Go figural: crop circle research and the extraordinary rifts of landscape

Introduction

One of the most intriguing findings to emerge out of cultural geography’s now extensive research on the ‘ordinary’ spaces of the ‘everyday’ is that the ‘extraordinary’ is ubiquitous. Taking initial inspiration from Raymond Williams’ injunction that ‘culture is ordinary’, as well as drawing on the insights of Walter Benjamin, Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, and others, geographers have become well versed in explaining how the mundane contexts that comprise everyday life are also imbued with the uncanny, spectacular, and phantasmagoric. ³ In recent years, a number of cultural geographers have begun to scrutinize more closely the relationships between the ordinary and the extraordinary. They illustrate, in various ways, how such relationships are not fixed and discrete, but rather, mutable and connected. ⁴ In this journal, for example, Peter Kraftl examined the social housing-cum-artwork Hundertwasser-Haus in Vienna and suggested that ‘a crucial way in which the extraordinary can be produced is in the meshing of the spectacular with the mundane, rather than a separation of one from the other’. ⁵ Similarly, Claire Dwyer’s study on the religious geographies of the Number 5 Road’s churches, mosques, and temples in suburban Richmond, British Columbia, illustrated ‘the juxtaposition of the mundane and the miraculous . . . a spiritual landscape where the “extraordinary can be made out of the ordinary”’. ⁶ Countering previous studies on sacred and spiritual spaces, Nadia Bartolini, Sara MacKian, and Steve Pile have illustrated how Spiritualist ‘practices and sites’ in Stoke-on-Trent, England do not support ‘a culture of enchantment . . . Quite the reverse, in fact: the miraculous is rendered mundane’ because it is ‘predicated on ordinary communication’. ⁷

This article builds on the above studies by focusing on how landscape combines the ordinary and the extraordinary. While the above studies acknowledge the importance of landscape insofar as it defines a particular locale and contextual background upon which the ordinary and extraordinary get entangled, I aim to show how landscape is central to how these entanglements are activated, apprehended, and encountered. To do this, I focus on one of the most beautiful, mysterious, and controversial landscape phenomena in the contemporary world: crop circles. On the one hand, many people regard crop circles as extraordinary because of enduring questions about how they are made and who or what makes them. From this perspective, ‘natural’ or ‘authentic’ crop circles are created by unknown forces that may (e.g. ball lightning) or may not (e.g. UFO activity) lie outside the purview of scientific understanding or the laws of nature. Fueling the extraordinariness of crop circles are the enigmatic symbols and other-worldly messages woven into their elegant patterns. On the other hand, crop circles are widely regarded as ordinary because they are deemed to be human-made hoaxes. Given their routine appearance each summer in many parts of the world, especially the southwest of England, crop circles have become a tourist attraction, pop icon (think, for example, of M. Night Shyamalan’s blockbuster movie Signs and the cover of Led Zeppelin’s Remasters album), and even an object of study in ‘cereology’.

The empirical focus of this article is the 2017 Summer Lectures Crop Circle Conference (hereafter the CCC) in Devizes, England. In many parts of the West, paranormal conferences have become quite ordinary because they are the result of the ‘greater availability’ and ‘democratisation’ of paranormal investigation cultures. ⁸ Researchers have observed an increase in the number of people who are devoting considerable amounts of time, effort, and money to the ‘scientific’ study of anomalous phenomena, in particular ghosts, UFOs, and ‘cryptids’ or monsters such as Bigfoot. ⁹ Paranormal conferences not only allow enthusiasts to meet like-minded people, they also help groups and individuals frame their activities as scientific wherein they ‘speak of the importance of scientific protocols but bemoan the elitism of scientists’. ¹⁰ These events also help to normalize, quickly capture, and render explicable a wide range of anomalous phenomena for those who ‘want to believe’ without need of a further scientific or scientistic discourses. ¹¹

The conceptual framework for the article draws on Jean-François Lyotard’s work, Discourse, Figure (1971). I argue that crop circles and the research practices at the CCC landscape the ordinary and the extraordinary because they magnify disruptive yet alluring rifts (écarts) between textual acts of reading and visual acts of seeing. ¹² Lyotard aligns such rifts with ‘figural space’ (l’espace figurai) or, more simply, the ‘figural’ (le figural). Following Lyotard, a key part of my argument concerns how the CCC’s discourses, which try to instantiate legibility, codification, and certainty are central to how the ordinary is partially established. Partially because such attempts are disturbed from without and within discourse by the sensory otherness of the figural. By engaging the figural, my article also attempts to provide an alternative theorization of landscape, especially in terms of the tensions between reading and seeing.

The split between reading and seeing echoes a long-standing debate or even rift in cultural geography, wherein some researchers focus on the discursive textuality of landscape, while others emphasize its visual and sensuous dimensions. This echo is no accident because the legacies of the two main theoretical targets in Discourse, Figure have been, and continue to be, influential in cultural geography’s well-known debates over landscape: structuralism and phenomenology. Very briefly, in terms of the former, geographers have drawn on post-structural theories to conceptualize the social processes and productions of landscape in terms of authorships, (inter)textuality, and (re)readings. Such studies shed light on how the ‘text of a landscape conveys and cements certain ideological narratives about the organization of society and relationships between culture and nature’, as well as how such a text is never stable, complete, or uncontested. ¹³ And yet, geographers’ conceptualizations of text and language often presuppose a discursive consistency or legibility that is immune to the radical otherness of the figural. While texts and readings are never innocent insofar as they promote the ideological naturalizations and mystifications of social relations, the textual landscape is routinely rendered as legible, intelligible, and navigable. Here, I echo Mitch Rose’s critique of cultural geography’s dominant conceptualization of landscape, which although often ‘described in terms of struggle it is defined in terms of structure. The landscape owes its existence to being read in a consistent fashion’. ¹⁴ Rose, of course, is not alone in making this argument. Other geographers and researchers have critiqued the limitations of representational and constructivist approaches to landscape by drawing on phenomenology, performativity, and non-representational theory (NRT). ¹⁵ Again, very briefly, this research illustrates the affective, excessive, and materially performative aspects of landscape in order to attend to ‘the immediate performative impact of the landscape in the actual present, in the present of the act of being in the landscape itself’, as well as an ‘understanding of bodies and landscapes as emergent through their mutual relationships rather than as autonomous or pre-defined forms’. ¹⁶

