Enchantment as fundamental encounter: wonder and the radical reordering of subject/world

Abstract

In this article, we approach enchantment as a fundamental encounter that incites new worlds. Our aim is to add to the recent discussion on enchantment as an immersive, life affirming moment. We outline enchantment as a radical reordering of the world during which there is both a profound loss of meaning and a sudden gaining of significance. Enchantment is a highly affectual event that uproots the subject, throws it momentarily off balance, outside of time and space. Enchantment, then, is not only a pleasant experience of being inspired by the world, but an uninvited ontological unfolding of it. This rethinking the world in enchantment can come into being through many different affectual states, including those of a ‘negative’ register. By attending to a vignette of despair, loss, and suffering, we clarify the circulation of affect involved in the disruption and emergence of the subject and, against this background, unpack the simultaneous disconnect and immersion involved in enchantment. An analysis of wonder highlights the deracination of the subject effected in the event and unfolds the ethical and political potential of enchantment: this totalizing, and hence liberatory, reordering brings with it a strong sense that things could be different.

Introduction: memory of a fundamental encounter

I now know what the most beautiful sound in the world is: that of another heart beating inside of me. I have also started to feel gentle, tickling kicks inside my belly. Yesterday, my partner felt one as well. A farewell of sorts, I suppose. Now my legs are spread and the doctor is pushing thin sticks of seaweed into my vagina. The aim is to gradually spread my birth canal open to get the baby out, something that all of my being passionately resists. My worry for the child’s possible suffering feels overwhelming. I do not want to take part in this. The doctor is too cheery for the occasion, detached and unempathetic, and I feel a strong urge to kick her. She proceeds with her work mechanically and dismisses my agony, my mourning, stating that this is nothing, really, and that I will be ‘up and about in the city in no time’ – her indifference, misrecognition, and calculation adds to my despair. Perhaps she forgot to look at my files: it took me nine years to get here, nine years of hoping to have a baby. With this baby, all hope dies. (Noora’s memory)

When discussing the writing of this article with Raine, I was not at all sure that I wanted to write about this memory: the late termination of pregnancy, and consequently the death of my much-wanted only child. First, it is a heavy and private topic. But, more importantly, putting the event into words feels like draining it of everything it fundamentally was. I cannot seem to grasp ‘it’. The atmosphere of the event is hard to communicate: a verbalized memory is a lame interpretation, a gray tombstone. The event was everything but. It was embodied, highly affectual, agonizing, violent, loud, and immensely sad. It was also love in all its vital ferocity. What took place was an encounter that radically changed my view of the world, although I could not have put it to words then. It was the end and a beginning, squeezed into one concentrated moment. The event linked to things there and then, but also strongly to the past and possible futures – to all the horizons that closed and opened within the totality of this death. It was a sudden arrest, a shocking change of direction that could not be ‘rationally’ grasped. The event was a moment of appearing. ¹ I felt alienated from everything, even from myself, yet at the same time, my sense of self was powerfully heightened by what was going on. Being ‘outside of myself’, nothing mattered, not even the physical pain, and yet somehow, everything was present right there. It was a radical clearing, destabilization and revelation: a combination of despair, rage, energy, even pleasure and beauty. I was hesitant about sharing this painful memory, but in trying to think through enchantment, I found that the memory lingered, and provoked me. In discussing this event at length, we began to feel that there was something to it, to this dispersion of the subject, that might prove to be a key to unlocking enchantment.

In her seminal work, The enchantment of modern life, ² Jane Bennett describes enchantment as a ‘state of wonder’, characterized by a ‘mood of fullness, plenitude, or liveliness’, that is connected to an atmosphere of playfulness and openness toward the world. It is an inspiring experience of being immersed in a moment and wonderfully engaged with the world. But, even while this joyful and energetic dimension of enchantment as engendering engagement remains a mainstay of discourse surrounding the experience, there is another, seemingly paradoxical dimension that has been under-theorized: the simultaneous loss of meaning and sudden gaining of significance. It is a feeling of alienation that attends a certain receptivity. ³ This aspect of enchantment can be found in John Wylie’s description of it as an experience of simultaneous immersion and disconnect with the world. ⁴ In enchantment there is the sensation of being lost and found all at once, a sudden and overwhelming feeling of distance, of disinterested clarity. Therefore, we argue that enchantment need not feel joyful or energetic. This moment of clarity can, in fact, be connected with seemingly negative affects. If we are to understand the power of enchantment, how it ‘stops time, freezes movement, heightens senses, and provokes wonder and unease’, ⁵ yet engenders care for the world – if we are to understand the potential of enchantment at all, then it is this tension between immersion and distance that we must be able to substantiate.

