In this chapter and the next, I will sketch out, very broadly, the main philosophical parameters or framework in which the work of enchantment is to take place—this is like, in gardening, preparing the soil, or, in cooking, getting the pans and implements ready. First we need to appreciate the importance of enchantment, which has to do with our cultural context in which the work of enchantment takes place; then we need to appreciate what I have called “the new priority,” which is about our historical position “after the war.” Here I will refer by “the war” to the two World Wars that took up the better part of the first half of the twentieth century and that continues to spill over and break out in other places, right into today. We are conscious of war and peace in a new way which is historically unprecedented.
In the Introduction I said that enchantment is something the soul cannot do without unless it is to starve. This is not just a metaphor. There is a question: with what are we feeding our inner world? This is the most important psychological question of health and wellbeing, because we can actually destroy ourselves without even realizing it by feeding our inner world with rubbish. People can “die inwardly” even before they are dead physically. The idea of the “living dead” is not just a horror movie: it can be a psychological reality—although, of course, because our humanity cannot be erased, the dead (in this sense) can be brought back to life. There is no better tonic for the soul than enchantment. But enchantment does not just happen: one must be ready for it.
Adorno, Proust, Lou Salomé, Rilke, and Goethe are important names for enchantment. While all of these writers, except Adorno, wrote creative literature (novels or poetry), and while we will be greatly concerned with fiction, we should not imagine that enchantment is therefore “fictitious.” What do “fiction” and “non-fiction” indicate, anyway, when it comes to enchantment? Our imagination interferes with reality, in either case, transforming and deforming it, whatever “it”—reality—truly is. Adorno, Proust, Salomé, Rilke, and Goethe—whoever these people really were we will never know. And not knowing is important to enchantment because it knows that some things, sometimes the most precious things, are kept secret, or that secrecy surrounds them, and love and wisdom, philosophy that is, are full of secrets and words that have been whispered.
It is significant that, while we cannot know Adorno or Proust or the others like they knew themselves, how well did they know themselves? How well do I know myself?—or you, my reader? The truth is that we can never become objects to ourselves in experience. “Know Thyself,” the old philosophical adage, is a chimera. There are no objective measures of the soul. But we need to realize that there are no subjective measures either! And yet, judgments are possible. They are made possible on the basis of the works of art and literature that enchant us and by which we take our measure of who we are, who we have become, and who we want to turn out to be like.
Adorno sets the philosophical coordinates in this book. He studied music in Vienna with Alban Berg and became an accomplished musician and musicologist. Adorno also wrote one of the best philosophical works of the twentieth century, Aesthetic Theory (1970). He is a famously difficult writer, but we should not be put off by his reputation; in any case, we will not need to go deeply into his thinking for its own sake, but just enough to derive some sensible orientation for our understanding of the work of enchantment.
We need to appreciate (and this is what Adorno will clearly show us) that enchantment is not the same at all times and in all places. In this book we want to see what enchantment means for us in “advanced” or “developed” countries today—and, negatively, what the social disablement of enchantment means too.
There is therefore a social and critical side to my account. One cannot speak of enchantment, if one is to speak of it with any worth or validity, in isolation from the social and political milieu in which it is to exist, or which resists its existence. I will just add an introductory comment about this now, before we proceed. Just as commodity capitalism can never be green in the sense of supporting locales into which it reaches—simply because an earth-friendly economics would have to be highly socially responsive and responsible and therefore not “free”—neither can this kind of irresponsible and irresponsive capitalism bring enchantment. “Big” capitalism, as I call it, where self-interest, development, sales, consumption, profit margins, and financial reporting are all that really count, and where money is the “bottom line,” provides the simulacra of enchantment with an infinite array of entertainments, gimmicks, and distractions, nearly all of which require money. Big capitalism provides delusory substitutes for enchantment, for instance, the glamour that surrounds things instead of the aura of enchantment. Glamour is generated by a massive advertising industry driving almost everything—even, today, the news, although that particular product is by definition not supposed to be glamorous, which is precisely its glamour. Even violence and gambling are made out to be glamorous. The point is that glamour in our age stands in (more and more) for enchantment, but my argument is that big capitalism can never provide enchantment, only the fake substitute. Many we call “celebrities” lead glamorous lives which, very often, are totally disenchanted, but so many young people, pathetically, aspire to “be like that”; and of course they learn this attitude from adults who do not know better.
