Michael Taussig
The miracle of finding your lost treasures
It’s like seeing them for the first time
-Carolina Saquel
I.
There are many ways of writing the world in relation to one’s experience
in it.
One way is to make a list of things that somehow hang together.
In Mille Plateaux (1980), a lively anti-structuralist tract, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari called such a hanging together an “assemblage” or “arrangement.” Their biographer, Francois Dosse, warns against casual applications of this idea, but provides little by way of guidance as to what counts as “hanging together”–a significant omission. He fears that in the hands of enthusiasts, what counts as “hanging together” could be just about anything. But surely that is what gives the concept of the assemblage (as with Proust’s wasp and orchid) its charm and tension, its surprises too, lying between nebulosity and the throw of the dice? Speaking of charm, what could be a better instance of a potent assemblage than sympathetic magic? Remember Frazer of The Golden Bough with his 150 pages on charms, meaning magical charms, as his portal into sympathetic magic?
Before going into the magical properties of an assemblage and Walter Benjamin’s ideas of constellations and mimesis, let me first dwell on the concept of the list, by which I mean an actual list of things as an instance of an assemblage. At first sight a list would seem antithetical to an assemblage. The former seems as linear as a clothes’ line, while the latter as lumpy and knobbly as a bunch of grapes or a dog’s breakfast.
More specifically I want to consider a list of objects generated by anxiety, by magical desire, and by what Deleuze and Guattari thought was crucial philosophically, namely “the event,” or the singular event which resists generalization.
The event I have in mind is an event as mundane as having a cheap airline lose my suitcase on a flight from Naples to Palermo followed by its eventual recovery four days later in Palermo, in June 2018, by which time I feared it was lost forever.
For the situation was not encouraging. All traces of the bag had disappeared from the airline computer. “Maybe the baggage tag was damaged,” suggested an employee when I returned to the airport two days after arriving. To obtain this information I had had to go back through “security” to the baggage area escorted by police whose nonchalance suggested that I was far from the first person to do this. By one baggage carrel for RyanAir about one hundred people were screaming about their missing bags, threatening airport staff. Repeated phone calls to the lost baggage office of the airline by myself and by the staff of the Palermo Museum of Marionettes, whose guest I was, were never answered.
In the larger scheme of things losing a bag is a minor irritant. But tell that to the person whose bag has just disappeared down a black hole. Losing the actual bag and its contents is one thing. Items of great sentimental value; gone. Items of practical value like toothbrush and underpants; gone. Irreplaceable items to be used in lectures and performance; gone. Cherished reading matter; gone.
But psychologically and philosophically what actually happens with such a loss is not mundane. What happens is an ontological transformation of the lost objects, as I shall further explain, and, secondly, the emergence of anger and despair not only with an airline but with the corporate world in general. Indeed, is not air travel with its nightmare scenarios, security queues, ever smaller seats, ghastly “meals,” and flagrant display of class privilege (business class and Others), an apt metaphor for much of what is wrong in the world today? It is astonishing, really, to walk down the aisle of economy class and see not only how awfully people are treated, but how they willingly suffer this indignity. To lose one’s bag is merely the symbolic capstone to what has already been lost—one’s autonomy, one’s physical well-being, one’s soul.
Forced to close the shades so your neighbors can watch a video, not even the beauty of the sky and the miracle of flight is allowed inside this flying coffin.
To lose one’s bag is to begin to awaken from the sleep of the normal and to become aware of the artificiality of the mundane. But precisely because it is so everyday, when something upsets the mundane it is like a time-bomb. Habitual reckoning is swept aside exposing the phantoms where subjective objects become objective subjects–a process described by the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott in his work on what he called “transitional objects” in children’s games, poised between the breast and world.
Speaking of subjective objects, let us recall Walter Benjamin’s idea in his essay on surrealism of the revolutionary potential of “the recently outmoded.” What he meant by this were objects now lost to fashion—styles, restaurants, taste, language–awaiting, as it were, the fairy-wand of surrealism not only to retrieve them but therewith to release their smoldering charge—like the things in my suitcase now rendered surreal thanks to the event of loss. In this regard there is no fairy-wand more magical or more effective than a list of the things lost.
II.
