In the author's note to My Cocaine Museum, Michael Taussig says that he wants his book to speak as a fetish. "This is the language I want, a substantial language, aroused through prolonged engagement with gold and cocaine, reeking in its stammering intensity of delirium and failure. Why failure? Because unwinding the fetish is not yet given on the horizon of human possibility" (xviii). I'm sure we can speak in various complex ways about fetishism, but going from Marx at least it seems we (or rather, perhaps Taussig, definitely me) mean some thing in which we believe value or power itself inheres, independent of the social web of signification by which we actually assign it value and power. So perhaps Taussig wants us to think his book is magical? Or perhaps he wants us to read it "as if"... By the time we get to the end, after Gorgona, and Taussig talks about mimesis and storytelling, his desire to work within the relationship between language and things, we've crossed rivers, pirates, narcotraffickers, Genet, snowflakes, heat, Benjamin, murderers, children, spirits, golddiggers, drunkards, canoes, and much else in a sometimes dreamlike, always erudite, and frequently beautiful journey. As wonderful as it was to read, though, it is harder to know how to talk about it...
Language is a virus, said William S. Burroughs, so perhaps we can think of My Cocaine Museum as a kind of medicine, a medicine fetish, something that purges and sweats. It's not diagnostic, it doesn't tell us what's wrong--we already know, with the gold and cocaine, with the rapacity of global development and the transgressiveness of punishing greed, that we've met the disease and he is us--but perhaps as a language-fetish, as a bit of mimetic shamanism, My Cocaine Museum can illuminate, or clarify, or some other light-based metaphor of activity, or perhaps it is more visionary, or sensual, or perhaps it is more like a fever. Taussig writes "There is a real sense in which Benjamin is advocating above all a 'shamanic take' on the artificial modern world of capitalism. This is why Adorno gets it so right when he sums up Benjamin's method as 'the need to become a thing in order to break the catastrophic spell of things' " (258). This seems to speak to what the book works toward and does, the magic it works: not casting a spell, but breaking one.
After reading My Cocaine Museum, the “transgressive substances” on the cover took on a new meaning. Each object, as well as the things written in the text, became the duality of their ‘substance and force’. (xiii) The bone is also a button, the stone an arrow, the tool a knife. (Was Durham purposeful naming the materiality over the enactment?) In the text, language becomes both literal and metaphoric; the justice system both criminalizes and relies upon cocaine. (177, 275) In a way, Taussig is looking at the reasons for privileging of one definition of a thing over another – the labeling of a little man over a toy, the users of cocaine in Columbia over the beneficiaries in the U.S., the valuing of gold while ignoring the abuses. It seems this unnamed contradiction (a thing being two things) is the crux of the mythic power that Taussig is chasing. (275)
While Taussig is clearly passionate about his subject and writes with great force, within all the paradoxes I sometimes lost his intentions. For instance, he talks about freeing the stone from “the burden of history” (250) but also goes to great lengths to reestablish history. Or does the freeing and restoration become the same thing? In other words, what did I already know but didn’t think I knew? (xiii)
Taussig starts “his” cocaine museum by asking a direct question that cuts deep into Colombia’s history, the objects it chooses to fetishize, and the people it chooses to forget. He is troubled by a missing story in one of the most renowned museums of the country. He asks over and over: Why is the Gold Museum silent about African slavery in gold mines that supported the political economy of the colony? This silence is surely not exclusive to the Gold Museum; it is found in society at large, a troublesome fact indeed, but historical montages can be tricky. For instance, the museum’s theme is pre-Hispanic goldwork, meaning before colonial times, that is, before slaves were brought to the country! These are some of the confusing images of the country’s history one gets from a montage style such as Taussig’s. Focused on gold and cocaine as fetishes, he tries to combine a history of things with a history of people, not following a linear course, but rather displaying intense flashes that themselves tend to fetishize in turn everyday life stories usually caught up in the midst of violence, sorcery and transgression. So, under this light, the book reads as an accumulation of the ethnographer’s work in the country and his incessant relation to Walter Benjamin. Representation and terror are center stage here—a problematic combination, at least for me. The subsequent 200 pages are filled with free association from natural history back to human history: a rock takes him to a book, a book takes him to an idea, an idea to an author, and author to an ethnographic entry, an ethnographic entry to an autobiographical account, an autobiographical account to a reflection about weather and so forth. His fabulous storytelling wants to collapse the thing and the word into the same materiality. I truly appreciate this move; it is evocative, “m-a-t-e-r-i-a-l” in all its right. The same corporeal and natural things that are directly involved in gold mining, and to less extent in coca production, end up telling their own social histories: heat, sweat, swamp, water, color, wind, weather, miasma… stones.
