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The Enchantment of Modern Life
Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics
By Jane Bennett PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2001 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4008-8453-7
CHAPTER 1
The Wonder of Minor Experiences
Queasiness
"Tereza was born of the rumbling of a stomach." That is how the novelist Milan Kundera describes the genesis of one of his characters. I take Kundera to be referring to his own affective state as he sat at his typewriter one day. Queasiness is something he felt, but it also participated in thought: the quivering sac in his abdomen helped to conceive the nervous, needy persona of Tereza. Indeed, a discomfiting affect is often what initiates a story, a claim, a thesis.
The story I tell is of a contemporary world sprinkled with natural and cultural sites that have the power to "enchant." It is a story born of my own discomfort in the presence of two images circulating in political and social theory. The first is the image of modernity as disenchanted, that is to say, as a place of dearth and alienation (when compared to a golden age of community and cosmological coherency) or a place of reason, freedom, and control (when compared to a dark and confused premodernity). For me the question is not whether disenchantment is a regrettable or a progressive historical development. It is, rather, whether the very characterization of the world as disenchanted ignores and then discourages affective attachment to that world. The question is important because the mood of enchantment may be valuable for ethical life.
The second source of my queasiness is the image of ethics as a code to which one is obligated, a set of criteria to which one assents or subscribes. In this picture, the affective dimensions of ethics are drawn too lightly. Codes and criteria are indispensable parts of ethics, and surely they will not work without a sense of obligation or subscription. But these last things are still not sufficient to the enactment of ethical aspirations, which requires bodily movements in space, mobilizations of heat and energy, a series of choreographed gestures, a distinctive assemblage of affective propulsions. Nor can they nurture the spirit of generosity that must suffuse ethical codes if they are to be responsive to the surprises that regularly punctuate life.
This book tells a story of contemporary life that accentuates its moments of enchantment and explores the possibility that the affective force of those moments might be deployed to propel ethical generosity. It claims both that the contemporary world retains the power to enchant humans and that humans can cultivate themselves so as to experience more of that effect. Enchantment is something that we encounter, that hits us, but it is also a comportment that can be fostered through deliberate strategies. One of those strategies might be to give greater expression to the sense of play, another to hone sensory receptivity to the marvelous specificity of things. Yet another way to enhance the enchantment effect is to resist the story of the disenchantment of modernity.
For that story has itself contributed to the condition it describes. Its rhetorical power has real effects. The depiction of nature and culture as orders no longer capable of inspiring deep attachment inflects the self as a creature of loss and thus discourages discernment of the marvelous vitality of bodies human and nonhuman, natural and artifactual. While I agree that there are plenty of aspects of contemporary life that fit the disenchantment story, I also think there is enough evidence of everyday enchantment to warrant the telling of an alter- tale. Such sites of enchantment today include, for example, the discovery of sophisticated modes of communication among nonhumans, the strange agency of physical systems at far-from-equilibrium states, and the animation of objects by video technologies — an animation whose effects are not fully captured by the idea of "commodity fetishism."
To be enchanted is to be struck and shaken by the extraordinary that lives amid the familiar and the everyday. Starting from the assumption that the world has become neither inert nor devoid of surprise but continues to inspire deep and powerful attachments, I tell a tale designed to render that attachment more palpable and audible. If popular psychological wisdom has it that you have to love yourself before you can love another, my story suggests that you have to love life before you can care about anything. The wager is that, to some small but irreducible extent, one must be enamored with existence and occasionally even enchanted in the face of it in order to be capable of donating some of one's scarce mortal resources to the service of others.
In the cultural narrative of disenchantment, the prospects for loving life — or saying "yes" to the world — are not good. What's to love about an alienated existence on a dead planet? If, under the sway of this tale, one does encounter events or entities that provoke joyful attachment, the mood is likely to pass without comment and thus without more substantial embodiment. The disenchantment tale does reserve a divine space for enchantment; in my alter-tale, even secular life houses extraordinary goings-on. This life provokes moments of joy, and that joy can propel ethics. I experiment in this book with a fable of everyday marvels in order to uncover and to assess the ethical potential of the mood of enchantment.
