Re-Enchantment Literature Review

Joel Blackstock (November 4, 2024) “The Metamodern Turn of Christopher Partridge: Spirituality, Depth Psychology and Healing Trauma in a Post-Postmodern World” at Taproot Therapy. https://gettherapybirmingham.com/metamodern-turn-spirituality-depth-psychology-healing-trauma/.

This essay is about how Christopher Partridge’s work “illuminates key themes and dynamics that are central to depth psychology—the tending of the soul, the quest for meaning, the transmutation of suffering, and the re-enchantment of self and world.”
The occult has gained ground since the ‘60s as a rejection of enlightenment rationalism, but it’s only under metamodernism that it’s taken a turn toward something more coherent. Postmodern strategies emphasized the incongruity of the various spiritualities, and how this incommensurability destroyed the totalizing Enlightenment narrative. But Metamodern strategies of the occult seek a type of higher “synthesis” from which meaning can be established.
The “integrative vision” of Carl Jung “finds echoes in the metamodern sensibility, which seeks to hold the tension of opposites and forge new wholes from the fragments of the postmodern condition.” Through embracing both light and shadow, joy and pain, metamodern psychological strategies are more like a dance of self-discovery than the treatment of symptoms. Trauma can then be a necessary door to the sublime, through which more of the soul becomes integrated.
He calls the “metamodern sacred” the “paradoxical synthesis of pre-modern enchantment and post-modern deconstruction.” [I assert that the postmodern element is the humble and limited subjectivity of postmodernism, the approach to knowledge which recognizes the limited vantage point available to us and that lets such limitations suffice for genuine knowledge and as a basis for willful action.]

Joel Blackstock (November 4, 2024) “Frederic Jameson: The Metamodern for Therapy” at Taproot Therapy. https://gettherapybirmingham.com/metamodernism-post-spirituality-and-depth-psychology-navigating-trauma-in-the-contemporary-era/.

Jungian theory has a corollary in metamodernism with his “transcendent function,” which “was the psyche’s innate capacity to reconcile opposites and achieve a higher level of integration. It is the mechanism by which we access the symbolic, archetypal dimensions of the unconscious and weave them into a coherent narrative of selfhood.” Since the “post-secular return,” or the rediscovery of spirituality by people “disenchanted” with disenchantment, albeit in ad hoc and idiosyncratic ways many times, such a psychological function has become ever more relevant and needed. Integration of the transcendent function of metamodernism allows one to weave a coherent narrative of self-hood while avoiding “the extremes of religious fundamentalism and reductive materialism.”
Depth psychology is cast as a metamodern strategy because of its space for the full spectrum of human emotion, but with the goal still being higher level integration.

Roy Suddaby, Max Ganzin, and Alison Minkus. (2017). “Craft, Magic and the Re-enchantment of the World.” European Management Journal 35(3), 285-296. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.emj.2017.03.009.

