Indeed, was antebellum America secular?

To answer his title question definitively, yes or no, is to commit oneself to a vision of the present in which religion recedes into oblivion, or flowers, or does battle with its secular other. Definitive answers, moreover, serve a politics of normativity for they help determine the ideas, objects, and persons to be jettisoned, not to mention what views of the world become authoritative, which moral feelings count, and which ones become unaccounted for and forgotten.

Warner engages crucial work on secularity even as he considers the dissolution of the entrenched differential of the religious and the secular. Consequently, Warner’s essay is also incitement for a renewed interrogation of the history of the difference between the religious and the secular and how that difference makes a difference in the lives of individuals—no less for historical actors than for the scholars who study them.

Such interrogations must be rigorous and responsible to the archive but also, at the same time, be deft and willing to account for the precipitous declining ground of secular analysis. Such interrogations, I would add, portend nothing less than a reorientation of historical inquiry.

So although the question of whether antebellum America was secular cannot and should not be taken at face value, it and other similar queries have done much to establish the taken-for-granted status of the differential in many arenas of American life—jurisprudence, corporate culture, mass media, religious institutions, academic environs. What happens, Warner asks, when the categorical difference between the religious and the secular is shown to be historically contingent, politically expedient, and, most perversely, a product of the very era and imaginary this differential is now called upon to analyze? What happens when we possess insight into the making of religion in all of its varied registers yet inhabit a world in which that making has structured the very possibility of our recognition? What happens, as the stowaway Pip so slyly asks, when you unscrew your navel, when the boundary between self and world begins to become undone?

Why this knowledge and why now?

The question of the secular, as I take Warner to suggest, is not merely dizzying. It is, at some level, incomprehensible. And I agree, although I suspect that we have different spins on what incomprehension portends and what the stakes are for analysis.

*   *   *

Warner commends Secularism in Antebellum America for the way in which it illuminates a tension between “analytic distance and normative involvement.” He remains wary, however, of my “Derridean pathos” and flattening of “the complex relations among secularity (constituting the real in a social imaginary and establishing religion as a category), political secularism (a project for regulating religion so conceived), and various forms of ethical secularism.” This is a fair concern (although I would insist that my pathos is Benjaminian) and one that I will not so much counter as qualify with a series of normative claims.

I welcome Warner’s call to distinguish between the background noise from which conceptual patterns of religion take shape, political projects that seek to create these patterns, and the living out and through these patterns. These three analytical distinctions are (and will be) immensely helpful in thinking about a range of contradictions endemic to the secular age and, in particular, the cultivation of selves within discourse and the maintenance of privacy amidst a swirl of conceptual demands. And as Warner himself notes, I, too, have these distinctions in mind.

But I have to admit that analytical differentiation was not my primary concern while writing Secularism. Instead, I sought to tell a story that conjured the dense experiential measures of a secular imaginary circa 1851. Rather than distinguish between the moods and motivations, the institutional directives, and the conceptual atmosphere, I focused on the relationality of concepts across cultural fields—remarkable moments in which abstract workings of discourse channeled through frail human beings.

My book is full of moments in which people experience intensity without an identifiable cause, an affect that is quickly given emotional shape and linguistic form. My narrative strategy was to highlight the experience of agencies from beyond and without as a way to tell a story of how the buffering of selves was achieved by way of one’s vulnerability (and response) to discourse. These are moments, I argued, that secularism got under the skin—not as some dominant force that invades and snatches the body away from you but rather, a moment in which neither the self nor the world was in charge. Or to put this another way, a moment when the self became the self through its exposure to discourse, an exposure that did not boil down to seamless incorporation but generated a complex process in which submission was accompanied by swerve, structuration by negotiation.

In the end, I was interested in framing the particularity of secularism’s excess. Background conditions that were not merely contextual but were agents in a distributive field. For to study secularism is to study those forces that originate in a human world but nonetheless assume an inhuman intensity.

*   *   *

Secularism is about the conditions and processes that generate religion. These conditions are not immediately present to consciousness and these processes structure more than matters of religious adherence. The “location” of these conditions—perhaps even their ontology and mechanics—is a matter of contention (informed as it is by disciplinary location).

In Secularism in Antebellum America I asked a set of questions about these conditions and these processes as they related to a range of Protestant subcultures in the northeast, circa 1851. How did they convince themselves that they were religious or not or somewhere in between? According to what criteria and why? What were the effects of their conviction, for themselves, for others, and for us?

The truth (and falsity) of religion was forged in relation with slaves, Mormons, immigrants, Catholics, and native populations. Violence—real and imagined—against these populations was integral to the making of the secular imaginary I sought to account for, as were internal divisions within the orbits of Anglo-Protestantism. I did not emphasize these conflicts as much as I might have because I was more interested in demonstrating the epiphenomenal nature of conflict—by which I mean the way in which particular conflicts, bloody and real, were effects as much as causes of secularism.

So, for example, those who took violent issue with Joseph Smith’s revelations assumed that some religions were true and some were absolutely not. While Mormonism may have emerged out of the fires of revivalism, antipathy toward Mormons served to consolidate an evangelical public sphere even as the resulting authority of evangelical truth served to naturalize anti-Mormonism beyond evangelical precincts. In taking issue with the truth of Smith’s religion (the excess of his free choice, his literalism applied to a supplemental scripture, the hints of ecstasy and erotics that simmered beneath his pious stance) Mormon haters in Carthage, Illinois participated in the same discursive field in and through which Smith experienced his First Vision in 1820. That spring, in the woods of Manchester, New York, Smith was stuck in the dilemma of voluntarism. As he pondered the question of which church he should join, the golden plates were revealed to him.

*   *   *

Upon examination of different geographic sites, different epistemic registers and social arenas, different language games and institutions, I concluded that the making of religion in antebellum America was a massively normalizing phenomenon. Perhaps even more so than had been previously acknowledged.

I was animated, for example, by the multiplicity of sites where spirituality was being made, encouraged, diagnosed, and promulgated. Spirituality and its advocacy could be found across all manner of sites—from the American Tract Society headquarters on Nassau Street to the colporteur knock on the hinterland door, from the dexterous phrenologist with his calipers to Unitarian sermons, trance lectures, penny presses and etiquette advice manuals, from spirit communiqués and ethnographic encounters to the dreams of prison reformers and their wards, and the burgeoning discipline of moral science. Much went into the making of spirituality as a self-evident faculty of the human. Spirituality, as theorized at mid-century, served to instantiate a sense of potential immunity. Indeed, the “most spiritual man” was “the one most quickened with potential life” according to Universalists [E.F., “Spirituality,” The Universalist Quarterly IX (July 1852)]. Moreover, the conceptual terrain of spirituality fueled all manner of political projects directed at cultivating selves that were porous to the degree that the traffic between self and world was ideally and naturally a matter of self-regulation. Spirituality, in other words, did not so much allow individuals to deny porosity as much as forget it, strategically, in relentless acts of self-cultivation.

