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‘telepathy against telepathy, distance against menacing immediacy’ (Derrida 2007: 259).

f o r e w o r d – a n n h a m i l t o n ’ s m a l e d i c t i o n

Seated with her back to the viewer, Ann Hamilton masticates and pushes mouthfuls of bread dough into her mouth’s upper cavity. Carefully retracting the objects, she places them – her ‘mouth casts’ – in a large wicker casket from the turn of last century used to transport bodies to the morgue.1 These bread dough casts of Hamilton’s inner mouth cavity result from part of her performance/installation malediction at the Louver Gallery in New York from 7 December 1991 to 4 January 1992.

Hamilton’s mouth casts challenge inside/outside or figure/ground relationships so that the objects, and the subject from which they flow, are somehow less locatable: not a body part, not an internal organ, not a live part, not a dead part, not nourishment, not not nourishment, not a fully activated performer. The mouth casts suggest three characteristics. The first is that, if we came across these figuratively ambivalent objects post-performance and without recourse to the event of the performance, we might not recognize them. This is true of those objects that survive the performance/installation, collected by the Louver Gallery’s then director Sean Kelly, and now in the RISD (Rhode Island School of Design) Museum of Art in Providence. It is also true of those mouth casts that fermented,

swelled and deteriorated during the course of the work (Simon 2006: 18). And it is true of the two photographs I have from which I interpret the artwork and which are themselves objects of performance. Without knowledge of provenance, performance or ritual informing us of what they are meant to ‘represent’, the ‘mouth’ gestures might fail a realist test. In this sense, Hamilton’s mouth casts are less about figurative accuracy, and, as I will argue, more about an encounter with the body as process. Their ambivalence makes them always complexly contingent upon their contexts of production for any determination of their efficacy.

Hamilton’s mouth casts suggest a second characteristic, that, with recourse to the ritual of the event, we know these objects have been intimately formed: orally sculpted, lubricated with the artist’s saliva, and, in this way, aligned with her body’s ontology. The substance of bread, combined with the artist’s saliva, is linked to digestion and nourishment.

A third characteristic of Hamilton’s mouth casts relates to the ambivalence and substance of the preceding two. With recourse to the event, there is she who produces them: her self-possessed actions, her partiality, her back turned to us, her silence, her repeated oral casting gesture until the death-basket was filled halfway every day for the duration of the one-month performative installation; her skin, her bite, her saliva.

Contagious ParticipationMagic’s Power to Affect

c h r i s t o p h e r b r a d d o c k

Pe rf o rm a n c e R e s e a r c h 1 6 ( 4 ) , p p . 9 7 - 1 0 8 © Ta y l o r & F ra n c i s L td 2 01 1D O I : 1 0 . 1 0 8 0 / 1 3 5 2 8 1 6 5 . 2 0 1 1 . 6 0 6 0 5 6

1 In the interests of focus I am commenting on an aspect of the whole performative installation malediction.

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i n t r o d u c t i o n 2

I want to pay attention to the ‘objects’ of performance art – those activated within performances and then acting as relics or traces, or those produced to activate viewer participation in a performative way – via theories of ritual exchange in magic. A core concept of ‘contagion’ (as it stems from a legacy of cultural anthropology dealing with magic) has associations of contamination by disease with its concurrent characteristics of unwitting participation or unseen networks that infiltrate bodies. Through the concept of contagion I ask how objects – like Hamilton’s mouth casts – become animated through participation and how objects, in turn, might animate bodies. As such, the concept of ‘animism’ (contextualized as an affect of sympathetic magic’s contagious participatory strategies) is explored in order to think through notions of reciprocal participation between people and things: who is giving to whom, who contaminates what, and vice versa? As will be seen below, a commonly perceived divide between inanimate objects and animate beings is contested by a model of participation that embraces forms of co-existence in nature and substance.

In asking how material things might be considered animate, the theories and rituals of magic enable a consideration of, for example, the ‘thing power materialism’ of Jane Bennett (via immanent theories of Spinoza and Deleuze) with regard to a question of attentiveness. Partly based on Bruno Latour’s concept of ‘actants’, Bennett engages with a vibrant materiality intrinsic to things in themselves as distinct from ‘transpersonal’ or ‘intersubjective’ phenomena (2010: xii). Her project, nonetheless, relies on ‘a cultivated, patient, sensory attentiveness to nonhuman forces operating outside and inside the human body’ (2010: xiv). She transparently (and to great effect) courts the contradictory nature of her argument: ‘is it not a human subject who, after all, is articulating this theory of vibrant matter?’ (2010: ix) These apparent contradictions test the ground between an

