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22 Dec, 2023

- Dancing and time

A dancer (left) with choreographers Martha Graham and Erick Hawkins, New York, 1946. Photo by Philippe Halsman/Magnum Photos

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Dancing and time

For Rachel Bespaloff, philosophy was a sensual activity shaped by the rhythm of history, embodied in an instant of freedom

22 Dec, 2023

by Isabel Jacobs + BIO

A dancer (left) with choreographers Martha Graham and Erick Hawkins, New York, 1946. Photo by Philippe Halsman/Magnum Photos

Isabel Jacobs

is a PhD candidate and teaching fellow in comparative literature at Queen Mary University of London. She works on Russian and French philosophy, with a focus on migration and the global entanglement of ideas.

Edited by  Nigel Warburton

Shortly after Rachel Bespaloff’s suicide in 1949, her friend Jean Wahl published fragments from her final unfinished project. ‘The Instant and Freedom’ condensed themes that occupied the Ukrainian-French philosopher throughout her life: music, rhythm, corporeality, movement and time. One of Bespaloff’s key ideas, ‘the instant’, is less a fragment of duration than a life-changing event, a moment of embodied metamorphosis. In the midst of a noisy world, torn between transience and eternity, the human being listens to the sound of history. Had she completed and published it, ‘The Instant and Freedom’ might have become the masterpiece of an important early existentialist thinker. Instead, her name is hardly mentioned today.

Yet Bespaloff was a brilliant and original thinker, among the first wave of existentialists in France. Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and Gabriel Marcel all admired her. A professional dancer and choreographer, she had finely tuned ears for the musicality of philosophical writing. For Bespaloff, philosophy is a dynamic, sensual activity of listening to and engaging with the voices of others, including those long dead. In dialogue with Homer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Heidegger, she found her own voice. At the heart of Bespaloff’s world is an original conception of time shaped by embodiment and music: the instant is a silent pause that suspends history’s repetitive rhythm. Through our bodies, we experience that break from history as a brief moment of freedom.

Her more famous contemporary Simone Weil also used her body to express her philosophy: Weil eventually starved herself to death in solidarity with friends and compatriots in occupied France. Bespaloff shared Weil’s interest in attention, listening and waiting as mystical practices of the body. For both thinkers, philosophy was an existential embodiment of their ideas. However, Bespaloff did not use her body as a weapon against itself; rather, she was interested in dance as a creative alchemy of movement. Bespaloff’s philosophy of the body is closely linked to the experience of time: it is our embodied day-to-day existence that measures and gives rhythm to time. In an essay on Homer’s Iliad written during the Second World War, Bespaloff captured the experience of living through the horrors of exile and war. The human being, ‘bound to her time by disorder and misfortune, acquires a new perception of the time of her own existence.’ (All translations here from the French are my own.)

Bespaloff’s own life was one of repeated displacement: she moved from Ukraine to Switzerland, Paris to southern France, to Mount Holyoke via New York. Born in 1895 in Nova Zagora in Bulgaria to a Ukrainian-Jewish family, she spent her childhood in Kyiv and then in Geneva where the family moved in 1897. Her mother Debora Perlmutter was a philosopher who taught at university; her father, Daniel Pasmanik, a surgeon, became a leading theoretician of Zionism in the Russian Empire. A fervent anti-Bolshevik, Pasmanik fought for the White Army in the Russian Civil War. In Switzerland, Bespaloff (then Rachel Pasmanik), studied piano and composition at the conservatory, philosophy at the university, and eurythmics with Émile Jaques-Dalcroze. These three areas of study are all entwined in her existential philosophy of embodiment.

Dalcroze eurhythmics is a holistic method of musical education; it turns the body into an instrument. Different temporalities are concretised through movements, arm gestures and steps. For Bespaloff, eurythmics became an intimate practice of listening with her entire body. Dalcroze’s favourite student, she was sent to work in Paris in early 1919. She began teaching eurythmics at the Paris Opera while also publishing short texts on dance. Bespaloff’s ‘plastic dance’ aimed to restore a lost dynamism. Her method attracted the attention of Jean Cocteau and Sergei Diaghilev, who introduced this new corporeality to his Ballets Russes. If philosophy sharpened her ears, eurythmics sculpted her body towards an embodied experience of temporality. She believed that a more authentic sense of time, lost in modernity, still lurked beneath our skin.

‘She listened with her whole person: with her hands, with her lips, with her eyes’

In 1921, Bespaloff was the choreographer of the ‘Royal Hunt’ scene in Hector Berlioz’s opera The Trojans – a theme she would return to in her Iliad essay. In ‘Dance and Eurythmics’ (1924), Bespaloff wrote that dance is a universe with ‘its vocabulary, a fixed language, its own logic, its needs.’ Eurythmics is the system of this universe, turning movement into existential experiences. Through the plasticity of our bodies, we can reach new forms of being. In the fragment ‘The Dialectic of the Instant’, Bespaloff describes time consciousness as ‘nothing other than a certain way of grasping the relationship between finitude and infinity in the instant.’ The instant’s brevity points us towards a lost continuity that can be restored. Through music and dance, Bespaloff discovered what she calls the experience of ‘magic interiority’. By externalising movement, the subject of eurythmics plunges herself into an inner experience.

Bespaloff met her second important teacher in 1925, the Jewish existentialist philosopher Lev Shestov (born in Kyiv as Yehuda Leib Shvartsman). The encounter with Shestov changed her life: Bespaloff the choreographer decided to become a philosopher. This was a radical move but, by then, she was already married to a Ukrainian businessman, which allowed her to quit her job at the Opera and soon after have a daughter. Shestov was a central figure in the philosophical émigré circles of interwar Paris. French existentialism gained fame much later through the works of Sartre and Camus. However, Sartre was deeply indebted to Shestov’s original synthesis of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky and Jewish theology.

Shestov’s charisma and unsystematic thought magnetised young philosophers, among them Georges Bataille. In many ways, the Shestov circle was the hotbed of French existentialism. Along with the Romanian poet Benjamin Fondane, Bespaloff was at the centre of Shestov’s salon. Her friend Daniel Halévy described her sitting on Shestov’s sofa, completely motionless, while ‘she listened with her whole person: with her hands, with her lips, with her eyes.’ One of the few women in the circle, she soon became friends with the Christian existentialist writer Gabriel Marcel and the Jesuit theologian Gaston Fessard who both admired her work. A female philosopher in the 1930s was, as Olivier Salazar-Ferrer put it, ‘a bit like a woman in the 19th century wearing men’s clothes.’ However, Bespaloff would soon wear her own clothes. In 1929, she had dinner with Edmund Husserl whose phenomenology she confidently attacked with Shestovian arguments.

Bespaloff caused another stir with the publication of her ‘On Heidegger (Letter to Daniel Halévy)’ in La Revue philosophique in 1933. It was among the very first discussions of Martin Heidegger’s thought in France. Fluent in German, Bespaloff had read Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) in the summer of 1932. Heidegger’s greatness, she wrote, was that ‘he situates himself in the inextricable; he does not want to detach himself.’ Similar to the experience of eurythmics, Heidegger’s philosophy proposes our hopeless entanglement with the world. It is not difficult to imagine a 28-year-old Sartre being drawn to Bespaloff’s letter, where she wrote excitedly: ‘Existence projects itself into the possible: choice is its destiny.’ For Bespaloff, interpreting Heidegger, this choice is not a matter of free will but of irrevocable commitment. By actively choosing, we dash beyond ourselves into an uncertain future.

As a musician, Bespaloff ‘listened’ to Heidegger’s text as if to a performance of Bach, a ‘monumental Art of Fugue’. She recognised that, as in a Baroque fugue, all the motifs ‘bring us back to the central theme of Being taken up in all its possible aspects, with increasing infinite variation, but always identical to itself.’ Bespaloff’s enthusiasm for Heidegger’s musical metaphysics was soon tempered by the discovery of another existentialist: Søren Kierkegaard. In 1934, she published notes on Kierkegaard’s Repetition (1843), a work that emphasised the musicality of repetition as continuous transformation.

She declares war on her teacher’s total denial of any possibility of truth

Repetition does not add anything, it only accentuates what is irreducible to human existence. Repetition in Kierkegaard is ‘the will to live again and the refusal to survive’. Only by repeating can we become authentic subjects. In Kierkegaard’s ‘beautiful moment’, Bespaloff found what she called ‘the instant’: an experience of absolute, eternal silence. The absence of a path, she wrote on Kierkegaard, is the only path his philosophy wants to follow. This Zen-like image also perfectly captures the meandering trajectories of her own thought, which Laura Sanò has called ‘nomadic’. A wandering cosmopolitan, Bespaloff was forced to traverse the boundaries of various countries, languages and cultures. Her philosophy mirrored that nomadism, with subtle attention to the embodied experience of movement, melody and metamorphosis.

Bespaloff’s essay collection Paths and Crossroads (Cheminements et Carrefours) appeared in 1938. Dedicated to Shestov, the book includes texts on Julien Green, André Malraux, Marcel and two essays on Kierkegaard. The chapter ‘Shestov before Nietzsche’ declares war on her teacher’s total denial of any possibility of truth. By refusing to think, she writes, Shestov had returned to another dogma – a radical relativism that ultimately turned into nihilism. Against Shestov’s rejection of reason, Bespaloff poses Nietzsche’s attempt to reach truth through and within one’s life. Nietzsche’s concept of the Will to Truth, she thought, could reconcile us to the tragedy of existence. Where Shestov saw an unbridgeable gap, Bespaloff made a leap: in the instant, happiness is in our reach. Bespaloff’s ‘happy consciousness’ made a deep impression on Camus who read the book closely in the summer of 1939.

Bespaloff’s writings on Kierkegaard coincided with the publication of Wahl’s Kierkegaardian Studies (1938) – a testimony to their friendship and lifelong collaboration. Bespaloff and Wahl were trendsetters in Paris. Introducing Kierkegaard’s anti-Hegelian philosophy into France, they prepared the ground for the existentialism that flourished in wartime Paris. Their ventures into Christian existentialism directly reacted to Hegel’s revival in France instigated by Alexandre Kojève’s lectures, held between 1933 and 1939. Another émigré from the Russian empire, Kojève was as pivotal as Shestov to the formation of French modernism. It was these refugees from eastern Europe, among them Bespaloff, who shaped the course of French culture by importing new currents to Paris, including Surrealism, Marxism, phenomenology and existentialist philosophy.

In the spring of 1938, Bespaloff began rereading the Iliad with her daughter Naomi. Her extensive notes turned into a brilliant essay on Homer’s epic poem. Shestov’s death that year deeply upset her. In a letter to Wahl, she calls Shestov one of the few truly noble men she knew. The family moved to her husband’s estate in southern France in 1939. Just before the Nazis occupied Paris, she wrote a letter to Marcel: ‘But the worse it gets, the more I realise that you can’t love life, the more I discover the urgent need to find new reasons to love it. And I am afraid that this time I won’t be able to, which would be worse than death…’

Her work on the Iliad essay became an existential ‘method of facing the war’. She soon became aware of a similar text, written coincidentally, that appeared in Cahiers du Sud in 1940: Weil’s ‘The Iliad, or the Poem of Force’. Bespaloff began to revise her essay; she critically responded to Weil’s condemnation of any use of force. Living as a Jew in Vichy France, Bespaloff became increasingly desperate, and with good reason. In November 1941, she wrote to Marcel: ‘I feel as if I am stuck in a sad, restless, absurd dream. And I am very afraid of waking up.’ Her friend Wahl, also Jewish, had been imprisoned and tortured by the Gestapo, and worse was to come for many Jews in Paris.

In 1942, Bespaloff managed to escape, boarding one of last ships to leave Nazi-occupied France, with her mother and daughter, her library and grand piano. Having narrowly fled a concentration camp outside of Paris, Wahl joined them. With his encouragement, Bespaloff began to rework her essay on the Iliad. She eventually finished her notes in yet another exile, this one in New York. Published in English translation in 1943, On the Iliad framed war as an absolute ‘question of losing it all to gain it all’. In the words of Fondane’s letter to his wife, war became ‘the moment to live our existential philosophy’. According to Bespaloff, Homer felt both intense love and intense horror of war. Where Weil claimed that force transforms subjects into objects, Bespaloff, emphasises brief moments of beauty that occur in the midst of violence. With war being waged all around, there are flashing instants of generosity and grace.

In the Iliad, force is both a supreme reality and an illusion. It is the superabundance of life itself, ‘a murderous lightning stroke, in which calculation, chance, and power seem to fuse in a single element to defy man’s fate.’ This does not mean that Bespaloff glorified violence. Far from it. But the experience of the Second World War made her realise the inescapability of force and its power to transform an individual’s understanding of the human predicament. At the heart of her essay is Hector, the ‘resistance-hero’ who embodies justice and courage. Like every human in the Iliad, Hector cannot flee his fate – and he knows it. Hector’s flight from force is short but has ‘the eternity of a nightmare’. That is the horrifying temporality of war that Bespaloff experienced first-hand.

Hannah Arendt’s reading of Kafka echoed Bespaloff’s existentialist despair

The most crushing parts of Bespaloff’s Iliad essay are dedicated to Helen, a woman with whom she clearly identifies. Clothed in long white veils, she is the most austere character of Homer’s poem. Both unbearably beautiful and unfortunate, Helen awoke in exile and felt ‘nothing but a dull disgust for the shrivelled ecstasy that has outlived their hope.’ She is the prisoner of her own passivity, forced to live in horror of herself. Ultimately, Helen’s promise of freedom, like Bespaloff’s own, remains unfulfilled. Helplessly, Helen watches the men who went to war for her, observing ‘the changing rhythm of the battle’. The breaks that interrupt the fighting are rare instants of silence:

The battlefield is quiet; a few steps away from each other, the two armies stand face to face awaiting the single combat that will decide the outcome of the war. Here, at the very peak of the Iliad, is one of those pauses, those moments of contemplation, when the spell of Becoming is broken, and the world of action, with all its fury, dips into peace.

While in New York, Bespaloff preserved her ties to Parisian intellectual life from her exile by exchanging letters with Fessard and Marcel. She got a job with the Voice of America’s French broadcast before moving to Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, where she taught French literature. Mount Holyoke became an important outpost for French culture in the US during the war. At gatherings of exiled scholars organised by Wahl, Bespaloff met Jacques Maritain, André Masson, Marc Chagall and Claude Lévi-Strauss.

This ‘small, dark lady who wore white gloves’, as her translator Mary McCarthy described her, also made an impression on Hannah Arendt who visited in August 1944 to deliver a lecture on Franz Kafka. Arendt’s reading of Kafka, later published in Partisan Review, echoed Bespaloff’s existentialist despair. Under the dark shadow of war, Arendt describes humanity as inescapably trapped in history’s meshes. Kafka’s ‘nightmare of a world’ had become reality. In an essay on Camus, her last published work, Bespaloff describes how history forced her generation ‘to live in a climate of violent death’.

After the war, despite previously having been fêted by them, Bespaloff became a vocal critic of the new generation of French existentialists, especially Sartre. In a 1946 letter to the musicologist Boris de Schloezer, Bespaloff wrote that ‘the hollowness of subjectivity that Sartre opposes to what I call “magical interiority” is much less the foundation of a new humanism than the harbinger of a new conformity.’ She argued that, instead of liberating the individual, Sartre’s existentialism destroyed the magical interiority through which humans can authentically connect with one another. For Bespaloff, Sartre degraded the subject into an object under the gaze of the Other. This objectified ‘subjectivity curiously aligns with American “individualism”, which unleashes itself in action to mask the absence of the individual.’ Like Helen’s Troy, the US felt both dull and hostile to Bespaloff.

Bespaloff’s journey to Mount Holyoke was her final exile. During term break, in April 1949, for reasons not entirely clear, she sealed her kitchen doors and turned on the gas oven. Her own complex fugue ended with a tragic cadence. She had written earlier of the happiness that can be found in an instant. In her final note, alluding to Camus’s claim, she wrote: ‘One can imagine Sisyphus happy, but joy is forever out of his reach.’

Thinkers and theoriesDance and theatreHistory of ideas

22 December 2023

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- The subtle art of elevation

From Richard of St Victor’s commentary on the Book of Ezekiel (c1171-90). Courtesy of the BnF, Paris

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The subtle art of elevation

Architectural drawing speaks of mathematical precision, but its roots lie in the theological exegesis of a prophetic book

21 Dec, 2023

by Karl Kinsella + BIO

From Richard of St Victor’s commentary on the Book of Ezekiel (c1171-90). Courtesy of the BnF, Paris

Karl Kinsella

is a lecturer at the University of Aberdeen. He is a medieval art and architectural historian with an interest in cultural history and heritage. He is the co-editor of Building Meaning: Medieval Architectural Representations (2022) and the author of God’s Own Language: Architectural Drawing in the Twelfth Century (2023).

Edited by  Marina Benjamin

Years ago, my professor would make his architectural history students prepare for seminars by pinning large sheets of paper to a noticeboard. Each had finely printed plans and elevations on them. Over the week, I’d stand in front of those sheets for at least an hour looking at the various drawings, as instructed. Back in class, students took turns to explain what exactly the drawings represented, determining the building’s appearance from the drawings alone and describing how a person might move through the space as if we were there. Those well-spent hours were among my favourite during my degree; the language of drawing was a catalyst to my imagination, creating worlds beyond what words could ever do.

In learning about this language, I realised that we know remarkably little about how it developed, as if it arose fully formed in the 13th century, since no single drawing can be linked to a specific building project until that century’s end. This baffled me. How could monuments like Durham Cathedral, the renovated basilica of Saint-Denis outside Paris (the genesis of the Gothic style), and all the High Gothic churches in northern Europe have been made without something so simple as a drawing? Visually communicating the appearance of a building seems a natural thing to do – an easier way of planning.

As it happens, drawings were used in the construction process before the 13th century. In the 1st century BCE, the architect Vitruvius wrote his De architectura in an attempt to elevate the practice of architecture to the level of the liberal arts; that is, work derived from the mind rather than the mindless graft of one’s hands. Near the beginning of the treatise, Vitruvius describes three types of architectural drawing: plans, elevations, and (very likely) drawings in perspective (his precise meaning is hotly contested). Despite this evidence for the use of drawings, none survive from antiquity. The only examples to weather the test of time are monumental plans inscribed on stone or mosaics, but these could have been decorative objects – simple maps or sculptural monuments: their purpose is not clear. Also, most were done after the buildings they depict were completed, so they cannot have been used in the construction process.

After the decline of the Roman empire in the 5th century, the infrastructure for educating and training architects vanished in the West. Not until the 13th century do we get a designer who oversees several projects simultaneously – a sort of proto-architect. Prior to their emergence, there was a master mason who’d make certain geometrical constructions on the ground or in plaster, allowing him to construct the layout of a building. This master mason is an obscure historical figure. He likely did not have a formal education but started his career as an apprentice who learned structurally sound forms from his master. He would have travelled across building sites learning and picking up new designs and ideas. At 12th-century Canterbury, for example, the original designer of the Gothic building was William of Sens, who likely had experience of working on the new Gothic elements of the French cathedral. He could promise that and more to his new patrons in England, not necessarily using a drawing but by describing what exactly he would do over the coming years.

Later, in the 15th century, the artist and architect Leon Battista Alberti, in his brief mention of architectural drawings, assumes that they are done only by architects. This leaves us with a story of architecture that follows a well-worn narrative: the decline of Rome led to a dearth of advanced practices, which were picked up again only in early modern Italy. But this is not the real story.

Towards the middle of the 12th century, a Scottish theologian named Richard moved across the Channel to Paris and to the Abbey of Saint Victor on the left bank, about a 20-minute walk from where Notre-Dame Cathedral stands today, but outside the walls of the medieval city. Here, Richard penned a commentary on the Book of Ezekiel, filled with more than a dozen plans and elevations that systematically represent the buildings the prophet describes. These are key to understanding the beginning of architectural drawing in the West. Richard is the first person to use the term ‘plan’ with reference to a drawing that would be recognised as a plan today. He was the first person we know of to represent a building more than once, offering a three-dimensional view of the structure; and the first to provide a clear sectional elevation, where part of the building is sliced through to give a view of the interior. His commentary suggests that architectural drawings were in use a full century earlier than is conventionally held, complete with a fully fledged language for the representation of three-dimensional objects.

The Abbey of Saint Victor was established in 1108, at the beginning of what the historian Charles Homer Haskins in 1927 called a ‘Twelfth-Century Renaissance’. This renaissance was characterised by a renewed focus on classical literature and a drive to understand the physical world. Latin translations of ancient Greek and Arabic works on mathematics, geometry and every other subject gave energy to scholars to interrogate the world a little deeper. Works by Aristotle, Euclid and Plato, dimly known but whose writing was thought gone forever, began to arrive on the shores of Europe. Within this swirling intellectual storm, the members of Saint Victor had one of the best libraries in Europe and a commitment to teach whoever wanted to learn. They were spiritual centrists, never veering close to zealotry and never losing their minds to the new fashion for pure logic, characterised by the infamous self-promotor Peter Abelard.

The Abbey of Saint Victor, Paris, etching, 1702. Courtesy of INHA, Paris

With the fine resources and stimulation that Saint Victor provided, Richard began his commentary on the Book of Ezekiel, a daunting task for anyone who has read it. Ezekiel prophesied during the Israelite’s exile in Babylon where the once-captive Jews remained in the centuries following the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem. It is a book of consolation and of hope; especially the last section, which contains a detailed architectural description of a new temple that would descend from the heavens onto the mountain when the Israelites returned to their homeland. Ezekiel describes meeting a man with ‘brazen complexion’ holding a measuring stick, who accompanies the prophet around the buildings, while measuring every detail. At first glance, the buildings Ezekiel describes, and their arrangement, seem straightforward. There are three courtyards of diminishing size, set into one another, and each section is accessed via an elaborate gateway. The new temple at the centre of everything (and modelled on Solomon’s original) is perched on the mountain’s plateau. Out front in the smallest courtyard there is an altar for sacrifices, while the Temple contains three spaces: a vestibule, a long narrow hall and a smaller room called the ‘Holy of Holies’.

Richard needed to know exactly what the prophet saw

But the details are impossible to follow. For example, the description of the gateways range over different chapters and, though Ezekiel specifies their parts, the measurements do not always make sense. We are told the breadth of the building is one reed (six cubits), that the threshold to the gate is six cubits, and the ‘porch of the gate’ is eight cubits. As the description continues, it is tempting to pick up a pen and draw alongside its reading, the better to follow, but the layout is difficult to grasp. In the 6th century, Pope Gregory I concluded that it was impossible to understand the architecture in a literal way, and that the lack of sense within Ezekiel’s words was a sure sign that they could only be allegorical in nature. Gregory gave the example of a door described as wider than the wall to which it is attached.

For Richard, brought up on an intellectual diet defined by the rigours of Saint Victor’s school, it was important to understand the facts of Ezekiel’s words. He needed to know exactly what the prophet saw. And so, Richard’s commentary on this part of the Book of Ezekiel included more than a dozen plans and elevations to help realise the prophet’s vision. Telling his readers why he included the drawings, Richard says he wanted to show that no matter how ‘simple’ they might be, the truth of his argument was that these buildings had a tangible existence, and that Ezekiel’s description makes sense if the reader has the wit to follow it.

Richard’s drawings

Richard’s drawings are like nothing made before. They are precocious in pointing to a masterful visualisation of space long before the language of architectural drawing was systematised. Richard used recent developments in geometry to fully articulate the relationship between the plans and elevations: in fact, the drawings represent the beginning of architectural abstraction in the West, not because he uses plans and elevations, but because he uses them together to give readers a real sense of the buildings’ three dimensions. As far as we know, no one in Europe had done this previously.

Richard’s final plan, vestibule running through the middle

In his commentary, Richard takes his readers through the envisioned Temple complex carefully, starting with a very general sense of the entire layout, allowing us to situate ourselves properly. Then he zooms in to focus on one building in particular, the gatehouses that combine the three atria that surround the temple. He provides three plans and two elevations for the gatehouses on three sides of the complex. The three bird’s eye plans show its general layout, a detailed rendering of half the building, then its complete internal footprint. The final plan (above) shows a vestibule running through the middle with long rectangular rooms perpendicular to it. If we set this plan alongside the elevation of the building (below), we can see these same rooms perched upon each step of the vestibule. To aid readers, Richard labelled the rooms in Latin, making it easy to work from one drawing to another. We can take the complexity a little further, since, in the elevation, the viewer can see the interior of the ground floor as if the drawing were a section where part of the building is cut open. This would make it the first clear sectional elevation, and an important development in architectural drawing.

Richard’s drawing of the sectional elevation

None of Richard’s innovations are accidental. Rather, they are rooted in the language of geometry: by including the elevation, the viewer sees that the gatehouses are located on a mountainside. Yet having to reconcile the plan with the elevation disturbed Richard’s attempt at accuracy. He knew that measurements taken along a flat surface and on a sloped one would be different when compared with one another, and result in discrepancies between his plans and elevations. To combat the problem, Richard proposed a method by which a ‘plan’ measurement could be translated into one that accommodated the mountain’s slope, using something very similar to the Pythagorean theorem, which was then circulating around western Europe. The plans include measurements that assume the site was flat, and so he calls them ‘planum’. This is the first time this term was used in reference to a drawing. For Richard, a ‘plan’ was a two-dimensional drawing that showed the layout of a building on a plane (ie, flat) surface – language that we still use today.

A number of tantalising plans, predating Richard’s commentary, survive, but they lack a systematic approach to representing reality. The best known is the 9th-century Saint Gall plan (below). This shows a monastery laid out in red ink, complete with church, cloister, abbot’s house, medicinal garden and everything else a monastery could need, right down to the number of beds in the dormitory. The note attached to the plan refers to it as an exemplata, a word that could mean anything from ‘copy’ to ‘proof’. The Saint Gall plan likely survived because a couple of centuries later someone wrote a life of Saint Martin on its reverse side – which for a medieval audience held much more value than this diagram. The Saint Gall plan is impressive, but it’s not entirely clear what any of the proposed monastery buildings would look like since there are no elevations and it is only one single drawing, unlike Richard’s more expansive approach.

Saint Gall plan, 9th century

There are other theological plans, images of the Celestial Jerusalem, of the Holy Sepulchre and a couple of others. Their survival suggests that, even in the context of so much medieval material that has been lost, there must have been more drawings that were destroyed or else deemed not important enough to save. Not all had the fortune of a life of Saint Martin written on their reverse.

It is tempting to imagine Richard in conversation with masons who must have been a constant presence in Saint Victor. Richard held the position of prior, a sort of second-in-command in the abbey. One of his responsibilities would have been to oversee the masons’ work in the abbey and to interact with the builders on a regular basis. There was, however, a cultural chasm between the cloister and the building site that Richard would not have crossed lightly, even for the sake of an important work such as a biblical commentary. To do that, I think he crossed another type of boundary.

