Current discourse around technology and its latest carnation is fraught and raging. Materialism and its Discontents expresses concerns, confusion, excitement, and the loss that a Judeo-Christian outlook on life must grapple with through the lens of art in our era. It invites readers to reflect on the interplay between art and technology, the sacred and the scientific, the personal and the universal.
This zine provides readers with a snapshot of an ongoing inquiry. It is a small manifestation which emerged via ongoing questions, doubts, and frustrations that feed into a wider project. All the manifestations that emerge from my scribblings are entangled relations, and this is a sibling to the work I made with Maria Ahmed.
The publication’s contents and its related blog-posts result from a fruitful, perhaps a little angry, energetic moment in my rambling investigations.
The ramblings and meanderings related to the zine have been collected here and are listed below:
Some of the contradictions, complexities and difficulties I explore in the posts above also fed into a somewhat more cohesive talk I gave for the OU/Shifting Power’s After AI Symposium last week. I had to ask for that talk not to be recorded since some of it will form new work, which has been promised elsewhere. I will share news about that as and when it’s ready.
Draft cover of zine made to accompany these posts, which is in the process of being re-edited.
In an earlier one of these series of notes, I mentioned that I found it odd that McGilChrist had written so much about Capitalism and our modern society being schizophrenic but didn’t mention Deleuze and Guatttari once (nor Frederick Jameson or Baudrillard, both of whom focus on schizophrenia in their essays in The Anti-Aesthetic (1998 [1993])). Given the many references to philosophy in his writing, this seemed like a strange omission, and I wondered why they were not mentioned, even if only to chastise their view for being too ‘left-hemisphere’-centric.
I am currently reading God, Human, Animal and Machine by Megan O’ Gieblyn which is an excellent companion book or perhaps a counter to McGilchrist’s. Both were religious, O’Geiblyn is no longer. She is a fantastic narrator and writes honestly and openly about her adult-found materialism. She links much found in the theories of modernity, especially the techno-sciences to concepts in religious fundamentalism, just as Sabine Hossenfelder’s pragmatic book Existential Physics (2022) does. I am about a third of the way through, and thinking about the title, wondering how or if O’Gieblyn will reconcile the human/animal continuum. I also cannot let go of the thought that in a materialist/phenomenological world in which the dualism of mind/body or language/matter is dissolved, either everything is metaphor or there is no metaphor. Surely that is the end point of Nail’s (2019; p1180 refutation of the representation/anti-representation debate, which seems to argue against dualism and splits with a definitional split: “There is no model or copy, only the formation of matter and the materialization of form in a continuous and open-ended centripetal spiral of mutual functional transformation.”
One of the clearest things I take from her writing is that, like me, she is not minded to forgo rationality, thin and illusory as it may be. Perhaps she sees it as one of the slimmest hopes of avoiding total societal collapse, and of destroying ourselves entirely, along with the habitat we and our species-friends need to exist.
I am doing a talk soon, which aims to explore Greenberg and AI. While doing my research, I was glad to hear Hal Foster imply in an interview that, in retrospect, the ‘anti-aesthetic’ impulse, which he championed, while an understandable reaction, was flawed. I think it is Western-centric and parochial. Not to mention, borne of immense privilege. Many highly educated and influential people seem not to have realised this yet. The article and related interview are both very helpful. I love its ending: “Criticism and culture are not therapy, not then, not now.”
He also writes… “in my introduction to the book, I opposed “a postmodernism of resistance” to “a postmodernism of reaction” and associated the former with poststructuralist critique and the latter with neoconservative politics. Already a year later, I had questioned this binary, for both appropriation art and postmodern architecture can be taken to promote a fragmentation of cultural signs that speaks to the corrosive action of capital more than anything else.1” This bold section is a great answer to McGilchrist’s view of contemporary art.
This speaks to my presentation title, After the Binary: AI and Greenbergin 2024. I had been thinking a lot about reaction or resistance as strategies and found Matt McManus’s articles and book on the “post-modern alt-right” really useful to help frame and develop some of my arguments for the talk. Foster’s retrospective article is also an excellent reference.
