Long read – 13 minutes
Intro: By the time I began the Contextual Studies (CS) essay for the final part of my photography degree, I had lost faith in ‘photography’ as a tool for positive change. Instead, the more I looked at and worked with it, the more I saw it as a reinforcer of unhelpful views, habits and trends in our society. What’s more, many people talking about photography seemed blissfully unaware, and continued to promote it as some kind of magical panacea capable of solving world problems, literally able to ‘change everything’, and even, at times, act as a cure for serious clinical depression. These sentiments echo a strange sense of superiority running through photographic discourse which I assume comes, at least in part, as superiority complexes do, from a feeling of inferiority, triggered by photography’s early compulsion to justify itself as an art form. (One of the problems I had in my essay was defining photography – the same issue arises here, and once scratched, opens up a never-ending interminable discussion, so for the sake of this blog, a simple ‘mechanical image capture of reality’ will do.)
My lack of faith, along with ongoing related studies about how societies and individuals form, led me to wonder if photography was simply too much of an expression of a certain mindset, to ever escape the limitations I recognised. Most simply put, that mindset might be described as Western, but if we delve into the literature, Cartesian might do, and further still, logocentric (which can appear counter-intuitive to some – logocentric being a pejorative term pertaining to paradigms dominated by writing and reading). Was, photography, I wondered just so inculcated with its Cartesian offspring, Colonialism and Capitalism (2020), as Areilla Azoulay suggests, that it could only ever continue to perform those movements’ bidding? There are lots of opportunities to say ‘but, what about…’ at this point – for instance, photography is now truly a universal phenomenon, not merely a Western activity, and my question might rightfully be accused of being centred within a myopic Western paradigm, influenced by writers from a limited cohort – namely, French post-structuralists. Of course, there is a much wider discourse out there.
Nevertheless, I ended up focusing on Karen Barad’s deconstruction around habits ‘of a Cartesian mind’ (2007; 47) where they rely on an idiosyncratic blend of quantum philosophy and poststructuralism to investigate how modern post-Enlightenment thinkers (that’s we Westerners) render reality, and function within. To support my investigation, I also cited writers such as Julian Baggini (How the World Thinks, 2018) , Frtijof Capra (with Pier Luigi Luisi, The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision, 2016) and Donald D. Hoffman (The Case Against Reality: how evolution hid the truth from our eyes, 2020) amongst others. I relied on contemporary writers addressing photography in a post-Cartesian world such as Areilla Azoulay, Kember and Zylinska, Daniel Palmer, and Daniel Rubinstein. The overall thrust of my inquiry was an attempt to understand if photography is just too much of a Cartesian invention to remain relevant in the world today as we Westerners begin, if some are to be believed, to move away from our individualistic Cartesian mindset.
Henrich’s Ideas and my ongoing inquiry:
Given that my essay will be accused of being too sprawling, perhaps it’s a good thing Joseph Henrich had not published his book The Weirdest People in the World while I was planning and writing. However, despite a significant issue I struggle with and which I will address in a moment, it is rich with useful information, data and suggestions about how linear-thinking Westerners came into being. Despite no mention of photography (unlike in Barad’s 2007 book Meeting the Universe Halfway), the topics covered relate directly to my own work. Before saying something about those topics, I have to address the acronym WIERD, which I cannot abide, despite enjoying the book. It stands for Western, Independent, Educated, Rich and Democratic. Although Henrich devotes some time explaining that we should not allow ourselves to be seduced into thinking in binary terms, WIERD and Non-WIERD, the words are simply too loaded. Yes, it’s the assemblage of those things – W I E R D – that combine to form the object or collection of objects (people/societies) he’s examining, but I don’t think it can ever avoid Othering, summoning up supposed non-WIERDs, encouraging baseless assumptions, i.e. anyone not WIERD is non-educated, poor, or undemocratic, therefore reinforcing ignorant nonsense about non-Western people. This is patently not Henrich’s intention but I don’t think the acronym can escape the problem, no matter how hard he tries to ‘inoculate’ (his word) his readers.
I also worried his work could be used by supremacists to justify their hateful ideologies just as Professor Robert Plomer’s deterministic genetic thesis has (his arguments suggests ‘it’s all nature and nothing to do with nurture’ – which contradicts Henrich’s ideas re. cultural evolution). In fact, while looking through reviews on Google, I came across a terrifying and stupid bunch of racists who claimed Henrich missed opportunities to argue in favour of ‘whiteness’ and labelled him a Marxist. So maybe my worries were unfounded.
