At a dinner party, there are many dishes and many guests. Conversation flows, along with the drinks, and relationships are formed and re-fomed. This is the metaphor you need to keep in mind for this post, the central axis about the whole thing turns. It\’s being front-loaded like this, precisely because it\’s something I want you to return to if you\’re feeling lost – if you lose the point. Consider it the well-worn path through the forest – a thing of ritual that both strangers and friends may use, made so by long practice.
Do not ignore the fact that a dinner party is the province of the middle and upper classes. Do not ignore that the working class have been getting together and enjoying food and fellowship since time immemorial. Neither should you forget that, in some senses, a dinner party began as highly formalised. There is an etiquette – specialist crockery, cutlery, even sometimes in seating. All these are used to gain particular effects.
I\’ll leave it to you to decide what those effects might be.
Nevertheless, every time Gordon brings up Big Table Animism, I have to work through the image of a dinner party. Though it\’s an excellent coinage, a dinner party is what the phrase summons, and that\’s deliberate. Many of us have little concept of what a ritualised feast would be like, after all. The closest we get is Christmas Dinner, or something similar. While for many, it and its equivalents may or may not take place on holy days, as modern Westerners we have few conceptions of ritual feasting – unless one is say, Catholic and in a neighbourhood filled with folks who are not WASPs.
Sure there\’s the Eucharist, a potent ritualised remembrance of a Pesach combined with deity sacrifice. But is it a feast?
feast (n.)
c. 1200, \”secular celebration with feasting and entertainment\” (often held on a church holiday); c. 1300, \”religious anniversary characterized by rejoicing\” (rather than fasting), from Old French feste \”religious festival, holy day; holiday; market, fair; noise, racket; jest, fun\” (12c., Modern French fête), from Vulgar Latin *festa (fem. singular; also source of Italian festa, Spanish fiesta), from Latin festa \”holidays, feasts, festal banquets,\” noun use of neuter plural of festus \”festive, joyful, merry,\” related to feriae \”holiday\” and fanum \”temple,\” from Proto-Italic *fasno- \”temple,\” from PIE *dhis-no- \”divine, holy; consecrated place,\” suffixed form of PIE root *dhes-, forming words for religious concepts.
Now, one might rejoice in the Mystery of the Resurrection, but the Old French feste clears things a little: market, fair; noise, racket; jest, fun. These are not genteel things, like Hyacinth Bucket\’s \”candlelight suppers\”.
They are messy, noisy common things. And that commonality does not preclude Mystery, indeed, these are often the periods when the High Wyrd manifests throughout the community. The dinner party is for a select few, carefully invited. Even if those invited are merely family and friends, merely a group connected by occupation or acquaintance, the host invites them to the table. That invite might be a religious initiation, a passphrase, an accident of birth, etc, but it is still there.
The reason the dinner party metaphor works is because all those invited are still small sections of the population. Monoculture as whole will not permit a feast, a noisy festive, fuzzy, barbarous expression of irrational and primal urges.
It\’s interesting to me that Gordon wrote the post that inspired this one, and that I\’m writing, during the Notting Hill Hill Carnival. A famous celebration of London\’s vibrant multiculturalism – arising out of attempts to deal with race-relations combining with street festivals. In its early years, and up until 1987, the police were severely antagonistic towards it, before taking a more conciliatory approach. Today, in 2017, the Guardian is running articles that the carnival is \’unsafe\’ and about police crackdowns in the run-up to this event. But this kind of thing is nothing new:
\”Carnival is not alien to British culture. Bartholomew Fair and Southwark Fair in the 18th century were moments of great festivity and release. There was juggling, pickpocketing, whoring, drinking, masquerade — people dressed up as the Archbishop of Canterbury and indulged in vulgar acts. It allowed people a space to free-up but it was banned for moral reasons and for the antiauthoritarian behaviour that went on like stoning of constables. Carnival allowed people to dramatise their grievances against the authorities on the street… Notting Hill Carnival single-handedly revived this tradition and is a great contribution to British cultural life.\” – Professor David Dabydeen
As Gordon points out:
\”It\’s even worse among the Frenchies, of course. You get caught up in the Paris trap of Latour and the like: Turning your telephone into a scary monster, fetishising the ‘primitive’ yet finding spirits too icky so pretending you’re doing the opposite, making everything a natural-cultural hybrid so no one can disagree with you and still somehow end up with something that looks like the secular republic: ‘political animism as hyper-rationalism’. It’s idiotic at this point, held together only by its self-justification that everything can be a hybrid so anything goes. Over-written jibber-jabber. (Shout out to Dr Clever: This is the origin of Ingold\’s suspicion of the hybrid, I surmise.) What are the hyper-rational, animist politics of the Fatima Incident?\”
Earlier in the week, I got into this on tumblr, with Mother the Ever-Animate. Except in my case, it wasn\’t a telephone, but the keyboard I\’m writing this on:
\”You don’t have to “believe” in spirits to understand that all objects are capable of conjuring experience within human neurology when we interface with them. But what our enculturated epistemological frame has done is excise 95% of those felt-senses.by saying it is impossible for the interface between so-called “ordinary” objects and humans to generate meaningful felt-sense-experience.
