The following article will appear next month in the Winter 2021-22 issue of the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory. It is published in three installments. The first installment can be found here.
Demonic Physics
Why, I ask again, does Wynter utilize the term “demonic”? This question becomes particularly relevant and necessary when we consider that the “demonic” and associated terms are frequently used in the service of racialized oppression and exclusion. Consider the continued stereotyping of African-derived religions such as Vodou and Santeria as “devil worship,” a claim that served to legitimate and justify laws that prohibited religious practices.[1] Moreover, there exists an intimate relationship between demonology and racialization that marks those racialized as Black as “demonic” and therefore evil, unworthy, less-than-human.[2]
For instance, in a recent and particularly vicious example, police officer Darren Wilson described Michael Brown as looking like a “demon” in the final moments leading up to his fatal shooting of the unarmed Black teenager.[3] Stating “it looks like a demon, that’s how angry he looked,” Wilson builds on and cements both the demonization and objectification of blackness.[4]
Against this discourse, Wynter’s reclaiming of the “demonic” as a vantage point to think against and beyond centuries of antiblack white supremacy, deserves careful scrutiny. In Demonic Grounds, McKittrick riffs on the etymology of the term: the “demonic is defined as spirits—most likely the devil, demons, or deities—capable of possessing a human being.”[5] She’s quick to add, though, that the demonic “has also been understood in terms that are less ecclesial.”[6]
In physics, mathematics, and computer science, writes McKittrick, the term denotes a “system that cannot have a determined, or knowable, outcome.”[7] Demonic systems hinge on uncertainty; they trouble linearity and determination. Wynter, McKittrick argues, develops her concept of the “demonic” in accordance with this second, non-ecclesial strand of thought. As liminal space opened up by and working against the desire for pure difference, the “demonic” suggests, as I noted above, “perspectives that reside in the liminal precincts of the current governing configurations of the human as Man in order to abolish this figuration and create other forms of life.”[8]
However, other than a general reference of “physicists,” it remains unclear who or what Wynter refers to precisely. Sarah Haley observes this as well in No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (2016). She offers a potential reference when she notes that “[t]he demon to which Wynter might refer appears in a mid-nineteenth-century thought experiment pertaining to thermodynamics.”[9] This tiny demon, also known as Maxwell’s demon, is the product of Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell.
In an 1867 thought experiment, Maxwell speculated about the possibility of a violation of the second law of thermodynamics, which postulates that entropy always increases as time passes. In the experiment, a demon who could effortlessly “follow every molecule in its course” would control a “vessel” that is “divided into two portions, A and B.”[10] By quickly opening and closing a “small hole” between A and B, the demon could ensure that faster molecules would pass from A to B and slower molecules from B to A, allowing B to heat up and A to cool down. This would decrease entropy and frustrate the possibility for equilibrium, thus violating the second law. Canales helps us to understand the importance of this experiment when she notes that Maxwell’s demon demonstrated that the second law had only “statistical certainty”; sometimes, “nature does follow the path less travelled.”[11]
As Haley notes, this “demonic challenge” theorizes an outside observer who disrupts the supposedly natural “progression of energy.”[12] If Haley’s interpretation is correct, embedded in Wynter’s “demonic” would not be simply that the “demonic ground” opens up the possibility of the unknown, the contingent, the non-deterministic, but also that such models actively disrupt and challenge what we may call hegemonic proceedings.
Haley’s theory helps to fill in the more abstract references to “physicists” offered by McKittrick and Wynter. However, Wynter does not refer to Maxwell’s demon and my own search for references pointed in a different direction: Alex Comfort’s article “Demonic and Historical Models in Biology,” published in 1980 in the Journal of Social and Biological Structures. I should note that Wynter does not cite Comfort’s article (or any of his works) directly. However, it includes the phrase “a time-and-place oriented homuncular observer” (1980, 208), a phrase that sounds quite similar to that used by Wynter when she explains how she came to the term demonic in her 1990 essay (a quote already cited above): “physicists who seek to conceive of a vantage point outside the space-time orientation of the humuncular[13] observer.”[14]
With his iteration of the phrase, Comfort refers to the Cartesian “little man” inside human brains who supposedly “initiates the actions of thinking, willing, and the like.”[15] “Western scientific ontology,” he argues in a 1979 essay that formed the explicit starting point for the 1980 article, assumes that this homuncular observer is “real” to the extent that it presupposes an objective, indeed mechanistic, universe that can be studied by a human subject. It assumes a distinction between subjective experience and “the objective word,” between self and environment, between mind and matter. This “observing I” is, moreover, assumed to be located in a specific point in space and time, where space—and here Comfort references Kant’s a prioris—is assumed to have three dimensions and time is assumed to be constantly elapsing.
