Mary Keller: Religion, Politics, Media, and War
I wish to begin addressing Religion, Politics, Media and War by picking up two threads. The first, written by Melanie McCallister :
one could argue that Foucault's work is about defining the much earlier demise of spectacle (punishment for display) toward a rationalized discipline/surveillance that disguised and internalized the operations of power.
The second, Ryan Bishop wrote:
for the veil and unveiling relate to truth as aeltheia, or truth as
ongoing unconcealment.
You must try to understand how bizarre it has been for me over the past several years to see France legislate against the wearing of veils by Muslim female students (France is doing WHAT?) followed by Britains top brass arguing that it was necessary for a Muslim woman to meet with him without her veil so that he could evaluate the truth of her words by watching more of her face and seeing more of her demeanor (he thinks he can see truth that the veil would conceal?).
I sit in Cody, Wyoming, very near to where Dick Cheney lives, and can generally, comfortably assume that it will be my people and my President who would presume such measures in their policies. It is, after all, my President who continues to tell us that he has looked Vladimir Putin in the eye and judged him to be a good man, and that he looked current members of the Iraqi government in the eye and saw their honesty and determination. That such naïve phenomenology and epistemology is espoused by our figurehead is the kind of stuff I am used to.
But not in Francehow naïve I was to think that Foucaults presence in that country had somehow permeated the administration with sophisticated senses of discipline and punish to augment the sophistication of style. And not in Tony Blairs Britain, whose national healthcare (considered liberal, wacko, spend and tax utopian thought in the U.S.) is a beacon of hope that progressive, humane government is possible.
The deal is simple if you want to understand why governments that grew out of Christian and Enlightenment heritages do not see themselves seeing the veil. I continue to point to Talal Asads "Genealogies of Religion" in order to explain the problem to my people. When the Enlightenment philosophers carved out the space for the proper sphere of religion, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, a pretense was created. The pretense was this: religion is about symbolic beliefs that individuals hold and can contain within a proper sphere of activity, guarded over by reason. With such a pretense, one can boldly claim to have a government based on the division between church and state. Happy, reasonable individuals get their symbolic beliefs on Friday, Saturday, Sunday. The rest of life will be run in the epistemological grids of reason, science, and politics using empirical methods, and the scientific method. The rest of life becomes what is now called the secularization of culture.
The problem with this pretense is that religion is not about symbolic beliefs. It is about relationships of power that give meaning to peoples sense of the ultimate significance of their place in the world, to paraphrase Charles Long from his book "Significations." Humanists are quite happy with the idea that humans need to orient themselves in their world, and Frederic Jameson proposes the development of an aesthetic of cognitive mapping to serve as a pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system in "Postmodernism" (54). And in the "Geopolitical Aesthetic" he writes about the desire called cognitive mapping, (3) a desire that is a response to invisible forces, a response that assesses the nature of an external force that does something to you, but which [remains unseen] by virtue of the fact that its power transcends your capacity to understand it or conceptualizebetter still to representit (88). Why would Long argue twenty years earlier that religion is best understood as orientation? Why would I challenge the humanist framework by suggesting that what it is describing is best understood as the work of religion?
France and Britain dont understand the hijab because they do not understand why someones religious life is as much about a negotiation with power as is consumer culture. Religious lives always have been and will continue to be deeply implicated in territory, gender, economy and war because questions of ultimacy throw humans when they encounter borders and boundaries against which they can effectively determine their ultimate significance. That is why, in the end, American money says In God We Trust. Sure you can set up your division between church and statebut just try to print money without getting theological. Sure you can be a modern war machine, but just try going to war without saying Oh God.
I think that if the West could just catch up with the shortcomings of its Enlightenment categorizations of religion, and could instead understand the embodied, cognitive, power relationship that is called religion, we could then begin to discern a ground for communication. If the nuns habit is not scarey, then why is the hijab? If the school teachers golden cross dangling at her throat is not a problem, then why is the hijab? The woman wearing the hijab is negotiating with power and is not exposing her morally disciplined body, she is not revealing her truths like the females of American culture do. This friendly comparison ought not to be rocket science.
