Contagious Animism in the artwork of Felix Gonzales Torres and Dane Mitchell
Christopher Braddock
This article discusses two installation artists—Felix Gonzales Torres and Dane
Mitchell—whose work explores a dispersion, or residue, of materials in ways that
engage audiences in forms of unwitting participation. A unique aspect of the article is
that these forms of participatory installation practice are explored through theories of
so-called ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’ magic ritual. To be more specific, magical concepts
of ‘contagion’, ‘animism’ and ‘ritual participation’ are employed to open up a range
of hotly debated questions about reciprocity between people and things, and, in turn,
where ‘liveness’ lives.
The article is based on a provocation—Jacques Derrida’s notion of the ‘trace
structure’ is profoundly ‘savage’ in its assertion that the sign has a real connection
with its world. That word ‘savage’ is used by late-nineteenth-century British
anthropologists Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917) and James George Frazer (18541941). They were baffled by the continuation of so-called ‘savage’ beliefs and
practices in their own contemporary societies. They managed, in fact, to disavow
aspects of their own Christian heritage that involved some of the very animistic
operations they saw as ‘savage’ in their concurrent ethnographic work. Their disbelief
in the force of magical ritual was partly due to their racialized and evolutionarydriven concept of ‘primitiveness’. In their minds, Culture, in opposition to the
darkness of savage Nature, gradually became more and more civilized until its
culmination in the white male Victorian intellect. What those anthropologists
observed in ‘savage’ magical practices was a breakdown in oppositional structures of
life and death, organic and inorganic, subject and object, whiteness and blackness,
linked to the possibility of a ‘force’ that precedes those terms related and contagiously
infiltrates all materiality beyond reason. This, it turns out, is a staple of Derridean
deconstruction and the notion of différance or the ‘trace structure’. Discussing Felix
Gonzales Torres’s ‘Untitled’ (Lover Boys) series (from 1991), and New Zealand artist
Dane Mitchell’s 2011 Radiant Matter series, this paper argues that the label ‘savage’
is always already in excess of those ethnographic and historical constraints. Put
another way, there are no savages, there never were. Or, put another way again, we
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are all savages.1 Through the consumption of candies (Torres), or the activation of
vaporous environments (Mitchell), these artworks provoke ideas of contagious and
vital fields of affect that provoke unwitting forms of participation that operate beyond
the senses.
What follows is a discussion in three parts. I begin with an outline of James George
Frazer’s definition of ‘sympathetic magic’ while mindful of Felix Gonzales Torres’s
artwork. I then touch on Marcel Mauss’s (1872-1950) notion of ‘effluvia’ which
‘travel about’ (1975: 72) from his A General Theory of Magic written between 1902
and 1903.2 I interpret ‘effluvia’ as a vaporous and contagious field of affect in relation
to Derrida’s notion of the ‘trace structure’. Finally, I conclude with a critique of Dane
Mitchell’s artwork alongside mention of Mauss’s contemporary Lucien Lévy-Bruhl
(1875-1939) and his concept of ‘mystical participation’. Lévy-Bruhl describes a realm
where ‘substance’ is an immeasurable essence that amounts to participation because it
is participated in.
Part 1: James George Frazer’s sympathetic magic
In his now infamous publication The Golden Bough (1890–1915), Frazer devises two
laws, one of similarity and the other of contact, that function under the general name
of ‘sympathetic magic’. The first of these laws involving imitation or mimesis is
underscored by the notion that ‘like produces like, or that an effect resembles its
cause’ while the second, involving contact, assumes that ‘things which have once
been in contact with each other continue to act upon each other at a distance after the
physical contact has been severed’ (Frazer 1924: 11). Frazer further clarifies his
terminology to describe this law of similarity as homoeopathic while the law of
contact he defines as contagious magic.3 In this context, he defines the most common
See Christopher Bracken as he writes: ‘There is no such thing as a savage society, nor
has there ever been. Savage philosophers are the outgrowths of discourse, and they dare
us to think more by daring to enrich signs with a principle of change’ (2007: 21).
2 As Michael Taussig notes that, while this work is attributed to Marcel Mauss, the
original Année sociologique essay is credited to joint authorship of Henri Hubert and
Mauss (1993: 258n14).
3 James George Frazer’s use of the term ‘homeopathic’ is a manifestation of the
(metonymic) idea in homeopathy that a diluted element (a part of a whole) carries the
healing force of the whole.