Disenchantment for Weber meant the removal of any “mysterious incalculable” force with the concomitant belief that all processes can [at least theoretically] be understood and predicted by calculation of material processes (1). Neo-institutionalism elaborates on Weber’s thesis and asserts that all of human life is and will come under the sway of rationalizing bureaucratism, thus utterly erasing magic and enchantment from human life (1-2). All the elements of industrial capitalism—“double entry accounting, the division of ownership and labour, measuring the time-value of money, and bureaucratic organizations”—are based on the idea that ever-expanding rationality within human life can control ever vaster processes and quantities (2).
John Meyer and others (2015; 1997) use the concept of “structural isomorphism” to explain how “certain formal rationalities (i.e. environmentalism, feminism, corporatization) now operate beyond the nation state in an emerging and continually expanding world-society” (2).
Disenchantment is best described by the dehumanizing effects of the Industrial Revolution, wherein the quest for increasing efficiency and control led to its own kind of irrationality. George Ritzer (1993) describes this in McDonaldization. The old, religious, nature- and village-centered life of wonder was replaced by the new, secular, machine- and urban-centered life of standardization (2).
As Nietzsche argued, has magic and mystery simply been “suppressed by an equally mythological belief in science and progress?” (3)
Populism is one counter point to the idea of inevitable total rationalization. This manifests in management science as trust in the crowd, whereas under liberal rationality, crowds are viewed as emotional and impulsive (3-4). Tribalism is another evidence. The increasing isolation of modern society is being resisted through new virtual tribal groupings, or even consumer tribal groupings, where collective identity is sought through product consumption (4-5).
Fundamentalist religion did begin to resurge in the late 1970s, as evidenced by the Islamic Revolution in Iran and Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority in America. These forces have done battle with neoliberal globalism, one side seeking reenchantment and the other disenchantment. New Age spirituality has complicated this conflict and taken on shades of both sides (5). “Post-material values” might be seen in things like corporate responsibility and “generative dynamics” aimed at employee wellbeing, purpose, and restoration (5). Distrust in official science reflects an attitude oriented toward re-enchantment. An opening toward secret, unproven sources of knowledge and the casting of official sources as no more objective than these other methods drives much of this. Business too is increasingly looked upon as something much more than amoral quantification, requiring unquantifiable, qualitative, human-centered inputs as well (6). Craft is also a vector of re-enchantment: people find local hand- and small-worked products inherently more valuable many times nowadays, with craft beer being a good example of this trend. The unquantifiable “care” that goes into these products defies their higher cost or lesser availability and allows them to successfully compete with mass produced products (6).
Neo-institutionalism is even less enchanted than the older theories of institutionalism because it seems to remove human agency completely and posits logic and agency at the institutional level rather than the individual level. Sudaby et al. offer ways to re-enchant the theory of institutions (7).
Legitimacy is a rationalistic, external check on an organization; authenticity in contrast is an idealized, internal standard an organization measures itself by. It implies a history that cannot be hastily discarded and a deeper reality that is not arbitrary, and so feeds an attitude of enchantment and particular identity (7). Legitimacy is a claim to normalcy, but authenticity is an aspiration “to be real” (8).
Rationalistic neo-institutional theory puts forth embeddedness as the cage that individuals find themselves in within organizations, thus robbing them of their agency. The authors counter this with reflexivity, or the capacity for critical self-reflection and awareness of both constraints and agency. Reflexive values and processes are not rigidly quantifiable and involve more “common sense” and intuition, thus lending themselves to a re-enchanted worldview (8). Isomorphism, which argues that behaviors are copied in a weak chase of social approval, is countered with memesis, which holds that copying is iterative and creative, thus bringing the possibility of an almost magic creativeness to social behavior (9). Diffusion is contrasted with incantation. Words are not mere vehicles of information, passively received by bureaucrats who slavishly implement them based on institutional peer pressure. Instead, words are like magic: they can conjure images and concepts that can radically change markets or inflate the value of a stock. There’s something not quantifiable behind this process (9-10).
There are still examples of enchanted practices that stubbornly refuse to be excised by omnipresent rationality. Deviling in Scotland is one, and I would add Groundhog Day in the US as another. George Soros of all people has attributed his success in investing to viewing markets as something more like alchemy than quantification. Social media curation is almost a form of animism: the idea “that material objects may, through process of human signification, acquire agency.” Indeed, enchanted thinking persists, even threatens to make a comeback, amidst the slow creep of universal rationalization and standardization (10).

Matthew David Segall. December 23, 2024. “Christ After Christianity: Metamodern Reconstructions of Religion” (dialogue with Brendan Graham Dempsey). Footnotes2Plato. https://footnotes2plato.com/2024/12/23/christ-after-christianity-metamodern-reconstructions-of-religion-dialogue-with-brendan-graham-dempsey/.

