Profane Illuminations, Delicate and Mysterious Flames
Mass Culture and Uncanny Gnosis
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20074013 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Michael Saler (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2008 |
| Pages | 181-200 |
| Publication date | 2008-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | CHAPTER |
| Venue | Uncanny Modernity (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | Palgrave Macmillan UK (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1057/9780230582828_10 |
| OpenAlex | W2502581136 |
| ISBN | 9780230582828 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 6 |
Those early twentieth-century thinkers who believed that modernity was ‘disenchanted’ were unlikely to perceive the uncanny as a source of genuine knowledge, but rather as an immature affect that needed to be explained away. It is possible to discern this sentiment in Max Weber, for example. Weber did not discuss the uncanny specifically, but he alluded to something comparable in a revealing aside in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905). Deriding the ‘fashionable’ idea that specialists ought to be ‘degraded to a position subordinate to that of a seer’, he sneers in response, ‘He who yearns for seeing should go to the cinema.’1 For Weber, rationalized science yields not only scientific specialists, but also the disenchantment of the world; both ‘seers’ and the cinema belong to the marginal and irrational sphere of mass culture. Thus the ‘uncanny’, associated with the mysterious powers of the seer, is implicitly dismissed as a relic of the premodern, enchanted world
Aesthetics · Art · Aside · Disenchantment · Epistemology · Literature · Modernity · Movie theater · Political science · Uncanny · Law · Philosophy · Weber, Simmel, Sociological Theory
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |