Good stuff! Glad to have happened upon your 'Stack. I very much agree about this search for missing Enchantment.... A few years ago, I wrote something along similar lines about superheroes (I might have to dust it off and publish it here). In that case, what's missing is less Enchantment than Power - but in both cases, as you argue, we have been cut off from our Magic, and from the places from which it springs...
(here's a snippet, if I may)
"Why superheroes? There are many theories. But let me suggest one: they are a simulacrum of what we’re missing. Their heroes are ersatz pagan gods and culture heroes, retrofitted to tell the mythology of capitalism. They are secret agents with superpowers for people who lack all agency, all power. They are methadone for people who have never tasted the real thing. They keep our inchoate cravings at bay, and unidentifiable. Fandom allows people to belong to a cult of the Übermensch, and to live out fantasies of power and beauty, and destruction of their enemies. But it’s all totally empty, and it keeps it all on the screen, and so that’s where we look for it. That’s where we’re hooked to it."
A good piece, offering juxtapositions and a rather sharp criticism, which to my sensibilities is fully warranted.
Corporate capture is, I think, more than a small feature in both your examples. Much appears to be associated with an idea of simply having something delivered. Thus the corporate version of magic must become commodity. It must be deliverable, which translates into a certain objectivity.
Which is about opposite of the genuine magical experience.
There is another feature, in corporate magic, the only failure is when someone doesn't shell out money. Yet in the real world, failure is a very important part of learning that one is dealing with living systems that are intelligent, that do feel, vs a kind of flip the switch and the light goes on as long as one pays the electric bill.
Movies cannot replicate the uncanny sense of being a part of a phenomena of timing, nor theme parks, and writing can it seems only get there by proxy.
It is perhaps the shallow illness of a society, this corporate magic. After all, even substack is a harvester of effort, a user of people as a means to an end. This is the corporate mindset. And it is exactly what we find in corporate magic.
I'd read this when you published it but just came back to read it again. There's so much here that resonates, and one thread I'm pulling on especially is how descent from settler-colonists leaves little room for this kind of relational reciprocity. It feels very much like trying to build something from the ground up, except there's no root system in the ground to draw on. (Or, there is, but those aren't roots I'm connected to.)
I never quite *got* Disney or HP--they were fun but at the end of the day I couldn't find deeper meaning in them. And I have to think that this framing of seeing oneself as a sole protagonist has led or at least contributed to how lonely so many people in America feel now.
Maybe this is odd, but what you're talking about basically happened to furries, right? Animal worship became LARPing in a fur suit. Even though furries are barely sanctioned, they formed their own subculture and community to let the pressure off the enchantment valve.
i’m not personally seeing the same through-line there but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. i don’t really know enough about the subculture to say where it originates
Very well written. Thank you for this. What strikes me is the particular wound of the immigrant , cut off not just from enchantment in the abstract but from the specific land, the specific dead, the grandmother who knew which saint and how. The inheritance interrupted mid-transmission. So they go looking, and the only containers available are the ones capitalism built. Real magic requires rootedness, and rootedness is exactly what was lost. Perhaps this is why the pilgrimage back to ancestral lands matters so much — not as tourism, but as a reestablishment of that broken thread.
maybe disney etc are the container where such folks are *ready* to meet it, as the formalized rituals in traditional religion sometimes are and have been?
Good stuff! Glad to have happened upon your 'Stack. I very much agree about this search for missing Enchantment.... A few years ago, I wrote something along similar lines about superheroes (I might have to dust it off and publish it here). In that case, what's missing is less Enchantment than Power - but in both cases, as you argue, we have been cut off from our Magic, and from the places from which it springs...
(here's a snippet, if I may)
"Why superheroes? There are many theories. But let me suggest one: they are a simulacrum of what we’re missing. Their heroes are ersatz pagan gods and culture heroes, retrofitted to tell the mythology of capitalism. They are secret agents with superpowers for people who lack all agency, all power. They are methadone for people who have never tasted the real thing. They keep our inchoate cravings at bay, and unidentifiable. Fandom allows people to belong to a cult of the Übermensch, and to live out fantasies of power and beauty, and destruction of their enemies. But it’s all totally empty, and it keeps it all on the screen, and so that’s where we look for it. That’s where we’re hooked to it."
thank you! and definitely am in agreement re: superheroes
Thank you for drawing a thread through this so beautifully!
thank you autumn!
A good piece, offering juxtapositions and a rather sharp criticism, which to my sensibilities is fully warranted.
Corporate capture is, I think, more than a small feature in both your examples. Much appears to be associated with an idea of simply having something delivered. Thus the corporate version of magic must become commodity. It must be deliverable, which translates into a certain objectivity.
Which is about opposite of the genuine magical experience.
There is another feature, in corporate magic, the only failure is when someone doesn't shell out money. Yet in the real world, failure is a very important part of learning that one is dealing with living systems that are intelligent, that do feel, vs a kind of flip the switch and the light goes on as long as one pays the electric bill.
Movies cannot replicate the uncanny sense of being a part of a phenomena of timing, nor theme parks, and writing can it seems only get there by proxy.
It is perhaps the shallow illness of a society, this corporate magic. After all, even substack is a harvester of effort, a user of people as a means to an end. This is the corporate mindset. And it is exactly what we find in corporate magic.
absolutely. there are so many factors at play.
I'd read this when you published it but just came back to read it again. There's so much here that resonates, and one thread I'm pulling on especially is how descent from settler-colonists leaves little room for this kind of relational reciprocity. It feels very much like trying to build something from the ground up, except there's no root system in the ground to draw on. (Or, there is, but those aren't roots I'm connected to.)
I never quite *got* Disney or HP--they were fun but at the end of the day I couldn't find deeper meaning in them. And I have to think that this framing of seeing oneself as a sole protagonist has led or at least contributed to how lonely so many people in America feel now.
Maybe this is odd, but what you're talking about basically happened to furries, right? Animal worship became LARPing in a fur suit. Even though furries are barely sanctioned, they formed their own subculture and community to let the pressure off the enchantment valve.
i’m not personally seeing the same through-line there but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. i don’t really know enough about the subculture to say where it originates
Very well written. Thank you for this. What strikes me is the particular wound of the immigrant , cut off not just from enchantment in the abstract but from the specific land, the specific dead, the grandmother who knew which saint and how. The inheritance interrupted mid-transmission. So they go looking, and the only containers available are the ones capitalism built. Real magic requires rootedness, and rootedness is exactly what was lost. Perhaps this is why the pilgrimage back to ancestral lands matters so much — not as tourism, but as a reestablishment of that broken thread.
thank you. and absolutely agree, especially as someone who is he child of an immigrant and refugee.
Love the language of a porous body
agreed! i much prefer it to the concept of “the veil”
very good!
maybe disney etc are the container where such folks are *ready* to meet it, as the formalized rituals in traditional religion sometimes are and have been?
fabulous, as always
ty my friend! <3
Very well said 🙏🏻
Christianity is what murdered magic— and corporations, opportunists they are, carried on the slaughter.