"I am a sick man.... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don't consult a doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect medicine, anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious). No, I refuse to consult a doctor from spite. That you probably will not understand. Well, I understand it, though. Of course, I can't explain who it is precisely that I am mortifying in this case by my spite: I am perfectly well aware that I cannot "pay out" the doctors by not consulting them; I know better than anyone that by all this I am only injuring myself and no one else. But still, if I don't consult a doctor it is from spite. My liver is bad, well--let it get worse!"
I've just finished reading Dostoevsky's terrifying 1864 book Notes From The Underground. The book was a decisive influence on Georges Bataille. From Michel Surya's excellent biography of Bataille:
"Chestov not only guided Bataille in his reading of Nietzsche, he initiated him into reading Dostoevsky. Everything suggests that this discovery was decisive. The young Bataille might be seen as 'Dostoevskian'; not only because of the explicit reference he made to the great Russian novelist in the sole remaining fragment of his first book W.C.; it may also be inferred by accounts from Métraux, according to whom Bataille wanted to follow the maxim 'everything is permitted' (echoing Dostoevsky's famous axiom 'nothing is true'), and Leiris. He first persuaded Leiris to read Notes From The Underground; in addition, Leiris depicts him at the time as 'frequenting dives and the company of prostitutes like so many heroes of Russian literature'. Leiris also suggests that the hero of Notes From The Underground influenced Bataille 'by his obstinacy in being what in popular terms one calls an "impossible" man, ridiculous and odious beyond limit'. Finally, Leiris portrayed the Bataille of 1924-5 as: 'impossible' certainly, debauched beyond a doubt, and a gambler like many of the heroes of Russian literature in general and Dostoevsky's in particular. Bataille gambled - often with money, and sometimes with his life at Russian roulette."
At a second-hand bookstore - for a mere € 15 - I found a beautiful hardcover edition of W.B. Seabrook's 1929 book 'The Magic Island', published by The Literary Guild Of America in 1929, in New York. It is illustrated with (politically very incorrect!) quasi-expressionist drawings by Alexander King, and with photographs by the author. Some of these are reproduced below (click to enlarge).
Seabrook was an exceptional figure: he was a Great War veteran, a journalist and a traveller, a friend to both the Surrealists and to the notorious sorcerer Aleister Crowley, an alcoholic and a sadist. He had supposedly eaten human flesh ("like good, fully developed veal"). The Surrealist photographer Man Ray was inspired by Seabrook's sadist practices to create pornographicphotographs such as "The Fantasies of Mr. Seabrook", "Lee Miller and William Seabrook" and "Homage to D. A. F. Sade", all with Lee Miller as a protagonist. In 1933 Seabrook was voluntarily committed in order to cure his alcoholism, and he documented the experience in his 1935 book "Asylum". Despite the treatment, Seabrook remained an alcoholic. He committed suicide by a drug overdose on September 20, 1945.
The illustrator, Alexander King, was a rake also, described "as a thief, morphine addict, failing playwright and painter, a man of iconoclastic observations and caustic humor who began his career as a painter of human figures, focused primarily on the face. Then he became an art thief, stealing fifty prints from the Metropolitan Museum." King, who claimed to have been married five times, published anecdotes on his life in a series of humorous books, such as May This House Be Safe from Tigers, Mine Enemy Grows Older, I Should Have Kissed Her More, andIs There Life After Birth. King was a frequent guest on on TV talkshows from roughly the mid-1950s until his death in 1965.
Georges Bataille's Surrealist journal Documents published an appreciative article on Seabrook's 'The Magic Island', written by Michel Leiris and Bataille himself. Even if Seabrook's reputation amongst anthropologists is quite bad (his account of Voodoo is often regarded as crypto-racist), Leiris credited Seabrook with being a "conscientious observer and the first man of the white race initiated into the mysteries of voodoo" and praised him for his "humane attitude" toward his subject. Bataille was especially appreciative of the final paragraph quoted below - it echoes Bataille's philosophical attempt to harness the forces of a dis-enchanted sacred to revitalize Western society.
From 'The Magic Island':
"And now the literary-traditional white stranger who spied from hiding in the forest, had such a one lurked near by, would have seen all the wildest tales of Voodoo fiction justified: in the red light of torches which made the moon turn pale, leaping, screaming, writhing black bodies, blood-maddened, sex-maddened, god-maddened, drunken, whirled and danced their dark saturnalia, heads thrown weirdly back as if their necks were broken, white teeth and eyeballs gleaming, while couples seizing one another from time to time fled from the circle, as if pursued by furies, into the forest to share and slake their ecstasy.
Thus also my unspying eyes beheld this scene in actuality, but I did not experience the revulsion which literary tradition prescribes. It was savage and abandoned, but it seemed to me magnificent and not devoid of a certain beauty. Something inside myself awoke and responded to it. These, of course, were very individual emotional reactions, perhaps deplorable in a supposedly civilized person. But I believe that the thing itself - their thing, I mean - is rationally defensible. Of what use is any life without its emotional moments or hours of ecstasy? They were reaching collective ecstasy by paths which were not intrinsically peculiar to their jungle ancestors, but which have been followed by many peoples, some highly civilized, from the earliest ages, and will be followed to the end of time or until we all become mechanical, soulless robots. It is not necessary to look backward to the Dionysian orgies, the bacchanalia, the rites of Adonis, or frenzied David dancing before the Ark of the Covenant. What, after all, were they doing here in these final scenes, when formal ritual had ended, that was so different from things which occur in our own fashionable and expensive night clubs, except that they were doing it with the sanction of their gods and were doing it more succesfully? Savage rhythm, alcohol, and sex excitement - yet there was an essential difference, for here was a mysterious something superadded. Lasciviousness became lust, which is a cleaner thing, and neurotic excitement became authentic ecstasy, the 'divine frenzy' of the ancients.
There us nothing quite as stupid and pathetic as an orgy that doesn't quite come off. Perhaps there is a deep mystical truth in the saying attributed to a much-misunderstood voice, 'Whatever ye do, do it in my name.' Perhaps if we mixed a little true sacrificial blood in our synthetic cocktails and flavored them prayerfully with holy fire, our night clubs would be more orgiastically succesful and become sacred as temples were in the days of Priapus and Aphrodite."
