Spinal Catastrophism: A Secret History

Preface: A Plutarchian Cauda

Aristotle reports that birds never fly backwards or tail-first. This is not simply a fact of avian ethology, but an exponent of a world’s choreographies, which are unlimited in principle. Thus any exhibition of the resulting world must cohibit these choreographies, i.e. must enclose their series in a finite finite form itself contributory to those movements. Movements are worldmakers of exactly the sort that worlds make, etching ontogenesis over the earth, by way of which the latter acquires, so to speak, lithic ‘morpholects’ in consequence of what is made of them. A mark’s being made renders any actual beginnings of directionality into referents for subsequent movements, but nothing dictates that such later movements merely continue or issue from their precursor states; later advents may reorient earlier, with morphogenetic vortices repeatedly refashioning or even revoking the axes of antecedent forms. Hence Aristotle’s ‘law of movement’, according to which the antecedent has its actuality in the consequent, applies ‘alike in figures and things animate’. It ‘constitutes a series, each successive term of which potentially contains its predecessor, e.g. the square the triangle, the sensory power the self-nutritive…’. Whereas Aristotle clearly foresees a progressive anabasis issuing from this law, it is, as Schelling recognized, an important precursor of the theory of recapitulation, particularly as advanced by Kielmeyer, and as received by post-Kantian philosophy of nature. That law, known variously (without implying any constancy of content) as the MeckelSerres or Biogenetic Law, states that ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’, which, when taken at the level of products, postulates that the later stages of lower forms are recapitulated in the lower stages of higher products. This raises a plethora of exploratory vectors, amongst which I will note two.

(1) Does (or, prophetically: will) finality of form obtain in nature or, to put it differently, does ascent terminate with the actualisation of a particular form? That is to say, following Aristotle’s formulation of the law of motion, can there be a form encircling all nature’s potentials, amounting to the most final of final causations in postulating an end to nature? If such a form has, does, or will obtain, ontogenesis is cast not simply as productive individuation, as in Simondon, but, via a singular, persistent embodiment, as the progressive exhaustion of all development. For in this scenario, ontogenesis would terminate in an ontology incapable of producing its own revelation, i.e. it would become ontographically compromised.

(2) How far back into phylogenetic history does recapitulation extend? Does the Great Circle entail that the achievement of the cervical zenith must coincide with the recovery, via phylogenetic katabasis, of the lifeless in the living? For in this Lovecraftian Orphism, polarities are maximally coincident to the degree that they maximally diverge. For the moment, we must note that if one is answered in the negative, so too must the other be, since to deny the first while asserting the second is to assert, inconsistently, that the exhaustion of nature is achieved from the first, or that ontogeny never took place.

Accordingly, the problems exposed by the very idea of a form of natural history, a ‘form of development’ (is a Platonic ‘Becoming Itself by Itself’ conceivable?) initiate the ungrounding Moynihan here mines, beginning from the mechanical agony of the ‘bad back’ resulting from the vain reorientation of lithic plains subjected to organic and so impermanent resculpting: of the possible termini of the spinal reorganisation of lithic cycles, the ‘cervical zenith’ is neither absolute nor final, but only the medium from which ‘phylogenetic katabasis’ descends. The ladder of beings does not lead ever upward but attains points of critical reversal, so that its uppermost rungs are bowed to coincide with those preceding their achievement. Will this fall terminate, like that of Icarus, in abrupt confrontation with the earth, or does the Great Circle descend deeper into phylic prehistory? What are the seeds of all becoming, the principles from which it emerges? If neither anabasis (the cervical zenith) nor katabasis (lithic reversion) attain finality of form, what ultimate determinants can the Great Circle have?

Here the question of a form of what is intelligible but by definition insensible assumes its fully amphibolic impact. We might even ask whether topology does not in fact eliminate the prospect of a valid critique of the coincidence of the sensible and the intelligible, insofar as asking after the form of accomplished being is indissociably a problem for noiesis as for poiesis, for the being of appearing as much as for the appearing of being, and therefore entails an ontographic productivity rather than a critical dissociation.

