Art Beyond Irony: MG Interviews Ken Wilber, Part One

I recently had the immense honor of interviewing author and philosopher Ken Wilber, known worldwide as the premier living philosopher of integral theory and the pioneer of the AQAL Model.  For over thirty-five years (his first book, the Freud-and-Buddha-reconciling Spectrum of Consciousness, was published when he was 23), Ken has been cultivating a reconstructive model of human experience and inquiry that cuts through the haze of postmodern confusion and relates art to science, psychology to spirituality, systems theory to cultural anthropology, politics to ecology, and business to medicine.  He is also a seasoned meditator, and draws his descriptions of the transpersonal realms of consciousness from personal experience - making him a rare resource, someone whose scholarly musings are informed by his vivid, living experience of enlightened awareness.

Dragging a train of both ardent supporters and vicious critics, Ken's writings have been translated into more languages than any other English-speaking author.  He is the founder of the Integral Institute, an international think tank where the extension and application of integral theory to every domain of knowledge and practice is being explored by thousands of people worldwide.

Most of Ken's writings focus on psychology, philosophy, and spirituality - all topics that inform a deeper understanding of art and music.  But Ken has written precious little about art, so I jumped on the chance to ask him my most pressing questions about how "integral consciousness" - this next great leap in human evolution - will inform both the artist and the artistic process.

Ken's language is dense and specific, so I have included numerous explanatory notes throughout the interview for those unfamiliar with his work.  If you would like to listen along to the recording of our call, it is available for download here:

Art Beyond Irony:  Michael Garfield & Ken Wilber, Part 1

Ken Wilber:  Hey, it's Ken.

Michael Garfield:  Hi!

KW:  Hi buddy, how are you?

MG:  I'm doing well, how are you?

KW:  Good!

MG:  Yeah, so how long do you have to speak today?

KW:  Um, oh, an hour, hour and a half.

MG:  That gives us plenty of time.  We tossed some issues around via email, and I guess we can just kinda swim around in those one by one until we run out of time...or attention.

KW:  Okay!  [Laughs.] 

MG:  So I kinda figured that the best way to go about this would be to ease into it with a little bit of discussion about, you know, an analytical discussion on music, and how music appears, and how we understand it.  And them maybe get into a little bit more of a poetic and artful tone in our discussion.

KW:  Uh huh, sure!  Sure, absolutely.

MG:  Well then, I - kind of my first - well, first of all, you're doing well, right?

[Ken suffers from CFIDS, a chronic RNAi disorder that causes everything from paralysis to seizures.] 

KW:  Yeah, doing fine, thank you.

MG:  And you've got a birthday coming up, too?

[This interview was conducted on 30 January, the day before Ken's 59th birthday.]

KW:  I do.

MG:  Well, happy birthday.

KW:  Thank you!

MG:  Well, one of the things that I've been talking about with my friends is something that's kind of central to a lot of people's world right now:  the changing role of music in our culture.  That there's this technological revolution that we're going through now, it's a revolution of communication, and so the role of communication is expanding - like it tends to, in the middle of a technological revolution.

KW:  Right.

MG:  And just as someone who's given a lot of thought to what the consequences of new modes of communication and discourse are going to mean, in the 21st Century, how do you see the role of music expanding or changing in the next ten, twenty, fifty, hundred years? 

KW:  Yeah.  Well it depends on how you look at music, in terms of its actual functionality, its actual contours, its actual definition.  We sort of begin with pointing out that music is an artifact.  So it's something that is created, meaningfully, by human sentient beings.  And it has a component of it that can be looked at as just purely expressive, which is something in a sense that an artist can theoretically just do alone, but then it also has a communitive aspect.  Something that is meant to be conveyed to another sentient being.  And that then opens the artifact to being interpreted at the altitude that it's created at.

[Ken's uses the word "altitude" to mean a particular station along the continuum of psychological development.  The more developed you are, the higher your altitude.]

And this then leaves music's self-expressive and communicative capacity coming from a particular altitude.  And different types of music, or even within types of music, individuals and different artists in specific types of music can pretty much span almost an entire spectrum.  And so what we're looking at is a range of signifiers [signals] that are both self-expressive and communicative.  And particularly in the communicative mode, it's a system or pattern of signifiers that's going to go through a particular medium, and the medium itself can be an important part of the message, but it goes through a particular medium and then is decoded as a signified [the signal's meaning] in a human or a group of human beings. 

