Michael Taussig - Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man. A Study in Terror and Healing (pt. 2)

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."

Michael Taussig - Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man. A Study in Terror and Healing (pt. 1)

Michael Taussig's 1986 ethnography "Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man. A Study in Terror and Healing" examines the origins of the extraordinary cruelties inflicted by colonial rubber traders upon Colombian Indians and those of the shamanic healing rituals of the Colombian Indians living in the Putumayo foothills.

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!

Gérard de Nerval - El Desdichado (1853)

El Deschidado

I am the man of gloom - widowed - unconsoled
The prince of Aquitaine, his tower in ruin:
My sole star is dead - and my constellated lute
Bears the Black Sun of Melancholia.

In the night of the tomb, you, my consolation,
Give me back Posillipo and the Italian sea,
The flower that so eased my heart's desolation,
And the trellis that twines the rose into the vine.

Am I Eros or Phoebus? Lusignan or Biron?
My brow is still red with the kiss of the queen;
I have dreamt in the grotto where the siren swims. . .

And, twice victorious, I have crossed Acheron:
My Orphic lyre in turn modulating the strains
Of the sighs of the saint and the cries of the fay.



(Translation by Richard Sieburth, sourced here; here is a line-by-line interpretation in French)

Henri Michaux - Le Prince de la Nuit, 1937

Prince of the Night

Prince of the night, of the double,
of the star-gland,
of the seat of Death,
of the useless column,
of the supreme question;

Prince of the broken crown,
of the divided reign, of the wooden hand.

Petrified prince in a panther's robe.
Lost prince.


(Painting: Le Prince de la Nuit, 1937, 33x25 cm, gouache on black background, Musée national d'art moderne, Paris; Poem: Peintures, G.L.M., 1937).

Chris Watson & BJ Nilsen - Storm

On August 20th 1907 German expressionist poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote 'Die Insel' ('The Island'), a triptych of sombre poems on Pellworm, one of the Frisian Islands.

In these poems, the elemental force of the North Sea - floods and storm - is associated with blindness, darkness, death, nothingness. The lonely life of the inhabitants of the tiny Frisian island Rilke writes about, is touched by this force: "its inhabitants who were born / into a sleep in which many worlds / are silently confused, for they rarely speak, / and every phrase is like an epitaph / for something washed up on shore, unknown, / that inexplicably comes to them and remains." In the last lines of the third and final poem, in lines which remind of Nietzsche's aphorism 'The Madman', the island itself is presented as adrift in cosmic darkness, "not in the plans of planets, suns and systems".

Storm is a cd of field recordings of North Sea storms by Chris Watson and BJ Nilsen. It consists of carefully edited and layered recordings of North Sea storms, made over a period of five years. The first track ('No Man's Land) was created by Watson; the second track ('SIGWX') is a collaborative effort; and the third and final track ('Austrvegr') was created by Nilsen.

The album paints a sound picture of the North Sea that is as ominous as Rilke's poems. The icy wind is harsher than the coldest Black Metal noise; the geese murmur and grunt, the seagulls shriek and the seals jabber as if they are all moonsick; the waves crash and the sea churns and rages and roils relentlessly. That no human sound is to be heard on 'Storm' only adds to the sense of desolation. The sound of 'Storm' is the sound one might hear on a rough night on that ‘long stretch of shore--shingle edged by sand, and intersected at short intervals with black groynes running down to the water’, the ‘bleak stage’ on which ‘no actor was visible’, and defined by ‘the absence of any landmark’, of M.R. James' ghost story ‘Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad’.

The liner notes to the cd, released on Touch Records, reflect the foreboding atmosphere:

"Late October on the strands of Budle Bay where dense layers of transient alien voices are swamped by a full moon tide creeping across the island’s silver causeway. Now lapping out of the gathering gloom an immersive sea wash is filling then draining away carrying slow currents from here to another place. There are no reference points in this darkness."

and

"A black ruthless sea. Heavy winds making it impossible to stand up straight, icy rain hitting your face like needles."

That Watson and Nilsen produce such a grim orchestration of field recorded sounds is not so surprising if one considers their antecedents. Chris Watson was a member of Cabaret Voltaire - cyberpunks avant la lettre, whose electronic dadaist cut-ups presented a bleak, oppressive vision of Thatcherite England. BJ Nilsen started out as Morthound. His first album was Black Romantic ambient and bore the title 'This Crying Age' . It was released on the Swedish label Cold Meat Industry ('Your Haunting Nightmare since 1987'), a label responsible for such releases as MZ412's 'Burning the Temple of God'.

Of course, the appreciation of storms as dramatic, as a sublime phenomenon is bound up with man's technological progress: with the industrial revolution came the introduction of steam-powered engines on board ships and the construction of iron and then steel hulls, and these gave humankind the illusion of rational control over nature. This made it possible to reduce nature to an object of aesthetic contemplation. No longer were the seas perilous to cross; they now became aesthetic spectacles. In a sense, 'Storm' is to storms and the sea what Swiss Black Metal band Paysage D'Hiver is to winter landscapes and mountains.

But the fact that it's aesthetic experience is historically determined in no way lessens my enjoyment of 'Storm'. Only for an withered, anaemic mentality would the fact that this aesthetic is bound up with an historical, cultural and social context be a reason for reluctance to love and enjoy this beautiful album. Such reluctance would be as senseless as complaining that the cathedrals were built in the middle ages.

The aesthetic concept of the sublime is not merely an abstract intellectual construction, far from the confusing and muddying effects of human experience. The sublime is also a historically, culturally and socially grounded method for intoxication, a set of practical waymarks and contextual clues leading to an experience which makes the air one breathes invigorating. It leads towards an experience at the extreme limit of the possible: "Strangely, from your little island in space, you were gone forth into the dark, great realms of time, where all the souls that never die veer and swoop on their vast, strange errands. The little earthly island has dwindled, like a jumping-off place, into nothingness, for you have jumped off, you know not how, into the dark wide mystery of time, where the past is vastly alive, and the future is not separated off." (D.H. Lawrence, 'The Man Who Loved Islands').




Epilogue

See also this (more conventionally beautiful than sublime) precursor to 'Storm', at the ever-interesting audio blog 'A Closet of Curiosities'.

Exotica - Colin McPhee

From the 1999 book 'Exotica. Fabricated soundscapes in a real world' by David Toop:

"[Composer and ethnomusicologist] Colin McPhee was not a surrealist, but his self-willed displacement in Bali projected him into the Interzone, the imaginative construct, a place that encouraged 'extraordinary realities drawn from the domains of the exotic, the erotic, and the unconscious'. Though McPhee was too discrete to make a connection public, the 'sensuous charm' that he heard in Balinese music seems connected to his enjoyment of other sensual pleasures: cooking, drinking, sexual freedom. In his essay, 'Eros and Orientalism in Britten's Operas', musicologist Philip Brett quotes a letter from McPhee in which he wrote; 'Many times there was a decision to be made between some important opportunity and a sexual (homosexual) relationship that was purely sensual. I never hesitated to choose the latter. This I did deliberately and would do again and again, for it seemed the only thing that was real. The Balinese period was merely an extension of this."

• Over at the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive, the are some silent films by MacPhee, as well as a slide show.
• His book 'A House In Bali' is still available.
• Here is an excellent blog post on McPhee.
  

The YouTube video below contain some silent movies Colin Mcphee shot in Bali in the 1930's.


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