Abstract
The article argues that the pre-modern/modern divide has a ‘regulative function’ in the narratives of the international and continues to be central in the reproduction of spatio-temporal hierarchies. The interrogation of spatio-temporal hierarchies in International Relations (IR) has predominalty focused on either searching for new origins or making the ‘non-West’ co-present but has not sufficiently interrogated the fixity of the past of Europe. The article will focus on the narrative of the disenchantment of the world and how it structures what is legitimate knowledge, what is past and what is inside and outside through three illustrative examples of different processes of ordering knowledge that fix the past of Europe. The first example will discuss how the division of alchemy and chemistry occurred, and how alchemy was delegitimized. The second example will focus on how the narrative of the magic as ‘past’ and the present as modern, scientific and rational came to be naturalized through the writing of history. The third example will discuss the search for the unicorn which continued long after the assumed disenchantment of Europe. The aim is to further the discussion how these processes order knowledge in a way that not only fixes the past of Europe but also structures how ‘ Europe’ and the ‘past’ is approached in IR.
Introduction
The Irish newspaper Nationalist & Tipperary Advertiser ran an article on March of 1895 entitled ‘Mysterious Disappearance of a Young Woman: The Land of the Banshee and the Fairy’.
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The article discussed the disappearance of a local woman stating that Her friends who were present assert that she had been taken away on a white horse before their eyes, and that she told them when leaving, that on Sunday night they would meet her at a fort on Kylenagranagh hill, where they could, if they had the courage, rescue her. Accordingly, they assembled at the appointed time and place to fight the fairies, but, needless to say, no white horse appeared.
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Eventually, the woman’s body had been found, and the case came to trial igniting a fierce debate around whether the Irish believed in fairies and magic? Moreover, if they did still believe in fairies what did that mean for their aims for self-governance? As such, whether one continued to believe in fairies and magic could be seen as being ‘not yet’ modern, still being in the ‘waiting room of history’. 3 The question here is not whether one believes in fairies, magic and/or unicorns as such but what does believing or not believing in these mean in terms of how we situate them in relation to modernity.
The article argues that the pre-modern/modern divide has a ‘regulative function’ 4 in the narratives of the international and continues to be central in the reproduction of spatio-temporal hierarchies. Spatio-temporal hierarchies refers to the way that knowledge is ordered. Spatially, the space designated as ‘Europe’ is separated from other spaces designated as ‘non-Europe’ and processes such as the advent of scientific knowledge are assigned as originating within the space of ‘Europe’. As a consequence, the spaces designated as ‘Europe’ are situated as being temporally ahead of other spaces who represent the ‘past’ of Europe and can only be in the same present as Europe by ‘catching up’. 5 Spatio-temporal hierarchies work through the naturalization of a series of binaries such as West/non-West, progressive/backward, developed/underdeveloped, rational/superstitious, modern/traditional, and knowledge/belief systems. The ‘regulative function’ 6 of the pre-modern/modern divide is to naturalize these binaries through a spatio-temporal relation to each other where one side of the binary is the present of Europe (progressive, developed, rational, modern and scientific), and the other side of the binary is the past of Europe and present of spaces designated as ‘non-Europe’ (backward, underdeveloped, irrational, medieval and superstitious). As such, the pre-modern/modern divide is one of the main ways in which spatio-temporal hierarchies get reproduced and binaries through which we make sense of the international get naturalized. The aim of the article is to focus on the narrative of the disenchantment of the world and the reproduction of the occult/science binary 7 and explore the ways in which these binaries get naturalized.
The mainstream narratives of the international and of modernity continue to reproduce spatio-temporal hierarchies through framing progress as happening only through moving from one side of the binary (beliefs, traditions) to the other side of the binary (scientific thought, modernity). As such the narrative of the disenchantment of the world is one of the central narratives of the move from pre-modern to the modern. The narratives of disenchantment of the world specifically and of modernity in general have of course been interrogated widely. 8 Postcolonial interventions, for example, have problematized the narrative of modernity, disenchantment and progress in depth underlining how these binaries of modernity/tradition or superstition/science are not universal and can have different trajectories and entanglements. 9 Yet, these interrogations, have predominantly, continued to naturalize the binaries but rather than moving from one side of the binary to the other, they have further fixed the binaries as essentialized characteristics of the constructed spaces of ‘Europe’ and ‘non-Europe’ predominantly due to assuming the fixity of the past of ‘Europe’. Therefore, their critique of modernity and/or disenchantment has been directed against a ‘hyperreal Europe’ 10 that never actually existed. In International Relations (IR), the ‘past’ to which the ‘non-West’ had been assigned was reclaimed through underlining that events, ideas and developments in the ‘non-West’ were not ‘past’ but rather co-present and coeveal 11 to ‘Europe’, 12 but this line of questioning though important very rarely also problematized that this ‘past’ of Europe never existed. 13 ‘Europe’ in these accounts continues to be the ‘sovereign subject’ of scientific knowledge, 14 and the occult, the magical and the imaginary become constructed as belonging to the ‘past’ of Europe and to the ‘present’ of spaces designated as ‘non-Europe’. As such, postcolonial critiques contribution in general is to interrogate the move from one side of the binary into the other rather than interrogating the constructions of the binaries themselves. The article argues that this occurs because of the lack of interrogation of the fixity of the past of Europe and aims to interrogate this fixity of the past of Europe through entering into dialogue with the literature on the histories of the occult, disenchantment and science that have focused on demonstrating the ‘myth of disenchantment’. 15 The occult was one of the dynamics absented from the ‘present’ of Europe in order to fix the past of Europe, and as such, the article will focus on the occult and interrogate how knowledge was ordered designating what is legitimate, what is past and what is inside and outside. The interrogations into these processes aim to not only interrogate the fixity of the past of Europe but also spatio-temporal fixities in general that continue to be reproduced in IR.
