I. Technologies of enchantment

In this video, Ba-Benzélé persons, members of a pygmy tribe in the African Congo, demonstrate the Hindewhu, a style of singing/whistle-playing which announces the return from a hunt. Michael Clayton says the word hindewhu is “an onomatopoeia of the sound of a performer alternately singing pitched syllables and blowing into a single-pitch whistle made from the twig of a papaya tree.”

Anthropologist Jerome Lewis has described the polyphonic, polyrhythmic music of the Ba-Benzélé pygmies as a "technology of enchantment," where one individual voice is lost in awareness of the community, creating a sort of vocal communion.

The term comes from the work of Alfred Gell, a British social anthropologist whose most influential work concerned art, language, symbolism and ritual. Gell’s “The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology” linked the spectator’s response to a work of art to their socialization, particularly how the spectator has been condition to perceive the technical processes which produce the artwork:

The moral significance of the work of art arises from the mismatch between the spectator's internal awareness of his own powers as an agent and the conception he forms of the powers possessed by the artist. In reconstructing the processes which brought the work of art into existence, he is obliged to posit a creative agency which transcends his own and, hovering in the background, the power of the collectivity on whose behalf the artist exercised his technical mastery.

At the heart of this mastery is the ability to induce a transcendence, or a state which lifts the individual outside their particular lived experience to partake a shared or cosmic experience. A communion. An eternity tasted inside a bread crumb. A we invoked by a Gregorian chant. A simultaneous sense of at-oneness and nonexistence.

“Just as money is the ideal means of exchange, magic is the ideal means of technical production,” Gell writes, arguing for an expansive understanding of valorizations outside capitalist markets. He notes that “money values pervade the world of commodities, so that it is impossible to think of an object without thinking at the same time of its market price.” In the same way, “magic, as the ideal technology, pervades the technical domain in pre-scientific societies.”

Modernity craves this we profusely—to the point of rabid nationalisms, to the point of hysteria inside stadiums where men kick balls for money—and one must wonder if the exhausting individualistic conception of accountability and agency generated by late Protestant capitalism has only increased the fever for communal ecstasy.

II. Empathy’s industrial complexities

In her Bookforum review of George Saunders’ recent fiction craft book, Russian scholar Jennifer Wilson headlined "The Empathy Industrial Complex" as a facet of American fiction—the belief that fiction can create empathy, and writers are part of an empathy-marketing industry. Wilson doesn’t like it. She thinks the focus on empathy in Saunders undercuts the how Russian writers "enable a critique of Western civilization and English society." In a sense, this maps on the socialist realist critique of literature as a bastion of bourgeois sentimentality that ignores social and structural issues, and sets aside the responsibility to create a new man.

Wilson is correct that Russian critiques of the West in fiction are not "roped off from discourse about race, gender, or empire,"  but her critique of Saunders revolves around the transcendence that we read into Russian writers. For example, she doesn't like that Saunders de-politicizes the anti-feudalist message of Ivan Turgenev's story, "The Singers." The reluctance to pass judgment, for Wilson, places Saunders in the let's-report-on-Trump supporters category of what she calls "the empathy industrial complex." Unfortunately, by failing to define this category, one gets the sense that it could be anything from a chain prayer spam to a nonprofit that reunites undocumented families.

Empathy matters. Fiction structures how we think about the world. Family, love, community, and interpersonal relations are often reflections of how socialization evolves in cultures. Granting Saunders' focus on the skaz tradition as a vehicle for multiple realities, Wilson suspects that the focus on narrative voice leads to a sort of tactical concession--that the fiction writer represents humanity, in all its grotesque banalities.  From here, she jumps to the assertion that Saunders' craft leads to the conclusion that Trumpists aren't racist so much as confused, lost in the loop, over-identifying with the collective We of late-Americanist capitalism.

Wilson's rue is not amoral--she hates seeing white racist as the victims they paint themselves to be. But the question of didacticism in fiction remains fuzzy. How much does the fiction writer owe the world? And what is critic’s role in the denomination of ethical voices?

III. Fiction scripts us

The arguments for the role or duty of fiction often overlook the extent to which fiction already socializes and creates the scripts by which we read and interpret one another’s actions. And I wonder what Gell would say about social media if he had not died in 1997, before the rise of virtual romance and screen-generated interpersonal relations.

