Bryan Hawkins
Disgrac’d Knowledges – Art, Archaeology, Magical Thinking and the British Radical Imagination
I would wish to suggest the consideration of ‘Magical Thinking’ as a characteristic and tradition and significant element of the British radical imagination is potentially rewarding, significant and long overdue. This magical thinking whilst remaining by nature, fugitive, secretive, mercurial, hidden, ambivalent and constructed in relation to the deviations and turnings of the empirical, the pragmatic and the rational is nevertheless present, significant and subject to constant renewals, mutations and materialisations.
This magical thinking might be provisionally characterised as:
a sympathy for disgraced and unconventional knowledge
the primacy of knowledge from the land and earth
an ‘antedeluvian’ sense of loss
a ‘prelapsarian’ sense of innocence
transhistoricity
an ‘antinomian’ tradition of refusal and resistance
an anti-enlightenment anti-hegemonic sensibility
the significance of the dream and the oneiric
the construction of a sealed and protected private imaginal world
sex as mystery, generation and spirituality