[mf2012] Reading Group Act 0

[rachelbaker at irational.org]

Hi all

I promised to furnish you with some notes from the reading group meet held
on Friday 13th April.
Now it is Monday 30th April, the Witches Sabbath or Walpurgis Night, still
celebrated around Scandinavia apparently, but not so much in the UK,
although the sky is appropriately thundering and lightening. We are
supposed to meet the witches tomorrow, MayDay, and welcome in the Spring.

On the relationship between financialisation and 'prophecy' I noticed
(quite tenuously) that some hedge funds and private equity orgs appear to
have ancient Greek, or pantheistic-sounding names such as 'Cerberus',
'Ares', 'Apollo', and then, 'Quantum', 'Pure Alpha', etc... these
allusions to ancient Greek language and gods are common in both the
corporate branding world and in computing and has something to do with
fictitious capital requiring a religious faith and immateriality as well
as the abstract logic of mathematics.

Anyway, notes!

I spent some time (too much, some said) introducing the context of the
Moving Forest and its project of staging a bowdlerised, magnified and
distorted version of Macbeth. A Sci-Fi Opera about revolt. It is still
satisfyingly difficult to explain, and still presents urgent questions:-

What to do in the face of this crisis - How to 'act', How to move, How to
create movement, How to revolt?

For the reading group, how to read?

Can The Olympics be read? As Tragedy?
(There was a nice moment during this conversation when someone in the
group, Angella, produced a Tarot card she'd chosen at the start of the
meeting, which was I think a '10 of Pentacles'. This depicts a scene with
an adult and child looking at a castle. Angella's reading was that the
child is saying 'Is that it?', registering a disappointment with what has
been presented as a legacy of wealth and security.)

Act 0 'Omen' directs itself to the role of the witches and the figure of
the witch as heretic, outsider and prophet. This is what we are 'reading'.
Within this we bounced around some ideas that took in...:-

1. Self-fulfilling prophecy, the patterns of capitalism, sowing the seeds
of its own destruction, the current financial crisis, the predictions of
chaos in the Eurozone, the permanent 'state of exception'.
2. Setting a course of events through source code. Code as the instruction
sheet for hardware to 'act'.
3. The  attempts by the state to control, secure, through austerity and
punishment, the  seizure of land and public assets for privatisation and
virulent urban development, echoing the enclosures which were significant
in creating the figure of the witch in the 15th /16th centuries.
4. Who are the contemporary 'witch' figures, or social demons? Some point
to children, rioters, 'hoodies', others suggest immigrants, anarchists,
any group that in a given context deviates from the instruction sheet.
5. What recourse? Magic, language, art, - accident, deception?! Theories
of cybernetic systems and game theory are about anticipating human
behaviour  – multiple, relational databases, social media, data- mining
and data protection industries leads to conditions for biopolitical
control of bodies, identities.

The group shared additional suggestions for further reading material:-
Norman Cohn 'Europes Inner Demons'

Frances Yates 'The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age', and
'Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition'

Philip K Dick 'Valis'

Philip Ball 'Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads To Another' and 'The
Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science'

Robert Graves 'The White Goddess

James Frazer 'The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion'

There was no internet unfortunately but I had lined up some YouTube clips
of films that portray the witches in Macbeth in different ways.
Shakespeare meant them to be properly, scary and disturbing, sinister,
(but what terrifies us now?):-

1. Orson Welles  1948  (Previously staged a 'Voodoo Macbeth' with all
black cast)
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1_I36qHDts
Film features witches making a voodoo doll out of clay representing Macbeth.

2. Penny Woolcock 1997 (Macbeth On The Estate)
Filmed on Ladywood estate in Birmingham, included residents. Children are
portrayed as the witches – that is what spooks us now, rather than
Shakespeares elderly weird sisters.
Lots of visual references to the National Lottery (fate, chance etc..!?).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UV25yBl9VkM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSSK4BuA8nI&feature=relmfu

3. Verdi opera
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=fvwp&NR=1&v=87vIcy_p1xY
Witches as cave women, pre-historic, neanderthal.

4. Kurosawa, Throne Of Blood
http://www.nipponcinema.com/trailers/throne-of-blood-trailer.
Witch of indeterminate gender.

We read the witch scenes in Macbeth.

'Foul is fair, Fair is foul' – moral order upside down.
In 14th C the Knights Templars, previously considered Christian heroes,
are accused by Catholics of heresy and persecuted as witches. This is
entirely to punish them for being the french king's creditors - he was in
too much debt to them.

WITCHES 'Thrice to thine and thrice to mine
And thrice again, to make up nine.
Peace! the charm's wound up'
Macbeth as automaton, coded, wound-up by the witches, set to run the script.

MACBETH “you should be women, And yet your beards forbid me to interpret
That you are so.”
Transgendered witches.

MACBETH
How now, you secret, black, and midnight hags!
What is't you do?
ALL
A deed without a name.

Robert Graves in The White Goddess discusses the willow tree which was
sacred to the goddess Hecate, connecting the word to the root 'wei': "Its
connection with witches is so strong in Northern Europe, that the words
'witch' and 'wicked' are derived from the same ancient word for willow,
which also yields 'wicker'.

MACBETH 'Say from whence you owe this strange intelligence'

In Ancient Greek tradition The Oracle had to be someone of little knowledge.

Next reading group meeting we'll begin Caliban and the Witch by Silvia
Federici.

See you at the Freedom Bookshop, Friday, 6.30pm.

Rachel