Irene Skovgaard Smith & Alison Hirst “Marcel Mauss and the magical agents of our time”

Skovgaard-Smith, Irene; Hirst, Alison 2023. Marcel Mauss and the magical agents of our time. Journal of Classical Sociology. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468795X2311517

As Hanegraaff (2016) argues, we cannot assume that certain modes of thought and action are magical per se, while others are not. Instead, we must ask how the extraordinary powers that imbue symbolic acts with social efficacy are collectively imagined and recognised in specific social contexts. (2)

To explore the contemporary relevance of Mauss’s conception of magic, we focus in this article on collective imaginings of supernormal human powers for ‘value-creation’ and solving problems to fulfil the neoliberal promise of contemporary capitalism. (2)

Capitalist technologies ‘generate their own magicalities’ (Pels, 2003: 31) and many aspects of business, finance, advertising, cultural production and consumption ‘operate according to magical premises’ (Moeran and Malefyt, 2018: 1). Yet, social theory has tended to approach magic as modernity’s antithesis, as Pels (2003) notes, calling instead for examination of the magic of modernity itself. (3)

Mauss approached magic as a social phenomenon and held that there are, in every age and every kind of society, collective ideas that endow specialised agents and their symbolic actions with a special kind of power and efficacy to transform, whether for good or evil. The key proposition is that the powers of magicians and the social efficacy of their symbolic acts are derived from collective beliefs. What Mauss was suggesting, although not systematically developing, is that magic is socially constructed and as such is real in its effects. (3)

Although Mauss was not consistent in breaking with the evolutionary model, he took important steps towards liberating magic as an analytical category from its association with ‘primitive’ beliefs in the supernatural and challenging the reified distinction between magic, religion and science. Mauss also did not see magic as necessarily separate from technical means, suggesting instead that many activities are simultaneously both technical and magical, and that ‘the greater part of the human race has always had difficulty in distinguishing techniques from rites’ (Mauss, 2001 [1950]: 24). Magic contributed to the growth of techniques, as Mauss showed, and was similarly closely linked with the development of astronomical, physical and natural sciences in different parts of the world (Mauss, 2001 [1950]). (4)

The aim was to show that no matter how magic is constituted in a specific society, it involves the same basic elements and ‘is on the whole everywhere the same’ (Mauss, 2001 [1950]: 19). Mauss defined these sociological elements as actions (symbolic acts/rites), officers (the agents who perform them) and representations (the ideas and beliefs involved). These elements are not inherently magical, but they become so as and when they are given a meaning that attributes them with out-ofthe-ordinary efficacy. No act, agent or idea is in itself magical, and any act, agent or idea can become so if attributed with ‘a dose of strangeness’ (Moscovici, 2014: 764). ‘The slightest return of the ordinary, on the other hand, tends to weaken that power’ as Moscovici (2014: 764) inferred. (5)

„The magician. . . is a kind of official, vested by society with authority, and it is incumbent upon the society to believe in him . . . He assumes the spirit of his function, the gravity of a magistrate. He is serious about it because he is taken seriously, and he is taken seriously because people have need of him. Thus, what a magician believes and what the public believes are two sides of the same coin“ (Mauss, 2001 [1950]: 119). (6)

Mythologies of ‘transformational’, ‘visionary’ and ‘charismatic’ superhero leaders abound in business, politics, professional sports, culture, and other domains. Variations of such representations are also evident in the ‘Great Man’ theories of business leadership literature (for critical reviews, see Ford et al., 2022; Robinson and Kerr, 2009), New Age inspired leadership training (Heelas, 1999), and media and political discourse. In the context of cultural organisations for instance, Nisbett and Walmsley (2016) show how arts managers, policymakers, and audiences idealise popular leaders as ‘clever’, ‘charismatic’, and ‘enthusiastic’ and exalt the possibilities and extraordinary effects of their leadership. Such tales are not simply exercises of the imagination or an expression of fantasies. Their constant repetition turns them into social facts as objects of collective confirmation (Mauss, 2001 [1950]). (8)

Related imaginaries of the powers of personhood are embedded in mythologies of creative potential and genius. Ekman (2015) for instance shows how ‘talent’ and ‘passion’ are perceived to enable creative knowledge workers to innovate and create ‘endless wealth out of nothing’, in the same way as ‘alchemy promises to transform lead into gold’ (p. 589). (8)

The figure of the expert consultant is increasingly important in shaping social life in profound ways through calculative practices, as Prince (2014) shows in the context of the cultural sector. Stein (2017) explores how management consultants perform the ‘abstract labour’ of ‘selling speed’, namely capitalist acceleration, altering corporate life and social relations using representations that refer to ‘entities and activities that lay far beyond’ the concretely observable (p. 5). (9)

In a Maussian perspective, magical action cannot however be reduced to deception or manipulation at the hand of skilled ‘mana workers’ such as marketeers or consultants. Magic is collectively produced to imagine a transformative social efficacy that exceeds and overflows, to embody that ‘something more’ at the heart of any given social order, which is ‘both instrumentally and symbolically indispensable’, as Mazzarella (2017: 4) writes. Notions of extraordinary powers attributed to specialised agents are generic and vague, representing an ‘indeterminate value of signification’ to use Lévi-Strauss’s (2002 [1950]: 55) expression, and it is by virtue of this quality that they can operate despite the contradictions inherent in them. (10)