Saint Victor was famous by the end of the 12th century, and one of the reasons why is how good its literal commentaries on the Bible were, an approach advocated by its earliest superstar and Richard’s mentor, Hugh of Saint Victor. Hugh was a teacher, writer, very much the 12th-century renaissance man, and he is known to have spoken to nearby rabbinic scholars and their schools. Hugh recognised the value of Jewish knowledge, especially when it came to understanding history: as one modern author put it, from a Christian perspective, talking to a Jewish scholar was like picking up the phone to the Old Testament. Richard, it seems, continued that tradition.

If Richard could speak that visual language, then so could the people he hired to build Saint Victor

As if to underline the connection between the two traditions, one of the earliest Christian manuscripts containing Richard’s work includes a map of the Holy Land described in the Book of Ezekiel 48 (below). It shows the land belonging to the tribes of Israel on the left and right, with the Holy City and its environs below. The map is almost identical to one in a Hebrew commentary (below) by the famous scholar Rashi who established his school not far from Paris. The only difference between the Hebrew and Latin maps is the language of the labels. Not long after Richard wrote his commentary, the Jewish scholar Maimonides included architectural drawings in his discussion on the Second Temple, called the tractate Middoth. Not just plans, but elevations and even sections, just as in Richard’s commentary. All these architectural drawings appearing in theological texts of the 12th century does not prove that drawings were used in the construction process. What it does prove, though, is that people such as Richard and the many readers of his work could understand the language of architectural drawings if a master mason put one in front of them.

Richard’s map of the Holy Land, as described in the Book of Ezekiel 48, in Latin

Rashi’s map of the Holy Land, in Hebrew

In response to my own question, as to how some of the great architectural monuments of medieval Europe could be built without drawings, the answer is they could not. Although we don’t have those drawings made by 12th-century master masons, Richard’s commentary certainly suggests that the practice of architectural drawing was common enough across the religious divide, and that if a patron such as Richard could speak that visual language, then so could the people he hired to build Saint Victor.

Richard’s importance is clear but, since he was a theologian working in a cloistered community, his legacy within architectural history is difficult to quantify. He never built anything as far as we know. I do not want to suggest that the invention of architectural drawing was a top-down affair, where the language and visual forms were invented by a patron within theological contexts and imparted to the lowly builder. I do not even want to suggest that parallel traditions in Islamic countries, and further east in China, lag behind the West: only that the practice as we know it in the West developed out of the complex relationship between patron and mason, and almost certainly predates the 13th century. Richard’s commentary helps us fill in the gaps. It demonstrates how known unknowns (the existence of drawings in the 12th century) become known. Masons and, later, architects used and developed these drawings to a remarkable degree, perhaps not based on direct knowledge of Richard’s commentary, but certainly from the world that those drawings inhabited.

ArchitectureHistoryHistory of technology

21 December 2023

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Mala Chatterjee

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19 Dec, 2023

- Saved by Infinite Jest

Illustration by Martin O’Neill/Cutitout

i

Saved by Infinite Jest

Bereft and suicidal, I lay on my sofa. Only David Foster Wallace’s novel kept me tethered to life, and still does

19 Dec, 2023

by Mala Chatterjee + BIO

Illustration by Martin O’Neill/Cutitout

Mala Chatterjee

is a philosopher, writer, legal scholar and associate professor at Columbia Law School in New York. She is also co-director of the Columbia law and philosophy programme and on the board of trustees of the Journal of Philosophy.

Edited by  Sam Haselby

In the surreal aftermath of my suicide attempt and amid the haze of my own processing, my best friend visited me in the hospital with a (soft-bound and thus mental-patient-safe) copy of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest under his arm. It was the spring of 2021. A couple months earlier, I had slipped in a tub, suffered a concussion, and triggered my first episode of major depression, and those had been the most difficult months of my life.

Though a lifelong ‘striver’ and ‘high achiever’, nothing I’ve ever done was harder than waging that war against myself while catatonic on that Brooklyn sofa. This was an inarticulable and so alienating war, one during which, at every moment, it was excruciating and terrifying to exist at all. I thought I knew the extent of my own mind’s capacity to torture itself, to hurt me, and what this thing we call depression can really be like. But I had been wrong.

For anyone who hasn’t experienced it at its worst, I now think it is psychologically impossible to imagine. It may even prove impossible for those who have experienced to still remember it after the fact, just as someone who temporarily perceives a fourth dimension wouldn’t really, fully remember what it was like once the perception is lost, only facets of the larger, unfathomable thing.

So maybe I can’t really remember, either: but I can recall thinking again and again these staggered reflections I’m writing now. Some of the swirling emotions that distressed and disoriented me on that sofa also remain faintly accessible, like the crippling inability to make any decisions, no matter how small, such that even contemplating a choice among some host of mine’s warmly offered selection of teas would incapacitate me with self-loathing and breathless, gushing tears. I remember hopelessly trying to make myself feel even the glimmer of anything good, turning to everything – the music, the friends – that had brought me so much joy before, only to find that I could no longer feel any of it but rather just, from somewhere afar, see and long for it while watching as the ever-darkening blackness in me instead consumed it all.

I remember the debilitating guilt and shame that emerged for everything I had ever done, including for having the audacity to keep existing for so long. And I remember an overwhelming empathy as I wondered how many others felt this way in the history of the world, imagining the vastness of all these solitary confinements within our minds across space and time. At the same time, it was unfathomable to me that anyone had ever felt like this, or that there could even be enough darkness in the universe to realise the experience more than this once.

From the days following my injury through the several months after, my ultimate challenge on that sofa was finding a way to endure the passage of time. I needed something to help me get through each moment and make it to the next one while still intact. I couldn’t actually do anything, but staring into space (or even watching TV) kept me vulnerable, as the cognitive passivity left ample room for the darkness to seep in and swallow me away. After a few desperate weeks, I eventually found that reading fiction – filling my head with another world that left room for little else – was the one thing that made it more bearable to exist. My best friend then suggested (after having gently and generously recommended the book to me for years) that perhaps this was the moment to read Infinite Jest. I think every day about how grateful I am that he did.

I started reading and it soon became the case that so long as Infinite Jest was in my hands, it was possible, okay even, for me to stick around. The core themes of the book that would soothe and sustain me over the coming weeks can be conveyed, I think, by its two dominant and contrasting venues – a halfway house for addicts in recovery on the one hand, and an elite and high-pressure tennis academy on the other – in conjunction with an underlying and unifying thesis: all of us, whether we’re chasing substances, achievements or whatever else we hope will satisfy us and make it bearable to exist, are afflicted. We are all, for lack of a better word, fucked in the head in the very same ways.

With Infinite Jest in my hands, I was suspended afloat by a contradictory catharsis, this evanescent insight that I could hold on to so long as I just kept reading and rereading the book’s (blessedly many) pages: that I was not crazy, nor alone, precisely because I really was crazy, which is to say that this all wasn’t me but rather it – it was a human condition. The book assured me that this was just what it was like to be crazy in this way, was exactly how others crazy in the same way were made to feel, a crazy that made them feel just as alone as I now felt. The book witnessed me, affirmed me, and assured me that my experience was familiar to the world. I can’t put it any better than just saying the book was my friend.

The book’s most famous lines are on suicidality, and the air-tight logic that it brings along

Some passages can only speak for themselves, as they so articulate (and help me remember) facets of the thing I was facing on that sofa. On the ‘psychotic depression’ suffered by the character Kate Gompert, the most haunting and compelling personification of depression I have come across:

It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it. It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature but as the essence of conscious existence. It is a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the self’s most elementary levels. It is a nausea of the cells and soul … It … is probably mostly indescribable except as a sort of double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency – sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or dying – are not just unpleasant but literally horrible.

No description that I’ve encountered has better conveyed, so clearly and directly, the precise nature of that moment-by-moment agony in which I had found myself.

Infinite Jest’s most famous lines are on suicidality, and the air-tight logic that it brings along. The book analogises it to the choice faced by those trapped inside a burning building and deciding whether to jump:

Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; ie, the fear of falling remains a constant … It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

The suicidal person, in other words, is not misguided but rather literally facing different choices – ones unimaginable to those who do not also have flames slowly engulfing them.

I don’t think I can really explain what reading all this meant to me. The book could see me like a mirror at that moment and describe it all right back. More concretely, I can’t explain what it meant to find such forceful validations of my particular sense of this ‘mental illness’, not as some wrong or irrational reaction by me, a misapprehension or miscalculation on my part, but rather as something happening to me; it was a thing inside me – a billowing shape, as the book often calls it – to which all my dread and despair was actually just the reasonable and appropriate response. But I can tell you that, once I finished Infinite Jest, my grip on this self-understanding – and so my self-preservation – quickly started to slip away, and it was only a few days later that I tried to kill myself. By then, I was back to being alone on that sofa, surrounded by those flames the book had managed to keep at bay. I think reading Infinite Jest had been keeping me alive.

So that’s why, when he came to the hospital, my friend knew to bring along another copy of the book. I remember looking up at him then, bleary-eyed with anxious shame for what felt like my most monumental failure, a profoundly self-absorbed act of weakness on my part – and, not to mention, a terrible inconvenience for all those I’d dared to drag into my life. He smiled softly while waving Infinite Jest in a silent reminder that these emotions, though compelling in their presentation and thus reasonable to be so compelled by, weren’t really reflecting the reality of the matter. And with a copy to share, in that secured visiting area, we then had our own little pop-up book club.

I admit to sometimes feeling guilty for being the one who found salvation in his book instead of him

It all felt a bit like Bible study or something, in the fluorescent sterility and chaos of that strange space, and I remember my friend making some fittingly dark joke about how this was probably how DFW would’ve most wanted the book to be read anyway: like the word of God, among rock bottoms, being involuntarily held. It was a glimmer of Wallace’s raw hilarity, which fills so much of Infinite Jest (1996) – a grotesque humour, one that could punctuate my otherwise continuously unbearable tenure on that sofa with stitches of transcendent laughter, and which not only kept me alive but sometimes feeling alive, wanting to be, hoping I do somehow make it through it all, if for no other reason than because laughing still felt like something worthwhile. I was reminded, in our pop-up book club, that maybe this was still worth doing. In truth, the reality of what had happened was only beginning to crash down upon me, and it was going to be a very long road ahead. But we at least managed to make it all a bit gentler and more intelligible in that moment.

As of this September, it has been 15 years since Wallace’s suicide and two and a half years since my attempt. Like Wallace’s, my own decision to take my life had immediately followed an adjustment to my antidepressants. I remember it clearly: I’d been holding on so long as I’d still been reading, and when the reading was over and the enkindling darkness took its place, there was just barely enough left in me to pull myself up and pick up a phone, to articulate the necessary words and ask the professionals if they could possibly find some way to help me out. I’d still been searching in anguish for an escape as the walls closed in, a way to still win, to stick around.

Sadly, it was the prescribed dosage increase itself that hit me – as it is sometimes known to do – with another dark wave, knocking me back into the depths of myself, right as I’d been treading so very hard to reach a stable surface. I know Wallace’s suicide had been amid choppy chemical changes of his own, which is to say that we’d both still been fighting, and so these disparate outcomes were the product of random chance. There is a tragedy and humanity, I think, for one’s own desperate attempt at staying alive to be the very thing that does one in – and I admit to sometimes feeling guilty for being the one who found salvation in his book instead of him, as though this salvation was itself cosmically predestined to be scarce.

When I’m asked what exactly I found in Infinite Jest, I limit myself to noting two things. I found powerful portraits of mental illness, and I also found empathy. Like I said, the book was my friend. But the thing is, I know that many others have very different things to say about Infinite Jest – about the book, its author, its ‘prototypical’ readers, the very idea of it, and the ethos it has come to represent. In her chapter ‘On Not Reading DFW’ (2016), Amy Hungerford defends her choice never to read it by arguing (among other things) that there’s no reason to think DFW could have anything valuable to say about women. More recently, in the London Review of Books this July, Patricia Lockwood said of Infinite Jest that ‘it’s like watching someone undergo the latest possible puberty. It genuinely reads like he has not had sex.’

Hungerford, Lockwood and the mainstream ethos generally dismiss the book’s intended and actual audiences as white, male and not to be trusted, driven by Stockholm syndrome, sunk costs or delusions of self-interested grandeur in calling the book genius or important. I’m not exaggerating when I say that I find these critiques – so often snide or irreverent in their cadence – baffling, gaslighting, disempowering, at times even agonising. I can’t understand what they could possibly have to do with this book that I know as my friend, that I found myself in at my most alienated moment. And the bitter irony is that this ethos all concerns a man who, after writing such an empathetic book about mental illness, took his own life; for it is a collective instance of the very kind of empathy failure that I think Infinite Jest asks us to resist and helped me resist myself. I guess it is the least I can do for it now – and for my own survivor’s guilt – to join this ongoing chorus on the book with my own belting, discordant voice.

Mental illness can persuade you that you’re now seeing the reality that had always been real

Infinite Jest was life-saving for me, but I don’t just mean when I say this that it had been saving me while I was reading it on that sofa, or even the times that I’ve read the book since. Infinite Jest is saving my life all the time. There’s a recurring motif in the book, a haunting symbol for all of our many mental demons: the Face in the Floor. It first appears in a second-person vignette as an evil presence that only you, the reader, can feel. You wake up from a nightmare, you look around, and you suddenly notice that there is the Face in the Floor beneath you. It is a Face that you know is evil, and you know this evil is only for you. But as soon as you notice this Face in the Floor, you are also convinced that it has actually been there all along. You are certain of this, that its ‘horrid toothy smile [has been] leering right at your light all the time,’ and that it had simply been ‘unfelt by all others and unseen by you’ until now. In a later passage, this evil Face in the Floor – ‘the grinning root-white face of your worst nightmares’ – comes back, but this time, it’s your addiction. It ‘finally remove[s] its smily-face mask to reveal centerless eyes’, and you see that the Face in the Floor – your addiction – has now completely taken you over. The Face in the Floor has become your own. It’s ‘your own face in the mirror, now, it’s you’ for it has ‘devoured or replaced and become you’.

I think about the Face in the Floor every single day. I remind myself of it. One of the most harrowing things about mental illness is not anything captured by descriptions of its first-order symptoms, but rather the way it can convince you that these symptoms are just picking up on something that is and has always been the case, that was actually there all the time; and when you didn’t feel this way it was because you had been blind. Mental illness can persuade you that you’re now seeing the reality that had always been real, the Face that had always been there in the Floor – which is all to say that your epistemic position has simply been improved. So long as that is what you are being made to believe, then how can anyone expect you to also believe ‘this too shall pass’ (or anything of the sort), or to somehow just stop it from swallowing you up?

I’m no longer on that sofa or surrounded by those flames. But still, I’ll probably always be moving with and managing my own billowing shape. Mine is a synergistic and explosive Molotov cocktail of depression and ‘emotion dysregulation’. This basically means that my internal reality is prone to quickly and intensely turn itself upside down again and again – somersaulting through euphoria, despair, mania, shame, rage, paranoia, guilt, panic, bliss, self-aggrandizement, self-hatred, even within a single day. My challenge in the dissociated midst of these episodes will always be to find something from outside the moment to believe in, or to at least have faith that any such thing could even exist, and so to resist the recurring immersive insistence that only this moment and nothing before it is what’s real.

Maybe that’s why I needed to say all of this, to give my experience this reality and write it all down, and paper over at least one of the Floor’s Faces and preserve this here instead for myself; and maybe these revelations are also my redemption for that audacity to have been the one saved. But when I say that Infinite Jest is saving my life all the time, what I mean is that I still keep trying my very best to tell myself – because I still need and will keep needing to tell myself – what has become both my mantra and my prayer: it’s the Face in the Floor. It’s the Face in the Floor. It’s the Face in the Floor.

In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. Or text HOME to 741741 to reach Crisis Text Line.

In the UK and Ireland, the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie

In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14

Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org

Stories and literatureBiography and memoirMental health

19 December 2023

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- A silken web

Tapestry from Iraq or Iran, first half of the 14th century. Silk and gilded lamellae spun around cotton. Courtesy of The David Collection, Copenhagen

i

A silken web

From its mythic beginnings in a Chinese garden, the story of silk is a window into how weaving has shaped human history

18 Dec, 2023

by Peter Frankopan, Marie-Louise Nosch & Feng Zhao + BIO

Tapestry from Iraq or Iran, first half of the 14th century. Silk and gilded lamellae spun around cotton. Courtesy of The David Collection, Copenhagen

Peter Frankopan

is the director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research and a senior research fellow at Worcester College, Oxford. He is the author of The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (2015) and The Earth Transformed (2023). He lives in Oxford.

Marie-Louise Nosch

is professor of ancient history at the Saxo Institute at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. Her co-edited books include Clothing Along the Silk Roads (2022) and Tools, Textiles and Contexts (2015).

Feng Zhao

is director of China National Silk Museum in Hangzhou and professor of history of textiles and costume at Donghua University in Shanghai. His co-edited books include Global Textile Encounters (2014) and Textiles and Clothing Along the Silk Roads (2022).

Edited by  Sam Haselby

Some say that history begins with writing; we say that history begins with clothing. In the beginning, there was clothing made from skins that early humans removed from animals, processed, and then tailored to fit the human body; this technique is still used in the Arctic. Next came textiles. The first weavers would weave textiles in the shape of animal hides or raise the nap of the fabric’s surface to mimic the appearance of fur, making the fabric warmer and more comfortable.

The shift from skin clothing to textiles is recorded in our earliest literature, such as in the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, where Enkidu, a wild man living on the Mesopotamian steppe, is transformed into a civilised being by the priestess Shamhat through sex, food and clothing. Judaism, Christianity and Islam all begin their accounts of their origins with a dressing scene. A naked Adam and Eve, eating from the forbidden tree, must flee the Garden of Eden. They clothe themselves and undertake a new way of life based on agriculture and animal husbandry. The earliest textile imprints in clay are some 30,000 years old, much older than agriculture, pottery or metallurgy.

Persian Carpet Dealer on the Street (1888) by Osman Hamdi Bey (1842-1910). Nationalgalerie der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

In the 21st century, the Silk Roads have re-emerged as the catch-all name for a highly politicised infrastructure project across Asia. The name Silk Roads comes from the origin and spread of sericulture – the practice of making silk fibres – in which Chinese women have played a special role. The discovery of silk fibres is attributed to the Empress Ling Shih, known as Lei Zhu. Legend says a silk cocoon fell into her cup and began to unravel in the hot tea water while she sat under a mulberry tree. Another legend tells that it was a Chinese princess who brought sericulture out of China to the Kingdom of Khotan by hiding silkworm eggs in her hair when she was sent to marry the Khotanese king.

In Modern Chinese, sī (絲, ‘silk, thread, string’) is commonly reconstructed as Middle Chinese *si. Linguists believe that the word journied via nomadic tribes in western China who also adapted the Mongolian word sirkeg (‘silk fabric’) and the Manchu sirge or sirhe (‘silk thread, silk floss from a cocoon’). The Greek noun sērikón and Latin sēricum come from the same Chinese root. The English word silk, Old Norse silki and Scandinavian silke – transferred into Finnish and Karelian as silkki, Lithuanian šilkas, and Old Russian šĭlkŭ – all have the same origin in Chinese. It took approximately one millennium for the word ‘silk’ to travel from China to northern Europe via Central Asia and Iran: 10,000 kilometres in 1,000 years.

In ancient Asia, silk was valuable and coveted, even by the powerful. It is said that in the year 1 BCE, China paid off invaders from the north with 30,000 bolts of silk, 7,680 kg of silk floss and 370 pieces of clothing. Among the less powerful, textiles possessed even greater value. We know from 3rd- and 4th-century Kroraina kingdom legal documents (from Chinese Turkistan, present-day Xinjiang province) that the theft of ‘two jackets’ could occasion a crime and that ‘two belts’ were significant enough to appear in wills.

Silk became the symbol of an extravagance and decadence

The classical Greek and Roman world thought of India as the site of great textiles and garments. The Romans marvelled at Indian saffron (Crocus indicus), a precious spice and dye plant yielding a bright yellow. Indigo was among the most valuable commodities traded from Asia. Diocletian’s Edict of Maximum Prices of 301 CE tells us that one Roman pound of raw silk cost the same as nine years’ wages of a smith.

In Rome, silk became the symbol of an extravagance and decadence that some saw as corrupt and anti-Roman. Cleopatra was also said to wear quite inappropriate clothing of Chinese origin, revealing her breasts and therefore also her vanity, and indicating loose morals and greed. The Roman emperor Elagabalus was described contemptuously by his contemporary Herodian, who wrote that the ruler refused to wear traditional Roman clothes because they were made of inferior textiles. Only silk ‘met with his approval’.

The Roman poet Horace dismissed women who wore silk, arguing that its lightness meant that ‘you may see her, almost as if naked … you may measure her whole form with your eye.’

Wall painting of two young Roman women wearing fine translucent fabric. Roman, 1-75 CE. Gift of Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman. Photo by J Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

The technology behind silk had long been a historical puzzle. The recent archaeological discovery of a 2nd-century BCE Han dynasty burial chamber of a woman in Chengdu has now solved it. Her grave contained a miniature weaving workshop with wooden models of doll-sized weavers operating pattern looms with an integrated multi-shaft mechanism and a treadle and pedal to power the loom. Europeans wouldn’t devise the treadle loom, which enhances power, precision and efficiency, for another millennium.

Chengdu loom model (digital reconstruction). Photo courtesy China National Silk Museum, Hangzhou, Zhejiang province

This technology, known as weft-faced compound tabby, also emerged in the border city of Dura-Europos in Syria and in Masada in Israel, dating to the 70s CE. We can, however, be confident that the technique known as taqueté was first woven with wool fibre in the Levant. From there, it spread east, and the Persians and others turned it into a weft-faced compound twill called samite. Samites became the most expensive and prestigious commodity on the western Silk Roads right up until the Arab conquests. They were highly valued international commodities, traded all the way to Scandinavia.

Fragments of silk samite from fabric no 1 from Oseberg, as drawn by Sofie Krafft. Photo by Ann Christine Eek. © Museum of Cultural History, Oslo, Norway

In Norway in 834 CE, two women were buried in the large Oseberg Viking ship, loaded with silk textiles, including more than 110 silk samite pieces cut into narrow, decorative strips. Most of the Oseberg silk strips are of Central Asian origin and they were probably several generations old when they were buried. The old Norse sagas speak of exquisite fabrics that were perhaps samites, even calling them guðvefr, literally ‘God-woven’.

These samite strips could have come to Scandinavia via close contact with the Rus communities settled along the Russian rivers, who could negotiate favourable conditions of trade with Byzantium. We know from historical sources that if a Rus merchant lost a slave in Greek territory, he would be entitled to compensation in the form of two pieces of silk. However, Byzantia also set a maximum purchase allowance for the Rus, and the maximum price for silk was 50 bezants. These silks that the Rus were trading in Byzantium, and then again with the Scandinavians, came from the Syrian cities of Antioch, Aleppo and Damascus.

Most early medieval silks in Europe are Byzantine, not Chinese. The Scandinavians also exported fur products to Asia that fuelled luxury consumption in Byzantium and eastwards, including coats, but also trimmings for hats and boots, and hems for kaftans and collars. The combination of fur and silk remained popular in prestige clothing to the Renaissance kings of Europe, and still exists in royal ermine robes.

Under the Muslim dynasties of the Umayyads (661-750), the Abbasids (750-1258), the Ilkhanids (1256-1335) and the Mamluks (1250-1517), diplomatic clothing gifts evolved into robes of honour. In Arabic, these are called khilʿa or tashrīf, and they are precious garments that a ruler would bestow upon his elites. They would then wear them to show loyalty. Silk gift-giving worked in both directions, it seems, and a caliph might receive hundreds of garments from one of his subjects.

A huge textile industry, private as well as royal, flourished in Baghdad in the 9th to 10th centuries, employing at least 4,000 people in silk and cotton manufacturing alone. Precious dyes, such as kermes from Armenia, offered opportunities for exclusive designs of bright-red fabric. Early Islamic scholars praise Central Asia not only for its silk but also for its wool, linen, fur and especially fine cotton. The 10th century also saw the spread of Islam, and the advance of trade networks lead to a renaissance in West African weaving and textile production.

The Rules and Regulations of the Abbasid Court state that, in the year 977 CE, the wealthy Adud al-Dawla sent the caliph gifts of 500 garments in a full range of qualities, from the finest to the coarsest – an excellent example of ‘silken diplomacy’. The Abbasid dynasty invested in palace textile workshops producing sophisticated patterns and techniques, such as the renowned tirāz. Originally a Persian loan-word, the term tirāz eventually became used for exquisite decorated or embroidered fabrics with in-woven inscriptions of the name of the ruler or praising Allah.

The silk tapestry roundel unites symbolic and aesthetic concepts from both the Islamic and Chinese realms

The purpose of tirāz textiles, at least to begin with, may have been a form of tax or tribute that was paid by provinces in Central Asia to honour new rulers when they took power. The term also came to be the name for a workshop where such exquisite fabrics with inscriptions were produced. The author Ibn Khaldūn, who wrote in the 14th century, dedicated a whole chapter to tirāz textiles in his book Muqaddimah:

Royal garments are embroidered with such a tirāz, in order to increase the prestige of the ruler or the person of lower rank who wears such a garment, or in order to increase the prestige of those whom the ruler distinguishes by bestowing upon them his own garment …

A 14th-century silk and metal-thread slit tapestry roundel. At its centre, an elegant ruler is seated on his throne, clad in a blue and gold robe or kaftan girded by a golden belt. He has a beard and a Persian-style crown, and is flanked by two seated noblemen, both wearing kaftans; on the right side is a Mongol prince or general, under whose foot is a blue tortoise, a typical Chinese symbol of longevity and endurance. Behind the throned ruler stand two guards wearing the same helmet-like hats. The medallion is decorated with an outer band of good wishes woven in Arabic golden letters, and inner bands of animals and imaginary creatures. Photo by Pernille Klemp, courtesy of David’s Collection, Copenhagen/Wikimedia Commons

The Abbasid rule ended in 1258 when Baghdad was conquered by the Mongols under the command of Hulegu, a grandson of Chinggis Khan. Hulegu took the title of Il-Khan to signal that he was subordinate to the Great Mongol Khans of China. One of his successors is portrayed in a silk tapestry roundel, uniting symbolic and aesthetic concepts from both the Islamic and Chinese realms (see image above). The depicted figures – Mongols, Persians and Arabs – manifest the union of ethnic and political groups in an idealised image of the Pax Mongolica. The technical features of this tapestry, made using a gold thread with a cotton core, suggest it may have been made in a cotton-growing region yet woven by Chinese weavers. The Mongols are famous for many things; it is less well known that they were great patrons of arts, crafts and textiles. The Ilkhanid dynasty ruled for some generations until it collapsed around 1335.

