“The Horror, The Horror”

By Michael Taussig

Talk to Barbarism Conference, Graz, Austria
November, 2002

Yes! This is Kurtz speaking. You do remember me, I’m sure. It’s been a long time since Marlow killed me off in the heart of darkness as he sat there on the other side of the world—the good side, of course--nice and comfy in his sailing boat by the marshes on the Thames downriver from the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth, waiting the tide, spinning his yarns as sailors do. But now there’s no more heart to the heart of darkness. It’s dark all over now, like the marshes, in which we poke about like the blind, tap-tapping here and there. Now a new empire is girding its loins to deal with savage customs and here I am once again goggle-eyed like a skull’s empty eyes spellbound by the depth of depravity—my depravity based on their depravity only worse because while theirs is natural mine is unnatural. This is what is so curious, how I yearn to destroy them by imitating them, or rather what I see as them, while all the time I condemn them. How does the enemy become a mirror like that, making you and he identical while you twist this way and that in the darkness, tap-tapping your way?

To succeed, I had to imitate them, and go one better. I had to imitate their imitating, by which I mean imitate their magic, based as it was, on imitation enclosed by barbaric rites, chanting, body-paint, gashing the body with knives in trance while dancing wildly. But you know what fascinates me, even more than all those heads and skulls hanging on the stockade fence looking inwards grinning in the moonlight, what fascinates me is how it all started, so they think, with rubber—rubber! Just imagine! Rubber for children’s balls, bicycle tires, car tires, and belts in factories whirring with that low pitched chirping whine like crickets on a summer’s night that only well oiled machines carefully tended can make. I can hear them now, those factories in the Ruhr and in the Midlands dependent on the high reaches of the Congo and the Amazon where the people wear few clothes, fear sorcery, and divine with dreams. Can you imagine that? Of course there was the ivory, too. Now that I can understand. Ivory is special. Ivory is luxury. But rubber! 

Maybe rubber can become ivory or be like ivory thanks to the law of attraction of opposites that makes them the same or carry the same value? One is soft and black. The other is white and hard. Well not exactly white. It’s white with a yellow tinge that seems to extend and grow more intense with age. Not altogether pleasing, actually, to see the proud purity of those tusks, once thrusting their way around the snout of some wild animal, become yellowed like that. Think of Marlow with his sunken cheeks and yellow complexion waiting for the tide to turn, sitting cross-legged against the mizzen-mast, looking  like an idol. Funny stuff, ivory. Funny to think why people are prepared to pay so much for it. It’s a bone, really, two bones, sticking out alongside a snout. Next thing you know people will be collecting human bones and making ornaments out of them just like they extract gold teeth. Even Eichmann found that too much and was annoyed, according to Hannah Arendt. Was this part of the final solution?, he asked himself. They stopped the trucks with the gas out there on the highway in some god-forsaken spot once the people inside were thought to be dead, pulled out the pliers and got to work. Was this the banality of evil? US army, same thing with the japs in the Pacific. I once asked my dentist whether he couldn’t recycle the gold crown in my mouth for the new one he had to make. He smiled and told me the gold was no good when it had been in my mouth that long. And rubber is white too. As white as teeth, at any rate. It starts off as translucent  white sap trickling drop by drop from the incision in the dark bark of the rubber tree once the trunk has been incised. Then it’s exposed to fire.

It started innocently enough, after all, when I got to the Congo working under Leopold and his boys, amputating a few fingers, ears too, when they didn’t bring in enough baskets with india-rubber every two weeks. Of course most of the time we got our native troops to do this for us, but now and again we had to wade in ourselves. You know how it is. Same as in the Vietnam War. They did it to us. We did it to them.

“At least pictures didn’t rot,” said Esquire magazine reporter Michael Herr in his 1967 dispatches from Vietnam.

