In a tale of Tantric sorcery, the hero comes to a cremation ground in the dead of night, where he secretly beholds a wandering mendicant seated upon a corpse and uttering mantras:
Suddenly, the corpse beneath the mendicant began making a 'put-put' noise, as flames belched from its mouth and mustard seeds shot out of its navel. Thereupon the mendicant, taking those mustard seeds and standing up, slapped the corpse with the palm of his hand. The corpse, which was inhabited by a gigantic [vampire spirit], rose up, and the mendicant then climbed up on it's shoulder. Thus mounted, the [vampire] began to move quickly away. ... [Then, having completed some bussiness in a Durga temple], the mendicant went out, and again striking him with his hand, caused the [vampire] to rise up with the sound of 'put-put'. And climbing up on the shoulder of him whose mouth was spewing flames of fire, he flew up, and went across the sky.
Using textual, sculptural, archeological and ethnographic evidence, White examines that element which distinguishes Tantra from other religious traditions: a form of eroticized ritual practice that emerged in India in the eighth century CE. In this ritual practice, Yoginis where worshiped: avi-cephalic or zoo-cephalic flying goddesses, at once divine and demonic, at once benign and dangerous. To these female divinities, sacrifices were made of meat, of alcohol, but most of all of semen. These oblations would be reciprocated by the Yoginis, who allowed the worshiper to drink their sexual fluids and menstrual blood. Drinking this 'flow of liquid gnosis' made the worshiper part of a clan family (kula), whose lines extend from the god Bhairava down to the human initiate. What is more, drinking the Yogini's sexual fluids and menstrual blood transformed the very being of the worshiper, and conferred supernatural powers, most particularly the power of flight and bodily immortality.
Between the tenth and the twelfth century CE, this medieval Tantric practice was gradually gentrified, in order to make it acceptable to Hindu "mainstream". This gentrification involved the subordination of the female goddesses to the male Tantric practitioner. Furthermore, Tantric practice became less and less corporeal, knowledge taking precedence over eroticized praxis and ritual taking precedence over sacrifice. In this process, the Yoginis came to be regarded not as sctual goddesses but as (symbols of) chakras, wheels of energy which were believed to exist in subtle bodies of man: the fierce goddesses were rendered powerless by internalizing and semanticizing them.
Nevertheless, it seems likely that practitioners of corporeal tantric rites continued to observe the heterodox rites in semi-secrecy, dissimulating their nocturnal identities. Dissimulating gave medieval South Asian elites an opportunity to experiment with a multiple religious identity.
White's book is magnificent, assembling a wealth of scholarly knowledge into a coherent - and to this reader, convincing - whole.
Nevertheless, I feel that White's book would have been even for interesting for the general reader if he had taken care to explicitly relate his empirical findings to theoretical concerns. The exchange of fluids between the Yoginis and their consorts could have been connected to Durkheimian and Maussian themes such as sacrifice, gift exchange and the idea of 'the sacred as the social'. As is, I feel White's reading of medieval Tantra must implicitly be informed by these themes, but the book would have gained in strength if they had been made explicit. Furthermore, the analysis of the strategies of dissimulation could have become stronger if they had been connected to ethnographic thought on secrecy and the social; I'm thinking of some of the essays in Michael Taussig's 2006 book Walter Benjamin's Grave.
I sympathize with White's disdain for New Age Tantra: 'New Age Tantra is to medieval Tantra what finger painting is to fine art, a remarkably unimaginative "series of yogic exercises applied to the sexual act ... a coitus reservatus par excellence ... a sad attempt to mechanize the mysteries of sexual love."' However, in some of his derogatory remarks I felt that he was loathing the right thing for the wrong reasons: the problem with New Age Tantra is not that it is inauthentic, Americanized. I'll quote Michel Leiris once more: “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.” The problem with New Age Tantra shows reluctance before excesses of joy, lacks audacity, asks for deliverance and salvation, is anaemic and impoverished. New Age Tantra - like Hindu elites between the tenth and the twelfth century CE - domesticates the wild Yoginis.
Notwithstanding these minor points, I can recommend White's fascinating book to all who are interested in Tantra, in the history of religions and in the anthropology of the body.
Post scriptum
These are some of the words from White's book which I (not being a native speaker of the English language) had to look up in the dictionary:
soteriology- the theological doctrine of salvation
hypaethral - partly or entirely open to the sky
melopoeia - the art of forming melody
theriomorphic - thought of as having the form of a beast. Used of a deity.
antinomian - opposed to or denying the fixed meaning or universal applicability of moral law
In his excellent biography of Georges Bataille, Michel Surya situated Bataille's ecstatic contemplation of photographs of the Torture of a Hundred Pieces in the Christian tradition of identification with the suffering of the Messiah. Thus, Bataille's meditative mimesis with the victim is contextualized in the history of (theological and philosophical) thought. Of course, this is perfectly appropriate for a book which aims to be an 'intellectual biography'.
In the previous post of this series, I hypothesized that it is also possible to situate Bataille's meditative mimesis in the context of the literary and aesthetic history of Black Romanticism. This enables me to explore the context even further, examining the historical backgrounds of this literary movement and its relevance to Bataille's grisly ecstasies.
II
The development of Romanticism occurred in the context of the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and Colonization. The socio-cultural, political and economic changes that these historical developments entailed, informed the literary genre. Colonial expansion brought about encounters between colonialists and foreign peoples and places, and Romanticism as a genre arose partly as a response in writing to such encounters.
In the process of colonial expansion, two diametrically opposed but interconnected views of foreign peoples emerged. In one of these a pastoral ideal, which earlier generations had placed in a mythical or classical past, in a real, was situated in an exotic yet visitable landscape. A salient example of this tendency is Gaugain's representation of Tahiti as an earthly paradise. In the other, the exotic people are savage: they transgress all symbolic boundaries, especially the boundaries imposed by utilitarianism, morality and rationality. That, according to Michael Taussig's 1986 ethnography "Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man. A Study in Terror and Healing", Colombian colonialists saw Amazonian Indians as violent and cruel cannibals, can be seen an example of this second tendency. As Taussig's ethnography shows, the two tendencies are not mutually exclusive; on the contrary, they are intertwined. The exotic people are a savage anti-self of the colonist, at once attractive and repulsive. This anti-self is not well-defined and clear-cut, but swathed in what Taussig calls 'epistemic murk': it is the unclear, murky nature of the wildness ascribed to exotic people in colonial fabulation that gave their 'otherness' such a powerful, obsessing hold on the imagination of the colonists.
