{"id":3008,"date":"2011-03-21T15:14:48","date_gmt":"2011-03-21T20:14:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=3008"},"modified":"2011-05-27T07:52:01","modified_gmt":"2011-05-27T12:52:01","slug":"enchantments-to-come","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/03\/21\/enchantments-to-come\/","title":{"rendered":"Enchantments to come"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Thoughts for a spring equinox…<\/em><\/p>\n

Complexity theorist (and colleague of mine here at the University of Vermont) Stuart Kauffman takes stock here <\/a>of the Enlightenment and sings of a re-enchantment to come.<\/p>\n

Disenchantment and re-enchantment are long-running tropes in the intellectual currents of modernity, which I’ve frequently explored in my writing (see here<\/a> for a quick synopsis of those explorations, and here<\/a> for an entry point into a discussion on The Immanent Frame, one of the most intelligent blogs exploring these issues).<\/p>\n

The linear narrative according to which we once lived in an enchanted<\/em> world, which then got progressively disenchanted<\/em> (by science, technology, modernity, capitalism, or what have you), and that we can feebly lament, or maybe feel called upon to reverse — a narrative that gets suggested by Max Weber and then picked up by Horkheimer and Adorno, Lynn White, Jr<\/a>., the whole field of “religion and ecology,” and countercultural thinkers like Morris Berman<\/a> — tends to be overly simplistic in its more popular forms. Historians<\/a> have more recently been probing<\/a> its limit points and gaps: the ways in which the debate ebbs and flows, appearing, for instance, in the late nineteenth century and contributing to the upsurge of late modern occultisms<\/a>, and the ways in which our world today<\/a> remains very much an enchanted one.<\/p>\n

But we shouldn’t throw out the idea either. An enchanted life is one that allows for experiences of wonder, awe, and mystery — all markers of a good childhood. These are the very things that disappear once we “mature” into the “adult” world of pre-digested, authoritative stories spelling out the way things are and our proper place within them, and admitting of no great mysteries left unsolved. Science doesn’t have to be the handmaiden of this kind of disenchantment — it is (at its best) a self-correcting enterprise that’s always throwing up new mysteries (black holes! string theory! 12-dimensional universes! dark matter! <\/em>and so on). Religion, on the other hand, is far from being the only vehicle of<\/em> enchantment; if anything, religious institutions tend to corral up the religious imagination, doling out its wonders only in the manageable chunks that allow the structure to retain its form within the marketplace of allegiances.<\/p>\n

But defined more broadly, the religious is that dimension that has always connected people to their worlds using the instruments we’ve always had for extra-human connectivity: affective bodily action, imaginative sensory extension (and compelling, nonordinary states of mind to go with it), ritual periodicity, mythic narrative, and other modes of creative relationality. The gods have always been embodiments, personifications, of the powers on which we depend and with which we flow. In this sense, it’s no wonder that Christianity in practice <\/em>always comes out looking different than Christianity in theory. While worldly<\/em> powers use religious beliefs and allegiances to pursue their own interests, earthly<\/em> powers — the ones that emerge out of our relations with the extra-human world around us — keep creeping in, turning Christ (for instance) into the dying-and-resurrecting god of an agro-vegetative cosmos, Mary into creatrix and protectress of all, saints into local deities, and so on. (I spelled out an early version of this argument in a chapter in James Lewis’s 1996 book on magical religion<\/a>, which I’ve been meaning to revisit, since my thinking has evolved a great deal since then.)<\/p>\n

Over the long haul of history, it is paganism — the creative religiosity of living in a particular place, with its forces and powers<\/a> and flows — that keeps re-emerging, because it’s most closely attuned to the neuro-ecology of the eco-human relationship. In a world in which the secular\/religious binary no longer holds, religion itself will have disappeared back into the world (or “earth,” to follow Heidegger’s distinction between the two). Or, as I’ve put it elsewhere<\/a>, like Michel Foucault\u2019s figure of man (l\u2019homme<\/em>), \u2018\u2018a recent invention\u2019\u2019 that, with a shift in structural relations, might \u2018\u2018be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea,\u2019\u2019 religion<\/em>‘s disappearance will simply be a guarantee that the elements that made it up will “persist in other forms for as long as there is sand, salt, and sea.”<\/p>\n

