Modernism and Charisma

A. Horvath

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137277855
• eBook ISBN: 9781137277862
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Looking at the relationship between modernity and the rise of charismatic leaders, Agnes Horvath uses 'threshold' situations to trace the conditions out of which political regimes developed. The focus on rationalism and structure has led to a systematic neglect of uncertain liminal moments, which gave new direction to societies and cultures.

1

Squaring the Liminal or Reproducing it: Charisma and Trickster

The liminal is an endpoint, where things hang over nothingness, being kept apart from life, yet feeling it intensively. It is thus something that has no unity, suffering from this deprivation, having a weakness for forms, which cannot be expressed; yet it is possible to sense it, approach it and exploit it. Liminality can only be expressed through the zero, as only nothingness can express nothingness: it is positional, and can only become visible when something infiltrates it. In the following, I give an account of the liminal incommensurability when it first appeared, as an apprehensible object of knowledge in a peculiar underground setting.

When one enters a place not one’s own, not only does one become part of it, but the place infiltrates the person as well, through a strange and uncanny feeling. This experience is even more pronounced when the place itself is somehow unusual, like an underground cave, where one literally enters the void, as if going through nothingness, becoming part of it, although not identical with it. Through those who enter it, this void can gain existence and thus visibility. The experience is identical for any cave, but it gains an additional and striking significance through those caves where very ancient wall paintings have been discovered over the past century or so. These cave paintings express this nothingness with the floating figures and the hazy lines, the beauty and joy in the lightness of forms, the cave being triggered into motion by the presence of people. Letting loose the void, by liberating it from the boundaries that contain it, liberates sensations of sweet delight. The problem is that some can access and approach the liminal properly, whereas others should not have, as eventually a visitor arrived who came up with false demands, based on false suppositions, which resulted in the decomposition of the entire realm of delight. This dramatic revolution is indicated by Lascaux’s famous ‘Shaft scene’, which demonstrates the presence of this intruder, who aimed to possess special knowledge in the prehistoric world.

Though the expression seems hazy, the term ‘prehistory’ can be given a precise meaning, which corresponds to a substantial cooperation of humans with the order of reality.¹ It does not refer indiscriminately to everything that happened before written history, but can be connected to a particular period: the appearance of harmonious images, which first took place on a mass scale and in a particularly impressive manner through cave paintings.² At this moment, with the Aurignacian (the period lasting from about 40,000 to 28,000 BC), we no longer have only to consider sparse objects here and there, like worked pebbles or hand axes, but there appears an astonishing quantity and quality of expression of a sense of commensuration with the world. This is the period when the Upper Palaeolithic started, around 35,000 BC. Palaeolithic cave art survives in Western Europe in about 300 sites, containing many thousands of images. These range from the earliest examples in the Chauvet cave,³ up to the Magdalenian, with Lascaux and Altamira, the most famous ones, dating from around 17,000 to 12,000 BC.⁴ Yet, at about 10,000 BC, the entire development became somehow blocked, the caves ceased to be visited and even their memory disappeared. Around this time people evidently lost awareness about a tradition when bows and other weapons or even hunting scenes were not depicted, when animals were not considered as merely sources for food and when the world was represented as operational without violence in line with one golden mean.

Cave painting generated an enormous amount of admiration among modern scholars and artists, and even the public. Archaeologists and art historians analysed the manner in which they rendered shades, captured perspectives, outlined objects and reproduced movements, underlining the graphic skill for measure and harmony, the figurative realism and expressive strength produced by the delicate use of paint, characteristic of the Western European sites. The discoveries shocked the scientific public and urged it to redefine previously existing notions about prehistory, as no population could maintain these kinds of skills without stable foundations in mind. The paintings expressed principles by people who possessed exquisite taste and native talent, paired with overall excellence.⁵ They reveal temperance, which is required for observing and depicting the powerful, running animals; and a similar moderation in painting that is relaxed (Johnson 2004). Cave paintings are unique documents about a unity with nature. They are animated by human passion and power, a delight in an existence without victims, whether hunters or the hunted, with no evidence for killing or anything else that would violate the order of things (the only exception being in the Lascaux cave that we are analysing). Most intriguingly, humans are not present in the paintings; they are implied as taking part in the whole, without any particular sign of their separate presence.⁶ These people, who came down there, were their own factorial, their own self, identity, sufficiency and creation in parthenogenesis, raising a unit to a second power by itself. This is probably what charisma means when it is able to square itself by multiplying itself by itself.

Parthenogenesis, charisma

In prehistoric cave paintings, man has no role to play. He does not act, does not exist at all as a separate agent, as if his existence were only part of a bigger picture, which is the whole being-in-the-world. This term, taken from Heidegger, can be understood as a lack of self-consciousness, or lack of self-expression. This can further be illustrated in a particularly lucid manner through Plato’s metaphor of wrestling, which captures the heart of the worldview of prehistoric man. Plato, who was himself a wrestler, used this sport, probably the first sport of mankind, preserved through the special esteem in which it was held by the Greeks in their Olympic Games, and in particular the wrestlers’ ‘method’ as a model for the philosophical manner of debating.⁷ Further, in his longest and conclusive dialogue, the Laws, Plato formulated this assimilation with one canon under established codes, which causes delight and beautiful strength, in the following manner:

But the exercises of stand-up wrestling, with the twisting free of neck, hands and sides, when practiced with ardour and with a firm and graceful pose, and directed towards strength and health, – these must not be omitted, since they are useful for all purposes; but we must charge both pupils and their teachers – when we reach this point in our legislation – that the latter should impart these lessons gently, and the former receive them gracefully [charisin].

Plato, Laws 796A–B (translation slightly changed)

With the wrestling metaphor, Plato illustrates two fundamental characteristics of being-in-the-world: gentleness and gracefulness. These are the two outcomes of the delight that is derived from a sense of freedom that is released by working out from hardness of the fight, in contrast to the sinking feeling of a hopeless struggle; out of the tightness of discipline instead of the weakening feeling of pity; out of a tuning towards rightness and tightness instead of being exposed to humiliating shame. Dynamis is derived from delight, the strength of freedom, from being in harmony with oneself, in a well-adjusted world. Here the divine is evident reality; but so are humans, who correspond to each other through ratio, or harmonious measure, as if they would know that they and the divine are corresponding sides in fair and square relation, that they have common measure in grace and strength. Grace is not a given, but is present in human beings, where everything has a meaningful role in reflecting and proliferating decency. Courage and determination produce a hearty soul, similar to the divine, implying being kind, considerate, virtuous, sincere and genuine. The meaning of unity or wholeness is where things belong properly to each other. In the cave, where the void was evoked, one could reach up to the highest, testing oneself by setting the void over and against oneself, feeling and experiencing how things belong to each other. This combat is complete and absolute, thorough, abundant and satisfying, involving the sensuality of man and God as well. Hence we arrived at a reductio ad absurdum, where the proposition of a principle is proved true as it is impossible that it be false. If the human is graceful, then the divine must also be graceful; whereas if it is felt that the human is true, then the divine cannot be false either, and therefore God is true and has a golden mean. A melted heart that is full of sweet adoration is the measure of parthenogenesis, which is bringing forth grace and so charisma, a divinity for those who are themselves equal with themselves; for them it is impossible to be other than graceful, which is at the same time an empty result, as if God becomes united with Himself, which produces the same end as meeting with none at all. Parthenogenesis is a kind of empty result, as the same one is born again who existed already, without any change or break. If you square 1 or 0, you get unity in each case, or one (the unit), the ethos of the cave paintings.

