Paper short abstract:

This paper rejects the story of modernity's disenchantment. Using material from the Swedish context and engaging with Bruno Latour’s dual concepts of “translation” and purification, I argue that there are both new potentialities for enchantment and for exploitation masquerading as enchantment.

Paper long abstract:

The rupture with the past that undergirds the teleological narrative of modernity is characterized by relentless progress, the triumph of Culture over Nature, and reason over superstition -- conventionally reduced to Weber’s “disenchantment of the modern world.”

This paper rejects the story of disenchantment despite its rhetorical dominance and asserts that we (moderns) have never been disenchanted. Not only was the putative break with the past anything but precipitous, there are also emergent forms of enchantment. Engaging with Bruno Latour’s concept of “translation”, which creates hybrids of nature and culture, I argue that mutations and transformations that escape categorical bounds allow for new potentialities for enchantment. Such enchantments can be enabled by technology -- nano-technology, genetic modifications, vaccinations and the human immune system, symbiotic and cyborg technologies; or they can arise from the fantastical worlds and effects of cinema, animation, advertising, and commodity culture generally. Rather than re-enchantments or a return, contemporary enchantments are those that erupt, disrupt, or penetrate our everyday life worlds, conventional temporality, and the general order of things.

Latour’s second principle of “purification,” however, warns of the masking or denying of the first principle of hybridization, and there are many ways in which exploitation masquerades as or utilizes conventional tropes of enchantment. This is informed by Lauren Berlant’s notion of “cruel optimism,” but also in the fractured fairy tale of modernity that has resulted in a cluster of existential crises.

This paper uses material from the Swedish context to examine the uses and abuses of “enchantment.”