The Cartesian “little man” is, essentially, what Wynter conceptualizes as “Man1” (even if her writings omit explicit reference to Descartes). It was Descartes, after all, who roughly a century after the rupture initiated by Columbus, Ficino, and others, theorized and cemented human nature as, essentially and fundamentally, rational—and did so while espousing a fully mechanistic worldview that viewed nonhuman animals as machines. It is important to note, however, that while Wynter’s study of “Man” underscores and explores the racialized nature and implications of the distinction between rational and irrational, subject and other; Comfort, on the other hand, does not seem to recognize or acknowledge the racialized nature of the “Western scientific ontology” he identifies and critiques.
What Comfort does note, however, is that the idea of positional identity “biases” our conception of how the world works, biases the models that we create to understand the world. Can we think of a model, he therefore asks in 1980, that is not determined by the necessarily limited temporal-spatial positionality of a human observer? Comfort arrives at this question through his studies of quantum mechanics which, he argues, demonstrates that there are levels of reality that are not understandable or even perceivable within the limits of human perception, within the limits of space-time. Consider, Comfort writes, theoretical physicist David Bohm’s “implicate reality.”[16]
Bohm argued that an “implicate reality” (or “order”) should be differentiated from the “explicate order” in that it is a deeper, more fundamental order of reality that is not and cannot be normally perceived by humans. Bohm essentially argued that the “implicate order” consists of an infinite number of overlapping waves that generate what appear to human beings, in the explicate order, as particles. To study or even begin to comprehend this, Bohm argued that we must do away with the mechanistic worldview that has dominated Western science and philosophy since Descartes.[17]
As Ashon Crawley writes in a beautiful exploration of what quantum thought can offer Black Study, “[t]hings that occur on the quantum level go against common knowledge regarding time and space.”[18] On the quantum level, the relationship between cause and effect is upended and troubled, in favour of a radical—if, admittedly, largely theoretical—randomness, uncertainty. The interconnectedness that quantum mechanics has been able to observe between two particles over a great distance should, in addition, not be able to exist within 4-space. At the quantum level, it’s all just so radically different, and pregnant with possibility.
Speculating about such alternatives, Comfort lands on the concept of “demonic,” a term that, he presses emphatically, does not refer to “an imaginary demiurge” but is used “to imply logical and intelligent but not human and therefore not homuncular.”[19] If “we program them correctly,” he writes in Empathy and Reality (1984), these “imaginary demons… will ask very awkward Socratic questions.”[20]
As indicated above, Comfort’s use of the term “demon” to describe such models is not out of the ordinary. In her aptly titled Bedeviled (2020), Jimena Canales writes that demons have populated science for centuries where they function as a kind of threshold or limit case: in developing scientific theories, scientists imagined powerful demons that could break, challenge or trouble these, thereby allowing them to uphold, strengthen or discard a hypothesis.[21] Invoked in 1641, Descartes’ demon—an “evil genius” that could take control over our sensations and whom, incidentally, sprang out of his dualistic understanding of the relationship between mind and matter—warned for instance about the limitation of the senses in perceiving reality.[22]
In line with this, Comfort describes the aim of “demonics” as detecting “the constraints on what we can think, so as to extend them and move towards experimentally testable predictions.”[23] Importantly, it is precisely in relation to this issue—testable predictions—that Wynter’s demonic is rather different from that of Comfort. While Wynter shares with Comfort a commitment to the necessity of experimentation and study, for Wynter (and this is of course what McKittrick already outlined) the value of “demonic” lies in that it opens up the possibility for ways of critique and thinking “otherwise” that value and reside in—rather than try to resolve—the unpredictable, the unknown.[24]
After all, as I noted earlier with reference to the early modern demonics of the “lay intelligentsia,” what was once “demonic” can become hegemonic—and, indeed, oppressive, stifling, destructive. In this way, Wynter may help us to avoid the desire for predictability that we continue to find in Comfort.
