For now, I’m glad to offer everyone who couldn’t make it both an MP3 download of the talk (with thanks to Mark Pilkington for tech duties), and a slidecast. This is a version of the slideshow I did, synched with the audio recording—which has come out pretty well.

If anyone’s interested in me doing this presentation in their neighbourhood, or in doing an interview on the subject, do get in touch.

At first it was a part of a talk given early this year at Metageum in London. Then I thought I’d develop it into an essay. Then it seemed long enough to print as a nice pamphlet. It’s ended up being a slim book.

It’s my effort to analyze and contribute to the recent debates about the “Noble Savage”. Are pre-civilized cultures more peaceful than we are? Do they live in greater harmony with the environment? Of late, people such as Steven Pinker, Lawrence Keeley and Steven LeBlanc, who aren’t overt bigots—indeed, who generally seem to be fine, well-meaning liberal folks—have been answering these questions with a resounding “no”. In War & the Noble Savage I’ve surveyed this recent literature, and tried to dig beneath the polarized surface of the debate using some less popularized anthropological and historical scholarship.

It went to the printers just today, and should be ready to send out by the end of next week. I’m taking pre-orders now if anyone wants to dive in. (Please note that I’ve also revamped my PayPal integration, and I’ve included options to buy different Dreamflesh publications together and save money on postage.)

October Gallery talk

Coinciding with the release of the book, I’m pleased to have been invited to speak in the October Gallery‘s ‘Ecology, Cosmos & Consciousness’ lecture series on Tuesday 27th October. For more details and booking information see the October Gallery website. I’ll be presenting the book’s main ideas there, and leaving plenty of time for discussion—please bring your questions and ideas along! Copies of the book will of course be on sale, at a specially reduced price.

Review copies

If anyone’s interested in reviewing this, please get in touch.

Related material

At the bottom of the book’s page you’ll find a compilation of related material—my book reviews and blog posts covering similar area, plus a collection of links to the websites, articles, and videos I drew on in my research.

Feedback

If anyone who reads the book wants to respond to anything in it or ask questions, please use the comments here…

Coming up fast, over the last week of March, is the next Metageum conference. The last one was a fascinating event in Malta; this time, we’re in the slightly less megalith-rich, but hopefully more humanly hectic environs of London. Specifically, at the ever-conducive venue, Treadwell’s.

Speakers so far include Paul Devereux, Peter Lloyd, David Luke, Lydia Oukhaneva, Toni Perrott, Peter Knight, Donal Ruane and Deborah Marshall-Warren.

And me. I’m on March 28th at 1.30pm—sign up and I’ll see you there!

My talk has changed slightly from the blurb currently posted there. Here’s the latest version:

Darwin, Rock Art, and the Human Animal

Commemorating this year’s double anniversary (of Darwin’s birth and the publication of The Origin of Species), this talk will delve into the complex influence of evolutionary theory on both the study of prehistoric rock art in particular, and modern attitudes to “primitive” man in general. From the surprising origins of the myth of “the noble savage” in Victorian ethnology to Stephen Pinker’s contentions about prehistoric violence; from Terence McKenna’s mycological speculations to recent archaeological controversies about shamans and visions. This will be a wide-ranging trip through our varying perspectives on the prehistoric mind, what it means to be an animal with imagination, and the bearing of these stories on the ecological crisis we find ourselves in.

All too often a “myth” (in the modern sense of a false image of something) is debunked in a way that is almost wilfully blind to the baby in the bathwater. Naturally, the encrusted mental habits that this kind of myth embodies, often bonded tightly together with the sticky glue of wishful thinking, need a jolt of force to be loosened up. But it’s often the case that people take this need for a bit of a conceptual shove as a license to instigate some kind of dramatic about-turn.

A recent case in point has been challenges made to the myth of the “noble savage”. Experimental psychologist and neo-Darwinist stalwart Steven Pinker, in ‘A History of Violence‘, sets about demolishing the idea that modernity and industrialism has led us into a mire of violence with the claim that on the larger scales of history, human violence has in fact decreased. Yet his claims, on further examination, seem to rest on quite a selective perception of human history. While the evidence that the past few millennia have seen brutality to rival the 20th century is convincing in important ways, the evidence about the bulk of the human story – the hundreds of millennia prior to the rise of agriculture – is shaky at best. When anthropological evidence from contemporary forager societies is wheeled in to back this evidence up, it is conveniently forgotten that most such evidence is looking at societies that have been very recently decimated by European diseases, conflicts and technologies. It’s like beating someone up and branding them as vicious when they fight back.

I noted in a recent post how Howard Bloom had fudged the terminology of “war” and “violence” when trying to debunk Richard Leakey’s claims about the absence of war among the !Kung in southern Africa. The evidence there involved a similar refusal to look closer at what these statistics of violence among contemporary foragers actually means in context.

I’ll not elaborate any further, because the point of this post is purely to direct people to an essential piece by Jason Godesky over at Anthropik.com. Jason details the history of the “noble savage” myth, drawing partly on a book by Ter Ellingson, but delving deep and wide into his own very capable research. He deals with five broad “sub-types” of the myth: The Ecological Saint, The Gentle People, The Honest Injun, The Super Human, and The Wise Indian. In each case, he maintains a steady grip on any and all harsh realities to be faced about primitive life, but also refuses to see-saw over to the other side. To my mind, this makes for a much more effective debunking of the myth, insofar as it is a myth.

There are crucial realities that we’ve been struggling with for 500 years now in what the European collision with non-agricultural cultures has reminded us about being human. Not all of it’s pretty, which is why the exaggerated Romantic myths about primeval innocence serve us badly. Yet much of it casts grave doubts on the modern project of technological progress – which is why the ill-conceived or disingenuous debunking favoured by otherwise dazzling thinkers such as Pinker and Bloom is to be held as suspect.

Godesky probably doesn’t “solve” all the arguments in the debate, but he’s created a precious reference point for anyone trying to rescue the kernels of truth buried in the myth.

Check it out.

Betty, the hook-making crow in a lab in Oxford, probably got the ball rolling, easily out-performing the rudimentary tool skills of chimps:

Then we saw the crows from Osaka, not directly fashioning tools, but demonstrating a kind of planning ingenuity that will drop the jaw of anyone who’s grown up with the word “animal” having connotations of “dumb and brutish”:

But while such tricks make great web distractions, they only breach the crumbling wall between humans and animals in the science-friendly realm of functional, practical behaviour. What about those shiftier areas, such as emotion, with all its attendant complexities and pathologies?

Our culture has a see-saw relationship with perception of emotions in animals. Sometimes it seems like the debate is divided cleanly in two, with criticisms of sentimental anthropomorphism flying one way, and protests about the species-centric, Christian-Cartesian separation of humans from nature going the other.

We don’t find “truth” at some magical fulcrum point between the two, though. Both sides have validity, but they’re just like kids hooked on the simple back-and-forth fun of the see-saw rocking. (OK, the metaphor breaks down badly here, as this sort of polarized debate is usually anything but simple fun…) Truths start to emerge when bums get sore, they get off the ride, and have a chat.

Then they slowly discover that “reductionist” science’s view of humans’ place in nature, based ostensibly on the Darwinian revolution, has indeed retained a few too many prejudices from Christianity and Cartesian proto-science. As Stephen Jay Gould often maintains, Darwin’s revolution has not been completed. Our evolution introduced some hugely important variations and complexities into the animal world, but we really haven’t fully embraced the idea of our place in an evolutionary continuum with animals.

The see-saw opponents also start to realize as they converse that touchy-feely sentimentality about animals has been one of the only refuges for perception of this continuum in our deeply Christian world. As an increasingly repressive society makes extremists out of its moderates, the lack of real appreciation for the resonance that the deeper levels of our emotional and psychic make-up find with other life-forms have distorted this resonance badly, dulling it to nothing here, leaving it to ramp up uncontrollably there.

How have the vestiges of the Christian-Cartesian split between humans and other animals distorted our self-image? In ways too numerous to mention here; I’ll narrow things down to one example that’s come up twice for me recently: chimp violence.

I’m a great admirer of Howard Bloom, especially his ability to see clearly through sentimental images of nature when the evidence of science demands it. However, in his book The Lucifer Principle, in his chapter titled ‘Mother Nature, The Bloody Bitch’, he makes blunders as he tries to demolish any resistance we may have built up to the image of nature as “red in tooth and claw”.

First off, he makes the embarrassing mistake of conflating and confusing “violence” and “war”. He tries to debunk Richard Leakey’s claim that southern Africa’s !Kung demonstrate the absence of war in non-agricultural societies by rallying evidence that they have a relatively high murder rate. He neglects to mention whether the situation that yielded this murder rate in the study he cites might have been affected by the influence of agricultural societies. Even so, homicide and war are, in the terms of Bloom’s own argument, different kettles of fish altogether.

Regarding violence among chimps, he naturally brings to bear Jane Goodall‘s famed studies, where she “discovered war among the chimpanzees, a discovery she hoped she would never make.” The implicit message of this, and most such use of primate studies (especially studies of violence), is that in looking at chimps, because they’re 99% genetically identical to us, we’re looking at our own hard-wired nature. As Bloom’s colourful language has it, “our biological legacy weaves evil into the substrate of even the most ‘unspoiled’ society.”

However, all may not be as it seems. For starters, Jason Godesky at Anthropik.com recently posted an extract from a review of Margaret Power’s book The Egalitarians – Human and Chimpanzee: An Anthropological View of Social Organization, which is worth re-quoting in full here:

Essentially, Power argues that because human hunter-gatherers and chimpanzees in the wild share the same ecological niche, their social organization is remarkably similar. The qualifier, in the wild, is significant, inasmuch as the dominant paradigm in chimpanzee studies today derives from the later work of Jane Goodall, who reports that the animals are strongly territorial, aggressive, and dominance-seeking. Whereas Goodall’s analysis might support a theory of phylogenetic continuity for similar, biologically inherent, agonistic qualities in humans, Power’s important contribution is to show that Goodall’s conclusions may rest principally on the “unnatural” environment that Goodall herself created for the apes in order to facilitate observation of their behavior.

When Goodall began her naturalistic studies of chimpanzees in 1960 in the Gombe National Park area of Tanzania, she was a distinctly non-participant observer. After some years of patiently tracking apes over large areas, Goodall discovered that she could lure animals into a more or less permanent presence around her camp, thereby improving opportunities to observe social interaction, by baiting the camp with supplies of bananas. Indeed, this was an inspired notion. According to Power, it worked too well.

Power maintains that the change that Goodall engineered in the food supply warped the chimpanzees’ conduct and social organization more or less permanently. Power pursues the argument by examining the differences between Goodall’s observations prior to the artificial feeding regimen and the subsequent findings. Goodall herself does not rely much on the results of her early work.

Power argues that, like human hunter-gatherers, chimpanzees in the wild roam widely, rarely confronting each other in direct competition over food. Goodall’s artificial feeding, practiced from 1964 to 1968, introduced direct competition among the apes for the first time. Bunched around the feeding boxes and often frustrated by not obtaining the bananas (which were doled out according to specific schedules), the animals began to engage in more intense forms of competitive, aggressive, and threatening behavior than was known to occur in the wild.

A couple of days after reading this, I was reading the recent “Psyche & Nature”-themed Spring Journal, specifically an essay called ‘Trans-Species Psychology’ by G. A. Bradshaw & Mary Watkins. In arguing for the extension of psyche outside the human realm that we’ve habitually confined it in, they note that “humans alone have been considered to possess the capacity to be un-natural.” We possess mind, psyche, or soul, which gives us our ability to behave in ways that respond in a much more sophisticated way to the environment than the “hard-wired” genetics of “mere nature”.

If we avoid the hard-line behaviourism that seeks to overcome this dualism by erasing psyche from the map completely, we might admit that in observing chimpanzee behaviour, we aren’t necessarily looking at some image of what our biological nature is “in itself”. We would realize that we need to be sensitive to psyche’s role in the scene – with its inevitable corollary, psychopathology. Obviously Goodall’s apparent artificial distortion of “natural” chimp behaviour is an extreme instance of this. But even genuine observations in the field may not be revelations of our encoded genetic inheritance; they may be contingent psychological aberrations, influenced by a complex network of forces in the immediate environment.

Of course, this isn’t to argue that our genetic inheritance is “clean”, wholly bereft of unfortunate traits. In fact, it means that as we open our emotional identities to the animal kingdom, we’ll find resonance with instances of cruelty and pathology as well as with instincts to love and nurture.

