Ilinx: [By way of] a rapid whirling or falling movement, a state of dizziness and disorder (Caillois, 2001: 12). Covering a variety of transport … a disorder that may take organic or psychological form. The Greek term for ‘whirlpool’, from which is also derived the Greek word for vertigo (ilingos) (Caillois, 2001: 24).

Iliggos: From the verb Eilo (Εἴλω) or illo (ἴλλω), meaning ‘tiligo’ (τυλίγω), to wrap or coil, and ‘sinotho’(συνωθῶ), to push against. Illo offspring include ‘iliggos’ (ἴλιγγος), dizziness. Iliggos is synonymous with ‘skotodinia’ (Σκοτοδινία), from the verb skotodiniao (σκοτοδινιάω = σκότος + δῖνος) (darkness + whirl/vortex) (Mantoulidis, Etymological Dictionary of Ancient Greek, 2009).

Scene 1: The Surge

Turbulent surges, vortices, spirals, and eddies ‘in which history …. Rises and descends, as if on the high seas under the movements of the hurricane’ are core to Michel Serres’ musing on the everyday experience of spacetime (Serres, 2000: 64). In analogies of rivers, glaciers, and the weather, and heavily influenced by Lucretian physics that includes notions of atomic swerves and vertical falls, Serres critiques the concept of the linear progression of time which, he believes, distorts our understanding of the multi-trajectories of events. The crumpled handkerchief:

If you take a handkerchief and spread it out in order to iron it, you can see in it certain fixed distances and proximities … Then take the same handkerchief and crumple it, by putting it in your pocket. Two distant points are suddenly close, even superimposed. If, further, you tear it in certain places, two points that were close can become very distant (Serres and Latour, 1995: 60).

In the turbulences of the crumpled handkerchief, the background noise of the past surges to form connections to disparate points; a vertiginous experience of being swept up by, plunging into, of falling through spacetime. The quakes open the ilinx (whirlpool) before us and we teeter, we scramble, we catch our breath. Ebbs and flows, swells and lulls in the landscape of spacetime lead to events being connected, or ‘hyphenated’, as building blocks of our lifeworlds.

(In the 2009/10 Greek economic crisis) [W]e are being thrown back in time, our future crashes into the past … reliving the era of Ottoman landlords (1800s), German occupiers (1940s), dictators (1967-74), and those greedy stockbrokers (late 1990s). All at once. My family are hungry with the same famine (1941-43) that my father experienced … Where do I belong? When do I belong? (Michalis, 61, Trikala, Greece, 2011)

Michalis experiences the anti-predictability of breaks in space and time. Surges, connections, and fractures. Seemingly haphazard topological trajectories. The turbulence leaves Michalis searching for coordinates: Where? When?

Scene 2: The Vortex

The preposition vers holds a double meaning, Serres says, at once indicating ‘direction’ (e.g. vertical) and ‘rotation’; ‘since vers originates in the Latin verto, signifying turning, possible gyration’ (2012: 112). It signals at one and the same time, going in a straight line and oscillation. While the vertiginous is multi-trajectorial, volatile in formation and surging, its vortex holds stability, predictability, straight lines, stillness at its eye, a state of ‘catalepsy’ (Caillois, 2001: 90).

At first, when economic crisis struck, I was shattered, I didn’t know where to look for salvation. My whole life was in pieces … the whole country … all the promises we had been given for thirty years were washed away. I was sick to my stomach in anxiety, not knowing what the future held … After ten years of crisis there is a different dizziness, not of loss but of captivity … stuck in permanent uncomfortable comfort with no direction … the fear is what comes after this intimacy with crisis, beyond this incapacitating calm? (Stella, 39, Trikala, Greece, 2019)

The vertiginous is an intense understanding of context obliterated in a moment of violent and violating disorientation. After the unimaginable storm, lifeworlds inside the vortex hold a sense of predictability or familiarity (almostness, ordinariness, uncomfortable comfort). As the tornado snakes its way through spacetime, eerie ‘incapacitating calm’ leaves Stella fearing her release from the clutches of a chronic condition.

With Serresian ink, Jane Bennett (2010:118-119) explains the repetitive nature of the vortical process: there is the inevitable fall and ‘an aleatory swerve that produces crash encounters, then a stage of confused turbulence’, followed by a congealment or crystallisation. The stability of being in the eye of the vortex will eventually give way to decay, decline or dissemination of the form. Another fresh fall and swerve conglomeration will likely suddenly appear elsewhere. ‘The vortical logic holds across different scales of size, time, and complexity, and the sequence of stages repeats, but each time with slight differences … “there are only vortices …, spirals that shift, that erode”’ (Bennett, 2010: 119 quoting Serres 2000: 58).

Scene 3: Ilinx of Pleasure and Pain

Crashing turbulent surges throw Michalis into the elsewhere/elsewhen, while the vortex provides familiarity to Stella’s life at the heart of a chronic social condition. Yet, in the philosophies of Roger Caillois, Michel Serres, and numerous others, the vertiginous is a desirable state of ecstasy. Can we locate positive vertigo in the ethnographic record, or is this friction beyond reconciliation?