And enchantments will arise with it, as long as the sea remains sea — not standing-reserve, not pretty sight, but roiling, cacophonous ocean itself.<\/p>\n

Shoo—–Shaw—–Shirsh—–<\/p>\n

Go on die salt light<\/p>\n

You billion yeared<\/p>\n

rock knocker<\/p>\n

Gavroom<\/p>\n

Seabird<\/p>\n

Gabroobird<\/p>\n

Sad as wife & hill<\/p>\n

Loved as mother & fog<\/p>\n

Oh! Oh! Oh!<\/p>\n

Sea! Osh!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(from Kerouac, “Sea<\/a>,” Big Sur)<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

An admission, to round things up:<\/p>\n

The ironies here, including using a Beat poem and a much\/over-interpreted piece of Japanese art to depict “ocean” (and choosing an eco-apocalyptic reframing of that very image), are all part of the big picture. The universe, after all, is the great ironist, not a sublime silence but (as Sean Cubitt<\/a> puts it) an “excess of signification,” communicativity all the way down. It’s in opening up to that communicativity that enchantment finds us; it’s in closing ourselves off from it that it sneaks out, but always only to sneak back in disguised, and all the more shocking when we realize what’s hitting us.<\/p>\n

Happy first day of spring (for northern hemispherians; fall, for the rest).
\n<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thoughts for a spring equinox… Complexity theorist (and colleague of mine here at the University of Vermont) Stuart Kauffman takes stock here of the Enlightenment and sings of a re-enchantment to come. Disenchantment and re-enchantment are long-running tropes in the intellectual currents of modernity, which I’ve frequently explored in my writing (see here for a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[691847],"tags":[17843,17841,4430,16828,17842,417,431],"class_list":["post-3008","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-religion-spirituality","tag-biosemiosis","tag-disenchantment","tag-enchantment","tag-kauffman","tag-kerouac","tag-religion","tag-semiosis"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-Mw","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1153,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/11\/14\/stuart-kauffman-coming-to-vermont\/","url_meta":{"origin":3008,"position":0},"title":"Stuart Kauffman coming to Vermont","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"November 14, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"I'm happy to share the news (a little belatedly) that complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman will be leaving his position as director of the University of Calgary's Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics to take a position here with the University of Vermont's Complex Systems Center, which, according to Grad College dean\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Academe"","block_context":{"text":"Academe","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/academe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1028,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/02\/11\/imagination-contemporary-theory\/","url_meta":{"origin":3008,"position":1},"title":"imagination & contemporary theory","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"February 11, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"This is a summary I provided to a grad student who was starting to get into this area. It\u2019s very introductory and far from complete in its coverage, but since there\u2019s so little out there on this topic, I thought it would be useful to post it. It's also a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1032,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/02\/23\/kauffman-shaviro-goodwin-et-al\/","url_meta":{"origin":3008,"position":2},"title":"Kauffman, Shaviro, Goodwin, et al.","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"February 23, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Complexity theorist Stuart Kaufmann recently gave a talk here from his book Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion, which is getting more press these days than most books with a Spinozian\/Whiteheadian take on the emergent nature of intelligence, complexity, spirituality, and all that. Talking to\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1293,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/06\/14\/potentially-real\/","url_meta":{"origin":3008,"position":3},"title":"potentially real…","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"June 14, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"It's just a blog post, but Stuart Kauffman is drawing on Whitehead and Peirce to propose a view of reality that sounds intriguingly like Deleuze's distinction between the Virtual and the Actual. He folds over Descartes to make a new dualism: Res extensa and Res potentia. In other words, a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":12302,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2021\/12\/14\/reimagining-religious-imagination\/","url_meta":{"origin":3008,"position":4},"title":"Reimagining religious imagination","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"December 14, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Wouter Hanegraaff has proposed that we rethink the study of religion as the study of \"imaginative formations.\" Much of my research has focused on something like that, or at least on the creative role of imagination in mediating the ways people come to live in the world, shape that world,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2021\/12\/9780231189460.jpeg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":6722,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2013\/06\/19\/aar-panel-on-latours-gifford-lectures\/","url_meta":{"origin":3008,"position":5},"title":"AAR panel on Latour’s Gifford Lectures","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"June 19, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"The AAR panel responding to 2013 Holberg Prize winner Bruno Latour's Gifford Lectures has now been scheduled. 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