Runesoup: Staring Up At You From The Shewstone

Staring Up At You From The Shewstone

When I talk about the Big Table Animism stuff, a lot of you nod along -which is great- but I want to emphasise that it is more than just talking to your tomatoes and more than just a few books (God save you if you ask me about Abram again) that think the whole thing can be solved by saying ants or spiders are the spirits. They are, but also so are spirits. The so-called anthropological turn is profoundly, insufficiently haunted. Extension of personhood beyond the human is essential, but it is only the first step.

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?

1. The sigils course: relied upon the recognition of semiosis, language and communication in the 'beyond the human' world as found in Kohn's How Forests Think. Sigils, of course, are semiotically situated in human languages. So exploring how they 'work' requires updated understandings of the presence of language and communication in a wider world. Not doing so falls into the falsified Enlightenment whimsy that only humans use language or think in language. Sigils are things that happen in a planetary communicative context, not a human one. (Oh! The places we go, eh?)
   
2. The grimoire course: relied upon Tim Ingold's 'lines' model to explore and model the changing ontology and teleology of the list spirits both before and during the grimoiric period. Not doing so, and unilaterally deciding that the spirits 'are' surviving Classical gods or whatever tips you into Viveiros de Castro's anthropologist trap. You have an 'unfair' yet ultimately useless epistemological advantage.
   
3. The upcoming journeying course: will, to some extent, have these two 'line' together. How do you ‘line’ archetypes when ‘thinking’ is widened out to the natural world -especially when Jung writes that they could well predate mankind? (People don't have ideas, ideas have people.) What prehuman 'mind' did the archetypes operate within if forests think? Describe to me in precise detail how this is materially different from the so-called spirit model? Chaos magic's 'Model categorisation' is probably still useful for out-of-the-circle analysis but the models most of us typically defer to are artefacts from the twentieth century. The metamodel is long overdue for its own 'anthropological turn'. (Maybe then we can finally throw out the 'information theory model' with the old Amstrads and Commodore 64s.)