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forms of contagious magic as
the magical sympathy which is supposed to exist between a man and any
severed portion of his person, as his hair or nails; so that whoever gets
possession of the human hair or nails may work his will, at any distance, upon
the person from whom they were cut. (38)
His terms of reference are very generalized and he extends this notion to items of
clothing and impressions left by a body, including the possibility of injuring footprints
in order to injure the feet that made them. The ‘natives of South-eastern Australia’,
Frazer says, ‘think they can lame a man by placing sharp pieces of quartz, glass, bone,
or charcoal in his footprints’ (44). And Frazer concludes this section of The Golden
Bough dedicated to ‘Sympathetic Magic’ by referring to ‘a maxim with the
Pythagoreans that in rising from bed you should smooth away the impression left by
your body on the bed-clothes’ (45).
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, ‘Untitled’ (Lover Boys), 1991, candies individually wrapped
in clear cellophane, endless supply. Overall dimensions vary with installation. Ideal
weight: 355 lb. Photo: Axel Schneider, Frankfurt-am-Main © The Felix GonzalezTorres Foundation. Installation view of Specific Objects without Specific Form at the
Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany, 2011.
This idea that things might ‘act on each other at a distance through a secret sympathy’
is key, for example, to a series of artworks by Felix Gonzalez-Torres titled ‘Untitled’
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(Lover Boys). The first of these installations, installed in 1991 at Xavier Hufkens
Gallery, Brussels, employed a 355 lb pile of candies equal to the combined body
weights of Gonzalez-Torres and his partner Ross who died from AIDS in 1991.4 This
pile of candies on the floor of the gallery conjures up the possibility that this ‘like’
weight produces or performs them both and that the effect of this work will resemble
its cause—will effect an ongoing unity of artist and lover embodied in the bodies of
the participating audiences who are free to consume the candies one by one as they
pass by the work. Artist and lover, as ‘donors’ of this ritualized (votive) offering,
therefore implicate the bodies of the audience in a profound form of contact
(understood as contagious ‘contiguity’) through digestion, implicating the bodily
nourishment of those viewer participants. By inversion, these are the objects of the
viewers’ performance where those participating perform the work. As those
participants leave the gallery they disperse, literally around the globe, continuing the
action of their participation at a distance, long after their physical contact has been
severed. These are the powerfully so-called ‘savage’ operations of sympathetic magic
at work in everyday consumption. Gonzalez-Torres’s candies are animated (in the
order of the spell) by the utterance of the title, and related instructions stipulating the
deployment of the work at each exhibition venue. Those participants do more than
just suck on a candy. They consume (and thereby embody) the gay relationship. They
become themselves animated by the magical ‘effluvia’ of the artwork, to coin Marcel
Mauss’s term.5 In this sense, while Gonzalez-Torres’s formal aesthetic (and content)
would seem not to derive from a history of magic, its operational force is deeply
‘magical’.
The nature of the candy pieces is that they can also be installed at alternate weights.
For example, the work ‘Untitled’ (Revenge) has an ideal weight of 325 lbs (first installed
in Madrid in 1991). Also during Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s lifetime, in 1994, he installed
the work at 1000 lbs at the Renaissance Society in Chicago. For further context, when
asked by Bob Nickas when interviewed for Flash Art, Nov/Dec 1991, p. 89, ‘Can you talk
about how the candy pieces relate to memory and the body?’, Gonzalez-Torres replies,
‘The pieces called Lover Boys are piles of candy based on body weights. I use my own
weight or mine and Ross’s together. If I do a portrait of someone, I use their weight.’
Thanks to Allison Hemler, Director of Archives and Communications, The Felix
Gonzalez-Torres Foundation, for these details.
5 This concept of ‘participation’ as an uncontrollable and contagious ‘trace structure’ is
also exemplified by Jacques Derrida’s notion of the impossibility of the gift. From this
perspective, I would not know I am being given the relationship and they would not
know they have given it to me. Thus the ‘value’, or ‘force’, of the artwork precedes the
participants.
