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Sitaram · Site Admin Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 1079

Date: Mon Apr 7, 2003 5:43 am
Subject: Religion and Postmodernism

http://www.sulekha.com/chpost.asp...ilosophy&show=0&cid=53523

http://www.zeal.com/category/manage.jhtml?cid=555652&rpc=2

(visit above url and click on Essays and Criticisms)

Let me give you the example of Californian culture where the person--
though ethnically European, African, Asian, or Hispanic--searches for
authentic or "rooted" religious experience by dabbling in a variety
of religious traditions.

The foundation of authenticity has been overturned as the relativism
of collage has set in. We see a pattern in the arts and everyday
spiritual life away from universal standards into an atmosphere of
multidimentionality and complexity, and most importantly--the
dissolving of distinctions.

(see below)
===========

What is postmodernism?

Firstly, postmodernism was a movement in architecture that rejected
the modernist, avant garde, passion for the new. Modernism is here
understood in art and architecture as the project of rejecting
tradition in favour of going "where no man has gone before" or
better: to create forms for no other purpose than novelty. Modernism
was an exploration of possibilities and a perpetual search for
uniqueness and its cognate--individuality. Modernism's valorization
of the new was rejected by architectural postmodernism in the 50's
and 60's for conservative reasons. They wanted to maintain elements
of modern utility while returning to the reassuring classical forms
of the past. The result of this was an ironic brick-a-brack or
collage approach to construction that combines several traditional
styles into one structure. As collage, meaning is found in
combinations of already created patterns.

Following this, the modern romantic image of the lone creative artist
was abandoned for the playful technician (perhaps computer hacker)
who could retrieve and recombine creations from the past--data alone
becomes necessary. This synthetic approach has been taken up, in a
politically radical way, by the visual, musical,and literary arts
where collage is used to startle viewers into reflection upon the
meaning of reproduction. Here, pop-art reflects culture (American).

Let me give you the example of Californian culture where the person--
though ethnically European, African, Asian, or Hispanic--searches for
authentic or "rooted" religious experience by dabbling in a variety
of religious traditions.

The foundation of authenticity has been overturned as the relativism
of collage has set in. We see a pattern in the arts and everyday
spiritual life away from universal standards into an atmosphere of
multidimentionality and complexity, and most importantly--the
dissolving of distinctions. In sum, we could simplistically outline
this movement in historical terms:

1. premodernism: Original meaning is possessed by authority (for
example, the Catholic Church). The individual is dominated by
tradition.

2. modernism: The enlightenment-humanist rejection of tradition and
authority in favour of reason and natural science. This is founded
upon the assumption of the autonomous individual as the sole source
of meaning and truth--the Cartesian cogito. Progress and novelty are
valorized within a linear conception of history--a history of
a "real" world that becomes increasingly real or objectified. One
could view this as a Protestant mode of consciousness.

3. postmodernism: A rejection of the sovereign autonomous individual
with an emphasis upon anarchic collective, anonymous experience.
Collage, diversity, the mystically unrepresentable, Dionysian passion
are the foci of attention. Most importantly we see the dissolution of
distinctions, the merging of subject and object, self and other. This
is a sarcastic playful parody of western modernity and the "John
Wayne" individual and a radical, anarchist rejection of all attempts
to define, reify or re-present the human subject.

Lately, everyone has been talking about postmodernism. Many of its
proponents see it as a liberating force in academia. For them,
postmodernism is expected to rescue us from the stifling rationality,
logocentrism, and Eurocentrism of whatever is supposed to have come
before it. But postmodernism also has many opponents. They see it as
the ungrateful enfant terrible of the Western intellectual tradition.
It is destructive, relativistic, nihilistic, and worst of all, it is
trendy. My aim here is to provide a short and inevitably overly-
simplistic summary of postmodernism. My approach will be generally
sympathetic - in part, because I agree with a lot of postmodernism's
contentions; but also because I think its many opponents have too
hastily dismissed it.