Indeed, the ontology presented by all forms of finalism may therefore be identified by its double incapacity, for ontography (being’s auto-exhibition) on the one hand, and for ontogeny (the production of being) on the other. Anontographic Being, incapable of self-revelation, is blind and anontogenetic, precisely because it is unproductive; ontography therefore implies ontogeny if sensibility neither obtains without the sensible production of the sensible, nor intelligibility without at least possible intellection. Ontography, accordingly, is onto-graphy insofar not only as graphisms are but additionally insofar as they are because they are made or generated. Ontography ‘is’ ontogenetically only if amongst the capacities of being are exhibitions that grasp being as its integral prosthesis. Ontogenetically, therefore, the graphic minutely augments being’s unstable futures, just as the earth illuminates its possible pasts. Hence Richard Long’s stone lines, for example, which are the autographs of a fragile actuality, the rectilinearity of which ‘lithographs’ the planetary surface with the rational operation that made them.

Moynihan’s graphic strategies similarly generate articulate lines. They are not records of some blunt imitation, but sensibly remediate the knotted bonds diversely formed by the intelligible and the sensible: the biped’s upright gait tends irrevocably to the quadruped’s geophilia, the forward becomes the downward and the upward geophilically forward. Crucially, this axial twisting, with the geometric trappings of ideality, is not sensibly neutral since the axes it twists make pain (cervical curvature). Meanwhile, what we might call, in a Fichtean register, the presentational stress towards grasping the Great Circle forces noogeny beyond the forms in which it happens to be incident.

This has an unlikely precedent in Plutarch’s Platonic Questions, where he unpacks Plato’s likening ‘of the All (τοῦ παντὸς) to a single line that has been divided into unequal segments’ to reveal two entailments of this image of the universe, this cosmography:

(1) The line is continuous prior to the division.

(2) Idea and perceptible are coterminous, insofar as ‘the intelligibles are patterns […] of which perceptibles are semblances or reflections’ (1001e).

The demonstration of this last point proceeds via a ‘leading down’ or katabasis through reasoning to geometry, then astronomy, harmonics, and somatics, leading upward again through abstraction. But the crucial hypothesis in this regard comes later, when Plutarch asks after the surface geometry on which the god ‘traces the design of the nature of the all’: the dodecahedron forms the preferred cosmogonic surface since it is ‘furthest withdrawn from straightness’ and ‘associated with the spherical’ (1003c–d). A continuous straight line traced on a planar surface differs topologically and in potency from the same line traced over a dodecahedron; where extremes do not meet, they must nevertheless cross. That ideas are always exhibited in a medium just if they imitate their generation from what antedates being and so renders the latter an outcome or product of that antecedence, means that their imitation consists in the attempt not to arrest or capture becoming, but to become an exponent of it.

And just as Plutarch combines the great Middle Platonic theme of ‘the image of the universe’ with the conceiving of becoming, this accords with Plato’s consistent formulation of the sensible and the intelligible in a twofold manner: genetically (as Bernard Bosanquet and Gernot Böhme pointed out at opposite ends of the twentieth century, Plato’s address to Ideas is couched in causal rather than mimetic language) and analogically: the graphic is to the sensible as the intelligible is to the ontological. Thus making or poietics is the condition of the analogical relation (though Plutarch asks whether there is a difference between parent and maker, between birth and becoming). Only both together enable the criticism of mimesis in Republic X, since the terminus of mimesis is not being but appearing, which reaches only part way up the ladder to being, while the Orphic triad formed of the musician, the lover, and the metaphysician seeks ascent not just to being, but beyond it, to become Lord of Being, or to imitate its source qua source.

