Towards a New Theory of Religion and Social Change

Sovereignties and Disruptions

Paul-François Tremlett

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781474272575
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book argues that neither theories of secularisation nor theories of lived religion offer satisfactory accounts of religion and social change. Drawing from Deleuze and Gauttari's idea of the assemblage, Paul-Francois Tremlett outlines an alternative. Informed by classical and contemporary theories of religion as well as empirical case studies and ethnography conducted in Manila and London, this book re-frames religion as spatially organised flows. Foregrounding the agency of hon-human actors, it offers a compelling and original account of religion and social change.

1

Energy

Introduction

In The Savage Mind (1962; 1966), Claude Lévi-Strauss distinguished between ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ types of society. At first glance, the distinction appears to map comfortably with the binary classifications typical of the classical anthropology of primitive and modern social forms. For example, Henry Sumner Maine distinguished between relations of status and relations of contract, Emile Durkheim between mechanical and organic forms of social solidarity and Ferdinand Tönnies between the organic bonds of the Gemeinschaft and the contractual relations of the Gesellschaft. However, while Maine, Durkheim and Tönnies were thinking largely within a constellation of nineteenth-century concepts of modernity inflected by rationalism and romanticism, Lévi-Strauss was thinking with the second law of thermodynamics, entropy and the concept of energy. For Lévi-Strauss, pre-modern societies were self-sustaining totalities immune to the forces of history and change while modern societies were simultaneously restless, progressive and destructive.

Lévi-Strauss’s exploration of the social through metaphors of energy was part of a small corpus of anthropological and sociological writings exploring intersections of energy and society that included the likes of Leslie A. White and Clifford Geertz among others (see Rosa, Machlis and Keating 1988). Much of this work was marked by the indelible stamp of evolutionist social theory that linked ethnographic observations of societal and technological difference to energy consumption, imagining, for the beneficiaries of modernity, a trajectory of limitless progress and growth. If Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard and the post-modernists would later outline a very different account of progress, European and especially German scholarship – particularly that articulated between World War I and World War II – had already sketched a pessimistic account of modernity intensely inflected by vitalism, anti-scientism and anti-reductionism, for which the eclipse of religious and spiritual truths constituted an almost intolerable prospect (see Eliade 1959; 1969a). This work was intersected by tendrils of holism and romanticism and would also become interwoven with the racist and anti-Semitic ideas that prefigured the emergence of Nazi culture (Harrington 1996; Jones 2010). If Martin Heidegger, Tönnies and Max Weber articulated a shared sense of German cultural crisis after World War I, (now) lesser known figures such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Christian von Ehrenfels, Oswald Spengler and Leopold Ziegler engaged in a German search for renewal in notions of racial and cultural purity as the means of staving off the collapse of a mythologized Teutonic culture (significantly – given his influence on the study of religions – Mircea Eliade also subscribed to these views and his work stands implicated in fascist and Nazi imaginaries of cultural degeneration and spiritual loss [Cave 1993: 106–7; 1993: 112; Dubuisson 2006: 173–88; Frank 2006]).

Precisely because of their anticipation of religious decline, sociological theories of secularization are located at a kind of hinge between vitalist and romantic critiques of modernity on the one hand and fascist and Nazi anticipations of collapse, on the other. Weber’s formulation of disenchantment as a process that promised the arrival of a time when ‘there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play’ and when ‘one can, in principle, master all things by calculation’ (1991: 139), augured the apparent reduction of the world to a series of instrumentally oriented forms of decision-making purged of empathic, sacred and emotional elements. Weber’s disenchanted modernity seemed to promise a future in which mechanical relations of cause and effect had become the blueprint of human action and agency, the outcome of which was not merely the total rationalization of human affairs but their secularization as well. Bryan Wilson’s definition of secularization captures this spirit of disenchantment perfectly:

The decline in the proportion of their time, energy and resources which men devote to super-empirical concerns; the decay of religious institutions; the supplanting, in matters of behaviour, of religious precepts by demands that accord with strictly technical criteria; and the gradual replacement of a specifically religious consciousness … by an empirical, rational, instrumental orientation; the abandonment of mythical, poetic, and artistic interpretations of nature and society in favour of matter-of-fact description and, with it, the rigorous separation of evaluative and emotive dispositions from cognitive and positivistic orientations. (Wilson 1982: 149)

Weber’s sociology of disenchantment, then, was more than a prediction of secularization: it was an anticipation of a wider exhaustion. At the end of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism he suggested that modernity was ‘bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism’, speculating that it would ‘determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt’ (2002: 123). Importantly for Weber, no amount of charismatic power or energy would be sufficient to forestall the inevitable running down of the system (Parsons 1949: 752). According to Eliade, this tragic course could be avoided through re-connecting with the sacred and embracing the ‘life-force’ (Eliade in Frank 2006: 31). As such, he characterized the study of religions as a series of ‘propadeutic and spiritual techniques’ (Eliade 1969b) and its methodology as an hermeneutics of restoration, whereby the ‘total man’ (Eliade 1969c: 8) might be returned to the spiritual truth and reality from which He had become alienated.

In the first part of this chapter I explore Lévi-Strauss’s writings on energy, situating them within a twentieth-century European intellectual milieu where currents of evolutionist, fascist, vitalist and post-modern thought swirl and intermingle. It is to be hoped that the juxtaposing of Lévi-Strauss with White, Baudrillard and Eliade is sufficient for opening out the treacherous currents of that moment – it is not as if we cannot still feel those currents today – and its concern with growth and expansion on the one hand, and decline and exhaustion on the other. The second part of the chapter sketches the contours of two, very different accounts of energy and society that move towards an animistic formulation. To do so I turn substantially to the works of Emile Durkheim (1915; 1960a) and Jane Bennett (2010). Both Durkheim and Bennett are interested in energies and things, and their role in the constitution of the social. Durkheim’s account of totemism describes how the release of explosive energies is enabled through ritual assemblies of human bodies and sacred objects, the violent force of which brings the totemic social into existence. However, it is also a tale of a particular kind of political subject which emerges through the externalization of thoughts, ideas and emotions into material form as signs, symbols and representations (Durkheim 1960b). By contrast, Bennett’s description of assemblages of human and non-human elements in ‘living, throbbing confederations’ made up of ‘energies’, ‘force[s]’, ‘pulse[s]’ and ‘charged parts’ (2010: 23–4), conceives of energy and things rather differently. Her methodological animism – if I can call it that – means that, for Bennett, there is no distinction between the human and the non-human, and there are no subjects and objects or insides and outsides: rather, there are only constellations in space of human and non-human elements. Moreover, her account of energy shifts the conversation away from explosion towards something more constant, more gentle and more sustainable.

I put flesh on this tale of two energies with ethnographic research I have pursued in recent years on the Occupy movement, specifically a political demonstration in the autumn of 2014 in Parliament Square in London, organized by a group called Occupy Democracy (see also Tremlett 2012, 2016; Soar and Tremlett 2017). The demonstration was very much a rite-like assemblage of bodies, objects, ideas, sounds and emotions but was marked by the iconoclastic destruction of protest material culture by heritage wardens and the police. My analysis of the iconoclasm posits a confrontation between two, rival assemblages of humans and things. The first, thoroughly territorialized at the protest site, configures together an urban topology of monuments and iconic architectures guarded by police and heritage wardens who, like the tourists that every day upload images of the site to social media (#ParliamentSquare), curate it. The political agency of this assemblage of people, place and things is constituted through exclusion, specifically an exclusion that requires the removal and/or destruction of rival elements. The second is made up of the protestors and their material culture, but includes other geological and ecological entities as well. The agency of this assemblage depends on its ability to occupy the space and disrupt if not indeed displace the icons and monuments of the first assemblage. I contrast a Durkheimian or explosive version of the iconoclasm with Bennett’s methodological animism, to offer an energized account of the political agency of protest material culture.

