WHERE TO BEGIN?

 

The painter never comes to a blank canvas. The artist's job, he argues, is not to create something from nothing but to create something new from the density of what is and what has been. That canvas may look white but it is infinitely dense with images from the history of art, from TV and movies, from advertising, from the news, from everyday life. See: Deleuze, The Logic of Sensation (London: Continuum, 2005)

A Note on Form

There is no correct way to read this introductory piece, which I hope it fitting. In it, I am attempting to describe something that has – to me – become known as Optimistic Criticism (OC). How I am able to define or clarify such a statement depends, I suppose, on you – dear reader – and how you engage with what follows. OC is not a theory. Nor, really, can it be called a practice. It is, instead, a perspective, a means of approach that then informs which tools one will pick up en-route to excavation of whatever subject one turns one’s mind to.

Crassly speaking, it is female. That is: it is not beholden to any teleological myth of the conclusion, contented as it is to present an idea as though it was miraculously brought forth whole into the world or represents a suitable end point of consideration. Stuff and nonsense. An argument that introduces itself, swells, grows and bursts into climax? A tad masculosexual for me. Emma Thompson says much the same about jokes. So this escapade is an escape, an attempt, fitted roughly together through various means of OC. OC, in turn, attempts to define my ideas of aesthetic ethics, or ethical aesthetics, or neither if one wishes to avoid the over-signified terminology of leaden “philosophers”, rather than the artists they so often critique.[1]

 

 

This piece is a wavelet, a more natural exploration of concept and ideas, which appear and recur like rings in the water widening out from wherever one begins. The disparate elements function as attempts. In Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode, she calls this a “wavelet,” structure, and describes it as using “Dispersed patterning, a sense of ripple or oscillation, little ups and downs, [which] might be more true to human experience than a single crashing wave.”[2] Start where you like, trace where you like. Each text within is fluid, as unedited as possible, to capture not my grand schema or erudition but honest development of thought. Perhaps that is foolish. But I feel it worthwhile to present texts as they develop and appear to me, rather than monoliths they may appear when "complete". For this reason, I am also limiting explicit internal connections, for I do not want to guide you in something I am merely reaching for myself. There are, certainly, many thinkers, artists and philosophers who have shaped these ideas, but again I do not want to bias or influence your reading. How I got to this point is, I think, somewhat less important than how you got to it, or how you receive it. Please contact me with questions, engagements, debates: this piece is an organism. It may be released, but it cannot be finished.

 

Consequently, I trust you, dear reader. I am not presenting an argument for you to digest, but suggesting ideas in their natural flux. I am not a lepidopterist, pinning the fluid beauty of ideas onto a backboard to better be able to analyse them. Rather, I am more of a keen twitcher: trekking for many miles away from comfort on the off chance I may glimpse something that takes me elsewhere, perhaps even more invigorated if I fail – safe in the knowledge that a time will come again. I want to intoxicate the norm, disrupt an academic lull. Failure requires faith in humanity. Each part of this piece is as unedited as possible, a flowing of ideas, thought at risk. I place the ideas on the precipice of sense: will you push or pull? OC is a striving, and I must trust you, dear reader, since I do not signpost the way, but invite you alongside me as I travel. I am a fellow traveller, not a tour guide. I seek not to repeat or re-clarify (read: bastardise) what has already been written, but provide exegesis, comment, aware that I approach my subject idiosyncratically, as you will. If I can provide the source, I will, else there is an imbalance between us which I wish to balance. OC is not easy, then, but richer in its development of ideas. 



[1] I lean here on the deftly enjoyable book by Jonathan Rée, Witcraft: The Invention of Philosophy in English (London: Allen Lane, 2019).

[2] Jane Alison, Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative (New York: Catapult, 2019).