It's the Discourse, Stupid!

March 17,1997 The Nation. 35 It’s the Discourse, Stupid! MICAELA DI LEONARD0 MAGIC STATE. existence of the material world. This move THE OF THE sets the stage for easy, dismissive anti- By Michael Taussig. an Marxism, a refusal to countenance the his- Routledge. 206 $17.95. pp. Paper torical and political-economic contexts of all culturd phenomena, and the related ten- funny thing happened in the progres- dency to “swallow” politics in cultureas sive American academy on the way to in studies of rap as “resistance” as if Snoop the millennium. While we were distract- Doggy Dogg (or even the magnificent ed by rightist political shifts across Eu- Queen Catifah) were the inheritor of the rope and the Americas, by the death mantle of SNCC and King. This depoliti- throes ofthe Soviet sphere and China’s new cization is associatedwith an appalling lack capitalist road, by the ineluctably connect- of respect for intellectual labor. A seventies ed piling-up of greater wealth and poverty slogan defined a Marxist-feminist as some- across the globe and a host of local-level one who goes to twice as many meetings. wars and disasters, the university gave birth The interdisciplinarity of Cultural Studies to--Cultural Studies. demands an analogous double effort, but Originating in an amalgam of Frankfurt giving in to its Dark Side involves substi- School work on mass media, Gramscian tuting trendy gestures and catch-phrases, concern with hegemony, long-term folklor- making Cultural Studies an oxymoron. ic studies of popular culture and latter-day poststructuralisdpostmodernism,Cultural Taussig’s whole is wholly false, a product of Studies is large and contains multitudes. Whether focused on art or ethnography, a romantic antimodernism that fals8es the whether discerning “resistance” or “con- sent” (or both), this sprawling interdisci- very lives he claims to be representing. plinary field holds out the promise of so- Enter anthropologist Michael Taussig, phisticated explanationsof culture and con- a favorite on the Cultural Studies lecture sciousness. It has enhanced new modes of circuit. His latest production, The Magic of understanding-substance, form and audi- the State, is a terrible book, badly written ence response to global mass media; chang- and embarrassinglybanal. But it is bad and ing religious belief and practice in quotid- banal in very particular ways that have ian lives; and the shifiing gendered and everythingto do with contemporary culture raced character of nationalist discourse- wars and with the strange liminal status of new ways of comprehending and thus en- American anthropology: Even as the dis- gaging in pragmatic politics. But Cultural cipline undergoes institutional hard times Studies also has a signal weakness: Its prac- and associated near-civil war, anthropolo- titioners too frequentlyhave given in to the gists have taken on the cachet of Otherness Dark Side of the Force. inthe public sphere. We are exotics at home, That is, in following the poststructural- those to whom others look for Primitive ist “linguistic turn” of recent years, too Wisdom, escape from modernity. But this many in Cultural Studies have declared, very trope, ethnological antimodernism, “It’s the discourse, stupid,” and taken the denies its liberal impulses in failing to see purblind idealist road, literally denying the Others as simply fellow human beings caught in and acting within shifting struc- Micaela di Leonard0 ’s co-edited ‘(with Roger tures of global power. Let us look at the Lamaster) GenderlSexualityReader will appear world, then, in this rather disappointing this springfFomRoutledge. Chicago willpublish grain of Blakean sand. her Exotics at Home: Anthropologies, Others, Taussig, “torn between thq overlapping American Modernity next year. She teaches at claims of fiction andthose of documentary,” Northwestern University. and calling himself Captain Mission or I 36 The Nation. March 17,1997 simply Mission, recounts his peregrinations enna,,) and Marx as Taussig does, we will tional and far-flung powers of nationalism, with and to individuals involved with spirit discover that bodies, sex, death and money for example, draw from Benedict Ander- possession in an elaboratelyunnamed Latin are all imbued with the magic of the state, son’s important work, but are stripped of , American state. (This site happens to have all to be explained discursively-and in his careful historicization, re-injected with Venezuelan currency and offical history; sentences whose lengthy awfulness must ethnological antimodernism, and then fed . other features unique to Colombia, includ- be experienced to be believed-with refer- through a New Age Stylewriter for that ing M- 19 guerrillas; and the cults of Maria ence to one another: ineffable Allen Ginsberg-on-a-very-bad- Lionza-the “Spirit Queen’’-and Sim6n For [Simh Bolivar] is truly the Universal day tone. Historians and anthropologists Bolivar, the former common to both coun- whose victorious emergence from the of religion have done much better, detailed tries