"The much-applauded interactivity of today’s media is an illusion, a trick and a trap. In pushing us to assume a harried, impatient posture of perception, reflexive rather than reflective, the screen is really a means of avoiding the kind of deep intellectual and emotional engagement that Heaney and Muñoz experience. We might today be quick to characterize their posture of calm, steady observation as “passive,” but as Muñoz makes clear, it’s anything but. It’s only through the contemplative gaze that we activate our sensory, imaginative, and interpretive faculties to the fullest, that we become most in touch with the world."
Funnily enough, I was also thinking of Sacasas' essay when I read these words. The issue surrounding the lexicon related to enchantment notwithstanding, I enjoy that both he and Carr propose that an attentive, contemplative gaze is the way through which we activate our "faculties" to the fullest.
Carr is correct: the "interactivity" offered by social media is a trick and a trap. While humans need and crave diversion, we are coming to understand that if one spends most of their time "interacting" with screens, one is by default unable to activate those faculties listed by Carr above.
If we spend most of our time in that particular realm, we are less able to not only enjoy the finer contemplative things in life, but we also may very well suffer with our interpersonal relationships (and not to mention our relationship with our own selves). Only by spending time being attentive to ourselves and our world are we best able to understand and appreciate them, and so while the occasional screen-based diversion is a joy, it's not primarily where we should be spending our time if we're interested in self-actualization.
I very much enjoyed the lengthy quote of Hawthorne's. It's reminds me of the (admittedly little) Zen I have studied.
I would be very interested to see Sacasas respond to this essay, as well. Here's hoping he's reads it!
Your developing line of thought and insight in this series is quite absorbing.
For whatever it's worth, I highly recommend the work of Jeffrey Kripal as an example of first-rank thinking among the re-enchantment crowd. Kripal is chair of the religious studies department at Rice University, and from that position of formal mainstream academic respectability, he has launched a sustained and sophisticated reevaluation of the West's collective metaphysics of materiality. In addition to his books and other publications on the subject, his work includes the establishment of the "Archives of the Impossible," a gargantuan archive of documents and oral histories, housed in Rice's Fondren Library, that collectively recounts apparently paranormal and preternatural events and experiences by multiple people around the world. It's not an overstatement to call Kripal one of the central figures in the movement you're examining here.
Here's an article on him that was published this past January in the online journal Arc: Religion, Politics, Et Cetera. The title says it all:
Thanks for this essay and this whole series. It popped in my mind the other day when I was reflecting on this age of "mediated reality".
In particular, it seems to me that the more our conversations are done through media, the things we tend to talk about are media as well. Yet another spin on the "Medium is the message"; media itself becomes the content of media.
I notice it in everyday conversations where the topic is most frequently about movies and other image-centric content. Even when the topic is about a "real" event, for example a football game, the focus is usually on the mediated experience of the event, not the actual experience of being there.
In this way, every event becomes a simulacrum in the Baudrillard sense.
This becomes much more apparent when comparing with writings of pre-mass-media cultures like the ancient Greeks. Even when discussing abstract ideas, it always comes back to the experienced real, like animals, rivers and such.
It's also obvious in the quoted Hawthorne passage. There's no part that's "Tik tokable", it's the perception of someone whose culture was firmly grounded on direct experience.
Problems and paradoxes are embedded in the act of perception. The McGilchrist remark clarifies that perception is liquid. If humans seek patterns as a way of hardening perception and then categorizing inputs, no surprise that one relies on cultural programming to organize and structure perception. Whether enchantment (or its allied terms) is immanent or projected is a chicken-and-egg question without an answer. I take your point about refusing enchantment as a perceptual frame, to (try to) perceive the world as it truly is, but that intellectual pose is losing ground steadily as more and more inputs arrive via augmented and virtual reality fed by screens. As a result, perception first passes through a deranging distortion lens.
I have gone gone back and reread both Sacasas' and Carr's essays, and I think that what at first appeared to be a philosophical agreement (substance) is really more about framing and language (form).
I would be interested in hearing if anyone agrees or disagrees with me, and how they understand these essays.