In many ways, Discourse, Figure aligns with the latter area of study insofar as it affirms embodiment, eventfulness, and the non-discursive. And yet, Lyotard’s work accords with a textualist approach to landscape because it asserts that the figural operates within discourse, for example, in ‘the “plastic” or graphic element of writing . . . and the “line” from which it is constituted’. ¹⁷ My interest in this article, however, is not to overcome or recommend a rapprochement between these two broadly defined approaches to landscape. To be sure, there already exists considerable connections and differences between and within their overarching theoretical frameworks, as well as shared attempts toward the pluralization and the dismantling of the binary of representation and non-representation. ¹⁸ Instead, my goal is to show how attending to figural space, that is, the rifts that entwine and separate discourses and figures (the comma in the book’s title demarcates a brief pause) can offer a new conceptualization of the tensions between reading and seeing landscapes. Importantly, a Lyotardian understanding of seeing does not refer to representational practices of vision or ways of seeing, wherein the idea of landscape aesthetically and ideologically buttresses and gathers together a ‘range of political, social and moral assumptions’. ¹⁹ Rather, for Lyotard, seeing refers to psychical, embodied, and libidinal modes of apprehension that encounter a disruptive ‘figural otherness within vision that “troubles” its discursive-like structure and its systematicity’. ²⁰ This notion of seeing, then, provides an alternative theorization of the strained relations between reading and seeing landscapes (as they are currently understood in cultural geography), which in turn comprise the disruptions between what is deemed to be ordinary and extraordinary.

By engaging Lyotard’s concept of rift, the article illustrates how the above dichotomies are landscaped as follows: first, through an awkward slowness demanded by drawing crop circle landscapes in a sacred geometry workshop. Second, as the result of the opaque thickness of the local landscape, wherein researchers struggled to locate crop circles in fields and navigate narrow country lanes. And third, in the oneiric operations of desire in group consciousness workshops that propelled disagreements over how to properly traverse the landscape and access the sacred. In the meantime, I take a closer look at the crop circle phenomenon, the CCC, and Lyotard’s concept of figural space. The article concludes by addressing some of the limitations of my theorization of figural space, as well as some reasons why we should ‘go figural’ in cultural geography.

The crop circle phenomenon

A crop circle is a geometric pattern, which can range in size from several to hundreds of feet in diameter, created by the swirling or gentle flattening (rather than the cutting or breaking) of cereal crops, usually wheat and barley. Often mysteriously appearing overnight, crop circles are restricted to the growing seasons in the many countries around the world in which they have formed. To date, ‘approximately 7000 formations have been discovered in about 60 countries’ around the world. ²¹ Since the 1970s, there has been a marked increase in the numbers of crop circles, especially in southern England. Since the 2000s, their formations have increased in size, complexity, and, for many enthusiasts, beauty. ²² Today, the vast majority (‘up to 80% of all crop circles’) of crop circles occur ‘in the South-Western part of England’, especially in or around the county of Wiltshire. ²³

The first recorded occurrence of a crop circle is usually attributed to a 1678 English pamphlet titled ‘The Mowing-Devil’, which describes the appearance of a circle in a field of oats. The pamphlet states that the ‘round circles, and plac’t every stalk with that exactness that it would have taken upon above an Age for any Man to perform what he did that one Night’. Other related historical records include the research of Professor of chemistry Robert Plot (1640–1696) on strange fairy markings in grass and the effects of storms on cereal crops by English spectroscopist J. Rand Capron in the late 19th century. During the early 20th century, Zulu spiritual leader and shaman, Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa claimed to have witnessed (alongside his followers) hundreds of crop circles in South Africa: ‘strange circular depressions . . . called “Izishoe Zamatongo”, the great circles of the gods’. ²⁴

The official scientific position, however, is that all crop circles are human-made whether they are hoaxes or explicitly created as works of art or advertisements. Like other paranormal research fields, there is a great deal of controversy, skepticism, and sometimes ridicule directed toward anyone who entertains the notion that some crop circles are not made by humans. Of particular note here are Doug Bower and Dave Chorley who, in 1991, claimed in the Today newspaper that they ‘conned the world’ by making all crop circles in southern England between the years of 1978 and 1987 with poles, ropes, tape measures, 4-foot wooden boards, and wire hanging from a baseball cap as a sighting device. ²⁵ Yet, when Bower and Chorley ‘retired’ in 1991, the crop circles kept on appearing as per usual during subsequent years. Numerous crop circle researchers pointed out that even if their claim of making 250 crop circles in England since 1978 were true, it still left approximately 1750 formations in England and other countries unaccounted for, as well as all the formations prior to 1978. Furthermore, there have been and continue to be a significant number of very large and elaborate crop circles whose precise origin is unknown, either because no one has claimed authorship and demonstrated how they were made or been caught in the act of making them.

To examine the human capacity for making crop circles, in July 2009, the National Geographic television channel documented four experienced crop circle makers taking 4 hours to create a circle of about 180 ft during a rainy night in England. By contrast, the renowned ‘Galaxy’ formation discovered in 2011 after a rainy night on Milk Hill, Wiltshire was ‘16-times larger and included 4.5 times the number of circles. The demonstration of 2009 for National Geographic showed all hallmarks of mechanical activity . . . while [according to researcher Charles Mallett] in the Galaxy formation the plants were significantly undamaged’. ²⁶ The claim that authentic formations can be ascertained by the brushed or folded appearance of cereal stalks is another contributing factor to people’s beliefs that crop circles are paranormal.

