Dialectics of Darkness: On “The Myth of Disenchantment” | Hacker News Reader

Dialectics of Darkness: On “The Myth of Disenchantment”

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26 pointsapollinaire9 comments

I think this sort of thing happens on a personal level as well as a societal level. There’s always a point in your life when you realize that Santa Claus isn’t real or that there’s no such thing as ‘true love’ and a little bit of magic just disappears from the world.

What I find interesting is how one continues to enjoy something which has been disenchanted — like adults who still follow pro wrestling, or people who watch magicians even if they know how the tricks are performed.

I think one way to continue to entrance people who know how the sausage gets made is breaking the fourth wall and going meta — Penn and Teller’s cup and balls routine, for example.

To speak to your two examples I will say that with pro wrestling, it's still physically demanding and impressive. More so impressive when you realize that they're doing everything to not seriously injure each other. If you see it less as an athletic competition and more like a stuntman exhibition, it becomes "enchanted" again. I mean, it takes skill, timing, and work to be able to jump off a turnbuckle, wrap your legs around someone'e head, spin around with them, and hit the ground without killing one or both of you.

Similar thing with magic. Knowing there are false shuffles, pockets, forces, double-lifts, etc makes it more impressive when you still can't see it happening. It's the execution that becomes impressive rather than the result.

That’s a good take on it. The demands the deceptive arts place on the performer’s intellect and agility can be more impressive than their actual effects.

Which gets us to this very good article in the Journal of performance magic (an academic journal published by the university of Huddersfield that offers some really good reflections on the subject) : http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/id/eprint/34495/

I think it also have a cross with something like theater - you know it is fake, but you watch it for fun and story and characters.

This willing suspension of disbelief -- or resistance to disenchantment, if you will -- is so central to professional wrestling there's actually a slang term the professional wrestling community uses to describe it: kayfabe. It's a pretty fantastic concept that describes a lot of social psychology beyond pro wrestling. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kayfabe

It's just theatre, no? Is there really anything more to it?

I think it's more than theatre. We know theatre is fiction, and we think of it as fiction as we consume it. Kayfabe is weirder, more nuanced. As we watch wrestling, we simultaneously hold two visions in our heads that are logically opposed: the spectacle is real and the spectacle is fake. We know the fakery makes it more compelling. But if we admit that it's fake, it loses its power.

Kinda how I see it, like a ballet for boys kinda thing

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