Sacharuna Library

3.1.4.1.1_Dialectical image[:] dislocating chains of concordance with one hand, reconstellating in accord with a mimetic snap, with the other. PP19

3.1.4.1.2_Benjamin’s fascination with mimesis flows from the confluence of three considerations: alterity, primitivism, and the resurgence of mimesis with modernity. Without hesitation Benjamin affirms the mimetic faculty as the rudiment of a former compulsion of persons "to become and behave like something else." The ability to mime, and mime well, in other words, is the capacity to Other. PP19

3.1.4.1.3_Benjamin’s notion regarding the impostance of the mimetic faculty in modernity is fuly congruent with his orienting sensibility toward the (Euroamerican) culture of modernity as a sudden rejuxtaposition of the very old with the very new. This is not an appeal to historical continuity.Instead, modernity provides the cause, context, means, and needs for the resurgence–not the continuity–of the mimetic faculty[...]mass culture in our times both stimulates and is predicated upon mimetic modes of perception in which spontaneity, animation of objects, and a language of the body combining thought with action, sensuousness with intellection, is paramount. She seizes on benjamin’s observations of the corporeal knowledge of the optical unconscious opened up by the camera and the movies in which, on account of capacities such as enlargement and slow motion, film provides, [Buck Morss ]says, "a new schooling for our mimetic powers." PP20

3.1.4.2.1_Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very cose range by way of its likeness, its reproduction. W. Benjamin, "the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical reproduction"

3.1.4.2.2_Here is what is crucial in the resurgence of the mimetic faculty, namely the two-layered notion of mimesis that is involved–a copying or imitation, and a palpable, sensuous, connection between the very body of the perceiver and the perceived. PP21

3.1.4.2.3_Frazer’s two great classes of sympathetic magic[...]: the magic of contact and that of imitation. Elementary physics and physiology might instruct that these two features of copy and contact[...]are steps in the same process, that a ray of light, for eample, moves from the rising sun into the human eye where it makes contact with the retinal rods and cones to form, via the circuits of the central nervous system, a (culturally attuned) copy of the rising sun. On this line of reasoning, contact and copy merge to become virtually identical, different moments of the one process of sensing; seeing something or hearing something, is to be in contact with that something. PP21

3.1.4.2.4_nevertheless the distinction between copy and contact is no less fundamental...PP21

3.1.4.2.5_Karl marx deftly deployed the connundrum of copy and contact with his use of the analogy of light rays and the retina in his discussion of "commodity fetishism." For him such fetishisation resulted from the curious effect of the market on human life and imagination, an effect which displaced contact between people onto that between commodities, thereby intensifying to the point of spectrality the commodity as an autonomous entity with a will of its own. "The relation of producers to the sum total of their own labor," wrote Marx, "is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labor." This is the state of affairs that makes the commodity a mysterious thing "simply because in it the social character of men’s labor appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the the product of that labor." Decisive here is the displacement of the "social character of men’s labor" into the commodity, where it is obliterated from awarenes by appearing as an objective character of the commodity itself. The swalloing-up of contact we might say, by its copy, is what ensures the animation of the latter, its power to straddle us. PP22s

3.1.4.2.6_[...A]s the commodity passes through and is held by the exchange-value arc of the market circuit where general equivalence rules the roost, where all particularity and sensuosity is meat-grinded into abstract identity and the homogenous substance of quantifiable money-value, the commodity yet conceals in its innermost being not only the mysteries of the socially constructed nature of value and price, but also all its particulate sensuosity–and this subtle interaction of sensuous perceptibility and imperceptibility accounts for the fetish quality, the animism and spiritual glow of commodities, so adroitly channeled by advertising (not to mention the avant-garde) since the late nineteenth century. PP22-23

3.1.4.2.7_[...An] arresting aspect of Benjamin’s analysis of modern mimetic machines,[...particularly in the advertising image...]is his view that it is precisely the property of such machinery to play with and even restore this erased sense of contact-sensuous particularity animating the fetish. This restorative play transforms what he called "aura" (which I here identify with the fetish of commodities) to create a quite different, secular sense of the marvelous. PP23

3.1.4.2.10_[...]his concept of optical uncosncious is anything but a straight forward displacement of "magic" in favor of "science." In my opinion this is because of the two-layered character of mimesis: copying and the visceral quality of the percept uniting viewer with the viewed-[...]aptly captured in benjamin’s phrase, Physiognomic aspects of visual worlds. [...]But where do we really end up?With technology or magic–or with something else altogether, where science and art coalesce to create a defetishizing/reenchanting modernist magical technology of embodied knowing?[...] Benjamin emphasizes again and again that this physiognomy, stirring in walking dreams brought to the light of day by the new mimetic techniques, bespeaks a newly revealed truth about objects as much as it does about persons into whom it floods as tactile knowing. "It hit the spectator like a bullet, it happened to him, thus acquiring a tactile quality," Benjamin pointed out with respect to the effect of Dada artworks. PP25

3.1.4.2.11_The unremitting emphasis of the analysis here is not only on shock-like rythms, but on the unstoppable merging of the object of perception with the body of the perceiver and not just with the mind’s eye. By holding still the frame were previously the eye was disposed to skid, by focusing down, by enlargment,[...w]e see and comprehend hidden details of familiar objects. We become aware of patterns and necessities that had hitherto invisibly rules our lives. But what is the nature of the seeing and comprehension involved?PP25

3.1.4.2.13_[..W]hat happens is that the very concept of "knowing" something becomes displaced by a "relating to." [...]not only are we stimulated into rethinking what "vision" means as this very term decomposes before our eyes, but we are also forced to ask ourselves why vision is so privileged, ideologically, while other sensory modalities are, in Euroamerican cultures at least, so linguistically impoverished yet actually so crucial to human being and social life. I am thinking not only of tactility and tactile knowing[...]but also, in an age of world-historically unprecedented State and paramilitary torture, of the virtual worldlessness of pain too–point recently made clear by Elaine Scarry.

3.1.4.2.14_Benjamin wants to acknowledge a barely conscious mode of apperception and a type of "physiological knowledge" built from habit. The claim is grand. "For the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at the turning point of history cannot be solved," he writes, "by optical means, that is, by contemplation alone. They are mastered gradually, by habit, under the guidance of tactile appropriation." PP26

3.1.4.2.15_In his essay "transparencies on Film," Adorno makes the muted criticism that benjamin’s theory of film did not elaborate on how deeply some of the categories he postulated "are imbricated with the commodity character which his theory opposes." Yet is it not the case that precisely in the commodity, more specificaly, in the fetish of the commodity, Benjamin sees the surreal and revolutionary possibilities provided by the culture of capitalism for its own undoing, its own transcendence? Far from opposing the commodity, Benjamin seeks to embrace it so as to take advantage of its phantasmagorical potential.PP29

3.1.4.2.16_Corporeal understanding: you don’t so much see as be hit. "The genuine advertisement hurtles things at us with the tempo of a good film".Montage.[...]"insistent, jerky, nearness"-the monteur’s rythm bartering desired desires internal to the phantom-object world of the commodity itself. And as with the fantasy-modeling of much shamanic ritual[...] there is a cathartic, even curative, function in this copy-and-contact visual tactility of the advertisemnt, with this result: "‘Matter of-factness’ is finally dispatched, and in the face of the huge images across the walls of houses, where toothpaste and cosmetics lie handy for gigants, sentimentality is restored to health and liberated in American style, just as people whom nothing moves or touches are taught to cry again by films" PP30

3.1.4.2.17_[...H]ow mobile, how complicated, the interconnected dimensions of copy and contact turn out to be with this dispatching of matter of factness! The copy that is as much a construction as a copy, and the sentient contact that is another mode of seeing, the gaze grasping where the touch falters. not just a question of changing the size and fragmenting the copy, but at the same time contact with it through an ether of jerky, insisting, neraness that, gathering force, hits us between (not in) the eyes. The question of being moved, again. The question of being touched again. Rebirth of mimesis, Short-circuit. Copy fusing with contact. Fire in asphalt. For the person in the street, says benjamin, it is money that arouses sentience. it is money that liberates these healthy American sentiments and brings the person into perceived contact with things...: "What, in the end, makes advertisiements so superior to criticism? Not whatthe moving red neo says–but the fiery pool reflecting it in the asphalt." PP31

3.1.4.2.19_here we do well to recall benjamin likening the process of opening the optical unconscious to the surgeon’s hand entering the body and cautiously feeling its way around the organs. For there is, as Georges Bataille would insist, great violence and humor here as a tumultuous materialism is ushered into modernity’s epistemological fold. The taboo is transgressed, the body is entered, the organs palpated. yet we are told, as a reslt of Bataille’s intellectual labors on taboo and transgression, that the function of the taboo is to hold back violence, and without this restraint provided by the unreason of the taboo, the reason of science would be impossible. Thus, insofar as the new form of vision, of tactile knowing, is like the surgeon’s hand cutting and entering the body of reality to palpate the palpitating masses enclosed therein, insofar as it comes to share in those turbulent internal rythms of surging intermittencies and peristatic unwindings–rythms inimical to the harmonious dialectical flip-flops or allegories of knowing as graceful journeys along an untrasngressed body of reality, moving from the nether regions below to the head above–then this tactile knowing of embodied knowledge is also the dangerous knowledge compounded of horror and desire damned by the taboo.Thus if science depends on taboos to still the ubiquitous violence of reality–this is the function of the whiteness of the white coats...–if science requires a sacred violence to hold back another violence, then the new science opened up by the optical unconscious is a science to end science, because it is itself based first and foremost on transgression[?]–as the metaphor of the mimetically machined eye and the surgeon’s hand so well illuminates. Confined within the purity of its theater of operation, science can proceed clamly despite the violence of its procedure. But...in the theater of profane and everyday operatins where, thanks to the ubiquity of mimetic machinery, the optical unconscious now roves and scavanges, no such whiteness cloaks with calm the medley of desire and horror that the penetrating hand, levering the gap between taboo and trasngression, espies–and feels. And "every day," as benjamin reminds us, "the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction."PP32

3.1.4.2.20_THIS IS WHY the scientific quotient of the eyeful opened up by the revelations of the optical uncosncious is also an hallucinatory eye, a roller-coasting of the senses dissolving science and art into a new mode of truth-seeking and reality-testing–as when Benjamin, in noting the achievemnt of film to extend our scientific comprehension of reality, also notes in the same breath that film "burst our prison world asunder by the dynamite of a tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of the far flung ruins and debris, we clamly and adventurously go travelling." And it is here, in this transgressed yet strangely calm new space of debris, that a new violence of perception is born of mimetically capacious machinery. PP32

3.1.4.3.1_He is similar, not similar to something, but just similar. And he invents spaces of which he is the convulsive possession.-Roger Callois, "Mimicry and Legendary Psychaestenia" (1935)

3.1.4.3.2_To gether with primitivism, alterity is a major component of Benjamin’s assessment of the mimetic faculty. This is a lot more performative and physical, a lot more relistic yet fanciful, than implied in the way "othering" is alluded to in discussions today. Indeed it is startling. "the gift of seeing resemblances." writes Benjamin, "is nothing other than a rudiment of the powerful compulsion in former times to become and behave like something else." Seeing resemblanes seems so cerebral, a cognitive affair with the worldly. How on earth, then, could it be a rudiment of "nothing other" than a "compulsion," let alone a compulsion to actually be the other? [Death instinct?] What does this say about thought, let alone the ability to see resemblance?Doesn’t it imply that thinking is, like theater, a configuration of very object-prone exercises in differentiated space, in which the thought exists in imagined scenarios into which the thinking self is plummeted? And what does such a compulsion to become Other imply for the sense of Self? Is it conceivable that a person could break boundaries like this, slipping into otherness, trying it on for size? What sort of world would this be? PP33

3.1.4.3.3_At its most extreme this would be a world of "legendary psychaesthenia," as Roger callois put it...Callois suggests that mimesis is a matter of "being tempted by space," a drama in which the self is but a self-diminishng point amid others, losing its boundedness. callois tries to describe this drama in itsmost extreme form where the mimicking self, tempted by space, spaces out: "I know where I am, but I do not feel as though I’m at the spot where I find myself." To these dispossessed souls, space seems to be a devouring force. Space pursues them, encircles them, digests them in a gigantic phagocytosis. it ends by replacing them. Then the body separates itself from thought, the individual breaks the boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of his senses. he tries to look at himself from any point whatever in space. he feels himslef becoming space, dark space where things cannot be put. He is similar, not similar to something, but just similar. And he invents spaces of which he is the convulsive possession. PP34

3.1.4.3.4_I take the extreme to instruct me as to what’s most at stake with the mimetic faculty, this "degree zero" of similitude, an ineffable plasticity in the face of the world’s forms and forms of life. I am struck with the way, therefore, mimesis is not only a matter of oe being another being, but with this tense yet fluid theatrical relation of form and space with which Callois would tempt us. I am especially struck by the notion of "presence" as an invented space of which the mime is the convulsive possession. And as such, presense is intimately tied to this curious phenomenon of "spacing out"–this plasticity and thetricality that I will later want to analyze as "mimetic excess" in late twentieth century post-colonial time. and which I now want to consider in terms of the tasks facing human perception at the turning-points of our history. For Benjamin asserted that these tasks that cannot be mastered by optics–that is, by contemplation alone–are mastered gradually by habit under the guidance of tactility. PP35

