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Mastery of Non-Mastery

(Extracts from a manuscript)

M. Taussig

October 7, 2017

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. . .that yielding water in motion

Gets the better in the end of granite and porphyry

Brecht

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Prologue

For a long time now we have excelled in mimicking

nature so as to exploit it, just as we exploit

each other and ourselves. What would it take,

however, to mimick in a different way that allows

for mutuality?

Let us begin with writing—which is to say

experimenting with the body and writing--as in

this book situated between science fiction, the

weather, and high theory.

The first experiment was a series of “solar

talks” each ten minutes long at different times

of the same day starting on a beach in southern

California. The speakers stood. The audience

stood. And the waves crashed. Language became

something else.

The second experiment was my devising a theater

of the sun in our age of global meltdown. This

was performed in Berlin, Helsinki, and New York.

In each venue a musician accompanied the text

along with the fluctuant light of dusk. Language

became something else in accord with solar

demands, the event being defined in the theater-

program as neither theater nor performance but as

a theater-piece pressing on ritual in which

viscerality, faith, and skepticism perform

marvelous tricks of revelation and concealment.

The third experiment is the book before you.

Enmeshed in the two previous happenings, it

struggles to find its own language of things as

prelude to the conjuring logic of the mastery of

non-mastery. The book began as a hybrid object,

in part theater, in part commentary on that

theater, but got away from me. Such is the

mastery of non-mastery; what Roland Barthes in

his lectures on The Neutral called an ethic, a

guide to life lived through twinklings of tact in

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an anecdotal discourse recruited to outsmart

mastery.1

1 Roland Barthes, The Neutral, translated by Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Holier (New

York: Columbia University Press), 2005 [2002], p. 30

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Act 17

Julio Reyes’ Phantom Ship

These out of season ideas began when I was thinking of

color and heat by the Timbiqui River in the forests of

western Colombia several years ago. I got the feeling that

the mimetic faculty, alive in all of nature, especially

human nature, was picking up on global meltdown, re-routing

language and consciousness through the space of death whose

shadow like the setting sun now claims us.

Poor nature! Melting glaciers. Polar bears adrift in

warming seas. Beetles scampering like refugees north and

south. Human civilization on the skids and the poor will go

first. Nature the first colony. Nature as victim, an Oxfam

basket-case with a pot belly and staring eyes staring at

you as you evacuate Florida with one eye on the tidal wave

behind.

But hang on. Maybe we should turn this around? Not nature

as victim but nature stirring, fighting back ferociously

with all its got by way of animistic impulses and mimetic

sympathies?

It was night-time. I started to paint a picture of Julio

Reyes’ phantom boat coming slowly upriver. Just a story,

you say, more like a gesture. But how do you paint a spirit

ship especially when it’s “just a story”? How do you paint

a spirit ship at night on the dark river unable to picture

different shades of blackness? It was beyond words, charged

with Nietzsche’s “knowing what not to know” or, worse

still, not knowing what not to know.

Beyond words? Is that why I was painting instead of

writing? Or was I searching for a form and a manner of

writing that was in itself painting or, better put,

cinematic, suited to the delirious circuitry of the mimetic

faculty in this our time of global meltdown?

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Perhaps the painting or at least the effort therein made it

real, not really real but sufficiently real in that

phantasmatic boat way so that the doors of perception

opened wide. Yes! Here it comes tacking through the upside-

down reflections of houses illuminated by kerosene lamps

glowing in the blackness of the river under a moonless

night. Perhaps it was more than I had bargained for.

Perhaps it was the mastery of non-mastery unwinding the

shroud known as “the domination of nature”?

And the waters came, and swept vast numbers

Of creatures through me, so that in my timbers

Creature befriended creature in the gloom

Brecht2

As we drift now like Julio Reyes’ phantom boat in our age

of meltdown we surely sense something new about the very

idea of being connected and making connections between

species as much as between language and species?

The ship sinks into its watery grave. Timbers rot. The

weaker parts fall aside. The fish and other marine

creatures enter and make a home, temporary as it may be.

But, Hang On! This ship is me! I have become porous to the

creatures and elements such as the storms and the sea and

the deepening colors of the descending depths. Friends,

they are, now. We communicate in new ways, now, in the

Death Ship.

