[-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 68, Issue 9

[Simon Biggs]

This is great!

I don't think technology is magical, at least not in its hardware (perhaps
the software, as a symbolic system, can be?).

But money! Yes, this is the purist form of magic. Magic is about signs, is
it not? About how we can evoke, invoke or abduct one thing from another
symbolically but with apparent affect in the material world. Sympathetic
magic is an example. Both Levi-Strauss and Mauss wrote on this. However,
Baudrillard identified this as sign value (Towards a Critique of the
Political Economy of the Sign). Money is a key instrument in our society for
achieving magic. It is an abstraction that since the end of the gold
standard is no longer connected to any materiality to determine its absolute
value. For decades we have lived in a world of relative value, not absolute,
as money has been spun in to more and more rarefied derivatives. It isn't
just magic for people from the Rai coast, it is magic for all of us, even
those who do the deals. It's magic allows us to leverage value where we
never had it before - or at least it did for a while.

As we have recently seen, the magic can fail. Magic seems to be about signs
(thus value) and our faith in them. When our faith is challenged then value
is compromised. The wizards of Oz are only as good as those who fear them
believe in them. When the internal structure of the sign is revealed to
enough people then the sign ceases to possess its magical power. However,
its signifying capacity remains, perhaps rendered as the quotidian.

Best

Simon


Simon Biggs
s.biggs at eca.ac.uk  simon at littlepig.org.uk
Skype: simonbiggsuk
http://www.littlepig.org.uk/

Research Professor  edinburgh college of art
http://www.eca.ac.uk/
Creative Interdisciplinary Research into CoLlaborative Environments
http://www.eca.ac.uk/circle/
Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice
http://www.elmcip.net/
Centre for Film, Performance and Media Arts
http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/film-performance-media-arts


> From: James Leach <james.leach at abdn.ac.uk>
> Reply-To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
> Date: Wed, 14 Jul 2010 19:30:47 +0100
> To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 68, Issue 9
> 
> Kriss: I dont know if this has anything to do with cinema, but as you asked...
> One of the things Anthropologists might say about magic is that it is (usually
> a derogatory) term western people use for the (practically oriented) actions
> of others that we dont understand (the mechanism for achieving effect). I
> think Malinowski said something along these lines...
> If used positively in relation to our own practices, don't we we mean
> something like enchantment (or re-enchantment)?
> 
> We think airplanes and mobile phones must seem like magic to people who have
> never seen them and only imagined being able to fly. But my experience is that
> these things are actually 'magic' for us - we can't explain them or make them
> ourselves. They have marvellous effects for us: do things we consider amazing
> because they fit with a certain worldview in which the domination of nature,
> time, space etc. are core to the definition of the human we operate.
> People in Reite were pretty unimpressed by laptop computers for eg. - what is
> the effect of these things in doing things they value - feeding kin, growing
> bodies of others, having the kinds of effects that human beings should, as far
> as they are concerned? (Of course, with time, one could demonstrate such
> effects are possible to them, but that is not my point).
> But money seems like magic to people in Reite - it has no origin, and seems to
> have almost infinite potential effect on people. It is mysterious, and the
> source of its power opaque to say the least.
> We think their rituals are evidence of 'belief' or 'magic', but to them they
> are just the practical and everyday way of ensuring the correct results from
> one's efforts. To make a ritual planting, ensuring the presence of the 'mother
> of taro' at the centre of one's garden of staple subsistence food looks like
> superstition to us - but in (their) reality, the taro grown in that garden is
> already destined for certain people, to grow particular bodies, and these
> things are indicated and anticipated by the form of the central planting,
> where those plants come from, which members of the family can tend the crops,
> how that crop will and can be valued as partaking of the mythic power to
> replace human bodies, or regenerate them  etc. etc. are all very practical
> elements of making that central planting (not to mention the botanical
> benefits of grouping certain plants together).
> The effects the taro will have are therefore already established, the way
> people respond or react, the way kinship is taken forward, all set in motion
> by the act of 'magic' at the outset.
> I think technology is our brand of magic. It is specialised, has specialist
> practitioners, is taken for granted by most. You probably mean something
> rather different in relation to film...
> 
> 
> On 13 Jul 2010, at 17:07, Kriss Ravetto wrote:
> 
>> It would be interesting to see what
>> James has to say about the interest in magic from the part of
>> anthropology since much of the contemporary work on magic comes from
>> that field or early modern history.
> 
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