The Resurgence of Religion and the Religion of Capitalism

Wendy Brown presents

Finally, after three days of exhilarating and sophisticated theorizing that had up to that point skirted the issue of religion, Wendy Brown was revealed. Her excellent presentation entitled, "The Religion of Capitalism," was a complex close reading of Marx that sought to redeem Marx for the contemporary world by explaining the seemingly unexpected ‘resurgence’ of religiosity. However, her analysis was also somewhat concerning for the manner in which she retains terminologies and definitions of religion used by Marx, that contain lingering sentiments of a colonial past that used the irrational religiosity of the native ‘other’ as a justification for enslavement, subjugation and genocide.

Brown introduced Marx’s thoughts on religion through his idea that the critique of religion is a prerequisite for all critique. Quite expertly she explored what he meant by this and offered three possible ways of understanding this idea. Firstly, she suggested that he may have meant that the critique of religion must precede all other critique. Alternatively, she continued, he may have meant that all the varying aspects of human life contain some form of religiosity which needs to be exposed in order to advance. Finally she offers the alternative that he may simply have been suggesting that a critique of religion reveals a lot about human nature. It is through this nuanced reading of Marx that Brown suggests his redemption from accusations of him as a secularist, to which I will later return.

But what did Marx understand by religion? In order to address this, Brown draws first on Feurbach whom she describes as an inspiration for Marx’s thought. According to Feurbach, the human is the only species that is conscious of the existence of the entire species. However the human is only capable of experiencing the individual. This ability of persons to only experience the individual while being conscious and in many ways dependent on the entire species results in a crisis which is then projected onto God.

Following Feurbach, Brown describes Marx's conception of religion as a sensuous experience that is a result of human alienation which precipitates into the projection of human capacities and potentialities onto the image of the other, namely God. Marx therefore accepts religiosity as a real experience while at the same time identifying its emergence in the human consciousness as a result of a reactionary response to alienation.

For Marx this definition of religion appears as one of the central points in his critique of capitalism. As Brown describes, Marx observes how capitalism, despite claiming to be a secularizing force that lays bare the world, continues to alienate those excluded from the promise of wealth and prosperity. This alienating effect, results in a lingering of religiosity that takes on new forms in terms of the divinity of money, and the fetishisation of commodities.

According to Marx “man” makes God, and God makes “man.” Similarly in a critique of capitalism, humans make commodities, which in turn make humans, and the world. Therefore, according to Marx the fetishisation of commodities represents the inherently religious aspect of capitalism in that there is a disjunction between the place of production and the place of exchange which distorts and mystifies the origin, production and value of commodities in a similar manner to the way in which the "mist enveloped regions of the religious world" distort and mystify the nature of God.

It is from this lingering religiosity of capitalism that Brown was able to bring the analysis forward to the 21st century in order to analyze the effects of neo-liberalism as an alienating force that results in the resurgence of religiosity. In doing so she offered an example of a numerology cult that that appeared in Thailand after the arrival of neo-liberal capitalism destroyed the agricultural economy, literally impoverishing those who previously relied on that sector. The result she describes was mass urbanization, which in the face of unemployment was accompanied by the increased proliferation of the lottery industry as individuals excluded from the promise of neo-liberal employment and prosperity turned towards the religious-like hope in the lottery as a means of salvation. Places where the politics of revolution have been replaced by the politics of the holy ghost.

In an analysis of Browns presentation I would like to present a few questions. The first concerns the need to situate the definitions of religion as presented by Marx and Feurbach in their political and social contexts. This is something that Brown herself touches on when she draws on Taylor, Asad and Masazuwa in their analysis of secularism as far from universal in that it is a product of the specific, situated modality of the subject, namely the late 20th century European. Particularly, she acknowledges that these analyses of secularism have identified it as a formation that associated reason and modernity with Christianity while relegating all other religious traditions to the realm of the irrational. Importantly, Brown avoids this categorization of Marx through her re-conceptualisation of his attitude towards religion. In his defence, she contends that Marx’s concern with religious consciousness, in his critique of capitalism places him outside of subtractionist thought, partly because he identifies the lingering remains of religion as continuous and partly from her re-reading of Marx’s attitude towards religion that she argues is a nuance thus far overlooked.