Given the above uncertainties, there are many different explanations for what causes crop circles. According to one report, of the ‘well over 50 people’ who ‘have reported seeing a natural crop circle being formed . . . their reports all have one thing in common: Everyone described the crop “flattening” process as something that happened in a matter of seconds and as if it was being done by an invisible source’. ²⁷ Some eyewitnesses have also reported strange buzzing sounds, which have been recorded on tape and analyzed by researchers, emanating from new circles and ones that were several days old. ²⁸ Other explanations, however, suggest that some crop circles may be caused by environmental factors such as ball lightning, mating animals, small cyclones, aquifers, alkaline chalk, sound waves, and the earth’s magnetic energy fields. Given the frequency of crop circles in Wiltshire, numerous researchers have suggested a link between the crop circle phenomenon and the surrounding ancient sacred landscape dotted with stone circles, long barrows, earthworks, hill forts, and earth energies or ‘ley lines’. More elaborate paranormal explanations refer to the role of unconscious forms of telepathy, spirits of the dead, time travelers, UFOs, ETs, IBs (terrestrially based Intelligent Beings), and divine feminine energy emanating from Gaia. ²⁹

The summer lectures CCC

Partly an outcome of the rise of ‘cereology’ during the 1990s, the CCC was founded in 2007 and co-organized by Karen and Steve Alexander. In recent years, the Alexanders have been helped by two renowned crop circle researchers who act as conference co-hosts, workshop facilitators, and speakers: Dr Jonathan Paul de Vierville, a Professor Emeritus of the Humanities, History and Interdisciplinary Studies at St Philips College, Texas, and Michael Glickman, a ‘former architect, inventor and teacher’ and ‘now a renowned, inspirational and often out-spoken speaker and writer’. ³⁰ Since 2007, the CCC has grown steadily in terms of the number of attendees and speakers. In 2017, according to the conference website, the CCC sought to forge a ‘new ethos . . . something that looked a little less like entertainment and felt more like community and collegiality . . . more inclusive and collaborative’. ³¹ The 2017 CCC, which took place between Friday, 28 July and Sunday, 30 July, was the first time it was held in the Bear Hotel located in the market town of Devizes in central Wiltshire (Figure 1). The Bear Hotel hosted the conference organizers, as well as some of the 12 speakers and CCC attendees (including myself) who signed up for the entire event. The average attendance for the lectures was about 40 and the cumulative attendance for the entire event was around 120. Most attendees were from southwest England. Participants in the sacred geometry workshop (16 people in total) and the three group consciousness workshops (attendee numbers ranged between 10 and 20) were from England, Ireland, Germany, Japan, and the United States. Conference attendees were almost all-White and middle class, and typically over 40 years old. The majority of data that informs this study was collected during my participation in all of the CCC’s workshops, speaker events, and the conference dinner. All interviewees and participants in this study provided me with informed consent to use their real names.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Location of Devizes and crop circles visited during the CCC.Source: John Ng, Department of Geography, Simon Fraser University.

Lyotard and figural space

Geographers often associate Jean-François Lyotard with his canonical definition of the postmodern as the ‘incredulity towards meta-narratives (grands récits)’. ³² For Lyotard, such meta-narratives are exemplified by the progressivist, universalist, and foundationalist schemes of ‘the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational and working subject, or the creation of wealth’. ³³ Given the centrality of Marxist, feminist, and humanistic approaches in the 1980s human geography, Lyotard’s work triggered many trenchant debates that lasted well into the 1990s over the theoretical and political utility of the postmodern project. One unfortunate consequence of geographers’ routine tethering of Lyotard’s name to the postmodern, which he characterized in terms of the ‘pragmatics of language particles . . . many different language games’ and institutional ‘patches’ of ‘local determinism’ in social and political life, is the widespread neglect of his earlier writings. ³⁴

One such work, Discourse, Figure, was published in France in 1971 and based on Lyotard’s doctoral dissertation. Adding to the neglect of Discourse, Figure, are the 40 years it took to publish a complete English translation. In his book review, David B. Clarke, called Discourse, Figure a ‘magisterial work of monumental proportion . . . an immensely rich, implacably precise text’. ³⁵ Yet despite Clarke’s praises and declaration that the belated English translation of Discourse, Figure meant the time was ‘surely ripe for a serious reengagement’ with Lyotard; there have been no subsequent in-depth engagements with this work in human geography. ³⁶ At stake in geographers’ neglect of Discourse, Figure, is not simply a better understanding of the development of Lyotard’s theories, but rather an awareness of its rich theorizations of space, psyche, society, art, affect, and language. Lyotard’s concern with space is central to the main arguments in Discourse, Figure, which concern the critique of several paradigms (as mentioned above) that dominated intellectual life in the late-1960s France: structuralism, phenomenology, and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Much of Lyotard’s critique, which engages a broad range of topics including the value of art, language, and the nonlinguistic, psychoanalysis, philosophy, semiotics, art, and ideology, is mobilized via the concept of the ‘figural’, which he frequently characterizes as ‘figural space’.