And from the same Foster essay: “If modernists stressed the originality of their oeuvres, postmodernists enacted “the death of the author,” and their practice of pastiche took the modernist fragmentation of language to a new level, one that Jameson likened to the effects of schizophrenia, in which “meaning is lost,” “the materiality of words becomes obsessive,” and the world is “transformed into an image.” [Relate this to my ideological ‘language-materials’]. Through this staging of an “unreality” that feels like “intensity,” Jameson concluded, postmodernism expresses “the inner truth” of advanced capitalism, which is to erode any “sense of history.” “Our entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change* that obliterates traditions of the kind which all earlier social formations have had in one way or another to preserve.” (How does this challenge or support some of the ideas I have been exploring re. monism and reductionism?) Jameson ended with a proposition of his own: “Postmodernism replicates or reproduces––reinforces––the logic of consumer capitalism; the more significant question is whether there is also a way in which it resists that logic.” Think of this in relation to McGilchrist’s narrative. Also* how does the perpetual present fit with Chaudhary’s (2024) elongated present in The Exhausted of the Earth? Or Haraway’s ‘thick time’? (Which I think links back to Hegel although Chaudhary cites someone else as a reference (will need to listen again to his talk.))
Again from Foster: In “The Ecstasy of Communication,” Jean Baudrillard also associated the postmodern subject with a schizophrenic who, no longer able to “produce the limits of his own being,” “is now only a pure screen, a switching center for all the networks of influence.” Of course, as with Jameson, such pathological diagnoses of an entire society are problematic, and Baudrillard was indeed prone to extreme statements, which were sometimes parroted in ’80s art talk. (And have continued to be parroted since, not least of all by McGilchrist, and the same could be said of Will Black’s Psychopathic Societies)
Baudrillard, J. (1998). ‘The Ecstasy of Communication’, in Foster, H. (ed.) The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. New York: The New Press, pp. 126-134.
Chaudhary, A.S. (2024). The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics in a Burning World. London: Repeater Books.
Jameson, F. (1998). ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, in Foster, H. (ed.) The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. New York: The New Press, pp. 111-125.
Draft cover for zine published as a continuation of these blogs, title to be confirmed
Continuing on from the previous posts which relate to religion, materialism and meaning:
From Ettinger: “the trouBle with metaphors of symBiosis and plasticity when applied to the human being — where life for the sake of life thrives with no consideration for the human individual, its consciousness, memory, and pregnancy—when such vision concerns a human being considered from the perspective of autopoiesis, where each organism takes care of its own ontogenetic emergence in a defensive and hostile way—is that such symBiosis, such plasticity, and such a paradigm to think the other of the self undermine the possiBility of ethics.” (2020; §23)
The above has synergies with McGilchrist
From Freud
From Nail: “De Rerum Natura calls for nothing less than a wholesale overturning of Western philosophy with its statism, logocentrism, idealism, patriarchy, and heteronormativity.” And “To overturn religion, from the Latin words religion and religio, is to overturn the first and most basic misunderstanding of philosophy: that stasis comes before movement.” (2019; p51)
From O’Gieblyn
Refs:
Ettinger, B. (2020) ‘Beyond the Death-Drive, beyond the Life-Drive: Being-toward- Birthing with Being-toward-Birth; Copoiesis and the Matrixial Eros—Metafeminist Notes’, in P. de Assis and P. Giudici (eds) Aberrant Nuptials: Deleuze and Artistic Research 2. Leuven, BELGIUM: Leuven University Press. Available at: http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ual/detail.action?docID=5983407 (Accessed: 11 October 2022).
Freud, S., McLintock, D. and Freud, S. (2002) Civilization and its discontents. London [: Penguin.
O’Gieblyn, M. (2021) God, human, animal, machine: technology, metaphor, and the search for meaning. First edition. New York: Doubleday.
Nail, T. (2019) Theory of the image. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
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
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”.
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.
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).
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”.
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.”
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
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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 Brainand 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?
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.
From Reconstituted (2024): A handmade sheet of paper made from the pages of a ripped up book, painted black, which references various artworks starting with Laurence Stern’s black page in The LIfe and Times of Tristam Shandy (December 1759 (vol. 1, 2) – January 1767), to Malevich’s 1915 Black Square, and reminiscent of the common technology phrase ‘black box’, also used by Flusser: “Apparatuses are black boxes that simulate thinking in the sense of a combinatory game using number-like symbols; at the same time, they mechanize this thinking in such a way that, in future, human beings will become less and less competent to deal with it and have to rely more and more on apparatuses. Apparatuses are scientific black boxes that carry out this type of thinking better than human beings because they are better at playing…” (2012 [1984], Loc 342).
