The Bardic Tradition of Magick

"The police were taking witness arias."

** Jazz Hands **

" In all of magick there is an incredibly large linguistic component.  

The Bardic tradition of magic would place a bard as being much higher and more fearsome than a magician.  

A magician might curse you.  That might make your hands lay funny or you might have a child born with a club foot.  

If a Bard were to place not a curse upon you, but a satire, then that could destroy you.  If it was a clever satire, it might not just destroy you in the eyes of your associates; it would destroy you in the eyes of your family.  It would destroy you in your own eyes.  

And if it was a finely worded and clever satire that might survive and be remembered for decades, even centuries. 

 Then,years after you were dead people still might be reading it and laughing at you and your wretchedness and your absurdity.  

Writers and people who had command of words were respected and feared as people who manipulated magick.  

In latter times I think that artists and writers have allowed themselves to be sold down the river.  They have accepted the prevailing belief that art and writing are merely forms of entertainment.  

They’re not seen as transformative forces that can change a human being; that can change a society.  

They are seen as simple entertainment; things with which we can fill 20 minutes, half an hour, while we’re waiting to die.   

It’s not the job of the artist to give the audience what the audience wants.  If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn’t be the audience.  

They would be the artists.  

It is the job of artists to give the audience what they need.  "

- Alan Moore

The Bardic Tradition of Magick

The Spear-Shaker, the Golem of Avon, he who shakes his spear of truth in the face of ignorance, is known universally as 

"The Bard."

Shakes-Spear is written as rhythmic verse, in Iambic Pentameter;

It is chanted, or entoned, like a mass or Gregorian prayers.

That which is chanted, must also be enchanted.

Like Logopolitan mathematics.

DOCTOR: 

As a matter of fact, they don't use computers, they use word of mouth. 

ADRIC: 

Is that another expression? 

DOCTOR: 

No. 

ADRIC: 

They speak it? 

DOCTOR: 

Mutter. Entone. 

ADRIC:

 Entone the computations? 

DOCTOR: 

Yes. 

ADRIC: 

Why? 

DOCTOR: 

[Pause] 

I've wondered that myself....

 I never quite had the nerve to ask them...

 "The connection of speech and reason is the organizing principle of Plato's dialogues and of all the literature based on them, through St. Augustine to the Italian Renaissance. The theater of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Schiller represents a continuation of this tradition in a slightly different form. 

We must also recall that the classical poetry of Homer, Dante, and Chaucer was meant to be spoken or sung aloud."

" In the Book of Genesis, Adam creates language under the direct tutelage of God by giving names to animals and other objects."

"The destruction of reason with deconstruction thus revealed as a slyly disguised form of destruction , the next question is to determine what is to be destroyed. Derrida wants the destruction of reason, the deconstruction of the logos, which he identifies as the central point of the Judeo-Christian philosophical tradition. That tradition is what the deconstructionists are attacking when they rail against "western metaphysics." Derrida is anti-western because he regards the line of development from Socrates and Plato through Gottfried Leibniz as "ethnocentric" and racist. When he attacks "metaphysics," he means human reason itself. 

Derrida writes: "The 'rationality' -but perhaps that word should be abandoned for reasons that will appear at the end of this sentence-which governs a writing is thus enlarged and radicalized , no longer issues from a logos. Further, it inaugurates the destruction, not the demolition but the de-sedimentation, the de-construction, of all the significations that have their source in that of the logos . Particularly the signification of truth. All the metaphysical determinations of truth, and even the one beyond metaphysical onto-theology that Heidegger reminds us of, are more or less immediately inseparable from the instance of the logos, or of a reason thought within the lineage of the logos, in whatever sense it is understood: in the pre-Socratic or the philosophical sense, in the sense of God ' s infinite understanding or in the anthropological sense, in the pre-Hegelian or the post-Hegelian sense"(OfGrammatology, pp . 1 0- 1 1 ) . 

And again: "This absolute logos was an infinite creative subjectivity in medieval theology: The intelligible face of the sign remains turned toward the word and the face of God" (OfGrammatology, p. 13). 

How then can reason and the logos be destroyed? 

