Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Blake as Shaman: The Neuroscience of Hallucinations and Milton’s Lark, by David Worrall
April 7, 2024‘Skatterlings of a Stone’: Finnegans Wake and the Moment of Philosophical Critique in Megalithic Archaeology
September 10, 2023This essay is an interpretation of aspects of the Neolithic of Atlantic Europe (c5000-c2000 BC) through the lens of James Joyce’s novel, Finnegans Wake, and an interpretation of his novel, dialectically, through this archaeological optic, complying with Theodor W. Adorno’s injunction to ‘treat profane texts like holy scripture’. This is the occasion to reflect on the coded ‘theological moment’ in the thought of Adorno and Walter Benjamin to activate shifting constellations of Archaeology, Literature and Philosophical critique. At best, the paper constitutes ‘a onestone parable, a rude breathing on the void of to be’ (FW 100.26-27) and, for better or worse, is one of ‘the “rejected stones” of the seemingly non-existent “impossible”‘ (Bielik-Robson 2020b: 65).
So goes the introduction to the uploaded text on the academia dot edu site… I’m uploading a pdf of it here (with some minor amendments and corrections) in the interest of open access.
‘Skatterlings’, the text, is based on a presentation to The Marrano Phenomenon Conference, organised by Agata Bielik-Robson, which took place in Warsaw, in September 2019. I’d been asked to participate in this conference by Agata on the strength of staging an encounter between the cryptotheological approach developed by her and the strange conjunction between James Joyce’s writings and an archaeoastronomical phenomenon associated with Portuguese Neolithic tombs. That text, A Ruby and Triangled Sign upon the Forehead of Taurus: Modalities of Revelation in Megalithic Archaeoastronomy and James Joyce’s Novels Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, was published here. I remain grateful to Agata for giving me the opportunity to publish and present material which would otherwise have languished in obscurity and helping to open the door to an interstitial territory I continue to navigate.
‘Skatterlings’ was initially written as a contribution to an edited conference volume. Once it became evident that it was not to be included in that volume (when I found it was published in 2022 as The Marrano Way: Between Betrayal and Innovation) I allowed the draft to drift over the word-count, fractally, and gave up on any further attempts to ‘Derridaize’ the text, as had previously been requested, in line with what I surmise would have been the ‘house style’. I hastily uploaded that document onto academia dot edu.
Here it is, duly corrected and amended.
Between Fractured Landscape and Neurological Event: A Philosophical Configuration of Anomalous Experience
September 3, 2023
I make no bones of the fact that the following essay was rejected out of hand by a psychical research journal of record for being ‘philosophical heavy’ (sic) after what must have been a thorough reflection of 36 hours or less over a weekend. Familiarising myself since with the conventions of that publication it’s obvious why such an – admittedly convoluted – exercise in philosophical critique would be out of synch with the static cognitive ideals which govern such research. There was really nowhere else I could have gone with this material and in response to the rejection I uploaded a pdf of the essay to academia dot edu. I’ve come to realise that that platform still presents insurmountable barriers to many, requiring an account to be opened, so I’m belatedly uploading the pdf here so it’s more accessible. As with anything Microsoft Edge-related, caution should be exercised – don’t (as I nearly did) accidentally set it as your default browser!
Here’s the abstract:
This essay investigates the anomalous character of two neurological episodes undergone by the author. Their perceived correspondence with periods of directed focus on archaeological and topographical themes has connotations beyond their ostensible neurobiological origins. These heterogeneous elements comprise a dynamic experiential complex, implicated in the induction of meaningful coincidence. The nonidentity of this indissoluble, contradictory ‘something’ with the static cognitive ideal of the concept elicits an approach informed by principles of philosophical presentation elaborated, respectively, by Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) and Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969). I draw on their theologically inflected attempt to retrieve the truth content in the object, which eludes identification and classification in customary philosophical and scientific determinations of the object of knowledge. That the proper approach to the unknown object is, rather, a self-forgetful immersion in it, and possession by it, implies a mimetic style of interpretation that takes shape immanently to the strange encounter with phenomena. Attempting to glimpse, in their subsequent development, essential qualities in the sphere where neurology and topography coincide, I stage a retrospective choreography of individually opaque elements, to spark ‘auratic’ moments of sudden reciprocal insight, illuminating the transitory promise of fulfilment which is repeatedly broken to preserve its truth. For Adorno, the immediate, definitive resolution of tensions riddling this constellation is impossible in the non-redeemed world. Hence, descending into the abyss of significances, I trace intimations of a latent transcendence, which has found refuge in art and registers in anomalous experience, its evanescent glow imbuing the ‘esoteric’ form of this essay.
Journey to Gorodovoy Cliff: UFOs, Shamans, and Nuclear Destruction
August 16, 2023Our trail is that of the grey hare, The dark wolf is our servant, The honking crow is our incarnation, The Hoto eagle is our envoy. On the summit of Bortoi mountain, Having turned into dark wolves, Curving our backs we ran. Whose son did you see there? On the summit of Tarsai mountain, Having become five geese, Crying out, we came in to land. Whose son did you see there? Western Buryat shaman's song (after Humphrey 1995: 155).