With regards to Deleuze and Guattari’s focus on “the event,” I have to admit that I have a long history of being perplexed by it. I recall being a young, bed-ridden, high school student, mystified by my physics tutor trying to explain that although physics could explain the principles of gravity, of mass and velocity, it could not predict the path of a particular stone rolling down a particular hill.
Years later I came across E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s 1937 attempt to set forth what he considered to be the logic behind Azande witchcraft drawing on his anthropological fieldwork in central Africa. He claimed that Zande ideas of witchcraft were generated by the same fascination and mystification I experienced with the rolling stone, attempting to graft the singularity of the event to abstract principles. The Zande, he explained, were eminently practical but nothing could answer two salient questions about an illness or other misfortune such as a granary collapsing on a group seated under it, in the shade, to escape the midday heat. “Why me? Why now?” were the questions. When confronted by misfortune, modern science recruits statistical probability so as to explain the singularity of the event. (But talk to someone “modern” and you will soon find they are asking the same questions.) Zande took a different tack, that of witchcraft.
Zande witchcraft provided oracles to determine the immediate causes of one’s misfortune as well as the rituals to cure it. That these causes lay as much embedded in nature as in the tensions of social relationships, made the parallel with my lost objects all the more relevant. Nature in the Zande situation included the fact that the capacity for exercising witchcraft was inherited and was said by many to inhere in organs in the body of the witch—such as the gallbladder. The oracles included the behavior of chickens fed a plant poison from the Congo as well as interpretations of the results of laying relevant materials on termite’s nests. Moreover, witchcraft was not voluntary; it happened beyond the will of the witch as if witches are possessed of capabilities beyond their control. Hence witchcraft in this account is very much a question of things affecting things beyond the orbit of consciousness. In my case there was not even an oracle to consult other than the mournful cry of a never-answered telephone. It would seem that with modernity, bureaucracy and corporate culture take the place of witchcraft.
Crucial here is misfortune. Not only does misfortune demand some sort of explanation but it evokes unsuspected qualities in things like underpants and toothbrush come alive with their own agency. Surely the current infatuation with “post-humanist” anthropology and with how forests think is testimony to the animating impact of misfortune and witchcraft at a global level?
This new life comes about through death. The objects are irradiated with the spectrality of loss, as in the case of the lost suitcase or with sickness as in the case of witchcraft. Loss actually is a type of illness, and the term “misfortune” covers loss and illness as well as witchcraft. Here we might bear in mind that mis/fortune literally means not just lack of luck but negative luck, invoking occult worlds and forces.
So here’s a word—misfortune—that having passed through the secularization-translation process of modern history, at least in the West, preserves within itself the meaning and memory of malign mystical power. We use the term misfortune without thinking of this, yet every time we do, it uses us, as well, similar to the lost objects in the suitcase.
The awakened life provided by singular events challenges the vanities of intellectual mastery built on the idea that singular things should be and indeed can be elaborated into a pattern, hitherto concealed, as we find with Hegel, Marx, and Freud, those great work-horses of the European intelligentsia. It is as if the patterns thus exposed exploit concrete singularity not only for this or that particular grand scheme (magical, for sure), but do this so as to feed the need for mastery as an end in itself (magical, for sure).
But what would the mastery of non-mastery look like?
Perhaps a list provides the answer?
III.
Here is my Lost and Found list
It is written down spontaneously without any conscious thought as to the order.
1. An electric toothbrush
2. Two black wool berets bought as presents from El Corte Ingles, Madrid, June 2018
3. Yellow cotton pants from Cairo, April 2018, bought with the help of Munira Kayatt who lives and teaches in Cairo with her young child and six shorn cats
4. Bright blue leather belt from Popayan, Colombia, 2010, bought outside the old market
5. Two “clapper sticks” aboriginal musical instruments from Broome, remote Northwest Australia, 2010, made by a whiteman gone native. The sticks are made of ultra-hard eucalyptus, about eight inches long, heavy, make a loud ringing sound when clapped together as accompaniment to the staccato-like presentation of my sea theater
6. White floppy thin cotton pants from Kolkata, 2005
7. Hito Steyerl essays, The Wretched of the Screen
8. External DVD drive
9. A scallop shell from Galicia, Spain, 2001, for my sea presentation in Munich June 14, 2018
10. A conch shell from Seal Rocks, north of Sydney, Australia, 1995, also for the sea theater
11. Large blue and white cloth for the sea theater draped over the podium for the sea theater as symbol of the sea (Cf Brecht’s “Alienation Effects in Chinese Theater”)