understanding of material substance as inherently or immanently animated and the thought of performance as a compelling force of ‘attention’ on the part of participants upon those substances. With regard to modalities of animism and anthropomorphism, Bennett resists the possibility that vibrant matter ‘is best attributed to a nonmaterial source, to an animating spirit or “soul”’ (2010: xvii). She does, nevertheless, see virtue in entertaining such systems of belief as a way of, ironically, working against anthropocentrism and the idea that ‘only humans and God can bear any traces of creative agency’ (2010: 120). My intention is to contribute to such debate surrounding non-modern modes of thought about animism as a means to discuss how ‘superhuman’ sensory attentiveness (where the term ‘superhuman’ is borrowed from Henry Balfour’s late nineteenth-century ethnography of sympathetic magic) (1892: 21–5) might operate in modes of participation.

In what follows, I offer an in-depth reading of an aspect of Hamilton’s artwork malediction in the context of a force-field of contagious animism. I will employ the terms ‘sympathy’ and ‘telepathy’ as related to the linguistic terms ‘metaphor’ and ‘metonymy’ which, in turn, correspond to the concepts of ‘similarity’ and ‘contagion’ as used by late-Victorian ethnographers of magic. I propose the ‘sym’ and ‘tele’ as two modalities of affect. A force-field of affect is a ‘there’. It is not governed by dimensions of size or time, but has the capability to affect, a power to affect. Pathos, in contrast, is the power to be affected (as in arousing feelings of sympathy). You can’t represent ‘force’. It is, on the one hand, an existent (always current and ongoing); but on the other, it is a force that needs to have its pathos (pathies). Put another way, what is at stake with force is not its representation but rather how it affects you, what it makes you do. A notion of contagious animism asks how ‘things’ are disclosive of the question of their power, disclosing possibilities of affecting and being affected which applies to all bodies, animate

Braddock

2 Thanks to Mark Jackson to whom I am indebted for many of the critical re-workings of this essay. See my forthcoming book Performing Contagious Bodies: Ritual Exchange in Contemporary Art to be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2012 where an extended version of this paper will appear.

• (opposite) Ann Hamilton, malediction, Louver Gallery, New York, December 7 - January 4, 1992. Courtesy Ann Hamilton Studio. Photo credit: D. James Dee.

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Contagious Participation

and inanimate. The space where sympathy and telepathy collide foregrounds a questioning of modes of representation and the idea that force resides uniquely in human subjects. Moreover, as a distanciation of distance, telepathy contests certain assumptions about our ability to be attentive, to attend the ‘event’ as the presumed site of participation.

From this standpoint, my essay serves as a survey discussion of two ethnographic moments, dealt with in reverse chronology, before returning to Hamilton’s artwork. The first is a moment in the late-1960s, in which structural anthropology contested a late-Victorian view of magical practices as driven by an over-determination of scientific models of cause and effect, to the detriment of understanding magic as a form of persuasive performative utterance indicative of participation. This legacy of cultural anthropology’s dealings with magic (which were privileged in establishing grounding aspects of structural linguistics) circulates around the anthropologist Stanley J. Tambiah, whose thinking on mimetic sympathy as a form of ‘persuasive analogy’ in ritual performance draws a crucial link between J. L. Austin’s performative utterance and notions of sympathetic magic. Rather than view magical rituals from a point of view of cause and effect, employing ‘empirical verification associated with scientific activity’ (Tambiah 1973: 219), Tambiah argues for an understanding of the performative aspects of magical acts, through which properties are transferred to recipients (objects or persons) as the act’s semantic basis. In this line of argument, the thought of performance manifest in ritual exchange becomes a compelling force of mimetic sympathy between participants and things. This sympathy with things – which I contextualize as magic’s contagious, animistic strategies – operates other than with respect to a subject’s intended view of the world and is untethered to the idea of an ‘event’ in time. Instead, it exceeds the subject in forms of unwitting infiltration. Uncritical of Austin’s assertion that performatives are bound to specific ritual

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contexts, Tambiah could not foresee theories of affect in which participation becomes contextualized as an affect of a contagious force-field, which in turn (as a contested site of putative intentionality) draws participants out of themselves.