Contact with Colliding Worlds
On 14 August 2022 I was alerted, via the Paranthropology Facebook page, to this youtube video, ‘Contact With Colliding Worlds Part 1 Synchronicities of Silence’, uploaded just three days before by Professor Wham (aka Dr CS Matthews). Described in this tweet by Stephanie Quick as a ‘deep look at the cultural/historical meaning of UFO encounters from a non-western, anti-colonial perspective’, it is a digressive but no less interesting review of the book, Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret, by Jacques Vallée and Paola Leopizzi Harris, in conjunction with David Roberts’ book, The Pueblo Revolt. Trinity is the account of an investigation into a UFO landing witnessed by two boys in 1945 which, in the words of Vallée, demonstrates ‘the existence of levels of reality science has failed to recognize’ (2022: xix). Part of the synchronicity identified between the two books was that the location of the boys’ encounter with ‘insectoid’ entities in August 1945, who appeared to have been transported in a metallic craft which crash-landed to earth, was in the area affected by the uprising of indigenous Pueblo people in August 1680 against Spanish colonial rule.1 Particularly striking was the fact that the encounter, on August 16th, 1945, had happened just 25 miles from Ground Zero, the Trinity test site, where the first atomic bomb was detonated on July 16, 1945, exactly a month before. It also happened within two weeks of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Indeed, the light from the blast at Trinity awoke the entire family of one of the witnesses and permanently blinded a relative in one eye. Of course, no one was warned. The devastating effects of the so-called test persisted in the proliferation of illnesses, cancers, premature deaths, infertility and birth defects in the ensuing years, negative impacts seen also in animals, wildlife and stunted plant growth.
Professor Wham draws a strong parallel between the insectoid occupants of the craft – described as seeming ‘almost like praying mantises’ – witnessed by two young boys2 and stories concerning the origins of kachinas, each cultural group having their own origin stories. Most striking, in regard to the boys’ encounter, are Navaho and Apache stories. White Painted Woman, the being who gave birth to the Apache people, descended to earth in a white shell, while in a Navajo account, the ‘insect people’ are the among the first beings to emerge into the world.3 The insectoid occupants of the egg-shaped craft seemed to be uttering cries of distress, which had a profound emotional effect on the two boys, even when they recounted their experiences decades later, and put pictures in their minds about the distress of the occupants, via some sort of telepathy. Altogether, there is a curious confluence of people and events, lent some significance perhaps by the site of the crash being once a watering, gathering and ceremonial area for Apache bands who regularly migrated through the region. A meditation by Vallée on the personal and social effects of traumatic events, ‘whether by our own hands in the form of nuclear power unleashed or at the agency of some kind of intelligent force that seems to live here with us on earth’, resonates in its evocation of an ‘intelligent force’ with Barton Wright’s identification of the central theme of kachina beliefs and practices as ‘the presence of life in all objects that fill the universe’ (Wright 2008: 4). Everything ‘has an essence or a life force, and humans must interact with these or fail to survive’ (ibid.). Vallée asks, what if the crash of the object was not an accident? What if the crash and the distressed creatures from the craft were the message? What would account, continues Professor Wham, for the distress of insectoid-like creatures who seemingly crashed to earth? What would the message be from entities who arrived not long after a matter-altering bomb was exploded and then used to destroy two cities, close to both the location and anniversary of one of the most successful revolts against a colonial invader? Fascinated by the video, I placed both books on a wishlist, but didn’t commit to getting them straight away.
My engagement that evening with such thought-provoking ‘wandering tangents’ coincided with the much-anticipated arrival of a book I’d actually ordered the day before the ‘Contact with Colliding Worlds’ video had even been uploaded, André Breton in Exile: The Poetics of Occultation, 1941-1947, by Victoria Clouston. Unable to retrieve the book immediately, as it had been delivered elsewhere, but dimly aware that Breton had been in New Mexico around the same time as this weird encounter, I searched online for any indications of this. I soon found the following link to a 2018 talk, Surrealism and the American West: André Breton’s “Hopi Notebook”. It was startling for its contemporaneity with the events of August 1945, casting unexpected light on discussion of Pueblo and Hopi kachinas. Dr Katharine Conley’s talk considered ‘the founder of the surrealist movement’s practice of collecting in light of the notebook he kept on his trip to visit the Hopi reservation in August 1945, the month the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki’. His belief in the liveliness of repurposed things, haunted by their former lives, ‘was particularly pertinent to the Hopi Katchina dolls he collected on his trip to the American West’. I was intrigued, startled even, to feel the synchronicities Professor Wham spoke of now impinging on me.
Oppenheimer
I have my hunting camp in the ruling pine-tree
I have my quarters in the huge pine-tree
I have transformation in the lightning filled sky
I have my hunting camp in the thundering sky.
