Subjectivity, and a diagram’s ‘firstness’

artist with an interest in drawing, who is currently engaged in a research project with i2ADS, Research Institute in Art, Design and Society, Porto University.

The blog entry is a very initial response to a project in i3S, in which Michael is participating: ‘Call for Drawing – Genetics and Identity’. Implied by initial, however, is that the statement is at the very start of what will be a developmental process, where any framing concept through drawing – if that’s what will be required – of how to respond to recently received ancestral DNA information through drawing has yet to emerge.  

The maternal side of M.’s family – M. is a fictional character who I’ve positioned in Part 1 of this project, conducted before the DNA ancestry test result came through – had, in the near past, at least, stemmed from a hill tribe in S.E. Asia, a people who are often without citizenship. There are a couple of implications here: firstly, what M. is considering as past has little or no bearing on the question of millennial ancestry; secondly, that as hill tribe his ancestors, albeit more akin to distant relatives, were still indicative of roaming and settling, and lived from hunting and gathering.  While the ancestral origins of hill tribe people will be additionally complicated by their relative lack of documentation, in S.E. Asia, at least, there may be considered a strong connection in recent centuries with China. If Homo sapiens ancestral migration had stemmed initially from Africa towards both Asia in the East and Europe more northwards, meeting and interbreeding with Neanderthal, then any DNA ancestral result that shows a small percentage of Near Eastern and South Asian biogeography is not too far removed from M.’s fanciful idea of having some hill tribe blood in him via his mother’s line.

Could M. stay with this idea? Why not, when the enormous gaps in types of knowledge about one’s millennial ancestry are a gift to one’s subjective imagination! While a scientist may be obliged to remain moot as to their lack of evidence-based knowledge, or at least clearly distinguish any use of supposition from evidential fact – the artist may tend to intervene either centrally or obliquely in such a gap. One errs on the side of caution, of course, and prefers tendencies towards the oblique. The fictionalisation of one’s ancestry will serve to obfuscate any sensitive information that might enter the public domain, and an imaginative response to statistical information will bring such statistics to life, as it were, through terms in which we all participate to one extent or another, as creatively inclined beings. Ultimately, it’s a matter of degree, and how one couches the fictional in relation to scientific evidence, when a motivation of the artistic, albeit often itself, moot, is to call out the limitations of the scientific method in the first place. Albeit from another field of science, although not so very different at the level of the microbiological, the author of books on both quantum physics and creativity, David Bohm (2002, p.169) – among other quantum physicists – states that one cannot separate any observation from whatever is the instrument of the observation. In other words, whatever the observing apparatus, whether mechanical or human, has its role to play in determining the result. When I look at a graph of one’s maternal line, for example, and don’t doubt its efficacy as ancestral findings, there is in a sense a massively subjective override that makes it very difficult for me to understand, not only as a layperson but also as an artist. What I’ve termed subjective override is in other words the graph’s encryption, which is readable and communicates in some domains but not in others. The artist could conceivably take such encryption on its aesthetic level and work with it, resulting either in diagrams that do not communicate, or where the content has shifted from the explicable – in specialist terms – to whatever is implicit in and as the medium. There is a level at which any diagram operates, in any case, before its communication, which is termed by the philosopher and semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce its ‘firstness’ (Hansen, 2016). In this respect, the idea of subjectivity implicit in the observing instrument at the scientific level is perhaps not so difficult to accommodate.

_{Hansen, Mark B.N.: Appearance In-Itself, Data-Propagation, and External Relationality: Towards a Realist Phenomenology of »Firstness«. In: ZMK Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung. Verschwinden, Jg. 7 (2016), Nr. 1, S. 45–60. DOI: https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/18636}