Concept

Dark reenchantment

Dark reenchantment is the return of a world populated by forces that cannot be interrogated — stripped of the meaning, cosmology and interpretive community that accompanied the old enchantment.

Max Weber described modernity as a disenchantment. The world ceased to be populated by forces that had to be placated and became, in principle, calculable: everything could at least be conceived as masterable by reckoning. This was not a matter of people growing wiser. It followed from a particular apparatus — the printing press, the bureaucracy, the archive, the reproducible method — which made causal chains followable by anyone willing to follow them.

The apparatus is being replaced, and the disenchantment is running backwards. The forces determining what a person sees, receives, pays and is believed about have again become unavailable for questioning. A model reaches a decision that nobody can account for and that cannot be reproduced. A system no single person holds in view distributes attention and credit. Asking for a reason produces an answer that is fluent, plausible and unaccountable.

This is where the word dark does its work. The old enchanted world was unreadable and meaningful in compensation: it arrived with a cosmology, a ritual, a priesthood and a community that interpreted it. The new one arrives with none of these. We get the unreadability without the recompense — mystery without meaning, an oracle without a temple.

Two consequences follow, and both are uncomfortable. Conspiracy thinking looks different once this is taken seriously: it is a formally apt response to power that genuinely is hidden, misdirected in its content. And tertiary orality is reenchantment in its purest expression — speech without a speaker, the utterance arriving without an origin, as it did before writing and has not done since.