So what is postmodernism? Well, this is an incredibly difficult
question because in many ways the term postmodernism is a misnomer.
Many intellectuals who have been labelled postmodernists refuse to
accept the label. And even among those who accept it, there is a
great diversity in approach. Given this, there are at least two ways,
I think, of approaching the question what is postmodernism?" The
first is a very anti-postmodern way of approaching the problem, and
that is to trace its historical development. The other way is to look
for a common philosophical (or anti-philosophical) thread among the
thinkers who are referred to loosely as postmodernists. I am going to
try to do both.

A Genealogy of Postmodernism

Because many postmodern thinkers are French, some have looked for its
origins in events such as the Algerian War of Independence or the May
1968 student protests in Paris which led to a mini-revolution in the
nation as a whole. Although these events were important to many
postmodernists, I think we can see a profound disenchantment with
modernism (and its conviction to reason, rationalism, scientism,
objectivity and progress) much earlier in Western history - beginning
with the works of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche.

Rather than discussing Nietzsche, which would be difficult and time-
consuming, I have decided to quote a passage from Thus Spoke
Zarathustra which I think conveys the flavour of his anti-modernism:

"What urges you on and arouses your ardour, you wisest of men, do you
call it `will to truth'? Will to the conceivability of all being:
that is what I call your will! You first want to make all being
conceivable: for, with a healthy mistrust, you doubt whether it is in
fact conceivable. But it must bend and accommodate itself to you!
Thus will your will have it. It must become smooth and subject to the
mind as the mind's mirror and reflection. That is your entire will,
you wisest men; it is a will to power; and that is so even when you
talk of good and evil and of the assessment of values. You want to
create the world before which you can kneel: this is your ultimate
hope and intoxication."

The next important individual in this ad hoc genealogy of
postmodernism is Martin Heidegger. His work is a continuation of
Nietzsche's attack on the certainty of modernism:

"...thinking begins only when we have come to know that reason,
glorified for centuries, is the most stiff-necked adversary of
thought."

Michel Foucault is next. And once again, I'll quote a poignant
passage rather than discuss his work at length:

"We must see our rituals for what they are: completely arbitrary
things, tired of games and irony, it is good to be dirty and bearded,
to have long hair, to look like a girl when one is a boy (and vice
versa); one must put "in play", show up, transform, and reverse the
systems which quietly order us about. As far as I am concerned, that
is what I try to do in my work."

The last individual is perhaps the culmination and the epitome of
postmodernism. He is Jacques Derrida. Much of his writing is
virtually indecipherable, and meant to be so. This is because his aim
is to demonstrate the dynamic and endless play of meaning in
language. Hopefully the following quote is somewhat comprehensible:

"Metaphysics - the white mythology which reassembles and reflects the
culture of the West: the white man takes his own mythology, Indo-
European mythology, his own 'logos', that is, the 'mythos' of his
idiom, for the universal form of that he must still wish to call
Reason."

Derrida has also been called a poststructuralist. Although some
consider postmodernism and poststructuralism to be synonymous, there
is, I think, one obvious difference between them. Postmodernism is a
reaction against the rationalism, scientism and objectivity of
modernism. Poststructuralism, on the other hand, is a reaction
against structuralism which claims that there are universal
structures of language, and that these structures are ultimately the
determining factors in life and thought. In Derrida, these two
movements overlap resulting in a repudiation of much of the Western
intellectual tradition.

In my opinion, these four "prophets of extremity" - to use Alan
Megill's phrase - have led the attack against modernism, and have
inspired many current postmodernists. Now this genealogy may have
given us some remote sense of the roots of postmodernism, but it
tells us little about postmodernism itself. For this we will have to
look for a common thread in the works of postmodern authors.

