thotti, play cow — review
thotti is sweating through the amazon in order to escape sociological resolution, to make ritual the arbitrary thing it needs to be to resist modernity
in the eight paragraph, thotti uses kopanawa to question if the modern western subject can still dream. "is the human kopenawa portrays—whose perfume and alcohol leave the “chest too odorous and too hot” to welcome spirits, and who “[does] not possess spirit houses or songs”—forever incapable of dreaming?" he quotes. but there is a problem here, the premise that ancestral relations, songs, and ritual infrastructures require the ability to dream already position the western subject as inherently divorced from this precondition, and also seperates thotti himself as divorced from it.
isn't posing a question such as this an epistemological failure, as in, by doing this, isn't he affirming the opposing logic to his stated goal by essentially accenting the logic as already-having-happened? as in, to welcome the logic of the portrayal of the dream as incapable is already to admit one cant dream in a way divorced from the problem of being able to dream, and thus to lose the grounding necessary to do so? if so, this leads to a seperation of the subject from the dream where every second that the dream isn't being generated, the subject's relation to the dream isn't actually being interrogated.
right after, thotti says "separated from ancestry, spirits, and cosmic meaning, thousands of people buy kopenawa’s books and venture into indigenous medicine, exotic journeys, ancestry dna tests, art and more art, and fashion reveries of shamanic materialism, seeking to excite similar psychedelia and inspire dreaming. but what does this dream truly consist of? what does this search genuinely aim for?" this list of items is already a testament to the lost dream, its less about what its seeking to accomplish and more about already arriving at the point where the dream is gone, the dream doesn't magically return if you change the way you are orienting around the question of the dream.
thotti himself mentions multiple times the non-deterministic and non-orientationalist aspect of dreaming, first by affirming kopanawa's critique "the act of duplicating not only reality but the self resonates with kopenawa’s insistence that dreaming is, above all, becoming other: “i continued to become other while i slept and the xapiri persisted in visiting my dreams.” and then far later by directly confirming that much like in his earlier example where becoming required a foreign interference and a passive agent, the parinthis festival requires the very same thing "[...] he and all the others seriously affirm that in parintins, you only choose one cow, or rather only one cow chooses you."
so therefore, by asking “can we dream again?”, thotti not only defeats his own premise due to it being positioned right after a claim about de-origination and an estrangement that has already seemingly occured, but also structurally positions the failure of his critique before the affirmation. in fact, before asking the question at the start of the very same pargaraph he answers it “white men do not know how to dream. that is why they destroy the forest this way.”. not only that, but he defeats his own premise by positioning himself as somebody who then has to implicitly accept that the western subject cannot dream. even worse, as shown earlier, this causes him to contradict his own later narrative, which, premised on a non-deterministic character of dreaming, doesn't actually ever need to encounter his earlier question.
curiously, the success of the other two chapters that come after this one, which are far more productive around this question in comparison to his opening (even if the opening itself is built as a sole treatment of this problem when the other chapters arent) don't actually depend on the conclusive frame he introduces around the end where he argues that the phenomenon of dreaming might involve a different organization of subjectivity and world altogether, because earlier in the text he already argues that the forest accepts all the contradictions of modernity, "likewise, the forest allows itself to be filled by the maps and names of el dorado [...] and progress to strangle all our dreams like a boa constrictor slowly digesting a thin, starving cow". this later point is directly mirrored in statements such as "he cow in the center of the stadium does not carry the immaculate innocence of a new world, nor a return to the old. everywhere in brazil, the cow is the bloodstained and inescapable emblem of the country’s colonization."
through this juxtaposition, thotti already sets up his trap against claims that his text “is romanticizing the amazon”, because the text itself stages that objection inside its own movement, and is aware of metaphysical overreach, and the aestheticization of indigeneity, even if his text is essentially built like something that wants to try to deliver as much of a fetishization of his own ideal as possible. “the cow in the center of the stadium does not carry the immaculate innocence of a new world, nor a return to the old.” thotti's attempt to divorce subjectivity from experience doesn't fully work, firstly because the the latent "metropolitan" western subject, who is supposedly fundamentally built on this role, and mimicked in the image of the colonizer of latin american native culture already should never have the ability to engage in the problem as anything but the contradictory "wholeness" of the forest, but more importantly, because epistemologically speaking, only an "innocent" frame that never attempts to view itself as foundational can actually enjoy the ontological benefit of a "base existence".
