The Mana of Mass Society

251 Pages·2017·1.498 MB·English

by  William Mazzarella

The Mana
of Mass
Society
Chicago Studies in Practices of Meaning
A series edited by Andreas Glaeser, William Mazzarella, William Sewell, Kaushik
Sunder Rajan, and Lisa Wedeen
Published in collaboration with the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory
http://ccct.uchicago.edu
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William
Mazzarella
The Mana
of Mass
Society
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago and London
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2017 by The University of Chicago
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University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.
Published 2017
Printed in the United States of America
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isbn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 43611- 1 (cloth)
isbn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 43625- 8 (paper)
isbn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 43639- 5 (e- book)
Doi: 10.7208/chicago/9780226436395.001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Mazzarella, William, 1969– author.
Title: The mana of mass society / William Mazzarella.
Other titles: Chicago studies in practices of meaning.
Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. |
Series: Chicago studies in practices of meaning | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: Lccn 2016058492 | isbn 9780226436111 (cloth : alk. paper) |
isbn 9780226436258 (pbk. : alk. paper) | isbn 9780226436395 (e- book)
Subjects: Lcsh: Mana. | Critical theory. | Anthropology—Philosophy. |
Mass media and anthropology.
Classification: Lcc Gn471.4 .M39 2017 | DDc 301.01—dc23
Lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016058492
♾ This paper meets the requirements of Ansi/niso Z39.48–1992
(Permanence of Paper).
Contents
vii Acknowledgments
1 Introduction
A Certain Rush of Energy
Part I: The Social in the Subject
33 Chapter 1: Modern Savagery
Mana beyond the Empiricist Settlement
63 Chapter 2: Ecstatic Life and Social Form
Collective Effervescence and the
Primitive Settlement
Part II: The Subject in the Social
101 Chapter 3: Anxious Autonomy
The Agony of Perfect Addressability
and the Aesthetic Settlement
137 Chapter 4: Are You Talking to Me?
Eros and Nomos in the Mimetic Archive
173 Notes
209 References
233 Index

Acknowledgments
The phrase “the mana of mass society” has been haunting me for a vii
while. It first came to me in early 2004, when I dropped it, rather
casually, into the conclusion of a lecture—thus conveniently excus-
ing myself of the responsibility of any rigorous elaboration. It re-
appeared as a section heading in my second book, Censorium, where
it framed a preliminary sketch of my reinterpretation of Émile Durk-
heim’s theory of ritual as a theory of mass publicity—a central theme
in the present book. Having now attained the declarative promise of
an actual book title, I hope that these words will also agree to the ex-
orcism that their full explication implies.
Although—or perhaps because—the questions that drive this
book have, in one form or another, been with me since as long as I
can remember, the manuscript itself emerged with startling, even ex-
plosive, speed during three intense bursts of writing in the summers
of 2015 and 2016. Between the bursts, friends and colleagues were
overwhelmingly generous in their critical engagements with various
elements of the work. This is, unabashedly, a “theory book.” But it
is also in its half- masked way the most intimate academic text I’ve
written. That so many of my interlocutors have understood this, that
so many of them have sensed the resonance between “theory” and
viii AcknowLeDGMents
“experience”—in their own lives as much as in mine—has felt like a
profound reward.
For their readings, commentaries, and suggestions, I want to
thank Sneha Annavarapu, Josh Babcock, Greg Beckett, Christian
Borch, Nusrat Chowdhury, Jean Comaroff, John Comaroff, Shan-
non Dawdy, Vincent Duclos, Maura Finkelstein, Dianna Frid, Leela
Gandhi, Rohit Goel, Guangtian Ha, Jenna Henderson, Laura- Zoe
Humphreys, Patrick Jagoda, Harini Kumar, Andrew Kunze, Amanda
Lucia, Agnes Mondragón, Sarah Muir, Nancy Munn, Sasha Newell,
Tejaswini Niranjana, Ray Noll, Eléonore Rimbault, Marshall Sahlins,
Eric Santner, Jay Schutte, Kristen Simmons, Bhrigupati Singh,
Emilio Spadola, Mick Taussig, Jeremy Walton, and Lisa Wedeen.
My coconspirators at the Chicago Center for Contemporary
Theory have, over the years, given me an intellectual home. R espect
and gratitude to—in addition to those already mentioned—Lauren
Berlant, Bill Brown, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Andreas Glaeser, Patchen
Markell, Joe Masco, Moishe Postone, Bill Sewell, Kaushik Sunder
Rajan, and Anwen Tormey. Priya Nelson, my dynamic editor at
the University of Chicago Press, somehow knew right away how to
calm my anxieties and to help me believe in the broader plausibility
of a project that, on some days, felt painfully idiosyncratic. As for
the mana of everyday and thus extraordinary life, I have, crab- like
as ever, approached it sideways, under cover of my disciplines. For
Dianna Frid, no such subterfuge was necessary. Her presence and
practice continues in so many ways to inspire my thinking about the
Sirens’ call, about wormholes, and about conceptual form as always-
already immanent life.
Introduction
A Certain Rush of Energy
A certain rush of energy. This is what the sociologist Émile Durkheim 1
wrote in his 1912 masterpiece, The Elementary Forms of Religious
Life: “The stimulating action of society is not felt in exceptional cir-
cumstances alone. There is virtually no instant of our lives in which
a certain rush of energy fails to come to us from outside ourselves.”1
One of the names that Durkheim gave to this energy, this stimulating
action of society, was mana—a Polynesian word meaning, roughly,
supernatural force or efficacy. Although Durkheim’s book was osten-
sibly concerned with “primitive” forms of collective effervescence, with
the ritual assemblies of Australian Aborigines and Northwest Coast
American Indians, it was in fact a meditation on what one could call
the vital energetics of all human societies, from the smallest to the
most complex, from face- to- face interactions to mass- mediated net-
works. Mana, Durkheim argued, was “at once a physical force and
a moral power.”2 It was a name for that feeling of “genuine respect”
that makes us “defer to society’s orders.”3 It might be embodied in
a chief’s potency or in the aura of a sacred object. But it was also
chronically unstable and leaky, perpetually and sometimes danger-
ously overflowing its containers: “Religious forces are so imagined as
to appear always on the point of escaping the places they occupy and
invading all that passes within their reach.”4