COLLAPSE VI
P h i losophers ' l slands1
Theoretical physics and cosmology over the last half
century has provided a new context in which some of the
most fundamental questions of philosophy find a new life
and a new sense. In this new context, we find the recurrence
of an image that spans the history of Western philosophy:
that of the island.
If we think of the fundamental parameters that
govern the laws of physics as the axes of a topographical
space, a landscape of possible universes, then to our best
knowledge, only a very small area of it is 'habitable' by life:
We live on an island - or rather, life as we know it is itself
an island. Of course this does not mean that the universe
was 'designed for us' : Rather, it opens up the question of
whether there might be other 'islands' in this space, other
1. Text of a public lecture given inJanuary 2009 at the Scottish National Gallery of
Modern Art to accompany Charles Avery's exhibition The Islanders: An lntroduct:Wn.
43 1
COLLAPSE VI
possible universes in which radically different forms of
life could emerge. Milan Cirkovic, posing this question of
'astrobiology', insists that we ought not to let the confined
shores of our island existence mislead us into thinking that
this is the only 'habitable zone' in the sea of possibilities.
Instead, he hypothesises, there may be an 'archipelago of
habitability', a system of islands whose pattern might even
be mathematically discoverable. Artist Charles Avery' s
'Sketch for an Archipelago', with its spiral structure,
illustrates the hypothesis perfectly. 2
1bis notion of the tiny habitable island in a vast sea of
possible universes belongs to a novel philosophical discourse
subtended by contemporary physical and mathematical
concepts. But it attests to the fact that certain enduring
images continue to constitute something like pieces of a re
usable theatrical stage-set for philosophical thinking. The
image of the island is one of these, and is as old as Western
philosophy itself. Charles Avery, like many before him, has
taken up this concept of the 'philosophical island' and made
it his own. In order to understand Avery' s contribution to
this history, we shall take a historical tour - inevitably very
selective - through the various ages of the philosophical
island. 1bis subject, and its history, are so rich in particular
because philosophy shares the 'geophilosophical concept'
of the island with literature. In fact, the island has always
defined an important relationship between the two: The
island is a kind of conceptual laboratory for transplanting
stories into ideas, for imbuing narratives with concepts, for
bringing ideas alive through myths.
2. See Milan Cirkovic, 'Sailing the Archipelago', COLLAPSE V, 292-329.
43 2
Mackay - Philosophers' Islands
The island first appears when Western philosophy, at its
birth, is still negotiating its divorce from its other: namely,
myth. In Plato's Timaeus the fable of the island of Atlantis
occurs within a discussion of the rational principles of a
perfect society. Socrates complains that, whilst he understands
the conclusions arrived at, he would 'compare [him]self to a
person who, on beholding beautiful animals either created
by the painter's art, or, better still, alive but at rest, is seized
with a desire of seeing them in motion or engaged in some
struggle or conflict to which their forms are suited'.3
This demand of Socrates sets in motion the history of
the philosophers' island. The demand for something to bn"ng
a1£ve ideas; to quicken the still body of rational discussion,
finds satisfaction in the story of Atlantis, the lost island.
As we know, Plato's dialogues often comprise
secondhand reports, but the Tzmaeus ramifies further this
strategy of framing, as the story of Atlantis is reported
by Socrates' friends as an ancient story heard from a
grandfather, who in tum heard it from a friend of his great
grandfather, Solon, who received it from an Egyptian priest.
Through this relay of memory, Plato establishes Atlantis
at an immemorial distance from his audience, endowing it
with a properly mythical status.
The priest's story is of a war waged by the island
kingdom of Atlantis against the city of Athens - but this is
an Athens separated from Plato's contemporary Athens by
an impassable gulf of forgetting. For the flooding of the nile,
as the priest tells Solon, has on many occasions saved the
Egyptians, and their knowledge, from great catastrophes
3. 'Iimacu.s 1 9b.
43 3
COLLAPSE VI
periodically visited on the Earth and which have wiped
out many other peoples including the Greeks. In this way
Plato gives his audience to understand that they belong to
a shallo w memory cut off from the deep past in which the
story takes place. Hence the priest' s gnomic declaration:
"You Hellenes will never be anything but children".
At the climax of the war both (the immemorial) Athens
and Atlantis were inundated by a great flood, and their
people, Plato tells us, 'disappeared in the depths of the sea'.
The island of Atlantis never reappeared, but Athens rose
again from the waters. Reborn into an immature state,
stripped of its former glory, the 'infant' Athens would have
to learn once again to be the perfect republic.