Heidegger had already given the example of attempt this by mystifying the concepts having to do with language: ''Thinking collects language into simple speaking . Language is therefore the language of being , just as the clouds are the clouds of the heavens . In speaking , thinking plows simple furrows into language . These furrows are even simpler than those plowed with slow steps by the farmer. " 'The death of civilization of the book' For Derrida, using a terminology that is borrowed from the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure , language is at first the realm of "sign" and "signified . " "The difference between sign and signifier belongs in a profound and implicit way to the totality of the great epoch covered by the history of metaphysics, and in a more explicit and more systematically articulated way to the narrower epoch of Christian creationism and infinitism when these appropriate the resources of Greek conceptuality. This appurtenance is essential and irreducible; one cannot retain . . . the scientific truth . . . without also bringing with it all its metaphysico-theological roots" (Of Grammatology, p. 13). 

In other words, Platonic Christianity is the basis for modem science, and that is the enemy Derrida seeks to liquidate by destroying language. The scientific tradition "begins its era in the form of Platonism, it ends in infinitist metaphysics . " (Here Derrida is probably targeting Georg Cantor and the transfinite numbers.) Derrida is fully conscious that the exhaustion of language will bring with it nothing less than the "death of speech" and the "death of the civilization of the book" (Of Grammatology, p . 8). 

Again following his Nazi guru Heidegger, Derrida focuses his destructive attention on the "metaphysics of presence" as this relates to language . The "presence" amounts to a solid grounding for certain knowledge, for the certitude that something exists . Derrida is at pains to point out that "presence" of this kind is required as a pre-condition for the conceptual apparatus of western philosophy from the time of the Greeks on down: "It could be shown that all names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the center have always designated an invariable presence-eidos [action], arche [principle or first cause], telos [purpose], energeia, ousia (essence, existence, substance, subject), aletheia, [truth] transcendentality, consciousness, God, man, and so forth" ("Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," pp. 279-280). In language, "the metaphysics of presence" is equated with a "transcendental signified" or "ultimate referent," which would function as the ultimate guarantee of meaning.

We see that for Derrida, all western languages are "metaphysical," since their key words and concepts are permeated by Christian Platonism. They are also metaphysical, he thinks, because the only way to be sure of the meaning of "Send over a pizza," presupposes the Christian Platonic foundations of the whole civilization. Derrida therefore sets out to destroy Platonism by destroying language, while hoping to destroy the civilization along with both. Reason and speech Derrida asserts that the western languages are "logocentric," that they are based on reason in this way. Logos can mean reason, but also lawfulness or ordering principle, but also word, discourse, argument, and speech. "With this logos," says Derrida, "the original and essential link to the phone [sound] has never been broken." In other words, human reason and human speech are inextricably bound up together. The connection of speech and reason is the organizing principle of Plato's dialogues and of all the literature based on them, through St. Augustine to the Italian Renaissance. The theater of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Schiller represents a continuation of this tradition in a slightly different form. We must also recall that the classical poetry of Homer, Dante, and Chaucer was meant to be spoken or sung aloud.

 If "the scar on the paper," were to replace all this, colossal cultural damage would of course be the result. Western language is therefore not only logocentric, but also phonocentric: that is to say, western language recognizes the primacy of the spoken language over the written language. 

"The system of language associated with phoneticalphabetic writing is that within which logocentric metaphysics, determining the sense of being as presence, has been produced" (OfGrammatology, p. 43). 

Derrida obviously cannot deny that spoken language "came first." He also cannot escape the fact that while the spoken word (parole) is a sign, the written word (mot) is the sign of a sign. He tries to go back to a mythical form of writing in general that might have existed before Socrates and Plato came on the scene, calling this arche-ecriture , (arch-writing) but this is plainly nothing but a crude deus ex machina hauled in to substantiate a thesis that has nothing going for it. 

In the Book of Genesis, Adam creates language under the direct tutelage of God by giving names to animals and other objects. But Derrida is hell-bent on reducing everything to writing and texts as the only sense data the individual gets from the world. Black marks on white paper In order to attack the logos and reason through the spoken word, Derrida sets against them his notion of writing: l' ecriture . Derrida explains that what he means by writing is "a text already! written, black on white" (Dissemination , p. 203). That means a text already written, black on white. Black marks on white paper, plus excruciating attention to spaces, numbers, margins, paragraphs, typefaces, colophons, copyright notices, plus patterns, groups, repetitions of all of the above and so on in endless fetishism. Since it is probably clear by now that Derrida, posing as the destroyer of western metaphysics, is only spinning out very bad metaphysics in the process, we can feel free to say that Derrida attempts to establish the ontological priority of writing over language and speech. Nothing in the way of proof is offered in favor of this absurd idea: The argument proceeds through a "we say" and ends by lamely hinting that the computer revolution will also help reduce all spoken words to black marks on the page: 

"The entire field covered by the cybernetic program will be the field of writing" (Of Grammatology, p. 9).