I am trying to get to the bottom of the difficult concept of latent space, out of which generative images (text or pictorial) emerge on platforms such as ChatGPT, Midjourney or Claude, to name but a few. I may also have to explain the concept to others soon.
I wrote a short paragraph and asked Gemini and Claude to tell me if the metaphors I used were adequate, and am sharing my interaction with Claude here (with minor edits to clarify and correct spelling/grammar in my initial text):
SJF: I want to describe metaphors to help people get a handle on latent space. I think if I combine the following three metaphors together, it will give people a decent idea about latent space. (1.) When I lie in the grass and look at the clouds and see faces and cars and other recognisable shapes, it is as if I were using nature’s latent space. 2. When I tear up an old book, pulp, and liquidise it, then pour a lot of water over it to create disorder, and then dip a deckle and mould into it before pulling out a new piece of paper, it’s almost like latent space. The difference is, the metaphorical bits of torn up paper in latent space are categorised into groups, and in latent space, there is less pedesis than in the watery pulp. (3.) In the film Inside Out, when Joy and Sadness end up in the memory bank, and they see old memories being ordered and stored, that too is a bit like latent space – except that in latent space everything has been reduced to a lower level abstraction, so we don’t see colours, people, or even numbers.
All of these are metaphors.
Latent space is the pre-consciousness of the digital realm.
Claude: Your metaphors provide an excellent way to help students understand the concept of latent space. Here’s how I would combine and elaborate on them:
The latent space can be thought of as a realm where information is represented in a highly compressed and abstracted form, much like how clouds in the sky can resemble recognizable shapes and objects when viewed from a certain perspective (metaphor 1). Just as the clouds themselves don’t actually contain those shapes, the latent space doesn’t directly represent the original data (images, text, etc.) in its raw form.
Instead, the latent space is more like the pulpy mixture you get when tearing up and blending an old book (metaphor 2). The individual pieces of paper (representing the original data points) have been broken down into their fundamental components and mixed together. However, unlike the watery pulp, the elements in the latent space are still organized into distinct groups or clusters, with each group representing a particular pattern or concept present in the original data.
This process of breaking down and reorganizing information is reminiscent of the memory management system depicted in the film Inside Out (metaphor 3). Just as memories are abstracted and stored in a compressed form, the latent space represents a lower-level, more fundamental encoding of the original data, stripped of its specific details and reduced to its essential features.
In summary, the latent space can be viewed as a pre-conscious realm in the digital world, where information is distilled into its most fundamental components and reorganized into a highly compressed and abstract representation. It’s a space where the raw data is deconstructed and reassembled into a more efficient and meaningful form, much like how clouds, pulp, and memories are reconstructed from their constituent parts. This latent space serves as a crucial intermediary step in various machine learning and data processing tasks, allowing systems to discover and leverage the underlying patterns and structures within the data.
SJF: Would you say, in the final paragraph, that “information derived from various language-materials” is a more accurate description? (I have been using the term language-materials for several years as it eschews sharp separation between language and materials).
Claude: Yes, using the phrase “information derived from various language-materials” instead of just “information” would be more accurate and relevant in the context of your work with language-materials and [the concept of] latent space.
In summary, the latent space can be viewed as a pre-conscious realm in the digital world, where information derived from various language-materials is distilled into its most fundamental components and reorganized into a highly compressed and abstract representation. It’s a space where the raw language-materials are deconstructed into their basic elements (like words, phrases, characters, etc.), and then reassembled into a new form that captures the essential patterns and relationships within the original materials.
This process is akin to how cloud shapes are not actual objects, but rather our perception of patterns in the amorphous clouds. Similarly, in the pulp metaphor, the individual pieces of paper are broken down into fibrous material, which is then remolded into a new sheet with its own cohesive structure. And as depicted in Inside Out, memories are deconstructed from their original vivid experiences and stored as condensed abstractions.
In the latent space, the language-materials undergo a comparable transformation where they are broken down into lower-level components, and then recombined into a new, more efficient representation that captures the underlying concepts and features present in the original materials.
