(The Somerset onion, from the Pitt Rivers Museum)
In his lyrical essay, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air
(1982), Marshall Berman defines modernism broadly, as “a struggle to make
ourselves at home in a constantly changing world” (6). By that he includes art, poetry, but also
political economy and philosophy; as an urban people, we are a moderns
engaged in this daily struggle of sense-making and homeliness. How we live in the world is a question
that exercises artists, revolutionaries, cosplayers: in short, all of us
suspended in a world not of our own choosing.
But that modernist impulse is not without its
push-back. “Making ourselves at home”
means finding the reality distinctly “un-homely,” or, as Freud defined it in
his 1919 essay, as “uncanny” (unheimlich): that is, the hidden, mysterious and
unexplained that invades the feeling of familiar, expected comfort. The two ideas, as Freud explained, are
related: “homeliness” has “unhomeliness” concealed within it like a family secret. It is the unheimlich that is at the
core of Benjamin’s bourgeois interior.
In his “The Exterior as Interieur,” Tom Gunning (2003: 107-108) goes back to an incident
in Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past” when the narrator, while bed-ridden
and convalescing, is treated to a “magic lantern” show projected onto the walls
of his bedroom:
"But my sorrows were only increased thereby, because the mere change of lighting was enough to destroy the familiar impression I had of my room, thanks to which, save for the torture of going to bed, it had become quite endurable. Now I no longer recognized it, and felt uneasy in it, as in a room in some hotel or chalet, in a place where I had just arrived by train for the first time . . ."
Of course, the “bourgeois interior” marks an uneasy truce
with an outside world, one that continuously intrudes upon the “homeliness” of
the inside, rendering the most familiar sights of bed and bedroom suddenly
strange.
There can be no better synecdoche for the modern condition. If we read Marx’s celebrated quote, “All that
is solid melts into air; all that is holy is profaned,” as a process, then it
is one where we again and again take refuge in comforting truths, solid
relationships and familiar routines, only to have these shift beneath us
through, of course, perturbations in political economy, but also through the emergence
of new discourse, new identities and transforming (and transformative)
relationships with things and the world.
In other words, our world
constantly confronts us with the uncanny: the comforting familiar that betrays
our trust and acts in ways contrary to our experiences.
Anthropology has not always been concerned with the
uncanny. During the twentieth century,
much of the power and popularity of anthropology was generated in the frisson
of the exotic and familiar—a trope that still recurs in popular media’s
occasional re-deployment of “primitive” tropes.
Of course, as many critics have pointed out, each evocation of the
exotic led to the reification of culture and to the spurious identification of
culture and place: in other words, the very opposite of the uncanny itself.
As James Clifford (1988: 120) writes,
“The ‘primitive’ societies of the planet were increasingly available as aesthetic, cosmological, and scientific resources. These possibilities drew on something that more than older Orientalism; they required modern ethnography. The postwar context was structured by a basically ironic experience of culture. For every local custom or truth there was always an exotic alternative, a possible juxtaposition or incongruity.”
Despite the violence wielded against the Other through widespread
deployment of the “savage slot,” this was still the heyday of cultural
relativism and, with it, the power of a cultural critique that denied the
universality of narrowly conceived Western rationalism. Unfortunately, the exotic could also readily
appropriated into colonial and racist scaffoldings, only now cultural difference
could be part of a process of reification that derogated the Other to the peripheries
of development.
With the critique of this exoticization, and the turn
towards public anthropology, an anthropology premised on the juxtaposition of
the familiar and the exotic seems like a relic from the past—albeit one
resurrected at key moments to justify this or that imperialist enterprise. Instead, we look to powerful structures and
practices that buttress global inequality—once the exotic Other, now the
marginalized global.
