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Revolutionary Spirit Wars in Contemporary Haiti

Text and photographs by John Cussans

The Case of the Monumental Pig

In December 2009 I participated in the Ghetto Biennale, an event organised by Leah Gordon and the Atis Rezistans group from the Grand Rue area of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. I had been invited because of a number of texts I had written about western representations of vodou; the history of zombies; and a complex set of correlations that linked the writings of the French surrealist philosopher Georges Bataille to the revolutionary history of Haiti.

My interest in Haiti derives from the images of voodoo that made their way to me through the vectors of mainstream mass media and popular horror during my childhood in 1970s Britain.(1)

The diabolical seeds that were planted during my regular Friday night ‘Appointments with Fear’ led me on an a twisted academic path that found me, in the 1990s, writing a doctoral thesis about the ‘video nasty’ controversy from a theoretical perspective based on the writings of Bataille (or ‘the Ian Brady...

1) It is interesting to note how closely the representation of the vodou ceremony in
Freddie Francis’ Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (1965) – a film which deeply impressed
my childhood imagination and kept me awake for weeks to come after watching it –
coincides with one of the first ethnographic accounts of a vodou ceremony reported
in Moreau de Saint-Mery’s Descriptions of the French Part of the Island of Saint Domingue
(1787) (translated by Spencer as A Civilization that Perished – The Last Years of Colonial Rule
in Haiti (1985)).

...of social theory’, as one of my supervisors memorably and unfairly referred to him).
It was towards the completion of my thesis that Haiti came to the fore of my research interests. I had been trying to understand how Bataille’s theory of sacred revolution – understood as a massive,
acephalic (headless), collective expenditure of social wealth, triggered by sacred ritual – could be applied to commodified representations of violent excess such as those incarnated in videos like
Cannibal Holocaust(1980) or I Spit on Your Grave(1978), which had been banned in the UK in the 1980s amidst fears about their detrimental influence on young people.(2)

The clearest correlation I could find was in the metaphor of mass (mediated) contagions of destructive delirium which was characteristic of both Bataille’s theory of revolution and the fears
expressed by censors who believed that video nasties were capable of transforming ‘suggestible’ young people into sociopathic delinquents who could bring British society to the brink of moral chaos.(3)

Bataille’s ‘base materialist’ theory of revolution insisted on the fundamentally dualistic nature of the sacred, moving between the poles of pure, ideal, productive and ‘Good’ elements and the abject, base, destructive and ‘Evil’ ones. For Bataille the deeply contagious energy of the sacred is constantly ‘channelled’ for the maintenance of social order.(4)

It was the magnetic metaphor underpinning the left and right-handed polarities of the sacred, along with Bataille’s insistence of the materialist foundations of his theory, that orientated me in the
direction of ‘animal magnetism’. I traced fears of ‘diabolical’ mass-mediated contagion back through nineteenth century theories of crowd psychology and mass influence (which accompanied the
emergence of the mass media) to the work of Anton Mesmer in the late eighteenth century. In Henri F. Ellenberger’s The Discovery of the Unconscious– a classic account of Mesmer’s life, the subsequent history of Mesmerism...

2) Video Nasty was a popular term used by the British tabloid press to identify a
number of low-budget, very violent horror f ilms available in rentable video formats
in the 1980s. The f ilms were considered to be in breach of the Obscene Publications
Act (1959) which was being circumvented by the new media format. The campaign
led to the prosecution of 39 f ilms for obscenity and the establishment of the Video
Recording Act of 1984.

3) In The Video Nasties: Freedom and Censorship in the Media (1984) Martin Barker points
out that these claims were inf luenced by the social unrest that followed in the wake of the Brixton riots in 1981. Although there was no causal link between the two phenomena an imaginary association was made by the government and popular news media at the time.

4) In Theory of Religion, Bataille argues that the archaic dualism of the sacred undergoes
a fundamental alteration with the development of monotheistic militarism and imperialism. The two poles of the sacred are clearly separated such that the divine is imagined to be the domain of the pure, ideal and transcendental aspects of the sacred while the base, sinister and malific elements become associated with materiality and profanity. It is the forces of malef ic sacred materialism that Bataille believed must be activated against the universal moral order of Reason and Divine Right which reduces all human beings to servicing its delusional productive ends.

...and hypnosis, and their role in the development of dynamic psychiatry – I came across the following quote: In Saint Domingue (pre-Revolutionary Haiti) Magnetism degenerated into a psychic epidemic amongst the Negro slaves, increasing their agitation, and the French domination ended in a bloodbath. Later Mesmer boasted that the new Republic, now called Haiti, owed its independence to him. Mesmerism(5) was brought to Saint Domingue by the youngest of three brothers from the aristocratic Puységur family. Count Chastenet de Puységur arrived in Saint Domingue in July 1784 on a cartographic mission to plot the coast of the island. His two elder brothers were already famous devotees of animal magnetism in France. Armand-Marie-Jacques (Marquis de Puységur) is widely credited as the inventor of ‘artificial somnambulism’ or hypnotism. He is also reputed to have
developed a means of magnetizing trees on his family estate enabling collective healings of his workers, a practice significantly similar to the vodou rituals which take place around sacred Mapou trees in Haiti.

On arrival in Saint Domingue the young Count Chastenet immediately set to work demonstrating the virtues of animal magnetism at the poor house in Cap Français. The miraculous successes of these demonstrations (and the ‘sensational’ effects of the cure amongst the women of the colonial administration) led to the rapid spread of Mesmerism throughout the northern part of the
colony. Enthusiastic slave-owners reputedly used the practice to re-invigorate their depleted slave properties in order to extract further profit from them (McLellan, p.176-178). At precisely the same time, back in France, Mesmer and his Societies of Harmony had gained a reputation for being hotbeds of revolutionary fervour (see Darnton’s Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France
) and were subject to an investigation by a Royal Commission intent on discrediting the practice by ‘scientifically’ disproving the existence of magnetic fluid.

The authorities in Saint Domingue, aware of these investigations, cast a sceptical and cautionary eye over the practice as it spread through the colony. Once the practice passed out of the hands of the white elites and into those of the mulattos and blacks, the authorities were quick to act.
The first historian of the colonial period, Moreau de Saint-Mery (whose early ‘ethnographic’ accounts of vodou were mentioned above) reported that in 1786, in the northern parish of Marmelade, a mulatto named Jérome and his black assistant Télémaque promoted a version of Mesmerism combined with ‘magical treatments’. The colonial authorities, no doubt still very concerned about the legacy
of Mackandal (an influential herbalist, poisoner, vodouist and leader of a series of rebel Maroon uprisings against the French plantation owners in the 1750s) aggressively suppressed this new brand of ‘Creole Mesmerism’ (McLellan’s term), condemning Jérome to the galleys and Télémaque to public pillory. According to his biographer, DM Walmsely, it was due to events at this time that Mesmer made his notorious claim that the black slaves’ confusion of animal magnetism with ‘black magic’ had led to their revolutionary uprising. Mesmer’s claim coincides perfectly, from a Bataillian perspective, with the accepted story of the foundational event which triggered the first slave-uprising of the Haitian revolution: the ceremony of Bois Caïman.

This signal event in the history of Haitian independence took place on 14 August 1791 in Alligator Woods, on the northern plains of Saint Domingue, the site of Mackandal’s sermons before his capture
and execution by the French authorities in 1758. During a secret gathering of rebellious slaves and their leaders, presided over by the...

5) Mesmer’s theory of animal magnetism was based on the assumption of a vital,
ethereal fluid permeating all physical bodies, from planets to molecules, which,
when blocked, caused ailments of all kinds. The Mesmeric system combined new,
‘scientific’ theories of magnetic conduction between physical bodies with social
networks of involuntary behavioural contagion induced by ‘action-at-a-distance’.
The theory and practice of animal magnetism resonated with radical political and
philosophical ideas that would go on to shape the French Revolution.

...priest and former slave-driver Dutty Boukman, a vodou ceremony was enacted in which a black pig was sacrificed and a blood oath sworn to the god of the black slaves and to the spirit of Liberty.(6)

The idea of an historical coincidence between a religious ceremony involving blood sacrifice and the channelling of the contagious ‘left-handed’ forces of the sacred in the name of liberation
from slavery with a materialist healing practice channelling blocked, corporeal matter-energy contagiously through human groups was about as Bataillian as a revolutionary historical event could get. And it was in pursuit of this mythical-material and historical coincidence that I found myself in Haiti.

The Story of the Monumental Pig

The designated residence for the international participants in the Ghetto Biennale was the Hotel Oloffson (made famous by Graham Greene’s novel, The Comedians. On my first day there I struck up a conversation with Cameron Brohman, a Canadian artist who was participating in the Biennale with the Brandaid project he had co-founded in 2009.(7)

When I explained to Cameron my reasons for being at the Biennale he recounted a story he had been told by Reginald Jean François, a Haitian-born deportee from the US with whom he was working, about a ceremonial ritual performed by a unit of United Nations military personnel on a sculpture of a pig in downtown Port-au-Prince during the early phase of their occupation. After consulting with Reggie, Cameron offered to take me to the site where Reggie could recount the story.

The following is an annotated transcription of the video documentation I shot at the Plaza Italia, Port-au-Prince, on 14 December, during our visit to the monument of the ceremonial pig:

Reggie: So what else do you want to know about the pig?

John: I’ll tell you what I want to know about the pig... there are some
things I know about the pig... I know the stuff about Bois Caïman.

R: Bwa Kayiman?

J: Bwa Kayiman, oui.

R: What about it?

J: Well, that they killed a pig and that set the whole thing off...

R: No, they ain’t killed a pig. The vodou spirits sent the pig for them to sacrifice. The pig couldn’t get killed. It was an offering to the demon gods in order for this thing to work, for liberty and freedom and a contract had to be signed.(8) Nobody killed a pig. The pig was an offering.

J: By Boukman, right?(9) ...

6) There is some controversy concerning the historical facts and cultural significance
of the Bois Caïman ceremony, a debate which has been recently re-kindled due to
post-earthquake accusations made by Evangelical Christian leaders that Haiti is cursed
by God because of a pact made with Satan at that time.

7) Brandaid is a non-prof it ‘micromarketing’ project that supports and promotes
the work of artisans in developing countries. At the time of the Biennale Cameron
was developing a project which involved establishing a sustainable community of
young artisans in the Cité Soleil district of Port-au-Prince who will produce model
Tap-Taps – the brightly decorated local buses in Haiti – made from materials
gleaned from local landfills

8) The Christian Evangelical notion that Haitians made an historical pact with Satan
is popularly referred to as ‘The Contract’ in Haiti. The story is widely promoted by
churches and missionary organizations as a pretext for anti-vodou campaigns there.

9) Dutty Boukman (which translates as ‘Dirty Bookman’) was a Jamaican born
houngan (voudou priest) who presided over the ceremony of Bois Caïman. He was
killed by the French shortly after the uprising and his head was displayed to try and
dispel rumours about his invincibility among the insurrectionary slaves.

...

R: Was it by Boukman Cameroon? Boukman was a slave that the French people couldn’t kill. They were shooting him, they were sticking knives in this man, they were tying him up, he was always coming out the chain, he was going to war with a big...you know back in the day their handcuffs or their kneecuffs weren’t as proper and small as what we have now... they had some big ugly looking stuff with a big ball of iron lead, heavy ball, I mean it could be at least three to four hundred pounds heavy, to move around. So he was very amazing. They ended up killing him though...they figured he couldn’t die.(10)

J: So people know and recognise this pig? Is it the same pig?

R: It’s the pig. You see that pig, if you notice, the pig that we have here right now is not the pig we’re going to see now. Coz that’s a boar. It has tusks. I don’t know what president it was but around thirty something years ago they claimed that all these wild boars we had weren’t good for the people of Haiti because they had worms and ate children.(11) But at that time we had no problem with our pigs. So it was a way that the American government was trying to destroy the Haitian meat programme. These pigs could survive on anything. They won’t get sick and we could eat them and we wouldn’t get sick. So they said that we don’t have enough knowledge. But it’s a lie though. You guys have got cameras right, we’ve had that. It’s all in the voudou. I have a mirror and I can conjure a spell and I want to see where you are and I can see you through that mirror from the invisible realm. And these guys said we weren’t good enough, we were stupid, we were ignorant, we didn’t know Jack Diddly about anything. So they have white magic, which is that, and we have black magic, which is something else that they can’t understand.

