<underfire> Religion, Politics, Media, and War

[jaw0871 at garnet.acns.fsu.edu]

I would like to preface this post with a statement of encouragement and
interest in this debate. Not only is there a genuine sense of openness,
but all posts have been measured by a certain reasonableness that would
make Juergen Habermas proud. In this post, I would like to address Mary 
Keller's post on Religion, Politics, Media and War with an eye towards 
the clarification of the French issue and a pragmatic approach to 
secularity and religion. I think it is dangerous to assume that this 
banning of the hijab or the veil from the classroom is related to a 
larger movement that suppresses basic freedoms in the French public 
sphere; and it is also crucial, as Mary Keller suggests, to correct the 
(seen as confrontational) relationship between religion and the secular 
state.

Mary Keller begins with a reference to two threads that bears some 
examination: One from Ryan Bishop's posted response to Wolfgang on the 
question of the originary moment of peace, and the other is Melani 
McAlister's post on spectacle and war. The juxtaposition of these 
quotes suggests a forged relationship between the notion of veiling or 
unveiling and its epistemologically oriented metaphorical 
interpretation and Foucault's conclusions regarding the shifting of 
punishment from open, public spectacle into the dark prisons. The 
construction of Foucault's system of punishment, oriented towards 
disciplining the body and soul of the citizen, was a shift, as Melani 
McAlister reads it, from the open display of state power in the 
spectacle, to the internalization (mystification?) of state power in 
the prison system. In relationship to religion, this has always been 
the case. The public spectacle of religion is celebration and communal 
gathering; but in Catholicism at least, the sin is revealed in the 
dark, prayer takes place in silence, relics are hidden away in safes, 
behind paintings. This has fed conspiracy theories about Catholicism 
for centuries. The spectacular side of religion (i.e. the open 
portrayal of a relationship between the 'proletariat' and a higher, 
mystical being) did not really come full-fledged into the west until
Protestant religions took a foot hold. Religion as a power struggle, as 
Mary Keller seems to wish to address the issue, has always been an 
aspect of religion, as well. Catholicism defined itself as essentially 
*not* Islam throughout the Middle Ages. Islam represented the radical 
'other', sometimes revealed as the exotic other, yes, but always 
radically different and thus defining. It continually defined itself 
internally, as well, by 'resisting' the manifold heresies (Palagianism 
and Aryanism being two of the more prominent). This resistance bubbled 
up again, in Catholicism, the dominant religion throughout Europe, in 
the form of the counter reformation (Catholic reformation). This was 
(obviously) the 'resistance' to Lutheranism, Anglicanism, Anabaptism, 
Calvinism and so forth. The 17th century Catholic obsession with the 
apocryphal story of Judith, Judith as the symbol for resistance, the 
symbol for the Catholic minions of religious virtue against the teeming 
enemies (this time, not the Muslims, but the Protestants), is a clear
indication of the traditional importance of 'defiance' in religious 
existence. Now to the situation in France, for a moment. It should be 
made clear, as it was not in the American media (thus this in itself 
represents one of the issues that Mary Keller wished to address), that 
the situation in France is much more complex. The notion of laicite is 
central to the French state. The question of the hijab, then, was one 
specifically of the 'hijab' as religious icon, and not one of the head 
scarf. Young girls can still wear head scarves in French schools, 
depending on the principle's understanding of the law, of course. This
law is, by the way, limited to the state school system, not the 
university system. This is also *not* limited to the hijab. No 
religious icon can be openly displayed in the classroom. They can be 
displayed in the school yard, on campus, but not in the classroom. 
