…Breath is some
Thing in the Air
It is not air
Stirred
Only,
It is a concretization,
Massive in
The air
And that must
Be felt
In the body
Like an agglomeration
In sum atomic
Of elements
And of limbs
Which at that moment
Make tableau.
Artaud, 1948
50 Drawings to Murder Magic
Plant pollen and fungi spores stir in the air with word and elemental dust we inhale and partake in the textures we exhale at varying rhythms, intensities, speeds and slowness. We can never tell when such a mixture suddenly overwhelms, takes over, lets something new emerge that perdures. It could be something latent, virtual that actualizes itself, contracts, leaks a past into a present, the former being under the latter (Bergson 2003[1888]). In anthropology we often call these events “telling moments” or “serendipity”, typically taking us by surprise. Artaud’s “breath of chaos” is a force, a presence or an order that elaborates in a mystery or chaos beyond things; “… this sort of vital hunger, changing, opaque, whose currents sweep across the nerves, and battles with the intelligent principles of the brain. And these principles, in their turn, recharge the pulmonary breath and confer upon it all their powers” (2003[1979]:16). To reach this chaos or what he also calls the Marvelous of conscience, Artaud considers a cactus (Peyotl), to which he was initiated during his stay with the Tarahumara (Rarámuri) in Northwest Mexico, can indicate “where it is and according to which concretions of an atavistically repressed and obstructed breath the Fantastic can give rise and renew its phosphorescence and powdering in consciousness” (ibid: 38). It would be the breath of all poetry which pushes the hand to draw or write, and the same vegetal, by indicating the right way, can diminish the chances of falling into the obscure of a sensation that leaps out.
Following Deleuze, sensation is vibration, and when it is in direct contact with a vital power that exceeds every domain and traverses them all, it can feel like a wave passing through us; a unity of the senses (sense as event) which can be felt like a fall or a rise. This vital power he calls rhythm, more profound than vision, hearing, etc. (Deleuze 2002[1981], p.47). “We can seek the unity of rhythm only at the point where rhythm itself plunges into chaos, into the night, at the point where the differences of level are perpetually and violently mixed” (Ibid.: 44). It is not that order is engulfed by chaos, yet chaos itself, or the power to affirm it which happens to us (Deleuze 1968). It is irrational and more powerful because of it; “a wave in the mind, a rhythm far deeper than words, that one must recapture and set working, find words to fit” (Woolf 1926 in Le Guin 2004: 1). This might modify a well anchored idea that ‘Any classification is superior to chaos…” (Lévi-Strauss 1962: 24), since it brings us closer to what is going on in experience and is thus relevant for anthropology. Ultimately, anthropology’s attention to the everyday emerges from what surges unexpectedly, adheres and perdures. We thus ask, along with Deleuze, if such events can be tapped into in more fruitful manners.
“ We can not give up the hope that the effects of drugs and alcohol (their “revelations”) will be able to be relived and recovered for their own sake at the surface of the world, independently of the use of those substances, provided that the techniques of social alienation which determine this use are reversed into revolutionary means of exploration. Burroughs wrote some strange pages on this point which attest to this quest for the great health —our own manner of being pious: ‘Imagine that everything that can be attained by chemical means is accessible by other paths…’ A strafing of the surface in order to transmute the stabbing of bodies, oh psychedelia.”
Deleuze, The Logic of Sense 1990[1969]
Most of all, we are interested in levelling the playing fields of currently reified “psychedelics” by exploring how a breath of chaos is accessible by other paths. We also want to explore how the bracketed “revelations” are “revelations without revelation” since the psyche is not something already there, yet an opening to what is yet to come. As such we wish to retrieve the ancient Greek meaning of “psyche” which refers to life or its breath, thus expanding this sort of ode to “psychedelia” in as broad a sense as possible which brings it closer to something we might rather call “cosmodelia”. Spinoza’s insistence that we do not know what bodies can do, nor is anything good or bad in itself (1994 [1849]), thinking beyond good and evil as per Nietzsche (1987[1886]), attuning to cosmic forces in a sort of mastery of non—mastery (Taussig 2020), tending to suspension (Choy and Zee 2015), to lines (Ingold 2015), chaos (Grosz 2020), sonorous sensations (Laplante 2020), elements (Fujikane 2021; Papadopoulos & al.’s 2021), jolting events in art and fieldwork (Rethmann and Wulff 2023) or to the short moment of breath that can inspire the next move, give it its specific tempo and intensity (Motta 2021), all turn our attention towards ways life emerges unexpectedly in ways that we do not yet know. It invites contributions done in a single breath, a wind, a performance, stretching out from a singular plant or encounter with fungi, animal, elemental or word dust, attending to rhythms without measure, to what surges and perdures, or in other words, to the potentials of life to renew itself.
