the hunger

something written in haste for a class that is barely a class. I'm really not sure if I agree with what I'm saying here, in fact, I think I fundamentally disagree. In a sense, I don't take any of my terms deep enough. But I felt like it was a train of thought I needed to flesh out and have articulated. What do you guys think?

the hunger

An unsatiated hunger plagues the mass of Urban Humanity. This is not another material desire fed by feverish postcapitalist consumerism. It is instead a simple desire to exist, even for material existence. For an absolute referent, a thing that precedes language. Reality.

Because in the urban space, every form is relational. Everything signifies, but the only signified is the void left by inescapable desire. In this environment, language itself—in the broadest definition of language: that which signifies—is the fundamental building block of material reality. This is the logic of capitalism: first, a market for a thing exists. A void exists, a desire, for, say, “real estate” or “fast food,” and then the materials are assembled into an object that fills the shape of that void. And livelihoods are made and wealth continues it’s reverse-entropic flow towards centralized power. The signifier always precedes the signified—everything is born of a desire.

But traditional rationality will claim that language is a set of signifiers that was created in order to describe a reality which preexisted language, and which will continue on long after language is dead. And now that real has abandoned us to our relational, artificial systems. And thus arises a deep desire to attain or reclaim the real that leaves us an unfillable void in the core of the masses.

So how are we to understand this Real, ever more elusive, ever more the object of raw uninteresting Nostalgia? So many theoreticians, Baudriallard, for example, claim that it does not exist. They claim that the very idea is simply another relational construct, whereby we imagine reality to exist because we are so sure of the existence of the unreality which immerses us. I can’t really argue that, except by referencing a set of emotions and carnal knowledge which I have access to, and I assume must be shared but repressed by Urban Humanity at large. I lust strongly, and I rage; I feel emotions which have no space in the temperate concrete space.

I have continually referenced the Urban because I feel that those whose life is lived in closer proximity to the natural sublime are less likely to have this problem. In the natural landscape of this earth we have inherited, we can get a glimpse, or get overwhelmed in the real. In this, perhaps, I indulge my own nostalgia.

There still exists in the American landscape a back-country, swaths of land unencumbered by roads, within the closed boundaries of the Frontier, and yet overlooked by Manifest Destiny. In these lands, it is still possible to exist as a beast. Here, fire is a sound which means a light and warmth—it’s not some new perfume from a Denim company. The skin is permeable and language is material. And yet, in this land of simplicity, almost any city-dweller will become overwhelmed with the feeling of the sublime. They will feel that they have transcended a previous existence. The raw fact of an expanse of natural space reaches into the Sublime, as it has for all the history of human consciousness. This appears to provide the physical real which would ground the metaphysical realm or representation which dominates Urban life. And for that moment, we can taste the presence of a real referent. But that moment is fleeting and foreign to our everyday modes of living. When we leave the country and return to our cement apartments, it is impossible to retain that feeling.

This is why nature poetry is the most quixotic of literary forms. Language is entirely artificial, well suited for cities and social commentary. Natural beauty precedes all literary forms. We have all had the feeling of being stunned and left without words by the natural sublime. Then why is there such a rich tradition of pastoral and nature poetry? because this type of literature does not reference nature as such, but instead references each reader’s highly personal relationship with the natural sublime. Therefore, the relationship of the signifier to the signified is much different when we describe natural beauty than it is in more urban contexts, where readers are more likely to share experiences and emotions. In urban, relational literature the reader seeks to understand the argument and get inside the author’s head, as you may be trying to do at this moment. But in nature poetry, the reader seeks only the contents of her or his own heart and feet. All we can know of Gary Snyder, for example, is that he existed in the back-country world at some point and that he had a personal relationship of that world, which may in some way reference our own (or it may not). The words themselves lose meaning, and their form gains importance; the more simple and lonely among a white page they are, the more effective they are in reminding me of my own relationship to the natural world. Through the medium of my mind, the natural real lends a fragment of its beauty to the purely relational worlds.

And thereby I see that my relationship to the real is one of deep aesthetic appreciation—both of beauty and of raw and real darkness, and by this recognition I can see how all art gains its power by its reference to the real. Instinctually, we value art beyond its potential for social relevance or political commentary. Because art derives more strength—even the most abstract or industrial art—by referencing the artist’s interpretation of our relationship to the real.

As inhabitants of the urban environment, it might make sense to rely on Framed Art to satiate our hunger for the aesthetic real. But in order to live our lives as artists, we must be more in tune to our relationship to the real than is available second-hand through someone else’s interpretations. We must seek natural beauty, stillness and chaos directly upon the living surface of this earth in order that we may develop a closer relationship to it and convey it through abstraction.

Thousands of artists will disagree with me. A relationship to the natural world seems as distant as conceivable from artistic production. Each artist comes to his or her finished product through an arduous process of creation, and that process itself is what creates a relationship of the real between the object of the art and the artist. For the viewer, a piece of art is representational, but for the artist, the art is a material object that he or she has struggled to create. This physical process of creation is another avenue to the real, because it is material.

But it will be objected that artistic creation can occur through language itself, as it is occurring at the moment of this writing. And this is the point at which we must remember that although I have been speaking of language as pure representation, it is also a material in itself. A word is a sound, or a splotch of ink. That it is directly representational, and in some ways the building blocks of representation itself, is secondary to this materiality. And the struggle to assemble these material units is a process of creation entirely unique to the author, which helps me form a relationship to the natural reality of my finished product.

The viewer does not have access to this process that is the origin of the real within the artistic process. For the viewer, the art is successful only to the extent that it references his or her own relationship to the real. As I have chosen to discuss ‘the real,’ it is natural material that precedes language and therefore precedes the market. A genuine experience of art is one that is outside the capitalist system of the commodity. Fundamentally, pure art liberates us from the economic and relational systems which govern our urban existence. This puts an immense political weight on the role of art in our society, because it creates an alternative space in which we can imagine ourselves in a relationship to the real outside of the linguistic and economic system which mediates us and removes us from the natural real in all other realms of urban existence.

But in reality, this is simply an unattainable ideal for art because it has become so thoroughly` integrated into the relational capitalistic marketplace which governs all other commodities. Art has become thoroughly framed, by galleries, hierarchies of talent and fame, and price tags. Because artists are bound to the same modes of existence as everyone else. Art is inescapably a marketable product of capitalism.

In reality, art is only a single element in the hypnosis of urban life. It is part of the same continuum that includes TV and crunk. We can lust after the Pure Art of the real, but art as an object can inevitably only satisfy our most surface, most lustful desires. Silence is inevitable, but hypnosis is not. Silence is the fuel of the chaos inside me, inside the core of the earth. Where they used to think Hell was, there lies silence. But hypnosis, the silent consent to be organized, is not inevitable, it is an urban creation. It is continual pleasure, a repetition of satisfaction, that lulls me and keeps me awake.