The Greek polis and the Roman civitas represent some of the most distinctive forms of political and social organization in history. Yet, they are often misunderstood when examined through the lens of the modern state. Modern conceptions of the state—centralized, bureaucratic, and sovereign—emerged from the intellectual revolutions of the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Thinkers like Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke reimagined political organization as a rational system of governance designed to maintain order, safeguard rights, and administer territories. This shift marked the state as an abstract and impersonal authority distinct from ancient communities’ organic, participatory systems. Labeling the polis or civitas as early forms of the state distorts their essence and overlooks their fundamental differences.

The modern state is defined by its sovereignty, territoriality, and institutionalization. It operates through impersonal legal frameworks and hierarchies, ensuring governance through the centralized exercise of power. In contrast, the polis was a holistic community where governance was deeply integrated with social customs, religious practices, and communal identity. Participation in the polis was not merely a right but a defining aspect of life, as citizens actively engaged in decision-making and the administration of justice. Similarly, the Roman civitas was built on shared norms, mutual obligations, and a sense of collective responsibility rather than modern states’ hierarchical structures and territorial sovereignty. These differences highlight the need to study these ancient communities on their own terms rather than forcing them into a framework they were never intended to fit.

Understanding the polis and civitas requires a departure from linear narratives of political development that portray them as precursors to the modern state. The participatory ethos and communal integration of these ancient societies starkly contrast with the alienation and abstraction of contemporary political systems. Ancient thinkers like Aristotle and Plato articulated a vision of political life rooted in virtue, justice, and the pursuit of the good life, emphasizing the collective flourishing of the community over the efficiency or control often prioritized by modern states. This perspective offers valuable insights into alternative governance models and challenges modern assumptions about the nature of political organization.

By exploring the unique features of the polis and civitas, this essay seeks to illuminate their distinctiveness and the lessons they hold for contemporary political thought. Far from being primitive or incomplete states, these ancient communities were sophisticated systems that integrated governance, ethics, and culture in ways modern states have often failed to achieve. Recognizing their differences from modern states allows us to appreciate the diversity of human political experience. It opens the door to reimagining governance in ways that prioritize community, participation, and shared responsibility.

The Emergence of the Modern State and Its Philosophical Underpinnings

The modern state emerged as a distinct political construct during the intellectual transformations of the Renaissance and Enlightenment. These periods, marked by a renewed emphasis on reason, individualism, and universal principles, redefined political organization as abstract and systematic. Thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke were pivotal in conceptualizing the state through the social contract framework. Hobbes, in Leviathan, argued for the necessity of a centralized authority to escape the brutish chaos of the state of nature. On the other hand, Locke saw the state as a mechanism to safeguard natural rights like life, liberty, and property. Both thinkers envisioned a political entity defined by sovereignty, bureaucracy, and legal-rational governance, a far cry from the communal and participatory ethos of the ancient polis and civitas.

This vision of the state was not just a theoretical construct but a reflection of broader social changes. The rise of centralized monarchies, the decline of feudalism, and the spread of capitalist economies necessitated new forms of political organization. The modern state became an entity capable of exercising impersonal authority over a defined territory, separate from the cultural or personal ties that characterized earlier forms of governance. It marked a shift towards abstraction, where institutions became the locus of power rather than individuals or communities. This framework profoundly contrasts with the polis and civitas, where governance was deeply embedded in the community’s lived experiences and shared values.

Greek Philosophy and the Distinct Nature of the Polis

Greek philosophy provides crucial insights into the polis as a unique form of human association. For Aristotle, the polis was not merely a political unit but an essential part of human existence. In his Politics, Aristotle described humans as zoon politikon—political animals—whose nature is fulfilled through participation in the polis. This community was not an abstract construct but a tangible and necessary framework for achieving the good life. The polis integrated social, ethical, and political dimensions, making it a holistic entity rather than a specialized institution. Its purpose was not efficiency or order, as in the modern state, but the cultivation of virtue and the realization of human potential.

Plato, too, underscored the polis’s ethical and philosophical dimensions. In The Republic, he envisioned an ideal polis governed by philosopher-kings, where the community structure reflected a harmonious order mirroring the human soul. While Plato’s idealism differed from the practical realities of most Greek poleis, his work highlights the polis’s focus on the collective pursuit of justice and the good. This contrasts sharply with the modern state’s emphasis on individual rights, contractual governance, and territorial sovereignty. In the polis, governance was inseparable from the pursuit of communal excellence, whereas the state prioritizes institutional stability and legal codification.

Misrepresenting the Polis and Civitas as States

Mischaracterizing the polis and civitas as states imposes a linear narrative of political development that distorts the diversity of historical forms. This narrative assumes that ancient communities like the polis and civitas were embryonic states, steadily evolving toward the modern paradigm. Such an interpretation fails to recognize that these ancient forms were fundamentally different, rooted in shared customs, face-to-face participation, and a communal sense of identity. The polis was not a proto-state but a distinct mode of human organization that cannot be understood through the lens of sovereignty, bureaucracy, or territoriality.

For example, Athens, often celebrated as the archetype of democracy, exemplified the participatory nature of the polis. Citizens gathered in the ekklesia (assembly) to debate and decide on public matters directly, without the mediation of representatives or institutions. This direct engagement was a political process and a cultural and ethical practice reinforcing communal bonds. Similarly, in Sparta, governance was shared among multiple institutions, including the dual kingship, the gerousia (council of elders), and the apella (assembly). These structures reflected a commitment to balance and collective responsibility rather than the centralized authority characteristic of the modern state.

The Holistic Integration of Life in the Polis

The polis was a holistic entity where political, social, and religious life were inseparably intertwined. Public festivals, religious rituals, and civic duties were all aspects of the same communal existence. For instance, the Panathenaic Festival in Athens celebrated not only the city’s patron deity, Athena, but also the unity and identity of its citizens. Participation in these events was both a religious act and a reaffirmation of one’s role in the polis. This integration contrasts sharply with the compartmentalization of life in the modern state, where political, social, and religious spheres are often strictly separated.

Similarly, legal practices in the polis were deeply embedded in communal norms and traditions. In Athens, the legal system relied on large citizen juries, often numbering in the hundreds, to ensure that decisions reflected the community’s values rather than the dictates of a professional judiciary. This participatory approach to law underscores the polis’s emphasis on collective deliberation and shared responsibility. In contrast, the modern state’s legal systems are administered by specialized institutions that operate independently of direct citizen involvement, reflecting the impersonal nature of modern governance.