A Brief Phenomenology of Enchantment
As I'm using the term, enchantment entails a state of wonder, and one of the distinctions of this state is the temporary suspension of chronological time and bodily movement. To be enchanted, then, is to participate in a momentarily immobilizing encounter; it is to be transfixed, spellbound. Philip Fisher describes this as a "moment of pure presence":
[T]he moment of pure presence within wonder lies in the object's difference and uniqueness being so striking to the mind that it does not remind us of anything and we find ourselves delaying in its presence for a time in which the mind does not move on by association to something else.
Thoughts, but also limbs (to augment Fisher's account), are brought to rest, even as the senses continue to operate, indeed, in high gear. You notice new colors, discern details previously ignored, hear extraordinary sounds, as familiar landscapes of sense sharpen and intensify. The world comes alive as a collection of singularities. Enchantment includes, then, a condition of exhilaration or acute sensory activity. To be simultaneously transfixed in wonder and transported by sense, to be both caught up and carried away — enchantment is marked by this odd combination of somatic effects.
Fear, accompanying such an extraordinary state, also plays a role in enchantment. The thirteenth-century writer Albertus Magnus described wonder as " 'shocked surprise' ... before the sensible appearance of a great prodigy, so that the heart experiences systole. Thus wonder is somewhat similar to fear. ..." But fear cannot dominate if enchantment is to be, for the latter requires active engagement with objects of sensuous experience; it is a state of interactive fascination, not fall-to-your-knees awe. Unlike enchantment, overwhelming fear will not becalm and intensify perception but only shut it down.
The mood I'm calling enchantment involves, in the first instance, a surprising encounter, a meeting with something that you did not expect and are not fully prepared to engage. Contained within this surprise state are (1) a pleasurable feeling of being charmed by the novel and as yet unprocessed encounter and (2) a more unheimlich (uncanny) feeling of being disrupted or torn out of one's default sensory-psychic-intellectual disposition. The overall effect of enchantment is a mood of fullness, plenitude, or liveliness, a sense of having had one's nerves or circulation or concentration powers tuned up or recharged — a shot in the arm, a fleeting return to childlike excitement about life. Historians Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park note that, in early modern Europe, the terms for wonder and wonders — admiratio, mirabilia, miracula — "seem to have their roots in an Indo-European word for 'smile.' "
One also notes that the word enchant is linked to the French verb to sing: chanter. To "en-chant": to surround with song or incantation; hence, to cast a spell with sounds, to make fall under the sway of a magical refrain, to carry away on a sonorous stream. The philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari describe the refrain as having a transformative or "catalytic function: not only to increase the speed of the exchanges and reactions in that which surrounds it, but also to assure indirect interactions between elements devoid of so-called natural affinity, and thereby to form [new] organized masses." In other words, the repetition of word sounds not only exaggerates the tempo of an ordinary phrase and not only eventually renders a meaningful phrase nonsense — it can also provoke new ideas, perspectives, and identities. In an enchanting refrain, sense become nonsense and then a new sense of things. The refrain, say Deleuze and Guattari, "turns back on itself, opens onto itself, revealing until then unheard-of potentialities, entering into other connections, setting [things] ... adrift in the direction of other assemblages." I emphasize throughout the book the ethical relevance of such "sonority." The last two chapters focus on the sonorous dimension of language, which makes possible plays on words, the spell-binding effect of stories told aloud, the enchantment power of chants.
Reuse and Recycle
Near the beginning of Franz Kafka's The Trial, it is mentioned that an old woman stands at the window directly across the way from Joseph K.'s room. A bit later, we are told that she peers in at K. "with truly senile inquisitiveness." Then, after K. has been informed of his arrest, we read that the old woman has "dragged to the window an even older man, whom she was holding round the waist." Finally, we learn that "the two old creatures ... had enlarged their party, for behind them, towering head and shoulders above them, stood a man with a shirt open at the neck and a reddish, pointed beard, which he kept pinching and twisting with his fingers." The old lady and her entourage are not mentioned again in the story; neither is there the slightest intimation of their relevance to the plot, which ostensibly concerns K.'s dogged pursuit of his accusation. Indeed, it was only after several readings that it occurred to me to wonder about them at all.
The onlookers are easy to ignore because they do not participate in the narrative quest — for justice, for someone in charge, for insight into the law — in which K. and I are caught up. The onlookers and their actions might be explained as red herrings, were it not for the fact that everything in Kafka's book is one, at least with regard to the mystery of K.'s crime. Every decision, event, proclamation, project, and scene are described with precision, but each is ultimately as rheumy as the old woman's eyes.