The Common Thread

In my opinion, the common thread between those who are loosely
labelled postmodernists - from Nietzsche up to Derrida and also
including current postmodernists such as Jean Baudrillard, Jean-
Francois Lyotard, Gayatri Spivak and Julia Kristeva - is a radical
anti-essentialism or anti-foundationalism. By this I mean that they
deny essences, natures, and any other universals which place a
grounded and constant meaning on existence. Thus, from a
postmodernist perspective, there are no transcendent, transhistorical
or transcultural grounds for interpretation.

The radical anti-essentialism of postmodernists leads them to
criticize concepts and erase distinctions with which modernists are
comfortable. I will outline a few of these here. Where necessary I
will refer to the writings of Michel Foucault because I am more
familiar with his work than with the works of other postmodernists.

The first concept that falls in the wake of anti-essentialism is the
idea of human nature, or what some postmodernists refer to as the
transcendental subject. In the discipline of history, for instance,
we assume that human beings are in some ways the same now as they
were in the past. We also assume that people in different cultures
are similar to people in our culture. This assumption allows us to
study history and have some faith that our claims about the motives
and actions of people in the past are correct.

Postmodernists argue, however, that there is nothing necessarily
essential about human beings. To assume this only reduces the
otherness, the uniqueness, and the singularity of individuals. For
postmodernists, the world should be imagined as radically
heterogeneous; the past as radically different from the present; and
all cultures as radically different from one another.

Next, postmodernists dissolve the distinction between fact and
fiction. For them, there is no necessary relationship between words
and things, signifier and signified, subject and object. Thus a
discourse which claims to be describing reality, such as history, has
no greater relationship to its referent than fiction. Both history
and fictional narratives are substitutes for reality rather than good
copies and bad copies of it. This is the basis for the following
claim by Michel Foucault: "I am well aware that I have never written
anything but fictions. I do not mean to go so far as to say that
fictions are beyond the truth. It seems to me that it is possible to
make fiction work inside of truth."

A fundamental category in history, I think, is the concept of the
event. It is supposed to refer to the particularity of historical
occurrences. Postmodernists argue, however, that the use of the term
event only reduces the singularity of actual events to a generality.
And since there is nothing essential about events that link them to
each other, the idea of the event is in fact a worthless concept.
Foucault refers to the term event as a "phantasm" which hovers over a
heterogeneous jumble of occurrences; it is an effect of meaning that
is not identifiable with anything in the actual event.

There are many other concepts that dissolve under the anti-
essentialist analysis of postmodernists. The point, however, is that
postmodernists are suspicious of essences and natures. This, in my
opinion, is what makes their enterprise distinctive.

Conclusion

Many have complained that postmodernism falls into nihilism - making
all philosophical (and historical) claims worthless before they are
said. Others complain that postmodernism eliminates epistemological
and ethical foundations. But in my opinion, these criticisms miss the
point. Postmodernists, to my knowledge, do not maintain that
decisions on epistemological and ethical issues are not valuable or
that they are futile. They simply remove the necessity of foundations
and the necessity of choosing one position over another, allowing us
the freedom to construct our own positions. But perhaps the burden of
freedom is something not all of us are willing to bear.

A quote from Foucault:

"The movement by which, not without effort and uncertainty, dreams
and illusion, one detaches oneself from what is accepted as true and
seeks other rules -- that is philosophy. The displacement and
transformation of frameworks of thinking, the changing of received
values and all the work that has been done to think otherwise, to do
something else, to become other than what one is -- that too is
philosophy.... It is understandable that some people should weep over
the present void and hanker instead, in the world of ideas, after a
little monarchy. But those who for once in their lives have found a
new tone, a new way of looking, a new way of doing, those people, I
believe, will never feel the need to lament that the world is error,
that history is filled with people of no consequence, and that it is
time for others to keep quiet so that at last the sound of their
disapproval may be heard."

