Towards an Existential Archeology of Capitalist Spirituality
Abstract
:1. Introduction
2. The Cybernetic Ideology of “Spiritual Management”
3. Existential Horizons at the Crossroads of Archaeology
In order to analyze the development of bodies of knowledge out of systems of power, Foucault employs a new historical method that he calls genealogy. Genealogy does not replace archaeology, which is still needed to uncover the discursive rules that constitute bodies of knowledge. But genealogy goes beyond archaeology by explaining (through the connections with power) changes in the history of discourse that are merely described by archaeology.([32], pp. 6–7)
4. Biographical History at Seeing Things Whole
4.1. Seeing Things Whole and Landry’s Bicycles
4.2. Tom Henry
Tom also invited partners to help strengthen the National Bike Summit, held annually in Washington, D.C. Founded in 2001, the National BikeSummit lobbies legislators regarding cycling issues. At the Bike Summit, sponsored by the League of American Bicyclists, industry representatives can attend presentations dealing with legislation affecting cycling. They can also take the opportunity to lobby legislators and to recognize government officials who have helped improve conditions for cycling in America. For example, in 2005, Sen. John Kerry, in accepting the National Bicycle Advocacy award, spoke about how honored he felt to receive it, having been a bicycle enthusiast since childhood.([53], p. 45)
A live cat is placed in a box. The box has solid walls, so no one outside the box can see into it. This is a crucial factor, since the thought experiment explores the role of the observer in evoking reality. Inside the box, a device will trigger the release of either poison or food; the probability of either occurrence is 50/50. Time passes. The trigger goes off, unobserved. The cat meets its fate. Or does it? Just as an electron is both a wave and a particle until our observation causes it to collapse as either a particle or a wave, Schroedinger argues that the cat is both alive and dead until the moment we observe it. Inside the box, when no one is watching, the cat exists only as a probability wave.([15], p. 61)
5. Towards an Existential Archeological Methodology
The concepts that govern our thought are not just matters of the intellect. They also govern our everyday functioning, down to the most mundane details. Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around the world, and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities, and what we do is very much a matter of metaphor.([54], p. 3)
Both the neoconservatives and the new social movements have, in addition to their critiques of the state, their respective cultural programs. These however are less interesting than the repetition of the antibureaucratic discourse of deregulation in the postmodernist cultural programs in terms like polyphony.([60], p. 134)
6. Concluding Reflections
Acknowledgments
Conflicts of Interest
References
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- 1Weber is often read as a historical sociologist who, within the context of his comparative studies of religion and society, describes the ways in which the modern West transitioned from a traditionalistic social order to one characterized by “legal-rational” rationality and a formal separation of spheres. However, in contradistinction to this normative reading of Weber, Jan Rehmann reads him as an “organic intellectual” of the modern, industrial bourgeoisie whose work anticipates and benefits the passive revolution of Fordist modernization [2]. Complexity theory, a theoretical science of complex adaptive systems, is primarily associated with the pioneering work of the Santa Fe Institute, which was founded in 1984. As I will discuss in this paper, some of the core principles of complexity theory anticipate the discourse of “new management” which would develop later. However, as would be anticipated by an archeological analysis, we can also note the emergence of complexity discourse within the purview of other social institutions (such as the architectural theory of Robert Venturi, see [3]).
- 2Jan Rehmann’s overview of theories of ideology is a very helpful reference [4]. Following Rehmann’s discussion, I understand ideology theory to both identify objective interests (e.g., objective measures of social security) and to explore the ways in which the turn to values and attitudes, “can go hand in hand with the loss of collective and individual agency.” There is an interest in the voluntary subjection to forms of domination but a facile and reifying account of “false consciousness” is resisted. As Rehmann suggests, “A theory of ideology begins at the moment when its social genesis, functional necessity and efficacy becomes the object of reflection” ([4], pp. 5–6).
- 3Of course, Weber’s account of ideal-types, or average cases, needs to be supplemented by genealogies which demonstrate the ways in which historical moments and historical change are characterized by messy counter-examples and accompanied by cross-purposes. Often, surprising examples turn out to be as much the rule as the exception. Ideas of neat “linear progress” pertain to the ideological and metaphysical repertoire of Western modernity and are confounded by historical details. Within religious studies, a classic study which unsettles many of the assumed secular trajectories and directions of American religion and modern Capitalism is Liston Pope’s Millands and Preachers—A Study of Gastonia [5].
