The (Im)Possible Grasp of Networked Realities: Disclosing Gregory Bateson’s Work for the Study of Technology

In a world that is becoming more ‘networked’ than ever, especially on the personal-everyday level—with for example digital media pervading our lives and the Internet of Things now being on the rise—we need to increasingly account for ‘networked realities’. But are we as human beings actually well-equipped enough, epistemologically speaking, to do so? Multiple approaches within the philosophy of technology suggest our usage of technologies to be in the first instance oriented towards efficiency and the achievement of goals. We thereby neglect the actual systemic, networked nature of technology, or its wider impacts. With regard to the pressing issue of how to cross the ‘gap’ between these two ‘modes,’ the paper at hand engages with the work of Gregory Bateson, reading him as a philosopher of technology. Bateson’s notions of “conscious purpose” and “learning” offer excellent tools to understand our predicament of living in a networked world but being partly unable to sufficiently grasp and come to terms with this situation. Moreover, as the article endeavors to demonstrate, Bateson’s thought is to be cast as a crucial addition to the body of theory being developed in the philosophy of technology.     

Blasphemous Thoughts

Abstract

The sacred, from the Latin sacer, originally meant both blessed and accursed. This article begins by remembering the intolerable qualities of the sacred as it is imagined, figured and mythed in Western culture. It is then argued that within Western culture there is a significant difference and unresolvable tension between ‘the sacred’ and ‘religion’ — a tension/difference strangely akin to that between the semiotic and the symbolic as theorized by Julia Kristeva. It seems that one of the functions of religions-as-institutions is precisely to control, tame, and make more manageable the sacred. In practice this means controlling sexual, sensual bodies — especially those bodies most closely associated with messy physicality and bloody corporeality.     

For the Love of God: Finding Support in the Church-Community: a Case Study from China

Abstract

Based on fieldwork in a Protestant church in Guangzhou, this article discusses the emergence of a new collective in urban China: the church-community. Offering various tangible and intangible forms of support, the church attracts people for various reasons, but especially those who have been left most vulnerable by the socio-economic transformations. Churchgoers form a spiritual and physical community through ritual practice and good deeds that are conceived of as ‘free gifts’. This community is importantly defined as a realm outside both ‘traditional’ notions of reciprocity and China's present-day consumer ideology. It thus provides believers with an alternative source or realm of moral authority as well as a sense of security.     

Post/Human Conditions

Abstract

Perhaps one of the most pressing issues for the twenty-first century will be the impact of new technologies on our experiences and understandings of what it means to be human. For many commentators, this signals the advent of the ‘posthuman condition’, in which digital technologies will have the capacity to reconfigure our conceptions of space and time; cybernetic devices will enhance and augment bodies and minds; and genetic modification will challenge the fixity of ‘human nature’ at the most fundamental level. This article examines some of the most influential discourses—from science, ethics and popular culture—that promise to shape the choices and values determining how such technologies will be used, and to what ends. Closer analysis reveals a multiplicity of visions of ‘posthuman conditions’, however, informed by a diversity of philosophical, ethical, political — and theological—understandings of what it means to be human in an age of technology; and this article proposes the terminology of ‘post/human’ as a critical device designed to alert us to the choices and values inherent in our engagement with our tools and technologies. The article concludes by advancing some themes by which a deeper theological critique of the post/human might be conducted: transcendence, sacramentality and creativity, divine and human.     

A Place for Porn in a Gay Spiritual Economy

Abstract

Long begins this article by posing the question, ‘What makes good gay porn?’ His reflections lead him to suggest that images of ‘good sex’, ‘real sex’, ‘hot sex’ point towards ideal forms of masculinity. Employing the Platonic linkage between the good, the true and the beautiful he argues that such ideal images lead towards the divine who constitutes ‘the authority of the truly ideal’. In this frame ‘good porn’ is not merely an escape from the present imperfection of life but a foretaste of eternal happiness in the face of its seeming impossibility.     

