Critical Politics

07 Monday Oct 2013

Posted by Timothy Fitzgerald in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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categories, church, Critical Religion, economics, India, Japan, John Locke, politics, religion, secular

Our blog ‘critical religion’ receives contributions from many people, and they usually have the terms ‘critical’ and ‘religion’ in them somewhere. Some are much more clearly theorised than that. My own understanding of ‘critical religion’ is specific. For me, ‘critical religion’ is always about ‘religion and related categories’, because I argue that religion is not a stand-alone category, but is one of a configuration of categories. On its own, ‘religion’ has no object; it only seems to do so. Religion is a category that is deployed for purposes of classification, but it does not stand in a one-to-one relationship with any observable thing in the world. In modern discourse, ‘religion’ works as half a binary, as in ‘religion and secular’ or ‘religion and [secular] politics’. When we talk about religion today, there is always a tacit exclusion of whatever is considered to be non-religious. If, for example, we talk about religion and politics, we have already assumed they refer to different things, and to mutually incompatible ones at that. Politics is secular, which means non-religious. Religion is separate from politics. If the two get mixed up and confused, then there is a problem.

One thing to notice here is that there has been a massive historical slippage from ‘ought’ to ‘is’. What started in the 17th century as an ‘ought’ – viz. there ought to be a distinction between ‘religion’ and ‘political society’ – has long become an assumption about the way the world actually is. In public discourse we have become used to talking as if ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ refer to two essentially different aspects of the real world, that we intuitively know what a religion is and what politics is, and we imagine that if we wanted to take the trouble we could define their essential differences. And yet of course the rhetorical construct of ‘ought’ keeps appearing, as for example when we insist that a nation that does not have a constitutional separation of religion and politics is undeveloped or backward; or when Anglican Bishops make moral pronouncements that seem uncomfortably ‘political’.

But what does ‘politics’ actually refer to? If the meaning of a word is to be found in its use, then we surely all know the meaning of ‘politics’. We use the term constantly. We have an intuitive understanding about what politics is. If we didn’t, how would we be able to deploy the term with such self-assurance? How, without understanding the term, would we be able to communicate about our shared and contested issues? We discourse constantly about politics, whether in private, or in the media, in our schools and universities, or in our ‘political’ institutions – and we surely all know which of our institutions are the political ones. Careers are made in politics. We join political parties, or we become politicians, or we enrol and study in departments of political science, and read and write textbooks on the topic. How could there be a political science if we did not know what politics is? There are journalists and academics that specialise in politics, journals dedicated to politics, distinct associations and conferences for its study, and thousands of books written and published about politics. Historians research the politics of the past. There is a politics industry. There are commercial companies that analyse and provide data on the topic of politics. Media organisations employ many people to produce programmes dedicated to politics and to political analysis, discussion and debate.

Yet the ubiquity of politics is our problem. For politics and the political is so universal that it is difficult to pin it down. Are there any domains of human living that cannot and are not described as being political, as pertaining to politics? If we try to find some definitive use of the terms ‘politics’ and ‘political’ by searching through popular and academic books, newspapers, TV representations, or the discourses on politics on the internet, it is difficult not to come to the conclusion that everything is politics or political. We can find representations of the politics of abortion, the politics of hunger, church politics, the politics of sectarianism, political Islam, the politics of universities and university departments, the politics of medieval Japan, the politics of the Roman or the Mughal empires, the politics of slavery, class politics, the politics of caste in colonial and contemporary India, the politics of Native Americans in the 16th century, the politics of ancient Babylon, the politics of marriage, the politics of Constitutions, and so on and on. And we surely know that politics is as ancient as the hills.

This apparent universality of the political, its lack of boundaries, seems to place a question mark around its semantic content. If we cannot say what is not politics, then how can we give any determinate content or meaning to the term? This lack of boundaries can also be seen in the problem of demarcating a domain of politics from other domains such as ‘religion’ and ‘economics’. If we try to find a clear distinction between politics and religion, we find a history of contestation, but one that only seems to go back to the 17th century – a point to which I return in a moment. We find claims that politics and religion have – or ought to have – nothing to do with each other, yet in contemporary discourse we find many references to the politics of religion, and also to the religion of politics.

The term ‘political economy’ also points us towards this problem of demarcation. Some universities have departments of politics, some have departments of economics, and some have departments of political economy. How are they distinguished? This is especially perplexing when one finds books written by specialists on the politics of economics, as well as on the economics of politics. Add in works on the religion of politics and the politics of religion; or the religion of economics and the economics of religion: we seem to have a dog’s dinner of categories. You notice these things when you read outside your normal disciplinary boundaries.

It is also of interest that all of these can and are described as sciences: viz. the science of politics, the science of religion, and the science of economics. We cannot in practice easily if at all distinguish between the categories on which these putative sciences are based. Yet all of them have their own specialist departments, degree courses, journals, associations and conferences.

Another point is that all these ‘sciences’, based on concepts so difficult to distinguish and demarcate, are ‘secular’, in the sense of non-religious. Describing a science or discipline as secular reminds us that we have another demarcation problem. If all secular practices and institutions are defined as non-religious and therefore in distinction to ‘religion’, we need to have some reasonably clear understanding about what we mean by religion to be able to make the distinction in the first place. Without such an understanding, how would we know what ‘non-religious’ means? This paradox is magnified when we consider that for many centuries ‘secular’ has referred mainly to the ‘secular priesthood’ in the Catholic Church, and the priesthood are hardly non-religious in the modern sense.

We thus find that in everyday discussions and debates, and also in the more specialist discourses, we deploy concepts with a largely unquestioned confidence that on further consideration seems unfounded. Speaking personally, I entered academic work through religious studies, also known as the science (or scientific study) of religion, the history of religions, or the plain study of religions. Yet I cannot tell you what religion is, or what the relation between [singular] religion and [plural] religions is. I have made it a point over many years of tracking down a wide range of definitions of religion, and found them to be contradictory and circular. There is no agreed definition of the subject that so many experts claim to be researching and writing about. I suggest this is the situation in politics as well. Attempts that I have read to define politics, for example in text-books written for students of politics, seem always to be circular in the sense that they define politics in terms of political attributes, just as religions are defined in terms of religious attributes.

I suggest that the perceived self-evidence of politics as a meaningful category derives from an inherent ambiguity – and in this it is a mirror-image to religion. On the one hand, the term ‘politics’ generally simply means ‘power’ or ‘contestations of power’, and since power is probably one of the few universals in human relations we can see why it might appear intuitively convincing. However, on that understanding, it is difficult to see what is not about politics, because it can surely be argued that all human relations have always been about contestations of power. We gain such ubiquity at the expense of meaning. Surely, political science has a more specific and determinate meaning than power studies? You might just as well say that the study of politics is the study of humanity.

Our sense that there is a more determinate nuance seems justified when we discover that the discourse on ‘politics’ has a specific genesis in the English language in the 17th century. Though we can find a few (probably very few) references to ‘politicians’ in Elizabethan drama, ‘politics’ is even rarer, and I cannot find a sustained discourse on politics as a distinct domain of human action earlier than John Locke’s late 17th century distinctions, developed in his Treatises on Government, between ‘man in the state of nature’ and ‘political society’. Here Locke explicitly distinguishes between man in the state of nature and political or civil society on the one hand; and also between politics and religion on the other. In his religion-politics binary, Locke links politics to the outer, public order of the magistrate and governance, and religion to the inner, private relation of the individual to God. (What he means by ‘god’ is itself a conundrum, for the evidence is that, like Newton, he was a heretic, either a Unitarian or a Socinian. ‘God’ is another of those endlessly contested categories. If you try to define ‘religion’ as ‘belief in god’, you find yourself in another infinite regress of meanings).

