#filmanalysis #art #DietrichBonhoeffer #SergeiBulgakov #theology #GeorgesBataille #atmosphere #CarlJung #atmospherictheology

The films of Panos Cosmatos are known for their intense atmosphere and striking use of color, drawing viewers into a world that is at once eerie and awe-inspiring. In works such as “Mandy,” “Beyond the Black Rainbow,” and “The Viewing,” Cosmatos creates a sense of otherworldliness through his use of color, light, space, and atmosphere. The screen is transformed into a mystically cosmic spectacle, disclosing apocalyptic noumena behind the thin veil of the everyday. To elucidate these themes, this essay will draw upon atmospheric theory, Sergei Bulgakov’s theory of religious materialism, Carl Jung’s theory of color, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theory of revelation, and Georges Bataille’s theory of limit experience.

Atmosphere

Atmosphere refers to the general affective quality of space and material environments when interacted with by agents. There are different models and theories about the ontology of an atmosphere. One metaphor is to say that atmospheres are like spatially extended emotions. Through the intentional staging of a material environment, a space can convey or encourage certain ranges of emotional or affective responses. Set design and staging within theatre is a great example. Professional production designers are highly skilled at constructing a stage that helps convey or support the affective qualities of the scene. Furthermore, as in the case of a haunted house attraction, human agents might not even need to be directly present in order for the space to radiate powerful emotions, such as fear.

Films likewise generate an atmosphere. Though it might not be as fully immersive as others, the staging of a film is capable of creating atmospheres that suture the viewer more deeply into the emotional landscape of the film. Panos Cosmatos brilliantly accomplishes this. For Cosmatos, the atmosphere is not merely a background, but rather an active agent in itself, playing as important a role as the actor.

Religious Materialism

In addition to emotional qualities, atmosphere can encourage or convey other types of emotional affects as well, such as religious affects. Religions throughout time have professed the religious significance of physical objects, sacred spaces, and material environments for worship. The 20th-century Russian Orthodox theologian, Sergei Bulgakov, called this “religious materialism” in his essay “Relics,” and the concept played a significant role in his own theology. In the essay, Bulgakov uses the topic of relics to articulate the vitality of the material world from a religious perspective and how, from his perspective, there is no such thing as dead matter.

Sergei Bulgakov's theory of religious materialism proposes that the material world is intrinsically connected to and infused with divine energies and attributes. According to Bulgakov, creation is not separate from God but rather a manifestation of God's presence and creative activity. Bulgakov emphasized the sacredness and spiritual potential inherent in the physical world, rejecting the dualistic notion that matter is inherently sinful or separate from the divine. Instead, he argued, based on the Orthodox doctrines of the Incarnation of Christ and deification of humanity, that matter is a vehicle for divine revelation and the realization of God's purposes, of which the Incarnation of Christ and sacraments like the Holy Eucharist are prime examples. As he wrote, “The spiritual bread, the heavenly food, is also bodily bread and food; by no means does the spiritual sacrament become incorporeal — rather, it is corporeal to the highest degree, corporeal par excellence. [...] [Christ] came not to destroy the world but to save it. Therefore, in the gracious life of the church, all that is spiritual is corporeal [...].” (Bulgakov, “Relics,” page 9, Boris Jakim translation).

For Bulgakov, the materiality of the world is not dead, but rather something sacred, given that it is thoroughly infused with divine life. However, this picture contrasts sharply with our Cartesian-capitalist paradigm in which matter is a dead resource waiting for exploitation. Material environments, human spaces, and urban buildings become little more than cogs in a wider machine. However, in the films of Panos Cosmatos, the world is strikingly more mystical and cosmic than the dead matter of modernity. Cosmatos’s cinematic worlds are pulsating with animated energies and spiritual dimensions that we cannot fully comprehend. Each landscape or set is permeated with a mystical and sublime awe, as if every part of the world is just a facet in a larger sacred space.

Jung and Color

The sacredness of the atmosphere and material environments within Cosmatos’s cinematography is captured largely through the striking use of color. To understand this point further, I will turn to Carl Jung’s theory of color:

According to Jung, colors possess inherent symbolic and psychological meanings that resonate with the collective unconscious, the universal reservoir of ancestral memories and archetypes shared by all human beings. Jung believed that colors have a profound impact on our emotional and spiritual states, transcending their visual aspects. He viewed colors as carriers of archetypal messages and symbolic representations of psychic energies. For instance, red is often associated with passion, vitality, and danger, while blue is linked to spirituality, introspection, and calmness. Jung argued that these associations are not arbitrary but rather reflect deep-seated universal symbols that have emerged throughout human history.

Within the realm of religion, Jung posited that colors play a crucial role in the expression and experience of religious phenomena. He noted that religious rituals often incorporate specific colors to evoke particular psychological states and tap into the collective unconscious. For example, the color white is frequently associated with purity and divine transcendence in many religious traditions. Similarly, gold and yellow are often connected to the sacred and divine illumination. Jung also emphasized that individual psychological experiences of color can vary due to personal associations and cultural conditioning. While certain colors may have universal significance, their interpretation can be influenced by personal experiences, cultural contexts, and individual symbolism.

Even if one does not concede the idea that there are specific archetypal meanings inherent within each color, I do think it’s not far off to note that religious rituals and religious experiences often involve the use of striking colors. In nature, colors are beautiful, but they are often more muted. Rarely do we encounter, for instance, a natural landscape bathed in bright purple. And if such instances within nature do occur, such as in the Aurora Lights, then it fills viewers with a sense of otherworldly awe. On the flip side, incomprehensible lights often occur in mystical experiences, and sacred architecture regularly incorporates colored phenomena not typically found in nature.

However, in the films of Panos Cosmatos, the world is saturated with mystical and transcended light. It is as if the veil has been pulled back from our eyes, and we see the radiant, spiritual dimension of reality that permeates the world around us. Cosmatos's films are a powerful example of the transformative power of colors in our inner world. By using color to create a sense of atmosphere and evoke powerful emotions, he taps into the viewer's psyche in a way that is both profound and unsettling.

Bonhoeffer and Bataille: Revelation and Limit Experience

The interesting thing about Cosmatos’s films is that the spiritual and the divine are not always equated with the good. Of course, there are many instances of the transcendent, color-rich atmospheres that do convey beauty and goodness — especially in the first act of “Mandy” in which cosmic colors interspersed with radiant natural lighting are used to show the love between Red and Mandy. However, some forms of spiritual, otherworldly, or transcendent experience turn into absolute terror and horror. Often, this is the case when, in a Frankensteinian or Lovecraftian fashion, the human characters attempt to grasp and control the transcendent themselves. Without giving away too many spoilers, we can see this within the “bad trip” scene of “Beyond the Black Rainbow,” in which Barry takes a concoction of psychedelics and has an existential breakdown from which he cannot recover. “The Viewing” likewise features a recluse billionaire for whom the world and its inhabitants are objects to collect, but his aspirations of collecting something truly beyond our world lead to drastic consequences. Thus, within the films of Cosmatos, the spiritual world is both overwhelmingly beautiful and also terrifying, filled with phenomena and agents beyond our understanding.