As soon as you understand death is not an

end but only a condition, only a step

between events, then there will be no more

slaves on earth. And of course no more

masters either. (B. Traven)

For just as cinema connected our bodies through images with

the wider world, so death of the planet re-images the

relationships between our bodies and the cosmos.

2 Brecht, “The Ship,” in Bertolt Brecht Poems 1913-1956 ed John Willet and others,

Methuen 1976

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What cinema was to the 20th century, so planetary meltdown

is to ours. We move into the future yet backward in time to

when mankind was ritually bound to the sky that entered the

body.

What used to be but a brief interlude in a diurnal rhythm,

namely the “magic hour” of twilight and dawn, beloved by

cinematographers, now expands in stops and starts

throughout day and night as much as through the brain stem

of being.

Thanks to the wisdom of the body “knowing what not to

know,” this sense of cosmic connectedness is largely

unconscious, set by the autonomic nervous system of the

body which is not so much something internal to each of us

as it is a tremulous node in a vast network of mimetically

resonating bodies leaving barely a tremor in consciousness,

ephemeral and fleeting.

In which case it is this tremor, ephemeral and fleeting,

that oscillates like a wave through the pages that follow

concerning the re-enchantment of the sun in this our age of

meltdown.

As an exercise in the mastery of non-mastery, this book

runs along the edges of “knowing what not to know,” which

is how Nietzsche in The Gay Science sees wisdom. Knowing

is good. Knowing what not to know is even better. There is

a scene from long ago attached by Nietzsche to this claim

with the witch Baubo lifting her skirt and making Demeter,

grieving the abduction of her daughter, laugh. This sudden

intrusion of knowing what not to know provoking laughter,

healing, and impromptu magical rite, parallels the rising

of the bodily unconscious into consciousness and its

subsequent falling away exacerbated by the end of history

scenario of global warming.

You can think of this book as plummeting along with the

planet earth in free fall as the solar system releases all

manner of mimetic and animistic impulsions that re-boot the

body in relation to the cosmos.

About time, too.

You can think of this book as science fiction become non-

fiction; as a book that is an object-in-itself as much as a

book, as an object that turns in on itself performing the

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mastery of non-mastery, taking off from where Baudelaire

left us with the notion that once upon a time the lyric was

grounded in nature until he found it in the shifting sands

of the great city in a prose form that allows us to “break

off where we choose, I my reverie, you the manuscript, the

reader his reading; for I have not tied his reluctant will

to the interminable thread of some pointless plot. Remove a

vertebra and the two parts of my tortuous fantasy join

effortlessly.”

“Who has not, in bouts of ambition, dreamt this miracle, a

poetic prose, musical without rhythm or rhyme, supple and

choppy enough to accommodate the lyrical movement of the

soul, the undulations of reverie, the bump and lurch of

consciousness?”3

That was then.

But now this lyrical prose fashioned in Paris, “capital of

the nineteenth century,” finds itself re-engaged with

nature, a nature tormented and riotous when the storm-

clouds turn the sky green, dark with foreboding, and you

feel it could be dawn or twilight only it's the middle of

the day and the birds are no less skittish than your heart.

Is there not a medium especially appropriate for this, the

medium being the threshold that filmmakers call “magic

hour,” the magical dimensions of which now bear down with a

force chilling and seductive?

MH is the time of cosmic gear-change, at dawn and dusk,

when light and dark slide into, over, and through each

other, de-realizing the world, suspending being in

becoming.

Threshold-time par excellence, expanding to the point when

it will no longer be threshold or, rather, reality will be

all threshold.

Which, again, raises the question of the “bump and lurch of

consciousness.”

“The problem of consciousness,” wrote Nietzsche in The Gay

Science, “first confronts us when we begin to realize how

much we can do without it . . . All of life would be

3 Baudelaire

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possible without, as it were, seeing oneself in the mirror”4

The thinking which becomes conscious, he avers, ”is only

the smallest part of it, let’s say the shallowest, worst

part—for only that conscious thinking takes place in words”5

It is all well and good to be sensitive to the difficulties

yet also the delights with language (as Nietzsche so

obviously experiences and practices throughout his work)

but this harsh condemnation seems willfully obtuse, an

inspired last gasp of language in its death throes hating

on itself.

It is all well and good to resort to such anodyne

phraseology as “embodied thought” like so many writers on

the topic do, but what Nietzsche expresses (I was going to

say “has in mind”) is not “thought” but something else

which I dare to say is closely tied to a movement of

thought rather than thought itself.