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This thinking is partly made possible by the work of anthropologists in the 1960s such
as Sri Lankan-born Stanley J. Tambiah (b. 1929) who argued that magic acts should
be interpreted as performative acts rather than judged on the basis of scientific
verification (1973: 199). In other words, to ask if magic works in terms of cause and
effect is to have asked the wrong question. Instead he interprets magic ritual as
engaging with objectives of ‘persuasion’, ‘conceptualisation’ and ‘expansion of
meaning’ (219). Thus he proposes as a new theory of magical language which helps
retrieve a philosophy of language from its racist heritage and therefore from preconceptions associated with ‘black’ magic. Accordingly, Tambiah develops an
understanding of so-called primitive thinking in ritual as underpinned by a theory of
performatives in an understanding of the agency of magic. In other words, it becomes
a question of what the ‘performativity’, which is the practice of magic, does. This,
therefore, allows an application of the theories of magic to coincide with theories that
privilege the artwork as a process. In this sense magic is a ‘harnessing of forces’, an
expression used by Simon O’Sullivan (employing the ideas of Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari) in suggesting the artwork is a ‘creative deterritorialisation into the
realm of affects’. With this in mind, O’Sullivan continues (without subsequent
mention of magic): ‘Art might be understood as the name for a function, a magical
and aesthetic function of transformation’ (2006: 52).
The immense importance of Tambiah’s contribution (and others dealing with the
linguistic properties of ritual6) lies in the fact that he re-examines a ‘discredited’ nonmodern worldview (that conceives of things as animated) through a concept of
performative agency. He thus gives us back that discredited history in ways that
enable us to re-consider what concepts like ‘magic’, ‘animism’ and ‘spiritual essence’
might signify. This, in turn, potentially enables us to reconsider our worldview in the
light of those so-called ‘savage’ histories. This creates a remarkable challenge to reStanley J. Tambiah was certainly not alone in his thinking of the performative nature of
ritual and the application of, for example, the performative theories of language by J. L.
Austin. See, for example, Ruth Finnegan, ‘How to Do Things with Words: Performative
Utterances Among the Limba of Sierra Leone,’ Man, n.s. 4, no. 4, 1969, pp. 537–52,
especially pp. 548–550. As Catherine Bell notes: ‘Finnegan also pointed out that the
notion of performative utterance solves the difficulties posed by a polarization of
utilitarian-functionalist versus expressive-symbolic styles of speech and action, which
was, of course, the type of distinction that kept differentiating magic, science, and
religion, as well as drawing distinctions between primitive versus modern’ (1997:
69n28).
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thinking the boundaries between subjects and objects, nature and culture, the psyche
and the material world.
Frazer, of course, would be hostile to Gonzalez-Torres’s so-called ‘savage’ thinking.
He and his Victorian contemporaries equated the possibility of contagious animism
with savage race relations. And in this respect, scholars such as Christopher Bracken
argue, the philosophy of language is partly based on differences between races and
has enforced a separation between signs and things. He writes: ‘The point is that a
difference between races has been projected onto an enduring scholarly debate about
the relation between signs and things’ (2007: 6).
Part 2: Marcel Mauss’s effluvia
The historical ethnography on magic grapples with the concept of ‘animism’ as a
belief that things in nature might possess consciousness, and a belief that people have
spirits that can exist separately from their bodies, contaminating other objects and
people. This is part of the overall concept of ‘contagion’ which sustains a view that
‘liveness’ does not reside in bodies or in things. It resides in what Mauss calls
‘effluvia’ which ‘travel about’ (1975: 72). In discussing the possibility that we have
already encountered with Frazer—that things act on each other at a distance—Mauss
struggles with such a resistance to conventional notions of time and space. Hence he
says that action at a distance involves ‘the idea of effluvia which leave the body’.7 In
characterizing ‘magical images which travel about’, Mauss cites an example from the
Malleus maleficarum8 of ‘a witch who dips her broom in a pond to bring on rain and
then flies away into the air to search for it’ (72-3). Read here, Torres's audiences who
take a candy (thus bringing on participation) and then fly away in search of it and so
on.
Significantly, Mauss develops this idea of ‘effluvia’ as ‘mana’. This is a force and/or
As a continuation of this discussion about ‘action-at-a-distance,’ see Chapter 2 of my
forthcoming book Performing Contagious Bodies where I propose the ‘sym’ of ‘sympathy’
and the ‘tele’ of ‘telepathy’ as two modalities of affect.
8 The Malleus Maleficarum (Latin for ‘Hammer of the Witches’, or ‘Der Hexenhammer’) is
a treatise on witches written in 1486 by Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger,
Inquisitors of the Catholic Church, and was first published in Germany in 1487.
