THE COGNITIVE TECHNIQUES OF TOTEMISM

WILLIAM PLANK

(this is a revised conference paper)

It appears that in addition to God, structuralism, and Man, totemism is likewise dead and long unmourned. Fathered by J.F. McLennan in the Fortnightly Review in 1869, it lingered for sixty or seventy years while numerous thinkers tried to define it in terms of its socio-religious function and to identify the universal characteristic which would make it theoretically useful to anthropology. Spencer saw it as a confusion of animal names given to humans. Lang extended the naming idea to social groups. Frazer had three theories: the bush-soul, the cooperative magic, and the cooperative theory. Schmidt found its origin in primitive trade and associated taboos. Hill-

Tout made it a question of the worship of guardian spirits. Ankermann, a compensation for a drab primitive life, and Graebner, the localization of paternal descent. Durkheim made it a kind of operator in a structural division of societies which gave rise to the notion of the sacred in ritualistic practice. Wundt extended the idea to an entire "totemic era" as one of the principal stages of human development. And Freud, as might be expected took advantage of the idea to Oedipalize anthropology a very suspicious practice if we are to believe the objections of the Anti-Oedipus of Deleuze and the Oedipe Africain of Ortigues. Goldenweiser pointed out the diverse origins of totemism, agreeing "that it had a psychological unity, although not a common psychological source" (Lessa, p. 270) and tried to associate it with the clan system. A.P. Elkin identified seven kinds of totemism by function.

In 1924, Ralf Limon wrote his well-known analysis of totemistic behavior in the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I, showing that group and individuals assumed the name of their unit (Rainbow, for example) although they did not go as far as basing an axiomatic of exchange on it. By the twenties and thirties, major anthropologists such as Boas, Lowie, Murdock, and Kroeber devote only a few scant pages to the problem in their major works. We find ourselves hard put today to find any universal primitive category in the totemic idea, since we civilized fellows have our Garfield, Opus, the Elks and Moose lodges, the Huskies, the Grizzlies, the Yellowjackets, the Dolphins, the Democrat Donkey and t he Republican Elephant, Russian Bears, American and Prussian eagles, Seahawks, Lions, Tigers and assorted football chickens, the psycho-social function of which makes us wonder whether our primitive-civilized distinctions have any value at all, or whether what we presumptuously call metaphor, metonomy, fable or literature are not what we would call totemism in an African or Polynesian colony.

By defining the hysteric, the artistic innovator, and the primitive as abnormal or outside the recognized socio-intellectual order, civilized man, by a political act, separates himself from the things he finds objectionable.

This brief history of the vicissitudes of totemism has been by way of an introduction to break down the distinction between primitive and civilized, a distinction questioned for decades anyway. Rather than to find a functional definition of totemism, which has historically been of doubtful utility, let us inspect the way the totem animal or object has been identified and not be concerned with some problematic psycho-social meaning.

The origin of the totem may be hidden in tradition and is a subject for surmise. But in the biographies of Plains Indians such as Plenty Coups, Two Leggins, Black Elk, Woodenlegs, etc., it becomes clear that the totem may be identified in several ways. (1) It may appear in a dream and be accepted as such or on the counsel of a shaman. (2) It may be the result of a mental state brought on intentionally by isolation, hunger, dehydration and the resulting "privileged" state of mind. (3) In some cases where the "medicine" or the vision is tardy, it may be encouraged by a drug such as peyote. (4) No special state of mind may be necessary at all, but simply an alert expectation of the external world, the natural acceptance of a kind of freewheeling bricolage in the apprehension of that world, generally that non-empirical or not necessarily empirical attitude which attaches meaning to objects because it feels good. Durkheim spoke of the "rituals which arouse pleasurable sensations in the participants by raising their social consciousness: (Lessa, p. 273)

The remark that the project of the bricoleur is the "contingent result of all the occasions there have been to renew or enrich the stock or to maintain it with the remains of previous constructions or destructions" makes the bricoleur sound very much as if he is indulging in the aesthetic of recombination which Breton explained was the basis of the surrealist aesthetic--and makes him sound even more as if he had already discovered intertextuality. I hope to show that such is the case.

Now, if we return to the criticism of Needham concerning the exorcisms of those categories which are offensive to the policy of the modern white male, we find that the definition of the free-wheeling bricolage which permits a fantastic, improvised identification of some form or some meaning which provides pleasure and satisfaction to the bricoleur, we fine that this bricolage is almost identical in meaning with the concept of the poetic, with the aesthetic posture in relation to the creation of form and meaning, a poetic attitude which is the basis of the genius of the civilized artist.

Post-modernism has a great confidence in the aesthetic posture to resolve the Hegelian diremptions, at least Jurgen Habermas does as he analyzes the promise of the power of aestheticism to provide continuity and unity to the fragmentation of modern life. His Philosophical Discourse of Modernity purports to find in Nietzsche a great confidence in the values of some mythic archaic period and in an "aesthetical phenomenon" wherein "the concentrated dealings with itself of a decentered subjectivity set free from the everyday conventions of perceiving and acting" (Habermas, p. 93) will release us from the tyranny of the purposive-rational.

