The Nervous System

Michael Taussig

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136606397
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

In a series of intriguing essays ranging over terror, State fetishism, shamanic healing in Latin America, homesickness, and the place of the tactile eye in both magic and modernity, anthropologist Michael Taussig puts into representational practice a curious type of engaged writing. Based on a paranoiac vision of social control and its understanding as in a permanent state of emergency leaving no room for contemplation between signs and things, these essays hover between story-telling and high theory and thus create strange new modes of critical discourse. The Nervous System will appeal to writers, scholars, artists, film makers, and readers interested in critical theory, aesthetics, and politics.

1

WHY THE NERVOUS SYSTEM?

I know of investigators experienced in this art of diversion which is a return of ethical pleasure and of invention within the scientific institution. Realizing no profit (profit is work done for the factory), and often at a loss, they take something of the order of knowledge in order to inscribe “artistic achievements” on it and to carve on it the graffiti of their debts of honor. To deal with everyday tactics in this way would be to practice an “ordinary” art, to find oneself in the common situation and to make a kind of appropriation of writing itself.

—Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life

I am working on the Nervous System, and it’s turning out to be hard labor indeed. Sometimes I suspect it’s working even harder on me than I am on it. This puts Hermeneutics and Reflexivity in a new light, since they’re now exposed as a property of the NS itself and not of the individual subject— that curious entity from which many of us have grown to latterly distance ourselves. Thank God it’s only a fiction. Nervous System. That’s all it said, scrawled across a shed I passed on the ferry, gliding over the green waters of Sydney Harbor, whenever I went into the city, reading about the terror of the early 20th-century rubber boom in the lower Putumayo River in southwest Colombia. It was the early 1980s. The signs in the street were of unemployment, purple hair, and postmod anarchy. Apocalyptic omens. An underground doing time. And over there and far away, Colombia was in a state of siege. Torture by the State was commonplace. Paramilitary squads were on the make. Whenever I got up from my desk to cross the sunlit bay away from my other world over there and back then in those Putumayan forests, the Nervous System stared at me in the fullness of its scrawled, enigmatic, might. A portent? A voice from nowhere tugging at my distracted attention. For I could not believe let alone begin to explain the terrible material I was reading about over there and back then, and much less could I put words to it. Wrenched this way, then that, I believed it all, I believed nothing. On yes! I admit to falling foul of the whirlygigging of the Nervous System, first nervous, then a system; first system, then nervous—nerve center and hierarchy of control, escalating to the topmost echelon, the very nerve-center, we might say, as high as the soul is deep, of the individual self. The massive forebrain, protuberant and hanging over the landscape, like the mushroom-shaped cloud of civilized consciousness; then the mid-brain and stem with their more “primitive” (according to medical science) olfactory, memory, and autonomic nervous system functions, intrinsically central, older, and self-locating, and then, dribbling down somewhat like a kid’s sandcastle, the spinal column with its branches, synapses, and ganglia. It’s a complex picture. The tissue is irreplaceable. Its cells are unregenerative. Even while it inspires confidence in the physical centerfold of our worldly existence—at least that such a centerfold truly exists—and as such bespeaks control, hierarchy, and intelligence—it is also (and this is the damnedest thing) somewhat unsettling to be centered on something so fragile, so determinedly other, so nervous. And whenever I try to resolve this nervousness through a little ritual or a little science I realize this can make the NS even more nervous. Might not the whole point of the NS be it’s always being a jump ahead, tempting us through its very nervousness towards the tranquil pastures of its fictive harmony, the glories of its system, thereby all the more securely energizing its nervousness?