It is a movement that cancels itself out in a peculiar and

fascinating manner emerging from and disappearing back into

the body as when we talk of “knowing what not to know” or

as with conjuring magic based on “the skilled revelation of

skilled concealment,” a movement that leaves traces and

residues I refer to as “the tremor” and “corporeal ripple.”

On this score language is the ultimate magical trick.

Such a body and such a ripple involves a good deal more

than what I call my body; rather it is that holy trinity,

my body, your body, and the body of the world. What I refer

to as “the bodily unconscious” is thus multiple and

effervescent, which is what makes language a delightful

burden.

Thus the trick forced upon us by meltdown is how to write

without words or, should I say, with words that act like

those evanescent spells spoken softly into things to

activate their glow, their speed, their love.

We can agree with Nietzsche about language only if we

recognize that there are many sorts of language; of writing

and talking and singing and humming, whispering too, in

which words engage with my body, your body, and the body of

the world in waves of mimetic impulsion with the dead and

4 Nietzsche The Gay Science, # 354, pp 211-12 5 Ibid 213

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the yet to come, not to mention that peculiar property of

“voice” you may discern in diary-writing.

Fires had been kindled in a few places.

Marvelous spectacle. Red, sometimes purple

flames had crawled up the hillside in narrow

ribbons; through the dark blue or sapphire

smoke the hillside changes color like black

opal under the glint of its polished

surface. From the hillside in front of us

the fire went down into the valley, eating

at the tall, strong, grasses. Roaring like a

hurricane of light and heat, it came

straight towards us, the wind behind it

whipping half-burned bits into the air.

Birds and crickets fly past in clouds. I

walked right into the flames. Marvelous—some

completely mad catastrophe running straight

on at me with furious speed.(Bronislaw

Malinowski, 1914 Fieldwork Diary)6

Walking into fire. This is how I envisage us today, faced

with the re-enchantment of the sun in the age of global

meltdown roaring like a hurricane of light and heat with

birds and crickets flying past in clouds.

And the fieldwork? What if now the sun and those hurricanes

of light and heat become our ethnographic focus? What if

the fieldworker practicing participant-observation

participates with the birds and the crickets flying past in

clouds as can happen when in Terra Incognita you write in

your fieldwork diary opening up that other fire called

yourself?

This is what happens when you take seriously all that magic

the islanders have told you about--soft murmurings of

spells into things:

like canoe lashings to go safer and faster

into fragrant herbs to make love magic

6 Malinowski A Diary in the Strict Sense f the Term, pp 11-12

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into crushed betel nut mixed with pigment to make an

intense red

into one’s skin to make it glow

What happens if the fieldworker participates in this magic

too, whispering prehistory into things as poetry in the

present when the sub-freezing temperature shot up yesterday

to early spring warmth. The snow started to melt like a

blowtorch was put to it and the mist rose from the river

like a shroud enveloping all that lay around. We walked in

the mountain close to sunset with the streams running high,

stripping off our clothes. At times we spooked ourselves,

disappearing into the mist like the phantoms we were, same

as happens in certain sunsets when the light turns

everything purple with shots of yellow and blue raining

like vapor from the far off ridge where the sun sets. The

craziest thing was that every few minutes we would walk

through a pocket of hot air and then a minute later walk

through chill. And the craziest thing was that as with

immersion in the mist, so you sensed this mimetic pull into

rampant Otherness of being. Tornadoes were reported further

south.

As was yesterday, one of those days of utter perfection

early fall, it seemed like we were living in glass, the

world not real but a picture in which we held our breath.

As was yesterday, “ . . . one of those days filled with so

many changes of weather, atmospheric incidents, storms,

that the idle man does not feel that he has wasted them

because he has been taking an interest in the activity

which, in default of himself, the atmosphere, acting as it

were in his stead, has displayed days similar to times of

revolution or war.”(Proust 7).

It is a mere thought at that stage of world history barely

a century ago, a dramatic aside, this meteorological

atmosphere “similar to times of revolution or war.” But

today it reads different. It is not an “aside.” And in its

awakened status as wild weather it not only invokes a

strangely familiar identity between the human body and the

weather (between the interior of the body and the weather),

but more specifically an identity between that aspect of

the body we can call “the bodily unconscious,” on the one

7 Proust, The Captive, 96—This reference is WRONG

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hand, and extreme weather, on the other, an extremity like

war or revolution.