In a sense, this sublimity of overwhelming beauty and terror in giving oneself to the Unknown, and hoping that it is good (while there is a threat it could lead to one’s own destruction) captures a sense of the harshness of religious experience in secular age. When people encounter something truly beyond their understanding, it can sometimes be perceived as a threatening force that leads to self-destruction because it breaks down the truncated, materialist world in which we believe ourselves to inhabit. This is perhaps similar to what Dietrich Bonhoeffer talked about in his book “Act and Being.” For Bonhoeffer, when God reveals Godself, it breaks down our rational systems and subverts the expectations we have of reality. It’s almost like an inverted version of H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraftian horror typically involves themes of the unknown, and the incomprehensible, often featuring ancient and malevolent beings that exist outside of human understanding. It relies upon the idea that human knowledge and understanding are limited, and that there are forces in the universe that are beyond human control and comprehension. When the characters encounter these incomprehensible forces, they are filled with a sense of dread and helplessness, often leading to madness, nihilism, and the futility of existence.

For Lovecraft, much of the horror comes from a revelation that humanity is little more than an ant to the cosmic, extra-dimensional monsters. However, for Bonhoeffer, this gets turned on its head. The horror is not that God is malevolent or uncaring, but rather that God is so loving, is so full of grace, is so beautiful, that we feel like minuscule dirt compared to God’s Perfection. For Bonhoeffer, this is especially the case in the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, in which this Perfection and Grace become incarnate in a particular person.

Back to the films of Panos, we can see this angst and struggle captured brilliantly in his films. There is a primal and cosmic dimension to the emotions and struggles of the characters. Stepping into the atmosphere is like stepping into another world, parallel to ours, in which everything radiates with the sacred. Or, stated another way, perhaps it is like taking our secularist blinders off for a brief moment and allowing the incomprehensible spiritual dimension of reality to rapture us.

The Bonhoefferian reading of Panos’s films brings some parallels to the theory of limit experiences as developed by the French philosopher, Georges Bataille.

According to Bataille, limit experiences are transformative and ecstatic encounters that push individuals beyond the boundaries of their ordinary existence, challenging established norms and rationality. Bataille believed that limit experiences arise from activities that involve risk, transgression, and the breaking of taboos. These experiences confront individuals with the limits of their own existence and reveal the underlying instability and irrationality of human nature. Examples of limit experiences can include acts of intense sexuality, ritualistic practices, extreme physical activities, or encounters with death.

Furthermore, as developed in his book Erotism, a limit experience can also be created through an experience of the intense combination of the erotic (not necessarily just sex) and the horrific. This is because limit experiences entail a loss of self and a dissolution of individual boundaries. In these moments, individuals transcend their individuality and merge with a larger whole, experiencing a sense of continuity and connection with the universe. Bataille associated limit experiences with a kind of sacred or mystical state that disrupts the everyday order and opens up possibilities for profound transformation. He notes that both erotic encounters and moments of horror (especially witnessing death) bring about this loss of self into the broader world, like pouring water into the ocean.

Bataille argued that limit experiences are essential for individuals to confront and transcend the constraints imposed by society and rationality. By pushing individuals to their limits, these experiences enable them to access a different realm of experience that is typically suppressed in everyday life. Through this confrontation with the limit, Bataille believed that individuals could gain a deeper understanding of themselves, the world, and their place within it.

Within films like “Beyond the Black Rainbow,” “Mandy,” and “The Viewing,” characters are shown having such limit experiences — situations that break down rationality and bring about a loss of self. However, such limit experiences often lead to the character’s own destruction, rather than the reconstitution of a consciousness that embraces a newfound sense of transcendence. These limit experiences are quite different from the types of experiences described by mystics, such as St. Teresa of Avila or Julian of Norwich. Perhaps this is because the saints and mystics were more embedded within a symbolic and living religious tradition that already embraces the sacred. Their limit experiences were reconstituted into a deeper awareness of God’s love and grace. Contrarily, for the characters within the Cosmatos filmic universe, no such structuring existence. It is simply the raw, unfiltered extremity of human experience, without any reconstitution into a higher meaning or purpose. In a sense, this capture the type of underlying nihilism latent within the secular. The spiritual and mystical is all around us, but we have all but lost our categories and structures for engagement.

Conclusion and Additional Remarks

In conclusion, the films of Panos Cosmatos are a powerful example of the transformative power of color and atmosphere in cinema. By creating otherworldly atmospheres, often using bright and striking colors, Cosmatos taps into the viewer's psyche in a way that is both profound and unsettling. His films convey a sense of the sacredness and spiritual potential inherent in the physical world, echoing the ideas of Carl Jung and Sergei Bulgakov. Furthermore, the sublimity of overwhelming beauty and terror captured in Cosmatos's films reflects the harshness and struggles of encountering the divine in a secular age, resonating with the ideas of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Georges Bataille.

But of course (and to perhaps entirely subvert my own writing) most religious experiences are not that extreme. In fact, they usually are cultivated within the small liturgy of the everyday, building up over time and transforming us step by step into a new person. There is great hope in this, because it means that we don’t have to rely upon the apocalyptic to dictate our religious experiences. It can start right now.

#atmosphere #architecture #psychogeography #capitalism #theology #SergeiBulgakov #atmospherictheology

Introduction

Ghost hunting has once again crawled out of the ether and is haunting much of pop culture. Television shows like Ghost Adventures, podcasts on the paranormal, countless internet hubs, as well as real-life expeditions seem to have gained a second life. Some interpret this phenomenon as symptomatic of how quickly America is given to fantasy thinking and delusions from reality. Others interpret this as a renewed longing for a spiritual dimension. And of course, there's the Bob Larsons of the world who claim that it's all just demons attempting to trick America away from following Christ. However, what interests me about the phenomenon is not so much whether ghosts exist. Instead, it seems to me that ghost hunting and ghost tours present an interesting form of psychogeography and cognitive mapping of urban and suburban environments. Within this new cognitive mapping of material environments, I believe it's possible to see cracks starting to form within our truncated, secularist milieu. And even though ghost hunting itself does not necessarily purport explicit theological or religious commitments, I think there is an interesting theology of space and material environments that could perhaps emerge from or exist in dialogue with cryptid psychogeography.

My Experience on a Ghost Tour

Recently, I had the opportunity to visit the Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. It purports to be one of the most haunted hotels in America, and so, naturally, I took a ghost tour.

For background, I am not a materialist or a secularist. I am a Christian, and thus supernatural, preternatural, or spiritual phenomena are a possibility within my worldview. For example, I believe in angels and miracles. However, I'm quite skeptical about paranormal encounters. Perhaps that's a result of living in secular age or seeing firsthand how often claims of numinous encounters can be abused by church leaders. Additionally, despite having numerous religious experiences throughout my life, I have never had a ghost, demonic, or paranormal encounter of the explicit kind one would label as supernatural (at least, that I'm aware of). Nonetheless, I try to keep a critically-open mind because I do believe that the universe is filled with spiritual qualities and high strangeness.

The Crescent Hotel tour was a lot of fun. The genre of ghost tour storytelling was fascinating as well: a combination of historical narrative and the horror genre. Furthermore, the introduction of “scientific” language — such as ghost hunting technologies — is an interesting combination of more ancient spiritual phenomenology (ghosts and spirits) with modernity (technology and science), even if the “science” might make professional scientists pull their hair out.

Unfortunately, I did not have a ghost encounter. Neither did I even have an experience of the heebie-jeebies. But it was certainly fun, and the hotel is quite beautiful and features a dark academic aesthetic, which is certainly worth checking out. Additionally, the experience of navigating a material environment from the perspective of a ghost tour really got me thinking about the psychogeography involved in ghost hunting.

Psychogeography

Psychogeography is a concept that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s within the realm of avant-garde movements and cultural theory. It explores the relationship between the geographical environment and the emotions, behaviors, and experiences of individuals within that environment. Psychogeography seeks to uncover the psychological and emotional impact of urban spaces on individuals and how these spaces shape our perceptions and interactions.

