My Cocaine Museum
by Michael Taussig
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Book Summary Information
Author: Michael TaussigEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2004-05-11
ISBN: 0226790096
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
Book Reviews of My Cocaine Museum
Book Review: My Taussig Museum
Summary: 4 Stars
, which is a technique he coyly conceals. The reader, whether of books or nature, passes into that which is being read. (29) [We travel to ¶2: the Drug Room] Is this travel? It seems more like a physiological test. (191) Benjamin has his hashish, I have Malbec, but Taussig admits no cocaine. He does not inhale, yet his pages are sprinkled with the rambling stream-of-conscious and free-association rush of this fetishized powder and, reflexively, with himself. Perhaps, like abstemious Nietzsche, his only drugs are those of internal passion: observation and outrage. His method, like his prose, reflects a paradoxical geography: were I a fish, I could swim up the coast from Mulattos a hundred miles to Buenaventura, a few thousand more miles, hugging the coast and I'd be home in San Buenaventura; were I a bird I could fly towards Polaris, like a missile until I descend mid-way between Baltimore and Philadelphia. How you travel determines where you wind up. Taussig, in undocumented fashion, crosses the map-imposed border of academic verification and asserts that "the United States [is] the most incarcerated society in the world" (273). With what authority does he assert this? Whether citing B. Traven or Kilgore Trout, Taussig lets his references and citations roam freely. Like a stone skipping across water, his documentation leaves ripples at seemingly sporadic intervals. Taussig does not provide (does not have faith in) maps; he prefers we swim or fly via the landscape of his words, instinctively, without thinking destination. But there is a destination; we will be guided to discover the placeness of place which JZ Smith denies. "This is a story about a prison island" (273).
[We enter ¶1: the Prison Island Room] Is this the central room of the museum? Why presuppose a museum such as this has a central room? Let us, instead experience the question raised by the room we are in: What is a prison island? Is it an abstract, academic, intellectual location built for those guilty of having read Heidegger and Freud? Is it an island in which a man will pay a merchant for a keychain made by a prisoner, but not pay a prisoner for a story about making keychains? Is it the authorial voice, calling for rescue, hoping to turn the surrounding waters to ice (water made of stone) thereby annihilating the alienation of the prison island? Such a rescue would require great magic. Thus Taussig, Adorno, Benjamin transform themselves into three magi attempting to turn the apotropaic Gorgon's head on modernity; but why? The crisis of modernity is a conceit of the aged and the dead. Do they seek to colonize the savage coasts of our minds with a leftist-humanist-post-modern rhetoric? Does the catastrophic spell of things alienate? At times, Taussig is acutely aware of his alienation in this malarial miasma of Colombia: "although he depends on being there, and although the grit of the place is what seeps into every particle of his writerly being, [the locations] are as foreign to him as a rank outsider and hence quite fabulous, like a stage set, allowing him to work out even more precisely what he needs to say..." (273).
This is as good a room as any in which to begin our tour of my Taussig Museum. Welcome to the Mimesis Room. [We enter ¶3: the Mimesis Room] All around pools of water and sheets of gold, reflecting images like fun-house mirrors: trickery to make people aware of what they already know but don't know. (xiii) Reflections which force us to be grappling with ... how nonfiction and fiction refuse to stay neatly separated. (65) My Cocaine Museum does not ... try to tease apart nature from culture, real stuff from the made-up stuff, but instead accepts the life-and death play of nature with second nature as an irreducible reality so as to let that curious play express itself all the more eloquently. (xviii) Taussig's writing on the wall of this room is a confession: "When you write, you feel you're short-changing reality. It's not even half the truth. And the more you write, the more it slips away." (306) Taussig's writing is faked. While recognizable as faked ... it is nevertheless effective, yet in saying as much, is he not faking even more, playing the ultimate trick, merely pretending to expose the trick of "voice" while leaving us hanging on the uncertainty of the contradiction by which its fakery makes for truth? (63) As I see it, there are two steps and one trick involved here, the trick that determines the fate of humanity. The first step is to observe and then imitate nature. The second is to go beyond imitation and become one with what you are imitating, ... . Here imitation undergoes a radical development. It passes from being outside to being inside, in fact, becoming Other. Imitation becomes immanence. (80) Is this, then what we, as scholars, and humans are to do? Is mimesis, of JZ Smith, of Tillich, of Eliade, the method we are to adopt, the technique we are to embody? While Taussig may seem to be radically separating himself from convention, he is obsessed with imitation and mimesis
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