However, I would contend that this situated consideration of Marx is unavoidable since the tendency of European modernity to associate Christianity with rational reason while relegating all 'others' to the realm of the irrational is far from innocent. Turning to the south, the work of David Chidester is of critical importance. In a variety of his work, Chidester explores and exposes how the conflation of European modernity with Christianity and reason by scholars, missionaries and colonial authorities, was repeatedly used as a means of dehumanizing the irrational, savage, barbarian 'other' in the desire for conquest, subjugation and plunder. Particularly relevant to this discussion is how the study of fetishism, thought to be the religious worship of inanimate objects by primitive natives, was used by anthropologists and colonial authorities (sometimes in dual roles) in order to understand the colonized native as an archaic, pre-modern formulation of human development, who was by implication susceptible to capture, subjugation and murder.

Returning to Marx we have to consider that his concern with religion was that its lingering effects are integral to the alienating effects of capitalism. Religion in Marx's argument appears in order to make a statement about the manner in which the workings of capitalism serve to continue the alienating causes of religiosity that it claims to eradicate through its message of secularism. Religion is used as a negative analysis of how capitalism turns the German proletariat into an irrational group of alienated individuals yearning for the promise of prosperity, analytically inseparable from the manner in which the irrational 'other' yearns for the promise of heaven.

Therefore, when anthropologists choose to focus on the worlds most impoverished and immiserated exteriors as sites for the resurgence of religion, they risk retaining a particular sentiment of condescendence towards religion and the religious. However rather than presenting a binary between the rational, Christian, European, and the irrational, savage other this condescendence is more subtle. Here a position of condescendence is established between a rational, modern, secular, academic, middle class subject and the poor, impoverished, excluded ‘other’. This condescending analysis that continues to treat religion as the irrational result of the alienating effects of capitalism, runs the risk of once more sidelining the question of religion and religiosity that the ‘resurgence’ of religion has brought to the surface.

An interesting example of the varied nature of religion in the contemporary world can be found in the work of Vali Nasr, appropriately entitled "Meccanomics." Nasr offers a pertinent example of a prosperous, capitalist yet conservative and religious industrial elite in the Anatolian regions of Turkey that have arisen to prominence from the booming textile and manufacturing industry in the area. Interestingly for this discussion, Nasr explains how this rising elite has embraced a revival of religion that is particularly ritualistic and austere yet prosperous and liberal in its economic and political inclinations.

A theory of religious revival in the contemporary world that draws on peculiarly western, colonial constructs of religion risks alienating the 'other' through the continuance of condescending binaries between the rational secular and the irrational other. Brown, through her excellent presentation, therefore reminds us to think carefully about the nature and substance of religion and religiosity and to think more broadly about theories that may explain the varied instances and conditions where religion remains an important aspect of people’s lives.

Shaheed Tayob

Writing the Ordinary

Harry Garuba presenting

Our session on the 13^th afternoon, featuring Meg Samuelson, Harry Garuba, and Laetitia Zecchini, was arguably the most literary of the JWTC sessions. Harry and Meg focused primarily on the novel, while Laetitia discussed the ordinary in poetry. Meg argued that the novel offers the theorisation of everyday lived reality, particularly in a mode of reading which views literary texts as offering novel ways of seeing. The South African novel, Meg argued, has sought to embed itself in the ordinary as a mark of its South Africanness, beginning with the first South African novel, Olive Schreiner’s 1883 The Story of an African Farm [http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1441]. Such an embrace of the ordinary operated as an attempt to inscribe South Africa as a lived place, and not merely as an exotic backdrop. Within South African literary criticism, two major debates around ordinariness can be dated to the 1980s and to the last decade, corresponding roughly to major socio-political developments. Writing in 1984, Njabulo Ndebele’s essay, “The Rediscovery of the Ordinary” [http://www.jstor.org/stable/2636740 ], advanced the writing of the ordinary as a way of reclaiming political and epistemological agency in black South African thought. In 2003, in contrast, Neville Alexander’s book An Ordinary Country argued that the post-apartheid era had transformed contemporary South Africa into an ordinary country, no longer a moral or political exception but a nation like so many others, subject to the rule of neoliberal capital. This ordinariness is then signalled in the South African novel’s turning outwards: its discussion of other places whose conditions relate to the ordinariness of life here.

