Modernist esotericism: Neither religious nor secular

I've been invited to a colloqium organised by the Social Science Research Council at NYU in May. It won't involve formal papers but rather short position statements circulated in advance and then discussion (a little like the Viennese event). This invite was received yesterday and it'll be useful to note my first thoughts on my contribution.

I am interested in two formations:
1 . the everyday social intersections between the secular and the religious in what we can think of as "modern" social existence. My example is John Byrom, the eighteeenth-century English Tory mystic, much influenced by Malebranche, William Law, Behmenism and the French quietist tradition who, in his commercial dealings in London and Manchester, is constantly confronted by the question of how and where to act and think religiously and how and where not to. The application of his mystic Anglicanism is a continual problem for him, which leads him to a consistent lack of transparency in his social dealings. His truer self is expressed in his diary and his poems (which were not for print).
2. the emergence of a high-cultural zone that is neither secular nor religious and that explores the everyday ethical consequence of the absence of God and cosmic telos. This zone really only comes into existence after Schopenhauer who seems to me is the philosopher who transports Humean scepticism into the heart of European theo-metaphysics. Schopenhauer's solution is to interrupt the workings of the cosmic blind will, under whose compulsions we live, by the truth of fragmented aesthetic experiences. And this solution is given literary form and expression and it ethical and political implications are explored in Joseph Conrad's early fictions as well as in his 'Preface' to Narcissus. In particular it leads to Conrad's theory of the 'sentimental lie' which binds society but which the artist and the participant in the Schopenhauerian 'neither religious nor secular' stand apart from, having a privileged and esoteric relation to truth. This can be thought of as a form of cultural modernist esotericism.

The point of placing these two formations along side one another is not to try to find analogies or similarities between them (although no doubt there are some) but to point to the ways in which the problem of everyday esotericism works outside of any model of secularisation, and does so by not having to take the religion/secular opposition as foundational. There's a genealogy of lived esotericism which intensifies under modernism.

The other interest of this line of thought would be to connect it to the role of 'transparency' both socially and politically, and the notion that the process of secularisation is also a process of extending tranparency. Here Hannah Arendt's chapter on 'The Social Question' in her book on revolutions, Leo Strauss's theory of accomodation and Starobinski on Rousseauvian transparency would all be useful reference points.

These remarks are obviously only a beginning.


What connects these two formation most interestingly it seems to me is the question of esotericism though of as secreted knowledge of the highest things.

Travels

Since the original idea of this blog was to record thoughts and events as an aid to memory (the blog is formally accessible to anyone but effectively remains unread and anonymous) it's worth noting some travels since last August. To Vienna in November for a seminar on Modern Enchantments. The city has been radically transformed since about 1980 when last I was there. Then it was a grey Eastern European city, dragged down and eviscerated by the cold war and the legacies of the nazi era. Now it's a strange reincarnation of its belle epoque self (Vienna 1900) when it was a European centre of elegance and imperial/biedermeier style. It's been reincarnated, so it seems, by money flowing in from the old Soviet bloc, much dirty (drugs, prostititution) but enough to fuel fashion, restaurants, luxury. And because many of the locals still live in state-provided housing (a legacy of old Viennese socialism) the public, street culture is vibrant and self-regarding just as it is in Italy. (Indeed the place seemed like a graft of Rome on Berlin).
And then over Xmas back home to Melbourne and Auckland. The latter in particular is ravishingly beautiful and a wonderful place to spend a couple of idle weeks. Howick where my mum lives, is changing too: Cockle Beach down the road is a hang-out for Polynesian islanders in the weekends, families come to spend the day at the beach, gathering shell fish, swimming, drinking, eating, playing as if a Tongan seaside village had been transported into suburban Auckland. (I think I blogged about this once before.) And the suburb itself is schizophrenic: it's always been sought after by migrants, mainly the Brits (a certain kind of lower-middle-class immigrant with a bit of money, not too much, not too little) who have now been joined by South Africans. (I suspect the political views of this combined group must be indescribably horrible). On the other side though it's a centre for Hong Kong and Taiwan Chinese, and in a small stripmall a mile or so from the beach we had the best chinese food I have eaten outside of China, a little hole in the wall restaurant where the brits and south africans never seem to venture.
It's certainly not the NZ of my childhood.

Mysticism Murdoch et al

It's certainly been a while since I blogged on this site and I'm uncertain as to why the inspiration came today. Probably simply because we were updating Nell's baby blog and the whole blogsphere became a little less remote and abstract as a result. Obviously the big reason for this blog drought has been Nell's existence: she basically takes up most of our lives.
Still, not everything has been babydom.
I cant say I have written much but have had three concepts floating about for future written work:
1. to examine the concept and history of what I'm thinking of as 'Tory mysticism.' This is related to the last post on passive resistance, but basically I am interested in the so-called mystical turn of some of those who stand against the secular enlightenment and its political regimes. These would include cases like William Law and Coleridge but also figures like Joseph Conrad and maybe Schopenhauer who are not religious or Christian at all. So a new genealogy might open up.
2. related to this I'd like to think about the play between the tendencies towards the institutionalisation of belief and cultural practices and tendencies towards de-institutionalisation, so as to think about the category of the aesthetics as more or less cripplingly split between the two drives. Like the first topic, this emerges from my interest in the eighteenth-century Anglicanism. The essay that will appear in Studies in the Eighteenth Century or whatever it is called is a kind of prologomena to this.
3. and something completely different: I've become interested in a project I am thinking of as 'the literary experience and the emergence of the mass-market paperback'. I had the idea for this when I went to Melbourne last year with a paperback copy of Iris Murdoch's Bruno's Dream—a US Avon book. I found reading this book completely absorbing to a degree I hardly ever experience, and I realised that the intensity of this reading experience was connected to the physical object which was its occasion, the cheapo paper edition with its lurid cover. And that that kind of book no longer exists: literary paperbacks now have other design conventions and other marketing strategies. I also realised what is fairly obvious that the UK mass-market paperback in the fifties and sixties (dominated by Penguin) was very different from that of the US and that a comparative study of book design would have something to say about the structure of both country's literary field and literary experiences. So it's along those lines that I am collecting mass-market literary paperbacks up until about 1970. Something will come of this I suspect.