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CHAPTER 1
It Does Not Exist
Animal Magnetism Before It Was True
They are all able men and have published a masterly report, which shews very clearly that this Magnetism can never be useful, for the best of all possible reasons, viz. — because it does not exist.
John Adams on the Paris royal commissions investigating mesmerism (1784)
In 1778, the practice of animal magnetism started in Paris. Magnetists enjoyed six happy years; then a star-studded panel of mostly French academicians declared, as John Adams put it, that their science did not exist. Late in 1784, the American Herald published a letter from Adams, then in France, to his friend the physician Benjamin Waterhouse, then in Boston. The letter contained the first mention in the American press of both animal magnetism and its debunking at the hands of the French academicians. The Austrian physician Franz Anton Mesmer had been making a succès de scandale in Paris by claiming to cure illnesses with the invisible fluid of "animal magnetism" (magnétisme animal), a living analog to mineral magnetism that was distributed throughout the cosmos and was especially active in human bodies. ("Animal" is something of a misnomer; Mesmer meant animal as opposed to mineral, not as opposed to human. Think "vital magnetism.") Adams aptly called Mesmer's practice "a kind of physical new light or witchcraft." It mixed Bavarian exorcism, a practice Mesmer had claimed to explain with his own principles, with a view of matter that seemed vaguely drawn from Benjamin Franklin's Experiments and Observations on Electricity (1751). According to Mesmer, imbalances in the magnetic fluid were at the root of all disease. By manipulating the fluid through gestures called the "magnetic passes," he could make his patients seize, shriek, go into hysterics, vomit, and, allegedly, get well. The theory was that magnetization cleared obstructions in the movement of the body's vital fluids. But Adams and other Anglophone observers were put more in mind of new-light Protestant convulsions in the Great Awakening. The prodigies of animal magnetism took place in Mesmer's very public treatment salons, where the miseen-scène showed the Austrian's flair for theater. The walls were padded and decorated with celestial symbols, the air vibrated with glass harmonica music, and the doctor wore purple — flowing violet robes, to be exact. Some of the patients' fits bore a suspicious resemblance to orgasm. "The thing is so serious," Adams told Waterhouse, "that the King has thought necessary to appoint a number of Physicians and Academicians, with your friend Franklin at their head, to enquire into it."
This, to Adams, was the point of the letter. Forget the pretensions of the "German Empirick" Mesmer; the real marvel here was Benjamin Franklin's power of annihilation. Franklin was by this time in semiretirement in the Paris suburb of Passy. But he and the founder of modern chemistry, Antoine Lavoisier, cochaired one half of the dual investigating commission appointed by King Louis XVI to examine mesmerism. Franklin and his fellow commissioners had shown, Adams said, that "this Magnetism can never be useful, for the best of all possible reasons, viz. — because it does not exist." Adams expected the commission's report to "annihilate the enthusiasm" for Mesmer's art. Franklin's name became central to the American reception of the commissioners' report. The Rapport des commissaires chargés par le roi de l'examen du magnétisme animal (1784), drafted by commission member Jean-Sylvain Bailly and translated by William Godwin as the Report of Dr. Benjamin Franklin, and Other Commissioners, Charged by the King of France with the Examination of the Animal Magnetism (1785), would find an interested audience in the United States even though mesmerism had never been practiced there. Magnetism slowly regained its footing in France after a brief intermission for the French Revolution; in the United States, by contrast, the successful introduction of the practice by Charles Poyen was still fifty years out. So it would be fair to say that animal magnetism came to the United States as a falsehood before it appeared there as a truth. In that intervening half century, magnetism was the quintessential example of modern idolatry. Guardians of public reason trotted out the 1784 report each time the crack-brained proponent of some new cure, prophecy, or electrical machine needed reminding of which side Franklin would have been on. As an exemplary falsehood, animal magnetism did a brisk trade.