To say “my laptop is alive” invites ridicule, because people naturally assume this is some kind of anthropomorphism. The laptop is patently not human.
This is anthropocentric reductionism and “inanimism” at it its finest.
But, if we approach the laptop, openly, pathically – in a state where we are open to all felt-sense-experiencesof it, then the ‘ordinary’ object becomes capable, within that context of conjuring, of Being itself.
If we managed to break free of the enculturation, all objects – all phenomena would be capable, would be revealed as enchanting us. That is, we are ensorcelled by our world; we act and react in response to it, though we know not why, because we have been *trained out* of the idea that the things we interact with act on us
[…]
As I type this now, opening myself to the felt-sense-totality of typing on this keyboard, I realise I am experiencing a charge of sort, an electric thrill, not unlike the moment you brush a lover’s hand for the first time – subtle tightening of the throat, subtle hair-raising of the scalp, the tingle in the spine.
There is something akin to desire there, to continue the complexity of the interaction. A feeling of being drawn in further, into a world of electric sparks and living plastic, metal and stone. Not human, not complex, but along with this, the knowledge of all the things we have created together, this keyboard and I – a desire to continue such conjurings.
Some might say I am projecting human emotions onto the keyboard – I disagree. I am not projecting. Rather I am experiencing, feeling, knowing. Sheer imagination though detractors might call it, nonetheless it has a biophysical effect on me, and as I go deeper, those sensations become richer, stranger – transporting me to a world where my sense of self is constantly being impressed-upon-and-impressing-on all phenomena.\”
Now, you might read this and wonder if I\’m saying that my keyboard has a spirit. Actually, I\’m not. What I\’m describing above is a method of interaction with the kosmos. Some folks have replied to the original post questioning whether the keyboard is truly answering back or not – if it has a volition of its own. Here\’s where we get technical, because an answer can come, even if there is no-one there to give it – it is the attitude of question which generates answer. In an interaction, the inter portion occurs through the action.
Technically the keyboard is a monster – in its original sense of portal, or marker, sign of divinity. But it\’s not a hybrid – not two things slapped together, to make another. It is its own thing, allowing \”[T]he recognition of semiosis, language and communication in the \’beyond the human\’ world\” as Gordon puts it.
It\’s sort of like my shewstone, or ouija-board in a sense, a constructed thing that allows me to write thousands upon thousands of words, some of which, I admit, have been written when my consciousness was capable of communicating with \’beyond the human world\’. In the right state of mind, it becomes a ritual tool.
But it\’s not a spirit, because animism isn\’t simply saying that everything has a spirit. An individual or group engaging in animistic realpolitik recognises that:
- The anthropocentric view appears very, very wrong.
- There are other Beings or wights which are capable of thought, action and communication. These three things may, or may sometimes very much not be like the human versions.
- Ockham\’s Razor is like bringing a knife to a gunfight – any reductionism you apply will be shot full of holes by the Kosmos at large and any inhabitant you attempted to reduce to your map. Probably with a weird-looking AK-47, because those things are everywhere
- Understand that, not only is the map not the territory, you\’re making it as a security blanket, investing it with talismanic power. Recognising this has its uses, but ultimately, it\’s only a security blanket.
