Day: August 17, 2017

Feuerbach [ … ] had the ingenious and remarkable idea of grasping religion as a projection: it is, he argued, a distorted vision of human productive powers, which has been externalised and reified into a force in its own right. Divine power, of which the various theologies are so many abstractions and elaborations, is in fact, unalienated human creativity which has then been re-alienated into an image or a figural form.”

“[A]nd this is why the most consequent fantasy is never some mere deployment of magic in the service of other narrative ends, but proposes a meditation on magic as such: on its capacities and its existential properties, on a kind of figural mapping of the active and productive subjectivity in its non-alienated state.”

“It is the trace of this history and this historical trauma that opens the possibility, from Le Guin to Perdido Street Station, of a materialist fantasy, a fantasy narrative apparatus capable of registering systemic change and of relating superstructural symptoms to infrastructural shifts and modifications. It is also the informing presence of this deep history which is alone able to ‘re-function’ (to use Brecht’s expression) the ethical superstitions of good and evil forces into concrete social phenomena a good deal more horrifying than the older abstractions.

The blinkered empiricist will of course deny that facts can only become facts within the framework of a system – which will vary with the knowledge desired. He believes that every piece of data from economic life, every statistic, every raw event already constitutes an important fact. In so doing he forgets that however simple an enumeration of ‘facts’ may be, however lacking in commentary, it already implies an ‘interpretation’. Already at this stage the facts have been comprehended by a theory, a method; they have been wrenched from their living context and fitted into a theory.