* The author is currently rewriting of the book-length manuscript, DRAWING - FICTIONS - TIME, dividing it into three volumes and increasing its novelistic style
* Hence, reducing the academic reference and accentuating the first- and third-person ratio to suggest more of an I - you relationship
* I - you as a strategy that somewhat objectifies the multiple-within-unitary idea of self-identity (to the extent that one does feel unified)
(See Tips 4 - 8 for details of the development towards this point)
The problematisation of him (the author) in relation to me, qua me in relation to him. Is it a qua; is it reciprocal? I’m not sure. His installation of me (Em) in the present work, which suggests his rather than my proactivity, is hierarchical, with me as a reflection of his voice, but in such terms as suit him to self-distance. I’m a semi-colon, in a sense, that’s an addendum of one thing to prefix something else, the latter of which is not unrelated to the former. Within reason, that is in terms that could always conceivably relate to him, I am from time to time my own person, especially in my narrative that unfolds up ahead, albeit in forthcoming volumes.
Am I the anomaly of which he speaks? I have my own set, insofar as anomalies can be stories, relating to an observed character of my own, the source, but elaborated later. But I’m at present thinking in terms of the gap, of which the author speaks, as drawing when he feels he should be speaking. His assumption, I should think, is that he feels he can articulate situations of difference in and towards himself through language as such, rather than the pseudo-language of visualisation, in this case drawing.
I’m aware that I’ve not said much – waffle, to put it in derogatory terms - except to draw attention to the problem of the problematisation; myself posited in and through the text as an other to the author, where much more is to be disclosed – if and when that should be – than myself pitched as a basic duality to him and weighted considerably more in his favour than mine. I wish that I could recede further into his head while still in full view, as it were, in order, paradoxically, to get out of it sufficiently far enough to be my own person: we’ll see in volumes to come, if not in the present manifestation.
How and what is Whitehead’s “great refusal?”[1] Used by Stengers as title for her Chapter Fourteen, last chapter before her interpretation of Whitehead’s cosmology, and hence reference to his Process and Reality, which is the book I myself have more or less read. More specifically still, how does the context of Stengers’s discussion around this term relate to what I’ve just said of myself? What draws me to such a context in the first place is that Stengers (citing Whitehead) includes art in actual occasions that involve the operation of the “great refusal,” among “’[…] art, romance, and by criticism in reference to ideals’,” where the “true” of these things brings one right up against the “untrue” by virtue of their sheer dismissal of the latter. According to Stengers:
Is there a presumption of accomplishment in this reference to art, among the other mentioned values? Stenger States: “[…] aesthetic accomplishment exhibits the way that the untrue is produced as well as the true that this accomplishment exhibits […].”[3] However, the basis of our orientation – I here include myself as if in collaboration with the author, as if democratically the case – is more of a what if, on the cusp of a resolution situation, where what I’ve already summarised, as far as I understand it, or making do instead with my interpretation, the process of forging actual occasions out from eternal objects in a formal sense through drawing, as that very thing, a process, and as such prior to resolution. True and untrue therefore oscillate, similar to the question of me amidst the present work as an insufficiently clear-defined relation to/with the author.
Still, this idea of the truth of an artwork disclosing what is untrue through a refusal to take the latter on-board, so to speak – Stengers refers to the true as “[…] vibrates with everything it does not include […]”[4] – is useful not only for what the author of the present work will later premise as art as a manifestation of the Lacanian Real, but also as the Lacanian termed artifice in the context of art, all but in other words.
Meanwhile, the author, and me by dint of my interventions, chip away at the process of trying – and making an issue of such trying – to achieve resolution; but because of which – and this is just an idea – the untrue is observed as potential, now shed, in truth’s vicinity. In Lacanian terms, such truth may be working or conscious knowledge that masks the truth of unconscious knowledge.
Whitehead, like Lacan, but for different reasons, views language as a challenge; in Whitehead’s terms due to the obligations of thinkers to think against language that “[…] cannot be abstracted from the way their epoch enables them to think.”[5] Whether epoch as an age or as the atomic unity of whatever is one’s actuality (Stengers[6] for the atomic suggestion), the author and I are setting up a kind of society within and as the present work to enable this oscillation of meanings of language more or less between Whitehead and Lacan, until such time as the content of the volumes broadens out.
[ 1]. Stengers (2011, p.219).
(Un)Believable Discussion: A Hybrid Narrative of Three People Interacting in a Space between Two Adjacently-Placed Drawings
(Chapter 18, in DRAWING - FICTIONS - TIME)
Abstract:
The article oscillates between fiction and reflective-academic writing concerning the dispersal of identity between three people and two visual artworks. Two drawings are seen to occupy the same studio, one of which is presented as the author’s, who is also the in-text referenced artist, and the other as the work of a fictional protagonist called Morry. The article concerns a discussion between the the author as artist, Morry, and another fictional protagonist that wavers between belief and disbelief concerning how a drawing practice may involve both the formatting and articulation of ideas of the subject. The author references the Lacanian formation of identity during early infant development, Lacan’s idea of the psychical gaze, and Paul Ricoeur’s idea of narrative identity through an explanation of one of the two drawings, Self & Other. The narrative provides a means of discussing the underlying motivation of both drawings. The question of the narrative’s believability is endorsed by a quote from Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, in which a certain decline of human identity is replaced by the essay form.
