Religion, culture and society in the 'information age'

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

Rather than offering visions of a post-representational world of excess, what Bataille and Zizek share is a commitment to a fuller sense of what it is to be human than that acknowledged in modernity, and in much modern social theory. Indeed, while Lash and Featherstone (2001:16) reference Zizek and Deleuze together as advocates of a notion of the real "in excess of Durkheim's symbolic," Zizek (2002:30) attacks Deleuze for occluding the real forces within society. It is also notable that, unlike Lash and Featherstone, Urry, Castells and Touraine, Zizek emphasizes the importance of religion in these terms; that is, he emphasizes the necessity of assessing contemporary cultural processes and changes within the context of a firm grasp of the intimate connections between religion, society and the real dangers and opportunities facing human beings in the world today. This emphasis, however, is strikingly different from the general neglect of religious issues in accounts of the information age.

RELIGION AND THE INFORMATION SOCIETY

The neglect of religion is well exemplified by the writings of Castells who, even while introducing a book centered on the notion of the millennium, appears to see religion as an archaic leftover from a previous age. Indeed, Castells's (1998:1) manifest inability to take religion seriously is signaled by his dismissal of Christianity as "a minority religion that is bound to lose its pre-eminence" as representation becomes shaped by "real virtuality" rather than religion, and by his failure to even consider what Virilio (1984) envisages to be the dangerous and inhuman consequences that flow from the attempted elimination of modernity's religious origins. Here, it is important to note that Virilio clearly stands apart from other theorists, offering an interpretation of the information that is more theological than sociological. For Virilio (2002:10), the history of the modern West can be read as a striving to be "rid of God." It is in the modern techno-scientific imagination, however, that this striving reaches its most extreme, "Satanic" form since humanity becomes enslaved to the pursuit of an immortality, beyond good and evil, that ultimately results in the elimination of the human (Virilio 2002:16, 19, 28). While these arguments have a characteristically apocalyptic tone, it is important to note that Zizek's more measured reassertion of the importance of religion nonetheless has a number of similar features.

Zizek's (2000) The Fragile Absolute is, uniquely, a Marxist defense of the West's Christian legacy. This defense takes seriously the increasing power of technologies to reshape cultural forms and experiences across the globe, but he is also concerned with the violence and corruption that often goes with this, and the fact that postmodern theorists of culture collude in such processes through their failure to engage with the questions about human nature and destiny that are as important now as they have ever been. Further to this, he is also highly critical of certain aspects of the apparent resurgence of religious factors in the contemporary world, since they often simply reflect, rather than challenge, broader patterns of de-humanization. Thus, for him, the return of the religious dimension in much contemporary social and cultural life is, in many respects, deplorable because it is manifest as an obscurantist postmodern spiritualism that dissolves social reality into a multiplicity of meaningless subjectivities. In contrast, what he finds in Christianity is a certain kind of social realism where, contrary to postmodern theory, people cannot be reduced into symbolic codifications of "otherness" which offer opportunities for self-realization, but are real, unavoidable neighbors whose very particularity confronts the individual with universal demands and obligations that cannot be ignored (Zizek 2000:109). This is why, for him, a proper engagement with the nature of culture and society in the contemporary Western world necessary involves an engagement with its Christian legacy.