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“The power to change form – power over the image – can be seen as the ultimate realisable power in a society dominated by consensual (visual) image,” writes Roy Wagner.(⊛)
By “consensual (visual) image” Wagner means what is commonly (and poorly) known as “tradition.” Take, for example, any extra-modern ritual: on the day in which… one of the two clans of a tribe dresses like… while the other clan dresses instead like…, on such or such occasion, things are done in such or such manner…, etc.; that is to say, a consensual visual image is produced regarding how things are or how they must be performed.
Why are images of this kind necessary? Lévi-Strauss offers an excellent explanation: classification, he says, is essential for any world to be there in the first place, and thus unrenounceable for any human group;(⦿) and to classify reality, one may add, does not only mean to assign meaning and identity to all things, but to picture them in some way – as a result, an image is produced, or rather multiple images, with each society consisting in a peculiar distribution of images.
Again, then: power over the image is the ultimate realisable power in a society dominated by consensual visual image. For otherwise no society would be able to transform its images, and all images must be both kept and transformed, as Sylvie Poirier recalls apropos the way in which Australian Aboriginals relate to their ancestral Law: its flexible interpretation and application contrasts with their own conservative discourse about it, so that structure and event dissolve into one another through their dialectical interplay.(⭐︎)
Actually, it is one and the same power that is at stake in the two cases, i.e. when it comes to organise images and when it comes to change them. Wagner once more: “What we might call ‘culture’ or ‘society,’ is the containment by human beings of a spontaneously occurring force or power” that enables them both to produce meaning anew and to “test its limits.”(⦼) Put differently, Apollo (form) and Dionysus (event) are the two faces of a single phenomenon (the two names of a single god): were it not for Apollo, nothing definite would begin; were it not for Dionysus, things would not be in position to begin otherwise.
Call it “double focus”(⊗) or “dual vision,” if you wish – or, what amounts to the same, “reciprocity of perspectives.”(Δ)
Now, such power (of transformation), stresses Wagner, “cannot attain complete closure or resolution without losing its situation of advantage […] with respect to conventional forms,” and it must thus be “retained […] in the form of a concealed ‘mystery’ or cult, one that […] stands in a contingent relation to social convention.”(⊙) In other words, extra-modern secrecy is anything but capricious, as, without it, such power would be capable of composing forms, but not of testing their limits so as to transform them when needed, as it would be always-already over-exposed and hence contained, limited, informed. If “tradition” is a bad name for conventional image, for it is the result of reducing convention to transmission (trans-dare) and of ignoring that the mechanisms of unconventional innovation may also be, to a certain extent, transmitted, “secrecy” is only a possible name, among others, to qualify the condition that the use of power must meet when the latter is used to produce the new against convention.
Following Wagner, one can describe convention as “containment” and innovation as “elicitation” – of meaning, what else? But it would be also possible to some extent to draw both concepts close to Félix Guattari’s notions of “territorialisation” and “deterritorialisation,” deprived of political connotations, i.e. taking them as modal categories of being.(*)
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But where can one find elicitation mechanisms at play inside an extra-modern society? In the following intersecting domains, to begin with (their order below is merely alphabetical):
Ancestors – i.e. the peculiarities and the bits of virtue and wisdom achieved by anyone, after deceasing, which are evoked and transmitted from one generation to the next.
Clan exchange and reciprocity – which requires that the making of the same, i.e. the production of new individuals belonging to a given clan or social body, takes place through the assumption of difference, or marriage with someone belonging in the opposite clan; clan reciprocity is preserved by having the members of each clan assume ongoing tasks and responsibilities vis-à-vis those of the other clan, i.e. towards what is more than their own body.
Dreams – by which one frequents other dimensions and realities, engaging in unpredictable adventures therein.
Ethos – which often enacts the power to disrupt otherwise stable social relations through an abusive use of jokes which puts such relations at risk of not being validated anymore, so as to have them intentionally and creatively validated rather than assumed out of routine.
Gender roles – which reproduce, in a different scale, the same logic mentioned above apropos clan exchange and maintained reciprocity.
Ghost places – which impersonate someone’s elicited singularity.
Metaphor– which breaks through the conventional order of meaning, on which we have written here and here.
Myth extension and gloss – which allow for the addition of new items to the conventional stock of myths characteristic of any human group and for the free and multiform interpretation of shared myths, respectively.
Picture-souls – i.e. the “artificially separable image to reconnoiter with, and from”(∞) that all animated being must posses as its own “imperative of motion,”(Ω) and of which that being’s shadow is the ingenious sensible proof.
Proper names – which function like people’s picture-souls do, allowing their bearers to become more than they are.
Secrecy – which frames, by definition, the ultimate reliability on power’s ability to transcend any norms.
Shamanism and sorcery (or magic) – which makes possible the exchange of perspectives between different things, e.g. a man and a jaguar, as well as, more broadly, the transformation of physics into semantics which is the key to extra-modern magic.
Yet all this would be incomplete without the opposite dimension of power being granted some active role, as well. Ritual alternation pursues that goal, at least partly, i.e. some rituals (those that celebrate/enact containment) do; and the same can be said of the elicitation of ethos, clan exchange and reciprocity, gender roles, and ghost places, which simultaneously tend to re-conduce the virtual back to the limits of the actual.