To cite as: Croft, M. 2025, “(Un)Believable Discussion: A Hybrid Narrative of Three People Interacting in a Space between Two Adjacently-Placed Drawings,” PsyArt 29.2, pp. 44-66.
Abstract: DRAWING - FICTIONS - TIME:
The question of subject in a drawing practice
(Volume 1 - provisionally, as of October, 2025)
The word fictions in the manuscript’s title, DRAWINGS – FICTIONS – TIME, can be read as both a plural noun and a verb that suggests an impact of the word drawing––the latter of which can also be both noun and verb––on time. The work, referred to generically as the present work, is divided into three volumes whose chapters across the volumes divide between two narratives that begin separately and increasingly interrelate. The first of the narratives is a reflective-interpretative consideration of the question of time explored through drawing, where several drawing-based projects are presented in order of their occurrence. The drawings’ rationale and interconnection are discussed by the author in the drawings’ dedicated chapters through reference to his on-going reading, mainly Lacanian-based psychoanalysis and phenomenology, interspersed with other theoretical reference. The author’s particular interest is in the visual-material work as its own entity and as both generative and illustrative of written dialogue. The second narrative, which is fictional, concerns a male character called Em. One of Em’s fictional roles is to have been invited to read the reflective-interpretative narrative and comment on its concerns. Such comment is inserted into the reflective-interpretative narrative in the form of interventions. Another of Em’s roles is to appear as the main character of several fictional chapters interspersed with the reflective-interpretative chapters. At the end of the interventions, in effect at the end of the three-volume present work, Em re-visits the manuscript at the beginning with a set of second set of interventions, this time in a context of the character’s own interest in the process philosophy of A. N. Whitehead. While this folded-in extension of the second narrative of course begins at the beginning of the present work, and its being a later addition in time is not explained as such, the reader will gradually sense that these are a second-set interventions are of Em as an older version of himself. The two sets of interventions therefore represent simultaneously the character’s younger and older age in time. A third set of interventions, dated by the author with their time of occurrence in the present work, which are roughly chronological but can vary according to how Em doubles back on his interventional reading, convey Em by now at around the same mature age as the author, and course through each of the volumes as Em’s reflection on his own present theoretical concerns. While in this Volume 1, his concern is a continuation with Whitehead, in Volume 2 he moves from Whithead towards an interest in the quantum theory of the feminist and quantum physicist Karen Barad. (A third section of the work has not yet been re-written as Volume 3.) Parallels and similarities are developed in the fictional narrative between Em and the present work’s author, while Em is also pursuing his own creative and written interests, among which concerns his transcriptions of observed spoken monologues by an old man whom he names the source. Concurrent with such interests, Em starts a relationship with an older woman, named Martha, who is a painter. Martha is also the estranged wife of a writer, named Maurice, who turns out to be the author-friend of the present work’s author. Em is gradually introduced to the present work’s author through circumstances of his own story, and increasingly replaces the author as the artist of the author’s drawings. While the conclusion to the reflective interpretative narrative is contained in the penultimate discursive chapter, the final chapter provides a resolution to how the fictional narrative is built into that of the reflective-interpretative. The entire work should suggest the oscillation and variability of a single identity; that of the manuscript’s author through his drawing and fictional interests in the context of time.
Throughout the entire manuscript there is reference to a fictional heteronym called Em (recently rewritten as the phonetic first letter of the character's name, Morry, as the nickname of Maurice). This character's role is on the one hand that of a declared fictional interlocutor of the work's author, who intervenes in their writing on an ad-hoc basis. There are in fact two sets of interventions, titled as such, that run through the work, the second set beginning after the manuscript has first been read and responded to by EM, coming in again from the beginning. A third set of interventions comes into the first volume of the now-divided manuscript, in process at the time of writing.
Em's second role is that of a fictional painter and writer whose biographical narrative unfolds as the author's reflective-academic writing on their drawing projects develops. While the reader is privy to Em's personal life in terms not disclosed by the author of their own life, is in many ways similar to that of the author, the closeness of relationship between this fictional character and the author only becomes apparent by degrees, as one reads through the manuscript.
The following intervention, Intervention 39b, dated 30th January, 2025, indicates the general tenor of this set, and how Em both discloses that he is a fiction and at the same time projects himself as if he were a real narrator.
Reference
Stengers, I. (2011) Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts, (Trans. Michael Chase) Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press
What is at stake is the very contrast between true and untrue: each proposition produced as ‘true’ vibrates with the ‘great refusal’ of everything that, inseparably, will have been produced as untrue.[2]