The article will first start by discussing how spatio-temporal hierarchies work and how the medieval/modern divide is one of the main ways through which the temporal difference is constructed and maintained. This section will then underline how spatio-temporal hierarchies have been addressed within the field predominantly overlooking the fixity of the past of Europe. The next section will introduce the concept of Occult qualities and how its meaning has changed redefining the boundaries between what is considered legitimate and illegitimate knowledge. The three sub-sections that follow are illustrative examples of different processes of ordering knowledge that fix the past of Europe. As Chakrabarty has stated, ‘the moment we think of the world as disenchanted . . .. We set limits to the ways the past can be narrated’, 16 and as such the article focuses on interrogating the processes through which the knowledge was ordered designating what is legitimate, what is past and what is inside and outside.
The first sub-section aims to problematize further how the division between the occult, magic and science occurred at the institutional level of the university through the example of the division of alchemy and chemistry and how alchemy was delegitimized. The example of how the divisions between chemistry and alchemy developed underscores that it is not necessarily more and better empirical knowledge that alters our way of knowing but rather the issue is epistemological. This sub-section then works to underline how unfixing the past of Europe allows for further rethinking how the past is approached in IR. The past is not a repository of knowledge from which better narratives can be constructed but rather is constructed through a variety of historiographical operations. 17 The second sub-section aims to further the discussions about the need for interrogations into how History functions as a system of knowledge that structures what gets assigned as past, what is constructed as being present and what futures are left available to be imaginable. 18 The sub-section will provide an example of this process of constructing the past as ‘past’ through a discussion of how the narrative of magic as ‘past’ and the present as modern, scientific and rational came to be naturalized through the writing of history. The discussions will be furthered in the third sub-section that explores how the past that is fixed in the space of Europe is externalized to the space of non-Europe as its present. The aim is to underline that fixing the past as past is one aspect of the dynamic, and this fixing is stabilized through a process of designating the inside and outside through mediations of the known, unknown and the unknowable. The sub-section will discuss these dynamics through the example of the search for the unicorn which continued long after the assumed disenchantment of Europe had taken place. The interrogation of this process aims to underline further that the characteristics associated with one side of the binary should not be essentialized into spaces but rather should be problematized as one of the processes in the ordering of knowledge. The aim of all these sub-sections is to provide illustrative examples of how these processes order knowledge in a way that not only fixes the past of Europe but also structures how ‘Europe’, the ‘past’, modernity and the international are approached in IR.
Spatio-Temporal Hierarchies of Knowledge
The aim of this section is to discuss how spatio-temporal hierarchies structure our understanding of the international. The discussion focuses primarily on how efforts to address the spatial and temporal difference (separation of Europe from non-Europe and assigning non-Europe to the past) predominantly overlook the second temporal difference at work which is to construct and fix the ‘past’ of Europe. 19 The first part of this section will present a discussion on how the medieval/modern divide has a ‘regulative function’. 20 ordering our understanding of concepts such as sovereignty and reproduces spatio-temporal hierarchies. The second part of this section will present an overview of how the spatio-temporal hierarchies were addressed in IR underlining that to the extent that the temporal difference was addressed it was how ‘non-Europe’ was relegated to the past and consequently the focus was on making ‘non-Europe’ co-present in the ‘present’. The section will then underline that, as important as these interventions have been, there has not been sufficient problematization with the second temporal difference, the construction of the ‘past’ of Europe.
The narrative of the international is predicated on a periodization of what is considered as the modern. As Costa-Lopez states ‘the Middle Ages are arguably an ever-present, silent counterpart to much IR theorizing, as they constitute a fundamental steppingstone in both the core historical narratives and the conceptual apparatus of the discipline’. 21 As such, the Middle Ages or the pre-modern as a demarcation point is one of the main regulative principles of the discipline. The Middle Ages is a ‘category of reification’ that emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries to fix certain categories as belonging to the ‘past’ so that other categories put in a binary oppositional relationship to them could be constructed as belonging to the modern, the now and the ‘present’. 22 Davis for example explores how the medieval/modern break structures our thinking about the sovereign state. She argues that ‘the idea of a “feudal” past for Europe emerged in the legal battle over sovereignty’. 23 Thus, feudalism as an ‘ism’ was a construct, ‘a fully reified object, a status that accords with the belief that it is a phenomenon of the past’. 24 It was a similar process in general with the category of medieval or the Middle Ages which is at the centre of the theoretical construct of modernity 25 and as Holsinger states tracing how medievalism works is a ‘powerful mechanism for questioning traditional schemes of periodization and temporality in the Western tradition.’ 26 In the same vein, problematizing the regulative function of the ‘medieval’ or Middle Ages can be useful in opening for discussion what the division works to fix and what it works to obscure in the narrative of the international.
