and its central figures — for instance, in Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, we see yet another German retrieval of the classical origin in theatre and poetic; however, it is worth noting that in characterizations of classical period are split between Apollonian-posturing and Dionysian-playful attitudes interplaying each other as part of the superficial masquerade over “What is Ancient Greece?” as opposed to the superimposition of the Socratic idea of Greece. Though, for Nietzsche, this masquerades of attitudes pertains a mutual support of the spirit and character of culture, we may find instances where the reappropriation of the classical period turns towards a single notion of the culture.
We consider, for example, in the case of Sargon of Akkad on YouTube whom, like most of the internet reactionary realm, stresses that civilization is degrading itself, so much like our German philosophers, we need a little revival of origin to restore culture. Of course, the differences between Sargon of Akkad (Carl Benjamin) and figures like Nietzsche and Heidegger are plenty — for instance, the latter ones actually develop their formulations of the problem with a considerable amount of rigor through etymology and philology; but also, we also consider that when Sargon of Akkad wants to revive the Culture, the image of Greece he has super imposes itself over the ancient Greece with much awkwardness and without justificatory philological warrant.
For instance, that when Sargon of Akkad envisions ancient Greece, he pictures it as a white, straight ethno-state — though, of course, ancient Greece was hardly a homogeneous culture, it held divergent political organizational systems, and it was not very straight. Nevertheless, it is this super imposition that characterizes some of the idiosyncrasies at hand in the conception of ancient Greece and the classical period today. In this sense, we may think of ancient Greece as nothing a void for the projective fantasies that constitute and corroborate contemporary desires — in essence, ancient Greece, in these two examples of neo-classicism and post-neo-classicism, is nothing but what we want to be at the time.
But we may linger on this “nothing but” — especially when we may take under consideration the repetitive compulsion of nostalgia and revival at heart here — for if ancient Greece is nothing, ultimately the repetitions in nostalgia and revival struggle with appeasing this nothing. In other words, if we may take on the common issue in Heidegger and Nietzsche, the return to origin is to restore the question of meaning and engaging with things in meaningful terms — thus, what is centrally at stake is meaning, and this “nothing but” highlights a gap and lack becoming apparent in the question of meaning. For instance, let’s suppose that may take notion of cultural decadence à la Sargon of Akkad seriously: his response to such a decadence and degradation of culture as a structure of meaning is to double down on an eroding meaning by returning to (at best an idea of) its origin.
In other words, the seeming response to securing meaning is by supporting the structure that maintains it as meaningful; however, this is not enough if the structuring meaning itself is structured around a gap it hovers over. Even if Sargon of Akkad is trying to grant again the foundation of meaning, that structural foundation itself is void — for the moment he tries to envision ancient Greece, he has always already missed it as if there were no ancient Greece but fantasies of it. One cannot just close the gap at the core of meaning, at best one can only patch it with the quick fix of fantasy as if it were a band aid.
We may consider that there are ways to partake on this post-neo-classical aesthetic project without looking totalize meaning or to render it secure — in this regard, the heretical post-neo-classicism of ContraPoints on Youtube is worth noting as an alternative, for, between the German vision and the Greek origin, her deployment of the aesthetic masquerade is irreverent to the original and its simulacra. We may turn our attention to one instance in her video on the question of aesthetics, where the image of Socrates is casted on an old-school television just as one channel amongst others to alternate from:
We note that this is not the only occasion where ContraPoints uses the superficiality of classical and neo-classical aesthetics — to this extent, we see in lo-fi T.V.’s Socrates a coincidence between neo-classical and millennial nostalgia and revival. As in her video on incels, she turns to practice of phrenology and its relevance to the notion of the involuntarily celibate in the internet — “you are not fuckable or desirable because your jaw is not definite enough” captivates the essence of incel phrenology, this essentialism or crystallization of a perceived problem into an immutable blockade for anyone’s way into getting laid. In her video, ContraPoints introduces the phrenological discourse of incels to the 19th century tune of Felix Mendelssohn’s String Quartet №6 in F minor III. Adagio — the video begins be her reading of r/Braincels forum post about an incel dreaming of finally touching a woman, concluding that “you will never get to experience this because your skeleton is too small or the bones in your face and not the proper shape, have a nice day” (Incels, 01:15–01:22)
Phrenology, which was conceived of in the late 1700s, was an approach to understanding the mind through the brain by measuring the skull as if it were a direct determinant of psychic life in casual chain — in many forms of early 20th century regimes, phrenology has been used to naturalized perceived notions of hierarchy and superiority, such as its deployment in Rwanda to determine the status of Tutsis and Hutus or those to justify other forms of racialization or gender discrimination or eugenics. Where phrenology and neoclassicism coincide is in that their attempts at retrieving the notion of ideal bodies and the embodiment of culture seek a similar principle.