Humans are plainly the most deviant, pathologized creature around. But finding cruelty in nature may not always be a cue to justify human foibles as “natural”; it may indicate that our struggles with the tumultuous difficulties of psychic life are not ours alone.

History is by far and away the biggest hole in my education, I feel, and in that I imagine I’m typical these days. Of course we long since left behind the world that could be practically comprehended by any single person—and since that watershed, things have continued to complexify exponentially. But I still sense that there’s a yawning gulf between the fragmentary story I have of our collective past, and the story that I’m capable of constructing.

What’s my motivation to elaborate and refine the story though? What’s the point? The best I can offer off the top of my head, in this rambling stream of "open source philosophy" that I call a blog, is that just as history is the sum of individual experiences (and more), the collective capacity to respond wisely to events is the sum of each individual’s historical consciousness. Sounds pretty impressive, but it’s a little too abstract to really motivate you. And while I’m sure there are myriad forces that impel myself and others to broaden and deepen our reading of the human story, current events highlight a crucial motivation: horror. The question "Why?" is never more urgent than when brutality threatens to render sense and reason redundant.

It seems to me that it’s precisely in these instants, when reason itself seems threatened, that we need to dig deeper—just as Freud realised that the "irrational" was a gateway to understanding individual motivations—looking for fossilised remnants of forgotten struggles, the discovery of which will expand our reasoning to embrace the unpalatable. Historical consciousness is the only way this "larger picture" can be achieved.

Still, Chechnya’s past is much more "forgotten" to me than to Chechen separatists. Doesn’t historical awareness perpetuate these conflicts? Blood feuds, ethnic and national rivalries inherited down through generations, bitter memories of abuse and slaughter burning away, fuelled by and fuelling the abuse and slaughter they engender… I often wonder if above is enough like below, macro like micro, for large groups to reflect individual traits such as pathologies like Repetition Compulsion, "the mind’s tendency to repeat traumatic events in order to deal with them"—and its extremist cousin that goes as far as visiting traumatic events on others in order to deal with them. This vicious cycle is a sorry truism for criminal psychologists who study serial killers (overdone in Hollywood of course, but retaining its kernel of truth). But for peoples and societies it’s hard to get to grips with—not least because it’s both complex and unscientific (despite the efforts of evolutionary psychologist Howard Bloom).

Talking of unscientific, I read a interesting but disappointing book recently called The Master of Lucid Dreams by Olga Kharitidi (subtitled "In the Heart of Asia a Russian Psychiatrist Learns How to Heal the Spirits of Trauma"). It has a Casteneda-ish edge to it, the Russian being initiated into an undocumented tradition of Sufi dream control in Uzbekistan. But Kharitidi isn’t a shady anthropology student, she’s a professional psychiatrist accustomed to dealing with severe rape and abuse cases in Siberia. Whatever the veracity of her story, it makes for interesting reading. The tradition she stumbles into holds a belief that severe trauma can incubate psychic entities, "spirits of trauma", that can be inherited, gradually aggregating across individual to families, across families to societies. She tells us that the previously secret tradition had been revealed to her, an outsider, as its guardians feel that these spirits have become so powerful that there is no longer time to be concerned with the coherence of their lineage.

Similarly concerned with the flow between individual and collective, and between victim and victimiser, is Stanislav Grof‘s salutary research into LSD psychotherapy—which was subjected to the rigours of coping with the inner struggles of Holocaust survivors in post-war Prague. His theories focus on the impact of the birth process on the individual, how the oceanic peace of the womb is violently disrupted by its sudden evacuation, with "no light at the end of the tunnel" during the most physically constricting phase.

His emphasis on the birth trauma always flits through my mind when I register the seemingly interminable violence and suffering in Africa, our species’ natal landscape. Or when reporters on the war in Iraq use the phrase "Cradle of Civilization". It also struck me in 2002 when the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem was taken over by Arabs and surrounded by Israelis. I’m sure you can fill in your own obviously selective, but nevertheless resonant examples.

I guess these are the places we’ve been the longest—the places with the longest histories, the most baggage, where the spirits of trauma have really dug themselves in. Can some deeper level of historical consciousness unravel these choking knots in our story? Will they only dissolve when we evacuate Mother Earth? Or will we drag them with us until we see sense? Fucked if I know.

a review by Gyrus

• Published: Flamingo, 2000
• ISBN: 0002258471

I must first confess that this is the first Ballard novel I’ve read since 1979′s The Unlimited Dream Company. Perhaps a journey through the books between this and Super-Cannes would have prepared me for his current stance, which I was mildly surprised to find had a much more overt moral component than I’d previously noticed.

That’s not to say his earlier work is out-and-out ‘immoral’—perhaps not even ‘amoral’, although this is the most generous that his critics used to get. It’s obvious from the Re/Search book on Ballard (which, if it can be considered one of his works, is my favourite) that he has a very powerful moral sense, only one that is coupled to an unflinching Freudian-surrealist passion for facing the unconscious on its own terms.

Here, though, we’re a step removed from the plunge into creative pathology. This is not a criticism, however. I’m fascinated to see Ballard for aiming his guns directly at a target (unbridled corporate power) rather than firing just to explore the possibilities—it’s just not what I expected.

The novel’s protagonist, Paul Sinclair, is an aviation magazine editor recuperating from a crash (Ballard’s not changed that much then!) who arrives with his young wife at her new job in Eden-Olympia, a utopian business park built near Cannes to house some of the world’s most powerful corporations. The familiar Ballardian roguish psychopomp comes in the form of Wilder Penrose, the park’s resident psychiatrist. Penrose—like nearly everyone else—is reluctant to say much about the recent spree-killing conducted by the former occupant of the Sinclairs’ new house, who was killed in the process…

Paul, bored by the pool with his injured leg, becomes slowly but powerfully obsessed by the spree-killer’s actions and motives. (I’m reminded of Jimmy Stewart’s wheelchair-bound amateur sleuth in Rear Window, but of course Ballard’s less interested in the injury’s connotations of impotence, as Hitchcock was, than in the character’s fascination with brutal incidents and acts, and the fetish value of surgical restraints.) He gradually uncovers a secret world of proto-fascist violence beneath the hyper-efficient work regime of Eden-Olympia, and, largely through the dominating influence of Wilder Penrose, becomes embroiled. But Paul struggles to maintain a measure of distance, forming a tension that drives the narrative, between fascination with the nearly consequence-free release of repressed urges, and shocked indignation at callous violence and perversity.

The seductive logic behind these covert eruptions of brutality is detailed in a riveting cod-philosophical conversation between Penrose and Sinclair. But the moral dimension to this work is foregrounded from the beginning, where we learn of the idea that Eden-Olympia, seen as an experiment in future living, was constructed with the intention of eliminating the need for moral choice in its inhabitants. Everything is automated, looked after, watched over, designed. The unquestioned and inexorable drive for more and more streamlined economic efficiency leaves in its wake confused people with a waning capacity for making difficult choices about what to do with their mounting wealth and power.

Certainly not one of Ballard’s best, but seeing the poet laureate of suburban alienation peel back the layers of deceit around our unelected techno-lords is fascinating at the very least.

by Jim Carey

"You have to realise that the events at Stonehenge polluted the reputation of festival goers in the eyes of Wiltshire Police." I looked around the tent to see how Inspector Hunt’s words would be received by those attending the question and answer session. There was not a flicker of dissent. Two minutes later the assemblage gave police a round of applause after being told how Wiltshire constabulary had ‘generously’ reduced their asking price for festival policing from £32,000 to £10,000.

This was the Big Green Gathering 1995, with no sound systems, no music licence, no bars; entirely powered by sun and wind. The one minor skirmish over the entire long weekend brought nine riot police on site.

"We were totally pissed off," a festival security guard told Squall. "It was nothing but one bloke who’d had one too many cans of beer, we could have dealt with it no problem but the riot police insisted on coming on."

The organisers paid the £10,000. They also paid for a marquee from which the police earned their easy overtime money by searching people coming in.

"Basically it’s a protection racket," said festival co-organiser Jean Viddler. "The police are saying: ‘If you don’t pay us, your event won’t happen’."

Stonehenge Free Festival, summer solstice 1983

It was all very much a far cry from the 10th consecutive Stonehenge Free Festival that had taken place in the same county eleven years earlier. By 1984, the Stonehenge Solstice celebration had become the apex of a burgeoning festival scene, attracting an estimated 30,000 people, with many more visiting the site during its month long celebration. Entirely unlicensed, unpoliced and free from the profit motivation that drives modern day commercial festivals, it was one of the great people-led social experiments of modern times. The festival existed in sharp contrast to the vacuous modern political rhetoric about ‘community’, for despite its many foibles, it was a genuine example of people working through the realities of the word.

The authorities, however, hated it with a vengeance and the following year inaugurated a new era of intolerance with blood.

The Battle of the Beanfield

It is difficult to convey the extent and affect of the berserk circumstances that occurred on June 1st 1985, but its socio-political ramifications were immense.

A convoy of Travellers’ vehicles left an impromptu park-up site in Savernake Forest to head towards Stonehenge. Seven miles from the Stones, and still some way out of the newly imposed four and half mile High Court exclusion order, police blocked the convoy with three lorry loads of gravel. After a short stand-off, the acting Deputy Chief Constable of Wiltshire, Lionel Grundy, gave orders for his men to begin attacking the vehicles and arresting drivers. When word swept through the convoy that police were smashing windscreens at the front and the back of the line of vehicles, Travellers pulled their vehicles off the A303 and into an adjacent grass field. At this stage, many Travellers were keen to return to the Savernake Forest site, but were told by Wiltshire Police that those wishing to leave the scene could only do so without their vehicles (homes).

After a tense wait, the pressure cooker finally exploded with over 1,000 police drawn from five constabularies charging into the field wielding truncheons.

In an effort to escape, the convoy drove from the grass field into the adjacent Beanfield looking for a way out. The huge numbers of by now hysterical policemen charged in behind them to commit their now infamous carnage.

Public knowledge of the events of that day are still limited by the fact that only a small number of journalists were present in the Beanfield at the time. Most, including the BBC television crew, had obeyed the police directive to stay behind police lines at the bottom of the hill "for their own safety".

One of the few journalists to ignore police advice and attend the scene was Nick Davies, Home Affairs correspondent for The Observer. He wrote: "There was glass breaking, people screaming, black smoke towering out of burning caravans and everywhere there seemed to be people being bashed and flattened and pulled by the hair… men, women and children were led away, shivering, swearing, crying, bleeding, leaving their homes in pieces… Over the years I had seen all kinds of horrible and frightening things and always managed to grin and write it. But as I left the Beanfield, for the first time, I felt sick enough to cry."

The only national television camera crew in the Beanfield was from ITN. Reporter Kim Sabido spoke to camera: "What we—the ITN camera crew and myself as a reporter—have seen in the last 30 minutes here in this field has been some of the most brutal police treatment of people that I’ve witnessed in my entire career as a journalist. The number of people who have been hit by policemen, who have been clubbed whilst holding babies in their arms in coaches around this field, is yet to be counted… There must surely be an enquiry."

However, when the item was nationally broadcast on ITN news later that day, Sabido’s voice-over had been removed and replaced with a dispassionate narrator. The worst film footage was also edited out. When approached for the footage not shown on the news, ITN claimed it was missing. "When I got back to ITN during the following week and I went to the library to look at all the rushes, most of what I’d thought we’d shot was no longer there," recalls Sabido. "From what I’ve seen of what ITN has provided since, it just disappeared, particularly some of the nastier shots."

Some but not all of the missing footage has since surfaced on bootleg tapes and was incorporated into the Operation Solstice documentary shown on Channel Four in 1991.

The Beanfield. Photo by Ben Gibson.

Photographic evidence is also scant. Ben Gibson, a freelance photographer working for The Observer that day, was arrested in the Beanfield after photographing riot police smashing their way into a Traveller’s coach. He was later acquitted of charges of obstruction although the intention behind his arrest had been served by removing him from the scene. Most of the negatives from the film he managed to shoot disappeared from The Observer‘s archives during an office move.

Fellow photographer Tim Malyon narrowly avoided the same fate: "Whilst attempting to take pictures of one group of officers beating people with their truncheons, a policeman shouted out to ‘get him’ and I was chased. I ran and was not arrested." Tim Malyon’s negatives have also been lost with only a few prints surviving.