The term “psychogeography” was coined by the Situationist International, a group of artists, intellectuals, and activists who sought to challenge the dominant capitalist culture and transform everyday life. They viewed psychogeography as a means to disrupt the prescribed patterns of urban life and create new forms of engagement with the cityscape.

Psychogeographers engage in a variety of practices to explore the effects of urban environments. For example, they often undertake “dérives,” which involve purposeful drifting or wandering through urban areas to uncover hidden aspects and unexpected encounters. Through dérives, psychogeographers aim to break free from predetermined routes and discover new perspectives on the city.

Psychogeography also involves the concept of the “psychogeographic map.” These maps deviate from traditional cartography and instead represent the emotional, cultural, and subjective experiences of individuals in a particular place. They may incorporate elements such as personal anecdotes, historical narratives, and symbolic representations.

The goal of psychogeography is to challenge the mundane and passive experiences often associated with urban spaces. By encouraging exploration, critical observation, and subjective engagement, psychogeographers aim to transform our relationship with the built environment and inspire new ways of perceiving and interacting with our surroundings.

Paranormal Psychogeography

It seems to me that ghost hunting and ghost tours represent a peculiar type of psychogeographical experience. Modern urban spaces are often not designed around spiritual matters, but rather upon the flows and accumulation of capital. One is meant to navigate an urban environment as primarily a cog in the machine of capitalism: either a consumer or a laborer. Of course, this is not entirely the case for every square inch of a city because one could contend that spaces like parks are centered around human interests more than capitalism. But these respites of human interest are still relegated to confined areas rather than permeating the urban space as a whole. The point of psychogeography is then to find ways of navigating a city in a way that brings a sense of the truly human, rather than a machine or zombie-like consumerism.

It seems possible to me that ghost hunting could be one such example of this alternative navigation — especially because ghost tours provide an alternative cognitive mapping of one's urban environment. A cognitive map is a mental representation or internalized image of a person's spatial surroundings, including landmarks, routes, and relationships between locations. It is essentially the way in which landscapes and urban geography — perhaps even one's own culture — exist within one's mind.

Thus, instead of one's cognitive map only being filled with points of consumerism, such as shopping malls, retail stores, and even necessary locations like grocery stores, ghost hunting creates new data points on one's cognitive map. Regardless of whether these places are actually haunted by paranormal forces, ghost hunting adds a sense of spiritual mythology to one's material environment. There is, at the very least, a potential for spiritual places, “thin places,” or locations of high strangeness to break through the cracks of the secular materialist mind into which we are all conditioned.

Ghost hunting trains one's brain to look for the spiritual dimension of a material environment. Even if there is no such thing as a location haunted by a ghost, the very act of delving into the mythological histories of haunted locations and contemplating the relationship between possible spiritual forces and one's material environment can be a means by which we leave open the door for religious materialism.

The Spiritual Dimension of Material

“Religious materialism” is a term I learned about recently while reading the essay “Relics” by the 20th-century Russian Orthodox theologian, Sergei Bulgakov. Bulgakov wrote the essay in response to vandalizes who had desecrated sacred relics of saints. Bulgakov uses the topic of relics to articulate the vitality of the material world from a religious perspective and how, from his perspective, there is no such thing as dead matter.

Sergei Bulgakov's theory of religious materialism proposes that the material world is intrinsically connected to and infused with divine energies and attributes. According to Bulgakov, creation is not separate from God but rather a manifestation of God's presence and creative activity. Bulgakov emphasized the sacredness and spiritual potential inherent in the physical world, rejecting the dualistic notion that matter is inherently sinful or separate from the divine. Instead, he argued, based on the Orthodox doctrines of the Incarnation of Christ and deification of humanity, that matter is a vehicle for divine revelation and the realization of God's purposes, of which the Incarnation of Christ and sacraments like the Holy Eucharist are prime examples. As he wrote, “The spiritual bread, the heavenly, food, is also bodily bread and food; by no means does the spiritual sacrament become incorporeal — rather, it is corporeal to the highest degree, corporeal par excellence. [...] [Christ] came not to destroy the world but to save it. Therefore, in the gracious life of the church, all that is spiritual is corporeal [...].” (Bulgakov, “Relics,” page 9, Boris Jakim translation).

For Bulgakov, the materiality of the world is not dead, but rather something sacred, given that it is thoroughly infused with divine life. However, this picture contrasts sharply with our Cartesian-capitalist paradigm in which matter is a dead resource waiting for exploitation. Material environments, human spaces, and urban buildings become little more than cogs in a wider machine. However, from a Bulgakovian perspective, a psychogeographer can resist such a truncated imagination and cultivate a way of seeing the city as a spiritual entity as well. And perhaps ghost hunting — the investigation of haunted places — might be one means toward that goal.

Ghost Hunting and Numinous Experiences

Related to this notion, I think ghost hunting shows how many individuals within our society are still searching for religious experiences or “numinous experiences” as the theologian Rudolf Otto called them.

If you want to read a full engagement with the topic of ghost hunting as chasing the numinous, you can read this great article by Daniel Wise from the Journal of Gods and Monsters linked here: https://godsandmonsters-ojs-txstate.tdl.org/godsandmonsters/article/view/28

To give a shorter summary, Rudolf Otto invoked the term “numinous” to refer to a transcendent and mysterious quality encountered in religious experiences. It represents a unique and awe-inspiring encounter with the divine that elicits a sense of fascination, awe, and even fear in individuals. The numinous is characterized by its 'wholly other' nature, going beyond the ordinary and mundane. Otto described the numinous as a sense of creaturely finitude when confronted with the divine. He emphasized that the numinous experience includes both a tremendous sense of mystery and an irresistible attraction. It involves a paradoxical combination of both fascination and trembling before the divine presence — a type of theological sublime.

Ghost hunting is, for many individuals, both scary and exciting — terrifying and supernatural. To encounter a spiritual entity in the world is to encounter the numinous.

Paranormal Psychogeography as Cruciform Cognitive Mapping

Most likely, however, one will not encounter a paranormal entity whilst ghost hunting or walking a ghost tour — if such an encounter is even possible. Nonetheless, adding “haunted” locations to the cognitive map of one's environment can still be a worthwhile endeavor because the stories behind such hauntings often contain historical-mythological narratives of one's city beyond the conventional narrative of capitalist expansion. Instead, the stories often testify to the underlying trauma of our cities, focusing on the exploited and marginalized individuals who were failed by society.

For example, the Crescent Hotel's foundation for being (allegedly) haunted rests primarily with the original history of a wealthy con artist named Norman Baker selling a “miracle cure” for cancer. Of course, it was a total sham, and many people died horrible deaths under his watch while he shamelessly exploited their illnesses for personal profit. It's a horrific story of exploiting the most vulnerable for greed and profit. The hotel is thus haunted, if not by ghosts, by the history of America's failed medical system and our society's continued apathy toward the mistreatment of those who have illnesses. The full story is way crazier than I could describe, so I'll link the Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_G._Baker

The Cresent Hotel is not the only building in America haunted by tragedy. Cities are often built on trauma: environmental devastation, pollution, exploited labor, racism (such as red-lining), and even genocide (such as the treatment of First Nation and Indigenous Americans). Furthermore, there is tragedy and violence all around us, such as violence and poverty. Often in paranormal lore, places of tragedy and trauma are most likely to be haunted. Thus, by engaging with these stories — even if they are mostly mythological — one can develop a perception of one's material environment that pays special attention to those who need it most.

