Bacon did not ignore any means

to tum us away from Plato’s philosophy, the human preface to the Scriptures, and praised, expounded, and propagated that of Democritus, that is to say, atomic philosophy, a desperate attempt of materialism pushed to extremes, which, being aware that matter escapes it and explains nothing, plunges into the infinitely small, seeking, so to speak, matter without matter and being completely happy even amid absurdities so long as it does not find intelligence.

In conformity with this system of philosophy, Bacon urges men to seek the cause of natural phenomena in the configuration of constituent atoms or molecules, the most false and gross idea ever to have stained the human understanding. And this is why the eighteenth century, which has always loved and praised men only for the evil they bear, made Bacon its god, while nevertheless refusing to give him justice for his good and even excellent qualities. It is quite wrong to believe that he forwarded the progress of science, for all the real scientific innovators preceded him or were ignorant of him. Bacon was a barometer who announced good weather, and because he announced it people believed that he had made it.

Joseph de Maistre, The Saint Petersburg Dialogues

The peculiarity of capitalism

is that it is a system of production and consumption that has no equilibrium point. It is either expanding or in crisis. The regime of representation that the bourgeoisie instituted once it achieved power shares this instability.

Modernism, like capitalism, is self-subverting and novelty-obsessed. Contrary to what Clement Greenberg claimed, modernism was not an artistic refuge from the vulgarity of capitalism. It was faithful reproduction in art of the alienating process that created the coommodity fetish by detaching value from labor and the set of social relations within which labor produces value. In the case of modernism, this process created the fiction of the autonomous work of art, which like the commodity fetish imbues the art object with magical "aesthetic" qualities derived entirely from within. 

More boadly, modernism supplied a bourgeoisie eager to burnish its progressive pretense a theatrical staging of nonconformity. It inaugurated an accelerated instability of style, the fetishization of unconventionality, the absolutism of fashion.

The impetus toward realism that we observe in early modernism is a naive effort at a democratic reform of the mimetic sign. The hope was that a more empirical, more democratic type of representation would escape the limitations of the old one. It was a short-lived hope that did not take into account the shallowness of the bourgeoisie’s purely pragmatic commitment to democracy and the fickleness of its tastes. Thus, as art became a commodity, realism gave way to a succession of other fugitive artistic trends, for the allure of the commodity requires the incessant refurbishment of its imaginary newness

The development of modernist abstraction is a product of the demystification of the sign. Once the sign is grasped as a convention, it is irreparably fissured and the signifier achieves independence. This is what the notion of “art for art’s sake” attempts to articulate. The material signifier (sound, color, mark, texture, gesture, etc.) is liberated from “meaning.” It is disburdened of its denotational (use) value and like the commodity becomes purely connotative, a screen for the projection of fantasies. Initially, it was indexical and symbolic signifiers that most readily lent themselves to this process of abstraction. However, the readymade and Pop art revealed that even the most iconic signs can be removed from denotational use and re-presented as pure, floating signifiers.

Modernism’s undoing, perhaps prophetic of the undoing of capitalism itself, is that the demolition of the sign pulverizes all difference and all possibility of aesthetic discrimination. Signifiers without meaning and without an assigned place in a symbolic hierarchy become “floating” signifiers, essentially floating wreckage. Modernism inaugurates a psychotic unquilting of the signifier. Liberal ideology tries to hide this impoverishment of the sign by repurposing signs into markers of identity. So Warhol’s Elvises and Marilyns are read as signs of their maker’s (and his complicit audience’s) "queerness." The old phallic signifiers are replaced by their inversions: one learns to idolize failure, flaccidity, and shabbiness as marks of a “transgressive” heroicized anti-heroism. In its fetishized form (as "identity") queerness hides from view the emptiness of a culture no longer capable of articulating any distinction save a distinction between jerry-rigged self-applied pronouns.

Identity is a flimsy peg on which to hang a sign because identity is always out of step with itself. Contemporary identities are never more than the hope of their own achievement and their declaration is also at the same time a declaration of the distance from their achievement. Thus, every self-applied identity replicates rather than resolves the fatal gap that modernity opened between the signifier and the signified.