I've always regarded Canadian Industrial band Skinny Puppy's 1992 album 'Last Rights' as a failure - a bloated album. If the band's 1990 album 'Too Dark Park' already teetered on the edge of the swollen, the 1992 album certainly was overdone. Nivek Ogre's vocals had devolved from anguish into kitsch sentimentality; the music was "... a scribble effacing all lines, a scramble effacing all sounds ..." (Deleuze & Guattari), a "statistical heap" of samples; the album as a whole somehow smacked of puerile Hollywood Gothic.
It was the last Skinny Puppy album I bought. In fact, the album was one of the reasons I abandoned the Industrial aesthetic and crossed over to the nascent IDM scene, a scene which I would abandon for Black and Doom Metal when IDM became too complacent and anodyne. To experience once more something filthy, something guilty! Writing my post on South Korean Black Metal band Pyha's 2008 album 'The Haunted House', made me go back to the Skinny Puppy album.
I must say the sixteen years which have passed since 'Last Rights' was released, have been kind to the album. It is as if time has assembled the scribble, the scramble that I used to hear into a consistency; as if time has simplified, creatively limited, selected the album's overabundance of sounds. The hands of the clock have achieved what the hands of the musicians could not.
By what means has the clock done this?
In 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', Walter Benjamin writes that "Within major historical periods, along with changes in the overall mode of being of the human collective, there are also changes in the manner of its sense perception." Certainly, my manner of sense perception has changed in the last sixteen years.
In part, this change is due to technological advances: the stereo equipment I own is much better than the one I had when the album came out, the acoustic spatiality of my Elac speakers making the disparate elements that constitute the album more clearly discernible. Furthermore, where the production style of 'Last Rights' seemed too rich, in fact downright Hollywoodesque at the time, now - in this age of compression and subsonics and 5.1 surround sound - it sounds quite restrained.
But my manner of sense perception has also been affected by changes in my personal mode of being. The passing years have expanded my musical horizon. Thus, 'Last Rights' has found a place in the procession of musical genres that I have liked. For example, the final track, 'Download', foreshadows the glitch music aesthetic by several years. My appreciation of chaotic music, pomposity and cartoonesque histrionics has grown through listening to Black Metal. And listening to Free Jazz has engendered an interest in (over-)ripe, late-style music in which complexity and chaos go hand in hand. The expansion of my musical repertoire has provided an enriching context for Skinny Puppy's album, and has allowed me when listening to select, capture and extract certain aspects of the album and thereby to effect a certain simplicity. Furthermore, my biographical aging has had an effect on my mode of perception. When I was young, I was more sectarian in my musical tastes than I am now; 'Last Rights' accords better with my current eclecticism than with my former purism. And in all probability, a barely-acknowledged nostalgia to the time when I was twenty-something plays a role also.
Finally, I like it that 'Last Rights' is completely outdated and utterly unfashionable. As noted by Walter Benjamin, the Surrealists had been "...the first to perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the 'outmoded' - in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings the earliest photos, objects that have begun to be extinct, grand pianos, the dresses of five years ago, fashionable restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb from them. The relation of these things to revolution - no one can have a more exact concept of it than these authors. No one before these visionaries and augurs perceived how destitution - not only social but architectonic, the poverty of interiors, enslaved and enslaving objects - can be suddenly transformed into revolutionary nihilism."
'Last Rights': a dress of five years ago, slightly dusty, taken from its cupboard to contemplate for a few brief moments, and then put back.
Post scriptum
Here is the video for 'Killing Game'.
And here a (crappy-looking) live performance of 'Love in Vein'.
Below, you'll find a YouTube video of the 1984 documentary 'Sur les traces du Renard Pâle' (Tracking the Pale Fox) by Belgian ethnographer and filmmaker Luc de Heusch. It is a fascinating documentary about French ethnographic research into the mythology and rituals of the Dogon, a West-African people living in Mali and northern Burkina-Faso.
The central figure of the documentary is the French anthropologist Marcel Griaule (1898 – 1956), who was affiliated with Georges Bataille's brand of Surrealism. He published several articles in Bataille's journal Documents, the publication which inspired this blog.
Griaule is perhaps best known as the leader of the 1931-1933 Dakar-Djibouti expedition, which became famous paradoxically because of one of its most disaffected participants: the Surrealist and ethnographer Michel Leiris, one of Georges Bataille's closest friends. The mission was organized by the Institut D'Ethnologie and financed by the French government and the Rockefeller Foundation. The mission, which took from 1931 to 1933 would "... criss-cross French West Africa, Nigeria, Cameroon, French Equatorial Africa, the Belgian Congo, Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, Abyssinia, Eritrea, and French Somaliland".
During the Dakar-Djibouti expedition, Griaule studied the culture of the Dogon, a West-African people living in Mali and northern Burkina-Faso. Following the expedition, Griaule would study Dogon culture extensively for more than 25 years, becoming famous for a study on the meaning of masks in the complex mythology of the Dogon.
Jean Rouch, whose utterly mindbending documentary Les Maitres Fous was featured earlier on this blog, narrates the story, and interviews Dogon elders and Griaule's closest collaborator, Germaine Dieterlen.
Valenapio, who posted the videos on YouTube, writes: "Note : As always, the translations and subtitles are clumsily home-made. A dogon game is mentionned in this part. I haven't found a transcription of its name : Griaule uses a phonetic sign for it in his book "Jeux Dogons", and the sound "un" or "in", which exists in french, doesn't exist in english. So, you've got an "ein" instead. Oh, well...".
In a 1953 Michel Leiris - Surrealist and ethnographer - published an article on the way Haitian Voodooists represent the loa - the spirits of Voodoo - using depictions of Christian saints. For example, the notorious Baron-Samedi, spirit of death, is represented by Saint Expeditus. In the article, it become clear how in the thought of Michel Leiris ethnographic and Surrealist theoretical and aesthetic frameworks intermingle:
"This hasty investigation of fifteen chromos bought in Port-Au-Prince would tend to show, then, that it is often on the basis of a purely circumstantial detail, what one could almost call a pun using things rather than words (such as, for instance, the lowered visor of the helmet likened to the chin bandage of the dead person), that the correspondence between the loa and the saint is established; for such a connection to be made, there need not be any similarity in the content of the symbol: a superficial, fragmentary, and, in short fortuitous analogy seems to be enough in many cases."
These 'concrete puns' - aren't they the chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table?