Daur shaman's song for the dolbor ('night road') ritual
(after Humphrey 1996: 231).
On 23 July, 2023, I went to see the film, Oppenheimer. What became evident in watching it, was the disjuncture between the desire within the ‘scientific community’ to impose ethical limits on the monstrous power to destroy that their research had helped to unleash, and the sociopathic realpolitik of those in power, ready to destroy all obstacles to American or so-called ‘Western’ hegemony. Parallels with the present political class of functionaries serving economic imperatives severely detrimental to life on earth were inescapable.
Another effect of watching the film was to impel me to finally order Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret when I got home that evening…
Reading the early pages of the book in the days that followed its arrival on the 25th, prompted a vague memory of being told, in a mountain cave in Buryatia, near the border with Mongolia, of a UFO landing nearby. The informant was Nikolai, the primary guide in the field for a joint expedition of the Department of Archaeology of the University of Southampton, the Buryat Institute of Social Sciences, and the Ministry of Culture of Buryatia, in search of rock art in August-September 1995. I was a second-year undergraduate at the time and had enthusiastically signed up for the compulsory international fieldwork in Buryatia, aware of the ex-Soviet republic’s history and culture of shamanism, a subject close to my heart. After rummaging through old papers and searching online I eventually deduced that the mountain cave was the Gorodovoy Cliff, situated on a sacred mountain called Khugtei-Khan (Buryat: Хугтэй-хаан). Retrieving the diary I had kept of the expedition 28 years before, I could tell from the entry I had made for the last day of work in the field, 13 September 1995, that I was exhausted after a very busy three-week schedule, travelling hundreds of miles to visit and survey different sites. Complaining of heading off at 8am to a mountain near the Mongolian border, I noted, ‘Passed thro’ a village where a flying saucer had landed. Three short silver people and one tall black one. They took off again.’ Doing an online search for UFOs in Buryatia, I found that the incident had happened on 16 May 1990, five years and four months before, in a village called Kudara-Somon, about 22 km as the crow flies from the Gorodovoy Cliff.
According to an account on this website, May 16th, 1990, was an unseasonably hot day in the village of Kudara-Somon, with not a cloud in the sky and temperatures reaching 34° C. By midday the village was bathed in a strange yellow light. After 14.25, from the direction of Mongolia in the south, an unidentified object appeared in the sky. Described variously as a fireball or an object coloured crimson silver, it hovered over the village before zigzagging and landing on one of the Kudarinsky Hills overlooking the village. Villagers ran out of their houses to view the spectacle, some bringing binoculars. Witnesses described seeing four anthropoids stepping out of the object, one of them taller than the other three by a head and wearing dark clothing, while the others were dressed in silver, orange silver or silver-crimson clothes. The quartet appeared to stride purposefully down the slope towards the houses, as seen by hundreds of witnesses in the village. Two people, a local resident and a policeman, raced up the slope on a motorcycle to meet the four visitors. At this the four anthropoids hastily retreated to the object, which then soared into the sky and immediately disappeared from sight.
Kachinas, Ongons and ‘Vegetal Revelation’
Of the ‘crash landing’ of ‘something’ in New Mexico, at a place 25 miles from the site of the world’s first nuclear explosion, Vallée asks why weird telepathic creatures were deposited in a vehicle – characterised by him as possibly both physical and ‘psychic’ – at an ancient traditional site, ‘one month to the day after mankind’s first large-scale, historic liberation of the Atom?’ (Vallée and Leopizzi Harris 2022: 308). One could also recognise in the burning bushes surrounding this crashed vehicle an echo of the ‘vegetal revelation’ in Exodus. Was the crash a direct answer to the discovery of nuclear forces? An opportunity to listen to other forms of consciousness, ‘so we could be clearly presented with the flimsy parameters of our survival?’ (ibid: 308). Put in these terms it encourages interpreting other instances of such otherworldly interventions in similar terms, in the collision of the apocalyptic and traditional geographies. Perhaps significantly, one of the young witnesses to the event in New Mexico, Jose Padilla, is the great-grandson of ‘Mama Grande’, Maria Amada Chavez (1856-1940), a local Chiricahua Apache leader and a wise and powerful woman recognised as ‘the community authority in the area’ (ibid.: 13). Hence the turn to the shamanic landscape of Buryatia, scene of a UFO landing witnessed by a whole village. Just as Professor Wham draws attention to the relevance of kachinas and the mythology surrounding them in interpreting the possible significance of what happened on the Padilla Ranch in 1945, can one look to the ongons of Buryat and Mongolian shamanism for analogies?
