62: Nyx, a noctournal: ISSUE 7: MACHINES: SPRING/SUMMER 2012

NOTES FROM A CONVERSATION WITH

At the Goldsmiths Excelente Zona Social event
1
in January this year a chance emerged to talk to Michael
Taussig about his recent work and perhaps get a more sideways take on machines, a subject upon which
he touches tangentially in a few of his works. A Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University,
Taussig has written on a variety of subjects from shamanism to the commercialisation of peasant
agriculture to studies on the enticing evils of gold and cocaine and is the author of What Color Is the
Sacred? (2009) and the recent I Swear I Saw is: Drawings in Fieldwork Notebooks, Namely
My Own (2011) as .ell as many other .orks. He is often referred to as a ma.erick academic due to
his approach of narrating ethnographic accounts with ction and critique, weaving in surprising and
unusual threads of associations. I decided to let the conversation ow rather than pave a set route; see
where it would lead, somewhere, nowhere or in all directions, with some notes on which to draw, in a
sense modelling the interview on some of Taussigs own techniques of ethnographic research. I told him
we were interested in machines, in exploring to what extent they are to be dreaded or treasured, and
this triggered him to kick the conversation o by drafting a talk he would be giving in Berlin at the
House of World Culture.
2
MICHAEL TAUSSIG
MICHAEL TAUSSIG: A good starting point would
be B. Travens book The Death Ship,
3
an intricate study
about work Ive never seen equalled. The paradox here
is that these machines, which enslave and destroy the
sailors, are also story-tellers, human or para-human,
and the sailors talk to them, in their imaginations, in
their actual beings. This aspect is part of actually a
much larger project I have, which is collective work,
and songs in collective work, songs recorded by
anthropologists, sometimes from Africa work,
songs, large groups of people Im thinking of old
stuff, pre-tape recorders, todays anthropologists dont
even do that stuff like that, its still like in the 50s, as
Laura Bohannan pointed out in her book Return to
Laughter.
4
I talk about this a little bit in my What Color
Is the Sacred? book, where I have a photograph of so-
called tribesmen in Bengal up to their chins, 12 or 15
of them in a bath, a vat, working through the hours,
paddling this indigo stuff which stinks like crazy and
of course is deeply coloured, and their job is to froth
it up and to get it to oxygenate and theyre supposed
to sing obscene songs. So I am actually interested in
collective work, songs and obscene songs, and I think
it is obscene songs at work that have something to do
with this animistic quality I see in this person-object,
or if you want person-machine relationship that is
animated. I want to explore what Marx calls praxis;
that comes from Hegel, where the worker acts on
the object and the object works on the worker, they
form a sort of mystical unity, which at the same time
is incredibly practical. Craftsmen and craftswomen
are famous for their knowledge of the work process
and the skill of their body, working on whatever it is,
leather, glass, silver, frothing, or even unskilled labour.
text by KEVIN W. MOLIN
images by CENTREFOLD
63: Nyx, a noctournal: ISSUE 7: MACHINES: SPRING/SUMMER 2012
I want to explore what Marx calls praxis; that comes from Hegel, where the worker
acts on the object and the object works on the worker, they form a sort of mystical unity,
which at the same time is incredibly practical.
Centrefold scrapbook 8: Fe.a ramesh
64: Nyx, a noctournal: ISSUE 7: MACHINES: SPRING/SUMMER 2012
Thats the larger horizon, and I would string together
The Death Ship with stills lrom a nlm calleo The Wages
of Fear, I dont know if youve ever seen it, made in
the 0s, Irench nlm, it`s about lour guys oriving two
trucks in Central America, full of dynamite, to snuff
out a nre, but il they orive too carelessly they coulo
be blown to smithereens, ano so the nlm is extremely
tense. That`s the nlm, it`s stuoying that tension. In
certain parts ol the nlm you see the truck sort ol on
the verge of a huge pothole, the camera zooms in onto
the tyres, these huge tyres, and the tyre becomes like
the main character in the nlm, it becomes like a person
and youre sitting at the edge of the seat, sort of trying
to get this thing to move without moving too much.