Four Characteristics of Postmodernity

The postmodern era can best be understood in terms of four major
characteristics: the decline of the West, the legitimation crisis,
the intellectual marketplace, and the process of deconstruction.(12)
Indeed, we can say that these four characteristics define the meaning
of postmodernity.

The first of these characteristics of postmodernity is the decline of
the West. Western philosophy has reached the impasse of linguistic
analysis, Western art is lost in the realm of abstraction, and
Western science is suffocating on its own pollution. Western
democratic political theory is being challenged by both Neo-
Confucianism and Islam, communism has all but collapsed into chaos,
and Western religion is caught between the horns of a dilemma with
secularism on the left and personal piety on the right.

The modern worldview was shaped by the Western assumptions of the
inevitability of progress, the invincibility of science, the
desirability of democracy, and the unquestioned rights of the
individual. It was assumed that "West is best" and that all other
cultures of the world would eventually adopt Western values which
would, with the passage of time, become universal. There was a built-
in cultural superiority on the part of the West which assumed that
development was a never-ending process. All this has changed,
and "the certitude of yesteryear is now at best ridiculed as naivety,
at worst castigated as ethnocentric."(13)

This new perspective is being elaborated through a rewriting of the
history of the so-called modern period. Socio-political theologies
such as liberation theology from Latin America and minjung theology
from Korea, homeland theology from Taiwan, and the theology of
struggle from the Philippines, are challenging the official histories
of the past and their accompanying theologies. This clash of
histories was brought to a powerful expression during the five-
hundred-year anniversary celebration of the "discovery" of the
Americas by Christopher Columbus.(14) It has become obvious that the
modernity of the West meant the eclipse and destruction of other
cultures. Today there is an attempt to recover the fragmented remains
of these cultures as well as make certain that Western cultural
hegemony comes to an end.

The second characteristic of postmodernity is what has come to be
known as the legitimation crisis. So-called metanarratives, which in
the past were accepted as authoritative, are now being seriously
called into question. One such example is the metanarrative of
unlimited development, which has been delegitimated, or deprived of
its authoritative acceptance, by a number of factors. These factors
include environmental pollution, the depletion of natural resources,
fear of global warming and increasing depletion of the ozone layer,
serious accidents at facilities such as chemical factories and
nuclear power plants, increased poverty in much of the world because
of unequal development, and the observation that developed nations
seem to reach an optimum point in development at which economic
decline sets in and the overall quality of life begins to
deteriorate. In the postmodern era it is no longer taken for granted
that development is unlimited or even that certain kinds of
development are necessarily good.(15)

On what is perhaps a more personal level, within Western society the
metanarrative of the Judeo-Christian sexual ethic has been
delegitimated. There was a time not many years ago when chastity
before marriage was accepted as a given. To be sure, there were those
who did not always live up to that ideal, but virtually everyone
accepted it as the ideal. College professors now report that there
are students who do not even know the meaning of the words abstinence
and chastity, to say nothing of the sexual ethic underlying these
terms.(16) Sexual activity prior to marriage, living together without
being married, and alternatives to traditional marriage such as gay
and lesbian relationships are so common in contemporary Western
culture that most people accept this new situation as a given.

The legitimation crisis reaches into virtually every area of
contemporary life. When previously held metanarratives are deprived
of their authority, what follows is a plurality of values. With no
universally held values there is no way that any one particular value
system can be universally legitimized and accepted. The result is a
pluralism of values and value systems with each competing against the
others. Furthermore, even within a given cultural value system there
may not be enough moral and political support to ensure legitimation.
In Western culture this has resulted in a fragmentation of society
into special interest groups based on ethnicity, religion, and
economic issues. This fragmentation has paralyzed the political
process, destroyed the idea of the common good, and given rise to
intense competition for increasingly smaller pieces of the political
and economic pie. Significantly, this same fragmentation is taking
place in the mainline denominations and in contemporary theology.(17)

The third characteristic of postmodernity is known as the
intellectual marketplace. In the past, cultural and religious
knowledge and value was effectively controlled by the intellectual
and political elite. Parents controlled their children, teachers
controlled their students, clergy controlled their parishioners,
politicians controlled the citizens, and so on. Knowledge was power,
and therefore the diffusion of knowledge was strictly
controlled. 'Those who were responsible for the diffusion of
knowledge often underwent years of specialized education and training
and had to pass an examination of their peers before they were
allowed to become practitioners of their particular speciality.