In this article, we will discuss enchantment as a fundamental encounter, a forceful event with the potential to radically reorder the world. ⁶ In our theorization, an encounter is always more than a meeting of two entities: it is a gathering of different bodies that compose the given spacetime. ⁷ Enchantment as an encounter is then something that emerges in-between, something that is grasped, as Gilles Deleuze points out, not through recognition (of discrete objects by intending subjects), but ‘in a range of affective tones: wonder, love, hatred, suffering’. ⁸ With the notion of fundamental encounter our aim is to emphasize the forceful and radical character of this event, which, following Helen F Wilson, directs attention to difference, rupture, and surprise. ⁹ It is, indeed, this shaking of the orders of the world that is left out from most conceptualizations of enchantment. ¹⁰ That is, enchantment is usually seen as something special that happens, an energizing moment, but not an encounter that includes a refusal to participate in the world. For Bennett, for instance, enchantment is a moment of being involved with the world, an inspiring experience of being caught in a moment. ¹¹ She views enchantment as something that may hit you by surprise but never entirely shut you down: as a stimulating mood of being-in-the-world, enchantment opens up sensory receptivity toward the world. From this point of view, enchantment triggers generosity for all life’s complexity, and is therefore an important resource for ethical being. Bennett’s mission is to show that the affective cannot be separated from the ethical, and that a dull or cynical take on life will not produce care for the world. While we are certainly on board with Bennett’s elevating project of hope, care, and ethical generosity, we approach enchantment from the added standpoint of the deracination of the subject. We argue that it is this suspension, and hesitation, that lies at the very core of the event. ¹² It is the shutting down of the ‘self’ as described in the opening vignette of pain, death, and despair that we take as a starting point for trying to figure out what we are dealing with when chasing enchantment.

In our argument, enchantment is connected to ‘the troubling and exhilarating feeling that things could be different’. ¹³ This means that enchantment takes part in how our subjectivities are formed in the assemblage of the heterogeneous materialities affecting the encounter. The connective, transpersonal experience of enchantment, as a highly affectual encounter that deepens human engagement with the world, and can then open up ethico-political space for being otherwise, is something that Noora has dealt with in her previous work with young people and urban space. ¹⁴ As a surprising moment of simultaneous attachment/detachment with the world that makes the most ordinary things seem strange, enchantment entails the potential to open up the question of being. This article will expand on the discussion by further elaborating on the totality of this experience. Enchantment will be explicated as a fundamental encounter, an event that has the potential to radically reorder the world through an involuntary change of perspective. This is the promise of enchantment that we want to emphasize: by attending to enchantment as an event of reordering, we aim to stress its potential in opening horizons of being differently.

To be able to scrutinize the reorganizing power of enchantment, we build our argument with memories of three different events. With these descriptions of elusive moments of affectual force, we will clarify the simultaneous, and interrelated, taking-place of disconnect (from meaning) and immersion (flattening of the world). The first vignette had to do with despair, pain, and death, as well as anger, the second introduces an event that brings together weather, people, and turbulent movement of things, and the final event has to do with hope, being receptive to the other, and becoming-together. But, as any representation is only a re-presentation, it is never the full picture. The names we give to our bodily states can only ever partially grasp them and there is always something that escapes our awareness and expression. Thus, we think with these memories in order to join with the fleeting experience that is impossible to empirically determine. We aim to sense with them, since events are necessarily registered outside or beyond our verbal capacity. The events we work with differ greatly from each other, but we argue that they all speak of a similar fundamental encounter, a generative event that has the power to open new horizons by simultaneously dislocating and sharpening the self. They are moments in our lives during which we have felt profoundly moved by something. These events are all connected to specific landscapes, which have transformed with us – even if no obvious marks have been left in them. ¹⁵ To explore enchantment as a radical reordering of the world, we work with non-representational theorization to pay attention to the very life of everyday life and ‘the new potentialities for being, doing and thinking that events may bring forth’. ¹⁶

The article is organized as follows. In the next section, we will briefly discuss the many affectual stirrings in the disruption and emergence of the subject. This will then be related to enchantment in the following section, where we will think with Martin Heidegger and Claude Romano in order to open up our understanding of enchantment as an event in which the deracination of the subject brings with it the possibility for seeing the world anew. Connected to this, we will move on to discuss the momentary loss of balance in enchantment, the feeling of being outside of time and space. Drawing from this discussion on the radical reordering of the world, we will probe the ethico-political potential of enchantment with, among others, Jane Bennett and Brian Massumi. We will conclude by wrapping up our argument of enchantment as both an energizing event of ethical generosity, and a forced opening of worlds.

Firework affects as calls to act

The experience of a kind of clarity of perspective in the despair and loss in the opening vignette returns to us again and again as we reflect on enchantment. There is something there, a disconnect, a detachment, a disorientation. A loss of self. And we ask: Is this rearrangement of the subject somehow fundamental to enchantment?

