the harry potter syndrome

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Erwin Wurm, Dreamer, one arm, 2024, aluminum and paint, copyright Erwin Wurm / adagp, Paris, 2024, courtesy of Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, photo Markus Gradwohl

essay

by EMANUELE COCCIA

artwork by ERWIN WURM

Italian philosopher Emanuele Coccia’s unique approach to philosophy combines ecology and metaphysics with everyday life. His latest book, LA VITA DELLE FORME, FILOSOFIA DEL REINCANTO, cowritten with Alessandro Michele, will be published in english next year.

Legend has it that the idea for Harry Potter came to the author during a train trip to Manchester in 1990. The manuscript, completed in 1995, received 12 rejections before it was accepted. From June 26, 1997, the day the first volume was released in Britain, to the present, the series has been translated into 80 languages and has had a worldwide success unparalleled by any other teen or young adult novel.

Beyond its literary merits, Harry Potter is both the symptom and the cause of a shift in the cultural sensibility and zeitgeist of contemporary times, right at the threshold of the 21st century. Harry Potter embodies and marks the shift from a science-fiction imagination to a magical imagination. If in the second half of the 20th century, science fiction played the role of initiation into reality and its possible transformations, then since the early 2000s, it is magic that has characterized most of the myths through which the world reveals itself to those who have just entered it.

The reasons for the movement that sociologists all over the world have begun to call, alternately enthusiastically or contemptuously, “the return of magical thinking” must be sought in the lines of this saga: Harry Potter is the myth that best expresses a global commons that thinks differently about the meaning of history and technology, the idea and role of knowledge, and the mutual relationship between nature and culture.

The first element of rupture concerns the nature of magic itself. Unlike the image handed down by Renaissance treatises or literary texts, magic in Harry Potter is no longer a hidden knowledge, linked to inaccessible, elitist, and distant traditions: it is
a knowledge that is learned in school, a transmissible, objective knowledge, taught to the youngest, thus capable of circulating in time and space. It is transmitted to the youngest because it is knowledge that can change not only reality but also and especially the lives of those who possess it; it is knowledge that changes one’s relationship to the world and thus one’s own face.

On the other hand, if magic is a knowledge that can be taught, then it ceases to have
a cultural or ethnic identity, as has often been presented. It is no longer the knowledge of the ancient Egyptians; it no longer belongs to a caste of cult-bound priests; it is no longer the cultural heritage of a single people. Instead, it is knowledge that at least potentially is present in any geographic (and historical) latitude.

Schooling, on the other hand, also appears to be profoundly transformed. Real schooling teaches and imparts knowledge that is different from that governing the rest of society. It does not give access to a bourgeois social position, to a real trade, to recognized know-how. It is, however, the key to accessing a universal power that coincides with the very potentiality of things.

Precisely because of those reasons, the new identity of magical knowledge dictates that the protagonists of the myth are no longer adults — like Rick Deckard in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? or Seldon in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series — but pre-adolescents. Taking on the point of view of a non-adult is something common in myth and literature, but no less significant for that; it means that the real is known not as something that has a future history and consistency, but as something that has a future and thus cannot be entirely determined. The future in Harry Potter is not the future calculated from the now, as in science fiction that awaits all of humanity and the entire planet; it is the future, above all, of an individual who has not yet decided what to do with himself even before he has decided what to do with the world. Time takes on a totally different texture than in the average science-fiction novel — it is more indeterminate and uncertain, but also more private, less cumbersome. This is because, compared with the idea of technology and science that dominates in science-fiction imagery, magic seems to pace time differently; it is not tied to the ideal of progress, for it is a knowledge in which the future is always inextricable from an ancestral past. History is no longer the advance of the whole species and the whole planet, but rather a geography in which the ruins and ghosts of an incomprehensible past are accompanied by the dreams of an uncertain future. The cult of innovation is replaced by an equal and equally enthusiastic stance toward the past and the future.

There is no arrow to animate time: magic is a deeply ambiguous knowledge that can produce progress as well as destruction. Therefore, unlike science-fiction literature, Harry Potter is the joint impossibility of utopia and dystopia. Time is no longer,
like technology, an engine of history that irreparably separates epochs and makes them incomprehensible to each other.

Universal history is replaced by the anecdotes of a group of teenage friends — extremely banal, without any truly heroic aspect.

The relationship to technique also changes. Magic is a technique, but different from that imagined in science-fiction novels. Technique is no longer the mode d’emploi for building alternative worlds, on distant planets. It is not something that destroys nature because the powers manipulated by Harry, his teachers, and his friends are mundane, natural powers. Magic allows one to divert their course, but it adds nothing to the world as it is. We can bring things to be contra nature, but we cannot eliminate the forces that animate them. Conversely, these same powers that are embodied in reality as it is known today, now, can never provide a radically different configuration. Magic does not like revolutions.

These differences, sketched too quickly to be exhaustive, outline a new way of imagining the real and positioning oneself within it. And one may wonder whether this dominance is destined to last long. In the meantime, it is important to keep in mind that magic, rather than a defined body of knowledge, is any knowledge that allows this new relationship to power, technique, and history.

END