breath of empty space

culture of terror

dark threatening mass of the undeserving poor

death space

defacement

epistemic murk

fictocriticism

image itself

mastery of non-mastery

mimetic excess

mimetic faculty

nature

nervous system writing

objectness of the object

optics of the nervous system

ordered disorder

politics of epistemic murk

preemptively apocalyptic knowledge

public secret

redeeming the object

sacred - sacrilege

shamanism

spaces of terror

state fetishism

terror as usual

unthought zones of materiality

nationality

Australian

occupation / innovator as

anthropologist

university professor

Columbia University

innovator in the field of

colonialism

marxism

university teacher

anthropology

Mimesis and Alterity

Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man

is something sexually and supernaturally charged with the power of the phantom presence of the known-unknown.

breath of empty space,' something 'sexually and supernaturally charged with the power of the phantom presence of the known-unknown.' ( )

is a society where torture is endemic and 'death spaces' (spaces allowing for enlightenment as well as confusion) proliferate.

Taussig says that in societies where torture is endemic and where the culture of terror flourishes, 'death spaces' proliferate, creating meanings and conscienceness. These spaces aren't necessarily physical, but, as Taussig says, they are more like thresholds. When they are crossed, they allow for enlightenment as well as confusion, as if they were shamanic transitions with transformative effects.' (net)

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is a non-physical space in societies where the culture of terror flourishes.

is a kind of criticism which attempts to duplicate something about the culture in question itself in the style of writing.

to ''duplicate in the writing something about the culture itself.''

is a spillage that oscillates out from the original mimetic act, creating a reflective awareness as to the mimetic faculty.

What Michael Taussig terms 'mimetic excess' is also at work in the Golden Potlatch festivities this excess is what oscillates out from the original mimetic act, an excess or spillage that, at its most generative, creates a 'reflective awareness as to the mimetic faculty.'47' ''

is the faculty to copy, imitate, make models, explore difference, to yield into and become other. It is the nature that culture uses to create second nature.

the nature that culture uses to create second nature, the faculty to copy, imitate, make models, explore difference, yield into and become Other. The wonder of mimesis lies in the copy drawing on the character and power of the original, to the point whereby the representation may even assume that character and that power.' (Taussig, Michael. Mimesis and Alterity . (New York: Routeledge, 1993) xiii.)

is a thing culture uses to create second nature.

is writing that finds itself implicated in the play of institutionalized power as a play of feints and bluffs and as-ifs taken as real in which you are expected to play by the rules only to find there are none and then, like a fish dangling on the hook, you are jerked into a spine-breaking recognition that yes! After all, there are rules..

Nervous System writing, what is that' It is writing that finds itself implicated in the play of institutionalized power as a play of feints and bluffs and as-ifs taken as real in which you are expected to play by the rules only to find there are none and then, like a fish dangling on the hook, you are jerked into a spine-breaking recognition that yes! after all, there are rules. And so it goes. Not a system but a Nervous System, a nervously nervous Nervous System, impressed upon me negotiating military roadblocks in the Putumayo area of rural Colombia in the 1980s as the counterguerrilla war heated up and reality was how shall we put this 'elastic' and multiple, 'montaged,' Brecht would say, a fact that had been strongly impressed upon me by the spasmodic flows of sorcery and its curing by shamans singing with the hallucinogens drunk in small groups, myself included. Think of a cubist drawing with its intersecting planes and disorganization of cherished Renaissance perspective. Think of a person changing into a jaguar, at least from the waist up. Or yourself outside of yourself looking at yourself. 'The silence fell heavy and blue in mountain villages,' wrote William Burroughs, no doubt thinking back to his time in the Putumayo, with that 'pulsing mineral silence as word dust falls from demagnetized patterns.'7 As I listened harder to my friends in agribusiness slum towns far from that sort of war and those hallucinations and that sorcery, I sensed how multiple real were their views of the world, too. (taussig 'corn-wolf' 2010:31)

Taussig (1992, 2) calls 'ordered disorder, the exception and the rule' (emphasis in original). Taussig analyzes terror in Columbia and elsewhere in Latin America, focusing particularly on how state-controlled death-patrols have operated through fear, and how the state of siege became the norm. The special conditions of this situation were that the state declared the exception. It tried to control its reach, which, according to Taussig, was impossible because it became appropriated and turned against the sovereign itself and therewith attempted to ensure the sovereign's special effects. Here, the arbitrariness of power has implications for the legitimation of authority, since reason is suspended and replaced with force and violence. But when the ordered condition is produced, disorder nonetheless continues to boil beneath the surface, retracted from the public gaze. (Blom Hansen)

is, as with the machine which begins to break down that you begin to see how it works, knowledge that it is when authority is challenged that you begin to see the otherwise concealed workings of the power structure.

The mere possibility that this could happen should be sufficient for us to consider other forms of the body's knowing itself as a consequence of planetary crisis and meltdown. It is when the machine begins to break down that you begin to see how it works. Likewise it is when authority is challenged that you begin to see the otherwise concealed workings of the power structure. This we could call apocalyptic knowledge, or preemptively apocalyptic knowledge, a thought experiment we can now conduct on ourselves and which in my case, which is the book before you, involves interrogating color as an offshoot of calor---for example, when you heat a pocketknife, as did Goethe, and feel the colors emanating therefrom, 'passing like a breath,' he says, flowing and changing at red heat to a beatiful blue and beyond. (Taussig 14)

is an 'active unknowing' or 'knowing unknowing', which consist in knowing what not to know'.

Michael Taussig's essay is also about affect. He speaks of the 'public secrecy', an 'active unknowing' or 'knowing unknowing', which consist in knowing what not to know' (457) (net)

is the routine violence of everyday life.

Michael Taussig

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