J:So you think this [the video camera] is a power tool?

R: Of course! Do you have the brain to create something like this? You have to be inspired by something invisible and it’s called the white magic. It comes from the white man. Do you have the brain to create a satellite to roam the space and having a solar panel on it to keep it energised? This is not things from men. This is from spirits with powers, from angels, and they will give you the knowledge, the know-how, just like they give us the know-how to do things with the mirror. So it’s the same world. It’s just a different way of doing things. Us, we have a lot of smell, a lot of perfume, and a whole lot of things from the ground, and that mirror will have to be a real secret mirror that no one can see except for the purpose of seeing where your mum or your enemies are. So now they’ve got it with satellite dishes. This is a real crazy world. The modern world and our world are two different worlds. If you see Richard [Morse] the owner of the Oloffson, he’s into
white people’s art, and he knows the difference between white magic and black magic.

J: He’s a smart guy.

R: Richard? Yeh, genius man. The man can see things from another way. If the American CIA want someone to speak all they have...

10) Stories about the invincibility of voudou-inspired slave leaders are most strongly associated with François Mackandal who organized mass poisonings of food and water supplies and created a network of secret rebel slave organizations in the 1750s. Haitian folklore tells of how, when the French tried to burn the captured Mackandal, he escaped death by transforming himself into a mosquito. The wave of yellow fever that helped decimate Leclerc’s forces during France’s attempt to regain control of the colony in 1804 is believed by some to have been the work of the spirit of Mackandal. In 1758 a law was passed to prohibit the use of makandals, one of the terms used by the French authorities to describe ‘magical weapons’, pwens or ‘body-guards’ (McAlister, p.121).

11) In 1978, during the Presidency of Jean-Claude ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier, the indigenous Haitian pig was diagnosed as having African Swine Fever and, under pressure from the US government, the population was almost entirely eradicated and replaced by an American pig that cost as much to feed as a Haitian human. See Leah Gordon’s 1997 documentary film, A Pig’s Tale.

...to do is put something in their water and start asking them questions and they’ll answer. If the Haitian wants you to speak all they have to do is get a demon in you and you’ll start speaking. You’re going to tell the truth. It’s the same thing. They just have different ways about it.
That pig down there, that big boar, they said let’s get all them pigs out of here. Guess what. The new pigs we have, they can’t survive in that garbage. Before you know it they get sick and die, they need shots, they need doctors, they need all sorts of stuff. They can’t eat garbage. Our old
pigs could eat all that and stay strong and ask for more. The new one won’t. For real! Our old pig would get in that garbage and eat all that up. Just like a goat can eat anything, the old pig eat more than anything.

J: So people are aware of this. So what are the UN doing?(12)

R: The UN are more aware of the Haitian history because the Haitians are not educated. So they won’t go the library and pick up a book and start reading about their history. But, what our parents will do is this: they will tell us about the story, from word to word, from way back till now. The reason they are calling us a third world or fourth world whatever – a dimensional different world from the real world – is that we’re still living two hundred years ago, like we’re here two hundred years later, that’s our mentality.

Cameron: So what did the UN do?

R: The UN? They came over here..

C: With the pig.

R: With the pig?

C: Yeh.

R: Well... we have the Sri Lankans, the Jordanians, the Bangladeshis who came to war here in 2004 with the Chimeres.(13) The UN said ‘Hold on. These guys have vodou!’ They couldn’t understand
why they couldn’t stop a bunch of untrained guys with guns, roaming the streets and warring with them when they’re well-equipped and well-trained. So what the Sri Lankans did was go down to the pig...

12) In February 2004, shortly after the 2nd ousting of President Jean Bertrand Aristide, the UN drafted a Security Council resolution to send a multi-national force to Haiti for three months ‘to help to secure and stabilize the capital, Port-au-Prince, and elsewhere in the country’ (UN Security Council resolution 1529). This was followed by the creation of MINUSTAH (United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti) in June 2004.

13) The term Chimere was used after the ousting of President Aristide in 2004 to describe armed gangs of his supporters from the poor neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince. It is a very controversial term in the recent politics of Haiti. Traditionally a deeply pejorative swear word meaning violent ‘monster’, ‘ghoul’ or ‘ghost’, it was widely used in Haiti to describe the worst kind of person. It was also used specifically by the wealthy elites as a derogatory term to describe very poor and unemployed people. In ‘Epithets without Borders’ Richard Sanders claims that the term was part of the military linguistic arsenal used to vilify and dehumanize the enemy during the ousting of Aristide.

...monument with drums, guitars, violins and rattles and all sorts of stuff and they started singing to the pig. And after they started singing to the pig, they put strange markings on it, weird markings. See that’s the ceremonial pig right there. You see all them strange markings on him? They were never there. The American folk they destroy all that pig. They’re like ‘this pig
is bad pig’. So they gave us new pigs. But the new pig is not that strong. They can’t survive the heat. But this pig survive everything, except human beings. So humans killed the pig. But when the UN came here in 2004, the Sri Lankans came in military clothes and robes, like the Arabs does, and they came here and started singing and playing drums to the pig, and we were all around looking at this, and to me this was strange because these guys have a gun mission, to come here with the guns, stop the bad guys, kill ‘em, put them to jail and then go back home. But these guys were doing some strange stuff. See that, that’s a cross and that’s a mark on the ear. They’re tying this pig up because they believe the monumental pig(14) still has certain powers that have the Haitian folks going crazy. Look around the leg. They’re tying it up with their mystical powers. You see the back? This is a cross in red graffiti. When it was fresher you could see better the other stuff they put on.

They want the pig to slow down. They cornered the pig down, all four sides. They’re not playing. They’re stopping the pig from the North, East, West and South. To them this pig exists right here in the spirit world. That’s why it’s got its monument here.

So that’s the story of the pig. This guy here he’s blind right. He’s going round the pig and he wants some money. See if I was lying I’d be dying by now because I can see what happened in 2004 and
he’s doing it now. It’s no coincidence that they keep playing music to the pig. Believe me man! It’s straight jacket. And not just them. We had some Baptist missionaries who came around 1988/9. They were playing Christian music to the pig and they were putting their hands upon the pig and cursing it: ‘In Jesus’ name you big fat pig get out of here! We’re chasing you off.’ If you think I’m lying this is where I sell mahogany and wood carving, right there. I’m here 24/7, except three
or four months from now. I haven’t been around lately, coz I’m doing work over at the airport. But this is where my shop, my paintings, my mahogany and things go, right there.

He ain’t gonna stop until you pay him for that pig man. That thing is real.

14) The sculpture is one of several bronze replicas of the Florentine Boar (or Il Porcellino). The sculpture in the Mercato Nuovo in Florence is itself a replica of the original, which was a bronze copy of a Hellenistic marble original. Visitors to Il Porcellino put coins into its mouth for good luck and rub its nose to ensure their return to Florence. I have not been able to ascertain how and when the replica arrived in Haiti and whether or not the monument is associated by local people with
the pig sacrificed in the Bois Caïman ceremony. However some Evangelical accounts about ‘The Contract’ claim that Haitians worship an iron effigy of the pig. I have as yet found no evidential support for these claims.

Bibliography

Martin Barker (Ed.), The Video Nasties: Freedom and Censorship in the Media, (1984), Pluto: London

Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, (1989), Zone Books: New York

Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France, (1968) Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass

David Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies, (2002), Indiana University Press: Bloomington

Elizabeth McAlister Rara, Vodou, Power and Performance in Haiti and its Diaspora, (2002), University of California Press: Berkeley

James E McLellan, Colonialism and Science – Saint Domingue in the Old Regime, (1992), John Hopkins University Press: London

Moreau de Saint-Mery, A Civilization that Perished – The Last Years of White Colonial Rule in Haiti, (1985), Translated, Abridged and Edited by Ivor D. Spencer, University Press of America

DM Walmsley, Anton Mesmer, (1967), Hale: London

More:

Art, Possession and The Revolutionary Unconscious

by John Cussans

June 6, 2011

The sinister left-handed path works in obscurity and darkness while the right-handed path works in light and clear view.

Intellectual obfuscation is an exercise of power that operates by obscuring comprehension, concealing sources and refusing explanation to those not ‘in the know’. In this way its exercise can be associated with those ‘left-handed’ and ‘sinister’ mechanisms of power that work through secrecy, fear and veiled threat.

the mass media – and particularly the mainstream news media – are themselves systems of magical power used to ‘bind’ populations according to particular dominant belief systems in the interests of those groups which have the most to gain in maintaining the cultural and political status quo. The case of the Narcosatanicos, as it turned out, was much darker and politically complex than this.

What was interesting in the story however, especially in terms of the relationship between Faudoux, Voodoo, and Vodou, is that the cult had used John Schlessinger’s voodoo horror film The Believers (1987) as a training film, suggesting that the lines between traditional ritual magic, its distorted malefic application and its sensational cinematic misrepresentation had become deeply entangled in this particular case.

Two guiding principles of my research at that time coincided in this complex of authentic, cinematic and sensationalist ‘applications’ of sorcery.

i) Cinema – and mass media in general – can be seen as a form of ritual magic. (This is explicitly in the case of avant-garde filmmakers and ethnographers like Maya Deren and Jean Rouch but it is also and most importantly the case precisely when it is not recognized as such (i.e. when it is engaged simply as news or entertainment)).

ii) Actual ritual violence and representational ritual violence partake of the same terroristic logic of power.

Faces of Death and Cannibal Holocaust) deliberately challenged the viewer’s ability to distinguish between representations of actual violence and their cinematic simulations.
Michel Lieris’ L’Afrique fantôme (1934). Lieris was an ethnographer at the Musee de l’Homme in Paris when he was invited by Marcel Griaule to be the secretary archivist for the major Dakar-Djibouti mission to West Africa, the first French mission in fact. At this time Leiris was in psychoanalysis (on the advice of Bataille) and the book that Leiris wrote was not therefore a formal academic ethnographic document about the culture he dispassionately observed there, but an account of his own delirious fantasies and responses to the experience of the journey. It is one of the first ethnographic works to explicitly acknowledge and foreground the distorting subjective lens (the ‘Eurocentric colonial gaze’) of the individual engaged in ethnographic ‘research’.

For me, the importance of Leiris critical strategy is to show that we cannot assume an objective, non-libidinal, and non-fantasmatic relationship to the exotic and the other, that such pre-conceptions must be acknowledged if we are to get any where near a non-imperialist mode of inter-cultural engagement and dialogue with people from cultures other than our own. Part of this process requires that we acknowledge and include our anxieties, preconceptions and fantasies about others in our relationships with them. Leiris included his own dreams and the dreams of his colleagues in this account.

Like many of his Surrealist colleagues who were beginning to discover the unconscious as revealed by Freud and others, Lieris was interested in trying to access the primitive core of his desires. It is likely that part of his motivation to travel to Africa on this mission was to encounter this Other within the self (see Phyllis Clarck-Taqua ‘In Search of New Skin: Michel Lieris’ Afrique Fantome, Cahiers d’études africaines, 1992).

It is important to note, in light of what we will be talking about here in the next few days, that the Dakar Djibouti mission was primarily intended to gather objects for the collection of Musee de l’Homme in Paris, and that Lieris noted with disdain the way this collecting was conducted by his colleagues.

On his return from Africa Lieris joined Bataille in the creation of two groups: The College of Sociology and Acephale. Both organizations were devoted to a re-introduction of the sacred into the world of Parisian intellectual life and revolutionary politics. What Bataille hoped to achieve was a ‘mobilization’ of the heterogenous, sinister, abject and left-handed powers of the sacred in order to counter the tendencies of imperative sovereignty that throughout Europe were leading to the formation of Fascistic social organizations (see Bataille’s essays ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’ and ‘The “Old Mole” and the Pre-Fix Sur in the words Surhomme and Surrealist‘ in Alan Stoekl’s Visions of Excess (1985)).