One unusual eye-witness to the Beanfield nightmare was the Earl of Cardigan, secretary of the Marlborough Conservative Association and manager of Savernake Forest (on behalf of his father the Marquis of Ailesbury). He had travelled along with the convoy on his motorbike accompanied by fellow Conservative Association member John Moore. As the Travellers had left from land managed by Cardigan, the pair thought "it would be interesting to follow the events personally". Wearing crash helmets to disguise their identity, they witnessed what Cardigan described to Squall as "unspeakable" police violence.

Cardigan subsequently provided eye-witness testimonies of police behaviour during prosecutions brought against Wiltshire Police.

These included descriptions of a heavily pregnant woman with "a silhouette like a zeppelin" being "clubbed with a truncheon" and riot police showering a woman and child with glass. "I had just recently had a baby daughter myself so when I saw babies showered with glass by riot police smashing windows, I thought of my own baby lying in her cradle 25 miles away in Marlborough," recalls Cardigan.

After the Beanfield, Wiltshire Police approached Lord Cardigan to gain his consent for an immediate eviction of the Travellers remaining on his Savernake Forest site.

"They said they wanted to go into the campsite ‘suitably equipped’ and ‘finish unfinished business’. Make of that phrase what you will," says Cardigan. "I said to them that if it was my permission they were after, they did not have it. I did not want a repeat of the grotesque events that I’d seen the day before."

Instead, the site was evicted using court possession proceedings, allowing the Travellers a few days recuperative grace.

As a prominent local aristocrat and Tory, Cardigan’s testimony held unusual sway, presenting unforeseen difficulties for those seeking to cover up and re-interpret the events at the Beanfield.

In an effort to counter the impact of his testimony, several national newspapers began painting him as a ‘loony lord’, questioning his suitability as an eye-witness and drawing farcical conclusions from the fact that his great-great grandfather had led the charge of the light brigade. The Times editorial on June 3rd claimed that being "barking mad was probably hereditary".

As a consequence, Lord Cardigan successfully sued The Times, The Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and the Daily Mirror for claiming that his allegations against the police were false and for suggesting that he was making a home for hippies. He received what he describes as "a pleasing cheque and a written apology" from all of them. His treatment by the press was ample indication of the united front held between the prevailing political intention and media backup, with Lord Cardigan’s eye-witness account as a serious spanner in the plotted works: "On the face of it they had the ultimate establishment creature—land-owning, peer of the realm, card-carrying member of the Conservative Party—slagging off police and therefore by implication befriending those who they call the powers of darkness," says Cardigan. "I hadn’t realised that anybody that appeared to be supporting elements that stood against the establishment would be savaged by establishment newspapers. Now one thinks about it, nothing could be more natural. I hadn’t realised that I would be considered a class traitor; if I see a policeman truncheoning a woman I feel I’m entitled to say that it is not a good thing you should be doing. I went along, saw an episode in British history and reported what I saw."

Largely as a result of his testimony, police charges against members of the convoy were dismissed in the local magistrates’ courts. However, there was no public inquiry. Of the 440 Travellers taken into custody that day, 24 went through the gruelling five year process of taking Wiltshire Police to court for wrongful arrest, assault and criminal damage. They finally won a four month court case at Winchester Crown Court in 1991, but their compensation was entirely swallowed by the legal costs incurred in the process. As Lord Gifford QC, the Travellers’ legal representative, put it: "It left a very sour taste in the mouth". To some of those at the brunt end of the truncheon charge it left a devastating legacy.

Alan Lodge, a veteran of many free festivals was one of the 24 Travellers who ‘successfully’ took Wiltshire Police to court following the Beanfield incident: "There was one guy who I trusted my children with in the early ’80s—he was a potter. After the Beanfield I wouldn’t let him anywhere near them. I saw him, a man of substance, at the end of all that nonsense wobbled to the point of illness and evil. It turned all of us and I’m sure that applies to the whole travelling community. There were plenty of people who had got something very positive together who came out of the Beanfield with a world view of ‘fuck everyone’."

The berserk nature of the police violence drew obvious comparisons with the coercive police tactics employed on the miners’ strike the year before. Many observers claimed the two events provided strong evidence that government directives were para-militarising police responses to crowd control. Indeed, the confidential Wiltshire Police Operation Solstice Report released to plaintiffs during the resulting Crown Court case, states: "’Counsel’s opinion regarding the police tactics used in the miners’ strike to prevent a breach of the peace was considered relevant."

The news section of Police Review, published seven days after the Beanfield, stated: "The Police operation had been planned for several months and lessons in rapid deployment learned from the miners’ strike were implemented."

The manufactured reasoning behind such heavy-handed tactics was best summed up in a laughable passage from the confidential police report on the Beanfield: "There is known to be a hierarchy within the convoy; a small nucleus of leaders making the final decisions on all matters of importance relating to the convoy’s activities. A second group who are known as the ‘lieutenants’ or ‘warriors’ carry out the wishes of the convoy leader, intimidating other groups on site." If the coercive policing used during the miners strike was a violent introduction to Thatcher’s mal-intention towards union activity, the Battle of the Beanfield was a similarly severe introduction to a new era of intolerance of Travellers.

Manufacturing a Case for Public Order Law

At the 1995 Big Green Gathering Squall approached Inspector Hunt, a member of Wiltshire Police force for 20 years, and asked: "Is there any acknowledgement in your constabulary that the events of the Battle of the Beanfield seriously polluted the reputation of Wiltshire Police in the eyes of festival goers."

Persistence finally drew a reluctant answer: "Look, Stonehenge Festival grew too large and out of control, the Battle of the Beanfield was just the beginning of the process of dealing with it. The laws that came after were even more effective."

Indeed the following year, saw the imposition of the Public Order Act 1986, a new law giving police powers to break up any gathering of 12 vehicles or over. This new legislation had serious implications for both festivals and Traveller sites all over the country; the multi-tactic war to eradicate Travellers and an emerging alternative economy had truly begun.

On June 3rd that year Douglas Hurd, then Home Secretary, described the Travellers as "nothing more than a band of medieval brigands who have no respect for the law or the rights of others."

On June 5th, Margaret Thatcher told the nation that her government was "only too delighted to do anything we can to make life difficult for such things as hippy convoys". On the same day, a cabinet committee was formed to discuss new legislation to deal with Travellers and festivals. Chaired by Home Secretary, Douglas Hurd, it comprised of the Secretaries of State for Transport, Environment, Health and Social Security, and Agriculture. Meanwhile, the convoy assembling to celebrate that year’s Solstice was chased around several counties by both police and right wing media outrage, before finally finding some temporary recuperative respite on a site at Stoney Cross in the New Forest.

Four days later, Hampshire Police mounted the 4am ‘Operation Daybreak’ to clear the Stoney Cross site. Sixty four convoy members were arrested and 129 vehicles impounded after police came on site armed with Department of Transport files on every vehicle. The police also came armed with care orders for the Travellers’ children, though a tip off had reached the camp beforehand and the children had been removed.

The Battle of the Beanfield, and the increasingly hostile political climate that followed, had a dramatic affect on the travelling community, frightening away many of the families integral to the community balance of the festival circuit. In 1987, people stood on the tarmac beside Stonehenge having walked the eight mile distance from an impromptu site at Cholderton. As clouds smothered the Solstice sunrise, those who had walked the distance were kept on the road, separated from the Stones by rows of riot police and bales of razor wire. The anger mounted and scuffles broke out. The following year the anger was tangibly increased and once again at Solstice dawn there were some who found the situation too unacceptable. This time the scuffles were more prevalent with concerted attempts being made to break through the police cordon. Secreted around the area, however, were thousands of waiting riot police and, as the anger of the penned in crowd grew, numberless uniforms came flooding down the hill to disperse the crowd with a liberal usage of truncheons and riot shields. Andy Smith—now editor of Festival Eye—finally received a £10,000 out of court settlement from Wiltshire Police this year for a truncheon wound to the head received after he tripped and fell at Stonehenge in 1988. In the years following the event, he was diagnosed as suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. "I’d had recurrent dreams about the episode and after eight years of raking over it, I needed to put the event behind me."

The numbers of people prepared to travel to Stonehenge and face this treatment naturally dwindled, resulting in a concentration of those who were prepared for confrontation in defence of what was considered as a right to celebrate solstice at Stonehenge. Successive huge police operations backed by the Public Order Act 1986, have become stricter and stricter in attempts to stop anyone from reaching the Stone circle at Solstice. There are still a few however, who hug hedgerows and dart between the beams of police helicopters in order to be in view of the Solstice sunrise at Stonehenge.

Destroying the Alternative Economy

Up until 1985, the free festival circuit had provided the economic backbone of all year round itinerancy. Traditionally the three cardinal points in the festival circuit were the May bank holiday, the Solstice and the August bank holiday. Without the need for advertising, festival goers knew to look out for these dates knowing a festival would be taking place somewhere. The employment of two bank holidays as specific festival times was designed to allow workers the opportunity of attending a festival without the inevitable bleary Monday back at work. The number of festivals in-between these cardinal points also blossomed, giving rise to the possibility of travelling from one to the other (with choice) over the entire long summer. By selling crafts, services, performance busking, tat and assorted gear, Travellers provided themselves with an alternative economy lending financial viability to an itinerant culture.

Evidence suggests that the political campaign to eradicate festivals was aimed at breaking this economy.

Indeed, a working party set up by the Department of Health and Social Security published a report on Itinerant Claimants in March 1986 stating: "Local offices of the DHSS have experienced increasing problems in dealing with claims from large groups of nomadic claimants over the past two or three years. Matters came to a head during the summer of 1985 when several large groups converged on Stonehenge for a festival that had been banned by the authorities. The resulting well publicised confrontation with the police was said to have disrupted the normal festival economy and large numbers of claims to Supplementary Benefit were made."

"As soon as they scared away the punters it destroyed the means of exchange," recalls Alan Lodge. "Norman Tebbit went on about getting on your bike and finding employment whilst at the same time being part of the political force that kicked the bike from under us."

In the years that followed, the right-wing press made much of dole-scrounging Travellers, with no acknowledgement that the engineered break-up of the festival economy was largely responsible.

Another ramification of this tactic was even more insidious and ugly.

At the entrance gate to the 1984 Stonehenge Free Festival a burnt out car bore testament to the levels of self-policing emerging from the social experiment. The sign protruding from the wreckage proclaimed: "This was a smack dealer’s car".

Dispossessed of their once thriving economy and facing incessant and increasing harassment and eviction, the breakdown of community left Travellers prone to a destructive force potentially more devastating than anything directly forced by the authorities.

"At one time smack wasn’t tolerated on the road at all," recalls mother of six, Decker Lynn. "Certainly on festival sites, if anybody was selling or even using it they were just put off site full stop."

Heroin, the great escape to oblivion, found the younger elements of a fractured community prone to its clutches and its use spread like myxamatosis. Once again Traveller families were forced to vacate sites that became ‘dirty’, further imbalancing the battered communities and creating a split between ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’ sites.

"I don’t park on big sites anymore," says Lynn who still lives in her double-decker bus. "Heroin is something that breaks up a community because people become so self-centred they don’t give a damn about their neighbours."

Many Travellers report incidents of blatant heroin dealing going untouched by police, whilst other Travellers on the same site were prosecuted for small amounts of hashish. The implication of their claims were that the authorities recognised that if heroin took hold of the travelling community, their designs on its destruction would take care of itself.

"So many times people got away with it and there were very few busts for smack," recalls Lynn. "They must know smack is the quickest way to divide a community; united we stand and divided we don’t."

The other manifestation of community disruption was the emergence of the so called ‘brew crew’. These were mainly angry young Travellers feeding themselves on a diet of Special Brew and developing a penchant for nihilism, blagging and neighbourly disrespect. Whilst festival culture was healthy, the travelling community could cope; once broken up however, the community had problems dealing with the exodus.

"To start with it was contained," says Decker Lynn. "Every family had its problems but the brew crew was a very small element around 1986, and very much contained by the families that were around. But there was a large number of angry young people pouring out of the cities with brew and smack and the travelling community couldn’t cope with the numbers."

The so called ‘brew crew’ caused constant disruption for the festivals still surviving on the decimated circuit and provided an obvious target for slander-hungry politicians and right-wing media, with the entire scene regularly painted with the inevitable all inclusive black brush.

Raves and the New Blood

Towards the end of the ’80s a cultural phenomenon began to emerge around the country resulting in an injection of new blood and economy to the festival scene. Rave parties were similar to free festivals in that they were unlicensed events in locations kept secret until the last possible moment. Such events offered similar opportunities for adventure and began attracting huge numbers of young people from the cities. This scene grew dramatically. Where some of these parties differed from the free festivals was that they were organised by groups such as Sunrise who would charge an entry fee and consequently make large amounts of money in the process. Not all such rave parties were of this nature however, and the free festival scene began to merge with the rave party scene producing a hybrid with new dynamism.

