Post Five: Notes continued and certain connections made (maybe)

Connections

This was meant to be the last post in this short series of ‘three or four’ promised. It’s No. 5 and there’s still some unpicking of McGilchrist’s comments about contemporary art to do. I do not disagree with everything he says. Far from it. But I think he’s fundamentally missed the point of what an artist’s job is in today’s landscape when he says Duchamp, or rather the left hemisphere, pissed all over art (2019; p441). Artists function as conduits, which he misses, focusing instead on negative feedback loops.  

There are those, including me, who might think I have spent more than enough time fixating on McGilchrist. But 1) it’s not really him – rather a specific trend which feeds into the arts, related criticisms and theories being undermined by conservatives all over the world. And 2) I suspect, well it’s quite clear, I’m arguing with my father. Unlike when I enter into dialogue via the LLMs (digital Big Others) with Flusser’s echo. In that case, there is some other kind of conversation with my father taking place, but I haven’t quite figured that one out yet. Flusser is likely the ideal father, the fantasy one without all the terrible flaws.

One of the few images I have of my father’s early years

1. In the UK, the ongoing “cultural and social vandalism” directed at the arts has resulted in unsustainable budget cuts for courses in the humanities. (See Goldsmiths for just one example). There have been ludicrous cuts across all domains, and the arts are far from the only area to suffer. But if someone said ‘stop whining’, everyone has been affected, I’d agree, and then say, ‘Yes, and in today’s hyper-visual-techno world, we cannot and must not separate ethics from aesthetics or sociopolitics’. And I suspect McGilchrist would agree. What I’m certain of is that he finds the devaluation of culture distressing too, but he sees examples of it in different places. He sees the devaluation coming only one way in a dirty, unmade bed in the gallery (2019; p442), whereas I see the value in being asked to consider why that is art today, and in the continued funding of such experimentation (whether I like the work or not is irrelevant). Recently, I said to someone, we sacrifice our celebrities (or artists) in an act of Afterwardness. In the case of the unmade bed, it seems the artist offers her anguish and so herself as a sacrifice about ‘being’ in the Now. You don’t have to like the work. In fact, I think it might be helpful to remove like, dislike, good and bad from the lexicon of art appreciation (a left hemisphere trope on my part, no doubt!) In the conclusion of his book, McGilchrist rhetorically asks, “What would the world look like if the left hemisphere took over?” (2019; p428 – 462) And then suggests a Brave New World scenario, in which a contradiction in his arguments emerges as he writes about the “downgrading of non-verbal, non-explicit communication” (Ibid; p432). In a previous post of mine, titled, Materialism and its Discontents, I commented on his dismissal of Duchamp’s Fountain where meaning is both explicit and not-explicit; it’s very obvious and yet there are always new things to discover. I aim to follow Vicky Kirby’s (2017; iii) advice, as she aims to find the value in such “hesitations and contradictions”.
   
2. Thinking about McGilchrist’s response to contemporary art has pointed me back towards work, ‘spawned’ from one of the few images I have of my late father, along with antique photographs I no longer have of Czech relatives who died in ghettos and camps. When I was a child, my father often asked me, Sarah-Jane, why are your stories so strange? In 2018/19, when I made work with the beginnings and ends of digital recordings of celluloid I’d appropriated from the internet, I could hear his puzzled disapproval from beyond the grave. And of course, he used to bemoan, why, Sarah-Jane, why are you such a Trotskyite? I’m not, by the way. I am a socialist though. He was desperately disappointed by this fact. He voted Conservative most of his life, except for the years we lived in South Africa, where he voted for the Progressive Federal Party (PFP). I don’t think he’d mind me sharing this information, as he frequently lent his minor celebrity to campaigns for the PFP, a centre-left liberal party. Later in life, he also wrote openly about his hatred of the left. As Flusser (2012 [1985]) insists, within the telematic society in which we find ourselves, perhaps “historical categories have lost their meaning”. I often wonder how my father would have reconciled the part of himself that voted PFP with today’s conservatives; people like Trump, Johnson and Erdogen. Regardless, he equated socialism with Nazi Germany – incorrectly. He also felt deeply aggrieved by the loss of his extended family’s brewery in Czechoslovakia, confiscated by the Communist Party, following WWII. In his mind, Nazism, socialism and communism were indistinguishable. All were associated with catastrophe.
   
