Including commentary on and images from Alone (All Flesh Shall See It Together), a digital work by R. Bruce Elder and Ajla Odobašić

Learning From My Women Students

This is the third of three linked essays whose purpose is to triangulate ideas from Plotinus’s aesthetic built on a feeling of love for higher reality (and the analogy between aesthetic experience and henosis, the unification of One that is beyond being), the cosmology in which Alfred North Whitehead unfolded the metaphysical implications of the science of electromagnetism, and feminist art and the experience of parler femme. In the previous installment I outlined how it came to pass that the courses I was most strongly identified with for the last three decades of my teaching in an art school were courses in which women students almost exclusively enrolled, and in which the participants in class mounted nude performances, usually improvisatory group performances that were deeply influenced by contact improvisation. There I suggested, in sum, that the experience led them to archaic forms of experience of the sort that the psychoanalyst and theorist of language Luce Irigaray described in her writings on phallogocentrism. (1)

Phallogocentrism inhibits the development and circulation of a distinctive women’s voice by positioning women as support for men’s projects, available to be governed and regulated by men, and submissive to men’s authority. Phallogocentrism is based on a form of ego psychology that proposes a unified self, a (fictional/identificatory) self that comes into being by becoming free of the other / others. Phallogocentrism strives for a fixed and pre-determined being. A woman’s role in this is to serve as a sort of mirror that supports men’s projects, thus helping to foster male identity and to give shape to men’s drive for mastery. In the absence of men, a different provisional self, a self that is always in process, could emerge out of the relationships among women. The self-in-relation was paramount. These all-women collective nude performances bolstered a different sense of the self than as support for male autonomy. They understood in their flesh that the members of the collective were actively engaged with one another and that what they created collaboratively allowed each and all to achieve a provisional self-realization through their relationships to one another. These performances arose out of the experiences of the women themselves; the absence of men reduced the regulatory effect of the masculine languages of art and the pressures women feel to serve as alter egos for men—for men’s ways of speaking, thinking, and making. These all-women performances intensified the experiences the women had of one another and engendered what could properly be called an erotic connection among them; a feminine jouissance fostered a distinctive, relational feminine subjectivity. That these were all-women performances freed the women’s subjectivity from the imperative to be the internalized mirror of the male, the (supposed) female ἀρχή (arkhé, origin or source of action) for the male, from whom men seek approval and, in seeking their approval, convert women into props for male autonomy and male mastery: the transition from infancy to adulthood for men is from first receiving physical shelter to later receiving psychological shelter from women. One result of this male-centred anaclitic process is a truncation woman’s being, as women become defined as being a support for another. By forging a society of women and by intensifying and eroticizing their relationships, these performances helped the participants to recognize, through movement and touch, that neither personal nor sexual identity is a matter of fixed and pre-determined being, of underlying essences or common properties; rather they are forms of becoming—of provisional self-generation. Gesture, touch, flesh, and being-on-the-way are hallmarks of women’s writing and, it seems, more generally, of women’s making.

If phallogocentrism concerns the complicity of language with law (a complicity made possible by the gap between Symbolic and the Imaginary orders), these performances, by re-connecting actions to drives and to the pre-Symbolic order, helped forge a distinct form of thinking and working, and a different kind of society than that based in the Symbolic. The male identification with a (fictional) unified self is only made possible by the sacrifice (through repression) of a primary connection; patriarchal society encourages the female become a mirror of this sacrifice. It could go without saying that in late modernity the sacrifice of memory, connection, and tradition has reached an unprecedented brutality—this will lead either to the complete collapse of civilization foreshadowed by the horrendous intercivilizational brutality we are witnessing or to a renewal of the sort Kenneth Rexroth called for and I have been reflecting on in this essay: the revolution—for it truly is that—world-wide renewal that arises from an archaic feminine.

We are at the cusp of a revolutionary spiritual renewal or catastrophe. The women in these classes were exhilarated at becoming a part of an antithetical subjectivity (antithetical in the sense that it did not revile women’s bodies, as patriarchy does)—an antithetical subjectivity that asserts itself not against the body or at the expense of the body (that is, a subjectivity that might have evolved at the cost of renouncing the body’s embeddedness in archaic feeling or its memories of coming-to-be), but through the body and its fluxing energies. More exactly, they experienced the joy and terror of a metaphysical abyss, of a freedom whose ends must be devised without help—because they eschewed pre-formed, conventional/societal/masculinist images of women’s being and women’s pleasure and were required, by the originality of what they were doing, to do without concepts handed down from precursors. They accepted the creative risk of becoming, of experiencing oneself as relational, as a self-in-process simultaneously emerging from and merging into a community mutually involved in self-creation.

The participants in these class projects stated with no little enthusiasm that they found the work liberating: they experienced an intense form of sharing and collaboration. They were struck with the process-orientation of the collaboration: as far as the actual performance was concerned, they got together and created in real time a novel and unrepeatable event. For them, the spiritual benefit experienced in the time-limited process of collaborative co-creation surpassed the aesthetic value produced by traditional means of artmaking that, ironically, explicitly strove to evoke a sense of timelessness—I characterize as ironic because the spiritual value experienced in the real-time process of collaborative co-creation provided unsought something akin to intimations of the timeless transcendent that traditional artistic means consciously sought but so often failed to achieve. Over the many years this course was offered, students continued to voice enthusiastically the feeling that nude collective performance granted revelations about the self that emerged in the process of showing/giving oneself to another/others and about being together. They came to feel viscerally that body-selves rely on being looked at by others to realize themselves and to flourish, and they felt viscerally, in their naked state, how each body craved the regard of the other and remade itself to solicit that attention. They also came to feel strongly that others’ desires mirrored their own. In other words, they came to feel, in their flesh, that each belonged to all others.

Diaries these student performers kept reveal that these spontaneously improvised performances allowed them to experience a new society, a community of love, emerging through connection, and to experience their provisional self-generation as occurring in relation to this process. Engaging in a form of spontaneous co-creation that bypassed immediate rationalization, they were bringing forth, pro tempore, a feminine language of kinaesthetic sensation, of movement and touch, of gesture and rhythm and repetition (a form of parler femme) that, as Luce Irigaray pointed out, is not only a threat to patriarchal culture but also a medium through which women may be creative in new ways. They were discovering a form of expression that would bring into existence alternative forms of relationship, perception, and expression and new forms of exchange through which each would intensify all others. They were generating a mixture of discourses that produced a novel intercorporeal subjectivity—they were experimenting in creating a novel micro-politics of community and a parler femme that functioned as a counter-molecular line of flight. The dynamic and improvisatory nature of their collaboration generated forms that, unlike those of men’s art, were not teleologically or narratively focalized. Instead, they were repetitive, cyclical, adventurous, meandering, unpredictable, always underway, and always without a destination. Among the revolutionary features these performances shared with other examples of radical women’s art was the effacement of the traditional divide between theory and practice. However, the thoughts—the “discourses”—the performances generated were not phallogocentrically aimed at outcomes. To the contrary, the thoughts they generated moved through and over the entire body as they sought expression—expression pro tempore.

Applying what I learned to my own work

As I noted in the previous installment, photographing a nude (of whatever gender) provides an opportunity to “do gender.” When I began making films, I recognized that heretofore my female co-workers weren’t being given the same opportunity to do gender and make culture, to create pictures that reflect or express who they were, to use the nude images (of whatever gender) as a means of personal self-expression: indeed, I brought this conviction with me to filmmaking. Furthermore, in the culture at large, women had few to no opportunities to view pictures of nude males other than musclebound hulks, images altogether lacking in tenderness. More to the point, women were rarely actual producers of images of nudes: when it came to images of nudes, the artworld preferred they not be makers but models. The artworld’s reduction of female experience, my co-workers and I felt, was an inequity that should be combatted.

As I outline below, the subject of the gaze (le regard) is not a passive subject—and this is acutely true being a cinematographer’s model. That role involves soliciting attention, receiving it with gratitude, and responding to it with an active understanding that one tries to convey to the other. Yet there are almost no precedents for female cinematographers/filmmakers to experience such behaviours from nude male models (in fact, I can think of none): to be dependent on the regard of another is believed to be incompatible with being a real man. What is more, as far as I know, there are no precedents or parallels for a female cinematographer and a nude male model understanding the process of making nude images together as a collaboration. But that was exactly how my female co-workers and I have understood the work we did together—it has been a collaboration that, so far as I know, is without precedent or parallel, certainly in extent, and I hope in the depth of its implications for new forms in cinéma féminin.

In what follows I outline my experiences as a nude model for my female co-workers and a kind of co-presence, that is to say, a novel intercorporeal subjectivity that came about as a result of giving myself to a process that would allow archaic feelings and memories of coming-to-be to emerge entre-nous; this occurred by encouraging the body’s fluxing energies to re-connect its actions to drives and to the pre-Symbolic order, thus forging a distinct form of thinking and working that accepts the creative risk of becoming, of experiencing oneself as relational, as a self-in-process simultaneously emerging from and merging into a community mutually involved in self-creation. The process demanded I refuse the singularity of isolated, dominating being and to risk feeling, viscerally, in my naked state, that my body craves the regard of the other and remakes, over and over again, itself—it demanded I solicit another’s attention in order to feel, in my naked flesh, that my new being belonged as much to my co-worker who filmed me as to myself. It demanded that I sense that, in Irigaray’s sense, I was becoming woman, since I understood that my new flesh was entre-nous.

Here are my phenomenological reflections on the process.

Becoming Woman: New Flesh, New Life, Entre-nous

For examples of electric images—feminine ecopoetic images—by volunteering to be a nude model for women artists with whom I collaborated, see Appendix, Part 2

The most important thing for me now is that you are seeing me and that I can perceive you seeing me. I am stirred by the thought that, just as I can perceive what is invisible in you, you can perceive what is invisible in me. The dissappropriation I experience in this somewhat awkward state engenders an apperception that is fused completely to perception: I am aware I am the subject who is looking at you looking at me and my awareness that you are exploring me as intimately as you are has the effect of attuning me all the more sharply to the electric vibration in my new flesh. I no longer know you as simply just another person I encounter in the world, more familiar to me, perhaps, than many (and so more accessible to my understanding), but still one amongst all the many others I meet in my workaday world. That sundered world of glancing awareness of many quasi-anonymous bodies-with-consciousnesses has gone. In this new world that has developed between us, my awareness of you is a focalized awareness: I experience you as a point of intense sensory awareness and I experience myself as a subject-for-you-as-a-subject-exploring-me. I don’t at all feel reduced to object, as one common misunderstanding represents what we are doing here: rarely do I feel so strongly that I can see through another person’s body to see what is invisible in her—and what I perceive in that invisibility is her attention to what is invisible to me. It is an almost magical crossing of feelings and awareness, yours and mine, elevated to a Beyond-Self.

I lie here, naked, agreeing to do what you ask. When you ask, I notice you speak more in verbs and participles than in nouns and gerunds. Nothing here is reified, I conjecture. We are building a world that will enclose us, whose limits will be defined by the scope of your attention and my eagerness to fill it. Everything is in process here, everything undergoes change. Nothing in this world has the nature of an object isolated in a bounded space. Desire makes this world, and desire is endlessly protean. As we pass from moment to moment, I reshape what is invisible in you, as you respond to what I experience while you explore the invisible in me; and as we pass from moment to moment you reshape my responses (which are hardly verbal and mostly corporeal). Each of us contributes his/her novelty to that which emerges between us. Our exchanges, verbal and corporeal, have become an original dialogue, distinguished from the set phrases of ordinary speech and scholarship alike by the uniqueness of what has come into being entre nous. We have to work at finding a way to articulate the emerging of this intimate mystery between us, a language that does not betray with nouns the greater process to which our intimate selves belong, a way of speaking that does not constitute an obstacle to giving oneself over to the mystery that is so far beyond us (even though we both take part in it). This new language serves as a sign that this mystery founds a poetic way of dwelling that we are coming to inhabit.

My new flesh is a gift of your attention. As you explore me, you reconnect me to myself. As you explore me, you allow me to collect myself. I know myself as, at once and with no distinction, a body (a thing) and a subject—the subject/object dichotomy on which epistemology founders is here overcome, for I know myself both as an object with a subjectivity and as an embodied (material) subject. More than that, I know that it is my flesh that knows your embodied (material) subject as flesh. I know you both as a subject that left her impress on the fibers of my flesh and as a subject that transcends me. A truth shines in what is between us—an unveiling that lets me come forth as one-to-be-seen by you. In the same act of unveiling, this truth reveals you as the one who bids me to reveal myself. Your look and the way you explore all of me almost completely restores to me an archaic and innocent flesh—you can re-endow me with all that I lost, and you can do this even though, in this situation, you are not as archaically innocent as I. Ever so softly, I am marked by the invisible imprint of your flesh—your eyes, your attention, the shape and dynamic of your gestures—whose strength is taken into this new flesh that emerges in the space between us. Your attention transfigures me. As you explore me with a frankness that lets me know I must will to conceal nothing from you, in order to be able to accept from you that gift of becoming wholly transparent to your regard.

Yet somehow, though it is born in the space between us, the flesh you grant me comes forth as my very ownmost being. This reality which is between us now founds what has become most privately mine. Attuning myself wholly to your exploring me according to my hopes, you have effected an alchemical transformation of my energies, which you, by your openness to my innocence, take within you, transform again, and project back to the between that has emerged entre nous. In focusing so intently (as you imagine/observe what part of me you will photograph, and how you will photograph it) on the energy you project into the space between us, you allow me to remake myself again and to put on ever more primeval bodies of innocence. This entre nous focuses my desire and my attention (as I hope it focuses yours): it focuses my attention because, nude before you (and in relation to you), I feel so much more intensely, and the intensity of the feeling makes me gratefully aware that only flesh has the privilege of responding to flesh. Yes, it is also true that only flesh can respond feelingly to things, but that seems of no importance right now: what occupies my attention is how my flesh responds to your eyes, to your attention, to your gestures and to what your eyes and gestures tell me about how your flesh responds to mine. I attune myself to those energies with an attention complete enough to become prayer.

I am transformed in such a way that my will and seeing have become fused; my seeing has become a form of longing. It is full of intent. The intentness with which you look at me has excited an energy in me that connects to something archaic, something beyond myself. My thinking/desire belongs to an elsewhere. There I become a globe of seeing that allows me to experience you seeing me, even as your looking responds magically to the energies you create in me. I know you as opening me to a self-knowledge that is your gift. I know you as knowing me as I would be. I know you as experiencing and accepting my fundamental innocence, for you look on me wholly and with innocence.

Despite my awareness you can perceive what is invisible in me, as I perceive what is invisible in you, the asymmetry in our relationship, that I give myself to be seen by you in a way different from the way you give yourself to be seen by me, makes a discomforting truth appallingly evident: that there is no fusion, no merger here. The relationship we have right now is so intensely intimate and personal that I long for it to complete (to perfect) itself by becoming a total identification, which would allow me to experience your flesh experiencing my flesh. Still, I know that can never be, for your consciousness, in all its specificity, transcends what my flesh can know. You cannot be reduced to me, nor I to you. By reason of your freedom, you transcend me (as I transcend you). Even though, here, I expose myself naked to you, lying back here in pose that amounts to a plea for you to explore me totally and intimately, I seek to initiate a process that will expand until it engulfs us completely and obliterates all that is not uniquely between us—even though my nudity pleads for you to give yourself over to me, to abandon your autonomy and to suffuse yourself through me, to entirely become nothing but me—I have to acknowledge your freedom and your transcendence. The tension here between the fantasy and reality, between desire and truth, intensifies my arousal.