It seems significant that this politics-religion binary is a modern, Enlightenment one, because Locke was arguing against the dominant understanding of Religion at the time. For his own reasons he wanted to reimagine ‘religion’. When the term religion was used at all (rarer than today) it meant Christian truth, and there was no clear sense (despite Locke’s claims) that Christian truth was not about power, or that it was separated from governance. The King was the sacred head and heart of the Christian Commonwealth, and what fell outside religion in this dominant sense was not a neutral non-religious domain but pagan irrationality and barbarity. In other words, what fell outside religion in the dominant sense of his day was still defined theologically and biblically in terms of The Fall. His privatization of religion to make way for a public domain of political society was an ideologically-motivated claim about how we ought to think about religion, not a neutral description of some objective facts.

It was especially in his attempt to legitimate new concepts of private property, and the rights of (male) property owners to representation, that Locke needed to completely revise people’s understanding of ‘religion’ as a private affair of the inner man (women were not much in the picture), in order to demarcate an essentially different domain called political society. This new binary found its way into written constitutions in North America, and is now naturalised in common speech and common sense. Today it seems counter-intuitive to question the reality of politics as a distinct domain of human practice. But this rhetorical construction was deeply resisted. Even the French Revolution did not succeed in formally separating religion and the state until the end of the 19th century. England was an Anglican confessional state until well into the 19th century.

Locke’s formulation was thoroughly ideological but has become naturalised through repeated rhetorical construction until now it seems to be ‘in the nature of things’. I suggest that, whenever we use the term politics with intuitive ease we catch ourselves and ask, in what sense am I using the term? Am I using it in the universal sense of ubiquitous power and contestations of power in all human relations? Or as referring to a specific ideological formation of modernity underpinning a historically-emergent form of private property-ownership and representation of (male) property interests? The elided slippage between the historically and ideologically specific formulation, and the empty ubiquity of ‘power’ as a universal in all human relations, lends the term its illusory quality of intuitive common sense.

Chauvinism and constructivism in contemporary Scotland

04 Thursday Jul 2013

Posted by Michael Marten in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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categories, constructivism, Critical Religion, essentialism, independence, nationalism, Scotland, unionism

On 18. September 2014 a referendum will take place in Scotland that will decide whether or not Scotland should become independent of the rest of the United Kingdom: the referendum was a key manifesto pledge of the Scottish National Party that won the last elections in the devolved Scottish Parliament. The question – “Should Scotland be an independent country?” – will allow the vast majority of people resident in Scotland the opportunity to choose independence for Scotland, or reaffirm their commitment to the three centuries-old union.

The two opposing campaigns are already hard at work on the issue. The unionist movement consists of the three major UK parties: the ruling Westminster coalition Conservative (Tory) and Liberal Democrat parties, along with Labour (all are now essentially neoliberal parties, though it is worth noting many grassroots Labour activists – marginalised by the party hierarchy – are not). They are campaigning under the banner of Better Together, though divisions in the campaign are emerging as Labour activists in particular struggle with the Tories. The independence movement consists (unsurprisingly) of parties with their roots firmly in Scotland: the Scottish National Party, the Scottish Greens, and Scottish Socialist Party and others (along with numerous elements of civil society, the arts and more – broadly, though not exclusively, a movement that tends towards the left and centre-left). They are campaigning under the banner of Yes Scotland.

My own positionality on this issue is important before discussing further detail: I expect to vote ‘yes’ in 2014, though I would never identify myself as a Scottish nationalist, as will become clear. This is why I feel Eric Hobsbawm’s warning does not apply to me (that it is impossible to seriously study the history of nations and nationalism as a committed political nationalist because ‘Nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so.’(1)). What I want to do here is look briefly at the categories being discussed. My position in this debate has arisen in part from these reflections.

The unionist side are British nationalists. This is not how they tend to describe themselves, and those who do so can expect to be vilified (the novelist Alan Bissett describes this happening to him when he uses the term; see also Gerry Hassan‘s writing). Instead, the unionists expend much effort at deriding what they see as a narrow nationalism that the SNP (in particular) are supposed to represent. And yet, in arguing for a united country, the No campaign – whose website homepage has the heading ‘The patriotic all-party and non-party campaign for Scotland in the UK’ – espouses a very clear form of chauvinistic nationalism. The Better Together website’s About page explains that they think ‘Scotland is a better and stronger country as part of the United Kingdom… [retaining the existing devolved parliament but also keeping] the strength and security of the United Kingdom.’ This is a point reiterated in several ways on another page that supposedly argues ‘The +ve case‘, including embarrassing comments about the British armed forces being ‘the best in the world’. The case being made is largely an essentialist one about greater strength, unclearly defined, in a world that is a threat (indeed, internally they call their own campaigning strategy ‘Project Fear‘). There is little self-reflection here. For example, we might want to ask: wherein lies this ‘strength and security’? As Simon Gikandi (e.g. in Maps of Englishness) and many others have described over the years, English identity in the colonial era was created largely on the basis of empire and the domination of peripheral neighbours (Wales, Ireland, Scotland), indeed, the novelist James Kelman argues that ‘Britain is not a country, it is the name used by the ruling elite and its structures of authority to describe itself.’ The growth of empire and the growth of global British trade are intimately linked, and this has played a role in post-World War II British foreign policy too. Even with the independence of most of Britain’s colonial possessions overseas, military engagement since the war has often been at least in part about securing trading advantages for Britain. Apart from 1968, Britain has been engaged in military conflict somewhere in the world in every single year since World War II. Many of these conflicts have been of dubious legality (the 2003 invasion of Iraq is simply the latest in any such list), but in any case, given the evidence of abuse at the hands of the British from 1950s Kenya to 2000s Iraq, those on the receiving end have rarely felt warmly about British military adventurism, even when cloaked in a mantle of ‘liberation’ or ‘freedom’. Britain is also – against the consistently expressed will of the vast majority of Scots in whose territory they are based – one of a handful of states with nuclear weapons of mass destruction (making no obvious move towards disarmament as they are obliged to do, in fact, quite the reverse). There are increasing numbers of Scots who do not see in such indicators a ‘strength and security’ they want to be associated with. And yet much of Better Together‘s rhetoric is about such forms of chauvinist nationalist identity.

In contrast, the Yes Scotland movement is light on identity issues, but strong on the opportunities for positive change that a ‘yes’ vote would bring. Whereas the Better Together campaign worries about the ‘threats’ that would face an independent Scotland, the Yes Scotland website (‘the campaign for an independent Scotland’) speaks of the opportunities that would arise, and does so in a positive way, as their Why vote Yes page argues: ‘This is an exciting and historic opportunity for our nation. We can choose a different and better path.’ Independence, they argue, is about ensuring that ‘decisions about Scotland’s future are taken by the people who care most about Scotland – that is by the people of Scotland. It is the people who live here who will do the best job of making our nation a fairer, greener and more successful place.’ Such an emphasis on opportunity, self-determination, fairness, environmentalism and success is not about essentialist interpretations of the past. There is no Braveheart here (such twee nonsense is left to the Tourist Board!): instead, there is a positive image of what Scotland could be in the context of self-determination. Yes Scotland is treading a fine line here: on the one hand, they want to extol the virtues of positive opportunity, whilst on the other, they seek to address some of the fears that the ‘no’ campaign is seeking to raise. The difficulty Yes Scotland have with this – and they have at times failed to recognise it – is that the ‘no’ campaign will mostly seem to ‘win’ such arguments, since they are demanding facts about the future, something that is patently impossible to provide (and Better Together know this). The alternative to the unrelenting negativity of the ‘no’ campaign cannot be unremitting optimism, however, since voters will simply regard that as naïvety. That is something that Yes Scotland have sought to avoid, with reassurances about Scotland ‘the day after’ the referendum. There is probably more they need to do in relation to thinking about the future, particularly in looking at other countries of similar size and context such as the Nordic countries (Lesley Riddoch’s Nordic Horizons does some of this; see also recent National Collective blog postings). The international context will, I think, become more important as time goes on, and offers Yes Scotland the possibility of meaningful insights into what an independent Scotland could be.

