‘”Servant to the Stars”
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Transcript of ‘”Servant to the Stars”
‘Servant to the Stars’: Non-Form in Iain Sinclair’s Essay Form
In this short paper I want to begin to define the specifically essayistic quality of Iain Sinclair’s work,
through an application of Georg Lukács’s theory of the essay form in his early Soul and Form (1974).
Though my argument here is focussed on Sinclair’s 1978 essay ‘Servant to the Stars’, his reading of Brian
Catling’s Pleiades in Nine (1976), I will suggest that Lukács’s notion of the essay as criticism is deeply
relevant to all of Sinclair’s subsequent work, written and filmic. For Lukács criticism’s 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 Sinclair’s ongoing project. The essay
form also problematizes the opposition between cognition and aesthetic experience, Lukács 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, Sinclair’s essayistic, critical mode
likewise operates on two levels simultaneously, at once replicating Catling’s 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 Sinclair’s style.1 His critical account of the neo-
Vorticist 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 Lewis’s 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 Sinclair’s neo-Vorticist aesthetic form the still point at the centre of the vortex, the point
1 Soul and Form , trans. by Anna Bostock (London: Merlin, 1974; first publ. 1911), p. 7; compare Elena Gualtieri’s useful discussion of Lukács’s 1910 letter to Leo Popper, in her Virginia Woolf’s 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 paus’d/ Betwixt the world destroy’d and world restor’d’. 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’. Catling’s 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.’ Sinclair’s cognitive commentary on Catling’s auto-commentary develops the analytic
technique of Catling’s 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 Lewis’s ‘Alcibiades’ (1912) design
– to which Sinclair refers in his essay (54-55) – are ‘all fixed in a slow-motion explosion whose next
centimeter’s expansion will occupy all eternity’2. For Sinclair likewise, Lewis’s assumed rôle 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
2 Blast 1, ed. by Wyndham Lewis (Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow, 1997; first publ. 1981), p. 148; ‘Servant to the Stars: B. Catling’s 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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seduction by poltergeist fury, which drives the development of analytic rationality. Myth also entices us
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)
Sinclair’s concern here with the augmentation of rationality recalls Siegfried Kracauer’s 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
Sinclair’s assertion of the push into enlightenment, into ‘analytic light’, to repeat, can be identified
precisely within his essay’s reflection on the mythic component within neo-Vorticist analytic rationality.
We could think too about Sinclair’s understanding of Prynne’s writing, as sharing with Catling’s 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 bio-chemical, 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 Prynne’s 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 [Prynne’s ‘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-god’s astronomical and metallurgical excursions, this does not make us less but more naïve.
3 ‘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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Sinclair locates sacral, mythic traces within star vocabulary, and so forestalls a premature
demythologization of the astronomer’s analytic rationality which is supported by this vocabulary, when he
opens his essay with a quotation from Paul Screeton’s 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 Sinclair’s 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 naïvely 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.
Sinclair’s 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 rationality’s
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 subject’s aesthetic risk-taking aligns that subject with
Marx’s ‘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 subject’s autonomy, can hence be said to raise the problem of
knowledge – or of the possibility of rational cognition – in precisely the manner of Postone’s 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 supra-individual) 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
4 Simon Jarvis, ‘Clear as Mud: J. H. Prynne’s Of Sanguine Fire’, Jacket, 23 (August 2003): http://jacketmagazine.com/23/jarvis.html; Quicksilver Heritage (London: Abacus, 1977), p. 187.
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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 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. Sinclair’s 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)
5 Kracauer, pp. 81, 82; Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge: CUP, 1993), pp. 76, 77.
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