Is atheism a necessary stage to getting to a reconstruction of faith that can genuinely meet the earnest needs of the moment? Dempsey says that’s the minority though, but that those are the more “metamodern” conversations. But he thinks the Jungian “door” opened by Peterson is being used now as just an entry point into a “conservative” approach to religion that he didn’t find very “productive,” and this probably because it seems too modern/fundamentalist to him.
Segall agrees with Dempsey and labels Peterson a postmodern conservative, someone who in a sort of Nietzschean move declares meaning willfully in the midst of chaos. [I’m saying something like this, but more humbly, because there’s simply no other path. Thus metamodernism. But it’s a knowing willfulness, not a naive one. It’s more based on hope that self aggrandizement.]
They think the reactionary turn is unfortunate because they don’t allow for returning to traditional religion to be an option for those who are moving through metamodern logic. They discount that reality could be in the shape of Christianity categorically, which is a bit of secular imperialism within their worldview that they don’t acknowledge.
They say Stephen Hicks and Jonathan Pageau have both been given space by the success of Peterson, though they’re very different, and that what they share is a critique of postmodernism.
They think the “conversion phenomenon” is not the desired result or logical trajectory of the Metamodern reconstitution of belief. They think this “reactionary” path will only engender another reaction, an “Atheism 2.0.”
Segall wants the Christ “before Christianity,” which means he’s become the arbiter of the Tradition. He is more qualified, presumably, to speak about Christ than the collective belief system that has emerged in the wake of the Christ event for the last 2,000 years. Things like “institutional religious trappings” are opposed to “what this is really about,” which reveals modernist assumptions. What prevents, after postmodernism, inherited religious trappings from being just as valid as archaeology? [What they’re missing is that you can’t curate your own version and get the same results. You have to submit to something larger than yourself, something worked out at a level above yours, to find true flourishing. There’s no way around that. And it does imply faith in a higher intelligence ordering things, but, as any addict will tell you, whether that’s true or not—it simply works.]
Segall casts America as a propositional nation and, in the same breath in which he says it would also be wrong for America to be constituted on acceptance of the Christian religion, he says that to be an American you must accept the civic religion of “individual freedom, social justice, you know, whatever else we might want to include in the idea of democracy as a way of life.”
Christianity certainly did teach that the individual soul is the locus of value, but it taught many other things that logically flow from this, which Segall and Dempsey would reject as dogmatism. What has to be preserved at every point is the true dogmatism they’re protecting though. That’s implicit in their denial that the Christ event actually could be different than any other religion, such as Rabbinic Judaism, which they are quick to deny. Because that leads to “nastiness.” [As metamodernists they are free to affirm values willfully, earnestly, even as they acknowledge this willfulness, but they need to understand that dogmatism runs both ways.]
Dempsey correctly shows how postmodern relativism does ultimately undermine the notions of progress that all liberals want to cling to.
Individuality is deepened by expanding the community to be ever more universal, because it’s only within community that individuality is recognized.
Dempsey: “I think that, left to its devices in healthy development, people and societies will become more open, expansive, and universal in their orientation to self and other.” [It is scary to admit this: that each dogmatic assertion is just that, something founded on faith or authority. But postmodernism taught us that. We’re afraid that if we admit that completely, that we’re now be adrift in a sea of relativism, and that a Nietzschean, post-moral, brutal dog-eat-dog landscape is all that would remain. But there’s freedom in realizing, on one level, that that’s all liberalism was anyways, but yet on another level, faith is the Kierkegaardian entryway into a semi-external validation system that can lessen the uncertainty. No, it’s not the dream of Enlightenment unbiased independent rational verification, but it’s all we’ve got.]
Metaphysically, they conjecture about Christological naturalism, which gets at the Logos being the deeply embedded, observable, fractal patterns seen in nature. But their slow, evolutionary theory still betrays their implicit mechanistic bias. For an underlying assumption of “mind” as the ultimate reality would make the supernatural eruption of miracles into the natural world make total sense. But if the bedrock assumption is mechanism, then such things have to be explained away or allegorized. For some reason they believe an emergent, in-process god is less problematic than an originary, perfect God. I argue this is because they’ve chosen to believe mechanistic process is primary in reality rather than mind. Case in point from Dempsey: “The idea of God’s face being chiseled out of the marble, you know, but like the process of that face being chiseled isn’t like a sculptor methodically doing something with a predetermined plan in mind—it’s more like a slime mold moving through a maze.”
Dempsey on reductionistic materialism: “It’s so absurd then when people flip that on its head and take consciousness and value and morality as epiphenomena and as illusions and these sorts of things, because they’re taking, you know, an earlier level of complexity and complex behavior and sort of presuming that everything works in that way, and then, as a result, has to negate or undermine or suggest as false consciousness, consciousness itself, and the very notion that is most immediately apprehendable to us.”
This quote demonstrates their arbitrary cleavage between symbolism and literality that only a providential God solves: “…not doing the sort of Jonathan Pageau thing where all of a sudden you think you’re talking about symbols, but then all of a sudden you’re talking about literal truth.”

Richard Jenkins. (2000). “Disenchantment, Enchantment and Re-Enchantment: Max Weber at the Millennium.” Max Weber Studies, 1(1), 11–32. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24579711.

