Visual Modernities VISUALISING WORLDS WORLD-MAKING AND SOCIAL THEORY

Martyn Hudson Visualising Worlds

This book examines the social production of our world, of the worlds of the past and of the worlds of the future, considering the ways in which worlds are created in both actuality and imagination. Bringing together central concepts of classical sociology, including social change, transformation, individuation, collectivisation and human imagination and practice, it draws lessons from the collapse of Graeco-Roman antiquity for our own world of virus and ecological disasters, considers the genesis of capitalism and intimates its ending. Rooted in classical sociology yet challenging its traditions and objects of study, Visualising Worlds: World-Making and Social Theory adopts new ways of thinking about visuality, aesthetics and how we ‘see’ social worlds, and how we then begin to build them. As such, it will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in social theory, historical sociology, cultural studies, critical theory, archaeology and the emergence, change and collapse of civilisations.

Martyn Hudson is lecturer in art and design history at Northumbria University, Newcastle, UK. He is the author of Visualising the Empire of Capital, Critical Theory and the Classical World, Species and Machines, Ghosts, Landscapes and Social Memory and The Slave Ship, Memory and the Origins of Modernity. Visual Modernities Edited by Martyn Hudson Northumbria University

The sociological imagination of modernity is entangled with our senses and, primarily, with vision, yet the process of being able to see something is often extraordinarily complex. Marx’s attempt to visualise commodities, Durkheim on totems of religious life, Simmel on money and the metropolis and Elias on social taste are all projects which attempt to see beyond the empirical and into levels of abstraction and immateriality that lie beyond the senses. Visualisation is part of the making of modernity and a response to it. This series explores and elaborates upon our experiences of modernity. It offersways of seeing from the margins of our world and from its exemplary sites of industry and urbanisation. Grand narratives of human history mix with micro-histories that are embedded across our globe. Using multi-disciplinary methods, it seeks to expand upon our knowledge of global and local visual cultures, whether in architecture, painting, photography, theatre, film and other cultural forms. Examining the material and the tangible as well as the immaterial and the imaginary it aims to offer the best of so- ciological thinking and thought: literally re-visioning our social world.

Visual Modernities welcomes new studies that have visualisation at their heart and embeds new ways of perceiving our shared world and our multiple and complex experience of modernity. It seeks to publish works that are innovative, multi- disciplinary in scope and which challenge and rupture the classical social sciences with new ways of looking at method, theory and our social futures.

Titles: Art, Critical Pedagogy and Capitalism Paul Alexander Stewart

Pandemics, Authoritarian Populism, and Science Fiction Medicine, Military, and Morality in American Film Jeremiah Morelock

Visualising Worlds World-Making and Social Theory Martyn Hudson Visualising Worlds

World-Making and Social Theory

Martyn Hudson First published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 Martyn Hudson The right of Martyn Hudson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identificationand explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hudson, Martyn, author. Title: Visualising worlds : world-making and social theory / Martyn Hudson. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. | Series: Visual modernities | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2021008572 (print) | LCCN 2021008573 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367681654 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367681647 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003134503 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Sociology--Philosophy. | Civilization. | Culture. | Critical theory. | Visual sociology. Classification: LCC HM585 .H83 2021 (print) | LCC HM585 (ebook) | DDC 301.01--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021008572 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021008573

ISBN: 978-0-367-68165-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-68164-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-13450-3 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003134503

Typeset in Bembo by MPS Limited, Dehradun Contents

Acknowledgements vi Preface: World-making viii

1 Groundwork: Origins of worlds, space and time 1

2 Imagining Neverlands 26

3 The dark centuries 39

4 Beowulf and the Beo-Monde 59

5 Building monsters 72

6 Endwork: Second to the right, and straight on till morning 81

References 92 Index 101 Acknowledgements

I have discussed these ideas with friends and colleagues over a long period of time including Emily Hesse, Baz Nichols, Gavin Parry, Liv Carder, Ted Foster, Paul Christon, Kay Hepplewhite, Tanya Wyatt, Vic Wood, Ben Reche, Mick Garratt, Gill Hale, Sam Garratt, Matt Kelly, Siobhan Kattago, Elinor Morgan, George Vasey, Gwilym Williams, Rachel Hann, Gavin Butt, David Petts, John Bowers, Yael Reicher, Emmanuel Tzwern, Julie Crawshaw, Susan Ashley, Lesley Twomey, Andrea Phillips, Justin O’Shaugnessy and Ysanne Holt. It was Eileen Joy who really cracked open the abyss of the early medieval to me and taught me about the time of monsters in the Dark Ages in a period when I was focused on Greek antiquity. Almost the entirety of my thought-process has been shared through the years with Neil Jenkings: we have read together, thought together. Thanks to Sean Breadin for all of his insights into the Green Man and foliate heads. Baz Nichols opened up the imaginative space of the dark world to me and helped me work there. Emily Hesse was a profound source of love, support and thought in her own studies of ceramic and aceramic worlds of the anthropocene and in our life. Liv Carder’s love and creative practice always inspires us. I would like to thank the AnMor collective and the Echtrai project for offeringan existential home to develop these ideas and specificallyBaz Nichols and Kerri Ní Dochartaigh. Thank you to Victoria Horne and the members of the Visual and Material Cultures research group at Northumbria University. A huge debt of thanks to my co-thinkers and co-producers in the Visual Modernities series at Routledge and specifically Neil Jordan, Alice Salt, Paul Stewart, Jeremiah Morelock and the many reviewers who have supported us. This work has been embedded in conversations with three separate but linked projects: Invisible Works, Fhithich and The Smell of Water. I thank Nick Stone, Mick Garratt and Gavin Parry for their help in those respective projects and their friendship. Some of the ideas rehearsed here have their origin in the ERiS (Experimental Research in Spaces) series at Baltic 39, Newcastle and thanks go to Andrea Phillips, Alan Lynn and Rob Tickell specifically around world- Acknowledgements vii building and speculative futures. Thanks go to my friends and colleagues in Castoriadis studies and specifically David Ames Curtis. Early conversations around comparative historical methodologies with Keith Macdonald, Nigel Gilbert, Nigel Fielding and Colin Tipton were important for thinking about the chronologies and planetary formulations of grand theory and for microscopic understandings of social formations. In that same spirit I thank colleagues and students at the universities of Surrey, Brunel, Roehampton, Kingston, Durham, Teesside, Newcastle and Northumbria and specifically Eric Cross, Roger Burrows and Joseph Bailey. A huge thanks to our MA students in cultural management who always share our journeys with us. I would like to note the support of the Environmental Humanities Reading Group at Northumbria and specifically Elsa Devienne, Matthew Kelly, Nick Pepper and Brycchan Carey and also note the shared love of ghosts and monsters with Michael Cawood Green. The Call Centre project at Allenheads Contemporary Arts provided a kind of theatre-space for this project. I would like to thank Alan Smith, Helen Ratcliffe,Ben Ponton, Tracey Warr, Andrew Wilson, Kerry Morrison, Helmut Lemke and Annie Carpenter for an amazing set of conversations throughout the Covidian summer of 2020. This book is dedicated to Rosa Betty Hudson-Carder, our own little Grendel. Preface: World-making