It is, of course, understood that a state of pain and loss can create a ‘sentiment of self’, an ‘I’ who suffers and wants out of the situation. ¹⁷ Indeed, pain may elaborate the subject and push it forward into action, into a fight for survival. But, at the same time, bodily pain can disorient the self and its ability to account for itself. ¹⁸ Pain may blur the borders of the body and its surroundings, lulling it into indifference – which can be taken as a form of freedom. And this detachment, disconnect, and failure to dwell ¹⁹ may very well entail the possibility for rethinking the world and becoming-other: this emptiness may allow for an awakening of desire that moves the subject beyond the known world(s), it pushes for the imagination of alternative forms of becoming. Massumi writes: ‘Becoming is an equilibrium-seeking system at a crisis point where it suddenly perceives a deterministic constraint, becomes “sensitive” to it, and is catapulted into a highly unstable supermolecular state enveloping a bifurcating future’. ²⁰ Becoming itself cannot be captured or discretely pointed at – it is non-representational. Yet, it can be felt. Becoming is not a question of intentional ‘choice’ or personal decision. Rather, it is a mode of desire that arises from our affectual relations with multiple others (humans, non-human animals, things, histories, ideas, etc.), and ultimately, from the limits that the situation imposes upon us.

Indeed, it is from the circulation of affect in a given encounter that the subject and its capacity for action emerge. Affect here is ‘the virtual co-presence of potentials’, a non-representational modality that can be best approached as a multidirectional opening: first, toward what one might be tempted to isolate as object(s), second, to what might likely be isolated as a subject. ²¹ Affect is in-between, in the event-forming relations from which the subject continually comes to be. Although it can be felt as deeply personal, affect belongs to collective situations as it has to do with relation, that is, the unfolding event. It is about what is going on: an intensity that can be contagious and transferred, spreading and multiplying. As a transpersonal intensity, affect limits or exerts pressure on a body’s capacity to act, its ‘force of existing’. ²² Subjectivity can thus be understood as a geography of complex spatial relations that are not limited to human life. ²³ The subject is always emergent.

Returning to our vignette, it is important to remember that a body’s orientation to pain changes in response to these circumstantial forces. ²⁴ For instance, in sex, pain can link to pleasure and enhance the body’s capacity to act, reifying the self. In other situations, pain can increase the body’s potential by turning into intense anger and rage, into powerhouses that Nigel Thrift calls ‘firework affects’. ²⁵ Since affects are relational and autonomous, they work differently in different situations: affective configurations are never stable. In our introductory event, there was a sense of beginning amidst the deep despair and loss. It was ‘just a feeling’, rebellion in the form of rising aggression. It was freedom in the face of the inevitable. Even if it was not clear then, the situation opened a whole new world through anxiety and anger. In this way, the event connects to what we will argue is at the core of enchantment: the momentary uncertainty of everything. It is this hesitation before the world that has to be sensed before anything genuinely different can arise. Of course, the narrowing of horizons that comes with uncertainty can work toward preventing action. But the other side of that same coin contains the promise of a different world in not-knowing. ‘Negative’ affects do not merely narrow horizons, they can also bring ‘closure’ to long journeys. They leave you with no choice but to discard the previously known or imagined. The radicality of the event distributes new possibilities by closing down all possibilities, it pushes a window open for something else.

Despair, for instance, calls one to act. A call that remains in-between, in the affectual event-forming relations. A call that is, strictly speaking, a call to no one. Romano clarifies the nature of such a call when he points out that in despair it is this ‘one’ that is conspicuously absent. ²⁶ And it is in this absence that the call to act acquires a special significance. In sadness, for instance, ‘I’ am always dominated by that which saddens me: sadness remains a way of relating myself to what happens to me, of appropriating it to and for myself. My sadness not only originates from an ongoing subjectivity and orientation to the world, but it is through this sadness that I constitute and reinforce the horizons of that world. I project my own needs and interests onto phenomena. Sadness reinforces the ‘I’ which it subjects (in the double-meaning of the word). But, in despair, there lies a desperate anonymity: ‘I’ actually become nobody. Romano points out that in despair ‘everything sinks into a kind of anonymous vigil, where “I” am there without being there, in an impersonal stupor where suffering, at its peak, becomes almost painless’. ²⁷ Pain often functions to call one to oneself. That is, the ‘I’ is often distinctly present in pain. But there is a threshold, a crossing, where pain may push into despair, where the self may be forgotten or impossible – where, lying on the operating table, all futures collapse and suffering ends. In ‘suffer’, the Latin ferre means to bear. In suffering, the one who suffers persists. One endures, bears. This ferre is what is overcome in despair: a threshold where the one who bears is dispersed. Selfhood flees in the face of despair. I cannot grasp myself. There is no way to intend this, to integrate this into existing projections of the world. There is suffering (undergoing), but there is no longer anyone to suffer. There is only prostration. Yet, despair calls one to act. It is the fundamental encounter that Gilles Deleuze speaks about. ²⁸ But now this ‘one’ must be understood in terms of no-one: what is the act that is left to this no-one except to become again, to reconstitute oneself? To come to oneself. Despair can be a fundamental encounter, at the heart of the (re-)emergent subject that forces one to think, to detour. Thinking here happens in the form of enactive thinking-feeling: it is one with the action. ²⁹ This is ‘thinking as experience’. ³⁰ Despair pushes one to be-differently-in-the-world in a moment of fundamental encounter, calls one to act in the face of our deserted ‘self’ and the world which it sublimated to its will. More than this, it reveals, in a kind of moment of clarity, the tenuousness and impossibility of our subjectivity and the impending violence of its perpetual re-emergence. After all, any ordering of the world is always volatile – and, this uncertainty is an affirmation of life itself. ³¹