Harry Garuba also discussed Ndebele’s essay, pairing it however with debates from the other side of the Atlantic. For Harry, literary modernity arrived with an investment in the ordinary, with the novel operating as the genre which invested in the ordinary, particularly through realism. The ordinary in black critical thought, however, has been deployed not as the ordinary of realism and of journalism but rather as the ordinary of the everyday, the ordinary of lived experience in situations of racial oppression and exploitation. In such circumstances, the ordinary becomes a resource which can be mobilized as a resource for social change, an argument made forcefully by James Baldwin in the 1949 “Everybody’s Protest Novel” [eng794spring2010.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/baldwinprotest.pdf ] and the 1951 “Many Thousands Gone” [http://www.dcgogo.com/jamesbaldwin.html]. In a society of the image and spectacle, the representation of the ordinary tends towards a condition of impossibility. Consequently, Harry noted, black critical thought has deployed the ordinary in perverse or at least counter-intuitive ways. The ordinary for Baldwin, for instance, is understood to hold a complex fruit which mere realism cannot capture. In this vision, the ordinary resides in art, and art is the key to unlocking the ordinary.

For Laetitia Zecchini, drawing on Victor Shklovsky’s “Art as Technique,” the purpose of art is the salvaging of the ordinary from readymade forms. In the work of poets like Arun Kolatkar, the ordinary thus becomes a residual space wherein creation and realism can both take place. This idea of the relationship between the ordinary and poetry is deeply indebted to the legacies of modernism and surrealism, evidenced for instance in Georges Perec’s discussion of “The Infra-Ordinary” [http://www.daytodaydata.com/georgesperec.html ]

In the hopes of continuing our conversation in this arena, I will enumerate some of the questions we discussed:

• The ordinary can be understood as the self-evident, the commonsensical, the banal: that which is so unremarkable that it need not be said. Does this mean, however, that the ordinary tends towards the impossibility of its representation?
• How can we understand the position of the literary with respect to ordinary life? How might critical theory within literary studies consider seriously the vast array of storytelling practices which occur outside of the form of the novel? How might the study of the literary benefit from attention to non-fiction and oral forms?
• Attending to fiction enables us to attend to the relations among knowledge, imagination, and everyday lived realities, and, in addition, to the powers of language as such. This has resulted historically in a particularly significant role for literary theory in critical theory as a whole. How might we understand that special relationship between literary studies and critical theory today? Does this special role still hold after the end, as it were, of the linguistic turn?

My own inclinations regarding the ordinary in literary studies have centred less around the writing of the ordinary – its inscription or mobilisation in literary forms – than in something we might term ordinary reading. Such an examination of the ordinary through literary studies would necessitate, I suspect, greater attention to the ways in which unremarkable books are read by unremarkable people, whether in book clubs, in bedrooms, or in commuter transit, usually involving neither the favoured authors of literary studies nor the favoured techniques of academic reading. Ordinary reading is part of our inhabitation in mass culture, a space of literary practice which is mostly unremarked-upon but perhaps not unremarkable. Attending to ordinary reading, however, would take us beyond disciplinary boundaries, requiring, for instance, a nuanced theory of how people from a variety of linguistic and educational backgrounds interact with written materials. Such a project would transgress literary studies’ investment in singularity, necessitating a combined attention to the banality of literacy and the exceptionality of the literary.