By specifying “information derived from various language-materials,” it acknowledges that the input data being compressed and encoded in the latent space originates from a diverse range of language-materials, rather than just generic “information.” This framing treats language-materials as a unified source of information that gets transformed and represented in the latent space during machine learning processes.
The following was added several hours after publishing, from a new LLM called DBRX.
I understand that you’re looking for a simple and accessible way to describe latent space to non-developers. Your metaphors are quite creative and can indeed help illustrate the concept. Let’s go through them one by one:
Cloud gazing: This metaphor is a good way to explain the concept of recognizing patterns in data. Just as we see shapes in clouds, a machine learning model can identify patterns in data. However, it might not fully capture the complexity of latent space, as it doesn’t address the transformation of data from a high-dimensional space to a lower-dimensional one, which is a key aspect of latent space.
Paper making: This metaphor illustrates the concept of disorder and order, and how something new can be created from existing data. However, it might be a bit complex for some non-developers to grasp, and it doesn’t directly address the concept of latent space.
Memory bank in ‘Inside Out‘: This metaphor is a good way to explain the concept of organizing and cataloguing data. However, it doesn’t fully capture the complexity of latent space, as it doesn’t address the transformation of data and the identification of patterns.
To improve these metaphors, you might consider combining them or adding additional elements. For example, you could start with the cloud gazing metaphor to explain pattern recognition, then use the paper making metaphor to explain the transformation of data, and finally use the memory bank metaphor to explain the organization and cataloguing of data.
In addition, it might be helpful to provide a simple definition of latent space: it’s a way to represent complex data in a lower-dimensional space, making it easier to identify patterns and relationships. This definition, combined with your metaphors, can provide a comprehensive and accessible explanation of latent space.
It would be good to get some comments from a developer working with latent space.
Refs:
Flusser, V. (2012) Towards a philosophy of photography. London: Reaktion Books.
Sterne, L. (2017) The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, gentleman. Kindle Edition. Miami: Hardpress.
I really liked McGilrchirst’s thesis on the divided brain. I watched a recorded talk while I researched my undergraduate final essay in 2018/19 and read his book recently. Throughout my time studying for the photography degree, I was struck by how photographic theory seemed to zoom further and further in on itself (pardon the pun, it’s difficult to avoid here), while appearing reluctant or unable to zoom out. As someone who tends to zoom out and see the connections, this frustrated me; although capable of attending to details, I find zooming in challenging or, if I’m really honest, a bit boring (perhaps the reason for several typos which have to be corrected in every post after publishing!) Not being a machine is a good thing, says McGilchrist. So his talk appealed to me – he seemed to be suggesting that brains which worked like mine should be valued more.
It also fed into my evolving thoughts about photography. It seemed obsessed with itself, isolated. I suspected this trope was linked to a lack of confidence in itself. Fundamentally, even when it declared itself more important than ever, it appeared to be pleading to be taken seriously as an art. Or should I say, Art, as in the serious academic and institutional type, which elicits rage and condemnation from members of the public who insist “a child could have come up with that!” Even as photography garnered ludicrous sums at Sotheby’s and many decades after Duchamp ‘invented’ the ready-made, which surely validates photography too, the defensiveness lingers. But I had also been wondering if there is something in the very act of photography that circumvented a wider view, and touched upon that in my extended essay, Image in the Age of Entanglement (2020). Although I did not end up quoting him, McGilchrist’s thesis is relevant because it addresses fragmentation and atomisation that seemed so related to photography’s place in the world. And until we get over our addiction to the linked structure of linearity which denies rhizomatic connection, we are, I suspect, pretty much screwed. Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi (2014) say it more eloquently in a paragraph I have shared often, including at the beginning of that essay:
“As the twenty-first century unfolds, it is becoming more and more evident that the major problems of our time – energy, the environment, climate change, food security, financial security – cannot be understood in isolation. They are systemic problems, which means that are all interconnected and interdependent. Ultimately, these problems must be seen as different facets of one single crisis, which is largely a crisis of perception. It derives from the fact most people in our modern society, and especially large institutions, subscribe to the concepts of an outdated worldview, a perception of reality inadequate for dealing with our overpopulated, globally interconnected world.”
p1
Yuk Hui (2023) says it too in ChatGPT, or the Eschatology of Machines, while discussing a tool that arguably abstracts more than most, large language models, which according to some, are part of a drive to make most of humanity surplus to requirements: “Recursive machines, and not linear machines, are key to understanding the development and evolution of artificial intelligence.” He too seems to think we are approaching the world, the AI world at any rate, with an old-fashioned view that does not help us.