Wonder at the end of the world

It is cold out. Cold and grey. But it is May 1st in Helsinki, Finland, and so the entire city has emptied into the chill air to celebrate the arrival of spring. Energetic crowds, collars pulled high, await green little men at crosswalks. Families pushing prams press their eagerness up against the dreary day. Clusters of balloons lean horizontal in the wind, dancing just out of reach of the too excited children. In the distance, a parade. And, in the midst of it all, me, stopped at an intersection, unable to move – or, perhaps, no longer with anywhere to go – staring in wonder at a world suddenly expanded, overwhelming, aching with significance. Everything becomes saturated, full, yet tinged with sadness, flush with emptiness. And I, suddenly a part apart, am lost. Outside time. (Raine’s memory)

As our second vignette above hints, despair is, of course, merely one of many diverse modes of subjectivization through which an ‘I’ may come about. That which is made possible through despair – the radical dispersion of the self and its subsequent invitation to a reconstitution (often in the guise of a re-collection) – may also be found in enchantment. In this section, we will discuss enchantment as a fundamental encounter that forecloses on the possibilities of a collected subject. We will address the characteristics of being enchanted – the acute sensory experience, the sense of wonder-at-the-world, the temporary suspension of time, and the experience of pure presence and absence – through an analysis of wonder. In so doing, we will locate enchantment at the vector of the event and therefore at the very possibility of being-otherwise. By momentarily collapsing any and all signification and hierarchies of an established self-hood, enchantment destroys worlds, deracinates subjects, and opens new horizons.

Part of the difficulty here lies in defining enchantment itself. It is, as Wylie highlights, fugitive: a moment that is always already escaping, a moment of heightened sensory receptivity that resists representation. ³² We could approach it proximally, through literature. We might quote Marcel Proust, speaking so eloquently of little tea-soaked Madeleines, or Knut Ove Knausgaard, getting lost in the refrain of ocean waves viewed through his television screen. ³³ Or we could even write little doomed vignettes of our own about brisk days and temporal shifts in a saturated Helsinki. But each portrayal will be inevitably flawed, each a misrepresentation of an encounter. Still, if there is something to be gleaned from these, if we can think with them, we may still be able to discover what enchantment does and how it works – that is, what possibilities it unfolds and how it does so. There is, for instance, a sense of wonder in each of these examples, a wonder-at-the-world, where the world comes alive as a collection of singularities. Where ‘you notice new colors, discern details previously ignored, and hear extraordinary sounds, as familiar landscapes of sense sharpen and intensify’. ³⁴ Indeed, Bennett writes that enchantment is a stubborn attachment to life, it is wonder before it. ³⁵ Perhaps, then, we only need to walk with this sense of wonder to begin unpacking the work of enchantment as an affective encounter.

In his 1937–1938 published lectures, Basic questions of philosophy: Selected ‘problems’ of ‘logic’, Heidegger distinguishes wonder from the notion of mere curiosity. ³⁶ Illustrating the commonplace conflation of the two, he distinguishes wonder (Er-staunen) from its related synonyms, amazement (Sichwundern), admiration (Bewundern), and astonishment (Staunen). Although seemingly similar, wonder essentially differs from these in that amazement, admiration, and astonishment all presuppose that the wondrous is something remarkable – each points to that specific something that, exceptional as it is, stands out from the background of everyday experience. Amazement, for instance, can be described as ‘a certain inability to explain and ignorance of the reason’ ³⁷ of something – it is that first, jaw-dropping encounter with a seemingly impossible technology, or the spellbinding appeal of an inexplicable magic trick. Even when it is of something typical or mundane, such as a particularly striking starlit evening, the amazing – as with the astonishing and again the admirable – is always contained in the extraordinariness of that instance. But in wonder, Heidegger tells us, ‘everything becomes the most unusual’. ³⁸ It is not merely the exceptional brilliance of this starlit night in particular that is wondrous, it is the crunching leaves, the hooting owl, the cold fingers curled into your palm for warmth, the ticking sound of the fast-chilling engine of the car, and even the continuity of this night among all the rest that is so affective – an intense and energetic co-presence where emergence itself is emphasized in the hesitation of the moment. In wonder, the usual itself becomes unusual, the familiar unfamiliar. ³⁹

