Contagious Participation

Magics Power to Affect

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christopher braddock

telepathy against telepathy, distance against

menacing immediacy
(Derrida 2007: 259).

foreword

a n n h a m i lt o n s

malediction

Seated with her back to the viewer, Ann Hamilton

masticates and pushes mouthfuls of bread
dough into her mouths upper cavity. Carefully
retracting the objects, she places them her
mouth casts in a large wicker casket from the
turn of last century used to transport bodies
to the morgue.1 These bread dough casts of
Hamiltons inner mouth cavity result from part
of her performance/installation malediction at
the Louver Gallery in New York from 7 December
1991 to 4 January 1992.
Hamiltons mouth casts challenge inside/
outside or figure/ground relationships so that
the objects, and the subject from which they
flow, are somehow less locatable: not a body part,
not an internal organ, not a live part, not a dead
part, not nourishment, not not nourishment,
not a fully activated performer. The mouth casts
suggest three characteristics. The first is that,
if we came across these figuratively ambivalent
objects post-performance and without recourse
to the event of the performance, we might not
recognize them. This is true of those objects that
survive the performance/installation, collected
by the Louver Gallerys then director Sean Kelly,
and now in the RISD (Rhode Island School of
Design) Museum of Art in Providence. It is
also true of those mouth casts that fermented,
97

swelled and deteriorated during the course of

the work (Simon 2006: 18). And it is true of the
two photographs I have from which I interpret
the artwork and which are themselves objects of
performance. Without knowledge of provenance,
performance or ritual informing us of what they
are meant to represent, the mouth gestures
might fail a realist test. In this sense, Hamiltons
mouth casts are less about figurative accuracy,
and, as I will argue, more about an encounter
with the body as process. Their ambivalence
makes them always complexly contingent
upon their contexts of production for any
determination of their efficacy.
Hamiltons mouth casts suggest a second
characteristic, that, with recourse to the ritual
of the event, we know these objects have been
intimately formed: orally sculpted, lubricated
with the artists saliva, and, in this way, aligned
with her bodys ontology. The substance of bread,
combined with the artists saliva, is linked to
digestion and nourishment.
A third characteristic of Hamiltons mouth
casts relates to the ambivalence and substance
of the preceding two. With recourse to the
event, there is she who produces them: her selfpossessed actions, her partiality, her back turned
to us, her silence, her repeated oral casting
gesture until the death-basket was filled halfway
every day for the duration of the one-month
performative installation; her skin, her bite, her
saliva.

Pe rf o r m a n c e R e s e a r c h 1 6 ( 4 ) , p p . 9 7 - 1 0 8 Ta y l o r & F ra n c i s L td 2 01 1
D O I : 1 0 . 1 0 8 0 / 1 3 5 2 8 1 6 5 . 2 01 1 . 6 0 6 0 5 6

1
In the interests of focus
I am commenting on an
aspect of the whole
performative installation
malediction.

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(opposite) Ann Hamilton,

malediction, Louver
Gallery, New York,
December 7 - January 4,
1992. Courtesy Ann
Hamilton Studio. Photo
credit: D. James Dee.

of cultural anthropology dealing with magic)

has associations of contamination by disease
with its concurrent characteristics of unwitting
participation or unseen networks that infiltrate
bodies. Through the concept of contagion I
ask how objects like Hamiltons mouth casts
become animated through participation and
how objects, in turn, might animate bodies. As
such, the concept of animism (contextualized
as an affect of sympathetic magics contagious
participatory strategies) is explored in order to
think through notions of reciprocal participation
between people and things: who is giving to
whom, who contaminates what, and vice versa?
As will be seen below, a commonly perceived
divide between inanimate objects and animate
beings is contested by a model of participation
that embraces forms of co-existence in nature
and substance.
In asking how material things might be
considered animate, the theories and rituals of
magic enable a consideration of, for example,
the thing power materialism of Jane Bennett
(via immanent theories of Spinoza and Deleuze)
with regard to a question of attentiveness. Partly
based on Bruno Latours concept of actants,
Bennett engages with a vibrant materiality
intrinsic to things in themselves as distinct from
transpersonal or intersubjective phenomena
(2010: xii). Her project, nonetheless, relies on
a cultivated, patient, sensory attentiveness to
nonhuman forces operating outside and inside
the human body (2010: xiv). She transparently
(and to great effect) courts the contradictory
nature of her argument: is it not a human
subject who, after all, is articulating this theory
of vibrant matter? (2010: ix) These apparent
contradictions test the ground between an

