Page:The Myth of the Burning Times and the Politics of Resistance in Contemporary American Wicca.pdf/6

 organization, must find a way to “reintroduce ‘popular’ techniques of other times and other places into the industrial space” (de Certeau 1984: 26), or be “a pagan in a nine to five world,” as one author puts it (Voigt: 173-88). La Perruque involves a whole series of tactics, including the apparently wasteful use of resources through the gift - a term anthropologist Marcel Mauss made chic in a number of disciplines. De Certeau views the gift as an outgrowth of industrial society. It is a subversive tactic, “transformed into a transgression in a profit economy: it appears as an excess (a waste), a challenge (a rejection of profit), or a crime (an attack on property)” (De Certeau 1984: 27).

[16] The most effective use of la perruque lies in its ability to re-interpret or even produce stories. Stories for de Certeau are “treatments of space,” which are fields of action (de Certeau 1984: 118, 122). Stories typically function as apologies for the social order:


 * From initiation ceremonies to tortures, every social orthodoxy makes use of instruments to give itself the form of a story and to produce the credibility attached to a discourse articulated by bodies (de Certeau 1984: 149).

A bit later, de Certeau adds that stories are typically fictions, narratives that function in advertising to create the real and suppress superstition (1984: 186-87). Consumers can, however, use fictions to resist power by producing “anti-stories” (1984: 106-7). Anti-stories open up new spaces for expression, whereas “rumors totalize” (1984: 107). In this sense, the Wiccan myth of the “Burning Times,” along with contemporary ritual and practice, serves as an anti-text - a construction of la perruque designed to open up alternative spaces.

[17] De Certeau describes a victory of the anti-text over the totalizing discourse of a culture. One must remember, however, that even this anti-text with its incumbent waste and deliberate flouting of efficiency still lies imbricated within the larger culture. It is but an island, forced always to defend its boundaries through guile and legerdemain. The anti-text speaks the language of Odysseus, mired between the Scylla and Charybdis of forces that may eventually destroy it. But this is resistance. Involving neither direct confrontation nor outright avoidance, the marginal must use the tools at hand to form novel combinations. Such is the witch’s formula (Magliocco: 113-14).

[18] De Certeau’s tactics, while opening a limited space for resistance, do not totally favor the ethics of self-transformation so prominent within Wiccan discourse. For Wiccans, resistance also involves a creative aspect, one that critics like Purkiss overlook. Just because Wiccans have thus far failed - if that is the proper term - to develop a centralized movement does not mean their readings of the Burning Times lead only to feelings of victimization. Rather, Wiccans engage in what Foucault calls “Technologies of the Self,” forms of askesis or self-tranformation that aspire to “care of the self,” practices that enhance community - defined in this case as a cooperative venture on the part of individuals to help each other explore his or her subjectivity (Foucault 1997: 223-52).

[19] For Wiccans, transformation begins with individuals and extends outward to social structures. This method seeks to free itself from the “disciplinary” models that characterize contemporary social discourse, instead preferring what Foucault calls the ancient Stoic approach - a means of self-transformation that records incongruities and lapses only to help the individual improve herself or himself, rather than formulate punishment. More traditional models use an opposite approach, seeking to transform individuals in an objective, “top-down” technique, disciplining subjectivities into conformity with the “norm.” This is precisely what Wiccans resist Journal of Religion & Society