As we will see in the screening which follows, the idea of a sacred revolution, triggered by an act of ritual sacrifice, corresponds closely to the story of the Bwa Kayman ceremony which inaugurated the Haitian revolution.

Demons Through the Ether: Haunted Media and The Terror of Possession

Implicit in the anxieties of the voices that sought to prohibit the circulation of video nasties during the 1980’s was the assumption that exposure to the graphic images of violence contained in them would lead to adverse effects on those viewers who were susceptible to suggestion.

This theme of suggestibility has its roots in the tradition of Mesmerism which emerged with the work of Anton Mesmer in the late 18th century and went on to inform theories of crowd psychology during the 19th and 20th centuries (most note-ably Wilfred Trotter, Sigmund Freud, Edward Bernays and principally Gustave le Bon, who famously described those groups most vulnerable to suggestion as ‘women, savages and children’).

Although Mesmer’s practice of Animal-magnetism was intended to put paid to superstitious and mystical accounts of physical disease and mental disorders the supernatural would return via the work of Mesmer’s followers – such as the Marquis de Puysegur (whose brother, as we shall see, brought Mesmerism to St Domingue).

Puysegur’s practice of somnambulism (or automatic sleep) was to give rise to a range of modern spiritual traditions in the 19th century, not least Spiritualistic séances in which mediums channeled to spirits of the deceased.

Since the beginnings of electronic tele-communications Spiritualists have believed that the channels of technology-assisted mass mediation have been vectors of incorporeal supernatural communication (I refer you here to Jeffrey Sconces’s Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (2000) and Erik Davis’ Techgnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information (1988)).

The characterizing of possession as a psycho-pathology in the west (as in multiple personality disorder) depends on this emphatically singular ideal of subjectivity. Like zombies, possession raises uneasy questions about the relationship between soul, consciousness and the body, and the relationship of self and other.

The point to make here is that the practice of animal-magnetism developed by Anton Mesmer involved a vital stage in the cure called the ‘crisis’ in which patients lost all conscious control of their bodies and fell into convulsion. John Pearson, writing in 1790 described a person on a mesmeric crisis as “possessed of his senses, yet cease to be an accountable creature”.

At the end of his life Mesmer claimed responsibility for the establishment of the Haitian republic, where, he claimed animal magnetism had become confused with sorcery and the colonial regime ended in a bloodbath.

A preposterous claim, one would think.

-John Cussans

The Militarization of Aid as an Act of Religious Violence

by John Cussans

"The Imperial Order of Things is Universal--law and morality also have their place in the empire in that they define a universal necessity of the relationship of each thing with the others. But the power of morality remains foreign to the system based on external violence. Morality only touches this system at the border where law is integrated. And the connection between the one and the other is the middle term by which one goes from the empire to the outside, from the outside to the empire"(1)

In the depths of the night a rasping cry pierced the core of my sleep. A strangely musical note remained, reverberating between the buildings beyond my window. It was a call made to travel far, to pass through walls: the sound of a solitary fox calling for kin. Fully awake now, I listened to the calls and waited for a reply.

Silence.

"The disaster is related to forgetfulness—forgetfulness without memory, the motionless retreat of what has not been treated—the immemorial perhaps. To remember forgetfully: again, the outside."(2)

I first had the impulse to write this text shortly after the earthquake that devastated Haiti on
12 January 2010. My initial intention was to analyse the militarisation of aid in post-earthquake Haiti from the perspective of Georges Bataille’s Theory of Religion. I imagined I could write an
exegesis on Bataille’s thesis that would illuminate the concealed religious violence of neo-colonial, militaristic humanitarianism in post-disaster situations.

Three weeks earlier I had participated in the first Ghetto Biennale, organised by an artists’ community in the Grand Rue area of Port-au-Prince. I had been invited to give a paper on the theme of Revolution and Revelation at the conference that accompanied the event and had chosen to explain my reasons for being there.

(John Cussans) My journey began with a childhood fascination with horror films, developed through an encounter with the writings of Bataille, to an interest in Mesmerism as the source of anxieties about the effects of mass media on ‘suggestible’ populations, a line of enquiry that led eventually to Haiti due to the bizarre claim made by Anton Mesmer, at the end of his life, that the introduction of animal-magnetism (the name he gave to the therapeutic practice he created) to Saint Domingue, had eventually led to the Haitian revolution, after the slaves mistakenly confused it with sorcery.

The tale eventually formed a spiral through the idea—-personified in Acéphale, the secret society founded by Bataille in the late 1930s—that an act of ritual sacrifice could trigger an unleashing of contagious, revolutionary force. This, I had discovered, was what had happened at Bois Caiman, the legendary ceremony that gave rise to the Haitian revolution in 1791.

In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, the word exigency in the writings of Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, but had not understood beyond the intellectual issue of those texts, acquired new meanings. ‘Suddenly’ the ‘immediate urgency’ of the situation in Haiti was making ‘impossible’ demands of the kind, I now understood, that compelled Bataille to write Theory of Religion.

"This condition of impossibility is not an excuse for undeniable deficiencies; it limits all real philosophy. The scientist is he who agrees to wait. The philosopher himself waits, but he cannot do so legitimately. Philosophy responds from the start to an irresolvable exigency. No one can ‘be’ independently of the response to the question that it raises"(3)

Two years after, those demands pressed heavily upon me, and still the text remained unwritten. Were there not more practical things to do? To be of real assistance, rather than labouring a philosophical exegesis that would be of practical use to no one?

Good work was being done. Colleagues joined together in solidarity with the people of Haiti, raised money, sent it, raised awareness, shared it. The lives of people we knew were marginally improved by our efforts. Three weeks after the earthquake and still no official aid had been seen by the majority of the population. Grand Rue, a relatively impoverished neighbourhood, had received little of what meagre aid was being distributed. We knew from Haitian grass-roots organisations that aid pledged to the major charities would probably never reach the Haitian people, so we were telling as many people as possible to send money directly to them.

Returning to the reports of the immediate aftermath is disheartening. Despite the massive outpourings of popular charity, the planned delivery of billions of dollars of humanitarian aid, and the blanket media coverage of Haiti’s trauma, little has changed for the better.

In many ways the situation is more hopeless. One sensed this at the time, this feeling of a double-urgency: the urgency of the immediate need, and the memory of all the need that had gone unanswered before.

Many of us hoped that such a spectacular catastrophe might make people in the wider world aware at last of the slow economic disaster that has been happening since Haiti won its independence from France in 1804. But as soon as the global media turned its attention to the next disaster, war zone or natural catastrophe, Haiti was once more returned to the equally pressing exigency: the necessity to alert people about the counter-humanitarian role of the US military in the unfolding crisis.

The centrepiece of President Obama’s ‘swift, coordinated and aggressive effort to save lives’ in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake was to send 14,000 US troops to ‘secure the disaster’.(4)

The city was informally separated into green zones (where aid workers could go about their work unimpeded) and red zones (such as Grand Rue) in which they were required to be accompanied by military security, a model developed in Baghdad during the Iraq war and transposed to New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina.(5)

After a week on the ground in Haiti, USAID reported that, after airlifting US and European survivors to safety, their search and rescue teams had managed to save a total of seventy people.(6)

As soon as the US air force took control of Haitian airspace, on Wednesday 13 January, they explicitly prioritised military over humanitarian flights. Although most reports from Port-au-Prince emphasised remarkable levels of patience and solidarity on the streets, US commanders made fears of popular unrest and insecurity their number one concern.(7)

That the actions of the US government were covertly anti-humanitarian was obvious to those familiar with the history of US involvement in Haiti. They would also have recognised the bitter irony of Obama’s invitation to two former US presidents to establish the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund. This looked ominously like the US was gearing up for an exercise of neo-imperialist disaster capitalism. The actions of the US government added an extra weight of hopelessness to what was already an appalling and desperate situation. Despite the massive donations of charity, and the ‘humanitarian assistance’ of the US military, for hundreds of thousands of sick, malnourished, injured, homeless and traumatised citizens of Haiti, life has not changed for the better. Their lot is in many ways worse.(8)

Distance and Proximity

Perhaps the intensity of my reactions was in part due to personal relations to people in the ‘disaster zone’. In a lecture given by Susan Buck-Morss, shortly after the earthquake, she showed images of victims being pulled from the rubble and spoke candidly about her reactions to them.(9)

In the discussion that followed, someone in the audience challenged her for showing such images, accusing her of exploiting the same liberal, bourgeois sentimentalism that was currently being harnessed by the media to channel funds to NGOs that would only intensify the political disempowerment of the Haitian people. Furthermore, such images perpetuated the myth of Haitians as victims, unable to help themselves, dependent on the charity of others and unable to challenge the way images of them were being used by foreign media. At the time, and under the circumstances, these seemed like technical, theoretical points. But I fully agreed with them. It was clear from previous disasters and the patterns which followed, that despite millions of dollars that would be raised by the general public (often via celebrity-endorsed, televised charity campaigns exploiting our compassion for the suffering of others), ultimately the major aid organisations would be ineffective and most of the revenue raised would end up paying the salaries of foreign aid workers, the executives of NGOs, and the contracts for reconstruction and development would be given to foreign companies. The accusations levelled at Buck-Morss suggested that immediate emotional responses to images of the suffering of distant others were a self-indulgent, sanctimonious reflex that deflected attention away from the real economic and political causes of structural violence. I wanted to say something in her defence. But I was already weighed down by a sense of powerlessness that the presence of the US military now made almost absolute. This powerlessness defines an apex of possibility, or at least, awareness of the impossibility opens consciousness to all that is possible for it to think. In this gathering place, where violence is rife, at the boundary of that which escapes cohesion, he who reflects within cohesion realises that there is no longer any room for him.(10)

Theory of Religion(11)

‘We have become the subjects of our own history.’ Aristide said in 1987, and ‘We refuse from now on to be the objects of that history.’(12)

I will not rehearse a general introduction to Bataille’s thought. I will simply underline the essential (usually obscured) interdependence of religious, economic, and philosophical thought and the central role of violence in this. I also will not labour a critique of charity. It is self-evident that charity has meanings common to all three discourses and it is widely acknowledged, at least on the left, that charity ultimately perpetuates the ills that it seeks to alleviate. The important point in the case of Haiti is that US military intervention there operates in concert with an ongoing Christian imperialist programme that has been waging a religious war against Vodou, the primary religion of Haiti, since at least 1860.(13)

Theory of Religion is divided into two parts. Part one—‘The Basic Data’—begins with the primal condition of ‘animal intimacy’ (a realm of continuity, immediacy, or immanence from which the human world is fundamentally separated), through the positing of a world of subjects and objects, to the development of war as an externalisation of communal, sacred violence to the outside, the reduction of humans to slaves and the institution of human sacrifice. Part Two—‘Religion Within the Limits of Reason’—traces the development of religious thought from the establishment of an imperial, militaristic order (which externalises violence to the outside) to the growth of industry.

The break between the two sections is pivotal because it marks a transition between an understanding of religion in which sumptuary, non-rational, and orgiastic violence is intimately associated with the experience of the sacred, to one in which the expenditure of wealth (or force) is strictly reduced to the acquisition of greater force. Violent sacrifice has a fundamental role in the previous world, affording temporary access to the lost realm of animal intimacy. In the latter the right to violence is exercised by a sovereign, imperial order that associates non-productive, violent sacrifice with evil.

Part One—The Basic Data

The human world begins with the positing of objects and the use of tools, which creates a ‘transcendent’ realm of objects in opposition to the undifferentiated continuity of immanence. Through sacrifice, the animal (or object), which had been reduced to a thing (or a tool) serving man’s utilitarian ends, is restored to the ‘vague sphere of lost intimacy’ (p.50) from which it was withdrawn.