In this sense, ghost hunting or paranormal tours can possibly witness toward a cruciform hermeneutics of the city. Within the tradition of Christian liberation theology, there is a strong emphasis on God's special concern and favor toward the poor, marginalized, oppressed, and suffering. The crucifixion is often pointed to as a testimony to how God, in Christ, willingly enters into the suffering of humanity in order to co-suffer with them and bring about their liberation from the condition contributing to that suffering.

In a tangentially related vein, ghost hunting and ghost tours often focus on stories of suffering, tragedy, and trauma that happen within the modern city. Death in the workplace. Domestic violence. Murder. Depression. Suicide. Natural disasters. The prison industrial complex. These are all common phenomena associated with hauntings. Indeed, even if ghosts do not exist, our towns and cities are haunted by these tragedies. Ghost hunting and ghost tours ask us to confront these hauntings existing all around us. Now, I'm not claiming that ghost hunting is a form of liberation theology, but there might be a resonance here when both are applied to an analysis of the tragedies produced by human systems.

However, it's not the case that ghost hunting and ghost tours are the anti-capitalist praxis par excellence. Like everything, capitalism is perfectly capable of appropriating the supernatural into its system. A guided ghost tour costs money, and businesses often exploit the “haunted” label in order to attract more customers. But these seem like minor problems compared to other major issues within capitalism, such as climate change, supply chains, and privatized healthcare. Furthermore, visiting haunted locations, embarking on ghost hunting expeditions, or following ghost tours does not necessitate spending money. These activities can be co-opted quite easily through self-organized tours and independent research on the Internet. Doing so even opens up the possibility of meeting more people in one's community.

Against the backdrop of an ever-suffocating and truncating secularist materialism, I think it's great to imagine new ways of engaging with high strangeness so that the spiritual might break through the rusting machinery of modernity. Ghost hunting and ghost tours might be one small tool within our arsenal as we seek to move out of the secularist ennui. And the cherry on top is that developing a new cognitive map of one's urban environment is something that one can begin today. So start researching, start wandering, and let yourself feel a little spooky.

Appendix: As a final thought, I think it's important to mention how sacred spaces should not be neglected when it comes to developing a post-secularist cognitive mapping of material environments. Sacred spaces such as cathedrals, church yards, and prayer gardens (which are often neglected but more common than one might think) can likewise be spaces of high strangeness. Sometimes, they even overlap with ghostly hauntings. At least speaking for myself, I have stepped into several cathedrals and sacred spaces that were so beautiful that it was as if I stepped into another world.

#atmosphere #consumerism #capitalism #architecture #psychogeography

In the famous novel “House of Leaves” by Mark Z. Danielewski, a family moves into a new house that, at first, appears unremarkable from the outside. But soon, the family begins to notice strange and unsettling things about the architecture: the house is filled with shifting and expanding dimensions, which seem to defy the laws of physics. The family discovers that the interior of the house is much larger than the exterior, with rooms and hallways that seem to appear and disappear at random. The walls of the house also seem to be made of shifting and unstable materials, with staircases that lead to nowhere and corridors that twist and turn in impossible ways. As the family explores the house, they become increasingly disoriented and paranoid, with each member experiencing the house's strange properties in their own way.

I was reminded of this story during my most recent trip to IKEA. There is something about the staging and atmosphere of IKEA that gives it a similar feeling to the house in Danielewski's novel. The winding, labyrinth-like journey through which one must travel takes on a surrealist or “psychotronic” atmosphere as each region of the store is staged with faux living rooms, kitchens, and bedrooms that continuously shift in design and affect.

The way in which one must navigate the terrain in an unconventional manner — the long, snaking path weaving through seemingly every crevice of the building — creates an effect that, to me, feels as if the building is larger on the inside than the outside. Of course, the building itself is large to begin with. However, if the labyrinth were not there, it would only take a couple of minutes to get from one end of the building to another. But in its current design, it can take perhaps more than an hour to get through the store. The labyrinthian interior staging is also combined with an element of questing. People go to IKEA looking for bedding, furniture, decor, and interior design inspiration.

To me, the element of questing/searching combined with a winding labyrinth structure creates a dreamlike, quasi-surreal atmosphere. I say “quasi” surreal because I would hesitate to call the atmosphere fully surrealist. Surrealism, in my use of the term, refers to a deliberate effort to create art within the genre of surrealism and requires a well-honed skill in the craft of artmaking. This genre of surrealism is usually characterized by non-sequiturs, archetypal imagery, and the breakdown of rational logic, resembling the logic of dreams more than conventional reality. Or, more properly, it is the combination of dream and reality into a higher reality — a sur-reality.

However, it is also possible to accidentally create something that produces surrealist affective responses, which I call “psychotronic.” Psychotronic is a term used in the film world to describe films that often include bizarre or unconventional content and are typically characterized by low budgets, over-the-top acting, and a cult following. They often feature elements of horror, science fiction, and exploitation films and are intended to elicit strong emotional responses from viewers. I once heard psychotronic films described as “naive surrealism” (I tried to track down the original source of this to credit them, but I could not find it). In other words, a psychotronic film is one that is so bizarre, jarring, or poorly constructed — along with disjunctive, visceral affective qualities combined with long periods of nauseating boredom — that the film creates a dreamlike atmosphere, though completely unintentionally.

Though I wouldn't necessarily call IKEA shocking, I do think it exhibits something of a psychotronic and naively surrealist atmosphere. In a sense, it's like a capitalist parody of a holy site. IKEA is not on every corner like Walmart. Thus, for many people (such as myself), one has to make a long pilgrimage to reach a towering warehouse (like a cheap parody of a cathedral) wherein one traverses an eerie and unpredictable landscape to the point of physical exhaustion — all in order to acquire a new TV stand.

Perhaps this is all a stretch, but I think it showcases how many of our spaces of consumerism mimic sacred spaces of worship. It's as if our drives toward the holy and sacred have been co-opted and redirected toward consumerism. This is something I've written about previously, so if you'd like to know more about this, I'll link the article below.

https://write.as/nathaniel-metz/non-places-muzak-and-george-bataille-losing-oneself-in-atmosphere

#aesthetics #atmosphere #postmodernism #weirdcore #sublime

In one of my earliest posts, I analyzed the weirdcore aesthetic and claimed that it represents a type of immanentized sublime produced by capitalism. More fully, I said:

“In the case of weirdcore, we see something slightly different. There is a combination of fear (eerie/weird) and enjoyment (nostalgia), but it is not the same as the transcendence of the sublime. Instead, weirdcore conveys a truncated and flattened 'outsideness.'(...) The outsideness creeping in on us is a hyperreality of postmodern capitalism, in which the production machine of industry, mass consumerist reproduction, and omnipresent media culture — and especially the internet — have created an eerie rhizomatic “outsideness” of space (both virtual and physical space) that conditions our material environment. Notice, for example, how often in weirdcore the image barriers bleed together, giant dark patches consume space like a black hole, singular text phrases are divorced from meaningful discourse, and objects are deterritorialized from their original context. These common elements of weirdcore art are the basic factors of postmodern hyperreality: everything is deterritorialized from its original context and placed into the organizing structure of capitalism, social media is breaking apart discourse into incoherent soundbites, and there is a looming dark presence of de-subjectivizing ambiances all around us.”

I encourage you to read the full article if none of this is making sense to you. https://nathaniel-metz.writeas.com/weirdcore-and-the-eerie-atmospheres-of-postmodernity

Recently, I was listening to a weirdcore music playlist on YouTube. However, the playlist was not simply weirdcore but incorporated other related aesthetics, such as kidcore and traumacore. The connection between traumacore and weirdcore struck me as interesting, and I realized that my previous theory about weirdcore as an immanentized outsideness of a postmodern sublime might explain the relationship.

