BLACK GOO: Forceful Encounters with Matter in Europe's Muddy Margins

This article undertakes an evocative conjuration of alternative visions of materialism through consideration of intermediary states of matter. Specifically, it focuses on gelid, semiliquid, semisolid environments such as bogs, swamps, and marshes lying on the fringes of human settlement and against which the claims of reason and historical progress have often been staked. The article juxtaposes ethnographic and historical examples from 611 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 26:4 Ireland, Italy, Scandinavia, and Siberia with reflections on (among others) Bachofen, Bataille, and Hegel. In doing so it seeks both to explore the limits of certain canonical formulations of historicity and historical knowledge and to ask what new cultural and political imaginaries and what possible futures might become thinkable through a more sustained engagement with the recalcitrant materiality of Europe’s muddy margins. [Materiality; Naturecultures; Philosophy; Environmental History; Europe] NOTES Acknowledgments. I am grateful to Anne Allison, Charles Piot, and the two anonymous CA reviewers for their support and encouragement and their generous and constructive comments. Among my friends and colleagues at the University of Minnesota, I wish to thank, in particular, Jean Langford, Hoon Song, and Cecilia Aldarondo for their readings of successive drafts of this article. The present version owes much to their insightful criticisms and inspired suggestions. 1. Gaston Bachelard, in his study Water and Dreams (1983), likewise attaches particular importance to earth–water mixtures, which he identifies as “one of the fundamental schemes of materialism.” Crucially, what such mixtures reveal, for Bachelard, is an “elemental” experience of matter as substance, prior to any imposition of form: “this admixture seems to me the basis of a truly intimate materialism in which shape is supplanted, effaced, dissolved” (Bachelard 1983:104). 2. Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815–87) was born in Basel, studied law in Berlin under Friedrich Karl von Savigny and later returned to Basel, where he served as Professor of Roman law at the University of Basel and Judge of the Basel criminal court (1842–66). After publishing two works on Roman law (1847, 1848), he traveled to Greece and Italy to study the symbolism of ancient tombs. Material collected during the trip served as the basis for his An Essay on Ancient Mortuary Symbolism (1859). His best-known work, Mother Right (Das Mutterrecht), was published in 1861. His last major publication, The Myth of Tanaquil appeared in 1870 (Campbell 1992:xxxiv–xli; Davies 2010). 3. According to Bachofen, it was women themselves who rebelled against the condition of hetaerism, under which they were compelled to submit indiscriminately to the desires of men. They rose up, slaughtering or driving away the men and reconstituting themselves as Amazons, independent and self-sufficient warriors. Such a phase, though, Bachofen argues, could only be a transitory one, representing as it did a distraction from women’s “natural” vocation as wives and mothers (Bachofen 1992:104–106). Demetrian matriarchy and the concomitant shift to an agricultural way of life, represented, in turn, a victory over primitive hetaerism through the ordering of sexual relations and the exaltation of motherhood: “The man is joined in wedlock with feminine matter, and this provides the model for an intimate, enduring, and exclusive relation between the sexes” (Bachofen 1992:191). 4. The argument put forward by Apollo would not necessarily have commanded universal assent among Aeschylus’ contemporaries. Equally widely attested at the time is the view that both men and women produced semen and that the sex of a child was determined by the relative contribution of each seed (Lloyd 1983:86–94). 5. The contemporary resurgence of the primeval swamp world was to be invoked by one of Bachofen’s most enthusiastic 20th-century readers, Walter Benjamin, in his 1934 essay on Franz Kafka: “Kafka did not consider the age in which he lived as an advance over the beginnings of time. His novels are set in a swamp world” (Benjamin 1999:808). Benjamin’s essay on Bachofen (1934–35) was written in the wake of a resurgence of interest in the latter’s writings. As Benjamin noted, such interest spanned the political spectrum from communism to fascism. Marxists like Friedrich Engels and Paul Lafargue praised Bachofen’s view of the patriarchal family as a historically recent institution, while expressing reservations about the primacy accorded to religious ideas in explaining the shift from mother right to father right. The conservative Lebensphilosopher Ludwig Klages and Nazi ideologues like Alfred Bäumler 612