"This book … of traces and tremors, if book it be": A review of Michael Taussig, Mastery of Non-Mastery in the Age of Meltdown

In Mastery of Non-Mastery in the Age of Meltdown, anthropologist and ethnographer Michael Taussig confronts the reciprocal problems of theorizing and representing climate change. In this, he joins a popular strain of contemporary environmental humanities literature that examines how modeling the environment analytically or artistically limits or expands the ways we can think about, and perhaps mitigate, climatic catastrophe. Much of the work in this tradition tends to keep its models at arm's length, using sober, scholarly analysis to master the myriad representational forms of climate change. It straightens out—in theory—the disorder of a world on the brink without letting theory itself become infected by such disorder. Taussig, by comparison, seeks to meld analysis with its object, making his text both product and agent of epistemic meltdown. Mastery of Non-Mastery in the Age of Meltdown (hereafter Mastery of Non-Mastery) in this way combines ecocritical and ecopoetic practices; it attempts to reshape, mutate, and parody the scholarly monograph in a bid to derive a form of expression commensurate with this surreal, volatile age of meltdown.

Taussig's correspondingly surreal and volatile text might at first appear a gimmick, where writing erratically mimics erratic weather patterns, as it were. But Taussig insists elsewhere that "while it is hazardous to maintain a mimetic theory of language and writing, it is no less hazardous not to have such a theory" ("Corn-Wolf" 33). For him, the distance assumed between the subject and object of scholarly analysis together with a presumed epistemic stability form the foundations of much traditional academic writing. As such, academic criticism often mirrors and reinforces the ideology of Man's mastery of nature—or, more academically, of subject matter—while concealing the role of narrative (or what Taussig more approachably terms "storytelling") in the perpetuation of such a disastrous pretense. Taussig has thus cast his "apotropaic writing" as a "countermagic" to this hegemonic mode of thought and language ("Corn-Wolf" 32–33).¹ Mastery of Non-Mastery presents his latest attempt to tap into the meeting point between reality and representation, where the "meltdown of the language of nature swamps the nature of language" (174).

Thus opposed to what he calls the "crabby and secular language" (56) of much contemporary environmental literature, Taussig variously situates Mastery of Non-Mastery as "somewhere between science fiction, high theory, and the weather" (3), a "book … of traces and tremors" (20), "a firefly moment navigating between light and dark" (57), "a too-late experimental ethnography" (120), and "a threshold between a theater and a book" (180). Nowhere does he employ the language of structuration and utility so normalized in works of theory. This "book that is not a book" (180) does not build anything. Nor does it seek to furnish its reader any theoretical tools. Rather, Taussig's preferred models are dancing (16) and the meandering flight of a firefly (95). The salience of such images is apparent immediately on opening Mastery of Non-Mastery in the Age of Meltdown, which spans nineteen brief chapters laid out in discrete blocks of text that recall a collection of vignettes composed of aphorisms. The staccato rhythm of its format mirrors the way that ideas and intertexts are made to waltz and flit through the book's pages, often disappearing suddenly only to reemerge in new combinations ten or fifty pages later. Lines of argument meanwhile cross and re-cross such that the author's central concepts are gradually fleshed out more through creative patterning—or the layering of textures, or the thickening of an atmosphere—than by way of the gradual construction of a theoretical edifice. How else, he asks, should one write about a planetary condition where "nature turns more surreal each day with ominous green-yellow vistas and bluer-than-blue skies while the snow falls one day, rising the next as mist, stripping us naked as pixies as the cosmos draws close" (19)? Taussig here...