A diary entry written by Michel Leiris 50 years after the publication in Documents (October 5th 1979, "Journal 1922-1989") explains the reasons for Leiris' review of Seabrook's book in that journal. Leiris was interested in Seabrook's book because Voodoo is a possession cult. Possession, understood by Leiris as "... losing one's head in a trance ...", points towards the concept of the "acephalous" (headless). In this concept several strands of Bataillean thought are brought together. For Bataille, the head’s function is utilitarian, and opposed to collective effervescence. Losing one's head means an ecstatic subversion of egotistic calculation. Possession was presented a method to lose oneself in Dionysian ecstasy, like expenditure, sacrifice, transgression, laughter and tears, ecstasy and madness, vice and revolt, eroticism and death.
Bataille used photographs of Voodoo rituals madde by Pierre Verger, a friend to Métraux, for his books "L'Érotisme" (1957) and "Les Larmes d'Éros" (1961). In the texts accompanying these photographs, Bataille also stressed the Dionysian nature of the Voodoo cult: "What the Voodoo-sacrifier experienced was a kind of ecstasy. An ecstasy which was in a sense comparable to a drunkenness. An ecstasy which was caused by killing birds."
On the contrary, in "Le Vaudou Haitien" (published in 1958, before "Les Larmes d'Éros"), Métraux would debunk the presentation of Voodoo as a Dionysian cult:
"Too often people imagine that a crowd exalted by mystic enthusiasm is the usual setting for Voodoo possession. In fact those who attend ceremonies as spectators only cast an occasional absent-minded glance at the goings-on. They gossip on the edges of the peristyle, smoke cigarettes, or nibble at tablettes (pralines). At no time is the crowd subject to a collective delirium, or even to a degree of excitement propitious to ecstasy. The traditional dances of Voodoo - yanvalou, doba, Dahomey, petro - all carried out with great seriousness, a subtle sense of rhythm and admirable suppleness - are far from being Dionysian. Only at certain ceremonial moments does the degree of excitement reach enthusiasm."
"Le Vaudou Haitien" is replete with such paragraphs, texts which aim to "normalize" Voodoo, that is to present Voodoo as un-heterogeneous as possible.
In his introduction to the English translation of the book, ethnologist Sidney W. Mintz (Wikipedia: "the doyen of Caribbean anthropology") calls the scant attention given in "Le Vaudou Haitien" to theoretical perspectives on Voodoo the major weakness of the book.
On the basis of the back story presented in this series of posts, I think Mintz is missing out on a covert debate between Métraux on the one hand and Bataille and Leiris on the other. In this debate Bataille and Leiris stress the ecstatic, Dionysian aspect of Voodoo, while Métraux stresses the normal, the useful and the productive in Voodoo. I think that there is more at stake than a reaction against sensationalist representations of Voodoo in Western popular culture. This debate points towards the wider question of the usefulness of the Nietzschean distinction between the Dionysian and the Apollonian as a tool for ethnographic analysis.
V
That Métraux stresses the normal, useful and productive aspect of Voodoo, in no way diminishes the beauty of "Voodoo in Haiti". Michel Leiris calls Métraux's concern for describing the world of Voodoo a poetic concern: "...not to be content with describing things but, having grasped them in all their singular reality, to make them come alive in the eyes of the person reading what he had written".
"It's by smell and taste alone," Proust writes, that we can recover "the vast structure of recollection." For Métraux, the taste and smell of Voodoo evoked childhood memories that carried him beyond the normal, the useful and the productive into the magical, exuberant world of fairy tales and myth.
"[The loa] are no longer the gods of an African tribe, but deities which think and act in the industrialized world of today. This is why the are as familiar and as close to us as the Gods of ancient Greece were to the people who worshiped them. The westernization of an African religion has brought to light all the features which it shares with the religions of the ancient world, so that anyone acquainted with the classical universe can easily enter the mysterious world of Voodoo. He feels as through he were among gods who speak his language and behave in a way he can understand.
Voodoo is a paganism of the West. We discover it with joy or horror, according to our temperament or our background. Many of us go to Haiti in search of our classical heritage, and find in Voodoo the charm of fairy tales. Without compelling us to give up our habits and our ties with the present, it takes us into a magic realm"
From 1929 to 1931, Métraux' friend Georges Bataille was the driving force behind the journal Documents, the publication which inspired this blog. The journal was the operating table where the encounter between Avant Garde art and ethnography took place: in fact, the famous ethnographer Marcel Mauss contributed a piece on Picasso. Documents also published an appreciative article on W.H. Seabrook's "The Magic Island", written by Bataille's and Metraux's close friend, Michel Leiris. Leiris credited Seabrook with being a "conscientious observer and the first man of the white race initiated into the mysteries of voodoo" and praised him for his "humane attitude" toward his subject.
Seabrook was an exceptional figure: he was a Great War veteran, a journalist and a traveller, a friend to both the Surrealists and to the notorious sorcerer Aleister Crowley, an alcoholic and a sadist. He had supposedly eaten human flesh ("like good, fully developed veal"). The Surrealist photographer Man Ray was inspired by Seabrook's sadist practices to create pornographicphotographs such as "The Fantasies of Mr. Seabrook", "Lee Miller and William Seabrook" and "Homage to D. A. F. Sade", all with Lee Miller as a protagonist.
"The Magic Island" was Seabrook's second book. In keeping with his personality, it was a sensationalistic account of Haitian Voodoo - a literary Mondo Caneavant la lettre. Before publishing his book on Haitian Voodoo, he wrote for publications such as Vanity Fair and Reader’s Digest and published a book on his travels through the Middle East: "Adventures in Arabia: Among the Bedouins, Druses, Whirling Dervishes & Yezidee Devil Worshippers" (1928). "The Magic Island", part of which you can find as an e-book here, inspired the 1932 horror film classic White Zombie.
In 1933 Seabrook was voluntarily committed in order to cure his alcoholism, and he documented the experience in his 1935 book "Asylum". Despite the treatment, Seabrook remained an alcoholic. He committed suicide by a drug overdose on September 20, 1945. Thus died the missing link between the two great heresiarchs of the twentieth century, Aleister Crowley and Georges Bataille.
To be continued...
Post scriptum
Interestingly, the 1928 personal diary of Aleister Crowley contained contact information for Man Ray in Paris (link here). As far as I know, this is the only concrete piece of evidence of a direct and personal contact between the Surrealists and Crowley. The item sold for approximately $45000.
Alfred Métraux' 1958 ethnography "Le Vaudou Haitien" opens with words evoking and dispelling the lurid image of Voodoo:
"Certain exotic words are charged with evocative power. It usually conjures up visions of mysterious deaths, secret rites - or dark saturnalia celebrated by 'blood-maddened, sex-maddened, god-maddened' negroes. The picture of Voodoo which this book will give may seem pale beside such images.
