Michael Taussig E-Book

Michael Taussig

• Herausgeber: Hatje Cantz Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: E-Books
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 60

Beschreibung

   Was macht die Faszination von Notizbüchern aus? Dieser Frage geht der Anthropologe Michael Taussig, für dessen Feldforschungen Notizbücher ein unverzichtbares Instrument darstellen, in seinem Essay auf den Grund. Im Zentrum seiner Untersuchung steht Walter Benjamin, der obsessiv seine Notizbücher füllte und nicht nur ihrem Zweck, sondern auch ihrer Materialität verfallen war. Anhand weiterer bekannter Notizenschreiber, von Roland Barthes über Le Corbusier bis zu Joan Didion, kristallisiert Taussig heraus, was ein Notizbuch wirklich ist. Weit mehr als ein bloßes »Ding«, entwickelt es ein veritables Eigenleben, das sich gerade aus dem speist, was nicht niedergeschrieben wurde, und schließlich ergreift es von seinem Besitzer Besitz: Das Notizbuch ist ein magisches Objekt, ein Fetisch.    Der Anthropologe Michael Taussig (*1940) ist Professor an der Columbia University, New York.      Sprache: Deutsch/Englisch 

Leseprobe

100 Notes – 100 Thoughts / 100 Notizen – 100 Gedanken Nº001: Michael TaussigFieldwork Notebooks / Feldforschungsnotizbücher

dOCUMENTA (13), 9/6/2012 – 16/9/2012

Artistic Director / Künstlerische Leiterin: Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

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Agentin, Mitglied der Kerngruppe, Leiterin der Abteilung: Chus Martínez

Head of Publications / Leiterin der Publikationsabteilung: Bettina Funcke

Managing Editor / Redaktion und Lektorat: Katrin Sauerländer

English Copyediting / Englisches Lektorat: Philomena Mariani

Proofreading / Korrektorat: Sam Frank, Cordelia Marten

Translation / Übersetzung: Barbara Hess

Graphic Design and E-Book Implementation / Grafische Gestaltung und E-Book-Produktion: Leftloft

Production / Verlagsherstellung: Stefanie Langner

© 2011 documenta und Museum Fridericianum Veranstaltungs-GmbH, Kassel; Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern; Michael Taussig

Illustrations / Abbildungen: p. / S. 1: Fridericianum, September 1941 (detail / Detail), Photohaus C. Eberth, Waldkappel; Universitätsbibliothek Kassel, Landesbibliothek und Murhardsche Bibliothek der Stadt Kassel; p. / S. 2: © Michael Taussig

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The author with schoolteacher Alejandro Peña, noting down names

of plants, Puerto Tejada, Cauca,

Colombia, 1971

Der Autor mit dem Lehrer Alejandro

Peña beim Notieren von Pflanzen- namen, Puerto Tejada, Cauca, Kolumbien, 1971

Michael Taussig

Fieldwork

Notebooks /

Feldforschungs-

notizbücher

Michael TaussigFieldwork Notebooks

I

Roland Barthes despaired of keeping a diary. Too boring. Too frustrating. Thediary disease, he called it. But there was one point of interest, and that had to do with re-reading an entry several months or years later. This could provide pleasure due to the awakening of a memory not in what was written but in “the interstices of notation.” For instance, on re-reading the entry relating his having to wait for a bus one disappointing evening on the rue de Rivoli in Paris, he recalls the grayness—“but no use trying to describe it now, anyway, or I’ll lose it again instead of some other sensation, and so on, as if resurrection always occurred alongside the thing expressed: role of the Phantom, of the Shadow.”1This is certainly intriguing, yet what is this Phantom, and what might it tell us about fieldwork notebooks?

In answering this question, I should note at the outset that not only anthropologists have fieldwork notebooks. One noted intellectual, Walter Benjamin, seems to have been lost without one. “At any rate,” writes Hannah Arendt, “nothing was more characteristic of him in the thirties than the very little notebooks with black covers which he always carried with him and in which he tirelessly entered in the form of quotations what daily living and reading netted him in the way of ‘pearls’ and ‘coral.’ ”2The reference is to Shakespeare’sThe Tempest.

Full fathom five thy father lies,Of his bones are coral made,Those are pearls that were his eyes.Nothing of him that doth fadeBut doth suffer a sea-changeInto something rich and strange.

The allusion to pearls and coral suggests that a notebook transforms the everyday into an underwater world in which things on the surface become transformed, rich, and strange. The notes in a notebook are what has been picked at and plundered from an underworld. They are of another order of reality altogether, and to all accounts the notes in Benjamin’s notebook form a wild miscellany. Arendt emphasizes the surreal impact of the juxtapositions of the entries. Next to a poem such as “Als der erste Schnee fiel” (As the First Snow Fell) was a report from Vienna dated summer 1939 saying that the local gas company “had stopped supplying gas to Jews. The gas consumption of the Jewish population involved a loss for the gas company, since the biggest consumers were the ones who did not pay their bills. The Jews used the gas especially for committing suicide.”3

Benjamin had long wanted to publish a book made out of nothing but quotations. This came to pass with the publication long after his death of what came to be calledThe Arcades Project(Das Passagen-Werk), all 954 pages, one of the few cases on record where a notebook—or a set of files of notes—has been published as such in its pristine state.4(He referred to the only book published in his lifetime,One-Way Street, a collection of his aphoristic, surreal, observations, not as a book but as a notebook.)

Long before the posthumously publishedArcades Project, in a charming essay entitled “Unpacking My Library,” Benjamin set forth some remarkable ideas about collecting, which I take to be pertinent to his notebooks no less than to fieldwork notebooks because fieldwork notebooks are exactly that—collections.5At one point, he characterized a “genuine” collection as amagic encyclopedia, on account of what he saw as its occult properties and divinatory propensities. Because the items in a collection gravitate into one’s hands by chance, a collection can be used as an instrument of divination, seeing that chance is the flip side of fate. For sure this is a wild idea, like you find with the private investigator Clem Snide trying to solve a case by sitting back, listening at random to sound recordings he made in the dead man’s empty villa in Greece a hundred feet from the beach. His recorder is “specially designed for cut-ins and overlays and you can switch from Record to Playback without stopping the machine.”6He records the toilet flushing and the shower running, the blinds being raised, the rattle of dishes, the sound of the sea and the wind as he walks along the beach, as well as the disco music to which the dead man danced. He cuts in by reading sections fromThe Magusas well as with his “thinking out loud” about the case. Later he randomly chooses different sections of the recordings while watching Greek TV so that he listens only subconsciously. “I’ve cracked cases like this with nothing to go on, just by getting out and walking around at random,” he says.7

In other words, chance determines (what an odd phrase!) what goes into the collection, and chance determines how it is used. (Imagine a socialsciencethat not only admits to this principle but runs with it!) This strikes me as an insightful way of portraying a fieldworker’s notebook. But I want to add still another feature that applies to the magic of themagic encyclopedia, and this is the way the notebook is actually an extension of oneself, if not more self than oneself, like an entirely new organ alongside one’s heart and brain, to name but the more evocative organs of our inner self.