The Roman Civitas: A Different Model of Community

Like the polis, the Roman civitas was a communal organization rooted in shared traditions and active participation. Unlike the modern state, which is characterized by territorial sovereignty and centralized institutions, the civitas was defined by the relationships among its members. Roman citizenship was not merely a legal status but a deeply ingrained social and moral identity. Citizens were bound by mutual obligations and shared values, with political authority emerging from the community’s collective will rather than from a separate ruling apparatus.

The civitas was also notable for its emphasis on legal and cultural integration. As Rome expanded, it incorporated conquered peoples into its political framework, granting them citizenship and allowing them to participate in the res publica. This inclusive approach reflects the communal and participatory ethos of the civitas, which prioritized shared identity and mutual obligation over territorial control or bureaucratic administration. The modern state, by contrast, often defines citizenship in terms of legal rights and territorial residence, emphasizing the individual’s relationship with the state rather than their integration into a communal whole.

Lessons for Modern Political Thought

The polis and civitas offer valuable lessons for contemporary political theory. Their emphasis on active participation, communal responsibility, and integrating public and private life challenges the atomization and bureaucratization of modern politics. In the polis, citizenship was not a passive status but an active practice, requiring individuals to engage directly in the community’s life. This model contrasts with the modern state, where political participation is often limited to voting or other symbolic acts mediated by complex institutional structures.

For instance, contemporary movements advocating for participatory democracy or community-based governance draw inspiration from the ancient polis. These movements seek to reclaim the sense of agency and collective responsibility that characterized ancient communities. Similarly, debates about the role of tradition and shared values in shaping public life can benefit from a deeper understanding of the civitas, where law and governance are grounded in communal consensus rather than abstract principles.

The Enduring Relevance of the Polis and Civitas

Understanding the polis and civitas on their own terms allows us to appreciate the diversity of political organization in human history. These forms were not precursors to the modern state but distinct entities with their own logic and purpose. By studying them, we can expand our understanding of what is possible in political life, moving beyond the constraints of modern assumptions. The participatory ethos of the polis and the communal integration of the civitas offer alternative models of governance that prioritize community, responsibility, and active engagement.

In conclusion, the ancient polis and Roman civitas were not states in the modern sense but unique forms of communal organization rooted in shared customs, traditions, and participation. To label them as states imposes anachronistic assumptions that obscure their distinctiveness and the lessons they offer for contemporary political thought. Recognizing the uniqueness of these ancient forms enriches our understanding of history and provides valuable insights into the possibilities of human association and governance.

Conclusion

The Greek polis and Roman civitas stand as unique historical examples of communal organization that defy the modern concept of the state. These ancient communities were deeply rooted in shared customs, traditions, and active participation, distinguishing them from the impersonal and bureaucratic systems that characterize modern states. By misrepresenting them as early forms of the state, we risk distorting their essence and losing sight of the alternative models of governance they represent. Understanding the polis and civitas on their own terms allows us to better appreciate their distinctiveness and contributions to political thought.

At the heart of the polis and civitas was a commitment to collective responsibility and the active engagement of citizens in public life. In these societies, governance was an extension of communal identity rather than a separate, centralized authority. The participatory ethos of the polis, where citizens deliberated directly on matters of governance, and the civitas, with its emphasis on shared obligations and legal traditions, reflect a fundamentally different understanding of political life. These systems prioritized the cultivation of virtue, justice, and mutual obligation over the efficiency or control emphasized by the modern state.

The lessons of the polis and civitas resonate in contemporary debates about political alienation, community, and civic engagement. In an era where politics often feels distant and impersonal, the participatory practices and communal bonds of these ancient systems provide a counterpoint to the atomization and bureaucracy of modern governance. By revisiting these ancient models, we can explore alternative approaches to political organization that emphasize active participation, shared responsibility, and integrating public and private life.

Ultimately, the polis and civitas challenge us to think more broadly about the possibilities of human political association. They remind us that governance need not be confined to the hierarchical, sovereign frameworks of the modern state. Instead, these ancient forms offer a vision of politics as a deeply integrated and participatory endeavor rooted in the collective flourishing of communities. By understanding the polis and civitas not as precursors to the state but as distinct and sophisticated systems in their own right, we enrich our understanding of political history and open the door to imagining new possibilities for the future.

The post Revisiting Ancient Communities: Understanding the Polis and Civitas Beyond the Modern State appeared first on The Miskatonian.

To point out how this distinction was once present, Weaver uses the example of how people in the eighteenth century would write letters to newspapers and sign them with the Latin word Publius or something like it. This old practice nicely captures how people distinguished between their private and public existences. They protected their own inner worlds while still serving the common good. What was in the public eye and so assumed to be in the public’s interest was not one’s private life but one’s sense of duty to the political whole. A person was thought perfectly capable of fulfilling his duties to others without parading his feelings and experiences, including his various vices. But, as Weaver writes, “Whatever barrier made this delicacy possible has long since been broken down. It is now felt that the individual’s entire life is subject to public report and review. Any privacy claim is viewed as a form of exclusiveness, to be denied in the interest of an onrushing democracy.”

Today, privacy is almost anathema. If not quite entirely gone, signs are that it is disappearing. The very addition of the word social to the word media, or perhaps the way that social media has in many ways replaced older mass media, is just one signal of how the private has been taken up not just as a part of the public but almost as its main form and content. It is not just celebrities who have been tabloidified. Unfamous people can now, through various channels, undertake to destroy their inner worlds in the name of publicity. You and I may be sharing images and thoughts within the confines of an intimate domain while simultaneously broadcasting them throughout the known universe.

It is astonishing to consider, however, that Weaver observed the above already sixty-five years ago, long before the advent of the internet and social media and trolling, well before the arrival of TikTokkers who, like so many celebrities and politicians before them, have so easily and unselfconsciously made a spectacle of themselves; well before it was possible, in other words, to publish the content of your own life without any access to a mainstream platform and the mediation of some public relations expert. Again, the trend is not owed to the digitalization of our lives but has become more apparent thanks to recent developments in diabolical electric circuitry.

For quite a while now, the attention economy has been an economy of self-publicity and self-commodification, which is to say that it prefers people to willingly offer themselves up to Hayekian market logic that allows atomized selves to become subject to whatever seemingly spontaneous order the market has for them. The problem identified by Weaver has deepened. The barrier between the inward and the outward is gone in this postliterate, narcissistic age of ours. But we are witnessing the effects and not the causes, although the causes are many and complex. The causes are bound up in the Lockean worldview that had Skinner turn rat psychology into something applicable to humans, that had him and other behaviorists believe that every child and every worker is a blank canvas on which you can paint any picture you like—as long as you externalize all motivations through incentives.