In the fallen world of the objectively real ‘nature becomes man’s property but ceases to be immanent to him’. (p.41)

The act of subordinating nature ties man to a subordinated nature and eventually man himself is reduced to a thing. ‘The agricultural product and livestock are things, and the farmer or the stock raiser, during the time they are working are also things [...]. The farmer is not a man; he is the plough of the one who eats the bread.’ (p.42)

The return to lost intimacy cannot occur without violence (or a ‘breaking loose’ from the real order of things) such as happens in festivals where wealth and force are squandered uselessly. ‘The constant problem posed by the impossibility of being human without being a thing and of escaping the limit of things without returning to animal slumber receives the limited solution of the festival’. (p.53)

It is a time of ‘spectacular letting loose’, a ‘crucible where distinctions melt into the intense heat of intimate life’. (p.54)

Human community is ritually re-created through festival. War marks a fundamental shift in man’s relation to the violence of the sacred. It represents the unleashing of communal violence to the outside. Whereas the violence of sacrifice and festival wreaks havoc within the community of individuals who participate in it, ‘armed action destroys others or the wealth of others’.(p.57)

Although war has a meaning akin to festival—‘in that the enemy is not treated as a thing’—it is not primarily engaged in as a return to lost intimacy.(p.58)

Instead war posits the individual beyond the individual-as-thing in the ‘glorious’ individuality of the warrior, who reduces his fellow men to servitude. ‘He thus subordinates violence to the most complete reduction of mankind to the order of things’. (p.59)

Slavery is a consequence of the unfettered violence of the warrior whose sacred prestige is a ‘false pretense of a world brought down to the weight of utility’.(p.59)

‘The warrior’s nobility is like a prostitute’s smile, the truth of which is self-interest.’(p.59)

Bataille argues that human sacrifice is ‘the most radical contestation of the principle of utility’ and ‘the highest degree of an unleashing of internal violence’.(p.60)

Human sacrifice, such as the Christian god’s bloody sacrifice of his only son, marks a transition from religion experienced as an ‘orgy of consumption’ returning isolated beings to a lost intimacy with animal immanence, to ‘an organized [...] rational use of forces for the constant increase in power’.(p.65)

Military Order and the Pacification of Sacrifice In Haiti, as in most other heavily exploited parts of the world, international aid is meant to develop a space open to foreign penetration and manipulation, a place free from intrusive government regulations, a place where people are prepared to work for starvation wages, a place where private property and profits receive well-armed protection but where domestic markets and public services do not. As several well-documented studies show, the development of such a place has been the explicit goal of the foreign donors (the US, the EU, the IMF and other unaccountable international financial institutions) who have usurped much of Haiti’s sovereignty over the last thirty-five years.(13)

The advent of the military order is fundamentally tied to imperialism. Having organised a rational use of force, it makes conquest ‘a methodical operation, for the growth of an empire’.(p.66)

The empire ‘is not a thing in the sense in which things fit into the order that belongs to them; it is itself the order of things and it is a universal thing’ (emphasis added).(pp.66–7)

‘The military order subordinates itself to ends that it [the empire] affirms: it is the administration of reason.’(p.66)

‘Every presence around it is ordered relative to it in a project of conquest.’(p.66)

The military order, ‘moving towards universal empire from
the start’, brings about ‘a profound alteration in the
representation of the world’: a universal moral law designed to
maintain the stability of the order of things.(p.69)

Whereas originally the divine (pure) and malefic (impure) tendencies of the sacred were opposed to each other and distinct from the profane, now the former is associated with the imperial order of things (Universal Reason, the Good) while the latter becomes associated with a dangerous, chaotic, and irrational immanence (Evil, matter, the animal). The good is an exclusion of violence and there can be no breaking of the order of separate beings, no intimacy, without violence; the god of goodness is limited by right to the violence by which he excludes violence.(p.80)

The principle of military order is the methodical diversion of violence to the outside. If violence rage within, it opposes that violence to the extent it can.(p.65)

One of the principal arguments for the presence of the US military in post-earthquake Haiti was to prevent ‘outbreaks of violence’. The expenditure of force was undertaken to ensure that aid would not be ‘wasted’ or ‘spent irrationally’ on a ‘volatile’ and ‘hostile’ population. Some mainstream media channels promoted the idea that Haiti was ‘on the brink of anarchy’, ‘spiralling out of control’, or ‘descending into barbarism’. From a Bataillian perspective there are a number of things are at work here: the military expenditure of force to secure the disaster zone, and export the threat of violence to the outside (i.e. to Haitians); the charitable donations of money and supplies from outside, intended to alleviate the suffering of those same Haitians; and the threat of destructive violence issuing from the Haitian people who have been represented as being reduced to a state of animalistic barbarism.

The military expenditure of force conceals its religious character under the cloak of a utilitarian rationality and imperialist reason. In the name of ‘disaster security’ it holds the victimised population hostage to Christian charity, while suppressing the political agency of the Haitian people. The revenue raised by international charity organistions is systematically channelled away from the Haitian people and their government towards international aid organisations, further undermining their national sovereignty and self-determination. In this sense, militaristic humanitarianism, of the kind exercised in post-earthquake Haiti, can be understood as a secularised form of Christian-industrial, neo-imperialist violence.

The basic paradox of this ‘theory of religion’, which posits the individual as a ‘thing’, and a negation of intimacy, brings a powerlessness to light, no doubt, but the cry of this powerlessness is a prelude to the deepest silence.(p.13)

1) Georges Bataille [1989], Theory of Religion, tr. by Robert Hurley, New York: Zone Books, 2001, p. 68.

2) Maurice Blanchot [1986], The Writing of the Disaster, tr. by Ann Smock, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1995,(p.3)

3) Bataille, Theory of Religion, p.12)

4) Peter Hallward, ‘Securing Disaster in Haiti’, Monthly Review, MR Zine, 24 January 2010., accessed 30 April 2012.

5) Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2008.

6) Hallward, ‘Securing Disaster in Haiti’.

7) Hallward, ‘Securing Disaster in Haiti’.

8) A recent article by Bill Quigly and Amber Ramanauskas accounts for where the money raised for disaster relief and reconstruction ‘did and did not go’. Figures show that less than one per cent of the $3.6 billion raised by charity donors actually went to the Haitian government, while most returned to the donor nations in the form of payment for civil and military disaster response; payment to UN agencies and NGOs involved in UN projects; to private contractors and independent NGOs; and to the international Red Cross. The largest single recipient of earthquake money was the US government itself. Bill Quigly and Amber Ramanauskas, ‘Where the Relief Money Did and Did Not Go Haiti After the Quake’, Counterpunch (3 January 2012), accessed 30 April 2012.

9) Buck-Morss’ talk was based on the book published a year earlier that explored the role of the Haitian revolution in the philosophy of Hegel (Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti and Universal History, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009). The book argues that Hegel had written the master and slave dialectic sections of The Phenomenology of Spirit with Haiti in mind, but had chosen not to acknowledge it.

10) Bataille, Theory of Religion, p.10.

11) Theory of Religion is a philosophical fable about the development of forms of religious life. It is deeply indebted to the philosophy of Hegel (to which Bataille was introduced by Alexander Kojève in the 1930s) —in particular the master-slave dialectic—and Durkheimian anthropology. A central issue throughout all Bataille’s writing is the role of sacrifice as a middle term between religious, philosophical and economic being. Further references are given after quotations in the text.

12) Peter Hallward, Damming the Flood—Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment, London: Verso, 2007, p.xxxv.

13) For an overview of the Christian demonisation of Vodou as a pretext for suppressing democracy movements in Haiti, see Richard Sanders ‘Demonizing Democracy: Christianity vs. Vodoun, and the Politics of Religion in Haiti’, accessed 30 April 2012.

Vodou, Possession and the Revolutionary Unconscious

by John Cussans

(Transcription of a talk given at the Brunei gallery, School of African and Oriental Studies, January 23rd, 2004 at the opening of an exhibition celebrating the 200th Anniversary of the foundation of the Haitian Republic. Transcript published in Frozen Tears II – The Sequel, ed. John Russell, ARTicle Press, 2004)

So just a little bit for those of you who may not be too familiar with the concept of Hatian Vodou: it’s a religion that began in Haiti with the arrival of slaves there and it was practiced throughout the period of slavery, largely in secret until the Haitian Revolution, the revolution being a key point after which Vodou became more over-ground, for obvious reasons. The term ‘Voodoo’ I discussed before, in my last presentation, in terms of a Westernised concept of Vodou and all the predjudices that had become associated with the term. I explored that particular area…I’ll speak a little bit more about that later. Today I’m going to try to address something more ‘authentic’ than the artificial construct that I talked about last time.

Just very briefly, for those of you who don’t know, the pantheon of Vodou gods are called the Loas, so when I refer to the Loas, that’s what I’m talking about. Also I may mention the ‘invisibles’ which relates to this invisible force that I’m thinking about. And they reside in the ancestral home of Guinea, the mythic ancestral home of the African spirits.

Important too is possession, a fundamental aspect of Vodou. I’ll be talking about possession. Now it has to…it has to talk about this…my experience isn’t direct it’s indirect in terms of possession. And er…well…my interest in it will sort of I think come clear. It’s to do with something more…at the moment it’s gravitating towards something much more towards mediumship in European and North American contexts in the 19th century. I’m very interested in mediumship in general. Another title for this talk could have been ‘Channelling the Revolutionary Spirit’. It’s what the kind of… that’s the focus on the kind of what I’m thinking about here.

Possession is going to be a key issue, as is the issue of sacrifice, whose social role I’ll be addressing today too. Now, at the last talk I gave at the exhibition ‘Smells Like Vodou Spirit’ I talked about the misrepresentations of Haitian Vodou in Western culture. I wasn’t really talking about Vodou as an authentic cultural practice of Haiti, I was talking about the idea of Vodou in Western culture. I talked about something called the ‘Voodoo Construct’ which was made up of four, key components – enduring motifs which in the west in representations of this thing called ‘v’ ‘oo’ ‘d’ ‘oo’ (voodoo which you’re not… you know we’re not spelling it… I mean you know what I’m saying about this voodoo spelling thing… it’s the whole [sharp intake of breath]) ‘V’ ‘OO’ ‘D’ ‘OO’ which is used to describe this sort of western conception of kind of a…a…anxieties around particular cultural phenomena and psychological phenomena. And I isolated four particular motifs then: the voodoo doll, the zombie, the witch doctor – who today will be played by a Mesmerist-hypnotist – and the possessed individual, which will today be replaced by the possessed crowd – something much more sinister and frightening than the possessed individual. So I’m about this depersonalisation, this collective depersonalisation in possession…is what I’m kind of moving towards.

Now what I did come up with in this idea of the Voodoo construct is that it’s much more about western cultural anxieties than it is about any authentic thing called Haitian Vodou. So therefore it’s not really a misrepresentation of an authentic culture. What happened in Hollywood Voodoo – and there’s not that many examples of Hollywood Voodoo – is that it’s much more about Western cultural and psychological anxieties, which loosely I would call the ‘return of the repressed’, the repressed being superstitious beliefs, beliefs in witchcraft, magic, supernatural beings and possession, key issues as to what the anxiety is undermining; fundamental notions about the properly individuated, rational and reasonable subject.

This isn’t to deny that representations of this thing ‘v’ ‘oo’ ‘d’ ‘oo’ don’t have a very strong racial character and they are also ways of playing out racial anxieties, anxieties about blackness in white western culture. But again this is not something that’s explicitly about Haiti. What I’m going to talk about today is something much more to do explicitly with Haiti.

This talk is gravitating between two poles. One pole is the revolutionary Surrealist movement in Paris in the 1920’s and 30’s. I consider the Surrealists to have been engaged in a radical, revolutionary reconfiguration of the unconscious in opposition to conservative and reactionary constructions. They were trying to re-radicalize the notion of the unconscious. For the Surrealists – as Michael Richardson has demonstrated in his book The Refusal of the Shadow, a book of writings by Surrealists about the Carribean – Haiti serves a mythopoeic function. Now this term ‘mythopoesis’ is a term that, again, I’m going to be talking to today (talking ‘to’? – talking ‘about’ – that’s so American. ”I’ll be talking to the concept of mythopoesis today”) I’ll try and explain why mythopoesis becomes relevant and important. It’s only recently popped into my head…”POP” like that [hit’s microphone]…and I suddenly realised that what I was talking about was mythopoesis but I didn’t know what mythopoesis was. Sometimes that happens you know, that suddenly you’re talking about something…and when I looked into the history of it it became even spookier because it was…well anyway, maybe later I’ll explain why.