European imports of silks from China and Central Asia rose steadily in the Middle Ages. In 1099, after the capture of Jerusalem by the knights of the First Crusade, they increased again. The creation of Christian states in the Holy Land opened new trade routes, which facilitated the rise of the Italian city-states. The westward expansion of the Mongol Empire under Chinggis Khan and his successors also helped augment the power of these Italian trading centres. Great quantities of raw silk coming into Italy helped stimulate creative and technological progress in Europe, generating new techniques and patterns as well as new technologies. The lampas or woven fabrics especially fuelled innovation in patterning and the introduction of the treadle loom in medieval Europe.

While China was an important source of silk and other goods, South Asia had long been part of exchange networks linking the Indian Ocean world with the Gulf, Africa, Europe, and South-East and East Asia. Economic and political shocks from the 14th century led to surging prices for silk in European markets. The value of silk thread per ounce approached the price of gold.

In the early 15th century, the Chinese white mulberry (Morus alba) began to be successfully cultivated in Europe, in particular in Lombardy in Italy. We should not think of European silk cultivation and silk weaving only as a short business venture or a mere adjunct to Chinese or Asian dominance. Italy remained a leading global producer over several centuries, first of silk fabrics and then of silk threads, maintaining its position as the world’s second largest exporter of silk threads after China into the 1930s. To this day, Italian capacity and expertise in silk production survives.

The most famous legend tells of two monks who smuggled silkworm eggs to Europe

New silk institutions also emerged. In Valencia in Spain, between 1482 and 1533, the ‘Silk Exchange’ was erected to regulate and promote the city’s trade. It served as a financial centre, a courthouse for arbitration to solve commercial conflicts, and a prison for defaulting silk merchants.

The Hall of Columns in the Lonja de la Seda or ‘Silk Exchange’ in Valencia, built 1482-1533. A UNESCO World Heritage Site of cultural significance, its impressive pillars are shaped like z-spun threads. Photo Trevor Huxham/Flickr

Many legends arose around silk, primarily because of its value, with the technology of sericulture and silk production jealously guarded in China for millennia. Perhaps the most famous legend tells of two monks who smuggled silkworm eggs to Europe, thus breaking the production monopoly and revealing how silk was made.

In the second half of the 17th century, Paris became the centre of European textile production, design and technique. This included the emergence of a luxury shopping environment of boutiques and fashion houses. Fashion magazines such as Le Mercure galant reported on style and new trends from the royal court. The largest Parisian fashion houses, such as the Gaultier family business, supplied the wardrobes of the royal family and the nobility, and held shares in the French East India Company. King Louis XIV and his minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert invested in fashion and textile production as an important innovative sector to showcase France’s greatness.

Illegal imports of foreign textiles and luxury copies posed a challenge for French trade and domestic production. French consumers had a large desire for foreign textiles, and colourful, cheap fabrics flooded the market. Illicit products from Asia arrived via trading posts in the Philippines and Mexico, putting pressure on European fabrics and fashionable goods in terms of price and quality. King Louis XIV of France and his grandson, Philip V of Spain, sent Jean de Monségur, an industrial and commercial spy, on a mission to Mexico City to collect intelligence on the legal and illegal trade between India, China and Europe. His detailed intelligence report addressed the trade in textiles, clothing and fashion. With great concern, he wrote:

[T]he Chinese have got hold of our patterns and designs, which they have utilised well and can today produce quality goods, although not everything that comes from over there can match the European standard … The times are over when one could assume that the Chinese are clumsy, without talent or trade talent, or that their goods are not in demand.

Monségur also noted that Chinese silks were highly competitive because of their lower prices. In Mexico, even commoners wore Chinese silk clothing.

When the victorious Mongols conquered new land, they selected artisans, especially weavers, and saved their lives because they were crucial to the expanding empire’s needs and ambitions. These skilled craftspeople were then ordered to settle where the empire needed them, hence the large-scale forced movements of textile workers within the Mongol Empire.

Beginning in the 15th century, the colonisation of the Americas brought about the largest forced textile labour movement in history. It forcibly displaced some 13 million people, transporting them from West Africa to the Caribbean and North America. Coerced labour was central in the establishment and development of a textile industry heavily dependent on cotton and indigo. Even today, cotton harvesting is very labour intensive: every year from September to October, millions of workers pick cotton in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, India, the United States and China. Cotton pledges have been signed by textile and fashion companies committed to banning forced labour in the cotton harvests, yet the massive need for labour and the low price of cotton are obstacles to these efforts.

‘Christmas greetings from the Danish West Indies’: postcard from the cotton plantation Bettys Hope on the island of Saint Croix, a Danish colony until 1917 and today part of the US Virgin Islands. Courtesy of the Royal Danish Library, Copenhagen

Some 60 per cent of the 40 million people employed by the garment industry today are in the Asia-Pacific region. Working conditions and pay levels are often poor, in part because of the pressure to lower production costs. Implications for the health and safety of workers are often terrible: for example, when the poorly constructed Rana Plaza complex in Bangladesh collapsed in 2013, more than 1,100 garment workers lost their lives.

Everyone knows that clothing can symbolise power, legacy, glory, as well as ethnic or national identity and aspirations. In male power-dressing, we observe over time how clothing emphasises the ruler’s head, shoulders and torso, and a belt highlights bodily strength. Jewellery, weapons and other royal insignia serve as garnish. The choice of simple clothes, preferred by many Left-wing leaders, also projects meanings – and the source of their power.

The last emir of Bukhara, Alim Khan (1880-1944), dressed in a deep-blue silk robe. Photo by Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Among the elite in many parts of Eurasia, Western dress practices became symbolic of a progressive mindset. In the late 17th century, Peter the Great imposed Western clothing on the civil administration of Russia. In Meiji-era Japan, the ruler and his family adopted full Western attire. The Japanese emperor would wear the sebiro, the Japanese term for ‘suit’ derived from Savile Row, the London street that was home to the finest gentlemen’s tailors.

Emperor Meiji in 1873, dressed in Western military parade uniform and with an admiral’s hat. Photo by Uchida Kuichi (内田九一) (1844-75). Albumen silver print from glass negative with applied colour. Courtesy of The Met Museum, New York

In the early 20th century, clothing became so accessible and cheap that rulers could demand that their subjects dress in a certain way and adapt their clothing to the ruler’s politics. They wanted the general population to mirror the rulers’ values, political beliefs and ambitions. For example, in 1925, the Greek dictator Theodoros Pangalos imposed a law stipulating that women’s dresses should not rise more than 30 cm from the ground. The same year, Ataturk’s Hat Law was passed in Turkey, another historical example of clothing regulations being used as a political instrument to orient, redress or change the mentality of an entire society. Wearing a Western hat and abandoning the traditional Ottoman and Islamic headgear of the turban and fez became a political act of adherence to the Kemalist republic. Men’s headgear became a potent symbol of ideology, and the ‘wrong’ hat was penalised with fines and, occasionally, even with capital punishment.

At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, Winston Churchill wears a civilian double-breasted wool coat, Franklin D Roosevelt, a civilian suit under a cape with tresses and a fur collar, and Stalin, a double-breasted Soviet uniform whose design mirrors both earlier Tsarist and 20th-century European uniforms. A Persian carpet from western Iran forms a connection between them all. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia

In the 20th century, military uniform design and cut followed those of the country’s allies and ambitions. We can see this in the military uniforms used across Eurasia during the Cold War, with a ‘communist’ style in countries allied with the Soviet Union or China, versus the ‘capitalist’ NATO styles used by the West’s allies.

Throughout the world, rulers have tried to control people by regulating their clothing

It is notable that textile metaphors gained currency to represent both the reign of the Cold War, with its ‘Iron Curtain’, and the period’s historic end in 1989, with the ‘Velvet Revolution’ in Czechoslovakia. The expressions play on both the softness of fabric (velvet) and its capacity to cover and conceal (curtain). In popular culture, it was denim and blue jeans that caught the imagination of young people in the East, as symbols of youth and of political and moral freedom. The name ‘denim’ comes from the French city of Nîmes in Occitanie, a major producer of blue dye from woad (Isatis tinctoria) and synonymous with workers’ blue cotton cloth. The word ‘jeans’ connects to the French name of Gênes and the Italian city of Genova, from where such coarse fabrics were exported.

Throughout history, and throughout the world, rulers have tried to control people by regulating their clothing. Regulations can be prescriptive or proscriptive, and carry gendered and social meanings and ramifications. Dress codes – from the military to school uniforms – indicate political and social alignment, to visually express unity, loyalty and adherence. Meanwhile, bans, prohibitions or censure of the dress practices of certain individuals or groups aim to exclude. When the Chinese emperor Zhu Yuanzhang, the founder of the Ming dynasty, took the throne in 1368, he banned the former regime’s style of clothing, branding it ‘barbaric’, and ordered a return to the clothing style of the Han dynasty.

Clothing regulations can be social or legal, and across Eurasia many have attempted to regulate how people dress to enforce an ideal, or to protect national production from foreign imports. Sumptuary laws (from Latin sumptus, meaning ‘expense’) could regulate both manufacturing and trade, as well as national moral economies that would influence consumption patterns and values. They represented social, gendered and racial hierarchies, and expressed them visually. Many regulated the use of jewellery and the practices surrounding feasts or funerals. The main objective was always directed at dress practices, with greater significance given to fabrics, fibres, weave and decoration than to cuts and tailoring. In Lima, Peru – in Spanish colonial America – sumptuary laws stipulated that women of African or mixed African and European descent were prohibited from wearing woollen cloth, silks or lace – though forbidden luxury fabrics often simply reappeared as cheaper copies, and trade labels were faked.

Fabric merchant in Samarkand, photographed between 1905 and 1915 by Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii. The merchant’s goods include striped silks, printed cotton, wool fabrics, and carpets. He wears a white turban and a silk kaftan adorned with Chinese-inspired floral motifs. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress

As globalisation intensified, it brought about technological breakthroughs in transport, communication and trade, through which dress has become more standardised, with many rich and diverse clothing cultures of the world diminished. Fortunately, the early 20th-century photographers Albert Kahn and Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii captured the clothing of many glorious local traditions of Central Asia. Today, we can see some of these local costumes only in tourist shows and museums.

Not surprisingly, we know much more about the textiles and clothing of the elite than about the attire of ordinary people on the Silk Roads. Archaeology can help. The Chehrābād tunic belonged to a salt-mine worker, perhaps trapped and killed when the mine collapsed around 400 CE. It was woven of monochrome cotton cut and sewn into a knee-length tunic with long sleeves. Perhaps the tailor knew the body size of the worker or about his hard toil in the salt mines, since gussets were inserted in the armpit areas and at the hips to provide him with greater freedom of movement. Weaving mistakes occur in many places, as if woven in a hurry, or maybe because this was, after all, a work outfit.

The history of textile production has always been linked to cheap labour. Shepherding, sericulture, and cotton and flax cultivation require many hands, time, constant tending, efficiency, and standardised tools and techniques. The mechanisation of the clothing industry and of textile production therefore produced dramatic change. Richard Arkwright’s inventions in the 18th century were put into industrial-scale production when the English entrepreneur introduced the spinning frame, adapted it to use waterpower, and patented a rotary carding engine. Arkwright’s achievement was to combine power, machinery, semi-skilled labour and a new raw material, cotton, to create mass-produced yarn.

European ladies wore fashionable, soft pashmina shawls with Iranian and Central Asian paisley patterns

The French city of Lyon took advantage of geographical advantages that helped it become the centre of a silk ‘tiger economy’. The hill of Croix-Rousse housed factories, with every street filled with the clamorous sounds of mechanical looms. With its 30,000 canuts (the nickname for Lyon’s silk workers), this industrious district turned Lyon into a major hub for textile production, especially silk-weaving, providing garments for the royal court and the nobility of Europe.

In the social world of the rising 18th- and 19th-century Western bourgeoisie, we find many products of the Silk Roads, both in textiles and designs. Ladies wore fashionable, soft pashmina shawls with Iranian and Central Asian paisley patterns – a style that had travelled from representing the bonds between Britain and its empire in Asia. Young and fashionable women in European royal families would inspire others to wear these colourful soft shawls as a new accessory. One of the most iconic ‘influencers’ was Empress Joséphine of France who integrated pashmina fabrics and paisley patterns into her wardrobe.

Portrait of Empress Joséphine (c1808-9) by Antoine-Jean Gros. Courtesy of the Musée Masséna, Nice/Wikipedia

Women of the Spanish Empire would wear the mantón de Manila, also known as the Spanish shawl, which takes its name from Manila in the Philippines, from where it was traded eastwards over the Pacific into the Spanish Empire of the Americas. Originally, it was a silk garment adorned with embroidery, and woven in Southern China, which was traded from the late 16th century via Manila and the Spanish-American colonies, then further into Europe via Spain.

Russian girls in a rural area 500 km north of Moscow, photographed by Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii in 1909. Industrially woven, colourful printed fabrics were accessible even in remote villages, and likely used, re-used, sewn and mended. At this time, dyes were chemically bonded and developed from the industrial competition between Germany, France and the UK in the race to patent new synthetic dyes. Courtesy of the Library of Congress

In An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith wrote that trade was not only mutually beneficial to trade partners but to society as a whole. To illustrate his argument, he explored the competitive advantages of cloth compared with wheat. Textile production was to Smith a sign of economic dynamism. It was only following the French Revolution that clothing regulations were abolished and the nation’s citizens could dress as they wished: ‘Everyone is free to wear whatever clothing and accessories of his sex that he finds pleasing.’ However, the very same decree stipulated the obligation to visibly wear the cocarde knot of red, white and blue ribbons, emblematic of the French Revolution. It was implicitly asserted that clothing should be gender-appropriate and respect earlier dress regulations.

Two Germans with particular textile histories would revolutionise the political landscape of the 19th century. Friedrich Engels was the scion of the family behind the cotton company Baumwollspinnerei Ermen & Engels in western Germany, and he settled in the English city of Manchester, a leading centre for global cotton trade and manufacture. Karl Marx was greatly influenced by his close friend Engels and by the textile industry in particular. In Das Kapital (1867), Marx illustrated his arguments about the working classes by referring to the Lumpenproletariat – or the ‘proletariat of rags’ – and by using the example of an overcoat as an allegory for the measure of labour, resources, technology and the uneven rewards of capitalism.

‘Drilling and training for the revolution, spinning and weaving for the people’: Chinese poster, 1974. Courtesy of the Landsberger Collection/chineseposters.net

In the 20th century, political transformations and new economic conditions and ideologies have negatively impacted artisanal weaving and other kinds of traditional crafts globally. Much intangible textile craft culture has been lost; new technologies have made handicrafts obsolete or very expensive; urbanisation has standardised fashion; and people no longer want to carry out what is seen as tedious textile work.

The word ‘text’ comes from Latin texere (‘to weave’), and a text – morphologically and etymologically – indicates a woven entity. We can therefore say that history starts not with writing but with clothing. Before history, there was nudity, at least in the Abrahamic tradition; clothing thus marks the beginning of history and society. The representation of nudity as part of a wild and pre-civilised life mirrors the European colonial perspective of the naked human as ‘wild’.

Across the world today, there are two main ways to dress: gendered into male and female, and stylistically into clothing tailored to fit the body, or draped/wrapped around it like the Roman toga or the Indian sari. Fitted clothing dominates globally, especially after the Second World War, with blue jeans and T-shirts now ubiquitous across all continents.

Today, a T-shirt on sale in any shop around the world is the result of a finely meshed web of global collaboration, trade and politics. From cotton fields in Texas or Turkmenistan, to spinning mills in China, garment factories in Southeast Asia, printers in the West, and second-hand clothing markets in Africa, a T-shirt travels thousands of kilometres around the world in its lifetime. On average, a Swede purchases nine T-shirts annually, and even if they are made to last 25 to 30 washes, consumers tend to discard them before. Greenpeace found that Europeans and North Americans, on average, hold on to their clothes for only three years. Some garments last only for one season, either because they fall out of fashion, or because the quality of the fabric, tailoring and stitching is so poor that the clothes simply fall apart.

This is the impact of fast fashion that has taken hold since the beginning of the 21st century: for millennia, clothing had always been expensive, worth repairing and maintaining, and made to last. Along with the acceleration of consumption came falling prices and an ever-narrowing margin for profit. The fast-fashion business model requires seamless global trade, inexpensive long-distance transportation, cheap flexible labour and plentiful natural resources. That equation is changing in a world that is warming and where trade barriers are coming up. The future of fabrics, textiles and clothing is bound up in the great themes of the present – and the future.

This Essay is based on the chapter ‘The World Wide Web’ by Marie-Louise Nosch, Feng Zhao and Peter Frankopan, from the UNESCO report Textiles and Clothing Along the Silk Roads (2022) edited by Feng Zhao and Marie-Louise Nosch.

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18 December 2023

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- When does after begin?

In Valle de Vázquez, Mexico, a resident watches his house being demolished, four days after the 19 September 2017 earthquake. Photo by Hector Vivas/Getty

i

When does after begin?

Three earthquakes hit Mexico City on the same date in 1985, 2017 and 2022. The coincidence left the city stranded in time

15 Dec, 2023

by Lachlan Summers + BIO

In Valle de Vázquez, Mexico, a resident watches his house being demolished, four days after the 19 September 2017 earthquake. Photo by Hector Vivas/Getty

Lachlan Summers

is a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, where he is a member of the ‘Time Scales: Historicizing Deep Time’ working group.

Edited by  Cameron Allan McKean

Shortly before 7:19am on 19 September 1985, time began to shift in Mexico City. It started with a tremor, emerging from the subduction zone on the Pacific coast, about 300 km southwest of the metropolis. The magnitude 7.4 quake took less than a minute to travel through the surface of southern Mexico before arriving beneath the city. Amplified by soft soils, it reached magnitude 8.1, killing, according to government data, around 10,000 people (the real number is likely much higher – perhaps as many as 40,000 people), and immediately causing 400 buildings to collapse (3,000 would eventually be demolished). Telephone lines went down, sewerage flooded the drinking water, roads into and out of the city became blocked. In the aftermath, up to 700,000 of the estimated 9.1 million residents in the Federal District of Mexico City were left homeless – the state response to the disaster was catastrophically incompetent. And behind it all, as the event recedes into memory, time itself began to take on ever-stranger forms.

During the following years, while city and federal governments grappled with the political fallout, the anniversary of the earthquake became a date on which the state expresses its contrition for the past and demonstrates its preparedness for the future. Every year since 1985, a minute’s silence is held on 19 September, followed by commemorative events, the unveiling of memorials and monuments, the inauguration of new preventative technologies and infrastructures, and the promulgation of risk-reduction legislation – all to ensure that similar disasters are avoided.

These state performances are also met with protests from residents demanding the government be held to account for rampant corruption in the real estate industry, which had led to the substandard construction in many of the collapsed buildings. In the early 1990s, evacuation drills were added to the commemorative events of 19 September. And in the early 2000s, these anniversary evacuations followed the sounding of the city’s Seismic Alert System (Sistema de Alerta Sísmica Mexicano, or SASMEX), which was gradually being implemented across the metropolis. From loudspeakers on street corners, the alert begins as a pulsing, vibrating rhythm that is more eerie than alarming. Over this sound, a cold monotone voice repeats the words ‘Alerta sísmica’. The anniversary becomes a day for declaring that the events of 19 September 1985 will never happen again. It turns the earthquake into something to be memorialised: a historical event.

All that changed in 2017, when the alarm sounded twice on 19 September. Once for the memorial and commemorative evacuations, and then again, two hours later, for a devastating magnitude 7.1 earthquake that killed more than 300 people and levelled dozens of buildings. For the survivors, the coincidence begins to create profound temporal disorientation. How, survivors ask each other, could this be happening again? How could the two most devastating earthquakes in Mexico City’s history strike on the same date?

Some residents told me that when the second alarm sounded, they assumed it was another commemoration of the 1985 earthquake rather than a warning of a new tremor, and so they remained in their buildings until the city began to shake. Fernanda, a woman living in southern Mexico City, told me:

I simply could not believe it… I heard the alert and thought to myself: ‘That’s strange, another drill.’ I did not think: ‘That’s another earthquake.’ I guess I thought that earthquakes would only come [during the other] 364 days of the year.

The apparent impossibility of the coincidence wreaked havoc with the past and present: people ran home to check on their apartments, only to inadvertently run back in time to where they lived in 1985. My friend Eli told me that when the city’s second alert began sounding before the 2017 earthquake, he became ‘atascado’ (meaning stranded, as in jammed, stuck or overwhelmed). ‘Here was the alert saying that an earthquake will happen,’ he told me, shaking his head. ‘But a large part of me is just wondering: Where am I? Is this really happening?’ Another friend, Carlos, described a similar sense of confusion. Earthquakes that were once separate Earthly events were now interconnected ‘reminders that the Earth is always happening to us’. And for Elena, whom I met in 2019 at a protest for still-homeless victims from the 1985 and 2017 disasters, the earthquakes never really ended. Though the tremors stopped, their effects lingered.

The unlikelihood of the coincidence showed that time was never really under human control

These responses all reflect a sensibility that is now common in Mexico City: when the 2017 earthquake struck, time itself shifted a little. Younger people, who ‘remember’ the 1985 disaster only through its annual commemoration, find themselves stranded between the inertia of human-historical time – of clocks, calendars and national anniversaries – and the demands of a looping geological moment. Since then, for many residents, it was as if the present became ceaseless and extensive, and the past and the future stopped being mutually exclusive temporal categories.

A 2020 survey by the newspaper El Financiero showed that Mexico City’s residents were particularly fearful of earthquakes. But, during my time in the city, I noticed that this fear was new and different: after the 2017 event, people had become more afraid of earthquakes. Like people living in other seismic zones, the city’s residents are accustomed to experiencing earthquakes, but the coincidence in 2017 proved too strange to simply consign to Earth’s arbitrary movements. Alongside the increased fear of seismicity, that same survey showed that much of the city is now frightened of 19 September – as a date. In the city’s collective imagination, the earthquakes that have occurred on other dates since 2017 are mere geological flotsam; 19 September, however, is a day that now belongs to Earth. Each anniversary, residents will attempt to either work from home, find open spaces away from buildings, or leave Mexico City entirely. All are worried about being caught somewhere precarious when the next 19 September arrives. And each year, fewer and fewer attend the protests, not because they are losing interest in justice for those who lost their homes in 2017, but because they are terrified of being in the city on the anniversary.

I am an anthropologist who writes about time, the state, and how people experience strange, inconceivable events. During the six years I conducted ethnographic research in Mexico City, I learned a little about how the geological coincidence in 2017 has shifted residents’ experience of time. One change is that the unlikelihood of the coincidence showed that time was never really under human control. Though a geological event can seem to have ended from a human perspective, it may, as Carlos told me, still be ongoing for Earth. In geological terms, the interval between 1985 and 2017 is just an instant. This dilation of human time by Earth becomes especially visceral as each anniversary approaches, and geological forces promise once again to gather human futures into an ongoing Earthly present. Though time might seem to be advancing for humans – the future becoming the present, the present the past – this temporal flow is contained in one duration for Earth: a long geological now. In the temporal imagination of Mexico City’s residents, it’s as if 19 September has become three things: a date on the calendar, a reminder of events in the City’s history, and a marker of the inhuman forces that have ravaged Earth in perpetuity. For many residents, the categories of past, present and future have become subject to the whims of a capricious Earth.

Opening a geology textbook unleashes a torrent of metaphor and analogy in which Earth appears to live and breathe. Slopes are described as ‘retreating’, mountains can be ‘revived’, streams ‘defeated’, plains ‘undulating’, walls ‘hanging’, glaciers ‘pulsating’ and rocks ‘fatigued’. As a descriptive science, noticing deep-time processes that appear static in human lifetimes – like the movements of tectonic plates – requires a turn to the metaphoric. Earthly metaphors seem to provide a sense of stability in our everyday lives that liquid metaphors can’t. We ‘lay the groundwork’ for plans; we seek a ‘sure footing’ or a ‘steady foundation’ on terra firma. Perhaps this sense of stability is why seismology offers such potent metaphors for massive, sudden or irreversible change. We might hear about ‘tectonic shifts’ in values and meanings, or entrenched political ‘fault lines’, or of an event’s inevitable ‘aftershocks’. This last metaphor, aftershock, is particularly malleable. It is used to describe post-traumatic stress disorder, interest rate rises, the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, and many other moments in which changes produce lasting effects. ‘Aftershock’ is a metaphor that locates an event by pointing to its consequences, using a linear imagination of time to move from cause to effect. But looking at the experience of aftershock sequences can open our imaginations to how time’s coherence is contingent upon the stability of an erratic Earth.

The term ‘aftershock’ comes from the Japanese seismologist Fusakichi Omori, who realised in 1895 that three major Japanese earthquakes – in Kumamoto (1889), Nōbi (1891) and Kagoshima (1893) – were in fact a single, staggered event. By identifying their contiguity, the similarity of their wave forms and other factors, he positioned these discrete events into an ongoing process that became known as the ‘aftershock sequence’. Omori’s Law, and Tokuji Utsu’s later amendments (known collectively as the Omori-Utsu Law) state that, after a shallow earthquake, the parts of the fault that slipped will readjust causing connected earthly movements, but over time, the probability of those events will diminish. In concrete terms, the likelihood of an aftershock the day after an earthquake will be half what it was the day of the earthquake, around one-tenth by the 10th day, and so on. In the mid-20th century, the Gutenberg-Richter Law added that the higher the magnitude of the mainshock, the more frequent and stronger are its aftershocks. Importantly, though aftershock timings, numbers and locations broadly conform to these statistical rules, they remain stochastic.

Paying attention to different forms of aftershock transforms the linear sequence of events into something strange and less determinate. Context renders metaphor uncanny. For instance, an important variable is the speed with which tectonic plates move. Along the San Andreas Fault, which moves around 37 mm per year, aftershock sequences tend to end about 10 years after an earthquake. In the New Madrid seismic zone of the eastern United States, however, tectonic plates move at close to 0.2 mm per year, so any earthquake that happened there before 2012 is considered an aftershock of an earthquake from 1812.