“No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear,” wrote Burke in 1757 in his essay on the sublime. “To make any thing terrible,” he noted, “obscurity seems in general to be necessary.” And as if this were not enough, he followed with the disarming observation that in “reality a great clearness helps but little towards affecting the passions, as it is in some sort an enemy to all enthusiasms whatsoever.”¹ But one thing was clear. What mattered for terror was how it was passed from mouth to mouth across a nation, from page to page, from image to body. There was truth enough. And here was I implicating myself into that very chain. Then it swung into view once again, Nervous System, now connecting, Yes! A System, all right, switchboard of the commanding heights, delicate in the power of its centrality. But there was no System. Just a Nervous System, far more dangerous, illusions of order congealed by fear—an updated version of what the poet Brecht had written in the 1930s, obsessed with ordered disorder, the exception and the rule. “Hard to explain, even if it is the custom, Hard to understand, even if it is the rule”:²

Fear rules not only those who are ruled, but
The rulers too³

Hence the sardonic wisdom of the Nervous System’s scrawling incompleteness, its constant need for a fix. Which is what, if only there were time, gives me pause. How does one side-step the NS’s side stepping? How does one intervene in the power of what Burke designated as its judicious obscurity wherein, without warning, the referent bursts through into the representation itself?

The following NS impulses are attempts at just such intervening; essays written for different audiences at different times from the late 1970s through to 1990. They span two books, the first written in the mid-1970s concerning the devil as a way of figuring the world historical encounter between what Marcel Mauss called the gift and what Karl Marx called commodity fetishism, the second written in the mid-1980s concerning terror and shamanism in the response to that world historical encounter.⁴ Looking over these essays, I am struck by their distaste for the straight line, testimony to the unsteadiness characteristic of the Nervous System, which was surely ingrained in my character-armor from a tender age yet came only and fitfully to my awareness through grinding on Marx’s strange concept of commodity fetishism, as filtered through the folklore of work and exchange in Colombian plantation towns and, later on, through a specific form of shamanic healing and terror, especially state and paramilitary terror.

In a langauge I find as tempting as it is undoubtedly precious, what I was sensitized to, in those early days in Western Colombia from 1969 onward amid the dirt-poor agribusiness slums and declining peasant plots, was a certain poetics of the commodity; as in one of the never-to-be completed sections of that name that Walter Benjamin proposed for his Passagenwerk study of the commodity in the social life of nineteenth-century Paris; as in so much of the work of the avant-garde, so many unsettling renditions of the form and allure of the object fatefully soaked in the spell of commodity-efflorescence, from the polyocularity of Cubist collage to Warhol’s endless serializations, so much reified, commodity, soup. But what montage, what craziness is this? From Benjamin’s Paris to the plantation town of Puerto Tejada on the garbage-infested banks of the Palo River in tropical Colombia! But then, after all, the plantation land invaded by malnourished squatters there in the 1980s wanting house sites adjacent to the town, was subsequently named by them—”The Heights of Paris.”

It was to the curious doubleness in Marx’s figure of the commodity that I was drawn, that quirky flickering unity formed by thingification and spectrality, which Georg Lukacs referred to as the phantom objectivity of capitalist culture, the sort of consciousness Marx highlighted in his notion that, thanks to the market and the revolution abstracting labor into homogeneous labor-power, things acquired the properties of persons, and persons became thinglike; hence the analogy he made with that curious notion drawn from Portuguese slavers and Auguste Comte of the African fetish as part of his way of dealing with the riddle of value.⁵ The analogy at one points reads as follows:

In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the 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.⁶

The matter of factness of production becomes anything but matter-of-fact, and facticity itself is rendered marvelous, mist-enveloped regions of frozen movement, projections at a standstill, in which things that come from the hands of man change place with persons, the inside changes place with the outside as commodities erase the social nexus imploded within and become self-activating spirit, even Godlike, “things-in-themselves.” Faced with this restless metamorphosing, how could one not despair at the mechanicians’ attempting to feed the NS’s desperate need for a fix by straightening out Marx’s insight into the epistemic flip-flop back-tracking over the capitalist moonscape of subject and object? Quite apart from the Herculean labors of stout-hearted left positivists hammering away, how could one not despair, for instance, of Georg Lukacs’ Weberian-inspired iron cage-form of straightening this out; Lukacs’ emphasis on what he called reification, a type of death, the thingifying quality of commodity-inspired culture manifested in such disparate forms as bureaucratic planning and Warhol’s all, all-alike, endless soup cans extending over the face of an ever more rationalized capitalist universe—what hits you as you wriggle out of the congestion of the city to leap westwards in the state-registered steel beast across the George Washington bridge onto Highway 101 starting with Exit 3 and numbered in order all the way to the Pacific coast where the pounding waves stop it short. A Cold War feat.

