Form Of Enchantment Research Articles

Techno-visual enchantments and an ethics of mattering

This paper makes a theoretical contribution to the socio-cultural geographies of enchantment, and introduces a mode of analysis which grapples with enchanted life as performative enfoldings of matter and meaning which have politico-ethical form, content, communicability, and power. The paper critically interrogates current theorisations of enchantment to expose the ontological, epistemological and ethical fragilities which lie at the heart of the concept, and asks whether enchantment may amount to more than an ephemeral, momentary, and non-representational experience. This prepares the ground for rethinking enchantment through a more inclusive and inventive frame of reference, one which can take stock of different forms of enchantment, specifically those made possible by the innovations of 21st century visualising technologies. Via Karen Barad's new materialist theory of agential realism, and her exposition of an ethics of mattering, the paper goes on to explore the techno-visual enchantments of drone technologies, tracing their ethical effects through dynamic and performative relations of enactment, intra-action, diffraction and difference.

Enchantment, trouble, and learning: reflections of a couple and family counselor participating in person-centered large group encounters

ABSTRACTInspired by experience in a large unstructured person-centered group in which I was both distressed and the cause of distress in others, I find parallels between group experience and that of persons in intimate relationships. In both, enchantment and belonging can give way to frustration and alienation. The encounter with the other brings confusion and disappointment that can interfere with the search to understand and be understood. I describe an inner dialogue in third person journal form at the heart of an encounter group that shows complexity not unlike that in friendships, families, and couples. One’s secure self-concept can be shaken by misunderstanding and apparent rejection in the course of intense human interaction. I consider two models of group process. Having a perspective from my own work as a couple and family therapist, I add the benefit of learning to expect trouble: seemingly irresolvable conflict and subsequent lack of skill and connection. Experience of group trouble makes normal our trouble at home.Approaching both group and intimate relationships as learners rather than holders of the truth can turn trouble into a deeper form of enchantment.

Taking story seriously

In narrative approaches to health and illness, a distinction between narrative and story has been lost or occluded. This paper considers how the terms narrative and story are defined and how they are used in practice in order to focus on rehearsed or ‘worked up’ stories, including fiction, rather than minimally defined narrative fragments. Story – written, spoken and shared – is a powerful way of contextualising health and illness in a wider landscape of human values and interests and, as a form of enchantment in the face of scientific rationalisation, a human necessity. Some reasons why sociology, and particularly medical sociology, has avoided defining fictional stories as part of its material and its method are explored. The reasons why a sociology of health, illness and medicine might want to include fictionalised story are sketched. Complex moments of human experience, including sick physicians’ experience of alienation from both themselves and their medical treatment, necessitate metaphor-laden and sometimes fictionalised writing to represent the subjective contradictions. Story, including fictionalised story, represents a means of including imaginative elements of human life in sociological view.

Fantasy and Belief: Alternative Religions, Popular Narratives and Digital Cultures (Danielle Kirby)

<i>Fantasy and Belief: Alternative Religions, Popular Narratives and Digital Cultures</i> (Danielle Kirby)

Enchantment, possession and the uncanny in E.T.A. Hoffmann's ‘The Sandman’

All enchantment is a form of possession: as love or religious belief, it can invest a person’s life with significance; but as revenge or fanaticism, it can also bring about a fundamental change in the subject’s personality. Few writers have explored the tension between these different forms of enchantment more intriguingly than the German Romantic writer E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776–1822). Der Sandmann (“The Sandman”; 1816) is one his best-known tales, partly because it gave rise to favourites of the ballet and opera repertoires – Delibes’ Coppelia (1870), and one of the self-contained acts of Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann (1881) – and partly owing to the enormous impact of the crucial section that Freud devoted to it in his essay on “The Uncanny” (1919). Although Freud’s views have been contested and re-articulated by a great many psychoanalytic critics, his essay continues to dominate literary discussion about this text. In this article, I show how a post-Jungian approach to Hoffmann’s celebrated text uncovers an unexpected reading of its concerns and a fresh way of thinking about narrative time. My aim is to propose that the tale has less to do with the events of Nathanael’s childhood than with the perils of enchantment in the present.