On Aesthetics Wiki, traumacore is defined as follows: “Traumacore is a type of aesthetic imagery that delves into the themes of abuse and trauma (particularly sexual trauma or CSA) along with cute visuals to give the whole aesthetic a 'bittersweet tragedy' feel. Mental, emotional, and spiritual abuse are also common themes in traumacore. Traumacore in general tends to be more focused on trauma experienced in childhood, explaining the cute visuals, although adult trauma can also be covered. Many people turn to these images to help them cope with the pain they suffered in the past.”

Full article. Warning: topics of abuse, PTSD, and other trauma-related topics: https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Traumacore

In many spaces throughout the Internet, traumacore and weirdcore often bleed together, so much so that different weirdcore forums now have strict policies against posting anything traumacore related. The relationship is born, on the one hand, from their similarity in form. Both utilize a type of haunted, surrealist, dreamy nostalgia permeated by an early-2000s cyber-surrealism. In the case of traumacore, the content within the form, such as the text or images, takes on themes of traumatic experiences. Imagine a glitched-out gif of a CRT television displaying Halo 1 footage with text that reads “Mom isn't coming back.”

In addition to the similarities in formal quality between weirdcore and traumacore, I think there is also a connection via the haunted outsideness of an immanent sublime. An experience of the sublime is an experience of something that combines beauty and terror in such a magnitude that the excess of experience has difficulty being fully registered within one's consciousness. The example I always turn to is that the sublime is like standing on a cliff looking down at the Grand Canyon. It's overwhelmingly beautiful, but there is also a fear that if you fell, the canyon would kill you — not to mention the feeling of finitude compared to the massive size of the Canyon. Weirdcore separates the sublime from its often theological or natural components and instead places the sublime within postmodern capitalist landscapes, such as a McDonald's play place.

Similarly, traumatic experiences bring when them an “excess” that the brain has difficulty integrating. In many ways, trauma can 'break apart' the brain. Or, put another way, the brain breaks apart the registration of the experience into smaller chunks and then 'tucks them throughout one's unconscious and body so as to avoid experiencing the excess of horror all at once, which would be too overwhelming. This is why many individuals struggle to fully remember all the details of their trauma encounters and why many go into the freeze response during a traumatic event. Likewise, this gives trauma a feeling of both outsideness (via the external event of trauma) and insideness (the trauma lingers within oneself). In a way, it's a haunted outsideness of an immanent sublime, albeit a dark and horrific one.

The way in which weirdcore is a surrealist non-sequitur art form, or 'breaking apart' of narrative and coherent meaning, coalesces with the feeling of 'breaking apart' experienced in trauma. This is not to say that people with PTSD or who undergo traumatic experiences are intrinsically broken people or damaged goods. Rather, trauma has a way of disrupting our cognitive faculties and resisting integration into the psyche, which is captured surprisingly well by traumacore's utilization and appropriation of the weirdcore aesthetic. Traumacore shows how these weirdcore spaces are not only found within dead shopping malls and abandoned indoor parks, but also haunt our own psyches as well.

Finally, I will end on a positive note. I want to reemphasize that trauma does not make one intrinsically broken or damaged goods, despite how one might feel. Given my theological background, I will end with a quote from chapter 3 of Image and Presence: A Christological Reflection on Iconophilia and Iconoclasm by one of my favorite theologians, Natalie Carnes:

“The cross breaks brokenness by showing that brokenness—sin, violence, torture, death—cannot exclude God’s presence. At one level, the cross announces an absence. It sounds an absence of health, vitality, power, and, in the case of Christ’s wounds, an absence of flesh. Crucifixes, having a dead corpus, even declare an absence of life. Yet by these publications of absence, the cross makes, at another level, a powerful proclamation of presence. Churches, homes, and individuals fill their lives with crosses to mark the ubiquity of divine presence in the world. To put a cross on an altar, whether by painting one on it, like Grünewald’s Christ, or setting one nearby, as Catholic canon law requires, identifies the cross with the proclamation of Christ’s presence in the liturgy of the mass. The cross’s status in the Eucharistic liturgy underscores the way divine absence is bound to divine presence. On the cross, where the negation of the Image would seem to go too far—to overtake and vitiate, rather than unlock, presence—that negation is itself negated. The negation of negation celebrates a new presence, whereby God is present even in death.” (Carnes, page 88)

#AndyWarhol #aesthetics #art #Icons #postmodernism #atmosphere

Intro

Andy Warhol's life was often shocking, uncanny, and bizarre. However, a fact that seems to shock people most of all is that Warhol was Catholic. And not simply nominally Catholic. He attended Mass multiple times a week, prayed frequently, and, according to the priest giving his Eulogy, is responsible for at least one conversion to Catholicism.

More specifically, Andy Warhol was a form of Byzantine or Eastern Catholic, being common in many Eastern European countries, from which the Warhola family immigrated. Eastern Catholicism is known for its blend of Catholicism and Eastern Orthodox theology and worship. Eastern Catholics remain in communion with the Vatican; however, their theology and liturgical practices — especially their art — is heavily influenced by Eastern Orthodoxy. Warhol's upbringing was conditioned by regular church attendance within this setting. Thus, he spent hours immersed within the sacred atmospheres of Byzantine chapels coated with icons of Christ, angels, and saints.

A Brief Theology of Icons

Within the Eastern Catholic and Orthodox tradition, icons are not merely images, but rather windows into heaven. The presence of icons is not the exact presence of Christ or the saint per se, but rather an appropriate representation or communication of that saint's life in heaven, where they are worshiping God. By having a space filled with icons, the congregation is reminded of how Sunday Services are moments in which worshipers cross the threshold into Heaven and participate within the perpetual worship carried on by the angels and saints who have gone before us.

If one looks at Eastern icons, and then examines some of the work in Warhol's Pop art, it seems as if Warhol's art becomes a type of iconography of Mass (pardon the pun) commercial media culture, such as the fetishization of commodities (parody of sacred relics and venerated objects) and especially celebrity culture (the 'saints' of our culture). But instead of providing a glimpse into the spiritual and heavenly realm, Warhol's Pop art icons act as a window into the broader virtual sphere and hyperobject of commercial culture.

Cyberpunk Asgard

Warhol understood this virtual media landscape quite well. He (or his ghostwriter) directly addressed the virtual space of commercialism in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol.

“Before media there used to be a physical limit on how much space one person could take up by themselves. People, I think, are the only things that know how to take up more space than the space they’re actually in, because with media you can sit back and still let yourself fill up space on records, in the movies, […] on the telephone and […] on television. […] If you were the star on the biggest show on television and took a walk down an average American street one night while you were on the air, and if you looked through windows and saw yourself on television in everybody’s living room, taking up some of their space, can you imagine how you would feel?” (Warhol, pages 146-147).

In today's world, the virtual cyberspace of commercial media saturates our environments even more than in Warhol's time, remaining present all around us through our smartphones, computers, televisions, etc. It's difficult to carve out spaces that haven't experienced a type of digital transubstantiation. Though it might remain invisible, it surrounds and haunts at every moment. Warhol's Pop art is a window into that landscape that seeks to be invisible.

Whereas the 'other side' of sacred icons is the spiritual and heavenly realm, full of the splendor, beauty, and majesty of God, the 'other side' of Warhol's art is a strange, cyberpunk virtual terrain, created simultaneously by both humans and machines. There is work created by real humans (actors, musicians, 'content creators,' etc.) but is also given animated power and transformed through digital technology, algorithms, cybernetics, the internet, etc. It is never merely human, and it could not be what it is without the magic of technological forces and machines. In a sense, it is a type of Asgard or Olympus populated by Freud's prosthetic gods.

