Event overview
Visual Cultures Public Programme Summer 2016
Barbara O’Brien’s 1958 narrative of a six month schizophrenic episode – ‘Operators and Things’ – begins precisely with perception, and with a process of attempting to perceive the intent of people in a specific environment (a large and expanding company, full of ambitious employees).
This account of an experience of schizophrenia needs to be re-told, but in a way where the thread of the questions of perception and lucidity is used for navigating through the described world. It is only, in fact, in treating the book as philosophy that there can be an avoidance of the issue that we cannot know with certainty whether the book describes real events, or is all along an extremely well-disguised work of fiction.
But this is not a loss: it is to engage with what is most important about the book. By the end of it O’Brien has created a framework in which the thought could arrive that the “sanity” of ordinary existence might all along be more disturbingly schizophrenic than schizophrenia itself (in relation to the everyday “voices” of counterproductive worrying, of interpretation of whether we have been negatively judged, of preparation of defence against censure, etc.). But most specifically she has quietly suggested that thought in a fundamental sense is separable from language, and that the faculty of reason is all along systemically related to a dysfunctional, deleterious cluster of emotions.
Chairs: Jon K. Shaw & Mark Fisher
Justin Barton is a philosopher and writer. He has published academic philosophical articles and has collaborated on projects with artists and theorists. With Mark Fisher he made the audio- essays londonunderlondon and On Vanishing Land. He once spent two years living in a tent in woodlands around London while working at a college in Covent Garden, and he has travelled to rarely visited places such as the mountains of Tuva and the forests of northwest Patagonia.
The event is free and no booking is required. All welcome.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 19 May 2016 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
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