Cyborg Politics and Economic Realities: Reflections on Elaine Graham's Representations of the Post/Human

Abstract

This article seeks to examine the political and economic context of cyborg culture and technology in Elaine Graham's Representations of the Post/Human. It begins by drawing out the relationship between Graham's study and Foucault's genealogical method and seeks to establish the ‘silent machine’ operating in Graham's analysis. By following three critical strands —knowledge as technology, economic determinism and imaginative agency and the economics of transcendence—the article highlights and extends a critique of capitalism and technology in the text. It argues that economics is now shaped by the machine and concludes by opening up a ‘politics of refusal’. Graham's work is acknowledged for bringing to light uncomfortable questions surrounding the politics of the machine.     

Does Global Democracy Require a World State?

Abstract

The question of whether global democracy requires a world state has with few exceptions been answered with an unequivocal ‘No’. A world state, it is typically argued, is neither feasible nor desirable. Instead, different forms of global governance arrangements have been suggested, involving non-hierarchical and multilayered models with dispersed authority. The overall aim of this paper is to addresses the question of whether global democracy requires a world state, adopting a so-called ‘function-sensitive’ approach. It is shown that such an approach is equipped to resist the predominant binary view of a world state (either accepting it or rejecting it) and offer a more differentiated and nuanced answer to this question. In brief, a basic presumption of a function-sensitive approach is that the content, justification and status of principles of democracy are dependent on the aim they are set out to achieve, what functions they are intended to regulate (e.g., decision-making, implementation, enforcement and evaluation), and the relationship between those functions. More specifically, within a function-sensitive framework, the paper sketches the contours of an account of global democracy consisting of five regulative principles and argues—utilizing the notion of ‘sufficient stateness’—that it would require supranational legislative entities and perhaps supranational judicial entities but not necessarily supranational executive entities.     

Contentious Conversation: Framing the ‘Fundamentals of Orthodox Culture’ in Russia

Abstract

The relationship between the Russian government and the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) has increasingly become the object of much scrutiny. The debate centres on the question of whether or not the ROC enjoys inordinate influence over the Russian political sphere. This article examines one case in which the Moscow Patriarchate has attempted to influence federal policy, namely, by lobbying the state to include courses on ‘Orthodox culture’ in the federal curriculum. The article draws on social movement theory to argue that the ROC has, to date, failed in its endeavour, as a result of a combination of three factors. First, it has failed to persuade either the state or society that teaching ‘Orthodox culture’ in schools is a worthy cause. Second, it has been unable to demonstrate a united front on the issue, revealing serious disagreements within the ranks of both clergy and laity regarding the content and form of the proposed curriculum. Third, it has been unable to demonstrate that it represents a constituency sufficiently numerous for the government to take its interests seriously in this case. The article thus argues that the relationship between church and state in the Russian Federation is more contentious than frequent joint appearances of clerical and lay leaders would suggest, and that the ROC is in the position of a junior partner whose ability to influence the state is circumscribed by important societal and political factors.     

Localizing Detroit’s Food System: Boundary-Work and the Politics of Experiential Expertise

ABSTRACT

Recently, different expert actors have attempted to localize Detroit’s food system to bring about greater justice citywide. At first, ‘professional experts’ dominated these efforts, claiming authority in the food system due to their knowledge based in qualified training and applied work experience. Yet a rival group of ‘experiential experts’ soon rose up to assert their power, arguing they and their unique race and place-based know-how merited greater influence. Within just a few years, experiential experts successfully replaced professional ones in commanding much area food localization. I show that experiential experts achieved this power largely through strategic boundary-work, including expulsion, expansion, and protection of autonomy. Nonetheless, some Detroiters and professional experts themselves questioned experiential experts’ legitimacy in removing professional experts from the food system altogether. I thus introduce a fourth form of boundary-work that experiential experts deployed to maintain their clout, what I term ‘accommodation’. Accommodation connotes instances of strategic inclusion where an expert authority facilitates rivals in sharing some influence based on distinct conditions that leave dominant epistemic arrangements generally intact. This occurred in Detroit as experiential experts accommodated professional ones in exercising some food systems power provided they better deploy their own race and place-based knowledge. Such actions helped quell public concern while also protecting experiential experts’ rising authority. Accommodation is useful for understanding cases in which diverse types of experts work together despite that single knowledge-forms guide their activities overall. Further research into accommodation could aid in identifying whether or not diverse forms of knowledge are together influencing decision-making around a range of cases, or if single forms of expertise remain dominant despite the appearance that democratization is taking place.     