   In Post One: Notes on the making and un/making of the Western world, I refer to both Sterne and Joan Copjec who discuss how we are always conversing with others while writing. I asked in that post who I might be talking with in this series. It seems to me that it must, at least in part, be my late father. In fact, I suspect I have long been talking to him through photography, and the later works, situated in an expanded notion of ‘image’. One of the last things my father said to me was, “Those are really good photographs”, while pointing to a set of three which I’d taken of my son walking in the snow. The night after my father died, I dreamt that the frame, which still holds these images on the wall, was absent. Not missing, but absent. As if it had fallen into a void. The absence was indescribably awful.

**

Skeuomorphism (2024)

My left-hemisphere love of irony

Another book I have been reading is Matt McManus’ What Is Post-Modern Conservatism: Essays On Our Hugely Tremendous Times, where he deconstructs the alt-right worldview. He borrows and expands on the phrase ‘post-modern conservatism’, both hilarious and insightful in its irony, given the way people such as Jordan Peterson or members of the Conservative UK Government rail against their understanding, or lack thereof, of post-modernism, positing it as the locus of so-called ‘cultural Marxism’, ‘wokeness’ and ‘lefty-libtard snowflakery’.  McGilchrist isn’t against irony (his rhetorical trick when he asks us to imagine what would happen if the left hemisphere took over is ironic as he’s describing the world in which we live) but he does imply the left hemisphere’s propensity for irony drowns out seriousness, vulnerability and pathos (2019; p397).

Like McGilchrist, McManus is also concerned with nihilism.  

… conservatives are correct to be concerned with cultural nihilism, but have misdiagnosed its causes and symptoms. This suggests that moving away from cultural nihilism will take steps which may not be amenable to many modern conservative thinkers (2020; p86).

I am in no way suggesting McGilchrist is alt-right. However, his authority makes some of his statements hard to dismiss or argue with. I suspect McManus would manage well. (For brevity’s sake, I will list a few of my own objections in another post.) Both cite the same authors, Benjamin, Nietzsche et al. And McGilchrist would likely agree with McManus’ (2019; p89) summation of “a society of atomized and nihilistic consumers quietly consuming to pursue the desires manufactured for them, indifferent to others except when they interfered in the pursuit of this desire.” But they have different solutions. Where McGilchrist wants more spirituality and less abstraction, McManus (Ibid; p92) suggests “a more egalitarian distribution of wealth to enable a fuller flourishing of the human intellect for all”. Perhaps if we had that, people would not need to express their despair via unmade beds in galleries. McGilchrist does end by rejecting dualism, something I am constantly arguing for – a rejection of dualism and simplistic binary responses – in my work. 

The alt-right presents a dreadful conundrum for traditional conservatives like my father. But as McManus writes, “Since there is no obvious solution to this problem, we will have to accept that the prospect of philosophical nihilism will remain for a long time to come” (2019; p89). I’m not sure McGilchrist can find any solace in this and may suggest we will be handicapped with increased levels of atomisation anyway until we break the left hemisphere’s feedback loop with society.

But as such, I respect and would try to adhere to Haraway’s (2016; p1) advice:

In urgent times, many of us are tempted to address trouble in terms of making an imagined future safe, of stopping something from happening that looms in the future, of clearing away the present and the past in order to make futures for coming generations. Staying with the trouble does not require such a relationship to times called the future. In fact, staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.

Refs:

Flusser, V. (2011) Into the universe of technical images. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (Electronic mediations, v. 32).

Haraway, D.J. (2016) Staying with the trouble: making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press (Experimental futures: technological lives, scientific arts, anthropological voices).

Kirby, V. (ed.) (2017) What if culture was nature all along? Edinburgh: Edinburgh University 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.

McManus, M. and DeJong, D. (eds) (2020) What is post-modern conservatism? essays on our hugely tremendous times. Winchester, UK Washington, USA: Zero Books (zer0 books).

Weale, S. and correspondent, S.W.E. (2024) ‘“Cultural and social vandalism”: job cut plans at Goldsmiths attacked’, The Guardian, 27 March. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/mar/27/goldsmiths-university-of-london-redundancy-plans (Accessed: 17 April 2024).

Post Three: Stop, Shutter, Fix

Long post – 8-10 minutes read

Potential Connection Two: Reconsidering the lines (of control) around concepts.

