In an introduction to similar subjects two years ago I made the suggestion that the most productive strategy for illuminating contemporary scholarly constructions of magic and supernaturalism is through a double movement of demythologization and reenchantment, a movement that invokes rational interpretation while simultaneously destabilizing the categories of that interpretation.

This strategy, can serve to unmask the contrivance and mystification through which scholarly objectivity itself is constructed. This type of double movement circles back to another  theme raised in my initial overview. Modern scholars have fetishized the concept, seeing it as a key to religion, psychology, and culture. Through this play of fixation and estrangement, meaning is simultaneously reinscribed and transgressed.

The operations of a double gesture towards which I first alluded in my year 2000 seminars about become more apparent as we consider one of the central themes in the scholarly literature on magic (and also in the nr. 5, 2004 book, of the ‘younger’ Harry Potter series) is the claim that magic is fixated on the power of words.

This issue has appeared in numerous contexts, from scholars who argue that magic derives from an inordinate belief in the efficacy of mere words, to scholars who assert that magic turns on an overinvestment of mental representations, to scholars who argue that magical thinking fails to recognize essential differences between representation and reality.

The German philosopher Ernst Cassirer provides an emphatic formulation of this theme in the second volume of his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1925). Cassirer argues that a decisive characteristic of the magical worldview is belief in the objective nature and efficacy of signs. As he explains, magic is commonly understood as seeking to animate the material world, but in a paradoxical manner this mythic drive is "directed with particular intensity toward what is most unreal and lifeless ... the shadow realm of words, images, and signs." This paradox can be explained only when we recognize that in the mythical world "the two factors, thing and signification, are undifferentiated, because they merge, grow together, concresce in an immediate unity." In the magical worldview "there is no such thing as mere mimesis, mere signification," since objects and signs are undifferentiated and intermingled.

Magical thinking fails to recognize the fundamentally illusory nature of language, and therefore interposes language and desire indiscriminately into the world of material reality. The practitioner of magic seeks to subject all outward being to the practitioner's desire, and external reality is thus deprived of autonomy and independent existence. In Cassirer's view we move away from magic only as the subjective realm of representation and desire is decisively segregated from the world of material objects and language is understood as "unreal and lifeless ... the shadow realm.

Cassirer here interweaves a view of language common among many modern scholars and a recurring theme in the scholarly construction of magic. Variations of this basic perspective can be found in numerous texts. For example, psychologists Leonard Zusne and Warren H. Jones claim that magic turns on a basic confusion of linguistic and physical relationships, a confusion between interpretive categories and external reality. Magic, they explain, disregards the distinction between physical and psychological causes, the difference between energy and information: "When meaning, instead of the physical processes of energy transfer or information transmission, is taken to be causal, when meaning is externalized or reified, magical thinking enters into this picture." In their view this confusion is symptomatic of the broader error of magic, its blindness to the strict and proper boundaries "between one being and another, between beings and things, and between the subjective and the objective.

This scholarly disavowal of the magical power of words has a long history. As Thomas M. Greene has  explored, debates over the nature and power of signification go back as far as Plato and Herodotus. In The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), Reginald Scot rejected the claim that words can exert magical power. Excepting only the decrees of God, he explained, "by the sound the words nothing commeth, nothing goeth."

Greene also cites Scot's contemporary, the theologian William Perkins, who sought to counter Scot's position on the illusory nature of witchcraft but offered a similar assessment of the power of language: "That which is in nature nothing but a bare signification, cannot serve to work a wonder, and this is the nature of all words; for as they be framed of mans breath, they are natural, but yet in regard of form and articulation they are artificial and significant ... for the first significations of words, depended upon the will and pleasure of man that framed and invented them."

Modern scholars of magic have amplified this theme, repeatedly affirming that language is inert and powerless. There are a number of significant layers to this scholarly disavowal of the magical power of words. First, it configures a sharp and impermeable boundary between nature and culture, a natural world subject to nonhuman causality and the artificial, transitory world of human language, meaning, desire, and value. As Bruno Latour has shown us, this rhetorical divide between nature and culture is a formative component of the modern constitution. To be modern is to recognize this essential binary. In this light, magical thinking is most fundamentally nonmodern in its refusal to acknowledge the firm boundary between nature and culture (as well, of course, as the cognate boundaries between objects and subjects, the objective and the subjective).

As Cassirer, Zusne and Jones, and numerous theorists from the preceding pages have argued, magical thinking brazenly disregards the modern configuration of this antinomy.

