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Servant to the Stars: Non-Form in Iain Sinclairs Essay Form

In this short paper I want to begin to define the specifically essayistic quality of Iain Sinclairs work, through an application of Georg Lukcss theory of the essay form in his early Soul and Form (1974). Though my argument here is focussed on Sinclairs 1978 essay Servant to the Stars, his reading of Brian Catlings Pleiades in Nine (1976), I will suggest that Lukcss notion of the essay as criticism is deeply relevant to all of Sinclairs subsequent work, written and filmic. For Lukcs criticisms project was to articulate intellectuality, conceptuality as sensed experience, as immediate reality, as spontaneous principle of existence: this strikes me as one accurate description of Sinclairs ongoing project. The essay form also problematizes the opposition between cognition and aesthetic experience, Lukcs argued; the essay blurs the division between epistemology and aesthetics. This argument rested on his notion of the essay as criticism: a criticism which is both itself form a form of aesthetic experience and a cognitive reflection on the forms of art. In Servant to the Stars, I want to suggest, Sinclairs essayistic, critical mode likewise operates on two levels simultaneously, at once replicating Catlings neo-Vorticist aesthetic and offering cognitive reflection on the neo-Vorticist aesthetic experience. This 1978 essay therefore itself provides a critical account - avant la lettre of the essayistic static poltergeist fury which continues to trouble (or enliven) many readers when they encounter Sinclairs style. 1 His critical account of the neoVorticist aesthetic experience, I will argue, asserts a neo-Vorticist refusal of form, in protest against the premature enlightenment which, within capitalism, continues to inhibit a genuinely rational cognition. Servant to the Stars politicizes Wyndham Lewiss declaration, in the first issue of Blast (1914), that the Vorticist is at his maximum point of energy when stillest. The Vortex is in the near brain-damaged violence of the streets, the aborted sounds, pins and shrapnels. The Vortex is forcing its design through the most corrupted channels, from the drains up: the points of blockage and inertia are now the first to be energized. The new mode of Vorticist aesthetic experience is seen generated out of social tensions, yet is also allied to the modernist still points which would block or interrupt naturalistic, sheerly reproductive expression of these conflicts. In Sinclairs neo-Vorticist aesthetic form the still point at the centre of the vortex, the point Soul and Form , trans. by Anna Bostock (London: Merlin, 1974; first publ. 1911), p. 7; compare Elena Gualtieris useful discussion of Lukcss 1910 letter to Leo Popper, in her Virginia Woolfs Essays: Sketching the Past (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 4-5; B. Catling, Pleiades in Nine (London: Albion Village Press, 1976), p. 9.
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of maximum energy, falls between each sentence. These centripetal still points interrupt the prose yet cohere it as a vorticegarden, though the blocks of prose are shifting as we look at them: The Archangel pausd/ Betwixt the world destroyd and world restord. Unresolved place; its plane[s] shifting as we look at them, its shape pure theory. Beasts mark the steps. A city of initiates, a city of the dead, Wyndham Lewis star-cult city. Secret tractate paths and seasons. Each turn, each impulse to movement, is a fresh sentence. Words demand single lines, breaks in breath. Death genetics. (52) Death genetics refers to the process of autolysis the destruction of body cells by their own enzymes which lends this essay its sub-title: the Autolystic Defiances. Catlings analytic, neo-Vorticist method, Sinclair notes, operates the rhetoric of autolysis, the cell that is willingly destroying itself. Pleiades in Nine not only describes initiation ritual; its language enacts an initiatory, self-negating immersion within its own secret tractate paths, not dominating the world by language but giving voice, witnessing. Responding. Sinclairs cognitive commentary on Catlings auto-commentary develops the analytic technique of Catlings neo-Vorticist aesthetic, breaking its own breath as it describes the method: Catling tends towards analysis, breaks movement down, gives voice to component parts. Leaves the scattered fragments on the slide, each one stressing its pain, each one moving the cosmological cradle out on its own trajectory. (53) Hugh Kenner wrote that the shifting analytic planes of Lewiss Alcibiades (1912) design to which Sinclair