To be enchanted then is not merely to ‘be struck and shaken by the extraordinary that lives amid the familiar and the everyday’, ⁴⁰ it is to be uprooted such that there is, for that brief moment, nothing familiar, nothing ordinary. What is effected in this state of wonder is a clearing in which the most mundane things feel uncanny and the commonplace becomes estranged. It is to be standing there, in the middle of the crosswalk, in the city that you know so well, and feel completely and utterly displaced. It is to be lost, at home. There is a sense of alienation, as the world is flattened, hierarchies upended, and all quotidian objects are evacuated of the assigned meanings and orientations which our circumspective gaze normally maintains. Thus, in enchantment, there is a feeling of pure presence and pure absence: absence of meaning, as phenomena are no longer subjected to the in-order-to structure that sustains their quotidian localization; and mere presence, as all phenomena becomes equally significant (or insignificant, since here there is no longer any difference between the two). It is an instance of what Wylie describes in Landscape, absence and geographies of love ⁴¹ as ‘unreflective presence and directly given phenomenality’: a moment of feeling simultaneously deeply involved with and excluded from a world that seems to transcend all particulars. The world is open, and, being momentarily freed from ourselves, we are open to connect with it. Here, the world seems revealed in its ‘true and original textures’, washed clean of the invisible scaffolds and ‘structures of intelligibility or ideal types’ that would typically inscribe them with assigned and corresponding concepts. It is as if seeing for the first time anew, where ‘everything was visible, everything was only visible’ ⁴² – the disclosure of the virtual (difference) in a stunning, forceful push.

Spacetime travels

If the quotidian meaning of phenomena is upended, so too is quotidian temporality. Time itself, structured and demarcated by that which matters to us, is altered when those hierarchies are suspended. Any sense of ‘continuous’, ‘objective’, and ‘measurable’ time is disrupted as the temporalizing technocratic practices of both place and discourse – those very same disciplinary techniques that petitioned docility of the patient in our first vignette, and permeated the background of our second – take a backseat to the given phenomenality of things. Thus, enchantment involves the ‘unheimlich (uncanny) feeling of being disrupted or torn out of one’s default sensory-psychic-intellectual disposition’. ⁴³ It is, as with Heidegger’s anxiety, a call away from the everyday modalities into which we have been distributed, a call by which we are individualized down to ourselves in our uncanniness, and thrown into nothing. ⁴⁴ Proust perfectly captures this existential disruption when he describes such experiences as ‘fragments of existence withdrawn from time’. ⁴⁵ No longer situated, that is, no longer finding ourselves in a situation, we instead discover that we can have neither a nature nor an identity, that we are dominated by the constant impossibility of being anything specific (as with despair, we are no one). Freed from the order of time, Proust discovers that such encounters, ‘instead of giving me a more flattering idea of myself, had almost caused me to doubt the reality, the existence of that self’. ⁴⁶ Indeed, as enchantment collapses the delimited sense of place and time, it takes with it all sense of self that had been distributed into it.

The extra-temporal character of enchantment, captured by Proust, Bennett, and others, can be traced to its nature as a fundamental encounter. Here, encounter is understood as that event which does not bring about a prior possibility, but itself renders what is possible, redrawing horizons in an anarchic bursting forth. ⁴⁷ Thus, the fundamental encounter is precisely that which outstrips me, which cannot be subjected to my will and reconstituted in terms of my life-project. The amazing, the astonishing, the admirable: each of these remain undisruptive, easily categorized in their extraordinariness and ignored as existentially irrelevant – that is, they maintain and even support the contemporary. But it was not an extraordinary city that was encountered that spring day, it was a retransfiguration of the world, an excess of meaning inaccessible to any explanation. An event of fundamental deracination.

To be enchanted, then, is nothing short of losing my ‘self’, as a constituting subject: a letting-go of the circumspective gaze through which phenomena are caught up in my struggle to sustain my existential project. I am stripped of my sense of individuality, of my very sense of temporality, and thrown up against a world reborn even as it has been destroyed. Instead of constituting the phenomena by imposing an order on them that sustains their quotidian meaningfulness, where phenomena get subjected in the ‘for-the-sake-of’, or the ‘in-order-to’ of my life-project, I discover myself constituted by the phenomena – the phenomena play themselves out in me. ⁴⁸ For this brief moment, it cannot be quantified or foreseen. I cannot prepare for it, anticipate it, or circumscribe it in terms of my will. Instead, everything is truly visible, and only visible. ⁴⁹ Thus, while Bennett describes enchantment as a moment that persuades without compelling, ⁵⁰ we argue that what one encounters in enchantment is a force a great deal stronger than persuasion. It is a force that grabs the self, throws it off its imagined balance, paralyzes, and energizes it at the same time.