Big capitalism produces a consumer culture and in this culture even culture itself becomes industrialized, glamorized, and cultural items become things and commodities which, in a sense, steal their charm and their reality—this, following Adorno, we call “the culture industry.” These “culture industries” (using the plural so as not to lump them together as one undifferentiated entity)—and we know their brand names—are more and more decisive for children and young adults regarding their “likes,” “dislikes,” and general interests. The culture industries suck cultural capital out of society. Cultural capital, a term of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, is what has gone to “make” a culture and is therefore constitutive of it—even psychologically. Cultural capital is human creation accumulated over the centuries and despite wars, but, in our time, the culture industries replace it (for the most part anyway) with junk entertainments and leave the shell. It is increasingly difficult for enchantment to survive in this atmosphere, up against the superpowers of the culture industries that tear it down and destroy it. My point here is merely that, in my story of enchantment, the social critical edges of the subject will be evident, and in fact they are crucial to any account of the subject.
Adorno was an arch critic of big capitalism and big socialism, and no fan of popular culture. Proust, Rilke, and Goethe knew little or nothing about popular culture compared to ourselves, and the little they did know they tended to see as vulgarism. However, my own stance is that enchantment is possible in popular culture, as, I imagine, it is in any culture. For, simply, where there are human beings there is creativity, and where there is creativity there can be enchantment—and popular culture is no exception to this fact. Nevertheless, it is more difficult to grasp enchantment, as we need to, first and foremost through examples of popular culture. Proust, Rilke, and Goethe will give us easier access to the subject of enchantment. Then, with a sense of enchantment, and the work of enchantment, we will be able to think about popular culture in a more informed way. With the demise of the humanities within schools and higher education the importance of reading, listening, and gazing as ways, within individuals, of building cultural capital which later on will play out in society and snowball over time, there is hardly anyone left any longer who can explain things as naturally and easily as we find them in Proust, Rilke, and Goethe. This is why I am dipping into their writings.
Despite the culture industries, I do believe that creative individuals and teams of people are able to stand clear of it. The culture industries by no means control creativity, nor, I believe, can they contain it. A good example is the film director—and there are many great artists among them—Chaplin, Hitchcock, Pasolini, Kazan, Rohmer, and living names like Mike Leigh, Roman Polanski, Chen Kaige, and Zhang Yimou. Film directors’ artistic talents are never contained and controlled (totalized) by the film culture industry. Chaplin, wrote, directed, and starred in The Kid, even writing the musical score, and no amount of money or technological innovation can ever replace the startling genius—the truly human element—evident in a film like that. More often, of course, the director works through his or her actors and these are mediated through a huge number of differentials, such as editing or casting. But a great director will oversee the differentials. The film will be his or her work—Agnes Varda would do her own editing. The great director will and does outstrip the tendency to the complete commercialization of the genre in order to make the film an artwork. Sad then that so few films may be considered works of art as they are completely commercially oriented and therefore only industrial outputs.
Even when genres seem to belong wholesale to the culture industry, and to be most obviously industrial outputs, such as “pop” and “rap,” even then new talent can arise which is real artistic talent, in the sense we cover it in this book, to shake the industry. Take, for example, the guitarist, drummer, songwriter, and band leader Jack White, who is reinventing the raw voice and stomping boots of blues man Sun House in another century; or take the example of the entertainer and actor Tom Waits or, at the other end of the spectrum, pianist and singer-songwriter Tori Amos. Indie music is by definition made and performed outside or over and against the commercial industrialization of rock music, and while it may venture into the market to make money, to survive, its roots are not there.
And consumers are not just consumers. Many consumers are not just horrid “culture-vultures” or passive “couch potatoes,” but actually have the “savvy” to recognize the creative edge; this is enough to keep the culture industries themselves from complacency or even from ceasing to strive after “the shock of the new.” In this sense, therefore, the culture industries do not just manufacture their product, but also they are in harness with really creative individuals and teams of people. Between the monopolizing power of the culture industries and the unique power of creative individuals, there is a relationship in which the latter continues to surpass, escape, and remain “outside” the system constituted by the former. For example, Kat von D would be Kat von D with or without television. She is soulful in the sense meant in this book; and only after that is she a television “star” or “media personality.” Of course, at a certain point of “fame,” this dynamic becomes confused, which is one of the problems of fame and why it can indirectly, as a result of the “pressure,” break and destroy “stars” as well.
By naming names from popular culture, as I have just done, one immediately faces the trouble that these names also indicate judgments of taste that someone else or even everyone else can easily disagree with and, therefore, disagree with everything else I have got to say. If we want to understand the work of enchantment, or what it can mean for a woman to be an enchantress, it is better to go back to Rilke and Lou Salomé, as we shall. Once we have established with their help what we mean, it will be much easier to see it in the popular sphere. This then is our tactic.
Let us not blame big capitalism and the culture industries alone for disenchantment: religion can kill enchantment just as well as glamour. Religious pomp, on one hand, and religious Puritanism, on the other, are both inimical for enchantment and therefore for the soul. The trouble is that a person can be very religious but totally soulless. Not much theology at all attends to this problem, but it can be a real problem in real communities. By religious “pomp” I mean retrograde ritualism, ritual pietism—even reification and fetishism under the guise of “holiness”; and by “Puritanism” I mean the stripping back of all the “trappings” from religion. Both opposed tendencies, which, possibly, may make us very spiritual in the eyes of others, are soul-destroying; and I cannot see how what is soul-destroying can be good for the spirit.