Our world was made, at least in large part, out of an understanding of enlightenment. The scientific and philosophical illumination of a world of darkness in the eighteenth century was part of a series of projects that contributed to the building of modernity and the modern world. These included the democratic revolution and terror in France and the emergence and intensification of industry and its concomitant empire or world of capital. From the eighteenth century onwards (and there had of course been precursors in the Renaissance and even Antiquity) there began a relentless process of lighting up the world both physically and metaphorically. These processes became entangled with racial classification and subjugation, the destruction of other species, ecological catastrophe, totalitarianism and industrial ruination. The triple economic, political and intellectual revolutions of industry, democracy and the Enlightenment, signified by Ernest Gellner as plough, sword and book (1990), would come to dominate cultural discourse for over two centuries and their effects and potential futures are still with us well into the twenty-first century: this time of virus and environmental degradation. The acceleration of industrialisation and its imaginaries would ultimately challenge from its margins and fractures by the subaltern and by other ontologies and knowledges that resisted their objectification and indeed the notion of a single ‘world’ as objective. The ‘world’ that emerged out of those economic, political and intellectual revolutions was both metaphor and actuality. A new capacious political imaginary began to develop which was satisfied neither with that existent world nor the worlds offeredto us after death. Fantasies of new worlds arrived and these were ones that were both potential and reachable. Economics, politics and ideas became anticipatory forms which began to delineate future social worlds. These often became as mythological as the nostalgic lost worlds of the past. Not only did the Enlightenment allow the description and classification of existent worlds it also allowed for the delineation of future ones. Our biosphere and its peoples and species could be mapped and future biospheres, peoples and species could be anticipated. These worlds, actual and fabricated, were places that had geologies and atmospheres, states, cities and Preface: World-making ix wild places. There were forests and places of inhabitation and cultivation. The worlds had metropolitan areas, empires and colonies, peripheral nations and peripheral peoples, the ‘civilised’ and the ‘savage.’ There were maps of these places, even of entire planets and most of them are yet to be built. The question is how we come to ‘excavate’ these now-dead worlds because each of them has passed and its peoples are dead. As Proust, in his own sedimentary revealing of lost worlds, wrote: ‘What once covered the earth is no longer above but beneath it; a mere excursion does not sufficefor a visit to the dead city: excavation is necessary also’ (1989: 90). We cannot make excursions to the dead city, we have to excavate its ruins. This book is an excavation of the ruins of those three revolutions of economics, politics and ideas and of the very idea of enlightenment itself. Yet it is also an excavation, and indeed an excursion, into other worlds of darkness that existed before enlightenment that enlightenment wanted to dispel in its search for rationality and the objective. These worlds of darkness were themselves a consequence of the economic, political and intellectual collapse of a previous social formation and its own illumination of the world. We will visit the world of the Dark Ages and its transition from Graeco-Roman antiquity in some depth and the transitions out of the Dark Ages also. Indeed we will visit, and attempt to excavate, a very specificruin . We may be able to learn something from such an excursion or excavation and specifically understand the collapse of light into dark that is so reminiscent of our own period without conflating different types of dark ages. There are moments in the literature of the Old English world that emerge out of an archaic past and reveal themselves to us precisely because of both their strangeness and familiarity. They continue to obsess us; the ruins, the seafarers, the whales, the warriors and monsters. It is precisely because they are half-shrouded in darkness that they appeal to our sense of mystery or imaginaries of the occult and the uncanny. We seem to know so well what came before the darkness and what came after and know next to nothing about this ellipses. The expanding knowledge of the archaeological with its own methods of excavation and illumination and performative revenance brings some light but no more texts will emerge, with their own illuminated letters, and what we do have is fragmentary and contradictory as if this world did not exist after all outside of the febrile imaginaries of clerics worrying about divine punishment at the hands of invaders. Ray Brassier has referred to the ‘Thanatosis of Enlightenment’ (2007: 32). Indeed the world or modernity of the Enlightenment has become a social formation defined by death. Its Thanatocracy, or Thanatocratic regime, has presided over the entire destruction of species, habitats, humans and indeed over its own world. This regime was validated by the politics and philosophy of those looking towards those modern economic, political and intellectual forces as projects. But how can we definethat enlightenment? For Foucault it determines, in part, what our thoughts and practice are (1984: 32). In Foucault’s reading of Kant, enlightenment is definedas an exit or a difference, x Preface: World-making a rupture in which reason is put to use (1984: 34, 38). Does this hold for a project of endarkenment: an exit in which unreason is put to use? I think it does and it is in this exit, interruption or rupture as the darkness emerges that the creative imagination of monsters emerge from the margins of the maps, or from the dark meres into the halls of human beings, extinguishing all light. We inhabit, in our modernities, many worlds. The materiality and physicality of our geological planetary substrate is encountered by us in the very act of existing upon it. This world shelters, feeds and clothes us as human beings. We can encounter with our senses, its cities, forests and mountains. Yet there are worlds beyond this material substrate that we can encounter and traverse through reading, or playing games, or in cinema. We do not live in these in quite the same way but they are still worlds that we are part of and that are part of us. We encounter, in our reading, the mountains of Antarctica through the accounts of H.P. Lovecraft and Ernest Shackleton. Just because one is imaginary and the other actual makes little difference to us from afar. There are also worlds which intersect with ours from the margins with their own processes of world-formation. We do not just consume worlds (their stories, images, food) we also build them, just as much in actuality as in our imagination. Indeed it might be the case that we can learn the skills of how to make material worlds from our making of imaginary, fabricated, fictional ones. What, also, of the worlds of history? What status does the world of Beowulf or of ancient Greece have in terms of existing or imagination? Can we reconstruct lost worlds and prefigure new ones by using both empirical evidence and the affordances of fiction and storytelling? It might be that the very fact of being able to conjure up a world in our storytelling might act as a resource to actually build the worlds we want or need. And what of my world or the worlds I am conjuring up here, playing with, recomposing? As Marguerite Yourcenar has said: ‘There are places where one has chosen to live, invisible abodes which one makes for oneself quite outside the current of time’ (1986: 288). These abodes are where we have chosen to reside. We have been there for some time, indeed for many years. We have lived through and traversed these imaginary worlds: Middle-Earth, Narnia, Neverland. This has been through the material practice of reading. We have also tried to trace out, in actual material landscapes the residue and sedimentation of past worlds and have, in a similar way, drawn maps of future ones and thought with others about how we might construct them or find them when they have become lost to us or elude us. The examination of slave cultures and the interrogation of race and empire revealed the materiality of the slave ship, the plantation and the new ‘worlds’ of the Americas (Hudson 2016). Subsequent work recomposed the haunted world of the phantasm (Hudson 2017a), the species and gods of the classical ‘world’ (Hudson 2017b, 2018a, 2018b) and the visible and invisible ‘worlds’ and empires of capital (Hudson 2019). One of the rationales for spending time Preface: World-making xi in the abode of the classical was the persistence of its themes, concepts, practices and politics into our modernity. Antiquity never quite died and where it disappeared it was located again and resurrected – perhaps even illuminated. As the world of antiquity came to a close with the collapse of Rome so new social formations emerged. The world of cities and classical philosophy and imperial domination dissolved into the Dark Ages. Not only does this collapse of the ‘civil’ into barbarism hold lessons for us in terms of ecology and the Anthropocene so it might alert us to the continuing persistence of themes of darkness that would forge and prefigure new feudal and early medieval social relations. It may indeed be argued that just as classical antiquity persists into our modernity so does that of the savage, the dark, the barbaric of that specific age. The age is dark precisely because it could not persist or be recomposed in its darkness – it is not, as some would argue, the origin of ‘English individualism’ or the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ race. Why does this age, if an age it is, not disclose itself to us? Is it mute to the questions we ask of it? Are there modes of interrogation that might lead us through surprising new routes or will the forest submerge the human pathways and the trees rise through the road and the ruin? This book answers and addresses those questions. I have been, previously, an historian and theorist of designed ships, bodies, gods, halls, civilisations, crystal palaces, commodities and workhouses. What is it about the ruin that both elaborates upon design and dissolves it? This history of design is about deconstruction as much as making. Specifically does the design, construction and making of the hall of Heorot say something about our civilisation whilst it can say very little about its own de-civilisation, un- civilisation or moment of the barbaric? I want to use the motif of the ruin to think about the extinguishing of light and the emergence of darkness and to use it to think about our own viral and ecological predicaments. The ruin is both actuality and metaphor but it is also the site of a very specific poem, written in Old English, about a place of ruination, amongst the collapsed walls of a Romano-British city. How do we first approach The Ruin (Alexander 1977: 28–29)? Do we approach it as poem or place? The world of the Dark Age is invested in the text, and we can understand something of that world through its words: the traces which have been left behind in this text, itself a ruined fragment, its manuscript scored by fire. As the translator Michael Alexander has said: ‘… anyone who reads, say The Ruin … will discard (if he ever had it) any idea that between the fall of Rome and the revival of learning Europe was a battleground where ignorant German armies clashed by night, and that the darkness of the age was deliberately maintained by Benedictine monks’ (1977: 8). The text itself is an extant description of a ruined, Roman city written three centuries after the empire had fallen. It is probably the city of Bath but we cannot know that for certain. xii Preface: World-making