Nevertheless, it is not the cause I want to examine here, although I get to the main one and its remedy below. In bringing the above to light, I mainly want to challenge the all-too-common view that our age is overly subjective and subjectivistic. I realize that evidence for the emphasis on subjectivity seems everywhere; claiming the opposite may, therefore, seem to be an example of some outlandish Žižekian inversion. After all, self-help pop psych is huge, and with it, so are mental healthism, personal days, and emotivist rights protests, which mimic revolution even while they ultimately serve the extremely banal status quo. The managerial class is obsessed with incentives, and almost every day, I hear people mention incentives as if it is genuinely possible to motivate people by placing all motivation outside of those people.

Still, surely this age is all about the subjectivity of subjects? Various discourses in the humanities have been obsessed with so-called subjectivities for a while now. It is based on subjectivity alone that people declare themselves to be non-binary. Is it not the reign of subjectivity that gets people to spill out their raw, unrefined thoughts on social media? Didn’t Philip Rieff call this the age of psychological man? Are the various turns towards interpretation, hermeneutics, deconstruction, and psychologisation not incontrovertible proof that subjectivity is alive and well? Is all the messaging around identitarian politics and conspiratorialism, and fake news, not evidence that objectivity is dead? Even following the science, after all, is less about the science than about the degree to which the social will has coagulated around some objective agreement. The  American astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson can claim, as a scientist, that what matters most is not the complex tensions and developments in scientific discovery and understanding but rather the “consensus” seems to be one sure sign that it’s all subjective. Isn’t it?

To all of the above questions, my answer is simple. No. If anything, the above proves that we have all but abandoned the realm of subjectivity and entered the world of artifice and artificiality. Perhaps people have given up on science, but the social realm and the degree to which people might agree upon neatly externalized values seem to have replaced it as an alternate objectivity. Why else would everything need to be externalized and declared? What is apparent, shared, and performed is what counts most. What recedes from consciousness is nearly irrelevant.

This is perfectly captured in a phrase I have heard some academics bandy about. Two words: performative subjectivity. The phrase is not meant to be oxymoronic, but it is deeply, deeply oxymoronic. That modifier, performative, ultimately suggests not that people are coming out of some proverbial closet to reveal their inner lives in some outward fashion. It means something else. There is no subjectivity anymore, or nearly no subjectivity. There is only the performance of subjectivity. There is only live-action roleplaying. One cannot feel what one has no access to feeling. If anyone claims to be someone else based on a feeling, the feeling is not about the thing itself but about an external and often highly stereotyped image. We live in an unphenomenological age, in which it is possible to claim to have experienced what you have not experienced, yet you can be believed. The age of all of this surface is also, it turns out, an age of lies.

How about a less controversial example of how subjectivity is nullified? At the time of my writing this, a new trend on X has been to name your most common deadly sins in the order in which you tend to commit them. How’s that for a sign of our times? What was once meant for the confessional booth, spoken in silence and shame and out of a desire for absolution to a priest, is now to be paraded for everyone to see and appreciate. Everyone applauds with tiny likes as if to say, “I see your sins; they are like mine. We are not absolved of anything, but in solidarity, we might feel better.” I wonder if anyone who fell for this trend did anything more than identify the surface of the problem. Was any real self-insight part of it? Unlikely.

The trend here is, or perhaps was, like the party game I Can’t Believe I Did That, which gives you points, as the box says, “for sharing awkward, awesome, and unforgettable moments.” Of course, anyone unwilling to play the game of sharing and self-shaming would be a spoilsport. Even your shame can be commodified. Even your depression can be commodified. Even your sadness can be turned in for a profit.

The modern world has based its metaphysics on advertising. You can externalize your nihilism so easily now, but, having externalized it, you don’t have to feel it, to wallow in the horror of it, and so you can carry on doing whatever it is that you like doing, oblivious to the subjective consequences of living in a meaningless universe. Or maybe you do feel it, if only for a moment. Don’t worry, I’m sure someone with Advertising-style metaphysics will be there for you to help you to escape your inner pain. Even your mental health will be met with corporate attempts to address the problem of your mental health. Isn’t this what the transparency society is all about? You get to utter or outer what’s going on inside you. But this is less to confront it, to see it, to help you process it, rather than to get rid of it. Self-insight is not the aim.

Another concrete example of a widespread antagonism towards subjectivity is found in studies on how television and other screens affect people. It is easy to forget, since so many of us weren’t alive at the time, that when television first arrived on the world’s stage, many were thrilled at how that new technology would improve everyone’s imagination. Television was considered this magical inspiration machine, an objective hallucinogenic of a kind, something to enrich the inner worlds of people, especially children. The truth turned out to be otherwise. Where imagination was once, in some ways, unbounded by external expectations, it became increasingly clear that children and grownups alike felt compelled to imitate only what they saw and not what they experienced. Overwhelmingly, studies have shown a decline in imagination. And people with poor imaginations tend to prefer action and violence. Now, let’s see what that does to our world.

Well, it’s only gotten worse as we have placed more screens around us, like shields against the world. They stimulate us without allowing us to feel the stimulus too deeply. Imagination is no longer reflective of the rich complexity of human psychology, like the psychology we find in Dostoevsky’s work, for example, but is concerned with the entirely external. It is telling, I think, that storytelling advice now focuses so heavily on action. Pick up an old novel and look at the dialogue. Now, pick up a new novel and do the same. Notice a difference? A character is only what they do, say the storytelling experts. Your ideology is what is entirely externalized, says Žižek, more or less. What you believe doesn’t matter, he says. All belief is outside of you. The university believes in education when you don’t. The church believes in God when you don’t. The television believes in imagination when you don’t. Is this how it has to be? Is this how it is?

Well, of course not. But, in our time, inner qualities are increasingly chaotic, and in the chaos, we are easily tempted to seek the solace of externality. Self-regulation, emotional control, and a sense of autonomy, even in our individuality, are all threatened because what is beyond us is what often tends to count more. Some theorists suggest that a sort of displacement has occurred, where external pressures have shoved out the inner worlds of people. The example mentioned above of how imagination has been compromised is just one. Another one is the phenomenon so often discussed by young people whose brains have been rewired by pornography. One of my younger friends admitted to me recently that he has erectile dysfunction, and he’s not even thirty because of all the porn he’s watched. He thought this was normal.

It’s no wonder that a certain kind of vitalism is making a comeback in our time, even if it is not yet sufficiently deep and reflective to mirror the vitalism of, say, Michel Henry. It’s impossible to feel the atrophy of desire without, in some way, wanting to restore it to its former glory. But doing so is far from easy. What Rieff calls the psychological man is the shallow man, the one-dimensional man, the man of personality but no character, the man who constantly relies on external stimulus because he has been emptied of the ability to connect with his inner world. The narcissism of our time is not, then, a narcissism of obsessive introversion; it is, rather, the exact opposite. It is a flight from the inner man.

