edited by Joseph Troia and Giulia Grechi
In the symbolic journey of the Major Arcana of the Tarot of Marseille, a court game and divinatory tool born in Renaissance Italy, the number 5 is headed by the Pope. Guardian of the threshold, bridge between the visible and the invisible: healer, shaman, visionary, poet, artist and dream traveller; and, when reversed, sorcerer, barker, manipulator of the collective unconscious, intent on capturing souls to put to work for himself or his master.
This archetype tells of the human possibility of breaking with the ordinary to invoke the sacred, understood as the pre-individual dimension, where the forces of the imagination dwell and negotiate, a place where cultures and human worlds are formed, find continuity, and restore psychic stability to individuals and collectives in times of crisis.
Looking along this opening, we want to inaugurate issue 50 of Roots§Routes with a call dedicated to “re-enchantment”. For the writer, the reference author is Stefania Consigliere, an anthropologist who has worked extensively on this topic [1]. In her writings, Western modernity appears as a historical and cultural operation in the name of disenchantment, understood as the systematic process of colonialist destruction of the multiplicity of human imaginaries. She invites us to reflect on re-enchantment as a political tool of counter-witchcraft, capable of unmasking the illusion of the modern and restoring dignity and political power to what has been expelled: dreams, spirits, ghosts, relationships with non-humans, forms of knowledge and experience reduced to superstitions and “savage” things. Re-enchantment thus becomes a practice that is both individual and collective, critical and existential: a gateway through which to reactivate the power of multiplicity and imagine other ways of inhabiting the world.
The aim of the call is to explore this theme, bringing it into dialogue with other critical paths, in order to grasp and loosen, as in divination, the signs, knots and blocks of our collective and social unconscious and provoke that part of consciousness in which futures become possible and desirable again.
The product of Western modernity
According to Stefania Consigliere, disenchantment is the structural precondition that has allowed Western modernity – understood as the historical process that has seen the coexistence, over the last four centuries, of capitalism, colonialism, and the production of knowledge [MOU2] [MOU3] according to the scientific method as the only valid one – to exist, form and impose itself violently on other human collectives and their possibilities for anthropopoiesis.
Events such as the witch hunts in Europe [2] and the witchification of colonised peoples [3] – which developed alongside the imposition of wage labour and enclosures in the European countryside, and slavery in overseas territories – tell of a foundational violence: one that, by vampirising peoples and territories under the regime of surplus value, filled Europe’s coffers and provided it with the raw material to exercise and expand its dominion over the globe.
This is the process of primitive accumulation described by Marx [4], whereby European wealth is not based, as the myth of the creation of capitalism would have it, or the story of the grasshopper and the ant, on our good intentions and moral superiority, but on primitive violence of enormous proportions. European prosperity is built on the blood and bones of others, and in order to be realised, it has required and continues to require a subtle and widespread strategy, accompanying the use of systemic violence with disenchantment as a weapon to bend the multiplicity of imaginaries to the phantasmagoria of capital, where every dream is measured in profit and every enchantment is translated into merchandise.
The critical movement to be undertaken at this point is twofold. In colonial capitalism [5], the violence externalised and removed onto others translates into a return violence onto ourselves. The repressed multiplicity, elsewhere and here, is a set of lost possibilities and creative ways of being human that leaves us with a single, suffocating anthropopoietic scenario [6]. Disenchantment is something we comfortably pay for in the misery of the neoliberal sovereign individual; in its rigid, sclerotic and neurotic form that does not allow for breaks, leaks and transformations: stasis without ek-stasis; in a devastated world, where survival, in its sense of psychic endurance and presence, constantly requires compulsive consumption, pills and supplements to remove pain and dissociation, reinforcing an eternally self-referential stimulus-response circuit.
Re-reading modernity from disenchantment means holding both things together: the horror of colonial capitalism and the awareness that the world it has produced is unsustainable everywhere, even in the “advanced” West. Beyond the victim-perpetrator framework, blood wasted for nothing: a war in which no one wins.
In the Tarot of Marseille, the Devil, arcane 15, complementary to the Pope, has an ambiguous gaze; rather than being cross-eyed, it seems that his eyes are turned inwards. Could it be that evil is something I hold within myself?