understanding of material substance as

inherently or immanently animated and the
thought of performance as a compelling force
of attention on the part of participants upon
those substances. With regard to modalities
of animism and anthropomorphism, Bennett
resists the possibility that vibrant matter is
best attributed to a nonmaterial source, to an
animating spirit or soul (2010: xvii). She does,
nevertheless, see virtue in entertaining such
systems of belief as a way of, ironically, working
against anthropocentrism and the idea that only
humans and God can bear any traces of creative
agency (2010: 120). My intention is to contribute
to such debate surrounding non-modern modes
of thought about animism as a means to discuss
how superhuman sensory attentiveness (where
the term superhuman is borrowed from Henry
Balfours late nineteenth-century ethnography of
sympathetic magic) (1892: 215) might operate in
modes of participation.
In what follows, I offer an in-depth reading
of an aspect of Hamiltons artwork malediction
in the context of a force-field of contagious
animism. I will employ the terms sympathy
and telepathy as related to the linguistic
terms metaphor and metonymy which, in
turn, correspond to the concepts of similarity
and contagion as used by late-Victorian
ethnographers of magic. I propose the sym
and tele as two modalities of affect. A forcefield of affect is a there. It is not governed
by dimensions of size or time, but has the
capability to affect, a power to affect. Pathos,
in contrast, is the power to be affected (as
in arousing feelings of sympathy). You cant
represent force. It is, on the one hand, an
existent (always current and ongoing); but on the
other, it is a force that needs to have its pathos
(pathies). Put another way, what is at stake with
force is not its representation but rather how
it affects you, what it makes you do. A notion
of contagious animism asks how things
are disclosive of the question of their power,
disclosing possibilities of affecting and being
affected which applies to all bodies, animate

Braddock

2
Thanks to Mark Jackson i n t r o d u c t i o n 2
to whom I am indebted
for many of the critical
I want to pay attention to the objects of
re-workings of this essay.
See my forthcoming book performance art those activated within
Performing Contagious
performances and then acting as relics or
Bodies: Ritual Exchange
traces, or those produced to activate viewer
in Contemporary Art to
be published by Palgrave participation in a performative way via
Macmillan in 2012 where
theories of ritual exchange in magic. A core
an extended version of
concept of contagion (as it stems from a legacy
this paper will appear.

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Contagious Participation

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and inanimate. The space where sympathy and

telepathy collide foregrounds a questioning of
modes of representation and the idea that force
resides uniquely in human subjects. Moreover,
as a distanciation of distance, telepathy contests
certain assumptions about our ability to be
attentive, to attend the event as the presumed
site of participation.
From this standpoint, my essay serves as a
survey discussion of two ethnographic moments,
dealt with in reverse chronology, before returning
to Hamiltons artwork. The first is a moment in
the late-1960s, in which structural anthropology
contested a late-Victorian view of magical
practices as driven by an over-determination
of scientific models of cause and effect, to the
detriment of understanding magic as a form of
persuasive performative utterance indicative
of participation. This legacy of cultural
anthropologys dealings with magic (which were
privileged in establishing grounding aspects
of structural linguistics) circulates around
the anthropologist Stanley J. Tambiah, whose
thinking on mimetic sympathy as a form of
persuasive analogy in ritual performance draws
a crucial link between J. L. Austins performative
utterance and notions of sympathetic magic.
Rather than view magical rituals from a point of
view of cause and effect, employing empirical
verification associated with scientific activity
(Tambiah 1973: 219), Tambiah argues for an
understanding of the performative aspects of
magical acts, through which properties are
transferred to recipients (objects or persons) as
the acts semantic basis. In this line of argument,
the thought of performance manifest in ritual
exchange becomes a compelling force of mimetic
sympathy between participants and things. This
sympathy with things which I contextualize
as magics contagious, animistic strategies
operates other than with respect to a subjects
intended view of the world and is untethered
to the idea of an event in time. Instead, it
exceeds the subject in forms of unwitting
infiltration. Uncritical of Austins assertion
that performatives are bound to specific ritual
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This notion of excess

vis--vis the debate
surrounding live arts
relationship to its
documentation the
record of the live moment
has played out in
numerous texts over the
last decade. See, for
example, Rebecca
Schneider as she writes:
The paper, frame, and
photo of the action all
represent to the viewer
that which the viewer
missed that which,
standing before the
document, you witness
yourself missing again.
And yet, in missing you
are somehow more
available to this excess
of the object than you
would be in a situation of
presence (2005: 42).

force-fields

As a means of articulating a power to affect

and a relationship to ritual contexts, Brian
Massumi employs a teleparable of the soccer
match, sketching out the playing field as a forcefield, and describing the players as part-objects
and the ball as a part-subject. He does this by
defining the ball as the focus of every player and
the object of every gesture (2002: 73). Thus, the
ball, not the player, is the subject of the play:

Braddock

See Anna Gibbs

expressing a similar view
in the context of the work
of nineteenth-century
French sociologist
Gabriel Tarde in relation
to sympathy, hypnotism
and suggestion vis--vis
the psychology of crowds
(Gibbs 2008: 140). See
also her overview of
mimesis and sympathy
(Gibbs 2010).

contexts, Tambiah could not foresee theories

of affect in which participation becomes
contextualized as an affect of a contagious
force-field, which in turn (as a contested site of
putative intentionality) draws participants out of
themselves.
The second moment, a short focus on the late
nineteenth-century ethnographies of Edward
Burnett Tylor and Henry Balfour, reveals, to
my mind, an astonishing yet equivocal insight
into the possibilities of a power to be affected.
Redolent with racist views of cultural difference
and Victorian evolutionist theories of their
time, I nevertheless pursue their thinking with
a view to, ironically, affirming some of their
observations as advantageous to the indigenous
subjects they critique;3 advantageous with
respect to a more open-minded comportment
(Bennett 2010: xv) to the possibilities of
animated non-human material. Late nineteenthcentury writing on sympathetic magical
practices proposes a contagious transformation
of objects such that they become a new body
that hosts, for example, disease-spirits. In a
reappraisal of this ethnographic material, it can
be argued that objects perform the person; that
is, they become contaminated to the point that
they become the thing. If such a contamination
is activated by the attentive sympathies of
ritual donors or participants, how is this idea of
attentive sympathy understood? One implication
is that these objects of magical ritual and as
I will argue, objects of performance art are
animated to the point that they participate as
part-subjects that catalyse events. Put another
way, as object-receivers of sympathetic mimetic
attention, these objects are transformed to the
point that they exceed the subject invested in
them.4
Before engaging more fully with these two
ethnographies and their application to notions of
contagious animism, I want to briefly outline two
pertinent conceptual frameworks: those of ritual
force-fields and gift exchange.

Since the ball is nothing without the continuum of

potential it doubles, since its effect is dependent
on the physical presence of a multiplicity of
other bodies and objects of various kinds; since
the parameters of its actions are regulated by
the application of rules, for all these reasons the
catalytic object-sign may be called a part-subject.
The part-subject catalyzes the play as a whole but is
not itself a whole.
(Massumi 2002: 73)

Here, the body figures not as a whole body

but as a part-body: a foot that kicks where
the kicking is not an expression of the player
inasmuch as it is a response to the ball drawing
out the kick. And typical of the unlimited
contexts in which performativity might be
articulated, the players are drawn out of
themselves, looking beyond the ball as they
take in a myriad of external factors that might
include, but are never exhaustive of, other
players movements, the crowd and extended TV
footage:
Any player who is conscious of himself as he kicks
misses. Self-consciousness is a negative condition
of play. The players reflective sense of themselves
as subjects is a source of interference that must be
minimalized for the play to channel smoothly. When
a player readies a kick, she is not looking at the ball
so much as she is looking past it. She is reflexively
(rather than reflectively) assessing the potential
movement of the ball.
(Massumi 2002: 74)

Ritual is perhaps the field that plays out our

power to be affected. Ritual provides procedures
to go through and takes what could otherwise
be everyday out of its everydayness. And the
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Contagious Participation

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rules and rituals of the game are constantly in

variance as the game emerges and continues to
evolve to the extent that circumstances arise
that force modifications to the rules (Massumi
2002: 72). That you are there, shifts you.
gift exchange

Marcel Mauss offers a view of economic

exchange between donor and donee that frames
a notion of gift-giving in terms of the law of
contagion that can be applied to principles of
contagious animism. In relation to the gift giving
of taonga by Maori in New Zealand, Mauss
writes that:
What imposes obligation in the present received
and exchanged, is in fact that the thing received
is not inactive. Even when it has been abandoned
by the giver it still possesses something of him.
Through it the giver has a hold over the beneficiary.

(Mauss 2002: 15)

This is a concept related to a notion of action

at a distance (read telepathy for the purposes
of this essay) embedded in sympathetic magic,
whereby things which have once been in contact
with each other continue to act upon each other
at a distance after the physical contact has been
severed (Frazer 1978: 34). From this perspective,
Mauss writes:
Magic performed over the residues of meals
follows from the idea that there is a continuity and
complete identity between the remains, the food
consumed and the one who has eaten the latter
being substantially identical to the food partaken
by him.
(Mauss 1975: 65)5

Mauss perceived Maori as adopting an

exchange system where gifts were ultimately
either reciprocated or returned, and which he
further outlines as the obligations to give, to
receive and to reciprocate (2002: 13, 505).6
Jacques Derrida critiques Mauss The Gift with
its emphasis on economy, exchange and contract
as speaking of everything but the gift (1992: 24).
He points out that if the gift is to be really a gift
101

it must be forgotten both by donor and donee.

