The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of men, is a demand for their real happiness. The call to abandon their illusions about their condition is a call to abandon a condition which requires illusions.
- Marx, Introduction to a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of the Right

Much of the ritual performance I have seen has had a political agenda attached to it. I still believe, more strongly than ever, that art should not attempt to seal itself off from politics, so at least in this aspect, I have respect for the efforts of Neo-Shamanistic artists. I see Pseudo-Shaman practice however as an ill advised homeopathic cure. Ultimately they reproduce the alienation they seek to overcome. Suzi Gablik seems to suggests that this neo-shamanism is another manifestation of the artist escaping the studio, and thus a move towards greater social/political efficacy, but where does the artist escape the studio to? To the primeval forests or to the streets of the contemporary city? Gablik, unable to see the historical developments which have lead to the the city as the site of the modern struggle, would rather wash her hands of it and return to the forest. This may ultimately be the central issue in regards to performance, a movement founded on the idea of the artist escaping the confines of the studio, the gallery, the museum in order to make life more immediately the basis for the production of art. Where do we escape to, the Tutonic forest mythically beyond the historical struggles of class or to the streets of the city.

The Narcissistic Omnipotence as a result of Political and Economic Disempowerment

"I can't bear the thought of being freed by anyone but myself"1

Analyzing this "reinvention of shamanic form" in its historical context, not as an expression of a trans- historical practice of an abstract "natural man", but as the outgrowth of purely contemporary concerns, one sees that the beliefs and actions of neo-shamanistic performers complies very closely with Freud's description of the Narcissistic/Omnipotent stage of child development. It is important to distinguish this infantile narcissism from vanity. It is a reaction to an overwhelming world in which one feels powerless. When an infant finally produces or discovers the boundaries of its self, the infant finds itself with no power to control its circumstances. In reaction, the infant attempts to return to the undifferentiated moment, but this time to retrieve power over the other which was so shortly perceived as part of the self. The infant imagines itself as actually in control of everything accompanied by the belief that everything is part of the self.

But why do we find performance artists returning to this moment? Capitalist society creates infantile individuals, in order to reproduce its own mode of production. So the construction of an imaginary omnipotence embedded in infantile relations is not altogether beyond understanding. One finds the reasons for the construction of an imaginary omnipotence both in the larger social formations of capital, the sense in which it creates feelings of social alienation. Then again, in the related phenomenon by which the individual feels ineffectual to change the conditions which have caused this alienation for the very fact that they are alienated. Capitalism, by its very nature is alienating and disempowering. To the extent that money is power, and the worker is economically exploited (paid less than his labor is worth), his power is systematically removed from him.

In the face of the individual's position in society, one feels unable to function to effect change. One desires to change one's position, and to transform society, but is unable to do so alone. One may lack the relation to a group large enough to make these changes collectively. At the same time, even when in a group large enough to make such changes, say a political party, one feels unable to have a meaningful impact on decisions made within the group itself.

Neo-shamanism seems to fulfill this need for relation to some larger group. It is a claim of membership to the largest possible group, "I am at one with all," while placing oneself in absolute control of this group, at its center "I have the godhead within me." With the lack of real power to change, because collective problems demand collective solutions, we find the Pseudo-Shaman presuming superhuman-supernatural power (as well as a privileged insight and relationship with nature to justify it) in order to solve these problems alone. This is done without engaging others, and in doing so buttresses the embattled feelings of personal power, importance, and efficacy. What the neo-shaman is left with is truly an absolute belonging, the need to matter and belong to everyone, but as such it is a resignation from all the contingent, frustrating, partial, and disappointing belongings of everyday life. By returning to an immediate and internally constructed community one does not have to risk rejection, or conflict of need with others, one does not allow for difference. By assuming a spiritual connection with others, we deny them the right to have difference, to be other than ourselves, or more succinctly, to be different than our projections of them. Further, this is personally impoverishing, as one does not allow these contingencies, and the conflicting views and desires of others to bring learning or change in oneself by allowing the other to be outside of one's mind. One privileges an imagined inner communication, a projection of the other which eclipses lived social relations, removing the pain and loss of these relations along with the joy and pleasure.

Pseudo-Shamanism valorizes traumatized individuals, relieving them of dealing with the real social origin of their trauma, and by validating them as shamen, in essence giving them license to forego mere corporeal and collective answers to these issues in favor of personal, spiritual and otherworldly answers. These feelings of narcissistic omnipotence in turn allow for the development of a theory of symbolic efficacy. If the narcissistic mind set allows one to posit a shared unconscious, then symbolic acts of self transformation can be seen to have a universal impact. But such a position is on the one hand an idealism, which is very close to the mind set of Capitalism itself, and on the other an entirely safe way for Capital to allow for the illusion of opposition, while guaranteeing it is not effective.