Black Romanticism used this contradictory view of exotic people for its own perverse purposes. In this literary genre, foreign peoples and places were painted as exotic, erotic, attractive and repulsive. Mario Praz's classic 1930 book on Black Romanticism, The Romantic Agony, provides many examples of this.
III
In 1905, China was not a colony in the strict sense of the word. Nevertheless, China and her people were very much under Western domination following the repression of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, and several major cities were controlled by Western troops. The Western view of China and the Chinese was undoubtedly strongly influenced by 'murky' colonial constructions of the colonized, exotic Other as at once attractive and repulsive.
The Chinese were at once represented as at once venerable, intelligent, cultured and aesthetically refined, and as decadent, cruel and addicted to opium. The portrait painted of the fictitious villain Fu-Manchu in Sax Rohmer's 1913 novel 'The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu' neatly encapsulates this bifurcated image:
"Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven skull, and long, magnetic eyes of the true cat-green. Invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present, with all the resources, if you will, of a wealthy government—which, however, already has denied all knowledge of his existence. Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man."
This attractive and repulsive Other was eroticized. A BDSM blog post on the 1932 film The Mask of Fu Manchu: "This is classic Orientalist BDSM fantasy, a dreamworld of magic, cruelty and sensuality. The nominal heroes are such passive drips (who incidentally regard other cultures with contempt) and the nominal villains are so charismatic and powerful that ones sympathies are almost reversed 180 degrees. All of this serves as a vehicle for male and female masochistic fantasies of bondage, captivity, mind-control, same sex action, medical procedures, deathtraps and more."
In the early twentieth century, the idea that the Chinese experienced a cruel delight in exquisitely refined torture was widespread. The cruelty of the Chinese was represented by photographs of executions that were diffused through modern mass media such as illustrated journals or postcards. In this website, specialized in representations of early twentieth century Chinese torture (!), you'll find many such photographs and postcards: Faces of Deathavant la lettre.
IV
In Bataille's oeuvre, one can find several instances where he appropriates colonialist discourse on the Other and transvaluates it, turning the moral structure of the colonialist view of the colonized topsy-turvy. In this sense, Bataille's take on colonialism can be characterized as carnivalesque.
One example of this strategy can be found in Bataille's Critical Dictionary, which was published in Documents, the journal which inspired this blog. In an entry in the Critical Dictionary (Documents 6, 1930) on the Hindu Goddess Kali, Bataille makes extensive use of Katherine Mayo 1927 book "Mother India". This book, though written by an American journalist, took a strong pro-colonialist stance, arguing that India was not ready for independence. It painted a sensationalistic picture of India: bloodthirsty sacrificial rites to Kali, child marriage, superstition, widow burning, young pregnancy, temple prostitution dominate Mayo's book. Bataille's Kali entry in the Critical dictionary transvaluates Mayo's blood-soaked description of Kali worship, exalting that which Mayo finds abject. In Documents, a similar strategy is applied to W.H. Seabrook's sensationalist book on Haitian Voodoo 1929 "The Magic Island".
What do we see if we situate Bataille's ecstatic contemplation of photographs of the Torture of a Hundred Pieces in the context of colonialism?
Bataille's meditative mimesis appropriates what is abjected by colonialism in Chinese culture and exalts it: the eroticized experience of a delight in exquisitely refined torture. Like the colonial construction of the Other, Bataille's position with regards to the torturer and the tortured is swathed in 'epistemic murk': he described his experience both as sadistic and as masochistic.
Bataille's ecstatic contemplation of torture is a carnival of colonialism, in which the colonial hierarchy of values is turned topsy-turvy. Western disciplining rationality is sacrificed to ostentatious Chinese cruelty, "hideous, crazed, lined with blood, as beautiful as a wasp".
It might seem bizarre to write, as I did in the previous installment of this series of posts, that Mark Stewart was a man possessed by the spirit of the Thatcherite Great Britain of the 1980s, a man communing with the military-industrial entertainment complex, a man in communion with the capitalist, proto-fascist, paranoid, surveillance-obsessed oppressor, a man in unio mystica with Babylon, with the enemy. Bizarre: wasn't Stewart an anti-fascist, anti-colonial, anti-capitalist activist?
But there is an interesting antecedent: the West-African Hauka movement. From Michael Taussig's "Mimesis and Alterity":
"Those involved in this rapidly growing movement, begun among the Songhay people in 1925, would dance and become possessed by the spirit of the French major who had first taken the offensive against him, who imprisoned those who had begun the movement, who slapped them around until they said there was no such thing as Hauka. Thus deified as "the wicked major," his spirit got into the first floor of the Hauka pantheon as one of its most violent spirits. Thus possessed, the Hauka would mimic the white men (and sometimes their wives, too) and acquire strange powers.
(...)
But in addition to the conscious play-acting mimicking of the European, conducted with wit and verve, there is bodily possession - which is what makes the mimicry possible yet generally works at a less than conscious level with special, even disturbing, bodily effects: frothing at the mouth, bulging of the eyes, contorted limb movements, inability to feel pain. Strange "Europeans" indeed. And surely that's the point - they so clearly are and are not Europeans. It's the ability to become possessed, the ability that signifies to Europeans awesome Otherness, if not downright savagery, which allows them to assume the identity of the European and, at the same time, stand clearly and irrevocably eye-bulgingly apart from it."
In the Hauka cult, the Europeans discovered "... the presence of an open dissidence, a society the members of which openly defied the social, political and religious order. It his here that we discover the most original aspect of the Hauka movement: their total refusal of the system put in place by the French." In embodying the enemy the Hauka appropriated his power. In this case, possession was anthropophagy.
Like the Hauka, Stewart embodied the enemy: in his case, the enemy was not the colonial authorities but the grey and hopeless Great Britain of the 1980s, the Babylon that Rastamen denounce, the "wicked major" Margaret Thatcher. And like the Hauka, the fact that Stewart embodied the enemy didn't keep him from refusing all cooperation with the authorities.