Two issues thus emerge. Firstly, an ultimately causal asymmetry between being and mimesis makes intelligible-sensible analogy asymmetrical in turn by, secondly, setting the ontological dimension of the problem itself into the ontogenetic. If, that is, mimesis consists in the imitating of being, but being is itself the outcome of generation, then generation by imitation (making) is closer to ontogeny than to its result. It is because the god is most godlike in so far as it creates that the homoiosis theo is adequate to the extent that production occurs, rather than insofar as the features of generation’s products repeat. Although the initial problem posed by the partial or asymmetrical analogy of the sensible and the intelligible, or of the ontological and the graphic, concerns the making or emergence of the sensible from the intelligible, successful mimesis consists always in the revelation of the production of the Ideas, their ‘emergence in a medium’, so that ontography recapitulates ontogeny. The consequent problem, however, is what becomes of a graphism that imitates not the product of ontogenesis, but its action (Aristotle) or operation (Aquinas)?

If a graphism, the poetics of the sensible whose tracks structure its objects, is mimetic of ontogenetic operations, how does it differ from the ontogeneses in approaching which, following the Platonic analogy, it falls short and falls, like Icarus’s katabasis? And if it does not, then its ascent, its anabasis, takes it beyond being in the sense that a being will be its product if the mimesis of operation is itself operation. An operation is an operation just when it is determined as the operation that it turns out to be by the product it produces, and to which, for that same reason, it is irreducible. If it is not so determined, of course, then neither does this problem arise, nor is it mimetic.

Once the productivity prior to being, the cause alike of sensibles and intelligibles, of being and beings—once this ontogenetic dimension is taken into account, graphism is no longer secondary in relation to a being as innocent of lines drawn as of becomings, but resumes its position amongst productives, making the line as much a worldmaker as any other.

Plutarch questions the ‘generated gods’ not out of scepticism, but in order to conceive the asymmetry of generation in relation to mere being. The instigating is not the coming to be, but itself comes to be being only through those consequents without which it would be neither being nor instigating. Being is the past tense of its presentation, and its presentation is the future of being, the additional mark by which being is augmented by cohibition, the encircling that ‘bound[s] the unlimited with limits and shapes’ (1001b). Cohibition in turn moulds the cohibited into the medium of both its contents’ futurition and therefore of errant phylogeny: no additional element, if additional, leaves the bonded what it was, on pain of simply not being an additional element. One of the consequences of the indifference of generation and making is that mark-making either is ontogenetic or is not at all. That phylogenetic katabasis is initiated in a world wherein mark-making and its exhibition occurs resituates being as the medium worked by ontogenetic turbulence and an ontographic cohibition whose exhibition is itself ontogenetic. How revelatory, then, ontography: drawing what there is where drawing was not.

"Person is a Forensick term".

- John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1700)

"Mere bones"?

- Stanisław Lem, Imaginary Magnitude (1973)

"Reason, an Ignis fatuus, of the Mind,

Which leaving light of Nature, sense, behind;

Pathless and dan’grous wandring way it takes,

Through errors, Fenny-Boggs, and Thorny Brakes;

Whilst the misguided follower, climbs with pain,

Mountains of whimseys, heap’d in his own Brain:

Stumbling from thought to thought, falls headlong down,

Into doubt’s boundless Sea, where like to drown,

Books bear him up a while, and makes him try,

To swim with Bladders of Philosophy;

In hopes still t’overtake th’escaping light,

The Vapour dances in his dazling sight,

Till spent, it leaves him to eternal Night".

- John Wilmot, 2nd Earl Of Rochester, ‘A Satyre Against Reason And Mankind’ (1679)

Cervical Prospectus

C1. A Giga-Autumn of Genealogy

Philosophical genealogy has lately been defined as the unveiling of ‘causes masquerading as reasons’. It works to reveal that those beliefs that we think depend upon edifying reasons in fact depend upon contingent causes, unveiling unaccountabilities in the structure of belief. Thus one may be seen to hold a particular belief not on account of deliberative ratiocination, but as a result of some accident of background or upbringing. (As Robert Brandom recounts, for Freud the latter would be something to do with the Oedipal drama, for Marx the effect of economic structures, and so forth).