3.1.4.3.5_This is not only to run an eccentric psychology together with an eccentric Marxist accounting of history. It also invokes the child tracing the figures of this newness of a history-to-be across the body of its mother, an invocation which[...]can also suggest an association, at once obvious and bizarre, of the womb as the mimetic organ par excellence, mysteriously underscoring in the submerged and consant body of the mother the dual meaning of reproduction as birthing and reproduction as replication. PP35

3.1.4.3.6_I want to draw out the presence of this mother in benjamin’s epistemology, first noting that to invoke the body of the mother is also to invoke the child, as when gertrude Koch reminds us of Adorno’s suggestion that the born-again mimetic faculty of modernity has affinity with "the earliest period of childhood prior to the ego having taken definitive shape." As with the child’s communicative understanding with the clown and animals, at stake is a language that does not aspire to generate meaning. There is fluidity, indeed porosity, of the ego here, and it is this, [...] that film stimulates and depends upon for its crushingly powerful reality effect achieved by "a smooth symbiotic sense of blending together, of dissolution into images and their movement," repeating "crucial motor experiences related tothose first laborious efforts that every human being makes when learning to walk upright rather than crawl. In this process the gaze is directed towards objects which the hand tries to grasp but fails to reach."PP35

3.1.4.3.7_[...S]urely what is implicated is not just the sensorium of the child as bodily knowledge, but the child’s relation to the body of the mother as well. Julia kristeva’s unsettling notion of the "semiotic chora," is a notion aimed precisely at this implication of the body in language wherein the subject blurs with the object, the child with its mother. The chora is a pulsational force of bodily drives invested in but developing before the acquisition of language per se, before syntax and the sign proper, but essential to their functioning. PP36

3.1.4.3.8_hegel’s phenomenology comes to mind where he insists on knowledge’s inner necessity to steep itself in its object, "to sink into the material in hand, and following the course that such material takes, true knowledge returns back into itself." Benjamin’s insight into mimesis as the art of becoming something else, of becoming Other, is quite crucial to this aspect of Hegel’s epistemology of sinking into the material, of what Hegel describes as the movement of becoming another and thus developing explicitly into its own immanent content, the activity, as he puts it, of "pure self-identity in otherness." Where Kristeva, Adorno, and Benjamin markedly differ from hegel, of course, is over the function of negativity in shaping the final outcome of that immersion in the concreteness of otherness. In their hands, given their belief in the unsurpassability of the negative as a consequence of either patriarchy or the commodity, the mimetic immersion in the concreteness of otherness can only teeter on the edge of stable knowledge and stable concept-formation. The rest is restlessness and the scarring of perpetual contradiction in which at any moment mimesis is likely to wildly spin off into sense-fragments or unstoppable metamorphoric reproduction. PP37

3.1.4.3.9_[Benjamin] writes: "if the theory is correct that feeling is not located in the head, that we sentiently experience a window, a cloud, a tree not in our brains but, rather, in the place where we see it, then we are, in looking at our beloved, too, outside ourselves. But in a torment of tension and ravishment. our feeling, dazzled, flutters like a flock of birds in the woman’s radiance. And as birds seek refuge in the leafy recesses of a tree, feelings escape into the shaded wrinkles, the awkward movements and inconspicuousl blemishes of the body we love, where they can lie low in safety. And no passer-by would guess that it is just here, in what is defective and censurable, that the fleeting darts of adoration nestle. PP38

3.1.4.3.10_"Sentience takes us outside of ourselves"-no operation could be more fundamental to understanding the visceral bond connecting perceiver to perceived in the operation of mimesis..."to grasp the actual as the obverse of the eternal in history and to take an imprint of this hidden side of the medal"PP38

3.1.4.3.12_The radical displacement of self in sentience–taking one outside of oneself–accounts for one of the most curious features of Benjamin’s entire philosophy of history, the flash wherein "the past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at an instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again." Repeatedly this mystical flash illuminates his anxiety for reapprisal of past in present, this understanding that "to articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it "the way it really was’ (Ranke). it means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up in the moment of danger." PP39

3.1.4.3.14_Everything in this somersaulting explosion of historical time blasting the homogeneity of abstract identity hinges on this singular act of recognition, the energy and consequences of its flash-like character. [...] Benjamin wrote that the perception of similarity is in every case bound to an instantaneous flash. "it slips past" he says[...] "[and] can possibly be regained, but cannot really be held fast, unlike other perceptions. It offers itself to the eye as fleetingly and transitorily as a constellation of stars." In other words, the Messianic sign is the sign of the mimetic. PP40

3.1.4.3.18_Not the least curious connection with the mimetic worlds of Cuna magic, as we shall see, is benjamin’s observation that, together with the nexus formed by the mother, the art of the storyteller, and the mimetic move of going outside of ourselves, there is the sexual continence of these "earthly powerful male maternal figures" who, Notes Benjamin, while not exactly ascetic, "have been removed from obedience to the sexual drive in the bloom of their strength." Howecer we define eroticism, it is less important to Cuna ethnography...than the transgressions entailed by birth and reproduction-processes that become synonimous with the bewildering contradiction at the heart of mimesis wherein to mime means a chamleon-like capacity to copy any and everything in a riot of mergers and copies posing asoriginals. PP42

3.1.4.3.19_Once the mimetic has spung into being, a terrifically ambiguous power is established; there is born the power to represent the world, yet that same power is a power to falsify, mask and pose. The two powers are inseparable. What’s more, both Callois and Cuna ethnography testify to an almost drug-like addiction to mime, to merge, to become other–aprocess in which not only images chase images in a vast, perhaps extended chain of images, but one also becomes matter. PP43

3.1.4.3.20_This is the world of spirit mischief, if not worse, death or epistemic panic. Those in league withthe spirits, the great healers and seers, have the power to arrest this riot and transform forms including those that lead to death. [..] The hermit [in Flaubert’s Temptation of Saint Anthony], notes Caillois, wants to split himself thoroughly, to be in everything, to immerse himself in matter, to be matter. "Oh happiness!Happiness!I have seen the birth of life, I have seen the beginning of movement," explains the hermit. "The blood in my veins is beating so hard that I will burst them. I feel like flying, swimming, yelping, bellowing, howling. I’d like to have wings, a carapace, a rind, to breathe out smoke, wave my trunk, twist my body, divide myself up, to be inside everything, to drift away with odours, develop as plants do, flow like water, vibrate like sound, gleam like light, to curl myself up into every shape, to penetrate each atom, to get down to the depth of matter–to be matter!"PP43

3.1.4.4.1_True scientific knowledge, on the contrary, demands an abandonment to the very life of the object.-Hegel, Preface to The Phenomenology of Mind

3.1.4.4.2_My concern with mimesis, then, is with the prospects for a sensuous knowledge in our time, a knowledge that in adhering to the skin of things through realist copying disconcerts and entrances by spinning off into fantastic formations–in part because of the colonial trade in wildness that the history of the senses involves.[...] I[...] am taken in by mimesis precisely because, as the sensate skin of the real, it is that moment of knowing which, in steeping itself in its object, to quote Hegel,"consists in actualizing the universal, and giving it spiritual vitality, by the process of breaking down and superseding fixed and determinate thoughts." I am mightily intrigued by this mischief of reality’s sensate skin to both actualize and break down, to say nothing of superseding universals, and I am disposed to locate such mischief in the high-jinks of a bakward somersault of European historical reckoning, the backward glance known as primitivism. Hegel urged the recuparation through the concrete because in modern times, as he put it, an individual finds an abstract form ready made, and his world-historical scheme informed him that therefore the present task was the very opposite of what he took to have been the task of the earliest epochs, namely "getting the individual clear of the stage of sensuous immediacy." Historicized precisely in this way and redolent with appeal to a precapitalist epistemology of the senses, Adorno’s work resonates with the power of this problem of sensuous immersion, it being clearly understood that hegel’s "abstract form ready-made" is very much the form generated by commoditization of life under capitalism. If in times past the shamans warded off danger by means of images imitating that danger, and in this sense they used equivalence–mimesis–as an instrument, then today we live a curious inversion of this equivalence, a Hegelian Aufhebung of it. "Before, the fetishes were subject to the law of equivalence," write Adorno and Horkenheimer. "Now equivalence itself has become a fetish." PP45

3.1.4.4.4_For Adorno and, I think Hegel , the sensuous moment of knowing includes a yielding and mirroring of the knower and the unknown, of thought and its object.[...]In Dialectic of Enlightment, he and Horkenheimer present no less a historicist position than Hegel, attempting the difficult argument that mimesis, once a dominant practice and component of knowing becomes, in Western historical development, a represed presence not so much erased by Enlightment science and practice as distorted and used as hidden force. This, of course, is not merely an argument about the development of science as an idea, or even as applied technology. Rather it is a blend of philosophical and historical argumentation concerning the snowballing effect, in the West, of over two millenia of what we might call the labor/domination complex, with its emphasis on the repression of the body by the social world of production that issues forth a world of things standing over the maker. The atrophy and subsequent refunctioning of the mimetic faculty, a faculty belonging as much to body as to mind, is to be clearly understood within this historical understanding. In respect to mimesis as yielding, in contrast to Enlightment science’s aggressive compulsion to dominate nature, Adorno and Horkheimer go so far as to write of that "trend which is deep-rooted in human beings, and whose elimination is a sign of all development: the trend to lose oneself in the environment instead of playing an active role in it; the tendency to let oneself go and sink back into nature. Freud called it the death instinct, Callois "le mimetisme." Here the yielding component of mimesis is presented in a passive, even frightening sort of way; the self losing itself, sinking, decomposing into the surrounding world, a yielding that is, be it noted, despite apparant passivity, an act both of imitation and of contact. PP46

3.1.4.4.5_In his discussion of the comic[...], Freud calmly presents the startling idea of "ideational mimetics," in which what I call "active yielding" as bodily copying of the other is paramount: one tries out the very shape of a perception in one’s own body; the musculature of the body is physiologically connected tp percepts; and even ideational activity, not only perception, involves such embodying–hence "ideational mimetics." Just as speech can be understood as though activating the vocal chords and tongue, so thinking itself involves innervation of all of one’s features and sense organs. PP46

3.1.4.4.6_In any event, this strange mixture of activity and passivity involved in yielding-knowing, this bodily mirroring of otherness and even ideas, is in the center of much of horkenheimer and Adorno’s elusive discussion of mimesis, and precisely in the activist possibilities within such yielding lie serious issues of mimesis and science, mimesis as an alternative science. We can appreciate this when we realize that for Adorno and Horkheimer the imitative practices of early shamans were crucial-and crucially ambviguous. For theearly magician signifies, as they would have it, not merely "a yielding attitude to things," but the threshold of history where mimesis as a practice for living with nature blurs with the transformation of mimesis into an instrument for dominating nature, the "organization of mimesis" necessary to that long march culminating in Enlightenment civilization. PP47

3.1.4.4.8_Frazer distinguished two great classes of magic[...]–that involving similarity (or imitation), and that of contact: "If we analyze the principles of thought on which magic is based, they will probably be found to resolve themselves in two; first, that like produces like, or that an effect resembles its cause; and second, that things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed. The former principle may be called the Law of Similarity, the latter the Law of Contact or Contagion. From the first of these principles, namely the Law of Similarity, the magician infers that he can produce any effect he desires merely by imitating it."PP47

3.1.4.4.9_I want to dwell on this notion of the copy, in m agical practice, affecting the original to such a degree that the representation shares in or acquires the properties of the represented. To me this is a disturbing notion, foreign and fascinating not because it so flagrantly contradicts the world around me but rather, that once posited, I suspect if not its presence, then intimations thereof in the strangely familiar commonplace and unconscious habits of representation in the world about me. PP48

3.1.4.4.10_Taylor has stated a quarter century earlier that "the principal key to understanding Occult Science is to consider it as based on the Association of Ideas, a faculty which lies at the very foundation of human reason." But, said Taylor, instead of moving from fact to thought, from things to image, in magic the flow was reversed. PP49

3.1.4.4.11_[...I]n 1973 the anthropologist S.J. Tambiah could demonstrate[...]the considerable scientific power of just such analogical reason in which the magic of reason was involved[...]Tambiah quotes Lloyd’s book, Polarity and Analogy: Two Types of Argumentation in Early greek Thought: Lloyd says that magic’s "general aim is similar to that of applied science, to control events, and one of the means whereby it hopes to achieve this is using the links which it believes may be formed between things by their similarities". PP49

3.1.4.4.12_History in the form of colonialism intruded into such image-making too.[...]Frazer noted that the Peruvian Indians were said to burn images imitating the persons they feared or hated. if the image was to represent an Indian, it was made from the fat from a llama mixed with corn (maize), native to the americas. But if the imagewas of a Spaniard, pig fat and wheat, both associated with the colonizing power, were used instead. This coding of colonial relations makes us aware not just of the magic of the image, of the visual likeness, but of the magic of substances as well, a staggering of the senses from sight to substance that impinges directly on the problematic nature of the copy itself. PP51

