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Dominic Wetzel,
"Introduction"
(page 2 of 4)
Science, Bodies, and the Christian Secular
The first section, Science, Bodies, and the Christian Secular
takes up these questions by examining and deconstructing the strict
binary often assumed between religion and science/secularism. Ann
Burlein, in "The Molecular Body and the Christian Secular," starts off
by asking, "what happens to Foucault's contention that the soul is the
prison of the body when sexuality gets routed not through confession but
through molecular biology and the so-called 'revolution in genetic
medicine'?" Further, "how does the market in knowledge-products and
services that this revolution has helped produce change expectations
regarding the body and its truths?" Despite the fact that genetics
makes biology conditional, linking body and soul in non-linear and
non-reductionistic ways, Burlein argues the "family" still remains the
primary point of access to the production of this (genetically variant)
de-standardizing body. The genetic revolution relentlessly re-inscribes
conventional relations toward belonging, intimacy, sexuality, and even
life itself. Why? As Burlein fleshes out in her paper—employing
Foucault's concept of secularism as "in-depth
Christianization"—largely because of the influence of the Christian
Secular.[13] In other
words, the idea, as Asad puts it, secularism in the West is "neither
continuous with the religious that supposedly preceded it ... nor a simple
break from it."[14]
Instead, religiosity and the secular co-constitute
one another. Nowhere is this demonstrated more fully than in modern
medicine, which, in Burlein's words, "provided crucial justification for
secular governance" through its "rational" aim to end pain, rather than
justify, inflict or palliate it. "Despite medicine's use of this
legitimation narrative to assert its status as empirical science",
Burlein argues, physicians have "relied on and even strengthened
religious sensibilities regarding sexuality and shame."
In a new twist of the co-constitution of the religious and the
secular, while 'sexuality' is still key to the molecular body—though
differently, insofar as the molecular body develops logics of variation
without norm that proliferate individual differences, evading the
shame medical norms engender—Burlein shows how molecular medicine
"curtails and contains these radical possibilities by foregrounding the
domestic family as the primary point of access and production";
realizing its "dream of tapping directly into the forces of life itself"
by "backgrounding reproduction and stigmatized forms of identity in
favor of foregrounding the lyrical and allegedly liberating discourses
and practices of romantic love." Drawing on Melinda Cooper's work on the
rise of the biotechnology industry, and its aim to generate "surplus
value from life's capacity for future capacity," Burlein argues that
while molecular medicine, "still tells sexual sermons (as did eighteenth
century sexology), its preaching works not by implanting shame or
stigma, but rather by inciting us to invest in the possibility of future
growth, not in spite of uncertainty but because of it."
Crucially, for Burlein's argument, it is the capacity of molecular
medicine for "smart touch" and screening of potential maladies and
genetic errors that ironically re-inscribes the familial romance back at
the center. Somatic individuals "seek to anticipate and shape 'nature'
before it actually comes to pass," yet, paradoxically, "despite the talk
of DNA as 'uniquely you,' and despite the flattening of
mommy-Daddy-Oedipus that molecular memories enable, genetic medicine
insistently embeds the individual within 'the background-body, the body
behind the abnormal body ... the parents' body, the ancestors' body, the
body of the family, the body of heredity; in today's clinic ... it is the
intimate, domestic family that provides the obligatory passage point to
knowledge about individuals as well as citizenship." For Burlein, even
artificial reproductive technologies work by "backgrounding reproduction
in favor of routing 'sexuality' through the gendered romance ... it is the
way that molecular medicine preaches 'the domestic family' that explains
why the new technologies for artificial reproduction have not troubled
traditional notions of gender and family in the ways that feminist
activists and scholars once thought they would." Just as Luther and
Calvin "disciplined sexuality through marriage," the "care for the
'self' that is emerging across the various sub-disciplines of molecular
medicine is always already care of familial others."
Today, Burlein argues: "Sex still stands in for material relations.
Its disciplines still provide support for lyrical forms of preaching and
promise. In a world that dreams of rendering even waste productive,
medicine's sexual sermons authorize specific expectations regarding what
makes life worth living and dying for"—such as the West's supposed
sexual "freedom" in contrast with its Islamic "other". Burlein
concludes:
Molecular medicine acts as (what Lauren Berlant calls) an
intimate public: juxtaposed to the political without necessarily
going there, medical discourses deploy 'sexuality' in ways that promise
us freedom—especially vis-à-vis our bodily fate(s)—even as these
same sexual sermons re-structure the conjunction of experiences that we
call 'sexuality.' To call these discourses 'sexual sermons' is not
to argue that sexuality 'functions like' a religion. It is, rather,
to pinpoint particular practices through which secular expectations
surrounding the body and its vitality draw force from long-standing
religious sensibilities in which sexuality stands in for ethical
relation to the material world. We respond to their force, believe
in the body (as Nietzsche put it), whether or not we profess or practice
Christianity."