Whether one agrees with the concept of laicite is not yet at issue, 
simply the clarification of the law--which is in compliance with 
laicite. The situation in France (especially considering the recent 
'riots' and the continual poverty of the racial other in France) is
much more complex. Thus Mary Keller's conflation of the nun and the 
hijab is rather misleading. Neither can appear in the French 
classroom--both can appear in the American classroom. France 
understands the hijab perfectly, which is one reason it is banned from 
the secular classroom; this negotiation of power is not one for the 
classroom at all, according to French laicite. Now, Mary Keller makes 
the argument, on the whole, against the facile approach to laicite or 
secularization, i.e. against the simplistic understanding of religion 
as irrational. (Or so it seems to me...) We could formulate this in 
Habermasian terms by asking where the place for religion is in the 
public sphere. It seems, as Mary Keller does, we need to draw a 
distinction between iconography as a symbolic practice and deeply held 
religious beliefs that inform
both the moral approach to the lifeworld and religious 
intersubjectivity. To truncate this already long post, I will present 
some hasty conclusions on this matter: 1) it is clear that the 
presentation of symbolic iconography is powerful to both members and 
non-members of the religious community, especially in the well-mediated 
age of contemporary social economy. No one can be offended by the
'Jesus fish' if that person does not understand that a) it represents a 
particular religious belief and b) it makes an inherent comment in the 
contemporary discourse on creationism and evolution. (This last 
'inherent comment' is not at all related to the deeply held religious 
beliefs of the bearer of the icon, which is the problematic. It is one 
that is generated outside of these beliefs, i.e. within the public 
sphere, and demands a certain 'working through' in order to be rid of 
these connotations) 1(a) thus the presentation of these symbols has 
significant bearing (intentional or unintentional) on the discourse of 
the public sphere and on intersubjective exchange. 1(b) as a means of 
defining, representing, mediating the deeply held religious beliefs it 
operates as a symbolic bridge to discourse that transcends the 
intersubjective exchange and informs the members of this exchange a
priori. This is the 'identity function of the symbolic material. 2) The 
question of deeply held religious beliefs is much more complex and has 
a longstanding, complex tradition behind it. While these beliefs inform 
intersubjective exchange, it is the gift of the enlightenment that 
members of the public sphere can request of each other to reduce their 
beliefs to the reasonable and rational--and to weigh them out in the 
process of communication. It should not be good enough to state simply 
that "marriage is between one man and one woman." We should be forced 
to base this *belief* in reason, in a rational framework. Religion 
should be seen as a moral set of codes to be respected, but not always 
perfectly adhered to by the state. It is on the communal level that 
religion should play out, through processes of intersubjective 
identification. But the mode must shift when entering the public sphere 
to an informing construct rather than a restrictive one.

But, I do completely agree with Mary Keller on the question of 
negotiating power and the *recognition* of this negotiation in all 
religious fields. Communication can only be effective if there is a 
process of negotiation and a certain understanding of the nature of the 
other. But, by so doing, we are making the leap into a mode of 
'reading' this religion as 'oppressive' or as a power negotiation at 
its heart that is then represented by the hijab. We must then see 
Muslim women as striving to negotiate their oppression. This is
predicated, however, on recognizing the western female, sexually free, 
able to wear what they want, as constructed by the media, which is 
where I believe Mary Keller was going. I see one problem with this: we 
are hung up again with the universalization of women (that mirrors the 
long-standing universalization throughout patriarchal history) and the 
construction of their 'condition' within the social field. Women are 
always already 'women' and not 'woman'. Either we recognize women 
(woman) as individually responsible for her decisions in cultural 
affiliations or we do not. (I differ with Mary Keller significantly on 
drawing an artificial distinction between religion and culture--religion
is primarily a means of intersubjective identification, i.e. culture, 
and only secondarily a means of individual emotional transcendence.) 
Now, the conflation comes in presenting the hijab as both deeply 
religious symbol and the symbolic representation of belief bound up 
with the transhistorical function of religious beliefs. One is 
synchronically oriented and the other is diachronically oriented. This 
conflation is the assumption that all resistance to the hijab or other 
religious iconography is based simply in an 'Enlightened' desire to 
suppress them. That is not always the case. Much conflict occurs in the 
question of the synchronic or diachronic nature of belief; this is also
the center for familial conflict within ?westernized? religious 
communities. Do you believe in the negotiation of power (synchronic and 
thus *informed* *enlightened*) or do you simply believe what you are 
told to believe (i.e. diachronic, traditional, transhistorical). The 
question is then whether the former is true or the latter: if the 
former then the person is someone who is actually negotiating with 
power, because aware of it; if the latter then that person may not be 
negotiating with power but be 'buying' into it, blindly so to speak.

