Irene Skovgaard Smith & Alison Hirst “Marcel Mauss and the magical agents of our time”

Skovgaard-Smith, Irene; Hirst, Alison 2023. Marcel Mauss and the magical agents of our time. Journal of Classical Sociology. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468795X2311517

As Hanegraaff (2016) argues, we cannot assume that certain modes of thought and action are magical per se, while others are not. Instead, we must ask how the extraordinary powers that imbue symbolic acts with social efficacy are collectively imagined and recognised in specific social contexts. (2)

To explore the contemporary relevance of Mauss’s conception of magic, we focus in this article on collective imaginings of supernormal human powers for ‘value-creation’ and solving problems to fulfil the neoliberal promise of contemporary capitalism. (2)

Capitalist technologies ‘generate their own magicalities’ (Pels, 2003: 31) and many aspects of business, finance, advertising, cultural production and consumption ‘operate according to magical premises’ (Moeran and Malefyt, 2018: 1). Yet, social theory has tended to approach magic as modernity’s antithesis, as Pels (2003) notes, calling instead for examination of the magic of modernity itself. (3)

Mauss approached magic as a social phenomenon and held that there are, in every age and every kind of society, collective ideas that endow specialised agents and their symbolic actions with a special kind of power and efficacy to transform, whether for good or evil. The key proposition is that the powers of magicians and the social efficacy of their symbolic acts are derived from collective beliefs. What Mauss was suggesting, although not systematically developing, is that magic is socially constructed and as such is real in its effects. (3)

Although Mauss was not consistent in breaking with the evolutionary model, he took important steps towards liberating magic as an analytical category from its association with ‘primitive’ beliefs in the supernatural and challenging the reified distinction between magic, religion and science. Mauss also did not see magic as necessarily separate from technical means, suggesting instead that many activities are simultaneously both technical and magical, and that ‘the greater part of the human race has always had difficulty in distinguishing techniques from rites’ (Mauss, 2001 [1950]: 24). Magic contributed to the growth of techniques, as Mauss showed, and was similarly closely linked with the development of astronomical, physical and natural sciences in different parts of the world (Mauss, 2001 [1950]). (4)

The aim was to show that no matter how magic is constituted in a specific society, it involves the same basic elements and ‘is on the whole everywhere the same’ (Mauss, 2001 [1950]: 19). Mauss defined these sociological elements as actions (symbolic acts/rites), officers (the agents who perform them) and representations (the ideas and beliefs involved). These elements are not inherently magical, but they become so as and when they are given a meaning that attributes them with out-ofthe-ordinary efficacy. No act, agent or idea is in itself magical, and any act, agent or idea can become so if attributed with ‘a dose of strangeness’ (Moscovici, 2014: 764). ‘The slightest return of the ordinary, on the other hand, tends to weaken that power’ as Moscovici (2014: 764) inferred. (5)

„The magician. . . is a kind of official, vested by society with authority, and it is incumbent upon the society to believe in him . . . He assumes the spirit of his function, the gravity of a magistrate. He is serious about it because he is taken seriously, and he is taken seriously because people have need of him. Thus, what a magician believes and what the public believes are two sides of the same coin“ (Mauss, 2001 [1950]: 119). (6)

Mythologies of ‘transformational’, ‘visionary’ and ‘charismatic’ superhero leaders abound in business, politics, professional sports, culture, and other domains. Variations of such representations are also evident in the ‘Great Man’ theories of business leadership literature (for critical reviews, see Ford et al., 2022; Robinson and Kerr, 2009), New Age inspired leadership training (Heelas, 1999), and media and political discourse. In the context of cultural organisations for instance, Nisbett and Walmsley (2016) show how arts managers, policymakers, and audiences idealise popular leaders as ‘clever’, ‘charismatic’, and ‘enthusiastic’ and exalt the possibilities and extraordinary effects of their leadership. Such tales are not simply exercises of the imagination or an expression of fantasies. Their constant repetition turns them into social facts as objects of collective confirmation (Mauss, 2001 [1950]). (8)

Related imaginaries of the powers of personhood are embedded in mythologies of creative potential and genius. Ekman (2015) for instance shows how ‘talent’ and ‘passion’ are perceived to enable creative knowledge workers to innovate and create ‘endless wealth out of nothing’, in the same way as ‘alchemy promises to transform lead into gold’ (p. 589). (8)

The figure of the expert consultant is increasingly important in shaping social life in profound ways through calculative practices, as Prince (2014) shows in the context of the cultural sector. Stein (2017) explores how management consultants perform the ‘abstract labour’ of ‘selling speed’, namely capitalist acceleration, altering corporate life and social relations using representations that refer to ‘entities and activities that lay far beyond’ the concretely observable (p. 5). (9)

