Blog Series on Romanticism #7: Future

This will be the final essay of this blog series on Romanticism. The series thus far has considered the history and manifestations of Romanticism as a cultural movement. It will be appropriate now, then, to turn toward the future and ask the question of whether Romanticism does in fact have a future within the context of the twenty-first century. This essay will begin with a consideration of the threats that the Romantic ethos faces in these times. Then, it will consider three manifestations of the Romantic ethos that are still alive and well in the present day: these are metamodernism, schizoanalysis, and lucid romance. Finally, the essay will reflect on the critical question of whether Romanticism does in fact deserve a future—that is, whether it is worth keeping the Romantic ethos alive, or whether it would be better off laid to rest as a thing of the past. 

Threats to the Ethos

As has been made clear over the course of the present essay series, Romanticism is primarily about human subjectivity. This comes across very strongly Goethe's novel The Sorrows of the Young Werther, a veritable archetype of the Romantic ethos; and it is evident in every other work within the canon of Romanticism as well. Therefore, if Romanticism is to have a future, this primary valuation of the subjective experience of the human soul would need to persist within society today. There is reason to believe, however, that such a valuation is on the decline. In part, this is because of the dominance of the cult of science and technology: as Heidegger has argued, modern people tend to experience the world in a highly objective way, looking at the world primarily in terms of how it can be pragmatically used and not in terms of the subjective thoughts and emotions the world evokes within one's own soul (25). This is quite antithetical to the heart and nature of the Romantic ethos. 

Moreover, to the extent that people do in fact experience the world in a subjective way, there is cause for concern over whether that subjectivity is healthy or sick, in terms of what has been discussed in the preceding blog post on Romanticism and madness, More specifically, given the nature of social media and technology today, it is possible that many people's subjectivities are conditioned by a kind of narcissism and/or solipsism, through which they come to see their own egos as the centers of all possible experience. In a way, this would be a perversion of the actual Romantic ethos—which, as is strongly evident in the poetry of Whitman, has always been about attempting to rise to a sense of communion with the entire world, and not about simply plunging into the recesses of one's own mind and then staying there. In contrast, any present-day emphasis on subjectivity would seem to be much more self-serving and egotistical in nature, with the intention being to make people feel self-satisfied and important, and not to rise to this kind of subjective and metaphysical transcendence. 

Metamodernism

One manifestation of the Romantic ethos in the present day can be found in what Turner has called metamodernism: in a manifesto for this vision, he has written that "we propose a pragmatic romanticism unhindered by ideological anchorage. Thus, metamodernism shall be defined as the mercurial condition between and beyond irony and sincerity, naivety and knowingness, relativism and truth, optimism and doubt, in pursuit of a plurality of disparate and elusive horizons" (paragraph 8). This is an intriguing formulation, and it specifically calls attention to the fact that the cultural movements of Modernism and Postmodernism have left a great deal to be desired in terms of the actual exploration of the human soul. 

Turner has understood himself to be speaking in the name of a broader cultural ethos in play within the context of today's world; and echoes of the Romantic ethos can be seen within the context of this new apparent ethos. A key point that can be made in this regard is that science per se, and the objective view of the world, cannot produce a final or existentially satisfying picture of what it means to be a human being. Turner, however, calls not for the rejection of science, but rather the synthesis of science as a subordinate element into a broader and deeper picture of reality: "All information is grounds for knowledge, whether empirical or aphoristic, no matter its truth-value. We should embrace the scientific-poetic synthesis and informed naivety of a magical realism. Error breeds sense" (paragraph 7). This call for a synthesis of the imagination with reality, or the objective world with the subjective world, represents some of what was best about classical Romanticism when it was actually carried out in a proper way, and it is reflective of one the ways in which Romanticism could still move forward today. 

Schizoanalysis

Schizoanalysis is an innovative psychological theory put forward by the writers Deleuze and Guattari. These writers distinguish schizoanalysis from traditional psychoanalysis on the basis of a fundamentally different orientation toward the nature of madness. In particular, whereas traditional psychoanalysts have tended to see nothing in madness but a total failure of the human mind, Deleuze and Guattari see a radical potential buried within madness—a potential not least for widespread social transformation. According to the perspective of schizoanalysis, the psychotic would be a person who, as a result of his very nature, cannot be effectively conditioned by the normative social and cultural order; and as such, he would potentially have access to a wide range of resources within the human soul that could led to a rejuvenation and transformation of a fundamentally broken society and world. 