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power or ‘magic potence’ which Mauss understands as ‘the presence of a kind of
magical potential’ (107, 113, 121).9 To get to this conclusion, Mauss has asserted an
‘idea’ of magic as ‘a field where ritual occurs … a place where spirits come alive and
where magical effluvia are wafted’ (118). This ‘idea’ (as distinct from the ‘outer
form’ of magic) becomes crucial for Mauss, and it is this ‘idea which animates all the
forms assumed by magic’ (118). This ‘idea’ develops into an understanding of magic
as a ‘social phenomenon’, as a ‘functioning of collective life’ and ‘collective
thinking’ (119, 121). It is only ‘a non-intellectualist psychology of man as a
community’, says Mauss, that will tolerate this ‘idea’ of magic (108).
From this perspective, Mauss’s contemporary Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1875-1939) can
say in his Notebooks on Primitive Mentality written between 1938 and 1939 that
‘participation’ exists as a felt experience of a community of essence which has an
equivalence to the act of participating. He writes: ‘participation between the
individual and his appurtenances (hair, nails, excretions, clothing, footprints,
shadows, etc.) …. equals a community of essence [as an] identity felt between what
participates and what is “participated in” ’ (1975: 108). Thus Lévy-Bruhl’s notion of
‘mystical participation’ describes a field of participants already affected (or
contaminated) and not a verifiable or rational play between elements, living or dead
or inorganic. It is there because it is participated in. As Rodney Needham notes, the
overwhelming breakthrough that Lévy-Bruhl offers at this time was a realization that
‘the strangeness of primitive mentality were not mere errors, as detected by a finally
superior rationality of which we were the fortunate possessors, but that other
civilizations presented us with alternative categories and modes of thought’ (1972:
183).
Lévy-Bruhl’s concept of of ‘mystical participation’ (discussed further in Part 3 of this
article) describes a realm where ‘substance’ is an infinite essence that equals
participation because it is participated in. From this key idea I argue for an ontology
of participation that emphasizes a ‘value’ or meaning that precedes the terms related
of subject/object, organic/inorganic. Moreover, things (and their substances) cannot
be determined by a ‘series of antecedents which result in some event’ Lévy-Bruhl
Mauss is referencing the contemporaneous ethnographer of the North American Huron
(Iroquois), J. N. B. Hewitt, as he develops this idea of ‘effluvia’ as ‘mana’.
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writes (1975: 133). Instead, they telepathically operate across space and time because
they precede the terms related (animate and inanimate). Thus this mode of thought
suggests an existent or a there in a field of affect that is already infiltrated, already
contaminated, and exceeding participants. But here the term ‘participants’ is expanded
to acknowledge all the secondary terms in an arbitrary dichotomy of
animate/inanimate, subject/object, presence/absence and so forth. This, as said at the
beginning of this article, is a significant aspect of Derridean deconstruction and the
notion of différance or the ‘trace structure’.
In his address to the French Society of Philosophy on the 27th of January 1968 titled
Différance, Derrida calls this inseparability and unlocatability of these binary terms a
double gesture that shares the characteristics of temporization and spacing.
As an abbreviated overview, Derrida explains that the verb ‘différer’ carries two
meanings: one associated with ‘a detour, a delay, a relay, a reserve’ which acts as a
‘temporization’ in time that ‘suspends the accomplishment or fulfillment of “desire”
or “will” ’ (8). The second meaning is associated with a space between polemical
terms such as speech/writing, subject/object, organic/inorganic that is not identical to
another as ‘an interval, a distance, spacing’ that is produced in repetition (8).
Accordingly, the word différance (with an ‘a’) compensates for the word ‘différence’
in that it simultaneously refers to this ‘temporization’ and the polemical while also
denoting an undecided sense of movement as neither active or passive (8-9). This
suggests that there can be no sense of an ‘action of a subject on an object’ (9). This
will mean a radical deconstruction of a notion of presence (or ‘liveness’) and how it
might be understood to operate, even telepathically, in relation to time and space.