In “On love,” Gell noted that conversation plays a critical structural role in modern British love, where “chatting-up” enacts a slow information striptease, a revelation of incremental information in the context of urban spaces and communities where residents hold little in common, or share little of their actual day-to-day lives. It is because modern humans are strangers to one another that how we disclose—and what we choose to convey—remains impactful and significant. In the lovers’ conversation, the “torrent of confidential information” usually occurs in person (and one wonders, again, how social media and email have increased the stakes of disclosure while simultaneously lowering the value of “emotional capital”).

“The effect of love, in modern society, is to reproduce, fictionally, the kind of pre-structured affinities which are taken for granted in a society like Umeda, thus converting the arbitrary into the inevitable,” Gell writes. Because there is no “structural predestination”—no tradition of parents arranging a marriage, no local rituals to rely upon—modern love has to invent itself from scratch, or rather, from the social scripts offered by culture. Hence the “fictionalization of love”:

…. the fact that the confidences that couples exchange are provided for them, structurally, because it is structurally necessary that these confidences by exchanged. Modern love would be unthinkable without fiction, romantic fiction in particular. 

Since the structural exchange of secrets forms the script which couples accept in order to play the game called modern love, one also wonders how “flirting” behavior is misread or misunderstood based on the individual fictions consumed by players. Is it wrong for the female-identifying player to reach towards the first kiss in heteronormative couplings? How has queerness inflected flirtation behavior?

“Each modern couple has to devise for itself a history which will justify its existence as a couple, on the basis of zero personal experience;” each couple makes use of the scripts offered by novels, magazines, television, sitcoms, soap operas, movies, and media; each navigates across the canyon of their chosen templates. “Love-fiction” is not less cool or authentic than lived experience precisely because it informs, shapes, and interprets lived experience. To quote Gell:

Fiction is a giant simulation, an external thought- process, which provides individuals with the scripts they cannot do without and which non-fictional experience cannot supply. This means that we cannot put love-fiction to one side as if it were less authentic than real life. Fiction is, where modern societies are concerned, what genealogy is in those societies which have marriage rules, i.e. the means of producing the relationships on which social life depends. Fiction, re-enacted as real life, produces the histories on which relationships and society at large are grounded.

Noticing how my own ideas of love and amatory relations have changed over decades, I’m inclined to agree with Gell. There’s an article in the current Atlantic Monthly about how the reality TV show Sister Wives inspired other persons to seek and sustain polygynous relationships—no word on polyandrous ones, however (and some theorists would argue that polygamy, itself, is so deeply patriarchal and essentialist that polyandry isn’t compatible with it).

Gell takes arranged marriage as a structural sensibility which exists in tight-knit communities. Westerners, with their love-at-first sight socializations, believe that love generates the relationship, but cultures with arranged marriages believe that the relationship generates love. In Bengal, where arranged marriages were common, access to Western media led youth culture to reject these traditions for the love-scripts they consume on television.

The production of love as knowledge is dynamic—it has social, emotional, structural, and economic repercussions. In cultures where arranged marriages predominate, bisexuality and queerness often remain illegible, secret, and persecuted. For Gell, the future of modern love includes a different form of match-making, a technical replacement of community by science, where couples may be matched according to genetic profiles or information deemed “scientific.” I think we see this in multiple online dating and match-making apps, and I wonder how these have evolved into “technologies of enchantment” and constructed affinities or group affiliations.

* Also, highly recommend Bergita Bugarija’s short fiction, “Summer of Bombs” (Pleiades) for a look at how Russian novels and bourgeois sentiment inflect the lives of those at war, those living in fear of bombs, those struggling to survive and clinging to the most ordinary parts of human existence—the hope of some exalted interpersonal communion.

Alfred Gell puts forward an anthropological theory of visual art seen as a form of instrumental action: the making of things as a means of influencing the thoughts and actions of others. The anthropology of art is here reformulated as the anthropology of a category of action: Gell shows how art objects embody complex intentionalities and mediate social agency. He explores the psychology of patterns and perceptions, art and personhood, the control of knowledge, and the interpretation of meaning, drawing upon a diversity of artistic traditions-European, Indian, Polynesian, Melanesian, and Australian.

Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. With a Foreword by Nicholas Thomas. Publisher Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1998.

[Source: Monoskop]