Even as I solicit your attention, I sense you escaping from me. But I also know that you, whose role in this play is consolidated in your eyes and hand, cannot be exchanged for me, whose role is to show himself as completely and intimately as possible. But the impossibility of substituting “the one” for “the other” is not the result of one of us being active, the other passive—of my being the passive recipient of your attention. I desire to show myself in a way that will allow me to be perceived; and you, for your part, to perceive the invisible in me, have had to open yourself to these intimate communications that I would not offer to just anyone. You have had to allow some part of you to become still and receptive, to accept what I want to tell you with my nudity. My uniqueness, your uniqueness, the uniqueness of what emerges between us, is absolutely crucial here. If I caress myself, if I electrify myself, I do it with energies that arise between us, entre nous, and I do this because I want to show myself this way and, more importantly, I want you, in your uniqueness, to see me this way. What is more, it shows that I want something unique, that I would not share with just any other, to emerge between us. I rely on your accepting my plea to be seen this way. I rely on your openness to having your actions shaped by what you perceive in me when, through the positions I adopt and my actions, I implore you to receive my desires. I rely on your agreeing to become open and receptive so that what I want to impart to you will impress itself on you (or on what your being contributes to the reality that emerges between us) in a similar way as your attention penetrates me and leaves its imprint in the energies that bring forth this new flesh I experience as delight. I rely on your acknowledging, as I open myself to you, as I offer myself as a to-be-seen, that this energy will expand and overwhelm all else that is between us. My offering my materialized body-of-energy as a to-be-seen implores that you will allow that energy to be become a globe of electricity that will see us both, and see in both of us our seeing one another. Like Fa Zang’s mirrors.

Because you transcend me and I transcend you, there is a mystery between us. Though what has come forth between us enables me to perceive the invisible in you, I do not see all of you, just as you cannot, despite my nudity, see all of me. Each of us shelters a mystery that inhabits what has emerged entre nous deux, something that is as archaic as the species and yet is renewed with every intimate encounter. The perceptible invisible in you is animated by this mystery, as are the secret desires that I harbour and I earnestly hope you can perceive.

This mystery is common to us both and protects what has re-emerged in what is entre nous deux. This mystery is the basis of another, more profound reality between us: as I perceive the invisible in you and you perceive the invisible in me, we, both of us at once, sense a common invisibility. I perceive what is invisible in you perceiving what is invisible in me and my efforts to have you sense the invisible in me rely on my capacity to sense what is invisible in you and, as though magically, to affect what pertains to your ownmost being. The body you see when you look at my nude form and the body I see when I look into your eyes become a bridge to the invisible that, though deeply within each of us, is also common to us both. We have this mystery in common because, though in our flesh, it overlaps a larger, more archaic mystery. So important is the commonality of our joint experience of the invisible that, if I experience your attention lapsing, I cannot bear to give myself to you to be seen. Reciprocally, whatsoever you endow my perception with cannot impress itself onto my being except insofar as I accept it as belonging to the reality of what is entre nous. When you avert your attention from me, that reality that has emerged between us becomes enfeebled—the bridge of energies between us disappears and you cease remaking me. Thus, I cherish your attention, as a form of praise between what is ancient in your gender and what is ancient in mine.

I sense the nakedness of my face as a most profound nudity, for its openness reveals how deeply you stir me. The more you stir me, the nearer I am brought by those energies you grant, the more naked my face seems to me. The eroticized flesh with which you have endowed me allows me to see your face in a glory that illumines it. I hope that you see my face in somewhat the same way. My nudity and openness seek you and you respond with an extraordinary attunement that is already clear in the mirror choreography of my showing and your exploring, but is revealed with an even more raw intensity when you stop shooting and your eyes peer into mine and you survey my inner state. You see into me when you turn your attention to my face, or when you stop shooting and your eyes meet mine. I long to mirror your seeing into me—to have myself see into you as you see into me and to have my seeing into you energize you as your seeing into me electrifies me. Even more, I long for you to know me exactly as I know you and for me to know you exactly as you know yourself: for you and I to know each other fully, with no part reserved from the other, for us both to be completely transparent to the other. At the same time, I know that is simply an archaic fantasy: while you see into me and seem wholly attuned to me, at the same time, your transcendence, your freedom, prevents this longing from being fulfilled. Despite the solicitations my nakedness offers, you remain beyond me.

Thus, though I refind myself through you, you remain an inappropriable transcendence. I perceive you, as you explore me, as being at once both immanent and transcendent—both entirely here, specific, concrete, a self-identical and determined being and yet free, mutable, indeterminant, open, protean—one who exceeds any conceptual effort to fix her. What is more, the relationship we have forged is nonreciprocal. I present my nakedness to you, to be explored (my nudity is a plea for you to explore me)—but to this vulnerability which I am, you seem infinitely remote—remote to the point that one aspect of the relationship is startlingly impersonal. You reach into my innermost being—but you remain in the Beyond and seem to me, in my vulnerability, to be infinitely remote, infinitely other, an infinite noema beyond all my noeses. And while, for me, you are infinitely remote, I, for myself, am entirely here, in this extremely elastic now (time, too, has changed for me), pleading for your eyes, my nudity a sign of my consent to be penetrated by your attention.

Because I cannot reach you, because you explore me without submitting to being explored yourself, I do not consume and exhaust you. You make me from on high. Yet at the same time, you undo me, and make me selfless: my attention to the energy you impart to me becomes so complete and total there is no room left over for an “I.” Your transcendence, your resistance to my wishes, reveals itself as an obstacle to fantasies and wishes; it reveals the reality of your otherness. This otherness appears to have two aspects. The first stems from your freedom: because we are not fused, because we are not truly at one, I cannot compel you to turn your attention here or there. The second arises from your ontological status a material being belonging to nature. In general, matter seems to be inert to our desire, and, more specifically, I know your body and its biochemical constitution can put up a nonresponsive resistance and inertness to my wishes and my desires. In having to acknowledge the material basis of your flesh, I am obliged to recognize the strict limits you put on my desire’s capacity to respond until it consumes you and your world (until it is merely an aspect of mine). Acknowledging those limits has a role in ordering this new world—but it also represents an intrusion of the world of ordinary matter into the different reality that is between us (a reality of energy, vibration, intensity, electricity, arousal).

Desire’s drive is to expand the reality of energy, electricity, and arousal until it consumes entirely the realm of ordinary matter; but matter thwarts desire. So, following the edicts of desire, I feel myself becoming less material (as vibratory pulsions and electricity come to constitute the world of which I am aware and to which my flesh belongs); and as I become less material, I feel myself becoming increasingly transparent to your attention. As you explore me, your attention produces a flux, a pulsion, in me that demolishes completely my reserve, my inhibition, my need to keep myself to (and for) myself. The energy you give me suffuses me, stirs in all parts of my flesh, from my head to my toes. It strives to expand, and as it does so, it sunders me, and brings forth a new self as a double form: first, the passive being who receives himself through you and so exposes himself to you as one who longs to be loved (who longs to be, at least for the duration of this elastic present, the only object of your fascinated attention); and, second, the active being who wants to show himself and in doing so induce energy in you. This new self is a double, too, in that I become at once, fully animated with an unusual intensity and yet wholly passive: active because I strive with every fiber of my being to impel you to explore my ownmost parts; and passive because I want to give myself wholly over to being bathed, in every inch of my physical being, in the warm globe of your attention, which radiates throughout my entire body and calms all striving. As for the active aspect of my being, it seems to arise from the blood and the pulse that drives the blood. The Ayurvedic tradition describes flesh as being made from blood and belonging to blood, and I can feel the truth of the claim in my very physical being. As for the passive aspect of my being, it is so completely suffused and reanimated by the complete and perfected reality that your attention opens me toward: being enveloped and enfolded in your attention opens me towards a more loving reality, in which I am bathed in the glow of a subjectivity that is no longer entirely yours, or entirely mine. It opens me to the truth of the completion. That complete and perfected reality we have in common stills me utterly, even while it stimulates me extraordinarily. I collapse into a feeling of wholeness and the intensity that permeates all of me makes me aware in every part of me that all my being is flesh that longs to show itself and to be seen. I sense myself as flesh, pure flesh, a puppet of a species memory that you awaken in me.

Though it is so deeply me, the new flesh I receive from you is beyond being controlled by my intention because it is stronger than my intention. (2)

Flesh, though spiritual, seems to clear away the fiction of the isolated ego and to join with the flesh of the world, in all its spiritualized materiality. I receive this new flesh from you with the utmost of passivity. Your attention falls on me and floods me. Once I resolved to give myself to you, all I wanted was to become the exclusive object of your attention. It is passivity I seek. In giving myself to you to be explored intimately by your eyes, I resolved to become passive, to allow myself to be swamped in the flood of your attention and in the entre nous that would emerge, thanks to your concentrated, focused attention. I long to become still, to do nothing, and to let myself become nothing but the innocent object of devoted attention. Yet that theme of the double again obtrudes on my feelings, for, while relishing by passivity, I have never felt more alive, never felt more vital, never felt more dynamic, never felt more aware of myself than when I feel the surge of energy that occurs when I notice your eyes and your gestures show that you are seized by the task of exploring me completely. So, even while your attention sweeps over me like a flood and renders me passive to a degree that only infants can normally know, I also feel enlivened. I tingle as I feel my energies pouring out of myself and enveloping you, in an effort to command your attention. My urge to become ever more completely the object of your attention is not something abstract. Rarely do I sense so intensely that my aims and my wishes are bodily—every least detail of the relationship that is emerging between us is bodily. I experience this recorporealization of my thinking and my being as delight, for with it comes an exhilarating sense of freedom that is your greatest gift to me, a gift that provides the energy that eroticizes my flesh and raises my feelings of being sexuate to such vitality that it comes to constitute the horizon of awareness

Electrology: Thought Remade by the Rise of the Science of Electomagnetism

Marshall McLuhan suggests that electrotechnics (the human use of electromagnetic phenomena to intervene in nature) inaugurates a new era in cultural history. He is right about that, of course. However, identifying when this change occurs has its challenges: two books by the Italian curator, art historian, and literary critic Renato Barilli, L’alba del contemporaneo: L’arte europea da Füssli a Delacroix (The Dawn of the Contemporary: European Art from Füssli to Delacroix, 1996) and Scienza della cultura e fenomenologia degli stili (The Science of Culture and the Phenomenology of Styles, 1991, new edition, 2006; English translation, 2012), offer insightful commentaries on the issues of dating the beginning of the new age (which, in keeping conventions in philosophy) we do well to call the postmodern age (the modern era beginning with the Renaissance and marked by a quest for a verisimilar, naturalistic art). Two momentous discoveries that occurred just a few years apart introduced the material changes with which one might mark the beginning of the postmodern age: the first was Luigi Galvani’s (1737–98) publication of De viribus electricitatis (1791), reporting his discovery of a form of electric current passing along a frog’s nerve tissue and causing its leg muscles to contract; the second was Alessandro Volta’s (1745–1827) invention of the voltaic pile (1799).

However, it is only in the later part of the nineteenth century (around 1860, Barilli suggests) that this new era began to manifest itself as an intellectual and symbolic force. Given the separation of six decades (and perhaps more), is it possible to maintain that the material and the symbolic strata of culture are connected? It is important to maintain that connection if we want to argue that electrotechnics are connected to the characteristics of the art of the era. Barilli responds brilliantly to this problem. His first tack is to deny that so many decades separate the first changes that occur in the material stratum of culture from the first changes that manifest themselves in culture’s symbolic stratum. He does this through a staggering insight: the first artists whose works reveal an imagination (and technique) shaped by electromagnetism are William Blake (1757–1827) and the Swiss-English painter Henry Fuseli (German: Johann Heinrich Füssli, 1741–1825). Blake he astutely describes as a “prophet of the wave of energy in human beings about to appear in all expressive graphic and literary forms.”(3) The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793), among the densest and richest of Blake’s wondrous prophetic books, avers that “Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason [for Blake a confining agency] is the bound or outward circumference of Energy. Energy is Eternal Delight.” Blake writes this, Barilli notes, at just the moment when nascent discoveries in electromagnetism appear with greater frequency. The development of the new conceptual regimen—a paradigm I refer to as the electrological paradigm—brought with it a new philosophical anthropology: the deep, uncontrollable passions depicted in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s (1749–1832) Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774, revised edition 1787) or the irresistible attractions between lovers in his Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities, 1809), Barilli notes, are understood as an irresistible attraction, as a kind of electromagnetic force of attraction that cannot be resisted.

From this point on (when Blake and Goethe begin to explore the new sentimental map), “we” are split in two: a superficial will controlled by Urizen, where we try to respect all the formal obligations, the norms of respect and social convention, and a “deep,” unlimited, and uncontrollable will that constitutes a unique reality with the very wellsprings of Life and Energy. However, “we” are always ourselves. The personality is split into two halves that have different origins: one conforms to the outmoded criteria of the rationalist age (mechanical, Gutenbergian, “modern”), while the other adopts to the “newest” demands of the electric world. (4)

The visual art of the modern period, from the Renaissance to the final decade of the eighteenth century, was dominated by the idea of drawing bodies by projecting rays from the object onto a two-dimensional plane. The Gutenbergian/Newtonian episteme had made the idea of perspectival distance integral to the concept of seeing: the modern conception understands seeing as an act that takes place at a distance, across an empty medium, or, at least, one that does not present obstacles (if space is understood as filled with “atmosphere,” then the particles that make up these atmospheric gasses are understood as particles that reflect rays—that is made evident by aerial perspective).

The mirror and the camera obscura are natural guarantees of the validity of a similar type of “reflection,” of representing reality to which both the theories of artists from Alberti’s time onward and “machines,” the technological inventions coming to photography and its derivatives, make reference. (5)

The new discursive regime—which began with Galvani and Volta and consolidated itself in the theories of Michael Faraday and John Clerk Maxwell, distilled into the mathematical form through which they have become known, in Maxwell’s 1865 paper, “A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field”—mandates different forms of representation. Renato Barilli set them out, lucidly:

Now, the concept of the mirror wanes. Humans “know” by sending into the atmosphere beams of concentric waves that quickly envelop objects, constantly changing the point of view and superseding that logic by substituting it with another in which “the centre is everywhere” and three-dimensional objects physically present, ready to be manipulated. . . . On the other hand, a similarly ubiquitous presence of three-dimensional objects, owing to the possibility of enveloping them with wave trains, acquires a dematerialized quality. (6)

The topoi and tropes of the new discursive regime Barilli describes are evident in a remarkable text “Fondamento plastico della scultura e pittura futuriste” (The Plastic Foundations of Futurist Sculpture and Painting), by Umberto Boccioni. At one point, Boccioni lays out his idea of atmosfera (atmosphere):

When I say that sculpture must try and model the atmosphere, I mean that I want to suppress, i.e., FORGET, all the traditional and sentimental values concerning atmosphere, the recent naturalism which veils objects, making them diaphanous or distant like a dream, etc., etc. For me atmosphere is a materiality that exists between objects, distorting plastic values. [This can be taken as expressing the idea of infinite plasticity and its connection to electrology.] Instead of making it float overhead like a puff of air (because culture taught me that atmosphere is intangible or made of gas, etc.), I feel it, seek it, seize hold of it and emphasize it by using all the various effects which light, shadows, and streams of energy have on it. Hence, I create the atmosphere!