If I may quote myself: “The issue I take with Sacasas’s essay is not a matter of sense — I’m pretty sure we’re talking about the same perceptual phenomenon — but of wording.” (Though choices of words can be philosophical choices, of course.)
Yes, I understood that when I read your piece; however, the implication is that you feel that it’s a distinction worth mentioning in this case, if I’m understanding you correctly. If I am, I’m curious why you find it noteworthy, because I don’t see a significant difference in the arguments you both are making; just different lexical choices.
Thank you for this thought-provoking essay, Mr Carr.
I'd like to hear more about the difference between enchantment as an act of hubris, (and re-enchantment as a powerplay,) and the epiphany of Seamus Heaney, by which he is able to see that,
"The stone’s alive with what’s invisible:
Waterweed, stirred sand-grains hurrying off,
The shadowy, unshadowed stream itself."
As you write, "In Heaney’s quiet epiphany, the two seemingly opposed meanings of the phrase seeing things — seeing what’s there and seeing what’s not there — come together in a single act of perception."
By the last few paragraphs of the essay, this kind of perception seems to have become suspect.
Thanks. Heaney’s epiphany is very real, the stuff of poetry. But it happens within his own mind, through the transformative power of imagination and memory.
I really enjoy reading your posts interacting with Sarcasas's work.
To sum up the argument as I understand it here, you are claiming that those in favor of "re-enchantment" commit the same error as techies' desiring "hyperreality". That both groups are not really open to the world at as it is but desire to superimpose their own constructed meaning, over the top of reality. The two groups would only differ in means rather than ends.
No doubt a techie would agree this is the case, and even argue they produce more concrete results then Re-enchanters. A Re-enchanter would not agree however.
By their lights, they are not performing this action, the unseen is indeed an extension of what is seen, just as the book is and extension of the cover. They would even argue your own poetic counter examples simply show alternative hermeneutics to reading these covers (to slightly overextend the metaphor).
To argue for say Hawthorne's reading, you'd have to disabuse a Re-enchanter of his world view and hermeneutical tradition for reading the unseen. This would have to be done on a case-by-case basis, as the group "Re-enchanter" is only a group in the context of this very modern discussion. Padre Pio and Aleister Crowley would be grouped together as "Re-enchanter's" but obviously they saw entirely different worlds before them, worlds that were exclusive of one another.
To accuse this broad group of having a lack of humility doesn't respect the depth of difference in traditions of thought.
Thanks, and point taken. I am indeed referring to contemporary re-enchanters, as described in the preceding post in the series. (At the risk of being overly cynical, I would suggest, for instance, that Tucker Carlson decided he’d been attacked by a demon because he wants to be the type of guy who gets attacked by a demon. There’s a certain status nowadays that comes with being the object of demonic ire, with being a chosen enemy of the forces of evil.) I would need to think some more before deciding how my point applies, or doesn't, to other, earlier re-enchanters.
I agree, Digital Pyrrho, that the 'enchantment' word can trigger certain unintended associations, and that not all believers in unseen worlds should be tarred with the same brush.
Your last phrase 'traditions of thought' I think is vital to this discussion.
If we look at someone like Tucker Carlson and his demons, although he says he's reading the Bible now, he makes a point of saying he can understand it himself and doesn't care what the clerics say. He knows better. In other words, he doesn't care about traditions of interpretation. His experience means more to him.
It's also debatable how much of what Crowley represents is traditional in any meaningful sense, and how much was attention-seeking.
As for Padre Pio and Sacasas, however, they are coming from genuine Christian traditions. The worldview they participate in is bigger than them, and more ancient and venerable than their imaginations. Is their worldview more arbitrary or idiosyncratic (or hubristic) than, say, secular humanism?
The most interesting part of this essay is here:
"The much-applauded interactivity of today’s media is an illusion, a trick and a trap. In pushing us to assume a harried, impatient posture of perception, reflexive rather than reflective, the screen is really a means of avoiding the kind of deep intellectual and emotional engagement that Heaney and Muñoz experience. We might today be quick to characterize their posture of calm, steady observation as “passive,” but as Muñoz makes clear, it’s anything but. It’s only through the contemplative gaze that we activate our sensory, imaginative, and interpretive faculties to the fullest, that we become most in touch with the world."