3.1.4.4.14_"The primitive man who avails himslef of dolls and drawings in order to bewitch is generally quite indifferent to the lifelike character of his magical instruments. The typical volt gives only a crude outline of the human body, and, which is most remarkable, it does not display any likeness to the man who is to be bewitched." PP51

3.1.4.4.16_With this we are plunged, so I believ, into a paradox–namely that the copy, magically effective as it is, with the point-for-point correspondences of body part to body part, for instance, with all this implies for the transformation of the imagized, is not a copy–not a copy, that is, in the sense of being what we might generally mean when we say a "faithful" copy. Yet for it to be (magically) efective on the real world of things, persons, and events, it would very much seem that it has to be just that– a "faithful" copy such that the (Frazerian) Law of Similarity applies: that law by which "the magician infers that he can produce any effect he desires merely by imitating it." It is here that Frazer’s other principle, that of Contact deserves consideration.PP52

3.1.4.4.17_Frazer defined this principle of Contact or Contagion, as the principle of thought which holds "that things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed," and the most common examples of such magic were those practices requiring body parts or clothing of the person to be magically acted upon–hair, nails, semen, excrement, spittle, footprint, teeth, navel cord, placentha, and so forth. PP53

3.1.4.4.18_Imitation and contact cannot so easily be separated[...]like fingerprinting by the modern state, the horse’s imprint in the soil amounts to a copy, indeed a potentially fairly accurate copy, of (part of) its uniqueself. The print is in fact stunning instance of imitation blending so intimately with contact that it becomes impossible to separate image from substance in the power of the final effect. PP53

3.1.4.4.19_[...]in many, if not in the overwhelming majority of cases of magical practices in which the law of similarity is important, it is in fact combined with the law ofcontact. PP53

3.1.4.4.20_This "impregnation" of the image with the personal influence of the man whose image it is, is crucial here; it would seem that the likeness is not sufficient in itself. Nor, for that matter, is the "impregnation" with the personal influence sufficient in itself. Both are utilized, indeed fused. PP55

3.1.4.4.21_Semen and pubic hair are quintisentially to do with Contact. But they are also profound indices of sexual attachment, impregnation, and the making of children: it becomes virtually impossible to separate their being signs from their being ontologically part of the sexually partnered Other. PP55

3.1.4.4.22_But what happens if we move the frame outward from the realm of the ritual objects, the candles and the cigars...to include the gestus of the ritualist herself? Isn’t this the image that captures the similitude that a Frazerian reading would seem to require? It lies not so much in the association of ideas as concepts, but in the association of images of sadness and anger [in this case], the senseof loss as well as the sense of initiative[...]Thus we move from image to scene, and from scene to performative action.PP56

3.1.4.4.23_[...W]hat i take to be so fundamentally important is not just that a little bit of Contact makes up for a lack of Similarity, or that some smattering of real substance makes up for a deficiency in the likeness of the visual image, but rather that all these examples of (magical) realism in which image and contact interpenetrate must have the effect of making us reconsider our very notion of what is to be an image of something, most specially if we wish not only to express but to manipulate reality by means of its image. PP57

3.1.4.4.25_A first step is to insist on breaking-away from the tyranny of the visual notion of the image. The Navaho sand-painting is said to cure not by patients’ looking at the picture inscribed therein, but by their placing their body in the design itself. Likewise, medicinally triggered visions ministered by healers in the Upper Amazon[...]are surely effective not only because of visual imagery, but also on account of non-visual imagery conveyed by nausea, sound, smell, and the changing cadence of chanting, not to mention less tangible qualities of presence, atmosphere and movement. Furthermore, the senses cross-over and translate into each other. You feel redness, you see music. Thus nonvisual imagery may evoke visual means. The medicine creates nausea–one of the great untheorized territories of experience–and one which has an enormous effect on cognitive processes and hermeneutic endeavor, no less than on the medley of the senses bleeding into each other’s zone of operations. You may also see your body as you feel yourself leaving it, and one can even see oneself seeing oneself–but above all this seeing is felt in a non-visual way. You move into the interior of images, just as images move into you. PP58

3.1.4.4.26_[...I]t is incontrovertible that the staging, the magician, the frug, combine to convert the eye into an optical means of contact in a stunning example of distracted tactility, all with the aim of changing the realities espied and hence contacted–so as to undo the illness and the misfortune caused by sorcery. To emphasize the "non-visual" here is to emphasize the bodily impact of imaging, to the point where Contact is displaced from its Frazerian context to become the term required for conveying the physiognomic effect of imagery. PP58

3.1.4.4.27_[...V]ery similar to Benjamin’s "optical unconscious" opened up by the camera, with all its implications of tactile consequence. Here Frazer’s primitive magic of Similarity-and-contact- can be read as replicating Benjamin’s argument regarding modernity’s imaging technology, creating in place of magic what Benjamin referred to as the profane illumination resulting from the revelation of "physignomic as pects of visual worlds which dwell in the smallest things, meaningful yet covert enough to find a hiding place in waking dreams." "Only when in technology body and image so interpenetrate that all revolutionary tension becomes bodily collective innervation, and all the bodily innervations of the collective become revolutionary discharge, has reality transcended itself to the extent demanded by the Communist Manifesto." PP58

3.1.4.5.1_They cannot stand the Jews, but imitate them.–Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment.

3.1.4.5.2_I am fascinated by the notion emerging from Frazer’s discussion of imitative magic as power that the copy extracts from the original. But I need to emphasize my ambivalence too, how i see in it a strange, indeed frightening explanation of the fetishlike power of the copy in my own daily life, yet I want to tread carefully when it comes to proposing it as a theory of primitive magic–as opposed to a primitivist theory of magic, which is where I feel it more fittingly belongs. Thus I feel the need to move from the mysterious "world we have lost," The Golden Bough, to encompass equally fantastic possibilities for magical mimesis on the colonial frontier. Indeed[...] it is here, with multinational capital and the modern State pressing in on the wilderness, where we can see how appropriate the argument about magical mimesis–that the copy takes power from the original–is likely to be. PP59

3.1.4.5.3_The healing of serious misfortune [in the Putomayo] usually requires the healer and the patients taking together, at night, a "hallucinogenic" medicine known as yagé. When strong, this medicine brings forth mental pictures referred to as paintings or pintas, mainly but not exclusivey visual, and these images can have curative functions. PP60

3.1.4.5.4_Years ago[...] Florencio saw angels come from the clouds with quartz crystals....The angels blessed him. That "painting dissapeared"[...]Then he found himself up in the Andean mountains where many Ingano Indians live. There he saw people lining up, dressed like healers in feathers and mirrors, singing and dancing with necklaces of tigers’ teeth and curing fans–the spirits of yagé no doubt[...]Then, in Florencios words: "Finally, emrges a batallion of the army. How wonderful!How it enchants me to see that.[...]And I try to raise myself[...] so that I can sing with them, and dance with them too. Then the healer, [...]with the "painting" he already knows that I am trying to get up to go there, to sing and to dance with them just as we are seeing[...]Thus, those who know how to heal are given account. Seeing this, they are able to cure, no? And they pass this painting to the sick person. And that person gets better!And I said to the healer who was curing me, I said to him, "Seeing this, you know how to heal?" "Yes" he told me, "Thus seeing, one can cure, no?"PP61

3.1.4.5.5_Here there is no embodiment of image, carved figurines or body paint, but the ephemera of a memory of a purely mental image reminding us that even so, such an image counts as an entity, "a painting" that can be passed on–just as Florencio passed it on to me, and I am passing it on to you. PP61

3.1.4.5.7_Surely this batallion is an intercultural, spliced, image, using the magic of yagé for the State, and the magic of the State for Yagé, referring in part to the yagé spirits and healers, but primarily to the Colombian army itself.[...]It is a complex image, sobering in the simplicity of the mystical grace with which it adorns what i take to be the authority of the State as embodied in the presence of the army of blacks from the interior and mestizo highlanders from [...]moving down the mud of the jagged slopes of the Andes[...]onto war for reasons that nobody could explain to me other that for La Patria, as if that were self-evident. PP62

3.1.4.5.8_And self-evident it is when we turn to Florencio’s "painting" a painting that captures just this mystique of the Nation-State, its sacred violence–and I use the word "capture" advisedly, it being a taken-for-granted way of vividly expressing not only the apparent physicality involved in imageric production, but also the capturing of something important, something otherwise elusive. but capturing what and for what end?Surely the power of that which the representation reflects–only in this case it is not so much a "faithful" likeness that iscaptured, nor is it a "faithful likeness" that is doing the capturing. What is faithfully captured is a power–[...] invested in a montage of abutted likenesses, of yagé spirits, angels, and dancing soldiers–sacred power on the march spreading a mantle of gold and music over the diminishing waves of mountain crests that form the cordillera, sinking into the rainforest. It seems to me vital to understand that this power can be captured only by means of an image, and better still by entering into the image. The image is more powerful than what it is an image of. PP62

3.1.4.5.11_The purpose of the Fascist formula, the ritual discipline, the uniforms, and the whole apparatus, which is at first sight irrational, is to allow mimetic behavior. The carefuly though out symbols (which are proper to every counterrevolutionary movement), the skulls and disguises, the barbaricdrum beats, the monotonous repetition of words and gestures, are simply the organized imitation of magic practices, the mimesis of mimesis.–Horkheimer&Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment

3.1.4.5.12_If the old Indian of the frontier forests gains access to healing power from his receiving an image of the State militant, the Golden Army[...], it is worth inquiring as to whether the colonial mirroring is not also practiced by those thus imagized–whether, in short, those within the "civilized" confines of that State find (magical) power in an image of the Indian forester.[...] Certainly most of the poor peasant colonists who daily make their way down into the Putomayo today express similar notions as to the power of the Indian, a power that derives from the mysteries that they, the colonists, attribute to the primevality accorded Indian rite and lore, which places the Indian healer of the forest as much in a supernatural capacity as in an infrahuman one. Thus it is to these Indians that both black and white colonists will go for cure when the fear they have been ensorcelled by another colonist out of envy.PP63

3.1.4.5.13_[A colonist relates this vision]; "I heard someone talking to me, singing rather, and I saw something there, it was frightening, it was the devil himself. But how could that be? Sitting there; right behind me. But it wasn’t the devil; it was the shaman. it was he who had been the devil./ Then i opened my eyes and saw all the Indians sitting there with the shaman. He’s put on his feathers, his crown too, sitting by the fire chewing tobacco. taita[Father] Martin, the tiger, the devil, it was taita Martin" At which point, thanks to this painting of the Indian as devil, the colonist, as he put it, "died" ascending i n his lonely curiosity to the Godhead to be unexpectedly blessed by God himself. Thus fortified he could return[...]feeling somewhat superhuman himself[...]and able to withstand for who knows how long the envy permeating the social landscape of poor peasant farmers struggling for survival, with and against each other. PP64PP64

3.1.4.5.14_God’s singular power is obtained here by the colonist passing, as deadman, into a narrative journey of images. By means of them he has entered into a domain of extraordinary power. he passes by and into them and hands them on to you through me. It is in the metamorphosing master-image, the pivoting trinitarian image of the Indian as jaguar, shaman, and Christian devil that secures the journey to the image-world. PP64

3.1.4.5.15_How much more complex than "like affecting like" this magical power now becomes!Yet the mimetic basis remains, dependent, above all, on an alterity that follows the ideological gradient decisive for world-history of savgery vis-a-vis civilization. If Florencio, the Indian, gains healing power by virtue of the "painting" of the Nation-State’s golden army, and the poor colonist, emergent from thet State, gains healing power through the "painting" of the Indian as devil, then we must needs be sensitive to the crucial circulation of imageric power between these sorts of selves and these sorts of anti-selves, their ominous need for and their feeding off each other’s correspondence–interlocking dream-images guiding the reproduction of social life no less than the production of sacred powers. PP65

3.1.4.5.16_But this power intrinsic to the mimesis and alterity on the frotier is as much a destructive as a healing force.[...A]t the turn of the century along the Putomayo River Indians were tortured on a massive scale with what appears to be a good deal of ritual as well as blind fury and cold calculation, pleasure as well as fear, by the agents of the [...]rubber compan[ies]. PP65

3.1.4.5.17_[The] term of reference, barbarism, does double service, registering horror and disgust at this application of power, while at the same time ratifying one of that power’s most essential images, that of the barbaric–the savage, the brute, and so forth. In condemning violence as savege, I endorse the very notion of the savage. In other words, the imaginative range essential to the execution of colonial violence in the Putomayo at the turn ofthe century was an imagining drawn from that which the civilized imputed to the Indians, to their cannibalism especially, and then mimicked. It should also be pointed out that while this vilence was doubtlessly motivated by economic pressures and the need to create labor discipline, it was also, as I read the evidence, very much a passionate, and gratuitous, end in itself. PP66