In fact - what is Voodoo? Nothing more than a conglomeration of beliefs and rites of African origin, which, having been closely mixed with Catholic practice, has come to be the religion of the greater part of the peasants and the urban proletariat of the black republic of Haiti. It's devotees have asked what men have always asked of religion: remedy for ills, satisfaction of needs and the hope for survival.
Seen from close, Voodoo has not got the morbid and hallucinatory character which books have given it. A talented but rather fanciful American writer, W.H. Seabrook, has given the most complete account of the black legend of voodoo. But that legend belongs to the past."
The prominent place given to the American William H. Seabrook 1929 book on Haitian Voodoo, "The Magic Island", in the opening sentences of Alfred Métraux's classic ethnography of that religion, become all the more significant if one examines the back story of those sentences.
II
Alfred Métraux (1902-1963) was a close and long-standing friend to the so-called "philosopher of evil", Georges Bataille. They had met in 1922, while studying at the École des Chartes. Bataille and Métraux physically resembled each other, so much so that they were frequently mistaken for brothers. The two shared everything, "...including women in black silk pyjamas, with long gold cigarette-holders and boyish haircuts, moving around in poorly defined and rather ambiguous surroundings" (via this book ). During three to four hour long morning walks along Paris's rue deRennes or the Champs-Élysés, Métraux spoke to Bataille of ethnography. These talks would have a strong influence on the development of Bataille's thought.
Métraux had an impressive international career as an anthropologist. Wikipedia calls Métraux "one of the most significant anthropologists of the twentieth century". The friendship of Bataille and Métraux would "... remain strong even after one became a great scholar and the other a great writer" (via this book).
During World War II, Métraux served in the Morale Division of the US Strategic Bombing Survey in Germany in 1945, and personally witnessed the devastation of war and genocide. This made a deep impression on the anthropologist, and it motivated him to join the UN in mid-1946, when he began working as Chief of the Section on Research in the Department of Social Affairs in New York. In this capacity, he led the UNESCO Marbial Valley (Haiti) anthropological survey from 1948 to 1950; "Le Vaudou Haitien" is the result of that survey. In 1948, the Surrealist and ethnographer Michel Leiris participated in the survey, writing a highly interesting article on Voodooist chromolithographs. Leiris and Métraux had met in 1934.
Alfred Metraux committed suicide on April 12, 1963, and was eulogized by Leiris in a special gathering in his honor at UNESCO House.
Both Georges Bataille and Marcel Mauss put the body in the limelight of their oeuvre's theatre.
That for Bataille, the terrors and delights of the body were essential, needs no explanation.
But for Mauss too, the body was an important concern. In his classic 1934 essay "Les techniques du corps" ('techniques of the body'), Mauss analyzed the body as the locus of the social. He defined techniques of the body as 'the ways in which from society to society men know how to use their bodies'. These techniques spring from collective and individual practical reason rather than from mere mechanical repetition. For Mauss, the body was more than a mechanism to be used instrumentally. Provocatively for his age, the essay ends with a statement that there was necessarily a corporeal way of entering into "communication with God". Not only in the case of Chinese Taoism and Indian Yoga, but in general, we come to know the sacred in embodied ways.
So perhaps there is no better way to get to know these two thinkers than through juxtaposing their bodies and their corporeal habits.
II
Michel Surya's biography of Georges Bataille contains a description of that so-called 'philosopher of evil' by his close friend Michel Leiris:
"'His non-conformist mind [was] marked by what it was not yet customary to call black humor. (...) Somewhat thin, with a style both romantic and of his time, [he] possessed (in a more youthful form of course, and less discreetly) the elegance he would never loose. (...) His close-set, darkened eyes, brimming with all the blue of noon, went with his teeth that oddly suggested a forest animal, often uncovered by a laugh that (perhaps wrongly) I judged to be sarcastic'.
Neither 'flamboyantly attired' nor 'extravagant', elegant but conservatively dressed ('I always knew Bataille dressed in a very Bourgeois way'; 'there was nothing Bohemian about him'). There was nothing Bohemian about him, but, as photographs of the time show, he displayed an elegance that was close to dandyism, a cynical dandyism"
"Beginning students were 'dumbstruck when they heard his cavernous voice gushing from a mouth concealed under a thick beard, enumerating unfamiliar writings and authors'. (...) To them Mauss looked like a 'patriarch, a nonconformist, facetious at times, but someone who had never abandoned Messianism and was unquestionably gifted with a sort of second sight'.
At the Collège, and the École, people listened to Mauss as if he were Scheherazade. He loved to astonish and provoke his listeners, even deigning to display a dandyism in his dress that was not widespread among his colleagues. He would wear a lightweight tweed with large black and light-grey checks, a striped pearl-gray shirt with a long pointed collar, a lemon-yellow bow-tie. One day, when he was speaking of the distinctive characteristics of the different races, he lifted his trouser leg without a second thought, showing off his calf and exclaiming: "So you see, I'm one of the hairiest men in the world!"
There is a strong thematic unity between the teachings of the great French ethnologist Marcel Mauss and the work of the so-called 'philosopher of evil', Georges Bataille. This is the fourth in a short series of posts in which I take up the relations between the writings of the two men.
Bataille abandoned the attempt to found a religion based on Maussian theory when the war broke out. Probably, several different reasons caused him to change course.
First, his closest friends and collaborators - Michel Leiris and Roger Caillois - became increasingly critical of Bataille's endeavors and in the end quit Acéphale. Bataille felt abandoned by his friends.
Second, some aspects of Durkheim's sociology became increasingly problematical as the confrontation with fascist ideology became more intense. Durkheim's maxim "Society is to it's members what a god is to the faithful" assumes a completely different aspect when seen under the light of totalitarianism.
Finally, a more rigorous analysis of the meaning of the meaning of sacrifice in a world whose God is dead drove him in a direction that was not new, but more awe-inspiring.
If God in Durkheimian thought is coeval with the social, the death of God equals the death of the social. If there was no hope of resurrecting God, there was no hope of revitalizing society through sacrifice - human or otherwise. Communication through sacrifice with either an elective community or with society as a whole, had become impossible. God himself had been sacrificed - not with an eye to periodic renewal, as with the agricultural deities analysed by Mauss - but irreversibly.