According to Caroline Humphrey, Buryat ongons are ‘a series of models or representations of spirits which are thought to have magical power in specific circumstances’ (1971: 271), made from a variety of materials such as cloth, wood, feathers, metal and beads.4 However, the ongon is more than a representation, for it is ‘both the spirit and the representation of the spirit’ (ibid.), consecrated by the shaman in that they make the spirit enter it (ibid.: 272). Indeed, the verb ongulakh, ‘to make into an ongon’ is used for the shaman when the spirit enters his or her body, or of an animal that is possessed by a spirit (ibid.: 271-272). The ongon could also be painted on multicoloured silk cloth (Heissig 1980: 13), these paintings being ‘always executed in red’ (ibid.: 14). This invites considering red-painted motifs on rocks and cliff faces in Buryatia as forms of ongons. It became evident that some rock art sites were still respected, judging by cloths tied in the branches of adjacent trees and emptied bottles of spirits, as were some burial sites of shamans, with some overlap between these sites.
Such a congruence of biographies of individuals and places is evident in the red cliff which features in a ‘shamanistic legend of origin’ in the book of the history of the Onghot, ‘The Black Tutelary Spirit’, discovered in the Chahar region of eastern Mongolia (Heissig 1953: 501). A dying father instructs his son, Ingdaqai, to find the right place to inter and worship him, promising to ‘perform things in later days which are of benefit’ to him (ibid.: 503). After his father’s death Ingdaqai carried the body away, laying the corpse on the top of a boulder at the south-eastern declivity of the Red Cliff. Over the years the son returned regularly to the cliff, making offerings of tea, water and brandy to the ‘Protecting Genius of the Ancestor’ (ibid.: 504). In time, the spirit of the father allied itself with the master spirits of the place, his power increasing as the years passed. When the mother of Ingdaqai died, she too was interred south of the Red Cliff and given offerings. Allying herself with the other spirits the old woman too acquired a powerful nature. The local population, much troubled by the dreadful harm the spirits did, made propitiatory offerings at the Red Cliff. Thereupon the spirit of the dead father entered a man, who began to tremble, while the spirit of the dead mother entered a woman, who also began to tremble convulsively. These two were now able to fly while they were possessed by their protective spirits, flying to the Red Cliff where they found drums and feathered head-ornaments, handed on to them by the spirits. Striking their drums they flew back, to request the people to offer the libations of tea, milk, spirits and water so that they could protect them. The people called them boge (male shaman) and idugan (female shaman) and made offerings as requested (ibid.). Later they made images of them, referring to them as Onghon (Heissig 1980: 10).
Healing the Metabolic Rift?
Having drifted on my own tangents, at this critical juncture I’ll conclude with an acknowledgment of what has been spoken of as the metabolic rift, ‘the material estrangement of human beings within capitalist society from the natural conditions which formed the basis for their existence’ (Foster 2000: 163).5 This element of social critique has become a point of departure for more ecological readings in response to the continuous and escalating ecological catastrophe of fossil and extractive capital which threatens earthly life along with the nuclear weapons that loom so large in Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret. I’ve only recently learnt of the the huge mine at Oyu Tolgoi, in Mongolia, one of the largest mines in the world (larger than Manhattan, and 2 miles deep), ‘upsetting not only the gods, but the herdsmen who live in this area who can no longer get the water they need’ (link here). Concluding Trinity, Jacques Vallée warns that we ignore ‘at our peril’ the ‘pressing enigma’ that undeniable cases like the Trinity UFO crash present (Vallée and Leopizzi Harris 2022: 313).
- As Professor Wham emphasises, Pueblo is the Spanish term used to designate all the indigenous communities under their colonial rule, obscuring the diversity of multiple communities, among whom are included the Hopi and Zuni ↩︎
- That the two boys had been looking for a missing cow in calf and heard the impact of the strange object moments after their discovery of the cow and her newly-born calf lends an interesting slant on the Cow and Calf Rocks on Ilkley Moor, West Yorkshire, a location for sightings of strange lights. ↩︎
- I’m presuming that, at this point, Professor Wham is referring to the origin of kachina dolls, as the kachina concept has three different aspects: the supernatural being, the kachina dancers, and kachina dolls (small dolls carved in the likeness of the kachina, that are given only to those who are, or will be responsible for the respectful care and well-being of the doll, such as a mother, wife, or sister) (Colton 1959: 1-3).. ↩︎
- In the context of manipulating organic and artificial materials to make ongons and other ‘magical objects’, I thought of Reme Baca and Jose Padilla picking through the detritus left by the crash landing of the object in 1945, retrieving strange bits of metal and filling bags with clumps of fibrous material they called ‘angel hair’, which was used to decorate Christmas trees because it glowed in the dark. ↩︎
- I’ve written elsewhere on Buryat shamanism here and in this edited volume ↩︎
References
Colton, Harold Sellers (1959) Hopi Kachina Dolls: with a Key to their Identification. Revised Edition. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press (Reference found on Wikipedia 5/8/2023)
Foster, John Bellamy (2000) Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature. New York: Monthly Review Press
Heissig, W. (1980) The Religions of Mongolia. Translated by G. Samuel. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul
Heissig, W. (1953) A Mongolian Source to the Lamaist suppression of shamanism in the 17th century. Anthropos 48: 493-536
Humphrey, Caroline (1996) Shamans and Elders. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Humphrey, Caroline (1995) Chiefly and Shamanist Landscapes in Mongolia. In E. Hirsch and M. O’Hanlon (eds.) The Anthropology of Landscape. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 133-162 (A nice pdf of this essay here. Photocopies of it were handed to each of us as we prepared to journey from Southampton to Buryatia in 1995).
