—Bertolt
Brecht, “Against Georg Lukács”
Act One
Anthropology
graduate student finishes two years of fieldwork and returns home with a
computer full of notes and a trunk full of notebooks. Job now is to convert all
that into a three-hundred-page piece of writing. No one has told her or him (1)
how to do fieldwork or (2) that writing is usually the hardest part of the
deal. Could these omissions be linked?
I mean—what a
state of affairs! Here we have what are arguably the two most important aspects
of anthropology and social science, and they are both rich, ripe secrets—secret-society-type
shenanigans. Why so? Could it be that both are based on impossible-to-define
talents, intuitions, tricks, and fears?
All the more
reason to talk about them, you say.
Yes, but what
sort of talk?
For is there not
something else going on here, something connecting fieldwork to writingwork,
something they have in common? For instance, fieldwork involves participant
observation with people and events, being inside and outside, while writingwork
involves magical projections through words into people and events. Can we say
therefore that writingwork is a type of fieldwork and vice versa?
Act Two
In a commentary
on Ludwig Wittgenstein's thoughts critical of James Frazer's The Golden Bough, Rush Rhees cites him: “‘And
when I read Frazer I keep wanting to say: “All these processes, these changes
of meaning—we have them here still in our word-language.”’”[1]
Wittgenstein
continues: “If what is hidden in the last sheaf is called the Corn-Wolf, but
also the last sheaf itself and also the man who binds it, we recognize in this
a movement of language with which we are perfectly familiar.”[2]
What is
Wittgenstein getting at? It is not altogether clear. He refers us to a movement
or slithering and shaking that occurs in figures of speech, tricks you might
say, which can occur with terms of reference that slip over into allied terms
of reference such that cause becomes effect and insides outsides. Something
like that.
The Corn-Wolf
is:
1) That which is
hidden in the last sheaf of corn harvested.
2) The last
sheaf itself.
3) The man who
binds the last sheaf.
When
Wittgenstein says we are perfectly familiar with Corn-Wolfing in the moves our
language makes, is he demagicalizing Frazer or, to the contrary, is he raising
awareness about the magic in language, meaning the familiar moves it makes?
And there is
another movement, as well, although we don't necessarily pick this up from what
I have said so far or from what Wittgenstein says in his commentary, and this
is the notion of sacrificing a human being or animal standing in for the corn
spirit. The person who binds the last sheaf is something more than a man or a
woman with a sickle or scythe doing an honest day's labor. You can find
intimations of this in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century
Europe up to the time when Frazer published The
Golden Bough, and according to Frazer you find it in many other times and places
elsewhere—ancient Egypt, for example; think of Osiris, the corn god; ancient
Greece, think of Dionysus. It is a momentous theme and Frazer spends two
volumes on it. In an age of agribusiness and global warming, of environmental
revenge following attempts to master nature, it is worth thinking about the
disappearance of the vegetable god and its sacrifice. In the supermarket there
is no last sheaf.
Act Three
A whole
mythology is deposited in our language. [R,
p. 10e]
This quotation
from Wittgenstein is what intrigued me for many years in Rush Rhees's
commentary before I got sidetracked by the Corn-Wolf. I have recalled it again
and again: “A whole mythology is deposited in our language.” It sticks in my
memory. It has become part of my mythology. For this to me is the
anthropological project: becoming aware of that presence in our lives, in our
writing, and institutions, so as to neither expose nor erase but conspire with
it, as does the wolf.
Always but
always I find this Corn-Wolf tugging at my elbow. I am writing a five-page
piece on obscenity for a conference in Iowa, and I cannot resist my
tongue-in-cheek title before I have written a word: “Obscenity in Iowa.” It
carries me away into the heartland on account of the contradictions this word obscenity
contains. So I write a Hayden White-type annals, a diary of four days in my
life watching out for the obscene, all the time aware of the heave and shine of
Wittgenstein's “mythology.”
Or else I am
writing about liposuction and cosmetic surgery as I hear ever wilder stories
about these procedures in Colombia among poor young women. I am enthralled by
the desperation of this search for beauty and the elimination of nature by
artifice. There is so much to tell, so much to consider, but what stands out
most is the fairy-tale resonance of this endeavor ending in disaster, same as
the stories of the devil contracts that I heard in the Colombian sugarcane
fields almost forty years before.
