David Abram: The Spell of The Sensuous,Vintage, 1997. Chapters 1-4. Synopsis
by Farid Rener. 1. The Ecology of Magic : A personal introduction to the enquiry.
David Abram: The Spell of The Sensuous, Vintage, 1997. Chapters 1-4 Synopsis by Farid Rener 1. The Ecology of Magic : A personal introduction to the enquiry David Abram, a slight of hand magician, takes a journey to rural Indonesia to share magic with the shamans and folk-medicine doctors there: “For magicians — whether modern entertainers or indigenous, tribal sorcerers — have in common the fact that they work with the malleable texture of perception.” These healers were feared and revered in the villages in which they practised, as it was believed they might be able to cast their spells backwards to inflict diseases on the people that they would later cure. This allowed the magicians, who often lived on the outskirts of their villages, to attend to what they saw as their primary function - mediate between the human community and “the larger community of beings upon which the village depends for its nourishment and sustenance.” (6) This larger community, is not just animals and ‘sentient’ life - it also includes the winds and weather patterns, the rocks, etc. As intermediary, the shaman ensures that there is a balance between the human world and this more-than-human world. Disease is seen in many of these cultures as a form of imbalance, or of a demonic presence within the body - hence, the sorcerer derives their ability to heal through a constant interaction with this outside world. The shaman doesn’t mediate with “supernatural” entities as was presumed by the anthropologists and Christian missionaries who brought knowledge of these people to the West, rather, they mediate with the very physical, very natural, ecology. For Abram, magic is “the experience of existing in a world made up of multiple intelligences,” (10) and that each of these intelligences is an experiencing form. Abram tells a story of ants, and spirits. These spirits are not anthropomorphic, as we would see in the West, rather, spirits are “those modes of intelligence or awareness that do not possess a human form” (13). In death, spirits do not leave the sensible world “(where would it go?)” (16), it changes form and remains an “animating force within the vastness of the landscape”(16). After spending some time in Bali, Abram became much more aware of the life, and intelligence that was around him, he starts having ‘conversations’ with nature. As an ecologist, Abrams explains that our industrial society can no longer have a reciprocal relationship with nature, as the centralized economy, “can hardly be seen in relation to any particular landscape or ecosystem.” (22) We have lost sight of how dependent we are on the ecosystem and how it has shaped us into who are are: “Our bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold textures, sounds, and shapes of an animate earth—our eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes, as our ears are attuned by their very structure to the howling of wolves and the honking of geese. To shut ourselves off from these other voices, to continue by our lifestyles to condemn these other sensibilities to the oblivion of extinction, it to rob our own senses of their integrity, and to rob our
minds of their coherence. We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human. ” (22) The way we see nonhuman nature, for Abrams, is through the way that our civilization and technologies put it forward: nature has become a stock of resources, a standingreserve. 2. Philosophy on the way to ecology 2.1 Husserl and Phenomenology Phenomenology questions the modern assumption of a single, wholly determinable, objective reality (which followed from Descartes): “The everyday world in which we hunger and make love is hardly the mathematically determined “object” toward which the sciences direct themselves”(32). In fact, the world and I are reciprocal - when I am sick, the world becomes hazy, when a fog descends on the world, my thoughts become muddled, and I feel like sleeping. Scientists also live in this world, and hence cannot be a completely objective spectator, hence “the world of science is actually built on a world as it is directly experienced”(36). Husserl sought to make a ‘science of experience’: within which he would be able to give a stable footing to the other sciences.
Intersubjectivity Husserl described a field of appearances, within a subjective realm, that is “inhabited by multiple subjectivities. There are two types of phenomena: one which is inside myself, for instance, my daydreams; and one which unfolds entirely outside of myself, for instance, a tree bending in the wind. The latter are intersubjective phenomena - they are experienced by multiple sensing objects. The world which we live in becomes “an intertwined matrix of sensations and perceptions, a collective field of experience lived through many different angles.” (39) Everything has a multiplicity of views: “I sense that that tree is much more than what I directly see of it, since it is also what the others whom I see perceive of it; I sense that as a perceivable presence it already existed before I came to look at it…” (39)The tree is sensed by everything around it, the mice that live beneath its roots and the very bark that is on the tree itself. The Life World The intersubjective life world, is that world somewhere between a transcendental consciousness and the objective world of modern science. “The life-world is the world of our immediately lived experience, as we live it, prior to all our thoughts about it.” (40) It is the collective, primordial world, from which we draw our nourishment, within which we play an active part. The life-world is different for different cultures, as the world within which we live is dependent on the ways we live and engage with the world, but there are some aspects which are shared. Husserl’s work is not a rejection of science. He is instead arguing that quantitative science
is guided by the qualitative world of our common experience. 2.2 Merleau-Ponty and the participatory nature of perception The mindful life of the body For Merleau-Ponty, it is the body that is the subject of experience. The body, as it actually experiences things, the body which is prior to our anatomical, mechanistic conception of the body, is called the “body-subject”. This body is intertwined with the world - it gets sustenance from the world around it and contributes, and participates with to the world. It is the body which allows me to interact and engage with the things around me. By acknowledging the physicality of the body, we acknowledge that we are one of earth’s animals, that we are linked with them in inextricable ways.
