The Will to Mediate

Writing about art is, in essence, a violent act. Whether it be in the form of attempted murder, as in Panofskyian modes of interpretation that seek to close off meaning by "setting a work in it's original context," or in the more drawn out, tortuous forms of interpretation that began with the proliferation of meaning in semiological and poststructuralist writings. The linguistic turn created a fantasy that all experience could be conceived of in terms of text. This has been the most violent act of all: at the expense of authentic experience we mediate what has happened by attempting to conceptualize all encounters with the phenomenological world. In doing so we are always in a process of looking back and in danger of never having actually felt what it was that occurred, what it was that we immediately feel the need to conceptualize into the awful tyranny of language.

Heidegger once spoke of the destructive act of translating Greek into Latin. It was destructive because translating Greek into Latin is not simply an exchange of one word for another. Something is lost in translation, to borrow from the common phrase, and that something is authentic Greek experience. It was this inability to translate Greek experience into Roman experience that led Heidegger to argue that this was the source of the "rootlessness" of the Western philosophical tradition. In exactly the same manner what occurs when one writes about art is always a loss. In our drive to understand, we have already moved beyond what is valuable in the work of art: namely the pure experience of engaging with the thing before us.

This whole process, the hermeneutical abuse of art, is indicative of a broader condition of human existence. It points to the Will to Mediate: an instinctive drive to, upon having experienced some "thing" in the world, make a conceptual move that leads immediately away from the ineffable qualities of authentic experience and to embark upon winding paths that act to veil purely sensual and bodily experience.

Perhaps we need to take Susan Sontag for what her words state, when in her influential essay of the mid-twentieth century she argued that "in place of hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art." This need not necessarily amount to a return to formalism as it has often been interpreted. Sontag's intuitions were correct, although I am not sure what we need is an erotics of art. This too seems to be part of the Will to Mediate. What I am advocating goes much further. We should not even attempt to conceptualize visual experience, with perhaps the exception of much twentieth century art which was designed for a particular kind of critical discourse, and which likely explains the phenomenological weakness of much of this art. The kind of twentieth century art I am referring to is often more interesting to talk about, rather than to experience. Perhaps that art is unsalvageable in phenomenological terms.

No words, though, can account for what it is like to stand in the Pantheon of Rome and witness a shower of hail stones pouring through the massive oculus at the dome's apex like a waterfall of diamonds. Even the words I have just used fail to capture or describe what was felt upon witnessing that moment, upon experiencing it. Such phrases could certainly be viewed as a return to aesthetic formalism, which again is something I do not wish to resuscitate. We should be content with silence in the face of experience.

The Will to Mediate is nothing new, although technological developments contribute to its expansion within the social sphere. We now live in an age where we can mediate most experiences in order to make them safer, more banal, and, in the worst cases, impossible. Online dating sites take the difficult aspects of meeting a potential partner out of the equation. Because one's experience of "meeting" others online is mediated through the all encompassing flatness of the screen, inhibitions are dropped and potential opportunities of exchange increase, making the practical outcome of increased numbers of potential dates simpler.

It may turn out, however, that what was enjoyable about one's life was not having our desired ends satisfied in ever more simpler fashions. It may turn out that struggle, failing, starting again, always striving, winning sometimes and losing others, will be what was most enjoyable about one's existence. We may find that it was always in the means that life is worth living, not in the ends. What amounts to the authentic means to our ends? Experience.

What is required now is a move away from writing about art. If we feel the need to turn the authentic experience of art into an object of study, perhaps we should be content with more contemporary anthropological approaches in our studies. Such methodological approaches tend to leave the nature of the experience to its own conditions, and instead perform a sort of "mapping" of the kinds of social activity which occur around art objects. If we must eventually give in to the Will to Mediate, this seems to be a less violent approach than critical and interpretive strategies.