Or else I am
thinking of the desperate need for cocaine, the mythologies this rests upon and
creates, cocaine that has now made Colombia into a drug colony instead of what
it was for four hundred years, a gold colony, and if you don't know or can't
feel the mythic power of gold and the fairy tales it has spawned circling
around God and the devil, then there is no hope for you.
And the wolf was
there bristling hair and breathing fire whenever there was violence because if
you write about violence, I found out quickly, if you are serious, it sticks to
you no matter how hard you try to get the drop on it. Worse still, you so
easily make it worse. How come? After all, common sense would tell you that
writing is one thing, reality another. How could one bleed—as they say—into the
other?
So, how much of
a difference is there between Wittgenstein's mythology in our language and the
mythic realities of these things?
They are exotic,
you say. Not at all typical, you say.
But aren't they
simple, everyday examples of life itself, of the lust for life and cruelty, of
the value and beauty that makes the world go round?
And nothing is
as exotic in this regard as agribusiness writing itself.
Yet what chance
is there for my anthropological project given the prevailing agribusiness
approach to language and writing that wipes out the Corn-Wolf?
Or so it seems.
Act Four
Agribusiness
writing is what we find throughout the university and everyone knows it when
they don't see it. “Even today,” wrote Theodor Adorno in his essay on the
essay, “to praise someone as an écrivain
is enough to keep him out of academia.”[3]
You can write about James Joyce, but not like James Joyce. Of course there is
always “experimental writing” and “creative writing” and “this is just a work
in progress,” as if all writing is not a work in progress. “Expt. writing” is
to real writing as the sandlot is to daddy's office. Licensed transgression.
Agribusiness
writing knows no wonder that, when it comes to anthropology, is really a
wonder. Agribusiness writing wants mastery, not the mastery of nonmastery.
Compare with Wittgenstein on Frazer: “I must plunge again and again in the
water of doubt” (R, p. 1e). Or
Georges Bataille: “I resolved long ago not to seek knowledge as others do, but
to seek its contrary which is unknowing.”[4]
Agribusiness
writing is a mode of production (see Marx) that conceals the means of
production, assuming writing as information to be set aside from writing that
has poetry, humor, luck, sarcasm, leg pulling, the art of the storyteller, and
subject becoming object. It assumes writing to be a communicative means, not a
source of experience for reader and writer alike (see Raymond Williams's
critique of George Orwell, model of the English language at its transparent
best, and, guys, watch out for those mixed metaphors, please!).[5]
And it assumes
explanation when what is at issue is why is one required. What is an
explanation and how do you do one, and how weird is that?
This is the main
reason for Wittgenstein's beef with Frazer's view of magic. Wittgenstein
singles out the assumption that we have to come up with an explanation for
exotic magics like the Corn-Wolf on which Frazer spends so much time.
Wittgenstein goes on to say (1) we have this exoticism, too, this magic, right
here in our language, only we don't see it, and (2) describe, don't explain.
But then that's no easy task; witness the following: “we have only to put
together in the right way only what we know, without adding anything, and the
satisfaction we are trying to get from the explanation comes of itself” (R, p.
7e). And (3) be open and be true to the emotional wallop we should get when we
read about stuff like the Corn-Wolf.
Recall old wolf
Friedrich Nietzsche in The Gay Science
choked up because in explaining, he claims, we generally reduce the unknown to
the known because of our fear of the unknown. Even worse is that this procedure
conceals how strange is the known. Agribusiness performs this in spades. It
cannot estrange the known, that with which it works, its itselfness.
Act Five
Agribusiness
writing wants to drain the wetlands. Swamps, they used to be called, dank
places where bugs multiply. As if by magic the disorder of the world will be
straightened out. Rarely if ever with such writing do we get the sense of chaos
moving not to order but to another form of chaos.
This law 'n'
order approach reminds me of mainstream anthropological approaches to magical
healing ritual in non-Western cultures, seen as restoring order to the body and
to the body politic. But isn't agribusiness writing resolutely rooted in
science as anything but ritual?