Not everyone on the free festival scene was pleased with the consequences of this festi-rave fusion however.

"One of the main things I liked about festivals was going around fires and trucks listening to accordions and talking to people," recalls Alan Lodge. "When the ravers arrived, I couldn’t hear anything other than the beat. A mass influx of young ravers who were not clued up as to country life did attract a lot of unwelcome attention to Travellers, but without them the festival scene would have finished in ’91 and no-one these days would know what we were talking about."

Others found renewed enthusiasm in the cultural mutation. Having attended free festivals since 1984 and lived on the road intermittently during that period, Steve Redshaw welcomed the new blood: "Towards the end of the ’80s things were getting bad on the festival circuit. Then raves revitalised the scene and I got my faith back."

Once again, political attention was now targeted against these new impromptu rave events, resulting in the Entertainment (Increased Penalties) Act 1990. Introduced by John Major’s Personal Private Secretary, Graham Bright, this private member’s bill brought in massive fines of up to £20,000 for the organisers of unlicensed events. Once again this legislation had a dramatic affect on the free festival/rave scene, pushing event organisation into the hands of large commercial promoters with the necessary sums required to pay for licences and policing.

"By 1993 the laws were having their effect on the free rave scene," observes Steve Redshaw. "Dance music then moved into clubs and became more exclusive." The nature of festival promotion consequently swung away from a community-based orientation, as businessmen and commercial club owners cashed in on the existing public desire for adventurous festival/parties in the countryside. According to Tony Hollingsworth, ex-events promoter for the GLC and now part of the multi-million pound commercial festival outfit Tribute: "The motivation behind these festivals is no longer passion, it is commerce." Relative to the people-led festivals, the commercial festival scene offers little more than another shopping experience, where an attendant wallet is valued and encouraged far more than participation.

Castlemorton Common

By 1992 leaked documents from Avon and Somerset Constabulary demonstrated the existence of Operation Nomad. Force Operational Order 36/92 marked ‘In Confidence’, revealed: "With effect from Monday 27th April 1992, dedicated resources will be used to gather intelligence in respect of the movement of itinerants and travellers and deal with minor acts of trespass." An intelligence unit set up by Avon and Somerset produced regular Operation Nomad bulletins, listing personal details on Travellers and regular festival goers unrelated to any criminal conviction. A Force Operational Order issued by the Chief Constable also stated: "Resources will be greatly enhanced for the period Thursday 21st May to Sunday 24th May inclusive in relation to the anticipated gathering of Travellers in the Chipping Sodbury area."

This item referred to the annual Avon Free Festival which had been occurring in the area around the May bank holiday for several years, albeit in different locations. However, 1992 was the year Avon and Somerset Police intended to put a full stop to it. As a result the thousands of people travelling to the area for the expected Festival were shunted into neighbouring counties by Avon and Somerset’s Operation Nomad police manoeuvres.

The end result was the impromptu Castlemorton Common Festival, another pivotal event in the recent history of festival culture.

Castlemorton Common Festival, 1992. Photo by Alan Lodge.

West Mercia Police claim they had no idea that an event might happen in their district, the truth of which relies on the unlikely situation that Avon and Somerset Police did not inform their neighbouring constabulary of Operation Nomad. In the event, a staggering 30,000 Travellers, ravers and festival goers gathered almost overnight on Castlemorton Common to hold a free festival that flew in the face of the Public Order Act 1986 and the Entertainment (Increased Penalties) Act 1990. It was a massive celebration and the biggest of its kind since the bountiful days of the Stonehenge Free Festival. West Mercia Police claimed that due to the speed with which it coalesced, they were powerless to stop it.

However, the authorities used Castle-morton in a way that led people to suggest it had been at least partly engineered. After all, a large number of people had been shunted into the area by Operation Nomad, was it really likely that West Mercia police were unaware of this? The right-wing press published acres of crazed and damning coverage of the event, including the classic front page Daily Telegraph headline: "Hippies fire flares at Police". The following morning’s Daily Telegraph editorial read: "New Age, New Laws" and within two months, Sir George Young, then Minister for Housing, confirmed that new laws against Travellers were imminent "in reaction to the increasing level of public dismay and alarm about the behaviour of some of these groups."

Indeed, the outcry following Castlemorton provided the basis for the most draconian law yet levelled against alternative British culture. Just as the Public Order Act 1986 followed the events at Stonehenge in 1985, so the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 began its journey in 1992, pumped with the manufactured outrage following Castlemorton. By the time it reached statute two years later, it included criminal sanctions against assembly, outdoor unlicensed music events, unauthorised camping, and ‘aggravated trespass’. The law also reduced the number of vehicles which could gather together from twelve (as stipulated in the Public Order Act 1986) to six.

The news-manufacture used to prepare the public palate for the coming law was incessant, with media descriptions of Travellers including "hordes of marauding locusts" (Daily Telegraph), and "These foul pests must be controlled" (Daily Mail).

Police Surveillance and Benefit Clampdowns

The year after Castlemorton Common, the police set up Operation Snapshot, an intelligence-gathering exercise on raves and Travellers, designed to establish a database of personal details, registration numbers, Traveller sites and movements. This information was used as a backbone for an ongoing intelligence operation begun by the Southern Central Intelligence Unit (SCIU), operated from Devizes in Wiltshire and initially co-ordinated by PC Malcolm Keene. The SCIU held regular meetings with representatives of all the constabularies of Britain.

Leaked documents revealed that Operation Snapshot had estimated there to be around 2,000 Traveller’s vehicles and 8,000 Travellers in the UK. In the minutes of a meeting held at Devizes on March 30th 1993, the objectives of the operation included the development of "a system whereby intelligence could be taken into the control room, and the most up-to-date intelligence was to hand"… "capable of high-speed input and retrieval and dissemination of information". The meeting was attended by constabulary representatives from Bedfordshire, Avon and Somerset, Devon and Cornwall, Dorset, Gloucestershire, Dyfed-Powys, Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire, Kent, Norfolk, Northamptonshire, South Wales, Gwent, Staffordshire, Thames Valley, Warwickshire, Surrey, Suffolk, West Mercia, West Midlands, Ministry of Defence and the National Criminal Intelligence Service (Hampshire and Essex sent apologies).

They were all asked and all agreed to provide the Southern Central Intelligence Unit with "any information, no matter how small on New Age Travellers or the Rave scene". The leaked minutes revealed the database was designed to hold one million items of information.

After a short period the Northern New Age Traveller Co-ordination Unit, designed to cover the north of Britain, was established and operated from Penrith in Cumbria.

Further monitoring information was gathered via social security offices. The working party report on Itinerant Claimants prepared for the DHSS in 1986 advised that "in the interests of advance warning and the safety of staff, we recommend better liaison with the police." A 1993 internal Benefits Agency bulletin (issue 24/93) headed ‘New Age Travellers’ and marked "not to be released into the public domain", stated: "Offices will be aware of the adverse reaction from the media following the treatment of claims from this client group last summer [Castlemorton]. Ministers are concerned that the Benefits Agency and Employment Services take all necessary steps to ensure that claims from this group are scrutinised carefully."

The bulletin reports that a National Task Force has been set up to "monitor the movements of such groups of Travellers" and to "inform relevant District managers of their approach and numbers". In the back of the bulletin is a list of telephone numbers for all the regional police contacts in both the Northern New Age Traveller Co-ordination Unit and the Southern Central Intelligence Unit. Every constable in the country, including the Ministry of Defence, had at least one but usually several, such co-ordinators.

Also included in the bulletin was a possible itinerary of festivals for Summer 1993. In 1995, the Benefit Agency conducted a census of New Age Traveller benefit claimants including their personal details. A leaked copy of the results suggested there to be 2000 such claimants. In July 1996, more leaked documents revealed that the agency was once again asking regional offices to carry out a census, the results of which are as yet unobtainable. After October 7th 1996, when the Job Seekers Allowance scheme began, benefit may be halted if "appearance" or "attitude" "actively militates against getting a job". The implications for the further selective targeting of the community are obvious.

The Mutating Aftermath

The extraordinary lengths taken by the authorities to annihilate the new Traveller population in the UK are a testament to the treatment meted out to cultural minorities outside the accepted hegemony.

The use of legislation, intelligence, targeted harassment, benefit clampdowns and news-manufacture have been employed as a multi-tactic approach stretched across a ten year period.

Such strategies are often achieved without public knowledge; with the length of time over which they are employed, diffusing recognition of their mechanism and ultimate intention. What is clear, however, is that rather than seek to democratically accommodate an expanding community culture, Margaret Thatcher’s government and those who replaced her, sought to annihilate it. The social consequences are immense.

The festival circuit, once an evolving people-led celebration and community co-operation, now lies largely in the hands of profit-motivated commercial promoters. Meanwhile, the travelling community, fractionalised by an annihilation strategy, now displays symptoms reminiscent of the inner cities from which many had fled.

Many travellers steered away from the iron-fist climate by moving abroad to countries like Spain, Portugal and France. Many would not or could not flee.

However, despite the worst excesses of the cultural clampdown, Travellers remain secreted all over the country. Many are now in smaller groups, inconspicuous and unregistered if not drawing benefit.

"I don’t think anything should be static," says Decker Lynn. "We’ve got to grow and we’ve got to move and flow with whatever’s necessary. I’ve got this strong feeling that whatever rules they make there’s always a way round it."

Indeed for sorted itinerants, necessity breeds ingenious evolution.

by Gyrus

On September 11th 2001, I was on a walking holiday around the Dingle Peninsula in the west of Ireland. I became aware of the attack on the World Trade Centre when I walked into a net café in Dingle, where some American tourists had just found out. They were gobsmacked. I was a little bemused, and just went to check my email. I overheard someone say that the buildings had collapsed, but they thought they had been evacuated. So hey, we lost some skyscrapers, I thought.

Then I started to realise the impact this would have on the world. The carte blanche that would almost certainly be given to the Bush administration to increase anti-terrorist (and anti-anything-else-we-don’t-like) surveillance and military measures. The tightening grip of fear and prejudice. I felt sad and angry. Then the American girl sat next to me burst out crying. I thought it was a curious over-reaction, maybe the American illusion of total cocoon-like safety being shattered. Then I remembered a friend who was on holiday in New York. As I trawled through the news sites that weren’t experiencing a meltdown, I realised that the Twin Towers were a tourist attraction, and that no, the buildings weren’t fully evacuated. Many, an unknown number, had just been killed. I felt unnerved and queasy, and had to go for a walk.

Of course, when I passed a pub with CNN on the TV, I was instantly drawn inside—for a pint to ground me as well as to see what had happened. My heart sank and jaw dropped as I watched the repeated footage of the second plane hitting, the towers collapsing, the distress, panic and disbelief. I thought of my friend, too. I felt burning anger towards the perpetrators.

Days later, in an article on Osama bin Laden in The Guardian, I read how his training programme "brainwashed" prospective recruits:

Many al-Qaida trainees saw videos of such [Stinger] missiles and other weaponry daily as part of their training routine. Showing hundreds of hours of Muslims in dire straits – Palestinians on the West Bank, Bosnians being shot by Serbs, Chechens under attack from the Russian army and (most of all) dying Iraqi children – was part of al-Qaida’s Ipcress-file style induction strategy.

So I thought to myself: What’s the real difference between CNN and al-Qaida training videos?

Both are voluntary (I’ve not heard of al-Qaida press-ganging recruits, however extreme they are). Both utilise repetition to emphasise a perspective. But one is consciously seen as an initiation into the dedicated service of a specific cause, while the other is… "the news".

Admittedly, however subtly Western media manufactures consent for its cause, there’s a lot more flexibility and freedom in the expression of different viewpoints compared to the lines of communication among extreme fundamentalist Muslim groups. Were the emotions triggered in me by the events just a subtle form of "brainwashing"? I don’t think so. My personal connection to the situation in New York—my friend there—was bound to make it more affecting than people I don’t and may never know being bombed in the Middle East and central Asia.

That’s callous. You mean you don’t care about all those men, women and children just because you don’t know them?

Yes and no. As a compassionate person, my heart goes out to everyone who dies or suffers needlessly. But it’s a human heart. And that means, besides being able to empathise, it is also limited. If I felt deeply unnerved and queasy every time people were killed in the world, I wouldn’t be able to function. I’m sure I’m not alone in this. I don’t sit down and decide who I’m going to feel for—I just feel when I do.

