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Myth-science as residual culture and magical thinking

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Notes

  1. The term myth-science is taken from Sun Ra (and Afrofuturism more generally). See Eshun (1988), especially Chapter 9, ‘Synthesizing the Omniverse’ (154–63). Kelley (1995) links the term more particularly to the fictioning aspect of contemporary art practice, especially in its expanded form.

  2. In terms of the first of these see the definition of hyperstition (and other writings on it) in Ccru (2015); in terms of the second see the essays collected in the final section of Mackay and Avanessian (2015).

  3. In terms of theoretical work in this area there is Dinshaw (2012), which specifically foregrounds the work of the amateur medievalist, in particular how this involves a more affective and performative involvement with the past. For a compelling example of a ‘theory-fiction’ that also explores and experiments with this area (and lays out a convincing argument for a neomedievalism in contemporary art practice especially) see The Confraternity of Neoflagellants (2013).

  4. Mark Fisher, following Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, develops a similar idea of the survival of future-orientated past cultures within the present in terms of a general hauntology (see as indicative, Fisher, 2014).

  5. I have written more about the possibility of ‘residual subjectivities’ in my book On the Production of Subjectivity (2012). There I staged an encounter between Williams’ writings on the residual and emergent with Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1988), and more particularly the plateau ‘587 B.C.–A.D. 70: On Several Regimes of Signs’ (111–48), with its laying out of the possibility of a mixed semiotic (and, in relation to the themes of the present article, the possible transportation into the present of a proposition from a previous regime that might then operate as an alternative point for subjectification).

  6. In many ways this article is an attempt to reclaim this particular ‘time-twisted vector’ away from the Right and, in particular, from Neoreactionaries.

  7. The thesis on and against Cathedral is laid out in detail in Land’s series of essays on ‘The Dark Enlightenment’ (n.d.).

  8. See, for example, Srnicek and Williams (2015) and Laboria Cuboniks (n.d.).

  9. In fact, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects is written against a certain ideological hangover from the past that views the technical as distinct (and inferior) to culture. Simondon’s aim, in this sense, is to explain technical consciousness and, indeed, gesture towards its future possibilities. My own article reads Simondon (or at least the extract in question) somewhat against the grain in so far as I am interested in the resistant and oppositional quality of a pre-technical mode of existence that might exist alongside the technical (and, indeed, resonate with a mode yet to come).

  10. Comparable, for example, to that found in Doris Lessing’s pentalogy of novels Canopus in Argos: Archives (1979–1982).

  11. See Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of the white face of Christ in ‘Year Zero: Faciality’ (1988, 167–91) and my own discussion of alternative modes of subjectivation (O’Sullivan, 2006).

  12. It is worth highlighting here that other definition of magic as a ‘regression in thought,’ as Adorno and Horkheimer understood it, and, as such, a form of thinking that is pre-capitalist, but also subsumed by late capitalist forms (Williams’ term ‘archaic’ would also be relevant here) (see Adorno and Horkheimer, 1969).

  13. In terms of Europe, the seminal text on these privileged points and their lines of connection is Watkins (1974).

  14. See also Deleuze’s discussion of the repetition of festivals at the very beginning of Deleuze (1994).

  15. See also my ‘A Diagram of the Finite–Infinite Relation’ (O’Sullivan, 2013).

  16. It is worth noting a key issue here – that of the differences between Simondon’s idea of magical unity as prior mode of existence (that itself involves magical thinking) and the more typical understanding of magical causality operative in the practices of magic. In The Golden Bough, Frazer suggests two ways in which such a ‘manipulation’ of nature might be achieved: by a law of similarity and one of contact (1957, 16). The term ‘sympathetic magic’ brings these two laws together.

  17. Dixon (2015) develops a convincing and compelling thesis on what he calls ‘magical aesthetics’ (through recourse to Simondon, Guattari, and the concept of animism) and relates it especially successfully to the expanded art practice of Mark Leckey.

  18. This formulation of a ‘folding-in’ of transcendence is my own take on Guattari. For a more detailed discussion of the latter, and of the three assemblages more generally, see O’Sullivan (2012, 89–123).

  19. Erik Davies in his chapter on ‘The Spiritual Cyborg’ (1988, 129–63) makes a compelling case for understanding Scientology as a very particular modern and technological religion (or spiritual Prometheanism, as he calls it). Dianetics – ‘the modern science of modern health’ that is the Church’s ‘Tech’ – involves an application of Norbert Wiener’s ‘new’ cybernetic theory to the mind, as well as the use of technical machines in its therapeutic practices (and in this sense of mobilising technicity alongside an understanding of the fiction of a self, Scientology might itself be described as a form of myth-science).

  20. In relation to this, see Sames (2014).

  21. See Brassier (2011).

  22. See Deleuze and Guattari, ‘1227: Treatise on Nomadology: –The War Machine’ (1988, 351–423).

  23. See also my essay ‘Accelerationism, Prometheanism and Mythotechnesis’ (O’Sullivan, 2015).

  24. In terms of a practice – or mode of existence – that involves these impersonal affects, or becomings, Deleuze and Guattari invoke (and themselves identify with) sorcerers. For more detail on this particular idea of magic – as involving inhuman transformation – see the three ‘Memories of a Sorcerer’ sections of the Becoming plateau of Deleuze and Guattari (1988, 239–252) and also my own commentary on these (O’Sullivan, 2017c).

  25. Hence, ultimately, the difference between fiction (and art more generally) and philosophy: the first is on the ground as it were, from the point of view of an embodied subject (albeit imagined); the second is more abstract – a disembodied view from above.

  26. For a compelling art historical account of the resonances between standing stones – and prehistoric objects and images more generally – with contemporary art, see Lippard (1983). For a more recent account of modern and contemporary art’s connection and resonances with the past, see Bracewell et al. (2009).

  27. The soundtrack by Coil also contributes to the affect of the film (Coil were also themselves interested and involved in magical practice). For a different fiction – that produces a different structure of feeling – in relation to pilgrimages to standing stones, see Home (2002).

  28. See Mellor (2012).

  29. I attend further to the Maypole – and its dance – as an alternative point of subjectification in my article, written with Ola Stähl, ‘Contours and Case Studies for a Dissenting Subjectivity’ (O’Sullivan and Stähl, 2006).

  30. For another example of this nesting of the future within the past, this time from the 1920s, see the Kibbo Kift whose look, practices, and ideas involved a particular combination of the pre-industrial and aspects of the modern in their experimental exploration of another mode of being (for an analysis of the Kibbo Kift along these lines see Plastique Fantastique’s review article on this ‘movement’, 2016).

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  1. Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths College, University of London, London, UK

    Simon O’Sullivan

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O’Sullivan, S. Myth-science as residual culture and magical thinking. Postmedieval 11, 119–136 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0086-2

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