All in Relation
Mia Middleton
As I move through life I increasingly experience temporal dilations. Flow states emerge more readily; that meditative feeling of an eternal present couched within a momentary wormhole, but the discontinuities go further than that. Childhood memories deliver messages from the distant past; glimmers of other lives leap into my eyes fully formed; my contemporary self sows the seeds of my childhood dreams. Just as consciousness might be described as a congealing of attention, episodic memory, fluid intelligence, imagination and other elusive phenomena, a chorus of images seem to arise through me, speaking in all directions across time. I often feel I am still everywhere I’ve ever been and beyond, and yet I am somewhere entirely new just the same.
My brain has always operated this way to a degree, like a series of slide projectors playing concurrently, but there's a deeper trans-temporality to it lately. The more I cultivate practices that lead me into my psyche—or perhaps more accurately, away from it— the more I’m struck by the effervescent impact of having a metacognitive dialogue with myself and by extension the world. It leads me to wonder: Is this blurring of my edges amplified as the bundle of my ‘selves’ accumulates over time, made more distinct by our particular modern turbulence? Or is this a kind of expanding radar-range, wherein the edges between subject and object dissolve when we finally let them? It’s a stretching of identity that I have been languishing in and has become the theme of my work over the last year.
In my exhibition ‘Double’, I step into this hall of mirrors. A shadow treads my footsteps, a spirit lives my dreams, a spy signals my secrets, an observer influences my actions, and I embody all of these entities and stories. Abandoning the notion that my skin and experience are the limit of myself, the dynamic manifold of life around me is not as distant as convention would have me believe. It’s a welcome sensation in a world where we often feel a loss of sensitivity to the threads that connect us beyond view. In a society where self-knowledge and self-actualisation are often heralded as our deepest governors, we tend to ignore the conduits between individual and collective, material and metaphysical. In this new body of work I set out to question the sharpness of a singular life, a penultimate time, a linear narrative. I explore the notion that the self is inherently dialogical, and is a reciprocal part of a whole that is in a constant state of emergence. A formal exploration of the topic needs to define many more terms than I’m able to do here, but I’d like to invite you into a journey through some of my working musings on selfhood and relationality.
One of the primary ambitions of my work is for the paintings to act as portals across self and time; to ignite recognition and transportation in the viewer. But if this exhibition is so driven by a flexing of boundaries between self and environment, how can I justify the function of my work as a passage into the self? In short, the self is my pathway to the whole. Theoretically, philosophers have long debated whether reality is unified or fragmented—whether it can be reduced to a single entity or is composed of many separations—and the divergent ontologies of Monism, Dualism and Pluralism embody that debate. But is it possible for multiple states to be true? Certain thinkers from Aristotle onwards have defended a notion of Holism that emphasizes an interconnected totality.
Metaphysical Holism views all parts of a system as related to the whole and the whole as having properties that the parts lack, meaning the whole cannot be fully understood solely by analyzing its parts.1 In certain distinctions such as Emergentism, the whole also has properties that communicate back with the parts, and generate novel structures within the system. The Buddhist philosopher Nāgārjuna outlines a dynamic interpretation of this in his Two Truths Doctrine, which proposes the existence of a fluid, ultimate reality that encompasses us. However, at everyday scale, vague and serviceable constructs like selfhood and language are essential for survival.2 Afterall, even our perceptual and cognitive apparatus can’t see the whole of anything in one view, even what sits directly before it. To Nāgārjuna, an awareness of our provisional truths logically implies a wider indefinable totality, but both are expressions of the same origin. It’s a notion that I find myself mirroring in my practice, whereby the limits of quotidian constructs leave inexplicable gaps and puzzles through which we might experience the supernormal.
Using a lattice of visual cues, I try to test the hypothesis that the very notion of the self provides the necessary lens for seeing beyond it. The stories and memories I store inside me connect and overlap with yours in heavily reduced fragments, and by isolating these fragments we experience connectivity, unification and shared ephemerality. In my attempt to engage with both the ubiquity and ethereality of these signifiers I have to step into a slippery, intuitive process of editing and aligning pictures in the hopes of inviting viewers into a realm of co-creation where self-image and world-building flex and converge. I’m not interested in trying to get at an objective reality, but rather find overlapping subjectivities through which we can realise ourselves and our world relationally, inconsistencies and all.