But what seems truer to this picture of a one-dimensional gridlocked Amerika as death-mask, and certainly more provocative, is the flip-flop from spirit to thing and back again—the decided undecidability that could so clearly, so mistily, be seen in Marx’s statement regarding the fetish quality of commodities (let alone in the decided undecidability of the straighter than straight city streets from which the steel beast sprang, and in the globule-laden insides of those Campbell soup cans). The death-mask was only one side; the ascendant spirit it masked, the other. And where the action was, where the NS was put into high gear, was in between, zig-zagging back and forth in the death-space where phantom and object stared each other down.

Working out the gamut of possible reactions to this mobility of the NS meant, eventually, breaking free of the rosary-bead claims of cause-and-effect thinking in historical and social analysis, developing an entirely other mode not just of “thinking” but of working, applied thought, embodied thought, if you like, which in my line of business eventually boils down to putting marks on paper, writing, and the occasional use of visual images like the photograph. The focus of worry shifted from the object of scrutiny to the mode of its presentation, for it is there, in the medium of presentation, that social theory and cultural practice rub one against and inform the other such that there is the chance, small as it might well be, of what I will call “redeeming” the object—giving it another lease of life breaking through the shell of its conceptualizations so as to change life itself. There was no Theory outside of its being brought thus to life. Social analysis was no longer an analysis of the object of scrutiny, but of the mediation of that object in one context with its destination in quite another—for instance, Putumayan healers over there and back then, with you engaged with these stained-glass words here and now. Thus all social analysis is revealed as montage.

This became clearer to me as I tried to work my way free of various notions of “contradiction” and had to confront the power play at work on the musculature of a middle-aged woman patient in the ward of a university teaching hospital in the midwest of the USA in the late 1970s, a power-play in which anthropology’s once long-standing preoccupation with magic, science, and religion was reborn in the encounter with modern medical reification and fetishization of the woman’s body as social sign. Not for nothing was the title of that rumination, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Patient” (1980), a reference to the celebrated 1922 contribution to Marxist epistemology by Georg Lukacs, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” the essay which Walter Benjamin credited as having a decisive influence on the Marxist direction his own work on allegory and modernism was taking at that time as he worked on “One Way Street” between 1924 and 1929.

It was from Benjamin’s work that I was encouraged to think about the possibilities for NS writing as incantatory spells of mimetic-realism in which, by means of judicious “quoting” of the real, one is simultaneously intimate and shocked by it—wherein (to raise Marx’s fetish-ghost yet again) the spirit of the matter meets the matter of spirit such that in the moving depiction of this moving reality to wound and heal, of what I now see as the NS, the rites of style are everything—words pressing into and impressed by the sensuousness of their referents, the power of arbitrariness of social conventions battling It out with the physical wallop of their effects, theory a never-to-be-sold-out implicitness in matter, sometimes conveniently storied. To categorize this as the project of doing or making theory, but implicitly in the synthetic density of its matter of factuality, is merely to grasp the first stirrings of a critical break from High Theory, while preserving its haughty suspicion of the obvious. Storied implicitness as a way of making theory make itself was something I several times aimed at, with variable success— as in “An Australian Hero” (1987), “Terror As Usual” (1989), Violence and Resistance in the Americas” (1990), and “Tactility and Distraction” (1990). What needed to be brought out was the curious activity wherein mine became but the latest, contiguous, link in a chain of narratives sensuously feeding back into the reality thus (dis)enchained.

