To read some of my work, see https://chicago.academia.edu/WilliamMazzarella

I work at the transdisciplinary intersection of classic social anthropology, critical theory, media studies, theology, psychoanalysis, South Asian studies, and esotericism. Drawing on these theoretical and methodological resources, I have published studies of the making of advertising and consumer-citizenship in postcolonial India; Indian cinema censorship as a technology of sovereignty across colonial and postcolonial moments; the enjoyments of Trumpism in the United States; the political theology of reactionary and revolutionary populisms around the world; and the disciplinary settlements and genealogies that both demarcate and conjoin anthropology and critical theory, especially around the question of what might be called the ‘energetics’ of social life.

At its heart, my work explores the dialectics of social force and social form – in other words, the restless relation between the incitement and the containment of social energies across scales from the most intimate interactions to the most impersonal structures. I am motivated by the conviction that the most unlikely archives often unexpectedly illuminate questions of very general interest, especially in zones of fundamental moral and political ambiguity. This is what has led me to focus, for example, on the enigmatic meanings and implications of charisma, on the equivocal fascination of the magic of mass publicity, and on the curious way in which crowd affect appears as a true social pharmakon: at once lifeblood and poison. Increasingly, the trajectory of my research has led me to an interest in the Möbius strip-like interchange between the ‘inner’ (esoteric) and the ‘outer’ (exoteric) dimensions of social life.

Current Projects

Each of the three projects described below deal, in quite different ways, with the relation between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ dimensions of social experience. ‘Magnetizer’ considers the existential cost of harnessing the powers of mass publicity; ‘A Secret History of the Social’ explores occult(ed) genealogies of social theory; and ‘Sidework’ examines a form of psychotherapy in which ‘subjective’ experience is understood to be non-interior.

Magnetizer: A Chronicle of Magic Found and Lost. The mystique of creative genius is an advertising cliché. But in this project, I explore its darker, more volatile aspect: what is the personal, existential cost of turning oneself into a lightning rod for the powers and desires that animate a generation?

‘Magnetizer’ has its roots in field research on the Mumbai advertising business that I conducted in the late 1990s for my dissertation and first book, Shoveling Smoke. Whereas that project was about the liberalization and globalization of Indian consumer markets in the 1980s and 1990s, the research also brought me into contact with an earlier generation. These men and women joined the ad business in the 1950s and 1960s, many of them breaking away from the expat-dominated blue chip ad agencies to form their own independent and Indian-led creative operations. This ‘creative revolution’ generation saw themselves as breaking with the colonial norms and forms of the worlds that had nurtured them. But they would themselves be displaced and rejected by the liberalizing generation of the 1980s. Driven by the arrival of commercial television in India, the liberalizing generation also claimed a decolonizing mantle, but this time in a populist and culturalist register, equating mass consumerism with democracy and often linking the project of advertising to ‘the real India’ with the Hindu nationalist mobilization that eventually led to the current near hegemony of the Narendra Modi regime.

The narrative spine of the project is the dramatic rise and fall of one man, Kersy Katrak, and the ad agency he founded, MCM. Katrak was the most flamboyant representative of the 1960s revolution in Indian advertising, combining his career in advertising with his work as a published English-language poet and an active spiritual/occult practice. Anchoring the project in Katrak’s story discloses the ‘magic’ of advertising as something more than a hackneyed metaphor, following Katrak’s own interest in mobilizing aesthetic, affective, and occult powers in the service of mass publicity. At the same time, it helps to show that the magic of mass publicity isn’t just a question of achieving mass fascination; rather, it is also, and crucially, a question of the fraught existential relationship of the advertising practitioner to the powers that they summon.

At one level, then, ‘Magnetizer’ attempts to provincialize the populist-consumerist ideology that, since the 1980s, has, as in so many other parts of the world, become dominant in India, often in combination with chauvinist-authoritarian cultural politics. From that standpoint, it is instructive to consider the work of advertising during a time when consumerism was, quite literally, politically incorrect.

A Secret History of the Social is a sequitur to my book The Mana of Mass Society (2017), which was itself a conceptual elaboration of questions that had arisen during my research for ‘Magnetizer.’ Chief among these questions is that of resonance or addressability: what tools do we have, in anthropology and more generally in social theory, for understanding why it is that we have not just meaning but meaning that matters? Why is it that some encounters, although they may be perfectly coherent at the level of meaning or cultural or personal ‘fit,’ remain indifferent, whereas others are vital and animated? In the development of social theory, such questions were, early on, often shunted over onto psychology (one thinks of Émile Durkheim’s decisive distinction between the domains of sociology and psychology). But psychology was itself the outcome of an ‘interiorization’ of forces that, until the middle of the nineteenth century, had widely been understood as ‘in the room’ - interpersonal and often public.

From the standpoint of theories of animal magnetism, for example, there was no clear distinction to be drawn between the effect that one person might have on another and the effect that a politician or a performer might have on a public – or indeed that nonhumans might have on humans. Such ideas were, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, not occult or eccentric, although they had important esoteric roots and corollaries. Nor were they by any means exclusively the province of reactionary obscurantists. Rather, they were an important dimension of the scientific and political transformations that we call the Enlightenment, and just as central to utopian revolutionary visions of the social as they were to conservative currents.

‘A Secret History of the Social’ is an opportunity to tell a different kind of story about the emergence of modern understandings of social relations, one that centers questions of resonance and addressability. I imagine it as a different genealogy of the social sciences, with anthropology playing a pivotally ambivalent role as the discipline that, from the beginning, accepted many social ontologies of resonance – as long as they were not ‘Western.’ My purpose is not, however, primarily to write an alternative intellectual history. Rather, my wager is that revisiting these neglected genealogies of our social sciences will give us subtle and creative tools with which to theorize contemporary problems of political enthusiasm, attachment, and fascination.

Sidework is a new ethnographic project on and in a therapeutic community in rural Sweden, organized around Iris Johansson, an autistic woman now in her late seventies. Johansson was nonverbal as a child and experienced other people’s consciousness in ways that we might be tempted to describe as simultaneously ‘telepathic’ and radically non-interior. Although trained in psychology and theology, she does not experience others as having psychological interiorities, but rather as externally manifesting their thoughts and feelings as vivid shapes, textures, and colours. Having developed an idiosyncratic theory and practice of communication, Johansson runs group therapy sessions in which what she calls ‘sidework’ – the nonverbal energetic and affective presence/activity of the group – transforms individuals’ abilities to cope with and transform traumatic and neurotic symptoms.

The project allows me to explore my long-standing concerns with group/crowd energies and with what psychoanalysis calls transference and projective identification in an intimately concrete ethnographic setting – a setting that pushes back on many psychological assumptions about individuated subjectivity. At the same time, it is of the greatest interest to me that Johansson herself understands the energies with which she works as just as powerfully present in public, mass-mediated settings as they are in face-to-face encounters. I am imagining ‘Sidework’ as a contribution to the anthropology of care and repair in a post-welfare-state setting – contemporary Sweden – that has a long and rich history of imagining utopian collectives. The research, which I am conducting in collaboration with Dr Amy Leia McLachlan, is in its early stages.