In my previous post, I said (perhaps even promised!) that I planned to continue looking at McGilchrist’s (2019) dismissal of contemporary art at the end of his book The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Particularly the kind that routinely invites critique which begins with ‘a child could do that!’ Given the UK Conservative government’s savage, short-sighted ongoing cuts to humanities’ budgets, it’s important to examine McGilchrist’s disparagement, especially because the Government’s cuts continue to fan the flame of their cynical culture war. Aside from making poor economic sense, the cuts feel like a ploy to extract votes from those who feel threatened or excluded from contemporary art (sometimes for good reason, but I’ll come to that later).
A 4-minute read.
This post does not exactly deliver on my promise to address McGilchrist’s comments, although it is working towards one that does. I have been reading a lot recently, and while much of that reading might seem unconnected to a casual passerby, the underlying themes connect to both McGilchrist’s comments and the Conservative Government’s cuts. There are likely to be several posts like this before I get back to the comments directly. Please keep in mind that the following are notes, and if it feels disconnected, that is because it is. This is a record of discovery which takes place through the writing. Those wanting linearity, resolution, or cohesion will be disappointed.
Potential Connection One: The Big Other, Sterne and Non-Conscious Cognition
Sterne and the making of the Western World
Note that the subtitle of McGilchrist’s book is ‘The Divided Brain and The Making of the Western World‘. Joseph Henrich’s somewhat problematic, yet fascinating book, The WEIRDest People in the World is another that explores the making of the Western World from a different perspective and may be worth revisiting (click here for a review and summary). In the meantime, I have been reading Laurence Stern’s (2009;[1759]] The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman which was written at a critical juncture within that making. It is one of several potential connections, which seem to point to a general obsession with self in Western culture.
Dialogue
“Writing, when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation”, Sterne (2009 [1759]; p73)
In Read my Desire (2015; p4), Joan Copjec agrees with Sterne when she expresses something similar; “One reason writing is so difficult is that one feels, while doing it, completely alone. Yet if this were true, writing and thinking would be impossible. The big Other aside (I don’t, after all, know his or her name), it is to a number of others that I have addressed myself in writing this book and who have made it, literally, possible”. (In my case, The Big Other is increasingly Gemini or Claude, which prompts several questions that I will address elsewhere. Also see Martin Buber I/thou, Ettinger, I/non-I and then, to McGilchrist’s horror, I/it.)
To whom am I talking?
Which multiple others am I writing to here, I wonder? McGilchrist? It feels impertinent to be challenging him at all, so probably not. In fact, if he responded, I’d be mortified! Impertinent or not, perhaps it’s better than writing to the dead philosopher, Vilém Flusser (d. 1991), who reminds me a little of my late father, as I have been doing for Telematic People. Neither addressee solves the disappointment I have in myself for not writing to and making work in response to a female writer in the first place. I don’t think I am writing to Sterne, but perhaps I should attempt conversing with his digital echo, as I am doing with Flusser. He is, after all, very amusing. Perhaps I am writing to anyone who responds, understandably, to Conservative policy with outrage? If so, I’m hardly going about it the right way in this distant, slightly barren corner of the blog-o-sphere – but addressing outrage on social media merely leads to more outrage and ends up feeding the Conservative agenda. If I were really serious about gaining an audience (I’m plagued with ambivalence) I’d be focused on writing to the kind of unseen audience the digital age can deliver. And especially to the people who are outraged, not by the cuts, but rather by contemporary art. However, I suspect there is even less chance of reaching them than there is reaching Flusser.
Who knows who I am really writing to? Myself? Will Self suspects that’s how most of us function nowadays (2016). I’m sure there are plenty of possible answers. The same could be said about why I chose to return to Sterne at this moment. According to Karthyn Hayles’ Unthought, another book I am currently reading, there are always non-conscious cognitive processes driving decisions and choices. (In a future blog, I will compare the vertical framework described in Unthought with McGilchrist’s horizontal one).
Sterne and the surrealist swerve
Also, it’s worth noting Hayles’ (2017; 86) explanation of the emergence of the kind of art that elicits “a five-year-old could do that!”: “In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, movements such as surrealism and practices like automatic writing sought to crack open the conscious surface and let something else—less rational, less dedicated to coherence—emerge.”
Sterne seems to have preceded those Surrealists by more than a century, and is also an excellent window into ‘the making of the Western world’. Sterne’s style – bawdy, fragmented and often akin to automatic writing – was loved by many but pilloried by others. His writing received similar disparagement that some contemporary art attracts. Who indeed was he writing for when he included the following page and others that challenged notions of what writing should and ought to be?
Image from Wikimedia Commons
Finally
A fragmented world is a frightening world. In this post, the first of several, I have connected ‘the making of the Western world’, and possibly its unmaking, to cognition, narrative, contemporary art – often fragmented, abstracted, and described as an attempt to ‘crack open the conscious surface’ – economics, sense of self, and the Big Other. Visit again for a continuation, in which I will share ‘Potential Connection Two: reconfiguration of lines (of control)‘. Perhaps, at the end of all that, I will be ready to address the antipathy towards contemporary art, as expressed in McGilchrist, more succinctly. Perhaps I will end by agreeing with McGilChrist. Perhaps I will feel even more certain that artists are responding to the unmaking of the Western World, and that it is their job to do just that. Maybe the antipathy and cuts are borne out of the fact that the West does not want to face its unmaking and whatever comes next. But will anyone other than the digital ‘Big Other’ be listening?
Sterne was way ahead of me with his squiggle drawing and other interventions by several centuries.
Despite making it clear in the opening passages that this post will be somewhat scrambled and unresolved, that it is a space for note-taking and discovery, the digital Big Other has suggested I make it less so, in order to gain a wider audience. Although I have accepted several revisions and suggestions, I have chosen to ignore the prompt to be more organised.
Refs:
Hayles, N.K. (2017) Unthought: the power of the cognitive nonconscious. Chicago (Ill.): University of Chicago press.
McGilchrist, I. (2019) The master and his emissary: the divided brain and the making of the Western world. New expanded edition. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Henrich, J. (2020) The WEIRDest People in the World. S.I.: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Available at: https://api.overdrive.com/v1/collections/v1L1BmUAAAA2X/products/aed95372-8c46-493a-915f-6e2db8e463c2 (Accessed: 15 February 2021).
Guyatt, N. (2020) ‘The Weirdest People in the World review – a theory-of-everything study’, The Guardian, 20 November. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/nov/20/the-weirdest-people-in-the-world-review-a-theory-of-everything-study (Accessed: 9 April 2024).
Self, W. (2016) ‘Will Self: Are humans evolving beyond the need to tell stories?’, The Guardian, 25 November. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/25/will-self-humans-evolving-need-stories (Accessed: 4 November 2023).
Sterne, L. (2017 [1759]) The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, gentleman. Kindle Edition. Miami: Hardpress.
Sketch Book 