In “Prosthetic Gods, Projected Monsters: Imagination and Unconscious Projection in Narratives of Technological Horror,” Filip Andjelkovic summarizes the prothetic god as follows:

“Technology is a means through which uncertainty is harnessed, a means through which 'man is perfecting his own organs, whether motor or sensory, or is removing the limits to their functioning.' The telephone serves as an extension of the ear, the television as an extension of the eye. Technology is the material product of an ideal omnipotence and omniscience, an imaginary extension of identity impressed onto the world and operationalized as an actual extension of the body – the realization of the human subject as a 'prosthetic God.'” (Andjelkovic, page 21). Full article here: https://godsandmonsters-ojs-txstate.tdl.org/godsandmonsters/article/view/19

Within the Asgard of cyberpunk virtuality, we experience what Andjelkovic calls a “technologized transcendence” (Andjelkovic, 19). As he describes it, “The unseen, supernatural forces of the divine and demonic have migrated from a spiritual and immortal pneuma to a personal and mortal psyche. [...] the popular, literary imagination became the new nexus through which old narratives of transcendence were transmitted and maintained – but with a reworked relationship regarding the human subject” (Andjelkovic, 19). The virtual space of commercialism creates a seemingly infinite immanent plane, which preoccupies hours of our time and energy in an ecstatic waste of consumerism.

Concluding Thoughts

My general approach to Andy Warhol is to see him as, whether intentionally or not, the greatest performance artist of all time, who holds up a mirror to society as it transforms into a postmodern consumerist cyberpunk terrain. He is Duchamp taken to his logical extreme. Or, in this case, he is an iconographer, showing us what we worship. Some people hate Warhol's art, but what I think what they truly hate is the reflection of society depicted by Warhol. Though we cannot separate ourselves from the cyberpunk postmodern world of techno-fueled consumerism, we can find ways of mitigating its effects and rediscover a sense of true humanity in the process. If anything, Warhol's art, and the inverted religion of Pop art, challenges us to rediscover a more authentic notion of the sacred, propel toward seeking out truly sacred spaces, and create new imaginations fueled more by prayer than by Netflix.

#atmosphere #Bataille #capitalism #consumerism #architecture #atmospherictheology #AndyWarhol

For starters, let's consider a quick definition of the concept of “non-place”:

Non-places are spaces that are not specifically designed for or associated with any particular social or cultural activities. They are often characterized by their lack of history or unique character, and are used by people for transit or as places to perform simple, practical tasks. Examples of non-places include airports, highway rest stops, and chain stores. Non-places are often seen as being anonymous and lacking in local or cultural significance. They are often contrasted with places, which are spaces that are associated with specific social or cultural activities and have a sense of history and character.

In this sense, a non-place is quite similar to a liminal space, which is likewise associated with transition and waiting, such as a hotel room or a shopping mall during closing hours. A liminal space can be a non-place, but I don't think they are precisely identical because a liminal space can still have a coherent sense of identity. For example, I remember when I was a kid, I once had to make a trip to my elementary school on a weekend. Walking through those abandoned, lifeless halls was certainly liminal, but it was not devoid of identity. My elementary school had a firmly established identity, which was connected to a broader historical development and narrative. A non-place, on the other hand, specifically lacks such an identity and historical narrative within a specific culture. The ubiquitous presence of a non-space provides for it something like a quasi-omnipresence that dissolves any particularity or presence itself.

The example of an airport mentioned above reminds me of Andy Warhol, who once said that he loved going through the airport. Apparently, he would go through security and traverse the terminals multiple times without ever intending to board the plane. In his book, “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol,” he said,

“Today my favorite kind of atmosphere is the airport atmosphere. (...) Airplanes and airports have my favorite kind of food service, my favorite kind of bathrooms, my favorite peppermint Life Savers, my favorite kinds of entertainment, my favorite loudspeaker address systems, my favorite conveyor belts, my favorite graphics and colors, the best security checks, the best views, the best perfume shops, the best employees, and the best optimism. I love the way you don't have to think about where you're going, someone else is doing that (...).”

Ironically, this is pre-9/11 airport travel, and going to an airport has only gotten more stressful with so many added security measures. Nonetheless, it's interesting that Warhol notes how one can, at least in his time, traverse an airport without thinking, as if one is a cog in the machine.

The machinic nature of going through the non-space of an airport fits well with the themes in much of Warhol's art — namely, the de-subjectifying power of commercialism and capitalism. As Warhol famously said, “Paintings are too hard. The things I want to show are mechanical. Machines have less problems. I'd like to be a machine. Wouldn't you?” Additionally, it is said that Warhol would create his art in a state of consumerist “zero-consciousness” where he would achieve a quasi-meditative state by simultaneously running the television and radio while thumbing through a magazine. When creating his art, Warhol would allow his consciousness to be thoroughly saturated by the mass consumer pop-culture of late capitalism, and thus you have Pop art. It seems to me that such zero-consciousness or de-subjectivity is the pure phenomenological experience of non-places.

Now, if I asked people to pick the ideal form of music to fill the atmospheres of non-places, they would perhaps suggest “smooth jazz,” elevator music, or corporate muzak. Muzak is a brand of background music that is played in public places, such as stores, offices, and hotels. It is typically designed to be unobtrusive and to create a pleasant or relaxing atmosphere for people who are working or shopping. In a sense, it is created to be “heard” but not listened to, existing purely for the sake of supporting the atmosphere of a non-place.

Because muzak is typically meant to point away from itself, it is a form of art that rejects itself as art. This is why I think vaporwave — and especially its subgenre “mallsoft” — is so interesting as an art movement. Mallsoft severs muzak from its original architectural, non-place location, and forces the listener to engage with music itself. In a sense, mallsoft tries to capture the atmosphere-in-itself of non-places.

For a sample of this type of music, here is my favorite mallsoft album: https://disconscious.bandcamp.com/album/hologram-plaza

Non-place and Religious Experience

Under the proper atmospheric conditions, when a non-space is combined with muzak, the result can be a type of regulated de-subjectivity, prompting the individual into a Warholian machinic behavior. In many cases, such as chain stores, the desired behavior is consumerism.

I don't mean to be too deterministic in my assessment. Atmospheres are composed of many agents, and people relate to spaces in different ways that are not a priori controllable when establishing an atmosphere. However, I think many of us could relate to the experience of getting “lost” in a dreamlike state while out shopping, moving on autopilot the way we sometimes unconsciously drive cars. Through this phenomenon, I think we can see that non-places operate as a type of sacred space for capitalism.

The religious nature of non-places might perhaps be linked to the feeling of continuity with the atmosphere brought about through (however brief) a disruption in the distinction between self and the external world.

The disruption of the distinction between self and the external world was a topic that fascinated French philosopher Georges Bataille. He placed this phenomenon within a dialectic between “discontinuity” (think “individuation) and “continuity.” Discontinuity is defined by Bataille as that which makes the individual distinct from the rest of the world—i.e., not in continuity with other beings, the ability to say, I am not identical to other things, but I am a unique being. In Bataille’s words, 

“This gulf (of discontinuity) exists, for instance, between you, listening to me, and me, speaking to you. We are attempting to communicate, but no communication between us can abolish our fundamental difference. If you die, it is not my death. You and I are discontinuous beings” (emphasis original). 

By “continuity,” Bataille simply means the parts of the external world that are devoid of sentience or subjectivity, whereas discontinuity arises from subjectivity. For Bataille, the chief example of continuity is death, in which the individuation of the subject passes, and the physical body is transformed into a corpse—a continuity with the rest of existence, subjectless and subsumed without resistance into the external order of things. The continuity-discontinuity dialectic is what makes atmospheres (and non-places) so interesting: in some cases, an atmosphere can inextricably link self and non-self. In most cases, the link is not so extreme, but it is still enough to cause a sense of wonder because it calls one’s discontinuity into question.

