(The Life and Work of Jane Roberts) by Peter William Skafish
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From Another Psyche: The Other Consciousness of a Speculative American Mystic (The Life and Work of Jane Roberts) by Peter William Skafish A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Joint Doctor of Philosophy with the University of California, San Francisco in Medical Anthropology in The Graduate Division of The University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Stefania Pandolfo, Chair Professor Lawrence Cohen Professor Niklaus Largier Professor Catherine Malabou Professor Ian Whitmarsh Spring 2011 © Copyright Peter Skafish. Abstract From Another Psyche: The Other Consciousness of a Speculative American Mystic (The Life and Work of Jane Roberts) by Peter Skafish Joint Doctor of Philosophy with the University of California, San Francisco in Medical Anthropology The University of California, Berkeley Professor Stefania Pandolfo, Chair This dissertation attempts to develop the beginnings of a new approach to understanding the significance of modes of thought marginal and/or external to those of the modern West. I call this approach an “anthropology of concepts” because it examines concepts and themes belonging to scriptural, “philosophical,” and poetic traditions as concepts rather than, as normally happens in anthropology, in the context of social practices, historical events, or everyday life. I also call it this because it accordingly involves the close reading and interpretation of the written or oral texts in which concepts are articulated. Concepts, when treated this way, retain their capacity to bring about novel understandings of the real, and to engender thereby theoretical perspectives not attainable through more conventional interpretive means. Such an approach may be necessary if the humanities and social sciences are to continue to hold a critical perspective on a world so enclosed that gaining any distance from its basic schemes of thought has become extremely difficult. The present dissertation undertakes such an “anthropology of concepts” in order to elaborate what I intend to be a new theory of the psyche and consciousness. Popularly regarded as one of the founders of the New Age spirituality of the United States, Jane Roberts (1925-1984) was a “channel” (a kind of spirit medium) and visionary mystic who published in the 1960’s and 1970’s over twenty books that she understood to have been dictated or written through her by different spiritual beings, including one she called “Seth.” Although these texts were crucial to the popularization of Western occult ideas about reincarnation, magic, and health that were at the heart of the New Age, Roberts’s intellectual curiosity and background as an author of science fiction give her writings a speculative, intellectually reflexive, and even manifestly ontological tone that is reminiscent of certain mystical thinkers and that sets them apart from popular religious discourse. My engagement with Roberts’ writings focuses, first of all, on the concepts she and her cohort of personalities articulated in the course of addressing what was for her the most pressing question raised by the decades she spent channeling: how could her experience during her trances of being herself and another self in the same instant of time be possible? Her answer was that such an experience—what she called “other-consciousness”—occurs not through language but when the subject sees itself in the non-sensory, mental images of dreams and the imagination. She was right in the sense that such images, as Jean-Paul Sartre makes clear in Psychology of the Imagination, allow two aesthetic figures or persons to appear as one. My argument is that her claim is significant for showing, surprisingly enough, that 1 contrary to what French philosophy claimed for decades, the other can be brought into and made part of consciousness without being appropriated and consciousness therefore takes a radically altered form. The baseline consciousness of oneself, that is, changes from apperception to a consciousness of oneself as both oneself and another—and even of oneself as a plurality of selves. To make this point, I read concurrently with Jane Roberts’ texts the work of Deleuze, showing that she raised in her own fashion some of the same questions about being, time, and the subject as he did, but that the strange context in which she thought led her to furnish significantly different—and now for us, novel—responses to them. Given that a subject that would be at once itself and another would also be both what it actually is and what it otherwise only could have been, I furthermore show how Roberts’ work allows one to rethink the Deleuzean (and by implication deconstructive) understandings of the categories of actuality and possibility and another concept—time—to which they are integrally tied. The fact that her writings provide a basis for recasting the thought of such a comprehensive philosopher on matters this fundamental is an indication, I think, of the broad value an anthropology of concepts could hold for humanistic research. 2 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The debts incurred in the course of thinking and writing are incalculable, but the people to whom one owes them are not unidentifiable—especially when they have become an integral aspect of one’s own (necessarily borrowed) consciousness. I would like to thank Lawrence Cohen for the wisdom, breadth of knowledge, and graceful criticism he offered while engaging this work and through the different phases of my intellectual development; Niklaus Largier, for showing interest in my research and for taking it seriously as a project on religion; and Ian Whitmarsh, for reading and commenting in an insightful fashion on a late version of this manuscript. To Catherine Malabou, I owe first of all the chance she gave a project as heterodox and as at first inchoate as mine; to have seen, as a philosopher, philosophical possibility in such a strange location required a balance of openness and rigor that I have sought to emulate. I am also grateful to her for a body of teaching and writing that transformed my thinking; for demonstrating so well the art of theoretical invention and encouraging my own attempt at it; and for a friendship that sustained me and gave me the courage to go on. I hope the book that emerges from this dissertation will appear to her as a metamorphosis of her own thought, and that she can already see an aspect of her own consciousness at work in my own. My deepest thanks to you. Stefania Pandolfo knows the profound difference she made early on in my thinking and writing: I would have never found my way had she not first shown me the road. She also knows, probably better than I, how much the anthropology I engage in here is in fact an approach on loan from her. So much about this text—its narrative dimension, its object, its conceptual approach—comes from her, and would have never emerged had she not cultivated the ethos of writerly ingenuity and intellectual intensity that is her own. The excesses and failures of this text remain my responsibility, but whatever successes it contains stem from her rare spirit. I will be happy if she feels that her own work on “other psyches” furthered here. Diana Anders’ friendship and care were unfailing, even during her darkest hours; Jean Lave reminded me the whole way that dissidence is often the breath of intellectual life; and Fawn Moran opened me to an experience of myself that brought me forever out of “the same” and gave me the insights behind my thoughts. The friendship and dialogue of Saul Mercado, Yves Winter, Katherine Lemons, Cindy Huang, Nima Bassiri, Patrice Bone, and Alexei Gostev were essential at different points during my time at Berkeley, and the teaching of Paul Rabinow and Pheng Cheah brought me into form so that I could better go out of it. Paul Rabinow deserves special recognition for creating an atmosphere of rigor, seriousness, freedom, and tension in Berkeley’s Department of Anthropology; without it, my work would have had nowhere to grow. Bill Hanks and Donald Moore gave me generous encouragement along the way, and Claude Imbert first taught me how anthropology and philosophy can be effectively joined. My parents, Peter and Linda Skafish, were there for me during my worst moments, and I trust they can see that their intelligence and kindness is alive in this text. My sister, Beth Skafish, gave me her complicity and love at every turn. I would like to dedicate this work to Vivian Chen. Your warmth, patience, fidelity, and love during the time of its writing made everything possible, and the uniqueness of your perspective changed how I see the world. I hope the image of the self I pursue here is as rich as your own vision, and that my gratitude is able to reach you. i ——INTRODUCTION—— GOD AS AN EVENT, A DECENTRALIZED GOD—THE GOD OF JANE Hers was an everything-God, a God everywhere and in all things while nowhere rising completely out of it all, “A DECENTRALIZED GOD” not culminating in some ultimate, scarcely encountered ontological peak or resting altogether and terrifyingly outside (as a mysterious nothing) the parts of the real encompassed by human purview, the God(s) of “A DEMOCRACY OF SPIRIT” putting “an end to divine hierarchies” (“no one person or group or dogma or book can presume to speak [of it] in absolute terms”) since its God is nothing else besides all the “VERSIONS OF GOD” that each of the real’s instances (and every “vision” of these) are, and thus also a “God” that “would be dispersed throughout creation,” “wouldn’t be confined