I’m using the term mythopoesis to suggest that stories and myths have a power to effect reality and effect social transformation regardless of their objective, concrete factuality, that stories have this creative power. And it’s the creative power of the story of the Haitian Revolution that I think appealed to the Surrealists in the 1920’s, especially the ceremony of Bois-Caïman, which is what I’m really going to be focussing on today. Bois-Caïman is the ceremony which, legend has it, was a Vodou ceremony which gave rise to the Haitian slave uprising of 1791. What I’m pointing towards here is a radical reconfiguration or rethinking of the unconscious which tries to remove from it the idea of it being under the mastery of a rational, individuated ego working for the reality principle. There’s a radical de-subjectivised notion of the unconscious that I’m trying to talk about today.

According to Richardson the Surrealists saw in the history of Haiti ‘the germ of a society that had the potential to challenge the ethics of international capitalism’. This is exemplified by André Breton’s visit to Haiti in 1945 and some of the consequences of his speeches in Haiti in that period.

Now the second pole of this presentation is represented by the figure of Anton Mesmer. Mesmer was a Swish – a Swiss physicist – who gave his name… (a swish physhisist?) – who gave his name to Mesmerism, which I’m sure you have some idea of. Mesmer is a key figure in the origin of the discourse of the unconscious and the development of dynamic psychiatry. The book that really put me on to Mesmer is a book by Henri F. Ellenberger, and amazing book, which I recently looked at again in the British Library, a book that I super-recommend, called The Discovery of the Unconscious. It’s an incredible book and Mesmer has an important role to play in it. I was reading this book several years ago and came across this very significant paragraph. Now the term that Mesmer used for his practice was magnetism (from animal magnetism, the name he gave to the subtle force that permeates all things in the universe). This is at the end of the 18th century:

“In Saint Domingue (pre-Revolutionary Haiti) Magnetism degenerated into a psychic epidemic amongst the Negro slaves, increasing their agitation, and the French domination ended in a bloodbath. Later Mesmer boasted that the new Republic, now called Haiti, owed its independence to him”.

Now this really intrigued me. What was Mesmer doing claiming to have founded the Republic of Haiti? How could this possibly be?

So I’m going to be moving between the poles of Revolutionary Surrealism and Mesmer’s claims about the founding of Haiti in 1791. And I’ve only done ten minutes.

Now my thinking in this regard is very much shaped by the writings of a Surrealist philosopher and thinker called Georges Bataille. And this is Georges Bataille [shows slide] sometime in the 1950’s. I don’t know how familiar people are with Bataille so I’ll say a little bit about his work and life.

When I was doing my doctoral research I was looking at Bataille in the context of debates about the detrimental social effects of representations of violence in the mass media. And some recurrent themes started coming up while looking at these issues, especially the issue of ‘contagion’. Another very dominant metaphor in the discourse of the social effects of mass media can be traced back to the notion of the hypnotist with certain sections of the population configured as vulnerable to suggestion, prone to this powerful influence of this ‘influencing machine’ (Victor Tausk’s term). I was looking at issues of violence in the media from this kind of perspective.

Bataille was associated with the French Surrealist movement of the 1920’s. He was excommunicated from the official movement by Andre Breton who described him as a philosopher who philosophised with a fly on his nose, which may…I won’t talk about that actually…but it’s to do with his…basically Bataille is an excremental philosopher. But that’s not important today.

Now alongside Roger Caillois and Michel Lieris, Bataille has been associated with what James Clifford, in The Predicament of Culture, describes as Ethnographic Surrealism. In the 1930’s Bataille founded something called the College of Sociology which was devoted to a sociological understanding of the sacred and ‘the sacred’ is going to be a key term here, especially the idea of a sacred force, a material sacred force which is something we will be moving towards.

Bataille’s thinking is very much influenced by the L’Anneé school of French sociology (Durkheim and Mauss). I’m just going to say a little bit about Durkheim and Mauss for those of you who are unfamiliar with this particular tradition within French sociology. First there’s the central role of religion in any elementary form of society and particularly the force of the sacred – that which is ‘set apart’. What’s also important for this sociology of the sacred is that the sacred is radically ambivalent from a Durkheimian position, that it partakes of both the pure and the impure. Bataille famously said that ”Every object of attraction can become an object of repulsion, and vice versa”. He also said “Nothing convinces me more than that we are bound and sworn to that which repulses us the most, that which inspires our most intense disgust”. Here we have an aesthetics of radical ambivalence associated with an elementary definition of the sacred as a social force which is both pure and impure. The other important characteristic of this notion of the sacred is that it is contagious. This is fundamental Durkheim; the (primary) prohibition on touching has to do with the contagious power of the sacred. It’s this idea of something incredibly powerful and contagious that can pass through things that is associated with the notion of the unconscious that I’m working towards.

The sacred also has a very important cohesive power too, in society. Not only does it bind societies together it also has the power to radically unbind them. I was going to show an image of Judith beheading Holofernes as in instance of what Freud used in his Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego to the radical dissolution of the social formation (in this case the Assyrian army) once it’s symbolic head has been decapitated. It’s a very Oedipal-Freudian model but it’s still based on an assumption of radically disintegrating society through some sacrificial use of the sacred.

Also from Durkheim and Mauss – particularly Durkheim – we have this very strong emphasis on the fundamental role of taboo and transgression and in many ways the history of the term ‘taboo’ is similar to the term ‘vodou’ in that both describe the power imbued in objects and also the objects which contain that power.

The third issue, which is very important here, especially for Bataille, is that both Durkheim but particularly Mauss in The Gift, were interested in counter-capitalist economic systems or alternative economic systems; non-acquisitive and non-productive economic systems like the gift, like potlatch and like sacrifice. Hence the fundamental significance of sacrifice for Bataille. These are economies which involve, and put at the forefront, non-productive expenditures.

Bataille’s thought is also violently anti-idealistic and fiercely religious. So we have a kind of materialist religiosity: very violent, very aggressive, very destructive. He advocated what he called a ‘base materialist’ theory of religion which was a mixture of Hegelianism, Marxism, Nietzsche and Durkheim but that’s…don’t need that. What it emphasises is this collective social force. What he was trying to do, in all of his works, was find ways of unleashing this collective social force, this force of the sacred in the interest of social revolution. He had a very strong sense that sacrifice was one of the key modes by which this sacred force could be unleashed. I’ve spent a lot of time in my research finding out how this could possibly be and have found that Bois Caïman is perhaps the best mythopoeic example of the relationship between ritual sacrifice and the unleashing of revolutionary social force.

For Bataille revolution is a grand collective act of non-productive expenditure that resonates very strongly with the mythic story of Bois Caïman.

In the 1930’s Bataille formed a secret society called Acéphale, devoted to a religious interpretation of the works of Nietzsche. Events surrounding Acéphale are ‘shrouded in secrecy’ but what the group seems to have been involved in is the promotion of the idea of ‘myth’. ‘Myth’ and ‘secrecy’ come together here. Rumour has it they were planning to enact a ritual human sacrifice at a place in Paris by a tree which had been struck by lightening. (There’s a book about this by Maurice Blanchot called The Unavowable Community). This very much following a kind thinking that Freud expressed too: that society is founded on a crime committed in common and that the blood oath is incredibly important in binding groups together, especially revolutionary groups, revolutionary cells, explosive revolutionary cells, which is what Bataille was trying to initiate in Paris in the 1930’s.

(Where am I now? I’m here.)

So we have an idea who Bataille was and where he was coming from in the 1930’s. Now we have to go back to Haiti in 1789.

This is an image from Alfred Metraux’s Voodoo in Haiti [a black and white photograph of a Vodou initiate drinking blood from the neck of sacrificed chicken], a close friend of Bataille’s throughout his life.

I’m going to give a brief overview, and I know I’m going to be out of my depth here because I know there’s a lot of experts on Haitian society and the Haitian revolution who will correct my scant knowledge of the formal history of that revolution. But I want to make the point here that after the French parliament’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of the new Republic – which was partly written by Lafayette, a figure who will come up more in a little while – that obviously there were free blacks and mulattos in Haiti at that time who were interested in extended the revolutionary cause to Haiti including Vincent Ogé. Ogé is a key figure in the prelude to the Haitian revolution, travelling to Paris to petition the new parliament to recognise Haiti within the auspices of the new revolutionary government. Ogé travelled back to Haiti via London and South Carolina with a view to extending the revolutionary franchise to blacks [correction: mulattos] in Haiti. This was obviously met with violent resistance by the white regime and Ogé was publicly tortured and executed as a sign to anyone who was thinking about rising up against the regime at the time.
(How am I doing?…is this about right?…okay).
The revolutionary army in Haiti would be under the leadership of Toussaint L’Ouverture. But the slave army was organised by Boukman who was himself a Vodou priest (as legend has it). Boukman is definitively associated with the Bois Caïman ceremony. There’s debate as to when exactly the ceremony took place. (I was speaking to Leah today who told me that some historians are now saying it didn’t actually happen. Which is great actually. In fact it’s better in a way that it didn’t happen for its mythopoeic value). But (according to other histories) it took place on either August 14th or August 22nd – there’s an eight day gap of uncertainty about when exactly it was.

A number of slaves gathered in the forests of Bois Caïman and a Vodou ceremony was held in which a pig was sacrificed and everybody swore a blood oath to overthrow their white slave-masters. And sometime in the next 8 days the slave uprising was inaugurated.

I’m going to skip the mythopeoic section. But what I want to do…you want me to do the mythopoesis thing?..okay.

Mythopoesis. Nice word. It was coined by a British psychologist called Frederik Myers. Now Myers is a really key figure because he was head of the SPR, the Society for Psychical Research in London. There’s this whole thing about Myers and Freud. Freud kept secret his belief in telepathy throughout his life because it was bad PR. Ernst Jones is telling him “Listen Sigmund, really don’t play up this telepathic thing because it’s really going to ruin the reputation of psychoanalysis” whereas Frederik Myers is an absolute believer. Now what the point of this is that the entire history of the development of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis and dynamic psychology throughout the 19th century is absolutely based on the bedrock of mediumship. It’s about possession, it’s about somnambulism, it’s about people having visions and it’s about an attempt to account for those visions. Mesmer himself began by saying “I can account for somnambulism on purely materialistic and mechanistic grounds.
Therefore all the possessions, the hallucinations and the visions can be explained without a superstitious belief system. We can move on a purely scientific basis”. However, throughout the 19th century, the scientists and psychologists were moving in and out of belief on this issue of whether or not people were actually channelling the dead, or channelling entities and what was actually going on in these situations.
Ellenberger’s book is brilliant for this and it’s just really very clear. So I was very surprised when I found that my research into mythopoesis took me back to Frederik Myers. There’s a whole thing about Myers. He wrote a book called Human Personality and its Survival Beyond Death, a massive two volume work in which he argued that mythopoesis refers to the primary level of unconscious processes. It means the capacity of humans to ‘weave’ (I won’t go into a kind of…you all know) to ‘weave’ and ‘fabricate’ fantasies and stories at a base level. So the base level of the unconscious is a kind of fabricating fantasy machine.

Now this has to do with the fact that many of the people they were examining hysterics. Now just read ‘mediums’ for ‘hysterics’. From one perspective they’re hysterics – if you’re a materialist psychologist – and from the other perspective, of believers, they’re mediums who are channelling entities, or they have access to channels of information which we are otherwise remote from. So they’re exploring mediums, schizoid mediums, who have dissociated they’re personalities, and are able to fabricate stories. The psychological and psychoanalytic communities were split as to whether these stories were inventions – very, very clever fabrications – or authentic examples of some form of channelling. And I don’t want to go…this is the kind of territory…I’m not sure. That’s just where things are at at the moment.

So mythopoesis comes to describe the creative power of myth, that stories can have a real transformative power in society. Now we can try to explain that in lots of ways, we can have a materialist explanation but what we can’t deny is that stories have power. Whether they’re true or not they work. And it’s this working function of the myth that I’m interested in, especially the working function of a revolutionary myth.

