The question of what computers can’t do was posed in 1972 by the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus. Dreyfus’s answer – think creatively – was soon considered an error, but the problem remained. It is difficult to distinguish human from machine intelligence because we use the same underlying philosophical and psychological understandings of the mind to discuss both. We think of human beings as essentially rational, problem-solving, goal-oriented animals – an idea that long antedates neoliberalism. At the same time, we think of the computer as a problem-solving calculator, though one with access to far more data than an individual person. The main alternative to this paradigm – psychoanalysis – has long been discredited. Nonetheless, I want to propose a psychoanalytic answer to the problem Dreyfus posed. What computers can’t do is free associate.
The events of this summer, Bibi Rabbiyah Khan said, are a wake up call for the community: to overcome divisions and fear, and draw on the support of interfaith groups, local authorities and anti-racism groups. ‘That's what saved London – people stood up.’
On 28 August, Israel launched a ground and air attack on the northern West Bank, ‘the biggest of its kind since 2002’. With the military onslaught came images of medical staff rounded up, hospitals besieged, ambulances and paramedics stopped, cities and refugee camps sealed off, roads destroyed, water, fuel and electricity supplies cut. Israeli occupation forces were reported to have killed twenty Palestinians in Jenin in two days. They took over people’s homes and positioned snipers on the roofs of buildings. Mass arrests and abuse of detainees were filmed by residents. The human rights organisation al-Haq has shown footage of the destruction of the eastern part of the city by Israeli bulldozers.
It isn’t only on the economy that Labour is aping the Conservative Party. In May this year, the High Court ruled that the protest regulations enacted by Suella Braverman when she was home secretary were unlawful.
The dining table at the Spanish embassy in Belgrave Square is 13.5 metres long and seats fifty people. It’s said to be the largest table (without leaves) in London. No. 24 Belgrave Square, once Downshire House, was acquired by the Spanish government in 1928. The table came with the house. The previous owner was William Pirrie, the 1st Viscount Pirrie, chairman of the shipbuilders Harland & Wolff and a one-time mayor of Belfast. It was in the dining-room of Downshire House in 1907 that Pirrie and Bruce Ismay, the managing director of the White Star Line, conceived their idea for three vast new ocean liners, the Olympic, the Britannic and the Titanic.
Walid Daqqa, a Palestinian writer and intellectual, died in prison on 7 April, at the age of 62, less than a year before he was due to be released. Convicted in 1987 for involvement in the abduction and killing of the Israeli soldier Moshe Tamam in 1984 – which he always denied – Daqqa, a citizen of Israel, spent 38 years behind bars. During his time in jail he was diagnosed with cancer and suffered from medical neglect. The Israeli government has refused to release his body to his family, withholding it as a bargaining chip for future negotiations with Hamas.
The scholarly consensus seems to be that Leonora Carrington was not actively involved in many – or most – of these late career sculptures. Marina Warner told me they were ‘versions of works she made – interpreted in a different medium’. It seems likely that some of them are reinterpretations of drawings or paintings, possibly based on sketches. Later in life she made little models in plasticine – there was one on the bench in her studio when I visited her in 2008. Some of them seem to have successfully made the jump into bronze, but many have been transformed beyond recognition, blown up into vast soulless structures with the precise proportions lost and one struggles to see the hand of the artist (or any artist).