TH11. Chiropraxis, Tarzan Philosophers & Penis Poeticisms

If Bataille is correct then neither gigantic wars nor great leaps of economic progress are ruses of cunning reason; they are more like orgasmic releases of energetic tension. For writers that were witness to the horrors of the Great War, this would have seemed apt. A global trauma, its psychic shock waves rippled forth and attracted yet more minds to ponder upon the ever-tighter intertwining of the atavistic and the futuristic—a coupling that is central to Spinal Catastrophism.

Nearly a decade before Velikovsky propounded that the peripheral nerves are telepathic conductors, and that the lower region of the nervous system maintains a herd-like form of life more communitarian and less individualized, D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930), himself a dabbler in psychoanalysis, formulated a theory of ‘vertebral telepathy’. Proposing the existence of ‘two forms of consciousness’—‘mental and vertebral’—that are ‘mutually exclusive’, he asserted that the latter is ‘the true means of communication between the animals’ and, being strongest where the brain is less developed, it is naturally ‘most absolute in the cold fishes and serpents, reptiles’. For such organisms enjoy ‘perfect ganglia-communication’ with one another:

It is a complex interplay of vibrations from the big nerve-centres of the vertebral system in all the individuals of the flock, till click!—there is a unanimity. They have one mind. And this one-mindedness of the many-in-one will last while ever the peculiar pitch of vertebral nerve-vibrations continues unbroken through them all. […] It is a form of telepathy, like a radium-effluence, vibrating fear principally. It is a form of telepathy, like a radium-effluence, vibrating fear principally. Fear is the first of the actuating gods.1

(As Ballard, no stranger to the iguanid portions of the collective psyche, would remark: ‘most biological memories are unpleasant ones, echoes of danger and terror’—‘[n]othing endures so long as fear’.)2 The provocation for Lawrence’s ethnology of reptilian ‘vertebral telegraphy’ was his observation of a similar ‘herd instinct’ in human crowds. He attributed a preponderance of ‘pre-mental’ oscillations to great leaders—to history’s heroes and despots—explaining their neuro-seismic capacity to command the mob as the effect of emanating spinal vibrations:

This is what makes the magic of a leader like Napoleon—his power of sending out intense vibrations, messages to his men, without the exact intermediation of mental correspondence. […] It is the stupendous wits of brainless intelligence. A marvellous reversion to the pre-mental form of consciousness. […] In Caesar and Napoleon, the vertebral influence of power prevailed.

Stirred by demagoguery’s deep-spine vibratiuncles, we all slip into a communal reptile brain. (Worse than a ‘swinish multitude’, a crowd is a salamandrine one: together, we all know what it is to live and think like lizards.) This is how Lawrence explained ‘that strange phenomenon of revolution’ which pockmarks modern history. In particular, ‘the Russian and French revolutions’ could be accounted for as eruptions of spinal telepathy. Revolution is ‘a great eruption against the classes in authority’, Lawrence ventured, and a ‘passionate, mindless vengeance taken by the collective, vertebral psyche upon the authority of orthodox mind’. All revolt is spinal revolt, wherein the populous becomes lumbar energumen. ‘All great mass uprisings are really acts of the […] dynamic, vertebral consciousness in man bursting up and smashing through the fixed superimposed mental consciousness of mankind’:

The masses are always, strictly, non-mental. Their consciousness is preponderantly vertebral. And from time to time, as some great life-idea cools down and sets upon them like a cold crust of lava, the vertebral powers will work below the crust, apart from the mental consciousness, till they have come to such a heat of unison and unanimity, such a pitch of vibration that men are reduced to a great non-mental oneness as in the hot-blooded whales, and then, like whales which suddenly charged upon the ship which tortures them, so they burst upon the vessel of civilization.3

Hegel, characteristically, had imagined the Zeitgeist of massified history as an ‘old mole’, churning under the planetary mantle, ‘until grown strong in itself it bursts asunder the crust of the earth which divided it from the sun’4—world-spirit as subterrene. But rather than Hegel’s flaming nous and its return to solar identity, for Lawrence the masses and their oncoming waves of revolution now represent, instead, a stony serpent spine—revenant of ancient reptile mindlessness—torquing through the rock of ages.

Inversely, instead of characterizing revolution as downward lapse, the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) championed the skyward surge of our ‘upright gait’ (aufrechter Gang) as the source of all ‘rebellions’. Without uprightness, ‘there would be no uprisings’, he insisted:

The very word uprising means that one makes one’s way out of one’s horizontal, dejected, or kneeling position into an upright one.

