But more than esoteric superstition—or, as Nadar puts it, “a vague apprehension of the Daguerreian operation”—Nadar’s written account of Balzac’s photographic reticence is also an example of what the anthropologist Michael Taussig has called the “mimesis of mimesis.” Taussig, describing a scene from filmmaker Robert Flaherty’s 1922 film Nanook of the North where an Inuk man, Allakariallak (the titular Nanook), bites a phonograph record, suggests that accounts of the “alleged primitivism” of those encountering a novel technology are just as much about those doing the accounting.
Or, as the anthropologist and art historian Christopher Pinney has put it, summing up similarly anthropological accounts of “primitive” enchantment with modern technologies of reproduction, “the native’s ‘difficulty’ with photography provides the alibi for the modern’s own desire to find in the photographer the descendants of ‘augurs and haruspices’.” In other words, reports of awesome encounters with new technologies allows the person doing the recounting to articulate the magic of the new.
For Nadar, the story of Balzac and the daguerreotype indexed Nadar’s own, almost ethnographic, desire to articulate the historical significance of the introduction of photography. The question of whether Balzac’s fear was real is perhaps less interesting than the work the story does to position the fearful encounter as simply a symptom of innovation. {read}