Why is all this important or of interest in the context of a project like the Critical Religion Association, which is seeking to understand categories of analysis?

It seems to me that the referendum debate offers us an insight into the interaction between categories which have a very definite end-point in the form of a referendum on 18. September 2014. Ostensibly, both the Better Together and the Yes Scotland campaigns are addressing the same issue, and yet the debate is happening in terms that mean they are effectively talking past one other:

The tendency for the British nationalists is to connect to a chauvinist nationalist identity that emphasises the place of Britain above all else. There is little recognition of what might need to change: no sense that British nationalism is a contaminated brand, or that the Scottish place in Britain is marginal, not only in relation to England, but especially in relation to the de facto city-state of London. The liberal use of the language of ‘patriotism’ and ‘pride’ and similar terms reflects an emphasis on identity based on a particular understanding of ‘tradition’ (or, as Scots might say, ‘it’s aye bin!’), rather than a future of potential and possibility. Of course, it is a truism to say that it is always harder to campaign positively for any kind of ‘no’, but whilst there is support from corporate sources for Better Together (some profoundly problematic), there simply does not appear to be a creative or inspiring hinterland underpinning the Better Together campaign, as Joyce McMillan recently noted. A negative referendum result would (in the short-term at least) almost certainly curtail any moves towards alternative possible futures for Scotland – the Westminster neo-liberal parties would see no incentive to give the devolved Scottish parliament additional powers, and the head of Better Together has made clear that is not how they see their role.
The Yes Scotland approach tends towards a constructivist perspective, one that argues for creating something by taking the steps that are necessary for that creation. What Yes Scotland and other independence campaigners want to do is ‘Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation’ (paraphrased by Alasdair Gray from Dennis Lee), or to refer to Hobsbawm again: ‘Nations do not make states and nationalisms but the other way round.’(2) Independence, in the eyes of Yes Scotland – and the various energetic and creative think-tanks and artistic movements that support independence (such as Bella Caledonia and National Collective, both, in different ways, models of creative civic engagement) – is not the end of a process, but the beginning of something new, something that allows for the creation of a state that will, ideally, be congruent with the developing national identity that Scots want to pursue, but cannot at the moment. The journalists Lesley Riddoch and Joyce McMillan have both argued in different ways that this idea of constructing a better society is what will motivate them to vote ‘yes’. In such a vision, voting for independence is not an end in and of itself, but a step on the way towards a society that more closely reflects what it is that Scots want. What the ‘yes’ supporters are aiming to excite is the imagination, in the belief that a community of people that can imagine a better future can also bring it about. This involves building on the past but not being held hostage to it, as Dominic Hinde puts it: ‘The historically rooted aspects of Scottish identity will not vanish, but they must be selectively built upon… Self determination for Scotland has the potential to be a Stunde Null, and that involves reimagining parts of the national consciousness which have no place in a modern society.’

Of course, there are chauvinists on the ‘yes’ side and constructivists on the ‘no’ side, but the overall tendencies are pretty clear. Perhaps it is the incongruence of categories of discussion here – chauvinistic essentialism vs. optimistic constructivism – that is one of the reasons why the debate itself has been characterised as negative.

Finally, in thinking about categories of analysis when considering responses to a question such as independence, we might be able to point to essentialism and constructivism as alternative approaches, but what this means for the vote itself next September is unclear: fear and chauvinism have often defeated creative and inspirational constructivist approaches – but there are also examples of the reverse happening, and I am hopeful a more positive approach will win out, and continue to work for such an outcome. Certainly, Yes Scotland’s case that the people of Scotland should decide Scotland’s future has an undeniable logic to it, and the fact that Scotland is even debating independence is met with bemusement by many outsiders. What is clear is that were it not for the common date of the referendum in 2014, many observers might struggle to realise that the two sides are even discussing the question of Scottish independence, so different are the categories with which they engage.

——

(1) Nations and Nationalism Since 1780. Programme, Myth, Reality, London, 1990, 1992: 12.
(2) ibid, 10.

The elephant in the room – religion and the peace process in Northern Ireland

10 Monday Jun 2013

Posted by Francis Stewart in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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Catholic, Critical Religion, culture, Northern Ireland, peace, Protestant, religion, violence

Since its legal inception in 1921 Northern Ireland has been plagued with violence and dispute. This blog does not provide the forum or indeed space to fully explore the myriad causes for the violence. Suffice it to say that it is a conglomeration of perceived imperial action by the UK through both military and political means, a monochromatic entrenchment of the past, cultural clashes and a severe identity crisis. Conspicuous by its absence from the list appears to be the question of ‘religion’.

Certainly when the Good Friday Agreement was created, and subsequently voted in within two referenda in both the North and South of Ireland, religion was not a factor in what was to be the proposed peace process. In fact religion is mentioned once, in the third section of the lengthy agreement under the headline of ‘human rights’. The salient part of the sentence confirms ‘the right to freedom and expression of religion’, frankly so vague as to be virtually useless given the situation it was linked with and intended to move beyond.

Inferences from this statement would seem to indicate two things, the first being that religion has no part to play within the peace process or indeed any lasting peace within the province, and second, that religion is a homogenous construct and practise within Northern Ireland. Both are significantly problematic and both will, ultimately, ensure that peace remains nothing but a cracked glass waiting for the final knock to shatter it (see also, Susan Mckay, Northern Protestants: An Unsettled People, (Blackstaff, 2006)).

Removing religion from a peace process that has in part, certainly within the media, been explained (away) as a violent, religiously-motivated conflict, seems naïve at best and disingenuous at worst. Paramilitaries on both sides of the divide frame their actions and indeed perspective through their religious understandings. Republican paramilitaries who died were given the last rites where possible and a Catholic funeral (with military overtones). Loyalists paramilitaries often utilised mottos such as ‘For God and Ulster’.

John Brewer, David Mitchell and Gerard Leavey have just released a book (Ex-combatants, Religion and Peace in Northern Ireland, London: Palgrave, 2013) that documents the role religion played in the lives of paramilitaries from both sides of the divide. It focuses on religion as a motivating factor in choosing to pick up a weapon or join a paramilitary organisation, religious experiences of imprisoned paramilitaries, and the relationship between paramilitary members and the churches.

Various religious ideologies are wrapped up in the conflict: loyalist wall murals quote Old Testament scripture, whilst Republican murals espouse New Testament ideas such as that of laying down one’s life for another in connection with the hunger strikers. The interviews by Brewer et al reveal the range of religious ideologies and personal faith that existed for paramilitary members (chapter 4 in particular). Ignoring the role of religion and the religious dimension in the conflict prevents a full understanding of what actually happened and why. By extension it prevents the development of a useful model to understand the ongoing concern of extremism within certain interpretations of Islamism.

So why is religion, and its varying interpretations, not discussed more substantially in the Good Friday Agreement, nor addressed seriously – or even included – within the ongoing peace process? Brewer posits that the answer may lie in the source of the structure of the agreement itself, that is within the field and purpose of transitional justice, which is often not amenable to religion playing a role (pp 160) as it interferes with the American cold-war triumphalism in which it was created (pp vii). I don’t disagree, but it does not provide enough of an answer.

Let’s push the idea further; perhaps its exclusion is also based on the possibility that inclusion of religion within both the reality of the conflict and the peace process would necessitate an acknowledgement that religion is significantly more important to identity construction and defence than is perhaps comfortable. Religion is intangible, difficult to understand and virtually impossible to define. Other factors that cause or contribute to conflict are significantly easier to categorise and even develop pathways to either re-route or correct or legislate for or against.

