Year Five

Aesthetic Exercises to Accept the Will and Mirror the Will of the World

Fifth Year:  Business and Politics

Business and politics are the will to the creation and destruction of social edifices.  While they can differ somewhat in their landscapes, their means and ends, apart from relatively superficial differences, are the same.  The arguments, occasionally virulent, as to whether politics controls business or business controls politics are specious and only designed to serve those who are making them; the two spheres are bound to each other by themselves being bound to the collective will.

The collective will is most evidenced by both the results of business and politics and their processes, although in the technological age, processes can sometimes be results, at least for study by historians and the curious, who observe remnants, often many times removed, of a society’s collective will.

While business and politics operate two or more degrees in separation from land and blood, and thus war, they are their agents, effects and intermediaries.  As agents, they precipitate war; as effects, they are altered by it; as intermediaries, they expose and protect people to and from war’s effects¾exposing during war and protecting during peace.  The initiate, in being active in business or politics during this fifth year, should observe their relationship to war and the people.  She should notice the laundering function of business, neither decrying nor encouraging it, but absorbing its necessity; for humans cannot always be at war, which must be an exceptional activity.  Business¾and when we use simply business we mean business and politics, the conglomerate of enterprise that reflects and manages the collective will¾allows for the basic instincts of the human will to work themselves out, without incessant carnage.  In this sense, business is not simply necessary, but good.

In a transnational age, politics is the fingers of land, reaching through the world, dabbing the land’s name and remnant rites and symbols in urban densities across the globe.  So politics is often the management of fingers and dabbing, the marketing of a word and a flag.  In such a way, the collective will is felt on occasion in the individual will and so the individual will is temporarily inflated, like a balloon.

Business, hyperventilating invisible currencies, numbers and resources, not being subject to the legacy of land but rather being the first virtual entities since the death of God, encircles the globe with its never-sleeping, ever-active eyes, orbiting to the beat of the collective will.

The initiate should obtain a position in government or business where she can, in an optimum manner, observe and participate in the processes, subterfuges and the will of which we speak.  She should observe the relationship between the individual and collective will, according to the hierarchy we earlier described.  The more the initiate has access to decision makers, the more she will have the opportunity to absorb the distinctive workings of business.

The reader should note that it is unlikely that the initiate will be a decision maker, or even that she should be¾the former due to insufficient time to establish credibility; the latter due to the difficulty in allowing the initiate adequate time for observation.  For it can be truthfully said that any competent business leader, by virtue of being competent at business, cannot observe himself with any significant articulation.  It is one of life’s ironies and core restrictions that one cannot be great at doing and reflecting, whether this reflection be of the mind or of art.

Now it is true that the great businessperson is a kind of mirror, reflecting the will of the people, and the greatest businessperson is a highly polished mirror in the way in which we have spoken that the artist is.  So all greatness is the greatness of mirrors and the act of polishing, and all mediocrity is due to dirt, and in the deep vacancy of the mirror and in the studious application of the polishing rag greatness meets and dissolves.  So, from the eyeless depths of the mirror, the great businessperson is an artist. 

The reader may be asking whether one could not argue then whether all are artists, for don’t all reflect the world?  Don’t all meet in the mirror, in that space without horizon, in life’s funhouse where one looks into the glass and sees a laughing Buddha and a skull?  The initiate should ponder these questions as she moves among the great and the small, the mediocre and the memorable.

Yet, even so, these Exercises are devoted to the development of the artist, and we have not been ashamed to say the development of a particular kind.  This kind is one who reflects the world in images, sound or word, and what we do know is that she cannot do this and manage the world.  One cannot be two kinds of artist and be of any worth at either.  The initiate spends a year in business not to reflect the world through business, but to trace a certain aspect of the soul within herself.

The reader may object that in the first phase of these Exercises, particularly in the first two years of that phase, the initiate became debauched and then ascetic, and was not simply called upon to mingle with the debauched and ascetic and observe them.  But one can become a great reprobate for a year and give it up; one cannot become a great general or businessperson in a year.  Thus our methods must shift with possibility, and the initiate may do well to reflect on the greater complexities that arise once one expands from the body, for these complexities are what we live within and what the artist must not just live within and have absorbed, but see, ideally in each moment as she moves.

Many artists avoid, through temperament or aversion, the world of business, but this is unfortunate and a blight on their development, for this world, more than any other, exposes the initiate to social power; it is, indeed, the only year dedicated to such power.

For the person dedicated to business is one who lives and breathes power¾not the power of bodies explored in the first phase of the Exercises, nor the brute power of nature and its technological extension, explored in the previous year, but the power of the unseen extension of humanity:  language and its offspring:   nuance, subtlety, charm, ambiguity, firmness (definition), value, deed, context, adaptability, surprise, evolution, suggestion, motivation and its thousand shields, consensus, fluidity.  Indeed, the initiate should explore the relationship between language and social power, for the two, while not one, are tightly interwoven.  Social power is made from the tension between light and darkness:  what is hidden, what to hide; what is shown, what to reveal.  This dynamic is in perpetual motion, and the adept in business are highly attuned to its motion, and place themselves firmly at its centre, and do not move.