What might be ‘after’ for the city might still be ‘before’ for Earth

In the 14 months after the 1891 Nōbi earthquake in Japan, 3,090 aftershocks were recorded; by 1975, three to four still registered each year. Some seismologists theorise that the magnitude 7.6 earthquake that struck Chiloé Island in Chile in 2016 was an aftershock of the magnitude 9.5 Valdivia earthquake in 1960. Moreover, mainshocks will often be preceded by foreshocks. The 1960 Valdivia earthquake was preceded by a magnitude 8.1 earthquake 33 hours prior; likewise, the magnitude 9.2 Sumatran earthquake of 2004 might have been presaged by a magnitude 7.6 foreshock in 2002. It’s not hard to imagine that a foreshock of that severity would have been considered a mainshock until a larger earthquake occurred. For example, on 24 August 2016, the municipality of Accumoli in Italy was struck by a magnitude 6.2 earthquake. Thousands of aftershocks followed it, hundreds each day, some up to magnitude 5.5, with a generalised decay in frequency and force. Then, on 30 October, a magnitude 6.6 earthquake struck the region – an aftershock that repositioned the August mainshock as a foreshock.

An aftershock sequence has a slippery temporality, despite its use as a metaphor denoting a linear succession of events. The relationship between foreshock, mainshock and aftershock only becomes clear long after the extended event has died down, sometimes at a scale that troubles conceptions of causality. This form of seismic time is not knowable through the human experience of a single seismic event. Instead, it is a geological process instituted within an earthquake that endures beyond it, distributed across years or decades. Under such conditions, ideas like ‘past’ and ‘future’ are shifting, contingent categories. One cannot be sure if their ‘present’ is before or after a mainshock – before or after (or within) the geological ‘present’ of Earth.

This describes how many people have experienced the uncanny geological temporality of Mexico City. Though the 2017 earthquake was not an aftershock of the 1985 tremor, the unpredictable temporality of an aftershock sequence, particularly the notion of an uncertain ‘present’, is a means of understanding residents’ sense that geological time had displaced the time of Mexico City. What might be ‘after’ for the city might still be ‘before’ for Earth.

I was in Mexico City in 2021, in the weeks before 19 September. As the date approached, the sense of an uncertain present began to return once again. While travelling through the city, overhearing conversations or talking with friends, I began to get a sense of these growing temporal anxieties. Some residents began to worry that this 19 September would be Mexico City’s last.

Shortly before 9pm on 7 September, as I sat reading in the window of my apartment, with the buzz of fat summer raindrops filling the street below, I heard the speakers of the city’s early warning system suddenly crackle to life. The other residents and I ran downstairs to await the coming earthquake, which arrived 20 seconds or so later. The electricity immediately cut out as a magnitude 7.1 quake, with long, rolling waves, turned the city’s surface to a piece of fabric billowing in a gentle breeze. It lasted for around two minutes. Fortunately, despite its magnitude and duration, the earthquake caused little damage. But, climbing back to our apartment, I receive a text message from a friend: ‘No way, it’s September 7, again.’ Four years earlier, the earthquake of 19 September 2017 had been prefigured by an earthquake on 7 September. The tremor we had just felt began to appear like a geological promise: a confirmation that Mexico City was headed for another disaster on 19 September 2021. We had 12 days.

The odds were so low that an earthquake would appear on the same date in 1985 and 2017 that some residents felt they had become exposed to a timescale that would make such geological coincidences possible. The unlikely becomes inevitable, precisely because of its improbability. And so, another earthquake was expected to arrive on 19 September 2021, and every other year since the 2017 coincidence.

Residents were convinced that the city’s repeating geological loop had initiated

Back in 2018, when the first anniversary of the 2017 quake approached (and the 33rd anniversary of 1985), a cartoon by Victor Solís was shared widely on social media, particularly in the WhatsApp group chats I shared with earthquake victims and their advocates. (Since then, Solís says, it ‘religiously wanders and arrives to him via WhatsApp on this day each year.’) The cartoon shows a man in pyjamas praying at the side of his bed on the evening before 19 September. The text at the base of the image, the man’s prayer, translates as ‘… and that tomorrow would be nothing more than just the drill.’

Cartoon by Victor Solís

This feeling underpinned the 12 days of expectation in 2021. Shortly after I received the message from my friend alerting me to the similarities with the 2017 earthquakes, a rumour went viral across Mexican social media reminding the city of its geological history. A common version of the message reads:

Do you want to scare yourselves? On 7 September 1985, there was a strong earthquake in Mexico City; on 19 September, an earthquake gravely damaged the heart of Mexico City. On 7 September 2017, Mexico City trembled hard; then, on 19 September, another earthquake shook Mexico. And today, 7 September, it just trembled very hard. Strange coincidences.

Residents were convinced that the city’s repeating geological loop had initiated. During the ominous 12 days between 7 and 19 September, Mexican seismologists appeared for interviews on television and in newspapers, reminding the city that Earth cares nothing for human calendars. Experts do this each September, but in 2021 they went so far as to publish seismograms showing unequivocally that there was no geological relationship between the dates 7 September and 19 September in 1985. Contrary to the rumours, there was no significant earthquake on 7 September 1985. And yet, despite the reassurances, the geological coincidence seems bound to return because Mexico City is in an ongoing geological present: after a before, but still before an after.

This expectation sometimes transforms anxiety into outright hysteria and panic. Upon hearing commemorative sounding of Mexico City’s earthquake alarm, some residents have nervous breakdowns, throw themselves out windows, or fall down stairs. Each year since 2019, the city’s governor has announced the number of injuries that the commemorative evacuation causes each anniversary. The double anniversary is so heavy with Earthly time and human history that it is as if, until 2017, 19 September was a date on which earthquakes couldn’t happen, but after 2017, it became a date on which they had to.

We wait nervously throughout the 12 days of anticipation in 2021. Ultimately, an earthquake doesn’t strike on 19 September. But relief is short-lived. Unfortunately for Mexico City, there is a 19 September every year, an annual promise that the city’s ‘after’ has yet to begin. We begin waiting and expecting. Will it happen again?

In an earthquake, the time of Earth and the time of human experience intersect. As John McPhee suggests in Annals of the Former World (1998), thinking at these two timescales – ‘one human and emotional, the other geologic’ – induces a form of temporal schizophrenia because they are ‘so disparate’. Generally, the experience of geological time at a day-to-day level involves an abstracted, expanded frame of reference that demands leaps of imagination: Picture seeing emptiness where Mt Fuji once stood; envisage the landmass now known as India colliding with the continent of Asia; imagine the Himalayas swelling up. But in Mexico City post-2017, the peculiar convergence of these two timescales provokes a more visceral sense of Earthly forces that would otherwise remain abstract. This feeling of a deep-time present becomes especially acute on the most geologically unstable date in Mexican history.

On 19 September 2019, I stood alongside earthquake victim advocacy groups in Mexico City while we waited for the commemorative evacuation drill. When the alert began sounding, many around me put their fingers in their ears to drown out the robotic voice blandly repeating ‘Alerta sísmica’ over the ghostly, pulsating tone of the alarm. As if the early warning alert itself were somehow causal of earthquakes, a woman said under her breath: ‘Que se quede tranquila la tierra hoy’ (‘That the earth would remain tranquil today’) and we murmured our agreement until the alert drowned us out.

One explanation of these fears of 19 September might be that residents are experiencing a kind of seismic PTSD – a fearful response to a date marked by the human grief and suffering that a volatile Earth can deliver. This may be true to some extent, but understanding the experience of being ensnared in geological time as a form of trauma is insufficient. ‘Trauma’ can psychologise experiences, obscuring the important role of structural and environmental factors. Trauma can also be an elastic concept, capable of describing the experiences of – as Ruth Leys points out in her 2000 book – both the attendees of a wedding bombed by a drone, and the pilot who did the bombing. But most importantly, trauma has a linear temporality, especially in experiences of post-traumatic stress, in which a past event determines the future. This linear sense of time and history can reduce contemporary experience to an epiphenomenon of the past, which risks discounting the strangeness of the present in Mexico City. To view residents’ fears as seismic PTSD would also require overlooking what happened an hour or so after the commemorative alarm sounded on 19 September 2022.

These temporal geometries contort human history into strange and terrifying shapes

When the third 19 September earthquake happened, and the ground began to tremble, the city lost power. The magnitude 7.7 tremor was felt in 12 states, damaging buildings and killing two people. It was relatively minor compared with the earthquakes of 1985 and 2017 but, as the city shook for a third time, the temporality of trauma shifted: fears and anxieties that might have appeared to result from past disasters could no longer be considered ‘post-traumatic’ because the ‘post-’ had yet to begin. Human time was being swallowed by an abyssal geological present.

I ran to check on my apartment, then went to a cantina. With the power out, the bartenders were taking beers from their fridges and putting them in big buckets of ice on the street. Workers, holidaymakers, street vendors and police officers all sat on the footpath, drinking warm beer, and theorising what the hell was happening to Mexico City. There was a 0.026 per cent chance that the 2017 earthquake would happen on the anniversary of the 1985 disaster; we would later find out that the 2022 earthquake had about a 0.000751 per cent chance of happening. But for everyone I spoke with, its unlikelihood guaranteed that it would happen. The improbable was not impossible, least of all in Mexico City. I heard countless theories that explained the tremor: the city was in an Earthly loop, simply beyond human comprehension; residents’ fears of the date somehow manifested the earthquake; millions of people stomping out of their buildings during the commemorative evacuation upset the tectonic plates. But, above all, held the idea that Mexico City’s residents were justified in their fears: 19 September no longer belonged to humans, and the city had been set adrift in the time of Earth. Though the three 19 September tremors are not formally defined as an aftershock sequence, for some residents, it feels as if ‘after’ will never begin.

We are currently in a moment described as ‘the Anthropocene’, an epoch in which the actions of some humans register at the geological scale through traces of anthropogenic matter, such as nuclear radiation, plastics and carbon emissions. From this vantage, the future becomes an aftereffect of human action. But Mexico City, with its looping geology and its long 19 September, points toward a different relationship between the human and the geological, in which time itself is an effect of Earth.

For the city’s residents, the disaster of 1985 is in the past. The 2017 earthquake is in the past. Even the 2022 event is now in the past. But as these discrete events slip into human memory, all three are folded into Earth’s geological present. In Mexico City’s geological now, the relationship between past, present and future is not preordained, and these temporal geometries contort human history into strange and terrifying shapes. Mexico City’s time is dislocated, its residents stranded after what was prior but still before what might yet come. And 19 September is now, like its own axis of time, a yearly reminder that humans might not be in charge of when ‘after’ begins.

Earth science and climateDeep timeAnthropology

15 December 2023

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- Of memes and magick

Photo Public domain/TikTok/Aeon

i

Of memes and magick

Bending a mysterious world to your will was the goal of esoteric practices. Now it’s the unashamed aim of the tech titans

14 Dec, 2023

by Tara Isabella Burton + BIO

Photo Public domain/TikTok/Aeon

Tara Isabella Burton

is a novelist and historian. Her books include Social Creature (2018), The World Cannot Give (2022) and Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians (2023), and she is currently working on a history of magic and modernity.

Edited by  Marina Benjamin

Deep in the labyrinthine tags of TikTok, a group of teenage occultists promise they have the power to help you change your life. ‘Manifesting’ influencers – as they’ve come to be known – promise their legions of viewers that, with the right amount of focus, positive thinking and desire, the universe will bend to their will. ‘Most of these people [who manifest] end up doing what they say they’re going to do and being who they say they’re going to become,’ insists one speaker on the mindsetvibrations account (600,000 followers). Another influencer, Lila the Manifestess (70,000 followers) offers a special manifestation (incantation?) for getting your partner to text you back. (‘Manifest a text every time.’) Manifest With Gabby tells her 130,000-odd followers in pursuit of ‘abundance’ about ‘5 things I stopped doing when learning how to manifest’ – among them, saying ‘I can’t afford.’

It’s not just TikTok. Throughout the wider wellness and spirituality subcultures of social media, ‘manifesting’ – the art, science and magic of attracting positive energy into your life through internal focus and meditation, and harnessing that energy to achieve material results – is part and parcel of a well-regulated spiritual and personal life. It’s as ubiquitous as yoga or meditation might have been a decade ago. TikTok influencers and wellness gurus regularly encourage their followers to focus, Law of Attraction-style, on their desired life goals, in order to bring them about in reality. (‘These Celebrities Predicted Their Futures Through Manifesting’, crows one 2022 Glamour magazine article.)

It’s possible, of course, to read ‘manifesting’ as yet another vaguely spiritual wellness trend, up there with sage cleansing or lighting votive candles with Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s face on them. But to do so would be to ignore the increasingly visible intersection of occult and magical practices and internet subcultures. As our technology has grown ever more powerful, our control over nature seemingly ever more absolute, the discursive subculture of the internet has gotten, well, ever more weird.

Sometimes it seems like the whole internet is full of would-be magicians. ‘WitchTok’ and other Left-occult phenomena – largely framed around reclaiming ancient matriarchal or Indigenous practices in resistance to patriarchy – have popularised the esoteric among young, largely progressive members of Gen Z. The ‘meme magicians’ and ‘Kek-worshippers’ – troll-occultists of the 2016-era alt-Right – have given way to a generation of neotraditionalists: drawn to reactionary-coded esoteric figures like the Italian fascist-mage Julius Evola. Even the firmly sceptical, such as the Rationalists – Silicon Valley-based members of tech-adjacent subcultures like the Effective Altruism community – have gone, well, a little woo. In an article for The New Atlantis, I chronicled the ‘postrationalist’ turn of those eager to blend their Bayesian theories with psychedelics and ‘shadow work’ (a spiritualised examination of the darkest corners of our unconscious minds). As organised religion continues to decline in Western nations, interest in the spooky and the spiritual has only increased. Today, witches might be one of the fastest-growing religious groups in the United States.

Magic, of course, means a host of things to a plethora of people. The early 20th-century anthropologist Edward Evans-Pritchard used ‘magic’ to describe the animistic religious sentiments of the Azande people, whom he deemed primitive. There is folk magic, popular in a variety of cultures past and present: local remedies for ailments, horseshoes on doors, love charms. There is fantasy magic, the spellcasting and levitation and transmogrification we find in children’s novels like Harry Potter. And there is magic-as-illusion, the work of the showman who pulls rabbits out of hats. But magic, as I mean it here, and as it has been understood within the history of the Western esoteric tradition, means something related to, yet distinct from, all of these. It refers to a series of attempts to understand, and harness, the workings of the otherwise unknowable universe for our personal desired ends, outside of the safely hierarchical confines of traditional organised religion. This magic comes in different forms: historically, natural magic, linked with the manipulation of objects and bodies in nature, was often considered more theologically acceptable than necromancy, or the calling on demons. But, at its core, magic describes the process of manipulating the universe through uncommon knowledge, accessible to the learned or lucky few.

The canny reader may note that magic as I’ve defined it sounds an awful lot like technology, given a somewhat spiritualised sheen. This is no coincidence. The story of modernity and, in particular, the story of the quixotic founders of our early internet (equal parts hacker swagger and utopian hippy counterculture) is inextricable from the story of the development and proliferation of the Western esoteric tradition and its transformation from, essentially, a niche cult of court scientists and civil servants into one of the most influential yet least recognised forces acting upon contemporary life.

From the Renaissance humanists onwards, nearly every major proponent of what we might loosely call modern, liberal, democratic, technologically saturated life was involved with, or at least influenced by, intellectual and philosophical movements – from Hermeticism to Freemasonry – that were laden with occult promise. That promise? That human beings could – indeed should – seek, contra Biblical fiat, to maximise their knowledge and technical capacity in order to transform themselves into gods. This differs from the Dan Brown vision of history, where a shadowy cabal of Freemasons (or Illuminati) secretly moves the gears of history. Rather, I’m suggesting that the once-transgressive ideology underpinning the Western esoteric tradition – that our purpose as humans is to become as close to divine as possible – has become an implicit assumption of modern life. At the extreme reaches of Silicon Valley culture, it’s an explicit assumption.

Earlier this year, the tech titan and Braintree founder Bryan Johnson, who made headlines for his multimillion-dollar quest for life extension, boasted on Twitter of his status as a new Messiah. ‘I am not a tech tycoon or biohacker,’ he wrote, ‘I am playing for societal scale philosophical transformation, competing for the status and authority of Jesus, Satan, Budda [sic], and similar.’ More and more of us – regardless of religious affiliation – see our relationship to nature and culture alike as one of entitled control: Of course we should harness the powers of the universe to serve our own ends and live our best lives. Of course we are, or soon will be, functionally divine. But when did all this start?

In the Renaissance, a controversial humanist scholar named Giovanni Pico della Mirandola penned his Oration on the Dignity of Man. Influenced by orthodox Christianity, the Jewish Kabbalah, Arab philosophy, and the revival and reimagining of classical Greek thought known as Neoplatonism, Mirandola believed that the defining characteristic of human beings was precisely that they are born to take the place of God. In his Oration, Pico retells the familiar story of Creation told in Genesis 1: God creating the world and ultimately humanity. But Pico’s God is a less omnipotent being than the Bible’s. He has only a limited number of mental ‘seeds’ – a Neoplatonic image signifying, essentially, divine implantation of purpose: or, the thing that makes, say, stems grow into flowers, or trees stretch for the heavens. By the time he gets to humanity, Pico’s fatigued God has exhausted his supply of such seeds. So he makes Man without one. Or: to put it more accurately, he makes Man to determine his own. ‘Adam,’ says God, ‘you have been given no fixed place, no form of your own, and no particular function, so that you may have and possess, according to your will and your inclination, whatever place, whatever form, and whatever functions you choose.’ Where other creatures have a ‘fixed nature’, God tells Adam ‘you, constrained by no laws, by your own free will … will determine your own nature.’

Pico’s writing can be read as a particularly extreme example of Renaissance humanism, as part of a general trend of early modern writing that emphasised human freedom and creative power, in contrast with medieval visions of human life as but a part of a wider, interconnected social and natural order – visions commonly associated with the theology of St Thomas Aquinas. But to understand Pico better, we must look at the texts that influenced him most: a mysterious compendium of writings known as the Corpus Hermeticum, or the Hermetica. Pseudonymously written in the first few centuries CE, likely in the philosophical melting pot of Hellenistic Alexandria, the 17-part Corpus Hermeticum purports to be the writings of a mysterious demigod, Hermes Trismegistus, associated with the Greek trickster-messenger god Hermes and the Egyptian god of writing, Thoth.

Human freedom, intellectual endeavour, progress – all were signs that humanity’s destiny was to become God

Blending philosophy, scripture, natural science, alchemy, astrology and magic, the Hermetica as a whole represents a distinctive vision of human transcendence. The mysterious Hermes Trismegistus is a self-made god: a mage with near-divine control over both the scientific and magical worlds – they are, in the Hermetica, the same world. As Hermes learns in Book XI of the Hermetica (from the translation by G R S Mead):

If, then, thou dost not make thyself like unto God, thou canst not know Him. For like is knowable unto like [alone]. Make, [then,] thyself to grow to the same stature as the Greatness which transcends all measure; leap forth from every body; transcend all time; become Eternity.

The highest purpose of the human is to transcend humanity through knowledge, and become creator. The material (mortal) decaying stuff of our physical animal bodies exists only to be overcome via a spirit linked with knowledge and will.

Central to Hermetic thought was the tenet: ‘As above, so below.’ Everything is connected, from the movement of the stars and the planets to the internal workings of an insect. Understanding these secret connections, and harnessing them, was the key to a successful magician’s art. Central, too, was the occult nature of the mage’s knowledge. The mage saw things, and connections, that ordinary or uninitiated people could not.

Supposedly lost for centuries, the Corpus Hermeticum was ‘rediscovered’ in the 15th century, when another Renaissance humanist (and occultist) Marsilio Ficino discovered a manuscript in the library of his patron, Cosimo de’ Medici, and translated it into Latin. Its humanistic vision – its transhumanistic vision! – was enormously influential not just on Pico and Ficino, but on the Renaissance intellectual project as a whole. Human freedom, human intellectual endeavour, human progress – all these were not merely allowed by God, such that human beings might better fulfil God’s purpose for them, but were signs that humanity’s destiny was to become God, bending technological power to accord with their own desires and wills. As the Hermetic-influenced Renaissance humanist Giordano Bruno put it, man’s purpose is ‘to fashion, other natures, other courses, other orders’ so that ‘he might in the end make himself god of the earth’. Scientific progress was thus bound up with spiritual development – a development predicated, in opposition to the authoritarian Catholic Church, on the notion of making manifest one’s own desired purpose. While, for much of Western religious history, the mythic figure of the would-be knower who rebels against God was a cautionary tale (Lucifer, Adam and Eve, the Tower of Babel, Prometheus), here, the seeker of knowledge was a model for human advancement.

Hermetic ideas diffused across a range of movements in the early modern period. The Rosicrucians, for example, dabbled in human self-transcendence and attracted scientific luminaries such as the German physician Michael Maier, the English mathematician Robert Fludd, and Isaac Newton, who spent decades of his research life trying to create the alchemical ‘philosopher’s stone’. Hermeticism’s tendrils could also be felt in the rise of ‘speculative’ Freemasonry, which swept the guild structure, rhetoric and imagery of medieval masons into the ‘free-thinking’ world of the 18th century to create a ritualistic structure at once distinctly anticlerical and thoroughly religious. Freemasons such as Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, as well as several signatories of the US Declaration of Independence, blended intricate ceremony with carefully crafted regalia as meticulous as any church’s vestments or liturgy into a kind of worship of human freedom.

It would be a mistake to think of Hermeticism as a codified religion: with a clear and consistent set of tenets and membership criteria. The Rosicrucians, Masons and, later, Hermetic-tinged groups like the Golden Dawn and Theosophists each had their own rites, rituals and subgroups. Nor was Hermeticism the only magical system in play; Solomonic magic derived from Arab and Kabbalistic sources also stressed self-divinisation (controlling angels and demons alike by calling them by their proper, yet secret, names). What these movements shared was a faith in human self-transcendence as the highest spiritual good. Those who participated most fully in the project of self-divinisation through knowledge could, in some sense, be said to be the most human: the elect whose ability to understand reality was bound up in their ability to shape it. Politically as well as theologically, their ‘priestcraft’ set them against the Christian ecclesiastical establishment.

In this, early modern occultists were not unlike today’s peddlers of meme magic: claiming a populist stance against the elite ‘cathedrals’ of academic and journalistic establishments, while affirming the distinctly esoteric ideal of the lone genius (or elite cabal) capable of seeing what the ‘sheeple’ cannot. Today’s meme magicians likewise claim access to the hidden forces underpinning the global order, which they seek to harness for their own ends.

Whoever shapes the perception of others, in order to get what they desire, is practising magic

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, transhumanist magic began to focus less on knowledge of the world, natural or otherwise, and more narrowly on the power and control of the mage himself. The controversial diabolist Aleister Crowley’s Thelema (a movement as much influenced by visions of a Nietzschean Übermensch as by Hermeticism’s demigods) and the New Thought tradition from the US, for example, focused on mastering one’s own internal psychic energies. (Indeed, Thelema takes its name from the Greek word for will.) What we want – and how we focus that energy of wanting – doubles as the primary engine of reality. Which, of course, only the most godlike among us can shape. Whether the creator-God is absent, abdicated or usurped, Man’s role remains the same: to take his place. Crowley’s most famous maxim takes Pico’s vision of a self-fashioning self to its natural conclusion: ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.’

In what is perhaps Crowley’s most powerful successor ideology, the ‘chaos magick’ that grew out of the 1970s London punk scene, we can find the most obvious genesis of modern internet culture. Heavily influenced by the writings of one-time Crowley acolyte Austin Osman Spare, chaos magick dispensed with Hermetic associations – and the lattice of meaningfulness that connected them – altogether. Rather, for the chaos magicians, meaning was not something to be discovered, but decided. Reality came to rest primarily with human perception, so that changing human perception was not to lie, but to reimagine reality itself. Or, as one chaos magician of the time put it: ‘chaos magick is the art of forming the unformed energies of creative chaos into a pattern leading to the outcome of the magician’s desire.’ The major tenet of traditionalism – that there was a secret initiatory truth underpinning all major world religions – collapsed into nihilism: there is no such thing as truth at all. All that matters is what we can make people believe.

As the occult historian Gary Lachman writes in Dark Star Rising (2018), his account of magical tendencies in modern internet culture: ‘for chaos magick the idea of “truth” or “facts” is anathema.’ Whoever shapes the perception of others, in order to get what they desire, is practising magic. Here, magic is effectively denatured, stripped of its supernatural and mystical elements and revealed instead as the mage-like ability to bend the social imaginary to his will. ‘As above, so below’, in this context, refers less to the relationship between, say, plants and planets, than to the relationship between the human psyche and human cultural life. Change one person’s mind – and you might change the world.

Enter our internet pioneers. Steeped in mid-20th-century counterculture, the futurists, technologists and inventors who would come to shape Silicon Valley culture shared with their Hermetic forebears an optimistic vision of human self-transcendence through technology. Freed of our biological and geographic constraints, and of repressive social expectations, we could make of cyberspace a new libertarian Jerusalem. As early as the 1960s, the futurist Stewart Brand, the publisher of the hippy counterculture bible the Whole Earth Catalog (1968), rhapsodised about how, in the modern world, the ‘realm of intimate, personal power is developing – the power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment,’ concluding that ‘We are as gods and might as well get good at it.’ Early cyber-enthusiasts and futurists – more than a few of whom, from Terence McKenna to Robert Anton Wilson, dabbled in occult, mystic or magical practices – saw in the prospect of cyberspace a new spiritual terrain for self-divinisation. Freed of bodily constraints and geographic limitations, the internet could help us at last achieve the magical dream of transcendence.

In an article for Wired magazine in 1995, Erik Davis chronicled one ritual, performed by Mark Pesce – the founder of the early programming language known as VRML (virtual reality modelling language) – during an event that was equal parts technopagan ritual and scientific summit. Heavily structured along traditional Hermetic and Rosicrucian lines, the ritual involved four personal computers, taking on the customary role of elemental watchtowers, running a graphical browser that depicted a ‘ritual circle’, pentagrams and all. An observer chanted: ‘May the astral plane be reborn in cyberspace.’ The internet seemed to be a place where humanity could achieve a more democratic and collective magical rebirth. After all, it was a place where, in the absence of our physical bodies and social restrictions – we could exist solely as manifestations of our own will. The early internet became a gathering space for waves of magically inclined cybernauts. Technopagans, Discordians (essentially: worshippers of disorder), neopagans, Wiccans, transhumanists could find each other in cyberspace, shoring up the notion that digital life itself might presage the magician’s eschatological dream of a place where human creativity could shape the landscape of its world.