Nietzsche on creating and discovering values

ABSTRACT

This article considers Friedrich Nietzsche’s claims about value creation alongside his proclamation that ‘nature is always value-less’ (GS 301), assessing their implications for his metaethics. It begins by weighing the evidence for a recent constructivist interpretation of Nietzsche’s metaethics, arguing that despite several apparent interpretive advantages, Nietzschean constructivism ultimately fails. Through a close reading of GS 301 and related passages, the constructivist interpretation is shown to be misguided in taking Nietzsche’s talk of value creation as expressing (or playing a significant role in) a metaethical view according to which the evaluative attitudes of philosophers ground what is valuable. Against this, it is argued that GS 301 should be understood as an assertion of the status of philosophers as the causal sources of new evaluative outlooks that shape the held values of their respective cultures, a claim developed through analysis of passages in which Nietzsche discusses his ideal of the ‘genuine philosopher’ and contrasts this figure with ‘critics’ or ‘philosophical laborers’ (BGE 210–211). It is next argued that, insofar as it is best understood as describing a social or anthropological phenomenon rather than a metaphysical one, GS 301 is a poor piece of evidence not only for the constructivist interpretation, but in fact for any account of Nietzsche’s metaethical position—including radical anti-realist interpretations informed by his statement that ‘nature is always value-less’. The paper then concludes by appealing to another passage, GS 55, which hints towards a very different—and plausibly realist—picture of Nietzsche’s metaethics     

Born a pastor,being a woman: biographical accounts on gendered religious gifts in the Diaspora

Women’s presence in Pentecostal leadership positions has slowly increased over the past decades, which raises new questions on the reconfiguration of gender roles and its relationship with religious doctrines. Based on empirical research, this article examines the construction of female leadership and religious authority within Pentecostal churches in a diasporic context. We draw upon biographical narratives of six female Pentecostal pastors—three African and three Latin American—who are leaders in Pentecostal churches in Spain. Our aim is to understand which conditions allowed these women to obtain positions of leadership in a mainly male dominated Pentecostal milieu and analyse the discursive articulation of Pentecostal conservative views on gender issues with local dynamics in the construction of female religious authority. The article shows that the authority of these women within the church realm is forged and legitimated through a religious narrative, one that empowers them as religious leaders without challenging their (and other women’s) subaltern role in the domains of social and family life.     

Pentecosmopolis: on the pentecostal cosmopolitanism of Lagos

ABSTRACT

Based on ethnography conducted in Lagos, one of the foremost pentecostal cities in the world, this article coins the interconnected concepts of ‘Pentecosmopolis’ and ‘pentecosmopolitanism’ to account for forms of cosmopolitanism that are shaped at the intersection of Pentecostalisms and urbanisms. These concepts highlight the dialectical role of Pentecostalisms in the cosmopolitization of urban sociospatialities, and of urbanisms in the cosmopolitization of Pentecostalisms. This article disbands the ideas of Pentecosmopolis and pentecosmopolitanism into two interconnected sub-concepts of ‘pentecosmopolitan spatiality’ and ‘pentecosmopolitan sociality’––of ‘pentecosmopolitan sociospatiality’. Against the background of marginality in scholarship, I examine the cosmopolitization—the diversification and contrastification—of sociospatial symbolisms, practices and relationalities taking shape in the city at the behest of Pentecostalisms, and in Pentecostalisms at the behest of the city.     

