“This book … of traces and tremors, if book it be”

Cory Austin Knudson (bio)

Taussig, Michael. Mastery of Non-Mastery in the Age of Meltdown. U Chicago P, 2020.

In Mastery of Non-Mastery in the Age of Meltdown, anthropologist and ethnographer Michael Taussig confronts the reciprocal problems of theorizing and representing climate change. In this, he joins a popular strain of contemporary environmental humanities literature that examines how modeling the environment analytically or artistically limits or expands the ways we can think about, and perhaps mitigate, climatic catastrophe. Much of the work in this tradition tends to keep its models at arm’s length, using sober, scholarly analysis to master the myriad representational forms of climate change. It straightens out—in theory—the disorder of a world on the brink without letting theory itself become infected by such disorder. Taussig, by comparison, seeks to meld analysis with its object, making his text both product and agent of epistemic meltdown. Mastery of Non-Mastery in the Age of Meltdown (hereafter Mastery of Non-Mastery) in this way combines ecocritical and ecopoetic practices; it attempts to reshape, mutate, and parody the scholarly monograph in a bid to derive a form of expression commensurate with this surreal, volatile age of meltdown.

Taussig’s correspondingly surreal and volatile text might at first appear a gimmick, where writing erratically mimics erratic weather patterns, as it were. But Taussig insists elsewhere that “while it is hazardous to maintain a mimetic theory of language and writing, it is no less hazardous not to have such a theory” (“Corn-Wolf” 33). For him, the distance assumed between the subject and object of scholarly analysis together with a presumed epistemic stability form the foundations of much traditional academic writing. As such, academic criticism often mirrors and reinforces the ideology of Man’s mastery of nature—or, more academically, of subject matter—while concealing the role of narrative (or what Taussig more approachably terms “storytelling”) in the perpetuation of such a disastrous pretense. Taussig has thus cast his “apotropaic writing” as a “countermagic” to this hegemonic mode of thought and language (“Corn-Wolf” 32–33).¹ Mastery of Non-Mastery presents his latest attempt to tap into the meeting point between reality and representation, where the “meltdown of the language of nature swamps the nature of language” (174).

Thus opposed to what he calls the “crabby and secular language” (56) of much contemporary environmental literature, Taussig variously situates Mastery of Non-Mastery as “somewhere between science fiction, high theory, and the weather” (3), a “book … of traces and tremors” (20), “a firefly moment navigating between light and dark” (57), “a too-late experimental ethnography” (120), and “a threshold between a theater and a book” (180). Nowhere does he employ the language of structuration and utility so normalized in works of theory. This “book that is not a book” (180) does not build anything. Nor does it seek to furnish its reader any theoretical tools. Rather, Taussig’s preferred models are dancing (16) and the meandering flight of a firefly (95). The salience of such images is apparent immediately on opening Mastery of Non-Mastery in the Age of Meltdown, which spans nineteen brief chapters laid out in discrete blocks of text that recall a collection of vignettes composed of aphorisms. The staccato rhythm of its format mirrors the way that ideas and intertexts are made to waltz and flit through the book’s pages, often disappearing suddenly only to reemerge in new combinations ten or fifty pages later. Lines of argument meanwhile cross and re-cross such that the author’s central concepts are gradually fleshed out more through creative patterning—or the layering of textures, or the thickening of an atmosphere—than by way of the gradual construction of a theoretical edifice. How else, he asks, should one write about a planetary condition where “nature turns more surreal each day with ominous green-yellow vistas and bluer-than-blue skies while the snow falls one day, rising the next as mist, stripping us naked as pixies as the cosmos draws close” (19)? Taussig here sets himself the task of philosophizing with the Nietzschean hammer, which resonates with its object so as to first match and then shatter its spell. This form of writing necessitates a way of reading that departs from what one might expect of an academic text. Like the figure on its cover, Taussig’s audience is meant to juggle rather than grasp his many tongue-in-cheek coinages—what he calls “‘shamanic tropes,’ such as ‘knowing what not to know,’ ‘the re-enchantment of nature,’ ‘the skilled revelation of skilled concealment,’ ‘the bodily unconscious,’ and of course the lead dancer itself, ‘mastery of non-mastery'” (34).