Humphrey, Caroline. 1971. Some Ideas of Saussure applied to Buryat Magical Drawings. In E. Ardener (ed.) Social Anthropology and Language. London: Tavistock Publications, 271-90
Vallée, Jacques F. and Leopizzi Harris, Paola (2022) Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret. Starworks USA. Second Edition
Wright, Barton (2008) ‘Hopi Kachinas: A Life Force’, in Hopi Nation: Essays on Indigenous Art, Culture, History and Law. University of Nebraska Digital Commons (Reference found on Wikipedia 5/8/2023)
To break the attunements of being
August 12, 2023I can’t help but see an affinity between the ‘logic of disintegration’ of Theodor W. Adorno’s philosophy – a logic which he recognised in the atonality of his teacher, Alban Berg’s music, with its tendency towards particularisation and disintegration – and the ‘intermittent rhythm’ of the music of Don Van Vliet/Captain Beefheart, its dissonance contrived to disrupt the hypnotic banality of what Beefheart called ‘that momma heartbeat, that bom, bom, bom’, so similar to the phenomenological ‘attunements of being’ that Adorno sought to shatter. The sky speckled with stars, the sombre ground interspersed with particles of light, is an obvious analogical field for attempting to ‘unlock the constellation’, a form of speculative thinking which Adorno derived from Walter Benjamin’s famous proposition in his Trauerspiel (1928), that ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars. One can therefore form a constellation between Adorno’s micrological thinking, focused on fragmentary particulars – figuratively-speaking, from the perspective of the Lurianic kabbalah, sparks of the scattered cosmic body of Adam Kadmon: ‘Damadam to infinities!’ (Finnegans Wake page 18, line 30) – and Beefheart’s application of a convulsive logic that stutters ‘in speckled, speckled speculation’ (Van Vliet 1969) enacted in his Trauermarsch (funeral march) for bourgeois musical sensibilities, Trout Mask Replica, released on June 16th, 1969, coinciding with Bloomsday, the day James Joyce’s novel, Ulysses. takes place in 1904.
Into the Esplumoir
June 9, 2023‘All souls were believed to be gathered in a big cage or treasure house in heaven, in a columbarium’ – The Esplumoir Merlin: A Study in Its Cabalistic Sources, by Helen Adolf. Speculum, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Apr., 1946), pp. 173-193.
Returning the Gaze
April 30, 2022
Construing ‘the lazily eye’ (FW 293.11) formed by the ‘ALP diagram’ on page 293 of Finnegans Wake as a thought-image to invert an attribute of Guy Debord’s central conceptual device, the Spectacle, which ‘concentrates all gazing and all consciousness’ (Debord 1983: Para.3):
“In part, a secularisation of ‘the eye of the world, whereby the Absolute sees Its own works’ (Bakhtiar 1976: 11), it is characterised by Debord as the projection of human powers into a transcendent realm, which takes on the form of the Spectacle (Russell 2021: 76), the social organisation of appearances in modern capitalist society. Implicit in such an inversion is the aspiration to reverse the perspective of the very structural totality the Spectacle is intended to define – as one interpretation of Walter Benjamin’s messianism puts it, the ‘radical destruction of the world of images’ consists in their dialectical reversal (Desideri 2016: 186). Although the thought-image at the core of Finnegans Wake is not identical with the ‘Eye of God’ or Debord’s Spectacle, it can still constellate thinking around these and other themes and draw attention to the Old Testament ban on making images of God, ‘the prohibition on the image’ (bilderverbot) as it has been employed by Adorno and Max Horkheimer as the ‘awareness that the world is appearance’ and therefore does not represent the ultimate reality (Jopp and Martins 2018: 679). This hidden element of the critique of Benjamin and Adorno, what Horkheimer called a ‘Judaism undercover’ (Bielik-Robson 2019a: xi), gives their ideas a critical and methodological force indispensable for disintegrating the pantheistic unity of a more-than-allegorical spectacular totality, derived from a kabbalistic cosmic drama with its own implicit critique of pleromatic orderings of society, of which Debord’s Spectacle describes but one.”
