TH1. Barker Spoke

Although, as has already been intimated, the doctrine commands a venerable prehistory, it was Daniel Charles Barker (1952–) who first explicitly coined the term ‘Spinal Catastrophism’ in 1992.1 Professor of Anorganic Semiotics at MVU from the early 1990s until the millennium,2 post-Y2K Barker’s whereabouts are unknown (though unlikely rumours circulate of a voluntary exile on an island in the Sunda Strait). Barker’s corpus circulates as samizdat: redactions are common, some papers have been suppressed, and much of it has simply disappeared, so that what follows can only be a tentative reconstruction of the course of Barker’s ideas based on fragments, secondary reports, and passing allusions.

What is biographically important here is how Barker, from his initial work in future-facing initiatives including NASA and SETI, eventually became obsessed with what is oldest and most cryptic in nature. What led him down this twisted route from most distant future into deepest past? Barker was only the most recent to tread this path, which has exerted an apparently irresistible pull on a series of very intelligent minds—yet it was to have disastrous consequences for his career and indeed his sanity.

To the extent that one can speak of a ‘Barker Affair’ to rival the ‘Velikovsky Affair’, we must note that the former was not as noisily public as the latter, although it proved no less vituperative within certain scientific circles.3 Although Velikovsky does not venture into the kind of speculative osseology that led Barker to understand lumbar pain as a resonance of cosmic dysphoria, what the two rogue scientists have had in common is their convicted dedication to neocatastrophism—and here Velikovsky was undoubtedly an influence upon Barker.

It is well known that early geoscience was split between the catastrophists and the uniformitarians (a debate that had spilled over from the earlier one between plutonism and neptunism). The catastrophists held that earth history is made up of a series of causally disconnected epochs separated by planet-shaking cataclysms and unexplainable ruptures of natural law (a Humean nightmare world, in other words).4 The uniformitarians, contrarily, held that only the processes observable today are responsible for shaping the planet (in other words, the types of causal connection encountered on Earth are ironclad, unchanging, and unbroken—and so too, therefore, are our empirical retroductions). The debate eventually resolved into the long-standing ascendency of uniformitarianism, or steady-state theories, which stretch back to the unreadable Scottish enlightenment writings of James Hutton and down to the elegant Victorian geotheory of Charles Lyell.5 This ‘resolution’ was due, in no small part, to Lyell’s rhetorical gloss and to his ‘self-serving rewrite’ of the genesis of the field. By the time Immanuel Velikovsky (1895–1979) divulged his catastrophist speculations in the 1950s (discussed in more detail below, section TH7), the very mention of ‘catastrophism’ within geoscience and cosmology was still abhorred. Although it exists in different formulations of varying scope, uniformitarianism broadly states that only causes presently operative can be rallied in our explanations of the past. In other words, it is the principle that what is currently actual exhausts what is possible throughout terrestrial chronology. Following what Lyell had long ago installed as ‘common sense’, the accepted story (often relayed by textbook hagiographies) taught that uniformitarianism had made geology a science by shearing it of supernatural explanatory cruxes (the naturally unaccountable miracles and calamities of prior theories of the earth were ejected because they could not be observed).6 This, however, effectively made ‘catastrophes’ (i.e. unprecedented, unobservable, or singular events—both supernatural and natural) forbidden in theorizations concerning the unobserved past. This is to say, due to stubborn empiricist anxieties about the requirements for legitimizing geohistory as a sensible and sense-based science, catastrophes have long been tarred with the brush of the unscientific. Nonetheless, uniformitarianism was largely overturned in 1980, when the father-son Alvarez team found convincing evidence of a dinosaur-killing bolide impact.7 Tracing iridium deposits at the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) boundary, the team also located a crater, of identical age, beneath Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula (the presence of iridium, evidencing an extraterrestrial source, would remain important for Barker’s own theories.8 Swift on the heels of this Alvarez hypothesis for the K-Pg extinction event, Raup and Sepokoski further proposed that such impactor events are themselves explained by an undetected ‘Nemesis star’, in twin orbit with our own, dragging thousands of deadly comets from the Oort cloud into our stellar vicinity within periodic time-windows of ~26 million years.9 In other words, the old view of our cosmic environs as insulated and stable was replaced, almost overnight, with a new picture of the Solar System as dynamically open and punctuated by paroxysm10—Velikovsky vindicated, in spirit if not in the details. It was this consolidation of neocatastrophism that provided the crucial backdrop for Barker’s work during the 1980s and 1990s (though it would not protect him from censure).11