He was with some press photographers--Dana Stone, Sean Flynn, and John Lengle--out at some God-forsaken place they called Mutters Ridge with a bunch of US Marines waiting to go into battle. News photographers were objects of curiosity because they didn’t have to be there risking their lives like that. Every so often a Marine would come over and start a conversation about cameras and photography. One Marine showed them his photo-album, and that’s what provoked Herr into declaring  “Snapshots were the least of what they took after a fight. . . There were hundreds of these albums in Vietnam, thousands, and they all seemed to contain the same pictures: the obligatory Zippo-lighter shot (“All right, let’s burn these hootches and move out”); the severed-head shot, the head often resting on the chest of the dead man or being held up by a smiling Marine, or a lot of heads, arranged in a row, with a burning cigarette in each of the mouths, the eyes open (“Like they’re lookin’ at you,  man, it’s scary”); the VC suspect being dragged over the dust by a half-track or being hung by his heels in some jungle clearing . . . a picture of a Marine holding an ear or maybe two ears or, as in the case of a guy I knew in Pleiku, a whole necklace made of ears, “love beads,” as its owner called them . . .”

“Love beads”! Why love beads? Are ears like genitals, maybe, especially when dried out and strung together? Here we go again, that damned attraction and identity of opposites I was talking about. “The horror!.” “Make love not war” is what they were chanting, the long-haired ones with the incense and flowers and south asian religious gear, and, yes, of course, love-beads. Yes! Chanting. Like what shamans are said to do, chanting as described by Marlow by those whom Kurtz called  “my adorers keeping their uneasy vigil. The monotonous beating of a big drum filled the air with muffled shocks and a lingering vibration. A steady droning sound of many men chanting each to himself some weird incantation...”

“Make love, not war.” But isn’t all fair in love and  war?

Then we took whole hands. Of course it’s hard to gather rubber without a hand. But we were into more than rubber by that time. Even more than ivory, hard and white as it is.  We were into hands.

They say we took the hands as punishment. Just like Sierra Leone today where the diamonds are and where young teenagers do the running.

But punishment was just a part of it. A small part at that. The part that’s easy to explain when you don’t look at the other person because you’re so busy looking at their hand and then at their stump where the hand was that you sometimes actually see the phantom hand there at the end of the bloody stump, waving at you wanting to shake hands, like the Europeans do, that’s how docile it makes them, and if by chance you suddenly look into the eyes, what you see is yourself. The damndest thing. Give me a hand any time rather than that! I mean you can take a hand, but can you take a look? There you are neatly circumscribed in that black porthole. It must be the phantom limb that throws you off like that.

 In his Congo diary Andre Gide talks of the hallucinatory haze of the heat and light on the river. But it was the phantom limb phenomenon that he was stricken by even if he didn’t know it, neatly circumscribed in the black porthole. That’s what I want you to remember. Yourself it could be in that black pin-point of light in the midst of all that white of the eyes wide-open in pain and fright. Now you see how rubber and ivory come together in tears that drip down like the rubber from the tree trunk each side of the snout where the tusks sprout. Today they call it oil, black and viscous like the pupil of the eye glistening . It pulls you in. Just a quick glance out of the corner of your eye at their eye, and there you are. Then you’re just like them, looking at yourself in the eye of the other like that, only you’re the one with the knife.

Like rubber and oil all this to-and-fro can be assimilated to the machine, but these machines have decidedly weird properties. When a US Marine calls his necklace of ears “love beads” he is not only equating love charms with the enemy’s mutilated body-parts, but he is also doubling the magic character of the love charm merely by citing it in this context. He is making the fey magic of a love charm more real and more explosive while at same time making love all the more precious in the shadow of terror. This even has a name. Apotropaic magic, it is called, and it means the use of a magical charm to ward off another magical charm. What a circle this must be! Freud uses this term to refer to the head that Perseus carried in his satchel, the head of Medusa, the Gorgon. Her face turned those who saw it to stone, hence it served Perseus well, once he had it in his possession, because he could convert his enemies into stone just as Medusa had done when her body was intact. The symbolism is intense. Freud suggested her face was far more than a face, and to be stoned by looking at it amounted to the fear and delirium of sexual excitement. There is much irony here, to be sure, irony itself being a form of apotropaic magic, but the irony is for meta-commentary as when talking to a reporter about love beads. In reality the irony melts away into good old-fashioned magic. His ears make me invulnerable. But what of the eyes? If  only they could be gotten too. What we call “barbarism” is the desperate desire to have those eyes as talisman so you can steal that petrifying look. And when we fail, as fail we must, for the eyes belong indisputably to that other, and it’s none other than myself I see in them anyway, then fury hath no bounds like a lover spurned. “All’s fair in love and war.”