In his Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin endorses this view

of things and does so along with a couple of

presuppositions. One is that there is no simple binary, no

clear-cut distinction between consciousness and

unconsciousness. Rather there exists a spectrum with

different “moments” forming a changeable mix—and here we

might take note of trance states, as key to Benjamin’s

contrast of astrology with astronomy, collective trance

states, at that.8 Second, that this variable and changing

mix of degrees of consciousness with degrees of

unconsciousness is patterned and checkered by sleep and

awakening. As such this is mapped onto or should we say

resonant with the wider world beyond the individual, with

society itself as well as with fashion, architecture, and

even the weather are to the interior of society what “the

sensoria of organs, the feeling of sickness or health, are

inside the individual. And so long as the world beyond the

individual preserves this unconscious, amorphous, dream

configuration, they [weather, architecture, and fashion,

etc] are as much natural processes as digestion, breathing,

and the like.”9

Well this is strange stuff, not so much sociobiology as

trance-like and historically sensitive intimations of each

in the other, the main feature of which I take to be what I

call “the bodily unconscious,” pretty much the same as in

the citation Benjamin inserts in The Paris Arcades

exploring “the visceral unconscious,” tied to the

“unconscious of oblivion,” which is where Proust comes in,

the citation noting that revolution and war, along with

fever, brings to light this visceral unconscious, tied as

it is to unconscious memory.10 Great emphasis is here placed

on the dependence of society on this visceral unconscious

which comes to light with war, revolution, and fever.

Which is why I wanted to find a way of writing that felt

right connecting the human body and changes in mood with

the passage of the sun each day across the sky of history

such that on occasion this bodily unconscious may rise into

8 Benjamin, “To The Planetarium” 9 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, pp 389-90 10 Benjamin, Arcades, 396-97

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consciousness only to subside, like the sun does across the

sky on its way underground.

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Act 3

Keywords

Sun: source of life, labor its equivalent creating more

value than necessary for survival; Cf. Marx, “surplus

value.” But Bataille sees another sort of economy, a gift

economy, in which the sun gives without receiving. Because

the profit-oriented economy guides technology, however, the

gift has become poison.

Sun: “re-enchantment of the sun” refers to the way by which

global warming creates a resurgence of what Bataille and

the College of Sociology called “the negative sacred” (at

its ominous, sublime, best). Benjamin was friendly with

Bataille, up to a point, but kept his distance from the

College. Bataille poked fun at the dialectic while for

Benjamin after 1924 the “dialectical image” (tied to

commodity fetishism) was the holy grail or maybe the

alchemists’ stone like the children’s toys he talked about

so wonderfully in his Berlin radio stories for kids.

Sun: “re-enchantment” involves demystification combined

with enchantment. What is called Enlightenment demystifies

in such a way as to enhance a soulless, reified (meaning

thingified), world, which is what Nietzsche meant by (the

illusion of) the “Death of God.” But our toy, Benjamin’s

toy, namely commodity fetishism, has two sides, the

reifying side and the fetish or magical side. This bifid

character fits nicely with the never-ending unwinding of

the need to become a thing in order to break the magic

spell of things (which is what Adorno, spellbound by

Lukacs’ notion of reification, came to regard as the trick

behind and within Benjamin’s writing which, as I said

before, is mimetic).

Sun: “mastery of non-mastery” is just that never-ending

unwinding action of thing and spell. This trick can be

described as the yet to be figured out strategy for

engaging with what Horkheimer and Adorno famously termed

the “domination of nature” as the history of the world.

Space of Death: drawn from my Modernist warping of Dante’s

descent into hell bound to my interpretation of mythologies

of race and conquest in Latin America, this “death space”

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is now ours in the age of meltdown, offering an assortment

of positions and trajectories pitching the real in

unaccustomed ways like a ship in a stormy sea. “Of the

pain, of the fever, I remembered nothing,” the man related

deep in the forest, “only the space of death—walking in the

space of death. Now the world was removed. Well, then I

understood.”11

Magic Hour: dawn and twilight; a favored time for

cinematography inviting connections with the world of the

dead and the yet to come. MH expands with meltdown as

Bataille’s delirious solar anus spits out fireflies.