refers in his essay (54-55) are all fixed in a slow-motion explosion whose next centimeters expansion will occupy all eternity2. For Sinclair likewise, Lewiss assumed rle as probing analyst is inseparable from his visionary status: Lewis took pose as Enemy of the Stars, fury, intelligence, anger as fuel, cold eye: visioning the metallic incandescent cities (not unlike those of the Italian primitives, high and distant in sharp dust-free air). Out of it, awaiting apotheosis. (54) Servant to the Stars offers a cognitive reflection on the neo-Vorticist aesthetic experience, primarily by reflecting on the analytic rationality exercised within neo-Vorticist technique. This analytic rationality has a mythic component as speculation or projection analytic rationality is straining towards its visionary double and indeed the essay suggests that it is precisely its mythic component, or the seduction by poltergeist fury, which drives the development of analytic rationality. Myth also entices us Blast 1, ed. by Wyndham Lewis (Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow, 1997; first publ. 1981), p. 148; Servant to the Stars: B. Catlings Pleiades in Nine, the Autolystic Defiances, in Tending the Vortex: The Works of Brian Catling, ed. by Simon Perril (Cambridge: CCCP, 2001), pp. 46-56 (p. 55); further references to Servant to the Stars are given after quotations in the text; B. Catling, Vorticegarden (London: Albion Village Press, 1974); Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971), p. 234.
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into enlightenment: Enticement then: static poltergeist fury/ entices the hunter. Away from the pull of the gravity of the building, father, heart-place, heat-place, known strength, on, into that analytic light, light with the power of dissection. Excessive information. The risk cannot be read. Featureless horizon. Mirage, a new presence, the projection meets its double at a point just beyond the normal focal range straining credulity, the interpretative eye, to make sense of its multi-banded colours. What is most desired melts fastest. (50) Sinclairs concern here with the augmentation of rationality recalls Siegfried Kracauers argument, in his 1927 essay The Mass Ornament, that enlightenment or rationality can still push beyond its own paralysis in the form of petrified capitalist Ratio. Kracauer argues that capitalism rationalizes not too much but rather too little. The thinking promoted by capitalism resists culminating in that reason which arises from the basis of man.3 Sinclairs assertion of the push into enlightenment, into analytic light, to repeat, can be identified precisely within his essays reflection on the mythic component within neo-Vorticist analytic rationality. We could think too about Sinclairs understanding of Prynnes writing, as sharing with Catlings a concern to reproduce the analytic rationality of contemporary science: What Catling shares with Jeremy Prynne is a heightened awareness of the astral and the biochemical, their kinship, giving voice to star-metaphor (the star fall broken polar light on the table); tensile plant strength, secret codings revealed, DETAIL, voice of the new science articulated. (52) Commenting on Prynnes analytic articulation of scientific languages in Of Sanguine Fire (1971), Simon Jarvis notes how the sedimentation of residues of mythic thinking within astronomical and chemical vocabularies, warns us against an impatiently enlightened materialism, which would finally fail to demythologize the secret codings accrued by analysis. Prynne writes as a philologist-poet, for whom the language of natural science has its own history of metaphorical extension and literalization. The virtues [Prynnes protraction, fortitude, appetite] cannot be reduced to a cell count, not because they are too ineffable for that, but because the language of natural science is itself already instinct with secularized myth. Mercury may have come down to earth, but if we just take that element for a brute fact, without tracing within it the track of the messenger-gods astronomical and metallurgical excursions, this does not make us less but more nave. Sinclair locates sacral, mythic traces within star vocabulary, and so forestalls a premature The Mass Ornament, in Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays , trans. by Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 75-86 (p. 81); for further commentary on the lines static poltergeist fury/ entices the hunter, in relation to mythic dread of nature, compare my More than Museums: No Traveller Returns, by Vahni Capildeo, Jacket, 26 (October 2004): http://jacketmagazine.com/26/bond-capi.html.