Central to Heidegger’s Being and Time ⁵¹ is the insistence that when a utilizing or circumspective, everyday comportment toward an object is put on hold, another kind of relationship becomes possible. Thus, in enchantment, when all familiarity is shattered in a radical upheaval of the world itself, when all settledness is suspended, there erupts, in this moment of hesitation, the potential for a reconfiguration of possibilities through a kind of ‘emergency of being’, ‘a state where the givenness of our belongingness to a particular clearing becomes unsettled’. ⁵² The world is reordered, new horizons formed, as the sundering of ‘my’ world – that is, of the constitution of the world in terms of myself – exposes to me that which was never entirely mine. What is illuminated in this ‘moment of vision’ ⁵³ is the very possibility of subjectivity itself: ‘the event of my always being on the way to happening to myself’. ⁵⁴ Strictly speaking, as with despair, in the event of enchantment there is no subject, yet the subject remains implicated. The ‘I’ emerges anew from this circulation of affect, from the rupture – only to be lost again. As an unprecedented moment of simultaneous attachment/detachment with the world that makes the most ordinary things seem strange, enchantment entails the potential to open up the question of being.

So what? Some thoughts about the ethico-political potential of enchantment

So far, we have defined enchantment as an event that distributes new possibilities by foreclosing on all possibilities through the evacuation of assigned significance that is made possible in wonder. In this section, we will look into the ethical and political potential of this event. From a situational and more-than-human point of view, politics is the enactment of productive assemblages, alliances that empower us to act. ⁵⁵ According to this understanding, political power is inherently tied to affect: it is, indeed, a capacity to both affect and be affected. Ergo, the connective openness of enchantment fights what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘micro-fascisms’ – the cancerous division of forces from within – since it alters our way of being, and brings passion and depth to our engagements with the world. ⁵⁶ Through wonder, enchantment confronts the heaviness of our times. However, as noted, enchantment does not merely work on the affirmative level but the foreclosure of possibilities – the moment of hesitation – forces the subject to face the full weight of life, to face the fact that the situation is out of one’s hands. It is from this forced re-evaluation of the situation that politics may emerge. Here, politics is understood to precede thought, speech, and reflection: it is in the practices of encountering the other. As Massumi points out, affect ‘concerns the first stirrings of the political’. ⁵⁷ Affect is the power to do, the power to act, in a situation that one is thrown into. As a highly affectual event, enchantment is a sudden change in capacity, a radical opening that energizes the forming subject(s). In enchantment, the subject is momentarily wiped out, and at the same time forced on stage – to improvise. Thus, while we generally agree with Bennett’s claim that enchantment has the power to cultivate ethical generosity and care for the world via the sense of connection to the world that it engenders, ⁵⁸ we argue that the real transformative potential of enchantment lies in the radical uprooting of the subject and opening of worlds.

Massumi connects the word ‘affect’ with ‘hope’, which is a powerful force in imagining possible futures: indeed, a capacity to act. ⁵⁹ The affectual energy of enchantment opens up a field of potential from which power emerges. The intensity of the event temporarily expands the powers of existence, clearing space for improvisation with the dominating forces. Reflecting on Foucault’s understanding of power as productive, Massumi clarifies its intrinsic nature: ‘. . . it’s part of our emergence as identified individuals, and it emerges with us – we actualize it, as it in-forms us’. ⁶⁰ The political power of enchantment radiates from a forced change of direction, an intense call to rethink the world. If one manages to do so, ‘the paralysis of hopelessness’ is fended off, even if just for a passing moment. ⁶¹ In enchantment, the virtual (difference) is felt, it is present there and then, as real possibilities. But the rethinking must arise from an acceptance of the limitations of life, from the loss of what was, and the joy of not-knowing. Only then can the event generate an excess of possible conditions of existence, and fight the prevailing processes of normalization.

The potential that we refer to here is a politics beyond human intentionality, it precedes thought and reflection. ⁶² It is a joint participation of the things taking place in a given encounter. This is what Bennett refers to as a political ecology, in which ‘agency has no single locus or mastermind’. ⁶³ As the subject re-emerges from the web of forces at work in enchantment, the ethico-political potential also arises from the interests of the event. ⁶⁴ There is no ‘I’ in politics, and this emptiness without identity needs to be sensed before things can start to change. ⁶⁵ Enchantment avoids a value perspective. It does not have to do with difference from, with opposition or hierarchies: enchantment hereby links to Deleuze’s philosophy of ‘difference-in-itself’. ⁶⁶ The energies that resonate from the event become political in relation to the prevailing circumstances: acts are politicized within the landscape, in the spacetime which they are becoming-with. Each landscape raises unique problems and poses questions that are in many ways always particular. ⁶⁷ Politics is about probing the limits of existence, hereby making space for the moment hesitation, that is, jolting the taken-for-granted ways of thinking/being. ⁶⁸ It is a shared refusal to settle down for the given world. Politics can then be understood as collective problem-solving provoked by the landscape. If the collective response gains force and momentum, the tendencies of what is taking-place may amplify.