Taussig wants us to see, feel, hear… because the heat, the desperation, boredom, wonder, it is real, and through translation and transformation we may be pushed towards new ways of sensing. Following Callois and his determination to forge different taxonomies, Taussig champions unexpected orders, meanings, sensations, through transgressive substances, small things, formless things that evoke death and life, and the blurred, snarled entangled, enmeshed interconnections, juxtapositions, “the confusion of the division between mind and body, spirit and matter, same as the confusion between form and substance” (125). Taussig’s connections and collections, like the gold museum and like his book, both reveal and hide stories, histories, things. They evade and evoke, through the mimetic symmetry immanent in magic, technology, structures, material, simplifying as much as extending meanings, made graspable, just as we should let go…
Contrary states are held together, made static, while moving, mutating, living, dying, festering. But, what makes them contrary, except his declaration that they are? Taussig follows and makes connections through his role as anthropologist/storyteller, translating or writing into being a changing earth, histories and state, which gold, cocaine and other elements are subject and subjected. Change as they may, the substances remain, resonating and reaching out past time, place, towards these things even more. This reach beyond is very much the thing itself. Magnetized, Taussig returns to Santa Maria, Gorgon, the coast, through mythology, history, ethnography through non-linear space-time and an interactive nature, petrified and awakened, appearing and disappearing through shock and movement. Revealing parts as whole, graspable, but beyond reach, beyond writing and capture, yet contained, collected within the book, geographies, state, laws that each seek transcendence, and transgression, through mimesis and imitation. Becoming, in order to bask in a cosmic oneness, or to dominate, and move beyond… Either way, imagination, and destabilization are summoned to reach a primordial Whole, whose parts inspire risk, and transformation
Michael Taussig's short essay titled “moonshine” procures a concise microcosm of the status of 'things' in My Cocaine Museum. In assessing the value of the objects gold, biché, and cocaine, Taussig enumerates the various approaches by which 'things' come to be analyzed as 'things'. First, something about their physical properties are important: they are all “enormously valuable in relation to their volume and weight.” Of course, they also have innumerably different qualities as well—for example, whereas biché and cocaine can be produced, gold cannot. Second, the implications of these properties matter significantly in terms of where they can be procured: they all can be found or harvested outside rural domains—an ideal trait for the latter two considering their illegality. Third, they are bound up in networks of circulation, regulation, and monopolization. And fourth, in defiance of economic theory, or so Taussig argues, these commodity-things “challenge everything the market stands for.” That is, they have a certain aesthetic—in all there degrees of beauty and sensuality—which makes them something special when brought into relation with people. Put more concisely, these things gain special properties when brought into particular arrangements with humans; properties that are meaningless outside of this relationship. This fourth quality, I think, challenges a certain ambition to know of a thing in itself. What is the cocaine-ness of cocaine if we foreclose its psychoactive capabilities? To try and write outside this human-bound relation would be to tackle Uexkull's seemingly impossible multiple worlds problem.
On page 80, Taussig tells us that there are only two steps and one trick involved in the determination of the fate of humanity. Our first step is to observe then imitate nature. The second step is to go beyond this imitation, “to become one with what you are imitating…here imitation undergoes a radical development. It passes from being outside to being inside, in fact to becoming other”. But then there is the trick, the “fork in the road” as Taussig says, the choice. As in the case of water, in becoming other (in becoming water) you can stay there, “like water in water, for the sheer hell of it, for the pleasure at the loss of self and the transformations of Being”, or you can chose to dominate nature and seek to profit from it.
It would seem that Taussig himself often takes the first choice and, as a good anthropologist, does not particularly denounce the second—he simply acknowledges it. His insistence on the first choice does however give us an incredibly visceral read. He is all about lots of viscosity. He tells us not to submerge with Helmreich in a submersible, but to open up the door when we are miles down in the sea and let our bodies explode (or is it implode?).