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demythologization of the astronomers analytic rationality which is supported by this vocabulary, when he opens his essay with a quotation from Paul Screetons Quicksilver Heritage (1977) mercury again! which informs us that according to a Gnostic account, the original abode of the Grail was the star Alcoyne, one of the Pleiades.4 (46) We can identify in this essay a protest against premature enlightenment, then, which works precisely as another indication of Sinclairs concern with the development of rationality. In The Mass Ornament Kracauer theorized premature enlightenment in terms of the return to the false mythological concreteness whose aim is organism and form, which he saw to be a delusive solution for the abstractness of capitalist Ratio; one which finally fails to demythologize our thinking. The result of the return to false mythological concreteness persists: an empty formalism which can only reinforce our mythic subjection to nature. From the perspective of the mythological doctrines, in which nature navely asserts itself, the process of abstraction as employed, for example, by the natural sciences is a gain in rationality which detracts from the resplendence of the things of nature. From the perspective of reason, the same process of abstraction appears to be determined by nature; it gets lost in an empty formalism under whose guise the natural is accorded free rein because it does not let through the insights of reason which could strike at the natural. The prevailing abstractness reveals that the process of demythologization has not come to an end. Sinclairs protest against premature enlightenment can be found within his descriptions of the formlessness within our thinking, or of thought which does not proceed towards empty formalism. Analytic rationalitys visionary double is a mirage that melts fastest. Neo-Vorticist risk has no form within which it can be read. The very formlessness of the neo-Vorticist subjects aesthetic risk-taking aligns that subject with Marxs Subject which, as explicated by Moishe Postone from Capital (1976), unfold[s] in time in a way that is independent of individual will. The visionary, mythic component within neo-Vorticist analytic rationality, which questions the neo-Vorticist subjects autonomy, can hence be said to raise the problem of knowledge or of the possibility of rational cognition in precisely the manner of Postones Marx, suggesting that the question of the development of rationality remains a question of the relation between forms of social mediations and forms of thought: [Marx] shifts the focus of the problem of knowledge from the knowing individual (or supraindividual) subject and its relation to an external (or externalized) world to the forms of social relations, seen as determinations of social subjectivity as well as objectivity. [] the Marxian analysis of the capitalist social formation implies the possibility of analyzing socially and historically the classical epistemological question itself, predicated as it is on the notion of an Simon Jarvis, Clear as Mud: J. H. Prynnes Of Sanguine Fire, Jacket, 23 (August 2003): http://jacketmagazine.com/23/jarvis.html; Quicksilver Heritage (London: Abacus, 1977), p. 187.
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autonomous subject in sharp contradiction to an objective universe.5 In Servant to the Stars, Sinclair sees true concreteness lived, transformable social relations to be denied by terrorist autonomous subjects, those new gods who set themselves in definitively sharp contradiction to the objective universe. Sinclairs invective against the absolutist political theology of contemporary political violence, is focussed precisely on the terrorist attempt to reduce the lived violence of the streets to an empty form: one uniform light-retaining surface. The kind of grey visionary dust, horizon to horizon, that is the compelling image behind much terrorist nihilist action: that is the literal inspiration to reduce all life, all the complexities, inequalities, corruptions, fat, bone, tissue to one uniform light-retaining surface, a fine powder for the new gods to smoke, to dream of rebirth, life-forms created in ash sweat, lilies blossoming on the scum. The assassin sees ash behind everything. A purity. An absolute. Terrorist ash remains as mythic as the brute data deposited by New Historicism. Fraudulent precision is rejected by Sinclair, just as Kracauer refuses false mythological concreteness and seeks to negate our surface realm: Pleiades, with a precision that is never fraudulent, gives narrative to those tests or Journeys. There is the frenzied questing coldness of the scientific eye leading us to (but not yet beyond) the horizons of the known: initiations at the fringe of fire, heat haze mantic mirage. The way those explorers (landbreakers) were mad, in orbit of obsessive visions, body possession, insect-bite fever blood racing into starry knowledge and annihilation of self. (47)

Kracauer, pp. 81, 82; Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marxs Critical Theory (Cambridge: CUP, 1993), pp. 76, 77.
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