Funnily enough, I was also thinking of Sacasas' essay when I read these words. The issue surrounding the lexicon related to enchantment notwithstanding, I enjoy that both he and Carr propose that an attentive, contemplative gaze is the way through which we activate our "faculties" to the fullest.
Carr is correct: the "interactivity" offered by social media is a trick and a trap. While humans need and crave diversion, we are coming to understand that if one spends most of their time "interacting" with screens, one is by default unable to activate those faculties listed by Carr above.
If we spend most of our time in that particular realm, we are less able to not only enjoy the finer contemplative things in life, but we also may very well suffer with our interpersonal relationships (and not to mention our relationship with our own selves). Only by spending time being attentive to ourselves and our world are we best able to understand and appreciate them, and so while the occasional screen-based diversion is a joy, it's not primarily where we should be spending our time if we're interested in self-actualization.
I very much enjoyed the lengthy quote of Hawthorne's. It's reminds me of the (admittedly little) Zen I have studied.
I would be very interested to see Sacasas respond to this essay, as well. Here's hoping he's reads it!
Your developing line of thought and insight in this series is quite absorbing.
For whatever it's worth, I highly recommend the work of Jeffrey Kripal as an example of first-rank thinking among the re-enchantment crowd. Kripal is chair of the religious studies department at Rice University, and from that position of formal mainstream academic respectability, he has launched a sustained and sophisticated reevaluation of the West's collective metaphysics of materiality. In addition to his books and other publications on the subject, his work includes the establishment of the "Archives of the Impossible," a gargantuan archive of documents and oral histories, housed in Rice's Fondren Library, that collectively recounts apparently paranormal and preternatural events and experiences by multiple people around the world. It's not an overstatement to call Kripal one of the central figures in the movement you're examining here.
Here's an article on him that was published this past January in the online journal Arc: Religion, Politics, Et Cetera. The title says it all:
"Has Jeffrey Kripal Gone Mad, or Normal?"
https://arcmag.org/has-jeffrey-kripal-gone-mad-or-normal/
The subheadline elaborates: "A leading religion scholar goes all in on UFOs, ESP, and other paranormal weirdness." The piece is well worth a read.
This all plays most interestingly in relation to your enchantment / disenchantment / re-enchantment / unenchantment schema.
Thanks for this essay and this whole series. It popped in my mind the other day when I was reflecting on this age of "mediated reality".
In particular, it seems to me that the more our conversations are done through media, the things we tend to talk about are media as well. Yet another spin on the "Medium is the message"; media itself becomes the content of media.
I notice it in everyday conversations where the topic is most frequently about movies and other image-centric content. Even when the topic is about a "real" event, for example a football game, the focus is usually on the mediated experience of the event, not the actual experience of being there.
In this way, every event becomes a simulacrum in the Baudrillard sense.
This becomes much more apparent when comparing with writings of pre-mass-media cultures like the ancient Greeks. Even when discussing abstract ideas, it always comes back to the experienced real, like animals, rivers and such.
It's also obvious in the quoted Hawthorne passage. There's no part that's "Tik tokable", it's the perception of someone whose culture was firmly grounded on direct experience.
Thank you, Nicholas Carr. This post has unlocked something for me, something profound and timely ... a lifeline.
Yep.
All the words, enchantment, disenchantment, re-enchantment, and un-enchantment. Are fictions.
The finger pointing at the moon, is not the moon.
Hawthorne‘s musings constitute an inspiring example of Ditch Vision: thank you for the long quotation, and for calling attention to this text.
Problems and paradoxes are embedded in the act of perception. The McGilchrist remark clarifies that perception is liquid. If humans seek patterns as a way of hardening perception and then categorizing inputs, no surprise that one relies on cultural programming to organize and structure perception. Whether enchantment (or its allied terms) is immanent or projected is a chicken-and-egg question without an answer. I take your point about refusing enchantment as a perceptual frame, to (try to) perceive the world as it truly is, but that intellectual pose is losing ground steadily as more and more inputs arrive via augmented and virtual reality fed by screens. As a result, perception first passes through a deranging distortion lens.
