antipopper

Sandy has an account of last night’s talk by Michael Taussig about “the colour of the sacred”, so I’ll avoid further theoretical explication. A couple of my old teachers had been wild about Taussig back in the day, so I thought he’d be suitably a hallucino-theoretical performer, and he didn’t disappoint. That shirt!

All his stories about Bronislaw Malinowski obsessively wearing his meticulous white outfits amidst the chromatic intensities of the tropics got me thinking about the figure of Elijah Snow in Warren Ellis’ Planetary series of comics: the Man In White who presides over the hidden, colourful mysteries of the world, occupying an ambivalent, mediating figure of authority in their uncovering. A far more resonant take on the X-Files and In Search Of‘s often drab approach to monsters-of-the-week, this heterotopia of retrofitted pulp fantasies really is colourful, especially in the vernacular sense of their intensity as “tall tales”.

Given that my thesis is now dealing more with the ways in which “the world” is politically modelled in (various approaches to narrative [{and its} aggregation] in) the blogosphere, Planetary might prove quite interesting as another hallucinogenic point of origin for me. Since I’m already counting Grant Morrison and David Lynch as valid philosophers of trauma, what’s another pop culture icon? Oh, how about Joss Whedon?

One thing I was really itching to talk about last night was colour’s relationship to more seemingly formal institutional politics, like concepts of democracy, in addition to Taussig’s interest in the colonial relation in and of itself. In that fantastic Buffy episode “Hush”, the Gentlemen (a bunch of scary fairytale monsters who literally steal the voices of the town of Sunnydale and keep them in a box in the clocktower) really are “gentlemen” — they’re cadaverous versions of the 19th Century bourgeoisie, dressed in black suits, kind of like undertakers-of-the-self.

In his book Men In Black, John Harvey identifies the sudden popularity of black in the early 19th Century as a traumatic marker of the bourgeois democratic revolutions:

What was being mourned? Baudelaire gave a political explanation: ‘And observe that the black frock-coat and the tail-coat may boast not only their political beauty, which is the expression of universal equality, but also their poetic beauty, which is the expression of the public soul.’ For him the black frock-coat was the uniform of the democratic spirit, of all the democratic bourgeois. He said ‘a uniform livery of grief is a proof of equality’. Democracy had killed a precious individuality, and following that death, democratic life could only be ‘an immense procession of undertakers’ mutes, political mutes, mutes in love, bourgeois mutes’.

Interesting. It’s no mistake, then, that the episode, in which the cast is mute for most of its duration, is completely ripe with allegory about the relationship of “communicative reason” to political institutionality. When my friend Natasja was going over the episode with a fine tooth comb for her own paper on “Hush”, she found some amazing little things in freeze-frame: Giles makes some scribbled notes in an attempt to analyse Buffy’s “the Gentlemen are coming by” children’s rhyme that she hears in a dream, including “Political ref — Bill of Rights?”. A split second shot of the local newspaper on Giles’ desk yields a fantastic story in small print:

President Clinton is embroiled once again in scandal after testing positive for the presidency-enhancing drug Crovan. Traces of Crovan were found in Clinton’s urine Monday during a random drug test conducted as part of the Federal Government’s employee testing program. Crovan, an orally administered drug that artifically boosts diplomacy and coalition-building skills, as well as perceived sincerity levels, has been banned from presidential use since the Ford

administration…”

Black, mourning, reason, scandal and the politics of democracy. But other than to throw in these allusive suggestions, I’ve not the skill to engage in some of the recent dialogues on democracy nearby.

Oh Glen: Margaret asked a question about fluoro uniforms as the new chromatic marker of work, but I couldn’t really follow Taussig’s answer.

[ tags: baudelaire, colonialism, colour, comics, communication, democracy, ethnography, michael-taussig, planetary, race, television, theory, tv, warren-ellis ]