Could
agribusiness writing itself be magical, disguised as anything but? Pulling the
wool over one's eyes is a simpler way of putting it, using magic to seem as if
having none, is what I am getting at. Here I think of so-called shamans using
sleight of hand to deal with malign spirits and sorcery. What we have generally
done in anthropology is really pretty amazing in this regard, piggybacking on
their magic and on their conjuring—their tricks—so as come up with explanations
that seem nonmagical and free of trickery.[6]
Act Six
Hardly a
sentimental traditionalist or antiquarian, in fact outrageously modern,
Wittgenstein provides my anthropological self with a sense of Nervous System
writing as magic—of writing as the Corn-Wolf—of writing that agribusiness
renders moot, cutting down the field in which there is now no last sheaf never,
all sheafs the same, just corn, we might say. Say dollars. Might as well.
Or so it seems.
Nervous System
writing, what is that? It is writing that finds itself implicated in the play
of institutionalized power as a play of feints and bluffs and as-ifs taken as real
in which you are expected to play by the rules only to find there are none and
then, like a fish dangling on the hook, you are jerked into a spine-breaking
recognition that yes! after all, there are rules. And so it goes. Not a system
but a Nervous System, a nervously nervous Nervous System, impressed upon me
negotiating military roadblocks in the Putumayo area of rural Colombia in the
1980s as the counter–guerrilla war heated up and reality was—how shall we put
this—“elastic” and multiple, “montaged,” Brecht would say, a fact that had been
strongly impressed upon me by the spasmodic flows of sorcery and its curing by
shamans singing with the hallucinogens drunk in small groups, myself included.
Think of a cubist drawing with its intersecting planes and disorganization of
cherished Renaissance perspective. Think of a person changing into a jaguar, at
least from the waist up. Or yourself outside of yourself looking at yourself. “The
silence fell heavy and blue in mountain villages,” wrote William Burroughs, no
doubt thinking back to his time in the Putumayo, with that “pulsing mineral
silence as word dust falls from demagnetized patterns.”[7]
As I listened harder to my friends in agribusiness slum towns far from that
sort of war and those hallucinations and that sorcery, I sensed how multiple
real were their views of the world, too.
And what about
me and my practice of writing? Wasn't I meant to straighten this mess out? A
year or so later in my hometown of Sydney, for me one of the world's centers of
order and stability anchoring the order/disorder paradigm we cherish—we have
order, the other doesn't—I saw the grafitti on a ferry stop in the harbor: Nervous System, it said, ominous in its
enigmatic might. A sign from the gods? A system on the verge of a nervous
breakdown? What sort of contradiction and Corn-Wolfing play of words was this?
At that time I was reading the British House of Commons Blue Books of 1912–13
with their testimony concerning the atrocities in the rubber boom in the
Putumayo, Colombia, like those in King Leopold's Congo—over there, back then.
British Consul Roger Casement up the Putumayo River reporting to Foreign
Secretary, Sir Edmund Grey. The violence was too much to read, my mind shuts
off, has to be exaggerated, but now it's not violent enough, whoa! where am I
going with this? Only stories after all—stories Casement got from other people
telling stories, and worst of all none of the motives made sense, leaving just
violence, a nervous system there on the frontier, so many hearts of darkness
and the ultimate violence was giving the Nervous System its fix, its craving
for order, at which point it would spin around, laughing at your naiveté
because the more order you found, the more you jacked up the disorder.
Could it be that
the stories themselves were the aether in which violence operated, the real
reality? What then would be an effective critical response? Check the archive
to go beyond Casement's stories to prove … well, prove what? That reality does
not come storied? That you can get the story behind the story and out-story it?
And what sort of calculus of utilitarian logic could prove that rubber, like
oil today, was the root cause? At once too easy and too crazy. Or could it be
that violence became an end in itself aligned with demons and magics expelled
by contemporary psychology but ever present in The Genealogy of Morals or Bataille's visions of excess, the sacred
payoff that comes from breaking the taboo? In which case my question becomes,
What sort of story can cut across and deflect those violence-stories, this
being every bit as much a question of art and of ritual as it is of social
science? The writer looks the history in the face at the receiving end of a
chain of storytellers and has for a brief moment this one chance, the one
permanently before the last, to make this intervention in the state of
emergency, before the writer's story is swallowed up by the response it causes.
That is what I
call Nervous System writing.
Roland Barthes
said codes cannot be destroyed, only “played off.”
But “only” is
quite enough. More than enough.
Hidden inside
the last sheaf, the Corn-Wolf knows this well—imagine the scene there in the
corner of the field as the reapers close in. Think Breughel. Think Thomas
Hardy. And the Corn-Wolf is also the sacrificed—that never to be understood
activity, sacrifice, like the Nervous System itself.