Further, in this scheme language is seen as functioning only as a medium of passive representation, a neutral, transparent-and powerless-reflection of stable natural processes (processes that are fundamentally more "real" than language). "Mere mimesis," "mere representation," "bare signification"-the construction of meaning and assertion of desire are portrayed as lacking all causal efficacy. Instead, as Cassirer frames it, language should be understood as "unreal and lifeless." The potency of representation-either in serving to constitute the phenomena represented or in exerting other causal effects is aggressively disclaimed. And in its most extreme formulations, this argument has the effect of removing human purposiveness entirely from the chain of natural causality. Any visible manifestation of human desire, agency, or purposive action can become tainted with the aura of magic.

Numerous scholars discussed in the preceding chapters have argued that magic involves willful, assertive action-a failure to submit to the inexorable divine and natural order. And a theorists who frames this claim so broadly that all purposive human action seems to be subsumed within magic W. J. Perry, explains the essence of magic as follows: "By the aid of certain substances or objects, or by means of certain acts, men believe, in certain circumstances, that they can influence each other, and also natural phenomena, for their own advantage."

In The Science of Society (1927), William Graham Sumner and Albert Galloway Keller assert that the basis of magic is the belief that personal longings and discontent prove that some satisfaction is possible, "that some change in conditions, instead of adjustment to them, is called for."

In 1948 William Howells argued that "magic, properly, means all the formulas for doing things which are beyond one's personal powers." Werner Stark asserts that magic is based on the effort of the magician "to insert himself into the natural nexus of cause and effect, to introduce his wish, his subjective whim, into the objective texture of events. He regards himself as a new cause that will bring a specific new effect." And in his 1995 text on the anthropology of religion, Morton Klass asserts that in order to avoid applying the modern distinction between religion and magic onto peoples who do not function within those categories, he prefers to define magic simply as "techniques employed by those who believe that in specific circumstances persons, powers, beings, or even events are subject to control or coercion.

Note the astounding breadth of these formulations. According to these scholars, any sense that human desire or behavior can influence other human beings or the natural world, that changes in circumstance are possible, that human techniques can exert control over other persons, powers, or events­ any such sense falls into magic. We might reasonably attribute this type of hyperbole to carelessness or inadvertence. But the ease with which scholars can lapse into this astonishing claim-that all purposive human action is magical-demonstrates a central feature of the cultural logic undergirding modernity that is manifest throughout these theories of magic, a preoccupation with power that is at the same time strenuously disavowed.

Throughout the literature reviewed here, one of the recurring themes has been a deep scholarly ambivalence-often suspicion-concerning any overt attempt to exercise power. In the view of the dominant voices of this scholarly tradition, religion must be limited to transcendent or supraempirical objectives: any attention to materiality or pragmatic worldly ends veers into magic. At the same time, the material basis and effects of modern rationality and science fade from view in contrast with the extravagance and futility of the magical search for efficacy, and the rhetoric of magic's overinvestment of material objects provides ideological cover for the preoccupation with materiality on which capitalism depends. As Timothy Mitchell states it, within modernity the appearance of order means the disappearance of power. Power is to operate more and more in a manner that is slow, uninterrupted and without 'eternal manifestation'." A broad range of scholars configure magic as the --aitome of a self-seeking and emotionally laden will to power. Through contrast with magic, the material effects of religion are disclaimed, and the massive rower of modern science and rationalized social control is naturalized.

This same logic of disavowal is also used to stigmatize the practices of groups on the margins of social power. As we have seen, scholarly debates over magic regularly turn on questions of social order. Issues of class, authority, and social control have been central components of theoretical formulations of magic, with magic commonly configured as the province of women, children, foreigners, primitives, and other deviants. The rhetoric of magic's self­seeking, irrationality, and futility reverberates with broader gender and racial ideologies, both lending its weight to those ideologies and taking on greater resonance through them. Magic is invoked as a marker of social difference, and by highlighting magic's preoccupation with power, the efforts of socially marginal actors to obtain or exert power is overtly stigmatized. At the same time, with the theme of power deflected onto magic, the forms of control exercised by the dominant classes are eclipsed and naturalized. As the prior chapters have shown, modern theories of magic have regularly conformed with the interests of dominant groups, both in configuring an unruly and benighted colonial periphery and in stigmatizing marginal groups within the domestic population.

A further effect of this logic of disavowal is to mask the power of the scholar. Despite the array of theorists who reiterate the claim that it is magical to believe in the power of words, scholars themselves have exerted substantial power with their theories of magic. While Cassirer or Zusne and Jones might assert that meaning and signification have no causal efficacy, the very labor they expend in producing meaning and signification belies their claim. As Latour states, "If magic is the body of practice which gives certain words the potency to act upon 'things,' then the world of logic, deduction, and theory must be called 'magical': but it is our magic. Scholarly words enter into the flow of material causation, producing unpredictable and unintended effects to be sure, but demonstrating great potency nonetheless. Theorists of magic exercise the very magical power of words they so disclaim.

