Pneumaterialism Pt. 1 (breath, Spirit, bless this immunity)

This is either a side story or the main summary to my PhD dissertation, which may have been inspired in theorizing by TOOL lyrics.

Even though I wrote my PhD dissertation in a narrative style and mentioned autoethnography as one main method (to the discourse analysis of social movements, contemporary poetry, and Indigenous creation chants), I decided not to be entirely transparent about the “Pneumaterialism” being sourced from TOOL’s 2019 album.

In retrospect, I don’t know why I bothered censoring that, aside from wanting to keep it as an anecdote to expand on for a perhaps different audience on a less academic blog. Welcome. I’m also still mourning the fact that after 13 years, I managed to score a Berlin concert ticket to the 2019 tour, just to have to resell it, because I also scored *an all-expenses paid trip to California* in *that same week* for a post-/doctoral academy. *sad face* The band managed to release a new album before I finished my PhD, not what I would have expected since 2015. But I guess I got two degrees in the meantime between albums and graduating from high school in 2006 for Rock am Ring.

The narratives in my dissertation come from my involvement in the Hawaiian land protection movement for Maunakea and Aloha ‘Āina (“love of the land”) in general, and center Hawaiian philosophies, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (as brought forward by Haudenosaunee & Anishinaabe scholar Vanessa Watts), and many other Indigenous forms of knowledge and kinship to the land, Huey P. Newton and the Black Panther Party’s Intercommunalism, Hegelian Geist of all things appropriative of the colonial,... to critique or enhance Marxian politics for global climate justice with an Intercommunalist or decolonial Indigenous-centered and place-based framework that reinserts ~ SPIRIT ~.

I did not set out to do that. It’s a big claim, but it happened. Anyone is welcome to read the 315 pages to see that I did do all that.

Its name, in reference to Hawaiian “sanctuary spaces” or “places of refuge:” “Growing Intercommunalist ‘pockets of resistance’ with Aloha ‘Āina in Hawai‘i”

While I reference all kinds of podcasts or conversations or less conventional citation sources, such as Philippine and Hawaiian ghost (Geist, get it) beliefs, I refrained from citing Maynard James Keenan’s “Pneuma” lyrics and transcendence from the Fear Inoculum album, or other previous albums and songs. The newest Dune (Villeneuve 2021) and its overlaps with Sufism, Islam, Buddhism, Jungian psychology made me reconsider if MJK, Frank Herbert, and myself were influenced by Higher Being/Spirit or Carl Jung, or if Jung himself was? You can find redditors cheering that TOOL guitarist Adam Jones mentions Dune as inspiration in 2019. And I keep forgetting that I once initially studied Psychology for 2.5 years before quitting my first degree (in the German bureaucratic academic mess that was the Bologna process), which made me wonder if I ever consciously read Jungian psychology because I never consciously did after.

I wanna feel the change consume me,
Feel the outside turning in.
I wanna feel the metamorphosis and
Cleansing I’ve endured in
My shadow
My shadow

Change is coming.
Now is my time.

I also barely remember that I read Marx, Freud, Weber, Foucault, Durkheim,… in my previous life of being a Sociology and Cultural Anthropology student, until I see the old course readers I never threw out or see which readings I even had to give a report on (Foucault in my graduate course of “Sociology of Resistance” from before quitting the first degree and being demoted). Since submitting the dissertation, I have had more time to develop the ideas I dropped into that writing. I have mostly been listening to intellectual podcasts on the “History of Philosophy without any gaps” (have gone through Hellenic/Ionian, and “in the Islamic world,” 200 episodes?), but also reading Dune reviews that link back to the 14th century Sociologist Ibn Khaldun, while channelling motivation into PostDoc applications. I now live in a town that has not had a movie theater in 10 years, I found out when looking up Dune screening times…

Although my PhD project has been “in progress” since early 2015, officially enrolled in late 2015, and I submitted a final dissertation in summer 2021, the greater bulk of its 7 chapters (5+ of them) were written in January–June 2021. Some days I wrote pages and pages and my *shorter* chapters are around 45 pages 1.5-spaced. Some 2–3 weeks I wrote nothing and barely managed to read through PDFs with CTRL+F to find the origins of old excerpted notes I hadn’t organized well in 2015–2020.