Bodily Unconscious: this is the body on automatic pilot

mimetically connecting as if through sympathetic magic my

body, your body, and the body of the world. Lurching from

extreme to extreme, freezing one day, burning hot the next,

meltdown enlarges our repertoire of sensations, augmenting

magical sympathies including the connection between writing

and what the writing is about. “Classic” anthropology

provides striking examples of sympathetic magic as do

Baudelaire’s fleeting “correspondences” in his forest of

symbols, ever more tenuous, he thought, on account of

modernity. (But the trees still acknowledged his gaze.)

Benjamin’s idea of the mimetic faculty, an earlier version

of which was entitled “Doctrine of the Similar,” guides his

last writing, “Theses On The Philosophy of History,” which

grafts Marxism to Proust in one vast upheaval of the bodily

unconscious that is the coming catastrophe.

Shamanism: should be “shamanism” thereby indicating some

discomfort with this bandied about term welded into a faux

evolutionary scheme of world religions. Shamanism varies

greatly and is influenced by colonialism which, in fact, is

likely to give it much of its allure.12

Tricks: abound in nature and language, most especially in

the “knowing what not to know” of the mastery of non-

mastery conjuring with the bodily unconscious in which,

along with corporeal ripple, an image surfaces at a moment

of danger--only to disappear into the abyss of knowing what

not to know.

11 Taussig, Shamanism . . . 12 Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing

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The Quintessential Trick: is the shamanic conjuring

detailed by George Hunt in 1925 (“I Wished To Learn The

Ways Of The Shaman”) translated from the Kwakiutal by Franz

Boas; the trick of skilled revelation of skilled

concealment in which flow is crucial (on which see Deleuze

and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus). Influenced by Marcel

Proust’s idea of the “memoire involontaire,” Walter

Benjamin sees this same quick-silver action in the

surfacing of images followed by their disappearance at

times of danger. Where do they go? Into the body? What body

is that? The body of the world? D&G provide an image; the

huge Japanese wrestlers who barely move then suddenly

uncoil so fast you can’t see it. “What is going to happen?”

Followed by “What happened?”13

Skilled Revelation of Skilled Concealment,(1): Both axiom

and trope, this figure-eight circuitry lies at the heart of

the mastery of non-mastery and yes! it is undeniably a

mouthful, as when the Selk’nam medicine man described

beginning of the 20th century dead of winter there in Tierra

Del Fuego surrounded by other Indians takes from his mouth

a strip of something that is perhaps guanaco hide,

stretches it four feet, then eight, and then lets it stream

back into his mouth with a shriek then chuckles, “I can get

it back,” and there like translucent dough spinning in his

hand it is alive and spinning all on its own then back into

the body once again, insides into outsides and back again

such that “being and nonbeing are transformed into the

beingness of transforming forms.”14

Skilled Revelation of Skilled Concealment,(2): undeniably a

mouthful including: (1) my “take” on shamanism; (2)

Benjamin’s mysterious quick-silver flash action; (3)

Nietzsche on knowing what not to know as related to the

bodily unconscious and language; (4) Nietzsche on truth as

a wager between absolute trust and absolute distrust, hence

his question Why not deceive? Followed by his conclusion

that truth is trick; (5) Proust’s image practice; (6)

Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of “imperceptible

movement” which fits beautifully with skilled revelation of

skilled concealment which fits nicely not only with my idea

of shamanic trickery but can be seen as the alpha and omega

of A Thousand Plateaus itself; ie. as the basic yet

unstated premise of that major work; (7) Foucault’s

13 Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p 281 14 Taussig, “Viscerality . . .” p 128 of Walter Benjamin’s Grave

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“repressive hypothesis,” that secret of sex which must be

told so as to remain secret; (8) Ingemar Bergman’s film,

The Magician, suspended in the tension of the magic of

Enlightenment;(9) Benjamin’s little known story of Rastelli

the conjurer; (10) Sergei Eisenstein’s spies becoming

animal becoming spies in his film Strike; (12)Freud’s

fetish, now you see it, now you don’t; (13) the half light

of twilight and dawn known as “magic hour;”(14)sunrise and

sunset as skilled revelation of skilled concealment every

twelve hours or so; and of course (15) my analysis of

secrecy and public secrecy in my book Defacement as well as

my essay on trickery; “Viscerality, Faith, and Skepticism:

Another Theory of Magic.” As I said, undeniably a mouthful

which, like the aforementioned medicine man in Tierra del

Fuego, I shall attempt to extrude and expand in the pages

that follow with occasional shrieks and chuckle