Trained in cryptography and information science at MIT, Barker was recruited by NASA in the 1980s and was hired almost immediately by SETI, his cryptographic background recommending him, specifically, for METI (Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligences) and SETA (Search for Extraterrestrial Artefacts).12 The major difference between naturally occurring and intelligently originating interstellar activity, as Barker wrote, is that only the latter ‘can decide to camouflage itself’.13

(As already indicated, dissimulation is one of the myriad options afforded as soon as one owns a simulation—cerebrospinal or otherwise—of oneself.)14 Tasked with working out ‘how to discriminate—in principle—between intelligent communication and complex pattern derived from nonintelligent sources’,15 Barker gravitated towards the newly emerging SETA subdisciplines of exo-archaeology and astro-palaeontology (given the gargantuan size of the relevant time scales, it was felt that deceased ETIs may outnumber extant ones, and that in consequence ‘first detection’ may not involve a living species but, rather, its relics and hoary monuments).16

This change in direction set him upon an increasingly heterodox path. Originally subscribing to Wickramasinghe and Hoyle’s 1979 hypothesis that the Cambrian explosion was triggered by cometary infall of extraterrestrial retroviruses and the attendant mutagenesis of protozoic biota, Barker’s work on SETA eventually led him to Orgel and Crick’s ‘Directed Panspermia’ thesis—the idea that life on Earth may have been deliberately seeded by alien intelligences—and from there to the conclusion, crucial for everything that followed, that we ourselves are the primary archaeological site.17

This conviction was partly fuelled by the prior work of scientists such as Yokoo and Oshima, who had, in 1979, performed experiments attempting to prove the artificiality of the genome of the bacteriophage φC174 (a virus which attacks E. Coli in the human colon) by detecting intentional messages or glyphs hidden within its nucleotide sequence.18 If the Directed Panspermia hypothesis was correct, they reflected, then signs of intentionality may have been encrypted within terrestrial DNA as a kind of ‘signature’.19 The genome itself thus became a potential exo-artefact. Life as a dig-site, the body a matter for archaeo-forensic analysis. Is our daily replication the signal-trace of a memory that does not at all belong to us? Increasingly, such questions began to grip Barker, and would very soon become unhealthy obsessions.

Indeed, in 1986, whilst Barker was still working under NASA, Hiroshi Nakamura had attempted to find an extraterrestrial star-map encoded in the genome of SV40 (Simian Virus 40). Was biology just another form of media, DNA a signal propagated across the wounded galaxies? Inevitably attracted to the idea that interstellar palaeontology could become an in vivo pursuit, Barker set to work on his own innovative researches in the area. (The human genome had yet to be sequenced, but, among other things, Barker predicted that the ACVR1 gene, on chromosome 2, was a promising site for investigating potential genomic ciphers.)20 Barker gradually became convinced that the high ‘redundancy’ of our genome (i.e. roughly >98% of it appears to be non-coding) was only an artefact of temporal positionality: in an example of ‘clandestine evolution’ extending far beyond our biosphere, that which was now encrypted and unused could potentially later decrypt and effloresce (memories, indeed, tend to exert an operant pull upon posterity’s course in the sense that to have a past is to have a future continually canalized by that past).21 In this sense, futurity could possibly be anticipated as a function of the ancient mnemes to which we are somatic host.22 ‘Redundancy’ was simply a question of being too early.23

Moving and conversing within SETI circles, it was inevitable that Barker would eventually encounter the idiosyncratic ideas of Aristides Acheropoulos and his fascinating responses to the Fermi Paradox.24 Acheropoulos’s lifework, entitled The New Cosmogony, had wallowed in obscurity until it was championed by the influential astrophysicist Professor Alfred Testa in the 1970s (the Polish futurologist Stanisław Lem was also a long-time supporter of Acheropoulosan doctrine).25 In The New Cosmogony, Acheropoulos answered the core Fermi-question, ‘Where are all the astroengineering feats of ancient super-civilizations?’ by announcing that they are already here. In fact, they are strictly everywhere. The whole observable universe just is the prime artefact.26 Giga-anni old civilizations, Acheropoulos argued, would reach (and, given the age and size of the universe, already had reached) a level of technical mastery such that they would become capable not only of great feats of astroengineering, but also of manipulating physical law itself; consequently, what we perceive as ‘physics’ is nothing but the outcome of an ongoing Cosmic Game played by interacting Kardashev Type-Ω intellects,27 with each move or play constituting a nomological edit. (A game of giving and asking for cosmological constants: the universe as a cultivated product of Collective Reason.) As Testa summarized, ‘[i]f one considers “artificial” to be that which is shaped by an active Intelligence, then the entire Universe that surrounds us is already artificial’:

So audacious a statement evokes an immediate protest: surely we know what ‘artificial’ things look like, things that are produced by an Intelligence engaged in instrumental activity! Where, then, are the spacecraft, where the Moloch-machines, where—in short—the titanic technologies of these beings who are supposed to surround us and constitute the starry firmament? But this is a mistake caused by the inertia of the mind, since instrumental technologies are required only—says Acheropoulos—by a civilization still in the embryonic stage, like Earth’s. A billion-year-old civilization employs none. Its tools are what we call the Laws of Nature. Physics itself is the ‘machine’ of such civilizations!28

Given that intellect tends towards environmental manipulation, then, any sufficiently advanced intelligence becomes entirely indistinguishable from its own environment.29 ‘Brains’ the size of gas giants, neutron stars, or even entire globular clusters would be only the very beginning of this tendency.30 Could all observable structure, then, be some astronomically distributed and rarefied ‘neurosystem’, some Dysonian Organprojektion,31 physics itself the externalized ‘nervous array’ of computational behemoths and their ongoing interaction,32 dust clouds, black holes, nebulae, galaxies, clusters, superclusters, etc., all therefore memory-traces of onward-rolling cogitation, cosmological constants and physical laws the ‘reflex-arcs’ of a ‘metagalactically plural Reason’…?33 One recalls Newton’s proclamation that space is the sensorium of God; could we be living, literally, inside the sensorium of ET?34

With a nod to Vernadskii, Acheropoulos spoke of the ‘psychozoiciziation’ of the entire universe (through the ‘cosmometamorphic power’ of this ‘Game of Intelligences’).35 His vision was that the constraints and syntaxes of such a metagalactic game would concretize, emergently and without competition or antagonism, from the dialogic interactions of the Exalted Players—always open to revision and restructuring. (This has interesting knock-on effects for the veracity of ‘cosmic memory’ insofar as, within such a schema, memory is never not the parent of itself, so to speak.)36 Acheropoulosian science thus

sees the Universe as a palimpsest of Games, Games endowed with a memory reaching beyond the memory of any one Player. This memory is the harmony of the Laws of Nature, which hold the Universe in a homogeneity of motion. We look upon the Universum, then, as upon a field of multibillion-year labours, stratified one on the other over the aeons, tending to goals of which only the closest and most minute fragments are fragmentarily perceptible to us’.37

Acheropoulosian ideas proved revelatory for Barker, yet he would revolt against them, producing his own drastically inverted alternative: ‘Does one need a direction—panspermic or demiurgic—in order to have mnemonic persistence?’, he queried.38 What we perceive as cosmological constants could just as well be neurotic stereotypies as ludic deliberations. What if physics is sedimented catatonia rather than petrified play? And memory need not be of intelligent origin: physics may indeed be a sedimented mnemeplex, but a pile of garbage is as much a ‘chronicle’ as a score-sheet; indeed, most memories aren’t designed (let alone pleasantly ordered); whatever their medium, they don’t have to be ‘directed’ in order to perpetuate and persist. All of these insubordinate reservations were eventually to lead Barker to his mature hypothesis:

To cut a long story short, it became increasingly obvious to me that although they [NASA] said that were hunting for intelligence, what they were really seeking was organization. The whole program was fundamentally misguided.

As Barker recollects, at this point he ‘veered off the organizational model’.39 ‘[E]verything productive in signals analysis’, he now averred, stems from the ‘vigorous repudiation of hermeneutics’ in ‘processing sign-systems’.40 Turning his back on his prior commitment to Directed Panspermia, owing to its ‘residuum of intentionality’,41 and true to his information-theoretic background, Barker flipped the Acheropoulosian proposal on its head: It is not that all galactic noise is, in fact, intentional organization; rather, all galactic organization is the catatonic suppression of aboriginal noise.