3.1.4.5.18_This mimicry by the colonizer of the savagery imputed to the savage is what I call the colonial mirror of production and it is, I now see, identical to the mimetic structure of attribution and counter-attribution that Horkheimer &Adorno single out when they discuss not the violence of the twentieth-century colonial frontier but the blow-up within modern European civilization itself, as orchestrated by antisemitism. This is what they mean when they write: "They cannot stand the Jews but imitate them". And they continue: "There is no anti-semite who does not basically want to imitate his mental image of the Jew, which is composed of mimetic cyphers: the argumentative movement of the hand, the musical voice oainting a vivid picture of things and feelings irrespective of real content of what is said, and the nose–the physiognomic principium individuationis, symbol of the specific character of an individual, described between the lines of his countenance. PP66

3.1.4.5.19_They too, understand the power of mimesis in modern history as both imitation-and-sentience,[...]hence wanting to be like the Jew, and also the sensuosity of that act of being similar; detail upon detail, the hand gesture, the tone of voice, the nose, its shape, its size, its being the organ of smell, the "most animal" of the senses. "of all the senses," they write"that of smell–which is attracted without objectifying–bears clearest witness to the urge to lose oneself in and become the ‘other’." Thus we are led back to benjamin’s sentience taking one out of oneself, led by the nose to think anew what it means to objectify and sense an-other, of losing oneslf in that Other, as when benjamin writes of mimesis as a rudiment of a former compulsion to be another, and Callois toys with the scary idea of becoming similar, not similar to something, just similar. PP66

3.1.4.5.20_In Adorno and Horkheimer’s account, civilization does mora than repress mimesis, understood either as imitation or as sensuousness. on the contrary, civilization sniffs out the enemy, uses smell against itself in an orgy of imitation. Racism is the parade ground where the civilized rehearse this love-hate relation with their repressed sensuosity, with the nose of the Jew, their "instinct" for avarice, the blackness of the negro, their alleged sexuality, and so forth. There is furthermore a strange mapping of what is defined as sensuous excess whereby the "minorities" spill out, escape the grid of the normative, and therefore conceptuality itself. As sheer substance, matter out of place becomes matter with a vengeance, sensuosity shredding the very notion of conceptuality. Thus the idiosyncracy of the "minority" awakens "moments of biological prehistory[...]danger signs that make the hair stand on end and the heart stop beating." Confronting what is taken as ideosyncracy, individual organs may escape the control of the subject, and it is this very animality projected onto the racial Other, so the argument runs, that is desired and mimicked as sadistic ritual, degradation, and ultimately in genocide against that Other. Accused of participating in forbidden magic and bloody ritual, the jews: "are declared guilty of something which they, as the first burghers, were the first to overcome: the lure of basic instincts, reversion to animality and to the ground, the service of images. because they invented the concept of kosher meat, they are persecuted as swine. PP67-68

3.1.4.5.21_Fascism in this analysis is an accentuated form of modern civilization which is itself to be read as the history of repression of mimesis–the ban on graven images, gypsies, actors; the love-hate relatinship with the body;the cessation of Carnival; and finally the kind of teaching which does not allow children to be children. but above all, fascism is more than outright repression of the mimetic; it is a return of the repressed, based on the "organized control of mimesis." Thus fascism, through the mimesis of mimesis, "seeks tomake the rebellion of supressed nature against domination directly useful to domination." PP68

3.1.4.5.23_What makes Horkheimer and Adorno’s thesis distinctive is that far from being side-effectual, racism is seen as a manifestation of what is essential to modern civilization’s cultural apparatus, namely continuous mimetic repression–understanding mimesis as both the faculty of imitation and the deployment of that faculty in sensuous knowing, sensuous Othering. PP68A questin then arises in this version of the history of the senses–from mimesis to the organized control of mimesis–as to whether the mimetic faculty can escape this fate of being used against itself, whether it could be used against being used against itself? Can parody supply the answer? After all, parody is where mimicry exposes construction, suggestive of a new sort of anthropology, post-Frazerian, that defines its object of studey not as Other but as the reflection of the West in the mimetic magic of its Others.PP69

3.1.4.6.1_What matters for the dialectician is having the winds of world history in his sails. Thinking for him means: to set sail. It is the way they are set that matters. Words are his sails. The way they are set turns them into concepts.–Walter Benjamin, "Konvolut N."

3.1.4.6.3_here we are at odds with the fashinable theses of construction, just as we take odds with the converse, that history itself can be reduced to an essential nature. PP70

3.1.4.6.4_As the nature that culture uses to create second nature, mimesis chaotically jostles for elbow room in this force field of necessary contradiction and illusion, providing the glimpse of the opportunity to dismantle that second nature and reconstruct other worlds–so long as we reach a critical level of understanding of the play of primitivism within the mimetic faculty itself. This is why i cite Benjamin’s likening of thinking to the setting of sails in the winds of world history–lets us emphasize the worldliness of this history–in which the sails as images (read mimesis) develop into concepts according to how they are set. Here is the space for human agency and shrewdness, the setting of the sail within the buffetting of history. This is the decisive factor, setting the sail’s edge tensed so the image billows into the driving concept, and it is not without pathos that I recall it, because Benjamin’s philosophy of the image is a profoundly historical, time-sensitive, theory bound to a perceived moment of great specificity within the development of European capitalism: it is bound to a specific philosophy of history arching toward the flash of recognition of the past in an image that surfaces unexpectedly–that is to say, at the moment of danger, which is what he often had in mind–to achieve a type of mimetic remembrance in the face of the erosion of experience in modern times. PP71

3.1.4.6.5_Here Benjamin’s philosophy of history as a philosophy of picturing, adjusting the image to the salience of wind and map, force and goal, a philosophy that through imageric free-fall if not pictorial necessity invokes the history of sailors, the winds of history to be sure–European colonial history binding colored people to the metropoli by means of those sails. This is why the gringo spirit sailors of the Emberá shaman and the wooden figurines of sailors, spirit-helpers of the Cuna shaman, seem to me to be so important–not just for the Emberá and the Cuna[...] but for what I will generically refer to as the West thus depicted, embodied and made (magical)use of. PP71

3.1.4.6.6_So lets us attend to these sailors....first we have to contemplate, as they did before us, the vast emptiness of oceanic space binding Europe to its others, the space between flooding with primitivism. For this sapec provides the location for the study of the mimetic facultyand its place in the history of the senses.PP71

3.1.4.6.7_That study now becomes the study of the position of the primitive Other in modern Western notions of the mimetic faculty and of the place of wildness in sentience. Far from resting mimesis on a psychological or biological base-line such as a "faculty" and buttressing it with notions of "the primitive," as Benjamin does in his essay on the mimetic faculty with his suggestive assumptions about the ubiquity of mimesis in the dance and magic of the primitive world, can we not create a field of study of the mimetic which sees it as curiously baseless, so dependent on alterity that it lies neither with the primitive nor with the civilized, but in the windswept and all too close, all too distant, mysterious-sounding space of First Contact?

3.1.4.6.8_In describing Frazer’s Law of Contact, Mauss and Hubert evoke the world that such a notion of the magical power of the image entails. Tactility displaces the visual image into continuous impulses. "We find that both individuals and objects are theoretically linked to a seemingly limtless number of sympathetic associations. The chainis so perfectly linked and the continuity such that, in order to produce a desired effect, it is really unimportant whether magical rites are performed on any one rather than another one of the connections." The magician’s task is to know how to intervene in this chain of sympathy. It is anything but static. "It is the image of the thing to be displaced," they note, "that runs along the sympathetic chain."PP72

3.1.4.6.9_I want to ask where this wondrous chain of sympathy begins and ends, and whose image of what is continuously displaced by sympathetically attuned subtances? For surely this chain cannot be considered as strictly limited to the magician’s circle. Surely its wonders have also been displaced by the expansion of European colonialism from the sixteenth century on. And as primitive magic and modern mechanical reproduction were adjusted one to the other in a myriad of complex efforts at different times in different places through a common focus on the mysteries of representation and the powers of the mimetic faculty in signifying practice, it was above all that auratic moment of "first contact" with the primitive that gave the Europeans their first image of the mimetic treasure which lay, if not within, then between the collective bodies in contact with one another. PP73

3.1.4.6.10_Who is mi micking whom, the sailor or the savage? We find the same problem and the same "trick" of not seeing one’s own indulgence in, and stimulation of, mimicry vis-avis the "savage" when it comes to the way that adults in Western Societies teach and relate to infants and children. Adults imitate what they take to be baby talk or childish tones of voice and expression and insert themselves in what they take to be the "child’s world," playing with the child, sometimes with the aim of controlling it, or teaching the child by getting it to imitate the adult’s imitation[...] in fact the adult is imitating to differing degrees two different things here, one being the child, the other being the dog, the food, language, and so forth. Control and education comes about by judicious blending of these two realities, moving one into the other and thereby creating new behaviors and understandings. And the child? Does it respond to this with mimicry of mimicry? And what then, was the adult imitating in the first place–a real reality, as we might like to simplistically deacribe the issue, such as the child’s tone of voice or behavior? Or instead was the adult imitating the child’s mimicry of the adult’s mimicry? In which case we seem to be doing something quite strange, going around and around and unable to see that we are doing so, simulating and dissimulating at one and the same time for the sake of our epistemic health and the robust good health of realness. PP77

3.1.4.6.11_[...E]xquisite ambivalence we feel at the shock of recognition we receive on reading Darwin–"All savages appear to possess, to an uncommon degree, this power of mimicry." Fitz Roy’s sailor reminds us of the pleasure, if not the need, the civilized have of such a savage mirror on the edge of the known world, where mimesis as a faculty now burns with the intensity of a meta-category–not only in awe-inspiring concrete imitation of this or that concrete entity but the sheer fact of mimicry itself, mimicry as bound to the savage body as its rightful property. Yet it is the civilized eye that providesthis staging, this drawing-out and appreciation of the faculty, a drawing-out that impacts upon and blends into the body of that eye itself, as we in turn see it with Fitz Roy’s image of the dancing british tar. PP78-79

3.1.4.6.12_In this way mimesis as fact and as epistemic moment can be understood as redolent with the space between, a colonial space par excellence, a wind-swept Fuegian space where mankind bottoms out into fairy-tale metamorphoses with children and animals, so mimesis becomes an enactment not merely of an original but by an "original."[...] the colonial stage of historic surreality of copy/original reversals [...] in which civilization takes measure of its difference through its reflection in the primitives. So deeply invested is this scene in Western cultural patrimony, and hence selfhood, that it cannot be shrugged aside or calmly studied from a distance because it enters in all matter of subtle ways into that very Self, into the apparatus that might attempt the shrugging and, most pertinent of all, into its very philosophy of the senses and of copying the real–all the more baffling on account of the way by which mimesis entertains bewildering reciprosities, mixes them with sentiense, with pleasures, with pain, and with the "ludicrous" and "odd mixture of surprise and imitation." PP79

3.1.4.6.13_So much for sentience, for physicality, for the objectness of the object, for trying to articulate the inarticulable in which the very language of (Darwin’s) articulatin strains its outmost to become, like aArtaud or Futurist and Dada Bruitism, noise itself, to mime the (Fuegian) mimers, thereby recruiting the animal kingdom–or at least its domesticated subkingdom: chickens being clucked into order by what their masters regard as somewhat seductive chicken-sounds at mealtime; horses being cajoled by their masters with what their masters take to be horsey and horse-encouraging sounds. In short, these are the ounds that Englishmen use not only to imitate animals but to control them, and Darwin, in describing the speech of the Fuegians–whom he cataloges as the lowest grade of man in the world–not only compares their speech to this imitating-controlling habit and vocabualry of "ours" vis a vis animals, but he himself as the major move in this comparison imitates these sounds–he imitates the imitation in order to better imitate the imitators. And in his imitating we become aware of the sound of sound–of physical presence in action–and are reminded once again of the two -layered nature of mimesis as sentience and copying. PP80

3.1.4.6.14_It’s as if the Fuegians can’t help themselves, that their mimetic flair is more like an instinctual reflex than a faculty, an instinct for facing the unknown–and I mean facing. I mean sentience and copying in the face of strange faces. Note the way they are painted, especially the face, especially the eyes. Notice the grimacing of the face that sets-off a chain reaction between sailors and Fuegians. And most of all notice that there seems to be a tight fit between surprise and mimicry–as Darwin himself noted in his journal:"After our first feeling of grave astonishment was over, nothing could be more ludicrous than the odd mixture of surprise and imitation which these savages at every moment exhibited." What we find here seems close to shock and subsequent mimetic reaction to it: that odd mixture...at every moment exhinited. PP81

3.1.4.6.15_It would[..]seem of dubious, or at least complex, logic to make the common senseical if somewhat racist assumption, as Darwin does, that the extraordinary miming ability attributed to the Fuegians is a result of their keener (note the comparative) senses. And even if the notion of sensory acuity was not complicated in this way, because of dullness existing side by side with keeness, namely that there would seem to be no necessary link between such (alleged) acuity, on the one hand, and wanting or being able to mime and mime well on the other; having good eyes and ears neither makes one a good mimic nor want to be one. PP83