The mystical algorithm presents us with a landscape in which our desires determine all that we see

In the 1990s, the Extropian transhumanist Max More hailed the internet as an evolutionary portal. ‘When technology allows us to reconstitute ourselves physiologically, genetically, and neurologically,’ he wrote, ‘we who have become transhuman will be primed to transform ourselves into posthumans – persons of unprecedented physical, intellectual, and psychological capacity, self-programming, potentially immortal, unlimited individuals.’ (More was explicit about the occult genesis of the Extropian movement, exhorting readers to praise Lucifer as a self-divinising rebel against a hierarchical creator-God.) The British philosopher Nick Land, later a major figure in the far-Right Dark Enlightenment scene, hoped that digital advancements would ‘accelerate’ capitalism and technological progress and precipitate a civilisational collapse that would hasten the post-apocalyptic world to come. A devotee of Crowley, Land moved into the magician’s former home after resigning from the University of Warwick. He also coined the portmanteau term ‘hyperstition’ (‘hyper’ plus ‘superstition’) to express the notion that an idea might become real merely by being thought, which sounds uncannily like a precursor of manifesting. Later waves of transhumanists include the philosopher David Pearce, whose World Transhumanist Association (later Humanity+) openly pursued ‘eternal life’. In an interview in 2007, Pearce said that, in order to do so, ‘we’ll need to rewrite our bug-ridden genetic code and become god-like.’

The internet has absorbed some of its techno-utopian luminaries’ foundational ideas to the extent that they are practically built-in. In some ways, it’s provided us with nothing more nor less than a magical canvas – a soul-space, to paraphrase the early internet historian Margaret Wertheim, where our desires, impressions and the forces that act upon them can be made ‘manifest’. In this shared collective hallucination, we can don ideal avatars, create untethered social and even erotic relationships, curate our self-image, and in turn allow the mystical algorithm to present us with a landscape – from news headlines to targeted advertisements – in which our desires determine all that we see.

In the modern internet, desire is the secret undercurrent shaping our new reality. Our desire for dopamine hits – Likes, hearts, a few seconds’ TikTok entertainment – is inextricable from the wider economic enmeshment of desire within a capitalistic attention economy, where our time and clicks are monetised in the service of advertisers bent on stoking our desire further. Unencumbered by our bodies, or communities, we live in a miasma of yearning, willingly succumbing to an increasingly palpable form of spellcraft practised by the digital magi who profit from our attention. Like the old witches’ bargains of eras past, we agree to sell parts of ourselves – our eyeballs – in exchange for certain illusory fulfilments of desire packaged up by powerful corporate tech titans and memetically gifted shitposters capable of ‘going viral’ with a perfectly worded image or tweet. Memes, in this telling, become the modern interpretations of the magician’s sigil: a magical image empowered to convey the magician’s desired energy.

Charged with the collective energy of each subsequent re-Tweet or repost, memes seep into our subconscious and influence what we think, how we act and who we vote for. Memes, like sigils, are replicated in the digital space, first through the mage’s ability to tap into our desires, marionetting us to Like and re-Tweet, then through our collective urge to add meme power to our own personal brand. And, by channelling our desire and rearranging our interior landscape through a clever working of our cybernetic geography, the digital magi have the very power over us that so fascinated Crowley and the chaos magicians.

But has the internet betrayed the more idealistic principles of its early engineers, for whom human transcendence was a more collective proposition? Has the power of the few able to look behind the curtain replaced the goal of shared human liberation? Perhaps to a degree, but even in these more seemingly humanistic visions of internet culture, we find a chilling nihilism: a sense that magic is fundamentally about controlling other people’s perceptions. Speaking about the magic of being online, an early internet user, going by the handle legba, told Davis:

Words shape everything there, and are, at the same time, little bits of light, pure ideas, packets in no-space transferring everywhere with incredible speed. If you regard magic in the literal sense of influencing the universe according to the will of the magician, then simply being [online] is magic.

Put another way, digital ‘reality’ takes the magical principles of energy manipulation as its architecture.

We are all caught up in the cult of Hermes, or Prometheus, or Lucifer, in which the secret truth revealed by transgression is that truth is only ever a fiction of fools: reality is only ever what you can make people believe. Our social lives, sexual lives, professional successes are all mediated, in part or in full, by a disembodied landscape that quite literally runs on the engine of desire. The hypercapitalist attention economy – which invites us to post pictures of ourselves for Likes, or tell compelling stories about ourselves for GoFundMes or Kickstarters, or turn our eyeballs to clickbait that, in turn, shows us advertisements for items on Etsy or Amazon that we’ve already been craving – doubles as a kind of manifestation of the principles of post-Crowley magick. It is desire that makes reality real. It’s hardly surprising that new spiritual movements have cropped up in this postmodern landscape – from Left-coded practices like WitchTok to the ‘meme magic’ of the 2016-era alt-Right. Reanimating esoteric ideas of self-divinisation, and harnessing ‘energy’ to ‘manifest’ reality by attending to and valorising our own desires, they insist that what we want makes us who we are.

The spiritualised space of the internet has made magicians of us all in the service of becoming our best selves

As such, modern internet culture seems more indebted to Crowley’s nihilism than to the promise of Hermes Trismegistus. Widespread disinformation, ‘engagement farming’, meme culture, Russian troll bots and other fragmented attempts at capturing and shaping our attention function like magic spells of their own, warping our perceptions to reflect the perceptions of those who wield the memes. You might say the ‘meme magicians’ have won. They have revealed, at last, the dark heart at the centre of Pico’s seemingly optimistic vision of humanity: that, when we fashion ourselves according to our desire, it is because there is nothing real, or meaningful, in this world except those desires.

Scottish witches of the 18th century had a word for this: glamour – appearing to others the way we wish to be, so we might impress upon them that which we wish to impress. By 2019, the concept of glamour magick was sufficiently mainstream for Teen Vogue to publish a guide to the practice, extolling teenage girls to ‘be a better you’. But, in 2023, we’re all doing ‘glamour magick’ – intentionally or not. Our participation in the spiritualised space of the internet, where energy, intention and vibes are indistinguishable from the memes and bots and Tweets and deepfakes that shape our collective consciousness, has made would-be magicians of us all in the service of becoming our best selves.

As more and more of our online lives play out on platforms owned or controlled by billionaires convinced of their own divinity, we may find ourselves less mages than fodder for other magicians’ wills. More troublingly, many of us don’t seem to mind – or, if we do, we don’t mind quite enough to disenchant ourselves. We just keep pressing, playing, Liking and sharing. A Crowley devotee might think that this is because we are, after all, sheeple, lacking the mage-like temperament to determine our own destinies, or that of others. A more charitable read is that desire itself is asymptotic: it is never fully fulfilled. The longing for what we cannot have, for being more than we are, is as endemic to the human condition as death. The lure of the internet lies in the promise that this click, this article, this purchase will at last result in the final consummation we crave. We will be seen, paid attention to, and perhaps even loved, in just the way we wish to be. It is a promise as palpable as Eve’s apple.

SubculturesRituals and celebrationsTechnology and the self

14 December 2023

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What colour do you see?

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Gary Lupyan

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12 Dec, 2023

- What colour do you see?

Photo by Christopher Anderson/Magnum

i

What colour do you see?

New research is uncovering the hidden differences in how people experience the world. The consequences are unsettling

12 Dec, 2023

by Gary Lupyan + BIO

Photo by Christopher Anderson/Magnum

Gary Lupyan

is professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he researches the effects of language on cognition.

Edited by  Sam Dresser

On 26 February 2015, Cates Holderness, a BuzzFeed community manager, posted a picture of a dress, captioned: ‘There’s a lot of debate on Tumblr about this right now, and we need to settle it.’ The post was accompanied by a poll that racked up millions of votes in a matter of days. About two-thirds of people saw the dress as white and gold. The rest, as blue and black. The comments section was filled with bewildered calls to ‘go check your eyes’ and all-caps accusations of trolling.

Vision scientists were quick to point out that the difference in appearance had to do with the ambiguity of ambient light in the photograph. If the visual system resolved the photograph as being taken indoors with its warmer light, the dress would appear blue and black; if outdoors, white and gold. That spring, the annual Vision Sciences Society conference had a live demo of the actual dress (blue and black, for the record) lit in different ways to demonstrate the way the difference of ambient light shifted its appearance. But none of this explains why the visual systems of different people would automatically infer different ambient light (one predictive factor seems to be a person’s typical wake-up time: night owls have more exposure to warmer, indoor light).

Whatever the full explanation turns out to be, it is remarkable that this type of genuine difference in visual appearance could elude us so completely. Until #TheDress went viral, no one, not even vision scientists, had any idea that these specific discrepancies in colour appearance existed. This is all the more remarkable considering how easy it is to establish this difference. In the case of #TheDress, it’s as easy as asking ‘What colours do you see?’ If we could be oblivious to such an easy-to-measure difference in subjective experience, how many other such differences might there be that can be discovered if only we know where to look and which questions to ask?

Take the case of Blake Ross, the co-creator of the Firefox web browser. For the first three decades of his life, Ross assumed his subjective experience was typical. After all, why wouldn’t he? Then he read a popular science story about people who do not have visual imagery. While most people can, without much effort, form vivid images in their ‘mind’s eye’, others cannot – a condition that has been documented since the 1800s but only recently named: aphantasia. Ross learned from the article that he himself had aphantasia. His reaction was memorable: ‘Imagine your phone buzzes with breaking news: WASHINGTON SCIENTISTS DISCOVER TAIL-LESS MAN. Well, then, what are you?’

Ross went on to ask his friends about what it’s like for them when they imagine various things, quickly realising that, just as he took his lack of imagery as a fact of the human condition, they similarly took their presence of visual imagery as a given. ‘I have never visualised anything in my entire life,’ Ross wrote in Vox in 2016. ‘I can’t “see” my father’s face or a bouncing blue ball, my childhood bedroom or the run I went on 10 minutes ago… I’m 30 years old, and I never knew a human could do any of this. And it is blowing my goddamn mind.’

There is a moral imperative for us to study and understand these kinds of differences

There is a kind of visceral astonishment that accompanies these types of hidden differences. We seem wedded to the idea that we experience things a certain way because they are that way. Encountering someone who experiences the world differently (even when that difference seems trivial, like the colour of a dress) means acknowledging the possibility that our own perception could be ‘wrong’. And if we can’t be sure about the colour of something, what else might we be wrong about? Similarly, for an aphantasic to acknowledge that visual imagery exists is to realise that there is a large mismatch between their subjective experiences and those of most other people.

Studying hidden differences like these can enrich our scientific understanding of the mind. It would not occur to a vision scientist to ask whether being a night owl might have an impact on colour perception, but a bunch of people on the internet comparing notes on how they saw a dress inspired just such a study. The study of aphantasia is helping us understand ways in which people lacking imagery can accomplish the same goals (like remembering the visual details of their living room) without using explicit imagery. How many other such examples might there be once we start looking? There is also, arguably, a moral imperative for us to study and understand these kinds of differences because they help us understand the various ways of being human and to empathise with these differences. It’s a sobering thought that a person might respond differently to a situation not just because they have a different opinion about what to do or are in possession of different knowledge, but because their experience of the situation is fundamentally different.

For most of my research career, I didn’t really care about individual differences. Like most other cognitive scientists, my concern was with manipulating some factor and looking to see how this manipulation affected the group average. In my case, I was interested in the ways that typical human cognition and perception is augmented by language. And so, in a typical experiment, I would manipulate some aspect of language. For example, I examined whether learning names for novel objects changed how people categorised, remembered and perceived them. These were typical group-effect studies in which we compare how people respond to some manipulation. Of course, with any such study, different people respond in different ways, but the focus is on the average response.

For example, hearing ‘green’ helps (most) people see the subtle differences between more-green and less-green colour patches. Interfering with language by having people do a concurrent verbal task makes it harder for (most) people to group together objects that share a specific feature, such as being of a similar size or colour. But most people aren’t everyone. Could it be that some people’s colour discrimination and object categorisation is actively aided by language, but other people’s less so? This thought led us to wonder if this could be another hidden difference, much like aphantasia. In particular, we began to look at inner speech, long thought to be a universal feature of human experience.

Most people report having an inner voice. For example, 83 per cent (3,445 out of 4,145 people in our sample) ‘agree’ or ‘strongly agree’ with the statement ‘When I read I tend to hear a voice in my mind’s ear.’ A similar proportion – 80 per cent – ‘agree’ or ‘strongly agree’ with the statement ‘I think about problems in my mind in the form of a conversation with myself.’ This proportion goes up even more when asked about social problems: 85 per cent ‘agree’ or ‘strongly agree’ with the statement ‘When thinking about a social problem, I often talk it through in my head.’

On average, those who report having more visual imagery also report experiencing more inner speech

But 85 per cent is hardly everyone. What about those who disagree with these statements? Some of them report experiencing an inner voice only in specific situations. For example, when it comes to reading, some say that they hear a voice only if they deliberately slow down or are reading something difficult. But a small percentage (2-5 per cent) report never experiencing an inner voice at all. Like those with aphantasia who assume their whole lives that visual imagery is just a metaphor, those with anendophasia – a term Johanne Nedergaard and I coined to refer to the absence of inner speech – assume that those inner monologues so common in TV shows are just a cinematic device rather than something that people actually experience. People with anendophasia report that they never replay past conversations and that, although they have an idea of what they want to say, they don’t know what words will come out of their mouths until they start talking.

It is tempting to think that there is a trade-off between thinking using language and thinking using imagery. Take the widespread idea that people have different ‘learning styles’, some being visual learners and others verbal learners (it turns out this idea is largely incorrect). When it comes to imagery and inner speech, what we find is a moderate positive correlation between vividness of visual imagery and inner speech. On average, those who report having more visual imagery also report experiencing more inner speech. Most who claim to not experience inner speech also report having little imagery.

This raises the question of what their thoughts feel like to them. When we have asked, we tend to get answers that are quite vague, for example: ‘I think in ideas’ and ‘I think in concepts.’ We have lots of language at our disposal that we can use to talk about perceptual properties (especially visual ones) and, of course, we can use language to talk about language. So it is not really surprising that people have trouble conveying what thoughts without a perceptual or linguistic format feel like. But the difficulties in expressing these types of thoughts using language don’t make them any less real. They merely show that we have to work harder to better understand what they are like.

Differences in visual imagery and inner speech are just the tip of the iceberg. Other hidden differences include synaesthesia, Greek for ‘union of the senses’, in which people hear lights or taste sounds, and Eigengrau, a German word for the ‘intrinsic grey’ we see when we close our eyes. Except not all of us experience Eigengrau. About 10 per cent in our samples claim their experience is nothing like Eigengrau. Instead, when they close their eyes, they report seeing colourful patterns or a kind of visual static noise, like an analogue TV not tuned to a channel.

Our memory, too, seems to be the subject of larger differences than anyone expected. In 2015, the psychologist Daniela Palombo and colleagues published a paper describing ‘severely deficient autobiographical memory’ (SDAM). A person with SDAM might know that they went on a trip to Italy five years ago, but they cannot retrieve a first-person account of the experience: they cannot engage in the ‘mental time travel’ that most of us take for granted. As in other cases of hidden differences, these individuals tend not to realise they are unusual. As Claudia Hammond wrote for the BBC about Susie McKinnon, one of the first described cases of SDAM, she always ‘assumed that when people told in-depth stories about their past, they were just making up the details to entertain people.’

What is it about differences in imagery, inner speech, synaesthesia and memory that render them hidden? It is tempting to think that it’s because we don’t directly observe them. We can see that someone is a really fast runner. But having direct access only to our own reality, how are we to know what another person imagines when they think of an apple, or whether they hear a voice when they read? Still, while we can’t directly experience another person’s reality, we can compare notes by talking about it. Often, it’s remarkably easy: for #TheDress, we just needed to ask one another what colours we see. We can also ask whether letters always appear in colour (a grapheme-colour synaesthete will say yes; others will say no). People without imagery will tell you they cannot visualise an apple, and those without inner speech will say they do not have silent conversations with themselves. It is not actually difficult to discover these differences once we start systematically studying them.

Paradoxically, although language is what allows us to compare notes and learn about differences between our subjective experiences, its power to abstract may also cause us to overlook these differences because the same word can mean many different things. We use ‘imagine’ to refer to forming an image in the mind’s eye, but we also use it when referring to more abstract activities like imagining a hypothetical future. It is perfectly reasonable for an aphantasic to not realise that, in some cases, people use ‘imagine’ to mean actually forming mental images that have a perceptual reality.

Much of our understanding of hidden differences relies on people’s self-report. Can we trust it? Modern psychology is sceptical about self-report, a scepticism I’ve inherited as part of my academic training. Recent reports of large individual differences in imagery and inner speech have often been accompanied by incredulity. How do we know that these differences reflect something real? Can we really just take people at their word when they say they don’t have an inner voice?

If the goal is to understand what a person feels, self-report trumps objective measurement

Before tackling the more complex question of whether we should trust self-reports about internal subjective states like imagery and inner speech, let’s consider some simpler cases. When someone says they dislike cauliflower, they are reporting on their subjective experience, and we tend to take them at their word. But we don’t have to. We can easily set up an experiment where we observe how likely they are to eat cauliflower when given alternatives. It would be surprising if someone claimed to not like cauliflower but chose to eat it at every opportunity. There are, of course, cases where such ‘stated-vs-revealed preference gaps’ occur. Many researchers have made their careers studying these gaps. For example, if one lives in a culture where cauliflower-eating is associated with higher status, people may be compelled to say they like it even though they don’t. Conversely, someone might eat cauliflower only to avoid offending their host. Such situations call for caution in interpreting people’s preferences – both stated and revealed – but they do not negate the observation that, in ordinary circumstances, taking people at their word regarding their preferences is a very good guide to their behaviour.

Let’s take another case. You are in a shared office and your office-mate says they feel cold when the thermostat is set to 72°F (22°C). Do you take them at their word, or do you say ‘But 72°F is the proper indoor temperature? How can you feel cold?’ Suppose you take measurements of their skin temperature, core temperature, even an fMRI scan showing activation of their insula. None of these would allow you to claim that they don’t feel cold. None of these measures would negate their self-report. If one was concerned about hypothermia, relying on objective measurements may well be appropriate but, if the goal is to understand what a person feels, self-report trumps objective measurement.

The same logic applies to other inherently subjective states such as loneliness, pain and awe. To measure loneliness, it is not sufficient to count how many people someone talks to or is friends with because one person’s active social life may be another person’s depth of loneliness. We can tell if there is a flu epidemic by using objective tests, but diagnosing a ‘loneliness epidemic’ requires taking into account whether people feel lonely. This is also why, despite all the available technology we have to measure people’s physiological states, when it comes to pain, we continue to rely on pain scales, a simple form of self-report. If we take introspective judgments seriously when it comes to preferences, emotion and pain, why would we be more sceptical about them in cases of phenomenal differences such as imagery and inner speech?

One possibility is that we are able to reliably introspect about some things and not others. Perhaps we can reliably report on ‘basic’ states like pain and whether we like cauliflower (though, even here, there may well be differences in people’s ability to self-report), but in other cases our introspection fails. For example, most people think they are above-average drivers – one of the many examples of the so-called ‘Lake Wobegon Effect’. We can also be wrong in the other direction. In a typical implicit learning study, participants are exposed to sequences of flashing lights, sounds or shapes that obey a certain rule. They subsequently have to identify whether new sequences obey the same rule or not. Participants often feel like they are just guessing, that is, they think they have not learned anything. Their behaviour, however, can be far above chance level, indicating that they in fact have learned something. In such cases, the ‘incorrect’ self-report is still informative: it gives us insight into the person’s subjective reality (they think they are in the 80 percentile of driving ability, they think they are just guessing, they think they haven’t learned something that they, in fact, have). But at the same time, these self-reports do not reflect objective reality. They are poor guides to predicting what a person can or is likely to do.

Lastly, consider dreams. In a 1958 survey, Fernando Tapia and colleagues reported that only about 9 per cent of respondents indicated that their dreams contained colour. Other surveys done around this time reported similarly low proportions. A decade later, the tide turned and a large majority reported dreaming in colour. The philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel considers several explanations for this discrepancy. One possibility is that black-and-white photographs and television changed the content of dreams. As colour TV came to dominate, colour returned to people’s dreams (‘returned’ because, in a few studies from the more distant past, people did not claim to dream in black and white).

The problem with this is that there is no reason to think TV should have such an outsized impact on the phenomenology of our dreams. After all, the world never ceased to be in colour. The alternative, argues Schwitzgebel, is that ‘at least some people must be pretty badly mistaken about their dreams.’ Our ability to report on the perceptual content of our dreams may simply be unreliable. And with no objective measures against which to measure the subjective report, we can’t really know whether these reports reflect any reality, subjective or not. Why then would there be any consistency in people’s reports from a given time? Perhaps because, in the absence of having good access to their phenomenal states, people go with the response they think is most reasonable. In the 1950s, the dominant popular and scientific view was that dreams lack colour. And so, when queried, participants simply mirrored that dominant view. The same happened as the dominant view later changed. Neither case, Schwitzgebel argues, reflects ‘correct’ phenomenology because we simply do not have valid introspection when it comes to the colour of our dreams.

If reports about phenomenal states like imagery and inner speech are like reports about dreams, we have every reason to remain sceptical of whether differences in introspection report actual differences in people’s actual experiences. If they are more like reports about our preferences and emotions, then we can (mostly) take people at their word. Even then, we must consider social pressures to respond in a certain way. If having vivid imagery were a requirement for admission to art school, we should not be surprised if aspiring artists all claim to have very vivid imagery. If hearing a voice when one reads were considered a sign of mental illness, people would be less likely to say they hear a voice when they read.

Establishing the validity of self-report can be done in several ways. First, we must show consistency. If one day people claimed they experience inner speech constantly and the next day they claimed they never did, we have a problem. As it turns out, people’s reports are highly consistent. Inner speech questionnaires taken months apart show high correlations. (At the same time, Russell Hurlburt’s work using descriptive experience sampling, which probes people’s thinking at random points during the day, does show that people overestimate how much of their thinking is in the form of inner speech.)

We can also see whether differences in reported phenomenology predict differences in objective behaviour. This is not an option when it comes to dreams, but we can make specific predictions about behavioural consequences of having more or less visual imagery and inner speech based on existing theories of imagery and language. Differences in self-reported phenomenology can be linked to differences in objective behaviour. Those with less inner speech have a harder time remembering lists of words; those with less visual imagery report fewer visual details when describing past events.

There are also reported differences in more automatic physiological responses. More light entering the pupil causes it to constrict. But simply imagining something bright like the Sun also causes (a smaller, but still measurable) constriction. Aphantasics show perfectly typical pupillary responses to actual changes in light. However, their pupils do not change to imagined light. At the same time, many hypothesised differences in behaviour are not observed because, it seems, people compensate by, for example, discovering ways of remembering detailed visual content without engaging explicit imagery. Such compensation can prove beneficial. People with poor autobiographical memory find other ways of keeping track of information that can help stave off some of the cognitive decline in ageing.

It’s harder to brush aside self-reports of someone who says they could imagine things, and now can’t

Another way to establish validity is that we can ask whether there are neural and physiological correlates of reported phenomenal differences. If differences in reported imagery were mere confabulations or the results of people just telling researchers what they think the researchers want to hear, it would be surprising if they had different brain connectivity and functional activation as measured by fMRI. Yet this is what we are finding. Fraser Milton and colleagues scanned groups of people identifying as aphantasics and hyperphantasics (those with unusually vivid visual imagery). When asked to lie in the scanner and stare at a cross on a screen, the brain responses of the hyperphantasic group had greater connectivity between prefrontal cortex and the occipital visual network, compared with the aphantasic group. Participants were also asked to look at and imagine various famous people and places. The difference in activation between perception and imagery (in a left anterior parietal region) was larger in hyperphantasic compared with aphantasic participants. Those with typical imagery tended to fall in between the aphantasics and hyperphantasic group on many of the measures. Less is known about neural correlates of differences in inner speech. In work presented at the 2023 meeting of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language, Huichao Yang and colleagues found a relationship between how much inner speech people reported to experience and resting-state functional connectivity in the language network.

Lastly, even though we don’t know what it’s like to be someone else, we can compare how our phenomenology differs from one time to another. There are numerous reports of people with brain injuries that cause them to lose visual imagery, and some cases of losing inner speech. It is much harder to brush aside self-reports of someone who says they used to be able to imagine things, and now they can’t (especially when these are confirmed by clear differences in objective behaviour).

Holderness’s caption introducing the world to #TheDress had a second part. ‘This is important,’ she wrote, ‘because I think I’m going insane.’ The idea that the same image can look different to different people is alarming because it threatens our conviction that the world is as we ourselves experience it. When an aphantasic learns that other people can form mental images, they are learning that something they did not know was even a possibility is, in fact, many people’s everyday reality. This is understandably destabilising.

And yet, there is a scientific and moral imperative for learning about the diverse forms of our phenomenology. Scientifically, it prevents us from making claims that the majority experience (or the scientist’s experience) is everyone’s experience. Morally, it encourages us to go beyond the ancient advice to ‘know thyself’ which can lead to excessive introspection, and to strive to know others. And to do that requires that we open ourselves up to the possibility that their experiences may be quite different from our own.

Philosophy of mindCognition and intelligenceNeurodiversity

12 December 2023

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Dancing and time

For Rachel Bespaloff, philosophy was a sensual activity shaped by the rhythm of history, embodied in an instant of freedom

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Saved by Infinite Jest

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Trauma on a loop

I was the victim of a carjacking. The trauma from that experience was unendurable. Then I discovered eye movement therapy

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The two Chomskys

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Anita Guerrini

11 Dec, 2023

- Trauma on a loop

Photo by Sophie Chivet/Agence VU/Headpress

i

Trauma on a loop

I was the victim of a carjacking. The trauma from that experience was unendurable. Then I discovered eye movement therapy

11 Dec, 2023

by Madison McLoughlin + BIO

Photo by Sophie Chivet/Agence VU/Headpress

Madison McLoughlin

is a freelance journalist with a background in news production. She is based in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Edited by  Pam Weintraub

I wore leggings that Tuesday. I never wore leggings to work, but that winter three years ago the New Orleans heat was in hibernation. Ice climbed up my windows, and my sweater almost reached my knees. I whispered: ‘Be good, I love you,’ to the puppy sound asleep in his crate and the groggy cat still snuggled in bed before I stepped out into the unseasonably cold January air. A neighbour’s motion-sensor light blinked on to help me navigate the blackness. It was 12:50am; my shift at the news station started in 10 minutes. My fingers became numb quickly, making it difficult to turn the key in the lock. I speed-walked to my car, my beautiful, white Hyundai Kona, my college graduation gift from my parents. I twisted the heat all the way up, slapped the seat-heater button, and turned my Spotify to Maggie Rogers’s new album. With my hands pulled into my North Face sleeves, I grabbed the wheel.

