Credulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism by Emily Ogden (review)

Have we been mesmerized into modernity? According to Emily Ogden's Credulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism, being "modern" and being mesmerized are more closely entwined than one might think. Ogden's book argues that the nineteenth-century belief in mesmerism, which flourished in the US from the mid-1830s through the 1850s, offered mesmerists and their debunkers alike a pathway into the project of modernity—not by banishing belief, but by managing it. The persistent presence of excessive belief—variously identified as enchantment, imagination, "credenciveness," impressibility, or (Ogden's preferred term) credulity—provided an opportunity for those who wanted to distinguish themselves as enlightened subjects. Excessive belief was useful insofar as it permitted, indeed demanded, supervision by persons who saw things more clearly. Credulity worked to periodize antebellum Americans, separating the progressive and civilized from the embarrassingly retrograde; and this separation legitimated domination as well.

But credulity, cast outside the boundaries of modernity, is, for Ogden, precisely what sustains it. Credulity situates its exploration of mesmerism within contemporary critical debates around secularism, which Ogden, following Talal Asad and John Lardas Modern, addresses not as a location but as "a mind-set … a set of prescriptions" for those who wish to be constituted as modern (6). Ogden distinguishes her approach from the embrace of enchantment characterizing scholars such as Jane Bennett and Ann Braude, who counter secularism's hierarchies by affirming, in different ways, that enchantment empowers. Yet liberating enchantment, Ogden charges, is hardly the point. Far from seeking enchantment's eradication or repression, secularism depends on it: "Key to the secular is not the disappearance of enchantment but its redescription as the appropriate target of particular administrative energies" (7). Secularism needs the credulous to prop itself up insofar as its own ideal—the unfettered, self-directed, and forward-moving subject that Asad calls the "secular agent"—remains unattainable (231). The fantasy of secular agency requires a "disempowered counterpart," and this is the part, Ogden argues, played by the credulous—they "serve as fetishistic confirmations that the self's power is real" (231).

This assessment of the unfreedom of secular agency is familiar enough; the basic model can be traced back to Hegel's master/slave dialectic, as Ogden notes. What is novel about Credulity is its close attention to how the credulous are manipulated in the service of secular ideals. Ogden begins her examination of mesmerism with the 1784 report of an investigative committee set up by the French government in response to the work of the Austrian physician Franz Anton Mesmer. Mesmer's framework was medical—he claimed to have discovered a way to manipulate "animal magnetism," an invisible fluid that regulated the body, imbalances in which supposedly caused disease—but skeptics, as Ogden points out, often aligned the practice with recognizably spiritual phenomena such as the paroxysms of New Light Protestant devotees. A scathing report produced by the commissioners, authored by astronomer Jean-Sylvain Bailly but associated in the Anglophone world with American expatriate Benjamin Franklin, who was on the committee, established the terms for the management of credulity. In seeking to explain why people appeared to be affected by mesmerism, the commissioners needed to develop what Ogden identifies as an "idol-function" (30): something irrational that could rationally explain the production of observable effects by a false cause. The explanation identified in the Franklin report was imagination: those who were susceptible to mesmerism were those burdened with excessive imagination and a lack of worldly understanding; among this group, the commissioners suggested, were "those who were poor, uneducated, or female" (36). Yet as Ogden observes, imagination, as a psycho-physiological force, was not something the commissioners could altogether disavow; they needed, rather, to explain how they, and those who wished to be like them, could remain safe from its debilitating effects. The commissioners' repudiation of imagination, as Ogden shows, followed the model of Freudian fetishism—a disavowal of their own susceptibility, buttressed by a positive enjoyment of the credulity...