II
Reflecting on a specific moment in "Les Maîtres Fous" ("The Mad Masters"), a 1955 ethnographic film by Jean Rouch (1917-2004), Taussig writes:
"A man possessed by a Hauka spirit stoops and breaks an egg over the sculpted figure of the governor (a little statue not unlike the Mbari shrine of the white man) that presides over the day's events of Hauka possession. Cracked on the governor's head, the egg cascades in white and yellow rivulets. Then the film is abruptly cut. We are transported to a big military parade in the colonial city two hours away. The film hurls at us the cascading yellow and white plumes of the white governor's gorgeous hat as he reviews the black troops passing. Those of us watching the film in a university lecture hall in New York City gasp. There is something immensely powerful released at this moment, begging for interpretation."
Mark Stewart's version of William Blake's "Jerusalem" somehow parallels this moment in Rouch's film. Regarded as the high point of Stewart's career, the song was played on a regular basis by John Peel and constantly being asked for by listeners. Stewart's "Jerusalem" is more than a parody of the patriotic 1916 hymn, written by C. Hubert H. Parry: it is also an anthropophagic appropriation of the affective power of Brass band patriotism and militarism for anti-nationalist and anti-militarist purposes. But "Jerusalem" is even more than parody and appropration: the rough, almost Dadaist juxtaposition of incongruent sonic material (Industrial, Dub Reggae, Punk Rock, Brass Band, Song) mimics the tensions present in the British social and cultural life in the 1980s.
But Stewart's "Jerusalem" is yet more than a parody and an appropriation and mimesis: the song wrests Blake's poem "...away from a conformism that is about to overpower it". In "Jerusalem", Mark Stewart is a "...writer of history with the gift of setting alight the sparks of hope in the past, [he] is the one who is convinced of this: that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious" (Benjamin).
To paraphrase Taussig's analysis of Rouch's film: the deep Industrial Dub of "Jerusalem", with its ability to explore the sonic unconscious, to come close and enlarge, to frame and to montage, creates in this sudden juxtaposition a suffusion of mimetic poetry. Blake's poetry is allowed to flower in the grey Thatcherite Great Britain of the 1980s.
Mark Stewart's "Jerusalem" is to C. Hubert H. Parry "Jerusalem", what the rivulets of egg are to the governor's hat.
Post scriptum
I've posted Rouch's film before, but feel compelled to watch it. Even though I first saw it several years ago the film is still bending my mind into shapes that are "abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours" (Lovecraft). As Wizard Eibon commented on the earlier posting of the film: "a classic masterpiece you can't forget once you've seen it".
In Greek antiquity, Aristotle observed that "enthousiastic" melodies (associated, as their name indicates, with possession) used the (ancient Greek) Phrygian mode exclusively. The Phrygian mode was said to originate in Phrygia, a kingdom in what is now modern-day Turkey. Also, the aulos was regarded as the instrument specific to Dionysian ecstasies. It was a flute-like wind instrument, which also was seen as coming from the Phrygian kingdom. The music of Dionysian ecstasy was regarded as coming from Phrygia.
Gilbert Rouget in "Music and Trance": "It was indeed from Phrygia (or Thrace, but in any case from Asia Minor) that the Dionysus cult spread (...), or, as the Greeks themselves believed, that it originated. We are therefore justified in saying that, although Dionysian music was Phrygian in instrumentation and mode, it was not because the musical characteristics of this instrumentation and mode in and of themselves (that is to say, their particular timbre or set of intervals) were thought to have any remarkable effect on triggering trance, but rather because they were the clearest sign of Dionysus' identity. This would in any case concur with the general logic of possession. For in fact what is possession other that the invasion of the field of consciousness by the other, that is, someone who has come from elsewhere? Insofar as he is the other, Dionysus is at the same time an elsewhere. This is how he was thought to be, and how his music was experienced. In Dahomey, people of Gun or Fon origin speak Nago when they are possessed by a vodun of Nago origin. Elsewhere, people who ordinarily speak a given African language talk in Arabic if the spirit possessing them is thought to be of Arab origin. When she was possessed by Beelzebub, Jeanne des Agnes spoke, it is said, in Hebrew (...). What is true of speech could also be true of that other language, music."
Rouget's analysis puts in mind Michael Taussig's 1986 ethnography "Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man. A Study in Terror and Healing". In the book, white colonists visiting Indian shamans to be cured of the sorcery believe that the 'wildest' Indians, those Indians who live in the most geographically remote region, have the most powerful healing capabilities. The Indians on the other hand visit markets in Colonial towns to buy 'exotic' Western European grimoires. Here too, the magically powerful Other originates from the mysterious "elsewhere".
II
So what about the music of Mark Stewart, whom Mark K-Punk described as a man possessed, as "a shell and a conduit which other voices, outside forces, (...) occupy.". K-Punk dic not examine too closely which voices, which forces Mark Stewart channels: Stewart's loa was cursorily described as "...rage and utopian longings...". This raises the question: where, for Mark Stewart's, is the "elsewhere" that haunts him?
Even if the sources of inspiration for his music are diverse, Mark Stewart's first "elsewhere" is no doubt Jamaica: possessed by the dubby or duppy ghost, the Caribbean island's music has thoroughly invaded his field of consciousness.
"Dub arose from doubling—the common Jamaican practice of reconfiguring or "versioning" a prerecorded track into any number of new songs. Dub calls the apparent "authenticity" of roots reggae into question because dub destroys the holistic integrity of singer and song. It proclaims a primary postmodern law: there is no original, no first ground, no homeland. By mutating its repetitions of previously used material, dub adds something new and distinctly uncanny, vaporizing into a kind of doppelgänger music. Despite the crisp attack of its drums and the heaviness of its bass, it swoops through empty space, spectral and disembodied. Like ganja, dub opens the "inner door." John Corbett even links the etymology of the word "dub" with duppie (Jamaican patois for ghost). Burning Spear entitled the dub version of his great Marcus Garvey album Garvey's Ghost, and Joe Gibbs responded to Lee Perry's production of Bob Marley's "Duppie Conqueror" with the cut "Ghost Capturer." Perry described dub as "the ghost in me coming out." Dub music not only drums up the ghost in the machine, but gives the ghost room to dance." (sourced here).