We consider, for instance, The Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics by G.W.F. Hegel, he notes the stress on the body and the corporael that dominated much of Hellenistic art, as in the case of statues and pieces of architecture — for Hegel, the spirit at the back of culture manifests differently over various periods of art, moving from abstract expressions of the spirit to more concrete and embodied ones; and in the case of ancient Greece, at least to an audience influenced by Hegel and the aesthetics of his time, was understood through notions of beautiful corporeality. Interestingly enough, in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel also takes on the question of phrenology as a reductionist approach to mind and the spirit that is eliminative of dogmatic metaphysics — in a teasing gesture, Hegel plays to the absurdity of this by making playful speculative statement that “the Spirit is a bone” meaning that the highest function of culture, morality, and religion nevertheless coincides with its lower strata. Though Hegel’s commentary overcomes this supposed restriction over the spirit by stressing that “Spirit is” just in the same way as the bone is — we can say this playfully in the Christian refrain that God became the Flesh in Christ. But this is already getting ahead of ourselves, as to this extent, between Hegel’s discussions of neo-classical, classical art and phrenology, we may note some underlying principles to notions of compositions whether it is of psychic life qua the skull-brain or that of art and architecture.
And lastly, I want to note here my own irreverent post-neo-classicism as it showed to myself by having a framed picture of Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Diogenes — a 1860 oil on canvas, which in Gérôme’s time operated under an aesthetic academism seeking to revive European culture. In specific, academic art is the art and artists influenced by the standards of the French Académie des Beaux-Arts, which was practiced under taking on from the movements of Neoclassicism and Romanticism — right around the time we see various discussions of the Spirit, for instance, in German philo-fictions such as Hegel’s or Heidegger’s which taken on from both of these aesthetic and institutional influences in some respect or another.
It is here that I may rest this work of speculation by noting that having this picture is what centrally prompted me to write the work at hand. What I first started as a joke then began to realize that there was something to it — I messaged someone “post-neo-classicism” in wholehearted humour, but the more I considered it, especially after surveying some of the loose ties to this stretch of reason in the distillation of classical culture, I wish to conclude that post-neo-classical aesthetics are not committed to classical culture or neo-classical culture as such. Post-neo-classical aesthetics come at time of remix as the rebranding of nostalgia and revival, at a time where the gap of meaning seeks a quick fix through every one commodity that acts as a brief diversion from abysmal meaninglessness — though in the classical period, the question of meaning was overt and without contrivances, the neo-classical pursues the revitalization of meaninging in the face of its seeming erosion in decadence — this began the theme of the contrivances of the retrieval of origin and original meaning.
The post-neo-classical continues this distillation of inherited meaning, but in such a way that it starts acting heretical or irreverent to meaning and its structural security — the post-neo-classical realizes the abysmal distance from any origin and original meaning securing the integrity of the meaningful as such, such that the irreverent is key to some of the playfulness and aesthetic transformation of a lineage that remains only to be played on. The determinations that seeked to fix and stabilize meaning in the classical and neo-classical now are being diluted into indeterminations by which no one aesthetic entity can contain the excess to the classical origin and its revivals — the extraction and transplantation of their iconographies is explicitly in spite of them and their pretentions over any definite aspects of what they are, as the indifferent and indeterminate nature of the post-neo-classical breaks with grounding the culture and its meaning as determinate or definitive. The suspense of determinations and definitions is what allows the heretical and irreverent nature of these playful remixes to shine through by crafting a meaning and creativity irrespective originality — something possible in the times of information saturation and the excesses of content such as those of the internet.
I leave you with Fernando Botero’s Untitled which only matches the time period of neo-classicism and academism (not even the region of concern), but it is no other way relevant:
Notes
Note 1. We may note that the history of science in Germany may be at odds with this revivalism of the Spirit that cumbered upon other aspects of these issues — in this regard, Heidegger’s greatest foil philosophically would be the Austrian logical positivist Rudolf Carnap; even more curious to note the difference in their notions of politics, as Heidegger’s conservatism manifested in his revival of the original event, and Carnap thought that meaningless compared to an approach heedful to science’s resistance to this revival of the old, as a Ptolemaic counter-revolution. We may add that these issues are still with us in a broader philosophical context in the given tensions between the theological turn of phenomenology towards radical difference and the abolition of faith through the indifferent sought in speculative realisms such as those of Quentin Meillassoux and Ray Brassier.
Images and References
Images
Figure 1. By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use,
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=56767115
Figure 2. By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Macintosh_Plus_-_Floral_Shoppe_album_cover.jpg
Figure 3. Self-Provided
Figure 4. From ContraPoints’ The Aesthetic on Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1afqR5QkDM
Figure 5. Fron ContraPoints’ Incels on Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fD2briZ6fB0
Figure 6.
Self-Provided.
Figure 7.