And this is a radical forgetting where the gift
not only must not be repaid but must not be kept
in memory, retained as symbol or a sacrifice,
as symbolic in general (1992: 24). In this sense
Derrida points to the impossibility of gifting. As
soon as a gift is acknowledged as such it ceases
to be a gift: If the gift appears or signifies itself,
if it exists or if it is presently as gift, as what it is,
then it is not, it annuls itself (1992: 267).
A significance of Derridas critique is that
Mauss interpretation of gifting would always
position the donor as having specific intentions
that relate, in turn, to specific obligations;
I animate this object such that it will have
power over you. A question with respect to
donor participants, and of Hamilton and her
mouth casts, is who is giving to whom, who
contaminates what and vice versa. In this sense,
a question of contamination is a question of
what gives the power, animate or inanimate. In
effect, Mauss places limitations on a force-fields
power to affect by over-determining the thing
rather than a capacity to be affected. Mauss
is concentrating on the thing rather than its
capacity to be. He never says what gives the
thing power what makes magic work. And in
his over-determination of cause and effect he
risks closing down the nature of the phenomena
of magic. In this context, the term donor
accentuates a lack of disclosure with regard
to the one who gives. With its associations to
somebody giving blood, sperm or a body organ,
we do not always know who the donor is. I want
to emphasize the idea of a giver or contributor
where questions of what or who gives the
power to life are redolent. Via the operations of
sympathetic magical practices, I consider the
body of the artist as a ritual donor participant
within a complex and inexhaustible array of
participatory agents (audiences, you reading this
text ), less as one of exchange with attendant
putative intentions and more as unwitting
agents drawn out by the ritual force-fields of
participation. In this way, I aim to undermine
some modernist tropes which have tended to

5
Authorship for the
original version of this
work published in LAnne
Sociologique is attributed
to Marcel Mauss and Henri
Hubert.
6
See my forthcoming book
Performing Contagious
Bodies: Ritual Exchange in
Contemporary Art to be
published by Palgrave
Macmillan in 2012 where
an extended version of this
paper will appear.

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For a discussion of
these linguistic
operations in relation to
the failure of
performance, see
Braddock (2010).

the sym and the tele

o f m e ta p h o r a n d m e t o n y m y

In a critique of anthropologys methodologies,

Tambiah questions how Evans-Pritchards study
of Zande witchcraft can ask, from a European
intellectual standpoint, questions of cause and
effect with a view to empirical verification. As
Tambiah writes:
Magical acts are ritual acts, and ritual acts are in
turn performative acts whose positive and creative
meaning is missed and whose persuasive validity

is misjudged if they are subjected to that kind of

empirical verification associated with scientific
activity.
(Tambiah 1973: 199)

Braddock

The end of this passage

is paraphrased from
Brian Massumis
Parables for the Virtual:
Movement, Affect,
Sensation (2002: 73).

view the artist in the more authoritative (and

domineering) guise of high priest, shaman or
magician, as a kind of tragic subject in the centre
of the art work itself.
Hamiltons mouth casts are the focus of every
donor within the force-field that is the ritual.
But like Massumis soccer ball, these objects
on their own are not enough as they need the
field of potential: the ritual that is embedded
in institutional possibilities. From such a
standpoint, the mouth casts move the donor
participants. The donors are the objects of the
mouth casts within the force-field that draws
them out. It is in this sense that performance
(the body art project) plays with the rules of that
force-field, transforming the gallery for Hamilton
into an unlocatable space of transition (bakery,
morgue, workhouse, museum). Performance art
and the live body of the artist disrupts, always
having the potential to mutate: body art, with its
solicitation of spectatorial desires and deliberate
confusion of conventional artistic presentational
formats, complicates the tendency to codify
postmodernism purely in terms of artistic
strategies of production (Jones 1998: 30). And
since the mouth casts effects are dependent on
the corporeal presence of a diversity of other
bodies and other part-objects of assorted kinds,
these catalytic object-signs may be called partsubjects, making each donor its part-object.7
I now return to the first of my two ethnographic
moments in the work of the anthropologist
Stanley J. Tambiah.