this ontological purity concern never directly shows up in the text, but is indirectly reflected through this section, paragraph fourty, which states "if kojève understood human specificity as the negation of an original nature, several amerindian peoples of south america comprehended nature as a negation of primordial humanity." if everything that shows up in the world is an external outgrowth of a seperate power or demiurge, then the supposed "primordial anti-naturous nature" of the amazon basin should already "swallow" the latent artifacts by its default mode. thotti includes modernity's contradictions into the festival, but it denies their specificity, simultaneously viewing them as parasitical artifacts, dialectical necessities and inescapable social realities, but then the question of determinism cannot seperate its political from its ontological character, which shows up as a contradiction between mysticism as externality and ontological primacy as an apriori internality or situatedness.
and now here suddenly comes the most ironic element in the essay. at the very start, thotti states "although the names of goethe and schiller are carved in large letters inside the amazonas theater, the amazonian sublime is not built from what thousands of unsuspecting tourists believe it is. it is not built from a rapturous gaze or a moment of encounter and identity between the megalomania of humanity and the profusion of matter. it truly arises from a permanent foreignness." so this very same primordial humanity mentioned earlier that is situated in the very same location that swallows modernity within its wider cycles of heartbreak and interconnectedness, is itself an unapproachable foreigness, but weirdly enough, it re-postulates precisely the colonizer as foreign because it fails to give him a role.
if the amazon is mystical, this solves the problem, but re-opens thotti to criticisms of romantic gesturing. if the amazon is dialectical, then foreigness is either an element that comes from outside and is processed inside, or from the inside that only later allows the outside to partially take on its roles. but in thotti's instance, the foreigner is somehow isolated from the incident, the causal driver of the history of the solution to the incident, a non-deterministic agent who cannot belong inside the problem, and also the only one who has a problem (the incapability of dreaming as a fundamental feature of modernity's failure mode and its destruction of the sacred ground of dreaming).
but in fact, as can clearly be seen by his later paragraphs, thotti denies that the amazon has the power to become a "holy ground" at all. he begins with "every life, inside and outside, stitched by the same web, is nothing more than a form taken under a profound emptiness, where i can only recognize an incomplete part of myself [...] there are no conclusions or encounters, only openings, announcements, promises, and time installments.", thotti continues with "there was no star maker in the sky of parintins, [...] there was nowhere to begin or end. so many travel to the same amazon to find where to begin or end with the world [...] i wanted to think the amazon, but it only offered me two cows dissolving and forming ceaselessly" but simultaneously argues right before this "and in those distances and losses—incessant departures between giving and taking—a form is manufactured in wonder and beauty, in the glowing and shining star on the cow."
this isn't a contradiction, thotti ends his text on a very solemn and sweet but tragic ending, arguing that the island was asking him to leave his idea of a homeland behind, to blow itself up. the cows offer an idea of a shining star, but don't functionally contain anything but a holistic understanding of the world, one where nobody has a place to begin and the entire process of becoming is one where the world unfolds as it sees fit and mixes in with everything else. but there is an impression that this is also very much the vision of the western subject, who feels that colonialism is a global or universal quest to unify all things. this vision isn't entirely true, because passive holism isn't exactly equivalent to universal unification, and the denial of a centre isnt the same as the creation of "centers everywhere" in the way that universalism may see to it, the passive holism of the amazon may simply be a "tragic, inherently inert" subsumption rather than a "unificatory, dialectical" subsumption. but, thotti never manages to show how modernity relates to the amazon, all he wants is to figure out what the amazon has to say about it, and he learns that, as one can imagine, in its passive but eternal wisdom, it hasn't much to say about it other than to either behave as an opposing or subsuming force. this makes it so that the earlier epistemology mixes in quite corruptedly with his later cosmological holism, showing that the becoming he is speaking about must inherently be a becoming of colonization in the process of unfoldment thotti is describing.
this same holism and, almost, optimistic defeatism strikes in his actual dedicated analysis of modernity's interaction with the festival in the second chapter, where even there he ends on the note "but even in this silence of still trying to decipher the cow and its play, still trying to hear the heartbeat in its forehead and everything surrounding me, systole and diastole speak the language of the heart sutra from the cow fabric: “form is emptiness, and emptiness itself is form.”. thotti is obviously righteously trying to discover what makes the festival not a part of the religion of modernity, non-visible, non-mutable, non-transcendentable, non-territorializable, all of these different traits that non contemporary assemblages contain. but by his own testament, he is "too naive in my attempts to see something beyond the coca-cola advertising boards surrounding the stadium". the visibility of what shows up last, the intensity of the perfume, signification as signifance, all of these seem to be the game of modernity, so why exactly is he playing it?