This unveils the original function of the philosophers'
island as being connected with a mythical conception of
time, with forgetting and memory, with re-beginning
and with founding; It sets up a theme of utter oblivion
and forgetting only so as to pose the question of the new
foundation - no island, therefore, without the flood.
How does this myth transform the philosophical
discussion of Socrates and his friends? 'The city and
citizens, which you yesterday described to us in fiction,
we [ . . . ] now transfer to the world of reality'. Paradoxically,
fiction imparts reality to the philosophical discussion. For
the ideal city they had discussed now becomes the city of
their own lost ancestors. Where there was the mere idea of
a city run on rational grounds, now there is the prospect of
a repetition, the fulfilment of a cycle. The island myth, of
course, dramatises the notion of anamnesis, or unforgetllng'.
Rational insight comes not from our experience of this
world, but from a remembering of an other world, the
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Mackay - Philosophers' Islands
recovery of a pure knowledge that was lost when we were
incarnated.
Plato's Atlantean myth rises again as the perfect narrative
form for the ideals of the humanist Renaissance - naturally,
considering that it precisely concerns a 'rebirth'. In Francis
Bacon's 1623 .New Atlantis, for example, all the important
elements are reworked: A crew lost in a 'part of the South
Sea [ . . . ] utterly unknown', cut adrift 'in the midst of the
greatest wilderness of waters in the world', discover the
island of Bensalem, whose perfectly-calibrated civilisation,
with its gentle, humanistic, scientifically-advanced
government, embodies all of Bacon's aspirations for the
improvement of human society. The people of Bensalem,
it transpires, whilst their existence is perfectly unknown
to the rest of the world, have an astonishingly complete
knowledge of the whole globe, and their civilisation has
endured from time immemorial, from before the 'universal
flood'. Of the people of this island, too, one could well say:
'you Europeans will never be anything but children'. Again,
Bacon's advanced ideas on society and science, in the
mouths of these fictional, antediluvian islanders, become
an invitation to repeat: Not only does his 'New Atlantis'
repeat Plato's, it also calls his contemporaries to repeat the
example of the people of Bensalem.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves: For we should
remember the extent to which, before the Renaissance, It
was Arabic philosophers and commentators who nurtured
and developed philosophical thought. And the concept of
the philosophical island is no exception. One remarkable
text by a Spanish muslim philosopher could, without much
exaggeration, be described as being halfway between
435
COLLAPSE VI
Aristotle and Robinsan Crusoe. This is Ibn Tufayl's book
'Hayy ibn Yaqzan', a twelfth-century arabic text translated
into English in 1708 as 'The Improvement of Human
Reason', known in Latin as 'Philosophus Autodidactus' ('the
self-taught philosopher') . This is a text known to have been
influential for some of our most enduring modem myths:
The Jungle Book, Robinsan Crusoe, Tan.an to name but a few.
Tufayl's narrative tells the story of a child named Hayy ibn
Yaqzan, who is cast away on an unpopulated island, and
raised by gazelles. The narrative follows the development
of this castaway's philosophical meditations as he grows
up and discovers the world, in isolation from all human
contact.
Tufayl's book is essentially a philosophical treatise,
speaking of all things from biology to planetary motions.
But its form is that of a progressive narrative, recounting
how these philosophical reflections emerge in a man
reduced to his 'natural state', removed from all cultural
influence: We see Yaqzan growing up among animals, first
lamenting his own weakness and vulnerability relative
to them, then discovering the uses of his hands, making
clothes, devising tools and weapons. He discovers fire and
cooked food, thus awakening his human difference from
the animals. But his philosophical development really
begins in earnest when his gazelle-foster-mother dies. T his
precipitates a reflection upon what is alive in an animal
being, with Yaqzan concluding that the body is 'a very
inconsiderable thing', and beginning to foster a conception
of the soul. Thence to the questions of how the soul is
conjoined with the body, with the conclusion that the soul
is akin to fire, a kind of warm vapour. The individuality of
43 6
Mackay - Philosophers' Islands
each being must then consist in this 'vapour'; and Yaqzan
conceives an analogy between his own use of various
tools, and this vapourous spirit's use of the various animal
bodies for different purposes. With lengthy meditations
on unity and plurality, individuals and species, the self
taught philosopher rediscovers the principles of Aristotelian
taxonomy, and proceeds to classify the entire animal and
vegetable kingdom, finally considering inanimate objects,
and coming to the conclusion that 'all these things [are] in
reality one, though multiplied and diversified accidentally
as the plants and animals [are]'. But what then is the nature
of this unified substance that underlies all these various
things in the world? . . . With further meditations reaching
ever more abstract questions and lofty conclusions, the
feral child Yaqzan achieves philosophical enlightenment as
an adult.