Internal Reformation Within the Contemporary Coptic Imagined Community: The Sunday School Movement and Mechanisms of Minority Survival

Abstract

With the centennial jubilee of the Sunday School Movement (SSM) occurring in 2018, this article explores two main questions: what are the main features of the Coptic community as imagined by the leaders of the SSM? And what is the nature of the relationship between “Coptic” Christian and “national Egyptian” identities within the dominant discourse of the SSM? The article argues that the contemporary Coptic identity, as reconstituted by the SSM, helps the Coptic community to survive as a vertical ethnie. The new Coptic identity is rooted in and relies upon the exclusive use of demotic symbols and narratives. Thus equipped, modern Copts perceive themselves as part of an imagined spiritual community within the wider Egyptian community. Indeed, this article argues that the SSM’s discourse presents a unique ‘marble cake’ model wherein religious and national identities are both present. By portraying Coptism as the area of interplay between Christianity and Egyptian-ness, the SSM blends “biological” and “cultural-ideological” modes of myth-making. Accordingly, to identify as Copt becomes equivalent to identifying as Egyptian.     

Bad gifts,community standards,and the disciplining of Theravāda monks

ABSTRACT

The act of giving is among the most fundamental acts within the Buddhist world, particularly in the Theravāda communities of Southeast Asia. In many of these communities, lay followers give food and other dāna (merit-making gifts), providing monastics with the ‘requisites’ that they need to survive. Yet there is relatively little discussion within Buddhist or scholarly communities about what should be given, with formulaic lists representing the majority of discussions about these gifts. However, sometimes, the gifts given to monastics are not always appropriate, even bad. What to do in those cases is not always clear. In this article, I explore the ways in which monks in Thailand and Southwest China think about gifts that are not good. What becomes clear is that, despite the prevailing view that discipline is a universal process based on the vinaya (disciplinary code of Buddhism), monks have different views about what constitutes a ‘bad gift’ and what to do about it. I argue that paying attention to bad gifts allows us to see that lay communities have significant voice—although this is often implicit rather than explicit—about what constitutes ‘proper’ monastic behavior.     

Righteous Rhetoric: Sex,Speech and the Politics of Concerned Women for America

Abstract

This article considers the Catholic Church's rejection of female sexed bodies as capable of symbolizing Christ in the Eucharist of God's agency in the world. The theories of René Girard provide a useful resource for analyzing the fear of female sexuality within Catholicism. They reveal that an obsessive focus upon sex has been the means through which the male tendency towards sacrificial violence, forbidden within Christianity, has continued to exert a powerful influence. A recognition of this substitutory process would not only enable a revisioning of the roles women and men might play within the Church, but also enable the Church to more effectively oppose the ‘culture of death’ which endangers us all.     

Cultural psychology as a theoretical project / La psicología cultural como proyecto teórico

Abstract

Cultural psychology is the new effort to overcome an old problem in psychology as a science — its irrational effort to imitate the so-called ‘hard’ sciences by reducing complex phenomena to elementary constituents and attempt to ‘measure’ imaginary properties of the mind through quantitative methods applied to summary indices accumulated across various contexts. In a revolutionary move, cultural psychology reverses these social practices to replace them with a focus on the study of complexity of human psychological phenomena in their open-systemic flow in irreversible time — at all levels of (a) societal history, (b) personal life course and (c) immediate setting-specific innovations (microgenesis). The units of analysis used in cultural psychology are complex signs that entail the unity of observable and hidden parts of affective hyper-generalization by goals-oriented, meaning-constructing persons with agency. The example of one of the current theoretical frameworks — Cultural Psychology of Semiotic Dynamics — is used to illustrate the nature of cultural psychology as a basic human science.     