More here – Skatterlings of a Stone: Finnegans Wake and the Moment of Philosophical Critique in Megalithic Archaeology
Stonehenge and the Stalinist Amalgam Technique
November 20, 2020Interesting to see archaeologists who support the Highways England scheme to blast a tunnel and a dual carriageway through a bit of Wiltshire south of Stonehenge resorting to an atrociously dishonest polemical technique known as the ‘amalgam technique’. It is a way of invalidating any and all opposition to a policy by tainting all opponents with the bad opinions of a few. As a technique, it’s a bit of a double-edged sword, because by the same logic these archaeologists can be held responsible for all the continuing crimes of Empire (from Amritsar to Windrush to Grenfell) enacted by the British state with which they stand in solidarity. If anything, knowing collusion with an infrastructure project of the imperial state – “BUILD THE TUNNEL! BUILD THE TUNNEL!” – is worse. Consider that the industrial revolution in the UK, of which the tunnel project is a formal continuation, was initially funded by compensation paid to slave owners, who invested their ill-gotten gains in infrastructure projects like new roads, railways and canals. Arguably, every enterprise carried on in the wake of this development is a legacy of it and homage to it.
A rather quiet protagonist in this affair is the Ministry of Defence (the current euphemism for what was The War Office), which is allowing heritage bodies like the National Trust and English Heritage to be ‘cultural shields’, to take the flak for heritage destruction which bears its imprint as surely as barrows on Salisbury Plain with tank tracks and shell craters – a construction project in line with its logistical aims – viz Johnson’s multi-billion pound ‘Let them eat lead’ announcement, accompanied with photo-opportunities on Salisbury Plain. I find the effective collaboration of pro-tunnel archaeologists with the logistical needs of the war machine deeply distasteful. They really have some brass neck berating opponents for bad opinions while feigning ignorance of their own role in a military-archaeological-industrial complex, structurally far worse than having bad opinions, however despicable.
Perhaps, ultimately, the pro-tunnel archaeologists anticipate a share in the spoils of such a conquest as its building would signify. More work for archaeology units, additions to the store of knowledge about the past, in an extraction of ‘cultural resources’ not totally dissimilar to the extraction practices of the fossil fuel industry. The generation of ‘heritage capital’ is, however, a mere by-product of a system – with its arterial roads and high-speed rail – leading inexorably to climate catastrophe and mass extinction.
I’m sure pro-tunnel archaeologists’ current recourse to a notoriously dishonest technique of labelling opponents isn’t reflected in the quality of the work they did to gain their qualifications, so why not be consistent with their earlier work, lest it be judged by association too?
‘Primitivism’ in Art, the conceptual space of simultaneity, and other derivations of the concept of ‘the Spectacle’
November 1, 2020Your piece can play a decisive role in the prehistory of the anti-spectacle.
Guy Debord, letter to André Frankin, 24 July 1960
Apropos of the origins of Situationist usage of the term, ‘spectacle’ mentioned in this piece – https://cominsitu.wordpress.com/2020/10/30/from-the-commodity-to-the-spectacle-debords-marx-russell-2019/ – I feel compelled to present here part of a discussion of simultaneity and spectacle in art, extracted from an unpublished PhD, The World’s End: Rock Images, Altered Realities, and the Limits of Social Theory (Crook 2004), articulated in the context of the interpretation of prehistoric rock art in north-west Europe, sub-headed, The Optics of Simultaneity. Negotiating the conceptual space of this ‘north-west passage of the geography of real life’ (Debord), it becomes evident that the concept of ‘the Spectacle’ evolved in part out of the validation of the ‘simultaneous perspective’ of so-called ‘primitive artists’ as part of the critique of the alienating ‘masterpiece’ of urbanism constructed in the perspective of the Renaissance rationalists, and was a collective effort in which Asger Jorn played a critical role, as well as Attila Kotanyi and Raoul Vaneigem. The concluding passages of this section explain the importance of Finnegans Wake in constructing a conceptual space for the interpretation of ‘Atlantic Rock Art’, via Asger Jorn on simultaneity.
Note: I’ll add the bibliographic references fairly soon…
THE OPTICS OF SIMULTANEITY
The infinite changing of things in time is, states Boethius, an attempt to imitate the state of the presence of unchanging life, but continuously falling from sameness into change, from the immediacy of presence into the infinite extent of past and future, because it is unable to portray or equal that state. It ‘cannot possess simultaneously the whole fullness of its life’ (Boethius 1999:133). In this thesis I emulate ‘a property of the mind of God’ by the attempt to embrace ‘the whole of everlasting life in one simultaneous present’ (Boethius 1999:133). This is the essence of what I elaborate as an ordering principle for this study: simultaneity, a quality of knowing transcending all temporal change, embracing all the infinite recesses of past and future, and viewing them in the immediacy of its knowing as though they are happening in the present. The modality of vision, understood as a never-ending, two-way process of engagement between the perceiver and the perceived (Ingold 2000:257), proves central to the development of this concept. We must first distinguish the image of the spectator – detached from the world – from the image of the seer, ‘Immersed in the visible by his body the seer does not appropriate what he sees…he opens himself to the world’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964a:162, in Ingold 2000:264). Suggestive of a visionary, supernatural quality, this is consonant with exactly the vision of a cosmic totality displayed in this thesis:
As I contemplate the blue of the sky I am not set over against it as an acosmic subject; I do not possess it in thought…I am the sky itself as it is drawn together and unified, and as it begins to exist for itself; my consciousness is saturated with this limitless blue
(Merleau-Ponty 1962:214, in Ingold 2000:264).
