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March 17,1997

The

Nation.

35

It’s

the

Discourse, Stupid

M I C A E L A

DI

TH

MAGIC

OF TH STATE

By Michael Taussig.

Routledge.

206

pp. Paper

17.95.

funny thing happened in the progres-

sive American academy on the way to

the millennium. While we were distract-

ed by rightist political shifts across Eu-

rope and the Americas, by the death

throes ofthe Soviet sphere and China’s new

capitalist road, by the ineluctably connect-

ed piling-up of greater wealth and pove rty

across the globe and a host of local-level

wars and disasters, he university gave birth

to--Cultural Studies.

Originating n an amalgam of Frankfurt

School work on mass m edia, Gramscian

concern with hegemony, long-term folklor-

ic stud ies of popular culture and latter-day

poststructuralisdpostmodernismCultural

Studies

is

large and contains multitudes.

Whether focused on art or ethnography,

whether discerning “resistance” or “con-

sent” (or both), this sprawling interdisci-

plinary field holds out the promise of

so-

phisticated explanationsof culture and con-

sciousness. It has enhanced new modes o f

understanding-substance, form and audi-

ence response to global mass media; chang-

ing religious belief and practice in quotid-

ian lives; and the shifiing gendered and

raced character of nationalist discourse-

new ways of comprehending and thus en-

gaging in pragmatic politics. But Cultura l

Studies also has a signal weakness: Its prac-

titioners too frequentlyhave given in to the

Dark Side of the Force.

That is, in following the poststructural-

ist “linguistic

tur ”

of recent years, too

many in Cultural Studies have declared,

“It’s the discourse, stupid,” and taken the

purblind idealist road, literally denying the

Micaela di Leonard0 ’ co-edited ‘ with Roger

Lamaster)GenderlSexualityReader will appear

this springfFomRoutledge. Chicago willpublish

her

Exotics

at

Home:

Anthropologies

Others,

American Modernity next year . She teaches at

Northwestern University.

L E O N A R D 0

existence of the material world.

This

move

sets the stage for an easy, dismissive anti-

Marxism, a refusal to countenance the his-

torical and political-economic contexts of

all cultu rd phenomena, and the related ten-

dency to “swallow” politics in cu lt u re a s

in studies of rap as “resistance” as if Snoop

Doggy Dogg (or even the magnificent

Queen Catifah) were the inheritor of the

mantle of SNCC and King. This depoliti-

cization is associatedwith an appalling ack

of respect for intellectual labor. A seventies

slogan defined a Marxist-feminist as some-

one who goes to twice as many meetings.

The interdisciplinarity of Cultural Studies

demands an analogous double effort, but

giving in to its Dark Side involves substi-

tuting trendy gestures and catch-phrases,

making Cultural Studies an oxymoron.

Taussig’s whole is wholly false,

a

product of

a romantic antimodernism that fa ls8e s the

very lives he claims to be representing.

Enter anthropologist Michael Taussig,

a favorite on the Cultural Studies lecture

circuit.His latest production, TheMagic

o

the State, is a terrible book, badly written

and embarrassinglybanal. But it is bad and

banal in very particular ways that have

everything o do with contemporaryculture

wars and with the strange liminal status of

American anthropology: Even as the dis-

cipline undergoes institutional hard times

and associated near-c ivil war, anthropolo-

gists have taken on the cachet of Otherness

inthe public sphere. We are exotics at home,

those to whom others look for Primitive

Wisdom, escape from modernity. But

this

very trope, ethnological antimodernism,

denies its liberal impulses in failing to see

Others as simply fellow human beings

caught in and acting within shifting struc-

tures of global power. Let us look at the

world, then, in

this

rather disappointing

grain of Blakean sand.