The ruined city, amidst its ruined civilisation, is an artefact slowly becoming reclaimed by organic nature. It is a vestige of the past, emblematic of a processual barbarism or de-civilising process. The walls of the giants are decaying and the makers of the city are under the earth, sinking into the earth, becoming part of the geological sediments of the soil, the iron and the stone moulder. Plague and the ‘weird’ laid low the city and its bathwaters have diminished. The writer is alienated from this lost city, cannot understand its previous inhabitants, is writing from the next age looking backwards. At the time of writing an entirely new social order had emerged from the wreckage of Romano-Britain and the English settlements. The intervening darkness shrouds the moments and histories of transition. A world had been made, was overthrown and a new one made in its place. The passage from antiquity to feudalism runs directly through these ruined bathhouses. The stone shelter that the city had provided to humans was replaced by the wooden hall as artefact and home. The Roman city and its civic spaces were displaced by halls like those of Heorot, halls brought from the continent. The wooden hall has a different sense of building and dwelling and thinking from that of the stone tower (see Heidegger 2001: 143–159). It is a different mode or modality, period or epoch. The difference in inhabitation illuminates the ground-work of each period, its floor-plan or civilisational foundation. Indeed the foundation of empire was the stone fortress, just as the foundation of the Dark Age was the dark hall and its bowers of organic material. This is seeing a formation or an age as akin to a house, with foundations. These architectural metaphors help us to see into modes of dwelling and being. The domus becomes the locus of how human beings shelter and keep safe. What is it to design and to build? It is to labour and work. Indeed it is work that makes the world fit for human beings to inhabit. The labours of building and unbuilding make and unmake worlds. For Hannah Arendt, labour itself constructs the artificesand artefacts of a world which is not purely nature. The artifices,things and homes create borders and walls around the housed human. In making this world we construct something, like the stone tower, that lives beyond that act of labour and the human life that built it. Work for Arendt is ‘wordliness’ (1998: 7). We must build because of natality: the constant influx of new humans ‘born into the world as strangers’ changing the world, through building for them, from a natural to an unnatural entity (1998: 9). For Arendt, the world is inseparable from this radical act of making by humans and for humans: ‘The objectivity of the world – its object- or thing- character – and the human condition supplement each other; because human existence is conditioned existence, it would be impossible without things, and things would be a heap of unrelated articles, a non-world, if they were not the conditioners of human existence’ (1998: 9). The constructed artifices, the stone fortress and the wooden hall, are built for the human being but they outlast those individual human lives and persist, albeit as ruins, into the natality Preface: World-making xiii of new human generations. For Arendt, this world-making is an act of imagination, design and artifice:

The reality and reliability of the human world rests primarily on the fact that we are surrounded by things more permanent than the activity by which they were produced, and potentially even more permanent than the lives of their authors. Human life, in so far as it is world-building, is engaged in a constant process of reification, and the degree of worldliness of produced things, which all together form the human artifice, depends upon their greater or lesser permanence in the world itself. (1998: 95)

The human world is therefore both a natural and an unnatural one. Things persist and endure but humans dissolve, dissipate and die. Their designs and imaginaries persist precisely because they have been made into artefacts: the artificialartefactuality of the house built for humans by humans is a fabrication conjured out of the earth, out of its produce and its resources, and made into something unnatural. Sandstone bedrock is quarried out of the geological substrate, the ash tree is cut out of the biological metabolics of soil. The natural thing becomes, in the labour of humans, a human thing and this thing is a reification of their labour and imagination. Even if the consumption and sublimation of natural forms are part of the process of making, so human beings are primarily labouring beings rather than consuming ones. The production of the fortress and the hall is not a process of consumption but of building artefacts which will endure in order to surround human beings as border, membrane and shelter. For Arendt, the biological and geological substrate of the earth provide the context for making and production:

The world, the man-made home erected on earth and made of the material which earthly nature delivers into human hands, consists not of things that are consumed but of things that are used. If nature and the earth generally constitute the condition of human life, then the world and the things of the world constitute the condition under which this specifically human life can be at home on earth. (1998: 134)

The artificialfabricated home, upon and of the earth, has a durability in order to protect all incoming natal beings and generations. What, then, of consumption for surely the act of consuming takes place within the stone fortress and the wooden hall? The tool and the hall are used as technics in order for other humans, species and florato be sublimated within the bodies of the natal human beings in order for them to grow, reproduce and bring other natal human beings into their world. Consumption is the taste of this world and the tools and manners of this tasting can be seen as the process of civilisation. Even the spirits of the subjugated beasts and humans can be sublimated in the human form which consumes them. Consumption is an act xiv Preface: World-making of power about who kills and eats the other: it is precisely this that the Grendel motif signifies. The monstrous form is not eaten but kills and drags away the bodies from the Hall in the darkness. Theodor Adorno, in his understanding of the making of art, sees the same project of making and fabrication in our cultural landscapes: ‘Artworks detach themselves from the empirical world and bring forth another world, one opposed to the empirical world as if this other world too were an autonomous entity’ (2013: 2). This radical act of design, imagination and making, severs the aesthetic world from both the empirical and the natural world: they simply become the ‘afterimages of empirical life’ (2013: 5). Yet these things that are made, for Adorno, have themselves lifespans like their human makers – they are sedimented into layers, they age and die (2013: 5). The archaic ruin is simply a work or an artefact that is now dead (2013: 38). The cultural landscape is a humanly made one, an artifactual landscape or, as Adorno says, an ‘artifactitious domain.’ The transformation of nature into art and design is an act of aesthetic imagination and even more so when that artefact is a ruin. For Adorno the aesthetic ‘collective sensorium’ dates back to the ‘cult of the ruin’ (2013: 88). This production of artefacts is a violence that our cultures and collectives inflict upon geological and biological nature. As Adorno notes:

