UC Berkeley

My dissertation, Thinking Otherwise, is a triptychal essay that pursues the consequences of a common feature of two very different artists, Agnes Martin and Alice Notley, who each renounce the products of reason—concepts, ideas, knowledge—for the sake of thinking. Both choose the theory of evolution to exemplify their refusal to believe in ideas. Evolution is forsworn because of its fitness as an emblem of reason—a paragon of reason’s fruits that stands as explanation and cause of the way things are the way they are. Upon release from the class or hold of mental objects whose function the theory of evolution exemplifies, each artist performs a visionary perceptive mode without which her art would be impossible, and which she avers is transmissible to the audience.

Chapter one reads against the ubiquitous trend in Martin scholarship that divides the visual from the verbal, dissociating Martin’s “visions”—the way her paintings occurred to her entire, “the size of a postage stamp”—from her “voices,” auditory hallucinations symptomatic of Martin’s schizophrenia. Critics insist on this division between Martin’s visions and her voices to preserve the integrity of the paintings, leaving them uncompromised by Martin’s mental illness. I argue that consigning the voices to Martin’s pathology undermines her thinking about thinking, an activity that isn’t the same as the wordless activity her visions provide. To take seriously the mental activity Martin wants her work to initiate, I turn to two psychoanalysts working at the time Martin was diagnosed: Marion Milner—for her work on the boundary between creativity and madness in both her clinical studies and her auto-criticism—and W.R. Bion, for his understanding of hallucinosis and his theory of thinking as an apparatus that develops in response to thoughts.

Chapter two maps the trajectory by which Alice Notley’s “poetics of disobedience” authorizes not only her remaking of poetic genres, but also the launching of scientistic claims which culminate in her insistence that poetry determines speciation and is a tool with which we can measure the laws and nature of the universe. I show how Notley’s work exceeds the limits of feminist epistemology, and I consider her work in connection with the decolonial work of Édouard Glissant and Sylvia Wynter. The imbrication of Notley’s formal imagination and a counterpoetics (Glissant’s term) leads to a counterhumanism (Wynter’s term), which rivals secular humanism—deposing Darwin’s the Descent of Man with Notley’s The Descent of Alette.

The final chapter reads Martin’s paintings and Notley’s poems to discover a synthetic argument for measure’s capacity to recondition both the materials and process of thinking. Inhabiting the nexus of creative and academic writing, this chapter is a lyric essay that is both a narrative of my own responses to the objects of study and an exploratory confession of my methodology and my own filiative poetics.