In fact Yaqzan does make contact with civilisation again,
through the medium of a holy man who comes to the island
to meditate ; however, after having returned to his fellow
humans, he finds them so unwilling to consider the way of
wisdom that he returns to his island.
1bis remarkable story is the first fully philosophical use
of the island. Recounting the genesis of philosophical
thought as a natural development, it serves to ratify a
body of doctrine as belonging to the natural progression of
reason, untainted by outside influences. And the function
of philosophical islands continues to be involved with
this desire for purity - with philosophy 's impatience with
dogmatism or received wisdom, its compulsion to begin
from nothing, to re-begin with no presuppositions, to faund
itself. For the philosopher, the island is a chance to begin
437
COLLAPSE VI
over again, giving us the possibility of re-founding our
knowledge on the basis of an imaginary innocence.
Returning to the Renaissance and to its utopias - those
New Atlantises reflecting the optimistic spirit of the age
- the most important is probably Thomas More' s 15 16
fictional crescent-shaped Atlantic Island Utopia, a name
which of course harbours an etymological ambiguity: 'no
place' and 'good-place'. It' s precisely an ideal which cannot
be fully realised but which might serve as an orientation,
a navigation point: More' s discussion of the ills of society,
the vanity of people, the belligerence of leaders, gives us an
enduring model of sociological and philosophical reflection
that is very much alive two hundred years later - in more
satirical form - in Gulliver's Tra:oelr, which however teaches
through a mocking reductio o.d absurdum, not by example,
and is all the more entertaining for it.
Where Ibn Tufayl' s account of the gazelle-child Hayy
ibn Yaqzfui contained both an treatise of philosophy and
a philosophical thesis on the genesis of thought in one
isolated individual, these political fables use the island as
a controlled setting for thought-experiments concerning
the foundations of the social. A great seminal moment in
philosophical island literature occurs, however, when these
two aspects - the innocent indi:mduol finding enlightenment
in the seclusion of an island, and the ideal island society
prompting reflection on our own - are brought together.
This is Defoe' s 1719 Robinson Crusoe.
In Robinson Crusoe all the essential problems of the
philosophical island are brought together beautifully . We
have Crusoe as Christian autodidact, discovering true faith
through his own solitary meditations. But it is not only
438
Mackay - Philosophers' Islands
God that Crusoe discovers : he also enacts the origins of
sedentary human society : The need to settle and defend,
the planting of crops and building up of stores, the need
to domesticate wild animals, even the development of
hierarchy and the legitimacy of servitude . . . But Crusoe is
also the point at which the philosophical island comes into
disrepute, when we begin to harbour suspicions about the
supposed innocence of the protagonist. Readers excited by
the idea of the shipwrecked mariner exploring the virgin isle,
surviving on his wits, cannot but be somewhat disappointed
when Crusoe spends his first two weeks rowing back and
forth to the shipwreck to bring out everything he needs
to set up home, from gunpowder to tunics, from oatcakes
to a complete set of carpentry tools; cannot help feeling a
little cheated when he takes his smug walks to his 'country
house' with his four guns slung around him, or when by
'chance' he discovers some ears of wheat and prudently
sews and stores his harvests for three years . . .
At a century' s distance Marx sums it up drily in the first
volume of Das Kapital: 'having saved a watch, ledger, ink
and pen from the shipwreck, he soon begins, like a good
Englishman, to keep a set of books'.4 For Marx, Crusoe
represented 'a totally illusory foundation for economics,
that of the independent, non-social being'. The story was
an ideological sham, serving to naturalise the system
of bourgeois capitalism, its function to justify a system
through a bogus mythical 'proof of its spontaneous nature.
In short, the island is 'a false "origin"'.