But this did not mean Bataille abandoned Maussian sacrifice. Rather, he reinterpreted sacrifice as a procedure which consists in establishing (through the mediation of a victim) a means of communication between the profane world and an absence - the absence of God and the social. Communication is sought with the unchained, the disorienting, the vertiginous, an infinite nothing, an empty space, something colder, night.
In this un-social (the Durkheimian undead) sacrifice, the sacrifier and the victim are one and the same person: "Je suis la plaie et le couteau!" (Baudelaire).
And rather than the abandonment by his closest friends and collaborators and the restrictions war put on social life, I feel this profound absence of the social is the true cause of Bataille's inward turn during the war.
Post scriptum
Ceci alerted me to a book by Michèle Richman: "Sacred Revolutions: Durkheim and the Collège De Sociologie", which I wasn't aware of and ordered straight away (here). Thanks Ceci!
There is a strong thematic unity between the teachings of the great French ethnologist Marcel Mauss and the work of the so-called 'philosopher of evil', Georges Bataille: sacrifice, the sacred, power, shamanism, secret societies are themes that were taken up by Mauss and figured largely in Bataille's oeuvre. This is the first in a short series of posts in which I take up the relations between the writings of the two men. The posts are based upon Fournier's biography of Marcel Mauss, Surya's biography of Bataille and 'The Edge of Surrealism', a Roger Caillois reader. This being a blog and not an academic publication, I have omitted footnotes and references.
Marcel Mauss (1872-1950) was the nephew of the founder of French sociology Émile Durkheim, and in many ways he was the heir to his uncle's intellectual legacy. Mauss's most famous works are "Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifice" (written with Henri Hubert in 1899) and "L'Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de l'échange dans les sociétés archaïques" (1923). Mauss was not only active in academic circles, but was also a leading figure in the left-wing political scene of his era.
Bataille was introduced to the work of Mauss through his friend Alfred Métraux (1902-1963), who entered the École des Chartes just as Bataille was leaving it in 1922. Métraux had soon left the École des Chartes to study anthropology with Mauss, who was to call Métraux "one of his most brilliant students". Bataille and Métraux physically resembled each other, so much so that they were frequently mistaken for brothers. The two shared everything, "...including women in black silk pyjamas, with long gold cigarette-holders and boyish haircuts, moving around in poorly defined and rather ambiguous surroundings" (via this book). During three to four hour long morning walks along Paris's rue de Rennes or the Champs-Élysés, Métraux spoke to Bataille of Mauss and his studies of the potlach. The friendship of Bataille and Métraux would "... remain strong even after one became a great scholar and the other a great writer" (via this book). Métraux most famous work is a study on Haïtian voodoo; photos made by Métraux of a voodoo sacrificial ritual would grace Bataille's art book "Les larmes d'Eros". Métraux died by his own hand in 1963.
But Métraux was not the only friend and collaborator of Bataille that had received ethnological schooling from Marcel Mauss: Michel Leiris and Roger Caillois too were Mauss's students.
Bataille met Michel Leiris (1901-1990) at the end of 1924, shortly before Leiris was to join the Surrealists.
Six years later, Leiris was selected by Africanist and Dogon specialist Marcel Griaule to take part in the Dakar-Djibouti mission, which was organized by the Institut D'Ethnologie and financed by the French government and the Rockefeller Foundation. The mission, which took from 1931 to 1933 would "... criss-cross French West Africa, Nigeria, Cameroon, French Equatorial Africa, the Belgian Congo, Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, Abyssinia, Eritrea, and French Somaliland".
Leiris functioned as the archivist for the mission and as a researcher in charge of religious sociology - a theme that is at the heart of both Mauss's and Bataille's thought. "Parallel to his ongoing work (putting together the collection of objects), Leiris conducted two surveys; one on sigi so, the initiatory language of the Dogon society of Sanga (French Sudan, now Mali); the other on the zâr genie cult among the Christians of Gondar (Ethiopia)". Leiris was highly critical of the mission. "The expedition, he said, at times resembled tourism (in search of the picturesque or the exotic), at other times a circus (always on the move with the same show on every stop), at still others colonial plunder".
In 1933, the second issue of Bataille's Minotaure magazine was dedicated to the Dakar-Djibouti mission. In 1934, Leiris published "L'Afrique Fantôme" in which 'objective' ethnological data were juxtaposed with Leiris's personal experiences, dreams and self-doubts. At the time, this was a unique textual strategy, highly controversial in academia. Griaule, the mission leader, was furious and feared a back-lash from the colonial authorities; Mauss gave Leiris a talking-to, but "in a paternalistic, easy-going way". Nonetheless, Leiris became a student of Mauss's after returning from the mission. At the École pratique des hautes études, where Mauss taught ethnology, Leiris's 1938 thesis "La langue secrète des Dogons de Sanga (Soudan français)" dealt with the secret language of the Dogons of Sanga.
Roger Caillois (1913-1978) was another close associate of Bataille who was taught by Mauss, in his case sociology of religion at the École pratique between 1933 and 1935. There, he also studied comparative religion with Georges Dumézil and heard Marcel Granet apply Maussian ethnology to Chinese culture. His 1937 thesis for the École pratique, written under the informal supervision of Dumézil, was titled "Les démons de midi" (Noontime demons). Much of Caillois' work from the mid-nineteenthirties was serious ethnography, work which earned him praise from both Mauss and Dumézil. Mauss was especially enthousiastic about Caillois' 1934 article "La Mante religieuse" (The praying mantis), in which the author analyses the webs of mythological and erotic significance spun around that insect. Bataille, Caillois and yet another pupil of Mauss (Anatole Lewitzky, who had written a thesis on Siberian shamanism under the direction of Mauss) would create the (in-)famous College of Sociology, which attempted to find a in Maussian thought a weapon to at once combat the rise of fascism and revitalize society. Nonetheless, differing views with regards to the role of ethnological thought in society would cause a rift between Caillois and Bataille as the war drew nearer and nearer.
So there can be only one conclusion: Bataille's closest friends and collaborators were all schooled by Marcel Mauss. Even Bataille states in "L'Erotisme" that he did not take courses given by Mauss, it is certain that he was very familiar with Mauss's work. Furthermore, the density of the network between himself and the great ethnologist ensured that the latter's teachings could not fail to have an impact on Bataille's thinking. This impact will be explored more closely in a later post.
Marcel Griaule (1898 – 1956) was a French anthropologist, who was closely affiliated with Bataille's brand of Surrealism. Indirectly, he influenced the world view of one of the most infamous Black Metal musicians, Kristian "Varg" Vikernes, the man behind Burzum.
An unlikely lineage? Read on...