So here’s an account of Bois Caïman by Alfred Metraux. Apparently this account is from a Haitian school book from the 1950’s. This is the story told to school children in Haiti. And I love it because it’s the most lavish and lurid version I could find. This is how it goes. (28.47)

‘To put an end to all holding back and to obtain absolute devotion he, Boukman, brought together a great number of slaves in the glade of Bois Caïman near the red mountain. When all were assembled a storm broke. Lightening scribbles the low dark clouds with brief radiance. In a few minutes the torrential rain begins to turn the ground into a marsh while a savage wind twists the moaning trees until even the thickest branches are wrenched off and crash to the earth. In the middle of this impressive scene, motionless, petrified in sacred awe, the assembled slaves behold an old Negress rise up, her body shaking from head to foot. She sings, she pirouettes and over her head she brandishes a huge cutlass. Now, in the great congregation an ever more profound stillness, more bated breath, eyes ever more burning fixed on the Negress, show how the crowd is rapt. At this moment a black pig is produced. The din of the storm drowns his grunts. With one vivid thrust the inspired priestess plunges her cutlass into the animal’s throat. The blood spurts – and is gathered smoking to be distributed in turn, to the slaves: all drink, all swear to obey Boukman.’

So how does this relate to Anton Mesmer and what bearing does it have on the claim that the revolution was brought about by Mesmerism-Gone-Wrong in Haiti. Well, we need to know a little bit more about Mesmer. He was a Swiss physicist who developed that idea that physical and mental illness was explainable by the influence of the planets, bodies on bodies, a purely materialist account of physical disease, especially mental disease. He famously had a competition with an exorcist called Johann Joseph Gassner in which he cured more people than his opponent. So Mesmer won and said “Look, I’m the greatest and I can cure people without the need of outmoded religious and superstitious ideas”. Pure materialism, pure physics, pure enlightenment stuff. He identified this stuff called magnetic fluid that permeated the entire universe. Unbalances in this fluid led to un-health and disease. Now this substance was in the whole universe so social phenomena were also affected by imbalances in magnetic fluid. It can be stored, it can be channelled, it can be moved around. What I’m trying to say is that there’s something about this magnetic fluid which has the qualities of the terrible force of Vodou or of sacred energy in general. It doesn’t have any bite for Mesmer but it could have. It could be like magnetism with teeth or something.

Now, he was working with possession and he could account for possession without a demonological theory, which is very important. He set up these things called Societies of Harmony, in Paris, which is where you went to be cured by the Mesmeric practice. They set up these things called baquets, these big vats of water with galvanized rods immersed in them and everyone held the rods and the Mesmerist would go around – because he was imbued with magnetic power – and when he touched people with a rod they would go into convulsive spasms. The blocked energies would be released and they’d achieve health, a balance of energies. I’m sure you’re familiar with this. It’s been around a while this idea.

Many of the Societies of Harmony, and one in particular – called the Kornmann group (Kornmann was an Alsation banker who in fact bankrolled the Societies of Harmony as the major financier) – involved people who were later to be very active in the French revolution, including Lafayette who was a member of this group; people like Jean Louis Carra, Jean-Jaques Brissot, Nicolas Bergasse (who was in communication with Voltaire and Rousseau). The societies were revolutionary hotbeds, so much so that some of the theories of the Mesmerists, such as Jean Louis Carra in his Examén Physique du Magnetism Animal, from 1795 could claim things like this;

‘The entire globe seems to be preparing itself by a pronounced upheaval in the course of the seasons for physical changes. In societies the masses are agitating now more than ever to disentangle at last the chaos of their morals and their legislation’.

So we find here a revolutionary Mesmerist saying that global energies, manifesting themselves through the masses will make them ready to rise up, and push through and create the crisis through which harmonious (social) balance would be achieved. That’s the general idea that’s going on here. Now the Societies of Harmony in Paris were shut down eventually because of their revolutionary reputation amongst other things after an official investigation by a team of researchers.

I just want to put two things together here and maybe this is a little bit cheesy but I’m going to do it anyway. This is a description of the patients attending the Societies of Harmony written by one of the inspectors who were sent to check things out, to see if there was any ‘truth’ to the theory of animal magnetism.

‘A third class of patients are so agitated and tormented with convulsions, extraordinary by their frequency, their violence and their duration. As soon as one patient has commenced others are affected by the same symptoms characterised by precipitate and involuntary motions of all the limbs or the whole body, by contraction of the throat, by sudden affectation of the abdomen and by a distraction and wildness in the eyes, by tears, screams, hiccupping and by immoderate laughter’.

So, it sounds like a good party really.

Now this is a description by Metraux of a crise de possession. In the Societies of Harmony the state of convulsions was also called a crisis. It’s the same language of a subjective, personal and individualised crisis that can be extended to the entire society. So this is Metraux on Vodou possession:

‘The crisis of possession emits a power disturbingly contagious to unstable and nervous temperaments. That is why the sight of a possession sometimes causes others to break out, not only amongst the servants of the gods, who are prepared to be mounted but also amongst those who have come along as visitors or out of sheer curiosity’.

I know that putting these two examples together means I’m treading dodgy ground but it illustrates the point I’m trying to make quite simply.

I checked out the Haiti connection with the Mesmerists and it seems that New Orleans was the hub through which Mesmerism made its way to Haiti. The banker Kornmann received 2,400 livres from Saint Domingue which means there were at least ten members of the society in Haiti prior to the revolution. But the key connection is a figure called the Marquis de Puysegur, an aristocratic Mesmerist rather than a Jacobin. The aristocratic Mesmerists of the Puysegur family were in Haiti. The brother of the Marquis – who was famous for developing the idea that one could put someone into a hypnotic trance and then, while in the trance, the patient would predict the outcome of their cure (basically this psychoanalysis in another form) – took Mesmerism to Haiti. He developed a technique whereby a tree is magnetised and you get the peasants on your estate (because it’s the aristocrat’s Mesmeric duty to distribute his curative magnetic force freely to the peasants to cure them) to hold the branches of the tree and the magnetic power is passed through them. One of the biographers of Mesmer claimed that it was during one of these sessions that a group of Negro slaves confused Mesmerism with witchcraft ‘giving rise to wild orgies and sorcerers dealing in black magic, and the authorities banned the practice’ (Walmsley).

I’m getting close to the end now and I’m wondering “Can I do this?”. I realise that the thesis that the historical construction of the unconscious and the development of a reactionary conservative theory of the unconscious during the 19th century is shaped in some way by the mythopoeic value of the Haitian revolution (and Vodou’s role in it) hasn’t been proven in this presentation. But if you look at figures like Gustave Le Bon, whose book The Crowd, was an absolutely fundamental influence on Freud and theories of crowd psychology, on the development of Public Relations, Edward Bernay’s idea that the masses are slaves of their spinal columns, therefore we need to manipulate them because we can’t bring about…etc, etc. This is clear. Le Bon described crowd members as being like ‘women, children and savages’ (and by savages he clearly means blacks), lower down on the evolutionary scale, ‘slaves of their unconscious impulses’, prone to contagious mimetic behaviour, much more prone to these crises, these explosive behavioural patterns. And this was of course a sign of their evolutionary inferiority. Also they can’t distinguish between fact and fiction, reality and hallucination, which every sane, clear minded, white academic of the 19th century was easily able to do. An explicit text in this regard is Spencer St.John’s book on Haiti, written in 1884, about the same time as Le Bon’s book on The Crowd. Now I know these are very different texts but St.John’s book is the most explicitly racist account of Haitian society that you’re likely to come across (I’m sure some of you are familiar with this book). He argued that unless white, capitalists were allowed to invest in Haiti its society was destined to ‘regress to the state of an African tribe’. Of Toussaint L’Ouverture he wrote, ‘The story of Toussaint is so remarkable as to almost confound those who consider the Negro to be an inferior creature incapable of rising to genius’. Almost. This is so explicit. St. John was a pro-abolitionist because abolition would enable us to see, once and for all, whether blacks are equal to whites on the Labour market. This is the kind of attitude that is shaping crowd psychology at the end of the 19th century. White civilization over Black savagery is very the dominant ideological polarity that’s going on here.

(It’s always hard to do a good ending isn’t it?)

I’m talking about an image of the revolutionary unconscious as an invisible and terrible force of the sacred, channelled through myth and carrying fluid collective bodies, en masse (and this is the bit, how does it work? ) and overthrowing despotic top-down power structures. There’s a metaphor which recurs with this; the metaphor of the Volcano. (Another book on Haiti describes Louis the 16th as not knowing that he was sitting on a volcano until the lava – and this is a very weird play on the metaphor – the ‘lava’ arose up and strangled him).

So I’m going to close now, and the last word goes to C.L.R. James, from his preface to The Black Jacobins which comes very close to what I’ve been trying to talk about.

And this is the quote from 1938:

‘In a revolution, when the ceaseless, slow accumulation of centuries bursts into volcanic eruption, the meteoric flares and flights above are a meaningless chaos, and lend themselves to infinite caprice and romanticism unless the observer sees them always as projections of the subsoil from which they came. The writer has sought not only to analyse but to demonstrate in their movements the economic forces of the age, their moulding of a society and politics, of men in the mass and individual men and the powerful reaction of these on their environment on one of those rare moments when a society is at boiling point and therefore fluid’.”

Vodou, Possession and the Revolutionary Unconscious

by John Cussans

(Transcription of a talk given at the Brunei gallery, School of African and Oriental Studies, January 23rd, 2004 at the opening of an exhibition celebrating the 200th Anniversary of the foundation of the Haitian Republic. Transcript published in Frozen Tears II – The Sequel, ed. John Russell, ARTicle Press, 2004)

Haitian Vodou: it’s a religion that began in Haiti with the arrival of slaves there and it was practiced throughout the period of slavery, largely in secret until the Haitian Revolution, the revolution being a key point after which Vodou became more over-ground, for obvious reasons. The term ‘Voodoo’ I discussed before, in my last presentation, in terms of a Westernised concept of Vodou and all the predjudices that had become associated with the term. I explored that particular area…I’ll speak a little bit more about that later. Today I’m going to try to address something more ‘authentic’ than the artificial construct that I talked about last time. From the research I’ve been doing, the term Vodou..derived from the Fon language of Benin where it has various meanings including ‘God’, ‘Spirit’ and also God and Spirits as embodied in particular objects – ‘Fetish’ objects as they have been called. I won’t go too far into the history of the term fetishism but obviously, for those of you who know, it’s a loaded term.

The general meaning that I want to give to Vodou today, the meaning I’m trying to talk about, is the meaning of an ‘invisible, mysterious and terrible force’. I want to talk of Vodou as a force that’s much more anonymous and perhaps much more material than anything that’s personified in particular spirits and it’s this notion of a material force that I’m going to be trying to address today and hopefully it will become clear why I’m doing that.

Now Vodou is important in Haitian culture …’important’? …massively important in Haitian culture, as those of you who know that know, and it enabled the deracinated slaves to preserve an African cultural heritage in the face of systematic ethnocide carried out by the colonial rulers. (‘Ethnocide’ is a term from Pierre Clastres, if any one, well…I don’t know how academic I need to be about this, so I’ll tone down the academic stuff). So ‘ethnocide’; the systematic destruction of a people’s culture. And certainly the slaves brought to Haiti were deracinated in that way and ethnocide was enacted upon them. Vodou was practiced under the cover of Catholicism which was the official religion of Haiti throughout the colonial period and afterwards. It has been subject to a series of anti-superstition campaigns and has survived the systematic attempts to eradicate it very positively and strongly as you all know.

Just very briefly, for those of you who don’t know, the pantheon of Vodou gods are called the Loas, so when I refer to the Loas, that’s what I’m talking about. Also I may mention the ‘invisibles’ which relates to this invisible force that I’m thinking about. And they reside in the ancestral home of Guinea, the mythic ancestral home of the African spirits.

Important too is possession, a fundamental aspect of Vodou. I’ll be talking about possession. Now it has to…it has to talk about this…my experience isn’t direct it’s indirect in terms of possession. And er…well…my interest in it will sort of I think come clear. It’s to do with something more…at the moment it’s gravitating towards something much more towards mediumship in European and North American contexts in the 19th century. I’m very interested in mediumship in general. Another title for this talk could have been ‘Channelling the Revolutionary Spirit’. It’s what the kind of… that’s the focus on the kind of what I’m thinking about here.