Where does disenchantment actually put the things that do not exist; and what happens to them after that declaration? The 1784 commission report gives us a unique opportunity to ask those questions. It is a canonical instance of disenchantment. Faced with the claim that there existed something called "animal magnetism," the commissioners showed that this alleged entity was a fetish, cobbled together out of a couple of natural causes and a good deal of credulity. Disenchantment stories like to end with broken idols. But as with many a conventional generic ending, the truth is more complicated. After the idols stop functioning, they resume their activity in a new way, often enjoying long and eventful second lives. That liveliness, I argue in this book, takes place not in spite of disenchantment but in concert with it. The death knell the 1784 commissioners tried to ring was far less decisive than many observers had hoped it would be. Not only did the commissioners fail to obliterate animal magnetism — which, on the contrary, thrived throughout the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century — they also made a vital contribution to magnetism's later theoretical apparatus. Later magnetists would incorporate some of the commission's own anti-idolatry rhetoric, making the practice into a strange compound of the theories of its founder and of its first major debunkers. As for Poyen, the success of his 1836 lecture tour in the United States owed a debt to the Franklin commission. Poyen considered mesmerism a means of manipulating credulity, just as, in a different way, the commission had. Mesmerism's long association with falsehood in the United States did not exactly hurt Poyen's cause; he simply had to twist that association in another direction. Poyen and the other early mesmeric practitioners in the United States would till the rich fields of a half century of their own disrepute. This chapter is a tour of those fields in the years before he came. It aims to describe what imagination was in the commissioners' hands and why imagination and other concepts of nonexistence like it were both the necessities and the scourges of enlightenment.
Idol-Functions
There is a surprising consequence involved in accusing other people of believing in things that do not exist. The aim is to deprive these idols, these nothings in the world, of their power. And yet the end result is to give some placeholder —"belief" or "idolatry" or "imagination"— all the power that the idols once had. As humbug-buster David Reese would write in 1838, by which time mesmerism not only still existed but was the primary target of Reese's ire, "an idol is nothing, and error is nothing, but these nothings are the most dangerous things in the world." Reese was recalling some mixture of Francis Bacon's anatomy of the "Idols which beset men's minds" in the Novum Organum (New Organon; 1620) and Paul's declaration in the first letter to the Corinthians that "an idol is nothing in the world." Whether early Christian or early modern, disenchantment — which is to say, the performance of recognizing intelligence in fewer objects than one's predecessors did — has often been plagued with the same problem. To wit: if all those things that people "used to" believe — and that the wrong kind of people still believe now — are mere chimeras, then what explains their effectiveness? One can, if one wishes, sparingly decorate one's modern temple, distributing existence with a parsimonious hand and making a trash heap of idols outside the door. But doing so will not break the links of effectiveness that connect those idols to their human beings. If animal magnetism did not exist, for example, then why were Mesmer's patients convulsing? The debunker is obliged to supply an idolfunction: a cause to account for the effects formerly attributed to the idol animal magnetism. The trouble is that whatever this idol-function may be, it necessarily must have many of the powers attributed to the idol itself. In the case of the 1784 commission, the idol-function was a combination of things, including credulity, imagination, and imitation. Imagination, the leading cause in this group, soon came to be almost as powerful and worrisome as animal magnetism. To disenchant, then, is to invent idol-functions that explain the behavior of other people. And it is often to become unnerved by these inventions of your own.
Whose behavior requires more explanation: the idolater who worships at the shrine or the disenchanter who breaks the idol, sets up an idol-function on the plinth, and then runs from it in fright? Since the 1996 publication of Bruno Latour's essay Petite Réflexion sur le culte moderne des dieux faitiches (On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods), one of the sustained preoccupations of his work has been to shift the explanatory emphasis when it comes to scenes of disenchantment. Disenchanters tell us it is belief itself that needs to be explained, but Latour turns the tables: his object of study is the disenchanting "Modern" who "believes that others believe" ("Est moderne celui qui croit que les autres croient"). An "agnostic," Latour's name for his own position, "does not wonder whether it is necessary to believe or not, but why the Moderns so desperately need belief in order to strike up a relationship with others." The new secularity studies in general has made this correction: it explains the one who believes in belief rather than explaining the believer. As Charles Taylor comments, "the energy of disenchantment is double. First, negative, we must reject everything which smacks of idolatry." But the second energy is "positive," in that "we feel a new freedom in a world shorn of the sacred ... to reorder things as seems best." As an alternative to what he calls "subtraction stories," accounts of secularization that imagine it as a clearing away of superstition, Taylor proposes the view of secularization as an additive process, a construction of new "reference-points" for leading a life full of meaning.