In his 1946 essay 'Causes and Reasons of Desert Islands',
Gilles Deleuze, whilst affirming the philosophical power of
4. K Marx, Capital, vol I, tr. B. Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1 992) , 170 .
439
COLLAPSE VI
the island myth, seconds Marx's suspicions. The problem
with Robinson Crusoe, he writes, is that Defoe's narrative
fails the profound sense of the reinvention of mythology
that characterises the philosophical island: In Crusoe 'The
mythical recreation of the world from the deserted island',
Deleuze says, 'gives way to the reconstitution of everyday
bourgeois life from a reserve of capital. [ ... ] Robinson's
vision of the world resides exclusively in property. Nothing
is invented.' He continues, somewhat harshly: 'One can
hardly imagine a more boring novel, and it is sad to see
children still reading it today [...] Any healthy reader would
dream of seeing [Friday] eat Robinson.'5
Despite these cavils, the structure of Robinson Crusoe so
perfectly distils the island concept that it has proved robust
enough to be critically rewritten, not only in countless
inferior and derivative novels, but also in many inventive
and subversive ways: For example in the wonderfully
philosophically-rich 1972 novel Friday, or the Limbo efthe Pa.cffic
by Deleuze's friend Michel Tournier. Tournier's Robinson,
on the island he names 'Speranza', is depicted in the light
of a philosophical and psychoanalytical melange combining
Freud,Jung, existentialism and structuralism. For Tournier,
the story becomes that of Robinson discovering that what
made him human was his interaction with others. Alone on
the island, he begins to succumb to depersonalisation, sinking
into a delirium where he identifies himself increasingly with
the island. The very delirium against which Defoe's Crusoe
had defended himself implacably with all the salvaged
accoutrements of civilisation becomes, for Tournier, the
5. G. Deleuze, Desert Elmuls tmd other 1£xt.s, tr. M. Taormina (Cambridge, Mas s .: MIT
Press, 2003), 12.
440
Mackay - Philosophers' Islands
truth of the island adventure as philosophical, psychotropic
journey. As he struggles to 'humanise' the island, Robinson
becomes dehumanised, becomes the island: 'So Robinson
is Speranza. He only has a consciousness of himself by way
of the fronds of myrtle, through which the sun launches its
arrows of light, he only knows himself in the foam of the
wave washing across the white sand'.
The influence of Tournier's novel can be read in J.G.
Ballard's short 1973 novel Cmu:rete Island, in which - with
typical mordant wit - a businessman finds himself car
wrecked on a traffic island. Unable to escape, this hapless
protagonist also undergoes a kind of psychogeographical
trial, repeating, at the height of his ordeal, the phrase of
Tournier's Robinson: 'I am the island'.
Between Crusoe's island and the Concrete Island, we
must also note a great effiorescence of what can only be
called island narratives without islands: The social contract
theorists. The thought-experiments of Hobbes, Locke and
Rousseau, imagining how society might develop from a
'state of nature', are the great speculative works of modem
political philosophy. These theorists rightly saw that the
island-principle corresponded to an important truth: The
real - even the reality of society -
can
be profoundly
explored only through an ideal scenario, a controlled
experiment, that steps beyond the bounds of that reality.
In the twentieth century,John Rawls re-imagines the social
contract experiment using imagery that corresponds to
that of isolated islands such as Bensalem, with the 'veil
of ignorance' an impenetrable bank of fog around the
philosophical island. To make his argument, however,
Rawls for the first time posits the 'original position' of the
441
COLLAPSE VI
philosopher outside the island, meditating on the possibilities
of what it might hold and planning his disembarcation.
Even if social contract theory represented in certain
respects the consummation of the political employment of
the philosophical island, in a new modem conception of the
'grounding' or re-foundation of the social on the model of a
civil contract, from the nineteenth century onward its works
were liable to come under suspicion, and to be dismissed
as 'robinsonades' : post-Robinson Crusoe any supposedly
'innocent' deployment of the island as a speculative device
would be subject to great critical scrutiny.
In marking out Reason' s legitimate from its illegitimate
uses, Kant' s Critique ifPure Reason aims to provide the map
for a domain of well-founded, systematic knowledge, and
secure it against the flights of fancy and the speculative
excesses to which Kant considered earlier philosophers had
all-too-easily abandoned themselves. And yet to promote
this somewhat gruelling task Kant employs the image of
the island eftruth, in this famous passage from the Critique ef
Pure Reason:
We have now not merely explored the territory of pure
understanding, and carefully surveyed every part of it, but
have also measured its extent, and assigned to everything its
rightful place. Tb.is domain is an island, enclosed by nature
itself within unalterable limits . It is the land of truth - seductive
name! - surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean, the native
home of illusion, where many a fog bank and many a swiftly
melting iceberg give the deceptive appearance of farther
shores, deluding the adventurous seafarer ever anew with
empty hopes, and engaging him in enterprises which he can
never abandon and yet is unable to carry to completion. Before
442
Mackay - Philosophers' Islands
we venture on this sea, to explore it in all directions [ . . . ] it will
be as well to begin by casting a glance on the map of the island
which we are about to leave, and to enquire, first, whether
we cannot in any case be satisfied with what it contains - are
not, indeed, under compulsion to be satisfied, inasmuch as
there may be no other territory upon which we can settle; and,
secondly, by what title we possess even this domain, and can
consider ourselves as secured against all opposing claims.