In its terminal “postmodernist” phase, cultural production oscillates between a psychotic emptying of the sign (i.e. the production of froth) and delusional efforts to recodify the signt by turning it into a token of some transient identity. The figure that seems to me to best represent this moment is the shape-shifting cyborg in Terminator 2: Judgment Day after  he/it falls into the pool of molten steel. As he liquefies, he frantically attempts to recompose himself, mutating rapidly through the forms he had at one time or another assumed until, finally, he is overcome, vomits himself, and dissolves. His special power had been the ability to metamorphose into anything. At the end, he metamorphoses into nothing. This is the immediate future of a desacralized Western culture.

The distinction between

premodern, modern, and postmodern can be expressed semiotically in terms of the relative stability of the sign.

As long as knowledge is grounded in sacred revelation, the sign is a sacred symbol.

After the post-Renaissance triumph of humanism, there follows a modern interregnum during which the signifier is dislocated from its metaphysical referent and the sign is reduced to a convention. In visual art this is most pointedly evident in Cubism and what  descends from it, collage in particular.  Symbolism, and later on, surrealism, discover the “poetic” potentiality of this semiotic disarray. The most banal, ubiquitous signifiers encountered in everyday life are then found to be charged with myriad repressed meanings. Signs become symptoms.

Postmodernity marks the full disintegration of the sign, a semiotic psychosis. The sign is reduced to the concrete signifier, at once hyperreal and mesmerizing but, like the glittering mirror panels that clad postmodern buildings, lacking depth or interiority. The signifier becomes a “floating signifier,” which as Frederic Jameson noted, absorbs rather than bestows meaning. It is stupefyingly blank, brazen in its banality, unsettling in its aggressive shallowness. In place of the modernist investment in the sign’s excessive meaning, postmodernism emphasizes the sign’s abject poverty. The violent contrasts that define the surrealist marvelous are replaced by an undifferentiated aggregation of dead signifiers. Henceforth, anything can mingle with anything else. This is heralded as a democratizing of the image, a demolition of the distinction between “high” and “low.” In reality, this levelling project is a means to give the banal its mirrored surface, turning emptiness into fulness. This is how the readymade becomes the paradigmatic postmodernist invention.

Current woke virtue signaling is a desperate effort to reinvest the sign with unambiguous meaning. Dead traditions are turned on their head and reinvented as liberal pieties. Lameness and imaginary blasphemy (directed at canons and traditions long extinct) become cherished signs of hallowed marginality.  This is not a novel phenomenon. In the words of Sophocles “evil appears as good in the minds of those whom god leads to destruction."

The consequences of the secularization of art

have taken some 700 years to reveal themselves to their fullest extent. It is only with the advent of postmodernism that the full meaning of art's dissociation from the sacred becomes manifest.

Modernism attempted to overcome relativism or, at least keep it at bay, by making a fetish of form. It failed because form only achieves real significance in service to the sacred not as an end in itself. By the late 1950s the exhaustion of a formalism devoid of symbolic content showed itself in the banality of the minimalist object and the equally sterile opticality of postpainterly abstraction.

After decades of Dadaist proclamations of the death of art, art's actual end seemed impending. It turned out however that the aesthetic frame could be separated from and made independent of aesthetic criteria.  This was the fundamental lesson of Pop art, and it became the foundational principle of postmodernism.  Art was saved from extinction by a sleight of hand that enabled it to persist as anti-art art.

Postmodernism is the formalization of formlessness. Aesthetic criteria persist in postmodernism in inverted form, as conventions to be ceaselessly invoked and wilfully transgressed.  This explains why performance is so central to postmodernism, for ultimately postmodernism is but an endless carnival procession of displays of the  violation of good form, a cult of flagrant ignobility.

If art will not serve the sacred, it will serve the unholy, but the unholy is parasitic, and to sustain itself it has to keep conjuring the image of the sacred long after the sacred has ceased to have any real presence.

The energy of the sacred

is dissipated when the sacred is aestheticized and becomes mere object of beauty or "expressiveness." This is why moderns could not derive more than shallow inspiration from “primitive” (i.e. sacred) art.

The sacred is a revelation of an absolute truth and an absolute reality. The revelation of the sacred stops time and is ego-shattering.

Modern art, despite being sensitive to (and envious of) the power of the sacred object is too preoccupied with subjective feeling and the expression of individual vision to be satisfied with the “passive” (and repetitive) affirmation of eternal truths. So while it may emulate the superficial mannerisms of sacred art, modern art cannot achieve the tranquil and implacable conviction in the reality of the unseen that is the foundation of sacred art. 