When we begin to grasp this truth in Futurist sculpture, we shall see the shape of the atmosphere where before there was only emptiness or, as with the Impressionists, mist. This mist was already a step toward an atmospheric plasticity, toward a physical transcendentalism which, in turn, is another step toward the perception of analogous phenomena that have hitherto remained hidden from our obtuse sensibilities. These phenomena include perceiving the luminous emanations of our bodies, of the kind I spoke of in my first lecture in Rome, and which are reproduced in photographic plates. (7)

Interests in spirit photography, light emanating from bodies, and atmospheric plasticity leading towards physical transcendentalism are certainly a long way from the notion of Futurism that dominates art-historical writing—that it is “machine art,” with the term machine understood as later twentieth- and twenty-first-century thinkers conceive it. Boccioni goes on to relate the idea of atmosphere to the Faradayan conception fields of electromagnetic energy and that Faradayan field conception to the idea of vibratory reality, that benchmark esoteric notion.

Now this tangible measuring of what formerly appeared to be empty space, this clear superimposition of new strata on what we call real objects and the shapes that determine them—this new aspect of reality is one of the foundations of our painting and sculpture. It should now be clear, then, why endless lines and currents emanate from our objects, making them live in the environment which has been created by their vibrations.

The distances between one object and another are not just empty spaces, but are occupied by material continuities made up of varying intensities, continuities we reveal with perceptible lines that do not correspond to any photographic truth. That is why our paintings do not have just objects and empty spaces, but only a greater or lesser intensity and solidity of space. (8)

This remarkable passage, written by Futurism’s true theoretical genius, demands commentary. It states the universe is a plenum, “filled” with a material substance “that exists between objects” and is affected by “streams of energy.” This atmosphere, Boccioni suggests, is nothing like that of the Symbolists, a veil that makes objects appear “diaphanous or distant like a dream.” (9)

Boccioni’s connection of what he conceives as atmosphere with luminous emanations from bodies gives additional reason to believe that the phenomenon he is describing is an electromagnetic field propagating itself through space in the form of Hertzian waves. It explains his maintaining that it should “be clear . . . why endless lines and currents emanate from our objects, making them live in the environment [the electromagnetic field] which has been created by their vibrations.” Boccioni also draws on one of the topoi of electromagnetic esoterism (one that can be traced back to Neo-Platonist metaphysics or emanationist metaphysics of whatever stripes), namely that the different levels of reality are formed of energy that has congealed in different measures. Thus, space—a plenum—is filled with materials (electromagnetic energy) of different intensities. Boccioni even relates (in a manner consistent with electromagnetic theory) the linee di forza of Futurist painting to these varying intensities. The artist-theorist draws on Henri Bergson (1859–1941) to support this electromagnetic metaphysics: Boccioni construes Bergson as saying that reality is fundamentally constituted of varying intensities of energies and motion. He even implicitly makes a connection that other early twentieth-century artists also made, between the phenomena of thought-forms and electromagnetic waves transmitted through the æther. Concerning the new sensibility that results from rigorous spiritual and religious preparation (a theme of Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater’s Thought-Forms, 1901), Bocciani states,

Between the physical body and the invisible there is a space of vibrations that determine the nature of its action and dictates the artistic sensation. In short, if spirits wander around us and if they are observed and studied; if fluids of power, antipathy, and love emanated from bodies; if deaths are foreseen from a distance of hundreds of kilometres, if premonitions fill us with joy or annihilate us with sadness; if this entire impalpable, invisible, inaudible realm is becoming increasingly the object of investigation and observation—all this happens because in us a marvellous sense is awakening thanks to the light of our consciousness. Sensation is the universal garment of the spirit and it is now appearing to our clairvoyant eyes. And with this the artist senses himself in everything. By creating he does not look, observe or measure—he senses and the sensations that envelop him dictate to him the lines and colours that aroused the emotions that caused him to act. (10)

The ideas and motifs in this passage are remarkably close to those of Thought-Forms, but the fact that it followed remarks on electromagnetic phenomena suggests Boccioni, like so many other artists from the early twentieth century (and the genius Harry Smith), believed thought-forms to be electromagnetic events.

Boccioni’s affirmation that “it should be clear . . . why an infinity of lines and currents emanate from our objects, making them live in the environment created by their vibrations” merits further attention. For this remarkable passage (and its context) has not been understood for what it really is, namely an affirmation of Faraday and Maxwell’s ideas on electromagnetism. At the moment Boccioni wrote this pioneering text of electrological aesthetics, ideas about electromagnetism were collecting themselves into a force that would transform the material and symbolic cultures of the West. This transformation would be the most momentous in the West since Johannes Gutenberg’s (1400–1486) invention of moveable type (1439); further, its geo-cultural reach would extend farther, for this transformation would change the entire world as fundamentally as Gutenberg changed the West.

Marshall McLuhan understood the character of this transformation. One of the longest quotations in all his writings was drawn from Albert Einstein’s (1879–1955) forward to Max Jammer’s (1915–2010) Concepts of Space: The History of Theories of Space in Physics (1954), concerning the bypassing of absolute forms by means of a dynamic, non-homogeneous field:

The victory over the concept of absolute space or over that of the inertial system became possible only because the concept of the material object was gradually replaced as the fundamental concept of physics by that of the field. Under the influence of the ideas of Faraday and Maxwell the notion developed that the whole of physical reality could perhaps be represented as a field whose components depend on four space-time parameters. If the laws of this field are in general covariant, that is, are not dependent on a particular choice of coordinate system, then the introduction of an independent (absolute) space is no longer necessary. That which constitutes the spatial character of reality is then simply the four-dimensionality of the field. There is then no “empty” space, that is, there is no space without a field. (11)

McLuhan goes on to point out that Timothy H. Boyer’s Scientific American article makes the same point, that the classical vacuum “is not empty. Even when all matter and heat radiation have been removed from a region of space, the vacuum of classical physics remains filled with a distinctive pattern of electromagnetic fields.” (12) McLuhan also quotes Francis M. Cornford’s “The Invention of Space”: “geometrical space was seen to be continuous, not a pattern of empty gaps interrupted by solid things; it penetrates the solids that occupy its single continuous medium.” (13)

A hotly contested debate concerning the nature of electricity and magnetism took place in the 1860s, 70s, and 80s between followers of Isaac Newton (1642–1727) and those who sided with Michael Faraday. Though it is not yet a standard part of every school child’s learning, it should be: knowledge of it is essential to understanding the postmodern condition. The Newtonians modelled their understanding of electricity and magnetism on the scientific theory of gravity. The Faradayans, by way of contrast, modelled their understanding on the theory of heat flow, worked out by William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin, 1824–1907). Very soon after he promulgated them, Newton’s laws of motion and gravity were widely embraced and became the standard model for dynamics. They achieved this status despite having a troubling feature. Physical forces generally operate through contact: I need a clear space on my desktop to put down my bowl of soup, so I place my arm against some of the books cluttering it and shove them out of the way. My arm is in contact with the books and the kinetic energy it exerts on the books moves them out of the way. But Newton wanted to demonstrate that a gravitational pull, exerted by the sun, keeps the earth moving in its elliptical orbit. Against the intellectual climate of his times, Newton conjectured that space is a void—empty, a vacuum. This meant that gravity was to be understood as a new kind of force that does not operate through contact: space is a vacuum, and yet the sun can exert a gravitational attraction on the earth. The sun’s gravity acts on the earth at a distance.

Magnetism seemed similar to gravity in respect to being a force that acts at a distance: when a nail is placed near a magnet, but not in contact with it, it is attracted to the magnet. Both gravity and magnetism involve separate bodies that exert an attraction on one other: both seemingly act instantaneously and without any necessary physical contact between the two. The force of attraction/repulsion between two electrically charged bodies acts similarly. Newton’s prestige and the success of his theory of gravity lent support to action-at-a-distance accounts of electromagnetic attractions and repulsions. Newton’s formula for calculating the gravitational attraction between two bodies is F = m₁m₂Gr², where m₁ is the mass of one of the bodies, m₂ the mass of the second, r the distance between the bodes, and G is a constant of proportionality (known as the gravitational constant). (14) In 1785, the French physicist Charles-Augustin de Coulomb (1736–1806) worked out a formula for calculating the attraction or repulsion between two bodies charged with static electricity. It turned out to be F = q₁q₂K_er², where q₁ and q₂ are the respective charges on the two bodies, r is the distance between the two charged bodies, and K_e is a constant of proportionality (known as Coulomb’s constant, the electric force constant, or the electrostatic constant). That both formulae have the same pattern lent further weight to the supposition that electric and magnetic forces of attraction and repulsion are, like gravity, action-at-a-distance forces. The supposition seemed virtually established—only the details (and the development of a formula similar to Coulomb’s for electric currents) needed to be worked out.

Faraday wasn’t willing to go along with the supposition. He was staunchly independent-minded. He hailed from the working class and had little formal education: he started as an apprentice bookbinder and his interest in learning developed as a result of taking home and reading some of the books he was gluing and sewing together. One of these was Isaac Watts’s (1674–1748) The Improvement of the Mind (1741), a work that offers counsel on developing one’s intellectual abilities (he recommended, for example, keeping a notebook and corresponding with friends to get practice in expressing one’s ideas). Faraday applied its recommendations assiduously. He came to have that quality so common to autodidacts: he habitually considered topics from first principles, and he wanted to find out each fact for himself. Those intellectual dispositions made him one of the greatest experimentalists of all time. And, like many autodidacts, he suffered from too much diffidence—near the beginning of his career, he hired an elocutionist to attend his presentations so he (the elocutionist) could help Faraday overcome his working-class diction.

In 1831, Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction and formulated a law concerning the phenomenon: his law is one of the most basic laws of electromagnetism—it predicts how a magnetic field will interact with an electric circuit to produce an electromotive force (the force we now know propels electrons into motion). The law has wide-ranging application and helps explain the operation of transformers, inductors, electric motors, and electrical generators. Following on on this discovery, Faraday attempted to form a picture of how a magnet interacts with a wire to induce electricity. His sturdy independence of mind, along with his meagre mathematical skills, resulted in his conceiving a picture of the induction process that is fundamentally different from the one that would have been produced by applying the Newtonians’ supposition about the nature of electricity and magnetism. Newton was befuddled when he asked how gravity is transmitted through space. But he recognized the assumption that it leapt from the sun to the earth actually worked (that is, predictions based on that assumption were confirmed through observation). So he reluctantly accepted that supposition. Faraday, on the other hand, insisted on asking how electromagnetic forces are transmitted (and that led to his important role in creating the postmodern epistēmē). Faraday was convinced that something must exist between the wire and the magnet. He called that something a “field” and pictured it as an area filled with strings (like the string that can be used to pull an object) or lines of force. Faraday in fact went so far as to claim that force is a substance—indeed the only substance.

All the different manifestations of force (namely, gravity, electricity, magnetism) are interconvertible, as all are simply activities of the basic, underlying substance. This hypothesis was not taken up by subsequent scientists, including Maxwell, who played a cardinal role in laying the foundations of the science of electromagnetism; nonetheless, it appealed to many, if not most, artists who embraced the cosmopoetic ideas of the new science.

In a lecture on 21 April 1820, the Danish chemist and physicist Hans Christian Ørsted (sometimes Oersted, 1777–1851) took note that a compass deflected from true north when an electric current from a battery was switched on or off. When he investigated the phenomenon, he determined that an electric current passing through a wire creates a circular magnetic field around the wire. André-Marie Ampère (1775–1836) took Ørsted’s experiments a step further, by demonstrating that parallel wires carrying electric currents attract or repel each other—they repel each other if the currents flow in the same direction, and attract one another if the currents flow in opposite directions. He developed generalized laws, expressed in mathematical form, showing that currents have measurable and predictable magnetic effects. The best known (now called Ampère’s law) states that the electromagnetic interaction of two lengths of current-carrying wire is proportional to their lengths and to the intensities of their currents.

Ampère was a Newtonian, and his mathematical description of the magnetic effects produced by electricity depended on action-at-a-distance theories; moreover, the explanation was modern in the sense that it simply predicted regularities in the succession of observations. James Clerk Maxwell began considering Faraday’s field ideas, and felt a disconnect between the physical phenomenon Ørsted observed and Ampère’s mathematical description. Maxwell’s friend, William Thomson, had suggested an analogy among electricity, magnetism, and heat flow. I must oversimplify in commenting on this, to keep the account to a reasonable length: using a mathematical operator known as a gradient (informally, the gradient extends the operation of taking a derivative to apply to functions of multiple variables) allowed Fourier to compute the direction of a heat flow. In the end, he was able to show the existences of lines (directions) of heat flow. Thomson imaginatively connected Fourier’s lines of heat flow to the flow of electricity and the radiation of magnetic energy. Maxwell took a cue from that and set out to develop a mathematical formalism for Faraday’s ideas.

Maxwell’s decision was a bold and courageous move, especially for a young physicist who still needed to solidify his reputation. The physics establishment was almost entirely on the side of the Newtonians; Faraday’s ideas about fields and lines of force seemed to them like vague and amateurish conceptions developed by somebody who lacked the requisite mathematical skills to do real physics. On 10 December 1855 and 11 February 1856, Maxwell read his first paper on electricity to the Cambridge Philosophical Society (it was subsequently published in the society’s Transactions, vol. 10, part 1): its title was “On Faraday’s Lines of Force.” There he explains lines of force in the following way:

When a body is electrified in any manner, a small body charged with positive electricity, and placed in any given position, will experience a force urging it in a certain direction. If the small body be now negatively electrified, it will be urged by an equal force in a direction exactly opposite.

The same relations hold between a magnetic body and the north or south poles of a small magnet. If the north pole is urged in one direction, the south pole is urged in the opposite direction.

In this way we might find a line passing through any point of space, such that it represents the direction of the force acting on a positively electrified particle, or on an elementary north pole, and the reverse direction of the force on a negatively electrified particle or an elementary south pole. Since at every point of space such a direction may be found, if we commence at any point and draw a line so that, as we go along it, its direction at any point shall always coincide with that of the resultant force at that point, this curve will indicate the direction of that force for every point through which it passes, and might be called on that account a line of force. We might in the same way draw other lines of force, till we had filled all space with curves indicating by their direction that of the force at any assigned point.