At least, this characterises classical genealogy, as practised by what Brandom calls the ‘great unmaskers of the nineteenth century’. Classical genealogy works to reveal local unaccountabilities within the edifice of belief. In both Freud and Marx, suspicion bottoms out in a privileged register, and the genealogical endeavour is constrained to specific ‘vocabularies’ (i.e., psychology or economics). In both cases it thus remains, in many respects, a rational enterprise: the critique of supposedly rational beliefs doesn’t do away with rational belief as such. Despite critiquing reason, in classical genealogy the practice of suspicion remains beholden to the better reason and to the rational: it unmasks local arrogations in order to secure greater global accountability.

The strain of genealogy entreated here, however, is no mere question of ‘causes masquerading as reasons’, but very soon becomes a matter of tectonics parading as reasons. In this hypergenealogy, the liquidation of deliberations, reasons, and justifications is no longer constrained to specific vocabularies, but is generalized across the entire edifice. By definition, this does away with even the residual fealty to rational order retained by classical genealogy. Dragged across the thorny brakes and fenny-boggs of its own errant history, reason—that cozening ignis fatuus of the mind—is plunged headlong into doubt’s boundless sea. Hypergenealogy rejects all accountability, and thus all criteria of selectivity in our representations of an objective world—encouraging instead a libertine semantic irresponsibility. It is genealogy on steroids. For genealogically revealing everything that we think and do as utter arrogation is necessarily recursive. It cannot but also apply itself to itself. Hypergenealogizing therefore doesn’t generate claims that are ever more just (for, by its own lights, there can be no ‘better’ or ‘worse’ claims), it just enjoins the generation of ever more profligate, ever more exquisitely arrogated, claims. There can no longer be better or worse claims, only more. Here, boundlessness kicks into productivity: doubt becomes an orgiastic agnoseology, selectivity is duly suspended, and arrogation careens towards force rather than fallacy: a power to pullulate in muscular wrong-mindedness rather than an eradicable error or an avenue of tendentious deselection. Genealogy on steroids tends toward conceptual wantonness, semantic lasciviousness. What ensues is a voluptuousness of vocabularies: a mangling of target domains—from phonetics to rheology, from psychology to volcanology—that any right-minded thinker would consider distinct. ‘Suspicion’ is bent inward onto itself, spiralling into superlation.

From the perspective of right-minded reason, this is gross impiety. Yet, for many of the thinkers explored below, pollent superlation—rather than prudent suspicion—offers the promise of reconciling human experience with the enormities (in both senses of the term) of natural history. Instead of being responsible to an object=X, and thus having a world in view, superlation recaptures the ontogenetic dimension of enormous historicity, and forges the world anew. Ontogenesis, after all, has never itself been ‘suspicious’ in its gigantism. This is the promise of recapitulation: to redefine ‘conceptmongering’ not as a representational practice held accountable by natural history as a set object domain, but as natural history in the making. To be libertine is, in a sense, to reiterate the forces that made you: to allow graphism to once again reassume its proper place amongst the productives, to allow thought of the world to become a worldmaker. What could be more historical than creation?

And so, philosophic assiduity be damned, ‘fill me from the crown to the toe topfull’ with impious enormity. Supererogation and suspicion pushed aside, this book explores where, and how far, certain (arguably wrong-minded) thinkers have been able to travel along the twisted path of a genealogy that isn’t suspicious of the winding relation between planet and person but, rather, revisits (and in some instances reignites) the superlative dimensions of this filiation. This twisted path, again and again, turns out to be precisely that line from ‘crown’ to ‘toe’: the vertical axis of the body and its bony ledger, the spinal column. This is because, for a nature with a history, an anatomy is just a memory: and we have had spines for as long as we’ve had brains. Can it be a coincidence that so many thinkers have been drawn to a certain heady admixture of these notions— a theoretical superlation that has only lately been christened ‘Spinal Catastrophism’?