This brings me to the second quote and my conclusion: Ryan Bishop is 
referring to the possibility of an originary moment of peace. He uses 
the metaphor of the veil to probe what he calls the "epistemology of 
violence." The veiling and unveiling of the screen, of media, and so 
forth reflects truth as a process, and one that is essentially 
unending. Mary Keller reflects this epistemology of violence, as does 
Homer, onto the female body. What does this mean for the epistemology 
itself? To probe violence through the 'veil' is to unveil it, revealing 
it as the woman must reveal her face for the British technocrat. Truth
is traditionally found in the unveiling of it, while 'surveillance' 
operates as an internalizing function of state violence. But 
surveillance also plays into a mythification of state power, a removal 
of it into its core and away from the public sphere that supposedly 
determines it. The unveiling of the female body, then, takes up the 
symbolic function of the unveiling of surveillance itself. The state 
reveals itself by proffering its own hidden agenda onto the covered
female. The response to this should be pragmatic: unveiling the nature 
of the veil outside of its transhistorical function. Folding that into 
a recognition of its pragmatic power. The ideological function, that is 
to say, must be pierced to reveal something more profound, and this can 
only be done in a pragmatic and open framework. Sincerely

John A. Woodward
Florida State University

Quoting Mary Keller <kellerkeegan at hotmail.com>:

> I wish to begin addressing Religion, Politics, Media and War by 
> picking up two threads. The first, written by Melanie McCallister :
>
> one could argue that Foucault's work is about defining the much 
> earlier demise of spectacle (punishment for display) toward a 
> rationalized discipline/surveillance that disguised and internalized 
> the operations of power.
>
> The second, Ryan Bishop wrote:
> for the veil and unveiling relate to truth as aeltheia, or truth as
> ongoing unconcealment.
>
> You must try to understand how bizarre it has been for me over the 
> past several years to see France legislate against the wearing of 
> veils by Muslim female students (France is doing WHAT?) followed by 
> Britain’s top brass arguing that it was necessary for a Muslim woman 
> to meet with him without her veil so that he could evaluate the truth 
> of her words by watching more of her face and seeing more of her 
> demeanor (he thinks he can see truth that the veil would conceal?).
>
> I sit in Cody, Wyoming, very near to where Dick Cheney lives, and can 
> generally, comfortably assume that it will be my people and my 
> President who would presume such measures in their policies. It is, 
> after all, my President who continues to tell us that he has looked 
> Vladimir Putin in the eye and judged him to be a good man, and that 
> he looked current members of the Iraqi government in the eye and saw 
> their honesty and determination. That such naïve phenomenology and 
> epistemology is espoused by our figurehead is the kind of stuff I am 
> used to.
>
> But not in France—how naïve I was to think that Foucault’s presence 
> in that country had somehow permeated the administration with 
> sophisticated senses of discipline and punish to augment the 
> sophistication of style.  And not in Tony Blair’s Britain, whose 
> national healthcare (considered liberal, wacko, spend and tax utopian 
> thought in the U.S.) is a beacon of hope that progressive, humane 
> government is possible.
>
> The deal is simple if you want to understand why governments that 
> grew out of Christian and Enlightenment heritages do not see 
> themselves seeing the veil. I continue to point to Talal Asad’s 
> "Genealogies of Religion" in order to explain the problem to my 
> people. When the Enlightenment philosophers carved out the space for 
> the proper sphere of religion, Religion Within the Limits of Reason 
> Alone, a pretense was created. The pretense was this: religion is 
> about symbolic beliefs that individuals hold and can contain within a 
> proper sphere of activity, guarded over by reason. With such a 
> pretense, one can boldly claim to have a government based on the 
> division between church and state. Happy, reasonable individuals get 
> their symbolic beliefs on Friday, Saturday, Sunday. The rest of life 
> will be run in the epistemological grids of reason, science, and 
> politics using empirical methods, and the scientific method. “The 
> rest of life” becomes what is now called the secularization of 
> culture.
>
> The problem with this pretense is that religion is not about symbolic 
> beliefs. It is about relationships of power that give meaning to 
> people’s sense of the ultimate significance of their place in the 
> world, to paraphrase Charles Long from his book "Significations." 
> Humanists are quite happy with the idea that humans need to orient 
> themselves in their world, and Frederic Jameson proposes the 
> development of an ‘aesthetic of cognitive mapping’ to serve as a 
> ‘pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual 
> subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global 
> system’ in "Postmodernism" (54). And in the "Geopolitical Aesthetic" 
> he writes about ‘the desire called cognitive mapping,’ (3) a desire 
> that is a response to invisible forces, a response that assesses ‘the 
> nature of an external force that does something to you, but which 
> [remains unseen] by virtue of the fact that its power transcends your 
> capacity to understand it or conceptualize—better still to 
> represent—it’ (88).  Why would Long argue twenty years earlier that 
> religion is best understood as orientation? Why would I challenge the 
> humanist framework by suggesting that what it is describing is best 
> understood as the work of religion?