August 19^th, 2002: Where’s Kurtz? I need my Kurtz! After my telephone conversation with the New York Post reporter today, I realize some very fundamental things are wrong with what I’m doing.  He called me because of my seminar at Columbia university on war. He wanted to know if it was a response to 9/11 and got into asking  more and more belligerent questions, making me more and more defensive and incoherent. Why! We started to have our own little war ourselves! I quickly discovered I was meant to have a “position” and that I was meant to defend it to the hilt, or surrender. Are you against war? Is there no such thing as a “just war”? What do you mean by terrorism? How do you define it? Anyway, your colleague in the political science department, Professor So-and-So, thinks we should invade Iraq. To make matters worse, the journalist was a snot-nosed recent Columbia graduate.

But what if one avoids this trap and says “I don’t really know! What’s more, there are no absolutes. Everything depends on the situation and the situation keeps changing!"

In saying this I am responding to the terrorism of the question by mimicking it, only I am refusing to play the game of war. Let me explain.

In responding to terrorism, the state itself becomes terrorist for it has no other option. It terrorizes other nations and it terrorizes its own citizens. It has no other option. It is merely being its stately self, like Kurtz mimicking his fondest nightmares of  barbarism or like Marlow getting off on his yarns about Kurtz, those yarns you and I like so much. He called it “Heart of Darkness,” but it is  all about light and shadow decomposed into different colors, intensities, clarities, opacities, and  luminosities. Waiting for the tide to turn on the Thames:

The day was ending in a serenity of still and exquisite brilliance. The water shone pacifically; the sky, without a speck, was a benign immensity of unstained light; the very mist of the Essex marshes was like a gauzy and radiant fabric, hung from the wooded rises inland, and draping the low shores in diaphanous folds. Only the gloom to the west, brooding over the upper reaches, became more sombre every minute, as if angered by the approach of the sun. (28)

This sense of color occurs where light and color compose and decompose each other. Goethe called them “transparent” colors, and thought they had a close affinity to fire and water and to whatever it is that makes the world anew, flare, and vanish. Contrast with what Goethe termed “opaque” colors--reds,  blues, and greens, for example, or with black and white--as when Marlow looks at a map of the world:

There was a vast amount of red—good to see at any time because one knows some real work is done in there, a deuce of a lot of blue, a little green, smears of orange, and on the East Coast, a purple patch, to show where the jolly pioneers of progress drink the jolly lager-beer. (36)

It is the destiny of the transparent colors, says Goethe, to play like spirits around  these opaque colors. Thus it is also their destiny, I might add, to bring out what I can only call the counter-magic in Marlow’s story about Kurtz, no less than in the stories daily spun before our eyes right now, even by youngsters on the New York Post. Remember the love beads. For unlike what Karl Marx said he was doing to Hegel’s dialectic, inverting it so the rational kernel would be extruded from its mystical shell, manipulations more suitable for opaque colors, for Marlow meaning lies in a much more delicate operation whereby the secret and its aura are as much maintained as dissolved. Dialectics cannot be inverted or transcended. Otherwise they are not dialectic. Dialectic like the love beads belongs not to the sun, but to the moonlight.

