Enchantment as fundamental encounter: wonder and the radical reordering of subject/world

Abstract

<jats:p> In this article, we approach enchantment as a fundamental encounter that incites new worlds. Our aim is to add to the recent discussion on enchantment as an immersive, life affirming moment. We outline enchantment as a radical reordering of the world during which there is both a profound loss of meaning and a sudden gaining of significance. Enchantment is a highly affectual event that uproots the subject, throws it momentarily off balance, outside of time and space. Enchantment, then, is not only a pleasant experience of being inspired by the world, but an uninvited ontological unfolding of it. This rethinking the world in enchantment can come into being through many different affectual states, including those of a ‘negative’ register. By attending to a vignette of despair, loss, and suffering, we clarify the circulation of affect involved in the disruption and emergence of the subject and, against this background, unpack the simultaneous disconnect and immersion involved in enchantment. An analysis of wonder highlights the deracination of the subject effected in the event and unfolds the ethical and political potential of enchantment: this totalizing, and hence liberatory, reordering brings with it a strong sense that things could be different. </jats:p>

Entering the Fifth Dimension: modular modernities, psychedelic sensibilities, and the architectures of lived experience

“…It therefore signals potential avenues for producing the conditions for more innovative, stimulating, and ludic architectural engagements that disrupt tendencies to produce sensorially‐sterile, functional built environments. Our focus thus aligns with recent notions about re‐enchantment (Bennett, 2001; Pyyry & Aiava, 2020) that foreground how delight and reflection may be induced by architectural encounters that unsettle habitual sensory apprehension. In the next section, we outline our approach in expanding on this argument.…”

“…Third, we have especially focused on how Albarn's fun palaces expanded sensation through a disorientating, ever-changing array of Dionysian enchantments that immersed inhabitants in overwhelming alterity while disconnecting them from normative sensory habits (Pyyry & Aiava, 2020). We have explored how inhabiting play structures such as the Fifth Dimension might generate, in Lefebvre's (1973Lefebvre's ( /2014) terms, the "reeducation" of sensing bodies towards the production of lived space.…”

“…(Interview 18 July 2019) Albarn articulates ideas that resonated with those expressed by the adherents of mind-expanding drugs: "I also was concerned with the spectator who became disoriented from the normal world and found himself [sic] absorbed in a new environment in which his [sic] awareness expanded" (in Whitcomb, 1968, n.p.). Yet his work sought to reorient and expand critical consciousness without the use of psychoactive substances (Pyyry & Aiava, 2020). We therefore insist that it is critically important to reappraise psychedelia as a movement that was influenced but not determined by hallucinogenic substances.…”

“…Source: Keith and Hazel Albarn, reproduced with permission Pyyry & Aiava, 2020) that foreground how delight and reflection may be induced by architectural encounters that unsettle habitual sensory apprehension. In the next section, we outline our approach in expanding on this argument.…”

Animating a neighborhood: The enchanting placemaking of Le Grand Éléphant de Nantes

“…The elephant's giant, animated/animating presence is particular: it draws the spectator in, but it also spreads the spectator out into space, bringing life not only to its lumbering footsteps but to the built environment that contains it. Geographers Pyyry and Aiava (2020) consider enchantment as not only placemaking but world-building. The elephant participates in an urban stupor that looks away from Nantes’ history, looks away even from the infrastructural memory of that history in the built environment, building a new conception of the world of Nantes.…”