As Michele le Doeuff remarks in her The Philosophical
Imag£nary, Kant uses the image of the island to defend
his sober 'critical philosophy' against the more colourful
and grandiose promises of speculative metaphysics : The
'critical' island is certainly not a paradise - but it is infinitely
preferable to the frustrations and dangers of the boundless
ocean, upon which metaphysical speculation recklessly sets
out. If he claims to re-place our knowledge on its proper
ground, Kant is most circumspect about what sort of
territory philosophy can promise to secure for us.
Notably, as le Doeuff remarks, elsewhere Kant warns
against another island: the paradisiac island of the South
Seas. The yearning for its easier climes and for its innocence
is a snare, Kant suggests: they represent a pernicious,
imaginary utopia. Thus Kant sets the seduction of the
southern isle against the foggy northern isle which, whilst
somewhat bleak, is true and solid. As Deleuze says in his
book on Kant, this is the element in which Kant' s thought is
at home: 'the fog of the North'. When Kant trills 'the island
of truth - seductive name!', this is nothing but sarcasm: the
serious philosopher has no business with seductive, pretty
islands where he can lounge about all day under palm trees.
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COLLAPSE VI
So Kant reinvents the philosophical island as a duality:
There is the southern isle, with its dangerously desirable
holiday-brochure illusion of luxury and leisure; and the
northern isle, safe, secured, and systematic, if a bit grey.
In short, the island of truth is a dreich isle, but it's all we've
got. But even Kant's carefully-delimited and hard-won
piece of solid territory doesn't last long in the history of
the philosopher's island, as Nietzsche, in his 1882 The Gay
Sciena, announces the crisis of late modernity - not only
have we left Kant's island of stability, our own critical self
consciousness has destroyed it:
In the horizon of the infinite.- We have left the land and have
embarked! We have burned our bridges behind us-indeed, we
have gone further and destroyed the land behind us ! Now, little
ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean: to be sure, it does not
always roar, and at times it lies spread out like silk and gold
and reveries of graciousness. But hours will come when you
will realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more
awesome than infinity. Oh, the poor bird that felt free and now
strikes the walls of this cage! Woe, when you feel homesick
for the land as if it had offered more freedom-and there is no
longer any 'land' !
In the epoch that this declaration announces, the
problem is no longer that of founding or re-founding.
Instead it is the crisis of the fruits of enlightenment turning
bad, of science and critical thought having gnawed away the
very foundations of human existence. But even Nietzsche's
declaration that there is 'no longer any "land"' cannot
prevent literature from re-engineering the island for this
age, and according to its dreams and fears. From the end
of the nineteenth century, the philosophical island becomes
a dystopia where the most extreme possibilities, doubts,
444
Mackay - Philosophers' Islands
and horrors of Western civilisation are given free (if safely
sequestered) rein. This tradition begins with H.G. Wells'
(1871) Island ef Dr Moreau. Rather than the island being a
metaphorical setting for a philosophical thought-experiment,
instead we find ourselves on an island where actual
(scientific) experiments are underway and running out of
control. The island becomes a warning, concentrating the
most threatening aspects of contemporary reality into their
confined space.
Instead of accommodating an ideal society
whose
principles instruct our own, then, the twentieth-century
island - in which we
can
include, of course, many of
science-fiction's alien planets and stranded space-stations
- is more likely to amplify developments of real society,
concentrating them into an imagined future that is
all
too-near. The power of ideas, rather than being owned
and judiciously employed by philosophy, is now a power
effectively at work in the world, embodied in technology,
uncontrolled or controlled by megalomaniacs and evil
geniuses, perplexing and injuring humanity. This, in short,
is the philosopher's island resounding with the aftershock
of World Wars; and the island rifier Marx rifier Freud, rifier
Darwin.6 And after the twentieth-century revolution in
physics: it is the Island of the fateful experiment - the Bikini
Atoll - and its aftermath (Lord ef the Flies, and countless
other post-apocalyptic fantasies) .
6. Incidentally, we should remark that we owe the whole elaboration of evolutionary
theory from Darwin onward, to an island voyage - Darwin's journey, onboard the
Beagle, to the Galapagos, islands whose slow geological drift apart had effectively
isolated the different species of finches, which thus provided a living stop-motion
image of the process of natural selection. Note, however, that in his new book biologist
SteveJones argues that despite their mythical importance in the popular imagination,
in actual fact the most important island for Darwin's work was England. S. Jones,
Da1Win 's Island: The Galapagos in the Ga:rden ofEngland (London: Little, Brown, 2009) .