Here I witnessed a particular making and deployment of what, according to Charles Taylor, is the defining mark of the secular age—a buffered self. A buffered self is a discrete entity. A buffered self is smart in the brain and free in the person. A buffered self can, therefore, stand at distance from the religious to the degree that religiosity is one choice among many. For Taylor, the buffer is that which cuts across whatever distinction one would like to posit between the religious and the secular. Once located, this buffer “will demand from myself the highest attainable perfection in all things; and will apply negatively, —that I avoid all injury by self-control; and also positively, —that I secure all practicable improvement by self-culture.” The buffer, as a mechanism of self, serves to differentiate between 1) a western world in which individuals choose vis-à-vis the religious and 2) the “the world of spirits, demons, and moral forces which our ancestors lived in” and oftentimes chose for the individuals in question.

But how did this kind of self emerge as a default setting across the religious-secular continuum? What kinds of desire and force were at play in the making of a buffered situation—a self thinking about itself thinking about the world, from a distance, and a social environment that guaranteed the ability of that self to think, securely, across that distance? What about the constraints that enable the buffer?

Whereas Taylor places a definitive value upon the buffered self and its potential to stave off the world long enough so as to seek what he calls a state of fullness, I am skeptical of the concept of a buffered self—both then and now. I am suspicious of the way in which it feels so damn good, how it makes everyone an artist, how it offers an ironic defense against the algorithms that incessantly call upon us. For it is the buffered self that bolsters a bit too much and gives tremendous advantage as one seeks tactics and subtle strategies of resistance.

So I can appreciate the political freedoms instantiated by all manner of buffering formations: the social contract, provisions against pick-pocketing and leg-breaking, my mortgage, my life insurance, my Amazon wish list, my hyperlinked name at the top of this post, the MRI machines that resonate with my hydrogen nuclei (and erase my credit cards in the process), the designer drugs tailored perfectly to my taste for elliptical perception. But these formations do not resolve my porosity into a bounded commodity to manage and exchange. Their authority depends upon the persistence of my porosity and not its resolution.

And vice versa.

For the buffered self, I contend, is an advertisement, more of a social ritual than ontology. Earnest celebrations of the buffer make it incredibly difficult to sustain conversations about the ways in which the self is subject to the agencies of the object-world, to history, to strangers and expertly branded institutions, to forces that do not announce themselves as such. There is fullness and pleasure to be had in such relays, for better or for worse. As an advertisement that has been wildly successful, the buffered self occludes from consideration the complex conditions of its own possibility. And finally, theoretically, a buffered self leaves little room for the experience of dread, insights into the plurality of worlds we inhabit together, and consideration of the range of agents within those worlds.

*   *   *

Disenchantment is bound up in theses of secularization—a description of feeling and style within modernity as much as a prescription for thinking. Disenchantment is linked, of course, to Max Weber’s classic statement of the diffusion of instrumental rationality. As Weber made clear in “Science as Vocation,” a will to and dependence upon calculation had become a reigning principle, perhaps even an ethical imperative. In a lecture so sharp in its bleakness, Weber diagnoses an acute condition of reason—marked not by certainty per se but by the expectation of certainty. Passionate belief, in other words, is at the heart of disenchantment, namely, the belief in the human ability to rid the world of forces that, if they were to resist calculation, would effect us in incalculable ways. An abiding sense of incomprehension would serve the interests of neither State nor science nor sustained hierarchy.

Under the sign of disenchantment, the world at-large, and especially human being, become subject to efficient calculation to such a degree that the world and the human become means to the ends of organization and systematicity. As a generalization, Weber’s is generally true. But what is most interesting about Weber’s claim, and most in need of elaboration vis-à-vis secularism, is an analysis of the conditions that make such means possible and such ends desirable. For when such critical work is undertaken, we begin to sense that disenchantment is an apt moniker for neither the phenomenological nor sociological registers of modernity. Like the buffered self, disenchantment is a fiercely defended wish, often fulfilled but not a fait accompli.

This point is bound up in my interest in spiritualism as a complex of ritual practice, ideas, and affect. At mid-century evangelicals were horrified by spiritualism which they saw as an irrational and dangerous affirmation of an enchanted world. Spiritualists, in turn, insisted that séances and trance lectures would loosen evangelicals up, curing them of their unhappiness and their insanity. As one spiritualist journal suggested, it was precisely the accounting for ghosts that was the mark of a true best reasonable self—“the influence of Spiritualist teachings not only does not tend to produce insanity, but has a positively counteracting tendency” [The Spiritual Telegraph 1 (1853)].

In the myriad ways in which ghosts were named at mid-century, one can witness the strange play of enchantment and disenchantment that I argue is indicative of the secularity of a long nineteenth century. On one hand, we find throughout the spiritualist archive moments in which individuals sense that their very being was located elsewhere, on the horizon, outside of themselves. In these moments they sensed themselves in the throes of mediation, shot through with something ill defined, that nonetheless determined their present and future states of being. These moments, as strictly defined by the terms of secular modernity, were enchanted. Yet, on the other hand, these moments were indices of future certainty and fodder for ever more elaborate schemes of calculation.

The mid-century metaphysician Andrew Jackson Davis illustrates something about this distant yet effective backdrop of a secular imaginary, against which choices were encountered and decisions were made. Despite the fact that a spirit had instructed Davis that “the Whole System is a volume which even the highest seraph has not altogether read,”  Davis nevertheless offered detailed maps of the Whole. For even if mapping of the spirit-world was ever incomplete, it was the assumption that there was a “Whole” to be mapped that informed spiritualist practice and identity. To paraphrase Alex Owen’s description of British occultism at the fin de siècle, Davis did not recognize the relativism of his own self-reflexivity and could therefore assume his rightful place as lord of the universe.

Davis, like an American Tract Society official or individuals performing a phrenological exam on themselves, held a belief, and that is what it surely is, in the capacity to measure that which was essential, forever and ever, amen. The rendering of the entire universe, visible and invisible, as effectively compatible was also an instance of incredible discursive investment. Everything and everything, according to Davis, could and should be mapped. It was not the instantiation of systematicity as much as it was the promotion of it as an object of worship.

Warner suggests that one implication of my work is that the “literal hauntings of spiritualism were at root the realization of the metaphorical haunting [ ] in technological society.” I would qualify this by saying that it was not simply technology but the discourse of secularism (in and through which machines and mechanical metaphors assumed their strength) that was intensely felt yet never exactly present.

