follow up: performing disenchantment at work
i took notes!
i thought i was going to write about magick in corporate culture and just move on, lol! no, no, no no no. i just wanted to share some things about corporate culture, i didn’t know i’d become fixated, damn!1
i am fascinated by corporate culture as a case study in magic and western capitalism. the cult of corporate does the most and by that, makes things obvious. the drama, the desperate chaos, the mess of covering something mysterious up with performance: ‘let’s all pretend that magic does not exist and that what we are doing has nothing to do with [redacted]. la la-la la-la!’
the work places, ie. corporate offices2 often glamourized as start-ups where the jeans and hoodie followers of apostle steve jobs congregate, are my foreign lands. the stories i have and have heard become notes for anthropological study. with social contracts of appropriate and inappropriate behaviour, supposedly rooted in respect and rationality, the things that happen day to day are telling.
Max Weber argued that intellectualization was seeing the world in calculations and technical details. a few scholars i’ve been reading lately in the book Magical Capitalism summarize what Weber said in different ways. in the essay Magical Contracts, Numinous Capitalism, for example, author David A. Westbrook discusses magic in the legal field and summarizes Weber this way : “...becoming modern involves disenchantment, literally losing the sense that life is magical.”
what each essay in this volume argues is that capitalism and magic really can’t be separated. and what comes out of my field notes is, i think, proof; observations of the workplace as a stage where we act out a lost sense of life being magical at a fever pitch. it’s where we perform modernity and rationality even as we are, quite literally, surrounded by the same thing that is called irrational and is widely stigmatized; “obeah business” (derogatory). i mean, the logo as a sigil? hello, hi!
also in my notes is evidence of something else. being raised by and around Black people whose highest ambition in life was to be white. working for a company whose founder touched my hair (uberflip, perfect example of startups as new versions of the same shit). getting an email from an employer to say that the company i work for is on the side of israel.3
what is [redacted]?
what do we disguise with performances of respect and rationality and how are we working to cover up new versions of something very old. how and why do people we work with think and act in ugly ways that are ignored, leveraged, justified. how might we understand the disrespect Black and Brown women experience in the workplace.
yes, getting laid off from a job at one of the biggest investment firms in the world made it easy for me to drop the cognitive dissonance and connect the dots : the violence and self-hatred at home, the racism at work and in the society i live in, exaggerated disenchantment and rationality, all connected to the same thing. all in some part, byproducts of ‘white supremacist colonialism’4 with its history of grave crimes against humanity, which include the genocide of Indigenous people on Turtle Island, where i was born, raised, and live, and continue today in West Asia.
i argue that being “modern” or “rational”, as a continuation of ‘the racist project of white supremacist colonialism’ is the performance of disenchantment. the day job is just where the performance is allowed to be extra. the trick at play is of conviction, to convince you and i that it is not a performance, to believe in the roles and dramas of disenchantment and call it “reality”.
do you believe in the performance?
what’s fascinating to me is how the system shows its work. i think this is what scholars Brian Moeran and Timothy de Waal Malefyt describe as the power of magic, being that “…it doesn’t just skilfully conceal, but skilfully reveals its skilful concealment…”. this quote is from the introduction to Magical Capitalism. Moeran and Waal Malefyt go on to say, that in the skilful revealing and concealing, magic “…becomes transformative and effects change.“
the logo as a sigil is right out in the open, but it’s fine, accepted, expected, that a corporation would have a logo. it’s not necessarily a sigil, you could say. so let’s play rational. it is a logo and is not magic? whoops i meant to put a period at the end of that last sentence.
the “baby mystic” series came out of a very specific point of pain (Chiron enters the chat) that i didn’t always want to look at but realized is there regardless of whether my eyes are open or closed.
if i am to use my power to create a new world, i am compelled to see it now as it is, for what it is. selah.
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next post coming will be about defining the terms; magic(k), magic in capitalism, conjure, and more!
thanks to @alltimeisaac on instagram for giving me the language to understand what it means to claim knowledge through grounded theory, autoethnography, and narrative inquiry, more on this in a future post.
is it too on the nose to compare this to the “house”? juuust gonna put this in the parking lot for now.
also how this shows up within myself, when i excluded, the comments i made, the greed for “cheaper” places to get my hair braided. as a self-described ‘interpreter, i become part of the object of my study,’ to take a phrase from the introduction to Magical Capitalism.
a phrase from Magic Maker by Pam Grossman.