Our Occidental Sentiments with Notes on Hyperphotography

For those of us who are accustomed to live on the deepest cosmical sentiments, on the innate spiritual virtuosities of a future humanity, always seeking the clearest and purest aspects of the suprised-packed forest of advanced knowledge, the swarm of creatures who insist on praising and promoting the most primeval ananchronisms of cultural decorum, the least civillized of all geographical periods and the beggining of the vast decadence that surounds us, cannot but arouse our pity and our legitimate protests. Luxury magazines dedicate their glossy pages to the study and mechanical reproduction of the most superfluous, distracting articles of art, fashion, music, literature and their commentary which reflects their objects just as emptily; the aimless proliferation of civilian talents and those who sing their praise under the banner of the word 'creativity'.

Now we who, setting false modesty aside, have the spiritual, intellectual exactitude and memory of reincarnated masters, know precisely what constitutes the meaning of 'tradition' and want above all to study this phenomenon psychoanalytically and to see what are the elements of the repressions of instinct, of education, [the egoical interests, miscomprehensions, insensibilities, infidelities, compulsions, and morbid fantasies, etc., that caused the birth in our century of this collective Babylonian movement.] Our innate capacity to recognise the rarest meaning and sense among the most top-shelf specializations of discourse the world has to offer is not only a gift of developed taste but is as well a psychic propensity which goes beyond even our own intellectual prodigyhood into the unspoken, nostalgic sentiments of private degrees of knowledge that dwells deep within the hearts of great men and were known only to deceased genius, initiates within the tradition: the elder masters.

To say our sensibilities are of an eclectic nature is to miss the mark for these investigations go well beyond 'eclecticism' ranking instead in the most dusty recessess of archives, the accomplishments of rarity contained in the Annales historia, the cloistered traditions of Europe's aristocracies past that today's lack of sense has influenced most all to neglect them. For those born outside Europe, or those living in this century in a post-continental Europe, to understand the essence of the Occident is something of an enormous rarity. Who in the American continent has truly grasped the hermeneutic truth of our heritage? Who can honestly say, with tones of deep sentimentality, to have a sufficiently expansive and detailed experience with the Occidental programe of art and education, to have attained it's eschatological truth and history from Socrates to Patocka? The elder [international] philosopher-scholar certainly has this maturity, but the youth of our beloved Europe have lost their memory. Perhaps this is much to do with the advance of corporate America onto European soil over the past few decades.

In the present age of popular photography the subject, the human figure, has lost all power of expression, every element of spectrality reduced by digital compression techniques, all spiritual value of the optical renounced, both the living human personage and its image, becomes mere still-life portraiture. It is curious to note the affinity in reproducing the human figure of today between animate and inanimate objects, between a head, for example, and a lifeless mannequin. There are far too many people unaccustomed to the world of the soul who find facile and instinctive enjoyment in such reproducible forms and of the insane logic bred of ignorance. Today we see every revelatory potential discovery extinguished, together with every element of lively, spiritual inquiry for the transcendent, to be replaced by a sort of sheeply cowardice both in technical research and spiritual content. True depth of thought [reality] can be glimpsed in those moments of publically expressed truth — when people descend from their playpen in the clouds whereabouts their heads usually entertain so many grandiose perplexities of personal superiority — but this miraculous event of revolution occurs only when there is a majority support for it or social pressure leaning from a majority forces mass confessions. This observation holds true insofar as it can be said that the truth seeker has ceased to 'seek' truth, has lost the natural instinct of the sojourning devotee who explores the lands of learning untill he has attained a complete understanding. But instead, today, mental itinerancy and data 'sponging' of trivial factoids prevails. As a result, the cultural relativism of 'all truth as relative' has itself become an absolutism; thus we see also in effect a state of mental absolvency, mass psychological absolution etc., by penace and sacrifice.  


When we feel the obstinance of others reluctancy to come to terms with indisputable facts, when we see the impenetrable stone wall put up baracading such mentalities from accepting truth, this is not to be confused with possessing a self-certain knowledge of which we are asumed to be ignorant. Empty-headed obstinance, not soviergn solidarity, is a symptom of psychophysical absolvency (i.e., the dissolved state of cranial anthropic structure, is considered a product of Shannon entropy disequilibrium, imbalance at the level of thermal information, set in motion by communication devices that utilize post-Moore's law core-digital processors in the post-Y2K period.) As such, today's people have been so completely absorbed in conflicting information to neccesitate absolutist claims to truths invalidity have lost all perspective that definite actuality itself can even be violently detested or scoffed upon.

Returning now to our critique of method in the photographic arts — it is important to have grapsed the sense that when we speak of aesthetic aims in the capturing of a real object into an image that our aim has historically been allways the portrayal of real life and, more specifically, the representation of scale to form as it appears to us in the world — for this artists were known to use the method of painting to capture a pictorial representation of human figures as idyllic objects such as human beings had imagined themselves to be (i.e., self-representation and cultural identity.) With the loss of identity succeeding with the dissappearance of modernity — art — as the dominant method of representing reality, was replaced with the camera. Once the camera developed into an analog technology capable of reproducing visual objects at visibly accurate or 'analogical' scales of representation, photography was elevated to the level of an artform since it had to compete with this loss of identity in the presentational aesthetic. Photography is now a declining art and its technical exacting quality to depict reality in the scale to form representation has reached total decline since the introduction and adoption of high-definition digital cameras. The reason for this is of course due to the compression ratios of these devices which cannot produce smooth and fluidic, true to scale representations of persons and objects as we see and experience them with the eye.

Instead of the analog [copy] representation of accuracy that is scale fit we have the digitally compressed, reduced and fragmented presentations that do not do what painting and early photography intended to do which was to represent at scale the world as we perceive it. Thus by compressing the image at high definition ratios we move away from re-presenting the world to a bare presentation — presenting the world as if it were the actual world itself — an ironic style of distorting reality, which has then pressed itself into the opticon of perceiving the real, today, is no longer experienced truthfully since our logical sensorium is programmed by bombardment with the presentation of a real [simulacrum] that is empty of the thing itself. Just like the photographs that now present them, people also have been reduced to 'cinematic' presentations as a condition of this incessant bombardment of the eye with the cyber image. Representing is done with artfully crafted skills, a methodic task, to give presentation as well as a new cyber appearance, that of a physically present body and identity that voices its pressence by designed situational awareness, thematic pictorial arrangement etc., and induces a self eliciting effect.

To elicit is essentialy to draw out or bring about a desired reaction from someone or something extant that may or may not have previous latency of the reactive element in its extance. We must proclaim that natural things do not produce an elicit response, that they, being real on naturalistic-existent grounds, do not reach us through external self appearances. Neither are we to be effaced then by the disparaging effects of exerted forces by faceless objects, themselves having been annuled by their own techniques, for we know, prior to bombardment, what lurks below the surface of unreal appearances and phantasms. The convergence between psychical properties with those properties of instruments of technique have produced a hyperbolae of disconcerted responses in us. Such responses which we have engaged or expressly entertained are merely empty projections mirroring the elicited content. We must, on a daily basis, learn to deflect our awareness away from the emulations and enactments of expressive consciousness by those who do not possess it. The scandalous conjurations of collective mobs, with their minutely calculated jesterings, and the masterful placations and diversions of fanatics and syncophants, haunt us to no end.

It is no shock then to see how this crowd has taken center stage in the theater of masks given good consideration to the fact that the once powerfull real-life appearances of human beings can now be perceived with an eye of skepticism; an eye which has been trained to calculate and separate the physical features with the knife of a photogenic analysis. Favouring the extremes of light and darkness this new skeptical eye legitamizes truth and beauty by the confirmations of a retrograde analysis of surface structures. In like fashion the extremities of over exposure and chiaroscuro that supply demonstrable proof to immediate discernment, we behold the numerous charades played out by creatures in the shadows and spotlights as they flounder to voice their inexistence.