Weber was conscious of the dark side of modernity, which he considered disenchantment: the decline of magic and the rise of rational organizations in all domains of life (12). He described it as an iron cage, but there are reasons to doubt how efficient the capture has been: bureaucracies are full of dark corners, inexplicable incompetencies, and holdovers of myth, identity, and tradition. All of these things endlessly complicate the rational computation (14).
Jenkins calls into question how unified the premodern world was, or how fragmented our globalized postmodern world really is, and concludes that the two trends are in reality always two sides of the same coin: they entail and require one another (15-16).
Though magic has declined in its position in most of our daily lives, so has science—new diseases, skepticism about vaccines, new fractures in the scientific consensus unseating Newtonian physics—it’s become less hegemonic throughout the 20th century (17). Correspondingly, many a-rational enchantments affect most people’s lives—alternative or eastern medicines, complex identities, fundamentalism, astrology, psychoanalysis, political promises of utopia, and even the lottery (18). Entertainment and the charisma of global celebrities are also vectors of re-enchantment, conveying an altogether different worldview than the one encouraged by our institutions. And even within the implementation of global capitalism, resistance and adaption betray a contrary spirit that refuses to be totally absorbed (20).
Rationalization is not the only process of modernity. Theres also globalization, which paradoxically brings in its wake greater efforts at fostering local identity. Witness Nashville’s country music tourism scene becoming ever more distinct and assertive in the wake of the city becoming more globalized and homogenous with other globalized cities (21).
Gellner (1992) argues that though rationalization was the product of a specific place and time, nevertheless it assumed an eternal, disembedded universalism that now applies to all times and places (21). [This is definitely theological, even if the theology is “facts and logic.”]
Rationalization’s supposed march of progress is also marred by things like the Holocaust and Foucault’s panopticon, elements of violence and oppression that have cold bureaucratic logic (divorced from mystical “morality”) at their heart (22).
Weber said “affect” must be exiled from the public sphere, and he meant women by that, in order to realize the age of rationality. But modernity has paradoxically ushered women into every sphere of public life. Does this enchant “masculine reason” or does “masculine reason” disenchant women? (23).
Y2K is a good example of enchantment and disenchantment, depending on your perspective, all rolled into one. The religious fervor, the technological anxiety, the secular skepticism, and the chronological indeterminacy all conspired to create an event greater than the sum of its parts (28). Jenkins concludes that reenchantment is just as intrinsic to modernity as disenchantment—indeed, the two may require each other (28-28).

Benjamin J. Hartmann and Katja H. Brunk. (2019). “Nostalgia Marketing and (Re-)

Enchantment.” International Journal of Research in Marketing, 36(4), 669-686. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijresmar.2019.05.002,

The authors describe enchantment as a collective process, negotiated by both marketers and consumers. There are different modes of nostalgia, and the authors argue that these modes drive re-enchantment in different ways (1-2). Re-enchantment in this context refers to the imbuing of meaning into everyday experiences: the sum being greater than the mechanistic parts, basically (1). It’s not a straightforward claim of supernatural reality but a perspective on the lived experience of these phenomena. For marketing, it’s defined as practices that “incorporate non-functional sources of value in goods and services, and turn them into sources of hedonic, symbolic, and interpersonal value” (Badot & Filser, 2007, p. 167) (2).
Nostalgia is often initiated because of a changing present that creates feelings of dislocation and lack of belonging. Nostalgia allows a connection to a former time and place of belonging and connection (3)
German reunification is a good case study for looking at the effects of nostalgia on enchantment. When the GDR initially dissolved, the euphoria of the rush of capitalistic excess, which produced a type of enchantment, was soon replaced by disenchantment: migration, unemployment, social classes, and loss of cultural identity soon brought this feeling on. In this environment, a path to a nostalgic re-enchantment emerged with the consumption of GDR aesthetics (3-4).
Nostalgic products can retroject a consumer into the past (re-instantiation), inform the present (re-enactment), and/or add ludic, playful value to the present (re-appropriation) (7).
Re-instantiation is related to reluctant, melancholic nostalgia, nostalgia that yearns for a simpler, better time or place. Products tapping into a bygone aesthetic, such as brands from the former socialist East Germany, can fill consumers with longing for a supposedly better, simpler, more honest time. The consumer can “retroject” himself into a former time, and partake of that better time, just by using the product. It is in some ways a form of time travel (8-9).
Re-enactment allows progressive nostalgia, which is a feeling of desiring elements of the past to be enacted in the present to help ameliorate certain present day deficiencies, to replicate the older healthier ways in the new society. It’s more piecemeal and constructive than re-instantiation, which is more fatalistic. It’s enchanted because it imagines that the product or practice could really bring some intangible value back from the past so that it could enrich the present (9-10).
Re-appropriation is a contrasting strategy that results from playful or ironic nostalgia. It builds on a dislocated hedonism rather than fleeing it, and in the process gives access to a new level of confidence and feeling of power. It re-enchants by opening vistas of style and titillation inaccessible through the options on display in the present (11-13).

Alessandro Testa. (2023). “Re-thinking the Concept of Re-enchantment in Central-Eastern Europe.” Religio, 31(1). https://doi.org/10.5817/Rel2023-1-7.