Or…so, these are where my thoughts went as he explained his rush to return back to a sloth, who is “as close to death as you can get to life”, in order to take a picture (308). But this fantastic metaphorical creature “that plays havoc with life and death”, was fantastically metaphorically destroyed, that is, hacked up and rearranged in the shape of its original “form”. This is the game of “What is Life” that Joseph Beuys had constantly tinkered with in his installations and performances. Beuys not only included dead animals in his performances, but created things with the form of dead animals. In My Cocaine Museum, Taussig does not necessarily linger with the idea of life and death, but he does, in a sense, compare it to something else. In the density of the environments he describes, the miasmas, heat and mud (which he wonders whether it “is solid or liquid or nothing at all” 194), he most certainly blurs the self with the other (thing).
What shall we mine from this week’s text? There is a lot here to work with. I am reticent to circumscribe the text with any sort of summation because in a way it is writing against such. It is writing against the concrete… that “covers the earth”. That is, through what Ana referred to as his “free association” of thoughts we are asked to consider how things might relate to each other, and how possibly we can know something through its wide ranging, unbounded implications, just for being in the world. By the title of the book you would think that this were going to be about cocaine, but instead cocaine is just a departure point, a point in which to let oneself go into the circulation of goods and meaning, but not fixed meanings.
I would say that this text is not so much about anything that exists but which might exist, and ultimately about what we might know, “but didn’t know we knew”. I would say, in a way it is about the mediations between fixities and contingencies. Or as he says repeatedly: “something like that.”
There is a sense in this book that the history of the fetishized objects is in fact a history of the land and people combined, that body and geography are one. The "transgressive dynamic" thus appears as an alluring quality to the gold or cocaine that is drawn from danger and violence, exploitation. More importantly, the book uses cocaine as a kind of revisionist museum history of gold. Whereas the bank at Bogota emphasized the wealth beauty of it exhibit, whitewashing the history of mining and slavery, Taussig's cocaine museum as a modern historical perspective, inserts the violence of the colonial past into the essence of the gold, and thus into the land it came from, and the people who mined it. In a way, these fetishes transform the human and geographic resources into entities whose intertwined existences become the propagators of the fetish and the retrievers of the objects. Thus lives are shaped by the places they live and work in order to acquire these commodities, and when we view them as if from a perspective of a museum, these lives appear driven or even controlled by their role in creating an aura of magic or power around industries and business, by which they are exploited but also profit. From prisoners to miners, to stones and leaves, this seems to be the important quality of the book, that we imbue meaning upon objects and people alike, and thus they become connected, or integrated, into larger circuits of everyday and political life.
Taussig writes that “gold and cocaine are fetishes, which is to say substances that seem to be a good deal more than mineral or vegetable matter” and that he wants “My Cocaine Museum to speak as well – as fetish,” (p. xviii). As such Taussig does not resort to write about them as a narrative of colonization, slavery, capitalism, etc. Rather the “real histories” that he writes is that which is beyond human experiences and lives (p. 314). Taussig by bringing out attention to color, heat, rain, stones, … , tells us that the world as we see it today has a history that is already inscribed within the thingness of things. As we discussed last week with Callois’ text, when we shift our frameworks and refocus our attention (away from the cause and effects which we can observe and ‘testify’ for example), a space opens up that accounts for the sedimented qualities of the world. However, I think this project to write about the materiality of things we encounter is extremely difficult. What is the relationship between how we fetishize and crystallize? (What does he means when he writes “world where time is space”? (p. 246)).
Taussig never seeks to dispel the comfusion and terror, his project is to write it and try to do it otherwise. In Defacement - one of his lesser read books for I'm not sure what reason, it's a great one I think - Taussig argues for writing and theory that seeks not to expose the public secret, to break the spell, or to destroy the fetish, but instead, to enter into their mimetic logics, working and writing through them to enact them other wise. In many senses, I think My Cocaine Museum is an attempt to put this approach into proactice. Taussig enters, as Roy and Ana write, into the logics of histories and objects, writing through them to reach his mystical-theoretical reading list.
After putting this book down, I picked up his Law in a Lawless Land - a great complement to My Cocaine Museum, drawing on similar times spent in Columbia, but one that engages in a much more human centered, ethnographic diary style mode of writing. Combined, the entries that make up these two books provide an amazing array of styles to think through writing objects and histories, natural and other.