This is the third in a series of blogs in which I record seemingly random and unconnected thoughts which relate to contemporary art and “But a child could do that!” responses. It is much longer than the previous and again, does not promise resolution. Recall, that it was Iain McGilchrist’s comments about contemporary art at the end of his book The Master and his Emissary: the Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (2019) that sent me on this rambling investigation, when he wrote that future generations might look back on our era and wonder why we were so gullible to think certain contemporary art had anything valuable to offer. It is not really McGilchrist I am picking on, but a developing inquiry around the glaring obviousness of our material selves in a material world, and an emerging *”negative messianism”.

From In Pursuit of an Apparition, Hands Can Miss the Object by Maria Ahmed, Sarah-Jane Field and Flusser’s apparatus.

On one hand, he writes “The left hemisphere’s world is ultimately narcissistic, in the sense that it sees the world ‘out there’ as no more than a reflection of itself: the body becomes just the first thing we see out there, and we feel impelled to shape it to our sense of how it ‘should’ be. (Ibid, p48) which points to questions I have been asking. In the previous post, I wrote, “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 [of the Western world]. It is one of several potential connections, which seem to point to a general obsession with self in Western culture.”

But then McGilchrist thoroughly dismisses certain contemporary art, failing to see the artist’s role, not only as an observer and reporter but also as a conduit through which we might find ways to understand, question and explore the modern world and what he describes as its schizoid ontology. In the final section of his book, he titles a section “THE PROBLEM OF ART IN THE MODERN WORLD” (Ibid; 407). Don’t get me wrong, I think there is an awful lot to critique and question in contemporary art. I also side with his complaint, “Beauty is rarely mentioned in contemporary art critiques: in a reflection of the left hemisphere’s values, a work is now conventionally praised as ‘strong’ or ‘challenging’, in the rhetoric of power, the only rhetoric in all our relations with the world and with one another that we are now permitted” (Ibid: p.443). And I too have much to say about the anti-aesthetic, anti-photography, loser-images rhetoric that may come from a place of wanting to challenge dominant, commodified norms. But arguably, like most or all binary logic, it inadvertently underscores what it hopes to dismantle.

But here is where I start to become uncomfortable – and yes, I’m grown up to admit it is because his words challenge my strategies: “…metaphor and myth have been replaced by the symbolic, or worse, by a concept”. This seems unfair since myth is constantly being explored and re-explored in the contemporary art I explore and make. While he says a great deal valuable about art too, his view in the main seems unforgiving (Ibid; p442):

We stand or sit there solemnly contemplating the genius of the artwork, like the passive, well-behaved bourgeois that we are, when we should be calling someone’s bluff. My bet is that our age will be viewed in retrospect with amusement, as an age remarkable not only for its cynicism, but for its gullibility.”

A more nuanced argument is presented by Andrea Fraser (2006), which I have mentioned elsewhere.

Potential Connection Three: Nothing will come from nothing and movement

There is a great deal more to say, to be fair to both McGilchrsit and contemporary art, and it will take me a long time to make sense of McGilchrist’s words. In the meantime, I continue to connect Hayles’ (2017) ‘non-conscious cognition’, Sterne’s 1759 Tristram Shandy, and contemporary art strategies. Sterne’s book was loathed and loved and provides a precursor to surrealist tropes. It is very funny, pokes fun at itself constantly, and is reflexive, fragmented and non-linear. It is also unashamedly bawdy, often homoerotic (no, Uncle Toby is not merely too shy to know much about women), and teeming with double-entendre.

In the previous post, I shared Tristram’s image of a squiggle. One of my digital Big Others, Gemini, described the squiggle as exemplifying the following: 1. The tension between controlled representation and expressive impulse. 2. The subjective nature of interpretation and how we ascribe meaning.

While I read, I can’t help wondering what happened to the English psyche between the publication of Sterne’s book and the era of Oscar Wilde, famously ‘gaoled’ for his homosexuality, or later, when Turing was forced by society into therapy designed to ‘cure’ him’ while contributing to an early death. Not to mention the shameful lack of appreciation from society given his efforts in WWII. Although homosexuality is no longer illegal in the UK, hatred and bigotry persist here and around the globe, as does persecution. It’s as if society cannot stop yearning for stasis. We want fixed ideas of gender, sexuality, interior, exterior, and more. And yet, reality is not that. Whatever door you choose to enter to explore reality – physics, art, biology, ecology, philosophy – movement is an inescapable factor. This is not a metaphor. We live on a spinning globe, hurtling through space. The land we stand on never stops moving. Lines everywhere are constantly dissolving and reforming. Words too are emergent properties of matter, only accessible through matter, so why should they be any different? (They are not!)

