Why I find it unethical to write about myself as an artist

Marshall, Mike (2019) Why I find it unethical to write about myself as an artist. In: Ethical materialities in art and moving images. Bloomsbury Academic, London. (Submitted)

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Why I find it unethical to write about myself as an artist (278kB)

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Creators:

Marshall, Mike

Description/Abstract:

This essay examines the importance of indeterminate and emergent conditions of thought in relation to static identification and determinate meaning. It proposes that economic and technological processes combine to form an accelerating reductionism that de-complexifies formative and creative conditions. I argue that a forcing of standardized articulation is evolving from a fundamental tendency of ‘identity thinking’. Following Bergson and Deleuze, identity as ‘recognition’ is considered as a habit that grows from a need for self-preservation and stable self-image, and expands into social and technological structures that reflect it back in a destructive feedback loop. This accelerative reductivism, with its logics of growth and optimisation, increasingly drown-out and overwrite the fragilities of emergence and, ultimately, draw the Earth towards an Anthopocene finality of planetary death. Counter to this, I propose a practice of ‘creative ethics’ which gives primacy to the radical potential of the open over the procedures of identifiable communication. Creativity can involve capacities for receptivity and dynamic openness that might actually be nurtured. Alternative, slow and expanded spatio-temporal conditions may be developed that are conducive to the emergent, and the not quite formed, and whereby sensing and thinking might find the opportunity to arrive at something else.

Item Type:

Book Section

Date:

2019

Funders:

UCA and Bloomsbury Press