I argue that the operations of sympathetic magic incite these qualities of the ‘trace
structure’ in différance. The audacity of magic ritual is that it presumes that the sign is
the thing. The footprint, the saliva, the breath, is the person. The operations of
Derrida’s trace structure as a temporization in time and spacing as action at a
distance, like magic, questions a classical understanding of the ‘sign’ as meaning a
‘representation’ of presence. When Frazer says of the operations of sympathy and
contact (to repeat an earlier reference) that ‘like produces like’ or that ‘things which
have once been in contact with each other continue to act upon each other at a
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distance after the physical contact has been severed’ (1924: 11), he grapples with an
idea that he cannot tolerate: that the ‘trace’ of these magical operations might
constitute a questioning of presence (the implications of which are profound in
questioning the value of a unified, cognitive subject). The ‘trace structure’ helps us
understand that Frazer’s ‘Law of Contagion’ (in its combination of similitude and
contact) reveals an already contaminated field; an ‘effluvia’ as a contaminated
relationality that precedes and exceeds the terms related (subject/object,
presence/absence).
As I will continue to argue, this already contaminated field is important to an
understanding of Torres’s and Mitchell’s artworks.
Part 3: Dane Mitchell’s Radiant Matter
For Various Solid States (2010/2011) as part of Radiant Matter I at the GovettBrewster Art Gallery, Mitchell’s instructions to the staff are specific but openended—pour one cast per day but more if humid conditions create enough fluid.
Perform this task before the gallery opens but a little after is fine (or during the day if
necessary), and try to pour shapes that are ambiguous, that is, not too figurative (thus
avoiding Mickey Mouse ears and so forth). Following these instructions, each morning
gallery staff retrieve water, accumulated overnight in a dehumidifier, to mix plaster
from the 20 kilo bags stacked adjacent in the same exhibition space. After removing
the previous (now set) plaster pour and propping it against the walls of the gallery—
along with all the other plaster casts from previous days—the fresh plaster mix is
poured out onto a roll of bubble-wrap, itself a membrane of stored air pockets.
Mitchell describes this process as a ‘transformation of matter from one state to
another’ in the simplest possible terms. Accordingly, the techniques employed are
domestic, or studio based, while the atmosphere captured is, Mitchell comments,
‘infused with our own liquids, our own exhalations’10
Conversation with the author, 5 July 2012. I thank Dane Mitchell for his generosity in
the preparations for this article.
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Dane Mitchell, Various Solid States, 2010/2011, de-humidifier, water, plaster,
aluminum, bubble wrap, sieve. 1000mm x 5000m x 5000m. From the exhibition
Radiant Matter I at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand, 5
March 2011 — 29 May 2011. Photo: Bryan James. Courtesy the artist, supported by
the artist residency programme, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Zealand.
As another activation of vaporous environments, Epitaph (2011)—as part of Radiant
Matter II, at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery—employs an empty late-Victorian
vitrine from the holdings of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery. Each morning gallery
staff are instructed to open the rear glass door of the cabinet and spray a quantity of
scent onto its mirrored base. Through a 20 CM hole cut in the frontal glass face of the
vitrine, the viewer is able to lean forward, slightly into the hole, and sniff the scent.11
Mitchell explains that the fragrance (made in collaboration with the perfumer Michel
Roudnitska) includes a synthesized reproduction of musk produced by the civet cat:
an intensely bodily odor. Using such an aroma, Mitchell is attempting to activate
smell as a medium, or ‘effluvia’, that resists definition and one that reaches back into
our animalistic and sexualized primordial responses.12
As Aaron Kreisler notes: ‘Working with the perfumer Michel Roudnitska, Mitchell
produces a scent whose base notes allude to a bodily (ghostly) presence, with a
lingering hint of dust. The potency of this synthesised perfume is both amplified and
clarified by its placement in a seemingly empty late Victorian vitrine’ (2011: 38).
12 Conversation with the author, 5 July 2012.
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Dane Mitchell, Epitaph, 2011, perfume, mirror, cabinet. 1030mm x 1830mm x
860mm (cabinet). From the exhibition Radiant Matter II at the Dunedin Public Art
Gallery, Dunedin, New Zealand, 28 May 2011 — 28 August 2011. Photo: Bill
Nichol. Courtesy the artist, supported by the Dunedin Public Art Gallery visiting artist
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programme.
This assertion is further emphasized in Mitchell’s more overt references to magic
ritual. For example, Gateway to the Etheric Realm (2011) as part of Radiant Matter II
displays the remnants of magical spells and cantations. Mitchell hired the services of
a local witch to enter the exhibition space for six private rituals, leaving behind the
debris of crystallized dragons blood, herbs, owl feathers, infused blessed water,
incense, charcoal and salt. Adjacent to this artwork, Etheric Realm Spell Materials
(2011) stacks glass vials with these material residues, in turn, encasing these vials in a
glazed picture frame. These direct references to magical practices alert us to a realm
that cannot be justified by scientific intellectualization.
