Regarde l'objet

A materialist theory of re-enchantment

Dedicated to my partner C.

Marxist-feminist scholar Silvia Federici argues that the world needed to be disenchanted in order for it to be reduced to raw material and exploitable workers. Prior to the rise of capitalism, European peasants lived in what they believed to be a dynamic, responsive, living world. A world that can be collaborated with. A world that returns your gaze. The animistic spirituality of European peasants was empowering, because it meant that the world was something you could engage with directly without relying on those with power. You could walk around your field counter clockwise three times and bury certain objects in each corner of the field, and this was a way of communicating with the world and collaborating on a good harvest. People who believed this had access to a source of power that could not be bought, sold, or taken.

Federici argues that the European witch hunts that coincided with the beginnings of capitalism were a way to force women into a subordinate role in which their unpaid labour could be used to create the primitive accumulation needed to get capitalism off the ground. Additionally, the witch hunts worked to make all traditional spiritual practices evidence of conspiring with the Devil, and therefore very dangerous to take part in because doing so could lead to accusations of witchcraft which could lead to torture and death. The people were stripped of their animistic spirituality and encouraged to see the world as inert matter that could be manipulated and used but could not and would not speak back. This is part of the foundation of the profoud alienation of capitalism. We are encouraged to see ourselves as alone in the world. We are the only subjects, the only actors, the only ones who can speak. And so if we want to know about the world, we can’t speak to the world directly. We have to talk to another human, one who “knows.”

Federici’s work became very popular in the 2010s with self described witches. Believers in various stripes of new age spirituality aligned with Federici’s arguments and were very excited about her suggestion that the world can be re-enchanted. A lot of witches believe that practicing magic is inherently political and fundamentally disrupts capitalism. Federici’s arguments bolstered this position. Magic can be a way back into a living world that returns our gaze, and in this way can be a powerful antidote to the extreme alienation of capitalism, empowering us to come into direct relationship with the world instead of always deferring to those in power.

It is no secret that I am pretty woo woo myself. I take seriously visions I receive through psychedelic experiences. I intuitively sense that reincarnation is real. I used to be a professional tarot reader and still read cards from time to time. I believe the world is alive and that sometimes it speaks to me directly through various symbols and synchronicities. In the 2010s I was one of these witches who was very excited about the implications of Federici’s ideas and the potentially political and liberatory power of my bedroom altar.

Hilariously, I seem to be very attracted to atheists for a witch. My partner Jay is an atheist but loving them and knowing them for seven years makes me feel that the term materialist is more accurate. They are a deeply spiritual person and they don’t believe in any of the nonmaterial components of woo woo and other spiritual worldviews. Their spirituality is not defined by an absence of god or spirits, but by the presence, the profound and awe inspiring presence, of the material world. As in Kim Stanley Robinson’s beautifully articulated phrase from his Mars trilogy: The wild world itself is holy. For Jay, this materialist spirituality expresses itself in a deep love of the natural world and an interest in evolutionary biology. It also expresses itself in a deep love of everything human: anthropology, history, linguistics. Jay’s knowledge of world history and human cultures would dwarf even the most ardent astrologist’s knowledge of the stars.

My partner C is also an atheist and also has what I would call a materialist spirituality. For C the world is very much alive but what is animating the world is not invisible spirits but the invisible forces of physics that make material objects do what they do. C builds beautiful objects for a living, and is oriented toward the relationships between parts that make objects become what they are. He told me this incredible story about how he was trying to fix a lamp and a part of the lamp came totally apart sending various pieces flying across the floor. He dedicated himself to the puzzle of putting the lamp back together. There was no instruction manual. No lamp expert to ask. C’s only teacher was the lamp itself. He gathered and looked at the various pieces, their shapes, their probable functions based on their shapes, and then he considered how they might fit together. At one point he realized that based on the parts and the way they were fitting together, there needed to be a spring. He didn’t see a spring but the other components implied to him that there was supposed to be a spring. He looked more closely on the floor and sure enough found a spring that had rolled away. He fixed the lamp.

I was struck by this story. Not only because I would be absolutely useless in that situation, and so therefore I was impressed, but also because it was clear to me that C was communicating with the lamp. The lamp itself, a nonliving material object, was able to communicate to C how to fix it, because C knew how to listen to the inherent logic of its parts. When I was expressing my wonder at this, C told me a story that was told to him by one of his mentors in the object building world. When his mentor was a kid he was trying to fix some appliance and was frustrated and overwhelmed. He didn’t understand how to do it. He wanted instructions. He wanted some outside authority to explain to him how to fix the thing. He went to his father expressing this and his father told him “Regarde l’objet.”