A uniform concept of ‘religion’ is in itself problematic and erroneously assumes a common understanding and agreement as to what constitutes religion. Fitzgerald has argued that the term ‘religion’ is a Western construct with a particular agenda that includes exclusionary aspects regarding what is and is not ‘religion’. It has the potential to exclude those who hold strong opinions on both ethical matters and issues of faith yet would not self-identify as ‘religious’. In other words the term ‘religion’ is both constructed and constrictive, and in a situation such as that in Northern Ireland it is arguable that the problematic nature of the term is a contributing factor to the conflict.

The tantalising question arises: if we allow for a less constrictive understanding of religion within a situation such as Northern Ireland, what possibilities for reconciliation emerge? To answer that, even partially, requires a clear framework on which to set about addressing the question of religion. Refusing any boundaries or encouraging a general relativism is just as damaging and problematic as assuming too narrow an understanding.

A framework which enables a broad critique of religion and a variety of religious understandings and approaches is a necessity. Understandings of religion in Northern Ireland are so intrinsically linked to the character of the people and the very landscape itself (not just the murals but also how cities such as Belfast are physically carved up through permanent peace lines) it is possible to overlook the place of religion outside of institutions so vocal and prominent during the conflict. A study of grassroots organic approaches to peace is called for, but it cannot be limited to one framework or approach, it must be made from a variety of different approaches and ideas. In Northern Ireland we have a saying, ‘grasp the nettle’, which means do what needs to be done – a very apt approach that studies into the peace process need to take on board with regards to the place of religion.

Re-visioning Gender in Philosophy of Religion: Reason, Love and Epistemic Locatedness

21 Thursday Mar 2013

Posted by Bashir S. in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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epistemology, feminism, gender, Pamela Sue Anderson, philosophy of religion, review

Re-visioning Gender in Philosophy of Religion: Reason, Love and Epistemic Locatedness. Ashgate, 2012.

Pamela Sue Anderson has just published her second full-length book on the feminist philosophy of religion and I would argue that it has been well worth the wait! The ruling metaphor of the book is taken directly from an essay by poet/feminist Adrienne Rich (“When We Dead Awaken,” 1971) who wrote about the necessity of ‘re-visioning’ the past. Re-visioning indicates the vital life-giving work of looking back at the traditions of the past, ‘seeing with new eyes,’ entering from a new critical – in this case, feminist – direction. Only by confronting powerful past assumptions about women contained within their styles and stories can we hope to move on from the distortions all of us – men, women, the transgendering – have suffered on the account of sexist or misogynistic structures and systems.

In this spirit of re-visioning Anderson provides us with a range of meticulously worked through examples. Feminists of course have been discussing the issues for a while – in 1998, the year in which Anderson’s first essay into this area – A Feminist Philosophy of Religion phil, Blackwells – was published, another feminist philosopher of religion, Grace Jantzen proposed her own solution – Becoming Divine, Manchester University Press – to the problem of sexist or misogynistic structures in ‘religion’ by suggesting that what women needed was a parallel concept of the feminine divine, that could contest the violent, death-obsessed stories of masculine divinity in the Christian west. Now as then Anderson resists this path on the grounds that divinity is not a free-floating concept, but one already caught up in a web or gendered interpretation. Yet for those who think the issue is ‘over and done with’ Anderson’s book shows clearly that she thinks a kind of scepticism and complacency about gender still very much exists, not the least in discussions that take place under the heading of the academic study of the philosophy of religion. It is a kind of scepticism or complacency made apparent, for example, in the words of a theologian like, T J Mawson, who claims that ‘“no sensible theist has ever thought that God really does have a gender”’ or in the view that provided one is ‘clear-headed’, patriarchal bias can be avoided (Anderson, 2012, 176). As Anderson patiently but quite relentlessly, persists “the point is to question whether ‘clear-headed’ thinking can avoid any gender-bias in the traditional philosophical arguments for Christian theism, especially when such terms as person, action and love, along with adjectives like personal, incorporeal, loving and the pronouns he, his and him are all applied to God’ (Anderson, 2012, 176). There are also many references in this book to the work of French philosopher, Michèle Le Doeuff and to her idea – the ‘philosophical imaginary’ – that whilst gender bias and sexism are not very often on display in plain sight in our civilised western society, they invariably inform the spaces behind or inbetween, where we find ‘stories about men and women, myths about divine and human, imagery and asides about male omniscience and female humility’ (205-206). In other words, the fact that someone like Mawson can afford to ignore his own ‘epistemic locatedness’ has as much to do with the philosophical imaginary that is sustaining his unacknowledged privilege as a male academic theologian – the assumption of male neutrality – as it has to do with any genuinely universal validity to his argument, philosophically interrogated.

And this is what Anderson dares to do in a field that is notoriously challenging for women, defying in a spirit of love and justice, any suggestion that women cannot be philosophers of religion or that they cannot enter and offer insight to any philosophical discussion they might choose. She is rigorous, tenacious and undaunted, equally at home with the broad traditions of analytical and continental philosophy and always ready to challenge, on reasoned grounds, the implication that ‘here at least’ there is no ‘gender issue.’ So for example, in citing a discussion held in 1999, between the ‘continental’ philosopher Jacques Derrida and the Oxford ‘analytical’ philosopher, A.W. Moore on the ineffable – already a rich and lively philosophical debate touching on knowledge, truth and the infinite – she does not dismiss the discussion but neither does she flinch from making the point that these considerable thinkers do not make reference to gender when it would be philosophically appropriate to do so:

There may be a common core concern in the variety of masculinist, feminist and other philosophical attempts to show what is ineffable. Yet when we add gender to the mix it suddenly becomes clear that values are added to the task: philosophy is called to be serious or playful, sense-making or nonsense-producing, effable or ineffable, rational or corrupt; the values of these terms and their gender seem initially arbitrary; but they matter when it comes to ethics and justice, if not a sort of truth, that is worth having. Certainly, if we follow Moore an urge to orientate our finiteness, in knowing how to be finite, exists and it seems most valuable. However, to exploit this urge, in order to establish a (more) common concern: to better orientate our finiteness, we do perhaps need to admit the gendering of our relations. (Anderson, 2012, 85-86).

Critically speaking, whatever ‘religion’ might be in this philosophical context – and Anderson recognises other kinds of assumptions about the use of the term, aside from those relating to privileges of gender – this re-visioning or rich philosophical probing of epistemic locatedness in relation to traditional so-called ‘religious’ stories about love, reason and truth, provides us with an impressive model of how to ‘come at’ the philosophical imaginary, not simply destroying or dismissing the texts and discussions of the past, but having the courage to take them on from new perspectives – and therefore being able to ‘live afresh’ (“When We Dead Awaken’’).

Performing Gender and Sexuality in Early 20th Century India

25 Monday Feb 2013

Posted by Dr Rajalakshmi Nadadur Kannan in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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Tags

dance, devadāsi, gender, Hindu, India, Karnatic, music, patriarchy, sacred, sexuality

Contemporary understandings of Karnatic Music and Bharatnatyam (also known as Indian classical music and dance, respectively) as ‘religious’ arts that represent Hinduism and Indian culture originated within a very specific historical context: the Indian nationalist movement in the 1920s colonial city of Madras; Partha Chatterjee, discussing a similar movement in Bengal, describes this as ‘Classicization’ (Nation and Its Fragments, 1997, p73). The nationalist movement in Madras was a ‘culture-defining’ project in which music and dance were carefully re-constructed by pruning specific practices and traditions to represent the ‘pure’ inner sphere of spirituality that would displace the outer sphere of colonial politics. Such re-defining of performance arts mystified music and dance performances as ‘religious’ (read: Hindu) experiences and gendered the performances by defining femininity within the politics of nationalism. According to this emerging nationalistic patriarchy, whilst the outer/’material’ world belonged to men, the inner/’spiritual’ world ‘assigned’ to women had to be protected and nurtured. The nationalist politics created a new hyper-feminine middle-class woman defined by monogamous conjugal relationships as the Hindu way of life. This woman was defined by her sexual propriety who, through her spirituality, had to maintain the cohesion of family life whilst the man succumbed to the pressures of the material world.

