Mind And Matter Friday May 6, 2005
The miracle of photography, of its so-called objective image, is that it reveals a radically non-objective world. It is a paradox that the lack of objectivity of the world is disclosed by the photographic lens. Analysis and reproduction are of no help in solving this problem. The technique of photography…through its unrealistic play of visual techniques, its slicing of reality, its immobility, its silence, and its phenomenological reduction of movements, photography affirms itself as both the purest and the most artificial exposition of the image (Jean Baudrillard: Photography, Or The Writing Of Light, 2000).
I sometimes enjoy reading contemporary academic studies, and profit from it. Those kind of writings also impress themselves on your memory, even your identity. A colleague once declared she ‘really loved’ novelist Henry James and – surprise, surprise – she’d studied him intensively at university. This is only partly a matter of personal choice and inclination, since curricula are to a large extent imposed on people i.e. are non-negotiable. So if people declare their affection for what they have studied, that reflects the time and emotional investment they made and the corresponding benefit which ultimately derives from them, not the writer. In other words, you are fond of what you study but you didn’t make that choice, so to what extent does it correspond to your real interests, needs and inclinations? What if my colleague had studied Dickens or Proust? She would probably proclaim that she loved them, knowing nothing about Henry James.
When I reminisce over my previous studies, I feel ‘affectionate’ towards certain writings that I studied, where I invested a lot of time and energy. At the time they provided me with cultural, psychological and philosophical reference points, thus increasing my understanding of life. They enrich my cognitive world and it is fun to look back to ‘A’ levels, for example, and recall my introduction to Shakespeare, WB Yeats, Joseph Conrad, Durkheim, Althusser, and Karl Marx. It is fun, and profitable, to recall those studies and evaluate them again from a more mature and sophisticated perspective. I always resented the way you might produce some good insight into an examination question and get an ‘A’ grade, but would never see your work again as a means of solidifying and enhancing your understanding. What kind of education is it when the final payoff is a location on a scale of merit, an abrupt termination of what is actually a continuous process, a submission of a piece of work that you would like to see again for the best educational reasons.
Gilles Deleuze and Jean Baudrillard are probably the most significant writers I’ve encountered in recent years, with the greatest academic status. I like to investigate what people are discussing and how people are thinking about certain subjects, but eventually I step back and detach myself from this cultural discourse, in relation to a more comprehensive cognitive background. I liked the way Deleuze proposed that ‘film is a philosophy’ so any film has a philosophical status by virtue of the medium, and a film that is self-consciously philosophical – like The Matrix, for example – is correspondingly obvious and shallow. We all know about Gnosticism, so what is the point of telling the tale yet again? I once debated that subject with some academics at www.filmphilosophy.com, and this criticism was the dominant objection to The Matrix, as if old school philosophy is irrelevant and redundant, and we’ve moved on to newer and better things with the likes of Deleuze and other academic high priests. Basically, I think those people had simply overlooked and dismissed the real philosophical problems as expressed in Gnosticism. That is, they construed life in purely intellectual terms as if it were no more than an intellectual game – and that’s an old, boring game and we want to play something else now.
Deleuze based much of his work on philosopher Henri Bergson, who once said philosophy can and should be explicable in ordinary terms. In other words if it becomes saturated with jargon and self-referential density, it is bad philosophy – yes, there is such a thing. I find many contemporary theorists more aesthetic than critical or philosophical, their work concerned more with elegant complex construction than with penetrating insight. This is true for example in relation to digital media, where current theorists sometimes lack a requisite intellectual background, and are programmers and geeks more than thinkers. It becomes a realm of superficial clever-dickery, justified with the postmodern ethos of relativity. Jean Baudrillard is often invoked in relation to the ambiguous reality or ‘truth’ value of cyberspace interaction, but I think Baudrillard merely skimmed over the top of a far deeper philosophical subject – reducing metaphysics to a culturally and anthropologically specific theory. Questions about ‘reality’ and ‘simulation’ are ultimate, and have to be addressed in ultimate terms. I think Deleuze and Baudrillard play an interesting intellectual game and do have interesting and valid insight, but they also obfuscate and mislead.
My interest in so-called Eastern philosophy began in my teens, when I read the Tao te Ching, Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance, yogic and Hindu texts. I remember showing a quotation to my father from a book I still possess, which I now comprehend in a more developed context. Psychological teacher GI Gurdjieff said ‘take the understanding of the West and the wisdom of the East, and then seek’. My father disagreed with this idea, and I was terribly perplexed: it was obviously a remark of acute intelligence, so why did he object to it? It consoles me – just a little – to recall that towards the end of his life he was reading Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, Goethe and The Tibetan Book Of The Dead – partly attributable, I think, to my own interests. In other words, he’d begun to consider deep philosophical matters.
Eastern philosophy has a sophisticated wider context which includes meditation practice; the thinking is ultimately based on phenomenological reality and how to penetrate into it. Western philosophy starts from a different basis: a ‘religious’ belief in reason as a paramount cognitive force. Everything is out there, explicable in cognitive intellectual terms, and it is our task to unfold it in successive levels of thought, proving and disproving and thereby arriving at truth. All of which is nonsensical clever-dickery, when the more penetrating questions concern the nature of thought itself and the limitations it has. Thus, Baudrillard and Deleuze play intellectual games without stepping back and questioning the rules they have accepted, which are the most critical factor. It is possible to conduct that kind of enquiry in coherent Western terms, and it is why I value Kant’s Critique Of Human Understanding. You have to first question the tool you are using – thought itself – or you may simply run off in worthless directions. The limits of the mind have to be incorporated into your theory or ultimately, you are contributing to the problem of obfuscation and merely carving out additional cuts onto an iced over pond, when you need break through that ice to what lies underneath.
One of the reasons I like mountain imagery is because of its tremendous physical and symbolic presence, that antidotes erroneous thinking. It has an undeniable aesthetic and physical presence, is thus a formidable reminder of phenomenological fact and the trappings and dusty corridors of the mind. It makes no difference what you think about a mountain, it is undeniably there, and your presence is undeniably minimal in relation to it. As you negotiate your way up, down, and along rocky ridges, it soothes and clarifies the mind because your concerns are refreshingly simple and ultimately based on the existential need for survival. The Lake District is actually quite tame compared to the Himalayas, Alps, or even Scotland. But people die there regularly because it is sufficiently wild and remote to make it potentially hazardous, and although this is not why I walk – I am not interesting in adrenalin, fear and technical challenge – it remains a baseline fact that inevitably tinges your experience of high level wandering, in relation to the critical variables on which your life may depend: sufficient, food, water, navigation skill, clothing protection, and physical-kinesthetic stability. If you slip, fall, injure yourself, then no one sees you, get too cold, run out of food and faint, become lost in fog etc., the consequences can be serious. But as you become more experienced you feel increasingly safe and thus enjoy a new self reliance, and it is one way of rediscovering a more simple existence – albeit temporarily – which reminds me of the more carefree and sensory days of childhood, before thinking became so complicated.