The second moment, a short focus on the late nineteenth-century ethnographies of Edward Burnett Tylor and Henry Balfour, reveals, to my mind, an astonishing yet equivocal insight into the possibilities of a power to be affected. Redolent with racist views of cultural difference and Victorian evolutionist theories of their time, I nevertheless pursue their thinking with a view to, ironically, affirming some of their observations as advantageous to the indigenous subjects they critique;3 advantageous with respect to ‘a more open-minded comportment’ (Bennett 2010: xv) to the possibilities of animated non-human material. Late nineteenth-century writing on sympathetic magical practices proposes a contagious transformation of objects such that they become a new body that hosts, for example, disease-spirits. In a reappraisal of this ethnographic material, it can be argued that objects perform the person; that is, they become contaminated to the point that they become the thing. If such a contamination is activated by the attentive sympathies of ritual donors or participants, how is this idea of attentive sympathy understood? One implication is that these objects of magical ritual – and as I will argue, objects of performance art – are animated to the point that they participate as part-subjects that catalyse events. Put another way, as object-receivers of sympathetic mimetic ‘attention’, these objects are transformed to the point that they exceed the subject invested in them.4

Before engaging more fully with these two ethnographies and their application to notions of contagious animism, I want to briefly outline two pertinent conceptual frameworks: those of ritual force-fields and gift exchange.

f o r c e - f i e l d s

As a means of articulating a power to affect and a relationship to ritual contexts, Brian Massumi employs a teleparable of the soccer match, sketching out the playing field as a force-field, and describing the players as part-objects and the ball as a part-subject. He does this by defining the ball as ‘the focus of every player and the object of every gesture’ (2002: 73). Thus, the ball, not the player, is the subject of the play:

Since the ball is nothing without the continuum of potential it doubles, since its effect is dependent on the physical presence of a multiplicity of other bodies and objects of various kinds; since the parameters of its actions are regulated by the application of rules, for all these reasons the catalytic object-sign may be called a part-subject. The part-subject catalyzes the play as a whole but is not itself a whole. (Massumi 2002: 73)

Here, the body figures not as a whole body but as a part-body: a foot that kicks where the kicking is not an expression of the player inasmuch as it is a response to the ball ‘drawing out’ the kick. And typical of the unlimited contexts in which performativity might be articulated, the players are drawn out of themselves, looking beyond the ball as they take in a myriad of external factors that might include, but are never exhaustive of, other players’ movements, the crowd and extended TV footage:

Any player who is conscious of himself as he kicks misses. Self-consciousness is a negative condition of play. The players’ reflective sense of themselves as subjects is a source of interference that must be minimalized for the play to channel smoothly. When a player readies a kick, she is not looking at the ball so much as she is looking past it. She is reflexively (rather than reflectively) assessing the potential movement of the ball. (Massumi 2002: 74)

Ritual is perhaps the field that plays out our power to be affected. Ritual provides procedures to go through and takes what could otherwise be everyday out of its everydayness. And the

3 See Anna Gibbs expressing a similar view in the context of the work of nineteenth-century French sociologist Gabriel Tarde in relation to sympathy, hypnotism and suggestion vis-à-vis the psychology of crowds (Gibbs 2008: 140). See also her overview of mimesis and sympathy (Gibbs 2010).

4 This notion of excess vis-à-vis the debate surrounding live art’s relationship to its documentation – the record of the live moment – has played out in numerous texts over the last decade. See, for example, Rebecca Schneider as she writes: ‘The paper, frame, and photo of the action all represent to the viewer that which the viewer missed – that which, standing before the document, you witness yourself missing again. And yet, in missing you are somehow more available to this “excess” of the object than you would be in a situation of “presence”’ (2005: 42).

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rules and rituals of the game are constantly in variance as the game emerges and continues to evolve ‘to the extent that circumstances arise that force modifications to the rules’ (Massumi 2002: 72). That you are there, shifts you.

g i f t e x c h a n g e

Marcel Mauss offers a view of economic exchange between donor and donee that frames a notion of gift-giving in terms of the law of contagion that can be applied to principles of contagious animism. In relation to the gift giving of ‘taonga’ by Maori in New Zealand, Mauss writes that:

What imposes obligation in the present received and exchanged, is in fact that the thing received is not inactive. Even when it has been abandoned by the giver it still possesses something of him. Through it the giver has a hold over the beneficiary.’ (Mauss 2002: 15)

This is a concept related to a notion of ‘action at a distance’ (read ‘telepathy’ for the purposes of this essay) embedded in sympathetic magic, whereby ‘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 1978: 34). From this perspective, Mauss writes:

Magic performed over the residues of meals … follows from the idea that there is a continuity and complete identity between the remains, the food consumed and the one who has eaten – the latter being substantially identical to the food partaken by him. (Mauss 1975: 65)5

Mauss perceived Maori as adopting an

exchange system where gifts were ultimately either reciprocated or returned, and which he further outlines as the obligations to ‘give’, to ‘receive’ and to ‘reciprocate’ (2002: 13, 50–5).6 Jacques Derrida critiques Mauss’ The Gift with its emphasis on economy, exchange and contract as speaking ‘of everything but the gift’ (1992: 24). He points out that if the gift is to be really a gift

it must be forgotten both by donor and donee. And this is a radical forgetting where ‘the gift not only must not be repaid but must not be kept in memory, retained as symbol or a sacrifice, as symbolic in general’ (1992: 24). In this sense Derrida points to the impossibility of gifting. As soon as a gift is acknowledged as such it ceases to be a gift: ‘If the gift appears or signifies itself, if it exists or if it is presently as gift, as what it is, then it is not, it annuls itself’ (1992: 26–7).

