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"he Nervous System / Notes to 83-111 Notes to 112-121 6. REIFICATION AND THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE PATIENT I wish to thank Drs Tom O'Brien and Steven Vincent for helping me begin this project, and the members of the 1977 Marxist Anthropology seminar at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, for their comments on an early draft of this paper. 1. Gcorg Lukacs, "Reification and the Class Consciousness of the Proletariat," in History and Class Consciousness (London: Merlin Press, 1971), pp. 83-222. 2. t. E. Hvans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937). .}. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (Secaucus N.J.: Citadel Press, 1956), abridged cd., pp. 279-80. 4. P. Radin, Primitive Man as a Philosopher (New York: Dover, 1957), p. 274. 5. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Farrcr, Strauss & Giroux, 1978). 6. R. Linder, "Diagnosis: Description or Prescription?" Perc. Mot. Skills 20(1965), 1081; cited in M. Blaxter, "Diagnosis as Category and Process: The Case of Alcoholism," Social Science and Medicine 12(1978), 12. 7. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization (New York: Mentor Books, 1967). 8. Ivan Illich, Medical Nemesis (London: Caldar & Boyars, 1975). 9. J. Horn, Away with All Pests (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969). 10. L. Goodman and A. Gilman, eds., The Pharmacoloqical Basis of Therapeutics, 5th ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1975), pp. 166-67. 11. Steckel, S. Boehm and M. Swain, "Contracting with Patients to Improve Compliance," Journal of the American Hospital Association 51(1977), 82. 12. Ibid., p. 81. 13. Steckel S. Boehm, "The Use of Positive Reinforcement in Order to Increase Patient Compliance," Journal of the American Association of Nephrology Nursing Technique 1(1974), 40. 14. Ibid. 15. A. Kleinman, L. Eisenberp, and B, Good, "Culture, Illness and Care: Clinical Lessons ' t o from Anthropologic and Cross-cultural Research," Annals of Internal Medicine 88(1978). 16. Kleinman et al., ibid., 256. 17. Ibid., 257. 18. Ibid. 19. V. Turner, "A Ndembu Doctor in Practice." The Forest of Symbols (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1967), p. 392. 20. Claude Levi-Strauss, "The Sorcerer and His Magic." Structural Anthropology (New York: Anchor Books, 1967), pp. 161-80. 7. MALEFICIUM: STATE FETISHISM 1. Mv own introduction to the cultural studv of the modern State and to see this as a problem worth thinking about comes from The Great Arch; English State Formation As Cultural Revolution by Philip Corrigan and Derek Saver (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), by w-ay of the insights and encouragement of Professor Bernard Cohn of the University of Chicago. 2. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry Into The Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, edited and with introduction bv Adam Phillips (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 59. 3. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: Or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical! and Cm! (New York: Collier MacMillan, 1962), p. 132. 4. Shlomo Avineri, Hegel's Theory of the Modern State (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1972), p. ix. A.R. RadclilTe-Rrovvn, preface, in African Political S\stcms, ed. M. Fortes and E. E. Evans-Pritchard (Oxlord: Oxford Uni\ersity Press, 1970), pp. xi-xxiii. 5. Radcliffe-Brown, p. xxiii, emphasis added. 6. Philp Abrams, "Notes on The Difficulty of Studying the State," journal of Historical Sociology, 1:1 (1988), 58. 7. Ibid., p. 77. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Quoted in The New York Times, Mav 3, 1990 (p. B 1), in the coverage ot the violent dispute over gambling on the Mohawk reservation upstate New York. 1 1. Max Weber, "Politics As a Vocation," in From Max Weber: Essays m Sociology, trans, and edited by Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1948), p. 79. 12. I am indebted to Adam Ashforth for bringing this observation of Benjamin's to my attention. 1 3. Quoted in Robert Ackcrman, J. G. Fra/.er: His Life and Work (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 63. 14. In his foreword to an exhaustive collection of essays and talks prepared by the College of Sociology group around Bataillc, Caillois, and to some extent, Leiris (to name the bestknown), Denis Hollier indicates the College's vexed dependence on Durkheim and his school, especially in relation to the place of the "primitive" and "the sacred" in modern West European society; see Denis Hollier, ed., The College of Sociology, 1937-39 (Minneapolis: Univcrsitv of Minnesota Press, 1988). While many of the key concepts of Durkheim, almost bv default, would be theirs too, there were also profound differences, beginning with the question that formed the basis to their project—namely, the place of the sacred in modernity. Another outstanding difference is the College's notion of the sacred as not only a lorce for Durkheimian social solidarity, but also the opposite, the sacred as an excess, as "the outburst," as Caillois put it in 1938, "of violations of the rules of life," which is, of course, thoroughly consistent with Bataillc's fascination with taboo and transgression—a "post-Durkheimian" rewriting of the Liberal problematic of reason and violence; Roger Cailloi.s, in I he College of Sociology, 1937-39, p. 152. 15. William Pietz, "The Problem of the Fetish: I," RES, 9 (Spring 1985), 5-17, and unpublished 227-page manuscript on the history of the fetish. 16. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). 17. Quoted in a footnote in Steven Lukes, Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), p. 35. 18. Ibid., pp. 34-35. 19. George Catlin, "Introduction To The Translation," in Fmilc Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method (New York: The Free Press, 1964), p. xiv. 20. Lukes, op. cit. pp. 11-12. 21. Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action: A Study in Social Theory With Special Reference to a Group of Recent European Writers (New York: The Free Press, 1937). 22. As far as I can determine, Durkheim uses the term "fetish" but once in The EJememarv Forms of Religious Life (New York: The Free Press, 1965), p. 144, and does so in order to