Interconnectedness
In my essay, I quoted Susan Sontag, who wrote, “The camera makes reality atomic, manageable, and opaque. It is a view of the world, which denies interconnectedness…” Our lonely, atomised world is the subject of very many projects. Hannah Arendt writes extensively about its relation to the rise of totalitarianism and Eric Fromm are just two others who spring to mind. So as I was asking questions about photography’s role in the atomisation of reality, McGilchrist was positing the blame on a disadvantageous feedback loop between culture and the parts of our mostly Western brains that prefer abstraction and categorisation. And he suggests that as this feedback loop got stronger, there has been a dangerous involution in the parts of the brain that deal with empathy, understanding and connectedness. McGilchrist says that one of the most tragic outcomes for humans is loss of spirituality. Others, perhaps less inclined to refer to ‘spirit’ might choose ‘the sublime’. In other words, awe, wonder, a sense of one’s own smallness in contrast to the vastness and wonder of our universe.
This all fits very well with the direction of my research, which has moved beyond photography but remains concerned with the image. In my work, I ask questions about how humans cope with ever greater materialism, reductionism, and loss of meaning. And I do that by embracing the tools which are often blamed for exacerbating all of that, the latest of which are machine-learning processes (AI).
So, my little heart sank when I read a few pages at the end of McGilchrist’s (2019), The Master and his Emmisary, on art, which begins with the following:
Here I must speak for myself, since these matters are nothing if not personal [at least he admits as much]. When I think of such works of art [Bach], and compare Tracey Emin’s unmade bed, or even, I am afraid, so much other post-modern art, just as when I think of Bach and compare him with Stockhausen, I feel we have lost not just the plot, but our sense of the absurd. 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.
p442
He also writes that Duchamp pissed all over art with Fountain in 1917 (Ibid). Surely he was pissing on the authority connected to art while making connections with industry, capitalism, waste and the growing population, and the fact that art is everywhere (which Plato denied), even in the shitter – just a few of the implications of that work.
A more helful view
Duchamp’s 1917 Fountain
Oh no! I thought. The very impulse that makes people say “a child could have come up with that!” was rearing its angry head in the book I had been enjoying. I felt McGilchrist had completely missed the point of so much modern art, and of the artist’s role in society to call out and identify what is taking place. Does he not recall Lear’s Fool or Cassandra’s sorry tale? It’s not that I think modern art is without fault or should not be questioned. Bruno Latour (1993) rightly questions and criticises the postmoderns for being trapped in a postmodern Groundhog day. And I am aware how the fear of materialist reductionism affects people. Both Thomas Metzinger and Achille Mbembe have useful things to say about this (see refs below) which I might go into elsewhere.
As I have mentioned (several times; when something makes a lot of sense, I do want to share it far and wide), I have been reading Thomas Nail’s (2019) The Philosophy of the Image. Not only does Nail not miss the point, he also provides fresh and original ideas about art, and especially modern and postmodern art, as well as photography’s place within it. I really like his description of the image, which in his terms encompasses music, building, film, books, photographs and generated images – everything situated within the aesthetic field:
The image is not a copy or a movement relative to an object or subject; it is not even a copy of a copy without an original. There is no mimesis whatsoever. If we are looking for a new and more fruitful definition of the image, we need look no further than within the same Latin root of the word itself. The word image, from the Latin word imago, means “reflection,” “duplication,” or “echo.” These definitions imply precisely the opposite of what we typically think of as a copy. A copy must be something other than its model or, by definition, it cannot be a copy of a model.
p.10
This answers questions I was beginning to ask about anti-representationalism during my MA, which I began to see as a binary reaction to binarism. He also states at the start of his book, “All that was solid has melted into the electromagnetic field” (Ibid; 3), which ties directly to my concerns with reductionism and reality losing its solid ground.