I believe that absolute, universal compassion exists. I’ve felt it, from time to time. It’s crushing, liberating and vast. But most of the time I live in the relative world, where my sympathies hover closer to home most of the time.

However, it wasn’t just my friend—I felt for, and cried for, the rest of the people in the WTC.

Come on! You know most of those people in there were capitalist scum. Their lives, supporting America’s commercial, cultural and military dominance of the world, cause untold suffering. They had it coming. They were a lot less innocent than the people in Palestine being bombed by Israel, or the Iraqi children being starved to death by US sanctions.

Sure, many of the people in the WTC led the kind of lives that often make me sick and angry. But I don’t think they should die for what they do. I don’t think mass murderers should die for what they do, let alone greedy people. I may have had some emotional conflict over this if my friend had died in New York, but such are my beliefs.

If you believe in violent revolution against global capitalism, I disagree with you. I don’t think it’ll go away if we ask politely, but I do think it’ll bomb us the fuck out of existence if we try to do the same to it. It has bigger guns. We need to try something else.

If you don’t believe in violent revolution, but do utterly oppose global capitalist hegemony, and when the WTC collapsed with thousands of people inside, you joked about it, or felt a righteous sense of "about time", I think you’re a fucking cowardly hypocrite. You won’t take on the massive risks involved in opposing this system violently, but are prepared to bask in the aftermath when someone else does. Fuck you.

The WTC was destroyed in a well-timed attack designed to create a shocking media spectacle, because of its scale and concomitant symbolic value, representing US commercial might. For so many people with anti-capitalist or anti-American feelings—not terrorists but peaceful, mostly decent people—the success of this focus on symbolism was such that this is all they saw. An American icon crashing to the ground. It’s all I saw before I realised it hadn’t been evacuated in time. But even knowing, intellectually, that thousands had died, many people still only saw a symbolic, if violent, attack on American values—the bully that we all know America is getting its comeuppance. Why did so many people not feel anything for the people who died?

Because they were all affluent fuckers who have been isolated from the suffering they cause! It was time they faced their karma.

Well, I don’t believe that if every rich person in the world was killed anything would be solved. There’s plenty of greedy, hateful, uncaring people who aren’t skilled, intelligent or lucky enough to be wealthy. And—shock horror!—there are people who are wealthy who aren’t evil, and whose death would be a cause for sympathy if they hadn’t been as dehumanised as most Third World Muslims are. Besides, as I said before, I don’t believe in the death penalty. Let alone a vast, indiscriminate one without judge or jury. Isn’t that—despite the manipulative, unthinking use of the word by the media—barbaric? Just because they hate US dominance too, when did we start becoming apologists for barbaric religious fundamentalism? Did I miss a meeting?

One of my best friends has devoted most of the past 6 years of his life to political activism, fighting tirelessly and without compromise for the environment, for human rights, for civil liberties, for peace. When I first met him, he was working in a bank to pay off debts. If he’d lived in New York instead of Leeds, he could well have been in the WTC that morning. And the world would have lost one of the best souls I know.

I know that no intelligent people need it explaining to them. The vast symbolism of this attack hides its indiscriminate violence. Good people died. If you’re so hung up on money, what about the janitors, cleaners, waitresses, cooks, temping staff? What about the firemen? Over 300 firemen died trying to save lives. Did you manage to smother awareness of their inconceivable bravery and selflessness as well, as your political beliefs obliterated your human connection to the deaths involved in this catastrophe?

And of course, the number of deaths here are so large that the 200 or so passengers and crew in the hijacked aircraft are not even worth bothering about. Who cares, if America’s finally reaping what it’s sown?

But this may be the only way that America’s going to be woken up to the suffering it causes.

Perhaps. As you may have guessed, I oppose violence such as this. But it’s certainly made many people more aware of certain things. It’s given me, for one, a burning desire to learn as much as I can about what America actually has done, and what the situation really is in the Middle East and central Asia, beyond the media—mainstream and underground—I happen to have consumed.

But as it stands now—22nd September 2001—the main upshot of the terrorist action is to have united American people behind their barely-elected, widely criticised chimp of a President in a way I would never have thought possible. One woman’s reaction to Bush’s recent speech to Congress was—spoken through near-tears—"I don’t think he understands the words he’s using, and I’m embarrassed that he’s our President." Of course there are Americans who realise its government’s evils as much as anyone. (Some of them probably died last Tuesday.) But they have now been marginalised like never before. And internationally, it’s the same story. Many countries are bravely trying to moderate America’s response to the attacks, but the US currently has more support in the international community than it ever hoped for.

You were saying something about America "waking up"?

What I don’t get is why you’re so broken up about the victims in this attack. I’m sure you’ve heard about the violence in in the Middle East, the starving babies in Iran and the war-ravaged people facing famine in Afghanistan. Haven’t you just been conditioned all your life by the media, which dehumanises these "strange foreigners" and never, ever goes into as much depth about their suffering as it does about suffering in the West, when it happens on this scale?

Yes.

What? After all the time you’ve spent analysing the mechanisms of psychological conditioning, studying the methods of applying it in the media, trying to inoculate yourself against its insidious influence? You admit that all your emotions about this are just conditioned responses?

Not just conditioned responses. It’s not as simple as that. We’re all conditioned. Just because you’ve read or heard some things about "conditioning"—which inevitably focus on the negative aspects, its abuses in the hands of media manipulators, advertisers and politicians—you think it’s something that you can get rid of and be "free".

To me, culture itself is a form of conditioning. I feel empathy more closely with people I share cultural common ground with than I do with people from other cultures. This is natural. The dark side of it leads to bigotry, racism and needless prejudice and violence. None of this detracts from this basic fact of human emotions enmeshed in culture. I had much more common ground with a lot of the people who died than I do with anyone from the Third World. This is because of where I was born, not prejudice or racism.

However, I think my reaction had a lot more to do with the amount of media coverage I consumed in the attack’s wake. I was on my own in rural Ireland, and the immediacy and scale of these events made me hungry for understanding. I watched the TV in pubs for the first two days, then bought the papers every day for the following week. I read the analysis and commentary, but also read the first-hand reports of the scene in New York.

There is an element of "rubber-necking". For a start, the dramatic footage of the second plane crash and the crumbling towers contained a flicker of a thrill. Anyone who relished the perverse plane-crash fantasy in Fight Club (not to mention the final sequence) can understand this. Then there’s the morbid curiosity of the details of the aftermath.

But there’s also an attempt to grasp what had happened. Yes, we’ve been relatively cocooned in the West. Despite the IRA and psychotic nail-bombers here in London, September 11th ushered in a new awareness of danger and fear in Western cities. I wanted to understand this.

Now, had there been a week of media saturation as intense as this in the wake of an especially tragic incident in the Middle East or Afghanistan, my lack of cultural common ground with the victims would no doubt have melted away in the face of the raw pain and suffering. But this doesn’t happen, and probably will never happen. Our connection to anything outside our immediate physical environment is through media. The suffering of the Third World is, with a few notable exceptions, criminally under-documented in our media. Even the mass of coverage in non-mainstream sources just can’t compete with the sheer weight and impact of repetitious TV and newspaper reporting.

So what to do? Involving yourself with more non-mainstream media—creating as much, if possible, as consuming—is a natural step. Limiting your intake of mainstream media to that which gives you the information you want should also be considered.

But, besides being aware of how the media distorts and conditions, I’m also aware of how it desensitises. Surely, as much as my reactions were inevitably conditioned, the reactions of people who just restated their political beliefs about America, without expressing sympathy for the dead, were a sad result of desensitisation. And perhaps also conditioning—reflexive, knee-jerk "anti-Bad Things" righteousness.

(Even if some of the people I’m blindly referring to here have tangibly suffered at the hands of US foreign policy, is there an excuse for ignoring American people’s suffering at the hands of vengeful terrorists? If America’s so fucking blind, how has it managed to produce people who, having just lost loved ones to fundamentalist Islamic terrorists, have the immediate compassion and insight to plead against violent retribution?)

By consuming the media that I did, and opening myself to its impact, I chose to be conditioned into feeling some of the distress that people in Manhattan felt. I also choose, whenever I connect to any human disaster through the media, to open myself to its impact, as much as I can bear. I refuse to allow the overwhelming amount of human misery around us, and the overwhelming amount of media coverage of it, to blunt my basic human responses to suffering. And I know I would be truly fucked if I allowed my political beliefs to blunt them. To say, "The government of those people is evil, therefore I shut off my emotional connection to their pain." That seems to be a very dangerous path to follow.

You’re kind of glossing over the fact that these people elected their evil government.

Fact? Do you know how many people who died voted for Bush? Just as America dehumanises fundamentalist Muslims—barbaric or not—these hijackers surely had dehumanised their victims—government supporters or not—to the point where they were able to kill them. Should we also dehumanise them in the name of "democracy" (a process that, as we all know, became shakier than ever during the election that put Bush in power), in order to shrug our shoulders at their deaths? Likewise, we should guard against homogenising the millions of Afghanis currently under threat—thanks to their unelected leaders—into an obscure mass, whose suffering in the name of bagging bin Laden is seen as "justifiable retribution".

Communications media can open us to the experiences of people across the world. They can distort and manipulate our perceptions along the way. They can be actively used to effect such distortions. But, short of everyone suddenly becoming as courageous and mobile as frontline journalists, they are the channels of knowledge that keep self-awareness alive in this deeply dysfunctional, but potentially fruitful and precious global community.

Most of us are conscious of the mazes of self-deception and illusion that often have to be navigated when you’re a self-aware being. This is never an argument for less self-awareness, except for the alcoholic or junkie. Only more self-awareness will lead us forward. As a species, that means more media. Not more for its own sake, but more intensely active and involving media. Not immersive world-denying Virtual Reality, but collaborative, self-critical and life-affirming media. Honing and refining our critical faculties is crucial in this process. Equally crucial, though, is retaining the capacity for human response—allowing ourselves to be affected. Anything else will feed an encroaching numbness, and we won’t even feel the death of the future of Homo sapiens.

Postscript

I gradually discovered the world of blogging alongside the invasion and occupation of Iraq this year, and a positive outcome of this conjunction has been, I feel, discovering native bloggers from the country in question. There are quite a few, in fact; I’ve ended up reading Baghdad Burning, a wonderfully written journal that gives fascinating insights into life in Baghdad, from the daily fear of violence to local recipes and customs. An essential counterpoint to media coverage, and definitely an effective way of nurturing human sympathies across cultures, grassroots expressions from "over there" that go well beyond the news-centric conception of "coverage" are a hugely encouraging phenomenon. There is of course the danger of the divide ceasing to be across geographic and/or cultural lines, but across the lines created by media literacy and access. I say, stay aware of this danger, and use this awareness to constantly endeavour to increase media literacy and access. Gyrus, 29/11/2003

by Gyrus

In an age where anti-flesh puritanism seems to be waning, and yet still persists in subtle manifestations, more and more extreme stimuli—both physical and conceptual—may be necessary to re-establish our relationship with our bodies. The vicious and relentless suppression of bodily awareness that is our inheritance from Pauline Christianity will not just fade away if we ask nicely. It seems that the growing popularity in the West of body modification practices, and physical forms of S/M sexuality, is indicative of the what may be necessary to reclaim our flesh and provoke ourselves into a deeper body-consciousness. And, as we shall see, our cultural myths, the imagery and conceptions that our artists generate, may also have become equally extreme in their treatment of the flesh, of necessity.

What is most relevant to us here is the phenomenon that stands as the most violent litmus test of attitudes towards the body—physical illness. I say ‘physical’ to distinguish from mental illness, and straight away we’re plunged into the arbitrary, and only sometimes useful division of existence that is embedded deep within our psyches and our language. We’re talking Cartesian dualism, of course… body = matter, mind = spirit… they’re utterly divorced, and God knows how they interact. To me, this is less a scientific observation than a philosophical rationalization of the core myth of Christianity. That is, the belief that we have been expelled from the spiritual paradise of Eden into this lumpen world of mortality, matter and disease. This world, and thus our bodies, in which our souls are supposedly encaged, is our punishment for the transgression of Adam & Eve. However, as Science gradually replaced Christianity as the West’s guiding mythology, there was a growing impatience with the whole idea of ‘spirit’ or ‘mind’ ("Where is it? How can we measure it?" cried the anxious minds in the laboratory). So the concept was dropped altogether as an embarrassing ghost that evaded quantification—and we arrive at materialist reductionism. All mental phenomena are seen as illusory by-products of the chemical and electrical activity of the brain. The world, and our bodies, move from being seen as corrupt to being seen as essentially meaningless. Disease is seen as just a mechanical fault, to be repaired and patched up. Patients are usually allowed to believe that their thoughts and emotions are real, but any connections and correlations made between the mental and the physical are seen as dangerous superstitions.