The following is not Henrich’s flaw, rather it highlights the problem of writing holistically for an audience steeped in Cartesian thought. A reviewer complained that Henrich’s book was too long, covered too much scope and should have simply concentrated on one aspect – the influence of the Western Church’s Family and Marriage Plan (FMP), (instigated around 305 CE) over modern day sensibilities and its world view – the isolated, object-orientated, linear view which I have been investigating, and which Henrich’s book is really all about; and the costs and benefits of that view. Descriptions about how FMP affected us may indeed offer the most vivid sections (perhaps he understood and wrote about this aspect with more verve than elsewhere). However, Henrich is looking at the entangled, interconnected forces and feedback loops, which over millennia have led us here – a postindustrial, post-colonial society trying to imprint our democracy on other parts of the world which have had different journeys, and I have not found it too sprawling at all. His story is one of cultural evolution and the all-encompassing power of institutions, how we are affected physiologically and psychologically, how these journeys change our view of the world and of ourselves. In my essay, I explored Barad’s agential cutting which sounds very miuch like the process Henrich is describing (and if there had been more space, I might also have referred to Heimans and Timms New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World (2018) – strengthening the link between ‘cutting’ – forming reality- and agency in modernity and the future).
Henrich’s narrative explains how we Westerners have come to see the world as a collection of disconnected, non-related, isolated objects. For the last 200 years or so it has served the West overall well (during and after the industrial revolution and the period of colonisation leading up to it, Western societies started to live longer, have better access to education, and as a whole, became more affluent cross-culturally speaking.) Such ‘progress’ has, however, come at enormous cost – and I’ll address this in a moment. Although it may be tempting at this point to focus on the immense destruction wreaked by Westerners, and it is and has been immense, it is for now helpful to think in terms of cost benefit ratios, and how societies make those calculations. It may seem cold and detached, but I will get closer to the bloody reality for all later. This Western view, which has dominated the paradigm in which we Westerners live, has existed for centuries, but it is not innate – it is constructed. And it is currently being challenged, according to Barad and others, by quantum science and its related philosophy, and growing evidence that anything that comes into being does so through relational interaction – there is no preexisting store cupboard of isolated objects waiting to be named. Reality is an ongoing, malleable process, of which we are a part, which always has the potential for change, positive and life-affirming or anti-adaptive. Barad also reminds us that the human’s presence influences how and what the human sees. Barad and many other writers besides refer to the lack of acknowledgement of a relational holistic view as Cartesian, named after René Descartes (1556 – 1650). Henrich explores how we came, through cultural evolution, to have such a view, which is quite different to other cultural world views (as explored in Baggini’s How the World Thinks, 2018). He begins his book explaining how Lutheranism and the Protestant Reformation, alongside the spread of printing, caused societies to become more isolated, educated, and analytical (people were encouraged to have a personal relationship with God, rather than relying on priests, and began to read the bible themselves.) As he explains, an assemblage of interconnected ongoing events lead to people reading more, which in turn had an effect not only on the way we think about the world, but also on our physiology (without impacting our genetic code – although he does not mention epigenetic markers). For instance, he tells us, highly literate societies ‘have on average a thicker corpus callosa’ with associated costs and benefits (which societies favour based on their needs, most often economic, including in pre-agrarian societies). By doing this, he demonstrates how culture and institutions affect us. He then takes us much further back to when the Western Church began to grow and gain power and crucially, ‘restructure European families (starting around 305 CE), making it wrong to marry cousins – first or second, stepmothers, sisters-in-law, or other ingroup members, nor marry your dead brother’s wife, live at home after marriage, all of which was punishable at various times by exile or death, or loss of belongings, By dismantling kin-ship and extended networks, the Church drove societal change that led to the typical Western psychology we see today, Henrich says. You will need to read the book or watch the video below to get more of the story, but essentially the Western Church has had a profound impact on our view of the world.
“The Western concept of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe; a dynamic centre of awareness, emotion, judgement and action organised into a distinctive whole and set contrastively against such other wholes and against a social and natural background, however incorrigible to us, is a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures” (Geertz (1974: 31, cited by Henrich, 2020; 19). Henrich goes on to describe our linear thought patterns, relationship to objects and ownership, how we fail to see ourselves and behaviours as nodes in a network, how we miss relationships – ‘we know a lot about individual trees but fail to see the forest’ (Ibid, 22), how guilt drives us more than shame, our focus on personal attributes and achievements, our self-absorption, how we suffer more from cognitive dissonance and then perform ‘mental gymnastics to relieve this discomfort (Ibid: 33), and a whole raft of other traits that are peculiar cross culturally.
