To Talal Asad, the foremost anthropologist of modernity, “the secular is neither singular in origin nor stable in its historical identity,” but “it works through a series of particular oppositions.”[1] Secularity, then, is best understood “indirectly” since the secular understands itself primarily through what it is not—or does not want to be. But these “nots” can become difficult to untie, for while the secular understands itself in opposition to the religious, in actuality it is impossible to separate the two—in part because of their confused (and confusing) generative properties.
According to Asad, the discourse of modernity presents religious thinking as “a form of false consciousness” that is doubly generated from the loam of “the secular”: first in its oppressive form, which was produced by premodern secular society, and second in its tolerant form, which is produced by modern secularity (192-193). “Thus,” concludes Asad, “the insistence on a sharp separation between the religious and the secular goes with the paradoxical claim that the latter continually produces the former” (193). This already complicated interrelationship is further complicated by the modernist claim that “secularism” (as a doctrine) and its contingent discourses, principles, and practices is itself the product of “religious” society—that “secularism” emancipates itself (or is emancipated by) religious discourse just as “religion” has its origin in secularity. Finally, to complete this self-devouring circuit, the ideology of secularism contributes to the usage and meanings of “the secular.”[2]
To put it briefly, the secular and the religious together occupy a distorted and paradoxically circuitous discursive space—modernity. Modernity itself generates their arbitrary meanings even as it necessitates their continued usage, but sufficient critical distance insists that their unclear, codependent relationship calls into question their descriptive efficacy as well as their continued usefulness as epistemic categories. Asad:
“[T]he ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ are not essentially fixed categories. However, I do not claim that if one stripped appearances one would see that some apparently secular institutions were really religious. I assume, on the contrary that there is nothing essentially religious, nor any universal essence that defines ‘sacred language’ or ‘sacred experience.’” (25; emphases original)
There is a peculiar hesitancy here in Asad’s thought that suggests a protective impulse for “the religious” (or, in any case, the behavior and institutions customarily defined as “religious”). This is an impulse that would seem to clash with his constructionist view of “religion” as an anthropological category, and it is an impulse that is not displayed when Asad discusses the primary object of his critique—the hegemonic discourse of modernity.
Even if “modernity” has no essence, it is still useful to Asad as a way to conduct his anthropology of the secular. In response to the theory of multiple modernities propounded by many recent critics, who argue that “contemporary societies are heterogeneous and overlapping” and home to “disparate, even discordant, circumstances, origins, valences, and so forth” (12), Asad argues that the “integrated character of ‘modernity’” itself has been incorporated into political practice. Thus, proponents of modernization use this pluralistic language to “direct the way in which people committed to it [modernity] act”—these proponents still “aim at ‘modernity’” (13; emphasis original). My argument here is not that Asad is wrong about the non-essence of religion, nor is he wrong in maintaining that there is continued utility in studying and critiquing the objectives and practices of “modernity.” I agree with him that it is impossible and, indeed, not even worthwhile to attempt to construct a transhistorical, transcultural definition of “religion.”[3] My point is that people aim at “religion” just as people aim at “modernity” or “secularity,” and, additionally, there is particular “heuristic value” (as Asad argues) in “looking for necessary connections” (13).
NOTES
[1]
NOTES
[1]
Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 25. Hereafter, page numbers are referred to parenthetically.
[2]
A UU service is a freeplay of religious and secular signifiers: I cannot think of any particular rationalization behind the singing of both Graham Nash’s 1970 post-Woodstock ode to hippie domesticity “Our House” and the twentieth century gospel hit “This Little Light of Mine” in the same service. Their usage in this context obscures their link to any external referent as it generates new meanings or functionalities for both songs, a fascinating process to which I cannot do justice in this footnote. In a future post, which will focus on music in the congregation, I wish to develop this thought.
[3]
For Asad’s most brilliant sustained critique of this project, see Chapter 1 (“The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category” in Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1993), 27-54.