Broadly speaking, figural space concerns elusive, visible, and artistic elements and forces that disrupt, inhabit, and exceed the capture of signification, especially in terms of pictorial and textual representations of meaning. For Lyotard, Western thought is defined by an overemphasis and reliance on the discursive in terms of knowledge, thinking, and signification at the expense of embodiment, the unconscious, and disorder, which characterize the figural. Importantly, the discursive and figural are not binary opposites, wherein the latter supplements and ameliorates the former. Rather, discourse and figure are dynamic, polyvalent, and entangled. Many geographers will recognize in such formulations the ethics of post-structuralism. What distinguishes Lyotard’s argument from other writings associated with post-structuralism, however, is the attention on the distinctions between reading and seeing. For Lyotard, reading is primarily a discursive act of signification that seeks to decipher a meaning or truth that lurks in a text. Seeing, on the other hand, which precedes the repressive codifications of reading, involves the visual apprehension of an assemblage or spatial arrangement of lines, dots, shapes, and so on that comprise a text, for example, words on a page, a painting, frontispiece, or magazine article. Because seeing takes place prior to the reader’s decision about what that text might signify or mean, there exists disturbing though alluring rifts between the practices of reading and seeing. As Graham Jones notes:

Lyotard calls this disruptive, ‘troubling’ aspect of the visible the ‘figural’ – for the visible is a figure that is both present within discourse and simultaneously external to it. In transgressing the identifiable units and the fixed intervals or spacings that constitute the text, it potentially de-stabilizes the orderly arrangement of discourse, disrupts the communicative flow of information, and introduces a tension, a friction, and density into signification and the act of reading. This tension arises, Lyotard claims, from the blocking together of these seemingly incompatible elements within the ‘same space’ – they somehow co-exist irreducibly in a paradoxical or incommensurable relation. ³⁷

One of Lyotard’s central claims is that textual acts of reading frequently repress figural acts of seeing. For Lyotard, the difference between reading and seeing demarcates two different types of spaces between the text and the figure. As Lyotard notes:

This difference is not of degree; it constitutes and ontological rift. The two spaces are orders of meaning that communicate but which, by the same token, are divided. Rather than the space of the text one should speak of textual space; instead of the space of the figure, figural space. This terminological distinction is meant to underscore the fact that the text and the figure each engender, respectively, an organization specific to the space they inhabit. This space is not the container of an extrinsic content; even when it presents itself as such, as in the case of textual space, it is not a universal feature, but one specified by the property characterizing it. ³⁸

Shunning the idea that space is a static container of events is particularly helpful for understanding the ordinary and extraordinary aspects of landscape. How so? Paranormal investigations are characterized by a rift or disjunction between seeing an anomalous figure such as a UFO, ghost, or crop circle in a field and subsequent attempts to discursively read these figures through, for example, laboratory-based comparative analyses of the yields of crop grains located inside and outside a crop circle. ³⁹ Paranormal conferences such as the CCC landscape this disjunction between reading and seeing. Many paranormal conferences promulgate discourses of knowledge via PowerPoint presentations consisting of graphs, tables, and formulae that attempt to capture, quantify, and explain away anomalous phenomena, which are figural insofar as they transgress or disrupt the discursive laws of science, language, and nature. As a result, when ‘both reading and seeing, letter and line, discourse and figure are incommensurably and irreducibly blocked together in the same “space”, a radical otherness is potentially introduced’. ⁴⁰ I now turn to explore how crop circles and the CCC’s research practices spatially concentrate or block together the jarring otherness of the figural in terms of the landscaping of slowness, thickness, and desire.

Awkward slowness

Having grown up during the 1980s and 1990s in Gloucester, England, which is about 42 miles from Devizes, I was already quite familiar with the crop circle phenomenon. But this was my first crop circle conference. Within 10 minutes of Karen Alexander’s opening lecture, ‘An introduction to the crop circle phenomenon’, I was surprised by her focus on the beauty and ordered designs of the crop circles rather than their enigmatic etiology. Although Karen highlighted some features of the ‘authentic’ crop circles such as the ‘expulsion cavities’ (holes blown or hollowed out at the nodes of crops) which hinted at a possible high-heat microwave event, she emphasized the speculative nature of crop circle research and the ‘need to avoid rushing to judgment’.

The remainder of the lecture focused on the ‘geometry, mathematics, and symbolism’ of crop circle design in terms of Pi, the golden ratio, and the Fibonacci sequence. These features, Karen told us, were also common in natural phenomena such as flower petals and sea shells, and spiral galaxies. Karen lectured on how the geometric designs of crop circles can be codified in terms of sacred numbers from 1 to 13. For example, and in her words, a crop circle with one simple single point is indicative of the number 1, wherein ‘the monad with its still center’ represents the divine. A crop circle with two points is based on a ‘dyad’ and typically features the vesica piscis: ‘the splitting of unity where one becomes two wholes; not two halves’. A three-pointed crop circle is ‘the triad or triangle as a counterbalance of two’ while a 4-pointed crop circle consists of the tetrad and ‘squaring the circle’ much like patterns in Leonardo da Vinci’s, Vitruvian Man, which illustrates how ‘the human being is the meeting point of both the material and divine spirituality’.

From a Lyotardian perspective, the attempts to understand, or more accurately, read crop circles in terms of the logic of sacred numbers ‘is fundamentally “discursive” and concerns language, textuality, signification and conceptualization. It is “flat” and involves fixed, commutative elements’. ⁴¹ This discursive reading provided the introductory background to the 2-hour long workshop. The remainder of the workshop explored the sacred geometry of crop circle landscapes by drawing them. Karen told us that the goal was to ‘get in touch with and become more intimate’ with the crop circles. Getting in touch with, or, from a Lyotardian perspective, seeing crop circles involved tuning into the figural lines of drawing, which ‘concerns plasticity, opaqueness, density and feelings. It is “deep” and variable’. ⁴² According to Karen:

Sacred geometry is about the creation of the universe in your hands, using the unfolding of number and shape in space. And it’s exactly the same with the crop circles, so when you draw them, you’re participating in the phenomenon itself, not just being a passive observer, and I think people really get that. ⁴³