Taussig, “torn between

thq

overlapping

claims of fiction andthose of documentary,”

and calling himself Captain Mission or

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36

I

The

Nation March 17 199

simply Mission, recounts his peregrinations

with and to individuals involved with spirit

possession n an elaboratelyunnamed L atin

American state. (This site happens to have

Venezuelan currency and offical history;

other features unique to C olombia, includ-

ing M- 19 guerrillas; and the cults of M aria

Lionza-the “Spir it Queen’’-and Sim6n

Bolivar, the former common to both coun-

tries and the latter widespread acrossmany

Latin American states.) Taussig’s descrip-

tions of a series of ethnographic events,

from treks up the Spirit Queen’s m ountain

to watch and engage in possession ritual, to

an observationpost outside aprison where

a massacre had just taken place, to a variety

of frustrating encounters with bureaucratic

officialdom, serve as platforms for se ts of

increasingly all-encompassing heoretical

claims about human social lives.

aussig informs

us

that reifications bear

relationships to one another, and are

imbued with the power of the fetish

“Clearly [God, the economy, and the

state] are fetishes, invented wholes of

materialized artifice into who se woeful in-

sufficiency of being we have plac ed soul-

stuff..”

Moreover, these fetishized entities of

necessity unite opposites-thus “the ethe-

real confluence of reason and violence.. .of

force and fraud.. .constituting the state..

.

and its fantastic entity

known

as the na-

tional economy.” We can actually s6e these

processes in the “European Elsewhere’-

Taussig m eans the Third World-unlike

the Fallen West: “Here we should be m ind-

ful

of the fact that for most people for most

of world history, spirit possession was the

norm. Whatever feeble capacity theWest it-

self had to mobilize death

this

way, m oder-

nity erased with a vengeance.”

If y e only read Freud (“our man in Vi-

enna,,) and Marx as Taussig does, we w ill

discover that bodies, sex, death and money

are all imbued with the magic of the state,

all to be explained discursively-and in

sentences who se lengthy awfulness must

be experienced to be believed-with refer-

ence

to

one another:

For

[Simh

Bolivar] is truly the Universal

whose victorious emergence rom the

death-space founding the s tate endorses

value and in whose image money

not

only facilitates the exchange of differ-

ence, but opens up

Manr

to o ther read-

ings-readings wher ein money is the

bearer of congealed spiritual labor-power

orchestrated by the state of the who le

which, after all, not on ly designs, prints,

mints, regulates, a nd vouchsafes money

like God does man in His

own

image,

continuing hat magnificentoperation of

salvation of the sacred remains begun in

1842,

but is the very Godhead itself, the

state as repository of redemption no less

than the promise of credit on which the

circulation of coins and notes, like the

angels and h e wandering souls of pur-

gatory, depend.

Finally, all m odern architecture, every-

where, including roads and vehicles, can be

explained with reference to

this

dialectical

magic of the state: “Thinkmodern with the

‘concreteframe of reference’ flowing from

marble outcrops of the dead planted on the

carnage of originary violence. Forget the

ground. Forget the underground. It’s all a

matter of cem ent gushing across the face of

the earth in elaborate traceries bracing the

territory in hardening grids and tunnels of

user-friendly monumentation.”

At m any points, as we can see, Taussig

is only telling

us,

badly, what others have

told

us

before. His discussions of the emo-

THEWREN

Paper clips are rusted to the page s

before I have come back to hear a bell

I

remem ber out of another age

echo from the cold mist of one morning

in white May and then a wren still singing

from the thicket at the foot o f the wal

‘

that is one of the voices without question

and without answer like the beam of $om e

star familiar but in

no

sense known threading

time upon time on its solitary way

once more

I

hear it w ithout understanding

and without division

in

the new day

.

I

W.

S.

Merwin

tional and far-flung powers of nationalism

for example, draw from Benedict Ande

son’s important work, but are stripped o

his careful historicization, re-injected wit

ethnological antimodernism , and then fe

through a New Age Stylewriter for tha

ineffable Allen Ginsberg-on-a-very-bad

day tone. Historians and anthropologis

of religion have done much better, detaile

work on spirit possession across time an

space, and scholars’fromMaurice Bloch t

Viyiana Zelizer have enlightened

us

on th

varying cultural meanings of m oney. Ditt

for modem architecture. Taussig seems no

even to know that Fredric Jameson, Mik

Davis and R ussell Jacoby have com men

ed before mon the “postmodern” livin

structure in which “cars came and wen

through the garage at the back, so.. tlher

was

no

point in building doors for peopl

any more.”

aussig’s reply might be that what h

contributes is the vision of th e whole

But that is precisely the problem: H

whole is wholly false, a product of

omantic antimodernism that falsifie

the very “European Elsewhere” lives h

claims to be representing.