The regulative aspect of the pre-modern is discussed within IR especially in the works of Julia Costa Lopez. 27 For example, she underlines how ‘connectedness’ becomes established as a ‘modern’ dynamic through its juxtaposition against the ‘local, simple and isolated’ pre-modern. 28 Thus, the pre-modern works as a ‘regulative principle’ to understand the ‘modern’ international’ where ‘most characteristics of the medieval limit themselves to portraying the mirror opposite of the modern system: where the modern has public authority, the medieval has private, where the modern has territoriality, the medieval has fuzzy borders, where the modern has a system of multiple sovereign polities, the medieval has universal claims of church and empire’. 29 The isolation/connection binary is one aspect of this regulation and different constructions of the relationship between medieval and modern and when and how the transition from one to the other occurred, give different characteristics to these categories depending on what is constructed as being past and what is constructed as being present and as being characteristic of the modern international. One of the predominant regulative binaries is that of the disenchantment of the world whereby the occult, beliefs and superstitions belong to the past of Europe and the present is rational and scientific. These binary oppositions get naturalized through spatio-temporal hierarchies where not only one side of the binary gets assigned to the past (medieval times), but furthermore it also gets externalized outside of the space defined as ‘Europe’ and gets constructed as their present and as such, the medieval/modern binary is one of the main regulative principles through which the spatio-temporal hierarchies of the international get reproduced.
Spatio-temporal hierarchies refer to the way in which the international is ordered spatio-temporally. Spatially, the space designated as ‘Europe’ is separated from other spaces which are designed as ‘non-Europe’ and any development that is understood to be progressive is then assigned as originating within the space of Europe such as sovereignty, international system and scientific knowledge. Temporally, the spaces designated as ‘Europe’ are then situated ahead of every other space and spaces designated as ‘non-Europe’ are given the characteristics given to the ‘past’ of Europe. Thus, the characteristics ascribed to the past of Europe fixed through the assignation of medieval are also externalized to the non-European spaces who are constructed as living in the past of Europe. This temporal difference 30 is maintained through a double operation, the fixing of the past in the space designated as Europe and that past being externalized to non-European spaces as their ‘present’ and the ‘present’ of the European spaces as their future on the condition that they move from one side of the binary to the other and hence exist in the same ‘present’ as Europe.
How spatio-temporal hierarchies structure the narrative of the international has been addressed widely within the discipline. 31 The way in which spatio-temporal hierarchies has been addressed can be predominantly thought of under two dynamics; searching for the origins and making the non-European spaces co-present with the present of Europe. 32 Both these dynamics are related to one of the regulative functions of the medieval/modern divide, namely the isolation/connectivities divide. The dynamic of the search for origins can be observed in the literature problematizing the narrative of the treaties of Westphalia and the assumption that it marks the origins of the modern international. 33 These critiques were incredibly important in rethinking the history of the international demonstrating how ‘a fixation on sovereignty and the dubious view of sovereignty as based on military capability rather than mutual empowerment have tended to produce a narrow perception of “international” political phenomena’. 34 As important as this rethinking has been to problematize the ‘ontology of IR’, 35 it has predominantly led to different attempts to ‘date’ the origin of the modern international. These attempts have not solely focused on when sovereignty began but also when modernity began and different benchmark dates have been established to trace the cutoff point of sovereignty, modernity and the international. 36 As such, each iteration works to construct a ‘past’ from which the ‘newness’ of the present can be claimed such as pre-sovereignty/sovereignty and pre-modern/modern through different datings rather than exploring the regulative function of the division and the ‘pasts’ being fixed in order to define the ‘present’. 37 The search for origins is directly related to the search for connections and as such continues to reproduce the medieval/modern divide whereby the origin point is when connectivities begin. The second dynamic that is visible in efforts to problematize the narrative of the international has been to make present what was absented. These interventions did not focus on when the ‘beginning’ was but on the fact that within ‘modern present’ the ideas, events and developments from the ‘non-West’ had not been included. As such, their focus was on the connections and co-constitutions within the formation of the modern present. The aim of this literature has been, for example to foreground that the narrative of the diffusion of the international system overlooks not only the agency of the non-West but also that these developments (formation of international system) were not taking place in a vacuum but in interaction with the non-West. 38 These interventions have been extremely important in making visible the spaces designated as non-European but have also continued to operate within the established confines of what is ‘past’ and what was considered to be the ‘modern present’. 39 The efforts to address spatio-temporal hierarchies has predominantly taken the medieval/modern divide as their starting point and worked to present more accurate narratives of how events occurred or who was present rather than interrogating how conceptions of the past, Europe and modernity structured the narrative of the international within which we continue to operate.
