Page 19 - Cyberculture and New Media

10 ‘Until Something Else’ – A Theoretical Introduction
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document this overlay, with Rousseau’s virtuous ‘noble savage’ and
Gauguin’s entrée to primitivism, but most authoritatively later in the early
Picasso, through the same modern lens that, in its own temporally continuous
but seemingly disjunctive moment, also spawned Cubism. In the analytic
Gesellschaft of Great War-era Europe, the intuitive spirit of preliterate art,
evoking the Gemeinschaft’s numinous significance, marks the first
codification of a transhistorical overlay.
So it is too that an untainted, non-linguistic, perceptual probity
connects Stieglitz to the projects of several of his philosophical
contemporaries; inarguably to Whitehead and Wittgenstein, and not least to
Henri Bergson. It was the latter’s approach to intuitive process, no doubt a
counter to quasi-Enlightenment precise rationalities, that, from the outset,
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could have supplied a vade mecum to Stieglitz’s photography . This non-
rational palpability, that only a transformative escape from the logos of
discourse restores essential meaning, has remained vibrant and persistent in
art’s transhistorical explorations, mapping a field of unanswered questions
extending across a range of contemporary work. It was, for example, in 2003
that Mark Alice Durant and Jane Marsching curated The Blur of the
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Otherworldly (also co-editing the eponymous book ), an exhibition
examining the numinous through the contemporary speculum. Surveying
religious and extra-sensory imagery through postmodern, principally
photographic expression, Durant and Marsching fittingly locate this overlay
at the margins of perception that still stir us toward a temporal Other-time:

Henri Bergson has described an image as something that
exists halfway between a representation and the thing itself.
It is not just a lifeless sign, yet it is not quite life. The
image lives at the threshold, standing between us and the
abstractions we use to represent ourselves. The image is a
window, a doorway, a passage between the flesh of our
existence and the cluttered forest of signs we have invented
to communicate our inchoate selves. Before photography:
words, etchings, pottery shards, carvings in stone, the
artifacts left by our ancestors, the concrete pieces of a
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puzzle with which we attempt to reconstruct their lives.

Rapt between transhistorical horns and consequentially yearning for
conciliatory unison, Durant’s intones an Everyman lament, a cybercultural
sequel to the soul-searching of Joyce’s Ulysses/Bloom:

I desire otherworldly experiences, yet I want proof.
Humans are programmed with these sometimes-
contradictory impulses. By definition, having proof means