Gauguin might have admired the piety of Breton peasants but he could not become one of them; he could not enclose himself in the tight confines of their faith and their world. To do so, he would have had to forfeit his precious modern “creativity.” He would have had to withdraw not merely from France but from modern art altogether, indeed, from art itself given the impiety of the concept when art is no longer understood as sacred service.

All of which is to say that modernism, despite its anxieties about modernity, could not overcome what was modern in itself. The concept of and practice of submission, so fundamental to Islam but underpinning all sacred traditions, is alien to modernism. The modernist ethos is Promethean; its restlessness is satanic. 

No authentic spirituality comes from rebellion because sacred inspiration is available only to those who have achieved receptiveness through the practice of humility. The modernist artist aspires not to worship but to emulate God's creative power. Thus, even when he wants to be “spiritual,” he is aligned with the tendencies that are anti-spiritual. Instead of reinventing the sacred, modernist art itself became one of the symptoms of its abolition, one of the indicators of modern “disenchantment."

The desacralization of the sacred object,

Paul McCarthy, Complex Pile, 2007

which took the form of its transformation into art, gave art access to possibilities that could no be realized as long as art remained bound to tradition. The ability to exploit these possibilities appeared, initially, to inject new vigor into art. Untethered from its religious obligations, art became a source of novelties and sensations. 

It took a while for the consequences of this putative liberation to make themselves felt, but by the mid-twentieth century it had become readily apparent that in the pursuit of novelty, art had forged a path to banality. 

Art history has created a false image of continuity between the sacred object and the art object, subsuming both into the profane temporality of linear progression. It has forced them to share a history despite their being entirely different species. Indeed, the sacred object, as a symbol of the absolute and the eternal, only has meaning outside the flux of history. The profane art object is from its inception subject to the vapid exigencies of fashion. 

The emptying out of art, its diminution into mere cipher of exchange value, was for a time covered up by the supposed heroism of an avant-garde at war with outworn academic ideals.  But once the modernist moment was over, it was plain for all to see that the putative liberation of art from tradition was the prelude to its abjection.

Finally, with the advent of the readymade and the objects and attitudes it spawned, art dissolves in and becomes one with its commodity-glutted profane milieu. The appropriation of the banal does not close the gap between "art" and "life" because that gap was opened by modernity, when it replaced the masterful and sacralized production of everyday objects by industrial fabrication and artisans by coerced and alienated laborers. High and low were sundered when the High (the transcendent) was removed from the lives of the low. No purely artistic maneuver could restore that connection. The theatrics of the readymade do not overcome the disjunction of high and low, art and life. They merely reveal the insignificance and superfluity of art when it no longer has a sacred purpose and is reduced to making a spectacle out of its own debasement. 

Early modernists like Mallarmé did not envisage this. Art was supposed to redeem the squalor of modern life. Instead, it became part of it.

One can grant that formalism once served a purpose

as a stopgap against the encroachment of crass bourgeois taste and the demand for morally improving art. Where formalism failed is where all modern antimodern ideologies fail, in the inability to oppose banality in any but modern terms. Since banality is the product of the desacralization of the world, real opposition to it requires an affirmation of the sacred. But moderns are incapable of such an affirmation even when (like Max Weber) they acknowledge the lamentable consequences of the desacralization of modern life. This left modernists no choice but to base their opposition to banality on aesthetic criteria. 

Banality, however, has democratic appeal while aesthetic criteria come off as elitist. This meant that formalism, understood as an aesthetic rejection of the banal, was tenable only as long as there was a self-consciously aristocratic or, at least, a pseudo-aristocratic audience for art. However, at some point around the mid-twentieth century the fickle, fashion-conscious art audience decided to go slumming. Banality packaged as irony, the hot new commodity of the postmodern era, became fashionable. At that point, formalism became a pejorative, and the aestheticized banal debuted as the birth of the cool.

Rodchenko's monochromes proletarianize painting

by making the painting of a painting indistinguishable from the painting of a wall. And yet, with repetition, the meaning of this gesture, so radical in its implications, is inverted, and the monochrome becomes instead the sign of an extreme aestheticism. In this, I think one glimpses how modernism failed: it was meant to be a transitional aesthetic, a bridge to a future in which art would be reunited with everyday craft, as it had been in the preindustrial past. But this future never came and, with repetition, modernism’s radical gestures became mannerisms.