Perversion the Social Relation

82 Octave Mannonition is of no use at all. In a word, the belief must survive its refutation,even if it thereby becomes impossible to grasp and one can see nothingbut its utterly paradoxical effects.This example opens up paths of all sorts: the use of misinformation^ to propagandists ends, even if it must later be admitted that the informationgiven out was false; hollow promises; the psychology of thepractical joke; and the psychology of impostors. There is no reason thatsomeone who does magic tricks, however reasonable and lucid she maybe, should not make a living from the transformed belief that she is amagician, or that that should not greatly enhance the pleasure that plyingher trade gives her. Like the Hopi who admits that there are no realKatcinas left today, she holds a "but all the same" in reserve, one that ismuch harder to grasp than the Hopi's "but all the same," or even all butimpossible to pin down, except in little details that require interpretation.Yet sometimes it is obvious that the belief that one might supposehad been abandoned has in fact been maintained. I shall give some examplesof this; the first, which we owe to Claude Lévi-Strauss, is famous.It involves a shaman who, although he knows the tricks of his and hisfellow shamans' trade inside out, one day finds himself fascinated by anothershaman who uses the same tricks; he becomes capable of believingagain, with all his former naivete. I have summarized the story poorly,but everyone has read the essay in question and been more or less surprisedby this paradox; as he describes it, Lévi-Strauss interprets it asproof that an impostor can be his own dupe and invent an excuse forhimself in all good faith. As the preceding pages will have suggested, thereal explanation is different, and, not surprisingly, at once more obviousand more puzzling. Voltaire's treatment of imposture, which comesdown to repeating that two shamans or two Katcinas ought not to beable to look each other in the face without laughing, does not reflect thereality of the matter.Pace Voltaire, we have already begun to glimpse that there are severalways of believing and not believing. There is some slight resemblancebetween the shaman and the Hopi: the shaman too must have believednaively before repudiating his belief, although we do not know anythingabout the crisis he may have undergone when he was initiated into thetricks of his trade. However, the positions that the two end up in are notidentical: the shaman recovers his naivete, but his faith is not reinforced.