In Caillois’ typology of gaming, the deliberate pursuit of vertigo inflicts ‘a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind’. There is a spasm, seizure, or shock which shreds reality (2001: 23-24). When promoting the pleasures of ilinx, both Caillois and Serres talk of free-falling or being projected into space, gravity-defying pastimes such as jumping and trampolining, playground games of rapid rotation, waltzing and sailing the high seas. Lovemaking. ‘Have you forgotten the delightful pleasures of the merry-go-round, or the swing’, Serres asks, ‘where some return “beaming with delight” while others are seen “vomiting forth their seasickness?”’ (Serres, 2012: 126-127).

While potentially pleasurable, entering the ilinx, voluntarily or inadvertently, can lead to a dangerous vicious circle of vertigo; life inside the ilinx, clawing away at body and mind, from where there is only erosion. No escape (Caillois, 2001: 141, Knight, 2021: 16). Mairi lost her business, family members, home, friends, pension. She is left contemplating the eternal darkness of the infinite abyss, captivity inside the ilinx.

I have this constant nausea in the pit of my stomach. A feeling of sickness at what I have become … just being alive makes me feel sick … I have been stripped of what it is to be ‘Mairi’ … What have I become? I have nothing. I am nothing … I sit at my dressing table to brush my hair in front of the mirror and emptiness stares back. Blankness. Nothing. The person there, the thing, is not me. It is a shell, quite hollow. I ceased to exist many years ago, when life was taken from me (by the crisis). This cave has no light. (Mairi, 65, Athens, Greece, 2020)

From an ethnographic context where vertigo appears so destructive to Self and Society, I am left to ponder, again, the pleasurable productivity of the vertiginous, as proposed in so much social theory.

Scene 4: The Mayhem

Vertigo may be of the moral order, Caillois suggests; the ‘desire for disorder and destruction’ which is usually suppressed (2001: 24). This can be readily located in the lyrics of punk and metal music, where mayhem and chaos, spinning worlds and dizziness, are desired (see, for example, Mayhem by Halestorm, or Have You Ever, by The Offspring). Or in the psychedelic highs sought in rave and trance. The pursuit of such vertiginous pleasure, Caillois and Serres insist, is a mark of audacity and invention: ‘temporary destruction of equilibrium’ provoking ‘an abdication of conscience’ (Caillois, 2001: 44). To step over the cliff-edge, to allow oneself to ‘unravel’, is to embrace possibility; ‘the elation of inventive discovery’ (Serres, 2012: 138).

Does [vertigo] prevent us from learning or, on the contrary, does it accompany us, an ancient witness to our very first straightening up? … [D]o we experience the distress of the spins so as to get beyond it, after having severely experienced it, and to finally understand that the body undergoes it as an obstacle and makes use of it as a passage? … Do we owe our best balance to these whirlwinds or the vertical circle to these vortices? (Serres, 2012: 126-127).

One small step over the edge could create new history, new trajectories, new connections. Denying vertigo confines us to a stuckedness in familiar formats of society and history. Serres (2014) sees endless cyclical repetition if we do not learn from the vertiginous. No emergent novelty. Serres:

[E]very body honestly plunged into authentic life and into direct and courageous learning receives from them a force equivalent to this body directed upward, vertical, toward discovery. Amid the spins and the vertigo, we never find anything but while naked. Lifted by joy (2012: 151).

In Greece, the audacious pursuit of vertiginous pleasure may not be as dramatic as fairground rides and punk mayhem. Only on occasion do micro-portals emerge indicating novelty and sublime connection, pedagogy, and passage.

[Within] the dizziness of the everyday I have learned to be excited by very small things of beauty. I had not noticed beauty for ten years, until I saw a wild purple flower beside my greenhouse last spring … there must have been flowers there before, but the sickness was too all-consuming … From then on, my senses spiralled. I started tuning in to the music on the radio at work. The radio was always on, but now I could hear the songs. I noticed a new shop open in town, a small success. My senses came alive, I got quite swept away in my excitement with these new experiences, I began to seek out the light, with bated breath. (Dimitris, 32, Trikala, 2019)

The vertiginous can be navigated, Serres poses, yet only the audacious delight in the obligation to invent. But one must be wary, for the reckless embrace of the multi-trajectorial maelstrom of the ilinx can lead to life in the inescapable company of nausea, fragmentation, and the seemingly eternal spiral (Caillois, 2001: 141).

And So It Went…

Of course, for many of the people we work with, there is no choice, no tangible boundary to be crossed, brazen audacity is weighed against worldly responsibility. For Stella there is predictability, uncomfortable comfort in the vortex. After initial seasickness, Michalis finds familiarity with the simultaneous surges of crises past, even resolution that hard times can be overcome. Mairi is numb, resigned to a life of blankness. A decade since the economic crisis swept them up, threw them down, left them teetering, all bespeak an eerie atmosphere at the eye of the storm. As the rupturing event with its seismic energy has crumpled into a chronic condition, life inside the ilinx continues to provoke nausea, dizziness, palpitations, and loss of Self in their most unwelcome guise. Being tossed and turned, slung and spun, accentuates their vulnerability, anguish, and existential questions. Only Dimitris can find exhilarating micro-utopias which threaten to pierce the ilinx status quo. The anti-predictable multi-trajectorial turbulences of the vertiginous pose a challenge for comparative analysis: elsewhere, elsewhen, vertiginous pleasure may swell. In Greece, the initial surge has given way to life inside the seemingly inescapable vortex, with its own tempos and rhythms. This twister may yet change course, this pulsating star will almost inevitably supernova.

We walk this world, oscillating. We may thrive, confusedly.

References

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