Madhumita Lahiri

Traffic in words // breaking silence

If I say to you, “I am struck”, as in, “I am struck by the way we speak”, what kind of speech act would I be embroiling you in? Mostly, I want to say (and the very fact of my desire signals my failure), I am struck dumb. How could I possibly SAY this? What locutionary force could possibly be present in an act that cancels itself by its utterance? Entirely infelicitous, you would say.

This is precisely my predicament. And it is my predicament because I suffer it alone, I should properly say. My silence, my inability not just to express my thoughts (as if thinking were ever a purely interior experience, which I’ve never felt to be true), but to contribute generously to the collective conversation, I experience as a meanness on my part. (And if my silence is now marked by the recent outpouring of words concerning the necessary silence of white South Africans, I can do nothing about that except try to register my sense that MY silence is not that silence, that those words miss the mark – miss my mark).

And my mark, my aim, is to register some sense of the conversation, its qualities, textures, tones, excesses, brevities, of the JWTC this year. If the critical question of conversation is one of HOW we enter into it, how we enter the right words, transmit them, receive them, roll in them, then I want to say it should be, must be, mutual. Mutuality, after all, was staked as the vital source of redeeming the human from capital’s tendency to make waste human life – if I can retrieve Achille’s generous thought of 2009. What then of hesitation, accent, tone, unfinished thinking? What then of listening? Of performatively making hearing the critical question of conversation? What then of the question of voice and ear, rather than, or as well as, or alongside, eye and image? Commodity and spectacle and politics routed through image and screen contra voice, register, ear?

I am struck. The speech act again, but not just by accent and style and the profusion of words that trample, strike, drown, but by the queasy discomfort with thinking the ordinary, the everyday. I register the blow in the viscera. How much talk on the limit of the ordinary has turned on the capacities of the various parts of the body amenable to thinking? Those parts seem to stretch at the limit of metaphor, of metaphoricity, precisely because we want to resist the ordinary senses in which we speak with and from those capacities. We want them to perform extraordinarily, perhaps because we’re disappointed with the work they’ve done in the history of philosophy. But beneath, or alongside, our talk of the senses, in particular the eye and the skin in framing image and surface as concepts that labour across domains of thought and local instantiations, we have spoken of the psychoanalytics of teeth and power, of the political economy of evisceration, of the pulse of the archive, of the dialectics of tangibility (and striking and stroking). And yet we want not to take this kind of talk too seriously, as it were, for fear of being simple-minded, of taking it too literally, of missing some profundity. In this regard I am reminded of Stanley Cavell’s response to Derrida’s reading of Austin, in particular of Austin’s criticism of philosophy’s craven desire for profundity. Without developing fully the lines of thought I would otherwise want to, and putting aside the question of “ordinary language” (or at least our telling avoidance of the question of the ordinary as having something to do with fragility of the everyday, that is, the threat of our words missing their mark, of our saying more and less than we meant to, of our failing to recognise ourselves, or our world falling out from underneath our feet, as a condition of life not simply or entirely assimilable to a set of political, economic, psychic, or historical forces), I am tickled, as it were, by a week’s worth of sophisticated words and eloquent theories of the ordinary. We have battled with the question of what it is to enter into the mutuality of thought entirely implicitly – and thus regrettably. Big words up front about not doing Northern performance (by which we were meant to understand something like “showing off for the sake of appearing intelligent”), and self-reminders about “theorising from the South”.

I wager, here and now, late in the day though it is, that something of the form of conversation as we find it here in southern Africa would be useful as a mode through we might seek both theory and mutuality. It is a form that seeks to afford respect as much it seeks to garner it; it greets, enquires, affirms, honours, invites, circles, pauses, waits, deliberates, deflects, returns, and much more. Without descending to the order of proper or clean language, such a form, it seems to me, proceeds, can only proceed, because of some quiet acknowledgement of the capacity of these very words of ours for repudiation, failure, insult, or misdirection. Perhaps those meadows of communication* we all long for must remain just beyond our grasp, ever obscured by scepticism and its irritations. Or perhaps we relax into minor ordinariness.

* See Cavell, The Claim of Reason, p. 172.

Thomas Cousins, graduate student, Department of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University