If we accept the major categorization of thinking into rationalism-idealism and empiricism-realism, then we see another great reason for rejecting the distinction between primitive and civilized for whatever the opposite of primitive is). For the bricoleur does not have to verify empirically any distinction he makes or any form or object he valorizes. Like the rationalist philosopher, he may adopt as his motto, omnia porto mecum, I carry everything with me) applies equally well to him. I musts conclude that the primitive is a rationalist and that this rationalism cum idealism, which deals with a world invisible to the eye, is one of a kind from Plato to Plenty Coups. There are very few naïve realists, certainly not in the Western philosophical tradition of idealism-rationalism or in primitive totemism, both of which share similar cognitive techniques and a similar attitude concerning the relation of the observer to his own mind and to the external world. Hardly anyone is willing to see the object in the external world as an object in the external world: it becomes a sign of an invisible world or the world of the spirit where true reality resides. Now we begin to see the true scandal in the enormity of the political act whereby totemism was relegated to the primitive. The Socratic maieutic is related to the dream of Plenty Coups, where he saw the white man's longhorns and Herefords replacing the buffalo. They both carry everything with them. The bricoleur is pregnant as is the Socratic seeker after truth: it is merely a question of the differential obstetric technique required to externalize it.

The same technique shows up in Scholasticism. The medieval problem to determine how many angels could dance on the point of a pin, often used by later commentators to belittle the achievements of Scholasticism, was in fact a real problem concerning the nature of infinity and the capacity of a finite being to deal with such a concept. The rationalist technique of Aquinas allowed him to answer such questions as : What age will we appear in heaven? Inspired by the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, these erudites were to answer questions about things which did not even exist in nature, yet if we are not careful we end up giving Aquinas more credence than the taboo against the consumption of squirrels by pregnant women, automatically citing his importance in the development of western civilized thought and the Church. The mind which carries everything with it has a terrible freedom to create meaning in objects and whole implicit logics. The real question for the Scholastics was the extent to which the unbound mind may create meaning--the same implicit question in the primitive totemist.

When structuralism rejected the validation of the empirical and found in language a universal model for reality, and when post-structuralism rejected the test of the empirical and turned the signifier and the signifier chain into reality itself, they likewise found a tremendous creative freedom of philosophizing and the ability to treat texts in a dynamic and imaginative manner without any necessity or possibility of any kind of verification. Philosophy, in fact, in the case of Michel Serres and Derrida, history for Foucault, and psychiatry for Lacan become almost indistinguishable from literature. Michel Serres intentionally erases the line between science and literature. By operating a reverse epoche, Serres brackets out the subject and makes reality a communication among objects as palimpsests, thereby making totemism irrelevant. Roland Barthes drew the conclusion of the terrible to deal with the text without any empirical validation in his Le Plaisir du texte, where he made reading an erotic experience. Just as Santayana explained in Skepticism and Animal Faith , solipism is the final refuge of an exacerbated skepticism, and it is that solipsism we see in Barthes orgasmic theory of literature. As such, the text can be anything that makes Barthes feel good and his division of Balzac's S/Z into pseudo-empirical lexemes is not convincing except as a personal aesthetic exercise. Barthes' treatment of the text is totemic. And the totemist is the "primitive who knows the pleasure of Nature's text. The totemist, anyway, if we exploit Deleuzian terminology, is a desiring machine whose libidinal investment is always sexual and political.

In summary, I have drawn the conclusions of the proposition that the distinction between the primitive and the modern is invalid, and of the proposition that a non-empirical posture unites them in an overarching rationalism. That perfect self-sufficiency of omnia porto mecum sows up in bricolage, in the Socratic maieutic, in the Platonist-Aristotelian adventure in fantasy called Scholasticism (a kind of Catholic totemism) where the thinker could deal with things that did not exist in Nature, in Cubism-Dadaism-Surrealism, in the erotico-solipisistic pre-structuralism phenomenon called the Decadence, in every aesthetic model or solution to the diremptions, and in every other western thinking which finds empiricism-realism perfectly irrelevant and even annoying. All the non-empirical postures of the last twenty-five hundred years are various logics of an attitude toward the external world and a valorization of an inner-directed primitive-maieutic aesthetico-rationalism which makes the external world largely unnecessary except as a perceptual metaphysical crutch, which is the way the French symbolists used it--or claimed to use it.

Therefore, post-modernists who see a unification of the Hegelian diremptions in some putative Nietzschean archaism may be beating a dead horse. In the jargon of Gilles Deleuze, modern life would already be unified anyway in a capitalist axiomatic of quantification and in the libidinal investments of the desiring machines. We just don't like what we see!

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text. Hill and Wang. New York: 1975. Translation by Miller of Le Plaisir du texte, Editions du Seuil. Paris: 1973

Roland Barthes. S/Z. Editions du Seuil. Paris: 1970.

William Lessa and Evon Vogt. Reader in Comparative Religion, second edition. Harper and Row. New York: 1965.

Paris: 1962

M.C. and Edmond Ortiques. Oedipe Africain. Librairie Plon. Paris: 1966.

George Santayana. Skepticism and Animal Faith. Dover Publications: 1955. First published in 1923.