3.1.4.6.18_To gauge the intensity of such ritual practices in Tierra del Fuego one has to consult[...]descriptions of the ritual core of Selk’nam society, the lengthy men’s initiation known as the hain.[...] Not only is this stupendously "theatrical" and "staged", with the women and children providing the "audience", but it is obvious that in miming the (woman-hating) spirits, the men invigorate powers essential for the reproduction of society, especially the power to control what they fear as the sorcery potentially possessed by women–the original fear that, according tomyth, led them long ago to brutally kill all the women and build the men’s house in the firts place. So important is the ritual power of the theater of the men’s house, that gusinde refers to it as the sovereign power of an invisible state. He thus provides us with the elementary form not only of religion, [...]but of the State as well–a performative theory of the state as a mighty theater of male fantasies, illusions generated by potent male fear of women. PP85

3.1.4.6.19_And thus it is apposite to invoke the theme of sacred violence in mimesis. If Frazer directed us to think of the copy as drawing on the power of the copied, and did so from a utilitarian perspective, it is to Georges bataille evrlasting credit that, in his discussion of the Lasccaux cave paintings, he dismisses such a view that sees these paintings as aimed at securing game and argues instead that they are testimony to the release of the sacred through the violence of killing and that they follow transgression (in this case, of the taboo against killing). [...N]o doubt as to the mighty force of sacred violence in the mimetics of the Hain, a force that, following both Frazer and Bataille, we could see as securing its power from enacting the gods as well as from the violence entailed by that enactment. And here we see the most fundamental cleavage in mimesis. For this sacerd violence exists in two quite contrary ways. PP85

3.1.4.6.20_On the one hand the women and chidren, forming the "audience" have to pretend–to mime–on pain of death that what they are witness to are real gods and not their kinsmen acting as gods. In this way the public secret essential to mystical authority is preserved. PP85

3.1.4.6.21_On the other hand is the violence associated with the demasking of the gods that the male initiates are forced to witness in the privacy of the men’s house. Through the violence of demasking fused with laughter, the power of the mimetic faculty as a socially constitutive force is thereby transfered from the older to the younger men, the duped becomes one with the dupers, and what bridges refers to as "the great secret" fortifies Gusinde’s "invisible state". PP86

3.1.4.6.22_In both instances, male and female, imagined worlds become not only theatricalized but factualized as religious axiom and social custom. Illusions thus serve the cause of belief, if not truth, thanks to the magical series of transfers between theater and reality held in place by mimetic art and the public secret. Mimesis sutures the real to the really made-up–AND NO SOCIETY EXISTS OTHERWISE. PP86

3.1.4.6.23_MEN BECOME NOT ONLY SKILLED IN MIMESIS in the sense of simulating Others, which is what impressed Darwin, but become impressed by the power of mimesis to access the sacred and therewith control women’s potentially greater power to mime. As simulators, with the forced connivance of women, they reproduce the invisible state in a process wherein acting recreates the authentic. in this vast scheme, women, however, become skilled in the use of the mimetic faculty in a totally different way–with the power not to simulate an Other, but to dissimulate, to pretend to believe in the Other’s simulation. PP86

3.1.4.6.24_To read [about...]the late nineteenth-century extermination of the indigenous peoples of atierra del Fuego, is to be flung into horror[...] paid hunters were encouraged to wipe out the Indians. Gusinde say that they were paid the same price for a pair of Indian ears as the going rate for a Puma-one pound sterling. A pregnant woman’s ears together with those of the fetus extracted from her womb paid more. Gusinde knew persons who made money shipping Indian skulls to a European museum. Mastiffs were imported from Europe to hunt down the Indians; slain sheep were poisoned with strychnine in the hope that the indians would eat them; and Indian children were innoculated with fatal diseases. PP87

3.1.4.7.1_Yamerschoonering, he said, meant "Give me!"-but it is obvious from the record that "give me" was a complex composite that did not fall neatly into british political Economy, formal or informal. A composite of trade and gift, sometimes to be reciprocated, at other times not, it was all interwoven with a terrible insistence that the sailors came to define as outright theft[...] Agains and again this refrain of Fuegian noise, Fuegian demanding, Fuegian stealing–and perfect Fuegian equality. PP90

3.1.4.7.2_Yamerchooner. The word hangs on the English ear as we hear it through darwin’s sounding it out, the same way we might try to translate a sound of nature, the sea rolling...PP91

3.1.4.7.3_[...D]ifficulties that Fuegian exchange presents European political economy. meticulous in their observation of mine and thine, and in the severe condemnation of theft, the Fuegians were scrupulous in sharing and in the practice of mutual aid no less han of a constant give-and-take of gift-giving among themselves. In addition to the exchange that occurred locally, Gusinde made the point that a visitor from near or far always brough something to give away[...]Then the recipient had to supply a return gift as soon as possible, the gift being given and received without a word[...]It is one of those inescapable obligations, he reiterated, "of every Yamana to come now AND THEN WITH A GIFT FOR SOMEONE".Attaching considerable importance to the fact that the Yamana language has scarcely any terms for asking gifts, but many for expecting them[...]Gusinde observes that "great generosity and unselfishness are conspiuous basic features of the character of the Yamana." PP91

3.1.4.7.4_Gusinde says that some Fuegians took particular pleasure in lavishly remembering neighbors with the yields from hunting and gathering–that the "natives specially enjoy ownership in order to have the right to distribute what they have for the pleasure of being generous."[...T]he depth of the incongruities brought into play by the arrival of the beagle into this system can be appreciated[...] At stake, however, are the greatest human passions, the very nature of being a personm, and the strange intimacies that giving establishes between things and personhood. PP92

3.1.4.7.5_In short, these Fuegians, mighty mimics[...]"asked for everything they saw, and stole what they could," meticulously dividing the item so that "no individual becomes richer than any other."They were insatiable. "It was as easy to please as it was difficult to satisfy these savages," wrote darwin, taken by that "odd mixture of surprise and imitation which these savages at every moment exhibited" face to face with the Beagle’s Crew.PP93

3.1.4.7.6_With every surprise, an imitation–with every sailor’s good that catches the eye, a yamerschoonering! Mimicry and yamerschoonering seem intimately connected. You can trade fish for a knofe, or steal a button, but you can’t so easily trade a language or steal a squint or a strange motion. but what you cn do is imitate them if you want to or have to–if they’r surprising, that is. Put another way, you can imitate a sailor pulling faces, but you can’t so easily or convinxigly immitate his buttons or knife of ateel. In either event there is a way in which imitating and trading, as much as imitating and stealing, amount to the same system of gift exchange[...] In contemplating the analogy andthe historical fact that here establishes a connection between consumately skillfull miming, on the one hand, and the practice of that peculiar noncapitalist economics of exchange which Mauss called the ‘spirit of the gift"on the other, are we not justified in assuming that there is more to this than analogy–that there is indeed an intimate bond between the spirit of the gift and the spirit of the mime, whose fullest flowering requires exactly the sort of "perfect equality among individuals" that Darwin bemoaned as the Fuegian obstacle to "improvement".PP93

3.1.4.7.9_Foolhardy as it is to speculate what it might be about the absence of chiefs and property, capital and the State, that would enhance the mimetic faculty–the terms are overly generous-I cannot resist speculating that what enhances the mimetic faculty is a protean self with multiple images (read "souls") of itself set in a natural environment whose animals, plants, and elements are spiritualized to the point that nature "speaks back" to humans, every material enityt paired with an occassionally visible spirit-double–a mimetic double!–of itself. Now as against that profoundly mimeticized world[...], think of another, different, picture drawn by the Romantic reaction to Western capitalism, illustrating what happens with the "disenchantment of the world," with the scuttling of the spirits, as I described earlier, into the Emberá forests of the darien as the flames leap around the idols drenched in gasoline. Unlike the mimeticized world, this dienchanted one is home to a self-enclosed and somewhat paranoid, possessive, individualized sense of self severed from and dominant over a dead and non-spiritualized nature, a self-built antimimetically on the notion of work as an instrumental relation to the world within a system wherein that self ideally incorporates into itself wealth, property, citizenship, and of course "sense-data," all necessarily quantifiable so as to pass muster at the gates of new definitions of truth as Accountability. This latter feature especially might spell trouble for the mimetic faculty–accumulating sensation as private property and hence, like all commodities, incomplete without its necessary dose of abstraction that allows of general equivalence. PP97

3.1.4.7.11_private property, he argued "has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it–when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc.," such that the senses are estranged by having. But all this sense banking epistemology will be changed with the transcendence of private property, which will achieve: "...the complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities, but in this emancipation precisely because these senses and attributes have become, subjectively and objectively human. The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object–an object made by man for man. The senses have therefore become directly in their practice theoreticians."PP98

3.1.4.7.13_marx can be taken further still, where in the same passage he goes on to assert, "The senses relate themselves to the thing for the sake of the thing, but the thing itself [under his ideal of communism] is an objective human relation to itself and to man, and vice versa."By way of clarification he adds, "In practice I can relate myself to a thing humanly only if the thing relates itself humanly to the human being." On the face of it, this is no less animistic than benjamin[...] In an imagined society of perfect communism, where private property (along withthe State) ceases to exist, property relations ensure human agency to things as social, as human, objects!PP98

3.1.4.7.14_This has a significant implication for ‘fetishism’ as Marx used that term in Capital to refer to the cutural attribution of a spiritual, even godlike, quality to commodities, objects bought and sold onthe market standing over their very producers. he could have just as well used the term ‘animism.’ Under capitalism the animate quality of objects is a result of the radical estrangement of the economy from the person; no longer is the man the aim of production, but production is the aim of man, and wealth-getting the aim of production. (No sharing, let alone tearing up of shirts here, my friend! No falling for that cheap old scarlet cloth either, by Jove!) Post-capitalist animism means that although the socioeconomic exploitative function of fetishism, as Marx used the term in icapital, will supposedly disappear with the overcoming of capitalism, fetishism as an active social force inherent in objects will remain. Indeed it must not disappear, for it is the animate quality of things in post-capitalist sociaty without the "banking" mode of perception that ensures what the youg Marx envisaged as the humanization of the world. PP99

3.1.4.7.15_We are left to ponder two fascinating problems. How is the notion of a "rebirth" of the mimetic faculty with the Modernity of Advanced Capitalism to be understood in terms of these different forms of fetishism? Second, insofar as the "gift economy" entails and perhaps depends upon mimetic facility, should we not be ivestigating this facility as a privileged component of post-capitalist utopias organized around the playful exchange of difference, weak chiefs, sharing, and what we may dare designate as a "human," perhaps "yielding" relation to nature? PP99

3.1.4.8.1_So, what’s it like to live in the world we have lost, a mimetic world when things had spirit-copies, and nature could thus look back and speak to one through dreams and omens, nature not being something to be dominated but something yielded to or magically-outperformed, and people [...] were "born mimics"? To ask this rhetorical, even mischievious question, redolent in its self-assuredness with utopian longing for a theory of iconic meaning soaked in correspondences bound to impulses surging through claims of sympathy, is to enter another body of knowledge, another bodily knowing. let us begin with the soul.

3.1.4.8.3_It’s the soul that plunges us into the heart of the mimetic world. In notes made in the early 1930s on Cuna notions of Purba, which he hesitantly translates as "soul", Baron nordeskiold tried to sum it up as being a mimetic double–an "invisible replica" he called it, of one’s body. PP100

3.1.4.8.4_[...]what Ruben perez said to him about the matter at hand. Thus: "[...]everything, people, animals, plants, stone, things made by man, etc., have invisible counterparts which we sometimes can see in dreams and which leave the body or at least for the most part leave it when it dies. PP101

3.1.4.8.5_[...H]e goes on to say that even when awake we can sometimes feel the manifestations of "this invisible world, as in the warmth of the sun, in the noises of thunder, in music, etc...."PP101

3.1.4.8.6_Fifty ears latter, [...]former uS Peacecorpsman Norman Chapin writes: "The world as it exists today has a dual nature: it is composed of what is termed the ‘world of the spirit’ and the ‘world of substance’. The world of spirit is invisible to a person’s waking senses, et surrounds that person on all sides and resides inside every material object. Human beings, plants, animals, rocks, rivers, villages, and so forth all have invisible puroakana "souls" which are spiritual copies of the physical body. Pp101

3.1.4.8.7_In considering the implications of this world of copies, it is startling and wonderful to come across other meanings of this word ‘purpa,’ soul or spirit; it also means menstrual blood (red purpa), semen (white purpa), shadow, photograph (face purpa), and speech (mouth purpa). It is also the term used for the Cuna Origin Histories of important spirits–short orations in which the spirit is told how it was born and acts, thereby allowing the orator to control it[...]To further fascinate matters, [...] purpa also means what Chapin refers to as the "deep meaning" of the symbolism of the curing chants, the understanding of disease causation, and the workings of the spirit world. The chants in themsleves are not purpa, says Chapin. knowledge of what they mean is purpa. Pp101-102

3.1.4.8.8_[...]from the (mere) image of a thing comes its soul and spirit. And what a comment on the implicitly sacred nature of image-making!PP103