>
> France and Britain don’t understand the hijab because they do not 
> understand why someone’s religious life is as much about a 
> negotiation with power as is consumer culture. Religious lives always 
> have been and will continue to be deeply implicated in territory, 
> gender, economy and war because questions of ultimacy throw humans 
> when they encounter borders and boundaries against which they can 
> effectively determine their ultimate significance. That is why, in 
> the end, American money says “In God We Trust”. Sure you can set up 
> your division between church and state—but just try to print money 
> without getting theological. Sure you can be a modern war machine, 
> but just try going to war without saying Oh God.
>
> I think that if the West could just catch up with the shortcomings of 
> its Enlightenment categorizations of religion, and could instead 
> understand the embodied, cognitive, power relationship that is called 
> religion, we could then begin to discern a ground for communication. 
> If the nun’s habit is not scarey, then why is the hijab? If the 
> school teacher’s golden cross dangling at her throat is not a 
> problem, then why is the hijab? The woman wearing the hijab is 
> negotiating with power and is not exposing her morally disciplined 
> body, she is not revealing her “truths” like the females of American 
> culture do. This friendly comparison ought not to be rocket science.
>
> I recently had a friend ask me what was the difference between my 
> sense of religion and a general sense of ‘culture.’  The difference 
> is history and argument. That is all. History because we receive 
> established traditions of dealing with unseen forces whose power does 
> something to you but remains unseen by you by virtue of the fact that 
> its power transcends your capacity to understand it or 
> conceptualize—better still to represent—it. These traditions have 
> been called religions.  To use the word religion is to participate  
> in an established game in which that signifier is recognized.
>
> Why continue with the word? Because of value. Some things are more 
> equal than others. Some things are of ultimate value. If something is 
> of ultimate value, it will drive humans differently than things that 
> carry mundane value. It will drive humans to the borders at which 
> they can discern and determine ultimate value. It drives humans out 
> of their “numb” lives in search of something that will make them feel 
> alive. It drives humans out of their sense of meaningless, 
> insignificant anonymity to gain a sense of significance through acts 
> that will bring them across a new border of experience. Because 
> violence is an event of crossing mental and physical borders and 
> boundaries, violence is intimately related to the responses people 
> have to meaninglessness. Violence brings you into contact with a 
> border against which you can orient yourself and your significance. 
> Violence is an immature response to religious desire, but we are 
> human and tragically immature in our ability to respond to meaning. 
> Trying to make people go secular will not attend to their immaturity.
>
> Another reason to use the word religion: It doesn’t go away. We could 
> make a brand new start as the newly elected democrats suggest they 
> can do, and we could call it schmegli. We could call it an opiate and 
> exhort our comarades to take down the transcendentals—although that 
> sounds strikingly familiar to “the kingdom of humans is at hand.” 
> That plan hasn’t worked yet, with icons of Chairmon Mao selling like 
> hotcakes. We could call it projection and enter analysis interminable 
> instead. Or we could call it religion.
>
>
> It is different. It is not an essence or essential difference, it is 
> a matter of interpretation and argument regarding its difference. I 
> cannot put a woman on the scale, with or without hijab, and weigh her 
> in order to determine her religious essence. I can only argue why it 
> is most useful to understand a religious identity at work in the 
> borders and boundaries that woman cultivates to mark the significance 
> of her location in the world.
>
>
>
>
> Mary Keller, Ph. D.
> Adjunct, African American Studies Program and Religious Studies Program
> University of Wyoming
> Independent Researcher
> Research Associate, Buffalo Bill Historical Center
>
> 1025 Cody Ave.
> Cody, WY 82414
> ph 307 587 5312
>
>
>
>
>
>> From: "bracha L. Ettinger" <brachale at zahav.net.il>
>> Reply-To: underfire at underfire.eyebeam.org
>> To: underfire at underfire.eyebeam.org
>> Subject: Re: <underfire> on compassion
>> Date: Sun, 12 Nov 2006 01:50:38 +0200
>>
>>
>> Kate, Sarah, Ryan, Wolfgang, Mary, Allan, Jordan, dear friends,
>>
>> The originary event of peace is compassion.
