April 20, 2012

Identity, Modernity, and the Politics of Critical Religious Practice: Conference Version, part 3


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.

April 19, 2012

Identity, Modernity, and the Politics of Critical Religious Practice: Conference Version, part 2


In attempting to place First UU Springfield in the context of modernity as a project, I am, of course, obliged to note from the outset that modernity has proven to be a difficult object to define for theorists and philosophers alike, and it is perhaps just as difficult for those who “live” or “practice” modernity to grasp it cognitively. Talal Asad, the foremost anthropologist of secular modernity, has suggested that this condition is more than the unfortunate result of simple theoretical shortcomings; for modernity, he admits, “is neither a totally coherent object nor a clearly bounded one.” Yet even if “modernity” has no essence, it is still useful as an epistemological tool for making connections in contemporary societies. Therefore, even though there is no single space or time that epitomizes “modernity,” one can understand modernity indirectly through its attitudes toward itself and others.

Asad has written elsewhere that one such attitude is the modernist notion of critique, or secular criticism; in one essay, Asad argues, “The practice of secular criticism is now a sign of the modern, of the modern subject’s relentless pursuit of truth and freedom, of his or her political agency.” But what is “criticism,” and how might it work in a religious congregation like First UU Springfield? Asad points to the introductory chapter of Edward Said’s The World, the Text, and the Critic, in which Said defines “criticism” as that which is “always situated; it is skeptical, secular, reflectively open to its own failings. This is by no means to say that it is value-free.” This strikes me as a suitable definition to start with, though by using Said’s definition here, I do not mean to suggest that First UU Springfield is operating under Said’s specific definition of criticism—and neither am I, for that matter. It seems obvious that criticism does not need to be secular, to be reflexive, to turn inward and take itself into account. Nevertheless, I find it helpful that Said’s definition balances the idea of critique as “skeptical,” “secular,” and “open” (thus creating the necessary distance between the critic and the object of critique) and at the same time his definition affirms the subjective values of the critic (thus establishing a fixed but reflexive and amendable point from which the critic views the object of critique).

This dual responsibility of “criticism,” to be seemingly impartial yet not neutral helps to illustrate what Foucault in a talk called “What Is Critique?” calls the “critical attitude” of modernity:  “[B]etween the high Kantian enterprise and the little polemical professional activities that are called critique, it seems to me that there has been in the modern Western world…a certain way of thinking, speaking and acting, a certain relationship to what exists, to what one knows, to what one does, a relationship to society, to culture and also a relationship to others that we could call, let’s say, the critical attitude.” With this argument, I think Foucault develops a key insight into a specific aspect of post-Enlightenment Western culture, an epistemic that allowed for the establishment of new modes of thinking and critical discourse about the previously sacrosanct, untheorizable religious object.

If First UU Springfield is to fit into the modernist context I am describing, then one would expect “critique” to be an important part of the congregation’s religious practice; and indeed, within the congregation (and, for that matter, in the larger UU tradition), there does seem to extend a consistently positive valuation of one’s individual intellectual investigations into (and interrogations of) religious and non-religious traditions and beliefs that might be called “critical religious practice.” In other words, the specific practices each individual congregant takes upon herself ought to be less important than the reasons she gives for them and the intellectual processes by which she reaches her conclusions. “Critical religious practice” cannot terminate either—it is seen as an ongoing process of negotiation. As a congregant commented in an interview, “We don’t define things rigidly. We do accept, honor, and actually encourage people to use the platform of the church as a way to determine for [themselves] how to live ethically… [This church] promotes thought—or stimulates thought—rather than ends it. We have more question marks than we do periods at the ends of our sentences.”

The valorization of critique as the most ethical way of living in and relating to the world—this is, in a word, how First UU Springfield  aims at being “modern” and, also, at being “religious.” And yet there is, in a sense, a failure or exhaustion of religious critique at First UU Springfield, a lapse into uncritical tolerance in which religious and ideological differences are officially supported but generally ignored by the congregants. The foundational value placed on the individual’s journey, and the corresponding need to tolerate uncritically the differences that arise because of it, inhibits the growth of intra-religious, dialogical critique, and thus the church fails to locate itself in the context of world capitalism, much less offer a coherent, mobilized resistance to the patterns of social and economic injustice that characterize our era. In the following, I want to discuss First UU Springfield with reference to the external socio-economic forces at work and, in doing so, seek a way out of the exhaustion of the critical faculty that characterizes not only First UU Springfield, but perhaps all religious institutions today.

April 18, 2012

Identity, Modernity, and the Politics of Critical Religious Practice: Conference Version, part 1

This is part one of the version of my final essay about First UU Springfield that I presented at the 2012 Midwest American Academy of Religion conference in Rock Island, IL. This and the following two parts will not have foot notes or references; I removed them from the text so that it would read easier.