The interrogation of spatio-temporal hierarchies has predominantly meant that the spatial was problematized in that the spaces designated as non-Europe were brought in and the temporal difference was problematized in so far as those spaces were made co-present and coeveal with the spaces designated as Europe. 40 Despite important insights, the second temporal difference was predominantly not addressed which was the construction of the past of Europe as ‘past’. 41 In that sense, one aspect of excluding the ‘other’ from the narratives was addressed, but the second other ‘the past of Europe’ continues to be fixed in time and space leading to a reification not only of ‘Europe’ but also of the concept of the past and modernity structuring what becomes visible and invisible in our narratives of the international. 42 The narrative of disenchantment of the world then continues to be assumed to be ‘real’ for the space designated as ‘Europe’ and becomes problematized in spaces designated as ‘non-Europe’. The fixity of the past of Europe is as such one of the main dynamics that structures the binaries through which we make sense of Europe, modernity and the international. As such, interrogating the fixity of the past of Europe not only allows for a problematization of modernity and the international but also the binaries that continue to structure how we make sense of them.
The critique of spatio-temporal hierarchies has so far predominantly continued to take the binaries that structure these hierarchies as their starting point rather than interrogating the function of these binaries. Thus focusing only on the initial temporal difference – how the spaces designated as non-Europe were relegated to the past and not on the second temporal difference – how Europe’s past was fixed results in a reification of the ‘colonial difference’ as absolute rather than relative whereby the characteristics constructed as belonging to the ‘West’ or ‘non-West’ become essentialized identities of these spatial constructs rather than seen as characteristics assigned to them. 43 This process is explored by Narayan who argues that ‘reducing “cultural imperialism” to the problem of the imposition of “Sameness” conceals the importance of the role that sharply contrasting essentialist pictures of “cultural differences” between “Western culture” and its various Others’ played during colonial times’. 44 This has resulted in making claims for the ‘non-West’ in the image of the non-West this production of knowledge has constructed. 45 Thus, the binary constructions naturalized by spatio-temporal hierarchies such as superstitions/knowledge, belief/science, spirituality/rationality continue as these become essentialized characteristics of the spaces they were designated to whereby bringing in the non-West is predominantly equated with underlining its spiritualism and how its knowledges were different rather than interrogating how that difference came to be constituted and reproduced. As such the aim should not be to show how the non-West is a realm of the magical and imaginary beings as opposed to the rationalism of the West 46 but rather question how these divisions between magic and science and real and imaginary came to be constructed. As Herborth and Nitzchner so aptly summarize, ‘to the extent that cultural difference is equated with non-European voices, i.e. to the extent that cultural difference in relation to a fixed idea of Europe, the underlying image of Europe itself may remain by and large unchallenged’. 47 In those terms, the aim is to unpack the image of Europe as the space of scientific knowledge as opposed to beliefs and superstitions which disappeared into the ‘past’ with the advent of modernity. This interrogation into how to unfix the ‘past’ of ‘Europe’ as past allows for further discussions into how the issue is not one of lack of knowledge but rather how knowledge is organized and how the fixity of the past of Europe works to order knowledge and structure our conceptions of the past, Europe, modernity and the international.
The aim is not to find a better periodization or a better narrative but rather through this example explore the naturalization of binaries of what is legitimate/illegitimate knowledge, what belongs to the past and what belongs to the present and what is located inside and outside of ‘Europe’. The aim is to further the discussion on the processes of how these binaries and differences get constructed in order enable the interrogation of what the ‘regulating principle of medieval/modern holds in place, and what does it help obscure?’. 48 The next section first presents an overview of the changing meanings of the occult and how it functions to then focus on three processes of ordering knowledge; designation of what is legitimate, what is past and what is inside and outside to further interrogate how fixing the past of Europe structures narratives of the international and how these processes of ordering knowledge can be further interrogated.
Qualitas Occulta
The aim of this section is to explore how the divisions between the occult, magic and science evolved to unsettle the spatio-temporal fixity of Europe and problematize the ‘standard narrative, according to which belief in witchcraft and other forms of immaterial or spiritual agency simply declined in direct proportion with the advance of modern science’. 49 The concept of magic has been central to the way in which spatio-temporal hierarchies of knowledge have been established and as such the separation of magic from science had political, social and cultural functions. 50 As Syers states, ‘magic has offered scholars and social theorists a foil for modern notions of religion and science, and more broadly, a foil for modernity itself’ and as such continues to be a ‘topos in European and American social theory’. 51 As such, demystifying the ‘magic-religion-science’ triad means that we can write the history of the ‘concept of magic, and how these have been applied to a wide range of practices and beliefs in different periods of history’. 52 Thus, the aim of this section is not to present a correct periodization for when ‘magic’ ended but rather since ‘drawing these distinctions is an exercise in power’ 53 the aim is to explore through three illustrative processes of how knowledge was spatio-temporally ordered and how interrogating these processes of ordering can be useful in destabilizing how concepts of the past, Europe and modernity are approached in IR. The section will first present an overview of what was called ‘occult qualities’, its meaning and development. This discussion will set the stage for the three illustrative examples that follow.
The definition of occult according to Cambridge dictionary is ‘relating to magical powers and activities, such as those of witchcraft and astrology’ 54 , but this is not the only definition available. Another definition is that it is what is ‘hidden from view’ or ‘not easily apprehended or understood’ The transformation of the meaning from that which is hidden from view to being equated with witchcraft (and the way the meaning of witchcraft also changes) is related to issues of how knowledge was constructed and organized. 55 Hanegraaff 56 argues that until the 13th century, magic had a negative meaning. The meaning would alter with the introduction of the concept magia naturalis. The rediscovery of ancient science from Islamic sources meant that the study of these subjects needed to be legitimated and consequently, the concept of qualitas occulta was used to bring the ancient sciences from being considered as superstitio into being considered as magia naturalis. 57 According to this thinking, ‘wondrous’ or ‘marvelous’ phenomena were not superstition or magic but rather were natural.