A significance of Derrida’s critique is that Mauss’ interpretation of gifting would always position the donor as having specific intentions that relate, in turn, to specific obligations; I animate this object such that it will have power over you. A question with respect to donor participants, and of Hamilton and her mouth casts, is who is giving to whom, who contaminates what and vice versa. In this sense, a question of contamination is a question of what gives the power, animate or inanimate. In effect, Mauss places limitations on a force-field’s power to affect by over-determining the thing rather than a capacity to be affected. Mauss is concentrating on the thing rather than its capacity to be. He never says what gives the thing power – what makes magic work. And in his over-determination of cause and effect he risks closing down the nature of the phenomena of magic. In this context, the term ‘donor’ accentuates a lack of disclosure with regard to the one who gives. With its associations to somebody giving blood, sperm or a body organ, we do not always know who the donor is. I want to emphasize the idea of a ‘giver’ or ‘contributor’ where questions of ‘what’ or ‘who’ gives the power to life are redolent. Via the operations of sympathetic magical practices, I consider the body of the artist as a ritual ‘donor’ participant within a complex and inexhaustible array of participatory agents (audiences, you reading this text …), less as one of exchange with attendant putative intentions and more as unwitting agents ‘drawn out’ by the ritual force-fields of participation. In this way, I aim to undermine some modernist tropes which have tended to

5 Authorship for the original version of this work published in L’Année Sociologique is attributed to Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert.

6 See my forthcoming book Performing Contagious Bodies: Ritual Exchange in Contemporary Art to be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2012 where an extended version of this paper will appear.

Contagious Participation

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view the artist in the more authoritative (and domineering) guise of high priest, shaman or magician, as a kind of tragic subject in the centre of the art work itself.

Hamilton’s mouth casts are the focus of every donor within the force-field that is the ritual. But like Massumi’s soccer ball, these objects on their own are not enough as they need the field of potential: the ritual that is embedded in institutional possibilities. From such a standpoint, the mouth casts move the donor participants. The donors are the objects of the mouth casts within the force-field that draws them out. It is in this sense that performance (the ‘body art’ project) plays with the rules of that force-field, transforming the gallery for Hamilton into an unlocatable space of transition (bakery, morgue, workhouse, museum). Performance art and the live body of the artist disrupts, always having the potential to mutate: ‘body art, with its solicitation of spectatorial desires and deliberate confusion of conventional artistic presentational formats, complicates the tendency to codify postmodernism purely in terms of artistic strategies of production’ (Jones 1998: 30). And since the mouth casts’ effects are dependent on the corporeal presence of a diversity of other bodies and other part-objects of assorted kinds, these catalytic object-signs may be called part-subjects, making each donor its part-object.7 I now return to the first of my two ethnographic moments in the work of the anthropologist Stanley J. Tambiah.

t h e ‘ s y m ’ a n d t h e ‘ t e l e ’ o f m e t a p h o r a n d m e t o n y m y

In a critique of anthropology’s methodologies, Tambiah questions how Evans-Pritchard’s study of Zande witchcraft can ask, from a European intellectual standpoint, questions of cause and effect with a view to empirical verification. As Tambiah writes:

Magical acts are ritual acts, and ritual acts are in turn performative acts whose positive and creative meaning is missed and whose persuasive validity

is misjudged if they are subjected to that kind of empirical verification associated with scientific activity. (Tambiah 1973: 199)