3.1.4.8.9_[...I]t is something altogether too grand to contemplate that the entire known world couldbe copied in this way. Thus construed on the principle of self-mimicry, this world becomes power-packed, too."The world of spirit underlies the world of substance, resides inside it, and provides itwith vital force" says Chapin, and [...] this is the force that, in strings of images, has to be tapped by the readers of dreams and the curers of disease. This strange world of reality-copy "extends out in all directions"Chapin tells us, through a series of eight levels labeled ‘level one,’ ‘level two’and so on". Yet it is also modeled after nature, following the topography of the land. And just as physical bodies, people, animals, and the land itself are mimicked in this way–or is it the other way around; which comes first, spirit or substance, original or copy?–so it follows that basic Cuna social relations themselves are replicated–chiefship, marriage rule, matrilocality, house-forms, households, and major life-ceremonies. "In short," concludes Chapin, "the spirits of both good and evil, live more or less as the cuna live, and the basic model for the spirit world comes from the conception Cunas have of their own society."[..] Jean Langdon describes a similar mimetic geography of spirit and matter[...] making up the Siona universe. "Each different realm is a replica of the others. They are all populated by people, domestic animals, cultivated fields, and othet objects found in this world." In a sense these other realms form, she says, "an alter reality of this [earthly] realm"; it is as if" behind all objects, animals, and places in the concrete world there is a supernatural force that is the creative life source of the object." This indicates that spirit is superior to and causal of the concrete/manifestation.[...T]here ceratinly seems to be anxiety, even paranoia, about the spirit realms, the realm from which sickness and disaster can arise; and in this sense too the spirits’ realms could be said to weigh over the earthly realm. PP104

3.1.4.8.11_Ruben perez informs us that the Great Seer, or nele, received visits from wild animaols of the forest. He would go into a partitioned hut, sit down and, bending his thoughts to the origin of the animals, would sing. : :a jaguar came along...it was not a spirit but a real jaguar. After the jaguar came some peccaries[...] in the same way there were neles who received visits from caymans. PP104

3.1.4.8.12_[...]singing origins is not done so much to gain control over the object of the origin-History song, but first and foremost, to create that object through its soulful evocation–the jaguar, for instance, or the peccaries–such that "calling them up" is to conjure with their image, hence their soul, and hence give birth to the real. I am suggesting, in other words, that the chanter is singing a copy of the spirit-form, and by virtue of what i call the magic of mimesis, is bringgn the spirit into the physical world. PP105

3.1.4.8.14_reconsider the modus operandi of Cuna medical chants[...]Through detailed descriptions. power is gained over the thing described[...] Joel Scherzer: "A detailed and exact decsription of an object, including representations of its spirit language in conversational form and its daily round of activities, demonstrates to it (really to its spirit) that the performer of the ikar [chant] has intimate knowledge of it and can control it. PP105

3.1.4.8.15_Was ever Frazer’s mimetic magic better expressed–except that the simulacrum here is created with words, not objects! In fact two mimetic movements are involved. one is the duplication in song of the spirits, detail by slow-moving detail, in songs that canlast up to several hours. The other mimetic movement depends upon this invocation of the spirits because, since they duplicate the physical world, then to bring them forth by menas of song is to mimetically gain control over the mirror-image of physical reality that they represent. PP105

3.1.4.8.16_As Chapin puts it, [..]: "Two skills are given particularly high value among Kuna ritual specialists: a thorough knowledge of the features of the spirit world, and an ability to articulate this knowledge in a coherent, comprehensive, and pleasing manner. The Kuna believ that in order to control the course of events in the world of the spirit–and consequently, in the world of substance–one must be able to tell the spirits about themselves. A specialist must demonstrate to the spirits that he knows who they are, how they came into being, what their physical and behavioral characteristics are, where they live, and what their names are. PP106

3.1.4.8.17_the "specialist" must "demosntrate"[...] far from being "mere" revelation or passive copying, demonstration here has to transform reality. "You are being changed, you are becoming medicines." The verses areredolent with this strange sense of continuous becoming as the "description"-i.e. the copy–engages with the thing being described so as to bring out its spirit. PP106

3.1.4.8.19_These verses [chants]create magical power...The strange sense of time, detail heaped on detail, the inclusion of the chanter in the chant-surely all this is of another order of meaning and realization than being told what properties one is to have. For the chant is not so much instructing the spirits as, through the mimetic faculty, bringing them into being: "THE MEDICINE MAN BEGINS TO COUNCEL YOUR SILVER BARK, YOUR SILVER BARK’S PURPA IS COMING TO LIFE;MEDICINES YOU ARE BEING CHANGED, YOU ARE BECOMING MEDICINES. PP108

3.1.4.8.20_What is curious is the excessiveness itself. Understanding the singer’s task as first and foremost that of having to create a copy, might, to my mind, explain just this stylistic feature. The excess hammers home the copiedness, bringing out the real through the detailing. Then there is Bataille’s point[...] that the image follows the release of the sacred and is thus consequence, not cause! And lest one be carried away by excessively grim notions of the sacred, let us recall Bataille’s fascination with laughter and how an unnanmed Cuna chanter responded to Chapin upon being asked, after chanting six chants about the Great Mother, Muu, "what purpose they served?" "He replied with an amused chuckle: ‘Just play. It makes Muu feel good to hear about these things.’" PP109

3.1.4.8.21_There is a decisive mimetic component bult into Cuna speech. Sherzer goes on to state that Cuna "grammar does not readily make a distinction between direct and indirect quotations. The great majority of all quotation is direct–speakers are constantly uttering words that are not their own [and]it becomes very difficult at each moment of the narration, to decode exactly who is speaking" PP109

3.1.4.8.22_He quotes a chant in which the chanter is quoting his teacher who is quoting a mythical hero who is quoting a Choco Indian who is quoting a chief in the spirit world who is quoting god. ..Cuna speech is always one or more steps "removed from the actual speaker and that what one is listening to at a given moment is always a retelling, a rehearing, a reviewing, or a reinterretation of something said before. " PP109

3.1.4.8.23_The chants images are so real that they can, so it is said, kill those who mouth them into life. This puts make-believ in a new light. "Any failure on the part of the chanter as he directs his spirit helpers on their quest" writes Chapin, results in their destruction. he cites the case of a man who tried to earn [a chant] when he was too young, it being said that only a grandfather can learn this major chant. He was overcome by Muu, the great mother, vomited blood and died shortly thereafter. On the other hand if one is too old, one’s spiritual power diminishes. An old chanter runs the risk of being attacked by demons he is trying to control. Then again, if the spirit helpers embodied in the wooden figurines are trapped by other spirits, the chanter can die because (at least in the major chants) his spirit accompanies the spirit-helpers his singing has brought out from the figurines. The very ascencion to spiritual insight makes one vulnerable–a sign of what it takes to enter the interzone of mimetic space. PP111

3.1.4.9.1_In these mimetic worlds things connect with their invisible counterparts by virtue of the womb. Rendering copying synonimous with reproduction, this organ ensures that mimesis fuses as a male secret with origins and, [...]with history as well. PP112

3.1.4.9.2_[...] an important variety of magic, one to put alongside Frazer’s[...] sympathetic magic of Similarity and contact. For now we see that chanting or whispering or simply just thinking a thing’s origin gives the ritualist power over it. But let us not forget that here too it is necessary to make a simulacrum, a verbal, toneful, simulacrum, by means of chanting over or under one’s breath the birth-history of the thing in question. This puts the power of historicism in a new light. Indeed the theme of knowing something’s history, in the sense of its conception and reproduction, is basic and ubiquitous to Cuna magic.[...]As Chapin put it: "These origin histories are short orations in which the spirit in question is told how it lives,how it behaves, and what its ritual names are. It constitutes the underlying "secret" of that spirit, and enables specialists to dominate and manipulate it as they please. "PP144

3.1.4.9.3_[...Scerzer...]iforms us that with every chant is a "soul"[...] This "soul" he says, "describes the origin of the object to be controlled by the chant. Likewise in the very chant (ikar) itself, origin is crucial. PP114

3.1.4.9.4_Think back to the basis of all simulacra and hence mimetic realization in this Cuna world[...]–the basis of the female body; the womb, body parts, and the woman’s seeing. For in bringing together in woman’s body copying, reproduction, and origin, as so many moment of the mimetic, what we find is not only matching and duplication but also slippage which, once slipped into, skids wildly. PP115

3.1.4.9.5_You see this immediately in the fact that while ethnography [...] describes the Cuna world as made up of spirit doubles, it later proceeds to inform us without any hesitation that the spirits of plants and animals and so forth exist in human form! This slippage is eesential, and I presume its specification for any particular plant, animal, object, or person is its "secret," so that we would abbreviate by saying thet "secret" equals slippage. Origin History then becomes the attempt to trace the connection through history and from beginnings of how one thing becomes another thing while in some profound sense remaining the (mimetic) same–the sort of action of becoming different while remaining the same that we will later encounter as the primary paradox of Cuna ethnohistory–how the Cuna stay the same by adapting to the outside world. The equation of Origin History with birthing provides a complex sequence of magical transformations of one thing into another thing while, through the very act of transforming, conserving the notion of an underlying sameness held together as so many analoges by the woman’s fragmented body-parts. PP116

3.1.4.9.6_Chapin’s description of Cuna cosmology. First there is a depiction of the womb-emergent origin of the world from the Great mother with the ontological corollary of a world of matter replicated in layered spirit worlds . Chapin observes: that the world of spirit underlying that of matter: "extends out in all directions through a series of eight levels..."[...]PP116-117

3.1.4.9.9_The second mimesis between the woman’s soul and the spiritual cosmos rests on the notion that theearth is in an important sense "the mother," and that a section of the cosmos is given over to mythic women, particularly the spirit of Muu, to reproduce all living things–from the point of view of mimetic connection the crucial factor being that during pregnancy a woman’s "soul"or purpa becomes, as Chapin put it, "one with the cosmos itself. The two spiritual realms are fused together in the never-ending process of creating offspring and replenishing the Earth’s stock of living beings. PP121

3.1.4.9.10_If this double tracking along a spirtual river and along a spiritual birth canal is not too hard to hang on to–then take hold of this(...Chapin): "When they [the spirit helpers] arrive at Muu’s house [in the cosmos], they come to the [real woman’s] spiritual womb. At this point in their journey, however, the landscape alters (as often happens in the exotic world of spirit) and Muu’s houese becomes the woman’s spiritual body. The walls of Muu’s house are now her ribs, the door is her vulva, the door frame is her thighs, and thedoor chain is her pubic hair–all this in a song designed to change reality (...by acting on a copy of it). Moreover, this means that in this particular type of illness, the soul of the sick woman is abducted into her own (spiritual) womb (a sort of reverse hysteria), and it is into this womb that the character’s spirit and his spirit-helpers have to eter so as to free her soul and place it back into her (real) body. PP122

3.1.4.9.11_Thus, the joker in the mimetic pack is smartly dealt. We are lost, yet perhaps not uncomfortably, between so-called levels of reality which are levels of reference, cross-reference, and [...]all-of-a-sudden altering landscapes in which the Great mother’s house is another woman’s body, more specifically spirit-copies of her womb and genitalia. Yet at the same time mimetic fidelity, His Master’s Voice, is somehow maintained. This is exceedingly strange, wonderful, and , of course, a little uncanny in the way it so imagerically, so iconocally, copies Freud’s analysis of the uncanny (as experienced by men) as that powerful medley of revelation and concealement exercised by the slippage through the gates ofrepression of the secretly familiar, that origin of the world, that home of all homes, the (great) mother’s genitals[...]Freud wrote: "This unheimlich [uncanny] place, however, is the entrance to the former heim [home] of all human beings, to the place where each one of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning. There is a joking saying that ‘Love is home-sickness’; and whenever a man dreams of a place or a country and says to himself, while he is still dreaming: "this place is familiar to me, I’ve been here before," we may interpret the place as being his mother’s genitals or her body. "PP122

3.1.4.9.13_I want to emphasize that while access and recourse to alterity–the Other world of spiritual reality–is both necessary amd magically empowering, and that while that alter-world is deemed to be mimetic with the world of substance and modeled on it, there is also, as the reference to suddenly altering landscapes and jumping from signifiers to signifieds indicates, a curiously unstable aspect intrinsic to this mimetic doubling. What intrigues me about this instability, this copy which is not a copy, is that this particular feature of sudden alteration in the plane of reality of the referent occurs precisely at the moment of evocation of the womb. At that moment the genipa plant is born, not as a plant but as a person[...] Surely this suggests that the womb is of importance not merely for reproduction but also for the transformation of the level of reality that the chant both evokes and transforms and hence for the transformations required for healing. It is as if Muu’s abode, meaning the flesh-and-blood earthly woman’s spiritual womb as well, is the switch-board of the male-magician’s reality-control apparatus and that mimetic power and the mimetic faculty begin with this consideration. But what provides the switching so that copies heap on copies that are not copies in order to conceive and deceive the doubleness of reality? PP123

