We can start with one of the classics.
In The Division of Labor in Society, first published in 1893, Émile Durkheim distinguishes between mechanical solidarity and organic solidarity. Mechanical solidarity, characterized by the individual’s identification with the community, works on a smaller scale, but Durkheim argues for the inevitable dissolution of this solidarity in the industrialized world. The division of labor brought by industrialization and economic developments must instead lead to “organic solidarity,” for which Durkheim aptly chooses an ecological analogy to explain: “On an oak tree are to be found up to two hundred species of insects that have no contacts with one another save those of good neighborliness.”
Apparently Durkheim was unaware of the prevalence of insect on insect violence. Regardless of his shortcomings when it comes to crafting a good metaphor, however, Durkheim’s point is clear: Specialization allows society to become home to an increasingly diverse collection of subjects who identify foremost with their economic “niche” rather than the now-inoperative “community.” This is mirrored by the diversity of religious ideology in First UU Springfield, a fact which does not, my interviewees assured me, lead to tensions. The reason for this, they commented, is that very few people ask what each other’s individual beliefs are.
My goal in rehearsing Durkheim’s thesis and relating it to the present study is to point out that Durkheim’s concerns about the meaning of community in the context of industrial society remain relevant, even if his conclusions tend to be differently configured in contemporary discourse. Whereas Durkheim saw mechanical solidarity as impossible to sustain as society became more diversified and more complex and turned to his model of organic solidarity in what can only be called “cautious optimism,” anti-postmodernists such as the French Marxist Alain Badiou have sounded a vehement call for the return to “universal singularity” to combat the force of world capitalism. World capitalism, Badiou demonstrates, does indeed create the conditions necessary for Durkheim’s organic solidarity, but only in the form of a “process of fragmentation into closed identities.” This fragmentation constructs a relativist ideology though which the “universal subject” is disempowered; as universal narratives become impossible to uphold and utopian impulses become tainted by violence and bloodshed, what was once the collective is shattered, and individuals find themselves completely defined (and confined) by their national, religious, ethnic, or sexual identifications.
Yet at the same time, capitalism enacts on the global scale what Badiou calls “abstract homogenization,” through which the world is “finally configured, but as a market”; thus, it is also possible for Badiou to speak of capitalism as a “false universality.” In this conception of late capitalism, Durkheim is (indirectly) chided for his optimism: Though the specialization of society allows individuals to inch themselves out from under the limits of resemblance, they ultimately find themselves within the constrictions of a vastly more oppressive conditioning force.
Badiou’s insights into the condition of world capitalism, as a radical reinterpretation of Durkheim’s theory of organic solidarity, are valuable for understanding the economic and cultural forces at work in First UU Springfield. Specifically, the configuration of the world—and religion by extension—as a market poses obvious problems for “critical religious practice” as a self-governing discipline, even though individual congregants might see this configuration as enabling critical religious practice. The minister, for example, spoke of the importance of appropriating texts from multiple religious and spiritual traditions: “What a great privilege it is for me to be able to look at all these texts and not be prohibited from any of them—it opens up a whole new world, and for me it’s been incredibly liberating and helpful in my own journey.” In other words, because the UU tradition does not endorse any specific text or set of texts (or exclude any from individual consideration), each adherent is free to read (or not read) whatever book or books she wants. And indeed, it is not uncommon for services at First UU Springfield to incorporate decontextualized language, motifs, and pithy aphorisms drawn from classical Chinese philosophical texts, the Qur’an and Hadith, and sayings attributed to Native American spiritual leaders.
Yet the conception of these culturally and historically contingent texts as universally applicable and individually approachable is made possible by the arrival of what Jeremy Carrette and Richard King have called “capitalist spiritualities,” which “disavow explicit association with traditional religions, promoting instead a highly eclectic, disengaged and detraditionalised spirituality.” Though the church’s intentions are decidedly modernist, by advocating individualized spiritualities, the church becomes an unwilling participant in and proponent of the “spiritual marketplace.” Thus, we see an intrusion of individualist-capitalist sensibilities into the congregation’s modernist appeals to human reason and the inviolability of the subject.
Incidentally, it is in the 1980s, at the same time that the Unitarian Universalist tradition opens itself up to New Age-y movements and when neopagans and other religious “seekers” begin migrating to First UU Springfield, that Frederic Jameson, the noted scholar of literature, first theorizes postmodernity as a symptom of late capitalism. In a 1984 essay which he later expanded into a book titled Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Jameson, in an argument that owes a great debt to Jean Baudrillard, connects the breakdown of linguistically constructed meaning in society and art to the processes of capitalism.
I think First UU Springfield has experienced a similar breakdown—if we understand critique as a sign whose referent is the subject, the loss of the constituted self means that critique as classically understood is ultimately unworkable.
But what, then, is the way out, if there is one?
I choose the phrase “the way out” in conscious reference to another late work by Foucault, an essay called “What Is Enlightenment?” whose interrogative title and argument are similar to his talk I mentioned earlier. Foucault, like Kant, sees the Enlightenment not as an object to accept or reject, but an “exit,” a “way out.” When Foucault calls for a “permanent critique of ourselves,” he does so with the knowledge that “criticism is no longer going to be practiced in the search for formal structures with universal value, but rather as a historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, saying. In that sense, this criticism is not transcendental, and its goal is not that of making a metaphysics possible: it is genealogical in its design and archaeological in its method.” The problem with critique as it has been practiced in the modern West and in this congregation, with its careful binary division between the subject and object, between reason and the structures of power through which normative definitions are fabricated, is that it has not extended far enough. Only when critique turns on the structures of knowledge and power that make critique possible, when critique permanently dislodges us from a bordered sense of self, will it have fulfilled its task of liberation.
The possibility for liberation from the condition of postmodernity, then, lies in finishing what Kant started. If First UU Springfield is to formulate a coherent, mobilized resistance to social and economic injustice—if the church wants to provide the platform on which such a mode of inquiry can take place—then it must disentangle itself from the baggage of spirituality it has accumulated over the last thirty years and reenter into the critical conversation it once prized, and carry that task, finally, toward liberation.