It should be noted though that Rastafarianism - unlike many Afro-Caribbean religions such as Vodou - is not a possession cult. As far as I am aware, there are no rituals in Rastafarianism in which, during trance, the subject is thought to have acquired a different personality: that of a god, a deity, genius or ancestor who takes possession of the subject, substitutes itself for him, and acts in that subject's place. Furthermore, alcohol, which has an important role in many Afro-Caribbean possession rituals, is tabooed under Rastafarian food laws (I-Tal).
"[Rasta] has little in common with Haitian voodoo, Cuban santeria or the other Africanised remixes of Catholicism. Instead of a panoply of spirits, Rasta has just the one God, the stern patriarch of the Old Testament - not someone with whom you can cut deals, as you can with voodoo's loa. If anything, Rasta is Afro-Protestant, sharing with mainland America's fundamentalists an emphasis on close reading of the scriptures and a millenarian belief in an End of Time whereupon the righteous get transported to the promised land." ("Tangets #2. Back To The Roots", by Simon Reynolds, Wire, September 2000).
Nevertheless, in Rastafarianism communion or 'communial trances' do play a role. "Rasta mystical experience emphasizes the possibility of the immediate presence of Jah within the "dread," or "God-fearer." God's presence brought on an understanding of the fundamental unity of all humanity, expressed in the pronoun "I&I" (which can mean I, we, or even you, with Jah present). Discerning the will of God is an almost Talmudic process, achieved through night-long "reasoning" sessions, part theological debate, part prayer meeting and meditation, which lead to an "overstanding" (rather than understanding) of the truth through union with Jah." (sourced here).
“In fact, one of the most common Rastafarian rituals involves reading a chapter of the bible everyday. The version most commonly read is that of King James. The Rastafarians claim, however, that King James distorted the true content of the bible party because of his inability to translate the Amharic Ethiopian text accurately, and also as a deliberate ploy to perpetuate the suppression and oppression of the black race. So, although the bible is read and venerated, the Rastafarians only choose to read those passages which they ‘intuitively’ feel are correct.” (sourced here).
Many tenets of Rastafarianism, such as the I-Tal diet and the wearing of dreadlocks, are the result of an at once inspired and paranoid reading of the Scriptures, the result of a Ganja-entranced communion with Jah.
Employing Rouget's typology of types of mystic trance, we can describe Reasoning as a mystic religious practice in which "... the relation between divinity and subject is seen as an encounter which, depending upon the individual, is experienced as a communion, a revelation, or an illumination." For Rouget, this type of non-identificatory mystical trance is possession without the embodiment of the deity. Other examples of such non-identificatory possession are the (Protestant) Shakers of Saint Vincent in the Antilles, the Dervishes, the Schlustes (a Russian sect of dancers and flagellants) and the Camisards.
III
Mark Stewarts music can be described as a non-identificatory possession, directed not at communion with Jah but at communion with the Thatcherite Great Britain of the 1980s, at communion with the Babylon that Rastamen denounce.
Using his politically militant music his to reveal the Western world as a greedy, proto-fascist, paranoid, surveillance-obsessed society, Mark Stewart's use of Dub is informed by late-1970s Western interpretation of Jamaican culture:
"Reggae fans, black and white, (...) looked to the music for "a solid foundation" (as the Congos sang it), for certainty and truth, militancy and motivation. 'Roots rock rebel' neatly condenses how Jamaican music was seen both by rock and by reggae itself. Reggae was anti-imperialist: Rasta's Pan-Africanism connected with the period's post-colonial struggles (...). Reggae was anti-capitalist (...). And reggae was anti-fascist, (...) bringing radical chic to countless student digs with its poster iconography: Peter Tosh, a Che Guevara with natty dreads and black beret; Medusa-headed spiritual warriors Black Uhuru, Burning Spear, and Culture; Steel Pulse preaching about "Handsworth Revolution"." (from: "Tangents #2: Back to the roots", Simon Reynolds, Wire, September 2000 issue)
Stewart's mid-1980s music also looks forward to the mid-1990s discourse on Dub: "For simplicity's sake, this cluster of ideas can be described as the Afro-Futurist discourse, but it actually has multiple facets: dub as deconstruction (of the song, of the metaphysics of musical presence); the producer as mad scientist, dark magus, shaman, trickster; the 'Macro Dub Infection' notions of dub as post-geographical virus and of dub's sonic instability as an education in 'insecurity'." (ibid.)
Mark Stewart's image as a paranoiac can be compared to Lee Perry's image as a 'mad scientist', a madness which in the 1990s was exalted in terms derived from Deleuze and Guattari's "A Thousand Plateaus". Like Perry, Stewart has been portrayed in the press as being dangerously paranoid, and rumours abound as to "no-shows" at On-U Sound concerts being due to hospitalization. In a 1988 article in NME, the artist was presented as suffering from delusions:
"Sure enough our conversation slid rapidly into the realms of the bizarre. 'Of course I know people who are under surveillance,' he claimed at one point, getting up to close the door, 'I'm under surveillance because my Dad has Grade A security clearance and access to uranium.' You mean you're being watched? 'I'm not under surveillance,' he countered, donning a pair of mirror shades, 'I'm a vegetarian'. Looking straight over my shoulder, he laughed with a sudden, unexpected burst."
Mark Stewart's music interrogates his socio-cultural environment like a Rastaman interrogates the Scriptures: in a state of bleary-eyed Ganja-induced paranoid trance, finding unorthodox meanings occulted behind conventional signs. But where Rastafarians unearth the law of Jah in the Bible, Stewart uncovers the secret workings of Babylon in British society, a society which is nothing more than an cancerous outgrowth of the military-industrial entertainment complex; where Rastafarians find ‘a solid foundation’, Stewart finds semiological quicksand, seeing signs and portents which make him suspect the pavement on which he walks hides concrete bunkers; where Rastafarians expect the End Times to bring a repatriation to the Promised Land of Ethiopia, Mark Stewart anticipates - even desires - a nuclear Rapture.
Like Rastafarian Reasoning, Stewart's music conflates several semiological genres in a musical montage: his work is part political harangue, part invocation of the military-industrial complex and part divination aimed at discovering cryptic/encrypted knowledge by the entranced interpretation of the urban environment. Concealed beneath the city streets Stewart sees a veritable labyrinth of missile silos, blockhouses, ventilation shafts, corridors, and "...cathedral-like vaults with hydraulic platforms resembling Piranesi's prisons, endless concrete galleries leading to vertical shafts and even further galleries (...)" (from here).