Nervous System
writing aims at being one jump ahead of the rules of rulelessness but knows at
the same time this is a doomed pursuit. If it is true that there is a mythology
deposited in our language, NS writing aims not at exposing that mythology but
at conniving with it.
Act Seven
I have long felt
that agribusiness writing is more magical than magic ever could be and that
what is required is to counter the purported realism of agribusiness writing
with apotropaic writing as countermagic, apotropaic from the ancient Greek
meaning the use of magic to protect one from harmful magic. This is prefigured
in the wolfing moves alluded to by Wittgenstein, moves that counter the other,
as in a Chinese martial art that imitates so as to deflect.
Wolfing moves
include the following:
1) Refusing to
give the Nervous System its fix, its fix of order.
2)
Demystification—fine—as long as it implies and involves reenchantment. Glossing
Walter Benjamin, Adorno talks of trying to have “everything metamorphose into a
thing in order to break the catastrophic spell of things.” Note the word “spell.”
3) Recognizing
that while it is hazardous to entertain a mimetic theory of language and
writing, it is no less hazardous not to have such a theory. We live with both
things going on simultaneously. This absurd state of affairs is where the Corn-Wolf
roams. Try to imagine what would happen if we didn't in daily practice conspire
to actively forget what Ferdinand de Saussure called the arbitrariness of the
sign. Or try the opposite experiment. Try to imagine living in a world whose
signs were “natural.”
4) We destroy
only as creators, says Nietzsche. What he means is that by analysis we build
and rebuild, in ever so particular a manner, culture itself. And nowhere will
this be more pertinent than in anthropology—the study of culture. But what is
also meant is the blurring of fiction and nonfiction, beginning with the
recognition and appraisal that this distinction is itself fictional and
necessary. That too is a Nervous System, the endorsement of the real as really
made up. The ultimate wolfing move.
Act Eight
But are we
capable of wolfing the wolf? For we are the last sheaf—are we not? And who will
bind us? Is self-sacrifice the way out? After all, Henri Hubert and Marcel
Mauss say that the god sacrificing itself is the origin of all sacrifice. Truly
the mythology is one jump ahead. For as the world heats up, thanks to
agribusiness, is it possible that subjects will become objects and a new—which
is to say “old”—constellation of mind to matter, body and soul, will snap into
place in which writing will be neither one nor the other but both, in the Corn-Wolfing
way I have described in the previous act, the one permanently before the last?
The End
* * * * *
This is a
modified text of a talk given on 27 March 2008 at a panel on “Meaning and
Method in History” with Hayden White, organized by the Columbia University
Center for the Humanities by Akeel Bilgrami. I would like to thank the editors
of Critical Inquiry for their
suggestions and also Peggy Phelan and Bina Gogineni for their love of the Corn-Wolf.
I have just finished Dale Pendell's fabulous little book on Hayden's colleague,
Norman O. Brown—whom I knew a little—and as I reworked this text I found myself
thinking of him a lot, a Corn-Wolf if ever there was one. See Dale Pendell, Walking with Nobby: Conversations with
Norman O. Brown (San Francisco, 2008).
[1] Rush Rhees,
“Wittgenstein on Language and Ritual,” in Wittgenstein
and His Times, ed. Brian McGuinness (Chicago, 1982), p. 69.
[2] Ludwig
Wittgenstein, Remarks on Frazer's “Golden
Bough,” trans. and ed. Rhees (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1979), pp. 10e–11e;
hereafter abbreviated R.
[3] Theodor W.
Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” Notes to
Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, 2 vols.
(New York, 1991), 1:3.
[4] Georges
Bataille, “What I Understand by Sovereignty,” Sovereignty, vol. 3 of The
Accursed Share: An Essay on Political Economy, trans. Robert Hurley (New
York, 1991), p. 208.
[5] See Raymond
Williams, George Orwell (1971; New
York, 1981).
[6] See the
discussion of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Victor Turner in Michael Taussig,
“Homesickness and Dada,” The Nervous
System (New York, 1992), pp. 149–82 and “Visceralty, Faith, and Skepticism:
Another Theory of Magic,” Walter
Benjamin's Grave (Chicago, 2006), pp. 121–56.
[7] William
Burroughs, Nova Express (New York,
1964), p. 32.
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