Spring 2023, CairoThematic Course
Magic and Modernity: The Spell of Our Structures
Course details
- Cycle
- Spring 2023, Cairo
- Length
- 8 sessions
- Format
- In person
- Taught in
- English
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About the course
The course will challenge the conventional notion of equating modernity with disenchantment, through looking at the ways in which the secular and the sacred go hand in hand. We will examine how reason does not eliminate “superstition" but piggybacks upon it; chance and serendipity lie at the core of technological life and the bureaucratic world; mechanism produces vitalism. To put it another way, we will explore the ways in which our institutions produce magic; we will historically trace the tale of modernity’s rupture from the premodern past, through looking at the enchantments of urbanization, industrialization, globalization as well as various forms of rationalization.
Modernity is primarily about our capacity as rational and logical human beings to have mastery over nature and technically perfect the human condition; Yet, our attempts to bring perfection, always bring about violence. Worlds that have certainty and clarity are always violent worlds, as Camus says: “the evil in the world comes almost always from ignorance, and goodwill can cause as much damage as ill-will...people are more often good than bad, though in fact that is not the question...they are more or less ignorant and this is what one calls vice or virtue, the most appalling vice being the ignorance that thinks it knows everything” (Camus:1991, 194). It is in our nature as human beings to scramble for certainty whenever we recognize that everything around us is in a constant flux, we try to rationally plan our days, our lives, with the hope of finding stability so we can stand straight and be at ease. As a result, the knowledge we produce aims at fixing things within concepts of thought, to hold them to account, and to make them to some degree predictable. But, we are running after world that is manifesting in ways that are fleeting, continuously trying to pin it down with our grammar and categories of understanding. This course will hopefully enable us to create a space for hesitation; by the end, we will attempt to think/imagine/become otherwise through challenging the inherited categories we so comfortably inhabit; chief of which is the tale of magic’s exit from the henceforth law-governed-world.
Who teaches it
Amina Dessouki holds a masters degree in Anthropology from The American University in Cairo. She works on issues related to development, gender, water, and the urban. She has specific interests in alternative medicine, the circulation of indigenous knowledges, decolonial thinking and practice. Children’s books are her most consoling source of wisdom, she believes they are works of existential philosophy in disguise.
Course flow
Sessions without a date
- The Dialectic of EnlightenmentAdorno & Horkheimer. (1-34; 173-174)
- The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human SciencesJason Josephson Storm. (1-16)
- Critique of Black ReasonMbembe. (1-37)
In class
- DiscussionDiscussion: Deconstructing the modern binary of “the savage mind” and “the civilized mind” - Naturalizing the fantasy of whiteness - the world of words and signs
- The Making of Indebted ManLazzarato, Mauricio. (13-37)
- The Problem with WorkWeeks, Kathi. (Introduction)
- Bullshit JobsGraeber, David. (Introduction)
In class
- DiscussionDiscussion: Faith in Money, Economic Production and the Production of Subjectivities - Why is it that we are constantly asked to defer our present in the service of this thing called the economy? What is a national economy? What does it measure, value, or represent?
- Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844Marx, Karl. (Chapter: Estranged Labor)
- The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical ReproductionBenjamin, Walter.
In class
- DiscussionDiscussion: Progress, Mass Production/Commodification, Authenticity, The Human experience after the Radio, Telephone, Cinema - What makes us human? How do we fulfill our species essence under capitalism?
- Bergson, Deleuze and the Becoming of UnbecomingGrosz, Elizabeth. Parallax 11 (2):4-13.
- Machines to Crystallize Time: BergsonLazzarato, Maurizio. Theory, Culture & Society 24 (6):93-122.
- The Multiplicity of Conscious States. The Idea of DurationBergson, Henri. In Time and Free Will. New York: Dover. Pp. 75-139. Suggested extra reading.
In class
- DiscussionDiscussion: Intelligence vs. Intuition / Past, Present, Future/ How do we want to understand the immateriality of the world we are living? How have techniques of governance of and through time by state, capital, power at large shaped our very conception of the ordinary and the everyday? Of the possible and the potential, of the now and the then and that which was? Of duration and intensity, slowness and speed of time? Have we been limited in our imagining of time to the modern parameters disciplining our bodies and minds?
- The Mana of Mass SocietyMazzarella, William. (1-33; 137-173)
- The Politics of AffectMassumi, Brian. (Introduction)
- The Wave in The Mind (Being Taken For Granite)LeGuin, Ursula.
- Why bodies matterJudith Butler. Gender Trouble Conference (Youtube).
In class
- DiscussionDiscussion: The fallacy of “I think therefore I am” / Visceral Forces and Intensities that move us / Non- conscious experiences of intensity that cannot be realized in language / The stuff of the soul and the consciousness that live in the interstices of knowledge / Moving away from the linguistic turn, which was centered around the idea that language is the primary way we understand the world
- Being AliveIngold, Tim. (Introduction)
- A Thousand PlateausDeleuze & Guattari. (Body Without Organs)
- Affective Spaces, Melancholic Objects: Ruination and the Production of Anthropological KnowledgeYael Navaro-Yashin.
In class
- DiscussionDiscussion: Animating Nature / Non-Human Agency / Alternative perspectives on the body (not as a discreet entity but as a dynamic field of relations dependent and interdependent)
- The Soul of Man Under SocialismWilde, Oscar.
- Revolution in ReverseGraeber, David. (63-98, 102-121)
- On FreedomNelson, Maggie. (Selections)
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