I did an illegal U-turn to get out of my one-way street, cutting a whole minute off my arrival time. As I slowed at the intersection, headlights warned me to step on the brake. The red car seemed to slow as it passed in front of me, eventually turning into my street, barely missing my car. I pulled out.

‘Turn signal, dumbass,’ I mumbled, still frozen and half asleep. My phone lit up as I drove. It was a short journey; my seat heater barely had any time to thaw my insides before I got to the news station. Christmas lights and the occasional working streetlamp lit up the neighbourhood: the narrow shotgun houses with too many plants on their porches, the doors bright yellow, sleepy blue or lively green. When I would drive home later that morning, the people of Mid-City would be bundled up, starting their days with frigid dog walks and coffee runs.

I reached down to check the message from my boyfriend, Henry, warming my hand over my coffee tumbler. I slowed to turn and respond, eyes darting between my phone and the road. I had been in my car all of four minutes when I rounded the next corner, foot poised over the brake as I closed in on the stop sign. Flying headlights in my rear-view mirror caught my attention. The red car belted down the street. I stopped before the sign to let them go ahead.

They must be in some hurry. Maybe they have somewhere to be. At one in the morning?

The car screeched in front of me, cutting me off. Three doors flung open, guns pointing directly at me: a 23-year-old woman who had never really had anything horrible happen in her life. Suddenly, I was wide awake, but my mind was blank. I screamed, I cried, I shook. I rolled down the window. They shouted at me: ‘Put it in park, PUT IT IN PARK.’ Tears poured icy hot down my face. The mascara glued my lashes together. I begged for my life; something I had never considered having to do. ‘Please, please,’ I screamed over the banging of the guns on the roof and my skyrocketing heart rate. My car nudged theirs.

‘PUT IT IN PARK.’

I reached over and thrust the car into park. A hand slid along the seatbelt, unbuckling me from the live-action horror movie. He used just enough force to get me out. ‘Get out, get out! DROP THE PHONE.’ I obliged because what choice did I have? ‘WHERE ARE THE KEYS?’ he screamed. I cried out, telling him they were in my pocket. I could no longer control my sobs. He reached into my jacket, grabbed my keys, and got into the car – my car, warmed with Maggie’s voice leaking from the speakers. The other men with guns jumped in beside him. The red car’s tyres spewed gravel as their accomplices drove off; my white car squealed after.

I stood in the cold, in the middle of a run-down street, surprised no one had heard what had just happened. No lights flicked on, no one stepped out to see who or what was making hysterical noises in the middle of the night. I had nothing. I felt naked.

I ran to the nearest gas station – probably a quarter mile up the road. The chill wafted in from the bayou that separated the nice houses from the even nicer houses. My nine-year-old combat boots thunked onto the pavement. I could feel my feet rubbing the thin insides, a sole coming loose. Between the sobbing and the running, I could barely breathe, let alone talk, once I stepped into the artificial light.

‘I was just carjacked. Could I please use your phone?’

The cashier looked scared, taking in my heaving chest, mascara tears and red nose. I used the gas station phone to call 911; the operator pressed me for the street corner where it had happened. In that moment, the only clear thing in my mind was the scene, playing over and over. I called my mom. The first time I called, it went to voicemail. It was 2am her time. Fresh tears fought to escape, though my cheeks weren’t dry yet. I dialled again.

By the time the officers showed up, I had reviewed the mental footage a hundred times

‘Hello?’ she answered, dreams dripping from her voice. But this was a nightmare.

‘Mom,’ I half cried. The relief ripped me open. The tears fell. It took me a minute before I could even tell her why I had woken her up.

‘I was carjacked on my way to work. They had guns, so many guns. I called the police. I am OK, but can you please call Henry and have him meet me here?’

She was calm, much calmer than I would have expected. Not that this was something I had ever expected. Every day at the news station, we ran stories about crime victims, people who had lost everything, sometimes their lives, to a group of strangers bent on destruction. Never had I allowed myself to think that I could be next. In the gas station, I shook in my tattered combat boots and leggings, overcome with fear. It had happened to me. The world shifted, and my mind fell down a deep black hole.

My mom and I hung up, and I called work, letting them know I wouldn’t be able to make my shift that night. I stood awkwardly by the cash register waiting for the police to arrive, intermittently crying, not bothering to wipe the black streaks off my face. The guy behind the counter left to get me an old milk crate to sit on, his pity palpable. Twenty minutes later, Henry and his sister showed up. I took one look at his face and the dam broke. I heaved into his chest while he consoled me. He called the police again.

By the time the officers showed up, I had reviewed the mental footage a hundred times, but I still couldn’t tell them what kind of red car it was or whether the men were wearing masks or exactly how many of them there were. I didn’t know. I knew only that the car was red, my things were gone, and there were so many guns. I felt as if I were watching myself from a vent in the ceiling, helpless, giving them what little information I could.

For weeks, I lost myself. Time passed in a blur of fear and vulnerability. Seeing a reflection made me jump. I couldn’t be alone in my own apartment or my heart rate would shoot up. I didn’t drive myself to or from work, even after the police found my car. The officers told me the men had been spotted the day after they’d stolen my car, joyriding at 90 miles an hour down a one-way street; they then ditched the officers and the car altogether. The police found it the next day, two days after the crime, undamaged and parked in a random neighbourhood with a Louisiana licence plate in place of my Michigan one. That was the last time I heard from the detectives. The men with guns could still be out there.

I lay in bed at night, willing myself to sleep. When I finally did, I woke up crying or shaking or both. I retold the story to overly curious co-workers. I zoned out of conversations. I moved apartments. I never wanted to leave my bed. I wanted to stay in the comfort of Henry’s arms all the time. Even when I was there, I felt alone. The saying about how people who go through traumatic events end up going through the motions, watching themselves, trapped in their own heads, is true. I felt broken. I felt like I could never be fixed.

Three weeks after the carjacking, I started seeing a therapist. Maybe this constant horror movie on the backs of my eyelids would stop. Dianne Markel welcomed me into her spacious office, decorated with a beautiful wooden bookcase behind her desk, thriving plants and a softly humming air purifier. The woman had a kind face, one that told you she was really listening.

Markel worked with people who went through traumas, often using a technique called eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing, or EMDR. First developed in 1987, EMDR is an eight-phase psychotherapy technique that has mostly been used to treat veterans and others with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Today, the approach is becoming more common, especially for people with drug or alcohol addiction, as its therapeutic benefits are recognised. EMDR not only helps patients to process their trauma, but also to develop coping skills, calm the stress response, and sustain ongoing self-improvement. It can also transform their beliefs, helping them let go of negative thoughts and become open to recovery.

The first phase of EMDR is establishing trust. If the patient doesn’t trust or work well with the therapist, they might hold back during the process, not allowing themselves to fully heal. Markel’s comfortable leather couch moulded itself to me, even as I sat on the edge. Her soft voice matched her gentle demeanour, and she apologised for what had happened to me, struggling to find the words herself. She didn’t pretend to understand what I was going through or rush me. Her eyes seemed to smile as she shared bits of herself with me. She made me laugh with a story about how she had worn two different shoes to work the day before: a cheetah-print flat and a black ballerina slipper.

It was easy to let my guard down. Well, ‘easy’ for someone who had just lost all their faith in humanity and badly wanted to reverse back into what life was like before the incident: naive, normal and devoid of a seemingly endless vulnerability. Markel assured me that what I was feeling was more than normal, and it was OK to be afraid. But she also promised a light at the end of the tunnel.

During that same first visit, we entered the second phase of the treatment: preparation. Markel handed me a thick stack of positive mantras to repeat to myself when I got overwhelmed. I was supposed to pick one and say it slowly three times as I breathed in and out. Even though I chose a saying (I am OK; I am safe), in the weeks before our second meeting, the anxiety would usually be so consuming, the mantra did little to help. My therapist also explained what we would be doing and why it should help me recover. She would guide me through all the steps, but it would be up to me to open up fully to the treatment.

‘We can stop at any time,’ she said. I placed my trust in her.

Rhythms change the neural networks that haven’t adapted to the trauma

In our next session, we jumped right into the third phase: assessment. Markel had me hold a TheraTapper – two green rubber handles, one in each hand, that vibrated back and forth and connected to a small machine where I could choose the frequency and strength of the vibrations. Even though ‘EM’ in EMDR stands for ‘eye movement’, the tapper’s alternating, calming vibrations or tones in one’s hands, feet or ears have the same effect. They’re supposed to decrease the negative emotion associated with the traumatic event. My clammy right hand would feel the quiet buzz, then the left. I sank into the rhythm.

According to the EMDR International Association, the TheraTapper’s rhythms connect with the biological mechanisms involved with rapid eye movement (REM), which helps those undergoing EMDR begin to process, digest and store the memory and trauma. Basically, the rhythms help to speed up the healing process by mimicking REM, which changes the neural networks that haven’t adapted to the trauma. The stimulation facilitates communication across the brain to help make sense of traumatic memories. I was not in a trance, but rather recognising the incident as if I were a bystander, taking myself out of the picture and replacing the fear with appreciation for the event as it was: a thoughtless crime against an undeserving victim.

For two minutes, Markel had me close my eyes, grip the tappers and envision one part of the carjacking. It was not hard, as the scene played vividly through my mind every time I thought I was slipping into normalcy. The worst wake-up call. I watched myself succumb to the terror, become a victim over and over. My therapist had me focus on a negative thought that I associated with that part of the memory: I am weak. I am pathetic. I am helpless. I am scared. I am unsafe. I am broken. I counted the taps until it was over. Then came the difficult part. Once the two minutes were up, Markel had me rate how disturbing the negative thoughts felt on the Subjective Units of Disturbance Scale of 0 to 10, with 10 being the most disturbing. That fear, or negative thought, according to the EMDR International Association, is ‘locked in the nervous system’ after a traumatic event, which prevents the brain from processing it in a way that allows the victim to live without fear. My eyes focused on the spider plant sitting next to Markel who was listening attentively. After I answered a solid 9 on the Subjective Units of Disturbance Scale, she asked me to describe what I saw, how it made me feel, why I felt the way that I did, and where I felt it in my body.

A bomb went off periodically, melting my insides, forcing my heart to race, my hands to clench, my chest to tighten. That’s where I held the trauma. It felt like I had to physically pull myself out of that moment, away from the armed men jumping out of their car, from the guns pointed at me. I cleared my throat to avoid croaking out a sob. ‘I did nothing to stop it,’ I said during one of our first sessions. But then, what would I have done? I don’t own a weapon. Even if I did, I was drastically outnumbered. But I didn’t fight them off. I allowed myself to be a victim.

In the fourth phase, desensitisation, it was time to identify the negative emotions that had attached themselves to the crime. I breathed in, closed my eyes, and yearned for the TheraTapper to work its magic, still playing tag with vibrations. Terror, vulnerability, weakness, frustration, sadness, absence, anxiety, anger. I word-vomited up everything that I had been feeling about that night, surprised not to see a puke-coloured stain on the carpet. The second time I immersed myself into the rhythms, Markel had me detach my mind from the shaken version of myself struggling to put the car in park and instead watch from above, like my soul had left my body. Then, she listened to how I broke down the scene, how I felt, and turned around my phrases so I could see that this carjacking was not my fault. She spoke to me in a way that told me I would survive this and come back stronger.

In the fifth phase, installation, Markel asked me to identify a positive belief about myself during the moment I had pictured. I don’t remember exactly what my belief was in that first session; mostly, I was concentrating on sharing as much as I could because I just wanted to get better. It was probably along the lines of I did the right thing, because the positive belief is supposed to reflect a more appropriate thought on what happened. For two more silent minutes, I focused both on the vibrations and seeing myself doing the right thing when I was attacked. While my eyes were closed, I willed the mantra to get stronger. Markel’s voice pulled me out of the trance. She asked me to rate how true my positive belief felt in that reflection on the Validity of Cognition Scale, where 1 equals completely false and 7 equals completely true. My answer wavered between 2 and 3.

Then came the sixth phase: body scan. I identified the manifestation of the terror in my body as well as the emotions that bubbled up, so Markel could help me try to relieve them. First up, hands: my nails dug into my palms, white knuckles protruding. Why did I feel the terror there? What did my hands hold? An indescribable amount of tension. I shut my eyes again as my therapist and the TheraTapper guided me through a short meditation, targeting the terror in order to help resolve it. My hands had always been an outlet for anxiety – I grew up picking the skin around my cuticles until I bled or my mom got annoyed. For the past month, my hands had worked overtime. My fingernails looked like I’d just clawed my way out of a battlefield: bloody and raw. Slowly, I synced my breathing to the TheraTapper’s vibrations, allowing my fingers to unfold and my hands to relax and stretch. For the first time since the night of the event, the knot in my chest started to release.

I wasn’t burying the terror; I was learning to accept it and grow stronger

At the end of each session, the goal of the EMDR therapy was to feel better, generally, than when I’d walked in. My therapist and I breathed deeply together. In. Out. In. Out. During the first six phases, I was in control. In order for me to remain in control, Markel briefed me on what I could expect, back in the real world, as we transitioned into the seventh phase: closure. The scene would likely continue to play out, and there might even be times when a new detail would emerge. It’s all part of the process. She gave me a series of self-calming techniques: supplements, journaling, meditation, mantras, just breathing. And then I was on my own until I set foot inside her cosy office again.

After the initial two sessions, we began with the eighth phase, re-evaluation, then went back and covered phases three through seven again. Markel and I would talk about my past few weeks in the real world. Was I handling the anxiety and fear better? Did the scene play out less frequently? Was I healing? We repeated that sequence once every two weeks for months. The goal was to get my ratings on the Subjective Units of Disturbance Scale down to ‘not very disturbing’, and the Validity of Cognition Scale up to ‘very believable’. The therapy aimed to release the memory from the front of my mind, allow me to come to terms with what had happened, then store the memory in the back of my mind, without locking it away. I wasn’t burying the terror; I was learning to accept it and grow stronger. I was in control.

It took us about four months of going through the phases before I got to that point, before I no longer needed EMDR. Some sessions were less challenging, while others still felt almost as difficult as the first. Reliving the carjacking, allowing the scene to play out, got easier, but the tension in my hands never fully dissolved. It was like a part of me never wanted to forget how I had felt in that moment.

To this day, I refuse to wear leggings to work. I hate driving in the dark, but I’m able to drive my white Hyundai Kona without succumbing to a panic attack. I harbour a general distrust of male strangers, but I’m strong enough to venture out alone. I still sync my breathing to the ghost of a TheraTapper when the anxiety gets to be too much. I clench and unfurl my fingers to release tension. My life is nowhere near where it was before January 2021. I will never not be the girl who was carjacked on her way to work in the middle of the night. But now, when I look back at the memory, I no longer see a victim. I no longer beat myself up for not doing anything to stop it from happening. I see a survivor.

Psychiatry and psychotherapyMental healthMood and emotion

11 December 2023

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- The two Chomskys

Operatives using the SAGE air defence system in the ‘Blue Room’ at CFB North Bay, Ontario, Canada. 1963. Photo courtesy the Department of National Defence PCN4720

i

The two Chomskys

The US military’s greatest enemy worked in an institution saturated with military funding. How did it shape his thought?

8 Dec, 2023

by Chris Knight + BIO

Operatives using the SAGE air defence system in the ‘Blue Room’ at CFB North Bay, Ontario, Canada. 1963. Photo courtesy the Department of National Defence PCN4720

Chris Knight

is a senior research associate in the department of anthropology at University College London. He is the author of Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture (1991) and Decoding Chomsky: Science and Revolutionary Politics (2016). His website is scienceandrevolution.org.

Edited by  Sam Dresser

Noam Chomsky rose to fame in the 1960s and even now, in the 21st century, he is still considered one of the greatest intellectuals of all time. His prominence as a political analyst on the one hand, and theoretical linguist on the other, simply has no parallel. What remains unclear is quite how the two sides of the great thinker’s work connect up.

When I first came across Chomsky’s linguistic work, my reactions resembled those of an anthropologist attempting to fathom the beliefs of a previously uncontacted tribe. For anyone in that position, the first rule is to put aside one’s own cultural prejudices and assumptions in order to avoid dismissing every unfamiliar belief. The doctrines encountered may seem unusual, but there are always compelling reasons why those particular doctrines are the ones people adhere to. The task of the anthropologist is to delve into the local context, history, politics and culture of the people under study – in the hope that this may shed light on the logic of those ideas.

The tribe shaping Chomsky’s linguistics, I quickly discovered, was a community of computer scientists during the early years of the Cold War, employed to enhance electronic systems of command and control for nuclear war and other military operations. My book Decoding Chomsky (2016) was an attempt to explain the ever-changing intricacies of Chomskyan linguistics within this specific cultural and historical setting.

I took it for granted that the ideas people entertain are likely to be shaped by the kind of life they lead. In other words, I assumed that Chomsky’s linguistic theories must have been influenced by the fact that he developed them while working for the US military – an institution he openly despised.

This was Chomsky’s impossible dilemma. Somehow, he needed to ensure: a) that the research he was conducting for the US military did not interfere with his conscience; and b) that he could criticise the US military without inducing them to cease funding his research. His solution was to make sure that the two Noam Chomskys – one working for the US military and the other against it – shared no common ground.

He achieved this through a bold stroke of amputation. From the start of his academic career, no part of his scientific work would show up in his political activism, while no trace of his activism would be detectable in his science. Among the inevitable outcomes was a conception of language utterly divorced from what most of us mean by that term.

Language, for Chomsky, is a computational module restricted entirely to the individual, and devoid of communicative, cultural or social aspects. If it has any remaining purpose or function, it exists merely for talking to oneself. This novel and allegedly ‘scientific’ model of language was so extreme in its individualism and abstraction that, in the end, it proved of no use to anyone. Not even the US military could make any of it work.

Decoding Chomsky triggered a heated debate. Although reviewers were largely positive, Chomsky’s own response was that the ‘whole story is a wreck … complete nonsense throughout’. In a letter to the London Review of Books in 2017, he said that for anyone to suggest that the Pentagon once viewed his linguistics as important for future forms of war was too absurd to require comment. In 2019, in a considerably longer polemic, he accused me of continuing to spin a ‘web of deceit and misinformation’.

More recently, in an online interview with the physicist Lawrence Krauss in 2022, Chomsky suggested that those of us who raise the issue of his work for the Pentagon are just accusing him of ‘working for the war machine’. I concede that if that were my book’s message, Chomsky’s hostility would be easy to understand. But, in fact, I am saying something quite different.

He refused to get security clearance and made no attempt to understand electronic devices

Whether it’s Chomsky or anyone else, we all need to make a living. In a world where money talks, we’re often faced with a harsh choice – compromise on a point of principle or find ourselves out of work. One way or another, many of us have been there. To keep body and soul together, one version of ourselves colludes with the prevailing powers while another indignantly resists.

In 1955, Chomsky found himself in just such a situation. He had a PhD in linguistics but was unable to get a job at Harvard. So he went to see Jerome Wiesner at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Wiesner was a self-described ‘military technologist’ who had helped set up the Sandia nuclear weapons laboratory and was now the director of MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics. He was impressed with Chomsky and gave him a job, but the young recruit had few illusions about where he now worked. As he has confirmed in various interviews, MIT was ‘90 per cent Pentagon funded’, ‘almost everybody’ was involved in defence research, and he himself ‘was in a military lab’.

Chomsky was in no position to change any of this, but he could still avoid direct work on military technology. He refused to get security clearance and made no attempt to understand electronic devices, describing himself as a ‘technophobe’ who couldn’t handle anything more complicated than a tape recorder.

Of course, Chomsky had to do some work to keep his job. The solution he found was to confine himself to certain alleged yet previously unsuspected grammatical principles underlying every language in the world. If he succeeded, this would be an achievement on the scale of James Watson and Francis Crick’s stunning discovery of the molecular structure of DNA. It was this search for an invariant underlying pattern – which Chomsky termed Universal Grammar – that sustained his MIT career for more than six decades.

For anyone familiar with Chomsky’s powerful anti-militarist writings, it’s astonishing to imagine that the US Department of Defense once considered his linguistic theories as a means to enhance their computerised systems of weapons command and control. Their dream was that commanders could type instructions in ordinary English instead of having to master specialised computer languages. Astonishing, certainly, but such hopes are made quite clear by US Air Force scientists from the period.

Take, for example, Colonel Edmund Gaines. In 1971, Gaines referred to the kind of language research that Chomsky had pioneered in these words:

We sponsored linguistic research in order to learn how to build command and control systems that could understand English queries directly.

That same year, Colonel Anthony Debons wrote:

Much of the research conducted at MIT by Chomsky and his colleagues [has] direct application to the efforts undertaken by military scientists to develop … languages for computer operations in military command and control systems.

Lieutenant Jay Keyser was a linguist recruited by Chomsky to MIT who later became Chomsky’s close friend and his ‘boss’ as head of MIT’s linguistics department. In articles from 1963 and 1965, Keyser highlighted various problems with the artificial languages then being used in the military’s command and control systems. He recommended instead an ‘English control language’, based on Chomsky’s ideas, that would enable commanders to use ordinary English when communicating with their weapons systems. Keyser illustrated his argument with references to missiles and B-58 nuclear-armed bombers using sample sentences such as:

- B-58’s will refuel.

- B-58’s must be on base.

- The bomber the fighter attacked landed safely.

An Air Force-sponsored offshoot of MIT called the MITRE Corporation was particularly interested in such ideas. MITRE’s linguists were led by the former MIT researcher Donald Walker who, in 1969, explained: ‘our linguistic inspiration was (and still is) Chomsky’s transformational approach’.

The one place we might have expected the fiercely anti-militarist Chomsky to avoid would be MITRE

As many as 10 of Chomsky’s students played ‘a key role’ in MITRE’s linguistics research, and, in a report from 1962, Walker and his colleagues were quite clear that they intended to enhance ‘the design and development of US Air Force-supplied command and control systems’. MITRE’s original mission had been to design such systems for nuclear war but, by 1967, almost a quarter of the corporation’s resources were focused on the Vietnam War. MITRE’s role in that war included overseeing the technical side of the McNamara Line. This was a massive hi-tech project consisting of a barrier of sensors, mines and cluster bombs along the border between North and South Vietnam – a barrier that was intended to finally crush the Vietnamese resistance.

In light of all this, the one place we might have expected the fiercely anti-militarist Chomsky to avoid would be MITRE. But it appears that the career pressures he faced at MIT meant that, from 1963, Chomsky felt obliged to work directly for the corporation. We know this because two MITRE research papers name Chomsky as a ‘consultant’ and both papers are quite clear that this research concerns the ‘development of a program to establish natural language as an operational language for command and control’. We also know from Chomsky’s former students that he visited MITRE’s laboratories on several occasions in this consultancy role.

One of these students, Barbara Partee, told me that Walker convinced the military to hire her and other MIT linguists on the basis that:

… in the event of a nuclear war, the generals would be underground with some computers trying to manage things, and that it would probably be easier to teach computers to understand English than to teach the generals to program.

Partee qualified her statement by saying she is not sure anyone quite believed this justification. She also pointed out that any ‘basic research’ that might help the military might also benefit wider society. This is true. But it’s also true that the ability to communicate with computers in English would have given the US an important military advantage. Consequently, Chomsky’s students had to try to convince themselves that they weren’t guilty of colluding with the military. As Partee says:

For a while, the Air Force was convinced that supporting pure research in generative grammar was a national priority, and we all tried to convince ourselves that taking Air Force money for such purposes was consistent with our consciences, possibly even a benign subversion of the military-industrial complex.

One student, Haj Ross, even told me that he ‘never had any whiff of military work at MITRE’. But this all rather reminds me of the biologist Jonathan King’s comments about the level of self-delusion among MIT’s students in the 1980s:

There were hundreds and hundreds of physics and engineering graduate students working on these weapons, who never said a word, not a word … So you’d go and have a seminar on the issue they’re just working on; you know, they’re working on the hydrodynamics of an elongated object passing through a deloop fluid at high speed. ‘Well, isn’t that a missile?’ – ‘No, I’m just working on the basic principle; nobody works on weapons.’

In the 1960s, MITRE weren’t the only specialists in nuclear war command and control who were interested in Chomsky’s ideas. Researchers at the System Development Corporation were also trying to develop machines that could understand English commands, examples being ‘Blue fighter go to Boston’ and ‘Where are the fighters?’ According to A History of Online Information Services, 1963-1976 (2003) by Charles Bourne and Trudi Bellardo Hahn, these researchers ‘were paying close attention to Chomsky’s work and sometimes used Chomsky as a consultant.’

Fortunately, none of these military scientists managed to get Chomsky’s theories to actually work. Although MITRE’s linguists did produce what they called a ‘transformational grammar’ for ‘military planning files’, they don’t appear to have got much further, and the Pentagon’s generous funding for Chomsky’s linguistics eventually fell away.

Chomsky still seems to regret this loss of funding, claiming that it came without strings attached. As he explained in his 2022 interview with Krauss:

The Pentagon was the best funder ever. They didn’t care what you were doing … Nobody in the Left can understand that. They assume that if you’re working on problems of philosophy, and for the defence department, you must be working for the war machine!

Chomsky made similar points in a 2015 talk where he also mentioned that ‘a couple of generals’ would sometimes visit his workplace at MIT but otherwise there wasn’t much surveillance. Evidently, these generals were following in the tradition of General Dwight Eisenhower who, in 1946, directed that military scientists must be given ‘the greatest possible freedom to carry out their research’.

MITRE’s linguists always understood that ‘any imaginable military application would be far in the remote future’

Chomsky’s claim that the Pentagon ‘didn’t care’ what he was doing is one that he has made on several occasions. But it is in stark contrast to the documentary evidence. It seems that being an anti-militarist working in a military lab created a situation in which Chomsky has no choice but to hold contradictory ideas about his working environment. So while he has always known, as he said in a debate with Michel Foucault in 1971, that MIT was ‘a major institution of war-research’, he also needs to believe that ‘the Pentagon was not funding war work’ at MIT, as he said in an interview with Rebecca Schein in 2011.

Chomsky seemed equally conflicted when, in 2019, I raised the issue of his consultancy work for MITRE. While he usually dismisses any suggestion that the military funded his linguistics in the hope of military applications, on this occasion he resorted to a quite different argument: MITRE’s linguists, he said (while summarising Barbara Partee), always understood that ‘any imaginable military application would be far in the remote future’.

While this sort of reasoning might have reassured Chomsky’s students, it is unlikely to have reassured Chomsky. Consider his response when his wife Carol began working on an Air Force project in 1959. This MIT-based project was intended to enable people to communicate with computers in ‘natural language’, one aim being to enhance ‘military command and control systems’. We have it from the project’s head, Bert Green, that Noam was ‘very nervous’ about all this and needed reassurance that Carol wasn’t working on ‘voice activated command and control systems’.

