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Published in 1992 by Routledge An imprint of Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc. 29 West 35 Street New York, NY 10001 CONTENTS Published in Great Britain by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE Copyright © 1992 by Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc. Printed in the United States of America All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Library of Congress and British Library cataloguing in publication data is available. ISBN 0-415-90444-7 (HB) ISBN 0-415-90445-S (PB) \ Acknowledgments vii 1. Why the Nervous System? 1 2. Terror As Usual: Walter Benjamin's Theory of History As State of Siege 11 3. Violence and Resistance in the Americas: The Legacy of Conquest 37 4. An Australian Hero 53 5. Cane Toads: An Unnatural History 79 6. Reification and the Consciousness of the Patient 83 7. Maleficium: State Fetishism 111 8. Tactility and Distraction 141 9. Homesickness & Dada 149 Notes 183 Bibliography 195 Index 201
WHY THE NERVOUS SYSTEM? I know of investigators experienced in this art of diversion which is a return of ethical pleasure and of invention within the scientific institution. Realizing no profit (profit is work done for the factory), and often at a loss, they take something of the order of knowledge in order to inscribe "artistic achievements" on it and to carve on it the graffiti of their debts of honor. To deal with everyday tactics in this way would be to practice an "ordinary" art, to find oneself in the common situation and to make a kind of appropriation of writing itself. —Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life I am working on the Nervous System, and it's turning out to be hard labor indeed. Sometimes I suspect it's working even harder on me than I am on it. This puts Hermeneutics and Reflexivity in a new light, since they're now exposed as a property of the NS itself and not of the individual subject— that curious entity from which many of us have grown to latterly distance ourselves. Thank God it's only a fiction. Nervous System. That's all it said, scrawled across a shed I passed on the ferry, gliding over the green waters of Sydney Harbor, whenever I went into the city, reading about the terror of the early 20th-century rubber boom in the lower Putumayo River in southwest Colombia. It was the early 1980s. The signs in the street were of unemployment, purple hair, and postmod anarchy. Apocalyptic omens. An underground doing time. And over there and far away, Colombia was in a state of siege. Torture by the State was commonplace. Paramilitary squads were on the make. Whenever I got up from my desk to cross the sunlit bay away from my other world over there and back then in those Putumayan forests, the Nervous System stared at me in the fullness of its scrawled, enigmatic, might. A portent? A voice from nowhere tugging at my distracted attention. For I could not believe let alone begin to explain the terrible material I was reading about over there and back then, and much less could I put words to it. Wrenched this way, then that, I believed it all, I believed nothing. On yes! I admit to falling foul of the whirlygigging of the Nervous System, first nervous, then a system; first system, then nervous—nerve
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The Nervous System it, such a proje
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The Nervous System State Fetishism
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The Nervous System one of Walter Be
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The Nervous System Tactility and Di
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The Nervous System to be Benjamin's
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The Nervous System Homesickness & D
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