What for Acheropoulos is an exalted metagalactic game, for Barker is a bad memory. The palimpsest of physics isn’t some anciently externalized neurosystem; rather, the outermost antiquities of the cosmos can be read in encrypted form in our own neural axis. In other words, Barker, for his own ‘cosmogony’, turned away from ludics and toward schizotypy. (He had been long interested in such topics, ever since becoming involved, in the 1980s, in early NASA investigations into the psychiatric effects of ‘exposure to space’, or what is now called ‘space-brain’.)42

Pursuing SETI/SETA inevitably leads one to question the very distinction between intelligence and environs—and to do so on the scale of the very grandest of cosmographic catchments—and Barker simply careened in the opposite direction to Acheropoulos. ‘Suborganizational pattern is where things really happen’: rather than background noise being revealed as intelligently structured signal, instead signal is revealed to be noise suffering from a prolonged (yet ultimately unsustainable) self-delusion that comes to call itself ‘structure’. Such ‘delusion’, of course, is conceptualized along the lines of an auto-repressive tendency and is inwardly registered as trauma.43 Barker’s project of genomic exo-archaeology was still concerned with the unearthing of a message—it was just that the message no longer belonged to anyone, and was a relay of torment rather than exaltation.44 Thus the ‘Geocosmic Theory of Trauma’ began its life as an response to Acheropoulos’s ‘New Cosmogony’, modulated through Barker’s unique formulation of the subpersonal synonymy of structuration and traumatics.

‘Organisation is suppression’—this was the Barkerian Axiom, its first model being that of planetary accretion via magma-ocean solidification, producing ‘impersonal trauma’ as ‘anorganic memory’ via the interment of ‘the molten core [within] a crustal shell’. Baryspheric immurement: the first inward collapse or generation of a gradient and hence also of ‘proto-inwardness’. Higher up, this selfsame traumatogenic ‘tension is continually expressed—partially frozen—in biological organization’ with ‘the peculiarly locked-up life-forms we tend to see as typical’.45

Such a stance triggered a generalized diagnostic of ‘terrestrial symptomaticity’, enabled by the Axiom. Reports on Barker’s activities from this period (at this point on ‘final warning’ from his NASA superiors) are particularly unreliable, his research projects recorded only in the anecdotal reports of ex-colleagues who evidently didn’t understand Barker’s methodology or the scope of his work. It is said, for example, that he became preoccupied with tracing a perfect continuity between the Nemesis Star’s elliptical outer orbit and the curvature of human lordosis, or that he began to search for topological similarities between the human cranial vault and the Boötes void.46 There is, he supposedly convinced himself, a direct geometric relationship between the mammal’s swollen calvarium and the concavity of the Chicxulub crater.47 Who, after all, couldn’t see the continuity between mass transfer convective flows, magmatic plume currents, ocean-floor fractionations and the conglomerated body-tics of human postural dynamics? Personality and schizotypy are, in the end, just a question of rheidity. The perturbations of personal experience (panic attacks, limited symptom attacks, etc.) could now be placed in contact with structure on the largest of scales (i.e. the galactic ‘Local Hole’). However, the question of correspondence was no simple one: ‘neuronic time is supple, episodic, and diagonalizing’, Barker insisted. He apparently argued that cosmological time itself was not homogenous or isotropic, but that supercluster complexes, galaxy walls, filaments and voids coarsened and distorted spacetime through backreaction: such chronological inhomogeneity or anisotropy, he claimed, likewise applied when mapping our bodies as clusters of relations within macroevolutionary morpho-space. ‘We cannot take time’s homogeneity for granted’, he averred. (As the largest structures add a ‘coarse grain’ or ‘viscosity’ to cosmic time, so too do certain morphological inheritances have an analogous distortive effect.) ‘Trauma is a body’, Barker announced. In its final form (or at least, the last we know of), this strange line of thought yielded what was to become the foremost twentieth-century formulation of Spinal Catastrophism:

For humans there is a particular crisis of bipedal erect posture to be processed. [This] took me back to the calamitous consequences of the Precambrian explosion, roughly five hundred million years ago. […] Obviously there are discrete quasi-coherent neuro-motor tic-flux patterns, whose incrementally rigidified stages are swimming, crawling, and (bipedal) walking. […] Erect posture and perpendicularization of the skull is a frozen calamity, associated with a long list of pathological consequences, amongst which should be included most of the human psychoneuroses.

The Toba Bottleneck, being comparatively recent, could be read off the cervical atlas; mnemonic residua of the Neoproterozoic Oxygenation Holocaust, however, would of course have to be located somewhere much further down the spinal levels, and more deeply encrypted.

By this point, NASA was finished with Barker. His office filling with endocasts and craniometric charts, colleagues later recounted that, instead of conducting signals and detections analysis, he was spending his waking hours retrofitting seismological imaging algorithms for the detection of ‘deep-brain vibrations and elasticities’, claiming that suprachiasmatic shear-waves encoded data relevant for predicting solar Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs).48 He was unceremoniously fired—an event he recalled as ‘messy’ owing to his high-level clearance—and his ideas were neatly, yet fiercely, ridiculed. Amid rumours of an orchestrated smear campaign, Barker quietly moved on to his position at MVU.