But perhaps the most profound force of resistance stored in the cultural landscape is the expression of history that is compelling, aesthetically, because it is etched by the real suffering of the past…its images are a memento. The cultural landscape, which resembles a ruin even when the houses still stand, embodies a wailful lament that has since fallen mute. (2013: 89)

The ruin becomes memento and memorialisation and, as Adorno says, a mute lament. Our Dark Age ruin becomes a social memory or mis-memory of darkness and dissolution itself. Yet it is also testament to one central fact: that the ruin itself was made by humans even when it is falling into disrepair. The compulsion to make might be, for Adorno, an act of violence against a geological and biological nature that was itself terrifying (2013: 89). The artifactual design and product are the borders and shelters that shroud us from nature itself. Yet what of the world as ‘autonomous entity’ as opposed to empirical life? The notion of the autonomous world is almost unthinkable, indeed it is thinkable only in the sense that we can encounter new and fabricated worlds because we live in one which they are abstracted and extracted from. This challenge to the objective and the empirical is precisely about the fabrication of new autonomous territories and social imaginaries. The ruin is a place of haunting: the memory of monsters, wierds, giants and warriors. It is an echo of the once-existent. The made form, the artwork, the building is for Adorno precisely the haunted space of apparition (2013: 114). The locus of the ruin is doubly so for it is a place both of abandonment and Preface: World-making xv apparition. For Adorno: ‘In its aesthetic manifestation, spirit is condemned to its locus in the phenomenon just as spirits were once thought to have been condemned to their haunts; if spirit does not appear, the artworks are as negligible as that spirit’ (2013: 121). The landscape of the ruin in its world of making, formed by human beings, is persistently a place of ghosts: a space or even a stage of appearance. Indeed these ghosts are themselves ‘autonomous entities.’ Once they are made to walk again and rise from the dead, even if extracted from and abstracted from the empirical world of ordinary life, so they begin to haunt according to their own compulsions and logics separate from those of the living. This is precisely why the haunting is so frightening and why the ruined places and houses were shunned. Their logics had escaped that of the living human and the monsters haunted with the illogics of dreams and mis-memory. This is why the living thought of the cities as being populated by giants and the barrows inhabited by little people or even dragons persists in Anglo-Saxon culture and literature. What does the ruin mean to us now and why do we approach it again into the past, from the north, by way of the shattered tower? We are its future although it could not comprehend that. That age had differentversions of time to us, older imaginaries, cosmologies, constellations and starcrafts. Is it because we can learn something from it about us, that in seeking to explore its meaning we elucidate something about ourselves and our catastrophes and possibilities? The return to antiquity and to the beckoning darkness that replaced it, is not purely a scholastic exercise in exegetics. Perhaps that return is because of its enduring mystery: that somehow we still cannot dispel the darkness and that in the opacity or dusk the age can become a palimpsest for our own concerns. Its artefacts still continue to obsess us, its mythologies still part of our self- understanding. For some the age is the origin of something; English individualism, the nation and empire, kingship, codes of warriors, the supremacy of faith, all of the remnants of the ethno-history of a racialised ‘Anglo-Saxonism.’ For us, the return to the ruin has six primary compulsions. Firstly, we are compelled to understand the ‘interregnum’ of the Dark Ages: that precise moment of living between two kings, or between the collapse of an empire and the emergence of a ‘nation.’ The question of the Dark Age of the ‘English settlements’ will be addressed but certainly one of the pulsions of this book is to think through the question of transitions. We often think about the passages from antiquity to feudalism to capitalism and even beyond. There we discern a dynamic that somehow propels history forwards towards something (we might refer to this as teleology and which is often optimistic towards its own futurity). We can also discern dynamics of fall, descent and collapse from an original moment or state (often nostalgic for the lost past). What marks the Dark Age or Ages is that it is a moment of crisis, of in- betweenness, of an aporia as disjunction, of the ellipses as omittance – precisely the gap, fracture or abyss of the dark or even of sleep. Indeed that Dark Age is dark archive to us and one which we cannot penetrate with ease as if it were xvi Preface: World-making excursion rather than excavation. Yet it is also, in Slavoj Zizek’s sense and reading of Gramsci, the ‘Time of Monsters’ (2012). For Gramsci: ‘The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear’ (1971: 276). Out of the darkness the monsters like Grendel emerge – in the gap between the empirical history of Roman Britannia and the advent of (or at least the historically verifiable parts of) the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Not that the Chronicle is without its own imaginary monsters, including dragons, it is just that the farther away from the interregnum we get the more intensified does writing and documentation become as evidence banishes monsters. The abyss where the monster and morbid symptom appear, the interregnum, is not just location and period as ‘Time of Monsters,’ or as a monstrous time. It is also that its notion of time changes in that it is both monstrous time and monstrous time in that our notions of time are suspended in a kind of monstrous pause in reason and history. It is precisely this that makes the ‘world’ of Beowulf and the hall of Heorot so strange and, indeed, morbid. As we noted at the beginning, endarkenment initiates the regime of unreason as exit from reason. Secondly, we have a compulsion to explore the relations between the imaginaries of antiquity and their recomposition in this dark world. Indeed it is to explore the very notion of darkness, the dark archive and the enigma of a ‘world’ that does not easily reveal itself to us historically, epigraphically and archaeologically. It is compelling because it is so fragmentary and elusive. There are so many contradictions between the historical and the archaeological evidence that it is almost impossible to narrate the period effectively as a kind of story. This has led some to think of this as a palimpsest upon which to write out their own obsessions of this ‘Age of Arthur’ or as ‘Arthur’s Britain’ and to amplify the briefest mythological references to characters like Vortigern into the foundational myth of an entire civilisation. Further, there are questions about what comes to birth in this interregnum but also of what died here and whether we can recover the dead, the lost, the passed. The mythologies of Arthur subsume a hundredfold the documentary histories of Alfred because it means something to us and to generations before us who perpetuated its myths and found something new in them that would cast light on their current social predicaments, articulations and aspirations. Thirdly, to think about the reception of that age and its artefacts of design and making by our own ‘world’ or the multiple worlds, the intermundia, of modernity. This question of reception, of how we receive, is also one of meaning and interpretation. It involves the chronological understanding of artefacts, coinages and texts and their structural morphology, lineage and descent. The form of things is an interaction with the forms of the social and historical, situated within social-historical imaginaries. Often these imaginaries are located in civilisational forms that are contestatory, overlap with one another, or are in transition. Artefacts may tell us something about the emporia they are exchanged in or about the social world of their making. The interaction between Preface: World-making xvii made thing and world is illuminatory of that dark world in the ways that its history, non-history and dark history is or is not inscribed in the form. There are also a huge array of contradictions between material culture and text which can make difficult our understandings of epochs and transitions and specifically those around invasion and the succession of peoples and cultures. Fourthly, to understand and explore the fate of critical theory when faced with an entirely different social formation, or sets of social formations, to that of Antiquity. Particularly apposite here is the notion of the ‘world’ and what it means for social theory, for the study of social memory and for the making or design of imaginary and actual worlds. In some ways it is easy to assess the relationship of contemporary social and critical theory to ancient Greece and Rome. Many of its philosophical categories and political concepts have their origin in antiquity: demos, theoria, agora. The sustained reading of the classical world by thinkers such as Adorno, Derrida and Barthes and others was not paralleled by a reading of other epochs. When Castoriadis writes of the social- historical imaginary of Europe as having its origins in Ionia and its obsessive return to the concepts of the human, polis and democracy, he was conforming to an understanding of European history as made precisely possible and indeed miraculous because of the peculiar circumstances and concatenations of the Graeco-Roman, its persistence, refoundation and revival (Hudson 2018a, 2018b). After the collapse of Antiquity, the textual sparsity of the Dark Ages allowed for a profoundly imaginative moment in the world of medieval romance. This rediscovery of the ‘Arthurian’ age was itself a fabrication. There was little material-cultural propulsion for these imaginary projects and what little there was itself a fabrication. The re-emergence of Beowulf, for example, was a product of cultural Norsification rather than the classical and was often related to nefarious political projects of nationalism, and ‘blood and soil’ fascisms of modernity. The redefinition of the world of Beowulf and, later, in the Icelandic sagas, signalled a different understanding of social development and a very much darker one to that of classical antiquity. It had differentgods, differentpolitical trajectories and a radically differentimaginary and geography of worlds. The romantic recomposition of northern myth rather than Graeco- Roman (although the northern myth also looked for origins in the destruction and dispersal of Troy and the Trojans) led ultimately to our modernity but by an entirely different set of routes. Fifthly, to assess the nature of the walls, boundaries and seams that protect us from the ghost and the monster and to think through the very nature of monstrousness and what it might have meant for those social formations and our ‘civilisation.’ One of the things that obsesses the Greek imagination are the seams between human, animal, god and monster. Indeed there was a proliferation of metamorphosing beings as well as the transitions of souls between beings. Part of that obsession included the pursuit and the killing of various kinds of monsters in order to purify and make static the human form itself. The gods themselves were both human and profoundly inhuman: xviii Preface: World-making capricious and enigmatic. The dwelling of the Graeco-Roman was fundamentally an act of dwelling within city spaces and temples. The age of Darkness has a profoundly different monstrous sensibility and its dwelling- places are those of the forest and the hall rather than city and house. The hall of Heorot is a place of massacre and retribution, its shelter does not protect but provides a killing floor for the monster to practice his abominations. The pagan temples would ultimately be overthrown and the churches would come but for now they were groves in the dark wood rather than the luminous temples of Athens and Corinth. The monsters of the dark were also different. Their compulsions were more vital, more mysterious. Their spaces and dwelling-spaces far from other humans. They did not prophesy or command but took humans in the night, even when they were themselves of human lineage and bearing. The functions of the monstrous for the social imaginary were also different. There was seamfulness and borders and boundaries here between human and monster but this would express a very different story. Grendel and Gorgon are not the same, their monstrousness is performative in a different manner but as in antiquity, the monster emerges in the ellipses and gaps between histories and texts. They were half-remembered as what had been endured in the dark place. Finally, to understand the Neverlands that we make in our imagination and sometimes in fact and to assess whether the same process of design and imagination of fabricated worlds might indeed offer us lessons for the construction of the material social worlds of our future. The Neverlands of the ruin may indicate that there are futures beyond the collapse of civilisations and that it is precisely in ruination, collapse and dissolution that we can begin to discern the future survival of humans and other species in new types of relation. If we can build worlds in imagination then we can build worlds in fact. Indeed we can build not halls of monsters and fieldsof blood but places of repose, quiet and joy. Our history of making and design does not create malevolent objects and places and worlds but might indicate new directions away from ecological catastrophe and social violence. The reason why the Dark Age is so compelling is that our moment of possibility and transition is so similar. We are on the verge of collapse into darkness again, our lights will not endure much longer as a civilisation and the existence of our species and others are called into question. This is the actual collapse of worlds and planets and if we take planitude seriously then the work presented here offerssome signals of shift that might avert disaster. In the first chapter, we reflect on the origins of worlds, space and time. In this chapter we introduce the idea of worlding and imagine both the origins and the endings of worlds. The chapter acts as a kind of groundwork: a ground motif that plays beneath the melody, a groundfulness that situates these notes within a wider world, a field of grass and stone from which we begin to build worlds. Like the enlightenment, the endarkenment was not and is not an automatic process but one which is built by human beings. Preface: World-making xix