Recognisible is Ibn Arabi’s description of the ‘Universal Prototype’, embodied in the Prophet, who ‘stands in the same relation to God as the pupil which is the instrument of vision to the eye’. Through the Universal Prototype, ‘God becomes conscious of Self in all the Divine aspects’, it is ‘the eye of the world, whereby the Absolute sees Its own works’ (Bakhtiar 1976:11). In seeing its own works through vision ‘we come into contact with the sun and the stars…we are everywhere at once’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964a:187, in Ingold 2000:264). Ingold plays on the trope of a fall into alienation from a prelapsarian state of grace as he observes that the joy and astonishment of the discovery that ‘I can see’ gives way to the mundane indifference of ‘I see things’ (Ingold 2000: 265). The need to reverse this perspective, to recover the sense of vision original to our experience of the world, and that is a precondition for its objectification is what motivates the work of the painter (ibid.).
The ‘reversal of perspective’ of the ‘society of the spectacle’ was an artistic and political goal of participants in the Situationist International (1957-1972), who sought to determine how ‘the appearance of a cosmic consciousness in the classless society; the abolition of all functional signs in human relations; and the birth of new sentiments and of other unpredictable upheavals’ would ‘accelerate the processes that lead to the stage of this dialectical civilisation of leisure and of work for all humanity together’ (Frankin 1960, emphasis in original). For the situationists modern capitalism ‘organises the reduction of all social life to a spectacle’, is incapable of presenting any spectacle ‘other than that of our own alienation’, in which its urbanistic dream is its ‘masterpiece’ (Kotanyi and Vaneigem 1961, in Knabb 1981: 65). The painterly dimensions of involvement in and detachment from the world are expressed in spatial terms, in that:
We think we are living in the world, when in fact we are being positioned in a perspective. No longer the simultaneous perspective of primitive painters, but the perspective of the Renaissance rationalists. It is hardly possible for looks, thoughts and gestures to escape the attraction of the distant vanishing point which orders and deforms them, situating them in its spectacle
(Vaneigem 1983: 68).
The temporal distance afforded by this spectacle translates into a problem in the separation in time between the prehistorian and prehistoric people in that
we enjoy the perspective of seeing their lives encapsulated in a past that is somehow finished. This disengages people in prehistory from participation in changing presents, their own pasts and also futures.
(Goodman 1999:147).
In this way the temporal separation of observer and object aligns with the ‘objective time’ of chronology in which a static view of the past fixes the actions of people in prehistory in ‘a sequence of events which ignores that they came about amidst any number of other possible outcomes’ (ibid). Consequently, past action is seen to give rise necessarily to the outcomes identified by the prehistorian, in effect removing ‘prehistoric people from a role in decision-making’ (ibid). To recover the possibility of past generations to continue to ‘interrogate, disturb and challenge our time and our custody for their times’ (Chambers 1998:194) means adopting an ethical and involved, rather than a positivist and distanced, paradigm of knowledge (Moses 1992:127, in Chambers 1998:184). Scope for such an involvement is what the conceptual space of simultaneity suggests. A pictorial dimension for simultaneity was found in decorative principles by situationists such as the Danish artist, Asger Jorn:
Persian ornament does not yield its beauty, that is the possibility of grasping it as a whole, if you do not give up looking in a logical sequence … but instead see the relation the parts all have to one another at once and simultaneously. Our viewing must be expanded to take in the whole; stretched, not limited to one point in the whole
(Jorn quoted in Birtwistle 1986:53).
The symbolism of geometric patterns, such as those of ‘Persian ornament’, is generated through the concept of symmetry, in which correspondence in size, shape and relative position of the parts to the whole is their ordering principle, symbolising ‘the cosmic processes characterised by extension in all directions, by boundlessness and by infinite divisibility’ (Bakhtiar 1976: 59). To adopt a property of ‘the mind of God’, as I do in this thesis, then
A field of reality is something one chooses. Simultaneity is something one decides oneself or more correctly, everything exists under particular conditions seen from a particular view point in an absolute simultaneity. Establishing oneself in the absolute optics of simultaneity is called mysticism in the Swedenborgian sense. However … absolute simultaneity cannot be explained as anything other than absolute space.
(Jorn1962:77, in Shield 1998:118, emphasis in original).