To appreciate the strange ontology of discourse I drew from the testimony of historical actors. I took seriously their visions of haunted terrains and the invisible mechanics of body, mind, and much else. For when alone, at rest “a sweet sense of estrangement begins to creep over me. In such a case, it is truly most delightful to see how sweetly what is left behind insinuates its presence. The walk, the solitary chamber even, are haunted unawares by a feeling which must be called social . . . which is, in fact, a very present presence.” On one level, encounters with “very present” presences were enchanting in the Charles Taylor (and Edward Burnett Tylor) sense—a survival of what we imagine to be primitive proclivities. On another level, such encounters followed a Weberian script of disenchantment in which wonder and dread were evacuated in the name of measured explanation. When incomprehension began to set in, so, too, did the work of parrying it. Yet on still another level, such encounters were not encounters at all. They were matters of enchantment in which the self did not simply experience an inert object world but found oneself in relation to it, mediated by it, and in some weak sense, determined by it.

*   *   *

So Warner is right to point out that bloody, violent religious dissent is largely missing from my story—for there were indeed robust and deeply-felt antagonisms that I do not discuss at any length. My interest in the saturated phenomena of secularism led to different questions concerning how antagonistic positions can serve larger historical trajectories. There was, indeed, a politics to all this spirit-seeing—exclusions and closures that were real yet did not always leave a mark.

For ways of knowing and unknowing, of overcoming the limits of the visible with nothing but the promise of disenchantment, of keeping the incomprehensible at bay through a relentless desire to calculate—bore directly on the management of various populations and the lives within.  Rather than a flattening I would like to think of my chronicle of antebellum epistemics as staging the consequential turns in which selves are affected in ordinary ways by the conceptual terrain of the religious even as they deploy these concepts well beyond their immediate interests. Within the political projects forwarded by John Edmonds and Eliza Farnham (prison reform at Sing Sing State Penitentiary) and Lewis Henry Morgan (anthropology and Indian removal), the art of governance was suffused with existential navigations, ethical binds, as well as the imagination of racial difference. In each of these situations, whiteness reigned. Racial difference was an epiphenomenon of secularism, namely a common sense linkage of true religion with right morality with an essential humanity with whiteness. This linkage was manifest in the cat o’ nine tails at Sing Sing and the legal seizures of native lands in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, proving, perhaps, that people can bleed and die by the force of the epiphenomenal.

*   *   *

As one studies the making of the religious/secular continuum and the exclusions that support its normativity, one can quickly find oneself writing from a position of pious skepticism. Secularization theses, and more specifically, the secular and the breadth and scope of its truth claims become foreboding in their immanence, in the ways in which they seem to structure so much of one’s analytical choice with so little fanfare. One, therefore, cannot be shy, methodologically or theoretically, when approaching such a theologico-politico-social scheme.

The study of secularism, among other things, gives lie to the old differential saws of structure and agency, cognition and culture. It forces us, among other things, to reconsider the very suppositions of critique as secular.

So I plead guilty to Warner’s charge of standing in awe, of seeking to appreciate (and conjure) something that escapes my analytical frame. But does such pathos, as Warner suggests, “project[ ] from its own powerlessness a problem that cannot be addressed, and before which one can only stand in a vaguely radical appreciation of the tragic”? Well, yes and no.

Secularism does not exist wholly beyond the feelings, principles, and practices it authorizes. However, some part of its logic escapes our sensory orbit, out-imagining our capacity to imagine it, to name it, to grasp in its immensity. This kind of strange ontology cannot be exposed like a garden-variety object of Enlightenment critique. It can be neither cut up nor quarantined nor assayed after dutiful collection.

Herman Melville suggested that such tragic appreciation had its reasons and was the mark of our supple humanity. For Melville, original sin was a condition of permanent enchantment, a condition that could not be overcome as much as continually assessed. (Melville’s perspective was an affirmation of the “pasts” of Edwardsian Calvinism, primitivism, and Catholicism that so many Americans were in the process of defining themselves against at mid-century).  As a matter of metaphysics and writerly conceit, Melville assumed that people were, in part, constituted by powers beyond their epistemic purview—“infinite socialities” that demanded that humans struggle to do the impossible: move beyond mere humanism. “There lies the knot with which we choke ourselves,” wrote Melville. “As soon as you say Me, a God, a Nature, so soon you jump off from your stool and hang from the beam.”

These lines served as my own writerly conceit in Secularism. Indeed, they reminded me of my own failure to grasp the socialities within me, eliciting both suspicion and sympathy for those who claimed otherwise. If grasping for the precision of system is endemic to a secular age, I sought, instead, to provide a diagnosis, and on more illusory, manic days, an anecdote to what Brian Massumi calls the “preconversion of surprise into cognitive confidence.” For what I wanted to conjure was how secularity, political secularism, and ethical secularism swirl together in a seemingly unfathomable mix, which is to say at the level of the historical actor and historian alike.

*   *   *

There is no outside from which to objectify and to take the measure of secularity. No single inquiry can gain definitive leverage uponthe massive yet intricate mechanics of how religion—as faculty, phenomenon, mood, and category—gets real. A range of perspectives is required. Consequently, I see a necessary (but not exclusive) role for genealogical approaches to the secular age. The “entangled and confused parchments” must be given their due even as one seeks analytic purchase upon different layers and different moments of the secular age. In tacking back and forth between an appreciation for the excess of systems and the necessary work of systemization, there is a productive (and dialectical) tension to be had in all of this subterranean earnestness.

Perhaps this dialectic is a disciplinary inheritance of religious studies, ever inhabiting what Leigh Schmidt has referred to as the charged space between suspicion and sympathy, itself a product of the intellectual environs of nineteenth-century America. So perhaps it comes down not to an individual choice between suspicion or sympathy, but rather an embrace of both under the canopy of a future field.

As Warner’s provocation makes clear, scholarship on secularity must offer a sustained engagement with the complexity of the situation and its complicity in that complexity. Such immanent criticism “pursues the logic of its aporias, the insolubility of the task itself.” If future critics of secularity were to follow this melody laid down by Theodor Adorno—own up to it boys and girls!—they would seek the impossible: to draw from the inheritance of secular critique while simultaneously resisting its allure.

According to Adorno, “A successful work [of] immanent criticism is not one which resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure. Confronted with this kind of work, the verdict ‘mere ideology’ loses its meaning. At the same time, however, immanent criticism holds in evidence that the mind has always been under a spell. On its own it is unable to resolve the contradictions under which it labours. Even the most radical reflection of the mind on its own failure is limited by the fact that it remains a reflection, without altering the existence of which its failure bears witness.”

In light of this inevitable failure to grasp, from within, the making of an immanent frame, how to continue to write without buying into the reality of belief or the buffer between you and me, me and the archive, you and the archive? What kinds of sentences might yet achieve a hint of leverage—not upon the thicket, the blur, this secularism—but rather in light of it?