This prehistoric worldview, transpiring from the images, is at one with the whole; the corresponding life conduct does not know change, fraction, division, independence (Fagan 2010: 144), nor identification: one is differentiated within identification, entities come to be in accordance with a principle, while preserving their oneness. Measure and harmony were born from this unity, which was named by the Eleatic Greek philosophers as logos. Logos does not exist in plurality or in any contradiction. It must be in accord with every quantity that corresponds to the same parthenogenetic rational amount. Picasso famously acknowledged, when looking at the Altamira images, that ‘none of us could paint like that’ (as in Lewis-Williams 2002: 31). This, on the one hand, implies that we have still the same taste and eyes for logos as the ancients tens of thousands of years ago, as we can still appreciate their work. On the other, however, it also contains the astonishing acknowledgement, from a most authoritative source, that their capacities were superior to ours. The viewing of the world of prehistoric man, concerning perfection, harmony or formal beauty, falls within the same general patterns as those of modern man, the difference being that they could still partake in it with their ratio. Prehistoric men were not different from us: they saw and judged the world with our senses, though not with our mind, which has become irrational over the course of time. They meant the same thing by beauty and harmony, they did know what order is and what the principles of life are, though with a difference: they did not know about one thing of which we have ample knowledge, which is the opposite principle, irrationality; at least, until the Shaft scene, which admitted incommensurability.

The Shaft scene introduced incommensurable irrationality in the simplest technical manner, by breaking up unity, the common measure of the divine and the human. In this way technology was born, which denies a relationship between two sides. Thus something that could not be expressed, the arrheton (forbidden knowledge for the Greeks), was born, which was not in line with unity anymore. About 20,000 years passed between the emergence of cave art in the Chauvet Cave and the appearance of this secret knowledge in Lascaux’s Shaft scene, where a unique statement occurred on the rocks that attempted to ‘rationalise’ divisibility, claiming that every unity could be broken, that even the most sacred entities could be forced to give up their dignity, and that this knowledge yields infinite power to its holders.

The caves of Altamira, Chauvet, Cosquer, Lascaux, Le Madeleine and others were all hermetically sealed tubes, often miles long, containing the concentrated essence of a life in delight and strength, with hundreds of paintings expressing – close to saturation point – the representation of the fairest and the best of life: striving and power, and the belief that reciprocity is our greatest blessing (Barry 1997: 76–7). Here every animal had a will and character of its own as they always move together, as if their minds were synchronised with each other. In this sense there is no difference in substance between men and animals, society and nature, gods and after-world: all was represented in vigour and rejoicing with its own particular shape, being deeply thoughtful in its serious and quiet way, reflecting each other.⁸ We can in fact even recognise the power that kept all this calm reciprocity together, in the form of a net on the head of the 25,000-year-old and one-inch-high statue of the Brassempouy goddess: ‘It seems to have been love that encouraged the first sculptor to carve ivory to depict the woman he loved’, said its discoverer, Edouard Piette, in 1894 (White 2006: 269). It represented the power of the void when set against themselves once they entered the cave, and they ‘enjoyed the tender joys in the closed cups’ with her (Hölderlin), honouring her down there accordingly.

Aiming at transformation: Bringing forth schism

The basic thing about the Shaft scene is that it breaks with the standard distinction between painting animals and engravings of humans by enacting a painted image for the human being as well, and that it depicts a phallic man who is urging for copulation. The novelty of this image, a class in its own, is well defined by the phallus of the masked figure in the Shaft scene, which has again no equals in the cave paintings. It is true that in the caves there were other phallic signs present, but they were only symbols, not a definite member united to a human body. This small figure in the Shaft scene, with its elementary, vulgar pose, entraps and annihilates the whole tiresome effort of dozen millennia of work and art, reducing the magnificent art into one base – rather than basic – gesture. The Shaft scene changes involution, or the entanglement with the divine, into detachment. It thus alternates the process of turning upon oneself by a function of equal strength to its inverse, which is revolution, or the process of turning round and round. In opposition to the paintings, where everything is moving together in harmony, being caught firmly by an operational will that, invisibly, embroiled together the magnificent figures, this scenery visibly separates them into three different entities: the phallic figure, the divine animal and the bird spirit. In between them a new form of communication is enacted: that of the erotically possessive one.

This release from an elementary and comprehensible communication between the human and the divine, or a change from involution into revolution, entails other consequences as well. All three participants are alienated from their own shape and form: the figure from his human form by the mask, the divine from its divinity by lust, whereas the dislocated spirit has received a separate entity in the form of the bird on the mask and on the staff. Furthermore, the pose of the human is in itself contradictory, schismatic, defending and attacking at the same time: the body lying on the ground with wide open arms shows that he is being subjected to external forces to which he gives himself up, while his erect phallus demonstrates his objecting to the perceived violator.