3.1.4.9.15_For Freud the uncanny conveyed the sensation of magical, spiritual, and animistic powers, an eerie feeling that invisible powers were at work behind the facede of reality.. And while there is nthing in Cuna ethnography which would definitly help us ascertain if this feeling of the uncanny exists among healers and thei patients[...] we do at least know that reality is said to be a facaed behind which spiritual doubles are active. [...]Freud was unremitting in his emphasis on the uncanny as the secretly familiar which has undergone repression and then returned, albeit in distorted form.[...]Freud’s "secretly familiar" turns out to be a Western psychoanalytic version, indeed a double, of what the Cuna call origin Histories (equivalent to the thing’s soul/psyche)–except for the Cuna. it is not merely one’s self which came from the womb of the Great Mother but everything in the world. especially the great medicines and woods from which the curing figurines are carved. Given the zealous prohibition of "sexual" matters. more accyrately birth-matters, and the fact that the Origin histories[...]so blatantly, so assiduously, detail by lovong detail, overturn this prohibition, thus "returning" the repressed, then surely we are justified in calling attention to the connection between the womb and the magical powers of mimesis of which these chanters and herbalists, nearly always males, are masters–patriarchical masters in a matrilineal society of the return of the repressed, of the secret, the great secret, the Great Mother’s secret which, bodies immobilized, looking straight ahead, they chant into their European and "non-Indian" wooden figurines, gateways to a mimeticizing world. PP125

3.1.4.9.16_This is where we must differ with the great classical tradition yearning for harmony, narrative closure, and structural integrity, that recurring Western tradition which would "explain" the magic of healing rite as bound to the restoration of a balance and the resolution of a contradiction. To the contrary, this voicing the secret and breaking of taboo responds to an aesthetics of transgression contained by ritual. The "magical force" at work here cannot be assimilated into narrative closure. Nor can such magical power be meaningfully assimilated into the formula of the "return of the repressed" unless we focus on the implications and character of the transgressive power of that "return"–its danger and fascination, its insinuation into normality, in short its explosive power. It is true that the transgression occurs and can only occur within the bounds and buffers set by ritual. it is true that just as taboo exists in order to be broken, so transgression fortifies the taboo. But these equilibriums do not diminish the fact that the act of transgression is in itself fraught with the perils of indeterminacy, an indeterminacy constitutive of Being no less than threatening it with dissolution. It is the precariously contained explosion of the transgressive moment that allows for and indeed creates the "mimetic slippage" whereby reproduction jumps to metamorphosis, whereby the duplicating power of spirit (image) is also a self-transforming power–and hence a power for healing and for evil, transforming Being itself. PP126

3.1.4.9.18_What is obvious, once stated, is that for all this fixation upon and fixing of spirit copying and doubling, spirits are great transformers. They are great mimes, the greatest the world will ever know. They may be modeled on This world, but that does not mean that they therefore possess the aparent stability of forms in This world. Emerging from the transgression of the taboo, their very mastery of fidelity is the sign of their infidelity. PP126

1.2.2.3.1_Me: What does one say then, with respect to all the shamanic beliefs that illness and death are not natural, but always caused by either people or spirits sending harm, that is, from the Outside, to the argument that the Enemy is Us, and that projections of evil to the outside are only childish denials, escapism and escape-goating?. yet these people seem not to be too repressed, but rather integral, particularly the healers and shamans, yet there is always an outside, and the possibility of harm being done to us.

1.2.2.3.2_Look also at Kane’s description of Embera men and their fear/attraction of sleeping with women from the outside.

1.2.2.9.1_Me: Like when babies are kept from mechanical noises so as not to be harmed. Noises, as other "mpressions" canbe powerful agents of healing or harm

1.2.2.10.1_[Remember that in Hill(?) he is told that the soul of white people looks like books, etc?COULD WE BE SAYING HERE, THAT IMAGES, INSOFAR AS THE CREATED WORLD, SHORT OF THE NOTHING, IS COMPRISED OF THINGS THAT CAN MORE OR LESS BE PERCEIVED, ARE INTO THEMSELVES ALSO "POTENT" ALIVE WITH THEIR "SOUL POWER" AND THAT ITS POWER, AS THAT OF CONCEPTS, PLANTS, ROCKS, SPIRITS OR SOUNDS CAN ALSO BE USED FOR HEALING AND HARMING? AND THAT THEREFORE, THIS COULD BE WHAT BENJAMIN WAS GETTING AT, SPECIALLY SINCE IN CONTEMPORARY SOCITY WE ARE EVER MORE IMAGE-BOUND, THAT THE IMPRESSIONS THEY MAKE ON OUR BEING ARE WHAT THE SOCIALLY MADE-UP, THE REAL IS SUTURED WITH, AND THAT THEREFORE, THEIR VERY POTENCY CAN THEREFORE BE USED AGAINST IT, IN A REDEMPTIVE GESTURE; AS SPIRITS ARE ENLISTED TO FIGHT OTHERS, SO ARE IMAGES ENLISTED, SYMBOLS, ETC...FROM ADVERTISEMENTS TO POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS TO WAR PROPAGANDA, IMAGES MAKE MOSTS OF THE RELITY REAL. BUT TO USE THEIR MIMETICFORCE, ITS TRANSGRESSIVE POWER IN A LIBERATING GESTURE, AGAINST ITS "ORGANIZED COTROL" IS A CHALLANGE...CAN WE SAY WITH BENJAMIN THAT IS IS A MATTER OF PLACING IMAGES AGAINST THE GRAIN, USING SPECIALLY THE RECENTLY OUTMODED ONES TO SHOW THE CONSTRUCTEDNESS OF THE REAL AND RECENTLY PASSED? CAN HEALING COME FROM IMAGESACCORDING TO HOW THEY ARE POSITIONED? OR DOES IT COME FROM THE MOMENT WHEN A FLASH SURGES FROM AN INTERSTICIAL PLACE, WHERE A PROFANE ILLUMINATION BREAKS FORTH FROM A SPACE IN-BETWEEN? WHEN WE STOP SEEING THE IMAGES FOR WHAT WE MAKE THEM REPRESENT, BUT ALLOW THEM, AS THE WHOLE WORLD (OBJECTS, PEOPLE, NATURE, CONCEPTS, ETC) TO DANCE FREELY AND THUS MANIFEST THAT FLASH OF INSPIRATION? BUTTHEN, HOW DOES THAT HAPPEN? IS THER A TRAINING TO ACHIEVE IT? IS IT A MIRACLE? AND IF SO, WHAT KIND OF RESUTURIG THE REAL CAN WE THEN INSTITUTE TO RENDER IT MORE JUSTICE? What does this say then, about the everyday thoughts of people? why when they curse or imagine misfortune, either for themsleves or others, it is more likely to come true? Andwhy it is then important to cleanse oneself from negativity in its manifold expressions, so that we don’t curseor imagine evil. ideally, to walk not cluttering outr minds with any thought, and at times concentrating as in ritual, ceremony, prayer, and visualization, on positive effects. to use that power in a good way

1.2.2.12.1_An aside: Joseph saying that life eats our effort, as its food. our sacrifice in the everyday, is effort: Don’t sit on the fence.

1.2.2.12.2_Put another way, appearance seems crucial, pure appearance, appearance as the impossible–an entity without materiality. Its as if some perversely nostalgic logic applies wherein the spirit-form can only exist as an active agent through the erasure of its material form. Creation requires destruction–hence the importance of the Cuna land of the dead where images float in such abundance; hence the phantasmagoric quality of photographs. PP135

1.2.2.12.4_Through burning to ash is thus enacted the strange Frazerian logic of Sypathy, of imitation and contact, of copy iand sentience–and I cannot but once again be mindful of the configuration of the wooden figurines, outer form European (imitation), inner substance Indian (contact)–that provides the curer with (images of) active spirit-helpers. The point of my emphasis here is the assartion from the ethnography that the magically important thing is the spirit of the wood, not its carved outer form. Might not the burning of the pages of the Bible, of histor books, of parrots be the equivalent to this carving of wooden figurines followed by the conceptual erasure of the material outer form, the material simulacrum of the Europeans? This puts the practice of "reading under erasure" in anew light, and we seethat just as the question of the content of the image gave way to questions: Why make image sanyway? Why embody?–so now we see that making requires unmaking, embodiment its disembodiment. PP136

1.2.2.12.6_The strategy of mimesis and alterity involved in using a powerful First World State, notably the US, against the exactions of the local Thrid World State, is an important and often times tragic element ofmodern history. PP142

1.2.2.12.7_Sustaining the realpolitik of these situations is a powerful modern mythology of good savage/bad savage by which the whites of Europe and North America purify themselves through using the good savage to purge the bad one, whether communists in Vietnam, Sandinistas in Nicaragua, supposedly corrupt and ecologically-insensitive Third World government in Brazil and Panama or, most specially, the bad savage within the historic constitution of First World whiteness itself. PP142

1.2.2.12.8_This Janus-faced sense of the savage corresponds to the great mythologies of modern progress. The good savage is representative of unsullified Origin, a sort of Eden before the Fall when harmony prevailed, while the bad savage is the sign of the permanent wound inflicted by history, the sign of waste, degenracy, and thwarted narrative. Inthe New World, [...]these signs fell on the Indian and the African-American respectively. But while the phantom figure of the pure Indian becomes the object of desire by the First World, that same Indian tends to be the cause of unease if not the cause of erasure inthe Third World–no matter how much a certain style of Indianness may be appropriated and promoted by the State in the designs of the curency, a concern for archaeology, and in the promotion of weavings by Indian women for turism. Indeed, these signs indicate not only the degreee to which that national identity in a latin Americancountry is bound to First World criteria and First World recognition of the palatable and rousing difference, but that the carriers of that national identity, which is to say the elites as much as the populace at large, are placed in a basically untennable ambivalence–neither trylly Indian nor truly civilized, and forever at the beck and call of the White House and travel-guides such as the South American Handbook. This infernal American identity machine thus composes a mosaic of alterities around a mysterious core of hybridity seething with instability, threatening the First World quest for a decent fix of straightforward Othering–were it not for the degree zero provided by the black man, not to mention even more fabulous creations like the white Indian women of the darien. PP143

1.2.2.12.9_On a more sweeping view of identity-formations in the American continent, the marked attraction and repulsion of savgery as a genuinly sacred power for whiteness has continuosly been concretized in terms of noble Indians at home in nature, as against degenerate blacks lost no less in history than to history. That this history is every inch a history of labor discipline, a tropical version of Hegel’s Master and Slave in so many banana republics, I hope to make clear. That this history is, in secular times, a Sacred History too, in which race-fantasy takes the place of heavenly-fantasy, I hope also to make clear because "race" as defined, acquires the burden of carrying the emotive charge of men exchanging women across the colorless line of tropical proletarianization. It is here that the color of the penis acquires its full charge as democi power, the powers of what Emile Durkheim called the "impure sacred": "...evil and impure powers, productive of disorders, causes of death and sickness, instigators of sacrilege. The only sentiments which men have for them are a fear into which horror generally enters. Such are the forces upon which and by which the sorcerer acts, those which arise from corpses or the menstrual blood, those freed by every profanation of sacred things, etc. The spirits of the dead and malign genii of every sort are their personified form."PP150

1.2.2.12.10_Of consequence here is the necessary reminder that the primacy of Being is secondary to the safeguard of the Border. The figure of the nia or black phallus, as exposed by Cuna ethnography, alerts one to sexual fear and excitement of the boundary created out of mimesis and alterity under specific colonial histories. Rather than thinking of the border as the furthermost extension of an essential identity spreading out from the core, this makes us think instead of the border itself as that core. In other words, identity acquires its satysfying solidity because of the effervesence of the continuoualy sexualized border, because of the turbulent forces, seual and spiritual, that the border not so much contains as emits. PP150-151

1.2.2.12.11_[...]considerable anxiety about immigration and "racial mixture" in the U.S.–a concern serendipitously shared by Cuna Indians[...]regarding their own situation. As loin-girding mental impetus, this racial purity had everything to do with paranoid fantasies of certain men ealously guarding the Cuna womb, a larger-than-life figure for a cosmic model of mimetic reproduction of nature, society, tradition, and Indianness itself. But of course, it was the border which defined that tradition and that Indiannness, thus making the womb into an organ of alterity as much as mimesis, and this is where the "science" of the men from the United States blended so well with the "cosmology" of the men from the land of the Cunas.PP152

1.2.2.12.12_What is thereby discernible as the hidden historical force in Marsh’s quest for white Indians is this dream of power and freedom promised yet continuously thwarted by capitalist development. As in a shadow play, the Indian and the Black are the beings through which the ceaseless dilemma of labor-discipline and freedom in capitalsit enterprise is to be figured. The frontier provides the setting withinh which this problem of discipline magnifies the savagery that has to be repressed and canalized by the civilizing process. PP156

1.2.2.12.13_The blacks of Panama [...]upset white histories and the attempts of their authors to come to termswith the overwhelming turbulence of modern times. But the Indians are there to fix history and restore its sublime order. They are Origin–and as such they are also White and Woman. PP157

1.2.2.12.14_The black is cast as historical jetsam, matter out of place, the irrationality of history, while the Indian roots and order, an order of nature–as against history:matter in place. This exerts magnetic force over marsh and the Whiteness in the Indianness for which hi stext stands, for it is by learning to employ the irrationality of history that the secrets of its Origin shall be captured. PP159

1.2.2.12.15_[...]curious mimetic overlapping between Marsh and the Indians concerning what Freud, in his essay on the uncanny, designated as that homey place between the mother’s thighs.PP172