12. Two brilliantly colored flower pattern shirts from Paris, 2018
13. Old blue jeans
14. Donkey poster made by my daughter with a separate gold and blue cloth tail; for my “donkey talk” in Munich
15. Three full fieldwork notebooks compiled in Colombia from the early 2000’s. These are irreplaceable.
16. Two recent New Yorker magazines
17. Two recent Times Literary Supplements
18. Criterion DVD of Jean Painleve, “Science is Fiction '' which includes the 1928 silent movie, “The Love Life of the Octopus,” to be shown as “background” to my sea theater in Munich. (If sea sounds unlikely in Munich consider this: a fast running stream runs through the English Garden about ten minutes walk from where my talk in central Munich. The stream runs over a weir setting up a permanent wave which surfers ride with great audacity and skill. It is narrow and dangerous.)
19. A small poke and shoot high quality camera
20. Cell phone charger and laptop charger
21. Cotton underpants, different colors
22. Exquisite sculptural collage (three inches by three and half) of Taranto, Southern Italy, consisting of a blue frame of wood with sculptured 3-D Palm Tree with coconuts, flip flops, seagull, a cloud, and binoculars imposed on the frame enclosing a colored photograph of the sea and the 16th c fortress wall of Taranto built by Spanish king
23. Two pairs reading glasses
24. Several drawing pens, “Pilot G-Tech–C4”
25. Small set of Winsor & Newton watercolor paints
26. A ring from Nazareth, home of Jesus, Palestine, April 2018
27. A wooden cutout about one inch in diameter of the Nativity/ Three Kings from Bethlehem
28. A small packet of thumb tacks to fasten the donkey drawing to the wall in Munich
29. A pair of snug-fitting lightweight blue pants with rococo design in sweeping black curves
30. A small white box with two donkeys, one of iron, the other ceramic, plus some 100 US dollars
IV.
Lost & Found Online
1. Anger and sarcasm
Beware of lost luggage! Jul 5, 2010, 4:20 PM“I recently flew with Alitalia from Catania Sicily to Venice and connected through Rome. They lost my luggage. It is now 6 days later and I am back in Canada and they have finally delivered the bag to my home. 2 years ago they lost my luggage for two days and my friend was without her luggage for 9 days. The numbers they give you to follow up on your bag are useless. They give you false information and change the information on you constantly. They speak Italian–thankfully I speak fluent Italian but I couldn't imagine if I didn't speak the language. Here in Canada the Alitalia office does not answer the phone for lost baggage and after 17 phone calls, no one has responded to my voicemail either. They ask you to mail in the claim form but when you click on the website to download the form, it says that the web page does not exist. It is just one mistake after another. At this point I am not even going to bother putting in a claim even though I had to incur hundreds of dollars of expenses due to not having anything to wear in Venice. Alitalia does not care one bit about your lost luggage. My advice to you is this . . . Don't even bother following up.”2. Humor
July 5, 2010“Many many years ago I was on vacation someplace I can't even remember. The local newspaper had a cartoon in it. It showed a man checking in luggage in the airport. The caption underneath, which was clearly the man speaking said, "I'd like a ticket to wherever you are planning on sending my luggage!"V.
Here in this photograph as in the Shroud of Turin you see the moment of salvation when my suitcase was returned. As with spirit photography we see the surfacing of the suitcase from the world of the dead. It is the moment of ontological transformation as LOST becomes FOUND.
Figure 1, credit Caterina Pasquilano
At the point of retrieval there was no human contact, which in Italy, land of intense human connection, kissing and hugging, speaks volumes. Instead, I showed an email to someone behind frosted glass and five minutes later through a semi-opaque door could be seen the fuzzy outline of a human figure with something like a suitcase .
The door opened automatically. I reached in as it closed and grabbed my suitcase. There on my knees I opened it, partly to see if anything was missing, partly to become reacquainted—as it were—with my old friends. Yes! Now they were my old friends. Before they were what? Just objects.
