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Rosanna Mclaughlin
Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Articles Available Online


The Pious and the Pommery

Essay

Issue No. 18

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

Issue No. 18

I.   Where is the champagne? On second thoughts this is not entirely the right question. The champagne is in the ice trough, on...

Essay

April 2019

Ariana and the Lesbian Narcissus

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

April 2019

‘Avoid me not!’ ‘Avoid me not!’                                   Narcissus   Let me describe a GIF I’ve been watching. A lot....

The hypothesis underlying this study is that human beings act in strict accordance with an instinctive programme, which governs all of our actions, however unpredictable or freely chosen they may seem, and that our ‘cultural’ free will is consequently no more than a kindly illusion with which we dupe ourselves, as much a part of our innate heritage as the rest On the face of it, this proposal is extremely bold or outright preposterous: the idea that everything could be foreordained would seem to be refuted by the wild variety of human lives, beginning with the extravagant iridescence of thought, the unpredictability of our least reactions and the ideas that come to mind willy-nilly; and if it’s unconvincing in an individual case, how could it explain the incalculable differences between one human being and another, no matter how closely related they are? But this impression of difference is precisely the illusion that the hypothesis aims to dispel, and all one has to do (I’m not saying this is easy) is accept that it is an illusion for the variations to become irrelevant and the veil that hid our essential instinctive uniformity to fall away There’s no need to give up those variations, or sacrifice one’s ‘surface’ differences to a ‘deep’ essence, because, in fact, there’s no such essence; it’s all surface And what’s to stop all the countless minutiae of our acts, thoughts, desires, dreams and creations, everything that happens second by second between birth and death, being inscribed a priori in our genes, in the form of a programme that’s identical for every member of the species? Science has accustomed us, by now, to greater wonders of computing Humans have always been very sure that their actions are determined by a kind of causation that is free and superior, ‘cultural’ rather than natural… And the equally ancient hypothesis of instinctive programming has always been reserved for animals and applied to them with fanatical rigour   I don’t know if I’ll be able to persuade anyone The idea is too shocking and arbitrary; and in a way it’s self-defeating because if

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Ten Years at Garage Moscow

Art Review

November 2018

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art Review

November 2018

When I arrive in Moscow, I am picked up from the airport by Roman, a patriotic taxi driver sent to collect me courtesy of...
Becoming Alice Neel

Art

August 2017

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art

August 2017

From the first time I saw Alice Neel’s portraits, I wanted to see the world as she did. Neel was the Matisse of the...

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Art

September 2014

Semi Floating Sculpture

Luke Hart

Patrick Langley

Art

September 2014

Luke Hart will meet me at Gate 7. I get the text on the DLR, heading east past Canary...

feature

Issue No. 14

Editorial

The Editors

feature

Issue No. 14

Having several issues ago announced that we would no longer be writing our own editorials, the editors’ (ultimately inevitable)...

feature

July 2011

Herat

Sam Duerden

feature

July 2011

At Kabul airport, a man I mistook for a foreigner.   A security guard, red-haired with blue eyes and...

 

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