In the author's note to My Cocaine Museum, Michael Taussig says that he wants his book to speak as a fetish. "This is the language I want, a substantial language, aroused through prolonged engagement with gold and cocaine, reeking in its stammering intensity of delirium and failure. Why failure? Because unwinding the fetish is not yet given on the horizon of human possibility" (xviii). I'm sure we can speak in various complex ways about fetishism, but going from Marx at least it seems we (or rather, perhaps Taussig, definitely me) mean some thing in which we believe value or power itself inheres, independent of the social web of signification by which we actually assign it value and power. So perhaps Taussig wants us to think his book is magical? Or perhaps he wants us to read it "as if"... By the time we get to the end, after Gorgona, and Taussig talks about mimesis and storytelling, his desire to work within the relationship between language and things, we've crossed rivers, pirates, narcotraffickers, Genet, snowflakes, heat, Benjamin, murderers, children, spirits, golddiggers, drunkards, canoes, and much else in a sometimes dreamlike, always erudite, and frequently beautiful journey. As wonderful as it was to read, though, it is harder to know how to talk about it...
ReplyDeleteLanguage is a virus, said William S. Burroughs, so perhaps we can think of My Cocaine Museum as a kind of medicine, a medicine fetish, something that purges and sweats. It's not diagnostic, it doesn't tell us what's wrong--we already know, with the gold and cocaine, with the rapacity of global development and the transgressiveness of punishing greed, that we've met the disease and he is us--but perhaps as a language-fetish, as a bit of mimetic shamanism, My Cocaine Museum can illuminate, or clarify, or some other light-based metaphor of activity, or perhaps it is more visionary, or sensual, or perhaps it is more like a fever. Taussig writes "There is a real sense in which Benjamin is advocating above all a 'shamanic take' on the artificial modern world of capitalism. This is why Adorno gets it so right when he sums up Benjamin's method as 'the need to become a thing in order to break the catastrophic spell of things' " (258). This seems to speak to what the book works toward and does, the magic it works: not casting a spell, but breaking one.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteAfter reading My Cocaine Museum, the “transgressive substances” on the cover took on a new meaning. Each object, as well as the things written in the text, became the duality of their ‘substance and force’. (xiii) The bone is also a button, the stone an arrow, the tool a knife. (Was Durham purposeful naming the materiality over the enactment?) In the text, language becomes both literal and metaphoric; the justice system both criminalizes and relies upon cocaine. (177, 275) In a way, Taussig is looking at the reasons for privileging of one definition of a thing over another – the labeling of a little man over a toy, the users of cocaine in Columbia over the beneficiaries in the U.S., the valuing of gold while ignoring the abuses. It seems this unnamed contradiction (a thing being two things) is the crux of the mythic power that Taussig is chasing. (275)
ReplyDeleteWhile Taussig is clearly passionate about his subject and writes with great force, within all the paradoxes I sometimes lost his intentions. For instance, he talks about freeing the stone from “the burden of history” (250) but also goes to great lengths to reestablish history. Or does the freeing and restoration become the same thing? In other words, what did I already know but didn’t think I knew? (xiii)
Taussig starts “his” cocaine museum by asking a direct question that cuts deep into Colombia’s history, the objects it chooses to fetishize, and the people it chooses to forget. He is troubled by a missing story in one of the most renowned museums of the country. He asks over and over: Why is the Gold Museum silent about African slavery in gold mines that supported the political economy of the colony? This silence is surely not exclusive to the Gold Museum; it is found in society at large, a troublesome fact indeed, but historical montages can be tricky. For instance, the museum’s theme is pre-Hispanic goldwork, meaning before colonial times, that is, before slaves were brought to the country! These are some of the confusing images of the country’s history one gets from a montage style such as Taussig’s. Focused on gold and cocaine as fetishes, he tries to combine a history of things with a history of people, not following a linear course, but rather displaying intense flashes that themselves tend to fetishize in turn everyday life stories usually caught up in the midst of violence, sorcery and transgression. So, under this light, the book reads as an accumulation of the ethnographer’s work in the country and his incessant relation to Walter Benjamin. Representation and terror are center stage here—a problematic combination, at least for me.