II. Marcel Griaule and Surrealism
For students of Surrealism, Marcel Griaule is best known as the leader of the 1931-1933 Dakar-Djibouti expedition.
Amongst the participants in the mission was the prominent French surrealist and ethnographer Michel Leiris, one of Georges Bataille's closest friends. Michel Leiris's wrote his 1934 book "L'Afrique Fantôme" about his personal experiences during the expedition, describing it as a failed attempt to flee western civilization and the life in big cities.
André Schaeffner, a musicologist, also participated in the expedition and made field recordings of African musicians. In 1929 he wrote in 'Documents', the Surrealist review that inspired this blog: "No object of musical sound or sound production, however primitive, however formless it may seem, shall be excluded from classification ... it is only on the condition that nothing of a people's musical life shall be deemed unworthy of examination that we can consider a general study of instrument making and scoring throughout history and the five continents".
But Marcel Griaule himself also was close to 'Documents'. He succeeded Michel Leiris as the editorial assistant of the review, functioning as the right hand of Bataille, who was at the time the magazine's editor. In 'Documents', Griaule published several articles: on Abyssinian totemism in 1929, on the legend of the Queen of Sheba and on the gunshot in 1930. Griaule also contributed to 'Documents' infamous anti-dictionary, writing entries on the evil eye, on Abyssinian games, on the spittle (all in 1929), on the treshold, on pottery and on Ju-Ju (all in 1930).
III. Marcel Griaule and the Dogon
During the Dakar-Djibouti expedition, Griaule studied the culture of the Dogon, a West-African people living in Mali and northern Burkina-Faso. Following the expedition, Griaule would study Dogon culture extensively for more than 25 years, becoming famous for a study on the meaning of masks in the complex mythology of the Dogon. The star Sirius plays an important role in certain initiatory cults of the Dogon, and in a footnote to a 1950 publication Griaule wrote that aspects of the 'secret knowledge' of these initiatory cults seemed to tally somewhat to then-current Western astronomical knowledge on Sirius. After his death in 1956, Griaule's pupil Germaine Dieterlen continued his work with the Dogon. In 1965, she published "Le Renard Pâle: La Mythe Cosmogonique: La Création du Monde" in which even more extensive claims were made about the astronomical knowledge of the Dogon, such as the fact that they were aware of Saturn having rings.
Of course, it would be erroneous to suppose that the Dogon's initiatory secret knowledge was age-old. Mythologies are not static systems: that some peoples have no written history, does not mean their culture does not develop. On the contrary, mythologies are dynamic, transforming over time, incorporating new meanings and absorbing new knowledge. It seems likely that the Dogon had given Western astronomical information a place is their cosmological system. This information may have reached them through education by missionaries or other contacts with westerners. Research by Wouter E. A. van Beek, a professor in the Department of Cultural Anthropology of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, suggests that Griaule himself may have inadvertently supplied the astronomical knowledge to the Dogon. Van Beek was unable to replicate Griaule's findings during extensive field studies among the Dogon. In a 1991 article in Current Anthropology called "Dogon Restudies. A Field Evaluation of the Work of Marcel Griaule" Van Beek suggests that Griaule had expertise in astronomy, and that his questioning of his Dogon informant may have been leading.
Here is a subtitled excerpt from the documentary "Dogons: Chronique d'une passion" in which Jean Rouch and Germaine Dieterlen remenisce about the work with Griaule and the Dogon cosmological controversy.
IV. The Dogon and ancient astronauts
The next step in our line of descent from Griaule to Kristian Vikernes is Robert Temple. Robert Temple based an 'ancient astronaut theory' on Griaule's and Dieterlen's findings. Wikipedia: "Ancient astronaut theories center around the proposal that the Earth has at some point in the distant past been visited by intelligent extraterrestrial beings, and that furthermore such contact is linked to either the origins of, or their developmental influence on, human cultures, technologies, and religion". In his 1976 book "The Sirius Mystery" Robert Temple theorized that the Dogon's supposed extra-ordinary astronomical knowledge was brought to the Dogon by visitors from outer space.
Robert Temple's book was one of many books published in the 1970s which put forward ancient astronaut theories; the best known of these were the books of Erich von Däniken. These books were published in a period in the 1970s when fuzzy-headed thinking was very popular. Charles Berlitz's theories on the Bermuda Triangle sold 20 million copies, Fritjof Capra published the bestseller "The Tao of Physics" and gurus like Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and Sathya Sai Baba were gaining substantial popularity.
One may suppose that the idea that non-western societies were repositories of mysterious wisdom, fulfilled a vital function in the cultural life of the 1970s. The fascination with mysterious, non-western wisdom points towards the sacred, both the right-handed sacred (the accumulation of knowledge, asceticism, submission to spiritual authority figures) as well as the left-handed sacred (religious ecstasy as a 'high'; sacredness in opposition, if not rebellion to traditional sources of intellectual and spiritual authority: science and the Christian churches).
V. Viking fascist astronaut robots
As is detailed in Moynihan's and Søderlinds much-debated book "Lords of Chaos", Kristian "Varg" Vikernes, the man behind Burzum, has fashioned his very own ancient astronaut theory. Where Coil sing about "Egyptian Aztecs arriving from Norway", Vikernes dreams of fascist viking robots arriving in Norway - from Sirius. Vikernes puts forward the theory that Norse mythology finds it's origin in the arrival of extraterrestrial robots from Sirius which created the human race though genetic experimentation. Non-Aryan races, so Vikernes believes, are the result of failed experiments.
Like the fuzzy-headed theories from the 1970s, Vikernes's thought points towards the sacred, both of the righthanded variety (the accumulation of knowledge, asceticism, authoritarianism and - racist - taboos) and the lefthanded variety (rebellion, transgression, murder, madness).
And there we have our genealogical lineage: Vikernes's theories on astronauts from Sirius descend from those of Temple, which in turn descend from Griaule's ethnographic work. Of course, the parentage of Vikernes ideas is ironical. Griaule was an ethnographer who tirelessly worked to promote knowledge of the beauty of non-Western cultures - cultures deeply despised by Vikernes as non-Aryan. Griaule was active in Bataille's virulently anti-fascist circles, while Vikernes is an outspoken fascist. Griaule's thought fathered a strange, dangerous grandchild.
Post scriptum
Here is a documentary by Jean Rouche on the Dogon, shot during a 1950-1951 expedition with Griaule.
Here is a link to an interesting dissertation on exoticism, focusing amongst others on Leiris's "L'Afrique Fantôme".