In

addition, hi

orotund proclamations, in denying cu ltur

specificity and historical change, fall to th

ground in a welter of self-contradiction

Spirit possession is

not

by any means a

ways tied to national fetishes; human be

ings represent their bodies, and viscerall

experience those representations, in way

other than he ac knowledges; states them

selves vary enormously in the ways i

which they m obilize nationalist discours

and iconography.

And Taussig’s contempt for scholarsh

leads

m

into lengthy absurdities, as whe

he hooks an entire section discussing th

impact of cars

on

the Latin American land

scape

on

a false etymology for the wor

chhere:

“The expression

chevere

that cam

to signify ‘wonderful’ was in fac t derive

from the Chevie. Mission used to hear it i

the seventies.. on the lips of cane cutte

[who] of course cou ld only dream of eve

possessing an automobile.” But

infact,

a

hour or so in the library with national dic

tionaries of Spanish indicates that

chher

derives from a Mayan word mean ing o cr

has

been widespread across northern Lat

America and the Spanish Caribbean at lea

since the twenties and carries both positiv

(correct, elegant, fresh) andnegative(bull

braggart, spoiled) meanings. cu ltura l Stud

ies as oxymoron, in action.

We all of course make mistakes, bu

Taussig has an instructive history, over th

course of four books, of fleeing like a latte

day

Artfid

Dodger from a sw elling river o

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March 17 1997 The Nation.

37

polite scholarly correctives. After anthro-

pologists Michel-Rolph Trouillot, William

Roseberry and many others pointed out that

his

The Devil and CommodityFetishism-

which elegantly interpretedColombian and

Bolivian proletarian “devil” rituals as in-

digenous resistance to capitalist imposi-

ti on ei ts el f imposed an entirely false pre-

capitalist ‘’natural economy” on its subjects,

Taussig abandoned political economy.

Then, eminent Latin A mericanist June

Nash, whose Bolivian material Taussig

had misused in The Devil scored his next

effort,

Shamanism Colonialism and the

Wild Man

as “flights of fancy” in which

he “evok[ed] real natives as plants to sub-

stantiate his mock analysis.” And Marcel0

Suhez-Orozco has pointed out Taussig’s

simplistic analysisofcolonial torture, and

silence on “the new irty wars and terror”

that “remain an epidemic in the South

American world long after the conquest.”

Taussig’s next two books,Mimesis andAl-

terityand TheNervousSystem attempted to

escape ethnographers’ scrutiny through

the lavish use of Frankfurt School work as

theoretical imprimatur and further moved

toward postmodem writing. Intellectual

historian

Martin

Jay, reviewing both books,

pointed out that Taussig’s tenuous grasp

of the works of Adomo, H orkheimer and

Benjamin led mboth to m ake m ajor er:

rors

in

quotation and attributionand-more

important-to fail to see the contradiction

in using the Frank fkt School Marxists

t

commend magical thinking, given its “pro-

foundly hieratic andnon-democratic mpli-

cations.” He also notes that

“I

can’t remem-

ber another non-autobiography

in

which

the pronoun

‘I’

appears so frequently”-

thus the subsequent resort to “Mission.”

And so we return to

The

Magic of the

State and can see that Taussig has been

writing essentially the sam e book over and

over again, with each iteration abandon-

ing scho larly domains where he had been

proven shaky, until he ends “tom between”

documentary and fiction. Torn, or oscillat-

ing to escape being found out? Marx fa-

mously noted of Proudhon that “in France,

he has the right to be a bad economist, be-

cause he passes for a good German phi-

losopher.

In

Germany, he has the right to

be a bad philosopher, because he passes

for one of the greatest of the French econ-

omists.’, Taussig is merely updating the

Proudhon Scam for the contemporaryCul-

tural Studies scene: If it’s bad ethnography,

it must be good art and vice versa. At one

point, Taussig claims that a “Black Cuban”

accuses mof ‘‘ working in obscurity’.

with malign spirits.” The black Cuban was

half right, but maybe he’ll turn out to be

prophetic.

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