An engagement with the unconscious is a necessity here, and when I’m tip-toeing quietly around a painting I find myself drawing on methods like free association, dream analysis, active imagination and linguistic clues. These practices flow from the superstructures of psychoanalysis, all of which have disparate takes on the function of the self. A Lacanian might argue that the self is perpetually incomplete, divorced from reality and relegated to the world of the symbolic and the imaginary, whereas a Freudian would see it as a dynamic interplay between unconscious drives, conscious awareness, and societal constraints. A Jungian would position the self as a holistic, even transcendent entity that connects the individual with universal patterns, but a Gestalt theorist would counter the flattening of that view, seeing the self not as a static entity but an inherent process of relations with the environment.3 I situate myself in the latter end of the spectrum, whereby the dynamic boundary of the self can be a semi-permeable interface with the whole as in the Gestalt framework, but the symbolic fracturing observed by Lacan is our dominant experience. How can we access the fluidity of the material world through the self, rather than getting stuck in an auto-didactic fallacy of selfhood?
A recent conversation between cognitive scientist John Vervake and theologian Elizabeth Oldfield probes into this fissure to great effect. The two discuss wisdom and the divine from a holistic standpoint, pinpointing conditions for the reciprocal opening of the self to reality and lingering on a kind of indeterminate ‘really-realness’ that only an auditing of our self-narrativizing tendencies can afford us.4 So often, we are locked in our specific pattern predictions, and only by witnessing and challenging our cognitive machinery can we experience a kind of expansive clarity that might be equated with existential fullness. By making our perceptual apparatus more elastic we witness reality better, and the self and reality open reciprocally. But how do we enter into this fluid state? Oldfield rebrands some of the conservative language of religion, positing that the identification of values and sins can help us re-write our stories. In her view, we flourish as humans when we’re in touch with all aspects and impacts of our humanity, and faith is a doorway into that holistic and transcendent state.5
There’s a connection here to Vervaeke’s work in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. His research broadly identifies what he calls a “meaning crisis”, and in response he has identified two key questions that can lead us away from the ideological facades darkening the glass of the self, and towards a more clarifying experience: What do you want to exist without you? And what difference do you make to it now?.6 The paradox being that the determination of lasting meaning requires both the deepening and deprioritizing of the self. These questions feel salient in our phone-addicted moment, where a conditioned sequence of taps opens a video stream of influencers attempting to persuade us of capitalistic solutions to existential problems. Here, our selves are locked in a vicious regression of identity-optimisation and deployed into a marketplace of immediacy, with no chance of finding the clarity and intelligibility that Vervaeke and Oldfield are advocating for. When we outsource our agency, how can we experience reality?
In his famed dialectical materialist philosophy, Slavoj Žižek tackles this head on in his critiques of ideology and individuality, exploring the paradoxical limits of the self. He argues that the self is a product of ideology, caught in the illusion of freedom while being constrained by societal and cultural norms. His view, heavily informed by Lacanian and Hegelian theory, suggests that the self is an incoherent and alienated entity, co-constitutive with reality and emerging through the symbolic mediation of the unconscious and its interaction with external material conditions.7 This void within subject and object presupposes an ontological incompleteness which he uses to explain quantum indeterminacy—a scientific quandary about the nature of reality. Reasoning from his theory of ontological incompleteness, Žižek argues that reality is not only partially unknowable but also unfinished, providing a foundational justification for the impasse scientists encounter in quantum theory.8 As a Hegelian at heart, I find it a compelling argument for the existence of an emergent totality, but I don’t believe we’re relegated away from it as fundamentally as Žižek does. In fact there are a range of responses to quantum indeterminacy which might support a correlation between subjectivity and reality. Let’s take a quick detour through the quantum realm, although tangential, it’s worth the ride.