If Chomsky was nervous then, he must have been even more nervous when he found himself working for MITRE and the System Development Corporation, both of which were committed to designing computer systems for use in a nuclear war. To appreciate quite how much this must have troubled Chomsky, we need only recall his response when he heard the news of the Hiroshima bombing in August 1945. As he said in an interview with C J Polychroniou in 2019:

I was then a junior counsellor in a summer camp. The news was broadcast in the morning. Everyone listened – and then went off to the planned activity – a baseball game, swimming, whatever was scheduled. I couldn’t believe it. I was so shocked I just took off into the woods and sat by myself for several hours.

Chomsky was similarly shocked when Philip Morrison, a scientist who had worked on the Hiroshima bomb, told him that he couldn’t remember any discussion about the consequences of what he and his colleagues were doing until after the bomb had been used:

These are some of the most brilliant human beings in the world – very humane, European culture, high culture – not just engineers … [But they’re] so immersed in the challenging technical problems of getting this thing to work that they were simply not considering what the effects would be until afterwards!

Chomsky was always dismayed at how ‘brilliant’ people could so guiltlessly stoke up the possibility of destroying the human race. He was also well aware of the role of MIT’s managers in organising and giving focus to such brilliance.

Maybe Wiesner’s interest in linguistics was purely intellectual. But I doubt it

Take MIT’s vice-president in the early 1960s, General James McCormack. He supervised the university’s Center for Communication Science which naturally included MIT’s linguists. Perhaps McCormack’s interest in linguistics was purely intellectual – but I doubt it. After all, he was the general who had supervised the creation of the Pentagon’s entire nuclear weapons stockpile.

Or take Wiesner, who not only recruited Chomsky to MIT but who, in 1960, co-founded the university’s linguistics programme. Wiesner later became MIT’s provost and then president which, in effect, made him Chomsky’s boss for more than 20 years. Now, maybe Wiesner’s interest in linguistics was purely intellectual. But, again, I doubt it, considering he played a significant role in setting up the Pentagon’s entire nuclear missile programme, as well as its computerised air-defence systems.

By 1961, Wiesner had become President John F Kennedy’s science adviser. According to one of his MIT colleagues, Wiesner was well suited for the role as he was ‘soaked’ in military work such as ‘submarine warfare, air defence, atom bombs, guerrilla warfare, civil defence, and psychological warfare’. By the mid-1960s, Wiesner’s air-defence research at MIT had evolved into what Life magazine described as ‘the backbone of the American field communications in Vietnam’. Meanwhile, various laboratories at MIT continued to research helicopter design, radar, smart bombs and counter-insurgency techniques for use in that brutal war.

While Chomsky could sometimes ignore what was going on all around him, he couldn’t do this all the time. We know this from his own words, in a letter from 1967, published by The New York Review of Books:

I have given a good bit of thought to … resigning from MIT, which is, more than any other university, associated with activities of the department of ‘defense’.

So why didn’t Chomsky resign? Partly, I suspect, it was because MIT’s managers were so impressed with his linguistics work that by 1966 they’d given him a named professorship, which, as Chomsky recalled in a talk in 1995, ‘isolated me from the alumni and government pressures’. This meant that, although there was still a risk of prosecution and even imprisonment for his anti-war activism, there was now no direct risk to his MIT career.

This fortuitous situation enabled Chomsky to throw himself into campaigning against the Pentagon while remaining in a career largely funded by that same Pentagon. Among various motives for this shift into activism was undoubtedly a sense of guilt that this career had been so generously funded by the very institution that was, at this time, so brutally attacking Vietnam. As Chomsky told Ron Chepesiuk in 1992, he had reached a point, by 1964, where ‘it got so horrible over there that I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror anymore.’ By 1968, he was telling various journalists not only that he felt ‘guilty’ for waiting so long before protesting against the Vietnam War, but that he felt ‘guilty most of the time’.

Of course, if Chomsky’s linguistic theories had actually worked – if they had enhanced the Pentagon’s ability to inflict death and destruction across the globe – then he would have had still more reason to feel guilty. Such disturbing thoughts can only have deepened Chomsky’s determination to critique the US military-industrial complex – a critique whose credibility was only strengthened by the fact that he was someone from MIT, someone from inside that very complex.

Chomsky’s critiques were particularly inspiring to MIT’s more radical students and, by 1969, these students had pushed the university into a major crisis over its ongoing war research – a crisis that Chomsky did his best to resolve by opposing student demands to simply end this research. Instead, he proposed that MIT should restrict itself to war research ‘of a purely defensive and deterrent character’.

His anxieties would have kept narrowing his focus to the more abstract yet unrealistic aspects of his linguistics

Of course, the US Department of Defense describes almost all its activities in terms of defence and deterrence. Indeed, Chomsky’s position had some similarities with that of Wiesner who himself became quite critical of both the Vietnam War and the nuclear arms race. Although Wiesner’s opinions never stopped him from continuing to administer a huge military research programme at MIT, his liberalism did help create an atmosphere in which it was quite acceptable for MIT’s scientists to criticise the Pentagon for misusing the weaponry that they themselves had invented.

Now perhaps Chomsky was also content to do military research, secure in the knowledge that he could later criticise the military if they ever misused his work. But I doubt whether such wishful thinking could really have appeased Chomsky’s conscience. It seems to me more likely that his anxieties would have kept narrowing his focus to the more abstract, other-worldly and ‘beautiful’ yet unrealistic aspects of his linguistics – resisting any pressure to delve into the kinds of messy practicalities that might actually have led to weapons.

When the Pentagon funded basic research on MIT’s campus, it was always in the hope that it might lead to the development of actual weapons in various off-campus labs. But maintaining a clear distinction between basic research (on-campus) and practical applications (off-campus) was never going to be easy. As Chomsky himself says, academics and students were moving between MIT’s campus and its off-campus military labs ‘all the time’.

Despite this, the illusion of a distinction felt comforting to many at MIT. As we’ve seen, it enabled the university’s physics and engineering students to claim that they were ‘just working on the basic principle; nobody works on weapons.’ Chomsky felt he needed to take this idea as far as anyone could. And if the issue of MIT’s military work did come up, the convenient on-campus/off-campus distinction enabled him to claim, as he did in a conference hosted by University College London in 2017, that:

MIT itself did not have war work, war-related work, on the campus … In fact, the only exception was, at that time, the Political Science Department.

Chomsky is on firm ground here in pointing to the military work of MIT’s political and social scientists, some of whom advised US policy-makers on counter-insurgency and bombing campaigns in Vietnam. But to imply that MIT’s natural scientists weren’t also complicit is quite wrong, especially when we know that Wiesner recruited 11 natural scientists from MIT to work on the McNamara Line. Chomsky must be aware of this, but he was determined to see his linguistics as a particularly ‘pure’ form of natural science on a campus where this kind of science was considered – at least officially – free of military involvement.

On a political level, this approach seems to have helped quieten Chomsky’s conscience. On a scientific level, however, you can get only so far by conducting linguistics as if, like maths or physics, it was a branch of natural science. Since language is intrinsically a social phenomenon, it simply cannot be understood this way.

In the 1940s and ’50s, when computing was new and exciting, it was tempting to explore the idea that there might exist in the human mind/brain a computer-like ‘device’ or ‘mechanism’ that could account for our ability to speak. But from the 1960s onwards, as these investigations kept failing, dissenters among Chomsky’s supporters kept breaking away, insisting that historical, social and cultural phenomena had to be brought back in.

Chomsky, however, refused to move even an inch in that direction, his justification being that natural science is the only genuine kind of science, so-called ‘social science’ being nothing more than reactionary ideology. With this in mind, Chomsky made the striking claim that a rigorously ‘natural’ science of language is realistic in view of the fact that language itself is not social at all, having no significant function in terms of the communication of thoughts or ideas. In his book On Nature and Language (2001), he writes:

[L]anguage … is not properly regarded as a system of communication … [although it] can of course, be used for communication, as can anything people do – manner of walking or style of clothes or hair, for example.

So, according to Chomsky, language did not evolve to facilitate communication any more than people’s legs, clothes or hair did!

Most readers of Aeon will assume that our capacity for language must have evolved among our distant ancestors through natural selection. Most will assume that language is not so much a system for thinking in private as a means of expressing our thoughts so others can share in them. You will probably take it that language is inseparably connected with social life and hence with history, politics and culture. You might also assume that, although children are genetically equipped with the necessary linguistic capacities, they actually acquire their first language by learning from and interacting with those around them. Chomsky, however, rejects each one of these ideas.

Chomsky’s determination to free language from all connection drove him to bizarre conclusions

For example, in the paper ‘Three Factors in Language Design’ (2005), he claims that the biological capacity for language did not evolve but appeared suddenly when the brain of a single early human was ‘rewired, perhaps by some slight mutation’. From that moment, this mutant individual supposedly used language not to communicate with others but only for silent thinking. In interviews with James McGilvray in 2012, Chomsky argues that, even today, people use language 99.9 per cent of the time for talking to themselves.

Chomsky’s determination to free language from all connection with society, politics, history or culture – all connection, in other words, with the political activist side of his life – is evidently what drove him to these bizarre conclusions. It eventually drove him to the claim that words, or the concepts behind them, are lodged in the brain from birth – having become fixed in our genes at the moment when our species first emerged.

When challenged to explain how this idea could possibly apply to words such as ‘bureaucrat’ and ‘carburettor’ – things that clearly didn’t exist when humans first evolved – Chomsky held his ground. Like all lexical concepts, he insisted in his book New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind (2000), they must have been genetically installed thousands of years before real bureaucrats or carburettors had been invented.

When MIT’s Jerry Fodor took Chomsky’s side on this issue, his rival philosopher Daniel Dennett expressed astonishment, writing in Consciousness Explained (1991): ‘Thus Aristotle had the concept of an airplane in his brain, and also the concept of a bicycle – he just never had occasion to use them!’ Perhaps ‘Aristotle had an innate airplane concept,’ Dennett continued, ‘but did he also have a concept of wide-bodied jumbo jet? What about the concept of an APEX fare Boston/London round trip?’ Despite the hilarity, Chomsky has continued to defend the idea.

Chomsky embraces genetic determinism in an equally extreme form when discussing how a child acquires its first language. He claims that no child needs social learning to do this. Since all the world’s languages have been genetically installed in each individual from birth, says Chomsky, the child just needs to run through its internal library of languages and, by a process of elimination, compute which particular one to activate. As Chomsky said in a lecture at the University of Rochester in 2016:

It’s pretty clear that a child approaches the problem of language acquisition by having all possible languages in its head. It doesn’t know which language it’s being exposed to. And, as data comes along, that class of possible languages reduces. So certain data comes along, and the mind automatically says: ‘OK, it’s not that language, it’s some other language.’

Yet even while championing such extreme genetic determinism, Chomsky has in recent years happily swung over to the opposite extreme, suggesting that the role of distinctively human genetics may in fact be zero. This would be the case if Universal Grammar turned out to be a fundamental principle of language across the entire Universe. On this basis, bizarrely, Chomsky has since extended his claims to the languages of extraterrestrials, arguing at the International Space Development Conference in 2018 that Universal Grammar may prove to be universal not just among Earth-dwellers but on any planet in the Universe.

In ‘Rethinking Universality’ (2020), Chomsky and his co-author Jeffrey Watumull suggest that ‘any language anywhere in the Universe would resemble human language’. Not only that, they and their co-author Ian Roberts go on to argue in ‘Universal Grammar’ (2023) that any intelligent extraterrestrials would likely be endowed with ‘human-style linguistic “software”, thus eliminating any principled limit to effective communication [between aliens and humans].’ Certainly no one could accuse Chomsky and his supporters of being too cautious in their claims!

Not one of his ever-changing theoretical approaches has survived the test of time

I mentioned at the outset that my job as an anthropologist isn’t just to describe Chomsky’s strange ideas or find fault with them. It is to understand why he found it necessary to arrive at them. The only explanation that makes sense to me is that, given his institutional situation at MIT, Chomsky felt obliged to follow two basic principles: firstly, he would pursue natural science to the total exclusion of politically suspect social science; and, secondly, he would keep his natural science ‘basic’ or ‘pure’ – that is, uncontaminated by the moral danger of any practical military applications.

Even while continuing to admire Chomsky, most of his former supporters would now agree that, when tested in the light of how language actually works, not one of his ever-changing theoretical approaches has survived the test of time. Their most fundamental flaw was always their abstraction, in particular their insulation from social engagement and from the messy complexities of human life.

In Explain Me This (2019), the influential theoretical linguist Adele Goldberg makes the point that to study written sentences in isolation – the Chomskyan strategy favoured by most theoretical linguists until recently – may be ‘akin to studying animals in separate cages in a zoo’. Writing in 2016, the prominent evolutionary linguist and child psychologist Michael Tomasello and the developmental psychologist Paul Ibbotson summed up the prevailing consensus by observing that Chomsky’s ‘Universal Grammar appears to have reached a final impasse.’

Tomasello and Ibbotson are right. Not one of Chomsky’s models of Universal Grammar has proved workable. Each new variant has turned out to be not just mistaken but fundamentally useless. Although the Pentagon’s enthusiasm for artificial intelligence has rekindled some interest in Chomskyan grammar for what they call ‘future combat systems’, there’s no reason to believe that today’s military linguists will be any more successful than their predecessors.

This raises an interesting question. If the entire Chomskyan paradigm was a mistake, then how can we explain its lasting influence? Even when they proved unworkable, Chomsky’s theories retained their initial aura of promise and excitement, as if some extraordinary breakthrough was about to be achieved. In likening his intended reconstruction of linguistics to the accomplishments of Descartes and Galileo, Chomsky raised himself to a plane far higher than any rival theoretician, offering hope for nothing less than a world-changing scientific revolution.

In the early days, transformational grammar’s apparent endorsement by the Pentagon played a decisive public relations role. Previously, a linguist would most likely be some kind of anthropologist making notes about the language spoken in some marginalised community or little-known tribe. The prospect of such a scholar enjoying funding from the military would have seemed absurd. Chomsky’s arrival changed everything. Few people knew precisely why the Pentagon were so interested in his thinking, but the fact that they seemed interested did his institutional status no harm.

But there is more to it than that. My own suspicion is that, for Chomsky’s institutional milieu, his ideas just had to be true. Endorsing Chomsky meant endorsing his picture of language as a digital computational device. To any computer scientist, that was an attractive idea. Chomsky’s programme promised to elevate a generation of military-sponsored computer scientists to the status not merely of electronics engineers but philosophers in the tradition of Plato and Descartes, geniuses delving into the greatest of all mysteries – the ultimate nature of human language and mind. Right or wrong, it was clearly too attractive a vision to be lightly set aside. Even to this day, despite decades of disappointment and failure, the vision still enjoys passionate support.

For anyone in my position as an admirer of Chomsky’s political activism, it feels risky to say things that can so easily be misunderstood. No part of my account can detract from Chomsky’s unparalleled record as an activist. Neither can it detract from his persistence in putting up with the pressures and contradictions that inevitably came with a career at MIT.

Chomsky alongside members of the Student Mobilization Committee at a Boston University ‘Laos’ teach-in. Boston on Feb. 9, 1971. Photo by Cary Wolinsky/The Boston Globe via Getty

Many of Chomsky’s activist supporters have been shocked to discover that their hero has been on friendly terms not only with the former head of the CIA, John Deutch, but also with the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. But it would have been impossible for Chomsky to maintain his position at MIT for so long without associating with all sorts of dubious establishment figures. As Chomsky told The Harvard Crimson in 2023 of his meetings with Epstein: ‘I’ve met [all] sorts of people, including major war criminals. I don’t regret having met any of them.’ For me, Chomsky’s association with Epstein was a serious error. I also believe, however, that had Chomsky been so principled and pure as to refuse to work at MIT, then he might never have gained the platform he needed to inspire so many of us to oppose both militarism and the even greater threat of climate catastrophe.

There are times when we all have to make compromises, some more costly than others. In Chomsky’s case, it was his attempt at a new understanding of language that suffered most from the institutional contradictions he faced. Despite the failure of his attempted revolution in linguistics, Chomsky’s political activism remains an inspiration.

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8 December 2023

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The rights of the dead

From the Irish Giant to the Ancient One, is it ever ethical for scientists and museums to study bodies without permission?

Anita Guerrini

7 Dec, 2023

- The rights of the dead

John Hunter (1813) by John Jackson, oil on canvas; based on an original work from 1786 by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Courtesy the NPG, London

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The rights of the dead

From the Irish Giant to the Ancient One, is it ever ethical for scientists and museums to study bodies without permission?

7 Dec, 2023

by Anita Guerrini + BIO

John Hunter (1813) by John Jackson, oil on canvas; based on an original work from 1786 by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Courtesy the NPG, London

Anita Guerrini

is Horning professor in the humanities emerita at Oregon State University and research professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her books include Obesity and Depression in the Enlightenment (2000), Experimenting with Humans and Animals (2003, 2nd revised edition 2022) and The Courtiers’ Anatomists: Animals and Humans in Louis XIV’s Paris (2015).

Edited by  Sam Haselby

In 1786, Joshua Reynolds painted a portrait of the surgeon and anatomist John Hunter. Reynolds depicted Hunter gazing into the distance, caught in mid-thought, quill in hand. On the table in front of him, apart from inkwell and paper, are some books, one propped open to a page comparing the skulls and arm bones of humans and apes. Next to the books is an anatomical specimen under a glass dome. In the upper right-hand corner is a mantel holding another anatomical specimen in a glass jar. A pair of large skeletal feet suspended in the air next to the jar hint at the large skeleton attached to them and hanging from the ceiling.

The painting was well known, particularly after an engraving of it was made in 1788, and the dangling feet were also famous. Their inclusion in the portrait indicated that Hunter owned them and the skeleton to which he had re-attached them. However, in life, they had belonged to the ‘Irish Giant’ Charles Byrne.

I first saw Byrne’s skeleton decades ago in the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in London, among jars of preserved anatomical specimens that included an 18th-century bishop’s cancerous rectum. The last time I saw the skeleton, in 2016, I was not allowed to photograph it. The following year, the outcome of the case of an ancient skeleton in the United States brought to a head long-simmering issues surrounding the rights of the dead against the rights of museums to display their remains and of scientists to learn from them.

The contrasts are many between Byrne and the man who died 8,500 years ago and was buried along what is now known as the Columbia River near Kennewick in Washington state. Nonetheless, there are similarities between them. They share stories of identity and ownership in the aftermath of colonialism. More broadly, both men seem to epitomise science’s appropriation of individual identities in the service of a larger impersonal goal of knowledge that presumably will benefit humankind. By this argument, a dead body has no value other than as a source of information. Yet the stories of these two men, vastly separated in place and time, are not merely stories of a cold and rapacious science, but of the intertwined desires and beliefs that the living project onto the dead, both in the 18th century and today, both among scientists and among others who lay claim to the bodies of the dead. The dead themselves know nothing about it.

For several years, Charles Byrne, born in 1761 in County Derry, exhibited himself for a fee to the public at fairs, in taverns and coffeehouses, and at private homes across Ireland and Britain. Newspaper advertisements and broadsides breathlessly proclaimed him to be the tallest man in the world, at a height of 8 ft 2 in. We know little about him apart from his height, which was actually about 7 ft 7 in (2.31 m). His parents were of normal size but, since he hired himself out for money while still in his teens, they were most likely poor. His handlers dressed him in the height of 1780s fashion, with silk stockings and lace cuffs, and broadsides posted on walls across London announced his arrival in April 1782. The broadside described ‘The Modern Living Colossus, Or, Wonderful IRISH-GIANT’ noting his ‘admirable Symetry [sic] and Proportion’ and his ‘Vivacity and Spirit’.

Leaflet advertising appearances by Charles Byrne, the Irish Giant, c1781. Courtesy the Wellcome Collection, London

Byrne’s Irishness was part of his appeal. He was sometimes referred to, or referred to himself, as O’Brien, invoking an ancestry going back to the semi-mythical 11th-century Irish king Brian Boru, who in some tales was a giant. In Hilary Mantel’s novel The Giant, O’Brien (1998), Byrne is a storyteller, a myth-spinner, in contrast to Hunter’s cold rationality. Byrne was not the first Irish giant to display himself, and he would not be the last. Patrick Cotter, who really was eight feet tall, assumed Byrne’s role after his death. He also called himself O’Brien, and the two merged in the popular imagination.

Patrick O’Brien, a giant (1803), etching by J Kay. Courtesy the Wellcome Collection

Hunter would eviscerate it, dismember it, boil it until the flesh came off, and assemble the bones into a skeleton

By the spring of 1783, only a year after his triumphant entry into London, Byrne was in constant pain, his bones cracking under his weight. Newly destitute, robbed of his life savings, he was busily drinking himself to death. He was 22 years old, and he knew that Hunter wanted his body after he died. The anatomist had offered to pay Byrne a sum of money if he would bequeath him his body. This was not an uncommon practice. Forty years earlier, the ‘Irish Dwarf’ Owen Farrell had made just such an arrangement with a surgeon. The value of Farrell’s bones, at least initially, was as a curiosity: they entered the collections of the Duke of Richmond. Hunter’s brother William, who purchased the skeleton at an auction after Richmond’s death, was more interested in Farrell’s abnormally bony cartilage.

Owen Farrell (1742), engraving by J Hulett. Courtesy the Wellcome Collection, London

Byrne knew that if he granted John Hunter’s request, his body would share the fate of Farrell’s: Hunter would eviscerate it, dismember it, boil it until the flesh came off, and assemble the bones with wires and rods into a skeleton. Byrne refused Hunter’s offer, and took steps to ward off this fate, arranging with friends to seal his dead body in a lead coffin and pay for its transport to the coast for a burial at sea, far from Hunter’s predatory hands. Or perhaps the burial was to be in Ireland. There are many accounts and they say different things. The announcement of Byrne’s death in Parker’s General Advertiser in June 1783 noted that ‘His remains are secured in his coffin, which measures upwards of eight feet four inches.’ Although his friends were ‘determined to have him carried to Ireland in a few days’, they first offered to show the coffin to the public, for a fee of two shillings and sixpence apiece.

The coffin never made it, either to Ireland or to the coast. Accounts also differ of how Hunter obtained Byrne’s body; the London Morning Chronicle declared that Hunter paid 125 guineas, more than £20,000 today, for the body. Others claimed he paid £500. Possibly the friends who exhibited the coffin sold the body to Hunter. In any case, Byrne’s next public appearance was his skeletonised feet in Reynolds’s portrait. Hunter declared that his interest in Byrne was purely scientific. Examining the extremes of nature, as well as normal specimens, gave him insights into its inner workings. He amassed an enormous collection of human and animal skeletons, skulls and anatomical preparations housed both at his home in Leicester Square and his country house at Earl’s Court, where he also maintained a menagerie. While his collections were primarily for his own research, from 1788 onward he opened his home at Leicester Square for public viewing a few times a month. He put the skeleton of Byrne on display as part of a case depicting the growth of bones.

Hunter died in 1793, and in 1799 his anatomical collections, including Byrne’s skeleton, were purchased by the British government and transferred to the Company of Surgeons, which later became the Royal College of Surgeons of England. The College’s museum opened in 1813, and Byrne’s skeleton remained on display there for the next two centuries. In 1909, a US surgeon sawed open Byrne’s skull and found evidence of the pituitary tumour that caused the release of excessive amounts of growth hormone. Later, DNA was extracted from one of Byrne’s teeth. At some point in the 19th century, another skeleton joined Byrne’s on display. Known as the ‘Sicilian Fairy’, Caroline Crachami died in 1824 at the reputed aged of nine. At the time of her death, she was around 20 in (50 cm) tall – the size of a newborn infant – making her one of the smallest humans ever recorded. The two skeletons survived the Blitz in 1941, which destroyed much of Hunter’s collection, but were put in storage in 2017 when the museum closed for renovations.

Portrait of Caroline Crachami (1826), by John James Chalon. Courtesy the Hunterian Museum

A second story of identity and ownership of a dead body began in the summer of 1996, when some teenagers found a skull along a bank of the Columbia River. The man who had been buried there some 8,500 years ago was tall for his time, at around 5 ft 7 in (1.7 m), but he was not a giant. His burial was deliberate, with his body laid on its back, parallel to the river and with his head pointed upstream. When his skull eventually emerged from the riverbank, time had already removed his skin and hair, his eyes and tongue. The teenagers who found it assumed it belonged to the victim of a murder and called the police. The nearest town, Kennewick, is near the confluence of the Columbia with the Yakima River to the west and the Snake River to the east, and the waters here are bisected by the McNary Dam. The skull came to the local coroner, who called James Chatters, a local archaeologist, to determine if it belonged to a crime victim. Chatters recognised that the skull was quite old and, judging by its shape, he at first believed it had belonged to a white settler. Returning to the site, he found some 300 bones and fragments: nearly a complete skeleton. Carbon-14 testing on a finger bone initially established its age at around 9,000 years old.

The emergence from the muddy shore of these bones – who came to be called either ‘Kennewick Man’ or ‘the Ancient One’, depending on the speaker – opened a 20-year debate about ownership, heritage and science. Although this story was in some ways uniquely American, it also spurred global disputes that are still ongoing. The McNary Dam site is owned by the US government and managed by the US Army Corps of Engineers. The Corps issued the permits that allowed Chatters to find more of the skeleton and, once the age of the bones became clear, the Corps took possession of them. Since they dated from long before 1492, the course of action for the Corps seemed clear. Under the provisions of the six-year-old Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), if the bones were pre-Columbian, they were by definition Native American. If the bones were Native American, the Corps was obligated to repatriate them to local tribes. Five local Native American tribes had already claimed Kennewick Man as an ancestor, ‘the Ancient One’.

At this point, only a few months after the discovery of the bones, Kennewick Man was already renowned in the archaeological world. At that time, few bones of such an advanced age, and only one other skeleton, had been found in North America. Theories of the populating of North America, including when it occurred, where it originated and by which route, were in flux after years of consensus. New methods of analysis including CAT scans and 3-D modelling helped to reconstruct what skeletal bodies looked like when alive, while stable isotope analysis – which considers the ratios of stable isotopes of carbon and nitrogen in bones – reconstructed the diets, and the origins, of the long-dead. These and other methods were changing the picture of late Ice Age America. Most exciting was the potential of DNA analysis, which was in its infancy in the 1990s. Chatters had just sent a finger bone out for DNA analysis when the Corps ordered him to stop any further testing.