K.W. MOLIN: So the tyre has a kind life of its own,
sort of independent from the human, would you say?
MT: It might turn out that way if one studies it very
carefully, but I would say more that its very dependent
on
KWM: On being fetishised by someone?
MT: No no, youre making me think I was thinking
its very dependent on the worker: the workers job is to
somehow try and harness that life, but the life escapes
him or her to some extent too. How it takes on a life
ol its own I`m not sure, but I oo think nlm can almost
automatically enhance this phenomenon, I dont know
why, nlm has a magical power. The thiro relerence I
want to make is lrom an Amazonian Inoian, in a nlm
called The Laughing Alligator, a 45 second shot of him
ntting a blue leather to an arrow, which is just tuckeo
under his armpit, and hes just got a loin cloth type
ol thing, muscley guy, the nlm works very close to the
body and the face, and this arrow comes out like its
lrom his booy. He rolls the nbre on his thigh, makes it
into a thin string, and that takes him about 10 seconds,
and with incredible skill he connects this feather to
the end of the arrow, and it turns as hes doing it, the
blueness of the feather goes black, gets light blue and
dark blue, and the feather seems to have a life of its
own, it seems to be thinking. This connection is so
seductive where youve got this beautiful guy, beautiful
body, this thing is like emerging from his body, this
feather is totally magical, and its twirling away, and the
skill is incredible and hes so relaxed. It looks so easy.
And the last example I have is the magic of some
descriptions of these shamans taking stuff out of their
Centrefold scrapbook 1: Ellen Cantor
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mouths that I have in my essay Viscerality, Faith, and
Skepticism. This is a description by a white man in
around 1900 of a shaman who he wanted to teach him
magic stuff, and a substance comes out of the body,
a sort of white substance and it stretches like crazy
and then it collapses, gets back into his body, he takes
it out of his body again, revolves it in his hand; its a
very detailed description, maybe a page, and I think
we might call it conjuring, its supposed to be like the
power, to contain the power: a material substance that
is also the spiritual power to kill or to cure, and because
this substance has all these unreal, surreal properties,
so intimate to the human body but it can stretch across
mountains to kill other people, this to me is like the
ur-materiality. Its the magical art of the big guys who
through nature are themselves endowed with power by
a shaman. Im so intrigued by this substance, to call it
a machine might be seen as stretching things, but on
the other hand its probably nice to have a very broad
oennition ol what a machine is. That`s eno ol my story.
KWM: That is a fascinating question; what is a
machine? And even now that you are mentioning the
body, the body as separate from the machine
MT: Because a lot of people look at machines as if they
are unrelateo to the booy, right? Almost by oennition.
KWM: Well, at least as something separate, sure.
A connection here could be made with William
Burroughs, whose cut-up technique you acknowledge
as a great innuence to your work. This technique is
employed at large in The Soft Machine, a machine as
control system, be it language, time or the regulated
body, a machine however gone berserk that spits
out broken and erratic sentences because whatever
you feed into the machine on subliminal level the
machine will process So we feed in dismantle
thyself and authority is emaciated.