The concrete bunkers which Mark Stewart knows beneath the city streets are his second, his true 'elsewhere'.
IV
Here is a trailer for a documentary on Mark Stewart,"ON/OFF: Mark Stewart - from the Pop Group to the Maffia" by Tøni Schifer. The DVD will be released by Monitorpop in october/november 2008.
In my previous post about Michael Taussig's 1986 ethnography "Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man. A Study in Terror and Healing", I wrote that Taussig's description of the montage-like (dis-)order of Indian healing rituals is very reminiscent of Deleuze's and Guattari's concept of the rhizome. It must be stressed though that where Deleuze and Guattari tend towards the obscurantist and the disembodied, Taussig's work remains in close contact with the filth and grime of the physical world.
Below I quote Taussig's description of yagé-intoxicated montage-like (dis-)order in full, as I found it beautiful and inspiring.
"Montage: alterations, cracks, displacements and swerves all evening long - the sudden interruptions, always interruptions to what at first appears the order of the ritual and later takes on little more than an excuse of order, and then dissolves into a battering of wave after wave of interruptedness into illusory order, mocked order, colonial order in the looking glass. Interruptions for shitting, for vomiting, for a cloth to wipe one's face, for going to the kitchen to gather coals for burning copal incense, for getting roots of magical chondur from where nobody can remember where they were last put, for telling and retelling a joke (especially for that), for stopping the song in mid-flight to yell at the dogs to stop barking ... and in the cracks and swerves, a universe opens out.
Montage: the manner of the interruptedness; the sudden scene changing which breaks up any attempt at narrative ordering and which trips up sensationalism. Between the swirling uncertainty of nausea and the abrupt certainty of the joke there lies little if any room for either the sensationalistic or the mysterious.
Montage: suddenly altering situations of the group withing the room and mood-slides associated with these changing situations, scenes, as it were, from the art of trompe-l'oeil, passing in a flash from night to day through ages of time from despair to joy and back again without any guarantee of happy endings.
Montage: flashing back and forth from self to group; not simply self-absorption broken up and scrambled by participation in the group or with one or two members of it, but also through such flashing back and forth from self to group and group to self a sort of playground or testing-ground is set up for comparing hallucinations with the social field from which they spring. Hence the very grounds of representation itself are raked over.
(...)
Montage: the 'interior" scenes of dots and dashes of color and of phantasms, coming and going, death scenes, above all fragments of things - shiny blades of grass quivering under the rain, a tiny feathered segment of intricate pattern (the edge of a bird's wing, perhaps?), the quavering of yagé songs butting into the river's rush - all metamorphosing into memory images as the past gains force in its rush into the present "now-time" of the Jetztzeiten where time stands still as an image in which past and future converge explosively.
Montage: oscillating in and out off oneself; feeling sensations so intensely that you become the stuff sensed. But then you are standing outside the experience and coldly analyzing it as Bertolt Brecht so wanted from his "alienation effects" in his epic theater. Only here, in the theater of yagé nights in the Putumayo foothills, the A-effect, standing outside of one's own defamiliarized experience and analyzing that experience, is inconstant and constantly so, flickering, alternating with absorption in the events and their magic. Perhaps that is the formula for the profoundest possible A-effect, standing within and standing without in quick oscillation."
In Taussig's view, both the cruelties and the healing rituals are motivated by a view of the Indian as a Wild Man, that savage from medieval and Renaissance legend, Europe's version of Bigfoot.
The cruelties visited upon the Indians in the 19th and early 20th century by the colonial rubber industry were extreme. This terror was bloodthirstier by far than could be explained by rational, economic motives: in fact, the terror went against business interests as it destroyed scarce labor power. Taussig views the terror as an abreaction against the Wild Man, a construction of the Indian as a savage anti-self of the colonist, an anti-self which necessitated violence as savage as the 'savage' it was directed against. This anti-self was not well-defined and clear-cut, but was swathed in what Taussig calls 'epistemic murk': the colonists worried incessantly about the Wild Man, and this worry infected their imagination with terrible nightmares of Indian attacks, conspiracies, uprising, treachery, etc. It was the unclear, murky nature of the wildness ascribed to Indians in colonial fabulation that gave this wildness such a powerful, obsessing hold on the imagination of the colonists.
Quoting Alfred Métraux's 1958 book 'Voodoo In Haiti', Taussig notes that "Man is never cruel and unjust with impunity: the anxiety which grows in the minds of those who abuse power takes the form of imaginary terrors and demented obsessions. The master maltreated his slave, but feared his hatred. He treated him like a beast of burden but dreaded the magical powers imputed to him."
White colonists visit Indian shamans to be cured of the sorcery. The sorcery is either of human origin, perpetrated because of Invidia (envy, a capitalist affect par excellence), or the result of mal aires (literally 'bad winds'; for Taussig, memories about Indians killed in colonial conquest coming back to haunt colonists). The colonists believe that the 'wilder', the more mysterious the Indian is, the more powerful his healing capabilities are. Thus, in the healing rituals of Indian shamans, the healers use the view of the Indian as a Wild Man. The terrific magical powers imputed to the shamans by the white colonists are a colonial construction appropriated and used by the colonized. Taussig: "So it has been through the sweep of colonial history where the colonizers provided the colonized with the left-handed gift of the image of the wild man--a gift whose powers the colonizers would be blind to, were it not for the reciprocation of the colonized, bringing together in the dialogical imagination of colonization an image that wrests from civilization its demonic power.” It is Exotica used as a healing power by those deemed Exotic by the colonists.