>> Peace is a fragile encounter-eventing, an ever re-co-created and co- 
>> re-created fragile and fragilizing encounter-event, which I can  
>> articulate only in terms of what I have named the matrixial  
>> borderspace, a paradigm engendered from, with and within particular  
>> epistemological parameters that I have developed and elaborated  
>> during some 21 years of constant theoretical writing intertwined 
>> with- in psychoanalytic practice and artistic practice. It wouldn't 
>> be  possible to present briefly how compassion and responsibility 
>> meet in  the matrixial sphere, but I will try to open at least an 
>> entry, for  those who would want to go on and do some reading 
>> elsewhere. Through  some kinds of aesthetical working-through (in 
>> art for example) and  ethical working-through (in psychoanalytical 
>> healing for example),  compassion gives birth to responsibility 
>> while responsibility gives  birth to compassion to the extent that 
>> they are not thinkable apart.  Though we can think and talk on 
>> compassion and on responsibility,  their combination is not a 
>> thought but a practiced affective  encounter-event that becomes a 
>> point of view.
>> The following is extracted from my recent essay called " Com- 
>> passionate Co-response-ability, Initiation in Jointness and the link 
>>  x of Matrixial Virtuality" [in Gorge(l) (ed. S. Van Loo), The Royal 
>>  Museum of Antwerp]. I hope that those who are not familiar with my  
>> writing, who might find this language too dense or idiosyncratic,  
>> would simply read enter this post with their poetic antenne, since  
>> during so many years of theorizing I had to find or invent words 
>> that  fit the parameters of what I named the matrixial 
>> encounter-event, and  what I can bring here is just a hint 
>> concerning a whole field, in  which the definition of some familiar 
>> words change. ( You are invited  to read my book The Matrixial 
>> Borderspace, and perhaps the essay  "Matrixial Trans-subjectivity" 
>> [TCS, 23(2-3)], to have a glimpse at  this paradigm).
>>
>> "The pole of compassion resonates with the miracle of non-life 
>> coming  into life in jointness, with the ethical value of 
>> wit(h)nessing and  the virtual strings of matrixial com-passion. "
>> "Fascinance, compassion, awe and self-relinquishment participate in  
>> the originary matrixial knowing of/with-in the m/Other and 
>> of/with-in  the Cosmos. Early empathy that arises in extreme 
>> psychic-mental  fragility and vulnerability leans on the matrixial 
>> tissue of com- passionate co-response-ability. Response-ability, 
>> vulnerability,  fascinance, awe, compassion and self-relinquishment 
>> are forever bound  within matrixial nets composed of psychic-mental 
>> strings and threads  and working-through in metramorphosis.
>> In a matrixial sphere, the bending of the aesthetical toward the  
>> ethical and of the ethical toward the aesthetical is awakened by  
>> artworking and healing that resonate the originary aesthetical com- 
>> passion, co-response-ability and wit(h)nessing in and by which pre- 
>> subjective primary compassion is already manifested. The pre- 
>> subject's compassion and fascinance informs its own emergence 
>> with-in  a co-birthing (co-naissance) of trans-subjective 
>> entities—composed of  I(s) and non-I(s)—by way of affective and 
>> trans-sensed knowledge.  Trans-subjective co-response-ability, 
>> inaugurated by and in the  primordial matrixial 
>> encounter-event—where pre-maternal hospitality,  empathy and 
>> responsibility encounters prenatal pre-mature response- ability, 
>> compassion and fascinance—and inaugurated at the same time  also by 
>> and in interconnectedness in self-relinquishment and wit(h) nessing 
>> in awe, is the primary psycho-aesthetical and psycho-ethical  basis 
>> upon which creativity and ethical potentiality can evolve all  
>> throughout life with-in new matrixial clusters. " (Gorge(l), 
>> pp.11-13. )
>>
>> I just came back from a Arabs/Jews/Palestinians/Israelis peaceful  
>> demonstration at the Erez Crossing Gate between Israel and Gaza.  
>> There will be a demonstration in Tel Aviv on the 2 of December.
>> Bracha
>>
>
>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Under Fire  http://underfire.eyebeam.org
>> 16 October - 10 December 2006
>> International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville
>> all writings copyright individual authors
>> no commercial use without permission
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