Possession is going to be a key issue, as is the issue of sacrifice, whose social role I’ll be addressing today too. Now, at the last talk I gave at the exhibition ‘Smells Like Vodou Spirit’ I talked about the misrepresentations of Haitian Vodou in Western culture. I wasn’t really talking about Vodou as an authentic cultural practice of Haiti, I was talking about the idea of Vodou in Western culture. I talked about something called the ‘Voodoo Construct’ which was made up of four, key components – enduring motifs which in the west in representations of this thing called ‘v’ ‘oo’ ‘d’ ‘oo’ (voodoo which you’re not… you know we’re not spelling it… I mean you know what I’m saying about this voodoo spelling thing… it’s the whole [sharp intake of breath]) ‘V’ ‘OO’ ‘D’ ‘OO’ which is used to describe this sort of western conception of kind of a…a…anxieties around particular cultural phenomena and psychological phenomena. And I isolated four particular motifs then: the voodoo doll, the zombie, the witch doctor – who today will be played by a Mesmerist-hypnotist – and the possessed individual, which will today be replaced by the possessed crowd – something much more sinister and frightening than the possessed individual. So I’m about this depersonalisation, this collective depersonalisation in possession…is what I’m kind of moving towards.

Now what I did come up with in this idea of the Voodoo construct is that it’s much more about western cultural anxieties than it is about any authentic thing called Haitian Vodou. So therefore it’s not really a misrepresentation of an authentic culture. What happened in Hollywood Voodoo – and there’s not that many examples of Hollywood Voodoo – is that it’s much more about Western cultural and psychological anxieties, which loosely I would call the ‘return of the repressed’, the repressed being superstitious beliefs, beliefs in witchcraft, magic, supernatural beings and possession, key issues as to what the anxiety is undermining; fundamental notions about the properly individuated, rational and reasonable subject.

This isn’t to deny that representations of this thing ‘v’ ‘oo’ ‘d’ ‘oo’ don’t have a very strong racial character and they are also ways of playing out racial anxieties, anxieties about blackness in white western culture. But again this is not something that’s explicitly about Haiti. What I’m going to talk about today is something much more to do explicitly with Haiti.

This talk is gravitating between two poles. One pole is the revolutionary Surrealist movement in Paris in the 1920’s and 30’s. I consider the Surrealists to have been engaged in a radical, revolutionary reconfiguration of the unconscious in opposition to conservative and reactionary constructions. They were trying to re-radicalize the notion of the unconscious. For the Surrealists – as Michael Richardson has demonstrated in his book The Refusal of the Shadow, a book of writings by Surrealists about the Carribean – Haiti serves a mythopoeic function. Now this term ‘mythopoesis’ is a term that, again, I’m going to be talking to today (talking ‘to’? – talking ‘about’ – that’s so American. ”I’ll be talking to the concept of mythopoesis today”) I’ll try and explain why mythopoesis becomes relevant and important. It’s only recently popped into my head…”POP” like that [hit’s microphone]…and I suddenly realised that what I was talking about was mythopoesis but I didn’t know what mythopoesis was. Sometimes that happens you know, that suddenly you’re talking about something…and when I looked into the history of it it became even spookier because it was…well anyway, maybe later I’ll explain why.

I’m using the term mythopoesis to suggest that stories and myths have a power to effect reality and effect social transformation regardless of their objective, concrete factuality, that stories have this creative power. And it’s the creative power of the story of the Haitian Revolution that I think appealed to the Surrealists in the 1920’s, especially the ceremony of Bois-Caïman, which is what I’m really going to be focussing on today. Bois-Caïman is the ceremony which, legend has it, was a Vodou ceremony which gave rise to the Haitian slave uprising of 1791. What I’m pointing towards here is a radical reconfiguration or rethinking of the unconscious which tries to remove from it the idea of it being under the mastery of a rational, individuated ego working for the reality principle. There’s a radical de-subjectivised notion of the unconscious that I’m trying to talk about today.

According to Richardson the Surrealists saw in the history of Haiti ‘the germ of a society that had the potential to challenge the ethics of international capitalism’. This is exemplified by André Breton’s visit to Haiti in 1945 and some of the consequences of his speeches in Haiti in that period.

Now the second pole of this presentation is represented by the figure of Anton Mesmer. Mesmer was a Swish – a Swiss physicist – who gave his name… (a swish physhisist?) – who gave his name to Mesmerism, which I’m sure you have some idea of. Mesmer is a key figure in the origin of the discourse of the unconscious and the development of dynamic psychiatry. The book that really put me on to Mesmer is a book by Henri F. Ellenberger, and amazing book, which I recently looked at again in the British Library, a book that I super-recommend, called The Discovery of the Unconscious. It’s an incredible book and Mesmer has an important role to play in it. I was reading this book several years ago and came across this very significant paragraph. Now the term that Mesmer used for his practice was magnetism (from animal magnetism, the name he gave to the subtle force that permeates all things in the universe). This is at the end of the 18th century:

“In Saint Domingue (pre-Revolutionary Haiti) Magnetism degenerated into a psychic epidemic amongst the Negro slaves, increasing their agitation, and the French domination ended in a bloodbath. Later Mesmer boasted that the new Republic, now called Haiti, owed its independence to him”.

Now this really intrigued me. What was Mesmer doing claiming to have founded the Republic of Haiti? How could this possibly be?

So I’m going to be moving between the poles of Revolutionary Surrealism and Mesmer’s claims about the founding of Haiti in 1791. And I’ve only done ten minutes.

Now my thinking in this regard is very much shaped by the writings of a Surrealist philosopher and thinker called Georges Bataille. And this is Georges Bataille [shows slide] sometime in the 1950’s. I don’t know how familiar people are with Bataille so I’ll say a little bit about his work and life.

When I was doing my doctoral research I was looking at Bataille in the context of debates about the detrimental social effects of representations of violence in the mass media. And some recurrent themes started coming up while looking at these issues, especially the issue of ‘contagion’. Another very dominant metaphor in the discourse of the social effects of mass media can be traced back to the notion of the hypnotist with certain sections of the population configured as vulnerable to suggestion, prone to this powerful influence of this ‘influencing machine’ (Victor Tausk’s term). I was looking at issues of violence in the media from this kind of perspective.

Bataille was associated with the French Surrealist movement of the 1920’s. He was excommunicated from the official movement by Andre Breton who described him as a philosopher who philosophised with a fly on his nose, which may…I won’t talk about that actually…but it’s to do with his…basically Bataille is an excremental philosopher. But that’s not important today.

Now alongside Roger Caillois and Michel Lieris, Bataille has been associated with what James Clifford, in The Predicament of Culture, describes as Ethnographic Surrealism. In the 1930’s Bataille founded something called the College of Sociology which was devoted to a sociological understanding of the sacred and ‘the sacred’ is going to be a key term here, especially the idea of a sacred force, a material sacred force which is something we will be moving towards.

Bataille’s thinking is very much influenced by the L’Anneé school of French sociology (Durkheim and Mauss). I’m just going to say a little bit about Durkheim and Mauss for those of you who are unfamiliar with this particular tradition within French sociology. First there’s the central role of religion in any elementary form of society and particularly the force of the sacred – that which is ‘set apart’. What’s also important for this sociology of the sacred is that the sacred is radically ambivalent from a Durkheimian position, that it partakes of both the pure and the impure. Bataille famously said that ”Every object of attraction can become an object of repulsion, and vice versa”. He also said “Nothing convinces me more than that we are bound and sworn to that which repulses us the most, that which inspires our most intense disgust”. Here we have an aesthetics of radical ambivalence associated with an elementary definition of the sacred as a social force which is both pure and impure. The other important characteristic of this notion of the sacred is that it is contagious. This is fundamental Durkheim; the (primary) prohibition on touching has to do with the contagious power of the sacred. It’s this idea of something incredibly powerful and contagious that can pass through things that is associated with the notion of the unconscious that I’m working towards.

The sacred also has a very important cohesive power too, in society. Not only does it bind societies together it also has the power to radically unbind them. I was going to show an image of Judith beheading Holofernes as in instance of what Freud used in his Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego to the radical dissolution of the social formation (in this case the Assyrian army) once it’s symbolic head has been decapitated. It’s a very Oedipal-Freudian model but it’s still based on an assumption of radically disintegrating society through some sacrificial use of the sacred.

Also from Durkheim and Mauss – particularly Durkheim – we have this very strong emphasis on the fundamental role of taboo and transgression and in many ways the history of the term ‘taboo’ is similar to the term ‘vodou’ in that both describe the power imbued in objects and also the objects which contain that power.

The third issue, which is very important here, especially for Bataille, is that both Durkheim but particularly Mauss in The Gift, were interested in counter-capitalist economic systems or alternative economic systems; non-acquisitive and non-productive economic systems like the gift, like potlatch and like sacrifice. Hence the fundamental significance of sacrifice for Bataille. These are economies which involve, and put at the forefront, non-productive expenditures.

Bataille’s thought is also violently anti-idealistic and fiercely religious. So we have a kind of materialist religiosity: very violent, very aggressive, very destructive. He advocated what he called a ‘base materialist’ theory of religion which was a mixture of Hegelianism, Marxism, Nietzsche and Durkheim but that’s…don’t need that. What it emphasises is this collective social force. What he was trying to do, in all of his works, was find ways of unleashing this collective social force, this force of the sacred in the interest of social revolution. He had a very strong sense that sacrifice was one of the key modes by which this sacred force could be unleashed. I’ve spent a lot of time in my research finding out how this could possibly be and have found that Bois Caïman is perhaps the best mythopoeic example of the relationship between ritual sacrifice and the unleashing of revolutionary social force.

For Bataille revolution is a grand collective act of non-productive expenditure that resonates very strongly with the mythic story of Bois Caïman.

In the 1930’s Bataille formed a secret society called Acéphale, devoted to a religious interpretation of the works of Nietzsche. Events surrounding Acéphale are ‘shrouded in secrecy’ but what the group seems to have been involved in is the promotion of the idea of ‘myth’. ‘Myth’ and ‘secrecy’ come together here. Rumour has it they were planning to enact a ritual human sacrifice at a place in Paris by a tree which had been struck by lightening. (There’s a book about this by Maurice Blanchot called The Unavowable Community). This very much following a kind thinking that Freud expressed too: that society is founded on a crime committed in common and that the blood oath is incredibly important in binding groups together, especially revolutionary groups, revolutionary cells, explosive revolutionary cells, which is what Bataille was trying to initiate in Paris in the 1930’s.

(Where am I now? I’m here.)

So we have an idea who Bataille was and where he was coming from in the 1930’s. Now we have to go back to Haiti in 1789.

This is an image from Alfred Metraux’s Voodoo in Haiti [a black and white photograph of a Vodou initiate drinking blood from the neck of sacrificed chicken], a close friend of Bataille’s throughout his life.

I’m going to give a brief overview, and I know I’m going to be out of my depth here because I know there’s a lot of experts on Haitian society and the Haitian revolution who will correct my scant knowledge of the formal history of that revolution. But I want to make the point here that after the French parliament’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of the new Republic – which was partly written by Lafayette, a figure who will come up more in a little while – that obviously there were free blacks and mulattos in Haiti at that time who were interested in extended the revolutionary cause to Haiti including Vincent Ogé. Ogé is a key figure in the prelude to the Haitian revolution, travelling to Paris to petition the new parliament to recognise Haiti within the auspices of the new revolutionary government. Ogé travelled back to Haiti via London and South Carolina with a view to extending the revolutionary franchise to blacks [correction: mulattos] in Haiti. This was obviously met with violent resistance by the white regime and Ogé was publicly tortured and executed as a sign to anyone who was thinking about rising up against the regime at the time.
(How am I doing?…is this about right?…okay).
The revolutionary army in Haiti would be under the leadership of Toussaint L’Ouverture. But the slave army was organised by Boukman who was himself a Vodou priest (as legend has it). Boukman is definitively associated with the Bois Caïman ceremony. There’s debate as to when exactly the ceremony took place. (I was speaking to Leah today who told me that some historians are now saying it didn’t actually happen. Which is great actually. In fact it’s better in a way that it didn’t happen for its mythopoeic value). But (according to other histories) it took place on either August 14th or August 22nd – there’s an eight day gap of uncertainty about when exactly it was.