This ethnographic study of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Springfield, Missouri—hereafter referred to by the church’s own preferred abbreviation, First UU Springfield—is structured around the paradoxical relationship between the apparent self-consistency of the church as a religious institution and the extent to which this appearance of self-consistency is a projection of socio-economically contingent ideological processes.

My research began with attending the weekly service at First UU Springfield for roughly two and a half months in the fall semester of last year. It was then supplemented and retroactively guided by two personal interviews that I conducted with an active participant of the congregation and the church’s part-time minister. Because of the inherent limitations that come with my subjective position as a critical observer and the limited scope of this research project, I do not want my analysis to be mistaken for any sort of definitive statement about Unitarian Universalism generally or First UU Springfield specifically. Rather, I have used my observations at First UU Springfield to frame an investigation into the social and economic context in which religion is practiced and congregations attempt to develop a corporate identity and sense of self-direction.

This essay is organized in two interlocking parts. In the first part, I will argue that the weekly worship service of First UU Springfield provides its congregants with the discursive space in which values and practices of modernity become privileged, including especially a decentered, pluralist vision of society and the empowerment of the subject through critique. In the second part, I will turn to fashion my own critique of the congregation by engaging Marxist literature to show how the condition of postmodernity—which Frederic Jameson has famously called the “cultural logic of late capitalism”—creates fissures in the corporate identity and religious politics of First UU Springfield. Thus, even though most of the members of the church are committed to modernist ideals and oppose the social injustices of capitalism, their resistance to capitalism is framed by the paradoxes of this system.

But we can begin with a few general words about the congregation.

Even though First UU Springfield is a relatively small congregation, with only a few dozen registered members in regular attendance, it is home to an incredible diversity of religious views. Of the various traditions integrated into First UU Springfield, the minister noted congregants with Christian, Jewish, and Muslim backgrounds, humanists, agnostics and atheists, pagans, and others who are at least vaguely interested in (if not vigorously committed to) Native American spirituality, Buddhism, and assorted “Eastern” traditions. While there are a variety of paraliturgical opportunities for smaller groups with specific interests to meet in monthly “covenant groups,” a fact that would tend to indicate the compartmentalization of intra-congregational relationships, one equally important point to consider is that the weekly worship service attempts to accommodate this wide variety of viewpoints and synthesize the diverse concerns of the congregation into a reasonably coherent expression of group identity. To this effect, the weekly services are tightly structured and highly liturgical, with little to no room for deviation on a week-to-week basis. Such order is in pointed contrast to the congregation’s radically opposed viewpoints on all manner of theological, philosophical, and practical issues.

It is obviously problematic to conclude that First UU Springfield has something like a coherent identity based on the consistency of its weekly liturgy—and certainly the member I interviewed pointed to some dissatisfaction in the congregation—but we can understand the weekly worship service as the church leaders’ attempt to forge such an identity. And in what follows, I want to suggest that this identity is intimately related to the genealogical modernism of the UU tradition.

April 17, 2012

Congregational Studies, Selection 14: Food part 4—enough about food.


The suggestiveness of Foucault’s remarks resonate all the more strongly in contemporary late capitalist society when considering the pervasiveness of popular dietary regimens (from vegetarianism to Jenny Craig to Atkins), for, according to Foucault, dietetics also constituted a “deliberate practice on the part of the individual” in the sense that “it proposed to equip the individual…for a rational mode of behavior” (pp. 107-108). Dietary regimens continue to be self-imposed disciplines of the self, but they are impossible to separate from the economic conditions of consumer capitalism in which they are practiced. While dietetics in ancient Greece were transmitted through philosophical schools and medical texts, what might be called “capitalist dietetics” is transmitted through a barrage of advertisements, specialized cook books, celebrity testimonials, fitness programs, and so on that are designed less to “permit one to respond to circumstances” as they are to enable the user to build desired body-shapes in an alchemical, transubstantive process—the way dietary practices are advertised, health and nutrition often appear subordinate to concerns about physical appearance.

It is in this context that I propose to situate my observations about dietary practice at First UU Springfield. In this congregation, one sees an attempt at a break from the homogeneity of capitalism in the form of dietetics, a self-disciplinary impulse. However, the dominant economic structure continues to infiltrate and shape congregational practice. With respect to the study of dietary practice and religion, my analysis of the peculiar dietary dialectic at First UU Springfield poses what I hope will be a helpful challenge to the mainstream orientation of food scholarship in the field of religion. I have substantial doubts that the ritual-symbolic approach advocated by Douglas and appropriated by her followers in the field of lived religion makes much sense in the context of late capitalism, in which the commodification of dietary practices, in addition to food and drink more generally, seems to infringe on the ritualized element of eating and significantly limit the possibility of any symbolic correspondence between food and “social order” or the unlimited, autonomous construction of culturally-specific “meanings.” Instead, this report has argued that it is necessary to develop new vocabularies to better suit the socio-economic conditions in which food is eaten, in which diets are constructed, and in which discipline is practiced.