Energy, evolution and entropy

Discourses of progress have been shaped by a biological imaginary as I detail in the next chapter – but they have been shaped by an energy one too. Technological and material progress depends on the generation of energy and its consumption. For the likes of Herbert Spencer, ‘the ability to harness more and more energy … lay at the foundation of the evolution of societies’, such that ‘societal advance and the differences in stages of advancement among societies could be accounted for by energy – the more energy consumed, the greater the advancement’ (Rosa, Machlis and Keating 1988: 150). Yet, even after evolutionism’s demise in anthropology and the rise of culture as an explanatory horizon, the search for ‘laws’ (White 1943: 340) to explain technological and other differences between societies, continued. For example, the twentieth-century American anthropologist Leslie A. White re-ignited interest in questions of energy by framing culture as a ‘thermo-dynamic, mechanical system’ the functioning of which depended upon ‘the amount of energy harnessed’ and the way that energy was ‘put to work’ (White in Moore 2004: 185; see also White 1943: 346). White argued that progress was a direct, causal consequence of technological innovation and, while accepting that societies and cultures condition or shape the reception and development of technology, he tended to regard such feedback negatively as a potential break on technological innovation.

To us in the Anthropocene, the flaw in White’s culture-thermic argument is obvious enough: according to the second law of thermodynamics, ‘energy, unlike materials, cannot be recycled’, which means that ‘there is an inevitable limit to usable energy’. Given that ‘energy is the lifeblood of economic and social activity, continued inattention to its limits should be the source of serious intellectual and political concern’ (Rosa, Machlis and Keating 1988: 151). Indeed,

The second law of thermodynamics states the universal tendency of all isolated systems to pass from more to less organized states; this passage is called ‘increase of entropy’. Increase of entropy is, if considered within the confines of the given isolated system, an irreversible process; the system cannot ‘on its own’ return to a more organized state. There is an interpretation of entropy as energy, which must be applied to bring the system back to its initial condition. This amount grows unremittingly as a function of time flow. No isolated system can draw the required energy from its internal resources … The only remedy against the otherwise inescapable maximization of entropy … seems to be to break the boundaries of the system open to exchange with what was previously its outside, and unrelated, environment. (Bauman 1999: 47)

The work of the archaeologist Joseph Tainter (1988) is pertinent in this regard: his studies of societal collapse in the ancient world demonstrate on the one hand the diminishing returns of increased societal complexity and, on the other, the difficulties that follow in seeking to stave off entropic exhaustion:

More complex societies are more costly to maintain than simpler ones, requiring greater levels of support per capita. As societies increase in complexity, more networks are created among individuals, more hierarchical controls are created to regulate these networks, more information is processed, there is more centralization of information flow, there is increasing need to support specialists not directly involved in resource production, and the like. All of this complexity is dependent upon energy flow at a scale vastly greater than that characterizing small groups of self-sufficient foragers or agriculturalists. The result is that as a society evolves toward greater complexity, the support costs levied on each individual will also rise, so that the population as a whole must allocate increasing portions of its energy budget to maintaining organizational institutions. This is an immutable fact of societal evolution, and is not mitigated by type of energy source. (Tainter 1988: 91–2)

Lévi-Strauss’s engagement with theories of energy and society was very much informed, according to Christopher Johnson, by the ‘thermodynamic or informational concept of entropy’ (Johnson 2003: 116). In Tristes Tropiques Lévi-Strauss proposed the name of a new science – ‘entropology’ – to study processes of ‘disintegration’ (2011: 414), asking rhetorically, ‘what else has man done except blithely break down billions of structures and reduce them to a state in which they are no longer capable of integration?’ (ibid.).¹ Elsewhere he contrasted two models of the social, recycling the classical, sociological distinction between primitive and modern forms of society to suggest that

the clumsy distinction between ‘peoples without history’ and others could with advantage be replaced by a distinction between what for convenience I called ‘cold’ and ‘hot’ societies [les sociétés froides et les sociétés chaudes]: the former seeking, by the institutions they give themselves, to annul the possible effects of historical factors on their equilibrium and continuity in a quasi-automatic fashion; the latter resolutely internalizing the historical process and making it the moving power of their development. (Lévi-Strauss 1966: 233–4; 1962: 309–10)