And so, after lunch, a group of 16 people (including myself) returned to the room and sat down at the long tables, which were strewn with notepads, erasers, rulers, compasses, protractors, and felt-tip pens (Figure 2). Under the guidance of Karen and Michael Glickman our task was to copy onto a sheet of paper a crop circle, which appeared several months earlier near the small village of Chilcomb in Hampshire and was displayed on the projection screen. As the workshop progressed, the neat and tidy discursive readings in Karen’s lecture on the logic of sacred numbers began to dissolve into the disruptions of the figural. As we all began tracing in silence the first outermost circle, Michael (sat in his wheelchair in front of a microphone) regaled us with story about his first encounter with a crop circle in 1990. He saw a crop circle pictogram ‘on page 17 of The Guardian newspaper’, which he joyously declared was ‘like a kick in the head for me’. Having driven to Wiltshire to visit the circle, he recalled:

I walked in and never got out. I was arrogant. I knew how everything in the world worked. Then: crop circles. This is other, this is not of our world. How do you do that? How do you bend those stems? You can’t do that! Bewildering. I’d be in and out of those fields. Been in more than you’ve had hot dinners! Going in is great, but staring and drawing them for days, weeks, months teaches you so much. So much to learn. The way bits join together, bits miss each other. I could go on for weeks but will stop there.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

The sacred geometry workshop.

Michael’s description of the jolting otherness of crop circles, which are composed of ‘bits’ that sometimes ‘join’ and sometimes ‘miss’ (which he sometimes referred to as ‘hospitality portals’), recalls the figural as ‘something trembling trapped within’ discourse as a ‘movement and power to overthrow the table of significations with a quake that produces the meaning’. ⁴⁴ According to Michael, getting intimate with crop circles demands ‘time, commitment, and contemplation . . . more than glances that fuel our addictions to social media’. Similarly, Lyotard asserts that slowness is fundamental to the figural:

This slowness required by the figural comes from its impelling thought to abandon its element, which is the discourse of signification . . . An almost infinite energy is required for the eye to give into form, to become receptive to the energy stored therein. Here one must keep at arm’s length the assumptions, interpretations, and habits of reading that we contract with the predominant use of discourse. It is precisely of this skill that discursive education and teaching deprive us: to remain permeable to the floating presence of the line (of value, of color). ⁴⁵

In order to get in touch with the floating presence of the crop circle lines, values, and colors, Karen advised us to ‘draw the line in such a way that you can’t see it. Forget everything you’ve learnt at school!’ That is to say, avoid capture or being stultified by the signifying marks of the pencils so as to become receptive to the scared energy stored within the crop circles. Given our heavy schooling in ‘discursive education’, surrendering to the sacred form and energy of the crop circle via drawing took time and was fraught with difficulty. The quietness of the workshop was often punctuated by mutterings of doubt, hesitancy, and frustration:

Can we share the protractors? (participant)

How do you draw a circle without a center? (participant)

You have to establish a point! (Karen)

Oops . . . it’s 7.5cm! (participant)

How do you get your little circles on the outside? (participant)

Oh no! The lead’s come out. (participant)

The above exchange highlights the banal difficulties of neatly swiveling and keeping the lead in the pair of compasses in order to trace the extraordinary precision of a crop circle, which was originally created on a much bigger scale and in the dark of night. And yet, it was precisely in these struggles (echoing Michael’s initial encounter) to patiently copy the crop circle that our pens were able to come under the singular sway of the lines and ‘bias of the figural’. ⁴⁶ Somewhere along the way, I stopped conjoining the ‘graphic’s complicity with the eye’s racing’ by failing to accurately copy a line or area of shading (to indicate flattened crops). ⁴⁷ After each completion of a line and shaded area, the crop circle on my paper became unnervingly different to the one on the projector screen. But I was not alone. Once everyone had laid down their completed drawings on the ballroom floor, we all delighted in seeing how our crop circles were all slightly different to the one on the screen and each other’s drawings. This was not a discursive failure in accurately reading and reproducing the angles and ratios of landscape. Rather, it was a joyous exercise in learning to slowdown in the sensory space of the figural.

Into the thickness

On the first page of Discourse, Figure, Lyotard advances the book’s main thesis that the ‘given is not a text, it possesses an inherent thickness, or rather a difference, which is not to be read, but rather seen; and this difference, and the immobile mobility that reveals it, are what continually fall into oblivion in the process of signification’. ⁴⁸ In this section, I consider how we, with our socketed yet roving eyes (our ‘immobile mobility’), fell ‘into oblivion’ as we journeyed into the thickness of the landscape surrounding the Bear Hotel. The thickness of discourse also concerns a series of ‘mad vignettes’ and ‘wild events’ (as one reviewer put it) that curdled our journeys. I choose the following snapshots because they convey the most intense rifts between the ordinary and the extraordinary.

The first instance of going into the thick figural landscape occurred on a mostly cloudy Sunday afternoon during a visit to Boreham Wood near Lockeridge, which is about 12 miles from Devizes (Figure 1). We hoped to find a crop circle that was reported on 1 July and consisted of a 200-ft. diameter seven-petal flower, hexagonal cube, indicative of the ‘marriage of 6 and 7’. ⁴⁹ I traveled in the red rental car of Geoff Fitzpatrick (a CCC speaker) and his friend Tommy (who were both from Dublin), along with Danny Boyle (another CCC speaker) and his mum (who were both from North England). Finding the field was easy but locating the formation within the field was another matter. We spread out across the field, and, following the etiquette guidelines for crop circle researchers, slowly walked up the long, straight tractor tramlines so as not to damage the crops. ⁵⁰ Because of the high thick wheat, after 15 minutes or so, we still could not locate the crop circle. Geoff climbed piggyback on Tommy to gain a better vantage point and spotted a disturbance in the wheat. Then Geoff walked toward a ridge (gently brushing the tops of stalks with his hand) on the other side of the field to check to see if it was the formation. It was! Soon enough we walked toward the disturbed wheat (Figure 3). On one side of the formation, Danny and his mum were locked in silent embrace. In other parts of the circle, Tommy and Geoff were lying face down, flattening themselves like the bent stalks, affectively succumbing to the circle’s ‘energy’. ⁵¹

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

Part of the crop circle near Boreham Wood.