Your authentic self, it may seem, is no longer you, doing good works in secret, as Jesus commands, but the publicly performed self, the publicly humiliated self, the self who shares his own cringe like it’s everybody’s business. Arguably, even the proliferation of self-help books is, at its best, an attempt—a rather feeble one, I’d say—to reclaim some vague sense of inwardness. It is arguably the result of the widespread failure to nurture resources within ourselves that would help us to overcome the pull towards externalizing everything. The very terms and coordinates of such books, so many of which are overly technical and depthless, are not generally about inwardness at all. Compare any mainstream pop psyche book to the richness of Nietzsche’s insights into human psychology to understand what I mean. Subjectivity is dead, and we have killed it. Is that not one possible meaning of Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God? The King is dead; long live publicity!

One example of this is Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss. The book, my goodness, how I hated it, is fairly neatly and even well argued and deals with soft skills around persuading people. But it’s so very, very shallow. The overwhelming aim of the book is to get results—objective, measurable, tangible results—not to generate any measure of self-understanding. It did not at all surprise me that Voss notes, at the end of that book, how someone was speaking to him using his very own techniques to manipulate him. He was so taken in that he didn’t even notice at first how his own techniques—for technique is what subjectivity is often reduced to—were being used against him.

Human psychology commonly, although thankfully not always, becomes all about external incentives, whether the carrot or the stick. External aims and objectives. The inner man matters only insofar as those external aims and objectives can be achieved. But I need to sound a warning in all of this. As I’ve already hinted, none of this is because of the external world. This is because of a subjective unwillingness to tarry with our inwardness, nurture it, and let it grow. The erasure of inwardness is owed to the neglect of inwardness. But it is a sign of our times and must be noted and dealt with because it is pervasive. The pressure to accept it as normal has been with us for as long as most of us have been alive. I have noticed, in the time I have worked in education, how it is just getting worse. I meet all kinds of sparky and interesting students in my work. But they are increasingly deaf to their own inner voice. So many of them have allowed the internet, in its shallowness and hyperlinking, to shape the destiny of their own souls.

Now, the question of what is true is replaced by questions of what is effective or whose interests are promoted. Philosophical and theological positions are easily subsumed under sociological allegiances, which is to say that what matters is less the nuances of any thoughtful position than the possibility that some activism can be generated in its name. What anyone thinks about anything is close to irrelevant, while the side anyone picks is of utmost importance. Allyship triumphs over personality. The transformation of religion or any faith into a matter of merely private concern and the extroversion of state or other political concerns is no new thing. But as the state or hyper-individualism mixed with identity politics has become virulent even to the point of generating a kind of ideological cytokine storm, there has been a sense that even slight disagreement with the dominant ideology deserves the utmost derision. Public humiliations and cancellations indicate that independent, individual thought is not called for.

The old phrase declaring that the personal is political may mean many things, but among them, now, is the idea that what is personal is no longer really personal. What is personal must go for the sake of the political, even if the political is desperately sick. I have never fully agreed with any political side, and yet I am doomed, because we are in a transparent society, to have my own views conflated with and thus erased by what is most univocally self-evident. All of this is to say that there seems to be a widespread expectation that people should be one-dimensional. This may not be explicitly stated. In fact, when explicitly stated as I have done, people may recoil in horror. But the expectation is there, nevertheless. It lines up rather well with various attempts to reduce reality to being equivalent to some or other abstraction.

“Possibly the worst result of this one-dimensional concept of the person,” says Weaver, “is that it makes self-knowledge deceptively easy. In spite of the popularity enjoyed by psychology in recent decades, it may be questioned whether men understand themselves any better today than they did when Socrates was exhorting the Athenians to examine themselves and to learn whether man is a creature mild and gentle by nature, or a monster more terrible than Typhon.” But then, it seems, even in so much modern psychology, that genuine insight into people and ourselves is hardly the point. Helping people to understand themselves—in the way that, say, C. S. Lewis does in his still astonishingly perceptive Screwtape Letters—does not seem to be the aim. Helping them to “function” is often the goal. Just get people to modify their internal state sufficiently to help them conform to patterns in the world, even if those worldly patterns are inhuman.

There’s something in this, I realize, of Ted Kaczynski’s rather exaggerated but still pertinent claim that society, given a somewhat odd degree of agency here, often creates conditions that make people unhappy and then, instead of changing those conditions to stop making people unhappy, offers that the best cure for unhappiness is some antidepressant. People find other ways to alter their inner state to tolerate the intolerable. Kaczynski mentions antidepressants, and I take it he means these quite literally. But there’s a figurative dimension to his observation, too: often, we find ourselves adjusting inwardly, even if it means removing a sense of inwardness, to cope with external pressures. Often, the cure really is worse than the disease. Arguably, we are left with some subjectivity, but it is a shrunken subjectivity, so small and pathetic that it doesn’t even know how to fight back as the walls of a constructivist world keep closing in.

Very interestingly, Weaver notes that one way that the objective usurps inwardness is found in a widespread obsession with communication. “Communication is usurping the place formerly held by expression,” he says. “What used to be studied as an art, with some philosophical attention to the character and resources of the user, the truth of what was being expressed, and the character of the potential audience, is now being stripped down to a technique.” What was once meant to be the disclosure of being and inseparable from being has been replaced by mere sign exchange. This is evident everywhere in rapid-fire responses to immediate happenings in social media, but it is also there in vapid chatter and content creation.

Life is often reduced to being mere content now, which is another way of saying that it has been increasingly bewildered, rendered empty of being, and full of sign value. “The word communication,” writes Weaver, “presupposes the victory of the secularized society of means without ends.” Implied in this, although not explicitly stated by Weaver, is the idea that all you have to do to destroy inwardness is to destroy silence. If you want people without access to their inner life, keep talking. This, it seems to me, is the key cause for the destruction of inwardness. Haste. Busyness. Chatter. The buzz of the hive and the thrum of the hive-mind. Noise pollution and the often unconscious desire to fight fire with fire and produce an unhealthy compulsion to extrovert everything.

A number of years ago, I saw a documentary series produced by the BBC called The Big Silence. In it, Benedictine Abbot Christopher Jamison invited five people to have a silent retreat. The dear Abbot said at the start that he believed all participants would find God if only they allowed themselves to be silent long enough to hear him. This, to my mind, is precisely the right way to find God. The intellect alone can’t do it. All it can do is clear away some hindrances and nudge us in the right direction. But any genuine experience of revelation would be the result of listening. And you cannot listen when caught in the chatter and trying to fight it by adding to it. Well, the demands of the retreat, for those modern input-thirsty de-subjectivised selves, were pretty steep. Total silence for close to a week. Initially and without exception, the five participants were like naughty children sneaking out of their bedrooms to chat in the way that some of my high school classmates used to bunk classes to go and have a smoke. They craved noise because it had become the norm. We can become addicted to normal even when it’s killing our spirits, and those five participants proved this.

