steve dee | The Blog of Baphomet

I’m sitting in Julian’s front room and I’m surrounded by a multitude of artefacts from past rituals and hours spent in meditation. While the wood burner and main altar space provide a natural centre piece, today my eyes are drawn to the array of cut-up collages that deck one of the walls. These are not elaborate or overly wrought attempts at occult art; rather they represent raw, psychic high-dives in order to explore fragments of self and the processes that unfold as we try to explore darker, stranger terrain.

Cut-up

Having recently read and enjoyed Queer by Meg-John Barker and Julia Scheele, I started reflecting on the possible connections between how cut-ups and Queer dynamics might interact in our process of exploring Self. I have already written a post reflecting on how cut-ups might interact with aspects of ego psychology, but their book got me to wondering further about how cut-ups might represent a highly queered and magical form of expression. As I observed back then:

“Like collage, cut-ups seek to use existing material in new ways that often involve the combining and juxtaposition of words and images so as to create new insight and meaning.

In tracking the lineage of cut-ups as an approach, from the surrealism of the Dadaists, Brion Gysin, Burroughs and Genesis P-Orridge, we can begin to see the depth of magical thinking embedded in this technique. As we seek to engage with and manipulate reality, the cut-up not only embodies the desired efficacy of our sorcery, but also the fluid shape-shifters that our arte forces us, the magician, to become. If our magic has any real depth, then our ego must undergo a similar process of reassembly.”

Cut-ups for me are a potent means of challenging our attempts at fixed certainty and polarity. Ideas and images that we previously kept apart are cast together in potentially abrupt disruption. These cut-ups don’t allow for tidy answers or for a buttoned-up, linear sense of self, rather they represent a bubbling up from the unconscious that may reveal as much about the dynamic tensions at work as they do potential answers. Apparently unconnected images are juxtaposed with stark headline text and so new meanings and connections are made. To me this dynamic process feels potentially unsettling and hugely creative and thus quite Queer:

“Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence. ‘Queer’ then, demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-à-vis the normative.” David Halperin Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography

The Queer self is one that has a profound connection to the constructed and performed. As an outsider position it has had to survive by being magpie-like in pulling together those jewels and glimmering half-truths that help make sense of what it means to live with a greater sense of magic and power. Others may dismiss its rag-tag approach for its lack of coherence, but like the trickster or the holy fool it holds up a mirror to those parts of culture whose attempts at control appear all too reliant on dusty outdated certainties.

For me the playful complexity of Queer identity is one that disrupts my attempts at locating my sense of self in fixed descriptors and concrete identities. Any attempt to side-step curiosity and open-handed questioning is unlikely to withstand Queer’s rainbow-laser side-eye. This type of awareness asks that we acquire and develop skills that allow us to more effectively tolerate process, journey and uncertainty.

Wild words

Similarly the process of the cut-up requires vulnerability as we step-back, allowing patterns and (potential) meanings to emerge. Techniques such as cut-ups and automatic writing/drawing are certainly more towards the artistic end of the “Art and Science” dialectic, but such creativity shouldn’t be mistaken for laxity. Ironically it often seems that as we seek to make use of approaches that are less linear and apparently chaotic, that we have to exercise a more focused sense of awareness in gaining benefit from them. It may be that those people who are drawn to more scripted workings do so because it provides them with a greater sense of security and control.

One of the primary reasons that I was drawn to the magical path was its sense of collaboration and play. World views and metaphysics that declared absolute certainty were no longer viable but I was still hungry to explore the mystery of consciousness and the glimpses of awakening that were coming in and out of view. Techniques like cut-ups and collage can provide us with potent and creative means for accessing new insights regarding the paths we are seeking to walk. They are rarely complete answers, more often they are snapshots of a work in progress that we may need to slow down and wait for, rather than rushing to a sensible, adult conclusion.

Queer: A Graphic History by Meg-John Barker and Julia Scheele Icon Books 2016

I’m sure that like many a humanities undergraduate out there, I have had my academic bacon saved more than once by the Icon series on contemporary thought. Their pithy illustrated guides on topics and figures as wide ranging as Wagner, Jesus and Lacan, often provided an accessible doorway into some otherwise tricky territory. Histories were condensed and made vivid, and previously mind-bending theories were made moderately less so.

queer1

It was perhaps not surprising then that when I caught wind that one of my favourite authors Meg-John Barker was co-authoring an Icon book on Queer theory with illustrator and zine-smith Julia Scheele, I was more than a tad excited. I have already penned some reviews of Meg-John’s recent books on Relationships and contemporary mindfulness practice:

http://enfolding.org/book-review-rewriting-the-rules-an-integrative-guide-to-love-sex-and-relationships/

http://enfolding.org/book-review-mindful-counselling-and-psychotherapy/

and I find their level of both openness and insight deeply helpful and inspiring.

Writing about Queer theory was never going to be a simple task! Not only does it touch upon some highly complex philosophical ideas and movements, it’s very existence as a concept is reliant upon fluidity and a desire to defy concrete definition. (I recently wrote something about these ideas here, looking at the way in which Queer theory might inform magical practice, and there are considerable overlaps in relation to the subtlety, fuzziness and process dependent sensitivity that both seem to thrive on.)

In the course of the book the authors deftly distill some of the primary concepts of Queer theory as follows:

“Resisting the categorization of people
Challenging the idea of essential identities
Questioning binaries like gay/straight, male/female
Demonstrating how things are contextual, based on geography, history, culture etc.
Examining the power relations underlying certain understandings, categories, identities, etc.”

Meg-John and Julia then spend time exploring what the implications of such ideas might be for topics as diverse as identity politics, contemporary sexology and the shape that relationships and concepts of family might take.

queer2

I’d imagine that writing a book like this might be a bit of a challenge: “How do I make it pacey enough to be engaging and yet detailed enough to capture the complexity of what we are trying to describe?” Frankly I think that the authors have done a great job. Partly this is due to it being a big comic book that Julia has done a great job in illuminating. Visually Queer is great to look at capturing great portraits, humour, sensuality and struggle.

Conceptually it touches on historical forebears (such as the existentialists) and engages heroically with much of the complex postmodern philosophy that has birthed much of the Queer revolution. The sections dealing with the ideas of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler are especially vivid and helpful, primarily as I have tended to find their work pretty heavy going.

Given that Queer theory seeks to explore the reality of what we do rather than being fixated on fixed identities, it is of little surprise that the authors spend much of this work exploring the ways in which Queer theory has shaped activism on both the societal and personal stages. Meg-John especially is noted for their excellence in taking complex ideas and challenging us to think about what this means now: how will this promote compassion and a willingness to hear the subtlety of our unique stories?

One of the things that I love about this book is the way in which Meg-John keeps popping up as an illustrated character within the text. Engagement with Queer theory and activism is something that they are deeply involved in, and their presence in the text, dialoguing with us, seems to embody something of the open process that the authors are inviting us to.

Curious readers might wonder why I was so keen to review this book on a blog about Magic. Apart from wanting to bump up a friend’s book sales, Queer identity is not only vital to me on a personal level, but it also profoundly shapes the way that us Baphomet folks practise our chosen spiritual path. As creative ritual explorers, our magical practice is highly relational (we enjoy working with others), context dependent and focused more on process than some imagined endgame. In short, ours is a profoundly Queer Magic and dynamic works like Queer provide great fuel for this journey.