Republic of Consciousness Class of 2021: Unknown Language by Hildegard von Bingen and Huw Lemmey (Ignota Books)
Between March 8th and March 19th we will be posting ten pieces on our blog celebrating the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2021 longlist. There will be interviews, extracts and articles, with each piece focussing on a longlisted book.
Below is an interview with Sarah Shin and Ben Vickers, founders of Ignota Books, which publishes Unknown Language by Hildegard of Bingen and Huw Lemmey, with additional material by Bhanu Kapil and Alice Spawls.
Who is Ignota Books, and what’s your story so far?
We founded Ignota in the last days of 2017 and launched on Halloween 2018 with our debut book Spells: 21st-Century Occult Poetry. Since then we have published across areas including artificial intelligence, such as Pharmako-AI, the first book to be co-written with the language AI GPT-3; blockchain technology; mysticism and ritual in Nisha Ramayya’s States of the Body Produced by Love; form-making in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, and of course speculative mysticism in Unknown Language. Ignota, meaning ‘unknown’, is a path of exploration: we refer to Ignota as an experiment in the techniques of awakening and it is this sense of experimentalism, trying things out, that guides our decisions.
When Ignota was launched in 2018, you described our time as being one of "intense historical confusion" in which "our collectively hallucinated ‘reality’ has become more precarious than ever”. What role might cultural productions, and books/literature specifically, have in responding to a world, three years on, which seems more confused than ever, and in which people are living entirely different realities while sharing a society?
Our inception several years ago was in response to what we felt was an increasingly challenging set of political, historical, ecological, spiritual, psychological and material conditions for survival; the sense that the old narratives were no longer working. From the beginning we wanted to share tools and practices that we have personally found helpful, healing and supportive of the resilience and flexibility needed to deal with uncertainty and stress. Perhaps the best example of this in our work is the annual Ignota Diary—journals that serve as a personal chronometer, accompanying the everyday. In Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, which we published in 2019, she speaks of books as medicine bundles. In this moment of relentless connectivity, books offer the opportunity to turn inwards and to open to the possibility of transformation.
And, books have always been portals to the exploration of multiple consciousness. The Atlas of Anomalous AI, published towards the end of 2020, employs an associative logic to move between words and images to draw attention to the long history of modelling, memory, cognition and prediction that forms the unconscious of artificial intelligence development today. This history includes the Oracle of Delphi, the Quipu counting system, and the I Ching as proto-neural network, to make an intervention into the contemporary narrative logic by which AI is being constructed. The book tries to emphasise this history to show that it is not really that the world is more confused than ever, but that a certain worldview built on Westernised cosmotechnics can no longer withstand its own contradictions and mythology of a singular, stable reality in which the human is at the centre.
Unknown Language is a work of collaboration and correspondence. Was it always conceived this way and how did it come about?
In each project that we undertake we’re interested in worlding, asking “What is a world?” and “What kind of a world do you want to live in?” Unknown Language is possibly the first in the genre called speculative mysticism, and is an exercise in world-building through speculative fiction, for “the truth is a matter of the imagination”. To do this we knew that it would be necessary to bring together fragments of that world in non-chronological time, and that this would require multiple voices.
The core of Unknown Language is composed by Huw Lemmey, whom we invited to write a rendition of Hildegard’s story with her words, but to translate her teachings into a story that speaks to our age and that also resonates with her potent concept of viriditas, “greeness”: to re-green her work itself, to find ways of putting in conversation her experiences in the moral and spiritual ruins of her world with ours. As ever, Huw’s vision is sensitive to queerness and desire, here embedded in Christian mystical texts, and he brings a depth and sophistication to the encounter between politics and religion in the historical Middle Ages. The result is a queer pilgrimage narrative that tells the story of the journey of a soul. We feel this image is the best gesture towards the nature of Huw and Hildegard’s collaboration.
Bhanu Kapil’s work around monstrosity, hybridity, the humanimal, the migrant, mental health, the body and the racialised subject made her our ideal introducer to frame Hildegard’s story with a highly original, gently funny and touching new mythology that flips the colonialist underpinnings of discovery narratives in which an orphan of civilisational collapse finds and activates fragments of Hildegard’s messages. Her Pinky Agarwalia receives the story of Hildegard in 2121 on the planet Avaaz, formerly known as Earth, as well as the scholarly text of Dr. Alice Spawls from the Plague Year of 2020. Dr. Spawls’ text, written by Alice Spawls, is a paper about Hildegard’s remarkable musical composition, pointing towards the polyphonic nature of the project as a whole.
If you could be a bigger press, would you like to be?
Books are what we love, and when we reflect on the tools that have been most instrumental in our lives, it is always the book that we return to. But it is important that we state that Ignota was always intended as a starting position for us; the creation of a frame in which we could develop a language between our writers, readers and ourselves, from which we could then set out in new directions.
Since the first lockdown, we have hosted over forty online events that have brought together groups of anywhere between 100 to 800 people, for poetry readings, guided meditations, musical performances and conversations — this has been an exciting time to reconsider what a publisher can be in the 21st century.
We’re not necessarily thinking about becoming bigger in the sense that we scale up, but about how we can become more fluid, innovative and otherwise.
What does 2021 and beyond hold for Ignota?
2020 was a big year. It was also the end of a 200-year planetary cycle of the Earth Era in which materialism, use of fossil fuels, industrialisation and ceaseless extraction thrived. In the new 200-year cycle of Air, things are likely to be a bit different, for example we may see the expansion of airborne diseases, the acceleration of aerospace technologies, ungrounded financialisation and a strong sense of deep unknowability.
It seems like a good time to slow down and pay attention to what is changing before making any serious commitments. We might publish some books, lets see.
Unknown Language can be purchased at the Ignota Books website.