In the Documents exhibition in the Hayward Gallery in London - the exposition which breathed life into this blog - the 1929 jazz film "Black And Tan" was projected as a part of the multimedia extravaganza. Duke Ellington plays himself in the lead role of the film, which was set in the legendary Cotton Club.
The Surrealist magazine Documents, which Georges Bataille edited, regularly featured articles on Jazz, amongst others an interview by Jacques Fray with Ellington (published in the 6th 1930 issue).
An article by Simon Baker in the Documents exhibition catalogue ("Undercover Surrealism") is critical of the use the surrealists of Bataille's little coterie made of Jazz as a Black Music. Baker is a Lecturer in Art History at the University of Nottingham, who has written extensively on Surrealism. In the catalogue, he writes that "(...) Bataille, Leiris and Rivière were neither willing nor able to engage with, or reflect, anything like an authentic 'black' perspective".
I feel I must take issue with this sentence. First of all, there's something odd about putting the word ' black' but not the word 'authentic' in parenthesis. One cannot both have one's cake and eat it, one cannot distance oneself from essentialism by putting the b-word in parenthesis while calling for authenticity of perspective at the same time. Second, Baker 'forgets' (now it's my time to use parenthesis) that Michel Leiris was an professional anthropologist who participated in many expeditions to Africa, whose work played a vital role in the abolition of slavery in French colonies and who was one of the first to sign the ‘Déclaration sur le droit à l’insoumission dans la guerre d’Algérie’, the 1960 manifesto supporting the fight against the colonial powers in Algeria - now if that's not engaging with a 'black' perspective, I don't know what is. And even if Bataille, Leiris and Bataille did also use the physical and intellectual excitement of Jazz as a weapon against the dreary utilitarian world of the French bourgeois, there can be little doubt their appreciation of the music was genuine.
Be that as it may, here is Black And Tan on YouTube. The three videos together form a complete 19 minute version.
From the 21st of July to the 1st of August 1969 the First Pan-African Cultural Festival was held in Algiers, Algeria's capital.
The Festival was organized by the Organization of African Unity (OAU). Host to the festivities was "His Excellency, Houari Boumédienne, President of the Revolutionary Council, President of the Council of Ministers of the Algerian People's Democratic Republic, and current Chairman of the Conference of Heads of State and Government of the Organization of African Unity"; Algeria's military dictator, who had come to power in a blood-spattered coup. With the Icarian rhetorical style of Soviet-type bureaucrats, Mohamed Seddik Benyahia, the Algerian minister of Information (i.e. the minister of Censorship), said in the inaugural speech: "We have always believed that independence was not an end in itself, that it should promote the birth of new men, completely liberated and free. The task is to create, in each one of us, a new mentality, a new way of seeing the world (...)". In other words: national liberation should be the first step towards ideological brainwashing. The African Dream had already started to go sour.
The OAU was quite self-satisfied with the Festival: "Never before had African culture and arts given such a brilliant display of their richness, variety and genius. Above cultural and artistic achievements, this First Festival was the triumph of African solidarity and sense of purpose, the triumph of AFRICANITY". The OAU's satisfaction with the dislay of culture and arts was not entirely unjustified: the Festival had been able to attract quite a number of important jazz musicians from the United States. There, the Black Power movement had just come into being, and the rhetoric of that movement underlined Black African ethnic identity politics and Black nationalism - not unlike the propaganda of the Pan-African Festival. Thus, it was not illogical that militant American jazz-men would gravitate towards Algiers to participate in the Festival.
In the first (November 1969) issue of The Black Scholar, Nathan Hare wrote "A Report on the Pan-African Cultural Festival":
"There was a battle in Algiers in late July, with lighter skirmishes both old and new, and emerging signs of struggle which low lurk ready to boomerang around the world in the years (and months) to come. The troops came together, African generals and footsoldiers in the war of words and politics that splashed against the calm waters of the Mediterranean Sea - in the first Pan-African Cultural Festival - from everywhere in greater numbers than ever before; from San Francisco to Senegal, from Dakar to District of Columbia...
Hundreds of delegates came from thirty one independent African countries and representatives from six movements for African liberation, from Palestine to Angola-Mozambique and Congo-Brazzaville. And there were Black Panthers and 'black cubs' and old lions from the American contingent.
Secretly exiled Eldridge Cleaver chose this occasion to reveal his whereabouts, and expatriated Stokely Carmichael came with his South African-exiled wife, Miriam Makeba. Kathleen had her baby during the festival, and there was Panther Minister of Culture, Emory Douglass, inernational jazz artists such as Nina Simone and Archie Shepp, and Julia Hevre (the late Richard Wright's daughter, now living in Paris). LeRoi Jones (whose passport had been held up) could not get over, but there were: the serious and quietly charismatic young poet, Don L. Lee; Carmichael lieutenants, Courtland Cox and Charlie Cobb; Panther Chief of Staff, David Hilliard, who had to return to the United States before the Festival was over to take care of a crisis with the Chicago Police; and the compassionate black Parisian poet Ted Joans. There were many young black Americans who had not been invited but who had cared enough to piece together their own fare."
Archie Shepp performed at the Festival on the 29th and 30th of July 1969 and apparently he was in a pretty militant mood: "We are still black, and we have come back. Nous sommes revenus! We have come back to our land of Africa, the music of Africa. Jazz is a black power! Jazz is an African power! Jazz is an African music! We have come back" he harangued to the audience.
Shepp played together with a great line-up: Clifton Thornton on cornet, Grachan Moncur III on trombone, Dave Burrell on piano, ex-Sun Ra Arkestra member Alan Silva on bass, and rhythm revolutionary Sunny Murray on drums. The jazz-man played with a large group of Algerian and Tuareg musicians, possibly Diwan percussionists (Diwan is an Algerian style related to Moroccan Gnawa music).
Dave Burrell: "I was part of the all-star group that Archie Shepp put together to take to the Pan-African Festival in Algiers in 1969. (...) When I got to Africa and all of the countries were represented with their musicians, I heard drums all day and all night. Finally, it was our turn to play and they had us in a boxing ring in the town square. The boxing ring had an upright piano in it. I will never forget being led through the crowd to the boxing ring and getting in under the ropes. It was a very, very hot and intense evening. The music started to play itself and the people's energy made it easy. After that experience, we got to play in a hall opposite Oscar Peterson and Nina Simone. The French press was there from Paris and they talked about coming through Paris and doing a series of recordings. By this time, I was very spiritually charged".