Instead, Tambiah argues that the performative

nature of magical acts are semantically
embedded in ritual and that such ritual
engages with objectives of persuasion,
conceptualisation and expansion of meaning
(1973: 219). In other words, to ask if magic works
from a standpoint of cause and effect is asking
the wrong question. Thus, Tambiahs structural
anthropology analyses the concept of contagion
in theories of ritual and magic through the
operations of metaphor and metonymy in
language.8 He critiques, for example, EvansPritchards Zande case study in which a creeper
is employed for curing leprosy (1973: 214). The
case study relies on the creepers falling foliage
leaving behind residues that resemble a lepers
wounds. This residue is made into a paste and
is applied to the wounded body. Tambiah sees
the term metaphor as encompassing simile
and analogy, a surrogate which has a dual
reference to the original object and to the object
for which it now stands (1968: 189) in this
case, a plants growth formations and a lepers
sores. The creepers residue takes the place of
the lepers sores in visual mimetic sympathy.
While metaphor is a figure of similarity,
metonymy stands for a crossing of these chains
of metaphoric association, forming an unwitting
contamination of animate and inanimate
participants in ritual exchange. Roland Barthes
describes this overlapping of metaphoric
association, and its transfer of meaning from one
chain to the other, as a metomymic contagion
of qualities and actions (1972: 245). He makes
a crucial connection to Roman Jakobsons
opposition between metaphor, a figure of
similarity, and metonymy, a figure of contiguity
(1972: 245n2) where Jakobson was, in turn,
referencing the operations of sympathetic magic.
For Barthes, this is:
a technical transgression of the forms of language,
for metonymy is precisely a forced syntagm, the
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violation of a signifying limit of space; it permits,

on the very level of discourse, a counterdivision of
objects, usages, meaning, spaces and properties.

(1972: 246)

Such a violation of a signifying limit of space

resonates with Massumis force-field of affect as
an ongoing continuum of potential.
Tambiah contests that, insofar as the plant
is employed therapeutically, a persuasive
and forceful transfer is announced where the
undesirable loss of the limbs resulting in death
is replaced by a desired growth: a persuasive
mimicry of the plants growth in the human
subject. Here, Tambiah suggests a vacillation
in the ritual participants (donor, magician,
family members, and so on), between literally
knowing that a creeper is a creeper and a bodily
aphasia (not Tambiahs term) that I interpret as a
deeply animistic operation in that the creepers
residue is animated to the point that it becomes
the disease. Tambiahs understanding of these
operations (like Barthes counterdivision
of objects, usages, meaning, spaces and
properties) positions a metonymic contiguity
or contamination in the persuasive force of a
performative illocutionary act of doing (Austins
performative). In this sense, these forms of
transgression in language act in the bodies of
participants through mimetic sympathy (Gibbs
2010: 201; Strathern 1996: 27).9 It follows that any
attempt to explain magics animating contagious
strategies as an intentionally directed mental
force of attention on the part of participants,
or as a discredited belief system in a transfer
of disease-spirits, overlooks the phenomena of
ritual exchange in the affect of the force-field.10
Elsewhere, Tambiah explores a theory of
participation, once again, in contrast to a
concept of causality. Employing the work
of Mauss contemporary Lucien Lvy-Bruhl,
Tambiah writes that a late-Victorian view of
magical practices as irrational misunderstood
a law of participation that signified the
association between persons and things in
primitive thought to the point of identity and
consubstantiality (Tambiah 1990: 86). This
103

idea of consubstantiality can be understood as

participation of the same nature, co-existence in
the same substance. In this sense the action of
the Zande case study takes place in the original
creepers growth (all the creepers still growing)
and in the material substance now applied in
direct contact with the donors diseased body
part.
From such a perspective, the term telepathy
(action-at-a-distance) is understood as a
metonymic contamination of the rational
possibilities of representation (you cant
represent force). It plays out as the power to
affect whatever is there, animate or inanimate.11
As Tambiah notes: This sense of participation is
not merely a (metaphorical) representation for it
implies a physical and mystical union (Tambiah
1990: 86). In this sense, telepathy as a modality
of affect would be an unrelenting desire working
against innumerable undesired outcomes such
as disease and the failure of crops; or indeed,
against the failure of liveness. It operates
symbolically and ritually against each passing
moment. As Jacques Derrida writes, telepathy
against telepathy, distance against menacing
immediacy (2007: 259).
Here, the study of magic like a study of
gossip by Irit Rogoff is an investigation into a
principle of contamination (1996: 31719). Rogoff
discusses gossip as a form of radical knowledge
that negates the scholarly distanciation between
what is said, who it is said by and who is being
addressed (1996: 318). Likewise, to open up a
discourse of magic as radical knowledge negates
a scholarly distanciation between institutionally
and scientifically viable knowledge and modes
of performative ritual derived from discredited
folklore. Contagious animism complicates
the human and non-human, the animate and
inanimate, as it forcefully questions how the
objects of our address are in excess of us and
how the event of participation might occur
beyond rational modes of representation and
duration. As such, magic lies outside theoretical
frameworks in a manner akin to the way in
which Rogoff points to Derridas analysis of