April 16, 2012

Congregational Studies, Selection 13: Food part 3, or: Let me ramble about Foucault for a moment


From what theoretical perspective is a will-to-a-self-discipline-of-food best viewed? The theoretical underpinnings of Mary Douglas’s pioneering study of food in relation to religion and ritual, in which food events encode social order, have not gone unchallenged in other disciplines, yet her approach remains largely unchallenged within the discourse of “lived religion”; it is taken for granted that meals are “symbolic” acts and are thus able to be decoded according to some total system of symbols specific to a closed-off culture. But surely this approach will not suffice.

In attempting to find an explanation, I turn first to Michel Foucault, who touches on eating practices in his History of Sexuality. In a careful study of sexual politics in pre-Christian Greece, Foucault recognizes a preoccupation with the relationships between pleasure, health, life, and death that manifested itself in dietetic practices, or, “a matter of regimen aimed at regulating an activity that was recognized as being important for health.”[1]

In general, dietetics did not moderate pleasure in the spirit of any overarching moral judgment as to their “goodness” or “evilness”; instead, Foucault suggests that dietetics sought to “integrate it as fully as possible into the management of health and the life of the body” (p. 98). As such, dietetics was not exclusively or even mostly concerned with moderating sexual activity, but was an all-encompassing regimen for the moderation of food, drink, exercise, sleep, and so on. “Dietetics,” Foucault maintains, “was a strategic art in the sense that it ought to permit one to respond to circumstances in a reasonable, hence useful, manner” (p. 106). Such regimens, in other words, allowed the ancient Greeks to adapt to different situations by adjusting their behavior to fit both temporal and spatial circumstance.

Early regimens, Foucault notes with some surprise, were more concerned with food—“considered in terms of their peculiar qualities, and of the circumstances in which they were consumed” (p. 114)—than they were with sexual activity. This is in definite contrast to the portrait of early modern Europe that Foucault paints in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, in which bourgeois societies of the seventeenth century forward experience “a veritable discursive explosion” on the subject of sex, to the extent that sexuality, in contemporary society, becomes the primary means of self-identification.[2]

But if Foucault’s dietetic model is suggestive of a substantial epistemological shift toward sexuality as the basic means through which identity is self-discovered—or, as Deleuze puts it in his magisterial reading of Foucault, if a differential process has separated sexuality from the “alimentary” (or nutritive) concerns to become “the place in which the relation to oneself became enacted”[3]—where does this leave food? Since Foucault’s project is to trace the history of sexuality, he is only interested in food inasmuch as it intersects with sex and turns away from food in the second volume and only goes on to briefly reference diet in the third volume of The History. His dietetics of food thus remains more suggestive than explanatory.

NOTES

[1]
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990 [1984]), 97-98. Hereafter, page numbers from this volume will be referenced parenthetically.

[2]
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978 [1976]), 17.

[3]
Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Sean Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 102.

April 13, 2012

Congregational Studies, Selection 12: Food part 2, in which I advocate stealing from corporate turkey farms


When food is directly referenced in the services themselves, it seems to be included in an overall concern with health and nutrition—both spiritual and physical. A droll example of this came on the Thanksgiving service (November 20, 2011). For that week’s story for children, a lay leader read a picture book called ‘Twas the Night before Thanksgiving by Dav Pilkey (of Captain Underpants fame), in which eight elementary school children go on a field trip to a turkey farm just before Thanksgiving and play with eight turkeys. The children are shocked to find out that the farmer plans to butcher the turkeys to make their Thanksgiving dinners, so they formulate an elaborate and sophisticated scheme to smuggle the turkeys off of the farm. The book ends with the children and their new pets celebrating a vegetarian Thanksgiving together.

While the story’s endorsement of vegetarianism on moral grounds is fairly unambiguous (Unambiguous with the exception of the fact that the children are stealing from what I can only surmise is a small, family-run turkey farms—corporate farms, which would of course be an ethically acceptable site to steal turkeys from, would have much more than eight turkeys), its use at First UU Springfield cannot be seen as reflective of a congregational ideology of vegetarianism; though several congregants with whom I have spoken identified as vegetarians, the majority of the congregants seem to be omnivorous, and those that do identify as vegetarian supplied a variety of reasons that range from personal health to ethical considerations. Rather, the story as used in this context seems to support a sort of critical responsibility for and sensitivity to what one eats.