445
COLLAP SE VI
In his last novel, entitled imply Islarzd (1962), Aldous
Huxley seems to reverse the trend: He turns the island
once more into a utopia contrasting with the dystopia of
reality. Imagining science being harnessed only for the use
of man, rather than overpowering him, Huxley's 'Pala' is an
imaginary island of sanity in a mad world, where Eastern
wisdom and Western science comet together in the persons
of a shipwrecked scientist and an indigeneous quasi
buddhist order, giving birth to a society stable and free
from madness and venality. Like the autodidact Yaqzan,
everyone on the island is in a state of enlightenment,
nirvana even. And through the great slogan of this modem
Utopia still echoes the voice of Platonic anamnesis: 'Nobody
needs to go anywhere else. We are all, if we only knew it,
already there'. If only we knew it, we could repeat, return
to where we really are. Ultimately, however, the final twist
in Huxley's tale shows that he was himself no longer
convinced of the possibility of such a 'sane society', such a
return to the source. 7
Let's now ask whether we can make out the shape of
a new, twenty-first century philosophical island? Previous
models still haunt us: Just as, in the sixties, Lost in Space
reworked The Swiss Family Robinson for the space age,
Koushun Takami's (1999) comic book Battle Royale and its
(200 1, 2003) film adaptations unfolded as an ultraviolent
revisiting of Lord <fthe Flies; and the TV series Lost (2004-5),
with its plane-crash and its characters named Locke and
7. In a typically cynical rcappropriation of Huxley's combination of science and
religion, Michel Houellebecq's (2005) The Fbssibilily ef an Island returns it to reality.
Houellebecq envisions an island run by a 'cloning cult', based on the actual cult
'Radians' - a real world example of the terrifying combination of genetic engineering,
nanotechnology and religious messianism.
446
Mackay - Philosophers' Islands
Rousseau, remixes a bygone era of island thinking. At
the end of the second episode of Lost, entitled 'Tabula
Rasa', one of the characters declares : "This is a chance for
everyone to start again, regardless of what they were before
the crash". Utopia endures in Hollywood, even if the tale
of Lost becomes darker and more twisted (fatiguingly so) as
the episodes progress.
Perhaps ours is more properly the age of the house
island, isolated but visible by millions, and manipulated
by an unseen controller. Big Brother and its various reality
TV imitators (several of which take up the island theme
very literally, with woeful results) , although they harbour
no illusions of a tahula rasa or a complete new beginning,
are perhaps still rather tied to antiquated forms, their social
engineering redolent of The Tempest, where the audience
delights in Prospero's behind-the-scenes manipulation
of the hapless groups shipwrecked on his enchanted isle.
Ours is also the age of the geoplastic megalomania of
Dubai's man-made archipelagos, where millions of tonnes
of sand is dredged up from the bottom of the sea to create
new islands full ofluxury villas. (Have their architects never
heard the phrase 'built on sand' ... ?) Since every modem
convenience has already been imported, however, the rich
man's island is never interesting, it's never a desert island.
None of these constitute a philosophers' island for today.
The philosophical references of Charles Avery's work
set the conditions for one possibility of what such an island
might be. And his project itself responds to them. It's
a project which resides as much in his book, 8 at once an
8. C. Avery, Tiu: Islanders: An Introductian (London: Parasol Unit/Koenig, 2008) .
447
Mackay - Philosophers' Islands
island travelogue and an enigmatic work of philosophy, as
in the catalogue of drawings and exquisitely-crafted objects
in different media which make up his oeuvre.
At first, Avery's island seems to represent the landscape
ef philosophy, rather than being a vehicle for any particular
philosophical thesis. Looking at the names on his maps, it
seems Avery wishes to make the landscape of his island
and the world surrounding it describe the whole history of
philosophy. In this, his closest reference is Borges' (1940)
story Tian, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, which tells of a researcher's
discovery of a land - possibly real, possibly conspiratorially
fabricated by scholars - whose regions can be differentiated
according to their inhabitants' subscription to different
philosophical theories of meaning. But if we read Avery's
island as some sort of grand allegory, we soon find out that
there is no straightforward 'mapping'. Far from simplifying
the world of ideas by mapping it out, Avery adds to it
and twists it with his strange cartographies. The relation
between metaphor and what is metaphorised is always
slipping and sliding, and everything refuses to fit together
neatly.