A number of slaves gathered in the forests of Bois Caïman and a Vodou ceremony was held in which a pig was sacrificed and everybody swore a blood oath to overthrow their white slave-masters. And sometime in the next 8 days the slave uprising was inaugurated.

I’m going to skip the mythopeoic section. But what I want to do…you want me to do the mythopoesis thing?..okay.

Mythopoesis. Nice word. It was coined by a British psychologist called Frederik Myers. Now Myers is a really key figure because he was head of the SPR, the Society for Psychical Research in London. There’s this whole thing about Myers and Freud. Freud kept secret his belief in telepathy throughout his life because it was bad PR. Ernst Jones is telling him “Listen Sigmund, really don’t play up this telepathic thing because it’s really going to ruin the reputation of psychoanalysis” whereas Frederik Myers is an absolute believer. Now what the point of this is that the entire history of the development of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis and dynamic psychology throughout the 19th century is absolutely based on the bedrock of mediumship. It’s about possession, it’s about somnambulism, it’s about people having visions and it’s about an attempt to account for those visions. Mesmer himself began by saying “I can account for somnambulism on purely materialistic and mechanistic grounds.
Therefore all the possessions, the hallucinations and the visions can be explained without a superstitious belief system. We can move on a purely scientific basis”. However, throughout the 19th century, the scientists and psychologists were moving in and out of belief on this issue of whether or not people were actually channelling the dead, or channelling entities and what was actually going on in these situations.
Ellenberger’s book is brilliant for this and it’s just really very clear. So I was very surprised when I found that my research into mythopoesis took me back to Frederik Myers. There’s a whole thing about Myers. He wrote a book called Human Personality and its Survival Beyond Death, a massive two volume work in which he argued that mythopoesis refers to the primary level of unconscious processes. It means the capacity of humans to ‘weave’ (I won’t go into a kind of…you all know) to ‘weave’ and ‘fabricate’ fantasies and stories at a base level. So the base level of the unconscious is a kind of fabricating fantasy machine.

Now this has to do with the fact that many of the people they were examining hysterics. Now just read ‘mediums’ for ‘hysterics’. From one perspective they’re hysterics – if you’re a materialist psychologist – and from the other perspective, of believers, they’re mediums who are channelling entities, or they have access to channels of information which we are otherwise remote from. So they’re exploring mediums, schizoid mediums, who have dissociated they’re personalities, and are able to fabricate stories. The psychological and psychoanalytic communities were split as to whether these stories were inventions – very, very clever fabrications – or authentic examples of some form of channelling. And I don’t want to go…this is the kind of territory…I’m not sure. That’s just where things are at at the moment.

So mythopoesis comes to describe the creative power of myth, that stories can have a real transformative power in society. Now we can try to explain that in lots of ways, we can have a materialist explanation but what we can’t deny is that stories have power. Whether they’re true or not they work. And it’s this working function of the myth that I’m interested in, especially the working function of a revolutionary myth.

So here’s an account of Bois Caïman by Alfred Metraux. Apparently this account is from a Haitian school book from the 1950’s. This is the story told to school children in Haiti. And I love it because it’s the most lavish and lurid version I could find. This is how it goes. (28.47)

‘To put an end to all holding back and to obtain absolute devotion he, Boukman, brought together a great number of slaves in the glade of Bois Caïman near the red mountain. When all were assembled a storm broke. Lightening scribbles the low dark clouds with brief radiance. In a few minutes the torrential rain begins to turn the ground into a marsh while a savage wind twists the moaning trees until even the thickest branches are wrenched off and crash to the earth. In the middle of this impressive scene, motionless, petrified in sacred awe, the assembled slaves behold an old Negress rise up, her body shaking from head to foot. She sings, she pirouettes and over her head she brandishes a huge cutlass. Now, in the great congregation an ever more profound stillness, more bated breath, eyes ever more burning fixed on the Negress, show how the crowd is rapt. At this moment a black pig is produced. The din of the storm drowns his grunts. With one vivid thrust the inspired priestess plunges her cutlass into the animal’s throat. The blood spurts – and is gathered smoking to be distributed in turn, to the slaves: all drink, all swear to obey Boukman.’

So how does this relate to Anton Mesmer and what bearing does it have on the claim that the revolution was brought about by Mesmerism-Gone-Wrong in Haiti. Well, we need to know a little bit more about Mesmer. He was a Swiss physicist who developed that idea that physical and mental illness was explainable by the influence of the planets, bodies on bodies, a purely materialist account of physical disease, especially mental disease. He famously had a competition with an exorcist called Johann Joseph Gassner in which he cured more people than his opponent. So Mesmer won and said “Look, I’m the greatest and I can cure people without the need of outmoded religious and superstitious ideas”. Pure materialism, pure physics, pure enlightenment stuff. He identified this stuff called magnetic fluid that permeated the entire universe. Unbalances in this fluid led to un-health and disease. Now this substance was in the whole universe so social phenomena were also affected by imbalances in magnetic fluid. It can be stored, it can be channelled, it can be moved around. What I’m trying to say is that there’s something about this magnetic fluid which has the qualities of the terrible force of Vodou or of sacred energy in general. It doesn’t have any bite for Mesmer but it could have. It could be like magnetism with teeth or something.

Now, he was working with possession and he could account for possession without a demonological theory, which is very important. He set up these things called Societies of Harmony, in Paris, which is where you went to be cured by the Mesmeric practice. They set up these things called baquets, these big vats of water with galvanized rods immersed in them and everyone held the rods and the Mesmerist would go around – because he was imbued with magnetic power – and when he touched people with a rod they would go into convulsive spasms. The blocked energies would be released and they’d achieve health, a balance of energies. I’m sure you’re familiar with this. It’s been around a while this idea.

Many of the Societies of Harmony, and one in particular – called the Kornmann group (Kornmann was an Alsation banker who in fact bankrolled the Societies of Harmony as the major financier) – involved people who were later to be very active in the French revolution, including Lafayette who was a member of this group; people like Jean Louis Carra, Jean-Jaques Brissot, Nicolas Bergasse (who was in communication with Voltaire and Rousseau). The societies were revolutionary hotbeds, so much so that some of the theories of the Mesmerists, such as Jean Louis Carra in his Examén Physique du Magnetism Animal, from 1795 could claim things like this;

‘The entire globe seems to be preparing itself by a pronounced upheaval in the course of the seasons for physical changes. In societies the masses are agitating now more than ever to disentangle at last the chaos of their morals and their legislation’.

So we find here a revolutionary Mesmerist saying that global energies, manifesting themselves through the masses will make them ready to rise up, and push through and create the crisis through which harmonious (social) balance would be achieved. That’s the general idea that’s going on here. Now the Societies of Harmony in Paris were shut down eventually because of their revolutionary reputation amongst other things after an official investigation by a team of researchers.

I just want to put two things together here and maybe this is a little bit cheesy but I’m going to do it anyway. This is a description of the patients attending the Societies of Harmony written by one of the inspectors who were sent to check things out, to see if there was any ‘truth’ to the theory of animal magnetism.

‘A third class of patients are so agitated and tormented with convulsions, extraordinary by their frequency, their violence and their duration. As soon as one patient has commenced others are affected by the same symptoms characterised by precipitate and involuntary motions of all the limbs or the whole body, by contraction of the throat, by sudden affectation of the abdomen and by a distraction and wildness in the eyes, by tears, screams, hiccupping and by immoderate laughter’.

So, it sounds like a good party really.

Now this is a description by Metraux of a crise de possession. In the Societies of Harmony the state of convulsions was also called a crisis. It’s the same language of a subjective, personal and individualised crisis that can be extended to the entire society. So this is Metraux on Vodou possession:

‘The crisis of possession emits a power disturbingly contagious to unstable and nervous temperaments. That is why the sight of a possession sometimes causes others to break out, not only amongst the servants of the gods, who are prepared to be mounted but also amongst those who have come along as visitors or out of sheer curiosity’.

I know that putting these two examples together means I’m treading dodgy ground but it illustrates the point I’m trying to make quite simply.

I checked out the Haiti connection with the Mesmerists and it seems that New Orleans was the hub through which Mesmerism made its way to Haiti. The banker Kornmann received 2,400 livres from Saint Domingue which means there were at least ten members of the society in Haiti prior to the revolution. But the key connection is a figure called the Marquis de Puysegur, an aristocratic Mesmerist rather than a Jacobin. The aristocratic Mesmerists of the Puysegur family were in Haiti. The brother of the Marquis – who was famous for developing the idea that one could put someone into a hypnotic trance and then, while in the trance, the patient would predict the outcome of their cure (basically this psychoanalysis in another form) – took Mesmerism to Haiti. He developed a technique whereby a tree is magnetised and you get the peasants on your estate (because it’s the aristocrat’s Mesmeric duty to distribute his curative magnetic force freely to the peasants to cure them) to hold the branches of the tree and the magnetic power is passed through them. One of the biographers of Mesmer claimed that it was during one of these sessions that a group of Negro slaves confused Mesmerism with witchcraft ‘giving rise to wild orgies and sorcerers dealing in black magic, and the authorities banned the practice’ (Walmsley).

I’m getting close to the end now and I’m wondering “Can I do this?”. I realise that the thesis that the historical construction of the unconscious and the development of a reactionary conservative theory of the unconscious during the 19th century is shaped in some way by the mythopoeic value of the Haitian revolution (and Vodou’s role in it) hasn’t been proven in this presentation. But if you look at figures like Gustave Le Bon, whose book The Crowd, was an absolutely fundamental influence on Freud and theories of crowd psychology, on the development of Public Relations, Edward Bernay’s idea that the masses are slaves of their spinal columns, therefore we need to manipulate them because we can’t bring about…etc, etc. This is clear. Le Bon described crowd members as being like ‘women, children and savages’ (and by savages he clearly means blacks), lower down on the evolutionary scale, ‘slaves of their unconscious impulses’, prone to contagious mimetic behaviour, much more prone to these crises, these explosive behavioural patterns. And this was of course a sign of their evolutionary inferiority. Also they can’t distinguish between fact and fiction, reality and hallucination, which every sane, clear minded, white academic of the 19th century was easily able to do. An explicit text in this regard is Spencer St.John’s book on Haiti, written in 1884, about the same time as Le Bon’s book on The Crowd. Now I know these are very different texts but St.John’s book is the most explicitly racist account of Haitian society that you’re likely to come across (I’m sure some of you are familiar with this book). He argued that unless white, capitalists were allowed to invest in Haiti its society was destined to ‘regress to the state of an African tribe’. Of Toussaint L’Ouverture he wrote, ‘The story of Toussaint is so remarkable as to almost confound those who consider the Negro to be an inferior creature incapable of rising to genius’. Almost. This is so explicit. St. John was a pro-abolitionist because abolition would enable us to see, once and for all, whether blacks are equal to whites on the Labour market. This is the kind of attitude that is shaping crowd psychology at the end of the 19th century. White civilization over Black savagery is very the dominant ideological polarity that’s going on here.

(It’s always hard to do a good ending isn’t it?)

I’m talking about an image of the revolutionary unconscious as an invisible and terrible force of the sacred, channelled through myth and carrying fluid collective bodies, en masse (and this is the bit, how does it work? ) and overthrowing despotic top-down power structures. There’s a metaphor which recurs with this; the metaphor of the Volcano. (Another book on Haiti describes Louis the 16th as not knowing that he was sitting on a volcano until the lava – and this is a very weird play on the metaphor – the ‘lava’ arose up and strangled him).

So I’m going to close now, and the last word goes to C.L.R. James, from his preface to The Black Jacobins which comes very close to what I’ve been trying to talk about.

And this is the quote from 1938:

‘In a revolution, when the ceaseless, slow accumulation of centuries bursts into volcanic eruption, the meteoric flares and flights above are a meaningless chaos, and lend themselves to infinite caprice and romanticism unless the observer sees them always as projections of the subsoil from which they came. The writer has sought not only to analyse but to demonstrate in their movements the economic forces of the age, their moulding of a society and politics, of men in the mass and individual men and the powerful reaction of these on their environment on one of those rare moments when a society is at boiling point and therefore fluid’.”