The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like the kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of those misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine. (30)

It was Walter Benjamin’s contention that boredom—as in the boredom of the sailor’s life—was necessary for storytelling, and although he was sadly remiss in overlooking the overwhelming evidence implicating women and children in the stories we know—as with Charles Perrault’s Mother Goose, the Grimm brothers, and Italo Calvino’s collection from Italy—he nevertheless presented striking ideas about the role of color in children’s books. It was not form—as with kernels and shells—but color that drew children to books, into which as with magic, they disappeared. “The gazing child,” he suggested, “enters into those pages, becoming suffused, like a cloud, with the riotous colors of the world of pictures. Sitting before his painted book . . . he overcomes the illusory barrier of the book’s surface and passes through colored textures and brightly painted partitions to enter a stage on which fairy tales spring to life. (Sel. Writings, 1, 435)

Language itself is freed in this process, “returning,” we might say, to origins—origins present in every word we read and every phrase we utter. In the primers for learning language that Benjamin contemplates, many of them very old, color drenched images compete and combine with letters of the alphabet in a carnival of words and letters. Benjamin quotes a boy aged seven: “Prince is a word with a star tied to it.” (Sel. Writings, 1, 435)

Could it be that it is the so-called “transparent colors” that perform this trick with history, paving the way for the bolder, opaque ones? Being on the threshold between black and white, on the one hand, and the “opaque colors,” on the other, the transparent colors are the ones that decompose form by decomposing light.

Color belongs to smell and taste, said Benjamin, as contrasted with sight and sound, and in this he finds agreement with an otherwise rather different critic, William Burroughs, similarly enamored with montage, who in the chapter entitled “We Are the Language,” in one of his last books, Cities of the Red Night, has himself reading his own book as it is being written and being asked, within the text itself, so to speak, to reproduce some comic books.

The books are color comics. “Jokes,” Jim calls them. Some lost color process has been used to transfer three-dimensional holograms onto the curious tough translucent parchment-like material of these pages. You ache to look at these colors. Impossible reds, blues, sepias. Colors you can smell and taste and feel with your hole body. Children’s books against a Bosch background; legends, fairy stories, stereotyped characters, surface motivations with a child’s casual cruelty. (167)

And he asks: “What facts could have given rise to such legends?”

These cities are actually built out of color.

Blue twilight was filling the narrow, twisting alleys of the city. The stranger shivered, gathering his ragged cloak about him. Lights were going on behind latticed windows. Here and there blue streetlights sputtered in sockets. (275)

Phosphorescent stumps glow in the blue twilight that hangs over the streets at noon like a haze. Red brick houses line blue canals where crocodiles play like dolphins. Lost mournful stars dim as spark boys chitter and mewl against his shoulder, a frosty luminescence off their backsides, cool remote garden, lead gutters dripping, a stone bridge where a boy stands with a sad blue monkey on his shoulder. (279)

Burroughs asks what facts could have given rise to such legends? Maybe we should be asking what legends give rise to such facts?

One legend, in particular, comes to mind, a legend of the same conceptual order as Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan or other social contract theorists such as Locke or Rousseau. This is the legend of the “war machine” set forth by Deleuze and Guattari, referring to their Kurtzian vision of the nomads of Central Asia with their stealth and speed, their cruelty and their anarchy as regards space and time as much as authority. Since time immemorial, this war machine of theirs has hung around the edges of states, ancient or modern, and at times overrun those states or been conquered and absorbed by them like a foreign virus which cannibalizes the state from within to create a war machine within the armies of the state. Something of this comes across with the leopard skins worn by certain officers within the British troops when on display, imitating the natives they fought in Africa, such as the magicians and prophets like the Leopard Skin chiefs of the Nuer, and we also glimpse this in the ubiquitous camouflage-colored uniforms worn today with their blotches of green and wavy, irregular stripes of brown (even in the Iraqi desert), camouflage being what animals are supposed to do, imitating nature so as to seize prey. Pure Kurtz, we might say.

Similar but different to models of colonial empires, this legend maintains that the relation between states and war machines is a fluctuating constant throughout history, such that when the mix achieves a certain amplitude, then the always uneasy constellation of law and violence is radically re-constellated—as we see today with the world’s only superpower and Cities of the Red Night.