5
It is almost as if
the book was written by this machine, or a body that
is indiscernible from the machine: We fold writers of
all time in together and record radio programs, movie
sound tracks, TV and juke box songs all the words
of the world stirring around in a cement mixer and
pour in the resistance message Calling partisans of
all nationCut word linesShift lin-gualsFree
doorways Vibrate touristsWord failing Photo
fallingBreak through in Grey Room
6

MT: I should really check that out Nice connections

Centrefold scrapbook 1. Left: Filiberto Skid, right: Matt Bryans
66: Nyx, a noctournal: ISSUE 7: MACHINES: SPRING/SUMMER 2012
I dont know why Burroughs is so keen on that
machine analogy though. I think hes this sort of tough
guy, Brecht had the same thing, a lot of them, Germans
did, in the 1920s when they were deep into what is
called Expressionism and then they worked out of that
in a 180 degree turn into this anti-Expressionism they
called New Objectivism, and thats where I think the
machine analogy, the machine metaphor, becomes
very frequent, very powerful. So Brecht has the
A-effect, he doesnt even call it alienation effect, and
I think theyre into the Soviet Union, jumping past the
Futurists, all into the fucking machines and cog wheels,
hugely powerful metaphors right for those decades,
two decades or so. But then Burroughs is writing in the
early 60s, hes totally into this cut-up that he learned
from Bryon Gysin, and we have to try and understand
why the cut-up should be seen in a mechanistic way. I
could posit some relationships but Im not sure about
them. I mysell nno it gets in the way to be so machinic
about it. I prefer to stick with language or politics, but
hes very into this cold objectivism, hes a sentimental
lyrical guy but he keeps chopping it off you know, the
minute he nnos himsell getting a bit romantic it`s like
he takes a pill. Someone could write something about
that, but its not for me. I was thinking as we were
talking earlier about the Deleuze machine quality, in A
Thousand Plateaus: it seems very important in [Deleuze
and Guattaris] writing, the rhizome seems pretty
organic, to call that a machine seems a huge stretch,
but I always recoil also when I think about Burroughs,
about this machinic metaphor applied to society and
onto thinking, I cant remember but I thought I once
understood why they were doing it, tremendous anti-
humanistic impulse, we all think we are soft with no
power and it turns out we are tiny cogwheels in a huge
machine and we are set into motion by forces we do
not unoerstano. I oon`t nno that very helplul at all.
KWM: I suppose it might be an issue of language. In
the concluding chapter of I Swear I Saw This, when you
dwell on those afterthoughts that frustratingly only
make one think through an event in its aftermath, you
liken handwriting to being an ancient technology that
allows the pen to slide away from forming letters and
words to form pictures and back again to words. You
then go on to say that you start in the margin next
to the relevant entry and end up God knows where,
perhaps right here at the end of a book about drawings
in nelowork notebooks, namely my own.`
7
In a way
were getting back to the cut-up technique, the pen
perhaps being a sort of machine itself. And then in
another passage, when youre looking at the notebook
as a fetish object that does no damage being fetishized,
endowed with a life of its own, becoming an extension
of oneself, if not more self than oneself. You also
compare the notebook to the camera, saying that if the
camera is a technical device that often gets in the way
gets between you ano people the oiary or nelowork
notebook is a technical device of a very different order
and even more magical than the much-acclaimed
magic of photography.
8
So, what I am thinking here
is whether there is a hierarchy of different machines,
what they can achieve or give us and whether this
cut-up method is exclusive to notebooks, because in a
sense this mixture of fragments and texts and sound
and image and video is pretty much why people are
so attracteo to give up their lree time to nll their own
personal blogs, which also might get a life of their own,
get fetishised in not necessarily an alienating way.
MT: I think ol a blog as nrst oll somewhere between
a notebook and a published book. Theres other things
as well, but it doesnt have the privacy of a notebook,
the notebook is generally for oneself. I put a lot of
store I suppose on the physicality of a notebook, the
pages, the colour of the ink, its crumpled nature as
something thats been in a pocket, thats been around
for months or years. I suspect in many ways its easier
to write in a notebook than it is to blog, because you
need a computer, but I guess nowadays with iPhones
and all this, or even cheaper phones, people might be
blogging, right? Younger people especially, with good
eyes, are incredibly artistic, lets just take the iPhone,
it can be like a notebook, right? It stores information,
you add stuff to it, you can blog, you could write stuff
to yourself, it can also function as a tool to reach others,
so what happens to my sense of the physicality of the
notebook in this circumstance? Looks like it has to
move over, why is the notebook any more material
than an iPhone, thats a question as a sort of critique,
Im criticizing myself. Do you think people fetishise
their iPhones in the same way?