But after a time, true enough, each and every single participant did, indeed, find God. One even quit his job and started a new venture because, in that encounter, he realized that he had been throwing his life away on big business. This, of course, is an echo of some very ancient wisdom. In the nineteenth chapter of the first book of Kings, the prophet Elijah was expecting to hear the voice of God. He stood in a cave on a mountain and waited. As God passed, there was a great and terrible gust of wind that ripped into the mountain’s rocky face. But God was not in the wind. After that, there was an earthquake. But God wasn’t in the earthquake either. Then, there was a blazing fire, an eruption of luminescent power. But God wasn’t in the fire. After the fire, there came a very small, quiet voice, nearly silent but still audible to anyone sufficiently present to it. Elijah heard it, and he wrapped his face in his mantle and stood at the cave entrance. Because he knew that God was discernable in the silence as a very quiet voice, as power whittled down to something even a mortal man can take in.

I often wonder about those five people in that documentary. Already towards the end of it, when it showed all of them returning to their lives, they discovered again that the modern world is all wind, earthquakes, and fire and that silence was more and more difficult to find. It is not said explicitly in the documentary, as far as I can remember, but it was obvious to me that each of those people, in finding God, also found themselves. They had, in a very tangible way, denied their lives and, as a consequence, had found their lives. But when returning to the bustle of busy lives, it became nearly impossible to hear the still, small voice of Divinity. And it would not only have been God that would have been lost, then, but themselves.

Without genuine, deep inwardness, we cannot take a stand against the inauthenticity of the world. Fighting noise with more noise will not do. In doing so, inevitably, the crowd becomes the measure, just as political chatter so easily becomes the content of our thinking. Commitment to The Discourse demands that we stay in touch with every insipid offering by pop culture. But one of the greatest powers we have is the power to exit all of that, even for a little time every day, to shut the hell up, to be silent and listen. Prayer is primarily this: silence and listening. It’s the best shot of connecting to something—to someone—Who is genuinely transcendent. It’s the best shot at gathering and healing all the pieces of ourselves that have been shattered, taken up, and commodified by the tyrannical reign of objectivity. The obliteration of subjectivity does not have to have the last word. But we have to lose ourselves before the truth of our subjectivity can speak.

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The story of the film follows a supposedly great playwright and theatre director, Caden Cotard, who receives a MacArthur Fellowship out of the blue. This astonishing financial support allows him to pursue his own artistic interests, and he commits to doing so with magnificent fervor. He wants to create a theatre piece of absolutely brutal realism and unflinching honesty. He wants to pour his whole self into his work.

“Here’s what I think theatre is,” he explains at one point, “it’s the beginning of thought. The truth is not yet spoken. It’s a blackbird in winter. The moment before death. It’s what a man feels when he’s been clocked in the jaw. It’s love … in all its messiness.” It sounds very poetic, but it reveals a savage irony: Caden hasn’t got any idea what he’s doing. What he’s saying here is meaningless. The words are uttered less to explain than to evoke. Feeling is the goal, not meaning, and not truth. He does not even know how to be honest. And yet, this complete imbecile, who hides behind big words and grand gestures, must now create a masterwork, all while his life disintegrates.

So Caden does what any postmodernist would do. He rejects any story bigger than his own puny, sad life. In the absence of any sense of what is true and in the absence of any larger scheme, the best he can do is set up a world that emulates his own; only he must do this on a much larger scale. He makes a theatrical copy of his own life and even has a copy of the City of New York built inside a massive aircraft hangar. He hires an actor to play himself and other actors to play the people in his life. Soon, the actors playing the real people start to hire other actors to play the actors playing real people, and, well, it gets messy quickly. Rehearsals go on for decades without any performance taking place because, in deconstructionist style, no true performance is actually possible. Maybe a true life isn’t possible either.

As the size of Caden’s project—I almost said ego—grows, the meaning of it all continues to disintegrate. The constant metastasizing of meta-levels produces no explanatory power. Copies of copies devalue the very idea of an original. In the end, everything becomes interchangeable. Fiction and reality become indistinguishable. One of the lines towards the end of the movie, as it slumps into a deep melancholy, is, “Everything is everything,” and also, “Everyone is everyone.” Caden stops being Caden and becomes Millicent. And the real Millicent becomes Caden, narrating the life that once belonged to her to him, asking him to act out what she lived but has now become detached from. Was there any Caden to begin with at all? Suddenly, as Caden returns to himself, he has an epiphany about completing the project. But at that very moment, he dies.

The idea of the interchangeability of people in Synecdoche is echoed in Kaufman’s 2015 film Anomalisa, which perfectly depicts what Baudrillard calls the “hell of the same.” The definitive end-point of postmodernism, once everything has been ironized and deconstructed to death, is a sense that everything has been turned into more stuff, more content, just endless rehashing and repetitiousness. So many signs without any real referents. Everything is everything. Everyone is everyone.

This whirlwind of semiotic overload is still with us now. However, it has taken on a new flavor, one that is hinted at in Anomalisa. I say new, but this has been happening for a while now. Already in the early 2000s, when I was an undergraduate, I heard people talking about being sick of postmodernism and yearning for something else as if the best answer to a new thing grown old must always be yet another new thing. That something else was already on the horizon back then, but it took a while to see it. Still, now it’s clear enough to define. It is perhaps nowhere more noticeable than in the 2022 film, Everything Everywhere All At Once.

Welcome to peak metamodernism.

As you know, that film won a number of Oscars. This basic fact carries no real weight, but it does make it plain that we are dealing with a film and a phenomenon that is very much fitted to the tastes of the mainstream. Yes, the film has postmodern elements. But it’s got something else too.

There are complicated ways to understand the notion of metamodernism. At its simplest, metamodernism attempts to let sincerity and irony “hug it out,” as a headline from The New Yorker put it on the 27th of May 2010. It is often found in films that oscillate between modernist sincerity and postmodern irony. The idea is captured in Joss Whedon’s trick of adding bathos to any overly serious moment: “Make it dark, make it grim, make it tough,” he has famously said. “But then, for the love of God, tell a joke.” The same applies in reverse. If you’ve spent all your energies on making light of everything, excessive cultural references included, then you might as well pull a Bo Burnham and make it grim and tough with barely any light at the end of a distressingly dark tunnel, as he has done in both Make Happy (2016) and Inside (2021). I like Burnham’s work a lot, but I wouldn’t want to be like him. He seems miserable.