In chapter two, we begin to describe our Neverlands: the imaginaries of absent, possible, actual and never-will-be worlds and societies. From the children’s fictions of the Narnian world to Peter Pan’s Neverlands to the ‘world’ of Odysseus, there is a recurrent obsession in European civilisation with world-making. It is often thought that these are pure imaginative abstractions from the ‘real’ worlds that we inhabit but what if there were lessons there for the making and unmaking of our own social worlds, states and planets? Somehow the map of the land of Narnia offers clues to the redemption, if not the salvation, of the human species or indeed, dystopically, its survival and non-redemption for its historic crimes against the planet and against other species. The third chapter is neither a history nor a subjective account of what has come to be known as the Dark Ages. The philosophy of history has often thought about the relation between the phenomenal world and concepts, the relationship between empirical evidence and narrative account and the nature of historical progress and destination including the collapse of empires and civilisations. This chapter explicates some of those philosophical-historical concerns about enlightenment and endarkenment to illuminate the concept of the Dark Ages and civilisational collapse and ecology but it also uses the Dark Ages to think about our own social and ecological predicaments. In this chapter we begin to examine the decisive importance of the Dark Ages for understanding subsequent cultures. It examines what we might call the ‘world of Bede’ and the different worlds of the tidal and the magical. It examines the ‘sagaworlds’ of Norse and British contact and begins to explicate the relation between the lands of and the writings on Beowulf to which we return in a later chapter. Perhaps most importantly it begins to contrast the ruined Roman world of stone with the new organic wooden world of the Anglo-Saxons and its specific relationships to trees. The chapter concludes with some wider reflections on archaeology, Arthuriana and the birth of the early medieval world. In the fourth chapter we examine the ‘worlds’ of Beowulf and the Beowulf manuscript. This is not an exercise in exegesis but in the use of ‘Beowulfian’ categories to think about, home, being, violence, peoples and historical shift and transition specifically in the light of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ world that it was part of and that the story was a mythological precursor to. In this we also dispel some of the assumptions of ‘Anglo-Saxonism’ for national identity, patriarchy and race by arguing for the dissolution of the very category of the ‘Anglo-Saxon.’ Chapter five is a bestiary of monsters, including the monsters of Beowulf but also beyond it in the nether realms of the Dark Age world and even further towards the saga mythologies of the north. This is part of the trajectory towards the notion of the medieval monster and what it signifies for our civilisations and includes Grendel, his ferocious mother and other monsters like the dragon that Beowulf challenges at the end of his life. xx Preface: World-making