Chapter 5 is the only full chapter that was written before 2021, in the pandemic summer of 2020. The second chapter I wrote in full was Chapter 6 this February, then I went back to snippets and introductions and repetitions in chapters of things I talked about in guest lectures or conferences over the years. I submitted a final dissertation which was also a *first* draft, because, well, how German academia is, and how a German PhD works as individual study with no peers in solitary isolation, and how I could under no circumstances push this into 2022, because I had beyond cracked (I was ready to quit 10 days before submitting, then: a ghost).

As of right now I’m killing time between submission and finding out if I will ever have and pass a defense date, and acquiring this fancy title of PhD in American Studies from a fancy German university. I’m spending this time not going crazier (results may vary) by actually building theories on top of the theories built and seeds planted in the dissertation. I just submitted an Anarchist (academic) article that expands on the Philippine collectivism or kapwa “ontology” and bayanihan (mutual aid) “community pantries.” I got published in an Italian (progressive) print magazine (in Italian??) inserting the few sentences from dissertation contemplation of a Sylvia Wynter & Katherine McKittrick inspired plantation-plot spatiality of “palengke” marronage?

The gist of these theories:

Pneumaterialism from the Greek pneuma (πνεῦμα), materialism, and a pun intended on New Materialism,

which is not what it is.

Everything I have been reading and writing with since 2015, and perhaps since I started my M.A. in Pacific Islands Studies in 2012, is filtered through a decolonizing/decolonial lens of Indigenous Studies. Everything pneuma, breath, spirit, shadows, light, transcendence, I believed to be either inspired from Indigenous scholarship, or yes, TOOL and whatever music, podcasts, and other sources I picked and cited.

The breath/spirit metaphors definitely come from Hawaiian ea (sovereignty, emergence, breath) coupled with two diving mishaps with hāhālua (manta ray; “two breaths”) in Hawai‘i and the Philippines respectively, described in a personal narrative in Chapter 5. I have always been intrigued by Animism, Buddhism, Islam, and was made to take German religion class (reading Hermann Hesse and Fritz Nietzsche) in high school, so there’s that. I’m also a Protestant Filipina, which is *quirky* to interpret Roman Catholicism from without.

Also: ghosts in the Philippines *sigh* (respectfully)

After I had established some of my core ideas in spring 2021, I did audit a summer 2021 course (at my university, likewise previously that of Marx and Hegel) on Hegelian “Philosophy of Religion,” which I read and interpreted as I wished from an Indigenous-influenced perspective, but also to deliberate how to best translate/triangulate my own work for a German/Eurocentric (and maybe Protestant, but actually Atheist) audience.

I keep reiterating: an interpretation of “Absolute Spirit” and “community of Spirit” as in the Philosophy of Religion [unpublished lectures] held before Hegel’s death fits my needs of a

holistic (and not absolutist or totalitarian)

~ spirit in-between matter/beings ~

Shoutout to that online course, we first/last met in person the July day I came to Berlin to submit the printed and bound dissertation copies, and without whom I would probably not have finished. Plus, they were mostly my only sounding board, as I could hardly force other PhDs elsewhere to read or discuss my work with me virtually (have I mentioned 45–60-page chapters, not written in a linear fashion). We toasted sparkling wine at Hegel’s grave, to him, not me.

contagion/cognition, I exhale you

Now, there is still an on-going pandemic outside. In the meantime almost a year ago, I left Berlin and moved back to my parents, because I never did manage to pay my own rent during the PhD. I’m one of those unemployed and living-with-parents late-80s millennials, I’m being transparent, do not envy me. Berlin (housing) was also driving me to worse madness in the pandemic, and a rural town with a river outside my “office” window is *not bad* in this situation. The pandemic is a respiratory disease, something of a pneumonic disease. From zoonoses that spring from animal to human in close quarters.