Giovanni della Porta, in his books on Magia Naturalis, discussed the occult qualities as follows: They are occult and hidden because they cannot be known with certainty by way of demonstration. This is why the ancient sages considered it good to establish a certain limit, beyond which one cannot pass in researching the reasons of things. In Nature there are many inner sanctuaries, hidden and full of energy, whose causes the conjecture of the human mind can neither search nor understand. For Nature is obscure and full of hidden majesty, which one should better admire rather than wish to penetrate.
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Thus, the ‘occult qualities’ were meant to refer to ‘certain forces and connections in nature that remain invisible or “hidden” and are bound to strike us as mysterious because they are too hard to account for in rational terms’. 59 The discussion around ‘occult qualities’ was not one of ‘being magical’ or not ‘scientific’, but it was a matter of epistemology and the division between what was considered ‘manifest’ qualities (directly observable such as colors) versus ‘occult’ qualities (not directly observable). Within that understanding occult qualities ‘indicated a formal reality beyond sensory experience that usually required epistemological approaches remote from traditional reason’. 60 According to this line of thinking, the insensible must also be inexplicable since if God wanted us to explain it, he would make it sensible. It was in the 17th century that another reformulation occurred whereby occult qualities were reformulated as ‘temporary manifestations of human ignorance stemming from the inadequacies of the senses, rather than accepting them as unintelligible by their very nature’. 61 This shift meant that the insensible was not insensible because of nature and hence could be made sensible and as a consequence ‘the word “occult” lost its connotation of “insensible” and henceforth referred solely to the unintelligibility of the world’. 62 The insensible thus is incorporated into ‘science’, and the occult signifying the inexplicable becomes designated as ‘unscientific’. This process of the changing meaning of the occult and where magic and the imaginary were located was of course not a linear process but was naturalized through different sites.
Deligitimizing Knowledge
This sub-section aims to further interrogations on the narrative of ‘progress’ from one system of knowledge into another that is pervasive in discussions of the transition from medieval to modern. 63 Within IR, Allan has presented an account of changing cosmologies and argued that the emergence of balance of power in Europe was ‘premised upon a change from religious and dynastic ends to rationalist goals rooted in control of material elements of power’. 64 This narrative of changing knowledge systems was recently destabilized to some extent by Bartelson who argues that the shift did not occur seamlessly and the justification for overseas expansion worked through ‘blending of new and old cosmological beliefs’ trying to ‘mediate between popular beliefs in astrology, the geocentrism sanctioned by ecclesiastical authorities, and recent advances in geographical and cartographical knowledge’. 65 The aim of this section is not to date when the shift occurred, but interrogate further the reasons for it through the example of the division between alchemy and chemistry underlining how one became delegitimized and the other legitimized not because of ‘better’ explanatory power but rather because of the changing meanings of knowledge. 66
Until the end of the 17th century alchemy and chemistry ‘were used largely interchangeably’ and ‘the restriction of alchemy specifically to gold-making is a late development’. 67 Alchemy was not thought of just as a search for the Philosophers’ Stone or making gold but rather as part of broader research concerns. The laboratory notebooks of 17th-century American chymist George Starkey demonstrates what Newman and Principe have called a ‘coherent and sophisticated’ methodology. 68 Furthermore, figures such as Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton are known to have engaged with alchemy and that these engagements were connected to their intellectual pursuits narrated as being ‘scientific’. 69 Alchemy was about trying to understand and experiment with nature whereby ‘unlike those in the mainstream of the Scholastic tradition, were willing to argue that human art, even if it learned by imitating natural processes, could successfully reproduce natural products or even surpass them’. 70 Thus, if alchemy is ‘viewed as part of a wider early modern interest in experimenting with nature, rather than as an obscure, nonscientific endeavor that occupied outcasts, then its potential role in the development of modern science cannot be overlooked’. 71 As such, the rejection of alchemy happened ‘without ever been refuted’ since the rejection was not due to internal debates and one side winning the debate over the other due to the validity of their argument. 72
The division between alchemy and chemistry occurred primarily due to processes of professionalization. This occurred through discrediting alchemy at professional associations because of alchemies belief in ancient wisdom. Chymistry at the beginning of the 17th century had not yet achieved a secure place in universities. This was mainly due to transmutational aims being associated with forgery, fraud and avarice. The professionalization of chymistry meant that it was required to separate itself from those aspects (search for Philosophers Stone, transmutation). The Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris established in 1666 had by 1699 five places (out of 30) reserved for chymistry and very openly and fervently condemned ‘transmutational endeavours’.
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The condemnation of ‘transmutational endeavours’ and assignation of pejorative terms such as fraudulence and irrationality to alchemy as opposed to chymistry was due to the ‘success of a largely Protestant polemics against paganism’ which ‘targeted the Renaissance belief in an ancient wisdom rooted in the pre-Christian Oriental cultures such as Egypt, Mesopotamia, or Persia’.
