THE: MAGlC OF T K STAT

Swarming with hunches and surprises, this timely essay of Achille Mbembes opens new vistas for understanding ourselves as well as the State - not merely the postcolonial State, as he might have it, but the modem State in genera1.l This is predominantly a cultured and a cultural understanding, one sorely lacking in social science theory, not to mention current political philosophy. Its inspiration is to be fiound in an impassioned attempt to confront the fragmentation and surfaces of the postmodernity of State power in Africa today, therewith reworking Bakhtin and the most interesting of the relevant French theorists -Foucault, de Certeau and, especially (if infrequently cited), Bataille. And behind IBataille (whose collected works Foucault edited) lie de Sade, Nietzsche, and1 Mauss realigned - the gift as the sign of excess and spending, and a singular fascination with transgression of the taboo. The subject here is first and foremost th.at wondrous fetish, power. We want it and we are rightly scared by it, in eqyal, mighty, and fantastic measure. This cataclysm of ambivalence is the hallmark of the sacred as it filtered through Robertson Smith, Durkheim, Mauss, and Bataille. But it was Bataille who almost single-handedly and with enviable resolve derailed the one-track focus on the primitive and reanticulated primitivism back onto the modem, most especially the modem Euiropean State. To see power as a
The Banality of Power and the Aesthetics of Vulgarity in the Postcolony, Public Culture 4/2 (Spring 1992): 1-30.
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magical force, warns Mbembe, is admittedly to court the danger of reducing it to an ensemble of what is so easily termed primitive, African, custom. This risk is so high that most analysts, long before this mind-numbing age of multiculturalism, have shied away, seeking the soft sheen of enlightenment talismans instead. Mbembe, however, born and raised in Cameroon, with a university education in France, writing in French, advises that defecation, copulation, pomp, and sumptuousness are all classical ingredients in the production of power, and that there is nothing specifically African about it (11). Yet might it not require the authority of an intimate knowledge, an intimate experience, of the African postcolony to have brought this very generality into focus? And might it not also have required an intimate experience with Euro-American university theorizing about such knowledge? In which case the interest in the epiphanal differences of deflected meanings created by traveling theory, and the concept of late twentieth century anthropology being developed by the journal Pubtic Culture, become strikingly relevant. In any event what Mbembe presents is not simply despair with interpretations wedded to notions of structure and binary logic - notably state domination versus either resistance or compliance or permutations thereof. Although the tendency will be to read this often prolix essay as though this is what it is basically saying, it would be a pity if that detracted from its effort to forge a distinct vision and hence language of State power itself. This extends to the heroic attempt to see the State as a carnivalesque body whose gigantic largesse and erogenous zones nourish and shock a zombified populace. Spuming interpretations that would attempt to aggregate individual psychologies to the overwhelmingly social nature of the State, and casting aside the notion of the body as metaphor, Mbembe struggles to articulate a Dionysian vision in which force and meaning circulate as a togetherness blasting through the human no less than the social body, constituting ephemeral wholes and holiness. This then is a struggle to articulate non-Being no less than Being, the constant see-sawing of a decidedly nervous system, one of whose gambits is a polyrnorphous notion of identity. Analysis as usually practiced is inhospitable to such nervousness because analysis requires at least the illusion of constants -just as the State does. Mbembes essay is striking on account of its own largesse, its loops within loops, its back-tracking, its expansiveness. This is writing that creates, even if it does not acknowledge, a twoedged position of articulation within the phenomenon and outside it as well.

No writing is above the reality it realizes, and this is especially the case with the State, arbiter of reason in an unreasonable world. Yet such writing falls strangely on ears attuned to U.S. standard Ehglish construction. Hayden White referred us to Hegels idea that only with the State was the writing of true history possible, a point clearly established by Hegels epigraph to The Philosophy of History. The very rationality of the social world achieved by the State is what allows for this possibility to see and, through records and writing, organize the past. Max Weber advised that the State is definable as that which has the legitimate monopoly of violence. Mbembes essay makes us ask the obvious;: how can such reason and violence coexist? Related questions follow: what is the relation of writing the State to that coexistence? Does the postcolonial State illustrate more clearly than its EuroAmerican counterparts the terrific coexistence of reason and violence, bound to innumerable and necessary taboos? Mbembe wants to break the spell of the State as a theater of fantasy. He works hard. He tries to make his own magic with stories culled from newspapers. They are moving, but whether they make - let alone can begin to unmake -the points he wants is for me uncertain. For this is the challenge: to find the means to articulate in telling detail the realpolitik of the Statebody through which the carnival continues :its transgressions as routine. Mbembe says that both those who pull the strings and those who watch are zombified. This is a far cry from the forest of symbols, no less than from the reason at the heart of structuralist anthropology too. How then can we break with the spell of the real, this seciret - simulacrum, he calls it that encloses persons on all sides and creates a chameleon social universe with multiple capacities to act, enact, and dissimulate? The mystical foundation of State authority is composed not of a division between rulers and ruled, says Mbembe, but by a promiscuous, convivial tension, between the command and its targets. The command has an erotic surplus. Is this the public secret that most everyone knows but none dare speak, this simulacrum which keeps the leaky ship of State afloat?

Michael Taussig teaches in Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts of New York University, and has worked as an anthropoIogist in Colombia since 1969. He is the author of The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); Shamanism, Colonialism, and the W i l d Man:

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A Study in Terror and Healing (University of Chicago Press, 1986); The Nervous System (New York: Routledge, 1992); Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (Routledge, forthcoming).

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