Discourses on women’s sexual propriety as a pivotal point of re-defining performance arts specifically targeted communities traditionally performing music and dance, the devadāsis. Devadāsi (literally: ‘Servant of God’) referred to diverse categories of women (and occasionally men) who learned and performed dance and music within diverse settings such as temples or royal courts, festivals and private ceremonies for their patrons. They lived in a matrilineal set-up within a patriarchal society in which they had the right to education and property and enjoyed a high societal status as nityasumangali (eternally auspicious). However, in the early 20th century discourses on ‘purifying’ performance arts focused on two aspects of their tradition: a) they were not bound by monogamous conjugal arrangements; these courtesans went through dedication rituals after which they entered concubinage of the king or became mistresses of their patrons; b) traditionally they performed (among others) compositions that were erotic poems portraying explicit sexual acts (usually between the hero and heroine of the poem/story). A focus on the devadāsi community, which had a historically significant presence in South India, as a symbol of immorality emerged due to a set of historical developments beginning in the mid-19th century. As court patronages diminished devadāsis moved to Madras and set up salon performances for the newly urbanized audiences, both native and European. The mid-19th century saw transformations in colonial representations of devadāsis from performers of arts (from a tradition outside of monogamous conjugal relationships) to ‘prostitutes’ who could perform dance and music. This description, ‘prostitutes’, was affirmed by a series of Anglo-Indian laws passed during the late 19th century modeled after Britain’s Contagious Diseases Act that targeted ‘prostitutes’ catering to British soldiers, and brought devadāsis under the laws. Judicial definitions, coupled with the influence of the Purity Campaign in 1880s Britain, triggered a politics of morality that resulted in a ‘devadāsi-reform’ movement, which saw devadāsis as moral deviants from whom sacred music and dance had to be rescued.

The early 20th century focus on nationalism and Hinduism, in addition to transforming perceptions of devadāsis, resulted in the movement that defined female sexuality in the public sphere by drawing distinctions between the divine and the erotic. Thus, not only was the divine redefined to indicate a nostalgic pure religious and Hindu past, but the erotic was also redefined as sexual impropriety. Reformers petitioned the government to abolish the devadāsi tradition; the movement was spearheaded by Dr. Muthulakshmi Reddy, who was born into a devadāsi family but rejected the tradition. Her movement received support from (among others) the theosophist Annie Besant and Gandhi, who argued that music and dance were sacred but had been despoiled by devadāsis who had to be rehabilitated to become respectable middle-class women bound and defined by their monogamous conjugal relationships. Despite opposition from the devadāsi community, the Devadāsi Abolition Act was passed in 1947. Devadāsis were thus banned from performing dance and music within a salon set-up.

Whilst the vacuum in the performance space left by devadāsis was being filled by middle-class Brahmin women encouraged by nationalists and organizations such as the Madras Music Academy, these spaces were also being deified. Specifically, Rukmini Devi Arundale, a prominent theosophist and protégé of Anne Besant, employed stagecraft that reified Bharatnatyam as ‘religious dance’ by conducting a series of performances where she incorporated chants of Sanskrit verses and displayed an icon of Natarāja, an incarnation of the god Shiva in his form as a cosmic dancer, thereby representing the cosmic connection between art and the divine. She introduced sets of compositions in her performances that extolled Natarāja. While the devadāsi repertoire was removed from temple settings, Arundale adopted temple settings to her performance stage through portable temple background sets, thereby deifying the performance space. In contemporary Bharatnatyam performances, the presence of Natarāja idols and temple-setting backgrounds are ubiquitous.

(In this video, The image in the background is of Shiva, of whom Natarāja is an incarnation. The song is about Natarāja.)

The history of Karnatic Music and Bharatnatyam posits a focus on (among other issues) questions of embodiment and the female body. That the female body is impure had been established in the case of devadāsis within the politics of nationalism: music and dance representing the divine, their ‘sacred’ (read: ‘Hindu’) past therefore had to remain ‘pure’. The dimension of embodiment of music and dance permitted by patriarchy represents a dichotomy between the soul and the body in which the soul is the pure inner sphere that connects the performer to the divine, whilst the body represents the material outer sphere that needs to be removed from the context. Women as custodians of this inner spiritual sphere were to learn and perform these arts, thus embodying them, but had to remove the erotic from their performances, which were seen as belonging to the sacred inner space. This solidified the understanding that ‘true religion’ was sacred and must be distinguished from the non-sacred.

Approaching contemporary Christian faith in the Western academy

12 Tuesday Feb 2013

Posted by Kat Neumann in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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Christian, Critical Religion, liturgy, religious studies, spiritualities

Our general efforts of bridging the gap between our own socio-cultural parameters in research of other faith traditions no doubt has developed its own tradition and its own ethics of interdisciplinarity. It might then be necessary to reflect on the fact that aside from phenomena such as New Age or so-called sectarian fringe groups in society, it is also important to take stock of the course taken by once dominant and normative traditions, notably the Christian churches. In many ways their practices continue to be pervasive to many formative choices in constructing a symbolic imaginary – be that consciously in affirmation or rejection, subconsciously in modi of repression, or pre-consciously, i.e. without a prior awareness that elements adopted within a socio-cultural or political symbolic have had Christian “religious” origins. This is in part what the Critical Religion project is seeking to address.

The bold declaration of a “post-Christian secular” West, as has been elaborated across various fields and disciplines, has changed the influence and public emphasis ascribed to the institution of the Church (I mean this at a conceptual level, where denominational differences merely amount to a diverging implementation of its institutional character). Heralded almost as a revolutionary struggle to destabilise the institution(s) and its (their) insidious hierarchies, secularisation ushered in an era of research in alternative forms of spirituality (itself a crucial buzz-word), that was to displace the institutional, traditional religiosity of a former age. The phrase “I’m not religious, but…”, to my mind, stems from this particular antagonism between a view of traditional Christianity as naive and ritualistic, and the emergence of a popular, deregulated “spiritual search” which aims to find a relationship to “something sacred” in life, free-from disciplinary boundaries, a peculiar form of religious diet. Our postmodern sensibilities thrive on this kind of absolved freedom that does not need to submit to the regulation of the norm, does not have to answer to the need of the many. “I’m not religious, but…” is an idiom that identifies the wish for spiritual liberation without the risk of material relationship. In other words, each to their own!, even if that means rendering personal spirituality in splendid isolation, both from society and the demands of the public, as well as ultimately from an encounter with oneself as another. ‘I positively feel, in my hideous modern way that I can’t get into touch with my mind’ (as Katherine Mansfield wrote in her Journal (ed John Middleton Murray, NY: McGraw-Hill 1964 repr., p82). There is no encounter with an o/Other, only a reflection of one’s own urge of spiritual transcendence into nothingness.

What does and what can a critical view on the Christian tradition reveal standing outside of its institutional hierarchy, if not altogether outside its disciplinary conceptions? The history connecting the two institutions, academy and church, is long, and fraught with its own struggles of independence from theology and divinity faculties. The disciplinary differentiation between, for example, theology and (what has become known as) “religious studies”, was seen to follow the trend implicit in the secularisation of the academy that would posit critical rigour and scientific validation of varying research perspectives into competition with each other. The plurality of methods in the field of religious studies amplifies the problematic (and capitalist) ideological assumptions that become apparent when researching questions of institutional power, so tangible in matters ecclesial. Whereas the former is free to identify its self-interest in the hermeneutical horizon that focalises on the church and aspects of Christian living, faith and doctrine, religious studies, in an attempt to question not only the very assumptions of what constitutes any of these elements in interaction with other socio-political and geo-economic concerns, it also has to reflect on its own validatory methods drawn from a range of fields outwith the parameters of classical theology. Thus, its perspectives often drive at a philosophy, psychology, sociology or anthropology in deconstruction of “religion”, instead of organising and constructing frameworks by which to orientate a religious ethics in view of a Christian conception of divinity.