Latour, too, sees the Moderns as having added new ways of looking at the world rather than as having subtracted superstitions from it. The Moderns' chief peculiarity, on Latour's view, is their insistence that objects are either made by us (belonging to the realm of "values") or independent of us ("facts.") An object may act on us, as such "facts" as the economy and the law of gravity do. Or it can be made by us — a puppet, a novel, a moral code — in which case we must recognize that all "its" actions are actually our own. Facts or values, but never both, the Moderns demand. Idols — or "primitive fetishes," to use Latour's term — represent for the Moderns the confusion of facts and values. In the fetish that we treat as though it had autonomy from us, we misrecognize the work of our own hands and imaginations as coming from outside of us. Thus in the discard pile of broken idols Moderns place any object that is allegedly both made by humans and capable of acting on humans.
This rigorous act of sorting leaves the Moderns obliged to explain how it could ever have seemed as though made objects could act on their creators. Here is where an idol-function comes in handy. Moderns use the idea of others' "belief" (croyance) to explain the apparent action of made objects as merely the function of the "believer's" weak psychology. Says Latour in the voice of the Moderns: "those empty-headed fantasies had to go somewhere ... let's invent the notion of an interiority filled with hollow dreams." The psychological qualities of believers, "primitive, archaic, infantile, or unconscious human beings," explain how they can make the mistake of thinking a fetish is animate. In the work of disenchantment — of distributing intelligence more parsimoniously than those who came "before" did — belief, as an idol-function, smoothes over the gap between the power that can no longer exist and that power's still-evident effects. For every chimera that apparently acted, Moderns supply a belief to explain the illusion of that action — and a credulous person to hold the belief. Latour's interest is primarily in the Modern, and not in the (alleged) believer. He aims to reduce or even remove the distinction between the two, insisting that in fact Moderns have an ability to move between facts and values similar to that of a worshipper of fetish gods (and far greater than they would avow). But where does this leave belief and the complex relations that Moderns establish with it? Somewhere on the sidelines; in fact, Latour's ally, the ethnopsychiatrist Tobie Nathan, even goes so far as to say that belief does not exist: "Ah, my friend!" exclaims Nathan, "you must expunge from your vocabulary the words 'believe' and 'belief.' I can promise you: no one, no matter where, has ever believed in anything!" Latour is more measured: "No one, in practice, has ever displayed naïve belief in any being whatsoever. If there is such a thing as belief at all, it is the most complex, sophisticated, critical, subtle, reflective activity there is."
This is quite the suggestion, though Latour does not follow it up. What if belief and all those other hollow mental gymnastics that Moderns never tire of pointing out in others really were the sophisticated activities Latour envisions? What if, to put a finer point on it, the relations between the Moderns and the "belief" that they in part invented were critical and subtle in the way Latour suggests? In that case, it might well be worth identifying the moments where Moderns invent and elaborate their own practices of "belief." What flexibilities are they permitting, or stumbling into, at those moments? Here I want to make belief a bit more specific. The word has many shades of meaning; croyance, the French term being translated, is similarly broad. But Latour is specifically invoking the derogatory use of belief: belief as what happens when weak-mindedness in one person meets trickery in another, or when a false priest manipulates a mark. I have found it preferable to use the term credulity instead because credulity is more clearly derogatory. It has less chance of creating confusion with liberal, potentially secularity-compatible forms of religious belief, or with a distinction as to degree of certainty (i.e., between belief and knowledge). With credulity, the aim is to capture the Modern move of explaining the effectiveness of that which does not exist, as Adams put it, by reference to another's excessive tendency to credit implausible statements.
Rather than following Latour, then, down the road of seeing modern activities through the lens of the factish, I am following this other road he indicates: of considering credulity — which inevitably also means the relations Moderns enter into with credulity — as the most sophisticated activity imaginable. The essential preliminary work is to find the moments when Moderns think they are seeing credulity; later, we can ask what comes out of these acts of definition. The 1784 animal magnetism investigation was one of those moments. In explaining animal magnetism as the compound of belief and overactive imaginations, the commissioners made animal magnetism into a practice of credulity. They attributed to credulity all those powers that Mesmer had attributed to animal magnetism — the nothings, as Reese would later lament, that are the most powerful things in the world. The result of the commissioners' debunking was not that animal magnetism fizzled out; on the contrary, by the end of this chapter we will be able to say that calling animal magnetism pure credulity actually gave enlightened Moderns a reason to keep thinking about magnetism and eliciting its practice. And as soon as something is being incited — even if only so that it can be managed — there is room for it to expand and change. Thanks to its initial debunking, animal magnetism could eventually become an instance of credulity deliberately practiced.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Credulity"
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