Jill Marsden

The contribution that arts can make to our health and wellbeing is widely acknowledged in public discourse, with the concept of ‘creative health’ having come to prominence in the UK in the last ten years. This paper asks about the kinds of values at play in contemporary appeals to creativity by exploring the value of art for life from a 8 philosophical perspective. Drawing on Pierre Hadot’s influential work on the ancient 9 philosophical practice of the ‘art of living’, it goes on to consider how aesthetic 10 perception of the world functions as a kind of model for philosophical perception. 11 Inflecting these ideas with Friedrich Nietzsche’s genealogical critique of values, the paper 12 examines the role of art and philosophy in relation to luxury and need, and to fundamental conditions of life enhancement. Building on this distinctive application of Nietzsche’s genealogy, it develops the question of how to assess the value of art for life outside the current neoliberal narratives of wellbeing and the creative industries. In its focus on values rather than ideals, the paper makes an original contribution to current thinking and practice in creative health.

Mass Observation was the most ambitious and controversial investigation into cultural life in Britain in the twentieth century. Buoyed by a democratic spirit yet riven by eclectic intellectual allegiances, the project, in its inception, revelled in contradictions, many of which have endured in its legacy. This paper revisits the early countercultural aspirations of Mass Observation in order to reflect on the significance of these contradictions for the fate of popular writing. It is argued that the tensions between art, philosophy and science, as articulated in the inaugural statements of Mass Observation, are illuminated by the anti-elitist agenda of the founders. Building on these insights, the paper revisits controversies in the use of Mass Observation data for research and calls upon the findings from a recent recreation of Mass Observation Diary Day (12 May 2024) to argue that Mass Observation's 'science of ourselves' be reconsidered as creative cultural production and a contribution to the 'art of living'.

This paper draws connections between Nietzsche’s diagnosis of nihilism, his philosophy of the “nearest things” and issues of orientation in contemporary thought. The trajectory which Nietzsche traces from “the devaluation of the highest values” to the task of transvaluation, supplies an overarching context for addressing nihilism as a crisis of orientation. It is argued that Nietzsche’s turn towards the “closest” things as a new direction for thought shares priorities named as the “keywords” of our time: “embodiment, affect, the quotidian, singularity, contingency, intimacy, precarity” (Laura Marcus, 2016). In order to pursue the deeper implications of this affinity, some recent engagement with Nietzsche in new materialist writings are considered. It is claimed that Nietzsche’s ideas about the nearest things provide these theories with resources to contest nihilism at the level of value, without reinstating an uncritical appeal to the authority of “lived experience.”

In this essay I explore what might be meant by the “nearest things” in Nietzsche’s philosophy. In the first part of the essay I contextualise Nietzsche’s concerns with “the closest things of all” in the “free spirit” period (1878-1882) and raise the question of how knowledge of them is possible. This idea is developed in the second part of the paper in relation to the claim that dominant (Platonic/Christian) habits of thought impede our understanding of the body. In the third section, I suggest that Nietzsche’s interest in Epicurean thinking in this period enables us to situate the nearest things within the political aesthetics of a transfigured physis. In the final section, I examine how Nietzsche’s 1881 notes on eternal return provide a less-well known locus for his philosophy of the nearest things, one which suggests that to “incorporate” eternal return we need to become “good neighbours” to what is close.

This paper argues that new direction can be found for the modernist concept of stream of consciousness by returning to William James’s original insights in Principles of Psychology (1890). I begin by briefly outlining James’s idea of the “stream of thought” in order to identify the nature of its relationship to the literary technique. I go on to show how early readings of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929) were inspired by a modernist cognizance of “stream of consciousness” narration but were “ableist” in their treatment of Benjy Compson’s narrative. More recently, these shortcomings have been redressed from a literary disability studies perspective but not without importing unwarranted humanist values into Faulkner’s presentation of Benjy. To develop a reading of cognitive impairment which is neither dehumanising nor humanist, I return to James’s “stream of thought” to show how it can be reconciled with a recent (Deleuzian) disability studies account of “impersonal life”. The broader aim of this return to James is to explore how aspects of the stream of thought concept such as “fringe awareness” and embodied cognition might supplement and enrich contemporary literary and disability studies.

This paper seeks to establish what is distinctive about Will Self’s return to techniques of literary modernism in his novel Umbrella (2012). Despite deploying narrative styles typically reserved for the depiction of ‘inner’ worlds, Self’s novel seems more concerned with the concept of thought as a stream than with the psychological introspection afforded by ‘stream of consciousness’ narration. Drawing on William James’s founding ideas about the ‘stream of thought’ in Principles of Psychology (1890), this article suggests that Self’s version of modernism owes a greater debt to James’s philosophy of embodied cognition than to the interior monologue as a literary form. Through a range of stylistic anomalies, including abrupt shifts in grammatical congruence, idiosyncratic italicisation, and surprising jumps mid-sentence between different stories, Self dismantles the novelistic illusion of the isolated mind, returning thinking to a transpersonal affective stream on which conceptual order floats. In capturing a sense of the interflow between mind, body and world, his stream of consciousness serves new political and philosophical ends, challenging us to ask what our bodies are doing and where our minds are going in our present time.

When the brother of the poet Anne Carson died she wrote an elegy for him "in the form of an epitaph.'' Her 2010 work Nox is a beguiling and beautiful work, as difficult to characterize as the brother it seeks to commemorate. This article explores the sensory experience of reading Nox, a text, which appeals to an elusive awareness at the edge of memory and imagination. In describing her brother, Carson evokes "a certain fundamental opacity of human being, which likes to show the truth by allowing it to be seen hiding.'' The aim of this paper is to show how this opacity emerges in the encounter with this captivating work, to pursue what it means to let "night'' appear.