With postmodernity, however, comes a momentous change; no longer can
cultural and religious knowledge and value be effectively controlled
by the intellectual and political elite. Satellite television
networks, computers, and fax machines have made both censorship and
control obsolete. The "wiring" of all these technologies into vast
networks including telephones and videocassette recorders only serves
to enhance the significance of this marketplace. The so-called
information superhighway is changing the way knowledge and value are
diffused throughout society. In the United States it is not at all
uncommon to be able to receive fifty television channels into one's
home via cable TV. These channels cover a range from regular network
programming to education, twenty-four hour news and weather, sports,
entertainment, music videos, religious programming, children's and
family programming, twenty-four hour movies, sexually explicit films,
home shopping, and coverage of government meetings. Satellite
television is even more influential throughout the rest of the world.
Within Asia, for example, there are now very few places that do not
receive Star TV from Hong Kong, NHK from Tokyo, and CNN from Atlanta.
There are radio and television stations that broadcast in many
different languages targeting various immigrant groups. Here in Korea
one can choose a satellite television service based upon linguistic
preference -- English, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, French, and
German. The mass media have made available to the peoples of the
world a vast marketplace of ideas, values, and products. Even in the
most isolated areas of the world, one finds VCRs operating on car
batteries or solar power, and satellite dishes in the most unlikely
places.

The widespread use of computers has further enhanced this free
diffusion of knowledge and value. Through the Internet and other
computer networks one can access virtually every possible form of
knowledge and value that is available. All one needs is a computer, a
modem, and the right software; one does not have to be a member of
the intellectual and political elite.
But who is to control religious knowledge and value? Televangelists
challenge the theology of the mainline churches. MTV and pornography
in cyberspace challenge traditional moral values. Videos watched in
the privacy of one's own home challenge the values of polite, public
society. Information gleaned from the computer networks challenges
the culturally and religiously sanctioned view of things as presented
by one's teachers. We live in an intellectual -- and spiritual --
marketplace.(18)

A fourth characteristic of postmodernity is what has come to be known
as the process of deconstruction. Deconstruction is exactly what the
meaning of the word implies; it is the taking apart of texts somewhat
like the process of peeling away the layers of an onion. It is an
intentional process. In the words of Jacques Derrida: "Why engage in
a work of deconstruction, rather than leave things the way they are,
etc.? Nothing here without a show of force somewhere. Deconstruction,
I have insisted, is not neutral. It intervenes."(19) It is a way of
delegitimating the standard, accepted meaning of texts, a method
which goes straight to the heart of traditional understandings of
authority.

Deconstruction seeks to examine a text from all possible perspectives
so that individual bits of information are extracted and separated
from each other. Michael Foucault calls these bits of information
episteme:

By episteme, we mean the total set of relations that unite, at a
given period, the discursive practices that give rise to
epistemological figures, sciences, and possible formulated
systems. . . The episteme is not a form of knowledge. . . . or type
of rationality which, crossing the boundaries of the most varied
sciences, manifests the sovereign unity of a subject, a spirit, a
period; it is the totality of relations that can be discovered, for a
given period, between the sciences when one analyses them at the
level of discursive regularities.(20)

What this means is that every text at any given period of time is
conditioned by a network or web of relations that in turn affects the
meaning of that text. Therefore a tenet has no "once and for all
time" meaning. Thus "deconstruction categorically asserts the
absolute impossibility of attributing to any text one single ultimate
meaning."(21)