The emphasis I put onto the ethical dimension of disciplinarity here is crucial to the way I rationalise the critical capacity and impact for research into Christian institutional life in the West at present. Ethics, with its emphasis on right relations, on the means of such relationship and the modalities of their interactions offers a sufficient model for conceptualising interdisciplinary inquiry at the level of the text and its metanarrative discourse. Not by chance did discussions on “secular theology” popularised in the works of, for example, John A. T. Robinson (Honest to God, 1963), Paul Tillich (Theology of Culture, 1964) and Dorothee Sölle (Christ the Representative, 1967) tie themselves to a discussion of the ethics of incarnation, establishing theological enquiry at the intersection between anthropology and sociology on the one hand and the political and ideological impact of the institution of doctrine on the other. Whereas philosophy of religion has paved a way for the inquiry into the role of doctrine, and much has been written within and outside of the theological faculty to consider the psychology of worship, I want to suggest that the route to situating the current state of the churches, as institutions and as instituting bodies to the life of participating believers, can be helpfully illuminated by a focus on liturgy, conceptually and practically. In its multidimensional engagement, liturgy can be understood to intersect with every aspect of Christian living, inside and outside strictly ecclesial spaces (Peter Cornehl offers an argument to this effect in Die Welt ist voll von Liturgie, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2005). To be reading liturgy outside of a strictly theological concern, I suggest, not only allows investigation of crossing points between spiritual concern and physical embodiment, between individual participation and collective identity, and between a faithful repetition and innovative response to tradition, conceptualising liturgy also allows for a critical assessment from outside the institution that it perpetuates, and invigorates. Liturgy is an invitation to shift disciplinary emphases.

REF and the changing face of Academia

21 Monday Jan 2013

Posted by Jonathan in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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impact, interdisciplinarity, REF, United Kingdom

A while back I was doing a roundtable discussion for the Religious Studies Project and during the discussion one of the participants, Kevin Whitesides, refused to be allowed to be confined to a particular “box”. As is the way of this sort of thing myself and a couple of the other participants turned this into a running joke that Kevin doesn’t wear hats. Unlike Kevin the rest of us are quite happy to wear our academic hats that mark us out as anthropologists, sociologists, phenomenologists or whatever.

I happen to like my phenomenology hat and I imagine all those that do wear hats enjoy wearing them too. In fact our hats are quite important to us, putting on a hat helps us approach our subject because contained within our hats is a wealth of background knowledge. More exactly while I’m wearing the phenomenology hat, it determines the way in which I go about studying my subject. In a similar fashion if I were to wear the sociology hat I would go about my subject in a very different fashion. Now, to talk about wearing or not wearing a hat has always had the flavour of a joke but recently Michael Marten wrote on this blog about the encroaching REF and I started thinking about the wearing of hats in a more serious fashion.

The REF is meant to develop “overall quality” profiles of various departments to assess how much funding they should be recieving and sifting through the website which is sparsely detailed you can find the criteria for assessement here. The overall profile has five levels, four stars to no stars, that will determine how much money a department is due. Stars are awared according to the “quality” of the work an institution provides. I have placed quality in scare quotes because quality is a highly subjective terms and the REF does its best to assess this in terms of the department’s “originality”, “significance” and “rigour”, another set of highly subjective terms that have no definition whatsoever on the REF website. However, these terms don’t really need definition for REF because really the quality profile is determined by three further subprofiles, all graded from four stars to no stars, entitled “Outputs”, “Impact” and “Environment”. Of these three subprofiles “Outputs” occupies a whopping 65% of the overall profile and this again repeats the terms of “originality”, “significance” and “rigour” and again there is no definition as to what is meant.

What I suspect is that “Outputs” will have very little to do with “originality”, “significance” or “rigour” at all. It’s hard to see in fact how the words connect with one another. The title of this subprofile is a quantitative word suggesting that what this subprofile is concerned with is the amount of content a department can produce in a given amount of time. This association is all the more obvious when you notice that it is “Outputs” and not “Output” which is the only plural title among the profiles and sub-profiles on REF. Yet the criteria for this subprofile are all qualitative words which puts them at odds with the quantitative overtone of the profile title. There is no such thing as an originality scale where you can number your work on a scale of one to ten, and even if you could originality is one of the most elusive qualities to be found in academic work. Speaking personally I am acutely aware that more often than not the brilliant ideas I come up with have already been had by some previous scholar. But this does not as such invalidate the work that I do and certainly some of the best work going on right now is building upon what others have already done. Not everything needs to be original in order to be good.

There is a tension between quality and quantity and its one I feel quite regularly. In another podcast I found myself quite intimidated by Carole Cusack’s take on getting a job in academia when she advocated a much higher output of material than I have so far achieved in the second year of my Phd. And having attempted to increase that level of output I’m certainly feeling the strain as various commitments have ground together as they vie for supremecy (book reviews, article publications, tutoring, Taekwondo, my job, the actual thesis itself…). As Nietzsche pointed out, a person led by many virtues will find themselves in situations where those very virtues tear them apart. REF intends to exacerbate this situation by expecting four outputs (articles) by each researcher for each of its submissions. The chances of my getting two “outputs” done by the time I finish my Phd are slim at best but that’s what REF expects. Eventually the choice will have to be made to go with either quantity or quality because I doubt very few people would be able to successfully manage both. And ironically if REF pays attention to the level of journal your “outputs” are going to then the situation becomes ever more difficult. In order to reach the four “outputs” the researcher would have to scimp on quality and thereby send their “outputs” to lower end journals only to have REF deny them because the “quality” isn’t high enough. Admittedly I should temper this by pointing out that four is the maximum “outputs” expected of a researcher for a submission. But with funding becoming scarcer and competition fiercer I wonder how long it is before four becomes the minimum.

There are signs that departments are beginning to favour quantity over quality as pointed out by Michael Marten already which is why I started off speaking about hats. What it comes down to is that in an effort to work REF and get as much money out of it as possible we are starting to take off our hats, but unlike Kevin who refused to wear a hat we are putting on a new hat. The REF hat. What I see with the emerging REF is that people are going to start to cast off our sociological, anthropological and phenomenological hats because these hats won’t gain an institution any money.