Metamodernism is not supposed to be ideological, claim metamodern theorists. It’s not trying to offer a utopian vision. That, after all, would be too much modernism and not enough postmodernism. It’s futile to aim for utopia, for instance, but to get away from that postmodern statement, metamodernism would also acknowledge that, if we’re honest with ourselves, we actually want utopias. And so the aim of metamodern discourse is to describe, not prescribe. It tells us what we might expect in creative works, not how to create.

There’s a bit of a metamodern twist to this, though. Metamodernism is not a program (how very postmodern), but it still has a manifesto (how very modern). The first point of said manifesto is: “We recognize oscillation to be the natural order of the world.” Wait, is it? That seems like a silly principle, like making cyclothymia ontological. The second: “We must liberate ourselves from the inertia resulting from a century of modernist ideological naivety and the cynical insincerity of its antonymous bastard child [that would be postmodernism].” Gosh, must we? And are those the only two options? The third point: “Movement shall henceforth be enabled by way of an oscillation between positions, with diametrically opposed ideas operating like the pulsating polarities of a colossal electric machine, propelling the world into action.” To cut a lot out, the whole thing concludes with, “Go forth and oscillate!” Look, hold on for a moment. I’m getting nauseous. Is my saying this metamodern? Why all this oscillation? Isn’t that just repackaged postmodern indecision?

Metamodern theorists would say that it’s vital to see the meta in metamodernism differently than the postmodern meta in metareferentiality. Meta means both between, more appropriate in the case of the former, and beyond, more appropriate in the case of the latter. This is not to say that postmodern reflection isn’t part of it. But this reflection shows up now not in postmodern copies of copies of copies but in the current obsession with the metaverse—in, for example, Everything Everywhere All At Once or Rick and Morty or Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse or Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. In these metamodern amusements, the copy does not appear as a mere copy—that is, as a denigration of authenticity—but as confirmation. Yes, everything is arbitrary, but somehow, some things still align!

As with the postmodern copy, the metamodern copy has no aura. Only, we are now free, in the metamodern era, to allow all of our warm fuzzy feelings to compensate for that fact. In the meeting of copies, meaning can somehow be manufactured. The guiding assumption remains, therefore, that there is no meaning. But the metamodern twist on this postmodern realization is that whatever accidental sense we do make of things matters more than any real meaning ever could.

Just add more subjectivity, and you’re ready to go!

This brings me, at last, to a refrain I’ve encountered in various metamodern permutations. This is the essential metamodern oscillation: “Nothing matters, and everything matters.” I’ve even heard someone express the idea in this way: “Nothing matters, therefore, everything matters.” If that statement’s sheer lack of reasonableness and logic doesn’t make you want to bash your head against a wall, I’m not sure what will. “I know we’re all nihilists,” say the metamodern artists, “but at least we care.” More or less, the idea is that sincerity is sufficient to make up for the lack of truth.

Yes, metamodernism is supposed to be descriptive. And, sure, I think the idea captures a lot that we see in our time. But it happens to be descriptive of a worldview that is an already well-established and fully operative nihilism with a smile. You can find it all over the place. Liberal theologians, for example, are classic metamodernists. I think of a gifted but ultimately vacuous pop theologian, Peter Rollins, who hurls Derrida and Lacan at theology like Jackson Pollock hurled paint at a canvas, as if to say, “It’s all pointless, but I care deeply about it. Let sincerity and irony hug it out!” He follows every liberal theologian who has ever reduced everything in the Christian tradition to a mere metaphor. Well, that’s just nihilism with Christian language. If you believe everything is metaphorical and nothing is true, that’s still nihilism. It’s just got metamodern flavoring.

I get that metamodernism is sincere. It is also, by clinging to sincerity alone, sincerely wrong. Why must we always be playing dialectical games and sublating a bad thesis and a bad antithesis to create a new and equally awful—and I’d say dishonest—synthesis? This is just reactivity. No self-awareness at all. And yes, I mean that. That, in fact, is one of the points of Kaufman’s Synecdoche. Adding a meta-level to something, whether postmodern or metamodern, doesn’t help anyone reach the truth. It may be smart, but it’s not clever, or clever but not wise. It may, in fact, do precisely the opposite of helping people to reach the truth. Building a house out of mirrors means you’re hiding more of the world and showing more of yourself.

The metamodern mindset almost seems to operate on Yogi Berra’s quip, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it!” It structures a worldview that cannot tell you what a woman is (how very postmodern) but sincerely believes it is possible to become one if you are a man (how very modern). That oscillation is perfectly captured in the queer theory of the medical-industrial complex pipeline. The former is postmodern, and the latter is modern. It cannot tell you what being happy is, but it’ll sincerely offer you all the affluenza you can stomach. A lack of philosophy (postmodern) gives way to entire nations addicted to painkillers (modern). It has no principles (postmodern), but it’ll put it in writing and make sure to get all the bureaucratic boxes ticked (modern). Metamodernism cannot tell you what education is, but it’ll certainly and sincerely get you educated. And it’ll fail at every level to identify what justice looks like, but it’ll fight like hell very sincerely for social justice.

No one knows what’s right, but everyone has rights!

I may have quoted it before here, but I’ll risk quoting it again because it is something that I think captures the silliness of all of this rather well. It also reveals the essential continuity beneath the modern, postmodern, and metamodern modes of thinking, which is nihilism. It comes from Chesterton’s 1908 book Orthodoxy, and it says this:

“The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.”

Well, we are in the age of pity, it seems. We live in a time of immense sincerity. It is all to context-collapse a Jane-Austenian line, “Very agreeable.” But being nice and wrong does not seem to me to be ideal. To be sincere in beliefs that might land you or a few others in hell is a disturbing and not comforting thought. Is sincerity used as a defense against the task of actually figuring out what is true?

Metamodernism is not merely a way to describe certain developments in the creative arena. It describes very well what is happening beyond that. It describes a mask under which hides a very dark and ultimately mistaken worldview. It is still nihilism. In this, Bo Burnham’s depressive metamodernism gets closer to reality than Whedon’s bathetic metamodernism, although he is unlikely to dig beyond his therapeutic paradigm to find something more robust. Mere ontologised cyclothymia is not enough of a foundation. Merely oscillating from irony to sincerity when it feels emotionally uncomfortable to linger too long on one or the other is an attempt to cope with dissonance. It is much, much easier to believe that you get to manufacture and confirm the meaning you can sincerely care about than to consider that you may be answerable to someone else for the way that you have wasted your life and led yourself and others away from the truth, all while simply looking for ways to amuse yourself.