Kathryn Lofton’s Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon is a work, first and foremost, of cultural anthropology. The back cover confirms this fact. Yes, the book is about the incorporations of Oprah. But more significantly, it is an ethnography of “American astonishment,” of what it feels like to live before screens that enlighten and advertise and encompass (the virtual counterpart of living within the effervescent glare of studio lights and perpetual applause). Lofton captures, as few writers can, the everyday magic of our viral time—what, in the ritual grammar of Oprah, are referred to as “Aha! Moments.”

Caroline, for example, witnessed Oprah’s immanence by way of Skype, beamed up and in from a remote location. This forty-one-year-old from Pacific Grove, California, who had once made a decision to be a stay-at-home mother, spoke of her spiritual struggle during the “Best Life Week” that inaugurated The Oprah Winfrey Show in January 2009:

Hi. Twelve years ago I decided to give up my career and stay home with my kids, and I feel very blessed to do that, but there are times when I’m doing laundry and chauffeuring them around that I don’t always feel appreciated. And what I realized after reading the Eckhart Tolle book [is] that I am identifying with being a mother. That was a big aha moment for me. And I would like to create a larger space between realizing when I’m in ego and identifying with the role of being a mother, so that I can be in the present moment and find the peace and the happiness that I would like to be able to attain while I’m doing laundry or having to clean the bathroom and that type of stuff.

Caroline is a sophisticated analyst of her own identity, reading the push and pulls of her own psyche against a structural backdrop of gender and class formation. She is not bitter or resentful over her decision to be a stay-at-home mom as much as she longs to make the decision again, more decisively. After different layers of self-interest have been acknowledged, Caroline seeks to reconcile these differences by integrating them from afar. She is looking for that space that is both inside and outside simultaneously, performing her life but also directing the performance. This is the deferred sense of control that ‘spirituality’ has promised since the antebellum period, born aside the genre of the novel.

The sense I get from Caroline and Lofton’s other informants is that they take a certain pleasure in feeling out of sorts or misplaced or altogether some place else. For this combination of heightened consciousness and soft alienation is both strange and potent. It turns on a dime. It drags down even as it makes way for a transcendental perspective. For whether on stage with Oprah, in the studio with Oprah, or doing any manner of things—from a distance—with Oprah, these individuals receive a narrative gift that perfectly frames their sense of their own individuality.

And this is what I take to be the object of Lofton’s ethnography—the “Aha Moment,” the sense of being part (or is it a part?) of the time of the now. Such absorption, of course, is not new. Dare I say, rather, that such absorption is universal, is the very premise of being a subject in the world. We all gotta serve somebody. And so it is with a million screens of “Change Your Life TV” (and its consummation in OWN, the Oprah Winfrey Network). There is both wonder and sanity to all of this enclosure. There is also a powerful congruence of structural possibilities. There is safety and security in Oprah’s sway. For it—Oprahfication—keeps the swift jig of subjectivity from spinning out of control.

What is so incisive about Oprah is its account of onto-commodification and the work involved in “being possessed by possessions.” As Lofton writes, “Oprah offers to us a way to see a mechanism, up close, strings demonstratively exposed, of how contemporary mass culture convinces us of its conveyances.” The mechanism of this particularly virulent strain of biopower is seemingly simple: show, tell, idealize, and sell the spectrum of individuations. A gateway drug that is all but given away. Yet there is always a debt. For, in her “spirit-filled capacity,” writes Lofton, “Oprah supplies an array of products connecting you to the life you want and, more specifically, to the self you need to become to create the life you want.” Spirit, here, refers as much to an impersonal moral force as it does to a vehicle of the will and attendant self-knowledge. This is not so much a point of theological contention for Lofton as an operating assumption that allows her to spin a rather disturbing tale about our late, great secular modernity.

The spirit of the O generates the Emersonian desire of our time: You want to feel that nothing can befall you in life—no disgrace, no calamity—that Oprah could not repair. Standing on the bare ground, your head bathed by blithe light and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism will vanish. You will become transparent to yourself and the world. You will see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulating through you. You are nothing. You are part and particle of Oprah.

This enclosure of the O is a moment of transcendence shared by Oprah, her guests, and her studio and worldwide audiences. It may never really happen. But it doesn’t matter. For what does happen is the overwhelming promise of mediation, the moment when something else will pulse through you and all of you will pulse through it. Complicity, yes, but also the potential for precision and the renewed struggle for leverage.

Over the system the studio announcer announces to the studio audience: “the grim business of your audience lives” is about to end. “I summon you to a hyperlife of laughter and tears and tenderness and rocking socking sensation. Note well. Delfina draws literal life from her audience.” This is Delfina Treadwell, the not-unlike-Oprah talk-show host from Don DeLillo’s Valparaiso (1999). Delfina is a subject who is also a commodity, who gives life to others in order to satiate herself. Delfina understands intuitively, as does Oprah, this cycle of life, referring to her live performances as “my private moments.” “The studio audience restores my life force,” she confesses. “You have to understand. I live in a box in a state of endless replication.”

It would be comforting to know that Oprah, in her Delfina-like knowingness, was in charge. But she is not. She determines us only insofar as we determine her ratings. Her omnipotence feeds upon our improvisation; her cultural agency is not an either/or proposition, and neither is the freedom of those who watch or do not watch her. Whatever Oprah is depends, absolutely, on the freedom of each of her audience members. The self-consciousness of her subjects is Lofton’s working assumption. “Aha!” she exclaims, he exclaims, you exclaim, they exclaim. For Oprah’s audience demands the demonstration, the exposure, and the strings. These are complicated people, epistemologically speaking, as are we all.

Consequently, a necessary exactitude pervades the pages of Oprah, on each a clinical dissection of what Jenny Franchot once called “the interior life.” For everything pivots on the intimacy involved in the rituals of exposure and response. Oprah winks. She nods approvingly. “Aha!” she exclaims, over and over again, looking deep into the camera each and every time. Oprah is in on the joke. Oprah’s audience is in on the joke. We are all in on the joke. And yet we continue to buy.

There is a negativity in all of this Oprahfication, though it is no via negativa but something else—familiar and phantasmagoric. For Oprahfication is, among other things, the shadow cast by centuries of religious history and therapeutic culture, a point deftly made by Lofton in her discussion of such things as the anxious bench of Charles Finney and the World’s Parliament of Religions, New Thought, the Black church, and Protestant journal keeping. Lofton’s analogies between Oprah and American “patterns of religious productivity” are born of a sense of analytic implosion. Acknowledging that Oprah exists in the “excessive specifics” of her “vagaries,” Lofton has no choice but to dwell within her shadow. Oprah, here, is neither liturgical referent nor doctrinal vessel. For this is no mere “metaphoric transference,” David Chidester’s phrase for the fraught act of pulling the so-called secular into the light of religious meaning. On the contrary, Lofton insists upon the impossibility of ever resting easy with either the metaphors or their transference.