To set the debate rolling, let’s look at Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, perhaps the most concise, lucid and passionate statement denying a non-physical basis for physical illness. Briefly, her main argument runs along these lines…

In the nineteenth century, tuberculosis was a relatively widespread terminal disease that was seen in popular folklore, and through the eyes of artists, as indicative of a certain emotional temperament. The Romantics romanticized TB, seeing it as a sign of a passionate and sensitive nature. Then science discovered the physical basis for the disease, and consequently found a cure. The mythologizing of TB rapidly faded away, to be completely superseded in our century by another disease ripe for fantasy-projections: cancer. And, as a guaranteed medical cure remains elusive, cancer remains a condition muddied by unnecessary metaphorical thinking.

Sontag’s book is very persuasive, but tends to be very glib with regard to non-orthodox medical practice. Her persuasiveness largely stems from how she plays with the belittling connotations of ‘folklore’ and the authoritative tone of ‘scientific truth’. Also, she attempts to claim that ‘illness as metaphor’ is a dominant cultural myth of the modern era, when materialist science—’illness as mechanical breakdown’—undoubtedly holds this honour.

Neglecting to mention the vested interests that drug companies have in patients being treated solely via medicine, she states that "such preposterous and dangerous views", such as the idea that illness is a manifestation of unexpressed desires or impulses, "manage to put the onus of the disease on the patient and not only weaken the patient’s ability to understand the range of plausible medical treatment, but also, implicitly, direct the patient away from such treatment."1 This is a common distortion. The idea that a psychological view of certain diseases automatically places the blame for the condition on the patient is overly simplistic. In her criticism of Wilhelm Reich ("who did more than anyone to disseminate the psychological theory of cancer"—Sontag), for instance, she entirely neglects his extensive sociological analyses. While Reich placed the blame for cancer on unexpressed emotions, he usually placed the blame for this repression on repressive social systems. Of course, when thought about deeply, this reasoning leads to a classic ‘chicken and egg’ loop—which came first, consciousness or culture? To avoid metaphysical ‘first cause’ speculations, it is obvious that the most practical model for causality here is to accept the loop; to see causality as a dynamic interplay of external and internal factors.2

Essentially, then, Sontag is reiterating the doctrine of Cartesian dualism, or Christianity in disguise: that mind is separate from body; that the body is no more part of our identity than a car is; that disease, though painful, is merely a mechanical breakdown or invasion. And, like a car, the body should be repaired from a purely physical standpoint—any reference to emotional states or character traits is romantic mythologizing at best, dangerous delusion at worst.

While posing as a radical out to scythe down the perilous weeds of mythology, she perpetuates yet another form of the mind/body split that has drastically alienated us from the world we are part of.

The films of David Cronenberg are, if nothing else, resolutely body-conscious. Although the average reaction to this consciousness is one of hysterical revulsion, and although many critics claim that Cronenberg demonstrates a puritanical disgust with the flesh, it is my view that his films can be seen as a bloody and painful—but natural—conceptual birth process. The birth, back into awareness, of our relationship with our bodies. Just as scarification or piercing may be necessary to re-invoke body-awareness on an individual scale, the visceral pain of Cronenberg’s imagery may be a good example of what is necessary to kick-start the cultural meme-pool’s body-awareness.

Cronenberg has stressed his fascination with Cartesian dualism in statements too numerous to mention. He envisions the ultimate comment on this unfathomable ‘split’ (and the basis of all horror) as being the process of physical death. "Why should a healthy mind die, just because the body is not healthy? … There seems to be something wrong with that. It’s very easy to see why many philosophers detach the mind from the body … But I don’t believe that."3 It is this anguish of contradiction that lies at the heart of the painful mystery in his films. Cronenberg sees an apparent split—but his intuitions deny that such a thing exists.

Martin Scorcese once said that Cronenberg doesn’t understand what his films are about.4 Cronenberg himself has admitted that he makes a film to find out why he wants to make it. It is my argument that, from film to film, his central line of questioning has revolved around the mysteries of the mind/body/disease axis; and that in recent years, he may well have started to brush against some answers.

The Brood (1979) was Cronenberg’s first film with ‘name’ actors—starring Oliver Reed and Samantha Eggar. Reed plays Dr Hal Raglan, a maverick therapist who has set up a retreat to practice the controversial technique he has developed, known as Psychoplasmics. It is here, at The Soma Institute, that the film begins.

We are immediately plunged into a dark auditorium, where Raglan is giving a demonstration with a male patient. Psychoplasmics appears to be a rough parody or charicature of many of the alternative body-therapies of the seventies. Here, the patient is taunted and humiliated by Raglan, who plays the role of the dominant father, persuading him that he would have been better off as a girl—his weakness would then be more ‘acceptable’.5 The patient resists this suggestion fiercely, and as his anger wells up, Raglan encourages him. "Show me your anger!" he shouts, and the patient removes his top to reveal his torso—which has developed strange scarlet boils. With a mixture of defiance and frustration, the patient cries, "This is me, daddy!"

In line with the real-life therapies it apes, Psychoplasmics proposes that bodily dysfunctions give physical form to emotional dysfunctions—a hypothesis amplified here under the cinematic lens into a quite immediate process. This concept is neatly expressed in the title of Raglan’s book, The Shape of Rage.6 And this, in turn can be seen as a reflection of Cronenberg’s greatest contribution to cinematic expression, its visual grammar. In exploring and revealing hidden anxieties and abstracted conflicts, he has utilized the "gloop" (his word) of prosthetic special effects to give visual form to these mental phenomena. The basic model for nearly all Cronenberg’s films is to turn a violently alienated individual inside-out, to externalize their internal dynamics for the audience’s inspection—in the same way that illness, in the psychosomatic model, brings repressed conflicts to the attention of the individual.

Videodrome (1982) is probably Cronenberg’s most complex and provocative film, in both form and content. It deals with a vast constellation of issues that infest the late twentieth century: mass media landscapes, censorship, the effect of technology on humanity, loss of stable identity, violent sexuality, mind control… All these themes are woven together in the film via the body-mind of one individual, Max Renn (James Woods).

Renn runs a small cable TV station, Channel 83, which specializes in softcore sex and hardcore violence. While looking to commission a new show, he is intrigued by the latest illicit interception made by Harlan, Channel 83′s satellite broadcast pirate. Renn watches a short scene from a show called ‘Videodrome’. We see a rust-red chamber, lined with electrified clay, in which naked women are beaten and tortured by men clad in enveloping black uniforms. No plot, no dialogue, no characters, just "torture, murder, mutilation". Max tries to track the show down, encountering an intricate maze of leads, and it is revealed that what he has seen is in fact a prototype of a new TV show to be broadcast in the near future by a large, sinister defence corporation, CONSEC. He had been shown pre-recorded tapes by CONSEC plant Harlan to expose him to a signal which is transmitted together with the televisual images. The violent imagery supposedly opens up neural receptors, allowing the signal itself to sink in, and to eventually induce a tumour (or new organ) to grow in the brain—which in turn triggers bizarre hallucinations. It is also revealed that this Videodrome signal was invented by an eccentric, McLuhanesque media prophet, Brian O’Blivion, who was killed by CONSEC—they intend to utilize his creation to facilitate extensive mind control over the population.

Max’s hallucinations begin with video cassettes turning fleshy, and imagined episodes of sadistic violence against women. Never a friend of the censors, Cronenberg is confusing expectations here by following the censors’ own ‘screen violence leads to real violence’ logic. But, as in reality, things are not quite so clear-cut. On viewing some Japanese porn intended for Channel 83, Max remarks, "There’s something too soft about it. I’m looking for something that’ll break through, y’know, something… tough." Thus, before he’s even aware of Videodrome, we can see his attraction to the violent, penetrative shades of sexuality. And later, when confronted by CONSEC head Barry Convex, he comes close to having his rationalizations about Videodrome undermined. "Why would anybody watch a scum show like Videodrome?" Convex asks, "Why did you watch it, Max?" "Business reasons," is Max’s glib answer. "Sure, sure," Convex smiles. "Why deny you get your kicks out of watching torture and murder?" Convex knows Max better than he knows himself. This is precisely how CONSEC was able to lure him into being exposed to the signal, placing him under their control and giving them access to his TV station for the broadcast of Videodrome.

Then there is Masha, an ageing woman who commissions shows for Max. She can also sense Max’s hidden desires. She asks him what kind of TV show he would produce, given the chance, "for the subterranean [read: unconscious] market. Would you do… Videodrome?" Cut immediately to a scene between Max and Nikki Brand, a radio personality with a strong and guiltless penchant for scarification and masochism. Here, after Renn has frantically tried to persuade her not to ‘audition’ for Videodrome, she takes a cigarette and burns her breast.7 Previously, we have seen Max pierce her ear during sex. Nikki’s role in the film, then, is to initiate Max into the expression of his sadistic impulses.8

But the relationship is never allowed to settle into an easily categorized top/bottom, male/female one. And it is here where the role of the body becomes paramount in the revelation of Max’s unconscious dynamics. The first body-image hallucination that Max experiences involved his stomach opening up into a throbbing vaginal slit. In a startlingly literal scene of self-penetration (=self-knowledge?), he forces his handgun into his stomach, which then, inexplicably, closes up, leaving Max to search vainly for the gun. It is this slit which provides CONSEC with their control over Max. Fleshy video cassettes are inserted into his slit to ‘play’ a programme (or program) on his psychic video (or biocomputer). So Max’s body has become the site where his unacknowledged receptivity has manifested, with a vengeance. Aleister Crowley once wrote, "The act of repressing has the effect of exciting."9 Max’s repression of his passive receptivity (which seems to be more insidious than the repression of his sadistic aggression) leads to this receptive aspect emerging even more strongly? allowing CONSEC to control him with relative ease. But categories are mixed up again when Harlan tries to insert a cassette, only to have his hand ‘bitten off’ by Max’s slit. Vagina Dentata is evoked as Max (with help from O’Blivion’s daughter) turns his apparently receptive organ into a tool of assertion.

It may be time to pause here, and return to alternative therapeutic theories. In his many books on his clinical discoveries, Arnold Mindell has described his concept of the ‘dreambody’. He envisages this aspect of humans as a very fluid and pervasive version of the standard unconscious. It manifests in dreams, hallucinations and fantasies, as well as in bodily symptoms—the two areas are seen as opposite poles on the continuum of the dreambody. Mindell’s theories, developed through extensive work with ordinary patients in therapy, psychotics and the terminally ill, suggest that bodily symptoms reflect processes in the psyche which are trying to manifest. These processes are often natural developments in the individual’s evolution, stifled by various repressive mechanisms. His basic method for therapy involves ‘amplifying’ the symptoms (analogous to Jungian amplification of dream symbols) until their full intensity and meaning is experienced. Evading both Sontag’s criticism of models of illness that seem to blame the patient, as well as avoiding any absolutist mind/body split, he states: "I don’t believe that a person actually creates disease, but that his soul is expressing an important message to him through the disease."10 There is still a duality here—that of the individual ego and the unconscious, or the ‘soul’. I don’t think that many (except perhaps radical Taoists or Buddhists) will deny that this split exists; my main point is that it negates, through re-modelling, any absolute mind/matter division. Many consciousness researchers have realized that the ego/unconscious split is an imposition of our culture, and has been bridged in the past—and may well be bridged in the future, with the creative use of the many techniques of psychic integration we have at our disposal. What is important for now, though, is to recognise that the body, diseased or not, can be seen as a reflection of the unconscious—the regions of the soul, or Self, that the ego is removed from. Antero Alli describes this nicely: "The physical body is the visible manifestation of the so-called Subconscious Mind. The body is the fingerprint of the soul, a Rorschach of the Self. Nothing can be hidden. The body communicates it all."11 These last two sentences may be the motto of Cronenberg’s work—the unconscious is never as ‘un-conscious’ as we like to think.