We should thus obtain a geometrical model of the physical phenomena, which would tell us the direction of the force, but we should still require some method of indicating the intensity of the force at any point. If we consider these curves not as mere lines, but as fine tubes of variable section carrying an incompressible fluid, then, since the velocity of the fluid is inversely as the section of the tube, we may make the velocity vary according to any given law, by regulating the section of the tube, and in this way we might represent the intensity of the force as well as its direction by the motion of the fluid in these tubes.

The configuration of lines of force are captured in the patterns that iron filings make when spread evenly over a sheet of paper and the pole of a magnet held against the paper—“Hast ‘ou seen the rose in the steel dust / (or swansdown ever?),” asks Pound, that great pioneer (along with James Joyce) of electromorphic literature—and he continues “so light is the urging, so ordered the dark petals of iron / we who have passed over Lethe. (15) ” In “Vorticism” (an earlier work, from 1915), he writes somewhat less poetically,

An organization of forms expresses a confluence of forces. These forces may be the “love of God,” the “life-force,” emotions, passions, what you will. For example: if you clap a strong magnet beneath a plateful of iron filings, the energies of the magnet will proceed to organise form. It is only by applying a particular and suitable force that you can bring order and vitality and thence beauty into a plate of iron filings, which are otherwise as “ugly” as anything under heaven. The design in the magnetised iron filings expresses a confluence of energy. It is not “meaningless” or “inexpressive.” (16)

In this case, regarding its role in his great long poem (perhaps the greatest written in the English language in the twentieth century), it is clear that the influence of the magnet on the iron filings is an image of the Mystery ordering the material world so as to manifest beauty. Pound’s essay “Cavalcanti” observes that we “appear to have lost the radiant world, where one thought cuts through another with clean edge” (i.e., a world of compenetrazione); he continues with a vision of the paradisiacal realm, “a world of moving energies ‘mezzo oscuro rade,’ ‘risplende in sè perpetuale effecto,’ magnetisms that take form, that are seen, or that border the visible, the matter of Dante’s paradiso, the glass under water, the form that seems a form seen in a mirror, these realities perceptible to the sense, interacting, ‘a lui si tiri.’” (17) He contrasts this with the world of “modern” (along with Barilli, I would have used the term “postmodern”) science:

For the modern scientist energy has no borders, it is a shapeless ‘mass’ of force; even his capacity to differentiate it to a degree never dreamed by the ancients has not led him to think of its shape or even its loci. The rose that his magnet makes in the iron filings, [sic] does not lead him to think of the force in botanic terms, or to wish to visualize that force as floral and extant (ex stare). [Pound is absolutely right that the electromorphic realm is phytomorphic—and he is likely right that scientists, to which I would add some new media artists, fail to see this.]

A medieval ‘natural philosopher’ would find this modern world full of enchantments, not only the light in the electric bulb, but the thought of the current hidden in air and in wire would give him a mind full of forms, ‘Fuor di color’ or having their hyper-colours. The medieval philosopher would probably have been unable to think the electric world, and not think of it as a world of forms. Perhaps algebra has queered our geometry. (18)

Newtonians would have considered the patterns the iron filings form as showing the cumulative effects of the magnet acting individually on each particular particle—one would take each iron particle, one by one, and calculate the effect on it of the north pole and south pole of the magnet, taking into account the distance of the particle from each of pole. They saw no need to take into account the complex of lines in the entire field. However, that way of approaching the problem makes it difficult to establish why such clear patterns develop (and why there are such evident lines with spaces between them). Faraday took note that filings arrange themselves (or, rather, are prodded) into flower-like curving lines. He imagined a force that traced out invisible lines in the field, which the iron filings reveal (and, with the paper cited above, Maxwell was confirming that a force is transmitted along particular lines).

The great mathematical physicist Roger Penrose, in his enchanting The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe, says this:

a profound shift in Newtonian foundations had already begun in the 19th century, before the revolutions of relativity and quantum theory in the 20th. The first hint that such a change might be needed came from the wonderful experimental findings of Michael Faraday in about 1833, and from the pictures of reality that he found himself needing in order to accommodate these. Basically, the fundamental change was to consider that the ‘Newtonian particles’ and the ‘forces’ that act between them are not the only inhabitants of our universe. Instead, the idea of a ‘field’, with a disembodied existence of its own was now having to be taken seriously. It was the great Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell who, in 1864, formulated the equations that this ‘disembodied field’ must satisfy, and he showed that these fields can carry energy from one place to another. These equations unified the behaviour of electric fields, magnetic fields, and even light, and they are now known simply as Maxwell’s equations, the first of the relativistic field equations. (19)

Newton’s image of gravity, I remarked, pictured gravity as though being emitted by the sun, leaping over space, and acting on the earth—that is the crux of the action-at-a-distance theory. Ampère and the Newtonians believed electromagnetism operated on the same principle—that electromagnetic force acts at a distance (it could just as well act in empty space). Space was empty, a void—and gravity leaps over that empty space to attract a more or less distant object: the Newtonian early researchers into electromagnetism maintained that (like gravity) electromagnetic force can leap over empty space to affect a tangible body. Furthermore, Newton had presumed gravity to be a force that acted instantaneously—the sun’s pull on the earth (at some point in its orbit), and the earth’s response—being pulled from a straight line back to its elliptical path—happen simultaneously; so Newtonians supposed that magnetism and electricity behave similarly. Faraday had a different conception of magnetism’s relation to space: magnetic force flows through space, in curved lines resembling those in the patterns that iron filings make; and force therefore takes time to move through space: action and response (cause and effect) are not instantaneous. Furthermore, the magnet infuses the space around it with force: that magnetized space is what Faraday called a field, and it is shot through with invisible curved lines of force that carry energy from one place to another. A charge influences the space around it. Space is as though energized.

Maxwell’s Theories Found a Cosmology

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), who probably has gone further than any other thinker in outlining the contours of the postmodern metaphysics, wrote his doctoral dissertation on Faraday and Maxwell’s theories. In The Concept of Nature, he notes, “As long ago as 1847 Faraday in a paper in the Philosophical Magazine remarked that his theory of tubes of force implies that in a sense an electric charge is everywhere. The modification of an electric field at every point of space at each instant owning to the past history of each electron [the topic of this section of Whitehead’s book] is another way of stating the fact.” (20) He goes on to remark, regarding objects with which physical laws are concerned (namely, “bits of matter, molecules and electrons”)

An object of one of these types has relations to events other than those belonging to the stream of its situations. . . . In truth the object in its completeness may be conceived as a specific set of correlated modifications of the characters of all events, with the property that these modifications attain to a certain focal property for those events which belong to the stream of its situations. The total assemblage of the modifications of the characters of events due to the existence of an object in a stream of situations is what I call the ‘physical field’ due to the object. But the object cannot really be separated from its field. The object is in fact nothing else than the systematically adjusted set of modifications of the field. . . . From this point of view the antithesis between action at a distance and action by transmission is meaningless. (21)

Here is a somewhat less technical and more compact remark by Whitehead, making a similar point—in the course of this commentary, Whitehead critiques Thomson’s concept of the material æther and offers his own, even more radical conception of the æther—of an “ether of events” rather than a “material ether”:

The point I want to make now is . . . that something is always going on everywhere, even in so-called empty space. This conclusion is in accord with modern physical science which presupposes the play of an electromagnetic field throughout space and time. This doctrine of science has been thrown into the materialistic form of an all-pervading ether. But the ether is evidently a mere idle concept—in the phraseology which Bacon applied to the doctrine of final causes, it is a barren virgin. Nothing is deduced from it; and the ether merely subserves the purpose of satisfying the demands of the materialistic theory. The important concept is that of the shifting facts of the fields of force. This is the concept of an ether of events which should be substituted for that of a material ether. (22)

Faraday, we have noted, conceived of lines of force as like a substance (indeed, as being the only substance): Alfred North Whitehead rejects this, substituting for it the notion of “an ether of events” (23) as an entailment of the “shifting facts” of “fields of force.” In a similar vein, in An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge, Whitehead states, tersely, “Time, Space, and Material are adjuncts of events.” Recall, in this connection, Boccioni’s comment about endless lines and currents emanating from our objects, making them live in the environments from which they emanate. Boccioni’s ideas about space and his conception of lines of force can be connected to Faraday and Maxwell’s fundamental cosmopoeic ideas. And since it can be done, it must be done: what is at stake is the nature of space. To conceive of electromagnetism as being similar to gravity is to conceive of its relation to the space it passes through as having no importance and of space itself as almost nothing. To conceive of electromagnetism as being similar to heat is to conceive of its relation to a space into which it radiates as having key importance. Choosing the latter leads one up against a thorny question: what is the nature of this strange, invisible field?

A key to the answer is that interacting magnetic fields exert torsion on each other: they pull one field into another. Boccioni’s Sviluppo di una bottiglia nello spazio (Development of a Bottle in Space, 1912–13) and Forme uniche della continuità nello spazio (Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913) show what happens. Understanding twentieth-century artists’ interests in electromagnetic field effects casts their interest in plasticity into a new light. The impact that African American art had on Europe in the early twentieth century can be connected to the enthusiastic embrace of forms suggesting what Stanley Crouch calls “infinite plasticity”—I did that in Cubism and Futurism: Spiritual Machines and the Cinematic Effect. There I showed that African American art—especially jazz—made African and other so-called “primitive” (unhappy term!) art seem modern, a part of the American century. (24) Jazz and “primitive art” (again, I insist this is an unhappy term!) highlighted that to be modern was to be involved with plasticity. Distortions of form seemed novel, fresh, and potent. But it was not simply the novelty of such plastic interests (evident in “primitive art”) that appealed to twentieth-century artists: an equally compelling reason for the remarkable enthusiasm artists showed for infinite plasticity is that distortions of this sort are common in the electromagnetic realm: Boccioni’s work shows that. So-called primitive art was seen as being postmodern, because it had avoided the error of Newtonianism-Gutenbergism and was already electromorphic, all the while preserving the traditional richness of cultures that had not succumbed to the Western valorization of reason.

A major difference between the Newtonians and the Faradayans is that the Newtonians considered the force of attraction or repulsion on the iron filing particles (to take that example again) as acting between pairs—first, between the south pole of the magnetic and one of the iron filings, then between its north pole and that same iron particle (these computations would be done for each and every iron particle). The space between particles, and the space between the particles and a pole of the magnet, was of no account. Faradayans, on the other hand, supposed every point in that space to be charged by the lines of force. An electric current passing along a wire conductor would affect space similarly—the current would create a magnetic field around the wire, and that magnetic field could form patterns in iron filings, displaying the lines of force created by the current.

The iron filings make the lines of force visible. When there are no iron filings in the area, there is still a magnetic field around the wire, with lines of force. Faraday provided a means for calculating the force of an electromagnetic field on a particle at a given point, not by considering properties of the objects (the magnitude of the charges on them) and of the distance between them (as Coloumb’s law had it), but by considering the number of lines of force in the field around the particle. The pole of a magnet, or an electric current in a wire, radiates a force from what can be considered (for the sake of illustration) a point. As the rays of radiation fan out from the point into space, the distance between the lines of force increases and the number of lines of force in a given area decreases. (It is interesting, given Pound’s remark about algebra queering our geometry, that Coulomb’s law—the older way of understanding the problem—is based on an algebraic/analytic model, while Faraday’s calculation of the force of an electromagnetic field on a particle at a given point is based on a geometric model.) John Clerk Maxwell took Michael Faraday’s geometric intuition and, after developing a new mathematical object, the vector field, worked out its computational implications and applied them to calculating the characteristics of various electromagnetic phenomena. (25) In doing so, he established the science of electromagnetism on a solid foundation and, in the process, proved the accuracy of his friend Faraday’s intuitions. Unfortunately, Faraday did not live to see his science of electromagnetism triumph over that of the Newtonians: he died on 21 August 1867, broken-hearted that he had not prevailed. In 1873 Clerk Maxwell published the two-volume A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism. Thereafter, electromagnetic space was conceived in Faradayan terms.

Out of Faraday and Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism, a cosmology emerged—and the earliest truly profound statement of that cosmology is set out in the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. For Whitehead, reality was pervaded by a sort of nisus that strives to realize novelty—reality is process, a “perpetual perishing” of what is and the perpetual emergence, through what he called “concrescence,” of a new, short-lived entity/event. The fundamental unit of reality, he proclaimed, is “the ultimate creature derivative from the creative process.” (26)

The conviction that process has priority over things and substances (as process engenders things and substance and determines their characteristics), which Whitehead and Bergson shared, is one that conforms to the electromagnetic metaphysics that rose to prominence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Whitehead was acutely aware of the sweeping change that was taking place as a new world view, based on ideas about electromagnetism, emerged (and this awareness makes Whitehead an even more crucial figure that Bergson). Whitehead notes: that now “we are in a special cosmic epoch”, and that it is inhabited by electronic entities/events:

Here the phrase ‘cosmic epoch’ is used to mean that widest society of actual entities whose immediate relevance to ourselves is traceable. This epoch is characterized by electronic and protonic actual entities, and by yet more ultimate actual entities which can be dimly discerned in the quanta of energy. Maxwell’s equations of the electromagnetic field hold sway by reason of the throngs of electrons and of protons. (27)

Whitehead had attended presentations by Nikola Tesla (1846–1953) in London (1891) on the topic of “Experiments with alternate currents of high potential and high frequency”—lectures in which Tesla laid the groundwork of his ideas on radio technology. As far as I know, the text of the London lectures does not exist, but that of a lecture he gave on the same topic to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers at Columbia College in New York, on 20 May 1891, does, and it seems quite likely that the lectures were substantially similar. The address at Columbia began with Tesla saying that nature is a most captivating and worthy object of study, and that “Nature has stored up in the universe infinite energy. The eternal recipient and transmitter of this energy is the ether. . . . Of all forms of nature’s energy, which is ever and ever changing and moving, like a soul animates the inert universe, electricity and magnetism are perhaps the most fascinating.” He asked, “What is electricity, and what is magnetism?” (28)

Whitehead, we have seen, objected to the idea of a material æther, characterizing it as “evidently a mere idle concept” and “a barren virgin,” a petitio principii introduced on the basis of the materialist assumption that it must exist, since it should exist (“should” here meaning that its existence would make physics neat and tidy)—in fact, its status is really that of a hypothesis and its existence, in order to support that hypothesis, should be independently validated through observation. (29) Whitehead remarked that, “In all philosophic theory there is an ultimate which is actual in virtue of its accidents. . . . In the philosophy of organism this ultimate is termed creativity; and [God] is its primordial, non-temporal accident.” (30) Creativity is an attribute of all that is (that is one of the features of Whitehead’s philosophy that has made it so attractive to artists). Near the beginning of his magnum opus, Whitehead encapsulates the meaning of concrescence as the root metaphor of process philosophy: “The many become one, and are increased by one.” (31) And again, “The term ‘many’ presupposes the term ‘one,’ and the term ‘one’ presupposes the term ‘many.’ ”(32) Numerous electrological artists shared this religious conviction (especially San Franciscan artists of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s). This nisus of electrological cosmologies towards theism (and of theism’s bias towards organicism) was evident even as the foundations of the electrological paradigm were being laid: Michael Faraday was a pious Glasite (or Sandemanian), a denomination that was an offshoot of Presbyterianism, but maintained a distinctive view of faith as requiring merely the intellectual assent to the proposition that Christ was sent to redeem humans from sin (and does not require emotional feelings towards a supernatural power). For many Glasites, assent followed on the understanding that nature’s order demonstrates the existence of the creator. Faraday’s view of science developed out of these convictions. For one thing, Glasite teaching instructed followers that understanding arises from objective scrutiny. The stance towards reality that proposition endorses was the kernel of Faraday’s experimental method. Furthermore, Faraday seems to have believed that since one God created the cosmos, all nature must be interlinked. Faraday’s unification of electricity and magnetism helped confirm this unity. In his only public address involving science and religion, Faraday allowed that the “book of nature, which we have to read, is written by the finger of God.” This lecture appears near the end of Experimental Researches in Chemistry and Physics, and the talk is prefaced with the remark, “These observations are so immediately connected in their nature and origin with my own experimental life, considered either as a cause or a consequence, that I have thought the close of this volume not an unfit place for their reproduction.” (33) Electromagnetic theory tends to lead thinkers towards theism.