Dane Mitchell, Gateway to the Etheric Realm, 2011, powder-coated steel, spell, spell
materials. 6000mm x 6000mm x 3250mm (approximately). From the exhibition
Radiant Matter II at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Dunedin, New Zealand, 28 May
2011 — 28 August 2011. Photo: Bill Nichol. Courtesy the artist, supported by the
Dunedin Public Art Gallery visiting artist programme.
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Dane Mitchell, Etheric Realm Spell Materials, 2011, frame, glass, rubber, salt,
dragons blood, smoke, rosemary, water, dirt, feathers. 1450mm x 1275mm x 100mm.
From the exhibition Radiant Matter II at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Dunedin,
New Zealand, 28 May 2011 — 28 August 2011. Photo: Bill Nichol. Courtesy the
artist, supported by the Dunedin Public Art Gallery visiting artist programme.
The artworks of Torres and Mitchell complicate distinctions between art as
commodity or aesthetic form. In turn, they amplify our experiences of participation as
uncontrollable encounter. Our saliva, our exhalations, or those vaporous scents,
infiltrate all matter. Or put another way, those plaster shapes and that perfume are
inseparable from us and our breathing vapour. Likewise, magical rituals—in their
‘purported’ ability to confound boundaries between a natural world of objects,
material substances and human bodies—present, in the words of Frazer, ‘a spurious
system of natural law as well as a fallacious guide of conduct’. It is ‘false science as
well as an abortive art’, continues Frazer (1924: 11). In this sense, the possibility of
ritual contagious animism threatens the foundations of Platonic mimesis. Plato
banishes the artist from the city, not so much because of a threat to truth, but because
of a threat to order. ‘Through his doublings and multiplications’, Christopher
Prendergast writes, ‘the mimetic artist introduces “improprieties” (a “poison”) into a
social system ordered according to the rule that everything and everyone be in
its/his/her proper place’ (1986: 10). Let’s not forget that Plato’s Socrates says that
imitation is about ‘looks’ and not the ‘truth’ and ‘it is due to this that it produces
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everything—because it lays hold of a certain small part of each thing, and that part is
itself only a phantom’ (BookX/598b). As such, Plato’s Socrates speaks of the artist as
wizard and imitator. Thus, Plato’s Socrates continues, ‘he has encountered some
wizard and imitator and been deceived’ (BookX/598d). In this way, Plato
provocatively positions the artist as the source of magical utterance.13
Moreover, magic’s combination of body substances (breath, saliva, aroma, spittle,
nails, hair, etc.) with other materials (plant residue, ashes, etc.), like Torres’s candies
dissolved in the mouths of participants and Mitchell’s transformation of our vaporous
exhalations, provokes an idea of consubstantiation between persons and things; it
conjures forth the already contaminated field of the animate and inanimate, living or
dead. In this respect, Mitchell deploys smell or aroma as a performative encounter.
When Mitchell says of his project Radiant Matter that he deploys ‘perfume as a
concentrated form of loss’ he is engaging with a ‘trace structure’ where, Derrida says,
‘erasure’ forms its constitution ‘from the outset as a trace’ (1982: 24). Perfume will
always evaporate and in this sense it lacks clear description or defies definition. This
is radical because the sign (the aroma) does not represent. Again in the words of
Derrida, this operation ‘makes it disappear in its appearance’ (24). In this realm—like
Mauss’s effluvia—‘substance’ is an infinite essence that exists as a felt community
because it is participated in.
Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s concept of ‘mystical participation’
The remaining discussion is dedicated to the extraordinary insights of Lévy-Bruhl and
his emphasis on collective representations that led him to argue that participation was
not a comprehensible relation between individuals or things.
For example, in discussing the participation between a corpse and its ghost, LévyBruhl asserts that: ‘It is equally true to say that the corpse is the deceased, and that it
is not.’ ‘This proves’ he continues, ‘that neither expression is correct’ (1975: 1). He
qualifies this statement by affirming that this notion of ‘participation’ cannot
presuppose a connection or representation, it occurs simultaneously with them:
See The Republic of Plato, (Allan Bloom, Trans.), New York: Basic Books (Plato 1991:
281).