The shamans use yagé, a hallucinogenic drink made from the Banisteriopsis spp. vine, native to the Amazon Rainforest, in their healing rituals. The psychological effects of yagé, the montage-like (dis-)order of the healing rituals and the symbolic wildness create an 'epistemic murk' which heals by unraveling colonial, capitalist culture: "Wildness challenges the unity of the symbol, the transcendent totalization binding the image to that which it represents. Wildness pries open this unity and in its place creates slippage. (...) Wildness is the death space of signification.” Some critical remarks: - Taussig's book is about yagé ceremonies and the symbolic efficacy of montage and cut-ups. Yet Burrough's and Ginzberg's book 1963 "The Yagé Latters" is only given passing mention. Isn't it likely that Taussig's book is more deeply indebted to Burrough's conceptual apparatus than he acknowledges? - Taussig's description of the montage-like (dis-)order of the healing rituals is also very reminiscent of Deleuze's and Guattari's concept of the rhizome. Another unacknowledged inspiration? - In one of the final chapters of the book, Taussig almost calls Victor Turner a fascist, in short because he feels Turner's (Durkheim- and Mauss-inspired) attention to the community-forming effect of ritual and symbols is totalitarian. I disagree with Taussig on this point. Not only does Taussig fail to acknowledge the roots of Durkheim's and Mauss's thought in left wing (albeit non-Marxist) activism, and the continued relevance of that thought for issues of social solidarity. But if one denies the continued importance of community and solidarity, one plays into the hands of neoliberalism and its spurious, atomizing individualism. Furthermore, isn't Taussig's unwarranted attack on Turner the type of theoretical intolerance which will ultimately lead to a left wing divided against itself, to left wing paralysis? Finally, Taussig misrepresents the dynamic nature of Turner's analytic framework, which is directed not towards legitimizing stable hegemonies but towards change, towards "social structure in action".
Despite these criticisms 'Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man. A Study in Terror and Healing' is rightly regarded as Taussig's major work. Where Taussig's 1980 book 'The devil and commodity fetishism in South America' suffered from a heavy-handed Marxist approach, the orthodoxies had been shaken off by Taussig when he wrote this book six years later. While retaining a strong left wing political focus, Taussig's approach to his subject matter had become much more free (in an almost Free Jazz sense of the word). Walter Benjamin's work had clearly begun to inspire Taussig. But the book is not only highly interesting not only from a theoretical standpoint. It is also very well written, the theoretical content informing the literary structure of the book: the text is riddled by alterations, cracks, displacements and swerves, making it a work of hallucinatory montage. Recommended!
In Black Metal culture, the term 'Horde' is often used as a metaphor for 'band'. Even one-man Black Metal bands are described as Hordes!
Undoubtedly, the word 'Horde' is used in Black Metal culture because it carries connotations of violence, brutality, barbarity, belligerence, masculinity. The history of the use of this metaphor in Black Metal is obscure: I have not been able to reconstruct how it became part of Black Metal culture. Perhaps some reader of this post with a better knowledge of Black Metal history can enlighten me?
Nevertheless, in this post I will examine the 'web of significance' of the term 'Horde'.
The etymology of the word 'Horde' itself is clear: 'Horde' is a term of Turkic origin meaning a royal residence or camp. The 'Horde' is the residence of the Khan (paradoxically, where the original Turkic word had connotations of settling down, of stasis, the contemporary word has connotations of movement: a horde is teeming, swarming, advancing). Genghis Khan united the nomadic tribes of northeast Asia, and thereby founded the Mongol Empire, which eventually came to occupy most of Asia. Under Genghis Khan's grandson Batu, the Mongols definitively conquered Volga Bulgaria and the Kievan Rus in 1237. The Mongols brought a terror to Europe that would is remembered to the present day. However, the Mongol empire divided into competing factions before the thirteenth century was over, and in 1502 its last stronghold in Russia ceased to exist. Nonetheless, the name for their awesome military force would leave its burn mark on the languages of Europe: the Horde.
The mythic resonance of the word 'Horde' would lead Charles Darwin to use it in his 1871 book "The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex". He used the term 'Horde' to designate the social groups of primeval men and the ape-like progenitors of man. The sociability within these barbarous groups, from which all civilized nations descend, was the result of natural selection, spurred on by increasing reasoning powers and foresight, and by the praise and the blame of other members of the group. For Darwin, the male was the actor of natural selection, while the female was merely passive: "Man is more powerful in body and mind than woman, and in the savage state he keeps her in a far more abject state of bondage than does the male of any other animal; therefore it is not surprising that he should have gained the power of selection." The era in which this power of selection was wielded is long gone: "It deserves attention that with mankind the conditions were in many respects much more favorable for sexual selection, during a very early period, when man had only just attained to the rank of manhood, than during later times. For he would then, as we may safely conclude, have been guided more by his instinctive passions, and less by foresight or reason. He would have jealously guarded his wife or wives." I interpret Darwin's text as a creation myth, a story or explanation that describes the beginnings of humanity. Darwin' myth is an ethical precept that sanctions Victorian gender relations. In this myth, the primitive horde is presented as simultaneously attractive (there is more than a little nostalgia for the era when men wielded 'the power of selection') and repulsive ('an abject state of bondage').
Sigmund Freud's 1913 book Totem and Taboo uses Darwin's text as the basis for some myth-telling of his own. Drawing far-reaching conclusions for very superficial ethnographic knowle, he wrote: "All that we find [in Darwin's primal horde] is a violent and jealous father who keeps all the females for himself and drives away his sons as they grow up. (...) One day the brothers who had been driven out came together, killed and devoured their father and so made an end of the patriarchal horde. United, they had the courage to do and succeed in doing what would have been impossible for them individually. (Some cultural advance, perhaps, command over some new weapon, had given them a sense of superior strength). Cannibal savages as they were, it goes without saying that they devoured their victim as well as killing him. The violent primal father had doubtless been the feared and envied model of each one of the company of brothers: and in the act of devouring him they accomplished their identification with him, and each one acquired a portion of his strength. The totem meal, which is perhaps mankind's earliest festival, would thus be a repetition and a commemoration of this memorable and criminal deed, which was the beginning of so many things - or social organization, of moral restrictions and of religion." For Freud, the Horde as a social group - and indeed, humanity as a social group - is founded upon a crime - a crime which Freud describes with a strange combination of attraction and repulsion ('memorable and criminal').
Darwin's and Freud's myths remind me strongly of ethnologist Michael Taussig's 1987 book "Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing". In this book, Taussig investigates the “wildness” projected onto American Indians by Western colonial imagination. This 'wildness' evokes bloodthirsty repression by colonial (ecclasiastical and capitalist) authorities of the Indians it is projected on: the savages must be brought in line by savage means. At the same time, the 'wildness' projected on the Indians also leads the colonialists to impute supernatural healing powers to the Indians. Taussig: “So it has been through the sweep of colonial history where the colonizers provided the colonized with the left-handed gift of the image of the wild man--a gift whose powers the colonizers would be blind to, were it not for the reciprocation of the colonized, bringing together in the dialogical imagination of colonization an image that wrests from civilization its demonic power”. Cannibalism is an essential trait of the wildness projected onto Indians. Likewise, for Freud the cannibal wildness of oedipal totemism must be brought in line through civilizing psycho-analysis. Freud constructs psycho-analysis as a colonialization by consciousness of the exotic and savage jungle of the unconscious, which is simultaneously the exotic and savage, cannibal world of prehistory. But for Freud, the confrontation with the savagery of the unconscious also has extra-ordinary healing powers.
