Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative

by Michael Taussig

Defacement asks what happens when something precious is despoiled. It begins with the notion that such activity is attractive in its very repulsion, and that it creates something sacred even in the most secular of societies and circumstances. In specifying the human face as the ideal type for thinking through such violation, this book raises the issue of secrecy as the depth that seems to surface with the tearing of surface. This surfacing is made all the more subtle and ingenious, not to mention everyday, by the deliberately partial exposures involved in "the public secret"―defined as what is generally known but, for one reason or another, cannot easily be articulated. Arguing that this sort of knowledge ("knowing what not to know") is the most powerful form of social knowledge, Taussig works with ideas and motifs from Nietzsche, William Burroughs, Elias Canetti, Georges Bataille, and the ethnography of unmasking in so-called primitive societies in order to extend his earlier work on mimesis and transgression. Underlying his concern with defacement and the public secret is the search for a mode of truth telling that unmasks, but only to reenchant, thereby underlining Walter Benjamin's notion that "truth is not a matter of exposure of the secret, but a revelation that does justice to it."

Genres: Anthropology, Philosophy, Social Science

328 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1999

About the author

Michael Taussig (born 1940) earned a medical degree from the University of Sydney, received his PhD. in anthropology from the London School of Economics and is a professor at Columbia University and European Graduate School. Although he has published on medical anthropology, he is best known for his engagement with Marx's idea of commodity fetishism, especially in terms of the work of Walter Benjamin.

Reviews

[Andy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think highly of Taussig's other work - particularly "The Devil and Commodity Fetishism" and "Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man" - which are required reading for anyone interested in the Americas, Marxist cultural theory and ethnography. I also enjoyed his collection of occasional essays, "Walter Benjamin's Grave."

However, I was disappointed with this book.

The purported task that Taussig sets for himself is to study the "public secret" - which he defines as that which one must know not to know - through a "labor of the negative" (Hegel) that draws on anthropology, Walter Benjamin, Adorno and other sources. He is interested in public lies, unmasking, and the persistence of the secret in its unveiling. Another of his prime interests is the link between the sacred and sacrilege - following Bataille, he argues that sacrilege enacts the sacred, completes it; in a sense, the sacred presupposes sacrilege. Anyway, sounds exciting, doesn't it?

Part I was interesting, but fairly anodyne - an examination of an outrage over controversial art in Australia in the late 90's. His reading struck me as a not especially inspired cultural studies take.

Part II was much better - it follows an ethnography of an Andalusian town, carried out in the 1950's at the height of the Francoist regime, and the ethnographer's study of the practice of lying. The twist is that the ethnographer himself withheld the truth, in the name of protecting his informants, thus erasing the town's long entanglement in the proud tradition of Spanish anarchism. This section also has an extended discussion of Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice" which is less compelling.

Part III is an interminable discussion of the initiation ceremonies practiced by the peoples of the Tierra del Fuego, and the rituals' theatrical use of public secrecy. This section "breaks" with the rest of the book as it examines a "tribal" society whereas the rest of Taussig's book takes "modern" societies as its object.

Part IV returns to our contemporary cultural moment, and takes as its subject the "unmasking" of EZLN spokesman Subcommandante Marcos by the Mexican federal police. A much more interesting discussion of public secrecy and unmasking than Part III.

The book has its moments of brilliance, but over all it suffers from a sort of deconstructive logorrhea. I hesitate to even attempt to count the number of commas, asides, digressions, "what I means" and hanging phrases in this book. Supposedly this book was based on a series of lectures at Stanford, and aspects of the style make more sense in an oral environment, but read they are extraordinarily annoying.

Also, he never quite pulls together his inspirations - Hegel, Benjamin, Adorno, Bataille - into a coherent account of unmasking, public secrecy and sacrilege.

A solid book, but below Taussig's ordinary standards.

[Ben Joplin · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is no genre that fits this book. Defacement isn't just public graffiti, it's ripping the masks off the gods. In the act of destruction, defacement breaths life into the world. The act of ironic transgressive gestures raises the dead, topples the king, and tranforms word into corporeal matter.

[Malcolm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Michael Taussig's work is some of the most impressive cultural analysis there is. I really like the notion of the 'public secret', not as a secret we all know but as the vital social knowledge of knowing what not to know. In case this sounds too much like Rumsfeld doing the Black Swan known unknowns and so on, Taussig here is writing about things that are known but cannot be articulated, and presents us with series of demonstrations of the point in the frontispiece – a quotation from Walter Benjamin – 'Truth is not a matter of exposure which destroys the secret, but a revelation which does justice to it'. Taussig is one of the finest exponents of the ideas developed by Benjamin, and Defacement one of those books that gives more each time I delve into it. As stunning as this book is, it is not his best work.