Signification, Idealism, and the efficacy of Signs in Shamanism and its complicity with Capitalism

It is worse when the symbolic entirely eclipses effective action. Purifying the Rio Grande with a thimble, as one of Gablik's heros undertook, only provides alibis for not getting involved in a community petition against the plants dumping their waste into the river, for increasing regulation or enforcement of regulation, or better yet actually overturning the system of economic power and subjugation of which such pollution is only one of numerous symptoms. This reliance on the symbolic as means to transformation reinforces a divisive disjuncture of symbolic action and practical action. This disjunction has proven important in the past to capital. The freedom of speech clauses (with their various abridgements) are the perfect means to provide an outlet for oppositional forces; at the same time the system uses this release as a guarantee of truly open and democratic space as a means to stop others from resisting.

This construction of the unconscious may appear to demand a collective, but as already noted, it is really based on a belief in self sufficiency and faith in the rugged individual for whom the collective is better left imagined. Such a construction of the individual reminds me of the ad in which the Indian cries on the side of a freeway as someone throws a gum wrapper or a cigarette out the window of a passing car. It places the responsibility for pollution on the individual, not on corporations who have overpackaged the gum, or any on other larger social groups for not developing effective mass transportation, or demanding stronger pollution control from the manufacturers. It is a little known, but well documented fact that the corporations which got a tax write off for public service for producing this spot are among the nation's worst corporate industrial polluters, and well over half of pollution is industrial in origin. Considering that all the polluting agents are mass produced, and hard sold to a public alienated by their economic position, we can safely trace all pollution back to the corporate boardroom.

Further, such a position in which symbolic action has material efficacy is pinned to the same idealist metaphysics (often veiled in an interpretation of Eastern tradition, which I find equally suspicious) which is essentially the same as the metaphysical propositions necessary for Capital, and in particular the law of value to operate. It is exactly such a denomination of things to signs which allows objects to be exchanged in a system defined by the abstract sign of their monetary value. Strangely enough, despite the equally misguided cries to abandon the materialist greed of Capitalism (in part recapitulated in the asceticism which often attends pseudo-shamanic spirituality), Capitalism itself operates, has always operated on the basis of a system of signification. That is, the reduction of everything to the code of money, a sign to which all else is reduced, everything can be bought and sold. Marx notes in the Grundrisse, "Capital takes on an immaterial quality precisely because Capitalism is the social relations and not the objects themselves." Both Marx and Debord note that Capitalism is the materialization of idealist philosophy and Christian other-worldly values, "Philosophy, the power of separate thought and the thought of separate power, could never by itself supersede theology. The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion. Spectacular technology has not dispelled the religious clouds where men placed their own powers detached from themselves; it had only tied them to an earthly base. "3 It is for this reason more than any other, neo- shamanism's investments in reproducing the subject and ideology necessary to perpetuate Capital, that I am opposed to the re-emergence of "shamanism." Neo-Shamanism not only fails to resist the alienation of capitalism, but in fact only reinforces it. The Mythic world view Fatalism and the Naturalization of History: The function this serves in capital- naturalization/reification- the Myth of the primitive and the return to Eden Third world colonialism and the cultural colonialism and MNC's Such a faith in the symbolic is often tied to, as Neo-Shamanism is, the reconstruction of a mythic world view. However such a world view is not benign:

"Within myth, the passage of time takes the form of predetermination. The course of events is said to be predestined by the gods, written in the stars, spoken by the oracles, or inscribed in sacred texts. Strictly speaking, myth and history are incompatible. The former dictates that because human beings are powerless to interfere in the workings of fate, nothing truly new can happen, while the concept of history implies the possibility of human influence upon events, an history with it, the moral and political responsibility of people as conscious agents to shape their own destiny. "Myths give answers to why the world is as it is when an empirical cause and effect cannot be seen, or when it cannot be remembered. Although they satisfy the desire felt by being for a meaning-filled world, it is at the high price of turning that world back upon them as inescapable fate."4

We find that what is available here is a means to escape the responsibility for change. If it is natural that things recirculate and stay the same, then it is also true that nothing we do can change them. We can rest assured then that we are incapable of resisting the very real changes that capital inflicts upon us, for the fact that it too is only part of the natural process. The myth of progress not only naturalizes unchecked capitalist development in the West, but also our right to "manifest destiny." Our societies' construction of a natural need to survive is of course ideological, and functions to keep us from asking under what circumstances is life worth living, as anything which is natural is beyond change and therefore beyond question. This natural need to survive also is commonly used as a means to justify the existence of class and the violence necessary to hold classes in place under the general rubric of "Social Darwinism." In short Capital justifies its excesses through its own naturalization, survival of the fittest.

Ritual performance seems to search for its solutions in the past, but not in history, rather in a mythical construction of the past designed as it were to tautologically support its own claims. The belief that the myths are eternal forms only serve to hide that they always change in relation to the needs of power. Bourgeois reconstructions of history and the primitive have certainly aided them in their domination of class and culture alike. Nietzsche found a similar construction of the "primitive" in the Wagnerian Opera, an art form which probably in truth shares more with these pseudo-shamen than any healing rituals they claim as precedent.

