After Trump was elected president it felt like the sky had turned to iron with nothing but smudgy glass portals set in intervals through which I could even catch a glimpse of blue or the stars. It was like looking through the eyes of the long dead German exile Walter Benjamin who in the 1930s was obsessed with the Paris arcades. Was his fascination with these structures like mine a melancholia about the coming future; even dreams had a ceiling here while around and inside these greenhouses fascism was flourishing. He could at least walk out of these structures; I can’t. I read Susan Lepselter’s book soon after the election for the first time, then a second, and up to five times by now in part because in her book the sky is still open, filled with stars. It gives me hope. The sky hasn’t turned to iron yet. Where Benjamin retreated in his arcades to the point of virtual disappearance, Lepselter’s writing coalesces around the reader. She turns ethnography into poetics.
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The secularist killjoy: A reply to Schaefer and Smith
by
Emily Ogden
I am grateful to Donovan Schaefer and Caleb Smith for their productive, provocative responses. Both in their different ways have written about debunking and pleasure. Smith, in a description on which I couldn’t improve, says that the book “shows what secularism loves and not just what it hates, what it desires and not just what it wishes to get rid of; Credulity is, among other things, a study of ‘debunking’s pleasures.’” Schaefer, however, is concerned that Credulity may participate in a view of disenchantment as joyless. In Schaefer’s words: “Could we talk about the modern desire for debunking as something other than a dalliance with contempt?” We can, and on my view, Credulity does. Since Smith sees the book as preeminently concerned with secularism’s loves, desires, and pleasures—since, in fact, he lists among my “virtues” the fact that “[I do] not make it [my] business simply to debunk the debunkers”—I trust that my sense of what I’ve written isn’t entirely misplaced. But this book’s account of loves, desires, and pleasures may not be precisely the one that many readers would expect to find. I don’t rescue debunking from the charge of contempt. Instead, I point out that contemptuous debunking is a far more generative activity than we tend to imagine, with products that include pain and pleasure on all sides.
The art of debunking
by
Caleb Smith
If you want to understand secularism, Emily Ogden reminds us in Credulity, then you can begin with the art of debunking. Secularism is not only a political project; it is also a way of claiming authority on stage, on the page, and in other popular media. Calling out the frauds and the deceivers, secularism would prove, again and again, that there are no mysteries in the world. Secularism’s bad objects are many and various—priestcraft, hokum, fetish, sleight-of-hand—but it would do the same thing to them all. Secularism would authorize itself, indeed it would summon itself into being, by disenchanting all this bunk. Ogden’s marvelous book shows what secularism loves and not just what it hates, what it desires and not just what it wishes to get rid of; Credulity is, among other things, a study of “debunking’s pleasures.” Could it be that the object of debunking matters less to the secularist than the act itself? Could it be that what secularism really wants is not to banish false prophets but to trot them out, endlessly, so that it can demonstrate its mastery over them?
Credulity, or Science as an intoxication
by
Donovan Schaefer
[Emily] Ogden intends to “accentuate the negative,” so the train of questions I have—questions that view science in a more optimistic light—runs perpendicular to the thrust of her project. Nonetheless, I want to use her picture of the nonmodern obsessions of the scientists to explore how science is understood by the early architects of the secularization thesis. In her account of the debunking maneuvers of Franklin and Lavoisier’s 1784 commission, Ogden proposes that the debunkers are addicted to their debunking. She layers Bruno Latour’s factish—the peculiar feature of moderns to fixate on that which is made versus that which is “factical”—and Sigmund Freud’s fetish—the pathological obsession with a thing that resolves one’s own anxiety about lack. For Latour, the factish—the modern obsession with “facts” as if they were unmade, purely exterior realities—is a delusion. But is it pathological, in the way that it is for Freud? Could we talk about the modern desire for debunking as something other than a dalliance with contempt?