What’s been particularly useful for me:
- When reading child anthropology books obsessively (in favour of the usual tripe that gets marketed), I was struck by how Westerners are rather arrogant and sure their way is the right and indeed only way. And if not arrogant, then ignorant. It’s good to read a book that highlights how extreme we really are, although I suspect it will take Westerners a lot more self-reflection to come to terms with this reality, if they ever do. One of the things I yearned for then was a baby rearing book that told you not what was right and wrong, but that your personal history and culture would have a significant impact on what felt comfortable and what felt unnatural, and then to explain the options through that frame.
- The acknowledgement that so much research designed to determine what is ‘normal’ is based on a tiny minority, often university students in the West – and that as you move beyond that little cohort of people, it becomes clear that the West is anything but so-called normal.
- If it’s true the Church drove individualism by breaking down kinship connections and therefore power in the family, so it could have more of it itself, then it can be argued it triggered the path towards liberal secularism, which might be seen as a spectacular own goal (which gives me some churlish pleasure.)
- I’ve always enjoyed the anthropological intention of examining without making value judgements. There are problems with this as it is necessary to have moral boundaries, of course, but insisting one’s own way is the only way, is unhelpful. Anthropology is just as inured in Colonialism and associated practices – objectifying, cataloguing, extracting – as photography is. Malinowski, the supposed father, was, for the times, politically correct in public while utterly racist in his private diaries. Anthropology has had to do a lot of self-reflective examination and while I am sure it continues to have issues it must resolve, there is at least some acknowledgement. My sense is that photography is not as evolved. I have never heard talk of societal cost/benefit ratios amongst photographers, instead the discourse seems littered with binary arguments.
- At one point, Henrich argues, whether we focus on the crimes of the West and its idiosyncratic view or the positive collective achievements that emerge from that view, of which there are many, what matters in his narrative, is the systemic inter-relational forming and reforming between institutions, collective brain, individual psychology and biology. However, one cannot avoid looking at the costs and in particular the crimes committed by the West. The violence, just like the norms we inhabit are extreme, as Henrich shows us. The individualised view could be our undoing, despite apparent advancements, because if we cannot learn that everything is interconnected and that human beings are a part of reality not outside of it, we are unlikely to survive for very long. (See page 487 for Henrich’s thoughts about ‘pervasive horrors’ of Colonialism).
Finally, in terms of the question I was trying to ask when I began my CS essay – is photography simply too much of a Cartesian object to continue to be relevant or useful in a post-Cartesian process-led world? I still don’t know the answer and refer you to my hedged essay conclusion. However, what continues to grate me about photography is that it so often comes with supposed well-intentioned motivation expressed in statements that claim to be examining the world we live in, but too often from a parochial point of view – without any self-awareness. It behoves photographers to think more broadly. But even then, perhaps, it doesn’t matter about the artists’ intentions as photography can only ever promote an isolated, object-dominated, non-relational paradigm; perhaps it is the ultimate expression of it – because it emerged from that world view – and no matter how much we try to work beyond that, photography can never evolve. At which point it will and should become an archaic curiosity – although it seems most likely, certain useable aspects of photography will continue as we get closer and closer to recreating SIMs that are indistinguishable from ‘reality’. Why is that important to photography – because failing to think relationally has led us to a point where we are in danger of destroying the habitat entirely, at which point we might need those SIMs. But if we continue to favour tools that promote isolated object orientated thinking, we may forever by hindered, even when making work about the environment, by a failure to convey a more holistic view, which the present and future demands.
(PS. The research around trade and co-operation does not paint a good picture for the folly that is Brexit – “In hostile environments, only groups with institutions that promote extensive co-operation and sharing can survive at all” (Ibid: 97).)
Azoulay, A. (2018) Ariella Azoulay – Unlearning Decisive Moments of Photography. [online blog/forum] At: http://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/explore/still-searching/authors/10605_ariella_azoulay (Accessed 15/11/2019).
Barad, K. M. (2007) Meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Baggini, J. (2019) How the World Thinks: A Global History of Philosophy. (s.l.): Granta Books.
Capra, F. and Luisi, P. L. (2014) The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision. (Kindle 1st Edition) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Heimans, J. and Timms, H. (2018) New power: how it’s changing the 21st century – and why you need to know. (Kindle) London: Macmillan.
Hoffman, D. D. (2019) The case against reality: how evolution hid the truth from our eyes. London: Allen Lane.
Henrich, J. P. (2020) The weirdest people in the world: how the west became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous. At: https://www.overdrive.com/search?q=E42DFCFB-0872-4B28-85C8-8ECF83E3BAAF (Accessed 09/01/2021).