The second instance of encountering the figural landscape, which was more higgledy-piggledy, occurred on the Saturday evening after a failed attempt to visit a crop circle in a field beside Hackpen Hill, near Broad Hinton in Wiltshire (Figure 1). The formation, discovered on 8 July, consisted of a 150-ft. diameter circle with a six-fold design, harlequin design, expressing the ‘duality of light and dark’. ⁵² Given the gloominess of the evening, we had to move fast in order to make the most of the dwindling daylight. A group of us, Susan (from Florida) and Becky (from Hawaii) met up in the Bear Hotel carpark to drive with Jonathan in his blue Peugeot 208. We also planned on meeting up with Geoff and Tommy. It was overcast and drizzling. Because of the previous night’s heavy rain, Jonathan lent me some spare ill-fitting hiking boots. Soon Jonathan was driving us north out of Devizes to the crop circle, which was about 15 miles away. Our excitement, however, ended abruptly once we saw a ‘crop circle closed’ sign attached to a gate. So, we decided to drive up a very steep and windy road to the brow of the hill located right next to the famous chalk figure of the Hackpen White Horse. We got out of the car and discussed whether we should follow Geoff and Tommy, who having seen the small figures of people marching toward the circle, decided to scale a fence and gain access to crop circle from the top of the hill. Fighting back our disappointment (at the time, I regarded the ‘closed’ sign as a serious setback for my fieldwork), we decided to stay put and take some photos and selfies with the stark assortment of curious cows in the foreground and the faint outline of the crop circle in the misty background (Figure 4).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 4.

View from Hackpen Hill.

Our next task was to drop Susan off at Jonathan’s friends’ home in the village of Compton Bassett. We got back in the car. I sat in the back with Becky while Susan was in the front with Jonathan who was in front of me. Susan needed to relocate from the Bear Hotel because of an accidental overbooking. This is when we entered the thick figural landscape. After 15 minutes or so of driving we were lost. My disorientation was intensified by the ordinariness of the various features of the Cotswoldsian countryside (especially the hedges, verges, and rusty or mildewed three-way sign posts) and being squashed up in a small rental car with three buzzing big-spirited Americans. As twilight darkened our handheld devices with various map apps glowed and waved around more urgently (Figure 5). 3G Internet coverage became increasingly patchy. The banks of hedges and occasional avenue of trees surrounded us in (to use Lyotard’s phrase) a rainy ‘sylvan world’ through which we moved ‘searching for composition, constituting the space of the picture, relying on that plastic space where the eye, the head, the body move or swim, buoyed as if in a bath of mercury’. ⁵³ At one point, dealing with my growing anxiety, I had to quickly remind Jonathan about driving on the left. Clotting the situation was Susan’s now-full-on story about a tranced-out woman who was a reptilian humanoid in a church near Perpignan, France. Susan told us about a family wedding which was gate-crashed by this woman and a man in a black cloak. He might have been a fourth-generation black magician. At any rate, nobody knew him. And then, he threw some weird gooey black liquid that caused mayhem. Then it got really figural when we got completely confused by the village of our destination Compton Basset and a street also called Compton Basset. We were forced into numerous three-point-turns in cramped lanes, an admission of driving in a circle, and then politely begging a villager who was walking a dog for directions. In the end, someone’s phone got through to Jonathan’s friend and they reeled us in via real-time directions. We eventually dropped Susan off and headed back to Devizes. Turning into the Bear Hotel’s carpark, Jonathan summed up this figural journey by gently declaring ‘we let the spell get to us’. Such a pronouncement signals how the landscape’s thickness was not simply the result of the fading intelligibility of exterior road signs and online maps, it was also the effect of being taken in by the strange visions that sparkled within Susan’s narrative. The figural landscape was outside and inside discourse.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 5.

Into the thickness of landscape with Susan (left) and Jonathan (right).

The operations of desire

This final section explores the relationship between figural desire and crop circles. Desire is important because many CCC attendees told me about their profound desire to forge deeper connections with crop circles and how they wanted to share these extraordinary experiences with fellow enthusiasts (or ‘croppies’, as they sometimes referred to themselves). The CCC was geared toward helping attendees realize their desire not so much in terms of achieving a discursive closure that could explain away crop circles, but rather, in creating a space for people to open up to and learn from the mysterious power of the crop circles. We can consider such a desire as figural by attending ‘not to the immediate figures of desire, but to its operations’. ⁵⁴ From this perspective, landscape is not so much an object of desire as it is a figure that incites and constitutes people’s desire as such. The figure’s operations, which ‘enjoys a radical complicity with desire’, is comparable to what Sigmund Freud calls the ‘dream-work’, that is, the disguising operations and hallucinatory images of dreams. ⁵⁵ Arguing against Jacques Lacan’s then popular axiom that the ‘unconscious is structured like a language’, Lyotard advocates a reappraisal of Freud’s early hypothesis that the visible contents of dreams should be treated as objects rather than words. For Lyotard, ‘“the dream-work does not think”’ (the title of a chapter in Figure, Discourse and original quote of Freud’s) because it primarily consists of the transgression of the discursive by visible objects of desire. Pertinent to my focus on landscape, is Lyotard’s assertion that the dream-work is valuable because ‘it provides us with crucial insight into the operations of the figural “workshop” that pertain not just to dreams, or even to art, but to all forms of representation’ (my emphasis). ⁵⁶ Landscape is one such form of representation. Lyotard’s conceptualizations of desire and dreams, then, alert us to how dreams and the operations of desire circulate in the dynamic and porous interactions between the interior and exterior psychical spaces that comprise a landscape. I now turn to consider the above figural operations of desire in terms of dreams and transgression as they arose during discussions in the group consciousness workshops.