And so that essentially means several things, in terms of the role of music, what music is doing, and so on.  And one is that you can look at the actual content of music, its actual altitude, and whether it's evoking a sort of second or third chakra rock and roll beat -

[The chakras of the body's subtle energy system are roughly equivalent to the stages of human psychological development - chakras two and three are correlated with the emergence of the ego and personal power.]

- or whether it's more cerebral, and Bach-classical music sort of sixth or seventh chakra [the nexuses of intuitive insight and divine union, respectively].  And you can look at it in terms of that kind of altitude evoking, and that refers essentially to the structure of music, and the structural altitude that music fits into as a signifier - and, again, whether it's aiming at lower chakras or intermediate chakras or higher chakras - but you can also look at music as its capacity to evoke states of consciousness.  And this is probably one of the most important aspects of music as a spiritual transmission.  Because music at any level can start out as a third-person artifact,  and then can actually end up as a first-person identification.  A person can actually end up feeling one with the art in a nondual flow state [in which the boundary between self and other is completely dissolved].  And if not a flow state, then as a pure witness, a contemplation of the art as being so beautiful or so arresting or so provoking that one is thrust into a causal witness state.

[The witnessing state is a state of pure awareness, unidentified with any of the objects of consciousness - the featureless self of this state is "causal" in the sense that all things arise within its spaciousness, and so there can be no prior origin.]

And if that deepens or intensifies, it will go from that third- or second-person into a first-person identification, and one gets into a flow state, one loses one's self in the art.  The art evokes and pulls forth a capacity for causal or nondual Spirit.  And this can happen at, again, virtually any altitude, just as states, peak experiences can occur at any altitude.  But looking at the state transition itself is one of the really important aspects of looking at art, because at whatever level a society is at, art is one of its primary means of transmitting causal and nondual Spirit.

And you had some questions about environment and in the modern world, as artists are the primary spiritual speakers - one way to put it - and in a sense, that's true.  So what we're looking at are two different scales of what art does.  One is the altitude that the signifiers of art are flying at, and that's a developmental altitude, it's an altitude of complexity, an altitude that is put into the artwork by the consciousness of its maker, by the artist, and will then tend to evoke the same level - in viewers or readers or listeners - the same level of signifieds as the level of signifier.  And so in the modern, in the coming world, art does two things - one, it has a world of higher signifiers open to it, it has a world of integral or second-tier, in some cases, third-tier altitude open that it can resonate from.

["Second-tier" refers to the altitudes at which all previous altitudes are recognized as essential elements of one's own being, and less-developed individuals are treated compassionately and appropriately according to their own development.  "Third-tier" refers to the altitudes beyond second-tier at which the self/other boundary begins to unravel - not merely as a temporary peak experience, but as a permanent feature of one's identity.]

And whether it's in music, or painting, or literature, it can transmit that second-tier evocation, that integral transmission.  And then another is its capacity for states, and in this capacity, as in the past, art has a possibility of evoking state experiences in the viewer, listener, or reader.  And these can be subtle states, of just emotional intensity, but it can be spiritual states of causal contemplation and nondual flow.  And it was nondual flow, for example, that Schopenhauer had in mind when he talked about art transmitting spiritual awareness, where subject and object become one in the viewer, and that's a nondual flow state.  So, sort of two parts - and that's just an analytical, third-person answer to the question.

There's also first-person answers to the question, which are just more aesthetic responses to what aesthetics is.  But that's kind of an overview, a third-person view, of where art is and that it's opening up on a frontier now of a second-tier transmission as well as being able to transmit and evoke states of consciousness.  And those are essentially similar in the past, except that they are going to be interpreted.  If somebody comes out of a nondual flow state, and somebody happens to be at turquoise -

[Ken uses a color-coding scheme to refer to specific altitudes.  "Turquoise" refers to a mature and stable realization of so-called "integral" or "second-tier" consciousness.  See the chart below, from Integral Spirituality (hi-res image viewable here).]


- and the art itself was composed by a turquoise mind, then if you asked the person, the listener/hearer/viewer to explain the artwork, they will explain it from an integral vantage point.  They'll explain it from an turquoise vantage point, in terms of just the effect it has on them.  And whether that's music, and it just somehow "makes me feel whole," and whether it's literature, and there's a consistent writing from a second-tier perspective that's taken and conveyed and evoked in the narrative itself, or whether any sort of art in its communicative form now has signifiers that are available at second-tier.  And this is basically, this is a fairly novel breakthrough.  And certain great artists of the past have had a chance to push into second-tier cognitively and relate that aesthetically, but we're coming to a point now where there are a large number of everyday individuals that are at that - they're advanced everyday individuals, but it's somewhere upwards of five percent of the population, so that adds a mix to art that was not present before.