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participation is not established between the more or less clearly represented
deceased and corpse (in which case it would be of the nature of a relationship or
connection, and it should be possible to make it easily comprehensible); it does
not come after these representations, it does not presuppose them: it is before
them, or at least simultaneous with them. What is given in the first place is
participation. (2)
When Lévy-Bruhl says ‘what is given in the first place’, he questions a notion of
‘presence’ as a ‘concept’ that appears a priori before participation’s affect. Thus, he
calls attention to the labels ‘presence’ and ‘absence’, or ‘subject’ and ‘object’, that
problematically presuppose the presence of those concepts before their relation. If a
notion of ‘participation’ is thought of as a ‘concept’, he argues, it becomes ‘necessary
to involve the presence of those concepts of the things between which the
participation is established’ (3). Lévy-Bruhl does not want to put the concept of the
sign—that which Derrida says, ‘always has meant the representation of a presence’
(1982: 10)—in place of the thing itself. Magic, in this way, undermines the presumed
secondary and provisional nature of the sign and dares to question the authority of
presence, or of its simple symmetrical opposite, the inanimate and dead.14 We recall
Derrida’s discussion of the ‘trace structure’ as différance where this ‘term’ is neither a
word nor a concept. It is this ‘interval’ of meaning, Derrida notes, that ‘maintains our
relationship with that which we necessarily misconstrue, and which exceeds the
alternative of presence and absence’ (20). In this sense, Lévy-Bruhl’s notion of
‘participation’ has nowhere to begin. Magical participation therefore calls into
question what Derrida refers to as ‘a rightful beginning, an absolute point of
departure, a principal responsibility’ and therefore opens up a question of value as a
controlling principle and system (6). This kind of ‘savage’ thinking about a concept of
‘participation’ urges Lévy-Bruhl to abandon an intellectualization of what he calls
‘mystical participation’, where, he says in a very Derridean fashion, ‘even simply
expressing it in our vocabulary with our concepts, falsifies it’ (1975: 1). Moreover, in
introducing an inability for western ethnographers to comprehend what he termed
‘primitive mentalities’, he puts in place a vastly significant milestone for future
developments in cultural anthropology. Not only is an intellectualization of ‘mystical
participation’ a problem for the ethnographic ‘framing’ of other peoples (in that it
I am following Derrida’s phrasing here when he says that différance ‘puts into
question the authority of presence, or of its simple symmetrical opposite, absence or
lack’ (10).
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presents us with alternative categories of thinking outside our own experience), it
raises the potential impossibility of comprehending a field of affective participation.
Hence, Lévy-Bruhl sees magical or mystical participation as ‘the affective category of
the supernatural’ that is ‘not represented but felt’ (4-5, 106, 158).15
In short, participation cannot be determined through antecedents but in the course of
participation (Lévy-Bruhl 1975: 133). In this context, Lévy-Bruhl makes a striking
example of Melanesian languages and their names for a person’s finger (natugu or
natuku) that combine, he deduces, possessive and personal pronouns that attribute the
finger as ‘finger of me’ (107). This, he deduces, means that ‘this finger is me through
participation (in the sense where to be is equivalent to to participate)’ (107, emphasis
added). This means that participation precedes the identity of the finger. Furthermore,
he makes this observation while categorizing the finger as an ‘appurtenance’—that is,
an accessory or adjunct to the human body suggestive of a reassessment of the
finger’s subjecthood and positing the idea of the finger as neither part subject or
object. Rather, identity occurs simultaneously in participation.
In these ways Lévy-Bruhl re-configures a concept of ‘animism’. Rather than a
spiritual supplement that intervenes from an exterior source (as a life/matter binary),
he understands ‘mystical participation’ in the operations of magical ritual as emerging
from collective and incomprehensible dynamics. This relational dynamic is nonrational because it precedes an organic/inorganic divide. To say again that
extraordinary claim by Lévy-Bruhl cited above: ‘What is given in the first place is
participation’ (2).
Conclusion
See Benson Saler who borrows from Jean Cazeneuve’s analysis of Lévy-Bruhl where
this ‘affective’ category becomes ‘that of the role of affectivity of thought’ (2003: 48).
Saler is quoting Jean Cazeneuve, Lucien Lévi-Bruhl, Peter Riviere (trans.), New York,
Harper and Row, 1963, p. 22. With respect to Lévy-Bruhl’s notion of ‘participation’, Saler
argues for an ‘attempt to explore the affective as well as cognitive significance of beliefs
for those who affirm them’ (55). To my mind his discussion that ‘the border between
these analytical domains is unstable and fuzzy’ (55) does not fully account for LévyBruhl’s attempt to abandon categorization of ‘participation’ as incomprehensible.