When Whitehead was developing his ideas on actual occasions and concrescence, the radio was the only device that showed how Maxwell’s equations could model transformations of electromagnetic fields. (34) Yet, before the television and the computer had been invented—making evident electronic devices’ ability to produce from invisible waves in the atmosphere the sounds and sights of a palpable reality—Whitehead had already understood that these electromagnetic signals would form the foundation of an emerging conception of the constitution of reality: “Thus our cosmic epoch is to be conceived primarily as a society of electromagnetic occasions,” Whitehead wrote. (35) An electromagnetic society, he says,

is a more special society contained within the geometric society. . . . It is sufficient for our purposes to indicate the presumed character of this law by naming the members of the society ‘electromagnetic occasions’. Thus our present epoch is dominated by a society of electromagnetic occasions. In so far as this dominance approaches completeness, the systematic law which physics seeks is absolutely dominant. In so far as the dominance is incomplete, the obedience is a statistical fact with its corresponding lapses. The electromagnetic society exhibits the physical electromagnetic field which is the topic of physical science. The members of this nexus are the electromagnetic occasions. (36)

In this section of his exposition of his cosmological theory, Whitehead contrasts two types of societies, those in “occupied space” and those that are a “physical field in empty space”—he characterizes the former as a “restricted type of corpuscular societies” and the latter he characterizes as “the wider type.” He ends by saying, “It seems as if the careers of waves of light illustrate the transition from the more restricted type to the wider type.” Whatever this distinction amounts to (it is certainly not the most limpid passage in this famously difficult work), it is clear that the expression “the careers of waves of light” is particularly telling: light waves are conceived as processes that begin, prosper, and perish—and while they prosper, they produce results (they have a career). Light is energy, to wit, a form of electromagnetic energy.

In his 1891 lectures, Tesla too commented on light and its relation to electricity (though he went much further than Whitehead). In the course of commenting on the effects of heating a dielectric exposed to strong fields of high-frequency currents, he remarked on that phenomenon we today know as luminescence. Tesla explained the emission of light was “due to the air molecules coming bodily in contact with the point; they are attracted and repelled, charged and discharged, and, their atomic charges being thus disturbed, vibrate and emit light waves.” (37) His conception of light, then, resembles the postmodern idea that light results from photons being emitted from atoms that have been stimulated (either directly or indirectly) by an external source caused by electricity. From this Tesla concluded that it would be possible to use high-frequency currents to produce light and heat, as with an ordinary flame, but without consumption of material—light would simply manifest energy being transformed from one state to another (which, he evidently believed, requires no annihilation of matter).

Clearly, the period believed that electromagnetic energy (including light) has special occult powers.

More on the Attributes of Electromorphic Art

Every era alters the ratio among the senses and so creates a new body. The mechanical extensions of human beings into the world (wheel, mechanical tools, moveable type) gave way to the more inclusive, mythic technologies of the electric age (television, movies, computers, telephone, phonography). Every technological system creates new closures—it amputates one or more of the senses and thus engenders a new ratio amongst the senses. (38) McLuhan believed that new electric arts would foster a unity of the senses unknown since the invention of the printing press had created information-rich (“hot”) media that amplified sight and amputated the other sensory modalities. McLuhan went so far as to say that “language extends and amplifies man but it also divides his faculties. His collective consciousness or intuitive awareness is diminished by the technical extension of consciousness which is speech.”(39) Verbalization disrupts “the state of collective awareness [that] may have been the preverbal condition of men.” (40) The new electric orality would undo this damage. McLuhan’s Romantic enthusiasm led him to predict that the computer “promises by technology a Pentecostal condition of universal understanding and unity. The next logical step would seem to be … to by-pass languages in favor of a general cosmic consciousness which might be very like the collective unconscious dreamt of by Bergson.”(41)

Nonetheless, McLuhan was utterly clear that historical transitions of this sort are the source of the stresses and strains that accompany the appearance of each new technological system:

Any innovation threatens the equilibrium of the existing organization. … [T]he outering or extension of our bodies and senses in a “new invention” compels the whole of our bodies and senses to shift into new positions in order to maintain equilibrium. A new “closure” is effected in all our organs and senses both public and private by any new inventions. … Naturally the effects on language and literary style and subject matter were spectacular. (42)

Against the harmful effects of the closure of industrial technology and Enlightenment language and experience, McLuhan proposed to mobilize flows of energy along shifting, fluxing circuits that would destabilize taxonomies, liquify classificatory systems, and finally deliquesce the outmoded pedagogical regime that represses multisensory pre-literate experience. McLuhan proposed responding to challenges of the age of the electric circuitry by unleashing a renewed mythopoeic potential.

When Frye and McLuhan discussed the arts of the postmodern age they wrote about oral poetry, musique concrète, and electronic music. Oral poetry included the spoken or sung poetry and Surrealist prose of Leonard Cohen, along with the Beatles and Bob Dylan’s electric recordings. Both Frye and McLuhan thought deeply about television as exemplifying the attributes of the arts of the new era. They believed that these new forms of art might reverse print’s tendency to produce an inharmonious sensorium and an atomistic society. “The separation of function and the division of stages, spaces and tasks are characteristic of literate and visual society and of the Western world,” McLuhan said. “These divisions tend to dissolve through the action of the instant and organic interrelations of electricity.” (43)

Like Frye, McLuhan understood this deregulation of the body’s electric circuits to be a reversal, a Vichian ricorso to oral-poetic language, a form of expression that was still intimate with the body. McLuhan states in The Medium is the Massage,

What the Greeks meant by “poetry” was radically different from what we mean by poetry. Their “poetic” expression was a product of a collective psyche and mind. The mimetic form, a technique that exploited rhythm, meter, and music, achieved the desired psychological response in the listener. Listeners could memorize with greater ease what was sung than what was said. . . .

“Blind,” all-hearing Homer inherited this metaphorical mode of speech, a speech which, like a prism, refracts much meaning to a single point.

“Precision” is sacrificed for a greater degree of suggestion. Myth is the mode of simultaneous awareness of a complex group of causes and effects. Electric circuitry confers a mythic dimension on our ordinary individual and group actions. (44)

McLuhan’s insight into the postmodern age might be encapsulated thus: electricity is interpenetration and interpenetration is awareness: interpenetration or awareness is electricity’s message. Among McLuhan’s richest and most ponderable aphorisms is “EVERY-WHERE IS NOW HERE IN ECO-LAND” (45) Similarly, a notebook entry by Northrop Frye, with the heading “What Poets Say,” reads, “They say that everything is everywhere. They say that everything is everywhere at once. They say that all nature is alive.” (46) This shift from a systematic and mechanistic conception of reality to one that views reality as perpetually interacting energies—with every element continually interpenetrating all others—also saw the emergence of a new forma mentis, a new thought regime determining what thoughts could come forth. These new languages—and significantly, the language of media—associated with this new way of experiencing provided the categories within which our new ideas about reality were framed.

But on this, recall Plotinus on myth. Plotinus lays out a hermeneutics of myth in §9 of “On Love” (3.5):

Now myths, if they really are such, must do two things: split up temporally the things they refer to, and divide from one another many of the Entities’ aspects which, while existing as a unity, are yet distinct as regards rank and functions. After all, even reasoned discourses, like myths, on the one hand assume ‘births’ of things which are unbegotten, and, on the other, divide things which exist as a unity. When the myths have fulfilled their didactic function to the best of their ability, they make it possible for the perceptive learner to come to a re-integration. (3.5.9.24–29)

I pointed out in the second installment of this three-part essay, that Plotinus developed a hermeneutics of myth that involves two processes: the first is διαίρεσις (diaíresis, division) and the second is συναίρεσις (synaíresis, synthesis). (47) Plotinus tells us here that the διαίρεσις has a twofold character: it is both temporal and aspectual/conceptual. As concerns the temporal character of mythic διαίρεσις, myth, like rational discourse, presents diachronically realities that are atemporal—for example, myths suggest the birth of things which are unbegotten. As concerns the conceptual/aspectual character of mythic διαίρεσις, myths, like reasoned discourse, isolate aspects or characteristics of entities/persons whose existence is inextrically linked to a larger, organic whole. When a myth’s didactic function has been fulfilled, then a synairetic act of the interpreter re-unites these elements that have been separated. The allegories presented in mythic form come to life in the realm of actual beings.

Not the Logical Dialectic, Not Synthesis, Not Reconciliation, but Interpenetration: Whitehead Identifies the Linchpin of Postmodern Thought

Alfred North Whitehead anticipated the metaphysical impact of new technologies before the rapid increase in their control of communication systems. He presented the cosmos as an extraordinarily complex nexus of interpenetrating elements. Reality is not made up of bounded objects in space. It is made up of energy, and energy fluxes. Furthermore, it is: “a field of force—or, in other words a field of incessant activity.” (48)

And, “Long ago,” Whitehead wrote, Faraday remarked “that in a sense an electric charge is everywhere,” and “the modification of the electromagnetic field at every point of space at each instant owing to the past history of each electron is another way of stating the same fact.” (49) The basic lesson that Whitehead learned from the theory of electromagnetism is unambiguous:

The fundamental concepts are activity and process. … The notion of self-sufficient isolation is not exemplified in modern physics. There are no essentially self-contained activities within limited regions. … Nature is a theatre for the interrelations of activities. All things change, the activities and their interrelation. (50)

He added: “the togetherness of things involves some doctrine of mutual immanence. In some sense or other … each happening is a factor in the nature of every other happening.” (51) He sums up the position:

My theory involves the entire abandonment of the notion that simple location is the primary way in which things are involved in space-time. In a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every location. Thus, every spatio- temporal standpoint mirrors the world. (52)

In his magnum opus, Process and Reality, Whitehead proposes the hallmark idea that the whole of the universe penetrates every part; “Each actual entity … repeats in microcosm what the universe is in macrocosm.” (53) Similarly, “In a sense, every entity pervades the whole world.” (54)

As for his understanding of creativity—and among the features that have made Whitehead’s cosmology so appealing is the central place it gives to feeling and to creativity—Whitehead associates the quest for novelty with life. This “origination of conceptual novelty—novelty of appetition,” Whitehead characterizes as “a bid for freedom.” (55) This novelty allows the emergent society (the actual entity) to integrate more diverse features of the world, so as to interact with it more flexibly. “The purpose of this initiative,” Whitehead says, “is to receive the novel elements of the environment into explicit feelings with such subjective forms as conciliate them with the complex experiences proper to members of the structured society. Thus, in each concrescent occasion its subjective aim originates novelty to match the novelty of the environment.” (56)

This aesthetico-religious conception of a universe of total interpenetration in which all individual beings are enfolded within one all-comprehending Reality, and this same all-comprehending polity characterizes the being of each individual entity—in which each individual existence contains in itself all other individual beings, each of which contains all other beings, each of which comprehends all other beings, and so on, ad infinitum is the world-view of all religious poetry. Zen poetry captures that experience, and so does much Christian poetry. It is the central teaching of the great Avamtasaka Sutra, that Northrop Frye claimed became his vade mecum.

Imitating the Cosmos’s Creativity: Becoming One

For examples of electromorphic art, see Appendix, Part One

Both McLuhan and Frye agreed that artworks are mimetic. And both meant by that that the artist’s creative process imitates the creative force that engenders reality. According to Frye, William Blake (1757–1827) believed that God works through the artist to rebuild fallen creation. Thus, artists imitate the divine natura naturans. McLuhan also recognized that the dynamics of artmaking imitate the cosmic dynamics.

Aristotelian mimesis confirms the James Joyce approach, since it is a kind of recap of natural processes, whether of making sense via cognition or making a house by following the lines of Nature. For example, in the Physics, Book II, Chapter VIII, Aristotle writes: “Thus, if a house had been a thing made by Nature it would have been made in the same way as it is now by art; and if things made by nature were made also by art, they would come to be in the same way as by Nature.” Aristotle thus confirms the sacral quality of the cliché or artifact by aligning it with the cosmic forces, just as biologists say ontogeny recaps phylogeny, i.e., knowing and growing are one, which of course is the theme of The Portrait by Joyce. (57)

Here is the simple, compelling syllogism that drove the development of electromophic art: An artist’s creative process imitates the creativity of reality; the creativity of reality is at heart a cosmic electric process; therefore an artist’s creative process imitates an electric process. Much follows from this simple syllogism. First, an artist whose work is informed by the electric conception of reality will recognize the primacy of energy as characterized by unity, wholeness, and holism—such work will have an organic character, not the character of an assembly of parts. It will have no truck with detailed rendering of reality according to the perspectival system. The distinction between figure and ground is eliminated, as all elements everywhere on the picture surface take on equal importance. Consequently, electromorphic art is an art of flatness, of surface. As a result, electromorphic art elevates the importance of surface and texture. Simplified, flat shapes, without “realistic” chiaroscuro modeling and likely without clear boundaries—but definitely with gradient transitions—constitute the elements of the painting.

Further, each element will present itself as a novel concrescent occasion whose relationality matches the novelty of its environment. The imagination that brings forth such work engages in a form of weaving, selecting strands from each of the threads that will be integrated into each concrescent form. Each conscious act of imagination emerges within the cosmic creativity itself: it replicates on a grander scale the unconscious dynamics present at the microlevel of the concrescence of the actual occasion. There must be a feeling of mutual immanence in the societies’ relation to one another.