I’d also like to briefly look at another objection to psychosomatic theory—that this view doesn’t acknowledge the effect of the external environment on a person. In fact, in all but its most extreme versions, the philosophy I’m describing here has plenty of room for this side of the equation. In his vision of a utopian state, where medical science is entirely balanced, Mindell sees a world where a doctor will sometimes prescribe drugs, sometimes operate, sometimes work on body processes, sometimes bring the whole family in for therapy. And sometimes, "the doctor might say, ‘My dear man, go home, and wait and see what happens. Your problems are coming from planetary disturbance, and there is no sense in taking your problems personally. Wait until the city government makes certain changes. Write them your dreams now."12 Given the cultural milieu of Max Renn’s world, this may be a valid way of looking at his body mutations. Indeed, in his essay on media, identity and modern sci-fi, Scott Bukatman sees the body, in Cronenberg’s films, "as the overdetermined site for the expression of profound social anxiety. The subject of the Cronenberg film is hardly human action: it is instead … the structures of external power and control to which the individual (in body and soul) is subjected." Though valid, for me this is also too one-sided. Far better to view ourselves in terms of a continuum, a focused point in an organism-environment field, in the words of Alan Watts.13 Alternatively, in Mindell’s process terminology, "The inner world and outer world dreambodies are two-way streets, and it’s impossible to place blame, for we all contribute to the body as a whole. Our dreambody is part of the entire world’s dreambody, yet the world’s dreambody is also found within us."14

To return to the film itself, we can now discern a process of psychic integration, of sorts. In the final scene, Max ends up in a derelict boat—a ‘condemned vessel’. Inside, he is informed by Nikki, or at least her televisual image (if there is any difference), that it is time for him to let his body die. His present physical form, like the boat, has outlived its usefulness. He is shown himself committing suicide on the TV—placing a gun to his temple, saying "Long live the New Flesh," and firing. The screen explodes and spews out guts and intestines. Max proceeds to carry out his suicide, and the blast of the shot echoes over a blank black screen before the credits roll.

It is unfortunate that the intended ending never made it into the final cut—not due to censorship, but to inadequate gloop.15 The original script called for a scene following Max’s apparent suicide, where Max, Nikki, and Bianca O’Blivion meet in the Videodrome chamber and engage in a polysexual union, each producing new mutated sex organs, Nikki and Bianca developing cocks to match Max’s slit, all of them physically melting into one another. The New Flesh, the New Self. The Videodrome chamber, previously the site of Max’s fantasies of violence and torture, is transformed through (ego?) death into a place for a more creative, viscerally psychedelic existence—boundary dissolution and mind manifestation in the flesh. The womb connotations of the chamber were quite consciously wrought—"Freudian rebirth imagery, pure and simple."16 The dark orange/red colour of the chamber and the rusting boat Max finds himself in blend and evoke both decay and bloody birth. Note also Nikki’s advice to Max to "go all the way through". However, Cronenberg thought the scene may not have had the intended effect, that the mutated sex organ prosthetics may have been laughable.

As it is, we are left with a taste of the tragic finality that was to characterize his films’ conclusions throughout the eighties.

It is fitting that Cronenberg’s last overt ‘disease movie’ (to date) brushes closest to the roots of the quest for meaning in bodily illness. In The Fly (1986), Jeff Goldblum plays Seth Brundle, a lonely, obsessive scientist who has virtually perfected the world’s first teleportation system. There is one glaring fault—it cannot teleport live, organic matter. A baboon ends up being turned inside-out by the process. "I must not know enough about the flesh myself," says Brundle after the disastrous experiment. "I’m gonna have to learn." His first lesson occurs in bed with Veronica (Geena Davies). In post-coital play, Veronica pinches Brundle’s skin. "I wanna eat you up," she says. "That’s why old ladies pinch babies’ cheeks. It’s the flesh—it just makes you crazy." A flash of ‘Eureka!’ descends on Brundle, and he quickly realizes that he has to program that same ‘craziness’ for the flesh into his computer, so that it can cope with teleporting organic matter.

Another baboon is put through, this time successfully, and they agree to wait for tests on the animal to be performed before a human goes through. But Brundle gets drunk and jealous one night, believing Veronica to be with her ex, and teleports. He fails to notice a housefly in the telepod with him—the computer gets confused, and decides to splice the two genetic patterns together. Brundle emerges, apparently invigorated; but deep within him are insectile DNA patterns waiting to erupt.

Now, neuroscientists, psychonauts and tribal cultures alike know that we’ve already got some animals inside us. Evolution has built up layers of brain tissue, so that the human brain can be seen as being composed of an old reptilian brain, an overlaying mammalian brain, and the most recent and explosive development, the uniquely human neocortex. It seems that this neocortex developed so rapidly that it failed to fully integrate with the older animal brain sections, leaving a neural discrepancy that has been held by some to be responsible for humanity’s notorious inhumanity.17 And yet techniques for forcing integration of these layers have existed for many thousands of years. Frequently, researchers have come to the conclusion that the copious animal mythologies of tribal cultures around the globe, and the many pagan human/animal hybrid deities, represent an ancient awareness of our animal inheritance. And perhaps the most direct method of contacting and integrating this inheritance lies in the shamanic practice of shape-shifting.

I believe that in The Fly the genetic splicing idea and its subsequent developments represent a science-fiction model of this ancient consciousness-expansion technique, which finds its modern equivalent in Austin Osman Spare’s ‘atavistic resurgence’ (Spare’s art contains numerous shape-shifting motifs). Using various trance techniques, a state of consciousness is induced which allows total identification with a certain animal. This may be used for achieving certain effects in the world, but often it functions as a method of psychic integration—balancing. It seems clear that Brundle’s experiences propel him through an unexpected and violent process analogous to many aspects of the traditional shaman’s vocation. Aside from the shape-shifting aspect, the film also contains the following correspondences:

• What the teleporter does is what the shaman goes through during the initiatory experience—deconstruction/reconstruction, or death and resurrection. Like a shaman, Brundle (initially) becomes ‘superhuman’ as a result of this experience, incredibly strong and energetic. He says, "I’m beginning to think that the sheer process of being taken apart atom by atom and being put back together again… Why, it’s like coffee being put through a filter—it’s somehow a purifying process."
• An almost certainly unintentional, but amusing hint sneaks into the script. After seeing Brundle go through the teleporter, a woman he’s just picked up gasps, "Are you some sort of magician?"
• The shamanic initiation is reversed in the film. Brundle gets taken apart and put back together, then experiences an ‘initiatory sickness’. "I seem to be stricken by a disease with a purpose," Brundle quips, as any proto-shaman might.

You may object that what eventually happens to Brundle puts across a very negative message about the bizarre, rapid cancer he develops as he becomes more and more fly-like. And yes, we should always bear in mind while making the above connections that Cronenberg’s films are essentially morality plays—they show where the wrong paths may lead, as warnings. I feel that the tragic conclusion of The Fly is due to two main factors. First, there is the law of repression = excitation. Brundle’s initial repression of his animal nature, his relationship to his flesh, seems to be too rapidly torn away. His moment of realization in bed with Veronica is merely a conceptual lesson. His animality is yet to be unleashed through the teleportation ‘accident’, and his body, the canvas of the unconscious, reveals not only what he has repressed, but how much he has repressed it. (In a way, Brundle doesn’t escape being turned inside-out like the first baboon.) Secondly, there is the incomprehension and revulsion of others, represented here by Veronica. "I know what the disease wants," says Brundle. "It wants to turn me into something else. That’s not too terrible, is it? Most people would give anything to be turned into something else." "Turned into what?" Veronica asks. Although understandable, to me this attitude seems to resonate with our culture’s general fear of change, especially when it involves disturbing aspects (which it usually does). Even though The Fly manages to echo the shamanic roots of the idea of transformative illness, the impulse remains strangled by Cronenberg’s acute awareness of the dangerous stagnancy of Western society.

I mentioned at the start of this essay that I believe Cronenberg may have recently been moving towards some answers to his cinematic explorations. His (probably) unconscious connection with ancient mind/body/disease awareness is one of these tentative ‘answers’. The other came as the result of his fusion with his literary idol William S. Burroughs, in his film version of the novel Naked Lunch.

I do not have space to delve deeply into the fascinating relationship between Cronenberg’s previous treatment of disease and the ‘sickness’ of junk addiction in this film.18 My main focus is on how Cronenberg utilized Burroughs’ ‘Talking Asshole’ routine, the story of how a guy teaches his asshole to talk—and eventually gets his mouth sealed by the mutinous asshole. Though the routine appears verbally in the film, its visual influence is most interesting. The insectile typewriter that Bill Lee uses, and is given instructions by, has a ‘talking asshole’ through which it speaks. On one level, it functions as an alien intelligence using Lee as an agent; on another level, it is Lee’s unconscious mind guiding his actions.

The Talking Asshole is Burroughs himself, in the sense that it’s the part of you that you don’t want to listen to, that’s saying things that are unspeakable, that are too basic, too true, too primordial and too uncivilized and tasteless to be listened to… but are there, nonetheless. So in a sense, the mind/asshole schism, the head/mouth versus the asshole, is maybe more of a Freudian schism—the asshole’s really the unconscious and the head’s the superego. More than it being a true mind/body schism, it’s a sort of mind/mind split, I think.

David Cronenberg, Naked Making Lunch

So—for the first time, Cronenberg arrives at the previously described re-modelling of the Cartesian split. The somewhat gentler tone of his recent work may indicate a level of resolution in his mind/body dilemmas; for his own work, the visceral extremities of Videodrome and The Fly may no longer be necessary as stimuli to achieve consciousness of the body. The body is no longer separate from the mind—it is merely the physical aspect of the mind’s hidden depths. The gulf to be bridged is no longer that unfathomable metaphysical abyss between spirit and matter—these are already united. What now needs to be achieved is the dissolution of culturally sanctioned ego boundaries that make us all such fragile and illusory islands in the ocean of Self.

Whether Cronenberg is able to achieve the cinematic New Flesh he fell short of in Videodrome, and whether our culture can develop respect for our bodies’ intimate relationship to the deepest levels of our Selves, remains to be seen.

Postscript: Crash!

When I was writing Crash I did a fair amount of research, particularly from this book called Crash Injuries, a medical textbook full of the most gruesome photographs as well as a lot of extraordinary material . . . Upon viewing the photographs in Crash Injuries taken immediately after violent car crashes—all one’s pity goes out to these tragically mutilated people. After all, any of us who drive a motorcar may end up like them 5 minutes after starting the engine . . . But at the same time, one cannot help one’s imagination being touched by these people who, if at enormous price, have nonetheless broken through the skin of reality and convention around us . . . and who have in a sense achieved—become—mythological beings in a way that is only attainable through these brutal and violent acts. One can transcend the self, sadly, in ways which are in themselves rather to be avoided—say, extreme illnesses, car crashes, extreme states of being.

J.G. Ballard, Re/Search #8/9

After the commonplaces of everyday life, with their muffled dramas, all my organic expertise for dealing with physical injury had long been blunted or forgotten. The crash was the only real experience I had been through for years. For the first time I was in physical confrontation with my own body…

James Ballard, Crash

Seeing Crash (after aeons of waiting for the media-hounded censors to stop sitting on it) made me think of two things I had written two years before in Psychoplasmics. My tentative conclusion that Cronenberg’s work may become "gentler in tone", avoiding the "visceral extremities" of earlier films, turns out to be—thankfully!—a bit premature to say the least. While there’s no sign of a return to gloop, Crash is undoubtedly one of his most intense and provocative films—and easily one of the most uniquely disturbing films ever to make it onto the ‘mainstream’ cinema circuit.

The second part that struck me was my use of the driver/car analogy to look at mind/body dualism. My assertion that, in dualist thinking, the body has as little to do with our self-identity as a car does, is both revealing and flawed.

Firstly, by equating ‘body’ with ‘car’, it opens up the connection between the body and the environment. After the demise of classical physics, awareness of our physical manifestation in this world can no longer be seen in terms of strict separation. Our bodies are ultimately no more self-contained and isolated, no more in need of abstracted ‘spirit’ or ‘mind’ to transcend boundaries, than atomic particles are.