and the latter widespread across many death-space founding the state endorses work on spirit possession across time and Latin American states.) Taussig’s descrip- value and in whose image money not space, and scholars’fromMaurice Bloch to tions of a series of ethnographic events, only facilitates the exchange of differ- Viyiana Zelizer have enlightened us on the from treks up the Spirit Queen’s mountain ence, but opens up Manr to other read- varying cultural meanings of money. Ditto to watch and engage in possession ritual, to ings-readings wherein money is the for modem architecture. Taussig seems not an observationpost outside aprison where bearer of congealed spiritual labor-power even to know that Fredric Jameson, Mike a massacre had just taken place, to a variety orchestrated by the state of the whole Davis and Russell Jacoby have comment-‘ of frustrating encounters with bureaucratic which, after all, not only designs, prints, ed before him on the “postmodern” living officialdom, serve as platforms for sets of mints, regulates, and vouchsafes money structure in which “cars came and went increasingly all-encompassing theoretical like God does man in His own image, through the garage at the back, so.. .[tlhere claims about human social lives. continuingthat magnificent operation of was no point in building doors for people salvation of the sacred remains begun in any more.” aussig informs us that reifications bear 1842, but is the very Godhead itself, the relationships to one another, and are state as repository of redemption no less aussig’s reply might be that what he , imbued with the power of the fetish than the promise of credit on which the contributes is the vision of the whole. “Clearly [God, the economy, and the circulation of coins and notes, like the , But that is precisely the problem: His state] are fetishes, invented wholes of angels and he wandering souls of pur- whole is wholly false, a product of a materialized artifice into whose woeful in- gatory, depend. romantic antimodernism that falsifies sufficiency of being we have placed soul- the1 very “European Elsewhere” lives he stuff..” Moreover, these fetishized entities of Finally, all modern architecture, every- claims to be representing. In addition, his necessity unite opposites-thus “the ethe- where, including roads and vehicles, can be orotund proclamations, in denying cultural real confluence of reason and violence.. .of explained with reference to this dialectical specificity and historical change, fall to the force and fraud.. .constituting the state.. magic of the state: “Think modern with the ground in a welter of self-contradictions. and its fantastic entity known as the na- ‘concrete frame of reference’ flowing from Spirit possession is not by any means al- tional economy.” We can actually s6e these marble outcrops of the dead planted on the ways tied to national fetishes; human be- processes in the “European Elsewhere’- carnage of originary violence. Forget the ings represent their bodies, and viscerally Taussig means the Third World-unlike ground. Forget the underground. It’s all a experience those representations, in ways the Fallen West: “Here we should be mind- matter of cement gushing across the face of other than he acknowledges; states them- ful of the fact that for most people for most the earth in elaborate traceries bracing the selves vary enormously in the ways in of world history, spirit possession was the territory in hardening grids and tunnels of which they mobilize nationalist discourse norm. Whatever feeble capacitytheWest it- user-friendly monumentation.” and iconography. self had to mobilize death this way, moder- At many points, as we can see, Taussig And Taussig’s contempt for scholarship nity erased with a vengeance.” is only telling us, badly, what others have leads him into lengthy absurdities, as when If ye only read Freud (“our man in Vi- told us before. His discussions of the emo- he hooks an entire section discussing the impact of cars on the Latin American land- scape on a false etymology for the word chhere: “The expressionchevere that came THEWREN to signify ‘wonderful’ was in fact derived from the Chevie. Mission used to hear it in Paper clips are rusted to the pages . the seventies...on the lips of cane cutters before I have come back to hear a bell [who] of course could only dream of ever I remember out of another age possessing an automobile.” But infact, an echo from the cold mist of one morning hour or so in the library with national dic- in white May and then a wren still singing tionaries of Spanish indicates that chhere ‘ from the thicket at the foot of the wal! derives from a Mayan word meaning to cry, I has been widespread across northern Latin that is one of the voices without question America and the Spanish Caribbean at least since the twenties and carries both positive and without answer like the beam of $ome (correct, elegant, fresh) andnegative(bully, star familiar but in no sense known threading braggart, spoiled) meanings.

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