#10: Occultism, Postcoloniality, and Modernism
Instructed by Dr. Gauri Viswanathan at Columbia University
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Here in New York City, it’s common to find groups of students huddled together in chic coffee shops, reading tarot cards. Walk down any street in East Village and you might be lured in to the home of a self-proclaimed fortune teller who — for just $10–– will make vague claims about your future. Shops which sell enchantments can be found in various pockets of the city. And online, Instagram accounts that share astrology memes are followed by hundreds of thousands of social media users.
These practices find their basis in the traditions of the Occult– but the contemporary understanding of them is a far cry from the understandings held in the 1600s, when women (and men) were persecuted and hanged for (allegedly) practicing witchcraft. So, what’s changed?
In Occultism, Postcoloniality, and Modernism celebrated Columbia University professor Dr. Gauri Viswanathan explores antiquated and modern occult devices from a historical and literary perspective.
Occultism, Postcoloniality, and Modernism
School: Columbia University
Course: Occultism, Postcoloniality, and Modernism
Instructor: Dr. Gauri Viswanathan
Course Description:
This course probes the shaping of the modern subject through such “occult” devices as mesmerism, ventriloquism, hypnotism, telepathy, disembodiment, telekinesis, and clairvoyance. We will examine the ways that occultism constituted a crucial enactment of modernity’s contradictions and provided postcoloniality with the tools for critical definitions of selfhood and society, in what Frantz Fanon called a “zone of occult instability.” Some of the questions the course hopes to raise are: How does one account for occultism’s persistence in modernity? Is occultism a form of residual irrationalism, a mode of thought superseded by Enlightenment rationality? Or is it a constitutive element of modernity itself, reflecting its contradictions and ambiguities? To what extent can occultism be understood as a product of clashing world views? What is the relationship between occultism and anthropology, history, philology, science, Darwinian evolution, psychoanalysis, capitalism, and technology? How does occultism become a tool for both relating to the past and imagining future worlds, especially for the decolonizing imagination? In what ways, if at all, does occultism signal the emergence of a postcolonial moment in literature? In what ways, too, does occultism lend itself to the play of power?
Ask the Instructor: Dr. Gauri Viswanathan
Why did you elect to offer this course at Columbia this year?
I wanted to teach a course that reflected my ongoing interest in occultism as a branch of what misleadingly came to be known as “discarded” knowledge, superseded by Enlightenment rationality. I have been studying occultism’s place in the clash of epistemological systems for some years now, first in an article called “The Ordinary Business of Occultism,” in which I examined the ways that occultism did not fade into the background as superseded knowledge but entered academic disciplines as an object of study in such fields as comparative religion and anthropology, indeed even shaping these disciplines by creating a narrative arc for them.
My course engages with the following questions: How does one account for occultism’s persistence in modernity? Is occultism a form of residual irrationalism, a mode of thought superseded by Enlightenment rationality? Or is it an element of modernity itself, reflecting its contradictions and ambiguities? To what extent can occultism be understood as a product of clashing world views?
I chose to offer the course this year because, from the time I started researching this topic some time ago, the scholarship has grown in impressive ways across a variety of disciplines: history, religion, literature, visual arts, psychoanalysis, to name a few. I thought the time was right to offer this course so that I can build on this scholarship in my syllabus. In addition, the enormous success of the recent groundbreaking Guggenheim exhibition on the visionary painter Hilma af Klint clearly indicated that there is renewed interest in the place of occultism in art and culture. The driving focus of the course is: What makes occultism modern?
I have tried to draw attention in my course to the language of selfhood that took occultism away from its associations with the irrational and introduced a new language of consciousness, exploring the inner self and the psyche.
Is Occultism, Postcoloniality, and Modernism offered within the department at Columbia in which you usually teach?
Yes, it is offered in the English Department at the 4000 level (i.e., open to both grad students and upperclass undergrads). Students from a number of departments and programs have enrolled in the course, not only from English but also History, Anthropology, Art History, Film Studies, and Creative Writing.
What do you ultimately hope that your students take away from participating in Occultism, Postcoloniality, and Modernism?
I hope they will take away a more nuanced understanding of occultism as a crucial place holder for ideas that were either marginalized or suppressed — even deemed heretical — as mainstream orthodoxies consolidated their ground. It has become commonplace in many fields today to examine lost or forgotten histories: of women, racial and religious minorities, colonized subjects. However, what is less understood or examined are the occult texts that convey those lost histories and lives, often as dead, disembodied voices speaking to the living. I tell my students that occultism is ripe for research and has the capacity to generate new projects: for example, studies of texts that are believed to be produced through automatic writing and raise questions about authorship and the endpoint of occult transmissions (who is the author, the voice of the dead or the medium or the hearer of such transmissions?).
If you could teach a course on any topic at all, what would it be?
For many years I have been fortunate to teach the courses that interest me. I continue to be fascinated by the 1930s as a decade in which the rise of fascism coincided with the emergence of decolonizing movements in Europe’s colonies. I taught a new course entirely on Aldous Huxley last spring; apart from Brave New World, Huxley is infrequently taught today, and my students, in reading him last spring, were amazed by the breadth of his work and the intellectual questioning he stimulated. I would also like to return to a seminar I taught many years ago, “Blasphemy and Heresy”, and reframe it in light of new scholarship.
Increasingly, I want to teach a course on “Irrelevance”. You may find it odd to hear that I have an interest in this topic, especially in an age when we are all pressured to be relevant! The fear of becoming irrelevant typically drives the fears and anxieties of us moderns. But I started thinking about this topic when I wrote a recent article on “Value” for The Journal of the American Academy of Religion. In a reading of one of H. G. Wells’ novels, I observed that, at the end of the novel, the protagonist chooses to become irrelevant: his scientific inventions had failed and his pursuit of disinterested science had left him without connection to either the world of industry or military warfare. He’s left navigating a naval destroyer on the Thames River, an absurdist image that he admits is “irrelevant to most human interests.” But irrelevance is the closest he has come to an awareness of reality or truth. I am interested in exploring irrelevance as ironically the last refuge of meaningfulness, in that it signifies a lack of value in the terms established by modernity, or an inability to be anything other than it is. In a future course I would like to explore irrelevance alongside obsolescence, set against its opposites: canonicity, centrality, authority.
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