The bones of Kennewick Man had been in a box, in plastic bags and in an evidence locker

A group of anthropologists and archaeologists sued the Corps to prevent repatriation, arguing that the identity of the bones had not yet been determined, and that therefore NAGPRA did not apply to them. They pointed to the need for further study, which the five tribes strenuously opposed, calling for the bones to be buried without further analysis. Ironically – and this case is drenched in irony – because the Federal court agreed that the identity of the bones could be determined only scientifically, the scientists were freed to conduct studies to determine that identity. These studies mostly focused on craniometry, the size and shape of the skull, which many believed to indicate a non-Native American identity. Chatters published images of the skull in 1996 and 1997, and identified its shape as ‘Caucasoid’, an archaic racial classification that some construed as racist. The facial reconstruction Chatters made from a resin cast of the skull, published in Science magazine in 1998, most resembled the actor Patrick Stewart (Chatters admitted that he was a fan of Star Trek). White supremacist groups in the US seized on the ‘Caucasoid’ label to argue that white Europeans had settled the Americas before any ancestor of modern Native Americans.

By then, the bones had been deposited in the Burke Museum at the University of Washington, where they remained securely stored and were never displayed. The 2004 judgment in the lawsuit against the Corps declared in favour of the scientists. The settlement opened the door to a more detailed study of the remains over the next decade, resulting in what seemed to be the definitive account of the bones. Ten years later saw the publication of Kennewick Man: The Scientific Investigation of an Ancient American Skeleton (2014), edited by the anthropologists Douglas Owsley and Richard Jantz.

The study described Kennewick Man as relatively tall, ‘broad-bodied, and massive’. But was he an ancestor of modern Native Americans? Amid an avalanche of data on diet, overall health and burial conditions, the critical question of identity remained focused largely on the skull. Some anthropologists thought it resembled the modern Ainu of Japan, an Indigenous people who predate the Japanese but whose ancient origins remain debated. Additional analysis suggested that the skull showed most affinity with Polynesians, indicating a common set of ancestors. This theory in turn fit new ideas of multiple migrations from Asia to the Americas, with some travelling across the sea and perhaps predating those who came overland from Siberia across the Bering Land Bridge. Owsley and Jantz concluded that ‘Kennewick Man … differ[s] from modern American Indians in systematic ways … their difference is mainly genetic and as such carries information about their history and biological affinities,’ although the proofs they presented were mainly morphological. Throughout the volume, Kennewick Man is referred to as a ‘Paleoamerican’ rather than the more common name of ‘Paleoindian’, in an attempt to demarcate differing ancient groups. A new reconstruction of his face resembled photographs of Ainu men, with a full beard and lightly tanned skin.

Kennewick Man’s skull and recreation. Courtesy Brittney Tatchell/Smithsonian Institution

A little more than a year after the publication of Owsley and Jantz’s volume, the carefully constructed chain of identification fell apart when the results of DNA analysis showed that ‘Kennewick Man is closer to modern Native Americans than to any other population worldwide.’ An article in Nature magazine in July 2015, authored by a team led by the Danish scientist Eske Willerslev, reported the results of the analysis. The team had sequenced the genome of Kennewick Man and compared it with other populations, particularly other Native American populations. The closest relationship appeared with the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, one of the five tribes who had claimed Kennewick Man as the Ancient One nearly 20 years earlier. The Colville tribe was the only one of the five that agreed to provide DNA samples for comparison.

The development of research on what is known as ancient DNA or aDNA had progressed rapidly in the decade before the Nature article. Ancient DNA consists of short and degraded fragments that persist in materials such as bones and teeth, as well as hair, mummified skin and dental calculus. Although the first sequencing of aDNA occurred in 1984 from a museum animal specimen, the technological challenges to obtaining meaningful results from fragmentary and often contaminated evidence took years to overcome. Moreover, the interpretation of aDNA evidence required collaboration between bench scientists and social scientists, who had to overcome their mutual suspicion and develop a common vocabulary as well as a chain of ownership between excavation site or museum and laboratory that minimised contamination. For example, the bones of Kennewick Man had at various times been in a box, in plastic bags and in an evidence locker before their arrival at the Burke Museum, increasing their chances of contamination with modern DNA at each stop.

Perhaps most important, the analysis of aDNA is necessarily destructive. The sample to be analysed is reduced to a powder and treated with chemicals that purify the DNA from contaminants, isolate it, and extract and recover fragments. While improved technology has reduced the size of the sample required, the cultural significance of removing even a small sample from an ancient specimen cannot be ignored.

The results of the aDNA analysis fulfilled NAGPRA’s requirement of a preponderance of evidence, allowing the Corps to declare definitively that Kennewick Man belonged to the five tribes who had originally claimed him, and particularly to the Colville. The Corps confirmed what the five tribes had said all along: that the Ancient One was their ancestor. In February 2017, the Burke Museum turned over the bones to the tribes. As required by law, that meant all the bits and pieces, including what remained of the finger bone used for DNA testing, thus precluding any further testing. The Ancient One was reburied in an undisclosed location on the Colville Reservation along the Columbia River.

Such a resting place was not to be allowed to the skeleton of Charles Byrne. Calls for the burial of his bones – either in Ireland or at sea – began years before the Hunterian Museum closed for renovations in 2017. These calls intensified during the museum’s closure, with Hilary Mantel taking a prominent role. Every inch of Byrne’s skeleton had been measured and examined. A tooth had been extracted for DNA testing in 2011. Surely, Mantel and other advocates argued, science had learned all there was to learn. ‘He’s waited long enough,’ she said in 2020.

DNA testing had revealed that the pituitary tumour that caused Byrne to be a giant had a hereditary component. It was not merely a spontaneous mutation, but had a genetic basis, and the frequency of Irish giants was not merely apparent or coincidental but quite real. The giant Knipe twins, with whom Byrne had been depicted, had grown up in a neighbouring village to Byrne’s, and by this evidence they were most likely distant cousins. The genetic evidence showed that the giants trail went back for generations. Ireland really was a birthplace of giants.

The Knipe Twins depicted with Charles Byrne, etching by John Kay (1784). Courtesy the NPG, London

However, this evidence, far from persuading the museum that science had learned all there was to learn, led them to conclude that the bones still had more to tell. The scientists who had examined Kennewick Man would certainly agree with this assessment. DNA analysis and particularly the analysis of ancient DNA has been refined further and further in the past decade. Unlike Kennewick Man, Byrne has not been buried, although his skeleton was no longer on display when the Hunterian Museum reopened in May 2023. He remains in the museum as Osteo.223, available for future research. The tiny skeleton of Caroline Crachami, Osteo.227, also remains in storage at the museum.

The unwavering values of Native American communities claimed the Ancient One as their own

These stories affirm that the way the living have treated dead bodies throughout history is never about the dead but about themselves. The living give the bodies of the dead – and thus their own bodies – meaning, whether as relics, museum displays, scientific subjects or ones buried in the ground. Their status as colonial subjects made the remains of Byrne and the Ancient One particularly vulnerable to exploitation. In Byrne’s time, certain fields in Ireland were still littered with bones and skulls, the result of Oliver Cromwell’s brutal reconquest of Ireland in the 1650s. Byrne and his contemporaries assumed they owned their own bodies, believing therefore that they could control their disposition after death. But in Byrne’s case, he rejected the coldly transactional arrangements made by his countryman Owen Farrell, hoping to escape the fate of Farrell’s bones.

Although Mantel portrayed Byrne as a deeply spiritual man steeped in Irish mythology, in fact we know little of his spiritual or emotional life, or of his wider community. In contrast, the transformation of Kennewick Man into the Ancient One owed to the unwavering values of Native American communities who claimed the Ancient One as their own. However, the US government accepted these values only when science affirmed the claims. Moreover, although the Ancient One sleeps beneath the banks of the Columbia once more, forever lost to science, Native American bones and artefacts remain in anthropology departments and museum collections around the world.

The values of the community who have demanded the burial of Byrne are more diffuse, and the laws that govern the display of human remains in Britain are loosely interpreted unless the remains are under 100 years old, in which case they are subject to stricter regulation. Byrne’s bones hang in a storage room, awaiting further tests as the science of aDNA advances. Perhaps scientists will learn more about pituitary tumours from Byrne, and his body, racked with pain in life, will be able to prevent a similar fate for others. In place of the skeleton itself, visitors to the museum can view Reynolds’s depiction of his feet, hanging over Hunter’s mantel.

EthicsHistory of scienceBioethics

7 December 2023

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- Forging philosophy

Lalibela, Ethiopia. Photo by Juan Manuel Castro Prieto/Agence VU

i

Forging philosophy

A 17th-century classic of Ethiopian philosophy might be a fake. Does it matter, or is that just how philosophy works?

5 Dec, 2023

by Jonathan Egid + BIO

Lalibela, Ethiopia. Photo by Juan Manuel Castro Prieto/Agence VU

Jonathan Egid

is writing a PhD at King’s College London. He hosts the interview series Philosophising In… on philosophy in less-studied languages, and his essays and reviews have been published by The Times Literary Supplement, New Humanist and Radical Philosophy, among others.

Edited by  Nigel Warburton

In 2017, the Australasian Journal of Philosophy issued a rare retraction, informing their readers that one of their articles was not in fact written by a cat. The short article, a critique of David Lewis’s ‘Veridical Hallucination and Prosthetic Vision’, was published in 1981 under the name of ‘Bruce Le Catt’, a figure with no discernible institutional affiliation or track record of publishing, but who appears to have been familiar with Lewis’s work. As indeed he might have been, being the beloved pet of the great American philosopher.

It may not have come as a surprise to those familiar with Lewis’s work that ‘Bruce Le Catt’ was not the pseudonym of an astute critic, but of Lewis himself. The playfulness of Lewis’s writing is well known: for instance, the paper ‘Holes’ (1970), co-written with Stephanie Lewis, is a dialogue between two characters, ‘Argle’ and ‘Bargle’, on the ontological status of holes as found in Gruyère, crackers, paper-towel rollers and in matter more generally. Nevertheless, the attribution of the 1981 paper to a cat seemed to cross a line. It may have been playful, but it was also deceptive, hence the retraction.

Lewis was not the only 20th-century philosopher to publish using an invented persona. The contents page of the book Explaining Emotions (1980), edited by Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, features the essay ‘Jealousy, Attention, and Loss’ by one Leila Tov-Ruach, listed on the Contributors page as ‘an Israeli psychiatrist, who writes and lectures on philosophic psychology’. Some readers might have noticed that this is a rather unusual name – a pun on laila tov ruach or ‘goodnight wind’ in Hebrew – and might have had their suspicions confirmed by the fact that there is no discernible trace of this psychiatrist elsewhere on the medical or academic record. Indeed, as an erratum on the University of California Press website drily notes, Amélie Oksenberg Rorty and Leila Tov-Ruach are indeed one and the same person.

The case of Tov-Ruach is somewhat different to Bruce Le Catt. Rather than playfully externalising the critique of the originating philosopher’s own arguments, Tov-Ruach’s paper is included side by side with Rorty’s own contributions to a volume that she herself edited. The two write on different topics and have their own biographical entries in the volume but are not in opposition. It is certainly a more elaborate and less obviously tongue-in-cheek intervention than Lewis’s use of Bruce Le Catt as an antagonist.

What are the ethics of this kind of pseudonymous publication? When they realised what had happened, the Australasian Journal of Philosophy and the University of California Press evidently felt it necessary, as a matter of academic ethics, to issue a clarification on the identity of the true authors. They were prompted to do so by the unflagging work of Michael Dougherty, the Sister Ruth Caspar Chair in Philosophy at Ohio Dominican University, who has spent years unmasking cases of misattribution, and downright plagiarism along with murkier, quirkier cases like these. For Dougherty, such cases are primarily about disciplinary morality, amounting to a wilful obstruction of the scholarly endeavour. On the Rorty/Tov-Ruach case, he writes:

It’s odd to have a dialogue with yourself under two names in the published literature. I have no idea why she is doing this. Dr Rorty is a distinguished philosopher, and the use of pseudonyms can impede a genuine history of philosophy.

It is the implied question in Dougherty’s statement that interests me: why is she doing it? Why would any philosopher write under somebody else’s name, pretend to be someone that they are not? If plagiarism is the intellectual sin of taking credit for someone else’s ideas, what are we to think of its opposite: pinning one’s own ideas on somebody else who doesn’t even exist?

While it might seem odd in the world of contemporary journal publication, smuggling ideas under someone else’s name is rather more common in the history of philosophy than you might think. Medieval philosophy in particular abounds with texts that blur the boundaries between anonymity, pseudonymity and straightforward authorship. Consider the various ‘pseudos-’ – from pseudo-Augustine, pseudo-Aristotle, pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite – that proliferated in the late antique and medieval periods. Many of the medieval scholars used this kind of device to invoke the authority of an older figure for their ideas; humble monks who wrote (if writing under any name at all) under the names of the mighty dead to gain intellectual clout and authority.

Indeed, in a slightly different form, this practice has far deeper roots. Any philosophical dialogue using the names of real figures does something similar: is Plato’s Socrates the ‘real’ Socrates, or a mouthpiece for Plato’s own views, or somewhere in between? Was Plato’s Protagoras the ‘real’ Protagoras, or just a foil for Plato’s own ideas? And, if the latter, is there really anything wrong with this?

Courtesy Casa Fernando Pessoa, Lisbon, Portugal

And what about when the name under which a philosopher writes does not refer to a real individual? Søren Kierkegaard wrote under a great many names: Johannes Climacus, Constantin Constantius, Victorin Victorius Victor, Johannes de Silentio are a few of them, none of whom is anything but the creative imagining of Kierkegaard himself. In fact, it is perhaps more proper to call these personages ‘heteronyms’, as developed later in the works of Fernando Pessoa, in which the different names are not simply alternative labels for an identical author hiding behind the label, but denote fully conceived individuals, each with their own personality, appearance and distinctive literary style. Pessoa himself conjured more than 60 such persons, in addition to two ‘semi-heteronyms’ that constituted a ‘mere mutilation’ of his own personal style, and finally the single ‘orthonym’ that referred to the origin points of all of these names: Pessoa himself.

This thinker, who does not exist, nevertheless takes up a particular perspective on the world

Rorty’s use of an alias is in many ways easier to understand, mainly because she tells us precisely why she wrote under a name that was not her own. Indeed, Leila Tov-Ruach was not her only pseudonym. In addition to an Israeli psychiatrist, Rorty also tried her hand at writing as a Chinese Platonist and, in her edited collection Philosophers on Education (1998), she explains why she chose to write her article on ‘Plato’s Counsel on Education’ under the name of Zhang LoShan:

Ever since teaching a course in the history of philosophy in the People’s Republic of China in 1981, and finding students and colleagues there passionately interested in Plato, I had been trying to see him through their eyes, with their preoccupations … Although I wrote that essay, it is, in a perfectly straightforward way, not strictly speaking mine … It is an experiment I strongly recommend to all serious scholars: surprising features emerge from the exercise.

The aim of writing under the name of this nonexistent philosopher was, in Rorty’s words, ‘intellectual empathy’, understood as the attempt to enter into the mind of another thinker, a kind of exercise. This thinker, who does not exist, nevertheless takes up a particular perspective on the world, a perspective that rests on a different set of assumptions and preoccupations from the author’s. When the pseudonymous author imaginatively occupies such a perspective through the processes of intellectual empathy, they might thereby see things differently (as might readers).

Today, some people might object to the case of Rorty-as-Zhang-LoShan on grounds of cultural appropriation, and perhaps Rorty would admit that this is precisely the point: to appropriate a perspective that is not one’s own, that is not anybody’s at all (though, for her, presumably that wouldn’t have the negative connotations of ‘cultural appropriation’). And perhaps this is why she – and Kierkegaard and Pessoa, but not Plato or pseudo-Augustine – chose names of thinkers who never existed: so as to have the freedom not only to appropriate an existing perspective, but also to create and inhabit one anew.

But none of these examples, from philosophical felines to pseudo-Augustine or imaginary Chinese Platonists, is quite as perplexing as that of the Ḥatäta Zera Yacob. The Ḥatäta, or ‘enquiry’ (the root of which, ሐ-ተ-ተ, in the ancient Ethiopian language of Geʽez literally means ‘to investigate, examine, search’ ) is an unusual work of philosophy for a number of reasons. It is not only a philosophical treatise but also an autobiography, a religious meditation and a witness of the religious wars that plagued Ethiopia in the early 17th century; it presents a theodicy and cosmological argument apparently independent of other traditions of Christian thought; it employs a subtle philosophical vocabulary that is virtually without precursors. Finally, and most perplexingly, the progenitor of these ideas, the Zera Yacob who is the subject of the autobiography and gives his name to the title, may never have existed.

Why might we think this? The text is composed in the voice of one Zera Yacob, a man born to poor parents in ‘the lands of the priests of Aksum’ in northern Ethiopia around the turn of the 17th century. Driven from his hometown by religious conflict between Orthodox ‘kopt’ and Catholic ‘ferenj’, our eponymous narrator Zera Yacob flees to the hills and finds a cave in which he ‘meditated all day on humanity’s quarrels and wickedness, and also on the wisdom of the Lord their creator, who keeps silent when they act wickedly in his name, persecute their neighbours, and kill their own brothers and sisters.’ The basic problem of his philosophy is how to understand how God allowed this violent conflict to take place – a version of the classic problem of evil – and further to understand what, if anything, is true in religion.

In the most strident chapters, Zera Yacob critiques the religious practices and social organisation of his day

Zera Yacob poses the problem by asking how we can decide between two religions whose justifications and standards of justification are internal to their own systems of thought – who ‘decided everything according to [their] own creed’:

Where will I find someone who will decide [on the religions and creeds] truthfully? Because [just as] my religion seems true to me, so does another’s religion seem true to them.

The problem is not only that different groups disagree, but that there seems no way to resolve these disagreements without bloodshed.

His answer is remarkable. The only thing that can decide between competing religious claims is something that every human has inside them: the god-given faculty of lebbuna (variously translated as ‘reason’, ‘intelligence’ and ‘understanding’) that allows us to perceive what is right and wrong, good and bad by means of it being attuned to a kind of pre-established harmony between the creator, creation at large and this faculty itself. Lebbuna is common to kopt and ferenj, man and woman, young and old: truth and goodness is accessible to all, equally. And yet humans do not use it. It is onerous to apply one’s reason, and mankind is by nature lazy, preferring to be led by received wisdom.

The most strident chapters of the book follow, with Zera Yacob using the normative standards set by lebbuna to critique the religious practises and social organisation of his day. He criticises slavery for treating man like a beast; asceticism for perverting natural desires; and the practice of marriage for treating a wife as the slave of a husband.

When the civil unrest ends with the death of the emperor, he returns to society, settling in the town of Enfraz where he finds work and eventually an intellectual disciple in the form of a youth named Walda Heywat, who urges his teacher to write down his reflections before his death. He presents here a vision of the good life as living in harmony with the natural order of creation, earning his sustenance and that of his family by honest work. The historical details of the political background are all accurate, the language of the text beautiful, lyrical Geʽez. So why think that this character, so convincingly evoked, may never have existed?

The troubled afterlife of the text begins when the work is ‘discovered’ in 1852 by a lonely Capuchin monk named Giusto da Urbino in the highlands of Ethiopia. Before this date, there is no mention of the text in the historical record. The work was sent off to da Urbino’s patron back in Paris, the Irish-Basque explorer, linguist and astronomer Antoine d’Abbadie, and placed in the Ethiopian collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Over the next couple of decades, scholars flocked to consult this fascinating, seemingly unprecedented text. The Ḥatäta was edited and translated into Russian and Latin, and began to gain a wider readership among European intellectuals.

Then in 1920, an Italian Orientalist named Carlo Conti Rossini published an article in the Journal Asiatique, claiming that, far from being a masterpiece of 17th-century Ethiopian thought, the Ḥatäta was in fact a forgery, composed by the man who had claimed to discover it: da Urbino. Conti Rossini had been tipped off by an Ethiopian convert to Catholicism that da Urbino had been scheming with local scholars to create ‘heretical’ and ‘masonic’ works to undermine Catholicism and Ethiopian orthodoxy alike. Conti Rossini now started seeing proof everywhere, adducing philological arguments and cultural speculations in equal measure to the conclusion that this book was written by an Italian in the 19th century, not an Ethiopian in the 17th.

Conti Rossini was the pre-eminent Ethiopianist of interwar Europe, and his arguments were eventually accepted by almost all scholars, including those who had spent so long translating and commentating upon the work. But Conti Rossini was also a colonial administrator in Italian East Africa, and a supporter of Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, even going so far as to publish an article in 1935 titled ‘Ethiopia Is Incapable of Civil Progress’, arguing that the country could, indeed should, be colonised by a ‘civilising’ power, explicitly invoking his refutation of the Ḥatäta as part of his argument.

If faking a passport gets you somewhere, what does a fake work of philosophy get you?

The argument has raged for more than a century now, with new arguments being made on both sides. Claude Sumner, a Jesuit missionary who called himself ‘Canadian by birth, Ethiopian by choice’, made a passionate case for an Ethiopian authorship in his five-volume Ethiopian Philosophy (1974-8), building on the argument of Ethiopian scholars like Alemayyehu Moges and Amsalu Aklilu. The French historian Anaïs Wion has produced an ingenious argument against an Ethiopian authorship in her series of articles The History of a Genuine Fake Philosophical Treatise (2013), and these arguments have been taken up by scholars like Fasil Merawi and Daniel Kibret back in Addis Ababa. Finally, the late, great scholar of Ethiopian manuscripts Getatchew Haile reversed his position, held for half a century, that the work was a forgery in a paper published shortly before his death in 2021. It is no exaggeration to say that today, as interest in the Ḥatäta begins to peak once again with a series of new books, podcasts and the publication of a new translation of the Ḥatäta, the question of its author’s existence is in limbo.

The difference between the case of Leila Tov-Ruach and Zera Yacob is that the identity of the author of the Ḥatäta really seems to matter. Many Ethiopian intellectuals are understandably proud of the work, holding it up as a masterpiece of 17th-century literature and a foundation of an alternative, specifically Ethiopian path to modernity. And they are understandably furious at the idea that the writings of a fascist intellectual might deprive one of their greatest geniuses of his rightful credit.

In Europe and the United States, philosophers keen to diversify and decolonise their curriculums have seized on Zera Yacob as evidence of an ‘African Enlightenment’, as an African Descartes or Kant. As Sumner put it, the Ḥatäta demonstrates that ‘modern philosophy, in the sense of a personal rationalistic critical investigation, began in Ethiopia with Zera Yacob at the same time as in England and in France.’ If the work is a forgery, it seems that the Ḥatäta cannot fulfil this lofty role allotted to it. The implication seems to be that, if it is not written by a 17th-century Ethiopian scholar, it is not all that interesting or important after all.

So it seems that we do very much care who wrote it. But should we? The assumption on the side of both the proponents and opponents of authenticity is that either the work is totally genuine, in which case it can be used to diversify and decolonise, or else it is totally fake, a ‘mere forgery’ and of little interest, other than perhaps as a case of late-colonial cultural appropriation (or immersion, if one prefers).

But what is a ‘mere forgery’ anyway? If you forge a passport, you are creating a fake document that permits you to cross borders as if it were real. If you forge a work of art, you are creating a convincing (and therefore lucrative) fake that can be attributed to a known artist and sold as if it were genuine. But what might the forging of a work of philosophy be, beyond attributing the work to someone else, à la pseudo-Augustine or pseudo-Aristotle? If faking a painting gets you something and faking a passport gets you somewhere, what does a fake work of philosophy get you?

Presumably, what we care about most in a philosophical text are its arguments, its attempts to get at the truth and its means of getting there. If the argument is what interests us, then should the authorship matter, given that the argument is exactly the same, regardless who wrote it? Of course, historical context is important, both for understanding how the text might have come to be and what the text means. But unless this exploring of context is employed in the service of understanding and elucidating the arguments, we are treating the work as a historical curiosity rather than a source of insight. In the case of the Ḥatäta Zera Yacob, this would be a mistake, for the arguments are powerful and abidingly relevant. These arguments – about the causes of human suffering and conflict, the epistemology of disagreement and the twin temptations of relativism and blind absolutism, the relation between the world and our cognitive faculties – are precisely what tends to fall out when the discussion of the Ḥatäta focuses exclusively on the topic of authenticity.

We might conclude by offering a different sense of philosophical forgery, one less concerned with the cultural politics of a particular text than the words it leaves on the page. Forging in this sense might have more to do with the work of the blacksmith than of the counterfeiter. Rather than forging as deception, we might think of forgery as creation, namely as the creation of new words and, with it, new ideas. Consider that whoever wrote the Ḥatäta did so in a language, namely Geʽez, that previously quite literally did not have the words for expressing its most central ideas. Whoever wrote the Ḥatäta forged a philosophical-conceptual vocabulary.

This process of linguistic innovation, of coining new terms and adapting existing words to new meanings is by no means unique to Geʽez. It is more than 20 centuries since Cicero attempted to ‘teach philosophy to speak Latin’, not only by importing originally Greek words into Latin (dialectica, politica), but by teaching philosophy new terms (moralia, naturalis) from his native language. In a way, it takes place every time philosophy learns to ‘speak’ in a new language, including our own: we owe a great many words, both arcane (‘quiddity’, ‘apperception’) and commonplace (‘politics’, ‘nature’ and ‘self’) to the translation of philosophy into English in the 16th and 17th centuries. But rarely has it happened so suddenly, in such a concentrated way in a single text. This is impressive enough if its author is a 17th-century Ethiopian named Zera Yacob. If it’s the work of a 19th-century forger, it is an utterly astounding work of linguistic and cultural immersion.

Ultimately, the words on the page should be more philosophically interesting than the identity of the person who wrote them, and therefore the Ḥatäta (and, by extension, other such contested texts) should be judged on the philosophical quality and linguistic innovations, not on the name at the top of the page. There is a sense in which the identity of an author matters. Rorty wrote Tov-Ruach and Zhang LoShan into existence, and in doing so created two distinct philosophical voices, just as Kierkegaard conjured countless original perspectives. Plato wrote the perspectives of Glaucon, Protagoras and Thrasymachus in a way that may or may not have corresponded to their real views. Zera Yacob may be one such voice that is an unknowable mix of real historical individual and literary creation. But, then again, so is Socrates.

Thinkers and theoriesEthicsComparative philosophy

5 December 2023

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Table of Contents

Aeon: 22 Dec, 2023

22 Dec, 2023

Dancing and time

21 Dec, 2023

The subtle art of elevation

19 Dec, 2023

Saved by Infinite Jest

18 Dec, 2023

A silken web

15 Dec, 2023

When does after begin?

14 Dec, 2023

Of memes and magick

12 Dec, 2023

What colour do you see?

11 Dec, 2023

Trauma on a loop

8 Dec, 2023

The two Chomskys

7 Dec, 2023

The rights of the dead

5 Dec, 2023

Forging philosophy