We invite researchers and artists to engage critically with breath and chaos as ways of tapping into what is yet to come to compose foreseeable futures.
We welcome submissions from diverse perspectives, including academic research, experimental performative writing, drawing, and sounding in anthropology, philosophy and art.
Submission Information: Planned Publication Date –September 2026
Guidelines For Papers
– Abstracts (250-300 words) due by 1 March 2025
– Full Paper (5,000-7,000 words) due by 1 August 2025
–Artworks are due by
1 August 2025 (Submissions
should be sent as a JPEG and include caption and dimensions as well as an artist statement)
Please submit your proposals in English, French or Spanish to Julie.laplante@uottawa.ca and Afuenzal@uottawa.ca
Submission Guidelines:
https://ac.americananthro.org/submissions/
Journal Homepage:
https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/hub/journal/15563537/about/author-guidelines
Chicago Style Publishing Guide:
https://www.americananthro.org/StayInformed/Content.aspx?ItemNumber=2044
Julie Laplante (julie.laplante@uottawa.ca) is Professor in Anthropology at the University of Ottawa. She works in phenomenological approaches in anthropology with interests in indigenous and humanitarian medicine, attuning to bodily, clinical, sensorial, and sonorous abilities in healing with plants or molecules. Her fieldwork in the Brazilian Amazon and at two edges of the Indian Ocean (South Africa, Java Indonesia) has more recently moved to Cameroon and on islands and mountains in the Americas. She is the author of Pouvoir guérir (2004) and of Healing Roots (2015, 2018), co-editor of Search After Method. Sensing, Moving, and Imagining in Anthropological Fieldwork (2020) and of the special issues Devenir-plante (2020) and Phénoménologies en anthropologie (2016) in the journal Anthropologies et sociétés, as well as producer of the film Jamu Stories (2015).
Ariel Fuenzalida (afuenzal@uottawa.ca) PhD is lecturer in Classics and Religious Studies and Adjunct Professor in Psychedelics & Consciousness Studies at the University of Ottawa and Contract Instructor in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at Carleton University. His teaching and research interests focus on contemporary social theory, biopolitics, sociology of health and illness, science and technology studies, critical drug studies and addictions research.
***
… what counts is no longer the statement of the wind, but the wind.
Georges Bataille 1988[1954]: 13
I don’t know if it is that the wind that is lifting,
Or if a wind is lifting from that ancient music
that persists until today
Antonin Artaud 1971:75
Artaud, A. (2003[1979]). Heliogabalus or, The Anarchist Crowned. (Trans. Alexis Lykiard) Creation Books
Artaud, A. (1971). Les Tarahumaras. Gallimard.
Artaud, A. (1948). 50 dessins pour assassiner la magie. Gallimard.
Bataille, Georges (1988 [1954]), Inner Experience. (Trans. Leslie Anne Bolt). State University of New York Press.
Bergson H. (2003 [1888]). Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience. Les Presses universitaires de France.
Choy T. and Zee J. (2015). Condition-Suspension. Cultural Anthropology, 30(2), pp. 210-223
Deleuze G. (2002[1981]). Francis Bacon : Logique de la sensation. Éditions du Seuil.
Deleuze G. (1969). Logique du sens. Les éditions de minuit.
Deleuze G. (1968). Différence et répétition. Presses Universitaires de France.
Fujikane, C. (2021). Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future. Kanaka Maoli and Critical Settler Cartographies in Hawai’i. Duke University Press.
Grosz, E. (2020) Chaos, Territory, Art. Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. Colombia university Press.
Ingold, T. (2015). The Life of Lines. Routledge.
Laplante J. (2020). Sonorous Sensations. People, Plant and Elemental Stirs in Healing. In J. Laplante J., A. Gandsman et W. Scobie (dir.), Search After Method. Sensing, Moving, and Imagining in Anthropological Fieldwork (p. 21-48). Berghahn Books.
Le Guin, U. (2004). The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination. Shambala.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1962). La pensée sauvage. Paris : Plon.
Motta, Marco (2021). The Signal Gait of the Human. A contrario. 1(31): 165-186.
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1987[1886). Par-delà bien et mal. Folio essais.
Papadopoulos, Dimitris, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa and Natasha Myers (ed.) 2021 Reactivating Elements. Chemistry, Ecology, Practice. Duke University Press.
Rethmann, P. and H. Wulff, 2023 Exceptional Experiences. Engaging with Jolting Events in Art and Fieldwork. Berghahn..
Spinoza, B. (1994 [1849]). L’Éthique. Folio essais.
Taussig M. (2020). Mastery of Non-Mastery in the Age of Meltdown. The University of Chicago Press.
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