- 4Religious horizons were, already, from the start, imbricated in the cosmology of Fordist production. For a discussion of the ways in which “interwar religious visions trafficked in secular futures”, disrupting our analytical categories of the religious and the modern, (see [11]).
- 5In Being and Time, Heidegger seems to suggest that acts of superficial classification, which would include speech acts, sediment and constitute our world and its overarching taxonomical structures (see [17]). In my monograph [18], an extension of what I propose here, my ethnographic accounts of everyday speech and ritual at the workaday worlds of two organizations involved in the “workplace spirituality” movement are indebted to this kind of account of what Heidegger calls a “hermeneutic circle”.
- 6Prompted by Rehmann’s Gramscian analysis of Weber as an unwitting apologist for Fordist production, I mean here that all of these popular and influential theorists of postmodern work look to connect the interests of working persons to the corporatist level and to the needs of postindustrial management.
- 7One of the most erudite and persuasive readers of Foucault in religious studies today is Mark Jordan. In Convulsing Bodies—Religion and Resistance in Foucault, he argues that one of Foucault’s central interests lies in somatic rather than voluntary refusals of pastoral power (see [34]). To the degree that recoveries of agency in theory are tempted to look past these non-voluntary expressions of power, they ought to be chastised by the kind of reading Jordan offers. On the other hand, within the context of a critique of postmodern Capitalism, given the ways in which forms of collective bargaining have proven to be the sharpest tool in labor’s resistance to domination, it seems patent that due emphasis on voluntary as well as involuntary resistance is warranted and necessary.
- 8The work of Jacques Derrida has exercised a profound impact on the study of religion given deconstruction’s patent successes as a tactic and strategy for challenging and undoing the boundaries and parameters of identities and practices traditionally policed by religious institutions and authority. Of his celebrated notion of “différance”, Derrida writes: “Différance is the systematic play of differences, of the traces of differences, of the spacing by means of which elements are related to each other. This spacing is simultaneously active and passive (this a of différance indicates the indecision as concerns activity and passivity, that which cannot be governed by or distributed between the terms of this opposition) production of the intervals without which the “full” terms would not signify, would not function” ([37], p. 27). Logocentrists, Derrida insists, believe that “writing should erase itself before the plenitude of living speech ([37], p. 25). In other words, the “I” precedes my embodiment and adoption of it as a possible position for me (and one that is dependent on the spacing of différance such that I assume that my dog, Clover, can never embody that same position given the humanistic pretentions of Western metaphysics) but I conveniently disavow this reality as a speaker. The problem with Derrida’s approach is that he almost inverts the switch such that living speech is forced to erase itself before the primacy of writing.In Writing and Difference, Derrida proposes to further radicalize Freud’s concept of the unconscious via the trace, which, “is the erasure of selfhood, of one’s own presence, and is constituted by the threat or anguish of its irremediable disappearance, of the disappearance of the disappearance” ([38], p. 230). For existential anthropologies and practice theories like my own existential archeology, Derrida, like Freud, swings the pendulum too far in the direction of involuntary forces. The binary itself between speech and writing is itself a red herring, in the end. We cannot speak of one without the other since in the world of human meaning they mutually imply one another.Derrida’s poststructuralist challenge would also hold that metaphor is always and already performative. There is no discourse, for Derrida, that does not always and already show rather than state (see [39]). In a society in which global Capitalism depends as much as it does on marketers and corporate managers’ exceedingly well-funded science of metaphor, the empirical and political onus remains on the view which holds that metaphor is always and already performative and, as such, not amenable to any intentional organization and utilitarian appropriation whatsoever. Of course, none of this implies that attempts to mark, freeze, and understand metaphor will not also always be haunted by that which slips through the grasp of science and unsettles its ambitions to control the fluidity of lived phenomena. We need not revert to an a-reflexive empiricism, naïve phenomenology or vulgar positivism. Nevertheless, my approach stands in contrast to Derrida’s unrelenting critique of logocentrism, or his damning association of the idea that persons intentionally manipulate words to make meaning with the hierarchies of a Western metaphysics of presence. Neoliberalism is not conceptually underwritten by the metaphor of structure in the way Derrida suggests modern Capitalism was. It does not disavow the fluid movement of metaphor, as Derrida argues modernism does, but, rather, hopes to control and exploit the liquid power of language as a shifting, embryonic sac. Nor does neoliberalism overvalue the powers of the rugged individual, constructing persons, as it does, as iterations and instances of complexity driven discourses.Ken Surin explains that for Derrida the subject, “arises from a “space” of responsibility that is antecedent to the subject’s emergence and its identification with the self” ([40], p. 167). That is, the self can only always and already be identified to itself only via alterity and the traces of différance. According to Surin, the problem Derrida poses any critical theory of Capitalism is that within a Derridean account, “there is no way of (actually) inserting the subject into the domain of the political” ([40] p. 195). How to concretize Derridean ethics within extant institutional contexts is never self-evident and, unsurprisingly, Derridean deconstruction suffers from a certain sociological poverty when it comes to analyses of Capitalism ([4], p. 54).