The 'Horde', under the name 'nomadic war machine', swarms forth again in Deleuze and Guattari's classic 1980 book of postmodernism 'A Thousand Plateaus'. Inspired by the work of British historian Arnold Toynbee and by the psycho-analytic work of Freud, the two philosophers contrast the socio-philosophical meaning of nomadic life against that of life in city-states. Where city-states are characterized by a hierarchical, homogeneous and totalitarian ("arborescent") organization, nomadism has a more freely structured, heterogeneous ("rhizomatic") organization. Nomadism is idealized by Deleuze and Guattari as a practice which must counter the capitalist greed, soulless rationalism, and superficiality of the urban landscape. Again, the 'Horde' is presented as a violent force that must heal the ills of Western culture.
So how do these connotations of the word 'Horde' relate to the use Black Metal culture makes of it? What can we say now about the web of significance woven around the word 'Horde'?
The connotations of violence, belligerence, masculinity, primitivism, cannibalism and occidentalism that the word 'Horde' has in the writings discussed above, are all relevant to Black Metal. Like with Freud's primitive Horde, in Black Metal a culture hero whose life ended in violence (Dead) was cannibalized; I'm referring of course to the rumour that Euronymous would have consumed a part of Dead’s brain. Memorable and criminal, attractive and repulsive, Black Metal has wrestedits demonic power from civilization, receiving the left-handed gift of the image of the Horde and reciprocating civilization with teeming, swarming, blackened, buzzing noise.
In this post, the third part of a short series, I continue the exploration of the concept of 'fetishism' in Marx's thought.
In 1871, four years after the publication of the first book of Das Kapital, the British ethnologist Edward Burnett Tylor published his most influential work, "Primitive Culture". Building on the work of Charles De Brosses, Tylor considered fetishism to be a special case of animism, a form of religion in which all things are considered to have a soul: a fetish is a material object with a soul. Tylor believed that 'primitive' people are animists because they are not able to distinguish between dreams and waking consciousness. When primitives dream about dead relatives, they believe that these relatives must be alive in some non-corporeal form. The doctrine of spiritual beings developed out of dreams. And this doctrine was closely linked to the concept of the 'soul': death transformed the individual soul into a spiritual being. Because the transformative function of death is essential, the first rites of mankind we mortuary rites and ancestor worship. (Read an article on Tylor's concept of animism here).
In 1912, more than 40 years later (!), a book was published which would sound the death knell for Tylor's interpretation of fetishism: Émile Durkheim's "Les Formes Élementaires De La Vie Religieuse" (The elementary forms of religious rites). Unlike Tylor, Durkheim did not believe primitives to be blindly credulous. He pointed out that while some dreams might give rise to the idea of a spiritual double, many more dreams are resistant to an animist explanation. Further, the fact that primitives use religious ideas to explain some oneiric phenomena, does not prove that all religious ideas originate in dreams. On the contrary: far from having been able to provide religion with a fundamental idea on which it rests, animist interpretations of dreams presupposed and were the result of a religious system already constituted.
Durkheim pointed out that there is no conclusive evidence that mortuary rites and ancestor worship are in fact the oldest, most primitive forms of religion: such forms of religion have not proven to be central to the least technologically advanced of cultures.
Finally, if - as De Brosse and Tylor suppose - religion is merely based on hallucinations without any relation to reality whatsoever, it is unimaginable that religion could have molded human consciousness so powerfully and so lastingly. Saying that the primitives are mad, is no explanation at all.
Durkheim's criticism of Tylor's theory of animism has devastating consequences for Marx's concept of 'commodity fetishism' as well. Capitalists - like primitives - are not blindly credulous. Businessmen using expressions like 'an active market' and 'a sagging dollar' know full well these are merely metaphors, used to refer to complex socio-economical phenomena in a convenient shorthand. There is no evidence whatsoever that capitalist 'commodity fetishism' fulfills the same function as religion ('religious fetishism'). If that were the case, the need for religious fetishism would be the smallest in the most capitalist societies. However, the most capitalist society - that of the USA - is also a very religious one. Finally, if - as Marx states - the place commodities take in the cultural life of capitalist societies is merely based on hallucinations, it is unimaginable that these commodities would maintain such a strong hold on the popular imagination. Saying that the capitalists are mad, is no explanation at all.
Notwithstanding the fact that 'fetishism' as a theoretical concept has fallen out of use in ethnology, the concept of 'commodity fetishism' still has a powerful hold on literary theorists and social critics. In this sense, the impact that De Brosses work on fetishism has had, is only comparable to that of Sir James Frazer. The kindest explanation is that the chapter of Das Kapital which deals with commodity fetishism is relatively accessible, a chapter which doesn't require some knowledge of economics to understand. Those who are less kind might be tempted to think that the concept of 'commodity fetishism' fulfills the same role in the psychic economy of marxists as the concept of 'fetishism' did for Charles De Brosses: that is, it enables one to feel superior to a 'puerile and fearful' Other who supposedly has no stable system of value in which objects can be evaluated.
That Taussig, as an anthropologist, uses this specific part Marxist theory so unquestioningly and without reference to the genealogy of the concept, is almost unforgivable.
Nevertheless, I highly recommend Taussig's "The devil and commodity fetishism in South America".
First of all, it is very well-written: the long quote in the first of this short series of posts testifies to that.
Second, the way Taussig traces the connections between the economic situation of South American endogenous population and their Satanic cultural life is compelling. For me, it raises the question how Satanic practices in contemporary western society relate to that society's economic life.
