From eye-world to brain-eye

self-reflexivity in art and its education

pp. 201-206

in: Jan Jagodzinski, Visual art and education in an era of designer capitalism, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010

Abstract

If we take the post-Darwinian stance of species modification seriously, as opposed to the now-dated theory of adaptation, any hard line between biology and anthropology begins to weaken. The biology of the physical body must be placed within the context of anthropology, which recognizes the neurology of the brain and spiritual life as the movement of the mind. But neither anthropology, if it remains stuck in culture, nor biology, if it remains stuck in Nature, will do. They are necessary yet not sufficient in themselves. Whereas Derrida names the grammē (or "trace") as life itself, a break (Bernard Stiegler's "fault") needs to be posited where différance is "exteriorized" as protoculture of eolithic tools and artistic scratching. The grammē becomes "conscious' through techno-biological means. Mysteriously, DNA is modified in such a way that the brain is modified in a process of encephalization. Our species modification at the molecular level takes place in an interval between Nature and Culture, a process that is as sublime as it is unfathomable. We catch glimpses of it always after the Event, when the increment has become sufficiently noticeable—like global warming. We try to provide crude theories for this process—dialectics, complexity theory, and chaos theory, marked by fate, contingency, chance. But miracles, nevertheless, are Real.