In the final chapter we conclude the book by thinking about some of the sociological questions about world-making and the notion of endings and the ultimate destinations of our social and material worlds. In this sense we talk about the end of history and the ends of history but also about the history of ends in terms of how civilisations, worlds and planets ultimately fall. This might lead to the collapse and extinction of fictionaland actual worlds but also to the emergence of new worlds that we can barely conceptualise in advance of their birth and being. The initiation of new worlds might indeed initiate new species and indicate the emergence of new ‘hopeful monsters’ intent on pursuing their (and not our) evolutionary and civilisational routes. In the conclusion we offer some general thoughts about the significance of world- making to social theory and its futures. Chapter 1 Groundwork: Origins of worlds, space and time

1 Introduction There is no better starting place than a mountain above a shore in the north of a fabricated world called Earthsea. The slight and compelling figure of Ursula K. Le Guin introduces that world: indeed she speaks the words of making, the words of the dragons. Le Guin obsessively mapped that world, one of many worlds she made, and elaborated upon its geographies, folklores, histories and mythologies. This was, for her, the construction of a ‘non-existent history’ or a history of a place that she made up in her mind (2002: xii). Indeed there are many mysteries about Earthsea but no real mystery about how she made that world. For Le Guin: ‘When you construct or reconstruct a world that never existed, a wholly fictional history, the research is of a somewhat different order, but the basic impulse and tech- niques are much the same. You look at what happens and try to see why it happens, you listen to what the people there tell you and watch what they do, you think about it seriously, and you try to tell it honestly, so that the story will have weight and make sense’ (2002: xii). This is the weight and sense of a world as material as the world she writes from. It is a sensorial experience of seeing and listening. The double impulse to both fabricate and create on the one hand but also to describe and historicise on the other allows Le Guin to act as both the maker of a world and as its archivist. She creates its peoples and species but she also discovers them and in doing so the world that she makes exceeds her grasp. Its protagonists do things that she could never have foreseen and the world and its logics exceed those that she created for it: its spaces develop and its temporalities change. She returns time and time again to re-elaborate upon the world allowing its agents new forms of life as she narrates new and unexpected stories for them and finds them upon odd routes. Le Guin did not know that the dragons would ultimately be able to take human form as they once had and take the burned child with them. We must not underestimate their power. As Le Guin notes:

DOI: 10.4324/9781003134503-1 2 Groundwork

Imagination like all living things lives now, and it lives with, from, on true change. Like all we do and have, it can be co-opted and degraded; but it survives commercial and didactic exploitation. The land outlasts the empires. The conquerors may leave desert where there was forest and meadow, but the rain will fall, the rivers will run to the sea. The unstable, mutable, untruthful realms of Once-upon-a-time are as much a part of human history and thought as the nations in our kaleidoscopic atlases, and some are more enduring. (2002: xiv)

The land does outlast the empires, indeed it foretells their demise. This is precisely why the Earthsea, the Neverland, the Narnia are so dangerous to power and why it wants to sever the links between the worlds, the in- termundia, so the resistance cannot cross between them or build new worlds of their own as fugitives. The Once-upon-a-time are part of that history but they also challenge that history and make potential worlds actual worlds. The forest will grow again, even over the old ruins of the castle of Cair Paravel in Narnia, but the conquerors will also disappear with time. Little wonder that Victor Serge clearly saw, as we shall see, that new worlds were built by fugitives and not by conquerors (2008: 92). These are often utopian models as forms of escape. Often it is about the fleeing to territory to evade persecution, often for minority beliefs. Many of these fugitive worlds be- come dominatory in themselves as they subsume or dispossess those who held the ‘land’ before them.

2 World-making How can we make a first approach at defining world-making? By far the most protean text on the making of worlds lies in the work of Nelson Goodman which relies on a notion of the multiplicity of actual worlds by which Goodman means the experiential nature of multiplicity and the production of different versions of actuality. This means, for Goodman, a focus on multiplicity as actuality and versions experienced and proffered of the actual worlds (1978: 1–2). So the questions that Goodman asks of worldmaking have to do with the distinction between ‘genuine’ and ‘spurious’ worlds and the means by which the versions of the world are built, what they are built out of and by whom (1978: 1–2). This concept of world- making, posited as a philosophical problem of analysis and perception from literature to the laboratory, has led to the development of a wide range of literature on versions or iterations of the actual including in the work of Bruner on autobiographical self-making (1991) and in two respective collections on the literary (Clark, Finlay and Kelly 2017) and on media (Nünning, Nünning and Neumann 2010). Goodman himself has seen the nature of worldmaking as an attempt to understand, by way of Cassirer, the symbolic composition of worlds. This is specifically noted in his notion of Groundwork 3

