In this post, Chris Miller reports on the NSRN’s 2024 Annual Virtual Lecture, presented by Dr. Donovan Schaefer and moderated by NSRN President Dr. Atko Remmel on May 8, 2024. Chris summarizes Schaefer’s lecture, highlighting his argument of how disenchantment has been misunderstood, and how scholars can move forward in their work with a renewed understanding of this concept.
On 8 May 2024, the NSRN welcomed Dr. Donovan Schaefer (University of Pennsylvania) to deliver the 2024 NSRN Annual Lecture, titled “The Re-Disenchantment of the World: Thinking, Feeling, and Secularity.”This lecturebuilt upon ideas developed in two of his previous monographs: Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power (2015) and Wild Experiment: Feeling Science and Secularism After Darwin (2022) to argue that we have been looking at disenchantment ‘inside out.’
Schaefer began with an outline of what he calls the ‘common sense’ of disenchantment. This approach to disenchantment posits a fundamental break in human history. Simply, it claims we humans used to live in an enchanted world, and now we don’t. This shift was triggered by the advancement of science, leading to a state of disenchantment as a new epistemic and existential condition.
To problematize this simplistic understanding, Schaefer offered a close reading of Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction. He explained that this book’s enduring resonance is the concept of biopolitics, or how power functions through control of human bodies. However, since Foucault only turns to this idea in the volume’s final pages, Schaefer suggests that we are better served by a wider focus on the book as a whole.
Schaefer drew attention to the book’s original French subtitle: La volonté de savoir, or ‘Will to Knowledge.’ In a reference to Nietzsche, Foucault highlights the will to knowledge as something that manifests in our impulses, or an intellectual conscience that drives us forward. Schaefer argues that rather than trying to understand why (or if) humans are sexually repressed, Foucault is concerned with the emotional dimension of this question. Paraphrasing Foucault, Schaefer asked why we say, with so much certainty, that we are repressed. The answer, Schaefer suggests, is that there is an emotional dimension to posing such a question and feeling a sense of power by defying one’s supposed condition.
Schaefer also turned to Foucault’s power-knowledge nexus, suggesting that we should pay attention to the role of pleasure in this relationship. Schaefer argues that there is a sense of pleasure which flows through the intellectual response to thinking about science. That is, there is a sensualization of power and a gain of pleasure simply through the discourse and science of sex. Rather than view pleasure and knowledge in opposition to each other, therefore, Schaefer suggests that we see a matrix of positions of Power-Knowledge-Pleasure, which bodies can occupy in a range of ways.
In addition to his focus on Foucault, Schaefer analyzed Max Weber’s Science as a Vocation. Before diving into a close reading, Schaefer first gestures to the work of Jason Ā Josephson-Storm, who also pushed back against the ‘common sense’ version of disenchantment, and proposed the idea of ‘secular enchantment,’ which holds that science does not necessarily negate emotion or enchantment but that these forces actually co-exist. Diverging from Josephson-Storm, and other thinkers working with ‘secular enchantment,’ Schaefer argues that secular enchantment is disenchantment, at least in the way Weber originally intended.
Turning to Weber, Schaefer first highlighted the definition of disenchantment in the original German, which translates more closely to ‘de-magification’ or removing magic from the world. This describes a state of the world in which there is no part of the world that is not understood. Schaefer clarifies that it does not mean that everything is understood, by everyone and at present. He offered the example of the average person who might not understand how their phone works. While this technology’s inner workings are unknown to many individuals, one could theoretically read enough books and figure it out, just as the many scientists who worked on that technology have done.
Schaefer reflected on a passage in which Weber describes a student asking him how he might attain the post of academic that he so strongly desires. Weber squashes this dream quickly, telling the student to not aim for it, as there are many aspects of academic life which are undesirable (little pay, lack of respect, so on). However, Weber clarifies that there are some who see science as a passion or intoxication. These people, Weber says, have the calling for science, and they are the ones who should pursue this vocation. For these people, science is saturated with feeling and passion, not bereft of it. Schaefer argues that science draws from the same reservoirs of inspiration as art, as one is driven by a profound passion to understand the surrounding world. Linking back to Foucault, Schaefer explained that to Weber, disenchantment represents the affective dimension of pursuing knowledge. Schaefer concluded that whatever the secular is, it has something to do with the advancement of knowledge, and he calls on scholars to attend to new configurations of emotional formation. Just as Foucault asks why we are obsessed with asking why we’re oppressed, Schaefer asks why we are obsessed with asking why we’re disenchanted, or with so loudly claiming that we’re no longer enchanted. It is through asking and pursuing these new questions that we can better understand the meanings of these formative works by Foucault and Weber, in addition to paying more critical attention to the affective contours of knowledge and science.
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