The chief contemporary exponent of this hypergenealogical heresy is the notorious Professor Daniel Charles Barker. Yet, as we shall see, in incorporating Spinal Catastrophism into his ‘Geocosmic Theory of Trauma’, Barker drew upon a rich history. Before we explore its wealth of delirious superlations, however, it will pay to establish the philosophical stakes involved in the questions Barker and others drew upon. What exactly is involved in the relation between person and planet?

C2. Cervical Zenith

In his first Critique, Immanuel Kant orients reason in relation to the planetary surface, and thus to human bipedalism. He writes that, although the earth appears to one’s immediate senses as a flat surface extending indefinitely to the horizon, we can nevertheless, ‘in accordance with a priori principles’, know that it is a ‘sphere’ with ‘diameter’, ‘magnitude’ and ‘limits’. 1 Clearly intending a comparison between the two, the philosopher then adds that ‘our reason’ is, in identical fashion, ‘not like an indeterminably extended plane’ but ‘must rather be compared to a sphere.

This comparison, between the space of reasons and that of our globe, serves to dramatize Kant’s master-idea of the togetherness of empirical receptivity and conceptual articulation: the conviction that, although the cascading content of sensation is unbounded or infinite (in the same sense as, in traversing a sphere’s continuous surface, we discover no boundary or edge), the conceptual functions and maxims of reason governing this experience afford to it structuring ‘limits’ (just as, embedded within three dimensions, the sphere is indeed spatially finite). 3 Crucially, it is these bounds alone that make knowledge possible, in that they anatomize our judgings into those that are correct and those that are incorrect; with them in place, we no longer simply perceive objects in a prehensive sense—our perceptions gain a standard of objectivity against which they can be continually appraised and upbraided (thus contending, in our unfolding engagements with the world, for the epithet ‘objective’).

According to the critical philosophy, such limits are to be interpreted exclusively in juridical terms: they concern the irrealis scope of ‘ought’ rather than the realis scope of ‘is’. Yet in selecting this particular tellurian image, Kant unwittingly reminds us that we do not ‘orient’ ourselves in thinking through a judicial ‘ground of differentiation’ alone. 4 For we are able to orient ourselves upon Earth’s mundane sphere only because of the contingent fact of our vertical posture, our orthograde backbone. Reason’s supererogations rest upon our standing so. And this introduces a whole new plot thread, a cord upon which genealogy can pull.

In his Physical Geography, having once again compared the rational ‘whole’ to the telluric ‘whole’, Kant suggests that each person may triangulate their location within spheriform terrestrial space, and thus unequivocally orient themselves, by drawing a line upward from their head into the heavens, and downward through their pelvis into the earth. 5 One’s latitude may then be ascertained by measuring the angle between this extended spinal axis and the earth’s axis of rotation.

It is only because, uniquely among vertebrates, the human spine’s axis traces a continuation of Earth’s own radius, that we can extrapolate its trajectory ad coelum et ad inferos—upwards towards a supernal zenith and downwards to a hypogene nadir. Drawing an imaginary great circle whose diameter connects the points of this imagined zenith and its caudal nadir as antipodes, the observer can become aware of themselves as the centre point of a so-called celestial meridian. From here, they can locate themselves upon the planet by measuring the angle between the celestial pole (the point around which the stars appear to rotate) and the zenith of their vertebral axis (the point at which the extended line of the spine pierces outer space). This allows one to compute one’s latitude, or, as Kant puts it, ‘the distance [from] the equator’, and thus to acquire one’s North-South coordinates.

It would therefore seem that a quirk of spinal morphology is responsible for placing humans in direct relation with the figure of the earth, fomenting the human propensity for geodesic abstraction in a fashion entirely barred to pronograde quadrupeds—those flatlanding crust-crawlers who experience the planet only as a surface indefinitely far extended.