15
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The artworks of Felix Gonzales Torres and Dane Mitchell engage in fields of
contagious affect that infiltrate all bodies (animate or inanimate) in forms of ritual
participation. This means, not just we ‘subjects’, but us ‘objects’ too. Our habitually
polemical categorizations of people and things are made problematic in a radical
questioning of where ‘liveness’ lives. This highlights modes of unwitting participation
in which ‘value’ or meaning precedes the terms related of subject/object,
organic/inorganic. From this perspective, ‘liveness’ does not reside in bodies or in
things. It resides in what Mauss calls ‘effluvia’ which ‘travel about’ (1975: 72). Here,
the sign—like Mitchell’s effusive aromas—appears beyond reasonable representation
as a collective dynamic inseparable from bodily encounter.
This way of thinking about a dispersion, or residue, of materials in performative
installation art (and the objects of performance as such) allows for intense alternations
of time (temporization as deferment) and space (interval and distancing as
differentiation). We recall here Tambiah’s main objective in all his approaches to
anthropology, which is to overturn an ethnographic view of (black) magic as a
‘primitive’ and failed science and to lend it instead the agency of performativity.
Here, the force of the trace refers us beyond any intellectualization of participation
and beyond language to the point that we ask what other language this is (Derrida
1982: 25).
References
Bell, Catherine (1997) Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, New York: Oxford
University Press.
Bracken, Christopher (2007) Magical Criticism: the Recourse of Savage Philosophy,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Derrida, Jacques (1982) 'Différance', (Alan Bass, Trans.) Margins of Philosophy (pp.
1-27), Brighton, Sussex: The Harvester Press.
Kreisler, Aaron (2011) 'Radiant Matter II', in Dane Mitchell (ed.) Radiant Matter
I/II/III, Berlin: Berliner Künstlerprogramm/DAAD & ARTSPACE Auckland,
Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery.
Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien (1975) The Notebooks on Primitive Mentality, (Peter Rivière,
Trans.), Oxford: Blackwell.
Mauss, Marcel (1975) A General Theory of Magic, (Robert Brain, Trans.), London:
The Norton Library.
Plato (1991) The Republic of Plato, (Allan Bloom, Trans.), New York: Basic Books.
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Saler, Benson (2003) 'Lévy-Bruhl, Participation, and Rationality', in Jeppe Sinding
Jensen & Luther H. Martin (eds.) Rationality and the Study of Religion (pp.
44-64), London: Routledge.
Tambiah, Stanley J. (1973) 'Form and Meaning of Magical Acts: A Point of View', in
Robin Horton & Ruth Finnegan (eds.) Modes of Thought (pp. 199-229),
London: Faber and Faber.
Taussig, Michael (1993) Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses,
New York: Routledge.
Bio
Chris Braddock is an artist and academic. He is Associate Professor of visual arts in
the School of Art & Design, AUT University, New Zealand, and Chair of the AUT St
Paul St Gallery. His art practice involves performance, video, sound and sculpture.
See www.imageandtext.org.nz. His theoretical research employs key terms such as:
animism, material trace, performance and photography/video, part-object/partsculpture, art and spirituality, blasphemy.
This article is reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan. It reproduces
sections of writing from: Braddock, Christopher (2013) Performing Contagious
Bodies: Ritual Participation in Contemporary Art, London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Braddock’s book explores live/performance art and installation practices through
theories of magic ritual. It maps out a study of live art – together with its
documentation and object/material traces – and uses the concepts of contagion,
animism and ritual participation to open up a range of hotly debated questions about
the temporal aspects of live art and their relation to ‘event’ and where ‘liveness’ lives.
As such the book explores the intersections of performance studies, art history,
anthropology and contemporary visual art practices. Performing Contagious Bodies
dedicates full-length chapters to New Zealand artists Alicia Frankovich and Richard
Maloy, and to Australian artists Laresa Kosloff and Alex Martinis Roe, together with
discussion of a number of widely acknowledged Euro-American artists (Marcel
Duchamp, Ann Hamilton, Bruce Nauman, Gabriel Orozco, Felix Gonzalez-Torres and
Hannah Wilke).
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