- 9While his influence over my own thinking is strong, I do not turn to, in any immediate way, Pierre Bourdieu’s work to frame the present analysis. While Bourdieu looks to attend to this impasse in his later work (see [44]), I agree with Michael Jackson’s assessment that even the concept of the “habitus” is mired in a reductive expectation of a “quasi-perfect” coincidence between the objective tendencies of “structuring structures”, on the one hand, and subjective expectations and the living out of freedom “at the margins” of history, on the other hand (see [45], p. xxi). Similarly, Foucauldian ethics (e.g., the concept of “care of the self”) fails to concretize the relationship of the self to the discourses of social institutions at the level of lived relations, which are, at least in part, biographically mediated by personal histories.
- 10While there is no “unmediated” account of the “real”, Sartre nevertheless does recognize the important (if also necessarily insufficient) role non-dialectical, analytical knowledge plays in the progressive development of what he calls comprehension. Non-ethnographic, analytical knowledge (e.g., the institutional history of STW) can always, “be integrated into a more comprehensive dialectic” ([51], p. 275). What Sartre calls “dialectical reason” implies an empirical methodology which inserts the scholar “feet first” into the historical field and highlights the lived, intersubjective qualities of ethnographic relationships, framing scholarship, in the process, as a form of shared labor (see [52]). As Sartre notes, highly discursive projects tend to eschew the issue of the scholar’s relationship to history. I do not mute my voice when I narrate ethnography precisely because my own actions, choices and feelings are to be included within the scope of empirical data to be reflected on and theoretically reconsidered at the back end of “fieldwork” (see [18]).
- 11When Specialized, one of the major American bicycle retailers, accounted plans to go “big box” and expand the market within the likes of Wal-Mart, its then CEO told industry leaders that more profit could be made all around. To the independent bike shops, like Landry’s, he said that “big box” bikes would mean a greater demand for bike repairs. With a wink and a nod, the CEO of Specialized smiled and laughed while the industry leaders gathered around him and did the same. For Tom, this moment has become the paradigmatic example of “demonic possession” at work. The people in the room did not even realize, he says, that they were suggesting that they wanted to provide worse products and put people at risk all for the sake of profit. Tom stood up and gave a damning speech that, he will proudly tell you, has become part of urban lore in the bike industry. He says he took his stand from a position of “whole self,” a concept which resonates with themes in the management literature of the STW universe. Tom’s view won the day and Specialized and the industry, he explained, went in a different direction that resisted a “big-box” model for bicycle retail.
- 12Management discourse, like any other limiting structures of history, is never simply conserved and reiterated but always brought to new places through the mediations of intersubjectivity. As Michael Jackson writes, “As Sartre argued, the conscious projects and intentions that carry us forward into the future are grounded in unconscious dispositions, accumulated habits, and invisible histories that, taken together, define our past. Accordingly, any essay in human understanding requires a progressive-regressive method that both discloses the preconditions that constrain what we may say and do, while recognising that no human action simply and blindly conserves the past; it goes beyond it” ([50], p. 293).