The core of the quantum issue is that the mathematical language of space-time in general relativity and the language of quantum mechanics do not communicate well, throwing our immutable physical laws - and therefore our empirical understanding of reality - into question. One potential reconciliation is to suppose that there is, in fact, a more foundational micro-structure beneath space-time. Theoretical physicists like Daniel Oriti theorize that quantum entanglement—a subtle relation between two quantum objects—could be the language we’re looking for. In his recent interview for the New Scientist, Oriti expands on this, laying the groundwork for a theory of quantum gravity that “challenges the idea of a separation between the ‘world’ and ‘us’”.9 If reality is relations between quantum objects unbound by space and time, it arises dependently, and the boundaries between reality and the models we construct to define it fall away. Rather than there being an objective world that is independent of us, we impact even the most foundational tenets of reality by merely existing in relation with it. The notion challenges our conventional understanding of the real, and implicates our actions, morals and ethics in new ways. It also echoes findings in other dynamic systems across disciplines; the constructs of subjective parts and objective wholes are inherently intertwined within a complex web of interdependencies.
I could go on and on about dynamic systems that can be observed in other fields (assemblage theory, differential geometry, autopoiesis to name a few of particular interest), but I'll return to my own experience and processing. I recently had a stint of therapy that felt markedly different to any treatment I had sought before. I worked with a psychoanalyst specialising in Systemic Therapy to identify my ego states and treat myself as a collection of sub-personalities that broadly typify different patterns of thinking.10 Crucially, these components are borne of, and maintained by, my physical reality (places, relationships etc), and they exist in relational flux with each other. One of the tasks of Systemic Therapy is to ameliorate the conflict between those parts so that we can minimize our self deceptions and see more deeply into reality. By clearing the window of the self, we can better embody the world and its dynamism. Perhaps it’s because I’m so hardwired to plumb the depths, but I found the IFS experience deeply impactful due to its personal and explorative nature. My analyst and I were finding my novel language and pathway together in a non-pathologizing way. I’ve often found that for my particular way of seeing and thinking, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy can be too schematic and outcome oriented, like being dropped into a grid of predetermined pathways and then filtered through them and out the bottom. Unsurprisingly, I preferred the relational journey my analyst and I co-constructed.
This reflexive process of exploration is something I like to tease out in my work, given there is a foundational relationality that exists in the experience of viewing artwork. In the context of an exhibition, we arrive in an enclosed space without knowing the why or the how of the situation before us. There’s a voyeuristic frisson that comes with witnessing an intimate selection of creations in a public setting, where we’re able to reflect on our broader context, morals, memories and beliefs more acutely. As such, it’s possible to think of this as an interchange that induces cognitive flexibility and softens the border between subject and object. The suspended, semiotic series that comprise ‘Double’ attempt to amplify that logic and trigger new narratives and mysteries. Each series aims to be lyrical yet diverse, otherwise we’re lulled into a design system rather than animated by resolving discordance. Inside this animated state I hope to set off a trip-wire where the mind fuses memory with imagination to reconcile the scene. It’s a cognitive experiment of sorts into the blending of personal and collective towards what some thinkers are now calling transjectivity.4
As befits the creative realm, it’s far from an empirical approach, and grew from a much more amorphous impulse than the framework I have laid out here, but I do find myself embracing it more overtly as I grow as an artist. Visually, I find it impactful to play with the very essence of reference and subject/predicate logic. Even a cursory look at my work will reveal influences across art history, cinema, theatre and the arcane: arena’s of shared humanity, storytelling and mythologising. I refer to these public records in order to tap into a shared continuity of feeling, and I gravitate towards visual tropes that explicitly speak to the unseen and the unknowable being felt in some limited sense. For this project on the permeable contours of self and other, I found resonances in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Double Life of Veronique. The 1991 film intricately explores the doppelganger as a symbol of interconnectedness and the unconscious. Unlike traditional representations of the double that often emphasize conflict or opposition, The Double Life of Véronique portrays the doppelgänger as a source of mysterious connection and influence. Similarly, Georges Perec’s W or the Memory of Childhood delves into the fragmented nature of memory and narrative, revealing how personal histories intertwine with collective experiences, prompting us to question the reliability of our recollections. And no discussion of multiplicity can ignore Dostoevsky’s The Double, a haunting exploration of the self as a fractured entity. The novel seemed to track Dotstevsky’s own solipsism, which later in his life gave way to a lasting belief in the salvation of interdependency.
