Distraction Therapy – In the Slipstream of Signs
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
The collapse of shared symbols leaves us adrift in a world of empty signs. For Radio Lear, this dissolution is an opening. Postmodern irony exhausted itself; metamodernism invites renewal. Artists can restore the transcendent and numinous dimensions of life by re-rooting our symbolic experience in depth, myth, and aesthetic practice. Schopenhauer saw art as a momentary escape from the restless Will, a glimpse of eternity. Today, radio, music, and performance can serve again as thresholds of meaning. Radio Lear exists to nurture this reconstruction—tending the fragments, reimagining the symbolic, and shaping new constellations of meaning that speak to both the emergent and the eternal.
We live amidst dissolution. The once solid markers of meaning—rituals, traditions, institutions, even the symbols of our shared language—are now scattered like fragments in a slipstream. Detached from their symbolic roots, they float free, endlessly circulated through the machinery of global consumption. A sign is no longer anchored to what it once represented. It is a surface without depth, a gesture without ground.
For artists and creative practitioners, this is not merely a predicament but a rare aperture. When the old reference points have disintegrated, we are granted the space to redefine them. To weave new systems of meaning. To give back to our communities not stale affirmations of what we already think we know, but the surprise of the emergent and the transcendent.
Postmodernism trained us to doubt, to ironise, to strip every sign of its authority until nothing remained but the echo of nihilism. Yet metamodernism begins where that scepticism exhausted itself. It holds the capacity to overturn the void left behind by consumer culture’s endless cycle of signs without substance. It invites us to reawaken the numinous dimension of our symbolic life, to dare once more to look for transcendence in the aesthetic, the mythic, the archetypal.
Arthur Schopenhauer understood this possibility. Art, for him, offered a way to slip the grasp of the blind Will—a glimpse of eternity beyond the restlessness of desire. Today, in our dislocated media-saturated age, artists must re-enter that terrain. Music, poetry, performance, and radio can renew their power as thresholds to the infinite, places where signs become rooted again in lived and felt truth.
Radio Lear exists in this space of renewal. It is a practice of reconstruction, a sounding of what is yet possible. To tend the fragments, to realign the broken symbols, to make of them a new constellation of meaning. The task is not to restore the past, but to imagine into being the symbolic worlds that can sustain us through what comes next.
