Magic and Modernity: The Spell of Our Structures

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.