I feel sad and disappointed.
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
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.
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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.
*(There is an excellent relevant talk titled Negative Messianism in the Age of Animism by Achille Mbembe worth visiting if this interests you.)
Achille Mbembe: ‘Negative Messianism in the Age of Animism’ (2017). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyHUJYfk_os (Accessed: 24 May 2022).
Capra, F. and Luisi, P.L. (2014) The systems view of life: a unifying vision. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Field, S. (2020) Extended Written Project – SJField – OCA Level Three Study Blog, SJField – OCA Level Three Study Blog. Available at: https://sjflevel3.photo.blog/category/extended-written-project/ (Accessed: 15 February 2021).
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.
Yuk Hui (2023) ChatGPT, or the Eschatology of Machines – Journal #137 (2023). Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/137/544816/chatgpt-or-the-eschatology-of-machines/ (Accessed: 25 March 2024).