The body’s silent conversation with things We never see things as finished objects - looking at an apple, we only ever see one side of it, the other side is invisible to me. I can never see the whole of the apple at once, by picking it up and turning it around, I can no longer see the side I was originally looking at. When I look closer, I notice a blemish arising from a worm who got its way in, or a small bruise from where I just dropped it. When I pick it up later, with a different mood, I see different things: “When my body thus responds to the mute solicitation of another being, that being responds in turn, disclosing to my senses some new aspect or dimension that in turn invites further exploration.” (52) Perception, for Merleau-Ponty, is reciprocity - an exchange between our bodies and the things that surround it. The Animatedness of the Perceptual World Neither the perceiver or the perceived is wholly passive in perception: while perception is different for each of us, I am not the entire cause of the perception. Perception is “a solicitation of my body by the sensible, and a questioning of the sensible by my body, a reciprocal encroachment…”(54) Perception is a linking of my rhythms with the rhythms of the thing I perceive. For Merleau-Ponty, the sensible world is active and alive perception becomes a “mutual interaction, an intercourse.” (55). Everything in the sensible world is active, nothing presents itself to us as utterly passive or inert. Perception as Participation For indigenous, oral cultures, inanimate objects are often thought of as alive. All of these objects participate in our and their own existence. Participation is a defining attribute of perception itself -i.e. there is an active coupling between the perceiver and the perceived. We have continual participation with the world - we can suspend a particular instance of participation (e.g. when your mind wanders as I speak), yet “we can never suspend the flux of participation itself.” (59) Basically, we are always perceiving something. Synaesthesia - The fusion of the senses Perception is the involvent of all of the senses, together. Synaesthesia isn’t just what neuroscientists see as the overlapping of the senses, rather, our perception is inherently
synaesthetic. While our senses are distinct, they make up a whole - they all converge on a perceived thing. This is what allows us to experience the thing as “a centre of forces, as another nexus of experience, as an Other.”(62) Abrams sees our bodies as open circuits, completing themselves only through the things that we perceive.
The Recuperation of the sensuous is the rediscovery of the earth Abrams explains that our modern city has essentially dumbed our senses. “The superstraight lines and right angles of our office architecture, for instance, make our animal senses wither even as they support the abstract intellect; the wild, earth-born nature of the materials —the woods, clays, metals, and stones that went into the building—are readily forgotten behind the abstract and calculable form.”(64). On the other hand, when looking at the world as a body-subject, the world comes alive in a carnal way - we start living the biosphere from within, as part of the world, not outside it. Matter as Flesh The flesh is “the mysterious tissue or matrix that underlies and gives rise to both the perceiver and the perceived as interdependent aspects of its own spontaneous activity.” (66) This is what makes it impossible to imagine a sensible object without having it sensed, similarly, we cannot imagine being able to sense without having sensible objects to project onto our senses. Touching and Being Touched: The reciprocity of the sensuous As our perception is participation, we are only able to touch because it is possible for us to be touched. By touching a tree, we feel ourselves being touched by the tree. “We might as well say that we are organs of this world, flesh of its flesh, and that the world is perceiving itself through us” (68) This leads to an environmental ethic which leads us to respect the well being of nature and the well being of our fellow humans. The Flesh allows for a world in which everything is connected: “The surroundings are aware, sensate, personified. They feel. They can be offended.” (69) 3. The Flesh of Language We can only define language through language itself. We learn language bodily, not mentally - a child actively makes sounds and enters into language through play. For Merleau-Ponty, linguistic meaning comes from the “felt experience induced by specific sounds” (76) Thus, language is deeply embedded within the world - it is not just a ‘code’, this is only the case today, when meaning has become impoverished. Language has become the defining feature of humanity - it is what makes humans unique from the other animals. Language, however, has two parts - the sensorial part which has rhythm, tone, timbre, and a symbolic part where we attach abstract meanings to different words. For Merleau-Ponty these cannot be separated (for most scientists and philosophers, language is merely the latter), indeed, the sensorial part of language is what makes verbal communication possible. This is the part of language which we share with animals - if