Instead, Tambiah argues that the performative nature of magical acts are semantically embedded in ritual and that such ritual engages with objectives of ‘persuasion’, ‘conceptualisation’ and ‘expansion of meaning’ (1973: 219). In other words, to ask if magic works from a standpoint of cause and effect is asking the wrong question. Thus, Tambiah’s structural anthropology analyses the concept of contagion in theories of ritual and magic through the operations of metaphor and metonymy in language.8 He critiques, for example, Evans-Pritchard’s Zande case study in which a creeper is employed for curing leprosy (1973: 214). The case study relies on the creeper’s falling foliage leaving behind residues that resemble a leper’s wounds. This residue is made into a paste and is applied to the wounded body. Tambiah sees the term ‘metaphor’ as encompassing simile and analogy, ‘a surrogate which has a dual reference to the original object and to the object for which it now stands’ (1968: 189) – in this case, a plant’s growth formations and a leper’s sores. The creeper’s residue takes the place of the leper’s sores in visual mimetic sympathy. While metaphor is ‘a figure of similarity’, metonymy stands for a crossing of these chains of metaphoric association, forming an unwitting contamination of animate and inanimate participants in ritual exchange. Roland Barthes describes this overlapping of metaphoric association, and its transfer of meaning from one chain to the other, as a metomymic ‘contagion’ of qualities and actions (1972: 245). He makes a crucial connection to Roman Jakobson’s opposition ‘between metaphor, a figure of similarity, and metonymy, a figure of contiguity’ (1972: 245n2) where Jakobson was, in turn, referencing the operations of sympathetic magic. For Barthes, this is:

a technical transgression of the forms of language, for metonymy is precisely a forced syntagm, the

7 The end of this passage is paraphrased from Brian Massumi’s Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (2002: 73).

8 For a discussion of these linguistic operations in relation to the failure of performance, see Braddock (2010).

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violation of a signifying limit of space; it permits, on the very level of discourse, a counterdivision of objects, usages, meaning, spaces and properties. (1972: 246)

Such a ‘violation of a signifying limit of space’ resonates with Massumi’s force-field of affect as an ongoing continuum of potential.

Tambiah contests that, insofar as the plant is employed therapeutically, a persuasive and forceful transfer is announced where the undesirable loss of the limbs resulting in death is replaced by a desired growth: a persuasive mimicry of the plant’s growth in the human subject. Here, Tambiah suggests a vacillation in the ritual participants (donor, magician, family members, and so on), between literally ‘knowing’ that a creeper is a creeper and a bodily aphasia (not Tambiah’s term) that I interpret as a deeply animistic operation in that the creeper’s residue is animated to the point that it becomes the disease. Tambiah’s understanding of these operations (like Barthes’ ‘counterdivision of objects, usages, meaning, spaces and properties’) positions a metonymic contiguity or contamination in the persuasive force of a performative illocutionary ‘act of doing’ (Austin’s performative). In this sense, these forms of transgression in language act in the bodies of participants through mimetic sympathy (Gibbs 2010: 201; Strathern 1996: 27).9 It follows that any attempt to explain magic’s animating contagious strategies as an intentionally directed mental force of ‘attention’ on the part of participants, or as a discredited belief system in a transfer of disease-spirits, overlooks the phenomena of ritual exchange in the affect of the force-field.10

Elsewhere, Tambiah explores a theory of ‘participation’, once again, in contrast to a concept of ‘causality’. Employing the work of Mauss’ contemporary Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Tambiah writes that a late-Victorian view of magical practices as ‘irrational’ misunderstood a ‘law of participation’ that ‘signified the association between persons and things in primitive thought to the point of identity and consubstantiality’ (Tambiah 1990: 86). This

idea of consubstantiality can be understood as participation of the same nature, co-existence in the same substance. In this sense the action of the Zande case study takes place in the ‘original’ creeper’s growth (all the creepers still growing) and in the material substance now applied in direct contact with the donor’s diseased body part.

From such a perspective, the term ‘telepathy’ (action-at-a-distance) is understood as a metonymic contamination of the rational possibilities of representation (you can’t represent force). It plays out as the power to affect whatever is there, animate or inanimate.11 As Tambiah notes: ‘This sense of participation is not merely a (metaphorical) representation for it implies a physical and mystical union’ (Tambiah 1990: 86). In this sense, telepathy as a modality of affect would be an unrelenting desire working against innumerable undesired outcomes such as disease and the failure of crops; or indeed, against the failure of ‘liveness’. It operates symbolically and ritually against each passing moment. As Jacques Derrida writes, ‘telepathy against telepathy, distance against menacing immediacy’ (2007: 259).

Here, the study of magic – like a study of gossip by Irit Rogoff – is an investigation into a principle of contamination (1996: 317–19). Rogoff discusses gossip as a form of ‘radical knowledge’ that ‘negates the scholarly distanciation between what is said, who it is said by and who is being addressed’ (1996: 318). Likewise, to open up a discourse of magic as radical knowledge negates a scholarly distanciation between institutionally and scientifically ‘viable’ knowledge and modes of performative ritual derived from discredited folklore. Contagious animism complicates the human and non-human, the animate and inanimate, as it forcefully questions how the objects of our address are in excess of us and how the event of participation might occur beyond rational modes of representation and duration. As such, magic lies outside theoretical frameworks in a manner akin to the way in which Rogoff points to Derrida’s analysis of

9 The embodied nature of Stanley J. Tambiah’s semantics of persuasion is important to my discussion. Tambiah also entertains enacting performative acts without the use of words (1973: 221–2) as well as across a range of object mediums (1973: 223n1).