This is brilliantly illustrated in an animation that shows how empty space is never empty, dead or still. And at the most fundamental level – so-called empty space – there is a LOT of movement. We are warned not to take quantum images literally at the macroscopic scale, however, I wrote the following in an essay, quoting Karen Barad (2007; p110), and I stand by it:

“Although we are used to thinking about quantum physics describing the very small and classical physics, the large, Barad (2007:337) urges us to consider how these “separate determinate boundaries and properties” are based on Western human habits of thought. Quantum and classical physics are different models that aim to describe how things work in the same universe – not separate realities” (Field, 2020, p39 citing Barad).

I recently discovered Thomas Nail’s philosophy of movement which furthers the notion that movement is everywhere and in everything. Nail (2018; p51) writes in his close reading of Lucretius;

“De Rerum Natura calls for nothing less than a wholesale overturning of Western philosophy with its statism, logocentrism, idealism, patriarchy, and heteronormativity […] To overturn religion, from the Latin words religione and religio, is to overturn the first and most basic misunderstanding of philosophy: that stasis comes before movement.” (My bold and italics).

These comments about movement apply to all reality, including the material realities that come in the form of historical concepts. These concepts are material in that they are usually accessed in books, digital devices, through films or some other medium. Even if we remove all those objects/processes and imagine we are hearing them aurally from an ancient storyteller before the invention of writing, the human telling the story is material. Material that eats, shits, loves, and dies. And material that is intertwined/enmeshed/assembled with the other materials in which all materials exist. There are arguments to suggest that we might remove the S and refer simply to material.

Potential Connection Four: Shifting lines around historical eras, including the one from which the modern Western world emerges

Shortly after reading Books One and Two on Sterne’s novel, the following article appeared in The Guardian demonstrating that lines, often arbitrary, carve up historical eras but are also not fixed.

“The Industrial Revolution started more than 100 years earlier than previously thought, new research suggests, with Britons already shifting from agricultural work to manufacturing in the 1600s.

Seventeenth century Britain can be understood as the start of the Industrial Revolution, laying down the foundations for a shift from an agricultural and crafts-based society to a manufacturing-dominated economy, in which networks of home-based artisans worked with merchants, functioning similarly to factories.”

Stevinus’ sailing chariot (1603)

In Sterne’s fragmented narrative, there are plenty of comments on the Industrial Revolution and how burgeoning capitalist drives influence a human’s view. For instance, why asks Uncle Toby, do people who live on open plains like ours not make use of “Stevinus’ sailing chariot” when, unlike horses, they eat nothing and rely on wind for power, which costs nothing. Because, answers Uncle Toby’s brother and Tristram’s father, Walter Shandy, they eat nothing and cost nothing to power – “the scheme is bad. It is the consumption of our products, as well as the manufacturers of them, which gives bread to the hungry, circulates trade, – brings money, and supports the value of our lands; and tho’, I own, if I was a Prince, I would generously recompense the scientific head which bought forth such contrivances; yet I would as peremptorily suppress the use of them”. (2017 [1759], p.79-80)

Not only does this passage indicate how the same arguments are being played out today, it is also an example of time narrative, concepts and debate energetically crisscrossing spacetime. It also potentially supports The Guardian article which dissolves the fixed categorisations we impose on history. Of course, the Industrial Revolution did not suddenly appear out of a vacuum. And in any case, as we see above, a vacuum is never still or empty. It is always teeming with possibility and decay. For me, the specific changes and shifts in our historical narrative are less interesting than the fact that we’re questioning these lines at all.

Reality is not static. The whole idea of reality being static is a fantasy. We emerge into the universe for a moment and de-merge again soon afterwards. Is the obsession with self, which McGilchrist discusses, what prompts us to slow things down, even stop, fix, or shutter them? Do these attempts to control provide us with the illusion we are in charge? (And how does this relate to volition and free will? Well, that is the question, isn’t it?)

And so I come to the heading of this post. I am thinking about the words shutter, stop, and fix and photography. And wondering what on earth happened to make those 19th-century industrialists, perhaps some of the most suppressed people ever to be born on the planet, come up with a mechanical eye that functions by fixing, stopping and shutting reality down. (Incidentally, the camera too did not appear overnight. In fact, Shandy says the following: Others, to mend the matter, will make a drawing of you in the camera; that is most unfair of all, because there you are sure to be represented in some of your most ridiculous attitudes (Iid; p56). Referring, presumably to the camera-obscura).

