from Bakhtin to Deleuze. And, in his search for a philosophy as an embodied,
aesthetically engaging way of life, Dewey was making the same move as many
contemporary philosophers, back before the grand legislative experiments of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to the embodied, aesthetically engaging way
of life favoured by the Greeks and Romans, so powerfully revived by Foucault.^28
‘The bios philosophicus is the animality of being human, taken up as a challenge,
practised as an exercise and thrown in the face of others as a scandal’ (Foucault
1984 , cited in Shusterman 199 7 : 1 7 6–1 77 ).
Perhaps we really should think that thought again. Perhaps ‘we have to stop
pushing words and start moving limbs: stop talking and start dancing. Perhaps
I should say no more’ (Shusterman 199 7 : 129).^29
How it is
So how to understand a chapter which keeps on saying more when there is nothing
more to be said? As a plea. As a signpost. As an attempt to value the immaterial.
As a politics of passing. As a remembrance. And how might these ambitions
be realized when the whole point of the chapter is to value the unmarked? Perhaps
as something like a Malanggan (Küchler 1988, 1992, 2002), the ritual carving
used in northern New Ireland to take things on after death, the push briefly
incarnated in the performance of the object of social relations as one long last sigh.
Malanggan only ‘exist’ as socially salient objects, for a very short period, dur-
ing the mortuary ceremonies for important persons, during which they are
gradually inbued with life by being carved and painted, brought to perfection
and displayed for a few hours at the culminating part of the mortuary
ritual – only to be ‘killed’ with gifts of shell-money. Once they have been
killed they no longer exist as ritual objects.... The Malanggan is an object
whose physical existence can thus be measured only in days, or even hours,
as an index of agency of an explicitly temporary nature. During the brief
duration of the ceremony, the carving objectifies a dense and never-ending
network of past and future relationships between members of the land-
occupying matrilinial units which constitute northern New Ireland...
The purpose of a Malanggan is to provide a body or, more precisely, a ‘skin’
for a recently deceased person of importance. On death the agency of such a
person is in a dispersed state. In our terms, indexes of their agency abound,
but are not concentrated anywhere in particular. The gardens and plantations
of the deceased, scattered here and there, are still in production, their wealth
is held by various exchange partners, their houses are still standing, their wives
or husbands are still married to them, and so on. The process of making the
carving coincides with the process of reorganisation and adjustment through
which local society adjusts to the subtraction of the deceased from active
participation in political and productive life. The gardens are harvested, the
houses decay and become, in time, particularly productive fields, and so on.
That is to say, all this stored ‘social effectiveness’ of the deceased, the differenceAfterwords 149