- 13Political and ethical considerations are central to Sartre’s concept of choice. We are never simply passive vessels of limiting structures but are held to ethical account by our moral responsibility to choose. We are defined not by any essence but according to the ways in which we respond to the exigencies of messy existence. We can adopt a life-project which is characterized by chosen values which totalize the scope of our biographical history, as a whole. While Sartre understood well the need to change the structures that shape and constrain choice (and argues that the intellectual must commit to this goal), unlike Foucault, he did so according to an account of a biographically inflected freedom which does not collapse discursive and existential histories.
- 14Whenever we speak of word clouds or data clouds, we mirror the networked imaginary of contemporary Capitalism, while also, at the same time, reproducing these broader social formations at the level of lived experience. Recently, I have caught myself using the increasingly common idiom “having the band-with to” as in the question “do you have the bandwith to take care of this right now?” I do not intend to cite a subject position when I use this Internet metaphor, but, despite myself, such a statement contextualizes my life within the digital age and in important other ways as well.
- 15The work of Bruno Latour represents a watershed moment in Western social theory that privileges politics over and against existence. However, unlike Latour, whose “principle of generalized symmetry” assigns equal agency to persons as non-persons, including social structures and sedimented history, I am loath to go down Latour’s path of “Actor-Network Theory” on political grounds [57]. Systems very much express the agencies of individuals even if they also cannot be reduced to human agency. No doubt, some actors working for multinational corporations and in global finance work hard to support and maintain the “impersonal” structures of global neoliberalism because the paradigm enhances their financial and political power. The difference is that, as Sartre suggested, some individuals have more leverage than others and the processed materiality of history supports agency and human well-being in differentiated and unequal ways (see [43,51]). It is also not the case that the solidarity of the dispossessed can be ever be simply assumed at a distance, either. Choice always remains central to relationships of solidarity. Hence, both the constitutive instability of social solidarity and its very possibility are, in part, a consequence of a recalcitrant and at times politically inconvenient human freedom. For thorough discussions of the defining features of Sartre’s existential Marxism, see [52,58].
- 16Nor can we assume that desire and eros are the great antidotes capable of undermining utility’s system. Jean-Joseph Goux provides a useful discussion of the ways in which Georges Bataille misrecognizes the ways in which affect and the inner life are not other than or separate from the systemic coherence of Capitalism but, rather, constitutive and generative of it (see [61]).
- 17Focusing on social semantics or the space of intersubjectivity between self and discursive world does not in any way preclude supplemental, complementary or even antagonistic foci on something of what Jasbir Puar has in mind: “The assemblage, as a series of dispersed but mutually implicated and messy networks, draws together enunciation and dissolution, causality and effect, organic and non-organic forces” ([66], p. 211). My argument is not that we ought to privilege existentially mediated speech acts but, rather, that we cannot summarily dismiss them altogether from our analyses.
- 18For a discussion of the ways of the false oppositions, which tend to confuse understandings of the relationship of Sartrian and Derridean accounts of subjectivity see Steve Martinot, Forms in the Abyss: A Philosophical Bridge Between Sartre and Derrida [69]. Martinot writes, “Subjectivity does not manifest itself as writing in the Derridean sense, any more than writing manifests itself as subjectivity in the Sartrean sense. One can no more say that consciousness produces writing as its thought than that writing produces consciousness as its text. They are homological, which means these are not oppositions between Sartre and Derrida” ([69], p. 248). In a similar vein, I appreciate the ways in which Amy Hollywood’s Derridean readings, attentive to the “perversion” inherent to Derrida’s thought itself, resist a new, poststructuralist orthodoxy of the subject and make room for active, intentional work (see [70], p. 269).
- 19Indeed, in 2008, the New York Times reported that following the economic collapse of that same year, psychics and tarot card readers saw a spike in business as day traders looked to occult techniques to help them predict and manage the increasingly chaotic financial markets (see [77]).
- 20In her masterful, Politics Out of History, Wendy Brown queries: “are ghosts and spirits what inevitably arise at the end or death of something—an era, desire, attachment, belief, figure, or narrative?” There, she suggests that the mourning of modernity’s many certainties has given rise to the furtive specters which Derrida then conjures forth ([78], p. 114).