However, to the extent that Comfort remains committed to a version of positivistic science, there are other moments that his quest to push beyond the Cartesian “little man” takes him to less well-travelled terrain. In his effort to think outside the box, Comfort invokes a fair number of esoteric, spiritual and “religious”[25] worldviews that, he argues, already query a priori conceptions of space, time and positional identity. In the 1980 article that I argue inspired Wynter to take up the term “demonic,” he invokes these tentatively, sceptically, with several references to “telekinesis,” “telepathy,” and “vitalism”[26] which he four years later also captured, rather derogatory, as “Californianism,”[27] thereby falling in the trap of relegating such practices to the realm of “rejected knowledge.”[28]
However, in several other writings he invokes such alternative worldviews explicitly and with seemingly sincere and great interest—and it is in these writings that he establishes a link between “demonic models” and “oceanic experiences.”[29] Importantly for our present purposes, these writings also include I and That, the book that is topic of the review cited by Wynter, which devotes, as reviewer De Nicolas also notes, an entire chapter to “oceanic experiences.”
In an article published in 1979, Comfort proposes a shift from a “Cartesian positional identity (‘homuncular I-ness’)” to an “oceanic,” “nonpositional observer” modelled on “Buddhist and Hindu ontology.”[30] Why? Because in such models, both the “I” and the “objective world” are experienced as an illusion, rather than a fact—an experience, he notes, confirmed by modern physics. And while Comfort is particularly interested in Buddhism and Hinduism, he universalizes the oceanic in Empathy and Reality (1984), referencing “oceanic Christians” such as Meister Eckhardt, the oceanic experiences “studied and indeed experienced by William James” and, more generally to “altered states of consciousness (oceanic states)” facilitated by drugs, meditation or other rituals, or occurring spontaneously.[31]
While Comfort does not explicitly point to a specific source for his use of “oceanic” as a catch-all phrase to study such varied altered states of consciousness, he seems to locate it not, perhaps surprisingly, in the work of Sigmund Freud (who in turn borrowed the term from the French mystic Romain Rolland), but in the Sanskrit term samādhi. Samādhi is somewhat of a contested term, difficult to translate, but Comfort’s definition will do here: a “state in which Reality is experienced as seamless and without distinctions.”[32] Such a state, he notes early in Empathy and Reality, can be translated as “oceanic experience.”[33]
What connects all these experiences, for Comfort, is that I and other, self and environment, perceiver and that which is perceived, are “experienced as non-different.”[34] Such experiences suggest for Comfort that the hard-and-fast distinction between subjective and objective that underlies “Western scientific ontology” is only one way—and not the only way—of experiencing “reality.” It is precisely for this reason that “oceanic experiences” help to visualize ways of thinking not determined by the “observer bias.”[35] On the level of both quantum waves and oceanic experiences, Comfort’s writings thus suggest, things occur that go against conventional understandings of the relationship between inside and outside, subject and object.
Justine M. Bakker is Assistant Professor of Comparative Religious Studies at Radboud University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, and a postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven (Belgium). Her published work focuses on the intersections of race and religion with special attention to a study of alternative and esoteric forms of religion in the African diaspora.
______________________________________________________________________________
[1] Danielle N. Boaz, Banning Black Gods: Law and Religions of the African Diaspora (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2021).
[2] Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Adam Kotsko, The Prince of This World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016); S. Jonathon O’Donnell, Passing Orders: Demonology and Sovereignty in American Spiritual Warfare (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020). The demonization of human beings extends beyond Black people: consider, for instance, the persistent demonization of Jewish people and Muslims.
[3] Damien Cave, “Officer Darren Wilson’s Grand Jury Testimony in Ferguson, Mo., Shooting,” The New York Times, November 25, 2014, sec. U.S., https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/11/25/us/darren-wilson-testimony-ferguson-shooting.html, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/11/25/us/darren-wilson-testimony-ferguson-shooting.html.
[4] See also Kotsko, The Prince of This World, 1–5.