Introduction: The Practice of Enchantment: Strange Allures

Escape is not ghost, merely protean trickster. It is means to experiment and to initiate speculative ways to deal with immediate and concrete fads which dwell in our worlds, [and] their stubborn persistence.- Dimitris Papadopoulos, Niamh Stephenson, and Vassilis Tsianos, Escape Routes (2008, 66)This issue of WSQ seeks to experiment with powers and seductions of in an attempt to intervene in present moment. When survival is question for so many, when things seem impossible and world impassable - how to find and create places of allure? How to imagine world in which one could flourish? What might be serious and playful role of enchantments in materializing that world? We experiment with as both content of thought and as way of thinking because present so desperately requires fabrication of escape routes that are not escapist.Our call for papers for this issue was partly inspired by Jane Bennett's book from over decade ago, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (2001), and her more recent book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010). Seeking to invent new ways of conceptualizing world, Bennett refuses traditional dichotomy that reserves agency exclusively for humans, insisting that objects do not just block or hinder our actions. What if things really can hail us? she asks. Bennett takes risk of certain anthropomorphism in order to cultivate moments of enchantment - moments of wondrous yet disturbing surprise. Drawing from Foucault's work on practices of self (1985, 28), Bennett contends that ethics entail more than code and principles, for sheer commitment (or will) is not enough to ensure we live ethically. Thus Bennett turns to as way to augment motivational energy needed to move selves from endorsement of ethical principles to actual practice of ethical behaviors (xi). Her assessment of demands of present is shared by Joshua Landy and Michael Saler, coeditors of collection The Re-Enchantment of World: Secular Magic in Rational Age (2009) Landy and Saler conclude their introduction with confession of genuine urgency: . .it will not do to revert to prior forms of wonder, order and redemption. No, world must be enchanted anew - human flourishing requires it (14).At same time, in developing this issue we drew from incitements of Cornaron0 and Cornaron0 in Millennial Capitalism and Culture ofNeoliberalism (2001). Written during same years as Bennett's early work but from transnational perspective of historical ethnographers, introduction to anthology documents rise of new forms of enchantment (3) as millennial capital incorporates entrancing strategies and speculative seductions. Marked by occult devoted to magical, paranormal production of value, and by popular cultures of evangelical contagion and panic, enchantments of contemporary capital augur a world in which only way to create real wealth seems to lie in forms of power /knowledge that transgress conventional, rational, moral (26). In this world, both Weber and Marx's diagnosis of as an exhausted force in calculating economies of modernity looks dreadfully wrong in face of zombie powers. Vampire culture. The long night of living dead lingers on.Trans-Forms //Bending Lines of Flight (Sensual Matters)We can begin to map tensions evoked, then, between as potential line of flight and as canny technique of power in complex charms of response to our call. WSQ's inclusion of works by scholars, poets, artists, and creative writers offers variegated textual, and textured, milieu for scene of enchantment. As Roderick Ferguson writes in these pages, channelingthe erotic- theoretic poetics of Audre Lorde, the seriousness of intellectual work lies in critical activation of sensual matters. …

A Secular Age: an exercise in breach-mending

AbstractThis article considers three aspects of Taylor's A Secular Age: the issue of the status and authority of theological insights derived from sociological analyses; the irresolvable ambiguities of secularity, where it marks the disappearance of religion but inadvertently affirms its persistence; and the properties of nostalgia and memory that unexpectedly shape post-secularity and the forms of enchantment it seeks.

The Enchantment of Science in India

In critiquing methodologies of the "global" as a spatial unit of analysis or a receptacle for influence across the planet, this essay positions India so as to assess the role and forms of science in the modern world. By taking the mid-nineteenth century as a moment of departure, it asks why, under what conditions, and to what effects Indians accepted science, but not biomedicine, in the high noon of colonialism. Existing imperial histories of science that are primarily fixated on the eighteenth century cast science as a site of exchange and dialogue, thus replicating the narrative of European expansion overseas. Instead, the power of science is here understood in the context of the politics of religion and rationality. In a synoptic overview, the essay assesses the archaeology of science and the blurred practices between religion and science, described here as "insurgent." It argues that science in India was a form of enchantment, while religion had become a form of disenchanted but rational knowledge. Unlike in Europe, and contrary to orientalist positions, science in India neither declared the death of God nor became "spiritualized" via religion. Instead, science inflected religion; and religion, in turn, facilitated a rational mediation between science and man. This specific relationship accounts for the "soft landing" of science in India and its usurpation in the service of an unapologetic national modernity.

All this Useless Beauty: the Case for Craft Practice in Design for a Digital Age

This paper draws on practice-centred research combining craft practice and digital technology to illuminate the role of beauty in facilitating the engagement with digital complexity. In a climate where digital technology is increasingly prominent in our everyday lives, the role of beauty is seen frequently as an extravagance. As digital technologies extend their reach, the power we have to change and expand our potential for engagement with technology grows accordingly. To regard beauty as a stylistic afterthought is a flawed strategy.The phenomenon of human-digital technology interaction raises the potential for captivation, enchantment and fascination or frustration, distrust and doubt. Here we explore the ways beauty can create accessibility to the complexities inherent in much technology, referring to examples from the applied arts. We state the case for the relevance of craft to the design of digital systems and three-dimensional digital devices focusing on the role of research and method in this process. We define beauty in this context as a form of enchantment, drawing from perspectives from philosophy, human-computer interaction and the applied arts. This paper is based on research which illustrates the role of beauty and enchantment in the conception of digital jewellery, how people respond to enchantment and beauty, and how this acts as a key to a personally meaningful engagement with digital technology. Personal subjectivity and criteria for beauty are explored and responded to through the process of making objects which aim to enchant and linking this to an equally significant mode of communication. The results present a reflective view of the role of beauty and craft knowledge in the conception and design of digital devices and interfaces.

Conversation par écrit

Marc Buffat: Written Conversation. This article analyzes correspondance with Sophie as love letters, as distinct from their informative function, which Diderot called his «gazette». The first aspect analyzed is their intensity which takes the form of enchantment, madness and physical suffering, and compares absence with death. Another aspect of these letters is the fact that this written conversation is equal to a physical contact and even a complète fusion as it enables one to know everything that the other is doing. The author finally insists on the musical dimension of Diderot's style and concludes that the letters are marked above all by sensitivity and musicality.