While Burlein focuses on the (typically denied) co-constitution of
the religious and the secular within molecular biology, Melissa Wilcox
in, "Bodily Transgression: Ritual and Agency in Self-Injury," seeks to
open the binary between religion and the scientific (Christian) secular
by exploring what each might learn from each other via dialogue about
mutilation and self-injury. While religious traditions have a long
understanding of self-injury as a form of asceticism, Wilcox points out
that the clinical definition of self-injury includes the specification
that self-injurious practices include only those that are "socially
unacceptable." Yet, at what point does "pathology end and normativity
enter?" Why, for instance, is piercing one's own ears not self-injury?
Or body piercing or tattoos? How does scarification differ from
self-injury? Wilcox goes on to explore the different ways in which
self-injury, seen from science's standpoint mainly as pathology, with
aid from religious theories of ritual and postmodern feminism can be
seen as a "symbolic means of giving voice to pain, as a paradoxical form
of agency, and as ritual." Where science and modern psychology may
primarily see pathology, ritual theory can see voice and agency, even if
(often) self-defeating. Conversely, self-injury offers to (potentially
romanticizing) theory about religious ritual how agency and voice can be
interwoven with potentially self-defeating "misrecognition" of its
ultimate aims:
What self-injury offers to the study of ritual is the
question of external misrecognition, which fundamentally influences
the meaning and concrete social effects of a ritual. The potential for
misreading of self-injury leads to a potential for re-victimization
of those who self-injure by people whose interpretations of the practice
diverge from those of the self-injurer herself. The flip side,
though, of the ambivalence of self-injury is that it is in fact
empowering—and for very good reasons—despite how
self-destructive and maladaptive it may seem from an outsider's
perspective. Other rituals may share this fundamental ambivalence.
This should alert scholars to be sensitive, in the analysis of
ritual, to practitioners' claims of empowerment, even in cases where the
ritual appears from our own perspective to be disempowering, and it
should also alert us to the risks inherent in the misrecognition of
ritual.
Expanding on her reflections of self-injury as a technology of the
self or gender, Wilcox concludes by proposing the concept of
"technologies of the sacred" as a tool for transgressing simplistic
religion/science binaries to see their co-constitution and what each
might have to offer each other:
Technologies of the sacred, then, might be defined as those
practical, religious ways in which the self is brought into being,
shaped, and maintained. They would include the ways in which social
power comes to expression in the everyday sacred practices and
experiences of the subject, and also—showing the ambiguity in
self-injury as a technology of the self and a technology of the
sacred—the religious ways in which such subjects redeploy power to
undermine existing structures of domination. Technologies of the
sacred can also be understood as those practices that bring a sense
of the sacred into being, that construct the sacred, and that shape the
self in response to such experiences of the sacred. In this way,
self-injury as a technology of the sacred evokes an experience of the
sacred, marks that experience clearly on the body, and at the same
time reinforces—or, in some cases, subverts, or both—structures
of power and domination.
Pivoting from these reflections on individual bodies, the
science/religion binary and the Christian Secular, Laura Levitt, in
"Shedding Liberalism All Over Again," focuses more closely on the role
of the Christian Secular in the "exclusionary inclusion" of different
kinds of social bodies in liberalism in the U.S., focusing in particular
on the example of the historical experience of Jews who emigrated to the
United States. While on the one hand, America has served as a welcome
respite for Jews, particularly Eastern European Jews like her ancestors,
this has not come without a cost. Like today's Islamic cultures in the
U.S., or yesterday's Catholics, the Christian Secular is ostensibly
welcoming, but only to the extent outside groups fit into and conform to
the frame of its Protestant structure and outlook. It is "okay" to be
different, as long as you are a recognizable variation on its theme.
For Jews, Levitt argues, this has been recognition of inclusion only to
the extent that Jews are seen as "religious" and belong to a "church"
(synagogue). "Secular," unbelieving, or merely "cultural" Jews are
excluded from acceptable recognition in today's ostensibly "neutral"
public sphere. One can argue as well that this dynamic functions in
regard to today's relations with atheists, or nonbelievers. When was
the last time an atheist ran for President? Or a Catholic won? (Yes,
Kennedy did get elected, but only Protestants have been elected
President in the fifty years since his historic
victory.[15] Engaging
with Saba Mahmood's reflections[16]
on how liberalism regulates
difference through the idea of religious tolerance, Levitt aims to
create dialogue between different "excluded" factions, recuperating
(while mourning) liberalism's "revolutionary" promise of inclusion in a
"more inclusive collective future, a future that risks imagining
inclusion in new and more powerful ways that just might bring Jews and
Muslims into a more productive alliance with feminists and other
others."
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