The Liminal and Metamodern Art
February Gebser course launch, new Mutations episodes, and (more) writing.
Another year has arrived, another (personal) revolution around the sun. 35 years as of this January, 2022. The specificities of clock-time are blurry these days, like a lens permanently out of focus. One number mistook for another. Years rendered into a sliding scale. The “when” of pandemic time seems to be quite comfortable shucking off the dichotomous husk of Jan/Feb, then/now, fast/slow, yesterday/tomorrow of oscillating superpositions.
If this vertiginous temporalization ends up re-tuning culture to the rhythm and intensities of Anthropocene time, then we should embrace being good and lost so that the world might find us again. It’s time to get to know that strange stranger—the present—who appears to be pointing out to us that the weirdness we’ve been experiencing is due in part to the fact that we’re already standing in the realities of the Anthropocene future. The new/ancient ground underneath rises up to meet us. It’s time to land somewhere and meet the “slow urgency” of re-contextualization. If you don’t know the land you’re standing on, then it might be time to hesitate, “go back, look forward.” You can find your way through relationship, but you have to linger for that to happen.
“When mind uses itself without the hands it runs the circle and may go too fast... The hand that shapes the mind into clay or written word slows thought to the gait of things and lets it be subject to accident and time. Purity is on the edge of evil, they say.” ―Ursula K. Le Guin
~
What’s New
This month, I’m pleased to announce that the 2022 Gebser course begins on Sunday, February 20th. Read the course description and register for it here. If you’re an alumni or student on the Mighty Networks platform already, go here.
Shortly after last month’s newsletter, Integral Leadership dropped the 2021 Solstice Issue. I am very pleased to present Volume 21, Issue I with the ILR team. Check out our leading comments.
So what else is new?
Patrons can read my review of The Dawn of Everything, which I was honored to have published in the latest issue of Evolve magazine.
You can catch an excerpt of it here.
I also ended up writing a review of The Matrix Resurrections, which Patrons can read too. This year I’m working on an expanded feature for the next Evolve issue on different approaches to going “meta” and what we can learn from them about navigating our moment of civilizational liminality.
A new mutations episode is up! I spoke with Henry Andrews about “HELLAMETAMODERNISM,” the role and/or absence of art in “meta” theory spaces and the possibility that we need a kind of “system poetics” approach to theory building. For those who know me, this is nothing new, per se, to my intellectual lineage (from Thompson’s wissenkunst to Gebser’s kulturphilosophie), but I can’t overstate how welcome it is to have colleagues like Henry Andrews articulating and experimenting with this in brilliantly creative ways. Henry and I also spoke about Nora Bateson’s recent essay on “aphanipoiesis,” a way of describing those invisible processes of complexity in living systems that coalesce towards vitality. I remarked in the episode how aphanipoiesis shares its roots (aphanis) with the word diaphany, which is perhaps one of Gebser’s most important principles describing the nature of integrality.
The ways in which new mutations of consciousness may “show up,” as noted in the introduction, may be found beneath our feet. Through those often invisible processes found under the label of cultural phenomenology: those creative and experiential dimensions that indicate something about what we as individuals and societies are undergoing. Struggles and transformations in our imaginary.
This touches on just about everything: existential, spiritual, ontological. I’m considering how aphanipoiesis might be a helpful way of emphasizing those invisible processes in culture and consciousness that are coalescing towards vitality, i.e., new mutations of thought and being that help us live and die well in our planetary context.
Some of the intra-cultural context for this episode happened during the launch of the Game B film project by Jake Ruiz.
What stood out was the commentary. Some of the panelists seemed to struggle with finding a relationship with art in their thinking, emphasizing its role in an overall schema or art’s utility for conveying theory (Jim Rutt described it as “interior decorating” for Game B ideas).
I was thankful for the presence of Tyson Yunkaporta on the call, who gently noted that art comes from that place of liminality where the new emerges in the first place. There is no leaving us out this zone of entanglement. It may be where we really need to go more often.
A line kept recurring for me from Gebser. “What is effected can be understood systematically, but the power to effect cannot." We should venture there, that place where thought does not fathom so much as be fathomed by the world.
Reading Chair
I hope to see some of you for the Gebser course later this month. In the meanwhile, here’s a brief look at what I’ve been reading.
“My Year of Reading Every Ursula K. Le Guin Novel” by Susan DeFreitas. Quite possibly the best way to endure pandemic time.
More meditations on Le Guin and time by Susan DeFreitas. A wonderful read that touches on what I’ve been writing about in the new book. “Not a Circle, Not a Line: Le Guin's long view of the West.” Incidentally it also concludes with a beautiful meditation on coming home, or what I thought was a profoundly appropriate “planetary myth” for our transitional times.
Zak Stein’s new essay on Perspectiva, “Education Must Make History Again.”
Going analog (because it’s on my physical bookshelf), but I’m greatly enjoying The Varieties of Integral Ecologies, edited by Sam Mickey, Sean Kelly and Adam Robbert. This one is for my doctoral program at CIIS. I hope to share much more about that later this year.
That’s all for now. Until the next letter.
-J.
~
Connect and support my writing on Patreon. Subscribe to Mutations podcast. Contact me via email with inquiries: jeremy (at) nuralearning (dot) com.