Topological Redheads and Cod Philosophy

Dr Mike King, Reader in Computer Art and Animation, London Metropolitan University

God, science and philosophy diverged in the 18th century as part of the Enlightenment revolution that paved the way for the modern and postmodern world. As philosophy shrank back from both the empirical world of physical science and the felt world of religious experience, it gained a reputation for ever-increasing ellipsis and obscurity, whether of the analytical British type, or the more playful linguistic Continental variety. It has been left to an artistic tradition, of which De Los Bueis is the inheritor, to pursue a ‘raw’ philosophy, one that engages with a wider audience. In her piece ‘Six or Seven Wot is its’ she bridges the world of ‘cod’ philosophy heard in pubs and on the streets of South and East London with the erudite and aloof worlds of Wittgenstein, Derrida and Levinas.

‘God and Philosophy:’ this is the title of an essay by Levinas in response to Derrida’s ‘Violence and Metaphysics;’ ‘Cod and Philosophy’ is a term we might use for the raw philosophy of the streets. The ‘cod’ here is short for an English word, ‘codswallop,’ which means nonsense. Sartre was asked by his students why he hung out in cafes with them, to which he replied that you can learn from anyone, but in fact, the gems of wisdom that one may glean from the ‘knights of the road’ (tramps, hobos, derelicts), match any from the great philosophers. De Los Bueis recognises this when she chooses a narrator with the street accent of South or East London (poorer, working class districts) to deliver her homilies concerning bubbles and topological redheads.

De Los Bueis’s short film focuses on language and the brain, exploring the paradox that language when peered at too closely seems to fall apart, to be nonsense, yet to carry such evocative power. In Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations he puzzles, like a ‘knight of the road,’ on the conundrums posed by language: he is not satisfied by Augustine’s naïve account of denotation. ‘Why doesn’t glue stick to the inside of the tube?; Why is there only one monopolies commission?;’  these are conundrums we delight to contemplate in, like children perhaps, but with the legitimation of Zeno and the tradition of Western philosophy. New digital technologies give new immediacies to De Los Bueis’s reverie; allow for the juxtaposition and layering of visual meaning, tugging at our perceptual systems. What on earth is a ‘topological redhead?’ Well we now know, or we have a fleeting impression of knowing, a pre-linguistic visual set of associations with bubbles and planetary storms, sexually charged perhaps with whatever the term ‘redhead’ adds to the philosophy. And philosophy has always needed ‘redhead’ or some equivalent.

The East End pub and the ‘Symposium’ – drinking together – of Plato: De Los Bueis joins them again where class privilege and the centrifugal intellectual dispersion of the Enlightenment had made them two distinct worlds. Socrates could drink the whole of Athens under the table: ‘in vino veritas,’ said the Romans. ‘Wot’s it got to do wiv it?’ is the prime philosophical question. Artists absorb by osmosis and telepathy what the rationalists labour for decades to grasp. Leonard Schlain in his book Art and Physics suggests that artists have always anticipated new developments in science; certainly they refract them into culture. Art through Christian history occupied a contested space because of the tradition of iconoclasm: the image was suspect on theological grounds. Only in the 20th century did art stake out for itself a territory – philosophy-like – that allows it to roam over all of human experience and comment wryly on it through that forbidden language of the image.

De Los Bueis’s sign-language of the American tramp of the forties is the language of today: icons are no longer the domain of religion but of consumer electronics, we swirl in a sea of visual language – spam/junk/spam – out of which the artist constructs immediate meanings. Tensed over the abyss, always threatened with being overwhelmed, the artist is receptive to the torrent of information, languication, communitrol – whatever. Artists turn the oppressive technologies of the day into their means of expression and protest: the internet, the digital surveillance: these become the raw materials for criticism and at the same time the means of visual production. Socrates liked best the artisans in wood, stone and copper: they struggled with the truths of their chosen materialities, yet he stands at the beginning of an entirely word-oriented philosophical tradition. De Los Bueis deals with that ultimate conundrum: the digital domain which is not fully material, yet absolutely dependent on that ancient metal, copper, and increasingly visual.

‘Course, what do I know.