ReplyDeleteThe subsequent 200 pages are filled with free association from natural history back to human history: a rock takes him to a book, a book takes him to an idea, an idea to an author, and author to an ethnographic entry, an ethnographic entry to an autobiographical account, an autobiographical account to a reflection about weather and so forth. His fabulous storytelling wants to collapse the thing and the word into the same materiality. I truly appreciate this move; it is evocative, “m-a-t-e-r-i-a-l” in all its right. The same corporeal and natural things that are directly involved in gold mining, and to less extent in coca production, end up telling their own social histories: heat, sweat, swamp, water, color, wind, weather, miasma… stones.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteNina Mehta
ReplyDeleteTaussig wants us to see, feel, hear… because the heat, the desperation, boredom, wonder, it is real, and through translation and transformation we may be pushed towards new ways of sensing. Following Callois and his determination to forge different taxonomies, Taussig champions unexpected orders, meanings, sensations, through transgressive substances, small things, formless things that evoke death and life, and the blurred, snarled entangled, enmeshed interconnections, juxtapositions, “the confusion of the division between mind and body, spirit and matter, same as the confusion between form and substance” (125). Taussig’s connections and collections, like the gold museum and like his book, both reveal and hide stories, histories, things. They evade and evoke, through the mimetic symmetry immanent in magic, technology, structures, material, simplifying as much as extending meanings, made graspable, just as we should let go…
Contrary states are held together, made static, while moving, mutating, living, dying, festering. But, what makes them contrary, except his declaration that they are? Taussig follows and makes connections through his role as anthropologist/storyteller, translating or writing into being a changing earth, histories and state, which gold, cocaine and other elements are subject and subjected. Change as they may, the substances remain, resonating and reaching out past time, place, towards these things even more. This reach beyond is very much the thing itself. Magnetized, Taussig returns to Santa Maria, Gorgon, the coast, through mythology, history, ethnography through non-linear space-time and an interactive nature, petrified and awakened, appearing and disappearing through shock and movement. Revealing parts as whole, graspable, but beyond reach, beyond writing and capture, yet contained, collected within the book, geographies, state, laws that each seek transcendence, and transgression, through mimesis and imitation. Becoming, in order to bask in a cosmic oneness, or to dominate, and move beyond… Either way, imagination, and destabilization are summoned to reach a primordial Whole, whose parts inspire risk, and transformation
A Brief Reflection on “moonshine”
ReplyDeleteMichael Taussig's short essay titled “moonshine” procures a concise microcosm of the status of 'things' in My Cocaine Museum. In assessing the value of the objects gold, biché, and cocaine, Taussig enumerates the various approaches by which 'things' come to be analyzed as 'things'. First, something about their physical properties are important: they are all “enormously valuable in relation to their volume and weight.” Of course, they also have innumerably different qualities as well—for example, whereas biché and cocaine can be produced, gold cannot. Second, the implications of these properties matter significantly in terms of where they can be procured: they all can be found or harvested outside rural domains—an ideal trait for the latter two considering their illegality. Third, they are bound up in networks of circulation, regulation, and monopolization. And fourth, in defiance of economic theory, or so Taussig argues, these commodity-things “challenge everything the market stands for.” That is, they have a certain aesthetic—in all there degrees of beauty and sensuality—which makes them something special when brought into relation with people. Put more concisely, these things gain special properties when brought into particular arrangements with humans; properties that are meaningless outside of this relationship. This fourth quality, I think, challenges a certain ambition to know of a thing in itself. What is the cocaine-ness of cocaine if we foreclose its psychoactive capabilities? To try and write outside this human-bound relation would be to tackle Uexkull's seemingly impossible multiple worlds problem.
On page 80, Taussig tells us that there are only two steps and one trick involved in the determination of the fate of humanity. Our first step is to observe then imitate nature. The second step is to go beyond this imitation, “to become one with what you are imitating…here imitation undergoes a radical development. It passes from being outside to being inside, in fact to becoming other”. But then there is the trick, the “fork in the road” as Taussig says, the choice. As in the case of water, in becoming other (in becoming water) you can stay there, “like water in water, for the sheer hell of it, for the pleasure at the loss of self and the transformations of Being”, or you can chose to dominate nature and seek to profit from it.
ReplyDeleteIt would seem that Taussig himself often takes the first choice and, as a good anthropologist, does not particularly denounce the second—he simply acknowledges it. His insistence on the first choice does however give us an incredibly visceral read. He is all about lots of viscosity. He tells us not to submerge with Helmreich in a submersible, but to open up the door when we are miles down in the sea and let our bodies explode (or is it implode?).
