Religion, culture and society in the 'information age'

Sociology of Religion, Winter, 2004 by Philip A. Mellor

In broad terms, these developments signal a loss of faith in the social; a loss of faith also exemplified, and sometimes celebrated, in the more nihilistic elements of postmodern philosophy. This postmodern view, however, is strongly opposed by Virilio, who reasserts the importance of the social in the face of Baudrillard's nihilism, and rejects the concept of "simulation" in favor of that of "substitution" (Armitage 2000:43). For Virilio, there is no collapse between representation and the real, only the substitution of a virtual reality (with its own, technologically mediated, representations) for the flesh and blood reality of human interaction. This substitution is also, however, a religious substitution: the collapse of the social is tied to the gradual elimination of traditional forms of the sacred from the contemporary world, and the emergence of techno-science as a new, surrogate religion. For Virilio, genuine religion, along with humanity and society, is being systematically eliminated (Virilio and Lotringer 1997:124).

In contrast to many techno-society theorists, then, Virilio's vision is a passionate, immensely powerful depiction of the contemporary human lot, which does not simply accept contemporary technologically driven social and cultural changes as inevitable, let alone desirable. Furthermore, in contrast with much postmodern theory, he does not doubt that embodied human beings, natural and transcendental realities, and society have ontological substance to them. Likewise, there is a keen sense of the moral capacities and potentialities of humans that informs his work, and stimulates the outrage he expresses in relation to many aspects of techno-science. What he shares with writers such as Castells and Urry, nonetheless, is the belief that a radical reconstruction of such things is taking place. Thus, what alarms him is the dehumanization, disembodiment and moral anaesthetization that is now, he believes, accompanying the substitution of virtuality for reality.

REPRESENTING SOCIETY

Nonetheless, as challenging as Virilio's work is, the idea that society or even the social has now vanished into the simulations, circuits and networks of the information age finds its most robust challenge in Durkheimian social theory, which might explain why post-societal theorists tend to define themselves against Durkheim. Touraine (1989, 1995) and Urry (2000), for example, single out Durkheim's vision of society as the most influential source of sociology's anachronistic concern with society, even if the Durkheim they reject is often something of a sociological parody, wherein his arguments are characteristically reduced to a neo-Parsonian concern with the Hobbesian problem of order (see Mellor 1998, 2002; Morrison, 2000). What Durkheim's work alerts us to, however, is the fact that questions about society necessarily raise questions about human potentialities and limitations; questions that are ignored in much of the information society literature. It is the Durkheimian tradition, in fact, that expresses most forcefully the idea that being part of society is inextricably tied to our humanity, an idea that is of fundamental importance if we are to continue to study what societies really are rather than succumbing to technologically driven fantasies about what they might be.