To be fair to McGilchrist, Nail’s entire book is focused on art as well as ‘Art’ and he applies his process theory to all exteriorisations from cave handprints onwards – like a contemporary McLuhan; whereas McGilchrist devotes just a few pages to ‘Art’, despite his focus on Western culture’s modern failures. However, the difference of opinion is striking. Where McGilchist sees contemporary art as a form of Emperor’s clothes, Nail recognises its ingenuity.
All the newly dominant arts of the modern period are defined by the kinesthetic pattern of differential and elastic motions within and between images. Relation no longer appears, as it did in the Middle Ages, as the only fundamental aesthetic medium holding all forms together and apart. Now, the materiality of relation itself and all its forms are composed of more primary and differential fragments. The genius of modern art was to have discovered this constitutive difference and to have begun rebuilding these fragments into something entirely new. (My italics.)
p310
Is there not hope rather than disappointment in this paragraph, compared to McGilchrist’s condemnation? I have not quite finished The Philosophy of the Image but I felt ready to begin jotting down some notes and thinking about it in relation to my own artworks. And I am not giving up on McGilcrist. I like his humour and he seems genuinely humble in places. But mostly, I think he’s right that something has gone terribly wrong with us humans. So I plan to keep exploring how and where he connects to Nail and others mentioned here, as well as deviates.
Look out for a follow up post
You should know, I asked a large language model (LLM), that ultimate abstraction machine, to help me tie the themes I’ve touched on here together. I find LLMs extremely helpful in that way. Perhaps it’s a patriarchal habit – am I merely looking to the digital father for approval? Is that why it’s so comforting for me? What would McGilcrhist say to that? As this post is already long, I will write a second post using the LLM’s suggestions, questions and prompts when I’m done with Nail’s book. In the meantime, here are the LLMs suggestions:
Nuance: Avoid being overly simplistic. There’s validity in some of McGilchrist’s concerns even if you disagree with his conclusions: LLM, you are right. I think there is much in McGilchrist that will be valuable if I continue down this path. I have no desire to pit arguments against one another and recall the following from my undergraduate essay’s appendix;
….Barad’s diffractive approach offers “significant scope for rapprochement between Barad’s work and that in other strands of STS” (Ibid:23). Over the course of several edits, I dropped references to diffraction in this essay for the sake of word count and to make space to focus on entanglement – the more dangerous option according to Hollins, in terms of oversimplification and analogy. However, it seems that my approach is diffractive in any case (in the main, although it could afford to be more so.) But I have been taught and have internalised its predecessor dialectics, which as described by Barad (2007:91) pits one idea against another and therefore feeds representationalist thinking as those ideas are thought to have existed in isolation as predetermined objects. It seems as if the Cartesian mindset is what prompts people to describe photography (and much else besides) in binary terms, responding with increasingly alarming and attention seeking-statements such as ‘photography is dead’, which then motivates others to suggest something fantastical in the opposite direction. A diffractive approach might temper such ‘clickbait’ (Field, 2020; p44).
The following is one of three suggested strategies made by the LLM that I will use as a guide to write the next post. It called this Defiant Modernity.
McGilchrist’s Failure of Imagination: Criticize McGilchrist for his lack of understanding of modern art’s intention. Explain that artists like Duchamp aimed to expose the flaws of systems of value rather than destroy art itself.
Disruptive and Revelatory: Highlight the role of art as a disruptive and revelatory force. Modern and postmodern art, including photography, challenges us to question the way we create, see, and assign value to the world around us.
Embrace of Fragmentation: Argue that Nail’s view is more nuanced – modern art isn’t about destruction, but about embracing fragmentation as the starting point for creating new meanings. Photography excels at this; it takes fragments of reality and allows us to assemble them in unexpected, critical ways. Well, I am not sure about being so positive about photography, but this is my favoured route – and Flusser, whose writing informed a recent project may well suggest the same.
Call for Engagement: End by challenging your reader not to succumb to cynicism, but to actively engage with the challenges of modernity through its art, and photography in particular.
The next two bullet points from its first suggestion which it called Synthesis and Hope
Reiterate the Problem: Briefly restate that reductionism, materialism, and disconnection are major threats. Acknowledge the perspectives you’ve presented: Sontag on atomization, Arendt and Fromm on the societal impacts, McGilchrist on the loss of the interconnected view.
