In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Teresias, the blind prophet, foretold that Narcissus would grow to a ripe old age only “if he does not come to know himself.” This statement remained quite innocuous until the boy’s beautiful image inspired such unfulfilled longing that one of his many spurned lovers begged the gods to punish the ingrate. The sufferer asked for the beautiful one to fall in love with another in the same way they have: “May he too be unable to gain his loved one.” The gods took pity and granted the broken-hearted request. And so, once Narcissus caught sight of his own image in a pool of water, he gave up food and drink until he completely wasted away for the sake of that insubstantial reflection (83-85). The mirror and its capacity to reflect has long captivated human consciousness as a metaphor for the act of abstract reflection, which is what distinguishes human beings as those animals that form discursive abstract concepts from concrete perceptions. We marvel at our capacity to reason to such a degree that we lose concern for the perceptions we originally took our concepts from, thereby losing touch with the “the fact” that concepts in no way equal the richness of perception. Human beings become so preoccupied with the act of reflection that we even forget how we arrived at our current conditions for living. What could awaken us back to the world from which our reflections came? Can Narcissus relinquish his longing for his image, if but to save his life?
The plastic arts of architecture, sculpture, and painting, the narrative arts of poetry, the novel, drama, and film, as well as the musical arts all have long provided access for individuals to the possibility of awakening from their naturalized state of consciousness; they have provided the means to shock them out of deadening habit. Habituation to a particular conceptual state, according to Fredric Jameson in his Prison House of Language, “strengthens us in the feeling that the things and events among which we live are somehow ‘natural,’” or permanent (58). Reinforcing art’s privileged role in snapping us out of our semi-permanent, mesmerized stupor, Jameson introduces Shklovsky’s term ostranenie, defamiliarization, as the proper function of art. This quality offers us the prospect “to be reborn to the world in its existential freshness and horror” (51), and which promises us “the renewal of perception” (52). But when was the last time you had such an experience via the apprehension of a work of art? Walter Benjamin laments that in the age of mechanical reproduction the aura of the original work of art is lost in its convenient conversion to accessibility in the multitudes of simulations produced for economic profit (“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”). How, then, can depotentialized works of art reawaken us to the “existential freshness and horror” of life? And would we want such an awakening? After all, what would happen to our beloved reflection if we turned away from it?
The plastic arts of architecture, sculpture, and painting, the narrative arts of poetry, the novel, drama, and film, as well as the musical arts all have long provided access for individuals to the possibility of awakening from their naturalized state of consciousness; they have provided the means to shock them out of deadening habit. Habituation to a particular conceptual state, according to Fredric Jameson in his Prison House of Language, “strengthens us in the feeling that the things and events among which we live are somehow ‘natural,’” or permanent (58). Reinforcing art’s privileged role in snapping us out of our semi-permanent, mesmerized stupor, Jameson introduces Shklovsky’s term ostranenie, defamiliarization, as the proper function of art. This quality offers us the prospect “to be reborn to the world in its existential freshness and horror” (51), and which promises us “the renewal of perception” (52). But when was the last time you had such an experience via the apprehension of a work of art? Walter Benjamin laments that in the age of mechanical reproduction the aura of the original work of art is lost in its convenient conversion to accessibility in the multitudes of simulations produced for economic profit (“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”). How, then, can depotentialized works of art reawaken us to the “existential freshness and horror” of life? And would we want such an awakening? After all, what would happen to our beloved reflection if we turned away from it?