‘rendering’ by which rendering is not a simple, literal denotation of an aspect of an actual world but a complex and heterogenous experience of its sounds and sensorial activities – like the sounds and cries of the city (1991: 6). Renderings become, for Nelson, a way of documenting and recording the versions of actualities in all of their different recompositions all of which are ‘equally true’ (1991: 8 and see also Putnam 1979). The capture of all of these different renderings then help us to understand the multiplicity of the actual world. Arturo Escobar has developed a notion of world-making as pluriversal politics (2018, 2020). Escobar has examined what he calls the ‘civilizational conjunction’ of the worlds of the global south and global north in terms of designing for transitions and a new ‘reinvention of the human’ (2018: x). He argues for an understanding of world-making as questioning traditional ontologies and agitates for a new design dimension of multiple, pluriversal worlds (2018: x–xi). Informed by the Zapatistas and the Chiapas uprising and its own world-making process, the pluriverse is as the Zapatistas read it: ‘a world where many worlds fit’ (2018: xvi). For Escobar’s anthropology of design, design itself has to be severed from its relationship to capitalist domination and reworked as a practice in which forms, concepts, territories and materials are experimented with and for subaltern communities reor- ienting their material and design practice to new forms of worldliness and a new, sustainable relationship with the earth (2018: xvii). Not only can design and thinking about design challenge capitalism and ecological crisis it re- frames our world of beings and knowings ultimately leading to the design of forms of transition towards new, autonomous social territories, spaces and worlds (2018: 19–20). The work of Goodman and Escobar help us to initially understand worldmaking as, what we might call, worlding by which worlds are experi- enced or produced by humans living in the actual world. In this sense we can talk about the world of Athens or the world of the Dark Ages. Yet neither gets us closer to the fictive,the spurious or the possible world nor helps us to fully understand the processes by which worlds are built. World-making is en- tangled with the social imaginary and its permutations of which the symbolic is a component but only one and one which is not directly inherited, fully ordered or universal (either in the mind or the culture). The imaginary allows us to experience our actual worlds in imagination – and of course beyond our immediate sense data there is no other way of doing that in Antiquity or the Dark Ages. Yet it also allows for the construction of other worlds, perhaps made out of the resources of our own, but re-imagined and recomposed, but without a groundfulness that limits, a foundation which is always tenuous, an imagination which is palpably infinite in its modes of composition. This allows us not only to experience our actual world, but all of the worlds of the past and those of the future in the radical social imaginary 4 Groundwork extended through space and time. The idea that renderings of the world can proceed by ‘deletion, combination, deformation, reorganization’ (Goodman 1978: 9) is valuable if we can see a world as somehow having foundations, blocks or stones that can just be recomposed into another form and which will ultimately add up to a full, functional and actual world. The social imagination of worlds cannot be restrained by a simple reorganization of resources however. World-making is nothing if not an indefinable way of producing the worlds of the past, present and future, of worlds that are actual, fictiveor potential, and which can be produced by both the collective and individual imagination in multiple, protean form as metamorphosis and indeed metempsychosis by which the individual can imagine life in other bodies, observing other worlds, imagining and experiencing the inexplicable and unfathomable. The meta-crises of our modernities, and even our prehistories, can only be understood if we have the capacity to meta-narrate them. Grand theory has to be global, even when our worlds are not always globes or can be un- derstood with the metaphors of spheres and roundness. The grand theories and meta-narratives of critical and social theory, in their classical forms, al- ways attempted to deal with the crises and fractures of worlds but, perhaps most importantly, with the transition between one world and another or multiple others. Worlds are constructed out of the materiality and detritus of life but built and imagined in profoundly complex and serendipitous ways. There is little of complementarity or commensurability in classical social theory except around this question: that the problem of world-transition was the crisis that theorists had to come to terms with and even solve. This does not mean that we can easily address or narrate what the modernities and prehistories and dark ages of this planet or others might mean or what their futures are – just that the obsession of classical or grand social theory is to think about those planetary scenarios and enactments. Theory wanted to self-reflexively understand how its own world had shown up. The metho- dology of this book is to reveal the kinds of materials and concepts that help us experience and build worlds and to survey the metaphors by which worlds are understood. Writing this in a moment of time which we might call a viral interregnum means observing and documenting a transitional moment in which global civilisation and nature re-calibrate and re-form. The idea of the interregnum, of that durational period between one thing and another or one king and another is often, as Gramsci has said, a time of ‘monsters’ or a period in which ‘morbid symptoms’ appear. In previous work I wrote about Greek, and to a lesser extent, Roman Antiquity (Hudson 2018a, 2018b). This was precisely because so much of our European civilisation reformed and re- composed the motifs and mythologies of Antiquity in order to form and compose themselves and their worlds. To some extent globalisation can be seen as the extension of these motifs and mythologies in terms of philosophy, Groundwork 5 politics, economics. The conceptual natures of the human, the cosmos and worldliness lie in Graeco-Roman Antiquity and we are obsessive about their repetition and indeed the submergence of alternative ways of thinking and understanding the world. The Enlightenment project and its luminescence persists, looking backwards at archaic aesthetic and political forms and for- wards to a fully enlightened earth. It radiates both supremacy and disaster. The nature of the current book lies in what comes next. The collapse of Antiquity did ultimately lead to the resurgence of antique forms in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment but this interregnum was protracted, violent and non-linear – indeed no-one could have conceived of the radical act of imagination and persistence which would somehow transfer across the darkness. The idea that social and economic formations teleologically pro- gressed from lower to higher or that formations were ultimately progressive could be validated after a couple of thousand of years but in the aftermath of post-antiquity all we have traditionally seen is a momentary transition into darkness and barbarism. This is an age looking for a regnum, a transitional moment but in transition to what? Ultimately the medieval world, as we have called it, would emerge but can we say more about this moment of en- darkenment? If our global civilisations look back to the enlightenment of Antiquity why did they not look back to these societies of uncivilisation and decivilisation for their motifs and mythologies? Indeed there were monsters in antiquity and in what came after but the monsters were very differentand how human beings related to them were different again. This book is concerned with world-making in terms of the actual building of worlds even when they do not and cannot exist. It is also concerned with the fabrications and the mock-ups of worlds: about how people build the universes and cosmologies that they then live in. Actual and imaginary worlds are always entangled and neither can quite do without the other. We can think of this as the process of a globular mondialisation by which the actuality of the world can be fathomed through its imaginaries. The world can only ever be an act of imagination because our senses are so restricted. The abstractions of mondiality allow us to comprehend the nature of the world as material and imaginative grasping. The monde ambiant is the context of human physical and imaginative life, the primordial milieu of our being. We can build worlds out of the past – hence the notion of the Anglo-Saxon world which of course was not a world but a worlding process by which one provincial territory created its own cosmology out of collapse. These retrospective worldings can also be the resources for building futures rather than pasts. Can we build worlds in the same way as we retrospectively build models of worlds or built worlds as a species in the past? Can we model and build new worlds of destinations and horizons rather than origin? This entanglement between materiality and the active imagination, between the specific location and the abstract planet, between the past and the future is one which pinions us but which also allows us to move across the webs of intersection. 6 Groundwork

3 Civilisations Norbert Elias, in his analysis of the process of civilisation, has documented the emergence of what he calls the ‘West’ as a transition out of the barbarism of the ‘Great Migrations’ period (2000: 161). The development of the ‘psychical habitus’ of the West was part of a generalised sociogenesis of a specific social formation of affect,social and psychical constraint and individualisation (2000: xi–xii). This entailed a mode of perceiving the self and society in certain kinds of ways as the formation emerged out of a collapsed antiquity, the early medieval period and the development of courtliness. This notion of affect and the new kinds of emotional regimes would come to define behaviour and the relations between individuals. We will see this later in the case of Beowulf and Grendel but that affective shift from barbarism to the civilised would leaves marks in the social and literary memory of the West specifically around the arrival of the phantom and the monster in times of crisis and transformation. As Elias says: ‘The expressions of feeling of medieval people were, on the whole, more spontaneous and unrestrained than in the following period. But they were not unrestrained or without social moulding in any absolute sense. In this respect there is no zero point. The person without restrictions is a phantom’ (2000: 181). The social and psychical constraints were, for Elias, tantamount to the same thing as social being itself. This is not the entangle- ment of the social and the individual but a singular being without inter- penetration – as if the social and the individual were somehow differentthings. In his postscript to The Civilizing Process, Elias elaborates upon the suppo- sitions of a text which he originally wrote in the 1930s. The English translation of the book would initiate the further development of the concept of figurations and indeed, in its wake, an entirely new school of sociology. For Elias the metaphor of social and individual interpenetration has to be aban- doned (1968: 455–456). This metaphor implied the separation of the in- dividual and the social structure but for Elias they: ‘…do not relate to two objects existing separately but to different yet inseparable aspects of the same human beings, and that both aspects (and human beings in general) are nor- mally involved in structural transformation’ (1968: 455). These long-term structural transformations can only be understood as changing ‘entities’ in which the social being unfolds through history – generally towards greater individuation. Elias abandons the notion of the ‘wall’ between humans and structures and between humans themselves. Indeed for Elias the social being is permeable in its entirety – there is no human interior and no human exterior (1968: 472–473). This abandonment of the membrane between the social and the individual allows Elias to overcome some of the central problems of classical social theory and empirical historical research. The separation of the social to subjectivity allowed either the structures to be perceived as beyond the powers of the human or the human itself was privileged with the agency of historical change. This structure-individual Groundwork 7 metaphor does not allow us to see history in its human transformation. Yet the emergence of this metaphor in the ‘West’ was also part of a gradual se- paration of the body and the mind, the subject and the object and of the external and the internal in social life and human perception. As Elias argues, this allows humans to somehow perceive nature and structure as somehow external to them, to be observed, as separated from them by an ‘invisible wall’ and allowed the development of a consciousness that was individualistic and monadic (1968: 479). In one of his more remarkable passages he notes the illusion of this civilisational metaphor:

On this level there is nothing that resembles a container – nothing that could justify metaphors like that of the “inside” of a human being. The intuition of a wall, of something “inside” a human being separated from the “outside” world, however genuine it may be as an intuition, corresponds to nothing in a human being having the character of a real wall. One recalls that Goethe once expressed the idea that nature has neither core nor shell and that in her there is neither inside nor outside. This is true of human beings as well. (1968: 480)

This notion of the core and shell of nature and the core and shell of the human as illusion will be noted later. Yet it leads to a number of problems in the work of Elias that were never resolved in terms of human interiors and exteriors and which comprise the core theme of this book. That the figurations of social being exist as empirical entities is a given yet nowhere does Elias consistently point out what makes those vast figurations of structure and historical trans- formation work. Indeed it is the case that all civilisational figurations and configurations of social being and historical transformation are fundamentally exercises in radical imagination and indeed in imaginaries that are linked to the sensual world but also powerfully transcend them as monstrous forces of apparition. In the making of the world, to paraphrase Marx, humans eat, sleep and labour but further, they also dream and sometimes those dreams are those of heavens and sometimes those of hells. In any case in the beginning of that act of imagination lies the practical possibilities of those places: that hell can actually be built once we can visualise it.

4 Groundwork, fields and continents Civilisations, as a matter of routine, face predicaments, confront crises and endure collapses. These predicaments, crises and endings are often part of public discourse (or spheres to use that globular metaphor) and recognised for what they are. Equally often they are abdicated, unrecognised and unfaced. Indeed the crises can often be recognised only in retrospect. This is because the civilisation has died and methodological operations can be performed upon its remains, its detritus and sediment. At other times the crisis is some 8 Groundwork kind of measure or barometer of health, indeed pressure, that is brought to bear upon a social formation. In so far as social formations can weather storms they sink or fall if the crisis is somehow terminal. At other times, the for- mation changes into something else rather than disappears or is replaced by an alternate form or indeed storm. Sometimes this is a novel form, sometimes it is a reversion to an earlier form. At the human level much of this can be inapparent. The glacial flow and geological sedimentation are those of long durational historical and natural processes sometimes punctuated and ruptured by sudden movements and shifts. Our situatedness, as humans within those processes, is one of worldfulness and of earth-building as humans contribute to glacial collapse and processes of deposition. What it might be to be worldless or live in a position of earthlessness can only be part of the ima- gination of death or of the removal of humans to another planet or world. Indeed the compulsion to move beyond the world is itself a fascinating project of colonialism, withdrawal, travel, self-destruction and nostalgia and much of the new world-building of science fiction relies on these tropes. In worldfulness and mondiality the micro-historical and the macro- historical interact. We can see this in the concept of the Ark. Arks are the carrying-over of meanings and species. Out of pairs of animals new worlds are built, either on this planet after a deluge or potentially on others. These pairs are the remains and residues of species which carry forward new formations of meaning across catastrophic divides. Arks cross the gap, the fracture, the seam between civilisations – they ride out the storm that destroys everything else. They are passages across the interregnum between the kings. They are the boats which carry us across the watery deluge. They are the aufheben of prior species, civilisations and worlds: their cancellation, preservation, elevation and sublation. They become the origin of everything which comes after the dis- aster. When worlds and civilisations dissipate or are destroyed the Ark be- comes the genesis of new social worlds. Word Arks carry dead languages into new social formations, the motifs of older theologies, gods and monsters and myths of ancestors. They are everything that is remembered by those surviving pairs of beings who survive. If the Word Ark is the linguistic motif then perhaps we can see the pairing as that between word and meaning. It is often the case that in the transition across the flood there is a monstrous slippage between that pairing where meanings do not survive but the word does or the word is the deposit of something entirely ineffablethat does not make it to the shores of the new post-deluge world. The Ark is memory, persistence and perdurance but it is also elimination, destruction and forgetting. The inter- regnum of the morbid symptom and the monster lies in what was retrieved from the wreckage of the old world and what was somehow lost. The monstrous half-forgetting, half-remembrance is what brings us Grendel to the door of our houses as descendant of Cain. Grendel comes literally out of Genesis, out of the origins of civilisation, out of the primitive ‘world’ remade in our imagination precisely as it is wrecked, dissolved or overcome. Groundwork 9

John Berger has argued that the primitive is that which is made on the crossing of boundaries. The primitive is origin incarnate: ‘The primitive begins alone; he inherits no practice’ (1980: 68). The primitive exists as groundwork, a groundwork that must be superseded in the process of civilisation. Berger uses the actuality and the metaphor of the Field to examine that ground and groundfulness:

You relate the events you have seen and are still seeing to the field. It is not only that the fieldframes them, it also contains them. The existence of the field is the precondition for their occurring in the way that they have done and for the way in which others are still occurring. All events exist as definable events by virtue of their relation to other events. You have defined the events you have seen primarily (but not necessarily exclu- sively) by relating them to the event of the field,which at the same time is literally and symbolically the ground of the events which are taking place within it. (1980: 197)

The ground becomes that site where we can visualise agents in landscapes both real and imaginary. Mondiality is made up of these multiplicities of fields.The fieldhas a boundary where we can observe agents and the events they produce and where we can see each other. The field frames and allows us to see that delimited, bounded space of the literal and the symbolic. The field then be- comes the sedimented, place of deposition where we can reveal historical agency and the production of historical events quite literally. The fieldalso, in its literality, allows us through those depositions to somehow frustrate or reveal the symbolic life of those whose being intersected with the being of the field. Groundfulness and groundwork allow us to comprehend the monde ambiant as the context of human work and practice. Yet above the field lies the sky. Elsewhere Berger talks about the con- stellations which exist above that actual and imaginary field: ‘The problem of time is like the darkness of the sky. Every event is inscribed in its own time. Events may cluster and their times overlap, but the time in common between events does not extend as law beyond the clustering … A famine is a tragic cluster of events. To which the Great Plough is indifferent, existing as it does in another time’ (1992: 8–9). The temporality of the field, for Berger, displays humans as both biological entities and entities of con- sciousness that can extend into time beyond the biological. They can in imagination imagine the field both before and after their biological, meta- bolic intersection with the ground. The ground becomes the intersecting battlefield of many histories but the human-biological exists in an entirely different temporality to that of the constellation. 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