Although Bloch, like Lawrence, saw modernity’s turbulent history as a function of the spine, then, he did not see its insurrections as a reversion to ichthyoid-reptilian modes but as confirmation of our steadfast standing above the circumspections of supine material relations. He eulogized bipedalism as the ‘moral orthopaedics of human dignity, as strengthening the backbone against humiliation, dependency, and subjugation’: in diametric opposition to the emancipatory squirming collapses of Reichian biotherapy, Bloch’s rigid standing becomes the very somatic basis of the Marxist-Promethean demand to transcend all bondages.5 Praxis is chiropraxis.

Accordingly, Bloch was revulsed by the myriad anti-modern reactions to modernism and their pronotropic tendency, their shared desire to revert back to the pronograde. (Barker, of course, would later diagnose the ‘contemporary trends’ that ‘attest to an attempted recovery of the icthyophidian- or flexomotile-spine’.)6 Where Reich saw this as a therapeutic solution to the problem of the modern, Bloch only saw dirty backwardness. Deftly connecting various contemporary strands of thought and their expressions of longing for the irresponsibility of supine life, Bloch saw this will to ‘archaic collective regression’ as a common thread running through psychoanalytical, primitivist, and vitalist schools, all characterized by an enthusiasm for ‘fleeing the present, hating the future, [and] searching for the primeval time’. He railed against all such ‘Tarzan philosophers’. For his part in this overall pronotropic trend and in particular his carnal championing of ‘the nocturnal moon in the flesh, the unconscious sun in the blood’, D.H. Lawrence earned from Bloch the title of ‘sentimental penis-poet’.7 (In his defence, Lawrence had, in his own psychoanalytical writings, celebrated upright posture whilst stressing the centrality of ‘the great ganglion of the spinal system’ in the early development of selfhood: the child, Lawrence claimed, individuates itself in opposition to the parent when, upon standing, it ‘stiffens its spine in the strength of its own private and separate, inviolable existence’; and, thereafter, in ‘the lumbar ganglion the unconscious now vibrates tremendously in the activity of sundering’.)8 Beyond the English writer’s penis-poeticisms, though, Bloch found the worst culprit of all in the school of psychoanalysis, where the analyst digs down to ‘the archaic traces of the mere memory of humanity’—down through ‘much older layers’—to the churning core of ‘impersonal, pandemonic libido’. This ‘mandate to strive from the light into the darkness’ is a ‘true night-tolerance’; a rejection of the burdens of upstanding accountability and public lights in knowing. (Of course, von Schubert, who had earlier coined the terminology of a ‘night-side of natural science’, also exerted a significant influence on Freud.) Bloch complains that the Freudian unconscious has been ‘excavated’, by Orphic practitioners like Ferenczi, ‘down to the primal memories of the first land animals’. But no analyst, for Bloch, is worse than ‘C.G. Jung’, that ‘fascistically frothing psychoanalyst’ who ‘generalized and archaized Freud’s unconscious right down the line’ and, correlatively, aims to drag ‘all too civilized and conscious man’ back—down through the threaded vortices of the spine—into ‘ancestral night’ and the ‘witch-crazes’ of the ‘Tertiary period’.

In this way, the libido in Jung opens up like a sack of undigested, atavistic secrets, or rather abracadabras, in fact this sack, in Jung’s own words, drags ‘an invisible dinosaur tail behind it; carefully separated, it becomes the saviour serpent of the mystery’ […] The anatomical location of this libido is the ancient sympathetic nerve, not the cerebro-spinal system.9

Bloch goes on to attack the vitalism of Henri Bergson along similar lines. The French philosopher had previously been a target of the woefully underappreciated Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957). Ever inveterate, often undemocratic, always venomous, Lewis, like Bloch, saw in philosophies of unconscious flow and blind creativity an anti-modernist revolt against the rigid, upstanding, angular, geometric and autarchic. In their place, such philosophies luxuriate in the glandular, eusocial, pulsional, endocrine, and voluptuous; a hostile takeover of the unconscious, raising up the liquidities of time over the austerities of space. Lewis’s 1927 Time and Western Man is a 600-page multifront assault on all such presumption. He casts aristocratic cephalate centrality against ‘time philosophy’ and its preconscious ‘insect communism’ of the decentralized spinal crowd. With characteristic acrimony, he writes:

Imagine your body an ant-hill: suppose that it is a mass of a million subordinate cells, each cell a small animal. […] We live a conscious and magnificent life of the ‘mind’ at the expense of this community. […] But in sympathy with the political movements to-day, the tendency of [philosophic] thought is to hand back to this vast community of cells this stolen, aristocratical monopoly of personality which we call the ‘mind’. ‘Consciousness’, it is said, is (contrary to what an egotistic mental aristocratism tells us) not at all necessary. We should get on just as well without it. On every hand some sort of unconscious life is recommended and heavily advertised, in place of the conscious life of will and intellect which humanly has been such a failure, and is such a poor thing compared to the life of ‘instinct’.