Reason, I believe, is the precondition for enchantment, as it is for religion that is not superstitious and not the religiosity or sanctimony by which people vainly delude themselves in the name of revelation. However, having said this, religion is hierarchical and works at different levels with different sorts of people, and so what might not be misleading at one level may seem to be so at another level; but this is all merely relative, and, overall, reason may be said to be in play throughout: from pure simplicity to the heights and depths of erudition. Among the achievements of the Italian Renaissance, which influences me, is the discovery of the experimental and properly scientific spirit, and, correspondingly, the discovery of nature, nostalgia for the past and for cultural memory, and along with these, the pursuit of scientific research.
Scientific thinking and poetic thinking are surprisingly harmonized by the work of enchantment. They are harmonized in two ways: in the nature of what we mean by “thinking,” and educationally. On this latter point—education—the philosopher Wittgenstein, in 1939, wrote of a situation that has since got worse: “People nowadays think that scientists exist to instruct them, poets, musicians etc. to give them pleasure. The idea that these have something to teach them—that does not occur to them.”1 An educative quality is one thing the sciences and the arts have in common. Education does not just “inform” us, as a lot of people mistakenly think about education; it “educes,” that is, it calls us into our personal potential, collectively, over time. Education forms culture.
“Scientific thought is, in its essence, no different from the normal processes of thinking which we all, believers and unbelievers alike, make use of when we are going about our business in everyday life.” So said Freud in 1933.2 “It [scientific thought] has merely taken a special form in certain respects: it extends its interest to things which have no immediately obvious utility, it endeavors to eliminate personal factors and emotional influences, it carefully examines the trustworthiness of the sense perceptions which are not obtainable by everyday means, and isolates the determinates of these new experiences by purposely varied experimentation. Its aim is to arrive at correspondence with reality.”3
The work of enchantment is not an escape from reality, but faces the truth of reality. Freud’s science was psychoanalysis, which, in the words of Thomas Mann, confronts “the mysterious unity of the ego and actuality, destiny and character, doing and happening.” We follow the genius of Thomas Mann in believing that there is a profound sympathy between psychoanalysis and creative literature or poetry: the one investigates the soul, the other gives expression to it as art.
To get into the work of enchantment, we need a scientific sensibility as described by Freud (which differs from the non-humanist definition of science in terms of methodology and technology), but we also need art and artistic sensibility. Poetic thought (taken in the broad sense) and art are imaginative. “The imagination is regulated by art, especially by poetry. There is nothing more frightful than imagination without taste.” So said Goethe in 1821.4 Scientific thought will correspond to the external world within the bounds of bare reason—and imagination will clothe bare reason within the bounds of the ethical sense written on our hearts—if imagination is to be tasteful, or, as we will say, soul-making. Our inner freedom is the precondition for soul-making, as it is for moral responsibility; but these are merely fine words and, without the work of enchantment making light of them, they become the prerogatives of the sanctimonious and moralistic.
Poetic thinking too has its reasons. Scientific thought, properly conceived, and poetic thought, also properly conceived, need not be contraries. In these pages they are woven together.
“The relationship of the arts and sciences to life is very different, depending on the level at which they are situated, on the conditions of the time, and on thousands of other chance factors. For this reason no one can easily make sense of the whole.” So wrote Goethe.5
Many before and since Goethe have deluded themselves (and others) that they could make sense of the whole, but enchantment of the soul is infinite and the only absolute is in the individual case. And yet the intention that seeks to make the incomprehensible comprehensible is honorable in itself.
Working within these parameters for sane and sociable thinking, “we all, believers and unbelievers alike” will find in the story about enchantment that follows important clues toward a philosophy of life, especially with regard to the fulfillment or frustration of our desires; and I hope we will see, in no uncertain terms, the importance of enchantment.
Notes
1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value. ed. G.H. von Wright, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 36e.
2. Sigmund Freud, “On the Question of a Weltanschauung” (1933), in An Outline of Psychoanalysis, trans. Helena Ragg-Kirkby (London: Penguin, 2003), 159. (Italics added to original)
3. Thomas Mann, “Freud and the Future,” in Essays of Three Decades, trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter (London: Secker & Warburg, 1946), 411–12.
4. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Reflections in the Spirit of the Wanderers,” in Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years or The Renunciants. Goethe’s Collected Works, Volume 10, trans. Jan van Heurck, Krishna Winston (New York: Suhrkamp, 1989), 301. (Henceforth: Journeyman Years)
5. Ibid., 299.