Or…so, these are where my thoughts went as he explained his rush to return back to a sloth, who is “as close to death as you can get to life”, in order to take a picture (308). But this fantastic metaphorical creature “that plays havoc with life and death”, was fantastically metaphorically destroyed, that is, hacked up and rearranged in the shape of its original “form”. This is the game of “What is Life” that Joseph Beuys had constantly tinkered with in his installations and performances. Beuys not only included dead animals in his performances, but created things with the form of dead animals. In My Cocaine Museum, Taussig does not necessarily linger with the idea of life and death, but he does, in a sense, compare it to something else. In the density of the environments he describes, the miasmas, heat and mud (which he wonders whether it “is solid or liquid or nothing at all” 194), he most certainly blurs the self with the other (thing).
What shall we mine from this week’s text? There is a lot here to work with. I am reticent to circumscribe the text with any sort of summation because in a way it is writing against such. It is writing against the concrete… that “covers the earth”. That is, through what Ana referred to as his “free association” of thoughts we are asked to consider how things might relate to each other, and how possibly we can know something through its wide ranging, unbounded implications, just for being in the world. By the title of the book you would think that this were going to be about cocaine, but instead cocaine is just a departure point, a point in which to let oneself go into the circulation of goods and meaning, but not fixed meanings.
ReplyDeleteI would say that this text is not so much about anything that exists but which might exist, and ultimately about what we might know, “but didn’t know we knew”. I would say, in a way it is about the mediations between fixities and contingencies. Or as he says repeatedly: “something like that.”
There is a sense in this book that the history of the fetishized objects is in fact a history of the land and people combined, that body and geography are one. The "transgressive dynamic" thus appears as an alluring quality to the gold or cocaine that is drawn from danger and violence, exploitation. More importantly, the book uses cocaine as a kind of revisionist museum history of gold. Whereas the bank at Bogota emphasized the wealth beauty of it exhibit, whitewashing the history of mining and slavery, Taussig's cocaine museum as a modern historical perspective, inserts the violence of the colonial past into the essence of the gold, and thus into the land it came from, and the people who mined it. In a way, these fetishes transform the human and geographic resources into entities whose intertwined existences become the propagators of the fetish and the retrievers of the objects. Thus lives are shaped by the places they live and work in order to acquire these commodities, and when we view them as if from a perspective of a museum, these lives appear driven or even controlled by their role in creating an aura of magic or power around industries and business, by which they are exploited but also profit. From prisoners to miners, to stones and leaves, this seems to be the important quality of the book, that we imbue meaning upon objects and people alike, and thus they become connected, or integrated, into larger circuits of everyday and political life.
ReplyDeleteTaussig writes that “gold and cocaine are fetishes, which is to say substances that seem to be a good deal more than mineral or vegetable matter” and that he wants “My Cocaine Museum to speak as well – as fetish,” (p. xviii). As such Taussig does not resort to write about them as a narrative of colonization, slavery, capitalism, etc. Rather the “real histories” that he writes is that which is beyond human experiences and lives (p. 314). Taussig by bringing out attention to color, heat, rain, stones, … , tells us that the world as we see it today has a history that is already inscribed within the thingness of things. As we discussed last week with Callois’ text, when we shift our frameworks and refocus our attention (away from the cause and effects which we can observe and ‘testify’ for example), a space opens up that accounts for the sedimented qualities of the world. However, I think this project to write about the materiality of things we encounter is extremely difficult. What is the relationship between how we fetishize and crystallize? (What does he means when he writes “world where time is space”? (p. 246)).
ReplyDeleteTaussig never seeks to dispel the comfusion and terror, his project is to write it and try to do it otherwise. In Defacement - one of his lesser read books for I'm not sure what reason, it's a great one I think - Taussig argues for writing and theory that seeks not to expose the public secret, to break the spell, or to destroy the fetish, but instead, to enter into their mimetic logics, working and writing through them to enact them other wise. In many senses, I think My Cocaine Museum is an attempt to put this approach into proactice. Taussig enters, as Roy and Ana write, into the logics of histories and objects, writing through them to reach his mystical-theoretical reading list.
ReplyDeleteAfter putting this book down, I picked up his Law in a Lawless Land - a great complement to My Cocaine Museum, drawing on similar times spent in Columbia, but one that engages in a much more human centered, ethnographic diary style mode of writing. Combined, the entries that make up these two books provide an amazing array of styles to think through writing objects and histories, natural and other.