Thirdly, reading the chapters in which Taussig presents his ethnographic material, one senses that Taussig's Marxism is already overripe, ready to burst, unable to contain the complexities and dynamism of South American cultural life. Strangely, even though 'commodity fetishism' has a prominent place in the book's title, that fetishism itself is conspicuously absent in the presented ethnographic material. The black-magical and Satanist practices of South American semi-proletarianized miners and farmers are a critique of the significance of commodities in capitalist societies in terms of their own cultural idioms; these practices themselves cannot be assimilated to commodity fetishism. The reality of field work makes his marxist orthodoxies come apart at the seams. The devil of the mines of Potosi is more powerful than the pieties of Marxism.
I Karl Marx's concept of 'commodity fetishism' takes a central place in Michael Taussig's analysis of devil worship in South America. However, in "The devil and commodity fetishism in South America", Taussig neglects to trace the genealogy of Marx's concept. This is all the more remarkable, because the concept's origin is in anthropology and Taussig is an anthropologist.
So let's trace the genealogy of 'commodity fetishism' and see what this genealogical research reveals about Taussig and Marx.
II
"The term, “fetish,” (...) emerged out of intercultural trading relations in West Africa in whichEuropean traders argued that Africans, unlike European Christians, had no stable system of value in which they could evaluate objects. Overvaluing apparently trifling objects such as feathers, bones, and cloth used in ritual, Africans undervalued the trade goods brought byEuropeans. In this context, European Christians referred to African ritual objects as “fetishes,” a term derived from the Portuguese feitiço, referring to nefarious instruments ofmagic and witchcraft." (sourced here).
Fetishism as a concept was coined by Charles de Brosses. This French 17th century nobleman and academic published his dissertation "Du culte des dieux fétiches ou Parallèle de l'ancienne religion de l'Egypte avec la religion actuelle de Nigritie" in 1760 (find the French-language text here).
The dissertation brought about an important conceptual innovation in the historiography of religions, in developing the thesis that the mythology and religious life of the ancients (in this case: the ancient Egyptians) can be understood by studying contemporary 'primitive' cultures. Underlying this thesis was the idea of a common humanity of 'black savages' and the ancients. De Brosses stressed that all man had receive intellect from God - an idea which was far from commonly accepted in his era.
For De Brosses the veneration of material objects, deemed to have sacred powers, was a universal form of religion amongst 'primitive' people, interpreting religious practices of inter alia ancient Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Celts, Gauls, Black West-Africans, and Iriquois, as "fetishism". No explanation for the universality of fetishism was deemed necessary by De Brosses, other than the fear and insanity to which the human mind is susceptible.
Anticipating an evolutionist conception of culture, De Brosses characterized fetishist people 'puerile'.
A young Karl Marx read a German translation of 'Du culte des dieux fetiches' in 1842-1843 and based his theory of 'commodity fetishism' on it, as expanded in Das Kapital. The theory of commodity fetishism posits that fetishism is not limited to 'primitive' cultures. Technologically advanced, capitalist cultures know their own form of fetishism, and this is the fetishism of the capitalist commodity.
In capitalism like in any other society, products are created as the result of human relationships. However, in societies with a capitalist mode of production, the production process is presented as something that is abstracted from human relationships, as something that exists independently from the human world. Taussig illustrates Marx's theory with metaphors that are used for capitalist processes: the "economic climate", "an active market", "a sagging dollar". And if the production process is presented a something endowed with a life of it's own, so is the capitalist product. It appears as if it had a life independent from the humans who have created and use it. Thus, they are fetishes.
Marx: "[In] the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities. (...) The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour as long as they take the form of commodities, vanishes (...), so soon as we come to other forms of production." (sourced here). In capitalism, commodities come to dominate humans and their relationships: capitalist product are venerated, almost deemed to have sacred powers - like the fetishes of De Brosse's primitives.
Like the French nobleman, Marx ascribed to an evolutionist view on human civilization, expecting mankind to outgrow capitalism and it's fetishism of commodities.
"In the shafts of the tin mines in the mountains around the city of Oruro, Bolivia, the miners have statues representing the spirit who owns the mines and tin. Known as the devil or as the uncle (Tio), these icons may be as small as a hand or as large as a full-sized human. They hold the power of life and death over the mines and over the miners, who conduct rites of sacrifice and gift exchange to the spirit represented by the icons - the contemporary manifestation of the precolonial power of the mountain (...).
The body is sculptured from mineral. The hands, face and legs are made from clay. Often, bright pieces of metal or light bulbs may be of glass or of crystal sharpened like nails, and the mouth gapes, awaiting offerings of coca and cigarettes. The hands stretch out for liquor. In the Siglo XX mine the icon has an enormous erect penis. The spirit can also appear as an apparition: a blond, bearded, red-faced gringo (foreigner) wearing a cowboy hat, resembling the technicians and administrators who control the tens of thousands of miners who excavate the tin that since the late nineteenth century has made Bolivia a satellite of the world commodity market. He can also take the form of a succubus offering riches in exchange for one's soul or life (...).
Without the goodwill of this spirit, effected through ritual, both the mineral production and the miners' lives are imperiled. To say the least, this spirit owner of the mines is extraordinarily ambivalent, representing the force of life and the force of death; as the political and economic context changes, so does his ambivalence. Following the revolutionary changes and state nationalization of the mines in 1952, personalistic private ownership by the tin barons was replaced by stultifying bureaucratic control and military dictatorship, which, in some ways, have made the struggle over workers' control even more arduous and critical than it was in the days of the tin barons. Since the military takeover in 1964, the miners' rites to the spirit owner of the mine have been repressed. Asserting that they impede progress, some miners think that these rites are better forgotten. Others claim the opposite and maintain that the management suppressed the rites because they sustain proletarian solidarity and the high level of revolutionary consciousness for which the mining areas are famous."
Post scriptum
Here is a link to a YouTube video of a travel agent with some footage of a statue of the Devil in a Bolivian mine.
The first photo of the devil statue was sourced here.
The second photo of a devil statute was sourced here.
Taussig's book repeatedly quotes a line by Herbert Marcuse, which would be more at home at the excellent 'History is made at night' blog than here. I repeat the quote here nonetheless: "Art fights reification by making the petrified world speak, sing, perhaps dance" (from: The aesthetic dimension. Towards a critique of marxist aesthetics).
'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'
In a tale of Tantric sorcery, the hero comes to a cremation ground in the dead of night, where he secretly beholds a wandering mendicant seated upon a corpse and uttering mantras:
White's book is magnificent, assembling a wealth of scholarly knowledge into a coherent - and to this reader, convincing - whole.