Whatever is religious about Oprah, then, is fleetingly glimpsed, seen only when she appears in drag, a preacher queen whose Whitmanic largesse and benevolent hand secure the diversity of (and circulations within) an American order.

In Oprah, Lofton is practicing cultural criticism in a world that does not (and never did) fit into the neat boxes of profane and sacred, lifestyle and liturgy. At a time when “truth” and “cute” serve increasingly similar functions and amount to increasingly similar things, Lofton’s is no mere examination but a relentless documentation of the conceptual vortex from which new categories of thought emanate, new styles of reasoning emerge, and new gods are born.

From a 2003 studio encounter:

Winfrey: It is all yours, Fannie. God bless you.

Fannie: God bless you.

Winfrey: God bless you.

Fannie: God bless you.

Winfrey: God is blessing me right now. He’s blessing me right now. It is a blessing to be able to do this for you.

Fannie: God bless you. Oh, my God. My God, this is unreal, Oh, my God.

Winfrey: I know. But you have the tape. See, you can play it back. It’s really happening.

Whatever is really happening, here and elsewhere, is preserved in Lofton’s kinetic wordy precision—but also resisted, of course, which I take to be at the heart of her discussion of the ‘us’ who live in Oprah’s post-Empire. For it is in and through the line-to-line delight of these pages that an argument is forged. Lofton’s is not a voice crying in the wilderness but one that speaks of and from the mesh of the O. It is representative rather than authoritative, offering neither comfort nor clarity but, in the end, leverage. Words accumulate, circulate, and forge strange ontic indices—supply chain of self, smothered in sale, possessed by its own plurality. But such jest, energy, and unexpected sentence structure offer insight into living after the ruse of privacy has been exposed, self-consciously and celebratorily. For in the course of our modernity, Oprah—herself, her wares, her minions, and the connections between—has come to inhabit, if not altogether suffuse, the space of our psyche. This psyche, of course, does not refer simply to what is going on inside your head, or even to the reality that you posit outside.

Cut to The Delfina Treadwell Show. The studio announcer beckons:

The cameras will swing toward the audience in the course of the show. Not once but many times. Point to yourselves on the giant monitors. I understand the need for this. I encourage this. Wave to yourselves. See yourselves cross that critical divide into some plane of transcendence.

I will return to this latter, and perhaps over-caffeinated, comparative claim. But first I want to address the kind of materialism that fuels Bender’s patient and exacting study of contemporary spirituality.

In The New Metaphysicals, Bender homes in on a storied orbit of an American Metaphysical tradition, at once thick with the debris of precedent and inhabited by those who skillfully avoid contact. Bender addresses the “practices of experience” manifest in and around Cambridge, MA—the practice of past experiences and present ones, of future encounters, and of experiences desired, feared, and deflected. A virtual world of experience, divorced from much of what came before it, yet inflected by Puritan intellect, liberal reform (from Unitarianism and pragmatism to neo-pagan enclaves), as well as, in some cases, evangelical affect. Experiences, historically speaking, that are decidedly neither seamless nor self-contained (pace Emerson’s circa-1836 injunction to establish an original relationship with the universe).

As a matter of professional instinct, historians may be inclined to frame contemporary spirituality against a background of, say, emergent institutions of Unitarianism and Universalism, evangelical approaches to the question of mediation, therapeutic institutions, or perhaps the circles emanating outward from the figure of William James. It is equally necessary, however, to account for the synchronic affects of history in the moment—the backstory of spirituality as it becomes anonymous, diffuse, and utterly present precisely because it is unacknowledged.

“Experience,” writes Bender, “does not just happen.” Looking askance at some cherished traditions revolving around the history of liberal experimentation, Bender interrogates a subject who can doubt, distill, debate, and triumph.

Take, for example, the following image of what might be called secular religious consciousness: “I eavesdropped on two older women clad in track suits who were standing in Mondazzi Book Emporium’s occult section. One had a copy of The Idiot’s Guide to Communicating with Spirits in her hand, and said to her friend, ‘You see, look here, I knew I was right!’ The other read over her shoulder, nodding without much enthusiasm as she browsed the tarot decks.” One senses here both self-deprecation on Bender’s part and a subtle questioning of Geertzian thick description. The requisite winks and nods conform to a looking-over-the-shoulder ethnographic sensitivity. Yet for Bender, the significance of the scene does not reveal the “real” reason why two people would consider, largely independent of one another, the fashion of the tracksuit circa 2002, not to mention the practice of spirit communication. For rather than the promise of descriptive closure, scenes such as this accumulate and make evident the thickness of the atmosphere in which both observed and observer find themselves.

There is a representative quality to this scene, something having to do with an American imagination. As with everyone else these days, the belief-practices of Cambridge metaphysicians are mediated by market-driven circulations. Such mediation is, of course, acknowledged in the bookstore (you do not pick up an Idiot’s Guide because you think you are an idiot, but because you have gauged your current limitations). Such acknowledgment, then, serves to confirm that whatever terms the market may introduce into the process of self-knowledge, true self-knowledge, has nothing, essentially, to do with the market. But they are wearing track suits, for God’s sake!

Cutting to the chase, there is a methodological wager in Bender’s book that is reminiscent of a radicalism shared by Marx (or at least Wendy Brown’s reading of Marx)—an analytic admission that historical forces may not only exist but may also, at some admittedly vague level, possess an agency of their own.

An implication of Bender’s argument, and the one most pressing for me as an historian, is the decoupling of experience and agency. Although most would claim that free will is only a working ideal (a benefit of the doubt, a social construction), there is a way that this ideal begins to go without saying because it continually arrives without saying—what might be called an involuntary voluntarism. In other words, there is a particular kind of epistemics going on here, processes by which various doxa secure their own replication.

“Even in the age of the Internet,” writes Bender, “many spiritual teachers and healers spend time ‘flyering’ every month, walking from the Harvest Coop to the second-hand bookstore up the street, across to a café, to several branches of the public library, and hitting the homeopathic apothecary, the adult education center, and a number of others as well.”

The seeming banality of walking from place to place and posting signs at eye-level, perhaps endlessly—“a number of others as well”—is betrayed by the primitive potency of the technic. Public discourse, at ground level, is perhaps accomplished by something not unlike a stapler. The rhythms of perforated corkboard. Fine steel snapping into place. Over and over again.