The Artist as a Counterforce: Contrast McGilchrist’s pessimism with Nail’s view of art as a tool of rebuilding. Highlight the role of the artist in challenging dominant narratives and pushing for new interpretations and awareness.
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.
Metzinger, T. (2009). The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self. New York: Basic Books.
Latour, B. (1993). We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Nail, T. (2019) Theory of the image. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
I am storing this connection here, as I don’t want to lose it and may incorporate this (as simply as possible) into some talks/workshops:
“In the art of the Middle Ages, there is no radical division between aesthetic subject and object, divine and mortal, but, rather, a continuous distribution of light into degrees of lighter- and darker- colored regions. There are no lacks or absences, only degrees of shadow and illumination.” Nail, 2019; 190 (My italics)
Then from Kathryn Hayles:
“The computer restores and heightens the sense of word as image-an image drawn in a medium as fluid and changeable as water. Interacting with electronic images rather than with a materially resistant text, I absorb through my fingers as well as my mind a model of signification in which no simple one-to-one correspondence exists between signifier and signified. I know kinesthetically as well as conceptually that the text can be manipulated in ways that would be impossible if it existed “s a material object rather than a visual display. As I work with the text-as-flickering- image, I instantiate within my body the habitual patterns of movement that make pattern and randomness more real, more relevant, and more powerful than presence and absence.” Hayles, 1999; 26 (My italics)
“Without a kinetics of light, even the most dramatic images disappear into the night, in which all cows are black. Light is what gives aesthetic relation.” (Nail, Ibid)
Digital material is wave-like and responds to the conscious actor. Things/reality come into being on our screens when observed – when there is intra-action (a neologism coined by Karen Barad to imply more than interaction). When we swipe a page, or click on an icon, a digital wave having been drawn out onto the screen, momentarily appears as pixels/particles. But they recede when there is no intra-action. Donald D Hoffman tells us this is reality functions and the quantum field theory he relies upon is what Nail’s thesis also cannot do without.
From here, Nail makes light and vision imperative. However, I am interested in connecting that with a chapter from my old tutor, Daniel Rubenstein’s book, How Photography Changed Philosophy (2023); namely The Latent Image as well as an earlier chapter, Critiques of ocularcentrism – in which he warns about The trap of the visual – all chapter headings in his book.
“The reluctance of theory to talk about this primordial [invisible, pre-] state of the image can be considered symptomatic of the desire to focus on the visible and tangible image and ignore the invisible without questioning the basic premise of the distinction itself” (Ibidl 93). And, the following, “the emphasis placed on the visual content of images tends to obscure the processes of dissemination, production and dispersion that contain their own intelligent messages…” (Ibid)
However, here Nail emphasises how darkness and light work together (not as absence and presence but as continuously changing elements, intra-activity, out of which images emerge: “The second tension is between the lighted exterior of the church and the darkened center. It is only in such a high contrast between light and dark that the stained-glass images can appear at all” (Nail, 2019; 203). Nail also mentions ‘flickering’ linking back again to Hayles above although in churches of the Middle Ages rather than on our screen, where it might have been birds or trees outside a stained glass window that introduced the flicker. Nevertheless, the following description is indeed reminiscent of how pixels work: “…it is the contrast between color cells of light that generates the form of the image. Unity appears through fragmentation: a fragmented whole of relations” (Ibid). I am reminded of shifting outlines and boundaries and borders – and the fractal nature of reality.
I am only halfway through Nail’s book and look forward to seeing where he goes with the digital image towards the end of it.
Film shown on a 44-inch screen and included in Belongings alongside reconstituted paper, some of which includes text from Thomas Nail’s Borders, Migrants, and Writing (2020) which was co-created by Susan Aldworth, Sara David, Natalia Mesa Echavarria, Sarah-Jane Field, Silvina Maestro, Julia Shutkevych, Michaelle St Vincent and Judy Willcocks, with support from CSM’s Creativity in Action Fund, and with the CSM Museum and Study Collection
Hayles, N.K. (1999) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press.
Hoffman, D.D. (2019) The case against reality: how evolution hid the truth from our eyes. London: Penguin
Nail, T. (2019) Theory of the image. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Rubinstein, D. (2023) How photography changed philosophy. New York: Routledge.
Sketch Book 