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I don’t want to embarrass anyone, but this has been most evident to me in many online posts by new reactionaries about aesthetics, about art and architecture especially. You’ll find one person boasting about his newly discovered appreciation for old things by dissing all things modern. Then you’ll find someone else declaring that beauty is objective while casting before your eyes some obviously hideous modern artwork to drive the point home. The contest is easily won when you’re working from an unexamined intuition. These are the days of dead arguments, statements propounded and repeated ad nauseam as substitutes for arguments. And yet I wonder how anyone can honestly, so unselfconsciously and unironically, affirm tradition against all things modern, even while they post their thoughts on such a blatantly non-traditional thing as social media. In this age of ironies, the performative contradiction doesn’t bother them. Perhaps this is because it has not occurred to them that it is really a performative contradiction.

Not so long ago, a post went viral in which a certain well-read and usually thoughtful individual offered his followers a kind of cheat sheet, a spreadsheet of sorts, to help them discern between good and bad art. The result was particularly cringeworthy as he reduced the so-called objectivity of aesthetic beauty to entirely subjective feelings. If you feel weird, sapped of your energy, and confused, as opposed to uplifted, energized, and clear-headed—this is what he proposed on his spreadsheet—then, apparently, you’re dealing with bad art. And yet the author of the cringe-post in question insisted that the measure is entirely subjective. With one simple application of a category error, he confused mere sentimentality about art with the power of beauty to make us think less about ourselves.

Perhaps no example of supposedly “bad art” is more egregious in the eyes of naive traditionalists than Duchamp’s famous 1917 work, Fountain, a urinal purchased at a plumbing outlet and signed with the pseudonym R. Mutt. One online comment I read recently said: “This is the worst piece of ‘art’ in human existence, and it’s unironically evil.” Another said, “Modern art destroys classical ideas of beauty because it CANNOT compete with them.”

Every now and then, someone will pipe up, in a similar manner, yelling into the digital void about the terrible blight on art that is Duchamp’s Fountain. Perhaps rightly, they identify it as the source of so many subsequent artistic catastrophes. And, to be very honest, often, especially when certain newer human creations are juxtaposed against older human creations, I feel intuitively compelled to agree by screaming my agreement like some demon-possessed sports fan at that app on my cell phone. But the more thoughtful part of myself, which tends to win out more often as I get older, knows that these credulous art critics are wrong. I’m on their side, in a way, but I don’t agree with them, at least not in the way you’d perhaps expect.

To be clear, Duchamp’s Fountain is not my favorite piece of art; not even close. I would much rather spend time contemplating Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son, as Henri Nouwen does in his book of the same title, or sitting for an hour or two, as I have been lucky to do, in front of John Constable’s beautiful Haywain. The last time I was in the Tate Modern in 2019, looking at a 1964 copy of Duchamp’s Fountain by Duchamp himself, I was more than aware of just how dull and uninspiring it was, standing on the side of one room on a white pedestal looking an awful lot like a display at a plumbing supplies store. And yet, even with this in mind, I still have a problem with the spreadsheet aesthete who thinks it’s possible to divide art into columns with neat categories of what’s great and what’s rubbish. Such spreadsheetism simplistically equates what’s old with what’s good and what’s new with what’s bad.

In opposition to this, I have in mind the Scrutonian idea that to be properly traditional—to be faithful, that is, to the many good things we have inherited from a bygone age—one has to be modern. We can interpret this idea in a number of ways, but one of them is this: to be properly appreciative, in theory, and in practice, of what is traditional, we have to have some clarity on our present place and condition and of the fact that we are looking at the past from this very place and our of a heavily conditioned consciousness. We’re not living in the past but in the present, in the so-called metamodern world with its largely nihilistic sensibilities. This means our view of what happened long ago is filtered through our enwired and enworlded existence. To be properly traditional, I would say, requires seeing tradition less as something that happened, evident by some process of efficient causality in the present, than as a telos. Tradition goes ahead of us and draws us into its world vision if we’re open to it, that is.

I will spare you complex arguments about aesthetics, but I nevertheless want to present something of a defense of Duchamp’s little artistic monstrosity. I am defending it even though it’s a bit stupid. I’m defending it because I’m glad it happened. I can appreciate it, in a way, even if I am not a fan.

We know that in 1917, that infamous artist put a urinal into an art exhibition, signed it with a name that didn’t belong to him, and gave it a poetic rather than a literal name. He didn’t call it Urinal but Fountain. The crudity of the work was not erased by this nominalist addition, but that doesn’t seem to have been Duchamp’s aim anyway. The artwork is a readymade, which means Duchamp didn’t even sculpt it. Duchamp then submitted that readymade for an exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, to which he belonged, for the first annual exhibition by the Society, which was staged at The Grand Central Palace in New York. He did this anonymously since he was a member of the board.

Initially, the Society of Independent Artists met the work with disdain. They didn’t think it was worthy of being thought of as art either. But their rules dictated that anyone who submitted a piece for their exhibition and paid the entry fee could exhibit their work. A major component of their philosophy, which Duchamp wanted to openly mock, was their claim that America was at the forefront of artistic innovation. The rest, as they say, is history.

I have listened to art historians discuss Duchamp’s Fountain in terms of its sculptural qualities, in terms of the fact that he was taking something ordinary and viewing it as if it was art, in terms of the way he took artistic conventions and inverted them, in terms of its supposed revaluation of values, and so on. The typical suggestion even by certain art historians and art fundis, is that it is such art-like features in the object itself that make it art. There may be some value to such perspectives, but I want to focus on something else.

Do they not see that Duchamp was joking? Imagine the scene. You’re at an art exhibition, and right there, displayed as if it is a sculpture (when it clearly isn’t), is the very same object you, if you’re a guy that is, will urinate into later when you’ve had too many glasses of exhibition wine. Duchamp is taking the piss. His fake, crude artwork has been signed instead of urinated into as a way to mark territory (although anonymously, which deconstructs this very idea), and it’s displayed differently from how it is set up in a bathroom. But that’s all part of the quirk of the object. The right response is to laugh, although I don’t expect you to since I’ve now done the worst thing possible; I’ve explained the joke. Still, it’s funny that some cheeky little chess-loving Frenchman managed to get this nonsensical little so-called artwork displayed at an exhibition precisely because he played by the rules. He played by the rules to break the rules. Well done, Marcel! And, as I said, he was mocking the Americans who thought themselves to be artistically progressive when they were, at least in Duchamp’s mind, pretty stuck in their ways. 