- 21As Robert Orsi reminds, modern, Western criticisms and naturalistic reductions of the “real presence” of religious agencies necessarily participate in racial, colonial, gendered and class histories which have traditionally made much of modern, secular taxonomies according to which religious societies have been understood to exist at primitive stages of socio-cultural evolution and religious persons who insist on the reality of religious “presence” have been deemed some version of ignorant, psychotic or delusional. These histories necessarily breathe down the back of the critic of even highly commodified and bourgeois forms of “capitalist spirituality” (see [79], pp. 3–5). Capitalist spirituality places religious studies in a difficult but productive “double-bind”. There are simply no intellectually defensible reasons for concluding that it is appropriate to glibly write-off “capitalist” forms of “spirituality” on account of the charge that they are somehow “unreal” or not the kind of “religion” that is worthy of our best efforts as religion scholars. The kinds of lived experiences of “presence” which accompany self-help techniques ought to matter to us and to our scholarly projects. At the very same time, to eschew criticisms of the inequalities and social suffering that underwrite bourgeois capitalist spirituality is to seek refuge in an apolitical, phenomenological refuge of the scholar’s own making. Fortunately, a better understanding of how Capitalism is viscerally “religious” can only improve our social criticisms of contemporary conditions. Criticism and phenomenology are in no way opposed to one another.According to Amy Hollywood, the question of the limits of the “real” antecedes modern discourse and is, for example, constitutive of Medieval periods in which she works. It is also the case, as Hollywood suggests, students of religion are perhaps inescapably and especially confronted with the problem of critical reason’s constitutive limits (see [70], p. 135). Hollywood marshals the “apparently uncritical readings” of Medieval, women mystics traditionally marginalized for their purported bodily and affective excesses (readings which are bound to specific times and places but which can, whether “then” or “now”, ignite new meanings). While I am generally partial to this kind of Benjaminian dialectic, it must be contextualized within the movements of a post-secular discourse which generates much of its power by grinding its axes against a fetishized, “dead” and “unhip” secularism. While I agree that we cannot assume that religion is inherently uncritical, today, this kind of understanding must be contextualized within a sociology of “spiritual Capitalism” in which economic reason does not outright reject and disavow religious and theological reason but, instead, hopes to strategically manage, predict and control “religious”, “poetic”, linguistic and psychic borderlands through forms of statistical power. Today, Capitalist reason seeks not to disavow but rather to don the trappings of “excess”. This is precisely how fire walking corporate training exercises and shamanic rituals have become some of the favored technologies of today’s surfing CEOs and poet CFOs (see [18], pp. 1–34). Can the sacred past “blaze up” today the way Benjamin would have us hope when, in the contemporary context, the ideology of Capitalism itself covets the disciplinary power of ancient, religious metaphor and looks to mine penumbral spaces and liminal states in search of profitable creativity? As Hollywood’s Derridean readings would seem to suggest and I argue, from a slightly different angle in my monograph, our situation is marked by contestations over already overdetermined forms of “religious” metaphor. A double-movement is needed—the “religious” (or attendant forms of the poetic, the affective, spirituality and mysticism) cannot be opposed to the rational; instead, competing accounts of the “religious” (and the “poetic”) can be conjured forth, forced to coexist in generative tensions which might explode the possible horizons of meaning. In my own work, the ethnographic details resist the totalizations of management discourse and its ideological, capitalizing accounts of “spirituality”. They also resist the totalizations of critical reason. Politics is informed by phenomenology and phenomenology is framed by sociology but the connective circles are never closed. Detailed archival work can also accomplish something akin to this kind of open critique always at odds with itself so long as, in my view, intersubjectivity is not collapsed into a generalizing account of discourse.
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González, G. Towards an Existential Archeology of Capitalist Spirituality. Religions 2016, 7, 85. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel7070085
González G. Towards an Existential Archeology of Capitalist Spirituality. Religions. 2016; 7(7):85. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel7070085
Chicago/Turabian StyleGonzález, George. 2016. "Towards an Existential Archeology of Capitalist Spirituality" Religions 7, no. 7: 85. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel7070085