I remember well the repeated shock of returning from the Putumayo to the university in the late 1970s, after the fragmented joke-riddled incompleteness of ways of talk, of active Interpretation, so practical, so fabulous, in the all-night curing sessions there, coming back to face the demands for academic talk and writing—the demands for an explanation, the demands for coherence, the denial of rhetoric, the denial of performance, when what was crying out for a coherent explanation was the demand for such and the denial of such. What I was being invited to do in those hallucinatory curing sessions of magical practicality on the frontier where Indians cured colonists was to rethink the mode of work in which I was involved as work better approached from the tension involved in the disconcerting experiments in representation tried out by European and (as I later learnt to appreciate, early Soviet) Modernism—e.g. Joyce, Cubism, Woolf, Myerhold, Zurich, Dada, Berlin Dada, Constructivism, Brecht, Eisenstein, and Benjamin moving from allegory to the shock of montage and the liberating (messianic) mimetic snapshot of the “dialectial image.”

For in those curing nights what I had to reckon with was the power of the mental image to alter the course of misfortune. Now surely I want to historicize this imagery with its play of angels and sacred gold, its wildness and montage, its possible locations in a giant and, strange to say, curing, narrative of colonial conquest, Christian redemption, and Statecraft—the point of this narrative being the way the Indian, the (phantom) object of scrutiny, is recruited as a healing object. But just as surely, and precisely on account of this content, I need to highlight its physiognomic power, its power to disturb the (collective) body. “Seeing this, you cure?” I remember a man asking the healer about his vision of angels and birds, shamans and soldiers, priests and books spewing gold, the soldiers dancing and singing like shamans themselves. “Yes, friend. Seeing that you cure,” replied the healer, and at one point the man tried to get up out of his hammock, so real was this imagery, and join with the soldiers dancing and singing. And so it was explained to me that the healer passes on an image, the “painting” as it is called there, to the sick person who, seeing it, gets better—all this accompanied by waves of nausea gathering fires of sensory storm, vomit, and the cleansing pandemonium of purging. The man was climbing out of his hammock into his image, just as that queer thief, Jean Genêt, summed up the fix of the Nation-State, the erotic fetish-power of borders. “The crossing of borders and the excitement it arouses in me,” he wrote, “were to enable me to apprehend directly the essence of the nation I was entering. I would penetrate less into a country than to the interior of an image.”⁷

And so I got to thinking—passed on to me, and from me to you, how does this apply to my practice as a mediationist—and yours, as a reader— given the possibilities and even necessities for reconceptualizing the power of imageric and magical thinking in modernity? This was where Benjamin’s arguments concerning the importance of mimesis and the power of image as bodily matter awakening memory, awakening collective dream-time in our era of mechanical reproduction, pressed upon me as both method and a program of practical inquiry—as I hope is obvious in some of the following essays, bearing in mind the unreliability of a left-handed method dependent on chance in dislodging habits deeply ingrained amid the corporality of the Nervous System’s being. For precisely what calls the method into play, what gives it its chance no less than its necessity, are the fleeting instants of possibility which flash up in what Benjamin designated as “moments of danger”—which make it virtually impossible to succeed.

What was at stake, then, was not folk medicine in the trivialized sense with which a medical anthropology has now buried this object of scrutiny. What was at stake was the art of healing images lying at the cornerstone of power and representation, the space between art and life involved in...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Why the Nervous System?
• 2. Terror As Usual: Walter Benjamin’s Theory of History As State of Siege
• 3. Violence and Resistance in the Americas: The Legacy of Conquest
• 4. An Australian Hero
• 5. Cane Toads: An Unnatural History
• 6. Reification and the Consciousness of the Patient
• 7. Maleficium: State Fetishism
• 8. Tactility and Distraction
• 9. Homesickness & Dada
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index