I held up my cotton pants aglow with the sheen of the auratic. The triangle of black space formed by the white legs of the trousers against the black t-shirt and naked thighs formed a makeshift shrine on the cold airport floor.
The miracle of finding your lost treasures: It’s like seeing them for the first time.
Figure 2, credit Caterina Pasquilano
VI.
Loss creates life in otherwise inert objects and also something more than life, what George Bataille and the Collège de Sociologie (1937-39) called “the sacred.” Relevant to my tale of the lost suitcase is the talk by Michel Leiris to the College called “The Sacred in Everyday Life.”
In this talk, Leiris focused on objects he remembered in his childhood, objects such as the household stove, La Radieuse, a cocoa advertisement, his father’s Smith and Wesson pistol, the silks worn by jockeys at the neighboring race track, and children’s games with mishearing adult language and providing their own, made-up, names for things. Like mine, his is a list of loss and retrieval, although he does not see this. He does not see that the sacred quality he attributes to these things is first and foremost a working through of the adult’s imagination of the child’s.
Has not the person whose bag is lost become a child, powerless in an adult world, capable if not unconsciously forced to find enchantment in lost things?
But what status, really, has the lost yet enchanted object? It becomes, alive, you say. It becomes sacred, you say, not to mention annoying, because it’s lost. But what sort of life is this if the thing is absent and ethereal, like a phantom?
There is contagion here. Loss creates more of the same. Lost in the labyrinth of airline bureaucracy and indifference (note the unanswered seventeen phone calls in the Canadian woman’s plaint, above), we exchange one loss for another. We exchange the loss of material objects for our loss of Self. We sicken with the realization that we too have become objects, vanishable objects, like a lost suitcase.
Loss converts objects such as underwear into subjects but recovery means that instead of returning to their blissful prelapsarian selves as mere objects, they now bathe in the glow of salvation as you see in the photograph of my pants and the ritual they automatically create. Due to loss, objects became subjects and something more that we could call “doubly subjectified” on recovery.
There is something specially relevant to repetition and difference unfolding here. Deleuze insists that life is generated by this repetition in which difference asserts itself. The second coming is like the first, but different, too.
This finds a parallel with unmasking in initiation rites in so-called primitive societies. When the mask is removed or the sacred flutes unveiled, the secret is transformed, not destroyed. This is very much a theater of repetition and difference creating not only life invigorating society but thickening the layers and force of the mystery. The revelation of the secret behind the mask amounts to a repetition of what everyone knew anyway—my uncle’s face, the bullroarer, etc.. I know that face! I always “knew it,” what do I know? I know what not to know.
The unconcealing of the concealed–the skilled revelation of skilled concealment. Thus are religions based on theater and trickery, repetition and difference, bringing forth the trick that is life.
VII.
Loss highlights history, the history of the once was, a history in things as much as of things. The lost objects in the suitcase not only “have” histories but are history, mobile and spasmodic, multifaceted and saturated with a materiality running the fault line between the personal and the social. These are histories of accident, chance, nomadic travel, friendships, and intellectual and artistic projects in the making.
Loss intertwines these histories of any object with the histories of the other objects suffering the communal fate of loss. We can call this an assemblage. The objects are intertwined merely by sharing the cramped confines of the lost suitcase which effects unseemly cohabitation of items lying together cheek by jowl. How do you think a camera feels being pressed up tight against colored underpants? Hito Steyerl’s essays on the “poor image,” a scallop shell from Galicia, and a white box with two donkeys and 100 dollars? Do they like each other? Do they talk to each other, and what might they be talking about? What’s it like for them in the dark at 35,000 feet in thin freezing air with the odd tremor of fear they could be on their way to loss? How come I find it easy and fun to personify my dear lost objects?
Loss lends itself to making lists and lists are as good a way as any and probably better than most as a technique for describing the world. Instead of baring your soul to the analysts determined to get to the bottom of why you lose stuff all the time, instead of searching for that theory like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, make a list!
Actually people do this all the time: shopping lists, “to do” lists, FBI “most wanted lists,” and so forth. Too often is this classed as obsessional behavior, as a weakness, when it should be understood as a way of imbibing ontological essences.