Concrescence can be seen to have the mutuality characteristic of activities on the plane of immanence: concrescence involves bringing what is outside into the emergent actual occasion. It makes what is distant part of the emergent entity. At the same time, the occasion makes its presence felt in every other location. In visual terms, this means a radical dynamic centering, as elements have a nisus toward the central element (and axial symmetry is remarkably common in electromorphic visual art). At the same time, this implosion toward the center is matched by an emanation from the center, as energy flows out from the flattened body. If, as Hans Hoffmann taught, push-and-pull relations, in which colors seem to advance from the picture plane or to recede into it, were the key source of tension in late modernist painting, then this tension between centripetal and centrifugal forces is the key source of tension in electromorphic art. Consider, William Blake’s Queen Katherine’s Dream (c.1825, see Appendix, Part One). Persons sit quietly in fatigue, while angels soar endlessly without effort. Yet she lives in that dream. But this is exactly what we expect from James Clerk Maxwell’s equations: centripetal and centrifugal forces are suggested by the form of his beautiful equations, which gave definitive mathematical form to experimenter Faraday’s intuitively elaborated findings, and in the process created the mathematical language through which electromagnetic reality would be interpreted.

I referred above to the idea that Northrop Frye drew from the first electromorphic artist, William Blake, the idea that artmaking is a mimetic process and that artists’ creative energies imitate the divine natura naturans. That idea turns out to be widely shared among electromorphic artists, insofar as they believe that artmaking imitates the process of concrescence. But the idea that the artist imitates the natura naturans often takes a more specific form: electromorphic art assumes biomorphic or phytomorphic forms: “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower” and “the hand that whirls the water in the pool” drives the creation of forms in painting and sculpture. (58) Electromorphic artists generally have noted that the eddies in pools, the shape of lighting, tree forms, and neural pathways share similar characteristics, and call on every sort of meandering or branching or ramifying form to imitate them. (Consider Van Gogh’s The Mulberry Tree in October of 1889.)

There is also in Blake, and in electromorphic art in general, a peculiar fusion of oracular statement and pithy, compressed form, characteristic of all oral forms. Northrop Frye comments on that fusion. To help formulate the analogy between the oracular and the witty, Frye begins with an apothegm from Heraclitus: “There is an exchange of all things for fire and of fire for all things, as there is of wares for gold and gold for wares.” (59) Frye notes,

Heraclitus is concerned with the perennial theme of the one and the many, the world of “all things” and the sense of unity that the mind constantly struggles for, which emerges in some form in practically every effort to make sense of a pluralistic world. . . . But unity, the oneness of things, cannot be expressed except by such a symbol as the word fire provides. Heraclitus apparently does not think that we go up to an “other” world where, in Yeats’s phrase again, we stand indefinitely in God’s holy fire. Sooner or later the descent back to the world of things takes place, and we begin to sink from the dry light of fire [the higher level on the scale of being] to the mud-vision of the dreaming ego [the lower level]. Perhaps everything consists of these two movements: of death passing into nothingness, of new life coming to birth from the same nothingness. We live each other’s deaths and die each other’s lives, he says: we move from “all things” to the unity they symbolize, and find that the symbol of unity, the fire, is also the symbol of all things. If so, then the illustration of buying wares with gold is to be taken seriously: we may have one or the other, but not both. (60)

This is akin to Plotinus, especially his remarks on love. Recall that in the first part of this three-part essay, following Armstrong, I commented that Ennead 6.7, “How the Multitude of Forms Came into Being, and On The Good,” depicts the realm of the Divine Intellect as a world “boiling with life,” an eternal world which somehow contains time and movement and change and process. The experience of Divine Life, coursing through the Universal (ὁ Νοῦς) stirs us with Love.

All things are filled full of life, and, we may say, boiling with life. They all flow, in a way, from a single spring, not like one particular breath or one warmth, but as if there was one quality which held and kept intact all the qualities in itself, of sweetness along with fragrance, and was at once the quality of wine and the characters of all tastes, the sights of colours and all the awarenesses of touch, and all that hearings hear, all tunes and every rhythm. (61) (6.7.12.24–31)

Later in the same Ennead, Plotinus writes,

Whatever it generated, then, was the power of the Good and had the form of good, and Intellect itself is good from [the many] which have the form of good, a good richly varied [sic]. And so, if one likens it to a living richly varied sphere, or imagines it as a thing all faces, shining with living faces, or as all the pure souls running together into the same place, with no deficiencies but having all that is their own, and universal Intellect seated on their summits so that the region is illuminated by intellectual light—if one imagined it like this one would be seeing it somehow as one sees another from outside; but one must become that, and make oneself the contemplation. (62) (6.7.15.23–33)

It is also akin to Alfred North Whitehead’s religious cosmology.

The creative process is thus to be discerned in that transition by which one occasion, already actual, enters into the birth of another instance of experienced value. There is not one simple line of transition from occasion to occasion, though there may be a dominant line. The whole world conspires to produce a new creation. It presents to the creative process its opportunities and limitations.

The limitations are the opportunities. The essence of depth of actuality—that is of vivid experience is definiteness. Now to be definite always means that the elements of a complex whole contribute to some one effect, to the exclusion of others. The creative process is a process of exclusion to the same extent as it is a process of inclusion. In this connection “to exclude” means to relegate to irrelevance in the æsthetic unity, and “to include” means to elicit relevance to that unity.

The birth of a new instance is a passage into novelty. Consider how any one actual fact, which I will call the ground, can enter into the creative process. The novelty which enters into the derivate instance is the information of the actual world with a new set of ideal forms. In the most literal sense the lapse of time is the renovation of the world with ideas. (63)

This, too, speaks the language of interpenetration.

The Beautiful as What Commands Our Love

Plato’s account in the Συμπόσιον (Symposium, The Drinking Party) and Plotinus’s (ca 204/5–270 CE) in the Ἐννεάδες (Enneads) connect beauty to love and desire, but locate beauty itself in the realm of the Forms; further, Plato, and later, the Neo-Platonists, locate the beauty of particular objects in their participation in the Form of the Good (or, what is the same, the Beautiful). Indeed, Plotinus’s account in one of its moments makes beauty a matter of what we might term ‘formedness’: having the definite shape characteristic of the kind of thing the object is.

We hold that all the loveliness of this world comes by communion in Ideal-Form. All shapelessness whose kind admits of pattern and form, as long as it remains outside of Reason and Idea, is ugly from that very isolation from the Divine-Thought. And this is the Absolute Ugly: an ugly thing is something that has not been entirely mastered by pattern, that is by Reason, the Matter not yielding at all points and in all respects to Ideal-Form. But where the Ideal-Form has entered, it has grouped and coordinated what from a diversity of parts was to become a unity: it has rallied confusion into co-operation: it has made the sum one harmonious coherence: for the Idea is a unity and what it moulds must come into unity as far as multiplicity may. (Plotinus, Ennead I.6 [22])

On the account that Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus offer, beauty is not merely a subjective feeling: it is objective—indeed more objective than the objects of the world and more objective even than the particular Forms, for it is a syncategorematic Transcendent, a sort of Form of Forms.

Plato and Aristotle disagree with each other as much on the topic of beauty as on any other their philosophies treat. Nonetheless, they are in accord in saying that beauty is objective and not simply the result of our feeling. Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus all assert that beauty results from an object’s displaying a fitting adaptation of its parts to one another and to the whole that is its form. The fitting adaptation of parts to one another can be stated mathematically as, for example, in the golden section—at any rate, the meetness of adaptation of parts one another and to the whole in a beautiful was considered an objective truth. The sculptor Polykleitos (fifth and fourth century BCE) sought to capture the ideal proportions of the human figure in his statues: his male nude Doryphoros (Latinize Doryphorus, The Spear Bearer, ca. 440 BCE) is often believed to achieve a close-to-ideal representation. Polykleitos also strove to work out a set of aesthetic principles governing these proportions, which became known as the Canon or Rule. The Canon was based on mathematical ratios to achieve what the Greeks called συμμετρία (symmetria). It is important to point out, in preparation for subsequent remarks on dynamic equilibrium, that συμμετρία (or Polykleitos’s Canon) does not require exact formal balance—in fact, exact formal balance was distained as lacking in tension and dynamism. As we can see from the contrapposto stance of Doryphoros, the συμμετρία sought for an exquisite balance between tension and relaxation: it was this balance that offered a visual image of harmony. Accordingly, Doryphoros was held up as a model of harmonious proportion to be emulated by students and masters alike: beauty could be reliably achieved by reproducing its objective proportions. The harmony of the parts made a beautiful object something appropriate to love; so the ancients ordinarily describe our relation to a beautiful object as a loving relationship. The ecstatic quality of that relationship was stated by Plotinus: “This is the spirit that Beauty must ever induce: wonderment and a delicious trouble, longing and love and a trembling that is all delight” (Plotinus, Ennead I.3 [23]).

In Τίμαιος (Timaios, Timaeus), a dialogue that became very influential in the Renaissance (and remained very influential right up to the beginning of the twentieth century), the protagonist, Timaeus, a man trained in Pythagorean doctrine, describes the origin and nature of the physical world. Timaeus/Plato propounds these ideas in a way especially apposite to our theme, by offering what amounts to a cosmogenic myth. The central figure in this drama of cosmogenesis is the δημιουργός (dēmiourgos, artisan, but usually given as Demiurge), a kind of primary arranger. Because the term demiurge has no familiar meaning to us, as it would have to Timaeus’s interlocutors, and because the term artisan or craftsperson doesn’t mean the same to English-speaking readers as δημιουργός meant to those listening to Timaeus, I am going to take the unusual step of substituting “Mistress and Governor” for Demiurge. (64) Characterizing the δημιουργός as a Mistress and Governor will help me to connect Plato’s/Timaeus’s argument to the electrological idea of an electromagnetic force (or, better, urging) that lovingly guides the universe towards beauty.

Timaeus’s first purpose is to explain that the universe is one, a whole whose unity is like that of a living creature. (65) To explain that wholeness, he says that the universe has a soul, traditionally referred to as the World-Soul. He then explains the necessity for the world to possess intelligence: since unintelligent beings are less fair in their appearance than intelligent creatures, and since intelligence needs to be settled in a soul, the Mistress and Governor “put intelligence in soul, and soul in body” in order to make a living and intelligent whole. “Wherefore, using the language of probability, we may say that the world became a living creature truly endowed with soul and intelligence by the providence of God” (30a–b). Using the same axiological thought pattern, Timaeus notes that since the part is imperfect compared to the whole, the world must be complete, whole, unique, and perfect. It follows that the Mistress and Governor did not create many worlds, but one only (31b).

Similar ideas were offered in the medieval period. For example, the Christian Neo-Platonist Dionysus the Pseudo-Areopagite wrote in “De Divinis Nominibus” (late fifth or early sixth century CE):

The Superessential Beautiful is called “Beauty” because of that quality which It imparts to all things severally according to their nature, and because It is the Cause of the harmony and splendour in all things, flashing forth upon them all, like light, the beautifying communications of its originating ray; and because It summons all things to fare unto Itself (from whence It hath the name of “Fairness”), and because It draws all things together in a state of mutual Interpenetration. (66)

A misreading of Plato by philosophers who played a role in synthesizing Greek philosophy and Judaeo-Christian faith—and, thus, laying the foundations for Western Christianity (the Eastern Orthodox tradition did not make the same error)—accorded the δημιουργός (demiurge) a different status than did the Greeks, and that difference made possible a misidentification of the δημιουργός with the divine. The misreading was this: Plato distinguishes (Πολιτεία, Republic, 508c–509a) the Demiurge from “the first principle of all,” which is the Idea of the Good (ἡ τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ ἰδέα); however, later thinkers proposed that since the Good (the first principle of all) makes all other Forms intelligible and provides be-ing to all other Forms (Plato likens the Good to the Sun, which makes physical objects visible and generates life on earth), and since only a mind could accomplish this, the Good must have an ideal character (that is, must be mind-like)—so the Good must be God. In the end, the δημιουργός became identified with ἡ τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ ἰδέα and ἡ τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ ἰδέα with the Divine. This identification was given force by Plotinus’s drawing on Plato’s ἡ τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ ἰδέα for his notion of the supreme One, which is above Intellect (Νοῦς, Noûs) and the first principle of all. Later, Philo of Alexandria identified the Old Testament God with the unmoved mover and ἡ τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ ἰδέα; in doing this, Plato’s or Plotinus’s bodiless God replaced the Warrior God of First Covenant, who joined with the people of Israel to defeat their enemies and to deliver the chosen people or who, in act of retributive justice, waged war against the people of Israel, usually by commanding foreign entities to take them captive.

Aristotle’s active intellect (νοῦς ποιητικός, noῦs poiêtikos) went through a similar misinterpretation. Aristotle, as we have seen, had distinguished between the prime or unmoved mover (ὃ οὐ κινούμενον κινεῖ, ho ou kinoúmenon kineî) and the νοῦς ποιητικός. However, Aristotle also described the νοῦς ποιητικός, which is supremely intelligible, as the cause of intelligibility. In this sense, the νοῦς ποιητικός also had similarities not just to the δημιουργός (demiurge) but also to ἡ τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ ἰδέα (the Idea of the Good). So, a similar process of thought that led to identifying Plato’s demiurge with the Idea of the Good, and the Idea of the Good with divinity, led as well to identifying the active intellect with understanding beings (their intelligibility) through their formal and final causes and, in the end, with divinity. To be is to be intelligible; what grants beings intelligibility is the active intellect, which is itself the very paragon of intelligibility; the active intellect, in making things intelligible, gives them be-ing; to be intelligible is to manifest the good. The active intellect is the creator of beings and the paradigm of goodness—therefore, it is Goodness, and so it is divine.

This identification of the Good as the source of intelligibility, and of goodness and being with the divine, has another implication, one that explains why the cinema was accorded special privilege when electrology revived this ancient cosmology. For the identification of the Good with God conflated God with light. The reason for this conflation can be traced back to Plato (though Plato would not have endorsed it): we have seen that Plato, in the Πολιτεία (Politeia, literally, The Constitution, but usually translated as Republic) VI (507b–509c), offered the analogy of the sun to suggest that ἡ τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ ἰδέα (the Form of the Good) is the source of both be-ing and intelligibility. The sense of sight is different from the other senses, Socrates states there, since except for sight, all that is needed for sensation is the sense organ and object that is sensed: all that is required for someone to experience sweetness is a sense of taste and something sweet to be tasted. Sight is different in this respect: to see something—anything—the sense of sight and object to be seen are required, but something additional is required, namely light. The organ of vision and the object can be present, but when light is absent, nothing can be seen. At this point, Socrates exclaims, “Then with no slight idea have the sense and the power of being seen been united by a more precious bond than the other pairs!—unless light is quite without worth” (507e–508a). Socrates then asks Glaucon, “which of the gods in heaven can you put down as cause and master of this, whose light makes our sight see so beautifully and the things to be seen?” (508a) Glaucon responds by saying all would believe that this is the sun. Socrates then unpacks the analogy, saying that as the sun illumines visible things with light, so the Idea of the Good (metaphorically) illuminates the things of the intelligible realm (the forms or ideas) with truth. Also, as the eye’s ability to see is made possible by the light of the sun, so the soul’s ability to know is made possible by the truth of Goodness:

Understand then, that it is the same with the soul, thus: when it settles itself firmly in that region in which truth and real being brightly shine, it understands and knows it and appears to have reason; but when it has nothing to rest on but that which is mingled with darkness—that which becomes and perishes, it opines, it grows dim-sighted, changing opinions up and down, and is like something without reason. (508d)

The point of this metaphor is twofold: Socrates is explaining to Glaucon that as the sun illuminates the visible with light, so the Good illuminates the intelligible with truth. The light of the sun enables the eye to see; likewise, the truth of the Good makes it possible for the soul to achieve luminous understanding. Furthermore, in elaborating on the analogy of the sun, Socrates also distinguishes between “that which becomes and perishes” and that which perdures, ever self-identical; knowledge is to be found in “that region in which truth and real being brightly shine.” (508d). This is the intelligible illuminated by the highest idea, that of goodness. Behind this is the underlying assumption that true knowledge is unchanging and so of that which is not subject to change; so Socrates argues that the bodily senses can only bring us to what Socrates calls δόξα (doxa), a word meaning belief or popular opinion. Finally, when introducing this discussion of the Form of the Good and its relation to other forms and to beings, Socrates speaks of those others as “offspring [ἔκγονος, ékgonos, descendent] of The Good and most nearly made in its likeliness” (506e) or as that “which Goodness has begotten proportionate to itself” (508b). (67) This is the key source of the medieval era’s conviction that all beings owe their being to Beneficence.