Colonialist structures of feeling
In Things Fall Apart [7], a classic of 20th-century Nigerian literature set at the end of the 19th century, the protagonist Okonkwo, a young Igbo man belonging to the Umofia clan, sees his world and his village destroyed within a few years by white Christian missionaries and the British Crown administration. The novel recounts what is a fundamental step in colonialist practices: the destruction of other worldviews in order to implant its project of reductio ad unum of cultures. In the novel, when the white men arrive in the village of Umofia, the first thing they do is break some taboos. For them, Okonkwo’s gods are false, his ritual masks are mere pieces of wood, and his forest inhabited by irascible spirits is just a thousand hectares to be cleared for timber production.
Here we can read that the constitution of our world passes through the systematic destruction of the imaginaries of others, reinforcing our structures of feeling [8] as an inversely proportional consequence: the set of implicit assumptions that underpin our ontologies, epistemologies and ethics, or the unconscious filters that shape our way of living, thinking, feeling and acting in the world.
Achebe’s novel tells the tragedy of two conflicting structures of feeling, two worlds ordered by opposing criteria. The first is an immanentist and enchanted world, where human collectives share a reality with non-human collectives (spirits, masks, demons, gods, ancestors). The second is a transcendentalist world, in which “man” (the evangelical over-extension of the masculine is intentional here) is the only entity endowed with a soul, made in the image and likeness of the one God, where paradise is beyond, while on this side the universe is a field of dead objects to be used at will – which is usually a single way of using objects: that of instrumental reason for profit [9].
It is important to grasp this juncture: the violent destruction of immanentist cultures, both outside and within European borders, was necessary for the affirmation of colonial capitalism in severing ties and relationships between human and non-human collectives, with devastating consequences that are clearly evident, for example, in the transgenerational traumas linked to colonialism and the impossibility of interpreting them with Western nosographies [10].
The transcendentalist attachment is profound, both because it is truly difficult to give equal ontological dignity to other systems of knowledge of the world in those parts obscured by our filters – one example above all is our difficulty in considering other therapies as valid as biomedicine – and because imagining that we are acted upon by the objects we use, opening ourselves, for example, to immanentist sensibility, requires an effort of decentralisation that clashes with the Western Promethean claim to unlimited freedom. Developing a non-colonialist stance means experimenting with the possibility and difficulty of working on the structures of feeling and attachments that determine us, in an exercise that always involves disorientation and loss of presence.
If immanentist cultures have been so relentlessly destroyed by colonial capitalism – and we want to emphasise this aspect – the work on critical re-enchantment, rather than the empty (and colonialist) appropriation of other imaginaries, pushes us in two directions. The first is to consider ourselves in a relationship of interdependence with the invisible and non-human in order to do critical work on the attachments inherited from colonial capitalism, perhaps starting with the most subtle ones: which material and immaterial objects have a bewitching hold over us? To what invisible entity do those who go to die for “their country” respond? What are the long queues of people outside Apple Stores for the release of the new iPhone model? What is the symbolic function captured by multinational logos? How do social networks affect us, how have they drained human relationships? Who, and how, extracts surplus value from likes? Who is the demon of bureaucracy that empties the work of teachers in schools and universities of meaning?
The second is to negotiate alliances with the invisible who speak to us from the repressed: ghosts of colonialism, spirits of physical places ravaged by speculative interests, transgenerational traumas that inhabit us as silent presences; archetypes, themes and prophecies that resurface when we reconnect with the world of dreams.
The traces of work multiply when we refine our sensitivity to spectres [11].
This tobacco that I roll into a cigarette is so empty, it gives me nothing. Somewhere I read that elsewhere, in a place inhabited by an infinity of plants, he is considered the master of plants. Tell me the story of how you came to me.
I have a photo of one of my ancestors here. I know nothing about him. It seems like a simple piece of paper, yet since I brought it to this house, I haven’t been feeling very well.
Beyond capitalist realism
There is a quote by Mark Fisher that has marked the spirit of our times: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” [12].
A dry, lucid, all-encompassing diagnosis: modernity, with its disenchantment, has destroyed the multiplicity of possibilities, atrophied utopia, and rendered the imagination incapable of thinking about anything else. This gives rise to that sense of ontological claustrophobia that we call capitalist realism: the idea that there is no alternative, that what we are experiencing, even in disaster, is the only way to inhabit the world. In this horizon, suicide, whether on Fisher’s real level or on the symbolic level (acceptance of the world as it is), is a response of disarming intellectual honesty. Its theoretical fallacy lies in identifying “one” world, that of capitalism, with “the” world.
Yet all it takes is a leap outside the form to rediscover an area where the future seems possible, creativity is set in motion again and everyday experience is studded with meaning and significant coincidences.