Obviously, deconstruction has profound implications for theology,
since "objective truth is to be replaced by hermeneutic truth."(22)
This means that sacred texts, such as the Bible, do not have a single
ultimate meaning nor are such texts necessarily authoritative.
Indeed, the network or web of relations outside the text may
determine both the meaning of the text and the nature of its
authority. An example of this in the Presbyterian-Reformed tradition
is the controversy surrounding sexual ethics and the ways in which
different positions have been supported through interpretation of the
biblical text. A traditional reading of the text and a postmodern
deconstruction of the text will result in vastly different
interpretations.(23)

There are undoubtedly other characteristics of postmodernity that
could be mentioned, but the decline of the West, the legitimation
crisis, the intellectual marketplace, and the process of
deconstruction can be identified as so characteristic of the time in
which we live that postmodernity is a socio-cultural state of being.

Taken together, these four characteristics result in a world of
almost unlimited pluralism but provide us with no way of evaluating
this plurality of ideas, values, and products. As the sociologist
Zygmunt Bauman says:

The main feature ascribed to "postmodernity" is the permanent and
irreducible pluralism of cultures, communal traditions,
ideologies, "forms of life" or "language games". . . . or awareness
and recognition of such pluralism. Things which are plural in the
postmodern world cannot be arranged in an evolutionary sequence, or
be seen as each other's inferior or superior stages; neither can they
be classified as "right" or "wrong" solutions to common problems. No
knowledge can be assessed outside the context of the culture,
tradition, language game, etc. which makes it possible and endows it
with meaning. Hence no criteria of validation are available which
could be themselves justified "out of context." Without universal
standards, the problem of the postmodern world is not how to
globalize superior culture, but how to secure communication and
mutual understanding between cultures.(

Constructive Postmodernism: Continuity and Change

Social and intellectual transformation is not unlike reading a text.
Tradition always operates as a prejudgment in our reading of the
present/ed moment. We adopt some critical lenses through which to
interpret the present/ed structures and projected possibilities of
some better future. Whatever change does occur is also always
continuous with the past (see MacIntyre, 1990). Though a tradition
can be the repository of much thoughtlessness and harm, a tradition
is never simply all bad. Nor is the dream of a utopic and
epistemological break with the past ever really so immaculately
conceived, as indicated by the real history of political and
intellectual revolutions.

We have taken the metaphor of a house with a foundations upon which
are built the superstructures of rooms. Modernist theory asserts that
there exists a universal base upon which critical theory can be
founded. Postmodernist theory asserts that there are many foundations
and that those foundations that are unfamiliar may be most helpful to
the architect-builder.

To build a house takes a long time. To deconstruct a house takes only
a few reckless hours. Often deconstruction is a necessary part of
restoring the old and building the new, but it would be irresponsible
to use only the one tool of deconstruction or for that matter to
ignore it. The critique of religion and science with the explosive
tools of deconstruction does helps to prevent the idolatrous equation
of the partial with the divine. The modernist hubris of both
fundamentalist science and fundamentalist religion needs such
critique, but to totally reject and destroy the positive functions of
tradition would also be social, intellectual, and moral suicide.

In the science and religion classroom, postmodernism provides many
new insights and bridges for relating faith and reason in a dynamic
interface. I prefer, however, to talk of "constructive
postmodernism," because it is an invitation to engage in the creative
and productive intellectual and moral labors of relating science and
religion with the hope that good can be accomplished, knowing that
such labors must also fail.

Jesus of Nazareth told his disciples some two thousand years ago: "In
my Father's house there are many dwelling places" (John 14:2). To
build a great city on a hill will require many different laborers and
many different foundations. With a combination of insights, like the
blind men describing the elephant in the Jainist-Buddhist myth, we
might gain a fuller understanding of science, society, self, and the
sacred as we build a better city and a brighter future upon our many
foundations.

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