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Invisible Episteme

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Invisible Episteme View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by UC Research Repository IINNVVIISSIIBBLLEE EEPPIISSTTEEMMEE THE MIRRORS AND STRING OF MODERNITY AMBA MORTON (B.A. HONS) SCHOOL OF SOCIAL AND POLITICAL SCIENCES UNIVERSITY OF CANTERBURY SUBMITTED FOR A MASTER OF ARTS RELIGIOUS STUDIES 2011 ―The classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less here is essayed.‖ Moby Dick, Herman Melville, 1851.1 1 Herman Melville, "Moby Dick," ([Google Books], 1851), 131. CONTENTS Acknowledgements Abstract Introduction 1 Part 1: Methodology 21 Mediology 22 Epistemology 31 Part II: Definitions 46 Modernity 47 Secularity 56 Part III: Exorcisms 67 Banishing Spirits, Deposing Gods 68 Witches, Heresy, and Law 91 Pagan ‗Others‘ 103 The Birth of the Mind 122 Part IV: Conclusions 137 Secular Modernity 138 Mediating the Third 153 Bibliography 163 Acknowledgements Thanks are owed most especially to my supervisor, Dr Michael Grimshaw, for your unwavering tenacity, critical insight, and for encouraging me to „think‟; to the University of Canterbury and BRCSS for awarding the scholarships that funded this research; to my friends and family for their ongoing encouragement, love, and patience; and to Andrew Sepie, for your humour, counsel, proof-reading, endless cups of coffee, and for reminding me always that everything is possible. ABSTRACT This thesis is an interrogation into the epistemological structures which underpin modernity, the project and claim which has come to significantly shape the contemporary world. Following a line of inquiry which analyses the intersections between knowledge, power, and history, this paper examines how signifiers such as religion and culture have come to designate ‗otherness‘ in the context of modernity. The assignment of such terms to beliefs, values, worldviews, and ideologies that are not readily assimilated by the epistemological framework of modernity is problematised as a central obstacle to mediating social and political difficulties in modern contexts. The argument is that the issue of ‗what counts for knowledge‘ has been progressively ‗closed‘ through particular historical processes in which the shift from a societal model based upon Judeo-Christian tenets, to secular modernity, has been rendered invisible. The ‗other‘ has, through these processes, become twice-removed from epistemological validity: in the first instance, as the ‗pagan‘ other in early Christian contexts; in the second instance, as the ‗religious‘ or ‗cultural‘ other within a secular that is falsely claimed to have been liberated from its theological roots. These epistemological marginalisations impact significantly on social life, especially in the areas of education and medicine. The invisibility of the shift from Christianity to secular modernity is also perpetuated by the separation of social life and knowledge production into distinct ‗spheres‘, as mirrored by the arrangement of disciplinary spheres established within the modern universities. The conclusion is that a transdisciplinary space is therefore required to engage philosophically and critically with the now internalised Christian bias of modernity. P a g e | 1 INTRODUCTION ―It is always a thankless and awkward task to introduce ideas using notions from which one intends to be set free.‖ Media Manifestos, Régis Debray, 1996.2 Modernity is a story about how things should be – a utopian negotiation between order and chaos presented variously as an ideal, a claim, a project, an ideology, an age; a regulative politics that could, from the perspective of seventeenth century Europeans, be widely, if violently, distributed to all for the betterment of humankind. This has proved to be a compelling narrative; one fraught with hopes and dangers (or their alter egos – science, techné, ethnicity, and religion), and with a happy ending in which the heroes of progress, democracy, and reason will save the day. However, it‘s a hungry story too: obeisance to this story is epidemic, viral; even chemotherapeutic. The project of modernity involves replacement, and demands compliance. What once was imposed through colonialism and disseminated with the promises of better, richer, softer, warmer, ‗Western dreams‘3 now enjoys streamlined delivery via the speed and flourish of globalisation. Increased modernisation4 – the inevitable outcome of the implementation of such an ideology – is a total package, internal to which is an epistemological structure with central tenets that are, historically speaking, at least four hundred years old. To briefly signal the argument herein, it is precisely the invisibility of this episteme that appears to be at the centre of 2 Régis Debray, Media Manifestos : On the Technological Transmission of Cultural Forms (London; New York, 1996), 7. 