There are however some privileged philosophical
references. They belong to the development of the
philosophy of logic and mathematics at the beginning of the
twentieth century, the story of the search for a theory that
would provide a systematic foundation for all logical and
mathematical thought. One of the few actual philosophers
to appear in Avery's drawings, Bertrand Russell, has the
great distinction of having ruined this idea forever, in his
polite letter to his colleague Gottlob Frege. The simple but
powerful paradox discovered by Russell, and which bears
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his name, resonates throughout Avery's work: Take the set
of all sets which are not members of themselves : if it does
belong to itself, then it doesn't - And vice versa . . . Take
the barber of the regiment, defined as the man who shaves
everyone who doesn't shave themselves . . . does he shave
himself or not?? (You'll find Avery's own answer to that
particular riddle in his book.) Russell's paradox seems to be
the engine of all the dualities in Avery's work. His islanders
love to cut everything in the universe in two. In fact, the
apotheosis of the islanders' creed might be the old joke
that 'there are only two types of people ; those who divide
people into two types and those who don't'. But the island
is also prowled by anomalous animals that don't seem
to obey these distinctions : The Elusive Noumenon; The
If'en, whose 'defining characteristic [ . . . ] is that they lack
a defining characteristic' ;9 The Essential Mr Impossible . . .
one suspects these are the animating principles of the island,
paradoxes that not only accompany the sharp distinctions
the islanders like to make, but might even sustain them,
as the hope of snaring the Noumenon sustains the hunter.
The disorienting effect of all these paradoxes is already
a little like stepping into Avery's 'Eternity Chamber'. But
there is more. Russell had shown that the most powerful
foundational logical theory was punctured by paradoxes .
But by the 1930s, Godel had proved his incompleteness
theorem, demonstrating that any logical system powerful
enough to provide a foundation for simple arithmetic will
contain at least one proposition whose truth is undecidable.
This shatters philosophers' dreams . Avery's work registers
both the gravity and the humour of these developments.
9. Avery, The Islanders, 47.
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No foundations : does this mean no islands? 'In the horizon
of the infinite', neither philosophy nor art can rise above
or systematise the All, or provide it with a foundation.
philosophy and art are themselves situations within the
world, and all situations are incomplete. Avery's work
constantly presents us with this 'punctured' and incomplete
state of knowledge.
In this respect, one might relate Avery's work to that of an
apparently very different artist, Keith Tyson. In fact Tyson
shares similar formal concerns, since his work wrestles with
the idea of systems that strive to encompass and tabulate.
In Large Field Array Tyson tries to create a modular 'system
of everything' - scientific theories, his childhood memories,
images from TY, abstract concepts - and systematically
connect it all together. But he is inevitably faced with
having to rescind this work's claim to be comprehensive
or to systematically represent the world. Of this 'failure'
Tyson says that we must accept that it's impossible for the
artist to create, in a work of art, a model of the universe
that doesn't participate in that universe; works are models
in the universe, not models ef the universe. In an image
very apt for the present discussion, he says that they are
'like a postcard on the beach'. 10 Avery's work is something
like this : a map of the space of thought we inhabit, but
continually folding back upon that space, so that the map
can never be completed, but continually complexifies what
it's mapping.
G. K. Chesterton, in a witty piece entitled 'The
Philosophy of lslands' (1903) , remarks on the very human
need to identify things, and sees at the root of this a wish
10. Keith Tyson, Studio W<zll Drawings 1997-2007 (London: Haunch of Venison,
2007) , 2Z
452
Mackay - Philosophers' Islands
to isolate. It is to this desire that he links both what he calls
the 'perennial poetry of islands' and 'the perennial poetry
of ships':
A ship like the Argo or the Fram is valued by the mind because
it is an island, because, that is, it carries with it, floating loose
on the desolate elements, the resources, and rules and trades,
and treasuries of a nation, because it has ranks and shops and
streets, and the whole clinging like a few limpets to a lost spar.
An island like Ithaca or England is valued by the mind because
it is ship, because it can find itself alone and self-dependent
in a waste of water, because its orchards and forests can be
numbered like bales of merchandise, because its com can be
counted like gold, because the starriest and dreamiest snows
upon its most forsaken peaks are silver flags flown from
familiar masts, because its dimmest and most inhuman mines
of coal or lead below the roots of things are definite chattels
stored awkwardly in the lowest locker of the hold.
T his explains why earlier philosophers' islands now
appear to us to be typical 'philosophers examples' they are commodious to the mind only because of their
oversimplicity. The contemporary island can no longer
pander to the desire for isolation, because we know our
world is complex, interconnected, and uprooted: T here are
no more desert islands. Nicholas Bourriaud calls Avery's
island a 'heterotopia' rather than a 'utopia': it's neither 'no
place' nor 'the best place', but an 'otherplace', a 'manyplace',
a multiplicity that is already 'out there'. It is the multiverse
as refracted in Avery's mind. His question, though, is how
to create 'one' out of this dazzling multiplicity. This is
precisely the task Avery set himself when, in the inaugural
gesture of his mammoth project, he declared that from now
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COLLAPSE VI
on all of his work would find a place in this island kingdom
(so that the 'work' consists not in any one of the objects
created, but in the structural consistency of the whole) .