the problem the essay encounters between form and frame is never fixed, because thotti attempts to preserve premodernity by collapsing modernity into it, and by allowing the premodern to win on the condition that it leaves with dignity in the face of a power stronger than it, a power that refuses to define itself under premodernity's logic, but inherently requires a self-definition that transcends the logic of relation (in premodernity) that assumes that definition under a "situated" logic has to make sense (or better yet, makes sense so it has to - teleological continuity).
but this entire text is saved and entirely salvadged by one sole thing, the only thing this text actually is about - playing cow. the central paradox the essay states is that “here at the festival of parintins … lies an inextricable paradox: a cow is at the heart of the amazon.” playing cow is actually an example not of the holism that encounters premodernity's defeat, but of a transcendental condition that refuses premodernity's failure mode. playing cow is a simulation of colonization as a post-teleology. thotti realizes that he doesn't know what playing cow is about, and that the coca-cola advert is in the way, yet playing cow still happens. it's totally okay that the amazon basin has a stupid museum in it with schelling engraved and fake de-situated artifacts supposed to symbolize it as a center for modernity to inherently fetishize, because pre-modernity is openly "playing cow" in the face of modernity all the same.
it is clear that, once the analysis shifts to the festival itself, the earlier problem of dreaming appears less as a lost faculty and more as a relational process generated by ritual performance. the cows of parintins embody this process. they gather colonial history, commodity spectacle, religious symbolism, and collective participation into a single unstable form. the festival persists in the anthropological key of religion, the inherent arbitrariness of ritual, by comitting to a ritual that cannot understand itself, but perseveres itself by latching onto modernity's over-defined stake of (for) its own existence. the central paradox of a premodern ritual that sits in the middle of modernity's reconstruction of its own lens through premodernity's existence is that premodernity is using modernity's weapon to sustain itself as precisely not an artifact but as a thing who's sole purpose is to be that one dent that modernity can't actually fix in its self-image.
this reading is not my re-interpretation but exactly what thotti argues throughout. he claims that the “the cow of parintins is a fabric cow.”, that it is a “a dead cow resurrected in mimicry and collective phantasy.” that “pantomimes the emptiness and arbitrariness of colonial violence.” it is only thotti's framing of the situation that takes away from its ability to be itself. the festival sits somewhere in between being an image of modernity's cynicism, its latent but inert savior, its justification, or ultimately a part of the same process. it is clearly best framed as a reversal of the logic of modernity in favor of the preservation of its outcomes but not its will.
the black cow, the apparent cosmos and apparent premodernity, apparently “seems like a mirage from another reality.”, “more beautiful than any other for being more foreign.” the black cow is seemingly both the reflected and perverse inverted logic of modernity itself, but also clearly a symbol of metaphysical purity that denies itself, harking us back to the holistic concern. for thotti, when the cows are deflated they become the fabric cow of modernity, but in this deflation also lies his defeatist holism that they are symbols of the naturally occuring rupture of historical procession (not necessarily progress).
yet clearly they are different, the deflation of the cows is the festival ending and clearly can only be a mark of modernity, only their persistance can be a symbol of an alternate logic to modernity. they don't "become" modernity when they deflate, they become it most when they persist, when they are able to challenge it by existing in correspondence to it. modernity simply conquers them when they dissapear, which is why when the fabric cow shows up, commodification and industry return as "natural" elements to the environment rather than the forceful parody that the white cow supplements, “the cow falls silent amid the slumber [...] it would be easy to slaughter it now.”
the entire worldview espoused by thotti can fit into bahnsen's view of modernity, where julis bahnsen argued that dialectics itself is not a determine will but an unfolding process of base reality, connected to being rather than becoming, and always ending in negativity, arguing that contradiction itself cannot possibly be resolute. this type of "progressive antithesis" itself can be a productive current, and is clearly visible in the essay. the holism doesn't uphold contradictions but breaks them apart, there are a total of twenty nine cow metaphors in the essay, and this deterritorialization of the cow is an operation of modernity, the clearly defunctionalized character of the cow is a sign of processual contradiction. thotti is performing in the essay a type of deterritorialization of modernity, maybe even a first of its kind, given that his argument is not "positive/constructive" enough to neither protect the amazon nor to actually allow modernity to have any function in correspondence to it. this staunch negativity can only be produced by a powerful modern logic, one that allows the amazon to fight back