This is the tenor of the metaphor that Socrates proposes. However, Socrates’s use of this metaphor resulted in its vehicle being turned into the supreme ontological reality, as light assumed the status in the Neo-Platonic tradition of what is most real. (One could very well perform a Derridean deconstruction of what happens here, for the metaphor becomes ontologically reified.) Thus, Plotinus wrote of light as the principle of the intelligible realms. Frederick M. Schroeder, among the most distinguished commentators on Plotinus, notes, “The most adequate of all the sensible figures employed by Plotinus to describe intelligible reality is light” and explains this by noting (among other things) that light is

in an immediate, dynamic, and continuous relationship with its source. The source has only to be and to remain what it is for light to proceed from it. . . . Form does not derive its value from being a pattern on the basis of which other things are made or understood. The reverse is true. It is by being what it is in its intrinsic nature, without mediation, that it both creates and explains all that proceeds from it as its image. The question of its being and its relationship to the world will not ultimately admit of separation.

The image of light allows Plotinus to accomplish this purpose, since for him light is an effect of the source alone, while, and indeed because, the source remains what it is in an undiminished giving. (68)

Schroeder also notes that for Plotinus, Form is not merely a cause, but an object of (some sort of) experience. Of whatever sort Plotinus might have thought this experience to be, it is clearly ecstatic:

Many times it has happened: lifted out of the body into myself, becoming external to all other things and self-encentered; beholding a marvellous beauty; then, more than ever, assured of community with the loftiest order; enacting the noblest life, acquiring identity with the divine; stationing within It by having attained that activity; poised above whatsoever within the Intellectual is less than the Supreme: yet there comes the moment of descent from intellectual to reasoning, and after that sojourn in the divine, I ask myself how it happens that I can now be descending, and how did the Soul ever enter into my body, the Soul which, even within the body, is the high thing it has shown itself to be. (69)

The experience is that of “beholding a beauty wonderfully great,” to use Schroeder’s translation of the phrase in the second line above. (70) Plotinus characterizes the experience of sensuous beauty as a form of admiring “all its good proportion and the mighty excellence of its order, and the splendour of form which is manifested in the stars.” (71) The passage makes abundantly clear the foundational ideas that justified beliefs in the possibility of developing a thoroughly Pythagoreanized Neo-Platonism.

The influence of Pythagoras on Plato’s philosophy was deep, but a number of late antique thinkers developed an even more Pythagoreanized Platonism. A key figure in this was Iamblichus (ca. 245–ca. 325), the author of a multi-volume work (likely comprising ten books) titled Συλλογή των Πυθαγορείων Δογμάτων (Syllogē tōn Pythagoreiōn Dogmatōn, Collection of Pythagorean Doctrines, or On Pythagoreanism), a collection of biographies and treatises whose central purpose was to lead the soul from the material to the immaterial, from the transient to the immutable. The Florentine Platonist Marsilio Ficino (1433–99) knew at least four books in this set—Περί του πυθαγορικού βίου (perί toy pythagorikoύ bίoy, On the Pythagorean Life), the Προτρεπτικός επί φιλοσοφίαν (Protreptikόs epί filosofίan, Protreptic [or Incentive] to Philosophy), Περί της κοινής μαθηματικής επιστήμης (Peri tēs koinēs mathēmatikēs epistēmēs, literally On the Common Mathematical Science, but generally translated as On the General Mathematical Science), and Περί της Νικομάχου Γερασηνού Αριθμητικής Εισαγωγής (Peri tēs Nikomachou Gerasēnou Arithmētikēs Eisagōgēs, Commentary on Nicomachus of Gerasa’s Introduction to Arithmetic). Ficino not only knew but also produced summaries of these four works; he was certainly aware that Iamblichus had recast Pythagoras as a guide that the gods sent down from Apollo’s train to help humans, and that those who met the “divine Pythagoras” when he was young were so impressed by his serenity, sweetness, and balance that there was something god-like to him. When his disciples were having a hard time going off to sleep, Pythagoras’s music could purify their minds and bring them pleasant, even prophetic dreams.

These ideas likely seem, prima facie, a long way from the cinema-inspired aesthetics of the mid-twentieth century. However, reflection—not even rising to lucubration—should enable anyone to convince him or herself of the connection. I have been suggesting that the development of the era of electrology saw a revival of a version—updated, to be sure—of the Pythagoreanized Neo-Platonism of the Renaissance. The Renaissance was an heir to the idea of philosophy as a spiritual practice that Pierre Hadot, over the last three decades, has done so much to return to common awareness—the emphasis by later Classical writers mythologizing the degree of Pythagoras’s spiritual development is testimony to the truth of Hadot’s arguments. But, remarkably, Hadot’s insights have direct bearing on recent poetics and art theory. For Hadot, ancient philosophy “was a mode of existing-in-the-world, which had to be practiced at each instant and the goal of which was to transform the whole of the individual’s life.” (72) And further,

Attention to the present moment is, in a sense, the key to spiritual exercise. It frees us from the passions, which are always caused by the past or the future—two areas which do not depend on us. By concentrating on the minuscule present moment, which, in its exiguity, is always bearable and controllable, attention increases our vigilance. Finally, attention to the present moment allows us to accede to cosmic consciousness, by making us attentive to the infinite value of each instant, and causing us to accept each moment of existence from the viewpoint of the universal law of the cosmos. (73)

But this is exactly the spiritual state involved in spontaneous creation.

There is a further connection: Hadot argues that many works of ancient philosophy were written “not so much to inform the reader of a doctrinal content but to form him, to make him traverse a certain itinerary in the course of which he will make spiritual progress” and adduces Plotinus and Augustine as good examples of this form of writing. But that form is just the form (Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos argues) of Ezra Pound’s magnum opus, The Cantos. The Open Form poets—Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Robin Blaser—to a one electrological/electromorphic poets, adopted it from Pound. (74) The connections between mid-twentieth-century poetics and Renaissance Neo-Platonism are surprisingly close, so close they can well astonish us. Renaissance theology, which often saw itself—as the writing of Nicholas of Cusa (1401–64), Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandolla (1463–94), and Petrus Bungus (?, but before 1550–1601) all show—as furthering syncretism generally and more particularly of showing the compatibility of Greek cosmology (for example Pythagorean numerology) and Christian doctrine.

A Pythagorean cosmology, with its belief in the parallel between the self (or Self) and world, was passed down to the twentieth century. Artmaking and art theory in the early twentieth century give evidence of a new version of the cosmology taking hold—the same development is evinced in C. G. Jung’s works, especially in his idea of an unus mundus whose microcosm was the Self. (74) By the middle of the twentieth century the process had, to all intents and purposes, completed itself, so that artists (who, as Marshall McLuhan pointed out repeatedly, unlike most of us, live in the present and sense its trajectory) were thinking in electromorphic terms. Allen Ginsberg describing a life-transforming experience of a vision of the unica mystica in 1948, of hearing Blake’s voice reciting poetry knew exactly how to understand what the experience meant: it concerned vibrations, light, emanating from the One. Ginsberg’s description of the experience offers a reworked Pythagoreanized Neo-Platonism (with remarkable resonances of the Timaeus’s Mistress and Governor).

But the spirit of the universe was what I was born to realize. What I was speaking about visually was, immediately, that the cornices in the old tenement building in Harlem across the backyard court had been carved very finely in 1890 or 1910. And were like the solidification of a great deal of intelligence and care and love also. So that I began noticing in every corner where I looked evidences of a living hand, even in the bricks, in the arrangement of each brick. Some hand placed them there—that some hand had placed the whole universe in front of me. That some hand had placed the sky. No, that’s exaggerating—not that some hand had placed the sky but that the sky was the living blue hand itself. Or that God was in front of my eyes—existence itself was God. . . . My body suddenly felt light, and a sense of cosmic consciousness, vibrations, understanding, awe, and wonder and surprise. And it was a sudden awakening into a totally deeper real universe than I’d been existing in. (76)

This Neo-Platonic/Pythagorean cosmology was revitalized with the idea of an all-pervasive electromagnetic force that steers the universe. Artists began to assert that their works were brought into being by this force—that their role was only that of a channel (Leonard Cohen uses the phrase “a brief elaboration of a tube”) through which that engendering energy passes. Philip Whalen states in his preface to Every Day,

A continuous fabric (nerve movie?) exactly as wide as these lines—“continuous” within a certain time-limit, say a few hours of total attention and pleasure: to move smoothly past the reader’s eyes, across the brain: the moving sheet has shaped holes in it which trip the synapse finger-levers of reader’s brain causing great section of his nervous system—distant galaxies hitherto unsuspected (now added to International Galactic Catalog)—to LIGHT UP. Bring out new masses, maps old happy memory. (77)

R. Bruce Elder

Appendix

Section One: Electromorphic Images

Appendix, Part 2: A Gallery of Images from Alone (All Flesh Shall See It Together) and by R. Bruce Elder and Ajla Odobašić.

End Notes

1. In issue 40 of La Furia Umana, (April 2021) I developed, in an article titled “Gioli’s Cinema, Gioli’s Touch,” an analysis of the films and photographs of Paolo Gioli that was based on Irigaray’s idea of phallogocentrism.
2. The imago hominis that comes to us from the Greeks by way of the Enlightenment puts the role of intention at the very centre of human’s availability to the Good. The senses (flesh) would draw us away from the Good, but will can curb the senses and thereby allow reason to take its rightful place. Through reason we comprehend the precepts that found good judgement and good comportment. How wrong this account seems when we consider the feelings that arise at times like this, when the flesh’s openness to the other is revealed to be the very core of charity.
3. Renato Barilli, The Science of Culture and the Phenomenology of Styles, trans. Corrado Federici (Montreal and Kingston: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 2012), 84.
4. Barilli, The Science of Culture, 86–87; Urizen is one of Blake’s Four Zoas, the fourfold divisions of God—this Zoa a fallen Satanic figure representing the south and Newtonian reason and law.
5. Ibid., 91.
6. Ibid., 126.
7. Umberto Boccioni, “Fondamento plastico della scultura e pittura futuriste,” Lacerba 1, no. 6 (1913): 51–52. Also in Umberto Boccioni, Gli scritti editi e inediti, ed. Zeno Birolli (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1971), 137–44. In English: “The Plastic Foundations of Futurist Sculpture and Painting,” in Futurism: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 139–42, here 140–41. I discuss this work at considerable length in my book Cubism and Futurism: Spiritual Machines and the Cinematic Effect.
8. Ibid., 141.
9. One might feel entitled to consider this as giving voice to a narcissism of small differences, by exaggerating the differences between Boccioni’s and the Symbolists’ ideas about higher reality (which in the end are rather slight). If one is inclined to interpret this statement in that manner, he or she might consider how adamantly Boccioni must have believed the Futurists fundamentally transformed the metaphysics of Symbolism by introducing into its vibratory metaphysics the concepts of force, power, and speed.
10. Umberto Boccioni, “La pittura futurista.” Lecture given in Rome to the Circolo Artistico Internazionale futurista on May 29, 1911, in Altri inediti e apparati critici, ed. Zeno Birolli (Milan: Feltrielli, 1972), 11–29, here 29; the lecture also appears in two versions in Ilaria Schiaffini, Umberto Boccioni: Stati d’animo, teoria e pittura (Milan: Silvana, 2002), 158–81.
11. McLuhan and McLuhan, Laws of Media, 41. Again, I believe this statement represents Marshall McLuhan’s views. (I don’t think every passage in The Laws of Media does.) McLuhan cites “page xv” as the source in the Jammer volume. That is incorrect; it is actually page xvii.
12. Ibid., 19. McLuhan is citing F. M. Cornford, “The Invention of Space,” in Essays in Honour of Gilbert Murray, ed. H. A. L Fisher et al. (London: Allen and Unwin, 1936), 215–25, here 219.

13. McLuhan and McLuhan, Laws of Media, 19. McLuhan is citing Cornford, “The Invention of Space,” 230.
14. Many readers will have learned in high school that Newton’s equation relating force, mass, and acceleration, F = ma. The discrepancy involved in having two equations for relating mass and force troubled Einstein: to reconcile them (by showing that the equation we learned in high school is just a special case of the more general equation that provides acceptable predictions under restricted circumstances) is one of Einstein’s motivations for developing the general theory of relativity (November 1915).
15. Ezra Pound, the final four lines of Canto 74, in The Cantos (New York: New Directions, 1970), 449.
16. Ezra Pound, “Affirmations II : Vorticism,” The New Age 16, no. 11, January 14, 1915, 277–78, esp. 277; collected in Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts, ed. Harriet Zinnes (New York: New Directions, 1980), 5–10, here 7.
17. Ezra Pound, “Medievalism,” a section of “Cavalcanti” (1931), originally published in Make It New (1934), collected in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1960), 149–55, here 154–55.
    Pound is onto something here. The background to Pound’s theory of the vortex has not been recognized. In 1858, Helmholtz published “Über Integrale der hydrodynamischen Gleichungen, welche den Wirbelbewegungen entsprechen” (On Integrals of Hydrodynamic Equations, which Correspond to Vortex Motions) in the Journal für die reine und angewandte Mathematik 55 (1858): 25–55. His work on fluid mechanics introduced the idea of vortex filaments, sheaves that bundle together many vortex lines (which are everywhere tangent to the vorticity vector). An important part of this work involved studying the behaviour of these filaments when they cross an infinitely small surface element of the fluid: he noted these vortex filaments are conserved during the flow evolution, though they are usually stretched or distorted. He commented on the “remarkable analogy between vortex-motion of fluids and the electro-magnetic action of electric currents” and demonstrated that vortices exert forces on one another, and those forces take a form reminiscent of the magnetic forces between wires carrying electric current.

