on meeting Mic Taussig

Music: X Marks the Pedwalk: Inner Zone Journey (2010)

Some years ago I was at a house party thrown by an acquaintance in the English department, and I happened to meet (in the kitchen, always a kitchen) Ann Cvetkovich, a professor here at UT whom I had read but didn't know it at the time. Her widely praised and studied book, An Archive of Feelings has subsequently made quite an impact on my thinking (and graduate seminars), but perhaps not as strongly as the shear force of her personhood the last couple of years. After discussing our mutual scholarly interests (again, in the kitchen), Ann invited me to join a reading group of scholars strewn about the UT campus focused on "public feelings," a deliberately ambiguous concept that orbits the way in which human affective response is orchestrated and directed in respect to any number of "public" issues. Since joining the group, my intellectual ambit has ranged far from my disciplined rearing in communication studies, and there's no question I am better off for it. Discussions and readings with this group have taught me that my field is fiendishly pragmatic and wed to writing styles that hamper certain kinds of explanation or . . . experience. Of course, I've always struggled with the norms of writing in my field, but the group has taught me this is not uncommon---all fields have constricting norms in one way or another. Ann's work is considered groundbreaking by many in the humanities, but within English here at UT (I gather) it's regarded with suspicion---her style breaks the rules. As does just about everything we read in the group.

Therefore, I am a fan of Ann and this group; I'm fortunate to be included.

Last week the "public feelings" group got to hitchhike onto (or co-sponsor, intellectually) a visit from Michael Taussig from Columbia to the anthropology department. Katie Stewart, an advisee of Taussig and a tour de force in her own right, was instrumental in bringing him (back) to Austin, and so the group was oriented around his coming for some weeks. Stewart organized a "writing salon" at her home, where members of the reading group and grad-folks from anthropology could share work-in-progress with the visiting Taussig. I was extremely fortunate (and am very grateful) to be invited to this salon. I must say, after that meeting I don't think I have been as energized to write in some years; the salon was just what I needed to get back to work on the book-in-progress (oh, the textbook too). Meeting Taussig and being in Katie's living room was just the gift I needed to get back to that passion for thinking that had been flagging in the toils of administriva.

Here's the thing: three weeks ago I didn't know who Michael Taussig was. I had heard the name, particularly because I had devoted many years to studying the work Walter Benjamin in graduate school (after a very memorable seminar on his work directed by Keya Ganguly). But I had not read any of Taussig's books. Alerted of his arrival, I checked out three books from the library and started reading. And I read. And read. And got moist. Frankly, I devoured. Reading his Mimesis and Alterity, I thought: holy shit! How has this author escaped me? Why has his work not been put before me? I was simply blown away.

Taussig's talk focused on diurnal rhthms and the impact of mood on culture. I found him both brilliant and charming. His brilliance radiates in kind of childlike wonder and a writerly beauty: how many ways did he describe watching the sunset, but in a way that was so far from cliché it hurt? He has a gift, and I'm embarrassed I had not read his work or known about him until a few weeks ago.

In the workshop the next day, he was measured in his commentary. We spent some time discussing the constraints of writing norms in the humanities. He crystallized very quickly our predicament in a way that was both instantly obvious but not, well, instantly obvious: there are two types of academic writing, he said. There is writing to communicate, and writing to experience. I was reminded of the discussions in performance studies (of the speech tradition) as of late in respect to authoethnogphy (literature or bad poetry? expression or indulgence? And where does one draw the line between indulgence and expression?). One of the salon participants shared a very moving experience involving her grandmother; she worried aloud about being too indulgent, not knowing where to situate respect for the reader.

Interestingly, blogging arose as a form of writing that violates academic norms in a manner that is closer to the "writing as experience" model Taussig was talking about.

There's really not much to report than what I already have here; so much of what was accomplished was about . . . well, about feelings vis-à-vis academic writing. But what I came away with was a conviction that the way I felt about academic writing was shared by many, and that we would like to do things differently. The next academic book I'm writing is something of a gamble; it's about cultural mourning, but it's also an intensely personal book in ways that are hard to explain. During the salon, I mentioned that my ethnographic work (some of it "auto") was relegated to "interludes" in my first book, but that most reviewers mentioned them as distinctive and additive---that they enriched the more formal chapters that followed. I said that I was trying to integrate more fully my more personal and disclosive "interludes" into the chapters proper in this book. It opens, in fact, with an extended rumination on playing my mother's records on my portable phonograph as a kid. I was worried that opening an academic book with "me" would be a bit too much. But it wouldn't be for this group, the folks gathered with Taussig to discuss writing. And I realized last weekend this was the audience I was writing for.

The best gifts come without explanation and no expectation.