In a Maussian perspective, magical action cannot however be reduced to deception or manipulation at the hand of skilled ‘mana workers’ such as marketeers or consultants. Magic is collectively produced to imagine a transformative social efficacy that exceeds and overflows, to embody that ‘something more’ at the heart of any given social order, which is ‘both instrumentally and symbolically indispensable’, as Mazzarella (2017: 4) writes. Notions of extraordinary powers attributed to specialised agents are generic and vague, representing an ‘indeterminate value of signification’ to use Lévi-Strauss’s (2002 [1950]: 55) expression, and it is by virtue of this quality that they can operate despite the contradictions inherent in them. (10)

Toby Ashworth “Tectonic memories”

Ashworth, Toby 2023. Tectonic memories: Film, geology and archives in Diana Vidrascu’s Volcano: What Does a Lake Dream? (2019). Studies in World Cinema. https://doi.org/10.1163/26659891-bja10024

Janine Marchessault has written that “new ecological approaches to media studies, or media studies approaches to ecology, ask us to see relationships between things in terms of a broader continuum rather than as discrete temporalities and objects” (2017: 205). Indeed, she posits that the question of ‘before’ and ‘after’ becomes markedly less relevant when discussing longue-durée processes since everything is connected and the conditions from one lead into the other: “There is no before or after, there is only process” (264). (2)

The island is, therefore, “either from before or for after humankind” (2004: 9); thinking of islands short-circuits understandings of our coevalness with the geological, re-calibrating conceptions of ‘before’ and ‘after’ to dramatic effect. Witnessing the emergence of new land from under the sea, human perceivers are made radically aware not only of the falsity of their assumption that the earth’s geological formation is complete, as Deleuze suggests, but also that geological processes can have discrete and perceptible manifestations. Deleuze is particularly interested in the imaginative potential of islands; of particular use here, though, is his characterisation of the relation between, on the one hand, the emergence of an island as a product of the processual non-human geological materiality of the earth, and, on the other, the affective contours of human encounters with such novel geological formations. (4)

Cinema’s ability – indeed, its proclivity – to record the ephemeral or contingent is widely acknowledged; Mary Ann Doane’s contention is that it “directly confronts the problematic question of the representability of the ephemeral, of the archivability of presence” (2002: 25). Tiago de Lucameanwhile, lends a sense of greater urgency to the medium’s “duty to record phenomenal realities on the verge of disappearance” (2022: 23). The spectacular event of eruption and the materiality of a new island are both subject to a recording or documentary impulse – the ephemeral nature of which is well-adapted to the cinematic medium – while simultaneously posing challenges to the medium’s audiovisual and temporal strategies of recording. (5)

Birth of an Island is an example of a documentary approach to volcanic islanding that attempts to avoid, but eventually proves, what media historian John Durham Peters identifies as “the productive impossibility of capturing what exists” (2015: 11). The film (and most particularly, its narrator) seeks to present a comprehensibly scaled, chronological, totalising account of the emergence of Surtsey, but in the interstices of this encounter of an archiving and indexical medium with the archival-indexical materiality of geology, there emerges a productive excess that reveals the difficulty of fixing and controlling the meanings of the volcanic process. (7)

Vidrașcu’s film, in contrast, eschews the scalar, narrative approach exhibited in the Icelandic film, in favour of an unfixed, nonchronological, polyphonic and interdisciplinary account of three (relatively) temporally distant but spatially local tectonic events. Moving beyond a conventional narrative approach, the film includes the voices of several different residents of the Azores whose accounts of islands and earthquakes are derived from divergent forms of experience and knowledge. The film uses its own materiality (it is entirely filmed on analogue film stock of different types) to comment on the speculative (im)materiality of the disappeared islands, while its soundtrack, like that of Birth of an Island, unfolds in abstract form alongside the images. Unlike Birth of an Island, then, and as its speculative subtitle indicates, Volcano is characterised by an attention to and a preference for that which is in excess of documentary recording, and for what speculative futures might emerge from the polyphonies of the volcanic and cinematic archive. (7)

That a coalition between forms of acquired empirical knowledge and imagined, innate, or affective forms of knowledge is required for ‘volcanic island knowledge’ is reflected in Volcano, whose polyphonic attention to volcanic events incorporates factual records, embodied human memories and speculative visual abstraction. (9)

In Volcano, likewise, the unnamed speakers refer to events and places that are not always explicitly named or described, and more often than not they gesture towards mystery, imprecision and personal resonance rather than to scientific or empirical accounts. In so doing, they contribute to the film’s weaving together of the multiple material traces and immaterial memories of volcanic events into a dispersed and collaborative exploration of the coeval human and non-human histories of the volcanic. (10)

In particular, the film’s approach to human perspectives and its loosening of temporal linearity reveal the coevalness of human and non-human time. Smaill argues that Guzmán’s style of interview brings about “the decentring of human duration, understanding it to be subordinated to, and witnessed by, the open duration of the non-human” (2020: 161). This is through the positioning of interviewees within the frame but also through their temporal presentation “in a simultaneous duration, rather than suspended in time, above, removed, and classifying nature” (161). For Smaill, then, Guzmán’s film “allows […] simultaneous duration to emerge precisely because it elaborates a web of ideas, juxtaposing different events rather than seeking the causal relationships that structure linear history” (161). In Volcano, meanwhile, the human speakers recount, in half-formed sentences that begin without preamble and out of chronological order, their relation to the radical eventhood of the volcanic eruptions, the formation of new islands and the transformation of the landscape’s archival materiality. (10)