1.2.2.12.16_How cunningly this blind spot blends sex, race, commodity production, and land in an alternating current of revelation and concealement:"the closer you get the greater the mystery becomes"–a colonial version of Freud’s uncanny. What better way for a white world to capture the alternating rythm of mimesis and alterity than with the uncanny image of the white Indian? On the one hand is the mimetic revelation of whiteness, on the other, the alterity of the Indian hidden in the Darien jungles, the two "moments" of mimesis and alterity here energizing each other, so that the more you see the phenomenon as mimetic, as "like us," the greater you make the alterity, and vice versa. PP176

1.2.2.13.1_To exercise the mimetic faulty is to practice an everyday art of appearance, an art that delights and maddens as it cultivates the insoluble paradox of the distinction between essence and apearance. Cuna ethnography has much to each concerning the spirit powers that, in the form of images, emerge from this paradox. Suffice it to say it would be an excrutiating error to think of spirits as some sort of bounded population, like caterpillars, for instance.[...]"image" and "spirit" become interchangeable terms, testimony to the elusive and compelling power of appearance and its mysterious relation to essence, a fact illustrated by the various meanings for soul blurring imperceptibly with spirit, image, and appearance(s)..PP176

1.2.2.13.2_What is essential to grasp here is that appearance is power and that this is a function of the fact that appearanceitself can acquire density and substance. it is this property that brings spirit, soul and image, into the one constellation. That this arouses fear, longing, and wonderment, is surely no surprise. The fetish power of imagery in shrines and magic is merely a heightened and prolongued instance of this tangibility of appearance. The current coursing back and forth between Contact and Imitation, tactility and the visual image, is also testimony to this power of appearance. Epistemologies of science bound to the notion that truth always lies behind (mere) appearance sadly miss this otherwise obvious point. Daily life proceeds otherwise. PP177

1.2.2.13.3_Colonial history too must be understood as a spiritual politcs in which image-power is an exceedingly valuable resource.[...] While Cuna men, particularly in their high status and sacred roles, adorn themselves in western attire with felt hat, shirt, tie, and pants, Cuna women bedeck themselves as magnificently other. it is they who provide the shimmering appearance of Indianness. PP177

1.2.2.13.4_Might one suggest that the curing figurines match the male-female division of miemtic labor as registered by this western photograph, that the outer form of the figurine mimics the outer image of the Cuna man, as that image so manifestky presents its brave front to the Western world, while the inner spirit of the figurine, which is where the womb-sprung origins of Cuna power lies, is replicated by Cuna womanhood? This suggestion is important because,[...] it pinpoints the role of the "select appearance" vis-a-vis the outside eye. In drawing a parallel beween the composition caught by this outside eye and the magical compositon of the nuchus, we draw attention to this intercultural source of magical power[...] This male/female composite image is no less curative for the Western viewer than the nuchus are for the Cuna. PP18-88

1.2.2.13.5_[...]what extraordinary mimetological theater this major curing ritual turns out to be, with all player on the side of justice, large and small, human and wooden, decked out in western gear covering their inner, Cuna. "secret!". PP191

1.2.2.13.6_Not only is the healer copying the look of the West (imitation); he is also putting it on (contact). In putting it on he is establishing physical contact with the West, the touch, the feel, like putting on a skin. As with the mimetological technique of three-dimmensional self-sculpting photography conceived by Roger callois in his essay on mimesis and legendary psychestenia, here the healer’s very body becomes the vehicle onto which mimetic appearance becomes three-dimensioned, becomes optics in depth. PP191

1.2.2.13.7_And where does this putting-on the skin of the West occur? Precisely where the healer is bringing-out the Indian spirit-personae and spirit-powers of the different types of wood from which the figurines are carved as "european types." It is just at the point of assumption of Western male dress by the healer(in this two chnt-texts) that this ineffable moment transpires where spirit flows from the wooden matter, from "nature," to be objectified, personified, and readied for the task at hand, namely the pursuit of the lost human soul. Born of woman, exercised continuously by men through intercourse with the sirit (read image) world, and honed to a fine edge of perfection by colonial alterities, the mimetic faculty bears exactly on this crucial matter of bringing out the spiritual power of image that material things stand in for. PP191

1.2.2.14.1_The spread of U.S. popular culture throughout the world [...] owes an enormous amount to the music reproduced bythe phonograph. Indeed the great cotribution of the U.S. to world history has been precisely the shaping of the world’s ears and eyes–not to mention "morals"–by popular music and Hollywood.PP198

1.2.2.14.2_I am not so much concerned with a "sociology" of the phonograph or camera and their effect on "the natives." The more important question lies with the white man’s fascination with their fascination with these mimetically capacious machines. PP198

1.2.2.14.3_[...E]very effort is made to represent mimeticizing technology as magical, and the question must be repeated–because the phonographic mis-en-scene is surprisingly common in twnetieth-century descriptions of "primitive" peoples–as to why westerners are so fascinated by Other’s fascination with this apparatus. PP199

1.2.2.14.4_What seems crucial about the fascination with the other’s fascination with the talking machine is the magic of mechanical reproducion itself. In the west this magic is inarticulable and is understood as the technological substance of civilized identity-formation. Neither the prospector filming[...] nor Fitzcarraldo[...] could make a phonograph, nor an electric lightbulb switch for that matter. Vis a Vis the savage they are the masters of these wonders that, after the shock waves of surprise upon their invention and commercialization in the West, pass into the everyday. Yet these shocks rightly live on in the mysterious underbelly of the technology–to be eciscerated as "magic" in frontier rituls of technological supremacy. To take the talking machine to the jungle is to emphasize and embellish the genuine mystery and accomplishment of mechnical reproduction in an age when technology itself, after the flurry of excitement at a new breakthrough, is seen not as mystique or poetry but as routine. Taking the talking machine to the jungle is to do more than impress the natives and therefore oneself with western technology’s power[...] it is to reinstall the mimetic faculty as mystery in the art of mechanical reproduction, reinvigorating the primitivism implicit in the technology’s wildest dreams, therewith creating a surfeit of mimetic power. PP208

1.2.2.14.5_As with the dog of His Master’s Voice[...]It is the task of the animal to register the redicovery of the naturalness of the mimetic faculty in a technical age–confirming benjamin’s insight regarding the rebirth of the mimetic with mechanical reproduction. PP210

1.2.2.14.7_On the other hand, controlled mimesis is an essential component of socialization and discipline, and in our era of world history, in which colonialism has played a dominant role, mimesis is of a piece with primitivism. PP219

1.2.2.14.8_Horkheimer and Adorno" marxist inflection of Nietzche’s view of civilazation, turning the animal in man against itself, receives its due, the [talking] dog now being the civilized man’s servant in the detection, and hence, selling, of good copy. With the transformation from the sorcerer’s practice combining imitation and contact in the use of the footprint to that of fingerprinting (and use of the camera) by the State in the late nineteenth century, this "organized control of mimesis" has reached an unmatched level of perfection, truly the modernist rebirth of the mimetic faculty. PP220

1.2.2.14.9_But in this {Talkin dog] logo it is also possible to discern a continuous and indecisive struggle betwwen technology and magic, indicating codependence. For on the one hand the animal is what assures the fidelity of technical reproduction. But on the other, the dog not only looks quizzical but is in fact being fooled, for there is no real master, just the copy of the master’s voice. The technology of reproduction triumphs over the dog but needs the dog’s validation. PP224

1.2.2.14.10_Aristotle’s pleasure, the (not so) simple fact that observing mimesis is pleasureable.. And just as surely there is an ellemnt in colonialis mastery in this laughter;[...]how difficult it is to pry mimesis loose from pervaisve intimations of primitiveness. But there is also the possibility that this sudden laugh from nowhere registers a tremor in cultural identity, and not only identity, but in the security of Being itself. This is like Bataille’s laugh; a sensuous explosion of smooth muscle composing being in the same instant as it extinguishes it. This is benjamin’s flash, as when he writes that there is something peculiar about similarity: "Its perception is in every case bound to an instantaneous flash. It slips past, can possibly be regained, but really cannot be held fast, unlike other perceptions. It offers itself to the eye as fleetingly and transitorily as a constellation of stars. "PP226

1.2.2.14.12_Primitives make mighty mimics[...] But in the second half of the twentieth century, objects as commodities have displaced one side of the mirror. No loger is it sailors of the royal nay dancing s jig and pulling horrid faces, but a still-life of a British dog selling faithful sound recordings. Truly the commodity economy has displaced persons, if not into things then into copies of things flaring with life of their own, briefly animated (as Disney has taught us) by animal life stirring in the thickets of an ever-receding lost nature. Modernity stimulated primitivism along with wiping out the primitive. Commodity production was the motor of this destruction, and it was in the representation of commodities in popular colture that the primitivism of modernity surfaced with unquenchable energy. Is this the undefinable power that Cuna omen with their copies of copies bring out for western eyes? It is a visceral effect, to be sure, a ripple of pleasure felt as sheer substance, in which the mimetic machinery of the West is now mimed by the handiwork of tropical women restoring aura to the opening up of the optical unconscious achieved by those machines. For what could better highlight, magnify, and bring out the viscerality hidden in the optical unconscious than the auratic sheen of mimesis and alterity provided by these demuere women stitching the West on their chests with the same gesture as they preserve tradition?If the optical unconscious provided by mimetic machines is the preserve of waking dreams, as Benjamin would have it, then the Cuna Talking Dog awakens the dream. The Cuna Talking Dog , indeed looks back–looks back at the viewer and looks back to what benjamin theorized as the "recently outmoded," the surrealist power of yesteryear’s fashion, as well. PP231 PP231

1.2.2.14.13_The surrealists perceived an "atmosphere" concealed in these recently outmoded things. They based their (would-be revolutionary) art on bringing this "atmosphere" to the point of explosion, creating a "profane illumination," to which Benjamin referred as a "materialistic, anthropological inspiration." PP232

1.2.2.14.14_[...]The Third World and its objects are in a global perspective generally seen as permanently "recently outdated," a reservoir of First-World hand-me downs and sleepy-eyed memories of earlier consumer items. PP232

1.2.2.14.15_Obsolescence is where the future meets the past in the dying body of the commodity. Because history requires a medium for its reckoning, a temporal landscape of substance and things in which the meaning of events no less than the passage of time is recorded, in modern times it is the commodity that embodies just such a ready-reckoning of the objectification of the pathos of novelty. PP232-233

1.2.2.14.16_The commodity does more than yield the measure of history as time. it is also the petrified historical event where nature passed into culture, where raw material combined with human labor and technology to satisfy cultured design. Standing thus at the crossroad of past and future, nature and culture, and submerging birth in death, the commodity is hardly a sign or symbol. Only in religion and magic can we find equivalent economies of meaning and practies of expenditure in which an object, be it a commodity or a fetish, spills over its referent and suffuses its component parts with ineffable radiance. PP233

1.2.2.14.20_Fashion is the realm in which the obsolescennt character of the commodity is nourished and ritualized. in its tense articulation of future and past, ashion heralds birth and death. This is on ereason why the commodity is endowed with a spectral quality. In his famous text on the fetishism of commodities, Karl marx stated that all the "magic and necromancy" of the commodity is dissipated if we turn our gaze to noncapitalist societies, where production was not dictaed by the free market and hence the commodity form. But in societies on the margin of capitalist industry or capitalist culture, and where strong local traditions of magic exist as well, then the magic and necromancy of the commodity is not so muh dissipated as fortified. PP234

1.2.2.14.21_{As in the Cuna land of the dead, stuffed with the souls of white man’s commodities, and their appearance in women’s molas. PP234

1.2.2.15.1_...history has decreed otherwise. Mastery is mocked asFirst Worlds and Other Worlds now mirror, interlock, and rupture each other’s alterity to such a degree that all that is left is excess–the self-consciousness as to the need for an identity, sexual, racial. ethnic, and national, and the roller-coastering violence and enjoyment ofthis state of affairs. PP236-237

1.2.2.15.2_Mastery is no longer posible. The West as mirrored in the eyes and handiwork of its others undermines the stability which mastery needs. What remains is unsettled and unsetling interpretation in constant movement with itself–what I have elsewhere callled a Nervous System–because the interpreting self is itself grafted into the object of study. The self enters into the alter against which the self is defined and sustained. PP237

1.2.2.15.3_let me try to explain this mimetic vertigo through examples, and let me emphasize my intention to bring out the ways that the mimetic and alteric effect of such reflections must problematize the very act of making senseof reflection–which is why it fascinates and emits social power, and why it strips the anthropologist nakes[...]The problem, then, is how to stop yet another defensive appropriation of the unfamiliar by means of an "explanation", insead of creating another quite different mode of reaction to disconcertion adequate to late twentieth-century patterning of identities and alterities. For just as nature abhors a VACUUM, SO THE VERTIGINOUS CULTURAL INTERSPACE EFFCETED BY THE REFLECTION MAKES MANY OF US DESPERATE TO FILL IT WITH MEANING, THEREBY DEFUSING DISCONCERTION. TO RESIST THIS DESPERATION IS NOT EASY. PP237

1.2.2.15.4_17 Sympathetic Magic in a Post-Colonial Age