According to the CCC program, the three 2-hour sessions were ‘experiential workshops’ that explored ‘what links consciousness with crop circles . . . The group widens and deepens throughout the weekend to discuss synchronicity, dreams, how the crop circles impact upon the psyche and what that might tell us about the phenomenon’. ⁵⁷ The first workshop opened up with Karen asking the group of 20 participants seated on chairs arranged in a circle the following question: ‘What brings you here?’ A common thread in people’s answers was the desire to learn from and get more intimate with crop circles. One participant spoke passionately at length (eliciting nods of approval) about how the ‘energy’ of the crop circles made them ‘feel enlarged, expanded . . . with an incredible sense of wellbeing’. Another participant told me, ‘I am here to learn about the crop circles’ transmission of energy and mathematic and symbolic information’. Similarly, Karen spoke of the need to avoid ‘trying to fit our foot in that glass slipper like Cinderella. We don’t need to let crop circles fit into our paradigm’. Here, the locus of desire is on the side of landscape insofar as it radiates an extraordinary ‘call’ or ‘pull’. As Danny succinctly put it, ‘the crop circles are like a big magnet and I’m an iron filing’.

While the sacred geometry workshop taught us about how the landscape can be read or decoded via the discourses of mathematics, the group consciousness sessions provided a space for people to talk about their alien or strange desire for crop circles. That is to say, a figural desire that was opaque, difficult to articulate or put into words because it ‘has no lips upon which what it is saying can be read. It does not present itself to us, but elides us, dragging our eye over there: it represents’. ⁵⁸ Such a desire not only captivates and drags the eye, it also discloses a ‘store of “sights”, or an interworld that is a store of “visions”’. ⁵⁹ Exemplary was Karen’s description of her first ever encounter with some crop circles that appeared within a mile of her house in the Midlands: ‘In that moment, when I saw those crop circles, I somehow recognized their design, order, and shape. It was like finding a million words on the end of your tongue that your mouth couldn’t form’.

The ‘dragging’ of eye also occurred in the workshop in terms of looking at another participant talking about getting ‘hooked’ on crop circles or narratives of their ‘revelations’. These captivating operations of desire were neatly summed up by Tommy’s exclamation: ‘as I look at you saying all of this, it’s lighting my system up like a Christmas tree!’ This luminous desire, however, could be overwhelming. Sometimes people closed their eyes. Sometimes they cried. Sometimes they fixed their eyes on the floor in the middle of the circle, so their eyes wouldn’t be dragged here and there. Such distanciations evince the dangers of figural desire and the yearning for boundaries. Boundaries, of course, introduce the possibility of transgression. The landscaping of transgressive desire popped up during a surprise conversation in the final group consciousness workshop on the Sunday morning in the small Ante-room. Instead of commencing with a discussion about our previous night’s dreams, we began by casually chatting about the themes of ‘pathways’ and ‘thresholds’. Jonathan then spoke about the ‘problematic, troublesome spaces of thresholds’ and the ‘need to be vigilant about a darker side’. And then, suddenly the conversation turned into a respectful argument about our previous day’s visit to Hackpen Hill:

What is one’s relationship to the sacred, to the other? There is a difficulty when you commodify it. (Jonathan)

Thanks for your honesty. I’m trying to evolve a relationship towards the boundaries. To stop and hear the group’s sentiments was new. Boundaries are important, but the circle called to me. I couldn’t help myself. We don’t need permission. (Geoff)

But the boundaries . . . (Jonathan)

For whatever reason, we have to maintain a relationship with farmers. It’s a very delicate situation. It’s the famers’ land and the phenomenon is on that land. I could say, ‘fuck you’, but we need to be ultra-careful. (Danny)

Yes, a reverent relationship. (Jonathan)

Such discursive boundaries are set by the Core Group Initiative (CGI): a voluntary organization founded in 2011 that seeks to improve the public’s access to crop circles by co-operating with farmers who have a formation on their land. One aspect of the CGI’s mission is to raise funds for charities (chosen by famers) by asking crop circle visitors to deposit a small donation (about £5) in a wooden box near the entrance to a field. According to its website, the CGI has raised over £25,000 since 2012 in order to ‘help reduce social tensions by perhaps popularising crop formations more as they slowly become perceived as positive and productive instead of as a nuisance in the eyes of farmers and the general public’. ⁶⁰ The CGI attached the ‘crop circle closed’ sign on the gate at Hackpen Hill because their representative was not present (maybe gone for lunch, definitely gone figural) in the nearby camper van. The exchange between Jonathan and Geoff highlights the tension between a discursive and figural relation of desire. The former is underpinned by an obedient reading of the CGI’s sign while the latter follows the call of the figural: a ‘force [that] breaks the law’, in this case the law of the CGI. ⁶¹ By going figural, Geoff ignores the CGI’s ‘rules regulating the formation of the perceived object’ and by crossing into the closed off field affirms ‘the transgression of the contour . . . where the object of deconstruction is the edge, the line that indicates there is a single and rectifying point of view’. ⁶² And so, while the landscape brings together like-minded enthusiasts, each one of them is incited and coordinated by a certain relation of desire. Some attendees (like Jonathan and Danny) tended toward the discursive and rectifying point of view of the CGI, while others (like Geoff) were swayed by the figural and veered into transgression.

Conclusion: going figural in cultural geography

This article has covered a lot of empirical and theoretical ground. So, I begin the conclusion by addressing some of the article’s theoretical limitations. I then turn to consider some reasons why ‘going figural’ in cultural geography can further our work on landscape aesthetics, paranormal cultures, and the rifts between the ordinary and the extraordinary.