This regicide of the cephalon provokes ‘civil war’ in the body and soul:

Inside us also the crowds were pitted against the Individual, the Unconscious against the Conscious, the ‘emotional’ against the ‘intellectual’, the Many against the One. So it is that the Subject is not gently reasoned out of, but violently hounded from, every cell of the organism: until at last [it] plunges into the Unconscious, where Dr. Freud, like a sort of Mephistophelian Dr. Caligari, is waiting for [it].

This ‘triumph of the Unconscious’—and of the crowd— is properly a decerebration, a reversion to the salamandrine. ‘For the exercise of the Will (or of the Unconscious) no brain at all is required’, insofar as ‘[g]anglionic impulsion is just as good’:

For the Unconscious (or on the plane of the Will) the body is an egalitarian and self-sufficient commonwealth. Since in invertebrates the oesophageal ganglia take the place of the brain, we must assume that these suffice also for the act of will. In decapitated frogs the cerebellum and spinal cord supply the place of the cerebrum.

Thus, having ‘got the brain down into the ganglia, and made of the body a commonwealth of Unconscious “Wills”, we have taken the personality a step further on the road to destruction’, Lewis complains:

The personality of the animal, in this way decentralized, and characterized essentially by will, not ‘thought’, can be decomposed before our eyes.

This, then, is ‘the final extinction of such a redoubtable human myth as “the mind”’. In response, Lewis mourns Western man’s auto-decapitation.10 He sees this as an act of ‘tearing off and out of himself everything that reminded him of the hated symbols, “power”, “authority”, “superiority”, “divinity”, etc.’:

Turning his bloodshot eyes inward, as it were, one fine day, there he beheld, with a state of horror and rage, his own proper mind sitting in state, and lording it over the rest of his animal being—spurning his stomach, planting its heel upon his sex, taking the hard-work of the pumping heart as a matter of course. Also he saw it as a mind-with-a-past: and he noticed, with a grain of diabolical malice, that the mind was in the habit of conveniently forgetting this humble (animal) and criminal past, and of behaving as though such a thing had never existed. It did not take him long to take it down a peg or two in that respect! The ‘mind’ [was] soon squatting with a cross and snarling monkey, and scratching itself.11

Hypergenealogy aims at filthy superlation—the championing of theriophiliac oblivion—rather than right-minded or constructive suspicion. It aims to reduce Lewis’s ‘Western man’ to Swift’s excremental Yahoo.12 As Swift himself had quipped, centuries earlier, at the beginning of a time that would continually be made anew by the rolling regicides and revolutions thundering upward from the lower back:

We read of kings, who in a fright, Though on a throne, would fall to shite.13

Yet we remember that lucre is filthy, after all; so, presumably, the regal brain wouldn’t have far to fall. Regardless, Lewis angrily complained that, against the uprightness of the noble mammal and its cephalic monarchy, the trend of the times (exampled from Bergson to Lawrence, from Freud and Ferenczi to Jung) was instead toward the ‘swarming of insect life’ and its allegiance to ‘a rigid communistic plan’—less suited to the monarchic autarchies of the regal brain, and more to the parallel planning of the spinal reflex arcs—those neural pathways controlling our involuntary movements and jerks, which do not pass directly through the brain, and thus hint at a devolved and horizontalized vision of bodily function.