KWM: I dont think smartphones are used in the same
way that the notebook is, but then again, people also
make varied use of both notebooks and phones. I
think of it more as a tool for communication, to have
constant connection to the internet or email, to record
67: Nyx, a noctournal: ISSUE 7: MACHINES: SPRING/SUMMER 2012
sounds or talks and take photos, so you have these
multiple functions within one device and less stuff to
carry. In terms of written annotation though, I dont
think its that useful or much used, it takes too long to
write anything longer than text messages or one liners.
MT: One thing is it might be a lot harder to do
drawings, writing and drawings
KWM: There are applications for doing drawings,
but its certainly not the same thing as using a pencil.
Personally, I still use notebooks a lot; most other
students I know use notebooks. In lectures I see one or
two students taking notes on their laptops, but I cant
keep up typing that fast. Sometimes I record things,
but then, you nno yoursell sometimes recoroing more
that you have time to listen back to. I suppose you often
take notes and never look back, but I think the process
of you writing down something makes you process it
in some way, or helps you think it through. I wonder
whether when you have this almost unlimited capacity
to record stuff you note and you keep, its much
more likely to be unused. I think you record a lot of
inlormation you might nno very irrelevant ano never
look back to.
MT: The thing has gotten out of control
KWM: The machine consumes it for you, while the
notebook makes you put in more of an effort. I think it
has a oillerent value, it neeos somehow to be nltereo or
thought through before it gets to the page.
MT: Of course a lot of people dont look at their
notebooks like anthropologists. So we would have
to put a lot of emphasis on the initial act of writing,
and the afterthoughts that might occur, and the after-
afterthoughts, but its this imprinting that seems very
important. The next step, which may or may not
occur, is reading, and I make an argument in that
book [I Swear I Saw This] that reading itself is a new
act, and adds a whole lot because you start to read
between the lines, you start to envisage, re-imagine, nll
in blank spaces that you wont be able to write about.
I think a diary writer, an anthropological notebook
writer, always feels that what they are writing is totally
inadequate, the minute you start to describe something
it suddenly expands in complexity and detail, and you
can never get the pen to move across the page fast or
lar enough . so the nrst thing I wanteo to say here
is that reading, or I call it sometimes re-reading your
notes, is another important sphere of activity. Theres
the actual writing, the physical thing you are putting
on the page, then theres coming back and reading
that, which is also a very active process because you
are putting stuff there between the lines but its not
actually written, the lines evoke it, so thats a great thing
to do. That can occur with any of the digital media
too, but theres something, youre right, about speed
and quantity, the digital machine is so like a garbage
can, its got so much material, and so many people
blogging, Im thinking about Occupy Wall Street,
theres just tons and tons and tons of stuff, everybody
writing something on their own blog, and I wonder
how many people ever read. If its in the newspaper or
a journal you know a lot of other people are reading,
that seems to have more star power, even though you
might know it might not be as interesting as a minority
viewpoint. Puzzling questions
KWM: This might perhaps relate the notebook to
ideas around noise, being as it is an excess, something
unrepresented, a part that has no part, not good enough
to be in a publication. Like nrst steps, grounowork, a
conversation with your own self that publishing to a
virtual world might not allow to happen.
MT: I must say the way we have been talking, the
concept of the machine, the history of the machine,
and everything, the word machine. Its puzzling, you
wonder. What do you know about the etymology of
the word?
KWM: (Checking on iPhone) From Greek actually,
from mekhane, device, means, expedience, contrivance
something that enables
MT: Im thinking of etymology in the Raymond
Williams sense of active social history, looking at the
way it was used in English in the 14
th
or 16
th
Century or
18
th
Century, its possible that Raymond Williams has
this word in his Keywords book.
9
I think you get a lot out
of etymology, which doesnt mean how the word was
nrst useo, it`s more like trying to trace its career, with
different types of historical set-ups, production and so
forth, because the word is getting away from us a little
bit. To me the compelling question would be about the
relationship of the machine to the non-machinic, but
68: Nyx, a noctournal: ISSUE 7: MACHINES: SPRING/SUMMER 2012
now Im not sure what the machine is and where to
stop.