The flaw in my analogy is my failure to recognize that, even in a dualist, logos-dominated and bios-denying culture, there will still be very strong bonds between self-identity and body/environment. The fact that the interdependence of these things is not consciously dealt with results in the dynamics of the relationship being driven by neurotic and destructive elements in our psyches. Eating disorders, fitness-fanaticism, brand-name fetishism, fashion, all these things are signs of how deeply body-image (body consciousness) and objects in the environment are embedded into our sense of our selves. Crash is the pathological conclusion of the neurotic body-environment relationship, and hints at the initiation of a new relationship. Just as Process-Oriented therapy seeks to intensify bodily symptoms to force their unconscious meaning into consciousness, Crash pushes our culture’s deviant eroticism and obsession with vehicles (bodies or cars) into a place where they may be transformed, and true body-environment consciousness—where no fixed divisions hold inside and outside apart—may be reborn. "The deformed body of the crippled young woman, like the deformed bodies of the crashed automobiles, revealed the possibilities of an entirely new sexuality. Vaughan had articulated my needs for some positive response to my crash." (James Ballard, Crash)

The experience of seeing the film made many threads of connection between car crashes and eroticism more tangible to me than reading the book did, however vivid and striking Ballard’s prose is. One instance was when several characters were watching a video of test crashes while rubbing each other’s crotches. The slow-motion footage of cars hurtling into each other, their windows exploding out as they shatter, brought to my mind Wilhelm Reich’s focus on the idea or feeling of bursting in his patients. Many patients felt the therapeutic attack on their bodily armour, their rigidified energy structures, as a threat to their self, their entire being. In conjunction with this element of the psyche, which identifies with the body’s armour, and fears its downfall, there are also elements that desire the dissolution of these muscular cramps, longing for the free flow of bio-energies. The patient simultaneously wishes for and dreads the very same thing. Through exploring one patient’s fantasies and experiences of armour-dissolution, Reich came to this conclusion: "The destruction of the armor, the penetration into the patient’s unconscious secrets, is unconsciously felt to be a process of being pricked open or being made to burst."19 He goes on to make clear the connections between armour-dissolution and orgasm, and between the breakdown of the sense of ‘self’ in orgasm and the dissolving of identity in the process of dying.

To the extent that we base our identity, our conception of our selves, on the tense stiffness that our bodies have developed in this body-negative society, a threat to this hardness will be sensed as a threat to us. Yet it will also be, somewhere, our greatest desire. The bursting of energetic tension in the body becomes our gravest fear, often associated with death and dying; and at the same time it will be an erotic, life-affirming fantasy. One need only note the tendency of most people to invest personal energy in their possessions, to bestow upon exterior objects (especially houses and cars) an underlying quality of "me-ness", a symbiosis with our personal essence, and the formula for the psychic logic behind Crash is self-evident—not the wild alien pathology many have seen it as.

The car has been the 20th century’s dominant ‘image of self’ provided by technology, though this dominance seems quite mute and tacit. Much has been written about the computer as a self-image (or more precisely as an image of the mind or brain), perhaps because the emergence of this technology coincided with the popularization of psychology. Cars, however, seem to have slipped into our everyday lives, and thus into the deepest levels of our psyches, without overt recognition of the extent to which we identify with them, or allow them to mediate our experience of the environment. Their hard metal shells make them perfect totems of the armoured body, the petrified self. Their mutilation, destruction and deformation in violent crashes is thus the perfect exterior analogy for the melting, bursting and dissolution of hardened bio-energies, and their release in explosive eroticism.

On the same weekend that I saw Crash there was a brilliant documentary on Channel 5(!) called Damage. It looked at the increasing number of women and girls who cut or burn themselves. This is often associated with eating disorders like bulimia, and like such disorders it’s more common in females than males (one psychiatrist astutely observed that men with similar impulses and motives often harm their bodies in less obvious ways like getting into fights and playing violent sports). Most of the girls and women interviewed had seriously scarred arms. They cut themselves whenever they felt a seething rage or unbearably intense depression overwhelming them. And most of them said that the feeling they got from the experience was one of utter release—some were blissfully nostalgic about the experiences. Of course, they suffered too. Self-recrimination for harming themselves, recrimination from loved ones for harming themselves, even medical staff scolding them for ‘trying to get attention’.

What was clear, though, was that these were not suicide attempts, not half-hearted flirtations with death with which to guilt-trip others. These people were (in my eyes) responding positively to a very negative situation. I admired some of these teenagers immensely, for staying true to their survival instincts amidst vast negative forces, however strange their method seemed. Yet the clinic featured in the programme, which specialized in self-harming, was "radical" for taking the step of not reprimanding patients for cutting themselves. For most people, all they see in someone cutting their skin is negativity and self-destructiveness. Perhaps if more people were educated about the long history of life-affirmative self-mutilation practices (the American Indian Sun Dance being a famous example), these people’s spontaneous rediscovery of them wouldn’t get caught up in the knotted tangles of guilt, shame and fear that our culture wraps around nearly every intense, direct confrontation with our bodies.

This isn’t to suggest that scarification is some cure-all for mental distress! For my purposes here, I’m just trying to get a slightly closer understanding of the obsession with wounds and scars that runs through Crash.

Our identification with the environment, at present, is usually unconscious, and often neurotic. Cars are often status symbols, emblems of power or (supposed) desirability. The characters in Crash are seeking to merge with their environment in a more urgent, erotic, bodily way. Aside from the immediate experience of physical mutilation (which, depending on whether you want it or not, can be liberating or catastrophic—sometimes both) these people are erotically fascinated by the way scars describe a history of the body’s interaction with the environment. This is conveyed explicitly in the novel. In the film, there are many scenes where people tenderly kiss and caress each other’s scars, fleshy relics of a time when the barrier between the body and the environment was literally shattered—a violent parallel to sexual union. For a while, violence destroyed the burden of being cut off from the outside, caged in a sealed shell of defences. So as well as being an exterior image of the armoured body, the car is also the place where these people try to merge with their environment. The perverse extremity of their chosen means to try and fuse with their surroundings is dictated by the extremity of their alienation from it (just as the natural sweet melting of bodily tension may evolve into a violent sensation of explosion in the chronically tense). The sad fact that their environment is overwhelmed by these metal boxes is also a factor.

A scar is at the centre of an astounding scene where Ballard fucks Gabrielle, a paraplegic crash victim. Instead of taking the usual route, he becomes transfixed by a huge gash in her thigh, and enters her here. It’s astounding in its sheer perversity, and in the fact that it wasn’t cut out; but it’s also the first time, I think, that there has been a literal equation of vagina and wound in a film (beyond degrading verbal remarks, and that slightly less obvious scene in Videodrome). For the Freudian, this equation is due to castration anxiety: boy sees that women have no cock, assumes it’s been hacked off, and fears the worst for himself. Many books have been written about horror films, particularly ‘slasher’ films like Halloween, where cuts are seen in this symbolic light.

A more solidly grounded link in the vagina/wound equation is menstruation. Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove look at a few horror films as ‘fear of menstrual power’ films in their excellent book The Wise Wound. Whichever side you take, the dream-logic association of female genitalia and bleeding wounds seems to be one of the roots of the fear, excitement and attraction generated by bodily mutilation in horror films. The literal demonstration of this equation in a film, and the fact that erotic liberation and pleasure results from this odd union, is quite something. Cronenberg has already defined his own sub-genre within horror. With Crash, he makes explicit something that only psychoanalysts could dig out of other horror films, and transcends the genre completely.

As a final note, I should say that I agree with the censors on one point: Crash will make you commit irresponsible acts! As a direct result of seeing it (no, I didn’t go and cause a pile-up) I did something I had had the impulse to do many times before, but had kept in the ‘Er… Not Yet’ box in my mind. I went up on to a very beautiful, but very spooky moor near Leeds, and spent the night alone in the open. I experienced a lot of fear, but pushed through it and experienced a glorious sunrise as I chanted over a stone, soaking in the light and five minutes of rain that created a beautiful rainbow behind me.

If I had to pin it down, I would say the scene that inspired me most was where Ballard, Catherine and Vaughan encounter a car crash site. The whole sequence creates an utterly bizarre and compelling sensation that mixes fear, revulsion, excitement and fascination in a very powerful way. Our society’s secret morbidity is brought to the surface by encounters with crashes—truckers have a name for people who slow down on motorways to look at an accident on the other carriageway, ‘rubber-neckers’. This scene pushes that morbidity into the open, and transforms it into a strangely magical feeling of boundary-crossing. It may seem odd that I was inspired to spend a night on a moor by seeing some people hang out at a car crash. I would call it an imaginative response. And this is essentially what Crash is about—reacting creatively to extreme or negative situations. That it even shows signs of catalyzing the capacity for imaginative response in its audience makes it almost unique in cinemas today.

Footnotes

1. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, p.46 [back to text]
2. See ‘Individual as Man/World’ and The Book by Alan Watts for perhaps the most rational and accessible discussions of these issues. Describing Behaviourism’s surprising relationship with Mahayana Buddhism, he notes that " . . . the universe is a harmonious system which has no governor, . . . it is an integrated organism but nobody is in charge of it. [The] corollary is that everyone and everything is the prime mover." [back to text]
3. Chris Rodley (ed.), Cronenberg on Cronenberg, p.79 [back to text]
4. ibid., p.xxv [back to text]
5. The recurring polarities of weak/strong, female/male have been the focus for relentless feminist criticism of Cronenberg’s work. Most of this criticism merely reveals the simple-mindedness of the critics themselves. The director consistently portrays these polarities as intertwined, shifting continuums; his aggressive male leads usually turn out to be weak in their lack of self-knowledge, and seemingly victimized female characters are often the strongest in terms of knowing their own desires. As the refreshingly perceptive Carol J. Clover has noted in her book Men, Women & Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, "…what filmmakers seem to know better then film critics is that gender is less a wall than a permeable membrane." [back to text]
6. Also, the ‘plasma’ of Psychoplasmics comes from the Latin meaning ‘form’ and the Greek meaning ‘shape’. Interestingly, the word ‘psychedelic’ is nearly a synonym of psychoplasmics—it literally means ‘mind-manifesting’. [back to text]
7. This shot was originally censored. The impact of the film, in fact one of its central themes, is hopelessly distorted by this, and other cuts. [back to text]
8. The casting of Debbie Harry as Nikki Brand has interesting resonances. As lead singer of Blondie, she was often criticized for using her femininity and sexuality—visually, she fitted the role of blonde rock bimbo, but her attitude as lead singer undermined the stereotype. [back to text]
9. Aleister Crowley, Magick [back to text]
10. Arnold Mindell, Working with the Dreaming Body, p.13 [back to text]
11. Antero Alli, Angel Tech: A Modern Shaman’s Guide to Reality Selection, p.38 [back to text]
12. ibid., p.78 [back to text]
13. See Leary, Metzner & Weil (eds), The Psychedelic Reader, pp.47-57, and Alan Watts, The Book [back to text]
14. Mindell, p.79 [back to text]
15. See Rodley, p.97 [back to text]
16. ibid., p.97 [back to text]
17. See Janus: A Summing Up by Arthur Koestler [back to text]
18. Maybe I can just mention another shamanic correspondence. When Lee’s typewriter is destroyed, Kiki takes him to get it repaired, asking if fixing the typewriter will also fix his life. Lee is led to a blacksmith’s, where the pieces of the typewriter are slung into a furnace, and re-forged into a Mugwriter – the head of a Mugwump. This represents a new stage in the evolution of Lee’s ‘assignment’ in Interzone; and it resonates clearly with the blacksmith frequently encountered in shamanic underworld journeys, where the shaman is ripped apart and then re-forged. [back to text]
19. Character Analysis, p.334 [back to text]

Bibliography

• Cronenberg on Cronenberg, edited by Chris Rodley
• ‘The Wrong Body’ by Amy Taubin & ‘Interview with David Cronenberg’ by Mark Kermode, in Sight & Sound, March 1992
• Exterminate All Rational Thought, edited by Damon Wise (magazine accompanying Cronenberg/Burroughs season at the Scala Cinema, King’s Cross, London, 1992)
• Everything is Permitted: The Making of Naked Lunch, edited by Ira Silverberg
• Illness as Metaphor, by Susan Sontag
• Working with the Dreaming Body, by Arnold Mindell
• Angel Tech: A Modern Shaman’s Guide to Reality Selection, by Antero Alli
• ‘Who Programs You? The Science Fiction of the Spectacle’ by Scott Bukatman, in Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema, edited by Annette Kuhn
• ‘The Individual as Man/World’ by Alan Watts, in The Psychedelic Reader, edited by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner and Gunter M. Weil
• Echoes From The Void, by Nevill Drury
• Naked Making Lunch (documentary), directed by Chris Rodley
• Crash by J.G. Ballard
• Re/Search #8/9: J.G. Ballard, edited by V. Vale & Andrea Juno
• Character Analysis by Wilhelm Reich
• The Wise Wound by Penelope Shuttle & Peter Redgrove