[5] McKittrick, Demonic Grounds.
[6] McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, xxiv.
[7] McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, xxiv. Interestingly, however, scientific demons are not completely divorced from theology. When Descartes invoked his “all powerful” “evil genius” in 1641 to imagine the limitations of the human senses, he was quickly accused of heresy, a claim he countered by clarifying that the term “evil genius” did not refer to a power that equalled that of God, but rather to a lesser demon with limited powers, along the likes of pagan demons (Canales, Bedeviled: A Shadow History of Demons in Science., 25. This claim also divorced the term demon from its immediate, and fully Christian, association with evil, as pagan demons were often quite benevolent.
[8] Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 21.
[9] Haley, No Mercy Here, 229.
[10] Canales, Bedeviled: A Shadow History of Demons in Science, 56.
[11] Canales, Bedeviled, 55, 54.
[12] Haley, No Mercy Here, 229.
[13] Please note that the spelling is slightly different in the two texts: Wynter uses the phrase “homuncular” while Comfort speaks of “homuncular.”
[14] Moreover, Wynter does cite two other articles that were published in the same 1980 issue of the Journal of Social and Biological Structures that included Comfort’s article, which could suggest that she’s read the entire issue with great interest. One of these is the already referenced review article by Antonio T. de Nicolas which is, in fact, a review of Comfort’s book ‘I and THAT’: Notes on the Biology of Religion (1979). It could be worthwhile, therefore, to explore why and how Comfort uses the “demonic.” Importantly, I am not suggesting that Wynter would agree with all aspects of Comfort’s argument and neither, I think, should we; rather, I study Comfort’s work to better understand and build on the potentially hidden traces in the concept of “demonic ground.”
[15] Alex Comfort, “The Cartesian Observer Revisited: Ontological Implications of the Homuncular Illusion,” Journal of Social and Biological Structures 2 (1979): 211.
[16] Alex Comfort, “Demonic and Historical Models in Biology,” Journal of Social and Biological Structures 3, no. 2 (1980): 207, 214.
[17] Comfort, 214.
[18] Ashon T. Crawley, The Lonely Letters (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 5.
[19] Comfort, “Demonic and Historical Models in Biology,” 211.
[20] Alex Comfort, Reality and Empathy: Physics, Mind, and Science in the 21st Century (Albany: SUNY Press, 1984), 65.
[21] Even though several scientists involved in developing quantum mechanics referred to demons in their work, including Max Planck and Max Born (see: Canales, Bedeviled, 112-4), Comfort’s “demon” is not the same as those of quantum physics. In other words, Comfort uses the term “demon” as a kind of catch-all to describe the ways in which models inspired by quantum physics could challenge the positional identity bias in mainstream science; he did not, however, develop his own demon a la Maxwell or LaPlace.
[22] Canales, Bedeviled, 15.
[23] Comfort, Reality and Empathy, 194, 85.
[24] I take the term “otherwise” from Ashon Crawley, who writes in Blackpentecostal Breath: “Otherwise, as word—otherwise possibilities, as phrase—announces the fact of infinite alternatives to what is. And what is is about being, about existence, about ontology”; 2.
[25] I use the phrase “religion” or “religious” in scare quotes to signal well-known critiques of the term—critiques that demonstrate that “religion” is not a universal but a colonial category that was (re)invented in asymmetrical power relationships between Europeans and the peoples they encountered overseas.
[26] Comfort, “Demonic and Historical Models in Biology,” 211–12.
[27] Comfort, Reality and Empathy, 23.
[28] On “rejected knowledge” see: Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2012); Jeffrey J. Kripal, The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge (New York: Bellevue Literary Press, 2019).
[29] Alex Comfort, I and That: Notes on the Biology of Religion (New York: Crown Publishers, 1979); Comfort, “The Cartesian Observer Revisited”; Comfort, Reality and Empathy.
[30] Comfort, “The Cartesian Observer Revisited”, 211.
[31] Comfort, Reality and Empathy, 38, 4, 65.
[32] Comfort, Reality and Empathy, 260.
[33] Comfort, Reality and Empathy, 4.
[34] Comfort, Reality and Empathy, 4.
[35] Comfort, Reality and Empathy, 65.