9
The embodied nature of
Stanley J. Tambiahs
semantics of persuasion is
important to my
discussion. Tambiah also
entertains enacting
performative acts without
the use of words (1973:
2212) as well as across a
range of object mediums
(1973: 223n1).
10
See Jesper Sorensen who
points to a lack of
consideration for ritual
processes among the
Victorian rationalists: In
the attempt to explain
magic as actions that are
rational by reference to
underlying mental
procedures and beliefs,
they disregard the very
special status of these
actions that they are
exactly ritual actions
and thereby almost explain
the phenomena away
(2007: 3).
11
At the heart of Tambiahs
analysis of sympathetic
magical practices, while he
does not employ these
terms, lies metaphor as the
axis of symptom while
metonymy is the axis of
desire. In this respect
Jacques Lacans correlation
of psychoanalysis and
linguistics and its
relationship to Jacobsons
theories, as well as Freuds
condensation (metaphor or
symptom) and
displacement (metonymy
or desire) (Wilden 1980:
47), sit in the background
of this essay.

henry balfours

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a n a l o g o - t e l e p at h y

In this sense, both

Edward Burnett Tylor
and Balfour exhibit an
oscillation between
belief and disbelief in
the material discussed.
Tylor exemplifies this in
his duplicitous attitude
to sympathetic magic
when he states that he
was in possession of
various artefacts that
have disappeared
mysteriously,
suggesting that there is
some element of belief
invested in what he
earlier described as the
intellectual level of the
peasant and savage
(1891: 389).

12

I wish to thank the

staff of the Pitt Rivers
Museum, Oxford, for
assisting me so
generously with primary
research.

13

Tambiah is reacting to a group of since

discredited Western ethnographies of nonWestern notions of animism. He is right to head
a charge of misappropriating performative ritual
for a failed science. However, what fascinates me
in some late nineteenth-century ethnographies
of sympathetic magic, is an equivocal investment
in the ritual magic they critique.12
In 1869, in a paper delivered to the Weekly
Evening Meeting of the Royal Institution of Great
Britain, Edward Burnett Tylor outlined a view
On the Survival of Savage Thought in Modern
Civilization in which objects can operate as
substitute bodies. In the context of what he terms
lower animism he writes:
that diseases are caused by spirits possessing or
attacking the patient. It is another principle that
spirits may embody themselves for a time in any
material object. Thus the disease-spirits may be
persuaded to come out of the patient, and get into
some object prepared for them.
(Tylor 1869: 8)

And again in 1870, in The Journal of the

Ethnological Society of London, Tylor noted that,
to the savage mind, things as well as men and
animals have souls, and that the diseased-spirit
is offered a surrogate body in which to reside:
To get rid of this spirit they seem to say, let us
get it a new body to enter or pervade. He refers
to Burtons description of the Central African
habit of transferring diseases into bits of stick
or rag, &c., which form what is called the keti
or stool on which the noxious infection sits
(3767). In this manner, Tylor contextualizes
the idea of transferring diseases from human
being to object within the general notion of
animism, where savage psychology perceives a
soul as sometimes visible and invisible, and an

individual as one who scarcely distinguishes his

subjectivity from objectivity, hardly knows his
inside from his outside (1870: 3712).
Of course these ideas are laced with Victorian
racist attitudes that posit indigenous people
as under-evolved and lacking in civilization.
But such an ignominious view, from a
phenomenological standpoint, is paradoxically
apposite in its questioning of interiorized
subjectivities and exteriorized objectivities.
In his journal notes for an address to the
Oxford Biological Club of 1892 entitled Some
Aspects of Superstition: Sympathetic Magic,
Henry Balfour makes a link between the
phenomena of sympathetic (analogous) mimesis
and telepathy:13

Braddock

telepathy where [e]verything, in our conception

of knowledge, is constructed so that telepathy
be impossible, unthinkable, unknown (Derrida
2007: 244).

the doctrine of Animism, to capress [sic] the

theory of the general possession of souls and
spirits by all animate and inanimate objects
(tied to Sympathetic Magic). The intimate
relationship between shadow, reflection, diram [sic]
manifestations, and souls or spirits, is extended,
by analogical reasoning almost universally to
material images of representation of objects
or persons; thus, it is supposed that there is a
telepathic relationship between an object and its
material image or likeness, acting by analogy and,
here it [sic] not an inordinately ugly and cumbrous
term, we might ca [handwriting unclear] a word
analogo-telepathy for this kind of relationship
It is firmly believed, and this not only by lowly
cultured man, as I shall presently show, that the
possession of a figure or representation of a person
or other objects, gives the possessor superhuman
power over that object, and, that any treatment of
the image will be reflected in the body of the object
represented, and, on this account it is a dangerous
thing for a person to allow anyone to possess an
image or representation of him, as it gives the
possessor means of applying offensive magic to the
person represented.
(Balfour 1892: 215)