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As such, the distinction between chymistry and alchemy was the distinction between those who traced their genealogies to an ancient wisdom and learned tradition and those that did not claim any historical lineage but thought of themselves as experimental scientists. This division was exacerbated by alchemists focus on secrecy and interpretations of myths and stories as allegories. Thus, the difference was also one of constructing knowledge and writing knowledge. This is encapsulated by David de Planis Campy’s Opening of the School of Metallic Transmutational Philosophy (1633) where he argues that those who have discussed the Arts & Sciences have taken care to give them a very clear & intelligible order, beginning with general matters so as to end with special ones. But in this Art (of metallic transmutations) one does the complete opposite, for sometimes one has begun at the end & ended at the beginning & all that with so little order that, not at all having determined what it is, they have driven their readers into despair about never understanding nothing of it.
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The divisions were thus not because of one system of knowledge proving itself to be more explanatory, but more so because of how the system of knowledge organized knowledge and to what sources it traced that knowledge. This illustrative case underlines how the spatio-temporal fixity of Europe reifies the linear narrative of the development of scientific knowledge and disappearance of magic. 76 The aim of this section was to underline how the way spatio-temporal hierarchies were addressed in IR through making present what was absent from the narrative or assigning new origin points through correcting the narrative of the international overlook how certain knowledges are delegitimized and hence become invisible. The discussion in this sub-section aimed to demonstrate that silences and presences in narratives do not occur because of a lack of knowledge but are rather epistemological and about the division between legitimate and illegitimate knowledge and construction of past, present and future.
Constructing the ‘Occult’ as Past
The belief in witchcraft decayed with as little apparent reason as it arose. The civilized world gradually discovered that it had ceased to believe in the existence of witches even before it had given up the practice of burning them [. . .] Clearly the change of attitude was due chiefly to the advance of science, which slowly defined the limits of man’s mastery over nature, and disclosed the methods by which this mastery is attained.
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The above quote from Sir William Cecil Dampier made in 1966 is reflective of how the witch trials were constructed through historiographical operations 78 of assigning it into the ‘past’ and hence as over. 79 The aim of this sub-section is to underline that IR’s efforts to engage with the past focus predominantly on bringing in more accurate knowledge to present better narratives rather than engaging with debates within philosophy of history about what the past is and the constructions of the past, present and future. 80 The writing of history and designating what is past and what is present is one of the main devices through which knowledge is organized and binaries naturalized. This sub-section focuses on how the ‘past’ as past is constructed through the example of how the history of the ‘occult’ in general and of magic and witchcraft specifically were written. The aim here is not to give a comprehensive overview nor identify a correct periodization of if/when ‘magic’ became past but rather to illustrate how the historians of 19th century constructed a narrative about ‘overcoming’ backwardness and the ‘progress’ of rational thinking. The Enlightenment narrative about the witch trials was not motivated by ‘historical truth’ but was ‘propagated to stigmatize those who continued to believe that witches really existed and that they were doing people harm’. 81
The late 19th century saw a series of works that represented the ‘triumphalist’ approach to the past that worked to establish the witch trials as belonging to ‘medieval’ times and representative of a superstitious belief system. 82 In the continental tradition, two German historians were central in establishing that narrative; Wilhelm Gottfried Soldan’s work published in 1848 and Joseph Hansen’s work published in 1900. Soldan’s work can be considered as a ‘standard rationalist account’. 83 According to Soldan, the ‘end of the belief in witchcraft had marked a vital stage in human progress’. 84 Hansen continued the tradition and argued that the medieval Church was responsible for the witch trials. Furthermore, his focus on Malleus Maleficarum (1486) ‘helped establish that work as the most famous demonological treatise of all time, a reputation it still retains today’. 85 This process of establishing the past as ‘past’ and as medieval was not always the product of what would be characterized as meticulous historical research. One of the sources that both Soldan and Hansen based their arguments on about the medieval character of the witch trials was a book by the French Baron Etienne-Leon de Lamothe-Langon (1784–1864). In that book, he argued that the witch trials that occurred in southern France in the early 14th century were started by the Inquisition. His depiction of events consolidated the ‘stereotype of the diabolic witch’ and helped establish that ‘the witch trials were primarily medieval phenomenon’. 86 This depiction was though based on made up sources. 87 The passages referencing the witch trials in the 14th century have no primary sources but refer to another summary referencing two works: the Histoire Ecclesiastique et civile de la ville et diocese de Carcassonne by T. Bougues Paris (1741) and the Chronicle of Bardin. These sources are the same since Bogues translated the story from the chronicle whose validity was questioned by later historians. 88 Thus, the works that aimed to construct a specific past for the witch trials were not necessarily concerned with the historical method but rather about establishing the witch trials not only as ‘past’ but also as belonging to a specific character of that past (belief in superstition).
