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Rebecca Liu
Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

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There are only girls on the internet

Book Review

August 2022

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2022

I remember the first time I saw it, like a freshly alert hare alarmed by movement in the distant grasslands. It was 2013. Model...

Book Review

September 2020

Pankaj Mishra’s ‘Bland Fanatics’

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

September 2020

The Anglo-American commentariat is full of lofty egos. Pankaj Mishra has developed a reputation as their great deflater. ‘Watch...

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

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

Jia Tolentino’s ‘Trick Mirror’

Book Review

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2019

Talk about the fates of young professional women today and you will often alight on two themes: the anxieties that come with living in...

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poetry

May 2014

Rain on the Roof (to James Schuyler)

David Andrew

poetry

May 2014

Degrees of distance Who all died at different dates, known to each other: not just in the human race...

Prize Entry

April 2016

Role Play

Naomi Frisby

Prize Entry

April 2016

Your right hand is the first to go. One Sunday afternoon as you’re sitting on the sofa reading the...

Interview

Issue No. 3

Interview with Elmgreen & Dragset

Ben Hunter

Nicholas Shorvon

Interview

Issue No. 3

Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset are among the most innovative, subversive and wickedly funny contemporary artists at work, or...

 

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