A book devised to put its reader off-kilter leaves the reviewer in a predicament. On the one hand, I can give myself over to Taussig’s circuitous, often baroque style and attempt to do justice to the experience of reading his latest work by recreating it in miniature. On the other, I can set the juggling balls down and soberly attempt to taxonomize the performance at the expense of the intoxicating movement that gives it meaning in the first place. While the reader of this review need not fear (much) indulgence in theatrics, the temptation toward mimicry in this case is hard to resist. This impulse arises in part from Taussig’s compelling case against the ideology of Man’s exception from and dominance over nature and the scholarly mode of analysis that often ends up mirroring and reinforcing it, even for the most eco-conscious of critics. But mostly it comes from how powerfully the text conveys its central thesis on the contagious power of mimesis, which becomes the most enchanting of Taussig’s “shamanic tropes” and forms the gravitational center of his intellectual galaxy in general.

Mimesis emerged as a theoretical and methodological point of departure early in Taussig’s career by way of his ethnographic studies of the indigenous peoples of the Putumayo River Basin in Colombia. Starting in 1969, the Guna and others whom he lived among during his fieldwork—and to whom he has returned every year since—challenged Taussig’s self-described “western, middle-class life” and destabilized the “moorings that, up to that time, I thought I required for sociological reckoning” (37). Taussig’s life’s work became to understand and convey to those beyond the Putumayo Basin how sympathetic magic formed the foundation for thinking about and managing social, political, ecological, and even cosmic entanglements. Since the early 1980s, he has consistently figured shamanic practices of ritual contagion and duplication in terms of mimesis. Through the metonymic process of taking a part for the whole (e.g., taking blood or hair to represent the person whom a ritual is to affect), or the metaphoric process of fabricating or conjuring a ritual copy (e.g., crafting a likeness of the person whom a ritual is to affect, or taking on that person’s identity via performance or possession), sympathetic magic draws on a deep-seated mimetic faculty that Nidesh Lawtoo described in this journal as an “unconscious that responds viscerally to fluxes of affective contagion that operate on bodies and minds.” Taussig similarly terms this simultaneously intellectual and physical conatus the “bodily unconscious” (11–12, 73). Following the Guna, Taussig casts the bodily unconscious and the mimetic fluxes of affective contagion that operate on and through it as foundational to the very fabric of reality itself.

Mimesis thus represents for Taussig not only an atomic element of human sociality but also the metaphysical axis of art, technology, religion, language, politics, and nature itself. Its centrality to Taussig’s thought and methodology helps us to understand why his works present themselves as forms of mimetic ritual. Mastery of Non-Mastery is no exception in this regard. However tiresome the reader may sometimes find this cultivated grandiosity—showmanship and shaman-ship for Taussig are, if not identical, then at least inextricably intertwined—Taussig’s perspicacity and style attest to the pervasiveness and self-perpetuating momentum of the mimetic faculty. In reading his work, one can feel that mimesis designates the impulse to copy as well as the impulse to generate copies. Such generative processes naturally “lead to snowballing metamorphoses” (44), including the metamorphosis of his text’s readers (and its reviewer, and the reader of that reviewer, and …) into participants in the ritual.

“In other words,” Taussig writes, “mimesis has an inbuilt propensity to provoke a chain reaction in which things become other things in a process of mimetic fission … This I call the ‘metamorphic sublime'” (44). Via this “metamorphic sublime,” Mastery of Non-Mastery deftly synthesizes the affective flux of the bodily unconscious with the principle of generalized planetary interconnection now largely taken for granted among environmental scholars, while at the same time literalizing what Taussig elsewhere terms the “re-enchantment of nature” that the recent ontological and nonhuman “turns” in the humanities have called up (40, 42, 144, 176). “Global meltdown amplifies mimetic and animistic impulses as never before,” he declares (5). As such, it becomes reasonable to ask whether “we are now becoming like the soothsayers of old”:

Are we now becoming like ancient stargazers each night asking the heavens whys and wherefores? Do we not sense our animal selves, our plant selves, our insect selves, all of that and more as an angry sky beats down, our bodies resonant with hitherto unknown liaisons as foreign beings skid in from the unknown? Suddenly we are alive in our bodies as to stellar influence and solar wind when all goes dark once more but for fireflies, epitome of the newly animate world, reminders of chances missed, others to catch, roadside flares of pixilated consciousness.(61)

In this way, Mastery of Non-Mastery implicitly mobilizes a common criticism in environmental humanities discourse, especially vis-à-vis the colonial trappings of the Anthropocene and the principle of all-pervading planetary interconnection that heuristic has popularized. Bluntly: indigenous people have theorized these kinds of things long before Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer came along. And they have worked out elaborate ways of channeling the mimetic relays that form the warp and woof of human-nonhuman entanglement. “Weather magic,” Taussig reminds us, “is as old as the hills” (125).

Taussig’s point that we must now come to terms with a broad-based re-enchantment of nature in all its marvels and horrors begs the question: what is to be done? This is where his central thesis on the contagious power of mimesis, its tendency to compound its own momentum, and its entanglement with the bodily unconscious at the intersection of “my body, your body, and the body of the world” really begins to throw sparks (11). With due reference to Nietzsche’s hammer become tuning fork—which, “touching the idols of culture, echoes their hollowness, thereby destroying them” (13)—Taussig gradually fleshes out the notion of “mimetic excess,” that tendency whereby any copy always generates some volatile residue or remainder. This is the true potency of sympathetic magic: the shaman not only mirrors something or someone, but engenders a creative refiguration thereof. Because magic ritual resembles a sort of cybernetic relay where output retroactively affects input, this creative refiguration has the capacity to turn back and affect its original. He explains this process via the 1955 short, quasi-ethnographic film, Les maîtres fous:

The film concerns migrants of the French colony of Niger enacting in trance the spirits of French officials, seen now in black bodies gesticulating wildly and disjointedly, eyes rolling, spume frothing from their mouths. They enact mini-dramas of transgression and of military discipline. … They eat dog and they carry (toy) rifles. They exult in the exercise of mastery over craven subjects crawling on the ground. The crucial point is that the bodies in trance are and manifestly are not the French officials. The bodies mimic, yet the result is not without parody, and parody (as Steve Feld once pointed out) is mimesis with one aspect accentuated, which is all you need for mimetic excess. Yet even without accentuation, to be mimed is disconcerting. These men and women from Niger, part of the Hauka cult, thus bring out the wildness, the spirituality, and—most important—the sheer bluff their masters enact in the colonial theatricalization of mastery in general. … To mime is to get the power of what is mimed and power over it. (8)

Les maîtres fous was banned in Niger and then in British-controlled African colonies for its perceived insult to colonial governorship. Taussig’s reading exposes the powerful transgression in this “insult.” The Hauka cult’s performances reveal an uncomfortable truth about the performative nature of colonial governorship itself, namely that it “is a matter of guile, of foxes as well as of lions, [of] what Hubert Murray, a colonial governor in Papua in the early twentieth century called ‘administration by bluff'” (13). This is the showman-shaman magic of political power in general, the magic trick of political power. And yet, because “mimesis exists no less in the actual events than in their depiction, in the reality as much as in its representation” (131), the mimicry of the Hauka practitioners as captured in Les maîtres fous retroactively reshaped the reality it both copied and parodied. It revealed the magic (trick) of colonial governance precisely through the creative refiguration thereof. This, according to Taussig, is the “trick whereby tuning forks become hammers” (15).

