Unsynthesised manifold

And while we're reading Greer, just a reminder of the time she was knuckle-rapped by some Plain English people about her use of the term unsynthesised manifold and responded splendidly. I admit that I didn't know the term myself, which rather belies her optimism about reasonably educated Guardian readers. She says:

Most reasonably educated Guardian readers would, I faintly hope, have recognised the phrase "unsynthesised manifold" as an English version of a basic concept in Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment, first published in English in 1790 and familiarised in Britain by the work of Coleridge and just about anybody else who writes about aesthetic theory.

And if you're as disappointingly - and, I faintly hope,untypically - ignorant as I am, here's her definition of the phrase:

The "unsynthesised manifold" is, in the original sense, everything that is out there, regardless of whether we perceive it or not. As we can't sensibly talk about matters of which we are unaware, we can use the expression more usefully to describe the endless flood of undifferentiated sensory data we accumulate throughout our waking hours. Our conscious and subconscious attempts at organising this stuff and getting it to make a kind of sense are attempts at synthesis. Because of the way the brain routinely edits and translates the raw data, what we perceive is not reality itself but a model of reality as encoded by our individual software, even before we start trying consciously to make sense of it. Most of what we perceive evades conceptualisation, and is neither dreamed nor recollected, though sometimes we can fish it out under hypnosis.

So now we know.

Shit. Piss. Sperm. Gilbert. George.

Germaine Greer has a fascinating take on Gilbert and George in today's Guardian. The article is, I think rightly, less than warm about the work, which she seems to find as pompous, vacuous and posturing as I do. She has some sharp and entertaining things to say about the devotion with which women visitors gaze on a world in which they simply don't exist.

But what she's really interested in is the way the work reveals the mechanism that's enabled the couple's survival: the annihilation of Gilbert. After having said that 'this couple, like every other devoted couple, amounts to less than the sum of its parts' (hmm), in the final paragraph, she comments:

Gilbert and George do not answer when asked if they are lovers; they might as sensibly be asked if they are haters, for they are everything to each other. What their art says about coupledom is terrifying, for the suggestion that Gilbert has been annihilated is derived from the work itself. Gilbert is the tentative one whose eyes are most often cast down or up, evading the viewer's gaze. George wears glittering glasses; Gilbert seems blind as a mole.