Pneuma
Reach out and beyond
Wake up, remember
(We are born of)
One breath, one word
(We are all)
One spark, eyes full of wonder

My PhD is strictly-speaking in Eurocentric terms on “ecologies,” I was listening to TOOL’s new album, I had spent some of summer 2020 writing in Greece, I decided that the Chapter 3 on “Land” or Aloha ‘Āina was to include 1. zoonoses and 2. pneuma/spirits/ghosts, after I wrote Chapters 5 and 6. I established this having written those two chapters on the “Ocean” (deity) and on the “Estuary.” Chapter 4 is on “Sky,” or rather the Sky Father Wākea, whose mountain child Maunakea inspired this entire project in 2015.

In a travelling fashion from makai (oceanside) to mauka (mountainside): from the ocean depths to the coastline, up ahupua‘a watersheds and streams on the ‘āina or land, to the mauna summits, I ordered the chapters in the same way as envisioned (minus knowing what the “estuary” even was) way back in 2015–2016, just not in my chronological writing:

Chapter 5: Ocean (Kaho‘olawe Island), Foundations, Plantations, Demilitarization

Chapter 6: Estuary, Solidarities & Symbiosis

Chapter 3: Land, Aloha ‘Āina, Mutual Aid, Ghosts, Hydrology

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: Methodology (I have been told my nerd chapter of “methodology, positionality/responsibility, and critiques” is basically what is a “literature review” in other places, where one has PhD structures or expectations)

Chapter 4: Sky (Maunakea), Genealogies of Resistance, EAducation, Abolition, Optics

Chapter 7: Conclusions for Climate Justice

Chapters 3, 2, 4 were mostly written parallel after I wrote the introduction and sent that around to friends of varying (none) familiarity with the topic. The conclusion and introduction were modified when I finally managed to end Chapter 4 back on Maunakea and staring into the sun and space in/for ~ SPIRIT ~.

Chapter 6 *manifested* or *materialized* as an “estuary” while writing, as much of it was centered on Kāne‘ohe Bay, Pu‘uloa (Pearl Harbor, attack on), Manila Bay (in World War II and comparatively the attack on the “Pearl of the Orient”), Samar/Leyte Gulf (amphibious warfare of Magellan, Balangiga and “howling wilderness,” Douglas MacArthur’s return, Supertyphoon Haiyan). But it is also about the Dakota Access Pipeline, a bit of Black Lives Matter, the California Bay Area, Kamay-Botany Bay, and Berlin. Berlin is where my own DAPL solidarity was based, which led to other climate actions, which were all spurred by the Maunakea to NoDAPL and BLM relation of aloha ‘āina.

I got involved in NoDAPL, because Maunakea kia‘i (protectors) were involved. When I wrote an academic article on Maunakea and aloha ‘āina and the journal editors selected my photo of a graffiti to Queen Lili‘uokalani as its cover, the original artist that I couldn’t find before revealed himself, using the journal cover overlaid with a NoDAPL banner on Facebook. Hence, the convergence or “Solidarities” chapter, that is in riverine confluence of waters (Joanne Barker 2019) from origins to the estuarine gulfs or lakes, too, and reaching out across the Pacific Ocean.

My favourite TOOL song before this last album which includes “Pneuma” was “Forty Six & 2,” a song that even the band discusses is influenced by Carl Jung. As opposed to many other cryptic songs interpreted to death by discussion boards. This one is from the second album in 1996, nearly pre-internet message boards and blogging. The punning of Geist to “Spirit” and “Mind,” from Hawaiian ea and hā, as well as the Hawaiian practice of kaona or “hidden meanings” and “metaphors,” allowed me to narrate my own interpretations of the poetry in the dissertation to fit whatever I needed. However, most of the poetry was selected by way of some kind of relation (to the authors) or a “calling” or symbolism in the poetry (wayfinding and navigation, mākua or “parents,” when I had no idea yet I was going to be moving back…).