Testa asserts that total secularization, as predicted by Weberian theory and as developed by authors like Sabino Acquaviva, has not come to pass (103-104). Instead, it’s been more of a transformation than a decline, with fragmentation, individuality, consumerism, and shifts in personal ethics all fraying the sway of established religion but bolstering a re-enchantment that is more attuned to the neoliberal world system (104-107). “Marketisation, individualisation, identity politics, authenticity-seeking, ritual creativity,” etc., are the notes played by the different religiosity forming. It is much more choice-based (108). This is partly a result of the “disembedding” of all aspects of life from their natural contexts that has occurred under globalization (109). Only the “glocal” really exists anymore, the local (as isolated and “pure”) is extinct (110).
Testa led the way in examining the phenomenon of re-enchantment in the post-socialist countries of central-eastern Europe, beginning in 2020 (111).
Some of the trends: neopaganism is growing and is very vocal; eastern and Hindu religious practices are spreading to the upper-middle classes, chiefly in the form of yoga; churches are being built in Romania and Russia; spiritual but not religious people outnumber all Christians in Czechia; despite that, the restoration of the Marian Column in Prague has seen a great revival of spontaneous piety and was broadly supported, even in this most “apatheistic” of cities; finally, there are the invented religions, such as “Jediism,” which are also growing (116-118). The trends are disjointed and contradictory, representing ferment and decline, in the same area, even the same city, at the same time (118-119). Individualisation may be the main driver, growing out of the neoliberal globalization sweeping the region (120).
Some dispute the familiar story of disenchantment altogether, and argue instead that it was merely the withdrawal of church influences upon the state that created this impression, with private spirituality merely changing during this long transformation (122). Re-enchantment, as well, implies the practice of “charging” objects, practices, events, beliefs, situations, places, etc., with some special quality that is beyond the sum of their mechanical parts (“magic”). This is commonly thought to be something done outside the domain of traditional Christianity, but Testa points to it being present within the churches in central-eastern Europe as well (125). Testa lists out seven types of re-enchantment gaining ground. For my purposes, vernacular and magical practices believed to predate modernism are important, as well as new and peculiar forms of religious revivalism usually involving Catholicism (like the Marian column in Prague) (126-128).

Nicholas Paige. “Permanent Re-Enchantments: On Some Literary Uses of the Supernatural from Early Empiricism to Modern Aesthetics,” in The Re-enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age, by Joshua Landy and Michael Saler. (Stanford University Press, 2009): 159-180.

Paige explains that re-enchantment by definition implicitly acknowledges its modern character and therefore its position of estrangement; i.e., its needing to emerge back out into hostile territory (159-160). He maintains that efforts at enchantment began immediately with the pre-Enlightenment, at the end of the seventeenth century (160).
Disenchantment is commonly traced to Descartes, Pascal, Hobbes, and Spinoza, but it’s more difficult to date than that. It’s evident in the French royal edict of 1682, when it was declared that sorcerers and diviners were now to be apprehended, not because of their dangerous supernatural power, but because of their being deceptive imposters (161). Popular literature in this time started to reflect the trope of credulous, superstitious believers and sophisticated skeptics. Works of this time even begin to employ straightforward “debunking” narratives (162). However Anthony J. Cascardi (1996) argues that re-enchantment “is embedded within Enlightenment subjectivity itself (as opposed to a reaction against it)” as if to say disenchantment entails enchantment necessarily (162, footnote on 319).
The supernatural is in these stories exploited for the excitement and fear it initially elicits, then cast down by rational explanations which validate pervasive rationalistic skepticism (163-164).
Paige ventures that superstition and enchantment are something modern culture continually reinvents and raises the specter of in order to triumphantly deflate again and again in order to prove disenchantment (166). Fairy tales from this period were self-consciously not true, not meant to be true, but were ironic and instead flirtations with unbounded imagination (167-168). This was inevitable in an age where, as Malebranche said, the imagination was simply a source of sensory error (as it must be in the binary true-false world of instrumental reason (169). Modern fiction found its way out of the dichotomy in the 1700s: not a straightforward claim to truth but neither a transparently fanciful account either (170). Fiction could now take seriously the supernatural, partly because by the late eighteenth century, the process of de-superstitioning the world was thoroughly complete, at least in educated circles (172).
The fantastic and the gothic have been taken as the enchanted underbelly of the positivist era, but the realist novel also contributed to this goal: by being historical without being history, it showed how stories the reader knows are invented can conjure realities beyond themselves. Their representations of the social world can be true, even if their specifics are not (176-177).
He concludes: “before re-enchantment there was not enchantment, but some other mode of knowledge production that by its very nature could be neither superstitious nor antisuperstitious.” The obsession with something being either literally true or literally false came about with the age of reason (179). Modern fiction, then, “through the constant shuttling back and forth between reality and imagination, continues to beat away at the disenchanted barrier between mind and things, the subject and the world” (180).