Contagious Participation Magic's Power to Affect

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Notes

¹ In the interests of focus Iam commenting on an aspect of the whole performative installation malediction.

² Thanks to Mark Jackson to whom Iam indebted for many of the critical re-workings of this essay. See my forthcoming book Performing Contagious Bodies: Ritual Exchange in Contemporary Art to be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2012 where an extended version of this paper will appear.

³ See Anna Gibbs expressing a similar view in the context of the work of nineteenth-century French sociologist Gabriel Tarde in relation to sympathy, hypnotism and suggestion vis-à-vis the psychology of crowds (Gibbs 2008: 140). See also her overview of mimesis and sympathy (Gibbs 2010).

⁴ This notion of excess vis-à-vis the debate surrounding live art's relationship to its documentation – the record of the live moment – has played out in numerous texts over the last decade. See, for example, Rebecca Schneider as she writes: ‘The paper, frame, and photo of the action all represent to the viewer that which the viewer missed – that which, standing before the document, you witness yourself missing again. And yet, in missing you are somehow more available to this “excess” of the object than you would be in a situation of “presence”’ (2005: 42).

⁵ Authorship for the original version of this work published in L'Année Sociologique is attributed to Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert.

⁶ See my forthcoming book Performing Contagious Bodies: Ritual Exchange in Contemporary Art to be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2012 where an extended version of this paper will appear.

⁷ The end of this passage is paraphrased from Brian Massumi's Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (2002: 73).

⁸ For a discussion of these linguistic operations in relation to the failure of performance, see Braddock (2010).

⁹ The embodied nature of Stanley J. Tambiah's semantics of persuasion is important to my discussion. Tambiah also entertains enacting performative acts without the use of words (1973: 221–2) as well as across a range of object mediums (1973: 223n1).

¹⁰ See Jesper Sorensen who points to a lack of consideration for ritual processes among the Victorian rationalists: ‘In the attempt to explain magic as actions that are rational by reference to underlying mental procedures and beliefs, they disregard the very special status of these actions – that they are exactly “ritual” actions – and thereby almost explain the phenomena away’ (2007: 3).

¹¹ At the heart of Tambiah's analysis of sympathetic magical practices, while he does not employ these terms, lies metaphor as the axis of symptom while metonymy is the axis of desire. In this respect Jacques Lacan's correlation of psychoanalysis and linguistics and its relationship to Jacobson's theories, as well as ‘Freud's condensation (metaphor or symptom) and displacement (metonymy or desire)’ (Wilden 1980: 47), sit in the background of this essay.

¹² In this sense, both Edward Burnett Tylor and Balfour exhibit an oscillation between belief and disbelief in the material discussed. Tylor exemplifies this in his duplicitous attitude to sympathetic magic when he states that he was in possession of various artefacts that have ‘disappeared mysteriously’, suggesting that there is some element of belief invested in what he earlier described as the intellectual level of the peasant and savage (1891: 389).

¹³ I wish to thank the staffof the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, for assisting me so generously with primary research.