However, too often the ontological energy of the event is immediately drained by the dominating powers that find ways to either incorporate the event into their own operations or redirect its force of rupture. Part of the logic of neoliberal capitalism is to capture forms of resistance by techniques of domination. ⁶⁹ The system welcomes variation and deviations from the normal – the feeling of freedom is central to its functioning – but it quickly directs these toward profit-making. What may feel like liberation, turns out to be capitalist use of power. Punk aesthetics, interventionist tactics, queering – by affect manipulation ⁷⁰ resistance is tamed in the name of safety and turned into compelling ‘individual’ lifestyle choices that reinforce the system. What Michel de Certeau referred to as people’s ‘tactics’ are twisted into capitalist strategies. ⁷¹ Part of the logic is to mass produce experiences that feel just authentic enough to keep us hooked. ⁷² In the contemporary technoscientific world of continuous experience production, our attention is steered to always follow the next cue. We are encouraged to stay curious about the new, which is perpetually on the horizon, just a ‘click’ away, to the point that it defines our everyday modality. Progress becomes a strategy, the novel exalted. In this landscape, Heidegger’s differentiation between wonder and its synonyms becomes conspicuous: we are seduced by the amazing, cultivate movies and television programing that astonish, and create platforms that function entirely on admiration. ⁷³ Here, in every instance, ‘I’ am reinforced – identity itself is packaged and sold. Wonder, meanwhile, seems harder and harder to come by. It therefore becomes fitting to ask whether the speed and continual quest for the novel linked to capitalism even allows for the moment of hesitation that lies at the core of enchantment. Would Raine have been arrested and transported by a city abruptly present if, instead of being available, he had been focused on Google maps or responding to a tweet? Is enchantment itself being foreclosed upon by neoliberal strategies?

While keeping that critical question in mind, it is still possible to join Bennett in the argument against the disenchantment story of modern life. ⁷⁴ This endeavor requires going beyond either/or categorizations of how the world works. As in our first vignette, which highlighted despair as well as disregard for the other, it is true that different participants in an encounter do not, by any means, always work together to form a unity or community. ⁷⁵ Elements from past, present, and future cut across the encounter insofar as time itself is reconstituted in that event as manipulations of affect become part of it, twisting its relations, and molding the emergent landscape. The (body-)subject’s power of existence is eroded by disciplinary techniques that attempt to keep it docile and manageable. In the vignette, the subject is governed by medical expert control that assumes neutrality in a highly affectual situation, and dictates the body to act according to a prewritten choreography that leaves no space for improvisation. The body is a site of powerful politics that is hard to grasp, yet these types of choreographies work to order much of our life, preventing the suspension, that is, the hesitation before the prevailing circumstances that we locate at the center of enchantment. Likewise, the second vignette emerges against a background of technocratic procedurals that inform, direct and dominate. ⁷⁶ By dismissing the contradictory response(s) as mere ‘noise’, and thereby denying the existence of politics, the dominant system of power may indeed close the potential of the event, but not even this vampirism is ever complete. ⁷⁷ Rather, it is a continuous movement of running after the alternative-order forces to channel their energies back into the system. Every now and then, ‘noise’ is recognized as an argument, space is cleared for empathy and listening, and what once was a rigid choreography, suddenly opens up for changes of direction. Alternative movements that escape dogmatic ways of operating will go on finding new forms of emergence.

Often, these minor fractures in the ugliness of the situation go on unnoticed, but the affectual resonance can be felt ‘in the air’ – it creates an atmosphere of may-be. ⁷⁸ The response to the situation might fail per se, but it nonetheless swings the subject to a slightly different path. It is precisely the uncertainty of the situation that creates space for hope. Something is left nagging, begging for a re-evaluation of the situation, hence sparking a thought. This ability to respond arises from the event, it is what Massumi calls ‘response-ability’, ⁷⁹ the conditions the event creates for its own potential openings. ⁸⁰ Due to its affective force, enchantment intensifies the powers of existence and installs hope to the world. As Massumi remarks, this intensified moment, the in-between time that cuts transversely across dimensions of time, is the time of the event. ⁸¹ And this odd temporality shakes the orders of the world, even if only subtly. The event is, indeed, always part of a wider ecology, as Proust speculated: ‘It seems that events are larger than the moment in which they occur and cannot be entirely contained in it’. ⁸²

Closing remarks

To conclude, let us offer our final vignette, which again involves a subject-uprooting event:

Trying to overcome my fear of losing yet another child, asking myself if this one is really going to stay with us, or live, I placed the newborn baby to my breast. He immediately knew what to do, I followed, and ‘I’ disappeared. Immersed in the moment, breathing with him, skin to skin, I caught his birth mother’s eye. Hesitation before her loss. She was exhausted from the labor, but stayed with the eye-contact, and I could feel trust, love, forming between us. Simplicity amidst the apparent complexity of the situation. To this date, we are connected by our belonging to each other. (Noora’s memory)

