Patrick Farmer
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patrickwilliamfarmer@gmail.com
Dreams of Labyrinths are Shark’s Love for Humanity (excerpt)
For philosopher of science, Isabelle Stengers, magic is a practise with critical as well as political relevance, an experiment in learning with human-non-human-human spirited life worlds, and hopefully we can address this, considering human in non human, being as boundaries as to ‘what’ is and is not, who is and who is not, are so precarious and porous, they need devout attention. I’m not trying to claim that there are no differences between humans and non-humans, so called, only that there is no necessity to describe these differences in a way that places humans (whomsoever they are) at an ontological centre or hierarchical apex, a so-called chain of being.
Magic then, as a practise of attempting to make who is not understood, understood, in a way who is not understandable, a filling who is also an emptying, in this sense, belongs to our own problematic environments. As Stengers says, if there are witches, they are helping to gather strength to resist and survive life in dark times.
Stengers calls this pragmatic magic, an art of movement, sound, of light, of taking care with words, a will, to maintain a vision, not of power, but of strength. Stengers works with magic as term in part because she wants them to shock, to transform. Magic is an art of learning how to be attentive, to devote, cultivate attention, fold and enfold assiduity with estrangement as flax, to celebrate, to say thank you to who you have been able to feel as part and whole of event as process as someone who matters.