It may seem as if there is some defence against this when we look at the neat little categories that make up the 36 units of assessment. But do departments really fit into nice neat little boxes like that? Departments that straddle the nice neat units of assessment (like this one) will suddenly find themselves in danger because they don’t fit so easily. We might be called Critical Religion, but the work done here and by those departments like us covers all 36 of the REF’s units. We belong nowhere and everywhere, and even though our work can and does cover many units this is not likely to score us any points – quite the contrary. If funding is determined by unit and a department covers multiple units it is at a disadvantage because it is not clear which unit it should draw from. Could it mean that when applying for funding in one area, this will be denied because the department doesn’t match all the criteria for that unit? And the danger is that when the pressure’s great and the money’s thin we’ll allow ourselves to remove our hats and wear the REF hat as the only way to survive. But what would the cost of that really be? What sort of work can any department achieve when it is fenced into a little box with no room to manoeuvre of its own accord? Unfortunately, we may find out in 2013/2014…

Creativity, academia and Critical Religion

17 Monday Dec 2012

Posted by Michael Marten in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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commodification, Critical Religion, human resources management (HRM), impact, Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi, neoliberalism, REF, United Kingdom, university

It is widely acknowledged amongst those who still care that academia in the UK is in very serious trouble. The most infamous embodiment of the current malaise is a mechanism imposed upon universities by successive Westminster governments: a system of ‘research assessment’ driven by an ideology of neo-liberal commodification. Until 2008 it was called the Research Assessment Exercise; it now operates under the equally Orwellian name of the Research Excellence Framework (REF). Readers fortunate enough to be unfamiliar with the blight that is the REF may need an explanation: universities submit publications by their scholars to subject-oriented panels of academics, who will assess their relative ‘excellence’, awarding them scores from 1-4 to indicate just how ‘excellent’ they really are. An accompanying ‘environment’ narrative describing how wonderful these scholars’ departments are is also assessed, as are so-called ‘impact studies’ (the devising of specious measurements of the supposed ‘impact’ of academic work upon non-academics, an idea that barely works in the classical sciences, never mind the humanities). From all this, an overall score for the department will be given. That score, in turn, will determine the funding that the state gives each university, though perversely, the exact methodology for that decision has not (yet) been made public. Of course, many academics and most university bureaucrats have strong vested interests in these outcomes.

The broader ramifications of the REF are apparent in numerous contexts, long before the REF submission deadline at the end of 2013. Most universities appear to have appointed yet more managers, directors and deputy principals whose primary responsibility is to maximise their institution’s overall score for the REF. It goes without saying that many of these people are on salaries that far exceed those of the academics they are supposed to be ‘helping’. Varying levels of competency, transparency and accountability characterise such institutional engagement, as conversations with almost any UK academic will verify. The REF and its implementation corrodes the UK academic environment on all levels: for example, Phil Davis shows how citation records are being falsified in order to improve the supposed relevance of texts.

One of the most important elements of academic thinking to suffer in this context is interdisciplinarity. The REF’s structures barely cope with scholars who cross traditional disciplinary boundaries, such as those working in Critical Religion. A quick look through the list of scholars involved in the CRA highlights the nature of the boundaries issue: literature, gender, law, postcolonial studies, art, history, politics, philosophy, music, and a raft of other disciplinary descriptors feature prominently. Critical Religion is in substantial part about questioning the boundaries and categories that are seen to exist in different contexts, and related to that, to interrogate the power relations underpinning these categories – who benefits from categorisations and whose position is strengthened by maintaining them? Whether this be about interrogating ‘politics’ (e.g. here) or ‘gender’ (e.g. here) or ‘interreligious issues’ (e.g. here or here), there are innumerable categories that cannot simply be maintained in their present form without distorting the nature of human relationships. This thinking has its origins in ‘religious studies’, but perhaps the Critical Religion Association should have been called the Critical Categories Association!

These crossings form an integral part of the creative process. I have written here before on interdisciplinarity: it often involves a kind of creative thinking that needs a certain kind of space to be available. No scholar I know can squeeze meaningful engagement with their research into half-an-hour between lectures. Creativity needs a different kind of space, a space that may well lead, for example, to a loss of a sense of time or awareness of one’s immediate surroundings. In my own writing, I sometimes find myself working through the night on a chapter or an essay, not realising that I have completed 8 or 10 hours of intensive work – and outside it is becoming daylight again. These creative periods can lead to substantial leaps forward that push in some way at previous understandings, giving birth to new ideas or imagining new ways of interpreting old problems. As I have argued on my personal site, academic creativity is not substantially different to creativity in other contexts, though the forms it takes may differ. Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi calls this ‘flow’ – the creative energy that enables us to engage our creativity to the full:

As Czikszentmihalyi explains, entering a state of creative ecstasy presupposes certain training and experience. In an academic context, the degree pattern – undergraduate, taught postgraduate, and doctorate – is a way of developing this experience. Creativity, however, also needs more than just technical prowess, precisely because transgressing boundaries requires imagination: after all, the boundaries that we are seeking to overcome are frequently ossified and maintained (whether consciously or unconsciously) by vested interests.

The REF directly hinders this creativity, as do the endless funding applications we are expected to pursue (given the ridiculously low success rates, they’re largely pointless), the mindless form-filling for TRAC, and so on (Ross McKibbin eloquently describes some of the other manifestations of commodifying academia). These are mechanisms ‘human resources’ management (HRM) deploys in order to control the transgressive creativity of academic research. After all, although the REF ostensibly encourages ‘international level’ creativity that HRM desperately seeks to control, the REF’s regimentation of research activity maps onto HRM’s aims. Hindering interdisciplinarity, requiring endless completion of ‘accountability’ exercises, and rewarding only certain kinds of work… all minimise the spaces needed for ‘flow’ – or even kill them off altogether.

And yet these things will not last: as David Jasper once remarked, we may one day be remembered for writing an important book, but we will not be remembered for our funding applications. As the REF deadline draws ever nearer and overpaid managers exercise ever more unwanted pressure on academics, I sincerely hope that mechanisms of solidarity, perhaps through the union or the CDBU etc., can enable resistance to these attempts at commodification to flourish. If we care about our universities, we need to resist, not least by constantly reaffirming that the preservation of creative ‘flow’ leading to boundary transgressions are the things that really matter. In so doing, we may yet manage to subvert the rampant managerialism that is destroying higher education.

(I would be interested in comments that discuss more specific ways in which this might happen…)

——-

Warm thanks to Jason Theaker (photographer and academic at Bradford University, who sent me the video link in relation to a discussion about this image and text), and to Alison Jasper and Richard Roberts for helpful comments on a draft text).

Critical Religion and Female Genius

10 Monday Dec 2012

Posted by Bashir S. in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

≈ 1 Comment

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Christian, Critical Religion, female genius, feminism, patriarchy, religion, secular

What are some of the implications of the discussion of critical religion for feminist and gender theory making?

If part of the rationale for critical religion is to explain the ways in which the terms ‘religious’ and ‘religion’ frame and perpetuate forms of colonialist or western-centred thinking and acting in the world, then there is a clear connection: the nature of colonial discourse and the manner of its practices, have commonly been aligned with forms of Christian theological authority, carried in wide ranging missionary activity throughout the world. The gendered binaries of spiritual/material or spirit/flesh, derived from or supported by Christian theologies, still haunt us in the tendency to regard women and the female as better fitted for certain roles that tend to be less well rewarded in terms of money and influence. Recent analyses of the colonial subject/other strongly resonate with feminist and gender analyses of the hegemonic, patriarchal subject/other; woman like the non-westerner continues to be viewed as hostile, constantly in need of control or repression as they threaten the structures and boundaries that colonial, heteropatriarchal societies set up to maintain their privilege and security. The force of male normativity, often still difficult to detect, continues to hinder and hamper attempts to level the playing field.

In this context, it seems that a sizeable proportion of western feminists have also found the binary categories of ‘religion’ and ‘the secular’ – i.e. what is critiqued within discussions of ‘critical religion’ – useful, on the grounds that it allows women to dissociate themselves from powerful ‘religious’ – i.e. arbitrary – justifications of male authority. In a hopeful manner, they have put their faith in the autonomous exercise of reason that produced this distinction at the beginning of the European enlightenment, because here at least in the realm of so called ‘secularity’ they believe there is some chance of proving themselves the equal of men.