10 See Jesper Sorensen who points to a lack of consideration for ritual processes among the Victorian rationalists: ‘In the attempt to explain magic as actions that are rational by reference to underlying mental procedures and beliefs, they disregard the very special status of these actions – that they are exactly “ritual” actions – and thereby almost explain the phenomena away’ (2007: 3).

11 At the heart of Tambiah’s analysis of sympathetic magical practices, while he does not employ these terms, lies metaphor as the axis of symptom while metonymy is the axis of desire. In this respect Jacques Lacan’s correlation of psychoanalysis and linguistics and its relationship to Jacobson’s theories, as well as ‘Freud’s condensation (metaphor or symptom) and displacement (metonymy or desire)’ (Wilden 1980: 47), sit in the background of this essay.

Contagious Participation

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telepathy where ‘[e]verything, in our conception of knowledge, is constructed so that telepathy be impossible, unthinkable, unknown’ (Derrida 2007: 244).

h e n r y b a l f o u r ’ s ‘ a n a l o g o - t e l e p a t h y ’

Tambiah is reacting to a group of since discredited Western ethnographies of non-Western notions of animism. He is right to head a charge of misappropriating performative ritual for a failed science. However, what fascinates me in some late nineteenth-century ethnographies of sympathetic magic, is an equivocal investment in the ritual magic they critique.12

In 1869, in a paper delivered to the Weekly Evening Meeting of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, Edward Burnett Tylor outlined a view ‘On the Survival of Savage Thought in Modern Civilization’ in which objects can operate as substitute bodies. In the context of what he terms ‘lower animism’ he writes:

that diseases are caused by spirits possessing or attacking the patient. It is another principle that spirits may embody themselves for a time in any material object…. Thus the disease-spirits may be persuaded to come out of the patient, and get into some object prepared for them. (Tylor 1869: 8)

And again in 1870, in The Journal of the Ethnological Society of London, Tylor noted that, to the ‘savage’ mind, things as well as men and animals have souls, and that the diseased-spirit is offered a surrogate ‘body’ in which to reside: ‘To get rid of this spirit they seem to say, let us get it a new body to enter or pervade.’ He refers to Burton’s description of ‘the Central African habit of transferring diseases into bits of stick or rag, &c., which form what is called the keti or stool on which the noxious infection sits’ (376–7). In this manner, Tylor contextualizes the idea of transferring diseases from human being to object within the general notion of animism, where ‘savage psychology’ perceives a soul as sometimes visible and invisible, and an

individual as one ‘who scarcely distinguishes his subjectivity from objectivity, hardly knows his inside from his outside’ (1870: 371–2).

Of course these ideas are laced with Victorian racist attitudes that posit indigenous people as under-evolved and lacking in civilization. But such an ignominious view, from a phenomenological standpoint, is paradoxically apposite in its questioning of interiorized subjectivities and exteriorized objectivities.

In his journal notes for an address to the Oxford Biological Club of 1892 entitled ‘Some Aspects of Superstition: Sympathetic Magic’, Henry Balfour makes a link between the phenomena of sympathetic (analogous) mimesis and telepathy:13

the doctrine of Animism, to capress [sic] the theory of the general possession of souls and spirits by all animate and inanimate objects – (tied to Sympathetic Magic). The intimate relationship between shadow, reflection, diram [sic] manifestations, and souls or spirits, is extended, by analogical reasoning almost universally to material images of representation of objects or persons; thus, it is supposed that there is a telepathic relationship between an object and its material image or likeness, acting by ‘analogy’ and, here it [sic] not an inordinately ugly and cumbrous term, we might ca… [handwriting unclear] a word ‘analogo-telepathy’ for this kind of relationship – It is firmly believed, and this not only by lowly cultured man, as I shall presently show, that the possession of a figure or representation of a person or other objects, gives the possessor superhuman power over that object, and, that any treatment of the image will be reflected in the body of the object represented, and, on this account it is a dangerous thing for a person to allow anyone to possess an image or representation of him, as it gives the possessor means of applying offensive magic to the person represented. (Balfour 1892: 21–5)

I am struck, here, by the ontological shifts between subjecthood and objecthood; between an object and its material image or likeness, as if the human subject is a material image or trace: ‘that any treatment of the image will be reflected in the body of the object represented.’ But which

12 In this sense, both Edward Burnett Tylor and Balfour exhibit an oscillation between belief and disbelief in the material discussed. Tylor exemplifies this in his duplicitous attitude to sympathetic magic when he states that he was in possession of various artefacts that have ‘disappeared mysteriously’, suggesting that there is some element of belief invested in what he earlier described as the intellectual level of the peasant and savage (1891: 389).

