Reddit mentions of As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary PreHistory of Virtual Reality

As If - Michael Saler

>But Tolkien's most important contribution by far, and what is at the heart of the real revolution he effected in literature, was his construction of a systematic secondary world. There had been plenty of invented worlds in fantasy before, but they were vague and ad hoc, defined moment to moment by the needs of the story. Tolkien reversed that. He started with the world, plotted it obsessively, delineating its history, geography and mythology before writing the stories. He introduced an extraordinary element of rigour to the genre.

>This type of project is often mocked by those critical of fantasy. However, it allows for a unique and - at least potentially - uniquely engaged kind of reading. Readers can inhabit these worlds, and become collaborators in the process of constantly creating them, suspending their disbelief.

I'm glad that Mieville, a former Dungeons & Dragons nerd who's talked about his love of reading role-playing guidebooks like the Monster Manual, thought to focus on this as Tolkien's biggest innovation. I'd also recommend the book As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary PreHistory of Virtual Reality to anyone interested in the history of how "world building" caught on in genre fiction, it focuses on the trio of Tolkien, Lovecraft and Arthur Conan Doyle (and their early fandom).

Thanks, you state this all very well. I guess we're coming from the same place.

The problem is that these dualisms are inherent in the Western model of thought or consciousness. Daniel Quinn's cartoon "The Fence" is a humorous but profound illustration of this:

https://aftermathblog.wordpress.com/2006/01/18/the-fence/

"The Fence" is not just literal or physical, but ontological. These divisions between inside and outside are "baked in" to the way everything shows up for us. The werewolf, the dragon, the vampire can all guide us in our quest to reveal this way.

But also, the way werewolves, dragons and vampires are still evolving in popular culture, or in the stories we ourselves write, is actually something quite important. It can be very telling what aspects of this evolution say about "The Fence" and other fundamental issues.

Sure, it's commonly assumed that our world is disenchanted and that the scientific (or more accurately, scientistic) paradigm has completely taken over. This is the famous "disenchantment" thesis of sociologist Max Weber.

And yet (and even already in Weber's time), enchantment is everywhere you look in popular culture: fantasy novels, video and role playing games, fandoms and so on.

It's just a different mode of enchantment, the mode of the secondary world or "as if". This is a peculiarly modern mode that only emerged in the late 19th century. Enchantment didn't disappear, it merely transformed its basic mode of appearance.

A book by Michael Saler, As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality: https://www.amazon.com/As-If-Enchantment-Literary-PreHistory/dp/0195343174 explores precisely this thesis. I'd highly recommend it.

Also recently published in affordable paperback, is Egil Asprem's book The Problem of Disenchantment: Scientific Naturalism and Esoteric Discourse, 1900-1939 https://www.amazon.com/Problem-Disenchantment-Scientific-Naturalism-Traditions-dp-1438469926/dp/1438469926/ref=mt_paperback?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid= I have not yet read this book but it's on my list for this year.

Basically the discourses surrounding werewolves, dragons, vampires etc. are being revived and transformed right before our very eyes. These discourses, far from being diversions or escapes, or pure "entertainments" without value, carry profound meaning in how they help us negotiate fundamental issues, for instance the global environmental and political crises, the role of AI in the total platformization of the human, the collapse of linear history or any positive conception of the future, and so on. We shouldn't dismiss any of this as insignificant simply because these issues are being negotiated in popular culture, or in the mode of "as if".

My path through all this is a weird one. I have a technology background and yet most everything that interests me these days are in the areas of philosophy and history of religion, the history of Western esotericism, and the intersection of these areas with popular culture. Ultimately, I'm interested how popular culture becomes a space in which so-called "esoteric" discourses are revived, transformed and function as ways to think about fundamental social, cultural and historical issues. I am secondarily interested in this space as ontological "set and setting" for practical methods of consciousness expansion (or what I'd simply call "consciousness recovery"; e.g. lucid dreaming, incubation, trance meditation, psychedelics, qigong, etc.) I follow the Expanding Mind and Weird Studies podcasts and am now just catching up with the SHWEP (Secret History of Western Esotericism) podcast. I follow some crazy blogs like S.C.Hickman's Southern Nights (formerly Social Ecologies).

Once you get just a little bit of interest in this it becomes a huge rabbit hole, especially for those of us outside academia but who are primarily interested in an academic approach and yet who recognize that most of the issues are actually being negotiated in the realm of popular culture or other areas that academia for the most part ignores. We live in the curse of "interesting times", that's for sure...