Field Notes

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.

1. 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.”
2. 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.
3. 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.”
4. 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.
5. This speaks to my presentation title, After the Binary: AI and Greenberg in 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.
6. 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.))
7. 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)

Ref:

After AI Symposium (no date). Available at: https://afteraisymposium.com/?utm_source=Artsadmin&utm_campaign=722cabff0b-Artsadmin+Anchor+Issue+1101&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_48c680cd56-722cabff0b-295116565 (Accessed: 7 May 2024).

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.

Foster, H. (2023) ‘THE ANTI-AESTHETIC AT FORTY’, Artforum, 1 September. Available at: https://www.artforum.com/features/hal-foster-on-the-anti-aesthetic-252932/ (Accessed: 7 May 2024).

Greenberg, C. (1939) ‘Avant Garde and Kitsch’, Partisan Review, 6(5), pp. 34–49.

Haraway, D.J. (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.

Hossenfelder, S. (2022) Existential Physics A Scientist’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions. London: Atlantic Books. Available at: https://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/PublicFullRecord.aspx?p=6892577 (Accessed: 18 August 2022).

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.

McManus, M. (2017) ‘Walter Benjamin and the Political Practices of the Alt-right’, New Politics, 27 December. Available at: https://newpol.org/walter-benjamin-and-political-practices-altright/ (Accessed: 7 May 2024).

Nail, T. (2019) Theory of the image. New York, NY: Oxford University Press

O’Gieblyn, M. (2021) God, human, animal, machine: technology, metaphor, and the search for meaning. First edition. New York: Doubleday.