Writing just two years after Lewis’s invectives, the Irish crystallographer and futurologist J.D. Bernal (1901–1971), who was also an ardent communist, published his utopian vision of the socialist future. Prospecting an oncoming seizure of the means of genetic reproduction via promethean technoscience, Bernal noted that in ‘the alteration of himself man has a great deal further to go than in the alteration of his inorganic environment’. Humanity may have changed the entire surface of planet with noospheric aplomb, but it has not yet changed drastically itself. We must reengineer the spinal landscape, not just the earthly one. (Indeed, Bernal wrote of the need to reformat desire and the body, in tandem.) Nonetheless, taking Alsbergian ‘body-liberation’ to its most extreme, he saw that this seizure of the means of ‘growth and reproduction’ would lead to the secession of the cerebro-spinal system from the rest of the body—an enlightened decapitation. Reaching this conclusion, Bernal notes that modern technics have ‘rendered both the skeletal and metabolic functions of the body to a large extent useless’: the ‘limbs’ are now ‘mere parasites, demanding nine-tenths of the energy of the food and even a kind of blackmail in the exercise they need to prevent disease, while the bodily organs wear themselves out in supplying their requirements’. In direct tension with this drag of the evolutionary past into the technical present, Bernal points to the fact that

the increasing complexity of man’s existence, particularly the mental capacity required to deal with its mechanical and physical complications, gives rise to the need for a much more complex sensory and motor organization, and even more fundamentally for a better organized cerebral mechanism. Sooner or later the useless parts of the body must be given modern functions or dispensed with altogether….

Insofar as morphology and anatomy is itself a type of retention or biological memory, this is the final stage of retrograde amnesia for a ‘mind-with-a-past’. This would be total redesign; another maximum jailbreak. Indeed, Bernal looks at the ambitions of ‘eugenicists and the public health officers’ and their attempts at life extension, and finds them essentially lacking. One can prolong the life of the body, but one is only prolonging pain (and, worse, bad design) unless one starts again from the ground up. ‘Sooner or later some eminent physiologist will have his neck broken in a super-civilized accident or find his body cells worn beyond capacity for repair’, Bernal quipped. The solution? Get rid of the body below that neck. In short, Bernal anticipates that the communistic prometheans of the future will be cerebro-spinal systems surgically emancipated from the rest of the human frame (which has, of course, become a mere parasite). The promethean human is a brain trailing a spinal tail, the loosened tendrils of which, Bernal projects, will be repurposed as the connectors for various plug-and-play sensory and motor appendages that can be switched in and out according to need and desire. (Strange that Bernal’s omega point resembles Reich’s primordial plan: the humble jellyfish. Or perhaps not so strange when one considers Barker’s rumoured involvement with Maximilian Crabbe—specialist in abyssopelagic habitability and cetacean linguistics—whose project for self-preservation reportedly led him toward a dismembered existence residing in various high-pressure liquid vats.)14 Speculating on the ‘final state’ of this transformation, Bernal sees the body becoming a ‘cylinder’:

Inside the cylinder, and supported very carefully to prevent shock, is the brain with its nerve connections, immersed in a liquid of the nature of cerebro-spinal fluid, kept circulating over it at a uniform temperature.15

An unappendiculated, delimbed techno-spine floating in its own portable thalassa: the communist overmen of the future will resemble, if not the abysmally archaic radial barrel-shaped extra-terrestrials unearthed in H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, then perhaps the centipede monstrosities of Burroughs’s nightmare visions. Burroughs himself, however, would later claim that

[m]an is an artefact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.16

Ironic, then, that the human of the future will precisely come to resemble a tadpole, dragging a dinosaur tail: a cylindrical communist space-brain with a centipedal spine trailing behind it.

Karl Marx himself, however, had envisioned modernization not so much as Lewis’s formicating decerebration or Bernal’s decapitating body-liberation, but more as the conquest of the external world by our neural innards: as the onward-marching outpouching and eversion of our control centres. Having apportioned the planetary environs as ‘man’s inorganic body’, Marx, in the Grundrisse, is impressed that ‘locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs,’ and so forth, are ‘organs of the human brain’—they represent ‘the power of knowledge, objectified’.17

What is remarkable in this intellectual conflict, and indeed throughout all periods under scrutiny in our secret history, is that, although there will always be those who advocate submission to the yearning for katabasis and those who decry its mortal dangers, both sides are invariably unanimous in recognizing that—in some important sense—what is at stake in modernity is a genuine temptation toward, and a real possibility of, psychic regression. This is a battle over the very meaning of the tenses through which we understand temporality. The startling persistence of spinal catastrophic episodes in modern thought testifies to the fact that it is not so easy to separate onward rush and outward projection from inward involution and backward regression. Even the futuristic global telegraphy-actuated megamind, which was emerging as Marx was writing, came to curiously resemble our anciently-inherited neural make-up, thus heralding new potentials for archaeopsychic subsidence.

---