A review of Michael Taussig’s ‘My Cocaine Museum’

My Cocaine Museum (henceforth MCM) is a fascinating book, and I have held that opinion since I first read it a few years ago. After multiple re-readings and engagement with other work, I want to try and articulate why I find it such a compelling and challenging text, and ultimately a mode of scholarship worth emulating.

Providing a synopsis of the book is a challenge in and of itself, and speaks to the wide variety of subjects and issues that Taussig’s work tackles. It is at once a parody of the Gold Museum in Columbia’s central bank, the Banco de la Republica, in Bogota, a journey that is both literal (from mountains to the coast and out into the sea) and metaphorical (from past to present, from capital to violence and death), and a montage of the histories and geographies of gold, cocaine, slavery, colonialism and many other ‘things’. And it is a whole lot more besides.

I like to think about this book as a work about bodies. These bodies include those of humans, in all their sweaty, spit filled glory, but also the bodies of rivers, stones and swamps. We might even think about the economies, buildings, codes of conduct and islands that Taussig writes about as bodies: things that circulate and affect one another. By quite literally presenting all these bodies (as the Gold Museum presents its gold), Taussig traces and follows the multiple connections have with each other, and particularly with gold and cocaine. Hence I think another way of summarizing this book would be to suggest that it presents us with the complexity of a life that is at once politics, histories, economies, materials and desires, without these terms being collapsed in on one another.

MCM also takes the aesthetics of presentation very seriously, which means the poetics of the text are not simply their to make it readable – although like all the best books MCM is hard to put down. As Taussig well knows, the poetics of a text are also its force. What is a book if it is not another body, circulating in world full of them, while affecting some of them. Perhaps.

While not immediately obvious, (or perhaps not as easy to articulate at first – I’ve read the book three times now) is the brilliance of this theoretical contribution. Taussig refuses to reduce his work to generalizing signifiers (‘space of exception’, ‘actor-networks’) because he refuses to stand outside of the flows and process of which he is a part (but suggesting his work is particularistic would be a grave misunderstanding). While many advocate ‘modest’ theorization, few actually have the confidence to practice what they preach.

In my own work I have tried (and inevitably failed, but tried nonetheless) to write like this. Powerful, critical and evocative, Taussig’s work is for me exemplary (social science) research.

“This is my magic and this is why we write and why we write strange apotropaic texts like My Cocaine Museum, made of hundreds of spells, hundreds and thousands of spells, intended to break the catastrophic spell of things, starting with the smashing of vitrines whose sole purpose is to uphold the view that you are you and over there is there and here you are – looking at captured objects, from the outside. But now, no more!” (p.315)