One poem (on Kanaloa the ocean deity and a Honolulu Harbor molasses spill) is by a former classmate in Hawai‘i, one other poem is by a new friend made on social media from afar on Maunakea. A few are by people I don’t personally know and could hardly even find author information on, but the title or symbolism of the pieces spoke to the chapter metaphors at hand. Interpreting colonialism and genealogies, I placed Haunani-Kay Trask’s mo‘o (reptilian, genealogical) poetry in dialogue with her nephew’s (the Maunakea graffiti artist), on the same themes and in the same layout style of a cascade or mountain ridge, a kuamo‘o.

mangroves, metaphors, metaphysics

I mention in my academic breakdown of chapters above how I did “Hydrology” and “Optics” as themes. What this means is that mnemonic narratives or “metaphors of scientific processes,” as found in Hawaiian and other Indigenous knowledge systems, are explanations of geology, the hydrological cycle or the “being-with waters/land,” or the optics of mirrors, sunlight, and the astronomy of seeking the stars and the celestial heavens.

“Metaphysics” is an allusion to the spiritual, but also the meta or transcendence of the physics of land and waters into condensation or atmospheric phenomena like haloes and rainbows. And guess what, many/most of the oldschool European philosophers had the habit of explaining pneuma and community through metaphors of scientific procedures and the other way around. Some of their narratives turned out to be pseudoscientific, some are still explained in these ways and proved in empirical methods (e.g. gravity and apples falling from the tree).

Since the poetry was in some cases selected through inexplicable “calling” ( a kāhea in Hawaiian), especially the poems related to the spiritual tendencies of Chapter 6, maybe it’s not that wild to now consider if there was some spiritual influence.

The pneuma and spirit that relates or connects (I called it “spirit of relationality”), is easily found in religions and spiritual ecologies. In Christianity it is the Holy Spirit, in Judaism it is Ruach, in Sufism it is Rūḥ, in Daoism it is Qi, in Hinduism it is Prāṇa,… establishing my dissertation’s point that perhaps:

a spirit of relationality is required to

1. build/recognize community, and

2. center the holism in human to non-human or more-than-human ecologies (and spatiotemporal “posthuman” as ~ ghosts ~)

My point in turning to Hegelian Geist was also to find a place-based or culturally-appropriate understanding to this. Instead of offering aloha ‘āina as “Traditional Ecological Knowledge” (TEK) for a German university and thus institutionalized knowledge. I also sought to find out if Huey P. Newton included it within Intercommunalism, because I was feeling that vibe of it being from Ubuntu, but I was informed that maybe it was Daoism and not Ubuntu that influenced him (I say both).

Marxist theories removed Hegelian Idealism, and both Hegel and Marx are my “intellectual ancestors” (Teresia K. Teaiwa 2014) by way of imperial Prussian university and thus “place-based,” if not ethnicity/language. I found useful citations from Engels in The Origin of the Family to critique/connect with the Hawaiian imagery of the piko (umbilicus, navel) in Maunakea to Wākea and the sun, and a heliocentric/geocentric/egocentric alignment in axis mundi that illustrates Hawaiians are right about these ecological orientations in aloha ‘āina. As are many other Indigenous sciences perpetuated to this day, and which are now being highly prized as “TEK” against climate change.

On the one hand, I critique that Marxist theories removed the Haudenosaunee kinship spirit that it was informed by, on the other hand, I reinsert my own interpretations of Hegelian Geist to not appropriate Indigenous beliefs and to *cough* appeal to German “Leftism,” to get the point of anti-imperialism and climate justice. I wrote from a point of Philippine kapwa collectivism and ghost beliefs as related to Hawaiian places (in a subchapter on the zoonoses, trespassing, and unexplained spirits, as well as ghosts in “mapping” and in Indigenous erasure from tourist lands).

This is why I state it is not New Materialism. New Materialism and its lineage from poststructuralism, in my humble opinion, seek to interpret agential matter from a perspective where the individual is reconnected in networks or spaces with the environment/others.