The decentring of the human voice in Volcano is partially brought about by its relegation from a position of absolute authority over the images, to one where the imprecision and incompleteness of human accounts is foregrounded. (11)

In its unsettled, shifting effort to make contact with the disappeared islands through these traces and legacies, the film shows that such traces are not reliably to be found in the traditional archive, which cannot host such an event in all its scales and effects. Instead, the medium of film and its experimental excesses are made, here, to convey the contingency and coeval materialities of the sudden geological event. Among these excesses are Vidrașcu’s interventions in the medium, which interrupt film’s indexical link to filmed landscapes and project towards forms of visuality that are detached from representation but produced from archival footage, generating a textured and layered account. During Constância’s narration, beginning immediately after he names the island of Sabrina, an insistent, pulsing music begins to be heard under his voice, which increases in volume and continues after his narration ends. A sequence of three microscopic still images of geological samples fill the frame, two showing brightly coloured crystalline structures and the third a monochromatic conglomeration of more rounded particles. Having cycled through these images, holding each for just a few seconds, there is a sudden jump cut to a bright white frame within which there floats an abstract, black form, the lower edge of which fizzles as its blackness is replaced with a fast-moving, red-tinged tracking shot of a landscape held within the island-like shape. The shape is derived from an earlier shot of a small offshore island and is produced using an Oxberry optical printer and the matte technique, whereby an area of the surface of the film is masked, leaving it transparent, allowing another image or images to emerge behind it when the two are combined. Described by co-writer Johan Härnsten in a 2019 introduction to the film as a “celluloid eruption” that “[opens] up volcanic rifts within the film frame itself”, in the emergence of this abstract form, Vidrașcu’s account of the island now screens a particularly jarring contrast between epistemologies of the disappeared volcanic islands. (14)

Through the material and representational surface of a medium made transparent, then, Vidrașcu discloses the ongoing existence of the no-longer-material, lost, yet remembered and archived volcanic islands. To return to Peters’ contention that, in so-called elemental media, we might find a site for the ‘disclosure of being’, is seems that in Volcano, the opening of a gap in the surface of the filmic medium through which the form of an island emerges – like the emergence of the island itself through the elemental medium of the sea – performs a disclosure of an ontological entity (the earth) and its concomitant processes, as it “gathers its strength to punch through to the surface” (Deleuze, 2004: 9). Vidrașcu’s effort to capture the multiple material and immaterial aspects of the tectonic events through different forms of visual attention emerges, here, as a disclosure of the plural ontological status of the lost islands – material and immaterial, remembered and forgotten – as well as of the broader geological record, with the insistent reminder that both host polyphonic and multiscalar archival legacies that haunt the present. (18)

Martin Savransky “Passages to the outside”

Savransky, Martin 2023. Passages to the outside: A prelude to a geophilosophy of the future. Dialogues in Human Geography 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/20438206231151426

[…] the task might be to reimagine the future not as the promise of tomorrow or the hope of the yet-to-come, but as one or a thousand untimely passages to the outside: those immanent, groundless zones of indeterminacy, anarchy, and fugitivity composed in the interstices and outlaw edges of every territory, where impossible forms of sociality and speculative methodologies of life are improvised in the act of striding the forces and movements of an unstable and tumultuous Earth, of giving oneself over to the inchoate and the unformed, to a groundlessness that surrounds and subtends every ground, to a runaway metamorphosis which eludes finality and escapes totality. That, I suggest, might be the homeless task of a geophilosophy of the future. (3)

If this is first and foremost a geophilosophical task, it is because the Earth is not what we think (it is) but what makes us think. Geophilosophy, in other words, does not designate the kind of thought which would take the Earth as its object of analysis, but a mode of thinking activated by the speculative forces and metamorphic movements of an Earth which becomes its genesis, its unsettled and unsettling milieu of immanence, its ongoing and unfinished problematic. (3)

To fabricate one or a thousand passages to the outside is not therefore to build a roadmap to a redemptive yet-to-come. It is to risk an improper topology of variations and deformations, of the inchoate and the unformed, a fragmentary cartography of planetary interstices and intervals and outlaw edges where socio-ecological practices and speculative methodologies of life on inhospitable terrain get underway in spite of the world being made and the political, economic, and geo-ecological dynamics of devaluation that its ‘future’ portends. It is here, at the end of this world, in its refusal of the cruelty of the promise and in its joyful scatting of the eschaton, that the outside paradoxically opens a passage to a different sort of futurity: a homeless, intensive space, where ‘noting ends, since nothing has begun, but everything is transformed’ (Deleuze 1988: 89). (4)