- Relationships and pacts are not only useful but are in fact essential. Humans are not only social animals, we are daemonically social.
That daemonic sociability is fairly obvious in a carnival. Think of the masks, the floats with their effigies, the music, the dancing – all the things that Archontic forces would want to reduce, make \’safe\’. Think of the press of bodies, the rhythms. Think yes, of the psychoactive properties of them, of the drugs consumed on the sly, the offerings made, the entheogens interfacing with nervous systems.
Think of them, and then think of that route into the forest, I mentioned.
The politik part of animistic realpolitik is important here:
politic (adj.)
early 15c., \”pertaining to public affairs,\” from Middle French politique \”political\” (14c.) and directly from Latin politicus \”of citizens or the state, civil, civic,\” from Greek politikos \”of citizens, pertaining to the state and its administration; pertaining to public life,\” from polites \”citizen,\” from polis \”city\” (see polis). Replaced in most adjectival senses by political. From mid-15c. as \”prudent, judicious.\”
polis (n.)
\”ancient Greek city-state,\” 1894, from Greek polis, ptolis \”citadel, fort, city, one\’s city; the state, community, citizens,\” from PIE *tpolh- \”citadel; enclosed space, often on high ground, hilltop\” (source also of Sanskrit pur, puram, genitive purah \”city, citadel,\” Lithuanian pilis \”fortress\”).
The high ground, the enclosed space – the body that is recognised as itself, the state as entity. All of these, at root, both imply the need for sociability, community, affairs of state. But such things cannot happen in isolation. The structure of the polis must, occasionally, with deliberate spontaneity (not actually a contradiction) come to resemble what is beyond it.
beyond (prep., adv.)
Old English begeondan \”on the other side of, from the farther side,\” from be- \”by,\” here probably indicating position, + geond \”yonder\” (prep.); see yond. A compound not found elsewhere in Germanic. From late 14c. as \”further on than,\” 1530s as \”out of reach of.\” To be beyond (someone) \”to pass (someone\’s) comprehension\” is by 1812.
yon (adj., pron.)
Old English geon \”that (over there),\” from Proto-Germanic *jaino- (source also of Old Frisian jen, Old Norse enn, Old High German ener, Middle Dutch ghens, German jener, Gothic jains \”that, you\”), from PIE pronominal stem *i- (source also of Sanskrit ena-, third person pronoun, anena \”that;\” Latin idem\”the same,\” id \”it, that one;\” Old Church Slavonic onu \”he;\” Lithuanian ans \”he\”). As an adverb from late 15c., a shortening of yonder.
The forest has roots and branches, an ecology all its own. There are in fact, many paths. Many ways to navigate it. You could even cut yourself a new one, but in doing so, you might get lost, or irritate one of the inhabitants. Creatures once confined to its environs might enter your city, as you encroach on their habitat, and thus change the polis\’ ecology.
But if we investigate the carnival route, the spontaneously generated, well-worn path, what do we find but a method of engaging with the Forest which it allows – for that well worn path was begun that way, very often, because there was a pre-existing route – where the difficulty gradient of travel was, if not easier, then had less complications.
BTA is, in a sense a coming-to-terms, with our own daemonic sociability. It is easy to say, well yes, humans are wights, are spirits too. But beyond that? Its implications and consequences are massive, philosophically, morally, and existentially. If one is able to summon spirits, to bind or make pacts with them, then what does that say about us? Are we operating, functioning through habitual behaviours due to the interconnections of our daemonic sociability – peculiarly contoured due to pacts made and interactions had by our ancestors, by those in our locations?
Have our cultures evolved in response, not just to ancient and modern environmental and physicalist ecologies, but to those we might call spiritual? Do we act and react in response to localised and ancient animistic realpolitik?
If we suppose this is so, beyond Western New Age misinterpretations of karma, are we, as living entities, active or passive participants in the Pandaemonium?
There is a sixth rule which should be borne in mind by those engaging in animistic realpolitik:
6. There is no such thing as being in control. There is only the possibility of negotiation
In Mama\’s Carnival, the rules are very real. But they evolve out of politik-al expediency, custom, and experimentation.