I am struck, here, by the ontological shifts

between subjecthood and objecthood; between
an object and its material image or likeness, as if
the human subject is a material image or trace:
that any treatment of the image will be reflected
in the body of the object represented. But which
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body exactly? It is as if the material image

exceeds (goes over or surpasses) the subject
as the body of the object. Together with this,
Balfour can be seen as questioning, by virtue of
the idea of telepathy, the moment of the event in
which such operations might occur. I sense from
the language of these accounts and the manner
in which Tylor and Balfour elide a question of
primitivisms lodged in modern civilization
that a so-called savage animistic psychology
asks how things disclose their power in ways
that are disquietingly irrational. Lvy-Bruhls
law of participation, which Tambiah addresses
as a semantics of participation, offers these
anthropologists (albeit at-a-distance) a theory
of participatory contamination that entertains
disturbing consubstantiality as a metonymic
violation of animate insides and inanimate
outsides.
afterword

Hamiltons mouth casts are figuratively

ambivalent. In one sense, if they were more
representationally determined it might close
down their force, their power to affect. This is
not simply a recognition of aesthetic ambiguity;
rather, it shifts emphasis from an objects selfcontained objecthood, where meaning is located
in the product, towards an understanding of a
power to affect as located in ritual exchange
105

with, and through, other bodies and events

across time. Here, operations and products have
a primary significance that is radically other
than the aesthetic (Sparshott 1982: 372, my
emphasis). Francis Sparshott establishes such
conditions within mystic lines of representation
as he writes:
A magical image is not as such meant to be
contemplated or appreciated. An aesthetically
insignificant image would do equally well if it
happened to do the job what matters is what will
actually control or embody the force in the relevant
way.
(Sparshott 1982: 3756)

To repeat: What is at stake with power is not its

representation but rather how it affects you, what
it makes you do. It was from a similar perspective
that Amelia Jones revitalized the term body
art, positioning the art object as a site where
reception and production come together: a site
of intersubjectivity (Jones 1998: 14). From such a
point of view, a study of body art and its traces, in
relation to the rituals of magic as an animating
force of sympathetic mimesis, is apposite. In
processes of contagious animism, as is the case
in many theories of gift exchange, objects (and
subjects) become symbols of the act of exchange
itself, thus entering into forms of displaced
reciprocity (Wilden 1980: 32) that are as much
about bodies in ritual exchange as they are
about forms of production. In this sense, magics

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them out. In this way, the movement of the thing

exceeds the subject as unwitting infiltration. As
Derrida writes:
I felt from a distance and confusedly, that I was
searching for a word, perhaps a proper name.
Rather, it was the term that was searching for me,
it had the initiative, according to me, and was doing
its best to gather itself together by every means, for
a period of time that I could not measure, all night
perhaps, and even more, or else an hour or three
minutes, impossible to know, but is it a question
here of knowing?
(Derrida 2007: 226)

Braddock

contagious animism transforms Hamiltons

mouth casts such that they share some of the
characteristics of actants, defined as any
entity that modifies another entity in a trial,
something whose competence is deduced from
[its] performance rather than posited in advance
of the action (Bennett 2010: viii, quoting Latour).
Hamilton performs her casts, over and
over, facilitating (as distinct from producing)
part-subjects animated with nourishment,
digestion, patience, tenderness and (muted)
speech, placing them in a wicker casket used to
transport corpses. She sits (silently) in a space
burgeoning with the silence of that exploited
workforce of immigrants, women and children
who laboured at the turn of the century in SoHos
sweatshop clothing industry (Simon 2002: 1215).
Bread dough, following repeated pushing and
mastication, takes the place of all those dead. We
can extend Mauss argument to say that these
partial objects produce the person and, in Mauss
terms, that there remains a continuity between
these remains and the one who has eaten the
latter being substantially identical to the food
partaken by her (1975: 65; emphasis and gender
changed). This is Balfours telepathic relationship
between an object and its material image.
Tambiahs structural analysis throws into focus a
chain of metaphorical associations, in the sense
that they are complementary, as those of bread
dough, mouth, saliva, bread buns, womens labour,
and so on. But Hamiltons performative actions
present not just these complementary but also
distant terms, constituting an exchange which
undertakes to vacillate meaning (Barthes 1972:
244 7). In this regard, she is an ambiguous and
over-determined part-object. She is indeterminate
as she is many things (Eucharistic communicant,
labourer, artist at work), while a minimal play
of contiguity allows for a crossing of these lines
of metaphorical substitution. In the metonymic
contamination of a subjects sympathy given to
another, the mouth casts (as part-subjects) move
Hamilton and the innumerable other participants.
These donor participants are the objects of the
mouth casts within the force-field that draws