There is no more vivid display of this scholarly magic than the effort to conjure magic itself as a stable, reified phenomenon. We saw this tendency with particular clarity in the work of Brian Vickers, but the basic gesture underlies much of Western scholarship on magic through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Alexander Le Roy expresses an assumption that has shaped innumerable theorists: magic is "found everywhere, and everywhere is very nearly the same.... It is a fact." William Howells concurs that "magic is world-wide, by which I mean that it is the property not only of all primitive people but also of ourselves and all our ancestors, and it is the same thing precisely wherever it is found.

"It is the same thing precisely wherever it is found." In these words and in innumerable similar formulations, scholars set about the process of making magic-culling diverse forms of behavior, modes of knowledge, social practices, and habits from an indiscriminate range of cultural systems and historical epochs and transmogrifying them into a unified phenomenon. As long as within and by religious institutions. With all overt concern with power deflected onto magic, this ideological structure diverts attention from the material effects of religion within the modern world. Bruno Latour declares that the very notion of modernity has always been an illusion, that despite the modern insistence on binary logics-the obsessive reiteration of purifying norms and ideals-this insistence has served only to mask the proliferation of potent hybrids transgressing those boundaries. Despite the massive scholarly literature reiterating modern norms for religion (and the efforts by modern liberal social structures to enforce those norms), these ideals have only masked a powerful religious hybridity. Religious institutions exercise potent cultural and material force, but the multiple, often conflicting effects of this power have been cloaked in an ideology of transcendence.

But the scholarly spell seeking to reify magic has always faltered. The dominant theories of magic often move into self-contradiction or incoherence. At the same time there have also always been dissenting countermagicians, scholars eager to resist the alienation and disenchantment of modern social and economic structures, to foster the proliferation of human logics and new modes of social relation. For over a century there have been important scholars overtly contesting the effort to reify magic, whether by demonstrating the futility of efforts to subsume divergent cultural practices into a single mode of thought or by underscoring the ways in which Western modernity itself depends on the very processes it has sought so desperately to externalize. While we have seen many modern scholars of magic engaged in a duplicitous disavowal of power, exercising it more effectively through that very duplicity, we have also found other thinkers such as Taussig and Apter invoking magic to engage in a very different double gesture. The instability of magic as a scholarly category, the palpable artifice required to conjure it, serves to illuminate the contrivance through which all rational objectivity is maintained.

Other modern scholars of magic seeking to segregate human representation and desire from the workings of the natural world, but again the very extravagance of magic seems to destabilize this effort.

 In 1935 Ruth Benedict asserted that "the province of magic in human societies is as wide as human desires," and subsequent social theorists have elaborated this theme to reject the modern rhetoric seeking to impose some firm differentiation between nature and culture, reason and desire, objectivity and subjectivity.

 As Tom Driver has shown, magic draws much of its appeal from the overt insistence that human beings inhabit a world in which nature and culture are fused in a unity, that "not all power is physical and material." While the logic of modernity seeks to impose stark boundaries among the psychological, the sociopolitical, and the material, magic works instead to disrupt those boundaries, to affirm the complex ways in which these realms interpenetrate one another. Desireis constitutive of all human signification, meaning, and behavior, and human subjectivity plays a formative role both within the array of circumstances to be transformed and as a causal force contributing to transformation. As Driver asserts, magic aims at the transformation of a multifaceted situation including human subjectivity together with a range of external subjects and objects; it constitutes the "reordering of a totality."" Despite so much scholarly insistence that subjectivity and desire must be cordoned away from the world of material causality, magic illuminates the potency of their intermingling. And in this display, magic also points us toward what has been taking place behind the modern logic of disavowal: never before has human desire intervened so powerfully within the workings of material causality.

The dominant modern constructions of magic have configured a disenchanted world prone to commodification by rationalized markets. But critics of this configuration have turned the paradigm against itself, invoking magic to resist the fundamental play of power within modernity. I opened with Bruno Latour's warning of the duplicity of those who analyze magic:

“Fortunately, the world is no more disenchanted than it used to be, machines are not more polished, reasoning is no tighter, and exchanges are not better organized. How can we speak of a 'modern world' when its efficacy depends upon idols: money, law, reason, nature, machines, organization, or linguistic structures? We have already used the word 'magic'.... Since the origins of the power of the 'modern world' are misunderstood and efficacy is attributed to things that neither move nor speak, we may speak of magic once again.”