In their emphasis on the positive aspects of the darkness hidden within the human soul, Deleuze and Guattari hearken back to one of the defining features of Romanticism (and indeed, it may be more appropriate to think of them as neo-Romantics, than to class them as Postmodernists as they ordinarily are). In particular, the classical Romantics were not fascinated by madness per se, as an end in itself. The idea, rather, was that there are non-rational truths about the human condition that are buried within the human soul, and that the dominant society has in general tried to ignore and repress. Within this context, what is ordinarily called madness (or psychosis) would represent not just a breakdown of ordinary mental conditioning, but also an opportunity to retrieve what has been ignored and repressed by the dominant society. This is essentially the gist of Deleuze and Guattari's vision of schizoanalysis, and it constitutes a way in which the discipline of psychology could move forward on the basis of a mature Romantic understanding of the human soul, as opposed to just glibly moving forward on the basis of the standards of social normativity. 

Lucid Romance

Yet another manifestation of the Romantic ethos today can be found in Iyer's vision of lucid romance. Iyer has self-consciously situated himself within the Romantic tradition as a whole; and in particular, he has taken great effort to distinguish between what was good and what was bad within the classical iteration of that tradition: "I acknowledge the truth of the statement that romance [or Romanticism] has always been characterized by a strongly sentimental and anti-rationalist streak . . . In my view, though, there's nothing the matter with the fundamental passion involved in romance. It is, rather, the total lack of lucidity which catalyzes the slide of romance into solipsism" (26). An important aspect of lucid romance thus consists of the project of purifying the depths of imagination with the power of reason itself, so that the modern Romantic will be lucid in his exploration of the subjectivity soul and avoid the pitfalls of actual madness. 

Moreover, Iyer also tends toward defining Romanticism as a kind of perennial tradition and expanding the concept of the Romantic ethos beyond the bounds of the specific cultural movement known as Romanticism. For example, over the course of Iyer's work, lucid romance emerges as a distinctively Christian vision of the world—Christian not in the sense of adhering to the dogmas of contemporary churches, but rather in the sense of attempting to return to the worldview and ethos exemplified by the Gospels themselves. Likewise, Iyer's debt to the Existentialists who came after the classical Romantics is also quite clear over the course of his work. The main idea would seem to be that insofar as the Romantic ethos is defined in terms of a passion for the mysteries of the human soul and a subjective orientation toward the world as a whole, the ethos has had various manifestations over the course of human history, with the cultural movement known as Romanticism itself then being but one particular intense and self-conscious expression of the broader underlying ethos. 

Deserve a Future?

This essay has now discussed possible ways forward for Romanticism in the midst of the twenty-first century. A final (and somewhat disconcerting) question that could be asked here, though, is whether Romanticism does in fact actually deserve a future, or whether it would be better off left as a thing of the past whose time is now over. The psychologist Rank has suggested something along these lines with his notion that Romantic expression, at least within the domain of art, has perhaps been outmoded by the nature of the late modern world itself: people who continue to engage in such expression may by now rightly be thought of as eccentric anomalies who have no real sense for the nature of the objective world today, or the way in which art has such as gone into decline and tended to lose a great deal of the social power that it once possessed. 

Rank, however, does not stop with this thought; rather, his final vision would seem to consist of nothing other than a call for bypassing art as such, in the name of fusing the Romantic ethos with lived experience itself: "A man with creative power who can give up artistic expression in favour of the formation of the personality . . . will remould the self-creative type and will be able to put the creative impulse directly in the service of his own personality" (430). The same intense valorization of the subjective imagination that is found in the Romantics can also be found in this statement. However, what Rank has suggested is that all the imagination and passion that once went into the creation of the works of art would perhaps now best be utilized in the pursuit of an aesthetics of the personality itself, or an art of lived experience. Far from suggesting that the Romantic ethos has no future, this ethos would seem to imply that the actual fulfillment of the Romantic ethos would also at the same time be a fulfillment of the very nature of human potential itself, and even tantamount to a resolution of the existential problem inherent in the human condition.  

Conclusion

In summary, the present essay has consisted of a discussion of the future of Romanticism. The main conclusion that has been reached here is that what can be called the Romantic ethos would seem to be alive and well today, and that that ethos tends to transcend (both forward and back in time) the specific cultural movement that has come to be historically known as Romanticism. However, if the Romantic ethos is to remain vital, it will probably be necessary to reimagine that ethos with respect to what the actual connection should be between artistic creativity on the one hand and lived experience on the other.

Works Cited

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Print. 

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. The Sorrows of the Young Werther. New York: Oxford U P, 2012. Print.

Heidegger, Martin. The Question Technology, and Other Essays. New York: Harper Perennial, 2013. Print. 

Iyer, Sethu A. Testament: An Invitation to Lucid Romance. Austin: CreateSpace, 2016. Print. 

James, William. The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. New York: Cosimo, 2006. Print. 

Rank, Otto. Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development. Trans. Charles Francis Atkinson. New York: W.W. Norton, 1989. Print. 

Turner, Luke. "Metamodernist Manifesto." Author, 2011. Web. 11 Mar, 2016. <http://www.metamodernism.org>.

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass: The Deathbed Edition. New York: Book of the Month Club, 1992. Print.