Helmholtz’s report set three friends to work on applying the great German physicist’s findings on fluid flow to atomic theory and electromagnetic theory. One of these investigations was James Clerk Maxwell, who described Helmholtz’s interest as being concerned with “water twists,” one was William Thomson, the other Peter Guthrie Tait (1831–1901), a Scottish mathematical physicist with whom Thomson wrote the Treatise on Natural Philosophy. Tait’s was probably the pioneering work. He identified these behaviours of fluid vortices:
1). Vortex rings behave as independent solids.
2). In collision with one another, the vortex rings rebounded as if they were quivering elastic solids, like rings of rubber.
3). [Tait used smoke rings to illustrate the properties of vortices to his audience and] these smoke rings illustrated fascinating vibration modes about their circular form.
4). On each attempt to cut the smoke rings with a knife, the smoke rings would simply wriggle around the knife. The smoke rings were indivisible.
(I have quoted these points from Samuel L. Lomonoco, “The Modern Legacies of Thomson’s Atomic Vortex Theory in Classical Electrodynamics,” AMS PSAPM 51 [1996]: 145–66, esp. 146.)

Thomson was in the audience when Tait gave the series of lectures expounding his work on knot theory and vortices. Thomson worked at the beginning of the age of modern atomic theory and was deeply engaged with its issues. He was impressed at the permanence of these knots, so he asked himself whether atoms might be vortices in an æther that he (like most other scientists of his era) presumed pervades space—he was still a young researcher when he became convinced that a vortex ring in a perfect fluid would possess perfect elasticity. The postmodern idea of infinite plasticity finds a scientific basis in this vortical analysis of flow evolution.
Postmodern metaphysics views matter as congealed energy: we can now describe the matter more exactly: it is the result of energy being whirled into stable (knot) forms. This belief founds Pound’s notion of the vortex, and it explains the deep meaning of the slogan “every force evolves a form.”

18. Pound alludes to Guido Cavalanti’s Philosophic Canzone—the passages cited here are all translated in Canto 36, “mezzo oscura [luce] rade”—in the middle of darkness, light shines infrequently; “risplende in sè perpetuale effecto”—shines in itself, a Perpetual Effect; “a lui si diri”—draws to itself.
19. Roger Penrose, The Road to Reality: The Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe (London: Vintage Books, 2005), 441; “Maxwell’s equations” is italicized in Penrose’s original; the emphasis on the phrase “these fields . . .” is mine.
    Penrose makes this comment on the importance of Faraday and Maxwell’s contributions to ensuing developments in physics, cosmology, and mathematics.
    Maxwell’s equations seem to have a compelling naturalness and simplicity that almost make us wonder how the electric/magnetic fields could ever have been considered to obey any other laws. But such a perspective on things ignores the fact that it was the Maxwell equations themselves that lead to a very great many of these mathematical developments. It was the form of these equations that led Lorentz, Poincaré, and Einstein to the spacetime tranformations of special relativity which, in turn, led to Minkowski’s conception of spacetime. In the
    spacetime framework, these equations found a form that developed naturally into Cartan’s theory of differential forms; and the charge and magnetic conservation laws of Maxwell’s theory led to the body of integral expressions that are referred to . . . as the fundamental theorem of exterior calculus.
    . . . It was . . . the need to understand electric and magnetic fields that largely supplied the driving force behind these developments—these, and the gravitational field also. (Penrose, The Road to Reality, 441–42.)
20. Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
    1920), 146.
21. Ibid., 190.
22. Ibid., 76.
23. Alfred North Whitehead, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919; 2nd ed., 1925; repr., New York: Dover Publications, 1982), 62.
    The title of the Whitehead’s book reveals his interest in combatting what he saw as the pernicious influence of David Hume’s “sensationalist empiricism,” critiquing it (along lines that postmodern thinkers have made familiar), namely that pure sense perception reveals only a succession of spatial patterns of impressions of colour, sound, smell, etc., but it does not reveal any causal relatedness to interpret it (any form of process to render it intelligible). Whitehead advocates a radical empiricist methodology, which takes into account not only of sense data (colours, sounds, smells, etc.) but also of a manifold of natural relations and an electrological world view, in which the constituents of reality are not “simply located” substances (bits of matter, really), but internally related processes and events. He critiqued Hume’s scepticism for his exclusive reliance on the procession of forms of sense data. In a related vein, he critiqued Newton’s scientific materialism,

which presupposes the ultimate fact of an irreducible brute matter, or material, spread through space in a flux of configurations. In itself such a material is senseless, valueless, purposeless. It just does what it does do, following a fixed routine imposed by external relations which do not spring from the nature of its being. (Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World [New York: Macmillan, 1925], 25.)
Science, Whitehead insists, explains the dynamics of reality in terms of be-ing. The present volume claims that notion is central to the new conception of science that emerged at the turn of the century.

24. Walt Whitman was among the first to recognize the important relation among the ascendency of America, electricity, and democracy. In Democratic Vistas, writing of what will allow America to “lead the world,” he notes: “There will be daily electric communication with every part of the globe. What an Age! What a Land!” (Walt Whitman, Complete Prose Works [Frankfurt am Main: Outlook Verlag, 2018], 200–248, esp. 238).
25. The mathematics involved is ravishingly beautiful. Maxwell’s equations have charmed students for decades and decades, and their beauty accounts for why T-shirts emblazoned with them, in contemporary mathematical notation, have been purchased by engineering students since at least the 1950s, if not earlier. I would love to go into this mathematics in some depth, to extend our discussion beyond static electricity to electric currents, to show the science’s beauty, which appealed to many artists, Futurists and others. But I would face the prospect of diminishing returns for increasing expenditures of effort.
    I have published a commentary on the mathematics of Maxwell’s equations, by a visual artist for visual artists, R. Bruce Elder, “A Digital Filmmaker’s Reflection on Flux, Relational Reality, the Theory of Electromagnetism, the Most Beautiful Equations in Physics, and How to Renew Moving Pictures by Remembering High Modernism,” Parol: Quaderni d’arte et epistemologia 30/31 (2019): 51–102.
26. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 106.
27. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (originally publication 1929), Corrected Edition., ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: The Free Press, 1978), 91; emphases added.
28. Nikola Tesla, “Experiments with Alternate Currents of Very High Frequency and Their Application to Methods of Artificial Illumination,” a lecture delivered before A.I.E.E., at Columbia College, May 20, 1891; first published in Electrical Engineer (New York) 8 (July 8, 1891): 25–48 and reprinted many times after it appeared there.

29. Tesla’s conception of the æther as an eternal recipient and transmitter of infinite energy, as resembling a soul that animates the [material] universe, differs from the common, “folk” conception of the material realm just as much as Whitehead’s does.
30. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 7.
31. Ibid., 21.
32. Ibid.
33. Michael Faraday, “Observations on Mental Education” (a talk delivered to members of the Royal Institution, May 6, 1854), in Experimental Researches in Physics and Chemistry (London: Taylor and Francis, 1859), 463–491, here 471, 463.
34. If Isaac Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687) served as the defining document for the era of mechanics, then James Clark Maxwell’s A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field (1865) served as the enabling publication that, by synthesizing many intellectual and conceptual themes that had emerged over the previous century with his own discoveries, created the groundwork that allowed a new paradigm to develop—and like Newton’s work, Maxwell’s provided the first expansive theoretical formulation of that paradigm, still in statu nascendi. In A Dynamical Theory . . . , Maxwell showed that electric and magnetic fields travel through space as waves moving at the speed of light, and he argued that light is a phenomenon caused by undulations in the very same medium that is the cause of electric and magnetic phenomena. In arguing this, Maxwell developed a unified theory that treated light and electrical phenomena as essentially similar. This unified theory enabled scientists to predict the existence of radio waves: soon after, the radio itself was developed, establishing beyond any doubt that Maxwell’s equations founded a new model of reality. The capacity of electronic devices to produce from invisible waves in the atmosphere palpable sounds and sights made evident to all that electromagnetic signals could produce the impression of a material reality.
    Electromagnetic events came to be seen as fundamental entities whose immediate relevance to our construction of reality is continuously transmitted to us.
35. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 92.
36. Ibid., 98. In light of Pound’s suggestion that “perhaps algebra has queered our geometry,” it is worth highlighting that here Whitehead refers to an electromagnetic society and notes that it is a special case contained within the geometric society.
37. Nikola Tesla, “The New York Lecture: Experiments with Alternate Currents of Very High Frequency, and Their Applications to Methods of Artificial Illumination Electric Potential Currents” (delivered at Columbia College, May 20, 1891), in The Inventions, Researches and Writings of Nikola Tesla, 2nd ed., ed. Thomas Commerford Martin (New York: The Electrical Engineer, 1894), chapter 26, 143–97, here 164.
38. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Signet Books, 1964), 44.
39. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 79.
40. Understanding Media, 80.
41. Understanding Media, 80.
42. Understanding Media, 221–222
43. Understanding Media, 247.

44. Marshall McLuhan, M, and Quentin Fiore. 1967. The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (New York: Bantam Books, 1967), 113–115.
45. Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt. Take Today: The Executive as Dropout. (Don Mills, ON: Longmann, 1972), 297.
46. Northrop Frye, Northrop Frye Unbuttoned: Wit and Wisdom from the Notebooks and Diaries, edited by R. D. Denham. (Toronto: Anansi, 2004), 308.
47. Διαίρεσις can mean division; the verb associated with it is διαιρεῖν (diaireín), which can mean to divide, pull apart, decompose, analyse, disassociate, or disintegrate. The verb form associated with συναίρεσις is συναιρεῖν (synaireín), which can mean to meet, co-operate, associate, re-recompose, re-integrate, associate, contract, synthesize. Elsewhere, Plotinus associates συναιρεῖν with συμπλοκē (sumplokē, interweaving.)
48. A. N. Whitehead, Nature and Life (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, originally published 1934, reprinted 2011), 37
49. A.N. Whitehead, The Concept of Nature. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, originally published 1920, reprinted 1986), 144.
50. Whitehead, Nature and Life, 35–36.
51. Nature and Life, 87.
52. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 91.
53. Process and Reality, 215.
54. Process and Reality, 28.
55. Process and Reality, 104.
56. Process and Reality, 102.
57. Marshall McLuhan, and W. Watson. 1970. “Mimesis, or Making Sense,” in McLuhan and Watson, From Cliché to Archetype, 146–150 (New York: Viking Books, 1970), here 148–150.
58. Dylan Thomas, 18 Poems. (London: Sunday Referee, 1934), 17.
59. Northrop Frye, “The Symbol as a Medium of Exchange” in Symbols in Art and Life, here 15; in Complete Works, vol. 18, 340
60. Ibid.
61. Armstrong offers helpful footnote for “one particular breath or warmth” (οἷον ἑνός τινος πνεύματος ἢ θερμότητος μιᾶς): “Plotinus may be suggesting here that the life of the intelligible world in its complex unity is not to be thought of in terms of Stoic πνεῦμα.”
62. Armstrong comments on the phrase “richly varied sphere” [σφαίρᾳ ζώσῃ ποικίλῃ], “There is a reminiscence here of Plato’s description of the true surface of the earth in the myth of the Phaedo (110B7).” He then goes on to offer a remarkable gloss on the phrase, “or imagines it as a thing all faces, shining with living faces . . . [εἴτε παμπρόσωπόν τι χρῆμα λάμπον ζῶσι προσώποις . . .]”—Armstrong says about that passage, “What follows is strangely reminiscent of Indian many-faced representations of the gods (it is possible, though of course by no means certain, that Plotinus might have seen some small Indian image of this kind in Alexandria or elsewhere).” Enneads, vol 7 of Armstrong translation (comprising chapters 6 to 9), p. 137, ftnt 2. (on 6.7.15.26–7). In any event, the passage foretells attributes of the electromorphic aesthetic (and of Alone (All Flesh Shall It Together))

63. Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making, 113–114.
64. The term artisan does not mean the same now as it meant to Greeks of the Classical era, because what we mean by art or craft is not the same as what the Greeks meant by τέχνη, with which artisanship is associated, nor are we so clear that every craft has an ἔργον, or function (i.e., purpose) that it is fitted to accomplish.
65. This use of a biological entity as a model for cosmic unity is an interesting feature of Τίμαιος: the study of biology supplied Aristotle with many of the models he used to understand the cosmos, society, human be-ing, human relations, and natural processes; Plato, on the other hand, generally used mathematical (specifically geometric) analogies. (Of course, Πολιτεία [Politeia, Republic] is based on overarching analogy between the constitution of the society and the constitution of the human soul, which arguably, displays biological features.)
66. From The Divine Names, 701C, quoted in Umberto Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages,
    trans. Hugh Bredin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 18.
67. Similar comments are made at Νόμοι (Nómoi, Laws, begun ca. 360 BCE, left uncompleted) 897d–e and Φαῖδρος (Phaidros, Phaedrus, ca. 370 BCE) 246a.
68. Frederic M. Schroeder, Form and Transformation: A Study in the Philosophy of Plotinus (Montreal and Kingston: McGill–Queen’s Press, 1992), 25.
69. Stephen MacKenna, Plotinus: The Enneads, 3rd rev. ed., ed. B. S. Page (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), 4.8 [6].1.1–11.
70. Schroeder’s translation appears in Form and Transformation, 5.
71. The citation comes from Ennead 2.9 [33].16 (Schroeder, Form and Transformation, 7).
    Ficino’s ideas about the “divine Pythagoras” were supported by his awareness of an ancient tradition that maintained that Pythagoras had made direct contact with Jewish thinkers and was aware of Jewish tradition. Pythagoras served the Renaissance as an early advocate for forging an alliance between Greek philosophy and Jewish religiosity: furthermore, he brought together Greek rationality and Eastern spirituality (he was said to have studied “in the Orient” with Phoenicians, Egyptians, and Babylonians, and brought an understanding of their ideas to Greece).
72. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, trans. Arnold I. Davidson and Michael Chase (Oxford: Blackwells, 1995), 265.
73. Ibid., 84–85.
74. See Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos, The Celestial Tradition: A Study of Ezra Pound’s “The Cantos” (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1992). On a personal note, I have argued that the form of my forty-two-hours-long film, The Book of All the Dead, which takes Pound and Augustine as stand-in protagonists (and is patterned on The Cantos), began with the wager that the highly fictionalized representation of the maker of this work would become an artist worthy to compose a Paradiso.
75. I comment on the analogization of the macrocosm and microcosm (a topos in art influenced by Gnosticism, as well as in cosmopoetic art generally) in A Body of Vision; there I also remark on the parallels between Stan Brakhage’s Dog Star Man (1961–64) and the cosmology expounded in Jung’s writings.

76. Ginsberg, “A Blake Experience,” in On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg, ed. Lewis Hyde (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,1984), 120-130, here 123. (The remark appears in an interview by Thomas Clark, June 1963, and originally published in the Paris Review, Spring 1966). Ginsberg states that immediately after the experience, he read Plato’s Phaedrus, Plotinus on The Alone, and St. John of the Cross—“con un no saber sabiendo . . . que me quedé balbuciendo” (a knowing without knowing . . . that left me stammering). In Howl, he speaks of the best minds of his generation reading “Plotinus, Poe, St. John of the Cross, telepathy, and bop Kabbalah.”
77. Originally published as the preface to Philip Whalen, Every Day (Eugene, OR: Coyote’s Journal, 1965); it is reprinted in Whalen, Collected Poems, 835.