The Postmodern Sacred
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The Postmodern Sacred Popular Culture Spirituality in the Genres of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Fantastic Horror Em McAvan BA (Honours) Curtin University This thesis is submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Murdoch University, August 2007. Declaration I declare that this thesis is my own account of my research and contains as its main content work which has not previously been submitted for a degree at any tertiary educational institution. __________________________ Acknowledgements My thanks to Vijay Mishra and Wendy Parkins for their supervision, my friends and family for their support and encouragement, and to Candy Robinson for everything else. Contents Introduction 1 Chapter One 17 The Postmodern Sacred Chapter Two 60 ‘Something Up There’: Transcendental Gesturing in New Age influenced texts Chapter Three 96 Of Gods and Monsters: Literalising Metaphor in the Postmodern Sacred Chapter Four 140 That Dangerous Supplement: Christianity and the New Age in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings Chapter Five 171 Good, Evil and All That Stuff: Morality and Meta-Narrative in the Postmodern Sacred Chapter Six 214 Nostalgia and the Sacredness of “Real” Experience in Postmodernity Conclusion 253 Bibliography 259 1 Introduction The Return of the Religious and the Postmodern Sacred God is no longer dead. When Nietzsche famously declared his death toward the end of the 19th century, it seemed possible, even inevitable, that God and religion would die under the rationalist atheist onslaught. That, however, was not to be the case. Religion and “spirituality” have survived the atheist challenge, albeit profoundly changed. Although there are a number of contributing factors, the revival of the religious in the West has occurred partly as a result of the postmodernist collapse of the scientific meta-narratives that made atheism so powerful. The postmodern critique of Enlightenment universalism (of which, more in the first chapter) has had the unexpected result of fuelling the resurgence of some forms of religion. The critiques of religion made by such modern luminaries as Nietzsche, Marx and Freud have been found to be “also perspectives, also constructions or fictions of grammar” (Caputo, 2001: 59). Postmodern writers have critiqued modern universalisms as contingent, historically produced and arbitrary, but they are unsurprisingly also often aware of the contingency of their own positions. Significant too, the postmodern respect for tolerance and diversity (however limited or facile this may be in practice) has meant that atheist dismissals of religion as “superstition” have become problematic to make, considering that postmodern subjects are unable to make recourse to some universal truth claim. Definitive statements like “there is no God” come off suspiciously like the dogmatic statements of the Christianity of old. Concurrently, the postmodern skepticism towards scientific meta-narratives has meant the growth of all sorts of pseudo-science and New Age medical and psychological 2 practices. The apparent return of religion and/or pseudo-science are both unexpected considering the antipathy towards traditional religion by feminism and gay liberation, as well as the Marxist roots of the liberal Left, yet it emerges in part as a way of finding more female and queer friendly forms of spiritual practice. In practice, this respect for diversity is arguably oriented more towards the individualised practices of New Age “spirituality” than towards Christianity or Judaism (Islam arguably represents a rather different case post September 11), however God figures and Christian symbols are nevertheless pervasive through-out popular culture. The return of the religious has been in two forms therefore, the rise of so-called fundamentalisms in the established faiths—Christian, Jewish, Muslim—and the rise of New Age style spirituality.i It is in the interplay between traditional religions and New Age-ised spirituality that the stream of spiritual popular culture that I call the postmodern sacred finds itself. The question I ask, therefore, is how does the sacred appear in the postmodern media? Clearly after September 11, religion has become an ever-more vital, and contested, part of culture here in Australia, and indeed across the world. The aftermath of September 11, however, has not been a re-assessment of what legitimately constitutes the domain of the religious or the spiritual (and these two are not necessarily one and the same), but rather, the political implications that stem from religious belief. Debates over abortion, gay marriage, terror legislation, Israeli settlements, Middle East policy and so on are inflected with religious beliefs and practices, yet these debates all take