We’re bound to reach out and beyond
This flesh become Pneuma

In my non-humble opinion, I never read New Materialism… I questioned why, when I first consciously encountered the term earlier this year, and then in rereading Zoe S. Todd’s “‘Ontology’ is just another word for Colonialism” or Brendan Hokowhitu, Kim Tallbear, and Vanessa Watts’ reflections on what is so new about this materialism, I concluded it was the years of reading a canon of mainly Indigenous scholarship and these don’t cross-reference each other (plus my general avoidance of poststructuralism).

Indigenous theories are already holistically relational (networked) and spirited (agential) in ecologies of the more-than-human.

From the non-Indigenous Philippine collectivist perspective that I theorized, the individual is never the individual, but also already a part of the collective in shared space. The non-Animist point of view that I deliberated the Tagalog kapwa from is always already collectivist/relational, with personhood boundaries beyond the individual. In “Pneumaterialism Pt. 2” I expand on further inquiries I have been able to make on this since finalizing the dissertation. Here (practicing more concise writing with less tangents), I want to introduce the estuarine space a little bit before it gets into deeper spirit in the second part.

The material mangrove is an “invasive species” to Hawaiian estuaries. In He‘eia watershed and Kāne‘ohe Bay, the mangroves were choking the streams feeding the kalo lo‘i (taro fields) and the loko i‘a (fishponds), necessities for the reemergence/resurgence of place-based traditional forms of food sovereignty. Although the mangrove is a favourable plant to support most other sub/tropical coastal zones against climate-induced typhoon-related storm surges, and the habitat generally shelters and nurtures fishes and other coastal marine species, it is “matter out of place” in Hawaiian estuaries. I link these metaphors of the mangroves breathing in saltwater, its symbolism as an amphibious plant, and its functions in the intertidal or liminal space, with the Filipinx settlers in Hawai‘i and the need for relational symbiosis or synergies for Indigenous resurgence to dismantle settler colonialism.

As with all analogies, they can’t be too strict, and certain fishponds have also been utilizing the mangroves for other purposes, or fishpond practitioners saw how a tsunami from Chile once damaged the fishpond walls, but was held together in areas by the mangroves. The pneuma, the spirit of solidarity and relational awareness of community needs, is illustrated in these diverse uses of the mangrove as climate defense. In the case of Hawai‘i, further reflection can be considered on the purpose of seagrasses and algae, fishponds and tidal interactions, but also in the bamboo plant. The ‘ohe in “Kāne‘ohe” refers to the bamboo, another material that is durable and supportive and used in fisheries. It is fundamental for coastal fisherfolk, especially in Philippine cultures, where it is central in creation stories or in the bayanihan mutual aid of the nipa hut or the bamboo thatched-roof house of nypa palm… which invades mangrove biotopes.

While I speak of literal materials in the fishpond, I also speak of literal metaphysics or transcendence in the carbon and oxygen interactions in the freshwater-meets-saltwater estuary. I also speak of “materialism” in my Chapter 3 and Chapter 5 analyses of Asian settler labour organizing, houselessness, and pandemic mutual aid solidarities, where the “local Asian” of colonial settlement to the Hawaiian Islands obscures these material conditions, and the origins of initial solidarity against racial capitalism.

I also speak of the “spiritual” pneuma when I relate to the aloha and the kuleana or “responsibility”/“accountability” to Hawaiian sovereignty for Hawaiian lands.

In all cases of Pneumaterialism, I also mean to

center the spirit/s that inhabit/s the spaces in-between,

be it between the collective, and

between the realms of the material or visible and the invisible.

This is Vanessa Watts’ critique of Eurocentric appropriation of Indigenous kinship theories, one where Lewis Henry Morgan observed the Haudenosaunee Confederacy to only note the material territory and visible family members. But he and his intellectual descendants failed to recognize and include the essence and vitality of the spirit of the community and lands.

Click on the next episode (*coming soon*), and I will dive into how these spirits/ghosts (they are all friendly) that I called have been making more and more appearances since.