And the last thing I'll say about is, when it comes to art recognized by art critics, we have basically just about run the course of postmodern art, and that's art that has green-altitude signifiers [conveying an awareness of the social construction of the ego and systematically "deconstructing" it by illuminating its reliance on cultural context] and is heavily invested with normative judgments [declarations of right and wrong].  So art basically has been politicized, which is not really its function, but that's what green postmodern artists and critics have done with it.  But we have about run that course, and so what's new is signifiers coming from integral.  Signifiers coming from post-postmodern.  And whether that's just in music composed by individuals at second-tier, kind of a certain resonance that comes across in that, or whether its actual narrative forms that convey these second-tier perspectives either explicitly by talking about integrative material or implicitly by coming from that altitude - however the form that they are, it has the capacity to use signifiers, and it is going to start using signifiers, that are post-postmodern.  And that's going to be kind of huge.  We're waiting to see how it breaks out, waiting to see what form it takes, waiting to see what narrative form it takes and particularly what visual arts do in the face of integral.

So that's all right on the horizon, and that's why it's a very exciting time in the art world, we're watching the death of a huge movement and the birth of what will be a huge movement, and we're right on that cusp.

MG:  So, talking about the specific signifiers that are freshly being communicated by integral consciousness, I was in a discussion with my friend, the painter David Titterington, and he was telling me that [the early integral philosopher] Jean Gebser has a discussion of just that.  In one of his books, he says, he's asking the question, is the integral music structurally new music, or is it merely novel?  And he gives three basic criteria for what integral music would attempt to do, those criteria being:  "to resolve in its own way the time problem temporically" - to communicate this atemporal, post-temporal reality in a temporal way, and then also "to escape dualism," and "to attain an arational mode of expression."  He said that "the new music is in a position to abolish previous time forms."  So do you agree with him on that?

KW:  Not exactly.  What Gebser was doing was brilliantly tracing large epochs of development and not really understanding that individual holons -

["Holon" is a term coined by Arthur Koestler to signify anything with both a body and mind.  That includes you!]

- go through necessary stages, whereas social holons do not go through mandatory stages -

[Ken maintains that societies have no central organizing mind, and so follow a slightly different set of rules than individuals.]

- and also understanding that an individual holon has a dominant monad [a central nexus of consciousness and agency], and a social holon that has a dominant mode of discourse [for example, the magical meaning systems and tribal economic structures of indigenous peoples, in contrast with the rational meaning systems and industrial economic structures of modernity].  So he analyzed the dominant modes of discourse in major epochs that human beings have developed through, right up to sort of the leading edge of the epoch that he was in when he was writing - which was rational.  And he got those essentially right, although you can slice development in an infinite number of ways.  The way he did it captures very well large aspects of the worldviews of these epochs, and they were, of course, archaic, magic, mythic, rational - rational being the first of the mental - and integral-aperspectival.  And his "integral-aperspectival" is basically a mixture of green [postmodern], and teal [emergent integral], and turquoise [mature integral], and nondual states.  And it's just because he didn't have a model that more clearly separated these different dimensions, and so he tended to get right on the edge of what art was doing in his time, and look at any of the art beyond that, and think that was coming from the next structure.  Whereas a lot of the art beyond that was coming from states of consciousness, for example, some from very high states, nondual states.  And so he mistakenly imported a radical overcoming of duality in the integral-aperspectival structure.  And it doesn't overcome radical subject-object duality, that's still present.  It can do it in temporary states, in nondual states.  So I don't exactly agree with Gebser's analysis of that. 

What I see [integral] art doing is overcoming the problem of pluralism and the problem of relativism -

["Pluralism" and "relativism," in their extreme forms, lead to a philosophical conviction that there are no universal common features to humanity or human experience, and so no deeper truths, no way to ultimately understand each other, and no universal standards of goodness or truth or beauty.]

- and finding ways - starting narratively, but moving to visual arts and music - to overcome the performative contradictions of pluralism.  [The "performative contradictions of pluralism" center around its claim that there is no universal truth - except that one.  Whoops!]  And those are really fundamental in that they're problems of self-reflexivity.  And the problem of green art, of pluralistic art, is that it's actually self-deconstructing.  It starts out and it deconstructs things in the world that need to be deconstructed, but because it does not have access to a universalizing capacity - all it has access to is orange [rational] universals, which are rigid and monolithic and systemic.