In at least one respect this barbarism/terrorism within the state seems far worse than the barbarism/terrorism it imitates because it is justified by the rule of law. Nietzsche acknowledges this when he says the criminal becomes hardened because he sees the police doing what he does, but in the name of law. When Benjamin refers to the “rottenness” within the rule of law, embedded in the police in democratic society, it is precisely this same unseemly copying of the criminal to which he refers, “rottenness” being an analytic term gone awry, we might say, overburdened by the trickery or hypocrisy to which it both refers and succumbs. It is this very same rottenness, moreover, which gives rise to Kurtz’ Last Judgment: “The Horror! The Horror!

If “rottenness” applies to the police in democracies, how much more does it apply when they go to war! There is a culture binding combatants in war as expressed by the Geneva conventions, which the Bush administration, no less than say the Taliban, actually ignore, just as the Bush administration refuses to join the new international criminal court for fear its soldiers will be brought to law. In other words the culture of conflict binding antagonists actually contains its opposite, its “loophole,” whereby the rules are ignored or dramatically flaunted as with the dumping of prisoners of war in Guantanamo Bay on the eastern tip of Cuba. To call this a “loophole” or “fine print,” actually misses the point because this transgression of the rule is actually part of the rule and as necessary to it as it is essential to war. At the heart of war there is this strange flip-flop between law and lawlessness. The whole point of war, its art, you could say, is to skillfully play one against the other. “All is fair in love and war,” they say, don’t they? Remember the love beads.

Hence “terrorism” is not so much a thing or a state-of-being as it is a reflection of this necessary fiction, necessary, that is, to the art and practice of war. “Terrorism” is the act of creating terror, which of course is as likely to be carried out by a lawfully acting force dropping bombs on civilians, for example, as is it is by an unlawfully acting gang of religious extremists blowing up the Federal building in Oklahoma. The former get medals while the latter get the electric chair.

War consists of going beyond the limits, catching the enemy by surprise with unprecedented horror—Pearl Harbor no less than dropping the first nuclear bombs. Terrorism is intrinsic to war and essential to it, but at the same time has to be denied in one’s own practice. It belongs to the Other. The Other practises terrorism. We do not.

October 11, 2002:  I am listening to the debate in the US Congress on whether to support President Bush’s request for open-ended support to invade Iraq, a debate that ends with almost 300 votes for war and 130 against. A gifted speaker in favor of the open call to war, a republican from Texas, begins her speech:

“Why Iraq? Why Now? . . . “

I shudder with uncanny Kurtzian recollections. Is this not exactly the phrasing that the Oxford Anthropologist E.E. Evans-Pritchard (fondly remembered as EP) used in 1937 to get to the heart of darkness--of witchcraft, I mean--among the Azande where the headwaters of the Congo intermesh with the headwaters of the Nile? “Why Me? Why Now?” was essentially what an Azande person would ask when, in their paranoid way, they confronted what seemed like a threat to their happiness due to the machination of a witch. Statistical reasoning and positivist thought, in general, cannot supply an answer to the Why Me, Why Now, questions, said EP.  I myself in my capacity as a medical doctor treating patients with terminal illness in Sydney experienced this too. A man dying of lung cancer is told it is due to smoking. But his neighbor smoked as much or more and has no cancer. “Why me? Why now? he asks eyes wide, beating himself on the chest. Just a shade of Kurtz in those eyes and that fist beating.

This witchcraft question about the president’s plan to invade Iraq surfaced with increasing frequency because the collective sense of reality was becoming increasingly  unreal. You were either in the charmed circle dancing and chanting with the witch-doctors of the White House sinking daily into their Kurtzian selves in the heart of the heart of darkness, you were either with snot-nosed reporters drawing lines in the sand, or else you were outside that circle, numbed and deficient, unable to even ask what felt like appropriate questions because to do that would somehow affirm and dignify the hallucinatory reality of the frenzy and utter madness of the mad stampede for which explanations were offered, then contradicted, then repeated once again. Proofs of this and that connection were alleged, then withdrawn as with that able rhetorician, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, saying he had evidence of the connection with Al Queda, but it was “not bullet-proof.” In sorcery idiom this surely meant the opposite, that while the evidence was insufficient, it was more than enough for men of war, begging to be shot at. The murkier the evidence, the stronger the will. There they are, confronting the Dictator with eleven percent of the world’s oil below his feet destined for the gas tanks of SUVs pounding the US freeways. “The Horror! The Horror!” There they are braying to the moon, scenting the wolf ever-clearer in the diviner’s dancing as she traces oil across wind-rifts in desert sands where human blood is destined to run as well.