Much like Clarke’s book review, my article has ‘barely scratched the surface’ of Lyotard’s notion of the figural. ⁶³ Discourse, Figure is a notoriously dense and poetically difficult book insofar as it refuses systematicity and prompts further thinking. For the sake of clarity, I opted to focus on three major themes of the figural: slowness, thickness, and desire. In so doing, I neglected Lyotard’s triadic understanding of the mechanisms of the figural. The first aspect concerns the ‘figure-image’, which pertains to the unrecognizability of a thick landscape or ‘visible object and the diffusion or violation of its outline or contour’. ⁶⁴ One of Lyotard’s examples is Pablo Picasso’s sketch, Etude de nu, which illustrates the dissolution of the recognizability of the object as image: ‘what suffers abuse here are the rules regulating the formation of the perceived object . . . what it deconstructs is the silhouette’s outline; it is the transgression of the contour’. ⁶⁵ The second component is the ‘figure-form’, which ‘concerns the structure or support of what is visible – whether this be in respect to the mise-en-scène of a film, the use of perspective in painting, or the stage-machinery of a theatrical play’. ⁶⁶ The figure-form is comparable to the designs and drawings of crop circles in the sacred geometry workshop insofar as they promote ‘Pythagorean and Neoplatonic form[s]’ and figures that uphold ‘a philosophy, even a mystique, of the number and its luminous cosmic value’. ⁶⁷ The final aspect is the ‘figure-matrix’, which not only remains ‘unseen, but it is no more visible than it is legible’ and ‘belongs to neither plastic nor textual space’. ⁶⁸ The figure-matrix involves an ‘enigmatic “source”, the cauldron from which both phantasmatic images and forms derive (and from which they are also dismantled)’. It is akin to the indeterminate and unknown causes of crop circles, which many CCC participants called (with deliberate vagueness) the ‘circle-makers’.

Let me now turn to address the benefits of going figural for some subfields in cultural geography. To begin with, Lyotard has a great deal to say on the ‘aesthetic space’ of the figural, especially in terms of the oneiric images of dreams, which (contra Lacan) can neither be reduced to the order of language nor to the world of referentiality. ⁶⁹ The aesthetic dimensions of the figural resonate with discussions in creative geographies on the drawing of place and landscape. ⁷⁰ In particular, the figural can help further our attempts to investigate ‘landscape as a particular form of affective spatiality, a visual and haptic experience which, from the outset, enrols human and non-human, hands and eyes, one and many, the lived and the abstract’. ⁷¹ For Lyotard, the figural is thoroughly poetic insofar as it challenges the ordinariness of everyday discourses. By engaging the figural we can further explore the disruptive poetics of language and landscape much like Sarah de Leeuw’s beautiful evocations of landscape that froth with the thickness and jouissance of language. ⁷²

Going figural can also help us respond to Sally Munt’s call for researchers to better understand ‘what people are doing with the paranormal, in order to get a better grasp of what’s ‘out there’’. ⁷³ Focusing on the psychical and material landscaping of paranormal cultures can extend current cultural geographic work on paranormal investigation cultures, which has so far examined the folkloric and televisual rather than lived (and dead) spaces and landscapes of paranormal investigation. ⁷⁴ To be sure, the rifts of the figural pertain to the disjunction in the very word ‘paranormal’: ‘para’ (meaning ‘above’, ‘beyond’, or ‘contrary to’) is akin to figural disruption, and the ‘normal’ (deriving from the Latin ‘normalis’, which means in accordance with a rule made by a carpenter’s square) is akin to discursive regulation. Since this rift is inherently precarious and dynamic, the anomalous can inspire discursive certainty and the ordinary can hide a figural mystery. As Amy Rust writes:

Figures bind and unbind desire and fantasy in addition to perception and representation. They transform imperceptible, even unconscious wishes into discernible images, not unlike dreams. Figures are, for this reason, more than mere images. They answer unsatisfying circumstances, mingling extant realities with unrealized possibilities and supplying the means by which people adapt to and make sense of their worlds. ⁷⁵

The incitement of crop circles qua a figural landscape prompts the following reformulation of Munt’s call: what is the paranormal doing to people? The CCC illustrates the extent to which agency can be situated on the side of landscape rather than the researcher. The CCC provides an arena for attendees to adapt to and make sense of their worlds by learning from and being affected by the crop circles. This relationship can be deliberately sought after in the goals of conference activities, but it can also occur beyond the conference site as an accidental by-product of people’s encounters with the ordinary. Thus, our paranormal encounters and occasions to go figural are just as likely to occur in a sacred geometry or group consciousness workshop as they are in getting lost on a rainy evening in rural Wiltshire. One reason for this is because ‘there is simply no way to go to the other side of discourse. Only from within language can one get to and enter the figure’. ⁷⁶

The final advantage of going figural in cultural geography concerns language. While Nadia Bartolini, Sara MacKian, and Steve Pile argue that Spiritualist sites and practices are ‘relentlessly ordinary’ because communication is ordinary, they also show how this ordinariness is nonetheless still ‘vague, confusing, contradictory and opaque’, as well as ‘fraught with possibilities for misunderstanding and error’. ⁷⁷ Their argument not only highlights how language is inconsistent and indeterminate, it also shows why language works precisely because of its incoherence. Going figural, then, will help guide future work on where, why, and how these disfigurements of language manifest the ordinary spaces of ‘landscape with its distortions, overlappings, ambiguities, and discrepancies’. ⁷⁸ But if these rifts of landscape continue to be neglected by geographers, then they will remain extraordinary yet ultimately untroubling. If, however, we enlist the theoretical insights of Discourse, Figure, then these rifts will reveal themselves to be quite ordinary and an integral part of the discursive and figural works of landscape. Recalling the initial impasse at the foot of Hackpen Hill, it is high time cultural geographers flip over the ‘closed’ sign to the figural landscape and surrender to its appeal.