3 As to the origin of the idea of the „West‟, Le Goff writes: “...the notion of Europe was set in opposition to that of Asia and, more generally, the East. The „„West‟‟ may thus sometimes designate a territory that essentially constitutes that of Europe. The West was... strengthened by Christendom being split between the Byzantine Empire and Latin Christendom, the two corresponding, respectively, to an Eastern empire and a Western one. This was the major division bequeathed by the Middle Ages. Since the demise of the Roman Empire, it had been magnified by the split, at once linguistic, religious, and political, between an eastern and a western Europe. The 'western' nature of Latin Christian Europe, which lies at the origin of present-day Europe, was further accentuated by a theory that certain Christian intellectuals developed in the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries... that power and civilization had shifted from the east to the west... [The] westward march of civilization certainly encouraged a belief in the superiority of western European culture among many Europeans in subsequent centuries." Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Europe, The Making of Europe (Malden, MA, 2005), 4-5. 4 As sociologist Shmuel Eisenstadt has pointed out, classical theories of modernisation as promoted by Marx, Durkheim, Weber, and the like, “...assumed, even if only implicitly, that the cultural program as it developed in modern Europe and the basic institutional constellations that emerged there would ultimately take over in all modernizing and modern societies; with the expansion of modernity, they would prevail throughout the world.” He notes that a multiplicity of „unique expressions of modernity‟ (which he calls „multiple modernities‟), have been observed instead. Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, 'Multiple Modernities,' Daedalus, vol. 129: 1 (2000), 2. P a g e | 2 many of the difficulties associated with ‗the modern world‘. Yet modernity itself is not a common term, and the entanglement of history and power relations manifested through claims made in its name so often remain hidden: the ‗citizens of modernity‘ are perhaps dissatisfied, but unaware. This is an issue of power and knowledge: where the former emits from, how it is maintained, and what counts for the latter. In the words of Dean MacCannell, there is a restless and persistent ―...belief that somewhere, only not right here, not right now, perhaps just over there someplace, in another country, in another life-style, in another social class, perhaps, there is a genuine society.‖5 The dream is that somewhere, all objections to the black-skinned, white-skinned, cultured, gendered, gay, politically radical, mentally ‗ill‘, spiritually ‗different‘, and religious bodies have been suspended in a utopian hope of radical (yet still financially ‗convenient‘ – nobody likes to suffer) equality – the best of everything and everyone; the ultimate ‗overcoming‘ of violence and oppression as the world becomes egalitarian and harmonious… rather similar to the fantasy of multiculturalism pictured in Jehovah‘s Witnesses literature.6 The desire for a lost ‗golden age‘ appears to possess remarkable cross-cultural consistency, but this is illusory: it reliant upon a dislocation that is both spatial and temporal, which makes it Judeo-Christian – or more accurately, based upon a set of older cultural ideas which eventually codified into what is now collectively known as Judeo-Christian7 – the 5 Dean MacCannell, The Tourist : A New Theory of the Leisure Class, new ed. (USA, 1999), 155. 6 For example, consider the following anecdote: “A few weeks ago I was shovelling out my driveway when a young African American man approached me. I instantly recognized him as an evangelist coming to save me. He first handed me a pamphlet with a painting of a beautiful paradisiacal landscape, and everyone in the picture was smiling and having a wonderful and wholesome time. There are what looks to be an Asian mother and daughter petting a bear near a berry bush, a Latino family petting an African lion, an African man and woman, as well as a white boy carrying food. This is all set in an idyllic landscape with farmlands and mountains in the background. And, of course it is a splendid fall day. Everyone is smiling. I have seen pictures like this one, and they give me a feeling of intense uneasiness simply because, in my experience, people should stay away from African lions and bears (especially around berry bushes), and people who are delirious happy for no apparent reason make me nervous. But what really made me mad was the title of the painting, „Life in a Peaceful NEW WORLD.‟ The image that the young man gave me I will label a fantasy of multiculturalism. The reason it made me mad was that it was an image in which the challenge of diversity which has constituted the New World is stripped out of life. It is a very polite, cleaned-up fiction which we in the history of religions might jokingly refer to as the „take a Buddhist to lunch‟ notion of religious plurality.” Philip P. Arnold, 'Sacred Landscapes and Global Religion: Reflections on the Significance of Indigenous Religions for University Culture,' in Religion and Global Culture : New Terrain in the Study of Religion and the Work of Charles H. Long, ed. Jennifer I. M. Reid (New York; Oxford, 2003), 43.
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