The distinction between hot and cold societies was first set out in the essay ‘The Scope of Anthropology’ (1994a: 29) where Lévi-Strauss included an additional binary opposition to that of hot versus cold, namely egalitarian to hierarchical social structures (in an interview with Georges Charbonnier he also opposed clocks to steam engines as examples of distinct types of complex systems). According to Lévi-Strauss, cold, egalitarian societies required only a small amount of initial input energy to get them going. They were characterized by a negative feedback loop where ‘information on the output of the system is fed back to its input, to ensure that subsequent output is maintained within a limited set of parameters’, while hot, hierarchical societies generated energy through exploitation – ‘differentiations between castes and between classes are emphasized unceasingly in order to draw from them change and energy’ (Lévi-Strauss 1994a: 29) – and were characterized by a positive feedback loop where ‘the system is subject to an exponential growth that knows no limits’ (Johnson 2003: 123). In short, hot societies exploit their environments – colonialism and capitalism being examples of securing, by whatever means necessary, constant access to new sources of energy – while cold societies generate a steady state with their environment, thereby guaranteeing ‘both a modest standard of living and the conservation of natural resources’ (Lévi-Strauss 1994a: 28). According to Lévi-Strauss, this steady state is founded in ‘a particular wisdom which impels them [primitive societies] to resist … any modification in their structure that would enable history to burst into their midst’ (Lévi-Strauss 1994a: 28; see also Clastres 1994; Deleuze and Guattari 2014) and in a ‘deep respect for the forces of nature’ (Lévi-Strauss 1994b: 319).

In two further essays – ‘Race and History’ (1994c) and ‘Race and Culture’ (1985) – Lévi-Strauss outlined his view of history as endless combination, articulating simultaneously a critique of progress and the perils of mono-culture. Arguing that history proceeds in ‘leaps and bounds, or as the biologists would say, by mutations’ (1994c: 337), he introduced the notion of chance to history via the image of the gambler, whose moves and choices depend on successive throws of the dice. This re-formulation of history as radical contingency allowed Lévi-Strauss to suggest that progress was not the preserve of certain cultures over certain others, but rather the product of luck and, most significantly, combination and coalition with other cultures (1994c: 356). In ‘Race and Culture’, Lévi-Strauss continued the argument, but re-formulated it in genetic terms:

Over thirty years ago … I used the notion of coalition to explain that isolated cultures cannot help to create by themselves the conditions for a truly cumulative history. For such conditions, I said, diverse cultures must voluntarily or involuntarily combine their respective stakes, thereby giving themselves a better chance to realise, in the great game of history, the long winning series that allows history to progress. Geneticists now express similar views on biological evolution … in the history of populations, genetic recombination plays a part comparable to that of cultural recombination in the evolution of the ways of life, the techniques, the bodies of knowledge, and the beliefs whose distribution distinguishes the various societies. (Lévi-Strauss 1985: 17–18)

For Lévi-Strauss, entropy was not a process that could be avoided. Hence the question, how to develop a culture that was sustainable and that did not simply drain the resources – by conquest, exploitation and consumption – of everything it touched:

The necessity of preserving the diversity of cultures, in a world threatened by monotony and uniformity, has certainly not remained unnoticed by international institutions. They must also understand that, to reach this goal, it will not be enough to favour local traditions and to allow some respite to times gone by. It is the fact of diversity which must be saved, not the historical content given to it by each era (and which no era could perpetuate beyond itself). We must listen to the wheat growing, encourage secret potentialities, awaken all the vocations to live together that history holds in reserve. One must also be ready to consider without surprise, repulsion, or revolt whatever unusual aspect all these new social forms of expression cannot fail to present. Tolerance is not a contemplative position, dispensing indulgence to what was and to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Energy
• 2 Biology
• 3 Generative Interactivity
• 4 Emergence
• 5 Towards a General Theory of Religion and Social Change
• Afterword: Assemblage Drawings, by Atsuhide Ito
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Imprint