I recently had a friend ask me what was the difference between my sense of religion and a general sense of culture. The difference is history and argument. That is all. History because we receive established traditions of dealing with unseen forces whose power does something to you but remains unseen by you by virtue of the fact that its power transcends your capacity to understand it or conceptualizebetter still to representit. These traditions have been called religions. To use the word religion is to participate in an established game in which that signifier is recognized.
Why continue with the word? Because of value. Some things are more equal than others. Some things are of ultimate value. If something is of ultimate value, it will drive humans differently than things that carry mundane value. It will drive humans to the borders at which they can discern and determine ultimate value. It drives humans out of their numb lives in search of something that will make them feel alive. It drives humans out of their sense of meaningless, insignificant anonymity to gain a sense of significance through acts that will bring them across a new border of experience. Because violence is an event of crossing mental and physical borders and boundaries, violence is intimately related to the responses people have to meaninglessness. Violence brings you into contact with a border against which you can orient yourself and your significance. Violence is an immature response to religious desire, but we are human and tragically immature in our ability to respond to meaning. Trying to make people go secular will not attend to their immaturity.
Another reason to use the word religion: It doesnt go away. We could make a brand new start as the newly elected democrats suggest they can do, and we could call it schmegli. We could call it an opiate and exhort our comarades to take down the transcendentalsalthough that sounds strikingly familiar to the kingdom of humans is at hand. That plan hasnt worked yet, with icons of Chairmon Mao selling like hotcakes. We could call it projection and enter analysis interminable instead. Or we could call it religion.
It is different. It is not an essence or essential difference, it is a matter of interpretation and argument regarding its difference. I cannot put a woman on the scale, with or without hijab, and weigh her in order to determine her religious essence. I can only argue why it is most useful to understand a religious identity at work in the borders and boundaries that woman cultivates to mark the significance of her location in the world.
> Mary Keller, Ph. D.
one could argue that Foucault's work is about defining the much earlier demise of spectacle (punishment for display) toward a rationalized discipline/surveillance that disguised and internalized the operations of power.
The second, Ryan Bishop wrote:
for the veil and unveiling relate to truth as aeltheia, or truth as
ongoing unconcealment.
You must try to understand how bizarre it has been for me over the past several years to see France legislate against the wearing of veils by Muslim female students (France is doing WHAT?) followed by Britains top brass arguing that it was necessary for a Muslim woman to meet with him without her veil so that he could evaluate the truth of her words by watching more of her face and seeing more of her demeanor (he thinks he can see truth that the veil would conceal?).
I sit in Cody, Wyoming, very near to where Dick Cheney lives, and can generally, comfortably assume that it will be my people and my President who would presume such measures in their policies. It is, after all, my President who continues to tell us that he has looked Vladimir Putin in the eye and judged him to be a good man, and that he looked current members of the Iraqi government in the eye and saw their honesty and determination. That such naïve phenomenology and epistemology is espoused by our figurehead is the kind of stuff I am used to.
But not in Francehow naïve I was to think that Foucaults presence in that country had somehow permeated the administration with sophisticated senses of discipline and punish to augment the sophistication of style. And not in Tony Blairs Britain, whose national healthcare (considered liberal, wacko, spend and tax utopian thought in the U.S.) is a beacon of hope that progressive, humane government is possible.
The deal is simple if you want to understand why governments that grew out of Christian and Enlightenment heritages do not see themselves seeing the veil. I continue to point to Talal Asads "Genealogies of Religion" in order to explain the problem to my people. When the Enlightenment philosophers carved out the space for the proper sphere of religion, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, a pretense was created. The pretense was this: religion is about symbolic beliefs that individuals hold and can contain within a proper sphere of activity, guarded over by reason. With such a pretense, one can boldly claim to have a government based on the division between church and state. Happy, reasonable individuals get their symbolic beliefs on Friday, Saturday, Sunday. The rest of life will be run in the epistemological grids of reason, science, and politics using empirical methods, and the scientific method. The rest of life becomes what is now called the secularization of culture.