KWM: Yes, where to draw the line with the non-
machinic. Would that be the body, or could the body
be a machine as well? And then does this imply
everything is a machine, thus nothing is?
MT: It seems to me it has some very strong connotations,
the machine seems to stand for all that is non-human,
and therefore generates hostility, but then, people love
machines as well, right? Steve Jobs, Apple, and so on
and so forth, its highly ambivalent.
KWM: Thats perhaps why I was trying to draw
a relation with the notebook as well, in the sense of
extension of oneself, people do think of their phones
and their gadgets as a kind of extension of their body,
perhaps.
MT: Isnt that Deleuze and Guattari? Everything is
connected to everything else? And then they somehow
see that as machinic. Desiring machines, thats what
they talk about. Im not good on Deleuze and Guattari,
I nno them exasperating, but I remember in that nrst
chapter of Anti-Oedipus the machine is introduced in
a way, as I understand it, to obliterate, set aside the
subject/object distinction, I think thats whats key to
them: neither subject nor object, but desiring machines.
K.W. Molin is currently researching for a PhD at the Centre for
Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College. He is currently writing an
auto-ethnography of education that seeks to make creative use of
the arbitrariness of language, as well as studying experiments on
pigeons and their application into predicting human behaviour.
Centrefold is a series of handmade, limited edition scrapbooks
begun in 2003 by artists Reza Aramesh and Tina Spear. Centre-
fold Scrapbooks are held in private and public collections nation-
ally and internationally including A-Foundation, Philip Aarons,
Tate, and Zabludowicz Collection. www.centrefoldproject.com
NOTES
1. Taussig gave a talk entitled Occupy Ethnography, that was
an auto-ethnographic account of an afternoon visit to Zuccotti
Park in New York, trying to make sense of a whole wealth of
information by focusing on the signs and banners that populated its
surroundings.
2. By the time this article is published, the conference will have
already taken place. http://www.hkw.de/en/programm/2012/
animismus/veranstaltungen_68723/veranstaltungsdetail_72115.php
3. Published under a pseudonym, this is the story of a sailor
who loses all his documents and prooI oI identifcation and as a
consequence is constantly deported around Europe or imprisoned,
until he eventually fnds work in a death ship` literally, a ship
that is worth more to the owner sunk than functional. Although its
an incredibly exploitative situation, the sailor fnds comIort there,
as he transcends toils beyond any limit of possible endurance.
4. Similarly to B. Traven, the author published this book under a
pseudonym (Elenore Smith Bowen). Subtitled An anthropological
novel, its a book exploring the paradoxes and hypocrisies of
ethnographic endeavours to observe cultures alien to our own
in a way that proclaims itselI as objective and scientifc without
recognising the arbitrariness of these parameters themselves.
5. William Burroughs, The Soft Machine, 1961, London: Flamingo,
1995, p.107.
6. Ibid.
7. Michael Taussig, I Swear I Saw This, London: University of
Chicago Press, 2011, p.141.
8. Ibid., p.25.
9. Indeed there is an entry in which Williams goes a little into the
meaning of the word machine, but this is more to distinguish
it from the entry mechanical, a term that in English was used
before machine and which thus gathered along the way further
connotations and associations: frst used pejoratively in the 15
th

Century to indicate non-agricultural work, then from the 17
th

Century both as a description by materialists and as an abuse by
idealists to designate a universe explainable through science, it
is not until the 18
th
Century with the rise of industrialism that
machine and mechanical began to affect each others meanings.
The new machines, started up work 'on their own, 'replacing
human labour, suggested an association with an idea oI the
universe without a God or divine directing force, and also an
association with the older (and socially affected) sense of routine,
unthinking activity thus action without consciousness (Williams,
1983, p.202).
69: Nyx, a noctournal: ISSUE 7: MACHINES: SPRING/SUMMER 2012
Centrefold scrapbook 8. Left: Florian Foithmayr, right: !icki ornton