The Lexicon is reprinted here with the permission of the author, Daryl Sharp, of Toronto, Ontario. Daryl Sharp is a Jungian Analyst and the publisher of Inner City Books.
Art, the Net, the collective unconscious
Shakespeare’s Royal Self
by James Kirsch, M.D.
The root of all neurosis is the refusal to accept conflict consciously; once an unconscious conflict becomes conscious, it is no longer neurotic and neurotic suffering is replaced by authentic suffering, which brings about the healing of neurosis
This is by Ediger – found it in my old EditThisPage Weblog File (will post that up soon.) I like the quote and did a search for it, but only found my original post. PLUS other nice stuff.
Particularly the item linked here by James Kirsch. The cgjungpage is such a great resource! What struck me most was the quote from Jung. I am relating this to my earlier posts re Hillman and also to the nature of the NET.
The Net is an expression of the collective unconscious – like all great art. That is a BIG idea.
Art, by its very nature, is not science, and science is essentially not art, both provinces of the mind, therefore, have a reservation that is peculiar to them, and that can be explained only from themselves. Hence when we speak of the relation between psychology and art, we are treating only of that aspect of art which without encroachment can be submitted to a psychological manner of approach. Whatever psychology is able to determine about art will be confined to the psychological process of artistic activity, and will have nothing whatever to do with the innermost nature of art itself.
What contribution can analytical psychology make to the root problem of artistic ‘creation,’ that is, the mystery of the creative energy? . . . Inasmuch as ‘no created mind can penetrate the inner soul of Nature,’ you will surely not expect the impossible from our psychology, namely a valid explanation of that great mystery of life, that we immediately feel in the creative impulse. Like every other science psychology has only a modest contribution to make towards the better and deeper understanding of the phenomena of life, it is no nearer than its sisters to absolute knowledge.
C. G. JUNG
Ritual, virtual, sacred space
Ancient Strategies in Contemporary Art by Deni DeBon ©
Dominique Mazeaud began a project called “The Great Cleansing of the Rio Grande,” in 1987. Once a month, on the same day each month, like clockwork she went to the Rio Grande river, near her home, and removed garbage out of the river. Part of her work involved keeping a diary. Sometimes the diary was documentation of the day’s events and other times she wrote “prayers” or poems about her ritual.12 Though Mazeaud is not making a grand ecological impact, her art reaches out through compassion, for one day a month she coexists with the river. Her ritual is personal and usually involves herself, and the people who pass by. Personal rituals work to reclaim one’s own identity, which cannot be found in today’s industrial culture. There is a longing to obtain an intrinsic sense of identity within the individual. Artists are turning to interactive processes which often seem simple and down to earth, working towards finding a sense of function within the world which also heightens the sense of self. Within the current traditions, there is little understanding of ritual art forms. In Mazeaud’s piece, her diary is the only commodity available. The function of the work is the interaction between artist and subject, the ending result is only known to the artist
I am adding this as it follows up on the Suzi Gablik item below. There are some important elements here.
Ritual
prayers
diary
These are the things that move us into the virtual, and that is where the gods are.
Virtual and ritual – connected?
Blog
Whee! I have just updated the whole of the template for the blog! Simple look – white like it has been for a while but this time with a CSS – Cascading Style Sheet – which I will be able to use for all my three column layouts now.
The link above is to the info I used to learn the layout.
Promising Linux development? No.
ZDNet |UK| – News – Story – Linux vendors move to standard platform
Four Linux distributors – Caldera, SuSE, Turbolinux and Conectiva – are to back a standard software distribution, as a way of encouraging application development and battling the dominant position of Red Hat
This is an exciting development! I have Mandrake on my machine and so I can now read this stuff and at least have some grasp – none of it easy without a background in IT etc. Just downloaded & printed the white paper off the http://www.unitedlinux.com site. The implications of that will be interesting.
The thing is that once the UnitedLinux is there it is still free. Red Hat, anyone can use it. It takes a bit of getting your head around!