Bender’s object of inquiry is a clan in the Durkheimian sense—the representations of time, space, and technology becoming atmospheric. Consequently, Bender’s scenes of inquiry range across book clubs, group therapies, Starbucks, Whole Foods, TJ Maxx, Annie Call’s The Power of Repose (1851), Harvard Square, Swedenborgian Churches, the Old Cambridge Baptist Church, dining room tables, William James and The Varieties of Religious Experience, Friends Meeting Houses, Congregational Churches, rooms of Reiki, Zen, and acupuncture, the Theosophical Society, the Mystical Arts and Talent Show, yoga studios, the Boston Whole Health Expo hosted at the Park Plaza Hotel, and journeys to the Middle East on the astral plane. And although one could focus on the epistemic processes at work in any one of these social fields, Bender’s is a panorama of lives lived within them all. Together, her vignettes reveal how a particular discursive framing of piety congeals, almost imperceptibly, by resonating between multiple sites.

It is with this in mind that I read Bender’s claim that spirituality “is not its own field, but this does not mean that it is not organized except through the market, nor does it mean that it is ‘emergent’ into a field of its own.” Entanglements across and all the way down. A narrative of contagion that one cannot help but sense between the lines of Bender’s prose. A virus that seeks to secure the vitality of its hosts—to become a carrier of language, consciousness, and institutions. What Durkheim called the contagion of the sacred and what I have called secularism in other venues: atmospheric; an emergence that is not singular; a discourse that exhibits signs of organizational compatibility, moving systematicity, and feedback.

As scene follows scene in The New Metaphysicals, something is revealed: a mode of thinking and being that is not born solely of capitalism, nor that is unique to the economic sphere. It has emerged across a range of practices—work and consumption, to be sure, but also moral considerations and those of something called religion, political alignments and attitudes, struggles with familial relations and intimacy, modes of civic engagement, and imaginings of disengagement. Perhaps even the mood one inhabits when sitting at Starbucks, sun shining fiercely through the window.

*  *  *

In The New Metaphysicals, there is, once more, a representative quality to contemporary spirituality. Representative of what, exactly, is an open question.

So, although it may seem outrageous, I am struck by the degree to which the belief-practices of Cambridge metaphysicals resonate with Taylor’s subtle deflections of history, capitalism, and their attendant opacities. For Taylor’s epistemics of hope—his particular commitment to making the world a better, more just, and more humane place—posits something like an astral plane, a polis not unlike the space in which telepathy is a matter of intention and direction.

On the astral plane, explained Doug, “there is no room for error, you don’t have to be very careful about what it is you’re articulating because communication is absolutely perfect. It’s your intention—it’s your sort of perfect thought form that is being communicated, not the words. So you can have someone who speaks French as their natural language and someone who speaks Russian, and they’ll have a perfectly beautiful conversation and understand each other entirely well. Because it’s not the language that they’re communicating, they’re actually kind of expressing telepathically the essence of what they intended to say.” Overlapping consensus cannot help but emerge on the astral plane. And although this dream of the cosmopolis is impossible to translate into ordinary language, Doug affirms non-mediation as an assumption worth holding onto and working with in his daily life. This assumption is the sine qua non of Doug’s reasoning, without which there is little reason to think at all.

The expectations of immediacy can also be a source of awkward tension, as when Wes asks Bender for permission to “read” her energy. “I was surprised at how put off I was by Wes’s claims that he had found a way into my energetic interior, or rather, that our energetic interiors were so readily available to touch and sense.” And although Wes seems innocent enough as he and Bender sit around a kitchen table, there is emitted a kind of blithe aggression, not unlike the best intentions of an American empire.

So, to pick up a thread from the current discussion about The New Metaphysicals, “Market,” Economy,” and other secular distinctions are not the substantial equivalents of karma, energy, or soul clusters.  These former concepts are perhaps even more auratic, more magical in their capacity to organize the social spaces in which humans eat, work, dream, and think.

For Economy, the State, the Market, God, etc., are those words—spare and capitalized—that gesture toward a complexity that cannot not be summarized. Such words, despite their analytical limitations, do real work in the world. They are limit terms, efforts to encompass something that cannot be contained. Such words serve to convince the user that the complexity is not overwhelming.

Thus, what strikes me about Bender’s metaphysicals is not their inconsistency, their illogic, nor their bad faith, but their reasoning skills. For it is precisely their rationality that allows them, on one hand, to acknowledge that forces beyond their control pervade the universe, and, on the other hand, to immunize themselves from those forces (which is to say, from the more radical implications of the entanglements they acknowledge at the outset).

There is an honest grappling with enchantment among Bender’s dabblers. They may be ridiculous. They may be misguided. They may be inappropriately and overly enthusiastic when it comes to coming to terms with the vibrancy of the material world. But they are on to something even when they do not necessarily follow through on their critical insights. They grapple with thorny epistemic issues. They seek perspective upon institutionalized injustice and wrestle with their own alienation. They adhere to the myth of liberalism even as they question aspects of it.

Many of Bender’s metaphysicals, in other words, do consider enchantment as a possibility, but only before domesticating it. Rather than theorize or practice a dissolution of the self, they inevitably protect themselves from the more radical implications of enchantment, keeping them at a distance.

“I am tired of the chronic uncertainty,” says Marcy, an aspiring yoga teacher with an “incredibly stiff neck.” Uncertainty is “making me sick—affecting me physically.” Marcy still considers returning to “advertising in corporate America” or taking a job at Starbucks, where she could at least get health insurance. Marcy’s friends are empathetic. They are soothing. They offer suggestions that would allow Marcy to continue her metaphysical practice uninterrupted—writing more, working out an exchange with a chiropractor, and other ways of addressing the blockage of her “fifth chakra.”

Marcy’s friends are nothing but helpful. They share her despair over an uncertainty that is chronic. Their suggestions, however, frame uncertainty as an aberration, something that can be overcome if only one’s present situation could be seen with clarity. What corrupts such epistemic capacities are the contingencies of the corporate world (not to mention a model of insurance that allows bets to be hedged against a death that is both certain and opaque). For in Marcy’s case, as in so many others, the problem of uncertainty depends upon normalizing the state of present transparency. Consequently, auras are there to be read; past lives ready to be known; futures to be insured.

And it is upon this kind of reasoning that Bender’s book provides genealogical reflection. For in TNM, there is a hallucinatory quality to lives lived and imagined in the metaphysical grain. But those hallucinations are not simply their problem. The hallucinations, on the contrary, have as much to do with other spaces of submission.

Taylor’s sense of the material world is not unrelated to his not always implicit commitment to (or perhaps nostalgia for) the ideals of a self that flourishes, unfolds, and, at the end of the day, can be sufficiently liberated from history so as to be able to take the measure of itself—in concert, of course, with others, as they liberate themselves sufficiently from those very same forces.

In “The Sacred, the Secular, and the Profane: Charles Taylor and Karl Marx,” Brown takes Taylor’s reading of Marx to the genealogical mat. Taylor, argues Brown, practices a kind of materialist analysis that replaces a focus on the processes by which historical conditions are generated with explanations of what psychologically animates human action. Consequently, in Taylor’s story the focus on motives and aims leave little room for forces that do, in fact, exist, yet are “beyond our control, and even our cognition.”