The problem with this pretense is that religion is not about symbolic beliefs. It is about relationships of power that give meaning to peoples sense of the ultimate significance of their place in the world, to paraphrase Charles Long from his book "Significations." Humanists are quite happy with the idea that humans need to orient themselves in their world, and Frederic Jameson proposes the development of an aesthetic of cognitive mapping to serve as a pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system in "Postmodernism" (54). And in the "Geopolitical Aesthetic" he writes about the desire called cognitive mapping, (3) a desire that is a response to invisible forces, a response that assesses the nature of an external force that does something to you, but which [remains unseen] by virtue of the fact that its power transcends your capacity to understand it or conceptualizebetter still to representit (88). Why would Long argue twenty years earlier that religion is best understood as orientation? Why would I challenge the humanist framework by suggesting that what it is describing is best understood as the work of religion?
France and Britain dont understand the hijab because they do not understand why someones religious life is as much about a negotiation with power as is consumer culture. Religious lives always have been and will continue to be deeply implicated in territory, gender, economy and war because questions of ultimacy throw humans when they encounter borders and boundaries against which they can effectively determine their ultimate significance. That is why, in the end, American money says In God We Trust. Sure you can set up your division between church and statebut just try to print money without getting theological. Sure you can be a modern war machine, but just try going to war without saying Oh God.
I think that if the West could just catch up with the shortcomings of its Enlightenment categorizations of religion, and could instead understand the embodied, cognitive, power relationship that is called religion, we could then begin to discern a ground for communication. If the nuns habit is not scarey, then why is the hijab? If the school teachers golden cross dangling at her throat is not a problem, then why is the hijab? The woman wearing the hijab is negotiating with power and is not exposing her morally disciplined body, she is not revealing her truths like the females of American culture do. This friendly comparison ought not to be rocket science.
I recently had a friend ask me what was the difference between my sense of religion and a general sense of culture. The difference is history and argument. That is all. History because we receive established traditions of dealing with unseen forces whose power does something to you but remains unseen by you by virtue of the fact that its power transcends your capacity to understand it or conceptualizebetter still to representit. These traditions have been called religions. To use the word religion is to participate in an established game in which that signifier is recognized.
Why continue with the word? Because of value. Some things are more equal than others. Some things are of ultimate value. If something is of ultimate value, it will drive humans differently than things that carry mundane value. It will drive humans to the borders at which they can discern and determine ultimate value. It drives humans out of their numb lives in search of something that will make them feel alive. It drives humans out of their sense of meaningless, insignificant anonymity to gain a sense of significance through acts that will bring them across a new border of experience. Because violence is an event of crossing mental and physical borders and boundaries, violence is intimately related to the responses people have to meaninglessness. Violence brings you into contact with a border against which you can orient yourself and your significance. Violence is an immature response to religious desire, but we are human and tragically immature in our ability to respond to meaning. Trying to make people go secular will not attend to their immaturity.
Another reason to use the word religion: It doesnt go away. We could make a brand new start as the newly elected democrats suggest they can do, and we could call it schmegli. We could call it an opiate and exhort our comarades to take down the transcendentalsalthough that sounds strikingly familiar to the kingdom of humans is at hand. That plan hasnt worked yet, with icons of Chairmon Mao selling like hotcakes. We could call it projection and enter analysis interminable instead. Or we could call it religion.
It is different. It is not an essence or essential difference, it is a matter of interpretation and argument regarding its difference. I cannot put a woman on the scale, with or without hijab, and weigh her in order to determine her religious essence. I can only argue why it is most useful to understand a religious identity at work in the borders and boundaries that woman cultivates to mark the significance of her location in the world.
> Mary Keller, Ph. D.