The continental tradition was not the only one writing the witch trials as belonging to a past that had been overcome. One of the earliest historians to deal with the issue of the witch trials was William Lecky (1865) in his work entitled History of the Rise and Influence of Rationalism in Europe whose narrative was one of struggle between science and religion and argued that the decline of the witch trials ‘marked the rise, and its destruction the first triumph of the spirit of rationalism in Europe’. 89 As a consequence, the rise of rationalism was seen as the reason for the ‘vanquishing’ and disappearance of the belief in witches. Another figure of great importance in advancing this narrative was Andrew Dickson White and his work entitled A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom published in 1896. 90 Andrew Dickson White was the first President of the American Historical Association and the first President of Cornell University. White argued that historical accounts had to be in pursuit of morality and situated his works in that tradition. In his work he argued that the witch hunts were part of a ‘dogmatic theology’ and that the ‘decline of the craze was the direct result of the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century’. 91 His ideas were furthered by Lincoln Burr in his book The Witch Persecutions published in 1903. One aspect that his work focused on was the figure of Dietrich Flade who was tried and executed of witchcraft in 1589 when he tried to reduce the panic about witches. Flade was for Burr an example that ‘even in that most drearily doctrinaire of ages, there lived plodding men of affairs, who, spite of dogma and of panic, clung to their common-sense and their humanity, and with such firmness as was in them breasted the fate that came’. 92 As such, his narrative also constructed an irrational past filled with superstition also underlining that that was now in the ‘past’ and had been overcome.
This sub-section aimed to underline the process of assigning the witch trials to the past as part of the narrative of the struggle for rationalism and science. Of course, this process was not complete and there were dissenting opinions, but these historical works did establish a narrative that remained dominant well into the 1970s. 93 The aim in this sub-section was to underline that rather than a search for more accurate knowledge interrogations of spatio-temporal fixities need to further engage with questions of how the past was constructed as past and what events, dynamics and ideas were constructed as ‘past’. The aim here was hence to underline that the designation of the witch trials as medieval and as belonging to the past was a historiographical operation that fixed Europe’s past and made specific presents and futures possible.
Designating the Inside and the Outside
In his beginning, wherever and whatever they may have been, the unicorn was a symbol of beneficent power inhabiting the poetic imagination. The symbol expanded into myth, and this was debased into fable. The unicorn next became an exemplum of moral virtues, then an actual animal, then a thaumaturge, then a medicine, then an article of merchandise, then an idle dream, and last stage of all, an object of antiquarian research.
94
The quotes from Odell underline that the meaning of the unicorn has changed over the centuries and so has our relationship to its existence. The aim of this sub-section is to interrogate how the known and unknown were mediated to make what was unknown to Europe knowable but also through that designate the limits of the inside and the outside. This process will be discussed through the example of the unicorn and how it became resignified to make sense of encounters with spaces that were previously unknown and unclassified within the space of Europe. 95 The unicorn is representative of ‘imaginary beings’ that the ‘past’ of Europe, those belonging to the Middle Ages, would believe in and within the narrative of disenchantment and scientific progress, the unicorn, along with other imaginary beings, is exposed ‘as a creature of pure imagination, gladly relinquished by naturalists in the age of reasons’. 96 The continued search for the unicorns well into the 19th century gives important insights into the complex dynamics of how natural historical knowledge was produced 97 by categorizing it within what was known, and second, how the nonexistence could not be completely established well into the 19th century because of the continued search for the ‘imaginary beings’.
The unicorn was not only a product of the European imagination but also a way of making the world fit into the categories that already existed within specific vocabularies.
98
The process can be traced to the difficulties experienced in naming and categorizing animals that were not yet known in the European imaginary such as the rhinoceros and the narwhal which was initially called the ‘sea unicorn’.
99
The unicorn was how the European travelers made sense of animals they encountered for which they had no referent. For example, Marco Polo in 1307 claimed to have seen unicorns, They are elephants in the country, and numerous Unicorns, which are nearly as big. They have hair like that of a buffalo, feet like those of an elephant, and a horn in the middle of the forehead, which is black and very thick . . .. The head resembles that of the wild boar, and they carry it ever bent towards the ground.
100
It was the rhinoceros that was being spotted but then being written off as the unicorn in much of these travelers account also shaping the perception of the unicorn. 101 The misclassification of the narwhal as a unicorn had a similar dynamic where there were classificatory questions with respect to whether it was a fish or a mammal and whether its tusk was a horn or a tooth. 102 The main trade routes and sources for narwhals was around Greenland, and they were transported to northern Europe where ‘in the new cultural context they were appropriated as unicorn horns’. 103 As such, in the absence of a name or category for the animal, it was associated with the existing legend of the unicorn. This association was made easier because of the importance accorded to the unicorns horn both medicinally and as a collector’s item. 104 It was the narwhal tusks that had value as a collectors’ item as these tusks were displayed across Europe in curiosity cabinets well into the 19th century alongside husks of rhinoceros which were also sometimes classified as belonging to unicorns. 105 Thus, the horn of the unicorn and husks of the rhinoceros were both displayed in these collections as equally ‘real’ objects. As Spary states, ‘as with all the other animals whose presence in collections consisted of horns and nothing more, naturalists had to fall back on reliable accounts by travelers to account for the existence or nonexistence of unicorns’ and as such ‘personal authority became the only way to establish truth’ whereby ‘authors trod a perilous boundary between fable and reality in extrapolating from the three sources of evidence – material, textual and visual’. 106
Since the existence of the unicorn was tied to accounts of travelers, if such accounts continued to exist, whether it was real or not continued to be an issue of discussion. The search for the unicorn continued well into the 19th century. The search for the unicorn was part of the discussions during the re-occupation of the Cape by the Batavian Republic (1803–12) where Governor Janssens and the Comissary-General de Mist led two different expeditions.