[Think about how modernist thought declares "survival of the fittest" to be the best economic model, or a single, final materialist theory to be the achievable end of scientific inquiry, and you know what he means.]

And so green basically is in part a criticism of orange universals.  Because it has a perspective on systems, it has a meta-systemic view.  And so it sees that different systems can arise in different cultures.  And that in many ways, knowledge is socially constructed.  But then it takes that way too far, because it's the only tools it has.  And so [green] art starts out deconstructing things that need to be deconstructed.  It deconstructs the rigid conventions of this world, it deconstructs rigid taboos on virtually anything, any taboo on sex or power or  females/males, anything like that.  But then it has no ultimate place to stand, because the same principles it uses to deconstruct everything else actually apply to itself, as well.  And so you get an entire tension in postmodern art, you get a self-loathing that is deep and pervasive, and is only handled, basically, by irony.   And ironic art is art that says, "This is not true."  That's what irony is:  it's a statement that means the opposite of what it really says.  So, you know, irony is like, "Oh, nice tie."  And that sort of attitude of "Oh, nice tie" goes through all of [postmodern] art, cuz the only place it can stand is in an ironic, self-denying, ultimately self-loathing stance.

It's a bad time to be an artist, because it's essentially making conscious the self-loathing that it wishes the world to have for itself.  A deconstructed world is a world that is self-loathing to the core.  And that's the essential core message, hidden performative contradictory message, in postmodern art.  And it's because it's the performative contradiction in the green altitude itself.  Green is the last major structure before truly integral structure, and so green is two things:  it's both trying to be integral, claims that it doesn't marginalize anything, claims that it doesn't exclude anything, except it marginalizes orange [modernism], it marginalizes amber [conventional, ethnocentric consciousness], it marginalizes red [mythic, heroic egotism], it doesn't like any of those, and all of those get attacked.  So it says its trying to be integral, but it doesn't reach it, it doesn't really make it.  And so it's sort of a half-way step to integral.  And as such, it fails on its own desires.  And it knows, preconsciously, that it's failed to deliver the integral goods - and so, again, it slips into self-loathing. 

So I don't think that the new art is primarily concerned with the temporal problem, and I don't think it's concerned with the duality problem.  I think those are things that Gebser just picked out of the air.  And I don't think it's arational.  "Integral-aperspectival" is arational, it's aperspectival.  And what you get with second-tier is universal-perspectival.  You get, in other words, perspectives that hold up as good-enough universals, and show the common patterns that all cultures are following.  And these patterns are not given eternally by archetypes; they're given by a common history.  So we can still have nothing but history - the claim of postmodernism - but history unfolds in certain common ways around the world.  And therefore we have universals.  And they're not pre-given universals, but they're historically evolved universals.  And that's what second-tier can spot.  And artists, as well as writers, that are in that space, have an entirely different relationship to art.  Art goes from self-loathing to self-appreciative and self-satisfying and coming out of a self-abundance.  It's one of the first art forms that moves from deficiency needs, which classify all first-tier signifiers, to being needs or super-abundant needs.  Or overflowing motivation.

[Abraham Maslow identified a hierarchy of needs, from basic life needs to safety and security, belongingness and love, self-esteem, and then personal growth and fulfillment.  Once someone has achieved status, responsibility, and reputation, the only "deficiencies" are experienced as motivations of abundance - the eagerness to explore and contribute.]

And that infects art as well.  Art becomes celebratory, not necessarily in an exuberant way, but meaning in a non-self-contradictory way.  Art can actually make statements without meaning them ironically.  In other words, art can stop lying. 

And that's a fundamental change in the artist as well, because the artist becomes solid.  Because the artist can speak in one voice, can speak with one mind, with one heart, and can feel it, not feel that, "Oh, I'm just kidding - nice tie."  Whereas a postmodern artist, because of the plural nature of the pluralistic structure, kinda rings like a cracked bell.  And it's sorta preparatory work - the artist of the postmodern era is basically the artist that comes to reduce everything to equal fragments, including itself, in preparation for all of those fragments being integrated.  And that's what art in the coming years can do, is get into art that doesn't solve the temporal problem or the duality problem, but solves the plurality problem, the self-loathing problem, and the lying.  The fundamental lying that is at the heart of art in the postmodern era.