#stigmatized knowledge

…the rejection of “theory” itself by juxtaposition with “history,” a peculiarity in some of Hanegraaff’s recent work, is perhaps the most puzzling of all. The argument is again intimately tied to the emancipatory agenda of the rejected knowledge model: the worry is that coming to, or even selecting, the material with an explicit theoretical framework in mind will end up looking only for specific things with the end result that sources not considered relevant will once again “disappear.” The problem with this argument is that there is only one alternative to departing from explicit theorizations, namely, departing from implicit, hidden, or even unrecognized ones. One does not have to be a “radical theorist” to make the point that all scholars, no matter how big the pretention of meeting the world with a “theory-free” open mind, carry with them assumptions about what is relevant and what is not prior to even selecting one’s sources. It is a basic epistemological point recognized from the hermeneutics of Gadamer in the humanities to the post-positivism of Popper, Quine, or Kuhn in the natural sciences. The rejected knowledge model, as I have argued, appears to come with heavy layers of unexamined theoretical baggage about what “esotericism” is (what are its sources), which versions of it are relevant in the first place (who speaks for it), and how it ought or ought not to be studied (methods, research questions, analyses). If those unreflective assumptions lead to a suspicion of theoretical reflection in general, and a rejection of certain lines of theorizing in particular, we are at risk of creating an insular field. While the rejected knowledge model had sought to strengthen the legitimacy of the field, it is precisely that wider legitimacy that is at stake if the inflated version of the model takes hold. We should not reject theory to save our sources from oppression; what we need is more sophisticated and systematic theories in order to select and understand them better.

…we lack studies of what motivates social actors drawn to esoteric movements and what they think about esotericism’s presumed rejected status. But we do know that taking a heterodox stance can in many circumstances be highly desirable. Being “anti-Establishment” is a winning recipe in populist politics as much as in a business culture that rewards norm-breaking startups that “disrupt” the system. At a time when “political correctness” has become perhaps the most widely used political boo-word, aligning with heterodox, assumedly “rejected” or marginal ideas can take on the function of virtue signaling: “I don’t go with the consensus!” In everyday contexts, this may just as well lead to social rewards as to stigma, depending on the circles in which one moves and the audiences from which one seeks attention. In contexts such as the cultic milieu, it is far from obvious that actors would want to seek normalization or mainstream acceptance. The opposite may well be true: mainstreaming is often countered by the “amplification of deviance,” doubling down on radical expressions in ways that reestablish one’s transgressive sub-cultural capital. Historically, we find precisely this sort of self-conscious embrace of the “heretical,” standing proudly against the corrupt alliance of church and state, when the notion of “occultism” emerged in French socialist circles in the early nineteenth century.

…the emancipatory agenda of countering “rejected knowledge” appears to have moved much beyond historicizing how the category was initially shaped in a polemical context, to now also identify an increasing number of contemporary academic approaches, schools, and theoretical traditions as inherently “anti-esoteric.” From the early polemic against “reductionist” approaches, recent publications show a worrying fixation with labels such as “neo-Marxism,” “Critical Theory,” “the Frankfurt school,” and “postmodernism,” sometimes apotheosized into an attack on “theory” as such. “Neo-Marxist” critical theory tends to be implicated directly in a continued rejection of esotericism, often by quoting Adorno’s famous “Theses against Occultism”. This, however, tends to come at the expense both of a more nuanced historical understanding of how early critical theory in fact related to “esotericism” (the case of Walter Benjamin’s esoteric fascinations being the most obvious counterpoint), and by underplaying the real concerns of “Frankfurt School” critics’ diagnoses of modern capitalist society. The problem is that the historical analysis of how certain scholars influenced the conceptual history of esotericism becomes conflated with a polemic against contemporary perspectives on, for example, critical theory. This is particularly unfortunate seeing how important critical theory is for a whole range of approaches that the study of esotericism sorely needs to engage with in order to refine its perspectives, from gender studies and critical race studies to postcolonial and decolonial theory and issues of class. Excluding those perspectives and dismissing colleagues who work with them can only lead to further theoretical isolation of the field itself.