In regard of the need to isolate things, Chesterton
speaks also of the fear of infinity: for 'to be infinite is to be
shapeless', he says. However, as Alain Badiou has argued,
it is the finite that is the exception: infinity is normal.
Every thing, every situation, can be seen from infinitely
many perspectives, dissected in infinitely many ways ; so
that things are never one in themselves, they are always
multiple, infinitely multiple: To 'count-as-one' a situation
or a thing is always to intervene in it, to creatively shape it.
Cantor's transfinite mathematics, which Badiou
suggests we take as one of the conditions for contemporary
philosophy, is the third of Avery's philosophical sources to
which we should draw attention: Cantor's proof that there
are different .sizes of infinity, which secularises the concept
of infinity and introduces some exquisite paradoxes into
thought. For on Avery's island we meet the strange, ramified
quasi-elephantine creatures the Alephs, believed by some to
be 'descendent[s] of the Noumenon', of which we are told:
'upon the discovery that Aleph Null was not unique, the
ideas accounting for the species were modified'.11
And infinite variety is certainly reflected in Avery's
island - it may be a 'northern isle', but it is not ordered
and bleak like Kant's 'island of truth'. It's an island of gods
and pickled eggs, of bagatelle and pyramids, of seagulls and
alephs. All these things, belonging to very different registers
of reality, co-exist on the island, depicted through Avery's
work through a constantly-evolving palette of techniques
1 1 . Avery, The hlomkrJ, 50.
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Mackay - Philosophers' Islands
and media. Thus the aforementioned structural principle
of Avery's project is a way for the artist to 'count himself as
one', to bring together all the different situations of which
he is an intersection: philosophical ideas, places, concepts,
people he's seen or known, historical figures, imaginary
situations from books - without suppressing their
multiplicity. The idea of the 'whole project' always goes
before him as a task that will never be finally completed.
There is always more for him to discover on this island,
now that he's decided that the island is where everything
will be.
He therefore suggests a contemporary role for the
philosophical island, for individual and society alike:
stifled by a wealth of multiple possibilities, we lack any
immemorial, mythical example to repeat; there is no deep
past, no 'before the flood', that unifies us ; We can't appeal
to memory anymore for political strength, to tradition for
identity, or to ideal models for simplicity. It is therefore
no longer a question offaund£ng ourselves on the basis of
mythical islands. Rather, given this multifarious reality, the
problem is to find ourselves in it - or to hunt ourselves in it,
in the process adding to the territory with yet more maps.
Finally, Avery's story is also about the practice of
philosophy itself. His protagonist comes to the island
with a view to being its discoverer - he craves the glory
of discovering something new.12 But he immediately finds
he's not alone. The fantasy of the Victorian explorer
is already dispelled on page one of Avery's travelogue.
This in itself is the condition of doing philosophy in
the present day: a sometimes disheartening process of
12. Avery, The ls/muierJ, 9.
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COLLAP SE VI
discovering who has already had your thoughts before
you. You're exploring a land that seems, to you, to come
directly from the deepest part of yourself and to contain
the strangest, most intangible thoughts; But you constantly
have to accept others have been there before you, already
mapped, charted, and named these zones of thought,
just like the names on Avery 's map: Descartes ' axiom, The
plzenomenon efsense; The procession efthe Greeks (an archipelago
which includes the island of Tllllaeus). To think today, is
to negotiate an historical constellation of thought-positions;
anomnesis become historical. It is the problem, not of how
to begin from nothing, but of how to synthesise existing,
multiple lines of thought into something new. This
quandary, this weight of history, was the same in which
Avery found himself with respect to an overly historically
conscious discourse of art. The island, the construction of
this island that belongs only to Charles Avery, more than
the sum of its parts, more than any one narrative, is his
response.
According to Avery, if one can't be a discoverer, the
only thing to do is to reinvent oneself as a hunter, trying
to locate the island's greatest treasures, those that have
eluded everyone so far. If Avery says that this characterises
the figure of the artist, one would be inclined to say it
corresponds also to the figure of the philosopher: 'an
eternally hopeful and eternally hopeless individual.
Even though history and reason tell him otherwise he
continues to believe he will prevail'. 1 3 As we have seen, the
history of philosophers' islands is a moving image of this
eternal hope.
13. Avery, The lslmufers, 23.
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