107
In the records of Janssen’s expeditions, it is stated that We have searched many times for the mountain-drawings of the Bushmen but found nothing: all the members of the party, however, assure us that among these drawings of animals on all the farms, which are to be found there, the unicorn is pictured, and indeed everywhere in the same manner . . ..
108
This was not the only time of the ‘sighting’ of the unicorn. Even as some might have started ‘questioning’ whether the unicorn was real, there appeared another account of a traveller who had travelled further East than everyone else who had seen the unicorn. One such account stated that Buys also told us that to the north of the Tambookies there lives a yellow people with long hair, named Matola, and the unicorn is to be found there, of the size of an eland, and black in colour . . .. [. . ..] Coenrad de Buys also, in talking with us about the ubicorn, assured us of the existence of this animal. This burger has been far beyond Caffreland and the Tambookies, and says that there are many there . . ..
109
The changes in meaning undergone by the unicorn and the stories of the belief in its existence make it possible to underline how the construction of the occult and enchantment as past did not mean that it ceased to exist but rather that the relationship between the known, unknown and unknowable was renegotiated to designate who could be known, under what conditions and in which spaces. 110 This interrogation into the organization of the known and knowable underlines that the characteristics assigned to binaries should not be taken as essentialized characteristics of a space (Europe/non-Europe) but rather how these characteristics get assigned to spaces should be interrogated as processes of ordering knowledge and what is designated as inside and outside opening up for discussion how naturalizations occur.
Conclusion
Narratives of the past define what is possible to know, to be and the nature of the present being inhabited which defines the limits of the international and reproduces spatio-temporal hierarchies. The aim of the article has been to interrogate the spatio-temporal fixity of the past of Europe underlining different processes of ordering knowledge and naturalization of binaries. The article interrogated the regulative function of the pre-modern/modern divide specifically focusing on the narrative of the disenchantment of the world and how that narrative became naturalized through the fixing of the past of ‘Europe’ as disenchanted and non-European spaces as still enchanted. This process enabled a naturalization of binaries in spatio-temporal relation to each other such as non-West/West, tradition/modernity and belief/science. The aim of the article was to contribute to the interrogation of these binaries by underlining that the fixity of the past of Europe is an often overlooked process through which spatio-temporal hierarchies get reproduced. The interrogation into how the past of Europe was fixed aimed to underline different processes of ordering knowledge whether with respect to which knowledge is legitimate or illegitimate, which events or dynamic is considered as past and as being present and how the boundaries of what is known, unknown and unknowable are constantly renegotiated designating who is inside and outside. These processes not only fix the past of Europe but also structure how ‘knowledge’, ‘Europe’, the ‘past’ and modernity is approached in our narratives of the international. As such, these interrogations open the way to further interrogate not only the fixity of the past of Europe but also spatio-temporal hierarchies that continue to be reproduced in our narratives of the making of the international.
The aim of the article has been to further the discussion on writing about the past in IR and how spatio-temporal hierarchies continue to get reproduced through the example of how the past of Europe continues to be fixed. As such, the aim was not to present a comprehensive account of the examples being discussed but underline certain avenues that could be further explored. The first avenue that could be further explored is how the medieval/modern divide continues to regulate narratives of the international and what it continues to fix and naturalize but also what it makes invisible. Thus, more in depth tracing of how the notion of medievalism continues to structure how we think of the international, of knowledge, of sovereignty, of authority and the public/private divide would be needed to continue the exploration into the regulative function of the medieval/modern divide. 111 In relation to this point, second, it needs to be further interrogated how the writing of history performs the regulative function of the medieval/modern divide through designating when the transition occurred, what is considered past and what is considered present. This necessitates further engagement with philosophies of History and questioning of History as a system of knowledge that structures our knowledge of events, ideas and developments. 112 As such, this system of knowledge needs to be continuously interrogated in terms of how it delimits the meaning of politics, modernity and the international. Third, further explorations would be needed into the way in which spatio-temporal hierarchies have constructed the binary oppositions as if they are essentialized characteristics of the spaces they are assigned to (modern/non-modern, rational/irrational, spiritual/scientific) especially in terms of exploring how these divisions came to be constructed as natural.
The aim of the article has been to underline how interrogations into concepts such as ‘Europe’, the past, modernity and international are approached in IR needs to focus more on how the binaries that are spatio-temporally ordered get constructed and naturalized. As such, the focus should not be on finding correct timings of when change from one system of knowledge to another occurred whereby the move from one side of the binary to the other side signals progress, change and transition. The focus should also not be solely on making the non-West coeveal within existing binary constructions whereby rationality of the West and sprituality of the non-West become focal points of discussion. The focus thus should be on how these binaries get naturalized through different processes of ordering knowledge which might enable discussions that move beyond attempts at timing origins and designating moments of transition and change and continuity. As such, the aim of the article has been to contribute to further explorations into how knowledge is ordered and how these difference processes in ordering knowledge (in terms of what is legitimate knowledge, what is past and what is inside and outside) continue to structure what is visible and invisible in our narratives of the making of the international.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