Re-enchantment, therefore, is an encounter with a willingness to be disoriented; work to loosen the colonialist stasis that stiffens; genealogy of the margin and of knowledge excluded from the scientific method; coincidentia oppositorum of pain and breath, critical work and work on oneself [13]; openness to other states of consciousness (such as dreams, falling in love, passion, contemplation and not necessarily the abrupt outbursts of psychedelia); education in taking other worlds seriously and in making pacts and paths of struggle with the ghosts of our history, which are not only the ghosts of colonialism, but also those of revolutionary utopia [14].
Given these premises, for this issue, we are seeking critical, artistic, poetic and research contributions [gg9] that embrace:
1) Forms of knowledge and experimentation excluded from institutionalised knowledge: dreams, visions, ecstasy, trance, divination.
2) Critical contributions to the analysis of the structures of feeling of colonialism, fascism and capitalism.
3) Contributions on the role of subjectivity and traumatic memories linked to colonialism and its ghosts.
4) Contributions on the relationship between re-enchantment, critical thinking and activism.
5) Contributions on memories of the possible: at what points in our modern history have romantics, visionaries and revolutionaries imagined and practised the possibility of another world?
6) Contributions on the role of the arts and research in working on cultural attachments and the invisible forces that determine us.
“La prima prova di psiche”, 2024-present, Morena Cannizzaro
Notes
[1] Re-enchantment is a theme that runs through much of her work and is condensed in her latest monograph, S. Consigliere, Tales of Re-enchantment: Multiplicity, Imagination, Revolution, DeriveApprodi, Rome 2020.
[2] S. Federici, Caliban and the Witch. Women, the Body, Primitive Accumulation, Mimesis, Milan-Udine 2015.
[3] L. Parinetto, Witches and Power. Capital and the Persecution of Those Who Are Different, Rusconi, Milan 1998.
[4] K. Marx (1867), The So-Called Primitive Accumulation, in Id., Capital. Critique of Political Economy, vol. I, chap. XXIV, Editori Riuniti, Rome 1989, p. 777. For the author, however, Marx’s universalism and the epistemic racism that derives from it are unacceptable. For a more recent source on the limits of Marxist thought in the decolonial sphere, see R. Grosfoguel, Breaking Coloniality. Racism, Islamophobia, Migration in the Decolonial Perspective, Mimesis, Milan-Udine 2017, pp. 83-92.
[5] The definition of colonial capitalism is intended to make explicit the indissoluble link between capitalism and colonialism as culturally and historically reciprocal phenomena.
[6] There are many possibilities and lost memories here, where non-utilitarian relationships that form collectives, therapeutic forms other than biomedicine, rituals, carnivals, festivals and divinations are disappearing. It is emblematic that the first act of those who govern us today was to repress free parties (so-called raves). For more information on other therapies, see P. Coppo, Between psyche and cultures. Elements of ethnopsychiatry, Bollati Boringhieri, Turin 2003; on the political function of rituals such as carnival, D. Graeber D. Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, pp. 129-132; on the device of trance, G. Lapassade, From Shaman to Raver: An Essay on Trance. Apogeo, Milan 1997.
[7] C. Achebe (1958), Things Fall Apart, La nave di Teseo, Milan 2016.
[8] For further information on the concept of sentiment structure, see R. Williams, Marxism and Literature, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1977.
[9] For an in-depth study of the distinction between immanentist pre-capitalist cultures and transcendentalist modernity, see M. Sahlins, The New Science of the Enchanted Universe. An Anthropology of Humanity (Almost All), Raffaello Cortina, Milan 2023.
[10] On the links between diagnosis and colonial power, the classic reference is F. Fanon (1952), Black Skin, White Masks, Edizioni ETS, 2015. More recent research on the subject can be found in B. Duran, E. Duran, Native American Postcolonial Psychology, State University of New York Press, Albany 1995; S. Bouznah; C. Lewertowski, When spirits meet doctors, seven stories for healing, Colibrì Edizioni, Paderno Dugnano 2019.
[11] From an immanentist perspective, invisible transgenerational and collective traumatic memories take on legible and workable forms. See A. Gordon (1997), Ghostly things. Haunting and sociological imagination, DeriveApprodi, Rome 2022.
[12] M. Fisher (2009), Capitalist Realism, NERO, Rome 2018.
[13] Thus, disciplines such as cultural anthropology cease to be cold colonialist and Enlightenment catalogues and become archives and practices that challenge the modern Western worldview towards new anthropopoietic horizons.
[14] For more on this perspective, see M. Pezzella, The memory of the possible, Jaca Book, Milan 2009.