Against the tyranny of the Apollonian

Dionysos Skêptouchos, flanked by Maenads (a collage of three of my Acid Renaissance photographs) It’s one of those times when numerous disparate articles I read, written by people who I doubt are even aware of each other, seem to be swirling around a shared theme. The zeitgeist of the past few weeks seems to be a battle between the dominant Apollonian mode and a resurgent Dionysianism, but the subject matter stretches from the AI and the IndieWeb, to politics and popular music. A few weeks ago Brennan Brown posted The IndieWeb is Wonderfully Dionysian, a really interesting article that covered a lot of ground. About two thirds of the way through they reference Nietzsche’s framework of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, which I’ll quote here for easy reference: He distinguished between two fundamental artistic impulses. The Apollonian, named for the god of order, light, and reason—structured, formal, dreamlike in its coherence, imposing form on the chaos of experience; and the…