One of the most exciting parts of my job is the work of synthesising and translating information into new iterations; continuities between disparate phenomena flow into the work from all directions. I suppose in the context of my own practice I am patient zero, but rather than focusing on self-expression in the conventional sense, I try to position myself as a vessel for confluent parts, qualities and relations. My inability to do so completely is expected; the ineffability that snakes in has to have something to speak to. As such, I’m not claiming to have emptied myself from the work to allow grander forces to move through me, or to have masterminded some sort of novel integrative system; those would be egoic claims in my view. Rather, I try to find the outline of an object inside myself and speak to it, to you, so that you might speak back.
As I sit here writing, I’m reminded of the impact my personal history has on all of this. As the daughter of international school teachers, I grew up moving between countries and never lingering on one continent for more than a few years. It’s a kind of nomadism that many people identify with these days, and for all of its horizon expansion comes the requisite identity distortion. When I was unpacking ego states with my beloved analyst, we realised that they tended to be place-specific, such was the splintering nature of being uprooted across cultures coupled with seeing it all from a compounding distance. My upbringing was in many ways the starting point for my engagement with parts and wholes - should I view it as fragmentary or unifying? From where I stand now it seems to be both. As holism contends, reframing the self as a flexible interface with an evolving totality makes space for all of the contradictions and contingencies of the material world.
By embracing the porous boundaries of selfhood, we open pathways to an embodied relational understanding of reality at a grand scale. As Heidegger would put it, our task becomes being in relation to the world, rather than becoming too ensnared in the constraints of the models we construct to define it. This perspective-dependency where epistemology and empiricism combine forces a more participatory understanding of what is real.11 The further I scurry down this rabbit hole, the more I witness a deflation of the sharp edges between disciplines, individuals, generations and organizational models, and something transportative happens. I can let down my load a little and step into a correlative unfolding of selfhood and reality. By embracing their interpolation, a strange and ecstatic form of recognition arises, and I can travel across time all I like.
- Audi, Robert. “The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy”, 3rd ed., Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, 2015
- Higgins, Kathleen, et al. “Fragments and Reality” IAI, 9 Apr. 2024, iai.tv/video/fragments-and-reality.
- Stadler, Michael. “The Ontological Nature of Part-Whole Oscillations: An Interdisciplinary Determination” Vienna, Austria, Austrian Science Fund, Jul. 2020
- Vervaeke, John & Oldfield, Elizabeth. “Exploring the Connection Between Wisdom, Love, and the Really Real”, 3 May, 2024, https://youtu.be/GDPBQBOXLi4?si=Y6PWmuW-TQzy4OXK
- Oldfield, Elizabeth. “Fully Alive Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times”, Hachette UK, Brazos Press, 2024
- Vervaeke, John. “Dialectic into Dialogos and the Pragmatics of No-thingness in a Time of Crisis”, Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture, Vol. 5, 2 (2021): 58-75. 10.14394/eidos.jpc.2021.0017
- Carew, Joseph. “Ontological Catastrophe: Žižek and the Paradoxical Metaphysics of German Idealism”, Michigan, US, Michigan Publishing, Oct. 29 2014
- Zizek, Slavoj. “Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism”, Verso, London, UK, 2012
- Oriti, Daniele. “How You Create Reality”, New Scientist, 12 Oct. 2024, pp. 40-43
- Schwartz, Richard. “Introduction to Internal Family Systems”, Colorado, USA, Sounds True, 2023
- McGilchrist, Iain. “The Matter with Things”, London, UK, Perspectiva, Nov. 9 2021