The Nervous System - Department of English and Comparative ...

e Nervous System / Notes to 144-153
(Schocken Books: New York, 1969), p. 238. In emphasizing the tactile in the reorganization
of the human sensorium in the early twentieth century, Benjamin was echoing not only Dada
but even earlier statements, such as that of the Russian, Tatlin, in 1913: ". . . the eye should
he put under control of touch." Benjamin Buchloh, from whose article on "From Faktura to
Factography;" in October. The First Decade; 1976-1986, ed. Annette Michelson (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1987), p. 81, I take this quotation, adds to it Marcel Duchamp's "famous
statement" that he wanted to "abolish the supremacy of the retinal principle in art."
4. Benjamin, "A Short History' of Photography," in One Way Street, (London: New Left
Books, 1979), p. 44.
5. T. W. Adorno, "A Portrait of Walter Benjamin," p. 240, in Prisms (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1981). I have used Susan Buck-Morss' translation of this passage from her Origin of
Negative Dialectics (New York: The Free Press, 1977), p. 83.
6. J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, Part I: "The .Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings, vol. 1,
3rd edition, (London: Macmillan, 1911), 57.
7. lake the opening paragraph of Benjamin's 1934 essay, "On the Mimetic Faculty," in
Reflections (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovitch, 1978), p. 333, which reads:
Nature creates similarities. One need only think of mimicry. The highest capacity
for producing similarities, however, is man's. His gift of seeing resemblances is
nothing other than a rudiment of the powerful compulsion in former times to
become and behave like something else. Perhaps there is none of his higher
functions in which his mimetic faculty does not play a decisive role.
Adorno had much to say about the relation between alleged origins of mankind, mimesis,
and magic, in his posthumously edited Aesthetic theory (London and New York: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1984; first published in German in 1970). A good place to begin is with
Appendix II, "Thoughts on the Origins of Art—An Excursus," pp. 447-55.
8. Gertrude Koch, "Mimesis and the Ban on Graven Images," paper distributed in Dept.
of Cinema Studies, New York University, 1990, forthcoming in October. Sec also Sergei
Eisenstein's 1935 lecture, "Film Form; New Problems," in his Film Form, trans, jay Leyda
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, jovanovich, 1977), pp. 133-45.
9. Benjamin, "One Way Street," in Reflections, 86.
10. Benjamin, "On the Mimetic Faculty," op. cit., 333.
9. HOMESICKNESS & DADA
This is a modified version of my essay, "The Nervous System: Dada and Homesickness,"
which appeared in the Stanford Humanities Review 1:1 (Spring 1989), 44—81.
1. Victor Turner, From Ritual to Drama: The Human Seriousness ofPlav {New York, Performing
Arts Journal Publications, 1982), p. 72.
2. Roland Barthcs, "Brecht and Discourse: A Contribution to the Study of Discursivity,"
The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 212-22.
3. Walter Benjamin, "On the Mimetic Faculty," in Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott,
ed. Peter Demetz (New York & London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1978), p. 336.
4. W. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans, John Oshorne (London: New
Left Books, 1977), p. 161.
5. Ibid., p. 163.
6. Ibid., p. 165.
7. Theodore W. Adorno, Gessammehe Schriften, I, Philosophische Fruhscritten, ed. Rolf Tiedemann
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1973), p. 367.
Notes to 153-165
8. This discussion needs to be supplemented by a history of Sau$.sure's forbears See I G
Merquior, From Prague to Pom (London: Verso, 1986), pp. 10-12, and Hans Aarslef, From Locke
to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1982),
9. Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time, ed, and introduction by John hlderfWld, trans. Ann Raimes
with foreword to 1946 edition to Emmy Ball Hennings (New York: Viking Press, 1974) p
66.
10. The pertinence of this connection was pointed out to me in a lecture at Columbia
University in 1984 by Professor Sylverc Lotringer ot the Dept of French of that university.
11. Elderheld, in Ball, op. cit., p. xxiii
12. Ball, op. cit, p. 63
13. Elderficld, in Ball, op. cit., p. xxiii.
14. Ibid., pp. xliii—xliv
15. Robert Motherwell, The Dada Painters and Poets (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1981), p. xxvi.
16. Ball, op. cit., p. 56.
17. Ibid., p. 65.
18. Ibid., p. 55.
19. Ibid., p. 67.
20. Ibid., p. 71.
21. Ibid.
22. Motherwell, op. cit., pp. xxv—xxvi.
23. ElderHeld, in Ball, op. cit., p. xxv.
24. Mircea Fliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasv, tram. W. R. Trask, Bollin^ui
Series LXXVI (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), p. xv.
25. T. W. Adorno, "Der Wunderliche Realist: Uber Siegfried Kracauer," cited in Susan
Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theordore W Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the
Frankfurt Institute (New York: Free Press, 1977), p. 80.
26. Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Verso, 1983), pp. 17-
18.
27. Roger Dunsmore, "Nickolaus Black Elk; Holy Man in History," Kuksu: journal of Back
Country Writing 6 (1979), 9.
28. Ibid., p. 8.
29. Black Elk through John Nierhardt in Black FJk Speaks (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of
Nebraska Press, 1979), p. 270.
30. Alejo Carpenticr, The Lost Steps, trans, Harriet du Oni.s (New York: Knopf, 1974), p.
179.
31. Ibid., p. 180.
32. Ibid., p. 183.
33. Ibid., p. 184.
34. Ibid., p. 187.
35. I am unhappy using this word "soul" as a translation for the Cun&purba. So was Erland
Nordcnskiold, who wrote that "Purba is the only word which the Cuna Indians who know
some foreign language, translate as soul , . . but I still prefer not to translate it at all. It means
so much." Erland Nordenskiold, An Historical and Ethnographic Survey of the Cuna Indians, m
Collaboration »ith the Cuna Indian Ruben Perez Kantule, ed. Henry Wassen, Comparati\e Ethnographical
Studies, No. 10 (Gotcburg, 1983), p. 334.
36. The wooden figurines are said by Nordenskiold to be caned in the form ot Europeans,
and as "Non-Indians," by Norman Macphcsron Chapin, "Curing Among the San Bias Kuna
of Panama (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Arizona, 1983), pp. 94—95, Yet the
spirit-power is said by native informants to derive from the wood itself, and not the outer
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