In my work I am charged with writing descriptions of places, people, and histories. This is shaped by an Idea or Vision even if that is not prominent and the Vision keeps changing. In most academic writing the emphasis will be on the Idea or the Vision. But as such writing proceeds, the interest of readers falls aside. Something is wrong. Every scheme, every Idea, every Vision, especially the so-called “critical” ones, get boring fast if only because so much work is done covering over the holes. Forgotten is the adage: “When in a hole, stop digging.”
Lists step aside from this and, with a little nudging, each item in the list becomes a trapdoor into an enchanted cave. Each item, standing boldly on its own, yet part of an assemblage, acts like a button, allowing all manner of fervid description to follow. By the time you have thus itemized three or four things you have actually built a complex picture in the simplest way—which is what I discovered when, based on a drawing I made, I made a list of seventeen items in Doña Edit Villafabia Rodrigue’s house and then wrote a lengthy paragraph of things, stories, and people, that each item aroused into being. A fact is a fact, I wrote, but two facts together, Why! That’s a wasp and an orchid, by which I meant the famous assemblage developed by Deleuze and Guattari riffing off Marcel Proust’s use of this coupling to paint a picture of mimesis, sex, and gay desire.
With every comma and turn of phrase such lists bears the stamps of their makers. To make a list is a personal affair and by no means endorses so-called objectivity. What is more, listing is is a process of metamorphoses. As things rub shoulders with other things, cameras with donkeys, blue pants with yellow pants, so they fold into other things in flurries of transformative flux. Writing the list makes flux happen.
It is as if the listing of loss primes mimetic fields of resonance. As an insurance agent covering loss, Kafka must have been well aware of this. The metamorphosis from person to bug, from object to subject (as with countless Kafka stories, especially that lost being in a lost world, Odradek), generates countless mysteries in oceans of ontic flux. Things become other things and do so thanks to what Benjamin called the mimetic faculty, here activated by trauma, loss, misfortune, and witchcraft, thereby undergoing the multiplicities, transformations, and the rhizomatic quality of mimetic delirium. In other words, the innards of the suitcase amount to a constellation like the stars in the night sky, a poem of energies and the mystery of things talking to things in the darkness of their loss.
As for the list, this vertical, enumerated, itemization, mirroring bureaucratic procedures and accountants’ charts, the point is to allow each item to blossom like Japanese paper flowers placed in water, which is Proust’s metaphor for the miracle working of mémoire involontaire. Each item cries out for and merits the stories and histories congealed within—the yellow pants bought in Cairo with Munira (what’s going on here?), the blue belt bought in Popayan (ditto), those strange blue and black trousers, the thin cotton ones from Kolkata bought with Bina (ditto, ditto), those extravagantly crazy shirts from Paris, and, let’s not forget, those sober-looking, stern and forbidding, ever loved and respected, black fieldwork notebooks coherent and incoherent, words chasing drawings, covered with a scattering of fairy dust from trails long pondered.
“I’d like to write something that comes from things the way wine comes from grapes,” wrote Benjamin.
VIII.
Such a mundane event as losing one’s suitcase opens the floodgates to thinking of indescribably serious losses such as Palestinians losing their land and homes and lives to the Israeli state and illegal Brooklyn settlements in the west bank or losing one’s child at the US border to the Trump administration which in turn loses them either on purpose or bureaucratic ineptitude in gaols and so-called “detention centers.”
It also opens the floodgates to thinking of history as human suffering involving loss at its core, of magic and religion as elaborations of Lost and Found, and of positive as well as negative losses as when young Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels write as their grand finale to The Communist Manifesto,
Workers of the world unite
Your have nothing to lose but your chains
And, a century later, Janis Joplin can sing,
Freedom's just another word
for nothin' left to lose
Michael Taussig began his professional life as a doctor and then became an anthropologist. He is the author of The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (1980); Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (1987); The Nervous System (1992); Mimesis and Alterity; A Particular History of the Senses (1993); The Magic of the State (1997); Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (1999); Law in a Lawless Land: Diary of a Limpieza in Colombia (2003); My Cocaine Museum (2004); Walter Benjamin’s Grave (2006); and others.