The Negative Community: Categorization and Control

 

The basis of all domination is the absence of reciprocation

 

                                                       - Jean Baudrillard, La Violence du Mondial -

 

 

 

In The Invention of World Religions Tomoko Masuzawa sets out to trace the genealogy of the ‘world religions’ discourse which has become so prevalent in our time.  Reading her intriguing account of the movements of this discourse, I found myself wondering whether the genealogy of this discourse is part of a larger context.

 

The book addresses a central question: why was there a sudden surge of interest in religions that were other than Christianity in the 19^th century?  Was it sheer interest or fascination?  Was it to improve Christian self-understanding?  Was it the sudden rise of secularism that consciously or unconsciously brought about an attempt to locate answers elsewhere, in religions that were other than Christianity, which was perhaps deemed to have ‘failed’ to keep at bay the flood of secularism?  Was it the ‘spiritualist’ attempt to understand the world and to locate the universal core of the one, true ‘Religion’ underlying the diversity of world religions?  Most of the texts that Masuzawa explores hint at or explicitly refer to one or more of these reasons; however, these reasons are all to a large extent simply foreground, as Masuzawa herself recognizes.  Throughout the book, but especially in the final chapter, Masuzawa offers the possibility that the pluralist world religions discourse is perhaps indicative of the transplantation of the European project of hegemony from one context or discourse to another, particularly if we look at the work of Weber’s contemporary, Ernst Troeltsch.

 

So it would seem that the legacy of the world religions discourse, at least to some extent, is the European project of hegemony, of world domination.  This may likely be the motive force underlying the world religions discourse and the championing of pluralism, but one that would only be in the background of the genealogy of the discourse as the discourse developed among scholars, that is, in the field of research itself.  No scholar, especially as the treatments of the other religions became more and more sympathetic, that is, more politically correct, would want this motive of hegemony to become foreground, since ultimately the myth of scholarly objectivity is a highly valued and respected narrative.  However, well into the 20^th century, European governments, and by extension their citizenry, never shied away from being explicit about their imperialist, colonial or hegemonic motivations in deciding and implementing foreign policy in a ‘pluralist’ and ‘inclusive’ mode.  Even today a government as politically correct as the United States, with its diverse media-based technologies of manipulation and propaganda distribution, has no reservations in openly declaring that securing ‘democracy’ for all the nations of the world is in its own best interest, that such a project will strengthen its security and solidify its power so that it may continue fighting to expand the dominion of the free world and the ideals of ‘freedom’, ‘human rights’ and the like.                

 

This is all foreground and simple to spot, in fact it is meant to be so, since there is no nation that would openly declare that it is against such noble ends as stability and security, democracy and freedom.  As long as the free world, namely the West, is powerful and secure, so too, goes the logic, is the rest of the world.  Freedom and democracy are safe insofar as the West is in control of world destiny.  The interests of the West thus become synonymous with those of the rest of the world.      

 

As Masuzawa herself shows, in his 1891 Elias P. Ely Lectures Frank Field Ellinwood could and was willing to openly speak about the “great conquest” of Christianity “against the heathen systems of the East”(101).  Even George Matheson, who spoke about “reconciliation” with other religions, only allows for such a plurality insofar as it exists beneath the natural hegemony of Christianity: “for each and all there is a seat in the Christian Pantheon”(86).  He leaves no doubt that the pantheon itself is Christian.   

 

So if the legacy of the world religions discourse, European or Western hegemony, is itself foreground, even to some extent explicitly in the objective, non self-interested scholarship, at least early on, when political correctness was not the great virtue that it later became, does this signal that there is another, perhaps more complex, background underlying the genealogy of the discourse?  To find an answer to this question we have look at the broader context of modernity in the 18^th and 19^th century, during which time the world religions discourse was in its embryonic stages. 

 

The work of Michel Foucault offers us a starting point.  In the late 1970s Foucault began to study what he termed la gouvernementalité, a term meant to denote the techniques and procedures used to categorize and direct human behaviour in order to better control human resources.  The goal of such technologies is to solidify the politico-economic rule of a government over its sphere of influence.  The German Polizeiwissenschaft, as Foucault points out, was an exemplary manifestation of this method of categorization and control.  It developed in the 18^th century and its primary objective was the maximization of the economy of life administration in order to maximize governmental power.  The goal of governmental power was ‘biopolitical’, that is, the administration of life. 

 

The nexus of power and knowledge is the core of biopolitics, which is why contemporaneously there developed in the 18^th century a hierarchy of knowledge, wherein access to information and knowledge became the basis for modern class divisions.  Physicians and scholars began to form the new secular priesthood and institutions of higher learning, the new churches, multiplied across Europe and North America.  The biopolitical movement and the need for a secular priesthood arose as an attempt to confront the sudden increase in population and the massive influx of information and knowledge, which occurred to a large degree due to the expanding geopolitical context brought about by European imperialism and colonialism.        

 

It is perhaps only against this background that we can begin to situate and better understand the genealogy of the modern discourse of world religions.  Within this context, the genealogy of this discourse becomes a minor species or branch of the core genealogy underlying modernity, of the genealogy of biopolitics.  However, it seems that the motive force underlying the movement of biopolitics is itself hegemonic.  Yet there is a fundamental difference here and one which, as we shall see, reveals that there in fact does exist a form of community and egalitarian pluralism binding the ‘Christian West’ and ‘non-Christian other’.  Whereas the hegemonic nature of the world religions discourse was and, as indicated above with the example of the US, still is openly, though somewhat differently, hegemonic, the hegemonic nature of the biopolitical discourse was predominantly and is now entirely inconspicuously hegemonic.  The reason for this is that the hegemony of the world religions discourse has always been other oriented, that is, the object of domination has always been a foreigner, the East, for example, whereas biopolitical hegemony is both other and self oriented.  Biopolitical hegemony or governmentality originally began as an attempt to categorize and control local or native populations and only later, through imperial and colonial expansionism, foreign populations.  Political power never openly subverts itself.

 

The new information and knowledge that scholars in the 18^th and 19^th centuries studied and categorized not only served as the means by which European governments were able to establish vast and powerful technologies for dominating foreign populations, but also as the means by which these same governments were able to develop complex technologies for dominating their own native populations.  This secular priesthood was seminal in helping develop the technologies necessary to control the massive modern governmental systems that are in place in our time.  They are also, whether they are aware of it or not, still indispensible for its continued operation and sustainment.     

 

In this context the project of 19^th century comparative theology or of anthropology, of studying and categorizing the foreign other in order to conquer and bring it within its own dominion, was no different from the core biopolitical project of modernity: the study, categorization and control of all life, whether native or foreign.  The assumed superiority of the ‘Christian crusaders’ whose comparative work was meant to show the superiority of the Christian religion was exactly that, assumed, with little or no basis in reality, at least as concerns the mechanisms of political power or domination.  To be sure, the West has always had a privileged position in modernity, politically, economically and otherwise, but this does not alter the core reality that they inhabit the same community as the rest of the world, the negative community governed by biopolitical technologies of domination.  This is the true ‘egalitarian pluralism’ created and sustained by the biopolitical order of modernity.

~ by Babak on September 21, 2008.