Update Monday, 3, June
RMS has called for people not to support it. It is driven by the Ransom Love who is not pro free software. They will not be distributing the binaries on their CDs. Selling the trademark is the business model. What seemed promising now does not.
Archetypal psychology
Archetypal Psychology is . . . an innately diverse and complex style of psychological imagination. It can be seen as a broad, cross-cultural movement whose main thrust is to grant “psyche” or “soul” its legitimate place in modern cultural imagination.
OK. That fits.
The archetypal imagination in new realms of ensoulment
This paper actually reworks some of the ideas in an earlier paper I wrote here called “Cyberspace: Shadow of the Cultural Imagination?” It was inspired by a meeting between my class at Pacifica Graduate Institute and James Hillman.
This is the same article linked to below in a different place – perhaps not quite?
James Hillman – Luddite
The Cyberwork: The archetypal imagination in new realms of ensoulment. From the C.G. Jung Page: An article by Cliff Bostock. Towards a Jungian Psychology of Technology
In some ways, this paper represents the recanting of some of my own positions or at least an effort to situate myself with more clarity in cyberspace. It is also an effort to establish some kind of rapprochement between cyber – thinking and the archetypal imagination. This is important to me because among the archetypal Luddites seems to be James Hillman himself. I have heard him dismiss cyberspace in public talks.
The quality of images
The dismissal of cyberspace by so many archetypal psychologists intrigues me because, as I said, the medium is purely imagistic and, according to the Hillmanian view, images are the foundation of psyche. Of course, images have varying character. Images can be degraded in their representation and, certainly, the images in cyberspace vary wildly in that respect. But one does not dismiss all art on the basis of bad painting.
Have I already linked to this? I have some of Cliff’s stuff linked BUT atomz Search is not working! I’m fixing it. This article is of great interest because it addresses the *exact* field of my interest. And yes – many whose psychology I like miss the psyberside.
later: Saturday, March 6, 2010 Entire text follows to prevent link decay.
NY Arts magazine item by Scott Weiland
Virtual 2
NY Arts magazine item by Scott Weiland
In Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age, Levy presents the notion that art virtualizes the virtual. That is, it is possible to become structured by those virtual aspects of the real which in their function bear agency upon us as objects. If it is possible to understand the virtual through media theory, it is the artist in Levy…
Somehow the soul has to be mediated. In that way it is like or is information. Art is one way and the NET is another – that may be a starting point for my essay!
Suzi Gablik
The Nature of Beauty in Contemporary Art
Suzi Gablik has discussions with Thomas Moor and James Hillman.
Here is an excerpt.
Suzi: In our culture, the notion of art being in service to anything is anathema. Aesthetics doesn’t serve anything but itself and its own ends.
I would like that to change. When Hilton Kramer says that the minute you try to make art serve anything, you’re in a fascistic mode’well, I don’t believe that.
Hillman: I’d like to defend the cleaning of the river, for a moment. I’m going back to what you said a little earlier: it’s the attempt to put art in the service of something.
Suzi: Yes, that’s where the issue is.
Hillman: Art in the service of something. If we say that it’s life, and if we think, for instance, of the Balinese village where everything is made to be functional and useful, for celebrations or ceremonies… you’re still in service to the gods, somehow. Now we don’t have that we’ve wiped the gods out… So the god that art now serves is the god that dominates the culture, which is the god of commodity, of money. So it is in service, it’s in service to gods we don’t approve of… Now suppose the question doesn’t become what art should do, but rather how do we find that which art should serve? Art is already in service, so we could perhaps change that to which it is in service?
Suzi: So the question is what could art better serve than the things it has been serving, like bourgeois capitalism, throughout our lifetimes?
Hillman: Right! And I think the artist in the river is serving a different god.
To relate it back to the themes here, what it we replaced the word Art with Net? I see them as both mediating soul. However for it to be of the sort of art they are advocating here it is not all the net that works this way… have we wiped the gods out of the Net?