It seems, then, that Kafka crafts his story of the trial from the bits of experience ordinarily discarded as irrelevant to such a story. Instead of recounting those events that contribute to the reader's narrative preoccupation, Kafka names other contemporaneous events that constitute other stories. The Trial is less a photograph of Joseph K.'s trial than its negative: "background" objects are vivid, while one strains to discern the slightest trace of the "foreground." You wake up one day and are arrested without cause; your indignation grabs you by the throat and motivates your quest for vindication. But even as the warders make the charge against you, even as your affect kicks in, even as you hurry to clear your name, someone across the street glances out of her window, and someone near that woman puts on his shirt, leaves it open at the neck, and twists the hairs of his beard. These acts fall into the shadow of your rushing, indignant body. You note them — they are within the purview of your experience — but you pass them by. But if you were to gather up these dark, discarded scraps and peer into them, you would be on a different path, the path of a Kafkan tale.
Kafka's stories might thus be read as a literary form of garbage-picking, or "reusing and recycling." What I try to do in this book is something similar: to pick up some of the experiences that lie in the wake of a familiar story — not the tale of a man wronged, but of a civilization somehow wronged because it has been "disenchanted." The disenchantment of modernity is, I contend, a powerful and rather pervasive narrative in contemporary politics and political theory. It goes something like this:
There was once a time when Nature was purposive, God was active in the details of human affairs, human and other creatures were defined by a preexisting web of relations, social life was characterized by face-to-face relations, and political order took the form of organic community. Then, this premodern world gave way to forces of scientific and instrumental rationality, secularism, individualism, and the bureaucratic state — all of which, combined, disenchant the world.
The disenchantment tale figures nonhuman nature as more or less inert "matter"; it construes the modern West as a radical break from other cultures; and it depicts the modern self as predisposed toward rationalism, skepticism, and the problem of meaninglessness. Its versions vary according to what is identified as the primary target of the disenchantment process: selves can be disenchanted with ideals once held or heroes once admired, and so disenchantment can name an unhappy psychological state; the culture can be disenchanted, in that collective life no longer operates according to the cyclical logic of premodern or traditional forms and instead organizes itself along the lines of a linear mathematics or rationality; or nature can be the object of disenchantment, in that a spiritual dimension once found in plants, earth, sky is now nowhere to be seen.
There are more or less subtle, more or less convincing, versions of this tale, all of which posit some kind of absence or loss in the modern condition. The tale is flexible enough to accommodate both positive and negative valuations of the disenchantment process; it is told both by those who celebrate it as the fall of superstition and confusion and by those who lament it as the loss of contact with a meaningful moral universe. Even the celebrators, however, convey a sense of loss: the inevitable price for rationalization or scientization is, they say, the eclipse of wonder at the world. Max Weber makes this point when he says that life in a disenchanted world is stamped with "the imprint of meaninglessness." In this world, "there are no mysterious, incalculable forces that come into play, but rather ... one can, ... in principle, master all things by calculation." Weber and other griots of enchantment are the focus of chapter 4.
Surely the very prevalence of the disenchantment story, even if it can be resisted, reveals something about contemporary experience. Although I want to weaken its hold, I am less its critic than its trash collector. With Kafka as my inspiration, I dust off and shine up what it discards, that is, the experiences of wonder and surprise that endure alongside a cynical world of business as usual, nature as manmade, and affect as the effect of commercial strategy. The experiences that I recycle, like those of Kafka's three onlookers, are not invaders of the major tale but underground or background residents of it.
Kafka himself chooses not to give coherence to what Deleuze and Guattari might call the "minor tales" of these residents: he prefers them as fragments. Kafka also refrains from allowing the underground men to explain themselves: he prefers to let the scrappy onlookers stand silently as witnesses to the contingency of the plot that is getting all of the attention. Neither does Kafka explore the affect that their counterstory might spark, he does not allow the reader to take the flights that it might propel, and he does not experiment with how their minor story, with different affects and propulsions, might rewire the political or ethical circuitry. But I try to do these things. I weave the moments of enchantment that I find into an alter-tale, and I imagine the impact on ethical relations that such an alternative narrative might have.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Enchantment of Modern Life by Jane Bennett. Copyright © 2001 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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