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We should like to call here the reader’s attention, though, on two specific, and arguably re-integrative, rituals, to wit, exo-cannibalism and endo-cannibalism.
Exo-cannibalism –Here and there, extra-modern ritual exo-cannibalism (on which more academically we have written here) presents a common structure:
(1) It is not so much about eating someone (even if that happens, no one pretends to deny it) as it is about incorporating something (let’s call it “x”) by means of eating someone (“x’s bearer”).
(2) The something in question is always something else and something more than that someone’s physical substance (even if the latter is materially incorporated, as well).
(3) Since the eaten is always-already in a certain relation to the eater (before being eaten, that is) “x” is that relation (= R1).
(4) This means that ritual exo-cannibalism is, in the last instance, a question of relational logic.
(5) It also means that the consumption of “x” makes the relation of the eaten to the eater (R1) undergo a new relation (= R2). Whereas R1 is the other’s “Otherness” qua enemy, R2 amounts to its incorporation by his own enemy – that is, it corresponds to what Viveiros de Castro calls “an identification to the contrary”(⊜) – which transforms R1’s receptor in a even-more-powerful enemy in turn.
(6) Therefore, ritual exo-cannibalism is a second-order relation, or the relation of a relation.
(7) Given that any relation is both symbolic and signalic, and that any sign has life only within a sign system, the nature of extra-modern ritual exo-cannibalism is, in the last instance, semiotic.
It is fundamental to emphasise this against any substantialist interpretation (of the type: it is someone else’s substance, and thus someone else’s physical strength, that is consumed in it, so as to duplicate one’s own physical strength) of extra-modern ritual exo-cannibalism. Yet after restoring to it its inherently relational logic, it is likewise crucial to understand what takes place in it not only in terms of what exactly is consumed in it, but of how and by whom it is. And this leads us back to the difference between convention and innovation, elicitation and containment.
Usually, the victim is never eaten by the killer, but by the women and children of the killer’s family. In a matrilineal society (which are, by far, the most numerous ones among extra-modern peoples) this means that he is eaten by the enemy group’s body, and, consequently, that the elicitation of power carried out by the hunter/warrior to procure himself a victim from beyond the limits of his world, is re-contained by the group.
Endo-cannibalism –As for extra-modern ritual endo-cannibalism, it responds to a similar pattern: those who depart from the social body, i.e. those who die, are re-contained in it; or, rather, as we have written elsewhere, their bodies (which are always part of the social body of the clan or the family, since they carry its blood) are… while their shadows (or souls) wander about the territory of the family or the clan as ghosts and their spirit (i.e. the admixture of the most idiosyncratic traits of the deceased and the bits of wisdom and virtue that they may have achieved) gain the status of ancestors.
Therefore, whichever its modality, extra-modern ritual cannibalism must not only be seen as a type of funeral ritual; it must also be viewed as what Mauss famously called a “total social fact,” not in the sense that it covers all the spheres of society, but in the sense that it brings together any society’s two basic principles: elicitation and containment, form and event.
(⊛) Roy Wagner, Asiwinarong: Ethos, Image, and Social Power among the Usen Barok of New Ireland (Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 145.
(⦿) In the first chapter of The Savage Mind (La Pensée sauvage) (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966).
(⭐︎) Sylvie Poirier, A World of Relationships: Itineraries, Dreams, and Events in the Australian Western Desert (Toronto, Buffalo [NY], and London: University of Toronto Press, 2005), pp. 4-6.
(⦼) Wagner, Asiwinarong, p. xiv.
(⊗) Roy Wagner, Coyote Anthropology (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), pp. 50, 56, 74, 136, 152, 153; The Logic of Invention (Chicago: HAU Books, 2020), pp. 96, 99
(⊕) Wagner, Coyote Anthropology, pp. 22, 182.
(Δ) Wagner, The Logic of Invention, pp. viii, xiv, 1-18, 22, 95, 96, 113, 116.
(⊙)Wagner, Asiwinarong, p. 122.
(*) Notice that as Guattari himself gives to his thought an increasingly ontological texture from the late 1980s onwards. See e.g. Félix Guattari, Schizoanalytic Cartographies (trans. Andrew Goffey; London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013).
(⧀) Roy Wagner, Coyote Anthropology, pp. 49-50. On animism, see our entry “Animism as a Question of Bodies and Logical Paradoxes.” We still maintain what we wrote there on “bodies” and “souls” (namely, that it is something’s body that accounts for its unique ontological status and worldview, and hence for what things are and for how they approach other things), but there is something in what we are now saying that supplements what we said then (namely, that, concerning their creativity, things cannot be reduced to what their bodies are in any actual situation).
(∞) Roy Wagner, Coyote Anthropology, p. 59.
(Ω) Ibid., p. 59.
(⊜) Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, From the Enemy’s Point of View: Humanity and Divinity in an Amazonia Society (trans. Catherine V. Howard; Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1992), p. 286.
William-Adolphe Bouguereau, The First Mourning (1888). National Museum of Fine Arts, Buenos Aires