To return to the beginning, then, it seems to me most important to not be drawn into the defining game (What is war? Are you for or against it? What is terrorism? etc), because the game is inherently unfair and because each move depends on the one preceding. Instead one has to think hard not only how to counter-terrorism, but even harder about how to counter, counter-terrorism.

During somewhat similarly depressing times as ours today, Walter Benjamin entertained in 1933 what he called “a new, positive, concept of barbarism.” (Sel. Writings, 2, 732) This entailed clearing the decks of culture and starting afresh from a tabula rasa. Enter “the destructive character:” “Because he sees ways everywhere, he always stands at a crossroads. No moment can know what the next can bring. What exists he reduces to rubble—not for the sake of the rubble, but for that of the way of leading through it.” (Sel. Writings, 2, 542). To occupy this position on the crossroads, which is where we encounter “dialectics at a standstill,” is to laugh. Indeed, such laughter is the main thing even though it may occasionally sound barbaric. “Well and good.”( sw 2, 735).

Here lies Nietzschean play, where the epistemology of what I call The Nervous System functions consciously as with Alan Ginsberg’s “oom” (as my friend Marcus Boon pointed out to me), or Michael Herr’s cryptic despair in Dispatches--examples of efforts to break across the flip-flop and replay the fictions necessary to warfare.

Oom. Obvious non-sense so as to dispose of the less obvious sort. Oom. Obvious magic so as to dispose of the less obvious sort. Oom. Nonsense syllables with no picture and no referent other than

Oom as in petroleoom.

It is said that shamans—whatever they are—like the war machine, live in the shadows of Great Religions and the One God Universe.  This trickster view of shamanism, brings to mind the mercurial shape-changing “plasmaticness” much beloved by Sergei Eisenstein with his love of Alice in Wonderland and early Disney, and is nicely figured for us by the Winnebago trickster as recorded by Paul Radin, this trickster who never stays still, is so silly and fumbling, keeps moving in and out of bodies and keeps changing his own such that at one point he becomes naught else but his ever expanding anus defecating on this our shrinking universe dwarfed by his endless production. The trickster view of shamanism is one that thrives on dissolving binaries such as those propounded by the call to war and the Kurtzian fantasies of barbarism and its magic.  The trickster shaman knows barbarism intimately in the form of wind and thunder, clouds and yellow flowers and, above all, in animals and in color as opposed to the restrictions of form, especially when even the opaque colors, black and white, are associated with an animal as a magical becoming.

Smoker, the foundling, was a strange cat, writes William Burroughs. His fur was glistening soot-black, his eyes a shiny white that glittered in the dark. He is called Smoker after the Black Smokers, volcanoes deep in the sea and from which strange and abundant life forms emerge such as giant tuber worms and crabs which smell terribly. “A creature of the lightless depths,” Smoker the cat not only “brought light and color with him as colors pour from tar,” but also the compressed variety of life that swarms two miles deep. He loves the writer this cat, with a message as urgent as a volcano that onle the writer can read.

And then there’s Margaras. “Having no color,” writes William Burroughs in reference to his albino cat, Margaras, also known as the Tracker, the Hunter, the Killer-- “having no color, he can take on all colors. He has a thousand names and a thousand faces . . .”  Like a terrorist he can hide in snow and sunlight on white walls and clouds and rocks, he moves down windy streets with blown newspapers and shreds of music and silver paper in the wind.” 

Like a terrorist, his ass and genital wires are wired for a stunning shock.

Like a terrorist.

The End

Michael Taussig is a professor of anthropology at Columbia University. His most recent book is Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford UP). The photo at the head of the page is of Belgian army officer Leon Rom, whose acquaintance Conrad may have made in the Congo, and who apparently kept a row of severed heads of Africans in his garden.