This blew my mind and immediately reminded me of Silvia Federici’s work on re-enchantment. Capitalism doesn’t just strip away our animistic spiritual worldviews, it erodes all our relationships. It erodes our relationship with ourselves, our bodies and minds, each other, the animals and the plants, the ecosystems, the living world, and the material objects that surround us. At this stage of capitalism we are absolutely denied the type of interaction that C had with the lamp. In a time of planned obsolescence, the endless products we are manipulated into buying are designed so that they break and can’t be repaired. Capitalism does this to create endless demand for new products, and it also has the effect of disempowering us and making us believe that we cannot understand material objects on our own. We are in a collective state of learned helplessness because capitalism wants us reliant.

What the witches of the 2010s didn’t understand, and what many woo woo people still don’t understand, is that capitalism can and will commodify our spirituality and sell it back to us. The crystals mined from the earth, the endless packs of tarot decks, even the identity of “witch” have been sold back to us. We are not re-enchanting anything when we are mindlessly buying. Crafting our personal brand with a witch aesthetic is completely compatible with the goals of capitalism. C’s conversation with the lamp is not. C’s ability to listen to material objects flies in the face of capitalism and is the kind of empowerment that can truly begin eroding some of the profound alienation we live under. The lamp will give up its secrets to those who dare to regarde l’objet but most of us are going to wait for an expert who knows about lamps or — far more likely — throw it in the trash and buy a new one.

Spiritual types are used to dismissing atheists as less open to the profound mysteries of the world. I think spiritual types have so much to learn from materialists. It is not that materialists do not feel wonder and awe. It is not that they sense no mystery or feel no reverence. They feel wonder and awe at what they can see and experience in the material world. They turn toward the many mysteries with curiosity and they satiate that curiosity with learning and experimentation. They revere the material world and its staggering beauty so much that they don’t need to go looking elsewhere. They love the wild world itself. And so do I. My spirituality, after I detoxed from the commodified witch identity, turned out to be profoundly material. This is why I keep falling in love with materialists who give me sermons on lamps or the many adventures of Genghis Khan.

I still believe in reincarnation, and I believe that bats and foxes, while having their own personal lives, are sometimes enlisted by the living world to give me a message. I imagine that I too am sometimes enlisted in giving messages to others without my knowledge. Basically — I’m still very woo. But this woo is like a fluffy icing on top of the cake of my materialist spirituality. I can’t know if my nonmaterial spiritual views are true. That doesn’t mean they aren’t important or useful to me. They are. But I do know that the material world is very real, and is suffering greatly under the horrors of capitalism. The European peasants Federici describes weren’t just walking around their fields counter clockwise. They had a deep knowledge of the material world that far surpassed that of modern alienated people. They were building and fixing objects, growing plants, and making what they needed. This was also stolen from them in the long march toward total alienation and dependency on capitalism. It was stolen from us.

Returning to the material world is re-enchantment. There is so much here, present and material and verifiably real, that we completely ignore. We don’t know how to be in real relationship with what is here. We are trapped in learned helplessness, assuming that we must always defer to experts, or frustratedly throwing things away that could be repaired because it feels impossible. We don’t ask ourselves how things work because we assume that knowledge is opaque and available only to experts. We don’t realize that the world itself can tell us a lot if we will simply listen. When we regarde l’objet we treat the object like something we are capable of understanding. When we regarde l’objet we assume that the world is knowable and we become curious about the forces that make it work. When we regarde l’objet we enter into relationship with world.

---

---

Clementine Morrigan is a writer and public intellectual based in Montréal, Canada. She writes popular and controversial essays about culture, politics, ethics, relationships, sexuality, and trauma. A passionate believer in independent media, she’s been making zines since the year 2000 and is the author of several books. She’s known for her iconic white-text-on-a-black-background mini-essays on Instagram. One of the leading voices on the Canadian Left and one half of the Fucking Cancelled podcast, Clementine is an outspoken critic of cancel culture and a proponent of building solidarity across difference. She is a socialist, a feminist, and a vegan for the animals and the earth.

Browse her shop, listen to her podcast, book a one on one session with her, or peruse her list of resources and further reading.

---