A while ago I came across an advertisement for a book called Looking for a Sign: Contemporary Art, Magic and Language (2024), published in Ireland by Durty Books. In a fit of curiosity, and because I’ve a long-time interest in old songs and recent theories that relate to what, broadly speaking, might be called ‘magical understandings’, I bought a copy. Perhaps, before I go on, I need to say a little more about why I would do that. In 2018 I presented an illustrated talk to art students at the University of Dundee called Un-disciplining practices: some paradoxes and possibilities. Part of the introduction goes as follows.
“Increasingly, the assumptions that underwrite disciplinarity are being questioned. Isabelle Stengers is a Belgian professor of philosophy. She trained as a chemist and has won international acclaim for her work in the philosophy of science. Starhawk is an American writer, teacher, activist and leading exponent of feminist neopaganism and ecofeminism – or, as she might say, a witch. From the perspective of academic disciplinarity, these two women are separated by an unbridgeable divide. Yet in Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell, Stengers and her co-author Philippe Pignarre present Starhawk as somebody reclaiming an art of participation that deals directly with pragmatic concerns about effects and consequences”.
Put bluntly, Stengers and Pignarre’s book insists that we take witches seriously. I suppose I had hoped that Looking for a Sign might take up and extend the thinking that underpins that argument. And, if one understands that the point that Pignarre and Stengers want to make by references people like Starhawk and the practices they have developed is that they are ways of communicating with what Stengers describes as the ‘unknowns’ of modernity – with all that it fails to adequately address – then perhaps to a very small extent it does.
Andrew Gojfey is the translator of Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell. What follows is in part a free paraphrase of points made in his introduction to that book: On the Witch’s Broomstick. To help explain its orientation he asks whether it’s possible to take seriously somebody who claims to have been attacked by a sorcerer? The answer, he insists with the book’s authors, should be “yes”. But on the condition that we understand that the modern approach that frames such questions, namely that of psychoanalysis, is predicated on an unjustifiable pretension. Namely, that as a discipline it has scientific authority to make universally valid pronouncements about ‘the unconscious’. Stengers points out, however, that psychoanalysis fails to acknowledge what it does when it claims to explain its curative effects through quasi-scientific notions like ‘transference’. Stengers argument is that therapeutic practitioners in non-modern cultures are ‘technicians of the cure’ who adopt culturally specific approaches that are effective in their own context and, significantly, don’t make “scientific” claims regarding universal authority as does psychoanalysis.
Gojfey goes on to point out that one consequence of Stengers’ argument regarding the therapeutic practices of non-modern therapeutic ‘technicians of the cure’ is that it requires us to set aside any notion of their hierarchical subordination to science. A point that returns him to witches again, persons whose technique cannot be explained by science and so is, from a modern point of view, simply another artefact. However, if we refuse to ‘privilege episteme over techne, not only is artefactuality not necessarily a criticism, but the idea that there is something to be learned from the neo-pagans becomes a more credible claim – because a central element of what would otherwise allow what they do to be explained (away) is removed’ (p. xix).
Pignarre and Stengers, drawing on Guattari, consider the techniques of non-violent protest and ritual used by contemporary witches as an effective form of ‘existential catalysis’. Stengers notes that: ‘to take the efficacy of a technique seriously imposes the need to understand it as being addressed to something more powerful than the technician’ and that for witches such as Starhawk this is the immanent Goddess who, in turn, becomes the ground for cultivating ‘a sensibility and disposition to think and act’ otherwise (p.xx). For Pignarre and Stengers, then, the artifices of witchcraft are a means to cultivate an active thinking that is not framed by the presuppositions of modernity and, as such, returns us to the need to insist that alternatives to it are possible. Or, as Starhawk puts it: “Systems don’t change easily. Systems try to maintain themselves, and seek equilibrium. To change a system, you need to shake it up, disrupt the equilibrium. That often requires conflict. …To me, conflict is a deeply spiritual place. It’s the high-energy place where power meets power, where change and transformation can occur.”
It may be that the artists whose thinking and work make up Looking for a Sign: Contemporary Art, Magic and Language would be in agreement with this, although there s no evidence that any of them are aware of the arguments in Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell. All I can say is that I am more taken by the work of Crone Cast, a feminist art collective that explores the conditions of the pandemic, climate change, and societal and ecosystem collapse, and that reimagines the crone as noticed, seen, and heard so as to engage with ageing, power, identity, eccentricity and merging with the more-than-human as a process of becoming, in symbiosis with the precariousness of our times.
Images provided by Wanda Zyborska