The Nervous System / Notes to 121-128 Notes to 129-143 dissociate the totem from it. But this dissociation is implausible and probably reflects his need to distance himself from the theory of animism and fetishism put forward hv the British anthropologist E. B. Tylor. Durkheim's sociological analysis of "totemism" {guided by extant ethnography), in particular his tying sacred designs to a specific and bounded social grouping (hence "society"), is now considered wrong in important ways, ways that reflect profoundly on the present-day politics of land-claims by Aboriginal people against the Australian State. For important revisions of the sociology of the Australian "totemism" see W. E. H. Stanner, "Religion, Totemism and Symbolism," in White Man Got No Dreaming (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1979), pp. 106-43, and also his "Reflections on Durkheim and Aboriginal Religion," in Maurice Freedman, Social Organization; Essays Presented to Raymond Firth (Chicago: Aldine, 1967), pp. 217-40. For a debunking of the social philosophical basis of the anthropology of totemism, see Claude Levi-Strauss, lotemism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963). 23. Parsons, op. cit, p. 469, footnotes that Durkheim failed to admit that there was any such transformation. 24. Ibid. 25. Lukes, op. cit., p. 21. 26. Walter Benjamin, "Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia," in Reflections (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovieh, 1978), pp. 177-92, Of course I have taken great liberties here with Benjamin's suggestion. 27. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, pp. 142-43. 28. Roger Keesing, "Rethinking Mana, "Journal of Anthropological Research, 40 (1984), 1 37- 56. Also R. Needham, "Skulls and Causality," Man (n.s.), 11(1977): 71-78. This image of magical force as miasma is also crucial to Freud's analysis of imitation and contagion in Totem and Taboo. 29. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 144, emphasis added. It is obvious from Spencer and Gillen that the designs and the churingas are far from being all that goes into invoking sacred power. These elements are inserted into performative routines in which singing the dreamtinie and dance are essential. Durkheim himself cites many passages indicating this too. Nevertheless it is to the designs on the objects that he attributes central importance. 30. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 145. 31. He employs this argument vigorously with regard to what he identifies as sacred force in the principles mana, in Oceania, and wakan, in North America, and so forth. 32. Baldwin Spencer and F. j. Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central Australia (New York: Dover, 1968), pp. 145-47; first published in 1899. 33. Claude Lcvi-Strauss, "A Writing Lesson," in Tnstes Tropiques: An Anthropological Study of Primitive Societies in Brazil, trans. John Russell, p. 286-97 (New York: Atheneum, 1968). 34. Durkheim, The Elementary Forma, p. 266. 35. Ibid., p. 149, emphasis added. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid., p. 269, emphasis added. 38. Parsons, op. cit., p. 268. 39. Sec also the 1903 work Primitive Classification, by Durkheim and Marcel Mauss. 40. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 31 emphasis added. 41. Ibid., p. 32. 42. Ibid., p. 148. See Spencer and Gillen's version of this, The Native Tribes of Central Australia, p. 181. 43. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 1S6. 44. Ibid., p. 217. 45. Many arc the ironies created by such a comparison. Chief of them is that for Marx, the primitive world is one in which the social character of the (economic) object is transparent to all involved—quite opposite to the situation he describes for people in the capitalist economy of nineteenth-century western Europe. But in Durkheim's argument this is not the case; in primitive society the social character of the (sacred) object is erased, hence fetishized! 46. Ibid., pp. 144, 288. 47. Spencer and Gillen, op. cit., p. 129. 48. Abrams, op. cit., p. 77. 49. E. Lucas Bridges, Uttermost Pan of the Earth (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1951), pp. 424-25. 50. Fmile Durkheim, Professional Ethics and Civic Morals (London: Routlcdge and Kegan Paul, 1957), p. 72, first published, in French in 1904. 51. Friederich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. W. Kauffman (New York: Vintage, 1966), p. 10. 52. Emile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological .Method (New York: Free Press, 1938), p. 70. Thus, since there cannot be a society in which the individuals do not differ more or less from the collective type, it is also inevitable that, among these divergences there are some with a criminal character. What confers this character upon them is not the intrinsic quality of a given act but that definition which the collective conscience lends them. If the collective conscience is stronger, if it has enouph authority practically to suppress these divergences, it will also be more sensitive, more exacting; and, reacting against the slightest deviations with the energy it otherwise displays only against more considerable infractions, it will attribute to them the same gravity as formerly to crimes. In other words, it will designate them as criminal. Crime is, then, necessary; it is bound up with the fundamental conditions of all social life, and by that very fact it is useful, because these conditions of which it is a part are themselves indispensable to the normal evolution of morality and law. 53. Jean Genet, The Thief s journal (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967), p. 141. 54. Genet, p. 157. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid, p. 159. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid., p. 94. 59. Ibid., p. 95. 60. Ibid., pp. 101-102. 61. Ibid., p. 75. 62. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983), p. 16. 63. Genet, op. cit., p. 39. 8. TACTILITY & DISTRACTION This essay was written for the conference "Problematics of Daily Life," organized by Marc Blanchard, Director, Critical Theory, University of California, Davis, November, 1990. 1. F. Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morals, Walter Kauffman ed. (New York: Vintage, 1989), p. 119. 2. Walter Benjamin, "Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire," in Charles Baudelaire: Lyric Poet of High Capitalism (New Left Books: London, 1973), p. 69. 3. Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations 189
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