Although this is not a new inquiry (and I explore the same through Barad’s agential realism lens while completing my BA (Field, 202), I suspect the answer is linked to the topic in The Guardian article, and in Walter Shandy’s response regarding the “consumption of products”.

Despite McGilchrist and others’ distaste for ‘I/it’ dialogue, I asked Claude and Grammerly to help identify what needs expanding in future writings. I find it helpful because, as he likes to point out, I am not a machine. But I also think the machine misses things…

And so, I end by promising a shorter blog next time!

Digital Big Other’s Feedback

Claude

1. The reference to Laurence Stern’s “Tristram Shandy” and the parallels drawn between its fragmented, non-linear narrative and contemporary art strategies is insightful. The author could further explore how Sterne’s work presages surrealist techniques and challenges traditional modes of storytelling, which could be seen as precursors to the “anti-aesthetic, anti-photography, loser-images rhetoric” in contemporary art.
2. The discussion of movement, stasis, and the dissolution of boundaries between disciplines and concepts is strong, particularly the connections made to Karen Barad’s work on quantum physics and Thomas Nail’s philosophy of movement. This could be expanded upon to more clearly illustrate how these ideas challenge the Western tendency towards “statism, logocentrism, idealism, patriarchy, and heteronormativity.”
3. The juxtaposition of the Guardian article on the earlier-than-thought origins of the Industrial Revolution with the passage from “Tristram Shandy” is an effective way to demonstrate how historical narratives and categorizations are fluid and open to reinterpretation. The author could further develop this point by exploring how this fluidity and questioning of fixed boundaries relates to the broader themes of the text.
4. The final section on photography and the author’s questioning of why the 19th-century industrialists developed a “mechanical eye” that “functions by fixing, stopping and shutting reality down” is intriguing. This could be expanded upon by connecting it more directly to the earlier discussions of movement, stasis, and the Western desire for control and fixity in the face of a fundamentally fluid reality.

Grammarly’s suggestions

What does the author mean by “modern world and its schizoid ontology”?
How does the author reconcile their appreciation for contemporary art with McGilchrist’s dismissal of it?
What is the connection between Hayles’ ‘non-conscious cognition’, Sterne’s 1759 Tristram Shandy, and contemporary art strategiess.

*A phrase from Achille Mbembe which I cannot go into here as this already far too long! But I will at some point.

Refs:

Ahmed, M. and Field, S.-J. (2024) In Pursuit of an Apparition, Hands Can Miss the Object [Zine]. Available at: https://www.sarahjanefield.com/products/in-pursuit-of-an-apparition-hands-can-miss-the-object (Accessed 12 April 2024)

Barad, K.M. (2007) Meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.

Field, ~ Sarah-Jane (2020) ‘Image in the age of entanglement’, SJField – OCA Level Three Study Blog, 13 August. Available at: https://sjflevel3.photo.blog/2020/08/13/cs-a5-final-edit-of-essay-image-in-the-age-of-entanglement/ (Accessed: 12 December 2023).

Fraser, A. (2006) ‘Why Does Fred Sandback’s Work Make Me Cry?’, Grey Room, (22), pp. 30–47.

Hayles, N.K. (2017) Unthought: the power of the cognitive nonconscious. Chicago (Ill.): University of Chicago press.

Hall, R. (2024) ‘Industrial Revolution began in 17th not 18th century, say academics’, The Guardian, 4 April. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/apr/05/industrial-revolution-began-in-17th-not-18th-century-say-academics (Accessed: 8 April 2024).

Achille Mbembe: ‘Negative Messianism in the Age of Animism’ (2017). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyHUJYfk_os (Accessed: 24 May 2022).

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.

Nail, T. (2018) Lucretius I: an ontology of motion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Sterne, L. (2017) The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, gentleman. Kindle Edition. Miami: Hardpress.

Post One: Notes on the making and un/making of the Western world

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)

Sterne’s Tristram Shandy which precedes the Surrealists and Dada movement by roughly 150 years. Click through to the source to see more modernist strategies in Sterne’s book. From https://www.laurencesternetrust.org.uk/sterne/tristram-shandy/

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?

The curvy line from Tristram Shandy: The curvy line remains compelling for its ambiguity. It embodies themes in Tristram Shandy that still resonate today: 1. The tension between controlled representation and expressive impulse. 2. The subjective nature of interpretation and how we ascribe meaning (as described by Gemini).
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?

From my own project, Random Disturbances (2022).
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.

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