The ‘Shaft’ is actually a misnomer, as the scene can be found at the end of a small recess, on the right from the passageway that connects the nave to the main hall in the prehistoric cave of Lascaux (Aujoulat 2005: 26, 40–2, 158–61). Its access from the passageway is difficult, as one must negotiate a six-metre drop to reach the bottom level, the ceiling levels being identical; however, it is practically impossible to return from there to the main cave area, which contains the rest of the paintings (Ruspoli 1987: 138). Furthermore, it is now widely accepted that there was originally a second entrance to the cave, from which one could get access to the ‘Shaft’, though not beyond. It was therefore an authentic alternative sanctuary, outside the main paintings and ritual sceneries, yet closely connected to them, to which some people might have been genuinely attracted, with the promise of initiation into some hidden secrets to which the guards of the ruling cult were unwilling or unable to gain access. The mask is worn by a phallic creature with bird-like claws. He faces on the right side a bison, widely interpreted as a divine appearance, which, however, also alludes to a broken unity through an arrow-like sign. The bowel-like drawing under the bison expresses a maze symbol that has suddenly become visible, as if it fell out of the body of the bison. Finally, on the left, as if alluding to a narrative – which is again quite unique for Palaeolithic cave art, as these images do not have a narrative aspect – there is a rhinoceros and a spectre with a bird on it. They clearly belong to the same scene, shown by the manner in which they are facing each other: the bird’s beak faces the rhinoceros’s anus, which is opened up in a manner opposite to the way the tail of the bison is lifted up. There are also six dots painted next to the anal area, arranged in three pairs, as if they were just now being born out of the back part of the rhinoceros (for further information about the unique coordinated animation, see Leroi-Gourhan 1982: 42). The rhinoceros is giving birth to something multiplicative, in definite connection with the bird’s beak, as if this referred to a difference between the digestive system of humans and birds: although in the case of the latter only one orifice serves both for secreting waste and for reproduction, human beings have three, each well-defined and distinct. All three of these anatomical functions are brought into one line, as indicated by the bird’s beak, representing with its phallic, copulative form the cloacae as well, that it is itself the one that is fertilising, excreting waste and laying an egg. A communication chain is depicted here: from the bison’s bird-like soul to the man’s mask and bird fingers, and from the man’s bird essence to the rhinoceros’s behind, and then back to the bison, as the rhinoceros and the bison are mirror images of each other. It is not only the circular movement that is astonishing here but also the presence of a third being. The reciprocal links between the bison and the rhinoceros could function perfectly well without an outsider. Now the circle contains two equal beings, which are mirror images of each other, the bison and the rhino. The phallic figure of the Shaft scene is unnecessary in the circle; this is why the interloper is using a mask, mimicking the divine, disguising strength and so leaving a hole in the picture like a knife in the wound.

The bird and the rhinoceros as well as the man are not to be found anywhere else in the cave. The three pairs of dots, however, are reproduced at the very end of the Southern shaft, just after the Chamber of the Felines and a very enigmatic ‘house on the tree’, though the colours there are different (Eshleman 2003: 188). Given that the Chamber of the Felines is in the area of the main cave of Lascaux that is most difficult to access, and that the images there depict more frightening animals, it might be argued that they represent an alteration to the existing arrangements of the main halls. This lends further credit to the idea that the designers of the ‘Shaft scene’ intended it to represent something like a difficult and secret trial. Even if they did not want...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Editorial Preface to Modernism and Charisma
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Squaring the Liminal or Reproducing it: Charisma and Trickster
• 2 The Rise of Liminal Authorities: Trickster's Gaining a Craft, or the Techniques of Incommensurability
• 3 Liminal Mimes, Masks and Schismogenic Technology: The Trickster Motives in the Renaissance
• 4 Attraction and Crowd Passions: Isaac Newton and Jacques Callot
• 5 Charisma in Eroticised Political Formations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index