Of course, mimetic excess has both a liberatory and a repressive side. The viral power of those mimetic relays operating in and through the bodily unconscious are just as likely to generate fascistic formations as subvert them. This is all too obvious today, Taussig argues, in the way that Donald Trump has been able to feed off of the visceral, affective power of racial resentment and patriarchal bluff, conjuring a following that would have been close to unthinkable in mainstream American thought even half a decade ago. “Trumpism [is] a shorthand for the sleight-of-hand theatricality of today’s politics” (35) he says, a condensation of “what I have shamanically in mind regarding dodge and feint and a larger-than-large theatrical presence verging on the grotesque that is magical if not sacred” (37), and “all the more impressive for being semi-conscious, at best” (39). Donald Trump indeed looms large over Mastery of Non-Mastery as the fascist showman-shaman par excellence. The nexus of the presidential Twitter account, the right-wing media echo chamber, and the ever more deranged following all feed on one another and give credence to Taussig’s thesis concerning the particular “magic of the presidency” (36) and the dark metamorphic sublimity it has called into being. Taussig here affirms Lawtoo’s point that

mimetic behavior, just like the mythic tales that incite it, cuts both ways, depending on the model we mirror: if it can potentially turn a specific citizen into a model of resistance at a distance from power, it can also turn a democratic assemblage into a neofascist crowd under the hypnotic power of a leader’s pathos.

Similarly, David Joselit’s more recent argument in October shows how the viral structure common to both the current pandemic and to the spreading and attribution of fake news (habitually mobilized by Trump) is cancerously mimetic, making COVID-19 so catastrophic in the US. But where Lawtoo gestures toward “what Nietzsche called a ‘pathos of distance‘ to diagnose the spiraling loops generated by the swarming of mimesis” and Joselit calls for a move to “re-authorize information … in the face of our world gone viral” (161), Taussig suggests no such stepping back. The task instead is to “mimetically match the magic sustaining fascism, which, like the fortress, is best tackled not from outside but from within” (16).

This is a gutsy move that will likely earn him critics, sounding as it does like a call to stem the rising tide of fascism by, in a sense, jumping in and swimming with the current. It therefore doesn’t surprise me that Taussig, an avid student of the works of Georges Bataille, does not explicitly cite that thinker’s attempt to conjure up an antifascism based around the very same sort of détournement of fascist mimesis via the infamous Acéphale secret society and its eponymous, short-lived publication. Bataille’s invocation of a surfascisme that would ritualistically tap into and redirect the affective pull of reactionary forces earned him some of his most resounding denunciations, and remains a source of continuing confusion and misrepresentation today. Turning from politics proper, Taussig’s project makes a more modest proposal. He calls it “art versus art”:

What sort of art is that, you ask? Well, not to put too fine a point on it, it is certainly not ideology versus truth, nor discourse versus counterdiscourse, but an art of sorcery-speak in a world gone rogue, piling on the negative sacred in which nature speaks through animate impulse and mimetic relays. Whatever the terms, paramount will be the pulse between bodies as America is made again. (144)

Not putting too fine a point on it, indeed. In any case, there is no direct invitation to congregate in a secret grove around a dead tree struck by lightning to work out the terms of a human sacrifice (though Taussig does enigmatically refer to that acéphalic, lightning-struck tree of legend in chapter thirteen). Rather, a renewed art of “sorcery-speak” takes center stage, exemplified in certain works of Walter Benjamin and the “tremor-writing” that “draws upon and enacts corporeal tumult” (152) embodied in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.

In laying out how these authors are able to generate their characteristic, almost proprioceptive affect—which Taussig argues is crafted to operate on and through the bodily unconscious—Taussig demonstrates his powers as a reader of literature. Some of the best pages in the book engage his own hypnotic strain of ecocritical textual interpretation. Moving through the final paragraphs of Benjamin’s “On the Mimetic Faculty” or some passage from “Combray” with Taussig as guide is both pleasant and enlightening. Taussig’s language on occasion makes the book live up to its claim of being “a book of traces and tremors.” His prose, however, occasionally becomes as obfuscating as it is illuminating, and is sometimes overblown and clunky. He uses the phrase “they be” and variations thereof—”Shadows of life, they be” (100), “Those eyes, great black holes they be” (173), “Soul mates they be” (116)—with maddening frequency throughout the book. Far from lending the language a kind of sacred weight, this and similar idiosyncrasies end up distracting and frustrating this reader.² Additionally, and at a less granular scale, Taussig’s rapid shifts in focus and tendency toward digression make even his most profound analyses less effective than they could be. While I understand what he is trying to do with his Nietzschean hammer and apotropaic countermagic, I still wonder what insights a more sustained engagement with his interlocutors would yield. This is exacerbated by the fact that his two favored exemplars of the kind of tremor-writing necessary for “art versus art” are writers who spend hundreds of pages elaborating a single idea or image.