Agreed.
Quantum physics shows that perception affects reality, if not even creates reality, in some more radical interpretations.
Spooky.
I have gone gone back and reread both Sacasas' and Carr's essays, and I think that what at first appeared to be a philosophical agreement (substance) is really more about framing and language (form).
I would be interested in hearing if anyone agrees or disagrees with me, and how they understand these essays.
If I may quote myself: “The issue I take with Sacasas’s essay is not a matter of sense — I’m pretty sure we’re talking about the same perceptual phenomenon — but of wording.” (Though choices of words can be philosophical choices, of course.)
Yes, I understood that when I read your piece; however, the implication is that you feel that it’s a distinction worth mentioning in this case, if I’m understanding you correctly. If I am, I’m curious why you find it noteworthy, because I don’t see a significant difference in the arguments you both are making; just different lexical choices.
Thank you for this thought-provoking essay, Mr Carr.
I'd like to hear more about the difference between enchantment as an act of hubris, (and re-enchantment as a powerplay,) and the epiphany of Seamus Heaney, by which he is able to see that,
"The stone’s alive with what’s invisible:
Waterweed, stirred sand-grains hurrying off,
The shadowy, unshadowed stream itself."
As you write, "In Heaney’s quiet epiphany, the two seemingly opposed meanings of the phrase seeing things — seeing what’s there and seeing what’s not there — come together in a single act of perception."
By the last few paragraphs of the essay, this kind of perception seems to have become suspect.
Thanks. Heaney’s epiphany is very real, the stuff of poetry. But it happens within his own mind, through the transformative power of imagination and memory.
Would unenchanted be similar to non judgment and accepting what is, being able to allow paradox.
I really enjoy reading your posts interacting with Sarcasas's work.
To sum up the argument as I understand it here, you are claiming that those in favor of "re-enchantment" commit the same error as techies' desiring "hyperreality". That both groups are not really open to the world at as it is but desire to superimpose their own constructed meaning, over the top of reality. The two groups would only differ in means rather than ends.
No doubt a techie would agree this is the case, and even argue they produce more concrete results then Re-enchanters. A Re-enchanter would not agree however.
By their lights, they are not performing this action, the unseen is indeed an extension of what is seen, just as the book is and extension of the cover. They would even argue your own poetic counter examples simply show alternative hermeneutics to reading these covers (to slightly overextend the metaphor).
To argue for say Hawthorne's reading, you'd have to disabuse a Re-enchanter of his world view and hermeneutical tradition for reading the unseen. This would have to be done on a case-by-case basis, as the group "Re-enchanter" is only a group in the context of this very modern discussion. Padre Pio and Aleister Crowley would be grouped together as "Re-enchanter's" but obviously they saw entirely different worlds before them, worlds that were exclusive of one another.
To accuse this broad group of having a lack of humility doesn't respect the depth of difference in traditions of thought.
Thanks, and point taken. I am indeed referring to contemporary re-enchanters, as described in the preceding post in the series. (At the risk of being overly cynical, I would suggest, for instance, that Tucker Carlson decided he’d been attacked by a demon because he wants to be the type of guy who gets attacked by a demon. There’s a certain status nowadays that comes with being the object of demonic ire, with being a chosen enemy of the forces of evil.) I would need to think some more before deciding how my point applies, or doesn't, to other, earlier re-enchanters.
I agree, Digital Pyrrho, that the 'enchantment' word can trigger certain unintended associations, and that not all believers in unseen worlds should be tarred with the same brush.
Your last phrase 'traditions of thought' I think is vital to this discussion.
If we look at someone like Tucker Carlson and his demons, although he says he's reading the Bible now, he makes a point of saying he can understand it himself and doesn't care what the clerics say. He knows better. In other words, he doesn't care about traditions of interpretation. His experience means more to him.
It's also debatable how much of what Crowley represents is traditional in any meaningful sense, and how much was attention-seeking.
As for Padre Pio and Sacasas, however, they are coming from genuine Christian traditions. The worldview they participate in is bigger than them, and more ancient and venerable than their imaginations. Is their worldview more arbitrary or idiosyncratic (or hubristic) than, say, secular humanism?