The sessions were recorded and released by the French BYG/Actuel label under the title "Live At The Pan-African Festival". Given the conditions in which the recordings were made, it comes as no surprise that the sound quality is rather poor. Sunny Murray's drumming and Silva's double bass are completely drowned in the trance-inducing fury of the massed Algerian and Touareg percussion: drums, tambourines and karkabous (metallic castagnettes). Dave Burrell's piano can be heard only occasionally. The wind-instrument players - Shepp himself, Thornton and Moncur III - improvise their lines over the North-African rhythms, but the jazzmen's playing seems a little lost at the roaring sea of North-African percussion. Perhaps Free Jazz is too much of an individualistic music to comingle succesfully with the communal ecstatic music of Diwan. Let is not forget that Jazz is a Creole music, not a "pure" Black music, let alone an Arabic music. Shepp's "Live At The Pan-African Festival" mainly has value as a historical document.
Nevertheless, the Pan-African festival was an important moment in jazz history, as it provided a great inspiration to the musician's who attended it and who were invited to record in Paris by BYG Actuel's Jean Georgakarakos and Jean-Luc Young. The number of albums recorded after the Festival in Paris for the French label testifies to the impression that the occasion made on the musicians, and many albums directly or indirectly referenced the Festival: Clifford Thornton recorded an album called "Ketchaoua" (the name of the Algiers district where they had performed) on August 18th, 1969, and most of the album's titles explicitly pointed towards the Festival; Sunny Murray recorded an "Hommage to Africa" and Grachan Mocur III "New Africa"; the sleeve art of Archie Shepp's "Yasmina, A Black Woman" featured a North African photograph; and the last track of Shepp's "Blasé" was called "Touareg".
So perhaps it it a little too ungenerous to call "Live At The Pan-African Festival" "...mainly interesting as a historical document". Perhaps it is better to marvel at this intersection of decolonisation, Soviet-style dictatorships, Black Panthers, Free Jazz, Avant-Garde and Paris' May 1968 movement; and better to quote Michel Leiris for the second time in the blog: "As far as I am concerned, I love everything that presents this dimension of mixing, everything mixed blood, from sarcophagi dating from Roman times with faces of splendidly made-up women painted in the most realistic way to Fuegeans wearing European pants found in shipwrecks, not forgetting Alexandrine philosophy and the unmatchable elegance of Harlem negroes along the way”.
Meanwhile, the definitive history of the Pan-African Festival waits to be written.
Compiled by Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore and music journalist Byron Coley, Jazzactuel is a three-cd-box collecting free jazz, as well as some psychedelic and avant-garde music from the French record label 'BYG/Actuel'. The compilation was issued in 2001; the collected tracks date from the period 1969-1971.
The tracks were recorded for the record label as a result of an invitation to a large number of African-American free jazz musicians to record in Paris in august 1969, in the wake of the Panafrican Festival held in Algiers in july that year. This exodus to the promised land of France from the land of the American pharaoh Nixon continued a tradition of black musicians fleeing the US for Paris, a tradition which started in the roaring twenties (the Bal Nègre in the Rue Blomet, Josephine Baker) and which continued through the years (Miles Davis making the soundtrack to Louis Malle's 1958 film 'Ascenseur Pour L'Échafaud', Art Blakey and Thelonious Monk appearing in Roger Vadim's 1959 film 'Les Liaisons Dangereuses').
The musicians that recorded for BYG were perhaps one of the last waves of black musicians fleeing the US to Paris - can you imagine contemporary black musicians - hiphop, hyphy, crunk - leaving the States for France? The last group of prominent black musicians who came to Europe were Detroit's godfathers of techno - and they went to Berlin rather than to Paris, and rather than flee racial oppression by whites they fled the indifference with which the black community in the US treated their Great Black Music.
'Jazzactuel' brings together many famous Free Jazz names: Sunny Murray, Archie Shepp, SunRa, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Don Cherry and Sonny Sharrock; but also lesserknown artists are represented. The collection showcases how variegated a genre Free Jazz was. Some tracks are so dense, chaotic and noisy they would do Merzbow proud (and hasn't Masima Akita always said he was inspired by Free Jazz?), while other tracks are more laidback; some even explore romantic themes in a hardbop style. Psychedelic Prog by Gong and an electronic piece which sounds like an army of babies crying their lungs out by Musica Elettronica Viva only add to the diversity. Compared to Soul Jazz Records excellent "New Thing!" compilation, the music on Jazzactuel is more intransigent, more demanding, less languid: here political Pan-Africanism, no mystical Indian/Jazz-fusiona laAlice Coltrane.
My personal favorite is the slowly smoldering fire music of Archie Shepp's 'Blasé', the title song of Shepp's eponymous 1969 album. Shepp is assisted by brilliant musicians: Lester Bowie on trumpet and flugelhorn, Dave Burrell on piano, Sunny Murray on drums, and - above all - Jeanne Lee vocalizing poetry full of tender resentment.
However diverse the compilation is, all Free Jazz tracks display that lion-like fierceness, that rebellious pride that was prevalent in the Afro-American community of the era - Jazzactuel's sound is very much the sound of Black Power. In that sense, one wonders whether the musician's really went to France to seek refuge from the racial tensions of the USA, or if their they were attracted to the violently revolutionary situation in France - as moths are to a flame?
In any case, what Surrealist author Michel Leiris wrote in the fourth Documents magazine about the jazz revue "Lew Leslie's Black Birds", who performed at Paris' Moulin Rouge from june to september 1929, can also be said of these recordings, made 40 years later: they "...take us to another side of art, to a point of human development at which that bastard son of the illegitimate love of magic and free play, [had] not yet been hypertrophied"...
Post scripta
Here is a link to a French-language article on jazz and ethnography.
Many BYG/Actuel recordings are being reissued by the Italian 'Sunspots' record label.
'Black in color, with a gaping mouth and projecting teeth and disheveled hair, clad in filthy garments, very smelly, and dwelling in empty, broken-down buildings'
"I am a sick man.... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don't consult a doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect medicine, anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious). No, I refuse to consult a doctor from spite. That you probably will not understand. Well, I understand it, though. Of course, I can't explain who it is precisely that I am mortifying in this case by my spite: I am perfectly well aware that I cannot "pay out" the doctors by not consulting them; I know better than anyone that by all this I am only injuring myself and no one else. But still, if I don't consult a doctor it is from spite. My liver is bad, well--let it get worse!"
