Spinal Catastrophism: A Secret History by Thomas Moynihan (review)

Have you ever had a backache while reading Nietzsche—or Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Schelling, Fichte, Herder, Coleridge, Freud, Jung, Bergson, Bataille, Ballard, and Burroughs, to name only the most prominent line of thinkers traced here, albeit not in this order? (An alternative string of lesser-known or more abstruse thinkers also present might go something like: Steno, Oken, Frenenczi, Velikovksy, Reich, Leroi-Gourhan, Blumenberg, Morgan.) If so, then Spinal Catastrophism will resonate deeply, even painfully. Moynihan has produced no mere oddball intellectual history of the role that oft-obscured spinal thinking has played in modern Western thought, however; instead, he has (also) written a marvelous, maddening treatise on evolution, geology, bipedalism, the body and its nervous system, romanticism, modernity, time, space, the cosmos, and lumbar support (or lack thereof). In this triumphant albeit highly unusual first book, Moynihan is our mostly trustworthy guide to a panoply and genealogy of thinkers of what he dubs "spinal catastrophism," riffing on the early Enlightenment theory of the earth's development via a series of unforeseeable, cataclysmic disasters (as opposed to the uniformitarianism that eventually won out, for a while at least)—which turns out to be a pretty darn good model for spinal and central nervous system development, too. Along the way, Moynihan moves effortlessly across disciplines that were once as interfused as damaged vertebrae, from geology to biology to anthropology to psychology to linguistics to neuroscience to astrophysics and then sometimes back again, in the manner of the near-complete spinal curvature that, for some of those aforementioned theorists, represents a vain attempt to return to ground or close upon ourselves, ouroboros-like and orgasmic.

Consider merely a few insightful examples from literally hundreds in this book. "Bones are not concepts," Moynihan intones at the start of a chapter, "Traumata Triumphant," playing on Hegel's famous pronouncement to the contrary. "But they are constraints," he continues, "enabling ones at that. This is precisely what makes them legible as precursors of conceptual finitude" (p. 47). From this resonant opening, Moynihan proceeds to consider the eruption of Kant's career and its coincidence with the 1755 earthquake that destroyed much of Lisbon. Although perhaps best known as Voltaire's Panglossian example of "the best of all possible worlds," this event, as Moynihan shows, left Kant moved—literally, shaken—to begin his famous consideration of what could be known for certain, given that even the earth below our feet is unpredictable and unstable. And once that example has gotten under our skin, and into our bones, there's no stopping Moynihan:

Let us, then, embark upon a geotraumatic vivisection of our grounds of orientation: peeling back transcendental overlay down to osseous underlay; quarrying the prehistory of our inferential exoskeleton through our physical endoskeleton; shaving away conceptual, linguistic, and synaptic laminar; spelunking the larynx, opening onto grand coelems—dropping down the spinal echelons—in phyletic katabasis through our architectures of chronotopic encasement.

(p. 49)

This is not Spinal Tap, although at moments the density of Moynihan's prose and the welter of technical terminology seem to purposefully skirt the parodic. His purpose, nevertheless, is deadly serious: to demonstrate how thinkers in the long Western tradition—both the ones we are already generally familiar with (see the first list in my opening paragraph) and many others who were largely unfamiliar to this reader at least—have grappled with the body, its skeleton, its nervous system, and finally its very existence, especially with regard to considerations both geospatial and temporal.

Perhaps most fascinating, however, are Moynihan's excursions into the conceptual detours that even some of the best-known figures in his book occasionally found themselves. Consider the case of S. T. Coleridge, for example; we are all familiar with his contributions to romantic British poetry—but do we also recognize the extent to which, later in his life especially, he became obsessed with first understanding and then repudiating the earth-centric theories of F. W. G. Schelling...