So, as I sit here, in my comfortable chair, latte in hand, a Chocolate Mini Sparkle Doughnut by my side, I wonder whether such forces are simply too much to bear. I look to the copy on my cup for guidance: “Everything we do, you do. Buy our coffee and good things happen.”

Brown homes in on what I see as a significant detail of A Secular Age—the presentation of human intentions without sufficient attribution to the vibrancy of the environmental forces that conditioned them. To be sure, there are tragic limitations at the heart of Taylor’s story. But, as Brown argues, Taylor gives lip but little service to what Brown, via Marx, calls “historical forces conditioning and contouring secularism that do not take shape primarily as ideas or explicit human aims.”

Capitalism, to take but the most pertinent example, does not exist in essence yet possesses an agency of its own. “The movement of capital,” writes Brown, “violates both the creation of man (species being) and human capacity and creativity (making what we will of ourselves)—it violates holiness and humanism at once. Capital’s profaning power blasphemes human divinity and inverts the proper order of things, reducing us to its effects.” Capitalism is religious (and not simply like religion) precisely because of this unlocatable agency. Transgression follows in its wake, the only mark of its existence, portending a general state of enchantment. Capitalism disrupts all manner of binaries, profaning both human being and potential, transforming the best of Enlightened intentions into all manner of benevolent stasis and bloodless alienation.

Taylor, of course, is not alone in his failure to follow through on the more radical implications of Marx’s argument. Marx didn’t either, positing a heroic, ultimately expressive consciousness as the inheritance of a redeemed humanity that would make its way across a threshold of false consciousness, beyond capitalism.

But whither redemption when it has become all but impossible to come to terms—any terms whatsoever, mind you—with “forces” that are “humanly generated but not apprehended as such and not humanly controlled”? This is not any garden-variety illusion, but rather a particular kind of hallucination that is endemic to the secular age. This hallucination, moreover, is bound up with capitalism but cannot be reduced to mere economics. For it thrives in any space that entertains the outrageous perspective that opacity and enchantment can, with epistemic diligence (and a politics that promotes such diligence), be overcome.

Indeed, it would take someone like Walter Benjamin, stoned observer of modernity’s ambiguous core, witness to both the beauty and violence of capitalistic structures, to begin to take seriously the ontology of self-organizing economic and political systems. And it is this genealogical move that Taylor’s narrative refuses. In rendering enchantment as a pre-existing but unnecessary condition (and transparency as a kind of ideal), Taylor misses something definitive about the secular age whose story he is telling.

Summarizing (by way of a Benjaminian lineage of critique that addresses the phantasmic elements of modernity) what might be called the genealogical insight of Marx, Brown writes that humans are “extraordinary creatures, capable of endowing our mental and physical productions with autonomy, generativity, even sovereignty.” Once such sovereignty is entertained, the line of questioning posed by Taylor calls for a different kind of explanatory response. It requires a more meticulous, yet vaguer, documentation. It demands a history of modernity that does not simply jettison naïve theories of secularization (as Taylor’s admirably does), but that also gestures toward the norms of enchantment and opacity. Regrettably, such states are often assumed to be exceptional, existing only to prove other rules. This point, I think, is at the heart of Jane Bennett’s subtle critique of Akeel Bilgrami’s discussion of enchantment vis-à-vis Taylor’s use of it in A Secular Age.

Brown’s story of the secular age would begin with a different premise. The questions would be genealogical rather than analytic: How is the “secular subject to be grasped and articulated,” asks Brown, given that each one of our decisions may be our own even though the range of available choices has nothing, whatsoever, to do with us?  “How is its history to be traced, what are the most relevant conditions of its emergence, and what kind of consciousness is secular religious consciousness?”

Such questions inevitably turn the narrative logic of A Secular Age against itself, for they necessarily call attention to what is embedded deep within the structures of Taylor’s argument—namely, the communicative promise of liberalism, its imagined harmony of differences, and of course, a tolerant embrace of “alternative” notions and lifestyles.

In opening her essay with a discussion of the Obama campaign and the resurgence of a “spiritual left” in 2008, Brown positions Taylor’s work as partaking in a similar project of hope—of affirming “belief in belief.”  And who amongst us was not just a little hopeful when envivsioning an Obama administration? But what, exactly, was that hope about? Perhaps the same as that which gives A Secular Age its sense of welcome gravitas.

We have here, in two sites, the presence of a vague yet generative epistemics that serves, not to legitimate this or that doctrine, but to secure the kind of self who could assent to a doctrine if he or she only chose to do so.

For at the end of the day, Taylor’s story of the nova effect of choice vis-à-vis the concept of religion is premised upon a self that has the potential to fulfill such promises and fuel such harmonic processes in and through its inherent sovereignty and its capacity for immediate access to itself and the world around.

Brown broaches a question that confirms the deeply romantic genre in which Taylor tells his tale. The question is not whether Taylor’s is a great work. Nor, really, is the question about whether Taylor is right or wrong. It is, rather, a question of narrative effects. For, as the image on the cover conveys, an iron bridge of Whitmanic expanse is displacing the more dystopic iron cage.

The question—for me, at least—is to what extent the fragments of Taylor’s argument constitute a strategy of defense, shored against the ruins of history and society itself? A strategy of immunization? Of disenchantment in its classic Weberian formulation? A fixing of the distinction between subject and nature? A desire to immobilize nature, chance, and secrecy? A product, in other words, of the secular age it promises to describe?

*  *  *

Brown’s essay points to how, within Taylor’s narrative, enchantment and opacity exist for the purpose of being transcended—spectral forces ultimately succumbing to diligence and intention.

Another text, from Marx’s scene of writing, also speaks to this kind of relationship between reason and enchantment: On Hallucinations: A History and Explanation of Apparitions, Visions, Dreams, Ecstasy, Magnetism, and Somnambulism (1845), by A. Brière de Boismont, M.D. This founding text in the history of psychology was translated into English in 1860, when it, like numerous other scientific exposes of occult phenomena, was nevertheless embraced by burgeoning metaphysical movements on both sides of the Atlantic. (But that is another story.)

What concerns me here is de Boismont’s claim that hallucinations may “coexist with the due exercise of the reason.” Images, ghosts, specters (ethereal powers not unlike Marx’s commodities) were “creations of the mind.” And because they were “the result of things that have passed,” they were “visible to the external senses.” Yet despite their empirical veracity, hallucinations were ultimately harmless. For even when they were “looked upon as the effects of a supernatural power,” hallucinations did not pose a vital threat. De Boismont’s translated voice was emphatic, drawing on Honoré Aubanel’s Essai sur les Hallucinations (1839): hallucinations could “exist in man without the intellect being distorted.”