Then there are the interlocutors themselves. Taussig’s reviewers tend to point out that he appears to refuse, on principle, any sustained engagement with contemporary scholarship, preferring instead to stick with the tried-and-true cast of Benjamin, Proust, Bataille, and select others who, by and large, belong to the intellectual and literary canon of the Global North. He manages to avoid criticism for this pantheon not only because of his almost preternatural ability to generate fresh and audacious readings out of otherwise well-worn texts, but also because his profound investment in the ideas and practices of the indigenous cultures he studies allows him to unsettle the intellectual purview of dead-white-European-dom that often characterizes works of high theory. Mastery of Non-Mastery, though, largely leaves aside the second half of this formula. This is the work’s most significant shortcoming. Taussig makes frequent reference to the people, ideas, and experiences that populate the sub-equatorial half of his life and work, and he conveys a cutting if largely implicit criticism of the often parochial “flood of green books, freshly minted journals, essays, research grants, talk shows, films, fellowships, political campaigns, and endless conferences on the Anthropocene” (56). But Mastery of Non-Mastery itself features no truly sustained engagement with non-Western thinkers or texts, no first-hand testimonies, and not even any direct quotations from those among whom he lives when not in New York City. Walks around New York, in fact, take the place of journeys through the Amazon rainforest, and conversations with East Coast friends take the place of, for example, the conversations with the shaman Santiago Mutumbajoy around which Taussig built his watershed work, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man (1987).

One additional absence bears noting: the reader of this review has likely noticed my disappointment at the sudden, precipitous turn from the political point about occupying and redirecting the affective forces driving the current fascist resurgence to the more aesthetic project of crafting a kind of “tremor-writing” à la Benjamin and Proust. Given Taussig’s strident and often crushingly incisive comments on the current political landscape, a more directly political articulation of what is to be done in this “age of meltdown” seems called for. All the more so because Mastery of Non-Mastery is dedicated to “a Green New Deal,” and its first quotation is from the democratic socialist New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Taussig seems to indicate—albeit under his breath—that the current fitful growth of a mass politics to the left of the Democratic Party might well be the political embodiment to match—and undo—the magic sustaining fascism. This would be a fascinating, bold, and productive argument against the dominant left-conservatism that sneers at “left populism” and pines for a return to “normal,” that asks us to step back from the flux of the metamorphic sublime and reinvest ourselves in traditional institutions of knowledge and power while fascism gains an ever-tighter grip on the bodily unconscious of the American socius. But alas, all this is only a trace, only a tremor, in Mastery of Non-Mastery in the Age of Meltdown. To its credit, that is precisely what the book claims to offer in the first place.

Cory Austin Knudson Cory Austin Knudson is a doctoral student in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. His work focuses broadly on modernism and the environmental humanities, with emphasis on the function of decomposition in both literature and ecology. His essay, “Seeing the World: Visions of Being in the Anthropocene,” has been recently published in Environment, Space, Place. With Tomas Elliott, he is currently translating Georges Bataille’s The Limit of the Useful, a preliminary manuscript to The Accursed Share, for MIT Press.

Footnotes

1. Taussig writes, “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” (“Corn-Wolf” 32–33).

2. To be clear, I am aware that this kind of pirate- and/or Yoda-speak is a stylistic quirk that, in general, reviews of scholarly works might gloss over or outright ignore—but in order to take seriously Taussig’s own wish for his language to be “not a tool of representation but a way of being what the writing is about” (170), I feel obliged to make mention of it.

Works Cited

• Joselit, David. “Virus as Metaphor.” October, no. 172, 2020, pp. 159–62.
• Lawtoo, Nidesh. “The Swarming of Mimesis: A review of William Connolly, Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming.” Postmodern Culture, vol. 28, no. 1, 2017.
• Taussig, Michael. “The Corn-Wolf: Writing Apotropaic Texts.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 37, no. 1, 2010, pp. 26–33.