It’s funnier still that instead of being a little temporal blip on the artistic radar, the joke stuck. Granted, it took a while for this to happen. At first, the critics regarded the urinal with as much respect as the naïve reactionary. It was thrown away. But Duchamp got people to talk about it. With the help of Alfred Stieglitz’s photograph of that vulgar readymade and some assistance from a Dada publication or two, the fame of Fountain grew. It was only in the 1960s that Duchamp was commissioned to make 17 replicas of the original artwork, and it was one of these I saw in the Tate Modern. The fame of his original had caught on, and it had to be objectified because that’s something that tends to need to happen with artwork. It was marketing ingenuity that made all the difference.

Jump ahead a few decades, almost a century after the Fountain was first displayed, and you find, in 2004, that a poll involving 500 art experts voted Duchamp’s Fountain the most influential modern artwork of the 20th century. That’s quite a promotion for a urinal! This has been taken too seriously by the art establishment, but it’s just Duchamp’s joke being retold in a different register and with a different accent, all while people fail to see it as a joke. The supposedly smart art critics have elevated something made by a plumbing supplies factory over every other artwork created by every talented artist of the 20th century.

It is here that we might learn to appreciate the brilliance of Duchamp’s little piece of toilet humor. By submitting the artistic equivalent of garbage to that exhibition and then later capitalizing on some marketing acumen, Duchamp alerted everyone to the fact that what gave any artwork legitimacy was not so much the object as the context. Put differently, what matters is not so much the picture as the frame. What gave the artwork its power was the framing provided by the art gallery, the art world, and the entire history of art. In his The Fragile Absolute, Slavoj Žižek puts it this way: “Perhaps the most succinct definition of the modernist break in art is thus that, through it, the tension between the (art) Object  and the Place it occupies is reflectively taken into account: what makes an object a work of art is not simply its direct material properties, but the place it occupies.” Žižek suggests that when the Place is hallowed and rendered sacred, the Object gains a special importance. 

Duchamp’s artwork functions less as a simple extension of the usual expectations than as an event. It challenged the frame and therefore (at least potentially) made people aware of it but also, by existing in reference to that frame, affirmed its own place within it. It was a joke but with a serious point. The point was taken particularly seriously by the Canadian media guru Marshall McLuhan who came to see more clearly than many around him, and many around us still today, that the content of a medium is always less significant than its form when it comes to thinking about the effects of media. To use an analogy, it is the fact of reading itself that shapes consciousness more than the content of the things we are reading. And when a new medium arrives on the scene, it transforms the ground; it creates an entirely new environment. Add a new invention, and you don’t just get a new invention; you get a new world. Well, that is precisely what Duchamp did. He changed the entire art scene by installing something he didn’t make, signed with a name that wasn’t his, and which, by any standard logic, really should not have been considered art.

The thing is, though, that the basic Duchampian logic is evident everywhere. Things and people acquire an aura often because of the way they are framed. A normal human being is framed by the cinema or the media, and so becomes a celebrity or star. As Apple, in particular, has taught us, you can frame a smartphone in a particular way, through various kinds of advertising, to render it somehow more than just a smartphone. It can become an object of envy and desire. Somehow, even the most banal new feature can seem like a life-altering event. Wow, a rose gold phone! Woah, a pressure-sensitive screen! None of this novelty is inherently amazing. Framing is a powerful thing.

A band is framed by a stage, and “VIP” passes and so achieves a kind of aura of sacredness. The crown jewels, a bunch of rocks put together nicely but still a bunch of rocks, are framed by all the pomp and ceremony and royalty and, yes, the Tower of London itself and its security,  and so it becomes something tourists will queue for hours to see. A sports event is framed by the stadium and the expense of the ticket and so becomes all the more “special”. It’s even possible to create an aura around a CEO or boss of the company when he or she is “framed” by the secretary that you have to call to make an appointment. Arguably, even the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil would have seemed more special to Eve and Adam in the Genesis story because it was framed by the serpent as such.

I could go on, but instead, I want to go backward. Duchamp’s Fountain is significant, at least partly, because it has a demythologizing function. It takes the invisible mythical structure of the art world and exposes it. In a way, what I’m doing here is similar to what Duchamp did, only I’m demythologizing Duchamp’s demythologizing. What happened in and beyond Duchamp was something similar, given that the art world started to follow his lead. However, it did so by latching on, I would say mistakenly, to the sheer novelty of the event. They mistook the joke for a paradigm. What was great about Duchamp’s work, many subsequent artists thought, was not so much the way it called attention to the frame as its newness. Modernity has always had a novelty fixation, and this was the epitome of that.

But to my mind, fixating on the novelty at the expense of the evental character of Duchamp’s exposure of the picture-frame relation, or the medium-message relation (to think in a McLuhanite manner), is a mistake. Is there no way to adopt Duchamp’s Fountain less as a model of subversion and demythologization than as a reminder of our need to appreciate things? Is there not a way, I mean, to think of it as a lens through which we can better appreciate what art has been and can be? This is what a modern traditionalist might do to avoid the naivety often confused with traditionalism. One way to do this is to adopt the work less as a deconstruction of tradition than as evidence of a deep appreciation of tradition.

Without tradition, after all, Duchamp is nothing. You cannot see Duchamp’s work clearly without having a sense of the history of art. Its humorousness—I almost said humorosity, and perhaps I should have—is invisible without its being in tension with the tradition. This is precisely what struck me, in fact, when I saw Duchamp’s Fountain in the Tate Modern when I visited it in London back in 2019. There is no tension and no contrast there. The urinal is on display, quite separate from other artworks. It looks uninspired. But why? Well, because there it is juxtaposed with so many things that have simply followed its lead. It is juxtaposed with everything that is just more of the same.

Instead of recognizing the hermeneutical brilliance of throwing context into sharp relief, many artists have taken Duchamp’s work in the shallowest possible way. They have rendered it a formula: find something standard and subvert it, and there, where standardization is subverted, your artwork will be! Novelty-obsessed progressives are, in this, an echo of naïve reactionaries. They fail to notice that the only way to move properly forward is to know what you’re leaving behind. It’s to know that you can never really leave the tradition. You are bound to it, just as you are bound to the contingencies of your own time. Duchamp’s work was created as art precisely because it was tied to tradition, precisely because of how aware Duchamp was of the entire context within which all meaning is encountered. 

Yes, it looks pathetic where it is now, and by now, it should be clear that I am in no way defending how so many modern artists used this work as a technique and formula to live by. But even the sad look of that Fountain now is only evident because we have taken it out of its historical frame. The honest traditionalist, who is by no means not modern and who is by all means desirous of interpretive subtlety, is the person who will put it back where it belongs and accord it a sense of proportion that isn’t overly overblown. The mature traditionalist will not ask stupid questions about whether it is art or evil or not, but will ask, in hermeneutical fashion: What does it mean that Duchamp did what he did, and what could it mean for us now?

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