But of course forms of hegemony are resilient and deeply rooted. Even when the idea of a divine warrant for female culpability – and thus for the blameworthiness and moral inferiority of all women as daughters of Eve – began to lose its hold on the popular imaginary, there were still plenty of other ways to challenge a woman’s free access to what might be called equitable female subjectivity. In my book, Because of Beauvoir, I look, for example, at the notion of ‘genius’ as one way in which the idea of male superiority has been sustained from the earliest years of European Romanticism right down to the 2010 Channel 4 series, Genius of Britain. In this series about key British scientific figures, four male and one female commentator – physicist, Kathy Sykes – present the ‘genius of Britain’ in relation to a series of exclusively male figures: Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke. Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, and Edmond Halley. The fact that such an obvious gender imbalance provoked little if any disquiet at the time – are there really no British women in the field of science worthy of the title, ‘genius’? – seems significantly to support my argument; male hegemony cannot be neatly isolated within so-called ‘religious’ entities like ‘the Christian Churches.’

At the same time, is it just or fair to represent all women who call themselves Christians, for example, as either victims of, or collaborators with patriarchy? In my book I focus on four women writers, who might qualify as female geniuses all of whom have strong connections with English Christianity; drawing on ideas proposed by Julia Kristeva and Christine Battersby amongst others, that our western idea of ‘genius’ has been overwhelmingly gendered as male in the past and that this needs to change. Kristeva boldly claims that the achievement of an equitable subjectivity within the context of an unavoidable male hegemony, is itself a matter of genius. She herself nominates three notable women – philosopher, Hannah Arendt, psychoanalyst, Melanie Klein and writer, Colette – but her definition of genius in each case, stresses the sense in which they bring their creative ideas and actions to birth without denying those things that make them female – pre-eminently in the value they apportioned to the desire and embodiment of the non hegemonic fe/male which are discounted in definition by the male.

In other words, this redefinition of genius, opens the title up to a much increased range of women and forms of creative activity by going beyond the disembodied and god-like, and frequently also melancholic and isolated configuration of towering masculine genius, whose work contributes to a normatively male culture and economy; it can include both women scientists working with mixed gender teams and women giving birth to children and educating them. And of course, it can include women who are inspired as visionaries as well as by revolutionary or highly critical movements of all kinds. What comes into being as a result of this female genius can have just as profound an impact for one person or many of different genders, but more significantly, it is, above all, the joyous achievement of forms of female subjectivity in unpromising circumstances that are not usefully divided up and evaluated as either ‘secular’ or ‘religious’.

Blurring the boundaries – punk rock and religion

03 Monday Dec 2012

Posted by Francis Stewart in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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Charles Taylor, Critical Religion, Dan Laughey, faith, Gordon Lynch, John Storey, punk rock, religion, spiritualities

Ever walked into a music shop? What do you find? Shelves or boxes – depending upon your predilection for large stores or small independents – which are labelled with the music ‘type’ found within. Metal, jazz, country, rock, pop, opera, classical and everything in-between. Why? On the simple premise that it makes it easier to find the type of music you want and so increase the likelihood of expenditure on your part. What is the danger of presenting music in this manner? It makes discovery much harder and exploration much less likely. You go straight to the genre you like, find what you want, have a quick look around for anything else in that genre and then head straight to the tills. Potentially missing out on undiscovered gems in other genres, classics that influenced the music you liked or even simply misfiled music.

Rock and roll has always inspired tribalism, the music genres being one manifestation of this. On a larger scale there were the mods versus the rockers, the bikers versus the hippies and the punks versus basically everything and anything! Despite its love and promotion of various notions of anarchy, punk itself is replete with labels. Terms such as crusty punk, surfer punk, skater punk, street punk, hardcore punk, 77 punk, and straight edge punk and so on are rife. Why? To delineate borders, to define identities, and to attempt to create order and control in a world which can all too easily be wrested from them by profit focused companies. What is the danger of presenting identity in this manner? It assumes that identity, behaviour and presentation is rigid and definable, it assumes a shared understanding and therefore tradition of these identity labels, it creates a necessary ‘other’ within a subculture and finally it actually results in co-option and control being easier to obtain for large companies.

Identities are not static, but fluid as cultural theorists John Storey and Dan Laughey and sociologist of religion Gordon Lynch have argued. The boundaries between cultural and/or subcultural affiliation have become significantly less rigid and defined. It is now quite common, almost expected, that individuals will merge one or more – sometimes disparate – identities within their overall sense of self. The multi-faceted sense of self and identity formation is partly a feature of the consumerist, choice based West, partly a feature of the rise in significance of the self/individual and partly as a result of globalisation.

This has forced a re-think on what do we mean, understand and intend in utilising terms such as ‘world religions’, ‘religion’, ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’. In conducting my own interviews amongst straight edge punks in the UK and the USA (2009 – 2011) the issue of what we mean by these terms was repeatedly raised, discussed in depth and featured prominently in graffiti, tattoos, flyers and band imagery.

As much as punks utilise labels they are carefully chosen and carry a deep significance. Each denotes an important political or musical derivation that enables deviance and recognition in addition to the more negative connotations outlined above. For example, surfer punk was the term attached to the punks who came from the Huntington Beach area of Orange Country and were involved with the sport. It denoted the difficulty and danger of surfing that particular area of the California coast. The ultra-aggressive stance of these punks demonstrated this new culture of physical extremism, which they rode as one would a wave. Would the same careful labelling be applied to terms and concepts such as ‘religion’?

Overwhelmingly, a sharp distinction was expressed by between ‘religion’ and ‘faith’ (UK) or ‘spirituality’ (USA). This is perhaps unsurprising given punks’ stance of rejection of tradition – both real and imagined – in favour of creating something new. ‘Religion’ was applied when interviewees were referring to traditional religious institutions, texts, authority figures and evangelising individuals. In contrast ‘faith’ and ‘spirituality’ were used to describe the individual believer(s), specific practises which did not fall under one religion or another, personal beliefs and really interestingly, punk rock itself!

Punk clubs were spoken of as sacred spaces and attendees got agitated with those whose behaviour desecrated that, in their opinion, or disrespected it. Bands, specific musicians and other individuals important to the local scenes were spoken of with reverence and defended vehemently. Punk rock itself became a form of desacralised salvation for many interviewees. A form of salvation that is essentially a secular yet sacred good that has both personal and collective benefits and ramifications. A result of refusing a strong delineation between sacred and profane, religious (or spiritual) and secular; it relies on muddying the waters so to speak, blurring the boundaries.

Naturally punks would not achieve this in isolation, it is not even a stated goal of theirs. Instead they are feeding off and into a long history in the West which Charles Taylor identifies as moving from a position of belief in a specific god being the only option to a belief in any god (or none at all) as one option among many. The individual becomes the centre rather than a divine being or a numinous spirituality. Concurrently society has continuously removed authority from the divine or the ineffable and simultaneously wrested it from the hands of the institutions that function under the auspices of the divine, placing it instead in secular institutions and communities.

Consequently religion as the interviewed punks define it – practices, rituals, authority figures and to an extent ideology, can no longer be assumed to be succinctly definable or corralled into a specific notion. Instead we now face a vast range of human practices which are overlapping and do not function as religious or secular solely or discreetly. And so much like a growing subculture or indeed music shop, we have to ask, are new labels now needed, or can we do away with labels once and for all? The punk ethos of “question everything, accept nothing” seems somewhat apt here!

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Laughey Dan. Music and Youth Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006

Lynch Gordon. After Religion. London: Darton-Longman-Todd, 2002

Storey John. An Introduction to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture. Essex: Prentice Hall / Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1997

Taylor Charles. A Secular Age. Harvard: Belknap Press, 2007

The Critical Religion Association

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Category Archives: University of Stirling

Critical Politics

Chauvinism and constructivism in contemporary Scotland

The elephant in the room – religion and the peace process in Northern Ireland

Re-visioning Gender in Philosophy of Religion: Reason, Love and Epistemic Locatedness

Performing Gender and Sexuality in Early 20th Century India

Approaching contemporary Christian faith in the Western academy

REF and the changing face of Academia

Creativity, academia and Critical Religion

Critical Religion and Female Genius

Blurring the boundaries – punk rock and religion