Francis Bacon lamented that *magic kills industry.* And this is precisely because the continued relation of human beings to their magical capacities was also their capacity to find meaning and sustenance outside of the world of work and industry. Magical and spiritual beliefs were dangerous simply because their refusal of linear, empty time itself was a source of insubordination. In order for Leviathan [civilization] to achieve its restructuring of the body, it had to first divorce the body of its participation in a cosmology of power and spirit. The perceived wildness of the witches had to be crushed alongside the wildness of the world. Leviathan alone would possess the ability to alter, enchant and deploy the body. This control over the body certainly happens in a largely metaphysical operation, yet it obscures itself and pretends toward the Natural and Objective. Perhaps the most sinister aspect of the spiritual decimation which mechanizes the body is that it denies the existence of spirit at all. The mechanization of the body is so constitutive of the individual [in capitalism] that, at least in industrialized countries, giving space to the belief in occult forces does not jeopardize the regularity of social behavior. Astrology too can be allowed to return, with the certainty that even the most devoted consumer of astral charts will automatically consult the watch before going to work. ______ The stakes on which witches and other practitioners of magic died, and the chambers in which their tortures were executed, were a laboratory in which much social discipline was sedimented, and much knowledge about the body was gained. Here those irrationalities were eliminated that stood in the way of the transformation of the individual and social body into a set of predictable and controllable mechanisms. And it was here again that the scientific use of torture was born... This battle, significantly occurring at the foot of the gallows, demonstrates both the violence that presided over the scientific rationalization of the world, and the clash of two opposite concepts of the body, two opposite investments in it. One one side, we have a concept of the body that sees it endowed with powers even after death; the corpse does not inspire revulsion, and is not treated as something rotten or irreducibly alien. On the other, the body is seen as dead even when still alive, insofar as it is conceived as a mechanical device, to be taken apart just like any machine. [...] The course of scientific rationalization was intimately connected to the attempt by the state to impose its control over an unwilling workforce.
Posted on: Sun, 27 Jul 2014 20:43:02 +0000
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