we listen, we can hear as rich communication between blackbirds as we do when we see two friends talking. This extends, to some extent, to all objects, since “to the sensing body all phenomena are animate, actively soliciting the participation of our senses” (81) By speaking a language, you enter into it completely - there is no need to know every single word of it. Language is likened to a living fabric that is woven by those who speak it. (There is still a difference between expressive, genuine speech and speech that merely repeats established formulae). Language is like the flesh - it is interconnected with the whole of the sensuous world - when you speak of a being it is the being that speaks within you, not you speaking of being. Abrams believes that along with the rest of nature - language is also being destroyed by technology: “As the splashing speech of the rivers is silenced by more and more dams, as we drive more and more of the land’s wild voices into the oblivion of extinction, our own languages become increasingly impoverished and weightless, progressively emptied of their earthly resonance.” (86) For many indigenous tribes, it is believed that language was given to people by the animals, or animals and humans all used to speak the same language. Some traces of this language remain, and shamans are able to still enter into the more-than-human world to talk with the animals. Thus, language is not the special property of humans, rather it is an “expression of the animate earth that enfolds us.”(90) The question Abrams asks, if language and sensation is so participatory, how is it that these things are becoming more and more impoverished? 4. Animism and the Alphabet Abrams goes on a quest to find where our disdain for nature comes from. The Hebrews and the Greeks: “seem to have sown the seeds of our contemporary estrangement — one seeming to establish the spiritual or religious ascendancy of humankind over nature, the other effecting a more philosophical or rational dissociation of the human intellect from the organic world.” (95) Writing is like language in that it comes from a mixing of the human community and the animate landscape. We read words as tribal hunters would read tracks of deer on the floor of the forest. The first ‘writings’ are to do with the mysteries of the more-thanhuman world: images of lightning, snakes, paw prints. Abrams tells us of the creation of our alphabet, tracing it through rebuses (pictographic ‘puns’), to the aleph-beth which established a character for every consonant sounds of the Semitic language. This created a distance between culture and nature - prior to this, images would refer back to nature in some form, instead the aleph-beth was indicative of a form to be made by the mouth. The letters of the aleph-beth, however, were tied to the more-than-human world - the Aleph looked somewhat like an ox head, the word aleph means ox in ancient hebrew. Once this travelled to greece, this sensorial reference was removed: “While the Semitic
name had served as a reminder of the worldly origin of the letter, the Greek name served only to designate the human-made letter itself.”(102) Greece was an oral culture prior to the alphabet being introduced. As an oral culture, all practical knowledge was given through speech. Learning to write, “thoroughly disabled the oral poet, ruining his capacity for oral improvisation.” (107) Plato and Socrates were on the threshold between an oral and a written culture, and it was Plato who helped develop new thought structures to deal with this technology. Socrates, through his questioning “stunned his listeners out of the mnemonic trance demanded by orality, and hence out of the sensuous, storied realm to which they were accustomed.”(110) Abrams argues that this is the birth of the notions of being and becoming - by writing down terms such as ‘virtue’ it takes on an unchanging meaning independent of individual virtuous actions. It was the phonetic alphabet which allowed this to happen. This breeds a new reflective awareness - the psychê, which is refined by turning away from the sensory world to contemplate Ideas - i.e. to contemplate the literate intellect, the written word. However, in Phaedrus, Plato tells the story of Thamus who is offered writing as a gift by the God Thoth. He refuses it: “If men learn this [writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks” (113) For Socrates, writing, at best, serves as a reminder for things that we already know. This came at a time when Athens had already moved away from a direct participation with the natural landscape – Socrates explains in Phaedrus: “You must forgive me, dear friend. I’m a lover of learning, and trees and open country won’t teach me anything, whereas men in the town do.” (116) Reading as an activity, is inherently synaesthetic. We no longer experience the world as all encompassing - we can no longer read the signs that it gives us, as it is the written text has taken this locus. “For, to read is to enter into a profound participation, or chiasm, with the inked marks upon the page… We hear spoken words, witness strange scenes or visions, even experience other lives… This is a form of animism that we take for granted, but it is animism nonetheless — as mysterious as a talking stone.” (131) Some oral tribes see writing as a form of magic, a way to create “talking leaves”. By combining letters, the Holy One in the Kabbalah, created the universe. However, by introducing the magic of letters, other, traditional magics, whither and die.
