Commentary on the Course

Looking over my blog, my knee jerk reaction is to say that I have become more indecisive, less sure about terms and discourses that I might have used with confidence before. However, perhaps that’s a necessary outcome, too much certainty about “givens” is something that Derrida would critique, since nothing is a given if we take his view that logocentrism is misplaced. In becoming more uncertain about the terms we use, and the discourses and assumptions that are attached to them, we are paving the way, not for a future where we cease to use those terms, but a future where we think twice about our usage of them. In deconstructing the terms that we use to talk about religion, we are deconstructing ourselves, our own presuppositions, our own ‘situatedness’ that dictates the way we speak about and interact with religion. As Ricoeur said, in interpreting text, we are interpreting ourselves, because there is nothing ‘behind’ the text other than the reader herself. In the same way, when we speak about “religious experience” or “emotion” or any of the other bywords that are used to for the ‘essence’ of religion, our deconstruction of those terms reveals more about the interpreters than it does about the ‘true meaning’ of these terms.

The majority of our discussions maybe ended inconclusively, but we were generally all involved in a post-modern project of re-evaluation. For every term we examined, we began by problematizing the givens, and opening the discourse to other possibilities of meaning. The methodological change that I see in myself is a tendency towards looking more at the institutions and social processes as shapers of the individual, rather than an individual agency being the motivator behind social change. I think that this has already affected my research plan. I hope to study the institutions of religion that shape the character and experience of the immigrant community. I suppose another way I could have studied the phenomenon of immigrant religion would be to study the individual members of a congregation - their beliefs, their values- and looked at those as being constitutive of the immigrant experience. However, whether from this course, or from other readings, I choose not to look at the individual actor as an agent of social change, but rather the individual as shaped by social processes, and institutions.

While I think the idea of proceeding with this course on the basis of examinations of terms is a valuable way to go about the course, I also think that discussion on religion could have been saved for the end. Emotion, performance, tradition, ritual, from our discussion, as I mentioned earlier, these terms all seem to be bywords for ‘religion’. I think there is still a latent tendency in the study of religion to mark off religion as a distinct phenomenon, not reducible to sociological or psychological explanations. One can’t explain away emotion, it’s a phenomenon that exists, and yet one that escapes definition. “Performance”, we couldn’t really come to a conclusion about whether all religion/ritual was performance or not. Likewise tradition was not easily definable; where do we draw the line between contemporary rituals/performance, and ‘tradition’? Is it simple a matter of age? In that case, wouldn’t a scale be more appropriate than a black and white definition? None of these terms are self-explanatory, at first glance we think we understand them, and we think we are all on the same page. However, it soon becomes apparent as we begin to disagree that these terms are not clearly defined, and yet they are used frequently to address some kind of phenomena. These discussions were all forerunners (or derivative) of the discussion of the overarching term ‘religion’. At first we think we are all referring to the same thing, but from discussion the impression arises that thing designated by the term ‘religion’ is elusive, ethereal, perhaps even imaginary.

Perhaps we all participate in an imagined community as a religious studies faculty. If the definition “religion” is fraught with Western-centric biases that prevent us from understanding the “other” (another term fraught with problems), yet it continues to be a term that has currency, perhaps we are wilfully engaging with an imagined phenomenon that doesn’t actually exist in the coherent, cohesive, essentialized way that the term implies. Like the Flew-Wisdom parable, if we can’t agree on a definition for the term “religion,”- if it isn’t essential, if it doesn’t exist across social-cultural boundaries, if it is an individual rather than a social phenomenon, if it isn’t a psychological or sociological phenomenon, if it is “ineffable”- perhaps it doesn’t really exist at all. What I mean to say, is that if the term religion can never be described without qualifications, doesn’t it suffer “death by a thousand qualifications” and become meaningless?

However, despite the above rant, I will continue to use the term, because of its amazing flexibility to mean almost anything. It gives one a lot more academic freedom in terms of subject matter and methodology than other, more heavily defined fields might. In the end, perhaps ‘religion’s evasiveness is key to its survival. If religion could not be deconstructed, and argued as we did in this class, it would become stagnant and irrelevant: “Something that is insulated from deconstruction is not protected but petrified, having hardened over into a dogma, like a law that could never be reformed or repealed” (Caputo on Derrida). Thus its in-essentiality is key to its futurity. Because it can never be pinned down, it will never be discarded.