‘Mystic Atheism’: Julia Kristeva's Negative Theology

Abstract

This article examines Julia Kristeva's paradoxical concept of a ‘mystic atheism’. It falls into three parts. First, it briefly surveys Kristeva's psychoanalytic account of Christian theology in Au commencement était l'amour (1985). Secondly, it assesses Kristeva's analysis of the Christian mystical tradition from Teresa of Avila to Angela of Foligno in such works as Le féminin et le sacré (1999) and the three volumes on Le génie féminin (1999-2002). For Kristeva, Christian mysticism represents a key moment in the transition from theology to psychoanalysis: what she locates within the work of the female mystics is a so-called ‘mystic atheism’, that is to say, an affirmation of an other within the subject as opposed to the divine other that supposedly lies outside it. Finally, the article offers some critical comments upon Kristeva's own ‘mystic atheism’: I argue that—like much negative theology—Kristeva's psychoanalysis remains ontotheological in form and that this dimension expresses itself in a problematic tendency to anthropomorphize the other within. In conclusion, I will suggest that Kristeva's ‘mystic atheism’ ultimately remains within the theological tradition it seeks to call into question.     

Homosexuality and the Bible or Queer Reading? A Response to Martti Nissinen

Abstract

This article offers a response to Martti Nissinen's important text Homoeroticism in the Biblical World. Although Nissinen's research is historical, his analysis of ancient practices is offered as a contribution to contemporary debates on homosexuality within the Church. A powerful case is made that attitudes towards gender relations in the ancient world were governed by assumptions concerning the proper relations between active, ‘penetrating’, social superiors and passive, ‘penetrated’, inferiors. The disjunction between this worldview and contemporary contexts and concepts is demonstrated, thus problematizing the notion that contemporary practices can be predicated upon ‘biblical’ norms.

Despite its significance Nissinen's work cannot be straightforwardly appropriated as a helpful contribution to debate. The very act of constructing a canon of biblical references to homosexuality is problematic. It positions homosexuality once again as the object of research—that which is silent while spoken about. This, in turn, disguises the assumption that there is an unproblematic continuum in heterosexual relations that endures over time and does not require similar interrogation. Heteronormativity is thus actively sustained. There is a need to go beyond even the apparently progressive forms of biblical scholarship currently being pursued by Nissinen and others in order to develop a ‘queer commentary’ on the Bible. This will denaturalize the very concepts male, female and homosexual through which our relations with the text are currently constructed.     

Sense of community among Muslims in the Brazil–Paraguay border: narratives of belonging and generational differences

ABSTRACT

The so-called ‘Triple Frontier’—the border between Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina—is the ‘host society’ of an important Muslim community, composed mainly of Lebanese immigrants and their descendants born in Brazil and Paraguay. In less than two decades, Shi’i and Sunni Arab Muslims created mosques, religious centres, a cemetery, and three schools. Mosques, schools, and religious centres are spaces for the production of a sense of community. The institutional discourse of these entities emphasises the connection between religion and community origin, considering Islam as part of ‘Arab culture’. Taking generational differences into account, this article aims to analyse the narratives of plural identity expressed in the meanings attributed to the immigrants’ self-identification as Muslims. Based on fieldwork in the South American border area, this work aims to shed light on the way in which immigrants and their descendants reinterpret their religious belonging, informed by the new experience of living in multi-religious societies.     

Zorba The Buddha: Capitalism,Charisma and the Cult of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

This essay suggests a new way of understanding the notorious Indian guru, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, by examining the intimate relationship between his religious teachings and his business practices. Rajneesh's ideal was in fact that of ‘Zorba the Buddha’, the perfect synthesis of the spiritual and material, the religious and capitalist impulses. After analysing and criticizing the classical Weberian concept of ‘charisma’, this paper argues that charismatic authority is by no means incompatible with bureaucratic organization or rational business practices. On the contrary, not only can charismatic authority be combined with a complex bureaucratic organization, but it can also be transformed into a kind of ‘commodity’ which is bought and sold on the consumer market. Rather than a ‘routinization of charisma’ what we find in the Rajneesh movement is a kind of ‘commodification’ and ‘commercialization’ of charisma. Bhagwan offered (and sold) his followers the promise of the same charismatic authority and divine freedom which he himself enjoyed (though, in practice, this authority could never actually be attained by any of his followers). Moreover, charismatic authority became the basis for a new kind of bureaucratic organization in Rajneesh's world-wide network of commercial enterprises—an organization characterized by a high degree of fluidity and flexibility, able to adapt itself rapidly to meet the changing demands of its consumer market.