13 I wish to thank the staff of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, for assisting me so generously with primary research.

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body exactly? It is as if the material image exceeds (goes over or surpasses) the subject as ‘the body of the object’. Together with this, Balfour can be seen as questioning, by virtue of the idea of telepathy, the moment of the ‘event’ in which such operations might occur. I sense from the language of these accounts – and the manner in which Tylor and Balfour elide a question of primitivisms lodged in ‘modern civilization’ – that a so-called ‘savage’ animistic psychology asks how ‘things’ disclose their power in ways that are disquietingly irrational. Lévy-Bruhl’s ‘law of participation’, which Tambiah addresses as a ‘semantics’ of participation, offers these anthropologists (albeit at-a-distance) a theory of participatory contamination that entertains disturbing consubstantiality as a metonymic violation of animate insides and inanimate outsides.

a f t e r w o r d

Hamilton’s mouth casts are figuratively ambivalent. In one sense, if they were more representationally ‘determined’ it might close down their force, their power to affect. This is not simply a recognition of aesthetic ambiguity; rather, it shifts emphasis from an object’s self-contained objecthood, where meaning is located in the product, towards an understanding of a power to affect as located in ritual exchange

with, and through, other bodies and events across time. Here, ‘operations and products have a primary significance that is radically other than the aesthetic’ (Sparshott 1982: 372, my emphasis). Francis Sparshott establishes such conditions within mystic lines of representation as he writes:

A magical image is not as such meant to be contemplated or appreciated…. An aesthetically insignificant image would do equally well if it happened to do the job … what matters is what will actually control or embody the force in the relevant way. (Sparshott 1982: 375–6)

To repeat: What is at stake with power is not its representation but rather how it affects you, what it makes you do. It was from a similar perspective that Amelia Jones revitalized the term ‘body art’, positioning ‘the art “object” as a site where reception and production come together: a site of intersubjectivity’ (Jones 1998: 14). From such a point of view, a study of body art and its traces, in relation to the rituals of magic as an animating force of sympathetic mimesis, is apposite. In processes of contagious animism, as is the case in many theories of gift exchange, objects (and subjects) become ‘symbols of the act of exchange itself’, thus entering into forms of ‘displaced reciprocity’ (Wilden 1980: 32) that are as much about bodies in ritual exchange as they are about forms of production. In this sense, magic’s

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contagious animism transforms Hamilton’s mouth casts such that they share some of the characteristics of ‘actants’, defined as ‘“any entity that modifies another entity in a trial,” something whose “competence is deduced from [its] performance” rather than posited in advance of the action’ (Bennett 2010: viii, quoting Latour).

Hamilton performs her casts, over and over, facilitating (as distinct from producing) part-subjects animated with nourishment, digestion, patience, tenderness and (muted) speech, placing them in a wicker casket used to transport corpses. She sits (silently) in a space burgeoning with the silence of that exploited workforce of immigrants, women and children who laboured at the turn of the century in SoHo’s sweatshop clothing industry (Simon 2002: 121–5). Bread dough, following repeated pushing and mastication, takes the place of all those dead. We can extend Mauss’ argument to say that these partial objects produce the person and, in Mauss’ terms, that there remains a continuity between these remains and ‘the one who has eaten – the latter being substantially identical to the food partaken by her’ (1975: 65; emphasis and gender changed). This is Balfour’s telepathic relationship between an object and its material image. Tambiah’s structural analysis throws into focus a chain of metaphorical associations, in the sense that they are complementary, as those of bread dough, mouth, saliva, bread buns, women’s labour, and so on. But Hamilton’s performative actions present not just these complementary but also distant terms, constituting an exchange which undertakes to vacillate meaning (Barthes 1972: 244– 7). In this regard, she is an ambiguous and over-determined part-object. She is indeterminate as she is many things (Eucharistic communicant, labourer, artist at work), while a minimal play of contiguity allows for a crossing of these lines of metaphorical substitution. In the metonymic contamination of a subject’s sympathy given to another, the mouth casts (as part-subjects) move Hamilton and the innumerable other participants. These donor participants are the objects of the mouth casts within the force-field that draws

them out. In this way, the movement of the ‘thing’ exceeds the subject as unwitting infiltration. As Derrida writes:

I felt from a distance and confusedly, that I was searching for a word, perhaps a proper name…. Rather, it was the term that was searching for me, it had the initiative, according to me, and was doing its best to gather itself together by every means, for a period of time that I could not measure, all night perhaps, and even more, or else an hour or three minutes, impossible to know, but is it a question here of knowing? (Derrida 2007: 226)

Hamilton’s attempt to ‘transfer the desirable’ qualities of nourishment and speech ‘to the other which is in a defective state’ (Tambiah 1973: 222–3) is other than intersubjective or transpersonal. She is drawn out of herself, prompted by animated materiality and/or substance. But ‘animated’ is not quite a verb, not a wilful and self-consciousness action entering and animating materiality. Maybe this is more like waiting for something to reach us, rather than attentively pursuing it? As Derrida notes above: ‘it was the term that was searching for me, it had the initiative.’ This would be the importance of Baruch Spinoza’s understanding of the power of God and Nature. A concept of power is shifted from God as transcendent first principle and as ultimately that which sanctions and controls, to power conceived of as a potential in all substance. This resonates with Lévy-Bruhl’s ideas, discussed above, of identity in ‘participation’ as a consubstantiality or co-existence in substance. Here, power is understood ‘as capacity to be or the maximizing of one’s or a thing’s capability to be, which for Spinoza was expressed in terms of affecting and being affected’ (Jackson 2011: unpaginated manuscript). This drawing out of ritual participants is the force of an endless series of contagious participatory strategies, the context for which cannot be saturated. As Mark Jackson writes: ‘The material thing is thus the unfolding, in its singularity, of its own degrees of power within an infinite number of degrees as

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attributes of God / Nature as Substance’ (2011: unpaginated manuscript).

To tie the donor’s agency down with specific sympathetic attention/s would, with respect to Derrida’s thinking on the gift, dissolve the force that draws them out. Just as when Massumi’s soccer player focuses on the ball and misses, the donor must look past the gift, where her participatory agency is not driven by intentional and directed ‘giving’ inasmuch as drawn out by the part subjects of the mouth casts. A certain tension in Bennett’s argument comes to the fore here vis-à-vis a subject’s jurisdiction over attentiveness. On the one hand, the moment that ‘a cultivated, patient, sensory attentiveness to nonhuman forces’ (Bennett 2010: xiv) is conjured, it holds power over the potentialities of other substances. On the other hand, Bennett clearly seeks attentiveness that is less intentional, less directional, ‘a melting of cause and effect’ (2010: 31–3). Tambiah’s thinking, in the context of affect theory, provides a system where the operations of contagious animism become semantically embedded in ritual. Such transformations in language become somatically embodied in subjects as deeply persuasive and expansive modes of participation that exceed the ‘presence’ of the subject.

Hamilton’s actions consist of producing object-symbols as ‘tele-things’ in order to support (not direct) telepathic and therapeutic transfers of phenomena to various recipients: herself, her audience, us now, and, within a sphere of the unseen, those who have previously passed through the space. From this perspective, the objects of performance have been framed as contingent upon their contexts of production for any determination of their efficacy, and their substance aligned with the ontology of the body with a focus on she who produces them as ritual participant. Questions of contagious participation circulate around the one who attentively gives, except that there is always more than one, ‘of several lives at the same time, certainly more than two, always more than two’ (Derrida 2007: 228). Sympathetic magic’s

contagious participatory strategies allows for a questioning of how this attentiveness – let’s call it superhuman attention – is manifest.

c o n c l u s i o n

Thus Balfour’s description of the possessor’s ‘superhuman power over that object, and … the body of the object represented’ is re-contextualized. Less a subject’s anthropocentric hierarchy of power over another non-human entity, and more a power to be affected that slides beyond the traditional subject–object divide. Hamilton – like the individual ‘who scarcely distinguishes his subjectivity from objectivity, hardly knows his inside from his outside’ (Tylor 1870: 371–2) – seems now at a distinct advantage. Hamilton is precisely more corporeal and tangible (and of the moment) as part of the whole: all mouth and hands, like Massumi’s soccer players are all legs. The principles of contiguity (fundamental to the operations at work in contagious animism) contaminate meaning in their exceeding of the subject, provoking tele-things (remote and distant): sympathies and telepathies able to shift understandings of what it is to participate, to involve yourself, to partake. As such, Tambiah’s theory of participation operates as a force to affect beyond rational limits of representation and beyond what we might identify as thinking subjects and inanimate objects: a consubstantiality between persons and things.

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