The ethical power of enchantment has to do with affective tuning-in that happens before cognition comes into play, it is about being receptive to the other and responding to the circumstances through becoming-together. Ethics requires us to risk ourselves in the face of unknowingness, and this ‘willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming . . . ’. ⁸³ In enchantment, new forms of belonging and attachment surface through being lost. The hospital room in this last vignette was filled with joy, but also with a confusing sense of not-knowing. A hard-hitting, yet difficult to grasp difference in-the-making. A collective atmosphere of uncertainty with openness and possibility: this is the force of the virtual in which futurity combines, unmediated, with past events. ⁸⁴ Birth, of course, changes everything. It is an instant of fundamental shift in perspective which cannot be anticipated, no matter the preparation. In that event, much more than a child was born. New forms of kinship we found, ones that no one knew existed, ones that may have previously felt terrifying. When I think back, I return to an atmosphere of being ‘in sync’. In spite of all the fears and unpredictability involved in the situation, I felt a deep sense of connection with the birth mother (and her loss), and she seemed capable of finding joy in witnessing ours. This atmosphere of compersion points to the ontological energy in the event that worked against the deep sense of heaviness that paralyzes the subject in the face of uncertainty. ⁸⁵ In enchantment, this response-ability emerges from the event of deracination.

In this article, we have struggled with the fundamental inability to represent this perplexing event. By attending to our vignettes, we have aimed to draw near to what is at root in enchantment proximally, joining with past experiences to explore this moment of the world running through you. In this way, we have taken certain liberties, following intuition and culling seemingly disparate experiences to isolate and explicate the liberatory nature of enchantment as a fundamental encounter that uproots, deracinates, and compels. In resonance with Charles R Carlin’s insistance ‘that scholarship on human subjectivity should also emphasize its felt experience as well as its conceptual deconstruction’, ⁸⁶ we have stayed critical of the idea of an autonomous human subject while also acknowledging that the theorization of an always emergent subject is predicated on felt experience. Thinking with our vignettes, our aim has been to show that the reorganizing power of enchantment may manifest in a variety of affective atmospheres, and that its potential is necessarily tied to the circumstances in which it takes place. It need not, therefore, be a pleasant experience. Our argument is that new horizons may open even amidst a profound experience of pain or loss, when the forced totality of the situation generates a sense of openness, a freeing emptiness. Indeed, we argue that the affectual register itself is not the (only) defining factor in enchantment, and have therefore sought to draw attention to the radical nature of this event as that which fundamentally displaces. As an event, enchantment is a moment of non-identity. It throws the subject off balance, outside of time and space, and radically reorders the world by simultaneously closing and opening horizons. It is a totalizing moment of seeing the world anew, of becoming-otherwise by being lost. These theorizations have been measured over and against those characteristics that are often considered definitive of enchantment – and which therefore demanded explication – namely, the feeling of temporal disruption, the heightened sensory engagement, the sense of wonder, and the feeling of being simultaneously connected and disconnected from the world. Indeed, it is precisely these characteristics that provided the path toward the eventual nature of enchantment through an analysis of wonder.

As follows, enchantment is not only a catalyst to political change but a necessary condition to it, since it opens up questioning about being itself. Without the foreclosure of all possibilities in enchantment, that is, without the moment of hesitation and uncertainty in the event, a genuine re-evaluation of the world could not take place. This uninvited, non-linear, and pre-intentional moment challenges what is known, and attunes the human subject to the world somehow differently, and hence makes space for alternative directions of becoming. Thinking that arises from enchantment happens without a goal, it is thinking beyond representation, enactive understanding integral to the event: it is, indeed, ‘thinking-feeling’. ⁸⁷ This re-evaluation of the world can only retrospectively be owned or recognized, but the jolting of the organizing orders is sensed in the moment. ⁸⁸ The potential of enchantment as a radical opening is politically essential, and can be opposed to the closing power of curiosity, which works to capture the subject’s attention, and therefore narrows its horizons. This also points to the relational nature of our abilities to work the world: our actions take place within the collective field in which both power and its resistance continually operate. ⁸⁹ Variations happen all the time, ‘radical’ does not mean ‘big’ in scale. Enchantment is a sudden change in this capacity to maneuver: a ‘moment of vision’, often amidst the very ordinary. Enchantment is a connective encounter, it proposes unforeseen attachments through a reordering of what has been. It opens up new ways of being and doing in the world. The deracination of the subject in enchantment clears space for re-imagining one’s place in the world through emerging associations: this is of fundamental importance to cultivating care for others, human and non-human. Enchantment then fights the evil of cynicism through both by intensifying our belonging to the world and by forcing us to face the situation we have been thrown to.