religious positions as given. The terms shift depending on context, but all have a marked tendency to take religious beliefs as unified positions, static and fixed traditions—becoming, variously, religious/secular, Christianity/Islam, Judaism/Islam, East/West, and so on. This is, I should add, a 3 presumption not only of atheistic disdain towards religion (as outmoded for example), but one also made by religious adherents themselves, advocating their eternal, fixed truths. What I would like to do here is complicate the matter substantially, by pointing out how secular and profane are always-already entangled within one another. I use popular culture as an entry point, an entry point that can presume neither belief nor unbelief in its audiences. In particular, I shall chiefly use explicitly unreal texts, texts in the science fiction, fantasy and fantastic horror genres. All of these, I argue refract religious symbols and ideas through a postmodernist sensibility, with little regard for the demands of “real world” epistemology. The argument Chapter One traces the broad outlines of what I call the postmodern sacred, a strain of spiritually inflected unreal texts that have been remarkably central to the popular culture of the last decade or so. I begin by discussing the traditional sacred as analysed by such scholars of religion as Mircea Eliade and Rudolph Otto. This establishes the continuities and discontinuities the postmodern sacred has with the traditions it draws on. I analyse the postmodern turn by engaging with three of the most influential theories of postmodernity—Jean-Francois Lyotard’s idea of the collapse of the meta-narrative, Jean Baudrillard’s ideas about hyper-reality and simulation, and Fredric Jameson’s theory that postmodern art is a theory of pastiche. I argue that the postmodern sacred exemplify those three theorists’ work in different ways. As a consequence of the postmodern turn, it is an individualised, consumerist approach to spirituality, pastiching together religious symbols into unreal texts. Given that texts like Lord of the Rings and The Matrix have been some of the most 4 successful of the last decade, this appearance of spirituality in the midst of popular culture is an important cultural development. Chapter Two analyses the New Age usage of what I call transcendental signifier. Modifying Jacques Derrida’s notion of the transcendental signified, I argue that New Age influenced popular culture gestures to the transcendental as a way of signifying a spirituality distinguished from the monotheistic Jewish and Christian traditions. I argue that the transcendental signifier is reliant on a New Age approach to subjectivity—one that individualises and detraditionalises spiritual experience. I analyse the use of the transcendental signifier in such texts as Dead Like Me and The X-Files. In Chapter Three I discuss the literalisation of metaphor in the postmodern sacred—the appearance of gods, monsters, heavens and hells. I argue that the special effects of contemporary visual culture makes the supernatural a visceral experience, a process that makes the sign appear almost corporeal. Paradoxically however, that process produces a hyper-reality that makes the postmodern world highly unreal. I analyse corporeal gods and monsters in such texts as Stargate SG:1, Futurama, and Constantine. I suggest that the corporeal gods may in fact be a way of staging belief safely in a secondary world, without entailing the need for real-world belief and practice. In Chapter Four I analyse the key text of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. I discuss the relationship between Tolkien’s text and Biblical motifs such as apocalypse, sacramentality and Christ figures. I argue however, that the postmodern reception of Peter Jackson’s recent film adaptations has re-written the Lord of the Rings as a New Age style text as much as a Christian. I argue then that the postmodern sacred is marked by a supplementary relationship between Christianity 5 and the New Age, that these two elements both add to and replace each other’s presence in texts. In Chapter Five I discuss the apparent return of the meta-narrative after September 11. I argue that the “return of the real” discourse raised after September 11 disguises its own hidden postmodern positions, that September 11 merely provides a convenient pre-text around which to hang an already existent conservative “backlash” to the postmodern identity politics of feminism, anti-racism and gay liberation movements. I argue that whilst the postmodern sacred appears to present heroic narratives that would confirm the “return of the real” argument these are often diffused into the pleasures of postmodern textuality. I discuss a number of texts in this chapter—the anti-postmodern heroes of The Matrix and Harry Potter, and the direct responses