We might see this turn as the end of enchantment and the triumph
of Weber’s iron cage of rationality: “The fate of our times is characterized by
rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment
of the world’” (Weber 1946: 155). If by “disenchantment,”
we might include dismantling the various myths of savage and primitive that
have been utilize to justify powerful inequality, then good riddance! However, it hasn’t been that easy. If some forms of enchantment have been “dispelled,”
then others have rushed to take their place: mystifications of power wrought by
media spectacles, by commodity fetishism, and by the systematically distorted
discourse of the state.
But there are other ways enchantment intrudes upon the anthropological
consciousness. To go back to one,
well-known example. In his work on behalf
of the Pitt-Rivers Museum, and as proof of his theories of “survivals,” E.B.
Tylor was continuously on the hunt for proof of magical superstition among
England’s peasant classes. Various
magical implements (witch’s bottles, talismans, etc.) made their way to the
museum through his network of ethnographers and folklorists. In particular, one, old pub in Somerset
yielded a rich trove of apotropaic artifacts that worked into Tylor’s typological
schema perfectly, among them a bunch of dried onions with names written on the
skins and pins stuck through. Workmen
found them concealed inside the chimney.
Tylor then sent his dried onions to John Lubbock to examine,
and then Lubbock claims to have sent them directly back. But Tylor never received them. After his inquiries at the post office yielded no onions, Tylor decided to consult with ghosts through a séance—a
popular, middle-class pastime in England since the Fox sisters had introduced “spirit-rapping”
to England in the 1850s. Through the
medium—one that he had come across during his anthropological researches into
Spiritualism—Tylor contacted the spirit of a Native American, who told him that
he would soon be reunited with the onions (Wingfield). He never was.
It’s an extraordinary story, and an uncanny
story. Uncanny, of course, because of
the séance, and the Native American spirit—Tylor may have believed what he’d witnessed. But also uncanny because of the onions
themselves. Why did they disappear? Where did they go? Why was the post office unable to find
them? Things are, after all, uncanny
when their familiarity shifts to strangeness: when the world’s regular workings
open up to reveal a deep disquietude.
When the world, in other words, works in other ways than what we expect.
Even though there are many, many examples of the first sort
of uncanny (that of the séance), it’s worth looking in more detail at the
second. When do things turn
uncanny? Freud suggested several
scenarios: 1) inanimate objects animating; 2) the ‘doubling’ of objects; 3) the
repetition of phenomena. Each of these
suggests uncanniness for a post-industrial age where biology becomes an engineered
machine, and where the machine becomes fused in a cyborg assemblage. In other words, the uncanny as a rooted experience
of being modern.
Systems of production, of power, of knowledge; structures of
social life and education; discourses of identity, relatedness, nationality:
all of these shift into uncanny topologies that reveal deep, contradictory strangeness. E.B. Tylor’s experience was much the same:
the same England that represented (for Tylor) the epitome of rationality and
science could still kick up enough uncanny mystery to take him into a séance for
answers.
It is, therefore, anthropology that offers us a perspective
on an uncanny world, one that acknowledges the inherent strangeness of our
lives with reference to other peoples all over the world who are likewise at
the mercy of uncanniness amidst their own home-making. Similarly, the study of anthropology leads us
inextricably to the uncanny; for example, following a commodity chain from its production
under exploitative conditions in another country through to its incineration in
a polluted neighborhood closer to home is doubly uncanny. Just as Freud comes across a double of
himself in a mirror reflection on a train and finds it instantly unlikeable,
confrontations with the double of our commodity lives in their reflection
through others turns even these familiar things into sinister reflections.
References:
Berman, Marshall (1982).
All That is Solid Melts Into Air.
NY: Penguin.
Clifford, James (1988).
The Predicament of Culture.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Gunning, Tom (2003).
“The Exterior as Interieur.”
Boundary 2 30(1): 105-130.
Weber, Max (1946). From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology.
Wingfield, Chris (n.d.). “Tylor’s Onion.” England: the Other
Within [online]. Retrieved from
http://england.prm.ox.ac.uk/englishness-tylors-onion.html on
12/9/2011