"...they could abandon themselves to the dream of having descended once more into the paradisiacal beginnings of mankind… Here we can see into the innermost development of this thoroughly modern variety of art, the opera: art here responds to a powerful need, but it is a non-aesthetic need: the yearning for the idyllic, the faith in the primordial existence of the artistic and good man."5

Opera is not the reconstruction of tragedy but the reconstruction of history for the fulfillment of purely contemporary needs, and in todays' society as in Nietzsche's, the "past" serves as a basis to legitimate a flee from the responsibility for the production of the present. Such a need to escape modernity in its entirety, forsaking the good along with the bad, this position again repeats the infantile tendency to see things only in absolute terms. Not only does it see the present as all bad, but it also idealizes the past.

I should emphasize that the retreat from the oppression of urban life is not viable for the masses of people. We no longer have the option of a collective retreat to the woods. We may find there are more humane ways of organizing our living and working space for the sake of our own sanity, if not for the maintenance of our environment, but communal life in the forest is not a solution except for the few that can afford to leave their jobs, and the pleasures of modern existence. The industrial revolution, like the shift from hunting and gathering to agrarian life before it, was brought on by the inability of the land to provide. One look at Somalia or Ethiopia several years ago, in contrast to Southern California reveals the difference between long droughts in developed and under-developed countries. Unless one wants to mythologize and æstheticize the pain of starvation, I would prefer to be in L.A. smog, insurrections, and all.

Demands to remove the ugliness of industrial production are generally responded to by removing them from our sight; this is the meaning of "post" in post industrial. We can move the auto-plants to Mexico, `we can live in the suburbs,' we can try to regain a pastoral life on the land. All of these amount to a rejection of the same thing, a rejection of something (or seeing something) which demands transformation. A rejection of responsibility and a rejection of all the possibilities for the realization of human desires in a retreat to fulfilling needs, most dangerous of all, personal needs, needs which also reject their social and ideological origins.

There is a colonialist attitude in Neo-Shamanism as well, to go elsewhere is to go back in time. By escaping the polis these artists hope to escape the whole of modernity, but modernity is not only an external construction, but an ideology which shaped these subjects themselves. They cannot but colonize the natural world with their own modernist view of it. Perhaps more importantly, it creates a benign apolitical map of the world, one which covers the more insidious map of the post-modern. This hidden map would show the actual power relations between developed and undeveloped countries, along with the attendant flow of goods, resources, and exploitation of labor based on this mapping.

Conclusion

Furthermore, many of these rituals appear as a retreat from the "modern" world. Indeed, one should, I believe, have a critical position in relation to the despotic destruction of an economy which produces and consumes for its own sake without regard to quality of life or environmental damage, leading ultimately to the foreshortening of this planets viability. But one cannot abstract the problem or the solution from the social and historical forces which have brought about this crisis. On the one hand, urban life is the result of social developments which came out of real improvements in living; medicine and technologies which allow people to live longer in more comfort, resulting in a population boom,. Ironically, the systems of power which attended this growth, in terms of organized, more efficient production, in short Capitalism, have become a means to enslave humanity. One finds these gains reduced to an extended and more comfortable slavery. We are all interconnected, we are all dependent on the same resources of the same planet, but these connections are material and historical. When one denies the material and historical nature of these connections, in the ideology of spiritual connection, one has consigned oneself to complicity with ones oppressors. We must work together for change, with our bodies and our minds, not with our minds outside our bodies. The struggle today, and it is a struggle, is to re-invest our bodies, our corporeal action with meaning.

The repressive aspects of Capitalist production are held in place on the one hand by an ideological system, which can be addressed and manipulated by symbols. But when the belief system which attends power is in real crisis, you better believe that the material force of oppression will come into play. If you sit down in the middle of any large city's street and present yourself in protest to the oppression of the city, you will be dragged as roughly as possible by police out of that street. They prefer pulling you by the hair or by the collar (to choke you) if they have the opportunity and they will put your handcuffs on too tight so your hands swell up and get numb. No amount of prayer or meditation will stop this. Multi-national Corporations are not afraid of Mantras and they will do nothing to increase job safety of the quality of life of their Third World employees because you chant and dance naked in the woods. They will not stop dumping toxic chemicals into lakes, will not of their own accord spend money on double hulled oil tankers, if you chant on the beach in costume, even if you become the Mother Goddess. People have been involved in Pseudo- Shamanism for the last twenty years and to my knowledge I have never known one oil spill to dissipate, one square inch of earth to be "healed," one landfill to vanish. In fact the situation has gotten worse. I believe that these companies love the Mantras, the prayer beads, the tarot decks. Not only do they make millions if not hundreds of millions of dollars off the New Age Industry, they know that you are safely invoking spirits instead of organizing for meaningful political action. I would say Marx perhaps said it best, most succinctly, in the Paris Manuscripts "religion is the opiate of the people", had Nietzsche not outdone him in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, "I entreat you brothers, remain true to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of superterrestrial hopes! They are poisoners, whether they know it or not."

1 La Rochefoucauld quoted in Lacan Ecrits pg 13
2 Suzi Gablik, ", ", NewArtExaminer Vol #
3 Debord, Society of the Spectacle, section #20, Black and Red, Detroit, 1983
4 Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, pg. 78 MIT, Cambridge, 1989t
5 Freidrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, Trans Walter Kaufmann,pg. 155, Random House, NY, 1967