Bataille linked discontinuity with eroticism and continuity with death. As he said, “The transition from the normal state to that of erotic desire presupposes a partial dissolution of the person as he exists in the realm of discontinuity.” One becomes aware of one’s own individuation from the world and subsequently longs for a deeper connection beyond oneself—chiefly exemplified by the eros of romantic encounter with a beloved. Death, on the other hand, brings the loss of self to the order of the external world. To push the erotic to its extreme can even induce a type of ‘death,’ such as the loss of oneself in the most passionate of romantic encounters. In Bataille’s famous work Erotism: Death and Sensuality, he provides numerous examples in which death and eros, though distinct, are frequently intermingled, often resulting in states of ecstasy or fervor. The implication for atmospheric studies is as follows: By linking subjectivity and objectivity, atmosphere can be an avenue for blending discontinuity (eros) and continuity (loss of self) together into an ecstatic or surreal experience that is both spatial and emotional. Atmospheres can influence experiences of transcendence through the expansion of bodily space, resulting in a deeper connection to the surrounding world.

However, being subsumed (in whatever degree) into a space brings about danger: If the self is being, in some sense, disrupted and reconstituted, then into what new sense of identity is one emerging? In the case of non-places, it seems that one's identity is being reconstituted into that of a consumer. In a less-radical interpretation, we could say that this reconstitution might be trivial at best or only slightly harmful in that too much consumerism perhaps distracts us from more important matters and can lead to too much waste. In a more radical interpretation, non-places can be seen as “sacred” spaces in which the individual experiences a (brief) apotheosis into the capitalist machine god that is seeking world-domination and devotion, a type of spiritual warfare attempting to usurp the rightful rule of God. But again, that's a pretty extreme reading. At the very least, I think we can see that capitalism bears with it a certain type of truncated and immanent religious modality.

#postmodernism #aesthetics #capitalism #atmosphere #NickLand #Kant #Lovecraft #liminal #space

The Backrooms is a popular short story that went viral on the Internet with endless adaptations, memes, games, and short films. I think it's an ingenious bit of short horror fiction that sounds like something from the Twilight Zone. The story postulates that, at certain points in our world, one can make a wrong step and accidentally “no clip” out of reality. This language of no clip or clipping out is borrowed from video games in which there are certain points within a map where the game developers forgot to add barriers. If the player reaches those points, he or she “no clips” out of the map and into undeveloped digital landscapes (or perhaps falls into an infinite void).

The original post that created the basic lore is as follows: “If you're not careful and noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you'll end up in the Backrooms, where it's nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in. God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it (...) has heard you.”

Creepy, right? Most people think so, which is one reason why it went viral online. The basic structure allows for a lot of creative reimagining, and the liminal aesthetics allows for plenty of interesting artwork. But I also think the story's popularity rests in its ability to capture something about our postmodern condition. I'm not the first to point this out. In fact, there's a great video essay by Clark Eleison that talks about how the Backrooms captures our fear of loneliness and isolation (especially when considering how the story took off during the pandemic).

[Link] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fonsUaFURPI)

But I also think the story presents a fascinating illustration of the postmodern and capitalist material environments, landscapes, atmospheres, and architectures that we now inhabit. It shows the horrifying artificiality of these material environments, revealing how our spaces are constructed for the flourishing of capitalism itself rather than God's Creation.

The Backrooms represent a terrifying “outsideness.” What if, behind the borders of your house, workplace, and city, lies an infinite expanse of burning fluorescent lights, musky carpet, and ugly office hallways? It's like being trapped in the waiting room for a doctor's office from hell.

When I think about this outsideness, I'm reminded first of Immanuel Kant and his distinction between how we perceive the world and what lies beyond that perception. According to Kant, when we perceive the world, we do so according to internal categories and schematisms of the psyche, which arrange the raw sense data of experience into categories of understanding. When I look at a desk, I do not see the individual particles and atoms, but instead, I experience the desk according to how my brain is wired to recreate the input of visual stimuli. An entirely different creature, like a bat, might have an entirely different mental representation of the desk. Kant called this sort of stuff “phenomenal” experiences.

But what about the stuff that lies beyond, behind, or “outside” of the phenomenal? This stuff would be the thing-in-itself, and Kant called this the noumenal or noumenous. Our brains, rationality, and cognitive capacities are wired for decyphering phenomenal categories, but we cannot speak with any certainty about the noumenal realm other than to say it's out there. I can talk about, for example, my desk — its design, colors, and object parts — but I cannot talk about what the desk is like, in-itself, outside of my experience—according to Kant; of course, this is philosophy, so that has been subject to much debate. And even if we talk about the atomic structure of the desk, that is still talking about how the atoms appear to us, not necessarily the atoms in themselves.

In recent times, the professionally insane philosopher Nick Land has coined the term “fanged noumena.” Working under the influence of Kant, Deleuze, and Guatarri (and methamphetamines), Land used “fanged noumena” to refer to that “outsideness” which breaks into our world and rearranges things—sometimes in catastrophic ways.

Fanged, here, is to be taken in a Marxist-Lovecraftian sense. For Marx, capitalism is vampiric: “Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” In the writing of H.P. Lovecraft, cosmic, extra-dimensional monsters exist in a manner that is beyond the comprehension of humans, leading to madness, destruction, or both. Land combines these notions and thus theorizes capitalism as a type of Lovecraftian monster rearranging our world in order to be devoured; it is fanged noumena.

In my previous post, I talked about something similar to this fanged noumena in the work of Deleuze and Guatarri in their conception of time. Here is what I said:

To give an over-generalized summary: in a more classic theological understanding, there is a distinction between Eternity (the realm of God) and time (the temporality of creation). Eternity is transcendent to time. However, for Deleuze and Guatarri, there is no transcendent Eternity. Instead, they speak of an “Aeon,” which is a concept inspired by Kantian philosophy. In Kant's philosophy, there is a distinction between how we experience the world (phenomenal) and how the world is in-itself (the noumenal). Deleuze and Guatarri place Aeonic time into a type of material, noumenal reality that is on the same ontological status as our experience of time, “but it does not manifest itself in time. Though it is itself composed of singular events – which can be precisely dated and named – these events compose a virtual plane of intensity that positively avoids climactic actualization. Deleuze and Guattari call these Aeonic occurrences plateaus and show how they constitute an exteriority that haunts the successive order of extensive temporality” (Anna Greenspan, “Capitalism's Transcendental Time Machine,” page 17).

Notice how this Aeonic time is like a ghost (or even a Lovecraftian monster) sitting just outside our periphery, occasionally breaking into our world and leaving haunting traces of itself. The Backrooms seem to have a similar function. It is a realm of pure liminal space that is outside of our periphery or perception, and yet something about this reality conditions our world — or at least what the Backrooms represent conditions us.

The Backrooms are the pure form of a capitalist atmosphere that is devoid of subjectivity, existing neither from humans nor for humans. Indeed, it doesn't really exist for anything so far as we can tell. It is a material environment devoid of telos. It is artificial and yet not generated solely by human effort. This aspect of an artificial material environment without a telos or sole human origin is similar to Nick Land's famous description of capitalism in his famous essay “Meltdown”:

“The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalitization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip.”

