Field Notes

Notes: Immediacy, Neo-rationialism and ‘aesthetic populism’

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I have already written about my relief at witnessing a shift emerging in art and critique whereby the well-meaning but increasingly misplaced dogma of making everything overtly accessible is being questioned. It’s good to see further examples. As populism infects nearly every aspect of existence, more people are beginning to question the drive and outcome of avoiding difficulty and/or complexity. I too, have focused at length (i.e. citing Amanda Beech’s critique of the phrase ‘practice-led’, in particular) and continue to do so. In work I’ve not yet shared, I drive home the related problem of dualistic (Cartesian) habits and framing, and how it facilitates a trap, which those who often claim to be against social inequities can fall into. Vicky Kirby (2011) in Quantum Anthropologies sums up the predicament well when she asks, “What can we do when the vigilance of our arguments inadvertently reverses and entrenches the very logic that we hope to undermine?” My particular bugbear is practice vs theory, as if the two could not exist in the same place at the same time and inform each other as fish in a shoal might, leading without dominating as and when required, following when necessary; and which often frames practice as something ‘feminine’, soft and playful against masculine logic and rationality. Apart from its overt sexism, this kind of framing is exceedingly limiting.

Here is Johnny Golding (2020) in The Courage to Matter expressing the same concerns more eloquently and with greater detail than I can:

In short, an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ binaric vision of social life, the totality, of which, when taken together, exhausts the whole of the world.

In a certain sense, this elementary ‘first principle’ of leaders and led finds its equivalent in the infamous ‘law of physics’, whereby two objects cannot occupy the same place at the same time. Wrongly attributed to Newton, this seemingly ‘iron law’ has insinuated itself into modern and contemporary politics and aesthetics, not to mention, military strategy.19 In the version adopted by artists and non-artists alike, often one finds ‘artistic practice’ consigned to the nebulous-fuzzy-soft realm of feeling, emotion, intuition, pleasure, pitted against (or at least utterly distinct from) the deeply logicalhard-scienza realm of reason and rationality, stiff upper lip, furrowed brow and the like.20 Taken together, these realms express the whole of the field (intellectual and practical). But should ‘the soft’ move in such a way as to crash into ‘the hard’ (assuming the hard is raging towards the soft with exactly the same furore), either the hard would be flattened or become soft (or vice versa) or both would be destroyed on impact. In the version adopted by State/military strategy, particularly up until and including the great World Wars, though today more closely aligned with urban-turf wars and certain team sports, we find two sides gathering on the battlefield (street, scrimmage line), facing each other and commencing their shooting/ slicing/ mutilating at point-blank range. Victory is often empiric.

I am very pleased to have noticed two more examples of people questioning binary, ‘zero-sum’ (Golding, 2020) dogmas and habits that have become sacred cows in contemporary ideology:

  1. Ben Davis (2025) questions the well-meaning desire to make everything accessible and writes about his ambivalence in Artspeak After Social Media. He begins with “An era like ours, where the right-wing culture war against “liberal elites” combines with the Big Tech domination of media that turns everything into “content,” demands careful thinking about what the stakes of “aesthetic populism” really are.”
  2. In the same journal, Isadora Neves Marques (2025) grapples with immediacy, drawing from Anna Kornbluh’s (2024) Immediacy: Or, the Style of Too Late Capitalism, a phenomenon which social media makes so prevalent, in an article titled How to be Responsible Irresponsibly: On Art Beyond Immediacy. Marques writes: The question with which this text begins feels relevant today because you and I and most everyone else this century is submerged in the immediacy of affects and effects. It is an immediacy that is instrumental to a personalized economy, held together by the ongoing production and management of an impatiently narcissistic, economically lean, and ultimately banal notion of the individual; but just as well for flattening ideas and ideals, which are reduced to polarized ideological camps and knee-jerk efficiency in a media-accelerated, survivalist struggle for attention.

I am so pleased these questions and discussions around binary thinking and rejection of thought are taking place. But it does still feel on the fringes, and this is something I hope to address a little in the works I am currently bringing to fruition, Sense and Reason and On Obsolescence (Embracing it – EMO Mark ii), one of which is likely to be included in The Wrong Biennale pavilion I am contributing to and helping to produce .. more news soon!

Refs:

Golding’s footnotes:
19 That Newton never developed this particular ‘law of physics’ but instead developed arguments regarding motion, acceleration and mass in an entirely different manner—does not seem to have prevented centuries of wrongful attribution. The proposition that two objects travelling at speed towards each other cannot occupy the same space at the same time, was most probably developed by Thomas Hobbes in 1651, a full thirty-five years before Newton’s The Principia (1685). Irrespective of the profound conservative liberalism (or Liberal theory with a capital L, where having a ‘stake’ in society, that is, property, alongside the ability to be ‘in motion’ was the sine qua non for civil society), Hobbes’s political theory incorporated at its very core, a zero-sum ‘scienza / knowledge’, both natural and historical. Of particular interest: matters concerning movement, not only as an inalienable ‘right’ but as the manifestation of what it meant, biologically, politically and ethically, to be human. See: Thomas Hobbes (2017 [1651]), “Of the Liberty of Subjects,” in Leviathan or the Matter, Forme, & Power of a Commonwealth Ecclessiasticall and Civill, (printed for Andrew Cooke, at the Green Dragon in St. Pauls Churchyard, (Middlesex: Penguin Classics), 129–37. See also: Isaac Newton (2016 [1685]), Principia Mathematica: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, translated and edited from the Latin by I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman as The Principia: The Authoritative Translation, (University of California Press.
20 Hence, too, the rather annoying question: can artists work with scientists? Spoiler alert: yes

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