David Abram The Spell of The Sensuous (4 Chap)
David Abram The Spell of The Sensuous (4 Chap)
David Abram The Spell of The Sensuous (4 Chap)
Chapters 1-4
Synopsis by Farid Rener
1. The Ecology of Magic : A personal introduction to the enquiry
David Abram, a slight of hand magician, takes a journey to rural Indonesia to share
magic with the shamans and folk-medicine doctors there: For magicians whether
modern entertainers or indigenous, tribal sorcerers have in common the fact that they
work with the malleable texture of perception. These healers were feared and revered in
the villages in which they practised, as it was believed they might be able to cast their
spells backwards to inflict diseases on the people that they would later cure. This allowed
the magicians, who often lived on the outskirts of their villages, to attend to what they
saw as their primary function - mediate between the human community and the larger
community of beings upon which the village depends for its nourishment and
sustenance. (6) This larger community, is not just animals and sentient life - it also
includes the winds and weather patterns, the rocks, etc. As intermediary, the shaman
ensures that there is a balance between the human world and this more-than-human
world. Disease is seen in many of these cultures as a form of imbalance, or of a demonic
presence within the body - hence, the sorcerer derives their ability to heal through a
constant interaction with this outside world. The shaman doesnt mediate with supernatural entities as was presumed by the anthropologists and Christian missionaries who
brought knowledge of these people to the West, rather, they mediate with the very
physical, very natural, ecology. For Abram, magic is the experience of existing in a
world made up of multiple intelligences, (10) and that each of these intelligences is an
experiencing form.
Abram tells a story of ants, and spirits. These spirits are not anthropomorphic, as we
would see in the West, rather, spirits are those modes of intelligence or awareness that do
not possess a human form (13). In death, spirits do not leave the sensible world (where
would it go?) (16), it changes form and remains an animating force within the vastness
of the landscape(16). After spending some time in Bali, Abram became much more
aware of the life, and intelligence that was around him, he starts having conversations
with nature. As an ecologist, Abrams explains that our industrial society can no longer
have a reciprocal relationship with nature, as the centralized economy, can hardly be seen
in relation to any particular landscape or ecosystem. (22) We have lost sight of how
dependent we are on the ecosystem and how it has shaped us into who are are:
Our bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold
textures, sounds, and shapes of an animate earthour eyes have evolved in subtle
interaction with other eyes, as our ears are attuned by their very structure to the
howling of wolves and the honking of geese. To shut ourselves off from these
other voices, to continue by our lifestyles to condemn these other sensibilities to the
oblivion of extinction, it to rob our own senses of their integrity, and to rob our
minds of their coherence. We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with
what is not human. (22)
The way we see nonhuman nature, for Abrams, is through the way that our civilization
and technologies put it forward: nature has become a stock of resources, a standingreserve.
2. Philosophy on the way to ecology
2.1 Husserl and Phenomenology
Phenomenology questions the modern assumption of a single, wholly determinable,
objective reality (which followed from Descartes): The everyday world in which we
hunger and make love is hardly the mathematically determined object toward which the
sciences direct themselves(32). In fact, the world and I are reciprocal - when I am sick,
the world becomes hazy, when a fog descends on the world, my thoughts become
muddled, and I feel like sleeping. Scientists also live in this world, and hence cannot be a
completely objective spectator, hence the world of science is actually built on a world as
it is directly experienced(36). Husserl sought to make a science of experience: within
which he would be able to give a stable footing to the other sciences.
Intersubjectivity
Husserl described a field of appearances, within a subjective realm, that is inhabited by
multiple subjectivities. There are two types of phenomena: one which is inside myself, for
instance, my daydreams; and one which unfolds entirely outside of myself, for instance, a
tree bending in the wind. The latter are intersubjective phenomena - they are experienced
by multiple sensing objects. The world which we live in becomes an intertwined matrix
of sensations and perceptions, a collective field of experience lived through many different
angles. (39) Everything has a multiplicity of views: I sense that that tree is much more
than what I directly see of it, since it is also what the others whom I see perceive of it; I
sense that as a perceivable presence it already existed before I came to look at it
(39)The tree is sensed by everything around it, the mice that live beneath its roots and the
very bark that is on the tree itself.
The Life World
The intersubjective life world, is that world somewhere between a transcendental
consciousness and the objective world of modern science. The life-world is the world of
our immediately lived experience, as we live it, prior to all our thoughts about it. (40) It
is the collective, primordial world, from which we draw our nourishment, within which
we play an active part. The life-world is different for different cultures, as the world
within which we live is dependent on the ways we live and engage with the world, but
there are some aspects which are shared.
Husserls work is not a rejection of science. He is instead arguing that quantitative science
synaesthetic. While our senses are distinct, they make up a whole - they all converge on a
perceived thing. This is what allows us to experience the thing as a centre of forces, as
another nexus of experience, as an Other.(62) Abrams sees our bodies as open circuits,
completing themselves only through the things that we perceive.
name had served as a reminder of the worldly origin of the letter, the Greek name served
only to designate the human-made letter itself.(102)
Greece was an oral culture prior to the alphabet being introduced. As an oral culture, all
practical knowledge was given through speech. Learning to write, thoroughly disabled
the oral poet, ruining his capacity for oral improvisation. (107) Plato and Socrates were
on the threshold between an oral and a written culture, and it was Plato who helped
develop new thought structures to deal with this technology. Socrates, through his
questioning stunned his listeners out of the mnemonic trance demanded by orality, and
hence out of the sensuous, storied realm to which they were accustomed.(110) Abrams
argues that this is the birth of the notions of being and becoming - by writing down
terms such as virtue it takes on an unchanging meaning independent of individual
virtuous actions. It was the phonetic alphabet which allowed this to happen. This breeds
a new reflective awareness - the psych, which is refined by turning away from the
sensory world to contemplate Ideas - i.e. to contemplate the literate intellect, the written
word. However, in Phaedrus, Plato tells the story of Thamus who is offered writing as a
gift by the God Thoth. He refuses it: If men learn this [writing], it will implant
forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that
which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by
means of external marks (113) For Socrates, writing, at best, serves as a reminder for
things that we already know. This came at a time when Athens had already moved away
from a direct participation with the natural landscape Socrates explains in Phaedrus:
You must forgive me, dear friend. Im a lover of learning, and trees and open country
wont teach me anything, whereas men in the town do. (116)
Reading as an activity, is inherently synaesthetic. We no longer experience the world as
all encompassing - we can no longer read the signs that it gives us, as it is the written
text has taken this locus. For, to read is to enter into a profound participation, or
chiasm, with the inked marks upon the page We hear spoken words, witness strange
scenes or visions, even experience other lives This is a form of animism that we take for
granted, but it is animism nonetheless as mysterious as a talking stone. (131) Some
oral tribes see writing as a form of magic, a way to create talking leaves. By combining
letters, the Holy One in the Kabbalah, created the universe.
However, by introducing the magic of letters, other, traditional magics, whither and die.