The Backrooms spatially represent this noumenal or transcendental quality of capitalism as an alien force conditioning our world and vampirically sucking Creation's lifeforce to empower itself— a type of spiritual warfare if you will. And we see quite well in the Backrooms meme how this noumenal capitalism manifests itself in space: through the desubjectivizing atmospheres of postmodernity, such as office spaces, shopping malls, Time Square, and suburban sprawl. In a sense, all of reality is now suburban sprawl, and the Backrooms are the horrific psychogeography of that labyrinth that pushes us toward alienating individualism rather than communal flourishing.

Of course, much of what I've written in this post is imaginative speculation and intellectual experimentation. I'm not exactly convinced that this is the best way to understand the ontology of capitalism. But at the very least, I think the Lovecraftian lens of Land is an intriguing perspective because it would potentially allow for Christians to view capitalism as a “principality and power” (Ephesians 6:12) and thus under the category of spiritual warfare.

#aesthetics #atmosphere #postmodernism #weirdcore #liminal #sublime #artandtheology

As someone who is interested in contemporary art, I often explore the aesthetic wiki website in order to learn about new art movements. While on one of my adventures, I came across weirdcore. Weirdcore is defined as follows:

“Weirdcore is a surrealist aesthetic centered around amateur or low-quality photography and/or visual images that have been constructed or edited to convey feelings of confusion, disorientation, dread, alienation, and nostalgia.” [link] (https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Weirdcore)

Usually, the images convey a sense of vague, quasi-nostalgia—lost memories from childhood and dreams you can only half-remember. Or even better, a half-remembered dream about your childhood. But in contrast to pure nostalgia, the images often lack any recognizable “brand” iconography (there's no Surge soda or Lunchables), and the images contain an eeriness that many find unsettling—and yet slightly comforting as well.

Formally, weirdcore borrows many elements from liminal aesthetics. Liminal is a term that refers to an “in-betweenness.” Liminal spaces are often “non-spaces,” which forego a unique identity of their own, such as the interior of a public bus, hotel rooms, office spaces, hotel lobbies, waiting rooms, and abandoned malls. The liminality can also be found in spaces where normal activities are absent, such as shopping centers or worship spaces during after-hours.

Liminality likewise holds a vague quasi-nostalgia. When you look at a picture of a hotel pool, it feels like you've been there before, but the memory lies just outside of your grasp. There's a combination of pain and sorrow: You remember the fun adventures you had on that playground and realize that you perhaps made a friend for that brief hour, and you will never see them again.

Weirdcore picks up on some of that formal liminality but then saturates it with the weird and eerie qualities of postmodern capitalism. Weirdcore conveys the strange sensation of stepping into the Twilight Zone of capitalist hyperreality.

Within our culture, we are increasingly disconnected from the sorts of material environments in which humans evolved, and we have replaced those material environments with increasingly “plastic” surroundings. Natural materials have a way of generating their own sorts of energetic atmospheres. As an extreme example, imagine sitting in a cabin made of wood compared to that same cabin made of artificially colored plastic. Increasingly, our material environments mimic the plastic cabin more than the wooden cabin, which is why office spaces and Walmart shopping centers are so displeasure to inhabit. Likewise, the intentions of design behind the material environment are to create an atmosphere that pushes people toward consumerism above other forms of relation. Lost in a slurry of blinding florescent lights, randomly organized plastic plants, dazzling commodities, and faintly echoed music, the shopper can experience a sense of de-subjectivization or, in extreme cases, a quasi-disassociative state perfect for consuming.

With these interior design strategies built around unnatural “plastic” materials, postmodern atmospheres become eerie, weird, and strange — but also somewhat enjoyable. I think the perfect illustration of this eerie enjoyment is the McDonald's play place. It is a labyrinth of plastic tubes and shifting color blocks that cannot be easily navigated. And perhaps if you can remember as a kid, there could even be times in which you got lost within those spaces for a brief moment, or you were met with a sudden extreme darkness full of uncomfortable bumps as you went down a slide. The 'McAmbiance' is both eerie and enjoyable, and I think weirdcore captures that feeling within much of its imagery. The images creep me out, but I also find myself wanting to get lost inside them.

In this sense, I think weirdcore represents a new postmodern shift within the sublime. It's not the first instantiation of this shift, but I think it's a good example. In its simplest sense, the sublime is that strange combination of something that is both overwhelmingly beautiful but also terrifying. It is like standing on the edge of a cliff at the Grand Canyon: one is overwhelmed by the world's splendor, and yet one is also aware that one misstep could end one’s life. In the midst of such a vast beauty, we recognize our own finitude in comparison.

The sublime is not only a property of natural environments like mountains, oceans, or forests, but it can also inhabit architecture. Standing inside a large cathedral can be a sublime experience. However, in the case of the cathedral and natural environments, there can be a deeper spiritual and theological meaning attached to the sublime. For example, when standing inside of a beautiful cathedral, one can feel overwhelmed by its magnitude and outstanding beauty. But there is another step in which one is then awestruck by thinking about how God is even grander and more beautiful than the cathedral. It is likewise with nature: creation is vastly large and immensely beautiful, but God is even more so. One's sense of finitude turns into a religious experience of recognizing one's dependence upon the Infinite, generating gratitude toward God.

In the case of weirdcore, we see something slightly different. There is a combination of fear (eerie/weird) and enjoyment (nostalgia), but it is not the same as the transcendence of the sublime. Instead, weirdcore conveys a truncated and flattened “outsideness.”

The notion of a truncated outsideness is inspired by how the philosophers Deleuze and Guatarri truncated the concept of time. To give an over-generalized summary: in a more classic theological understanding, there is a distinction between Eternity (the realm of God) and time (the temporality of creation). Eternity is transcendent to time. However, for Deleuze and Guatarri, there is no transcendent Eternity. Instead, they speak of an “Aeon,” which is a concept inspired by Kantian philosophy. In Kant's philosophy, there is a distinction between how we experience the world (phenomenal) and how the world is in-itself (the noumenal). Deleuze and Guatarri place Aeonic time into a type of material, noumenal reality that is on the same ontological status as our experience of time, “but it does not manifest itself in time. Though it is itself composed of singular events – which can be precisely dated and named – these events compose a virtual plane of intensity that positively avoids climactic actualization. Deleuze and Guattari call these Aeonic occurrences plateaus and show how they constitute an exteriority that haunts the successive order of extensive temporality” (Anna Greenspan, “Capitalism's Transcendental Time Machine,” page 17).

I'll be upfront: I don't understand Deleuze and Guatarri, so I hope what I said makes the slightest bit of sense. Anyways...

What Aeonic time is to Eternal time, weirdcore sublimity is to transcendent sublimity. Though in this case, the outsideness creeping in on us is a hyperreality of postmodern capitalism, in which the production machine of industry, mass consumerist reproduction, and omnipresent media culture — and especially the internet — have created an eerie rhizomatic “outsideness” of space (both virtual and physical space) that conditions our material environment. Notice, for example, how often in weirdcore the image barriers bleed together, giant dark patches consume space like a black hole, singular text phrases are divorced from meaningful discourse, and objects are deterritorialized from their original context. These common elements of weirdcore art are the basic factors of postmodern hyperreality: everything is deterritorialized from its original context and placed into the organizing structure of capitalism, social media is breaking apart discourse into incoherent soundbites, and there is a looming dark presence of de-subjectivizing ambiances all around us.

As a concluding thought, I think we can see from these instances that the hyperreality of postmodern capitalism generates its own, rival forms of religious experience, space, and time. I think weirdcore has managed to do a great job of capturing the feeling. By engaging with that art and musing upon its meanings, I think we can learn a lot about our current (hyper)reality. And maybe it will also inspire us to spend some time out in God's beautiful creation.