Perceiving the world over a sufficient length of time, and along a sufficiently extended set of paths, is tantamount to perceiving it ‘as if one could be everywhere at once’ (Gibson 1979: 197, in Ingold 2000: 227). Just as the multiple paths of geometric patterns draw us within a whole, so our perception of the environment as whole is forged in the passage from place to place, in histories of movement and changing horizons along the way (Ingold 2000: 227). Animals and people see as they move, not just in the intervals between movements, an ‘ambulatory vision’ that takes place along a ‘path of observation’, which is not to be understood as an infinite series of discrete points, occupied at successive instants, but as a continuous itinerary of movement (Ingold 2000:226). Implicit is a challenge to the sequential periodisation of chronology, borne out by the situationist critique of existing spheres and ‘their integration into a single space-time construction (the situation: a dynamic system in an environment and ludic behaviour)’ (Debord 1958, in McDonough 2002: 55). The situation affords the critique of the topological chains of chronology inasfar as
the exclusion of singularities and interruptions, the constancy of intensity and the unique feeling of the propagation of the processes…also excludes the division in several times
(Jorn 1994b:32).
Chronology’s analogue in the linear progression of text draws it on one side of a contradiction between ‘simultaneity’ and ‘linearity’, parallelling the distinction Suzanne Langer (1942) draws between ‘discursive’ and ‘presentational’ forms. Language and thought are discursive processes from which a series of independent component parts derive their overall meaning through sequential articulation (cited in Miller 1987:97). It is tantamount to the ‘falling into step’ of words (Khayati 1966 in Knabb 1981:173), in which information – statistics, news, performance indicators – ‘is the poetry of power’ (anon:1963, in Knabb 1981:115) The rules of grammar are intended to analyse the structure underlying this discursive order (Miller 1987:97). On the other hand, a presentational form such as a picture, has no such divisions. In assimilating a presentational form we have to take it in all at once, rather than sequentially, and there is nothing equivalent to grammatical structure underlying it (Langer 1942:90-93, in Miller 1987:97).
In ‘running about their ways…pleating a pattern Gran Geamatron showed them’ (FW 257.3-5)1 a ‘texture of simultaneity’ is woven within Finnegans Wake, as ‘If there is a future in every past that is present’ (FW 496.35), where ‘a consciousness is free to consider events in any order it wishes, or spatially rather than temporally’ (Purdy 1982:212). Conceived as a unitary movement, the semantics of mystical union present in simultaneity offer a field of ‘acausal sympathy’ in which events, including the carving of motifs on rocks, can be situated. Thus, by ‘the foreknowledge or prevision by which he discovers all things, it will be more correct to think of it…as the knowledge of a never ending presence…better called providence or “looking forth” than prevision or “seeing beforehand”’ (Boethius 1999:134). This chimes in with the report that for Joyce, ‘his books were not to be taken as mere books, but as acts of prophecy’ (Ellmann 1959: 562, in Purdy 1982: 207).
1All quotations from Finnegans Wake are abbreviated to the initials of the book, and the page and line number. Thus, page 257, lines 3-5 are represented as FW 257.3-5.
References
Bakhtiar, L.1976. Sufi: Expressions of the Mystic Quest. London: Thames and Hudson.
Birtwistle, G. 1986. Living Art: Asger Jorn’s comprehensive theory of art between Helhesten and Cobra (1946-1949). Utrecht: Reflex.
Boethius. 1999. The Consolation of Philosophy (translated by V.Watts) London: Penguin.
Chambers, I. 1998. ‘History, the Baroque and the Judgement of the Angels’. In Marcus, L. and Nead, L. (eds), The Actuality of Walter Benjamin London: Lawrence and Wishart. 172-193.
Frankin, A. 1960. Programmatic Sketches. Internationale Situationniste. No 4 (June 1960). Translated by Reuben Keehan at https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/programmatic.html
Goodman, M. 1999. Temporalities of Prehistoric Life: household development and community continuity. In: Bruck, J and Goodman, M (eds). Making Places in the Prehistoric World. London: UCL Press. 145-159.
Ingold, T. 2000. The Perception of the Environment. London: Routledge.
Jorn, A. 1994b ‘Open Creation and its Enemies’. Originally published December 1960 in Internationale Situationniste 5. Trans. from the French by Fabian Tompsett..London: Unpopular Books
Joyce, J. 1939. Finnegans Wake. London: Faber and Faber
Knabb, Ken. 1981. Situationist International Anthology. Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets
McDonough, T. (ed) 2002. Guy Debord and the Situationist International. Cambridge, Mass. and London: The MIT Press
Miller, D. 1987. Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford: Blackwell
Purdy, S. 1982. Let’s Hear What Science Has to Say: Finnegans Wake and the Gnosis of Science. Benstock, B. (ed.) The Seventh of Joyce. Bloomington: Indiana University Press
Shield, P. 1998. Comparative Vandalism: Asger Jorn and the Artistic Attitude to Life Aldershot and Valby: Ashgate/Borgen
Vaneigem, R. 1983. The Revolution of Everyday Life. London/New York: Rebel Press/ Left Bank Books. (First published as Traité de savoir-vivre a l’usage des jeunes générations. Paris: Gallimard, 1967. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith.)
The Grammar of Matter 
