Rachel Holmes

Research project: The Language of Birds: Lucky Rituals and Malandragem

Abstract

Drawing from Dale Pendell's work on chance, and his ‘ecological' methodology concerned with the divination of signs, and the signifying practices of non-human creatures I describe beyond-human and inter-species communication as the 'language of birds', represented as pre-linguistic and instinctive modes of communication, including signification. I thereby generate an aesthetic theory of omens or 'lucky signs' produced by sentient ecologies, and apprehended through ritual practice, which enacts Georges Bataille's conception of sovereign communication, trickery, and 'living myth' in 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice', and Friedrich Nietzsche's description of divinatory intoxication in 'The Birth of Tragedy'. I investigate the status of ritual as 'the mother of culture' whose creative media is social reality, and its capacity for integrating the exiled and invisible.