Hamiltons attempt to transfer the desirable

qualities of nourishment and speech to the
other which is in a defective state (Tambiah
1973: 2223) is other than intersubjective or
transpersonal. She is drawn out of herself,
prompted by animated materiality and/or
substance. But animated is not quite a verb, not
a wilful and self-consciousness action entering
and animating materiality. Maybe this is more
like waiting for something to reach us, rather
than attentively pursuing it? As Derrida notes
above: it was the term that was searching for
me, it had the initiative. This would be the
importance of Baruch Spinozas understanding
of the power of God and Nature. A concept of
power is shifted from God as transcendent
first principle and as ultimately that which
sanctions and controls, to power conceived of
as a potential in all substance. This resonates
with Lvy-Bruhls ideas, discussed above, of
identity in participation as a consubstantiality
or co-existence in substance. Here, power is
understood as capacity to be or the maximizing
of ones or a things capability to be, which for
Spinoza was expressed in terms of affecting
and being affected (Jackson 2011: unpaginated
manuscript). This drawing out of ritual
participants is the force of an endless series
of contagious participatory strategies, the
context for which cannot be saturated. As Mark
Jackson writes: The material thing is thus the
unfolding, in its singularity, of its own degrees
of power within an infinite number of degrees as
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attributes of God / Nature as Substance (2011:

unpaginated manuscript).
To tie the donors agency down with specific
sympathetic attention/s would, with respect to
Derridas thinking on the gift, dissolve the force
that draws them out. Just as when Massumis
soccer player focuses on the ball and misses,
the donor must look past the gift, where her
participatory agency is not driven by intentional
and directed giving inasmuch as drawn out by
the part subjects of the mouth casts. A certain
tension in Bennetts argument comes to the
fore here vis--vis a subjects jurisdiction over
attentiveness. On the one hand, the moment that
a cultivated, patient, sensory attentiveness to
nonhuman forces (Bennett 2010: xiv) is conjured,
it holds power over the potentialities of other
substances. On the other hand, Bennett clearly
seeks attentiveness that is less intentional, less
directional, a melting of cause and effect (2010:
313). Tambiahs thinking, in the context of affect
theory, provides a system where the operations
of contagious animism become semantically
embedded in ritual. Such transformations in
language become somatically embodied in
subjects as deeply persuasive and expansive
modes of participation that exceed the presence
of the subject.
Hamiltons actions consist of producing objectsymbols as tele-things in order to support (not
direct) telepathic and therapeutic transfers
of phenomena to various recipients: herself,
her audience, us now, and, within a sphere of
the unseen, those who have previously passed
through the space. From this perspective, the
objects of performance have been framed as
contingent upon their contexts of production
for any determination of their efficacy, and
their substance aligned with the ontology of the
body with a focus on she who produces them
as ritual participant. Questions of contagious
participation circulate around the one who
attentively gives, except that there is always
more than one, of several lives at the same
time, certainly more than two, always more than
two (Derrida 2007: 228). Sympathetic magics
107

contagious participatory strategies allows for a

questioning of how this attentiveness lets call
it superhuman attention is manifest.
conclusion

Thus Balfours description of the possessors

superhuman power over that object, and
the body of the object represented is recontextualized. Less a subjects anthropocentric
hierarchy of power over another non-human
entity, and more a power to be affected that
slides beyond the traditional subjectobject
divide. Hamilton like the individual who
scarcely distinguishes his subjectivity from
objectivity, hardly knows his inside from his
outside (Tylor 1870: 3712) seems now at a
distinct advantage. Hamilton is precisely more
corporeal and tangible (and of the moment)
as part of the whole: all mouth and hands,
like Massumis soccer players are all legs. The
principles of contiguity (fundamental to the
operations at work in contagious animism)
contaminate meaning in their exceeding of
the subject, provoking tele-things (remote and
distant): sympathies and telepathies able to shift
understandings of what it is to participate, to
involve yourself, to partake. As such, Tambiahs
theory of participation operates as a force to
affect beyond rational limits of representation
and beyond what we might identify as
thinking subjects and inanimate objects: a
consubstantiality between persons and things.

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