Hallucinations, in other words, did not necessarily constitute mental distortion. Such imbalance, on the contrary, was the effect of an overbearing reason. When reason was excessively present, the “mind” became an “obedient slave.” Consciousness lost perspective upon its own shaky ground. Reason forgot that it, too, was born of feverish dreams, that it, too, was historically conditioned—born of physical sensations, ideological vectors, and lingering emotional streams.

More reason would not necessarily solve the problem (and could, perhaps, even exacerbate it). De Boismont’s concern, then, was how one lived with hallucinations, how one disciplined oneself in light of them. Reason was to be continually sharpened through willed distortion.

The ideal, according to de Boismont, was someone like Newton who could produce hallucinations “at his pleasure.” Newton, it was said, learnt such discipline when he spent “some time” looking at “an image of the sun in a looking-glass” and then “direct[ed] his eyes towards the dark part of the room, to see a specter of the sun reproduced bit by bit until it shone with all the vividness and all the colors of the real object.” Newton’s was a project of auto-enchantment whose discipline was a matter of separating oneself from the hallucinations one had generated for oneself—like becoming an addict in order to kick the habit. An act of both self-deception and honest truth-seeking.

So what happens when reason is recognized as, in part, hallucinatory? What happens when you stop fooling yourself that spectral forces do not exist because they should not exist, that false consciousness is only a possibility precisely because it is false—at the end of the day, a state that is anathema to the better part of human nature? What happens, in other words, when enchantment is considered the norm? When claims of disenchantment are considered forms of wishful, perhaps even animistic, thinking?

So what, exactly, is the payoff of Brown’s critique of Taylor, besides getting a sense of Marx’s scene of writing, the topic of reasonable hallucinations, and the subtleties of false consciousness? What might we learn about the secular age if we were to resist the sense of intentionality that Taylor harbors? And, finally, why has it been relatively difficult to maintain a sense of refusal when assessing whatever it is we are talking about when we talk about the secular age?

The change that must be recognized, grappled with, and prised open has everything to do with what we are talking about when we talk about secularism. It is a change that we have little choice but to believe in: Ideas, particularly religious ideas, can be seen and measured. They are located in the body and directly manifest in practice. This elegant notion is passionately articulated by televangelists and the token religious characters of reality television even as it remains entrenched in foreign policy debates about the Middle East. It is a habit propagated in therapeutic spiritualities, Christian nationalism, and suburban Catholic catechisms. And it goes unquestioned in certain academic circles.

Secularism, then, should not to be considered in terms of cognitive science affecting some species of belief and/or practice called religion, either positively or negatively. Nor should secularism be understood as a process in which a religious tradition, say liberal Protestantism, adapts itself to the methods and insights of cognitive science. On the contrary, secularism has to do with the mutual imbrication of two seemingly different traditions. For if one begins to excavate the relationship between cognitive science and various practices of Protestant religiosity—at least in American history—it becomes more and more difficult to demarcate any essential difference. Something else looms.

This difficulty of demarcation, associated with the looming presence of secularism, is precisely what makes predictions of a cognitive revolution affecting religion not simply premature but also reveals them to be ignorant of their own conditions of possibility.

Contra Brooks’ predictions about the future of neural Buddhism, Americans have long acted as though the self is a dynamic process of relationships. How else to begin to explain the alluring practice of revivalism across the centuries, the persistence of metaphysical religiosity, or the wholesale embrace of circulation under the guise of capitalism? Generally speaking, Americans have also approached both their own piety and critically appraised the religions of others according to the criteria of a common morality located deep within the recesses of self. And finally, they have often assumed that proper cultivation of a common humanity is subject to external verification, that is, resulting in truths that are universal and falsehoods that are actionable. Citing Brooks’s own words, Americans have long been involved in the enterprise of producing and evaluating grainy pictures of the “unknowable total of all there is.”

For better or for worse, we have already become a nation of neural Buddhists. We have become so not because of the formidable influence of Buddhism on the imagination of Americans. On the contrary, Brooks’s prognostications have already come to pass because of two interrelated phenomena: the importance of mental activity in the religious lives of Americans and the technics (and technologies) that have been deployed in measuring this importance. In other words, visual technologies, or more precisely, technologies of vision, have played a significant role in allowing Americans to come to terms with religion. Whether in the form of a statistical chart of the American Tract Society or an MRI, Americans have looked to a variety of images in order to provide terms for understanding their own religiosity, and, subsequently, to make claims about the past, present, and future of religion in America.

As suggested by Leigh Schmidt in his incisive prolegomena to a religious history of American neuroscience, visual technologies are laden with metaphysics of their own. He urges us to recognize that as machines change—becoming better, stronger, faster—so, too, does the form and content of the first principles emanating, with moral force, from these machines. In that sense, the most tangible effects of visual technologies are not necessarily the images that they provide us about neural activities associated with the religious. On the contrary, they are the ways in which their metaphysics become our aesthetics, affecting modes of sense perception, channeling our senses in particular directions, and making some feelings more real, that is, more reliable than others.

In light of recent claims of cognitive science to picture what “your brain looks like on faith,” I want to take a moment to reflect on the penchant for gazing inside the head for the purposes of seeing everything, confidently and assuredly, from the outside. What could be more representative of secularism’s power? The compulsion to capture, and therefore secure representations may not be distinctive to modernity but our technological capacity to produce images of everything—a situation that novelist Don DeLillo has called our pornography of seeing—certainly is. And it has been this penchant for picturing religion that has so often informed, and sometimes spurred, the desire to talk about religion as if it really existed—something you could catch, possess, or alternatively lose. There is an entangled history here, one that I take Schmidt to be calling for us to excavate.

The desire to explain religion by way of seeing it (and, conversely, to see religion by way of explaining it) is a remarkable feature of the world we live in. And although one could argue that this proclivity is not new in the American grain—it is manifest in Puritan notions of covenant and publicity or perhaps in Jonathan Edwards’ realignment of religion and the affections—the role that technologies of vision have played in the history of this desire, in its intensification and naturalization, is wholly undeniable.

Pictures of religion are ever becoming more precise, more pixilated, more infused with the air of verisimilitude. And in all due respect to Barack Obama, it is to this proposition—rather than to guns or religion, per se—that many in the so-called secular age cling. Pictures of the self being religious morphing seamlessly into knowledge morphing into knowledge of self morphing into the self as it is in essence. This series of elisions is, perhaps, fundamental to American life and has become, more ominously, both a weapon and religion of choice.

I call your attention to two examples that speak to the springs and motives of this choice: 1) antebellum phrenology and 2) Andrew Newberg’s “biology of belief” cited with prophetic approval by Brooks.

The infamous “Symbolical Head,” made ever-present in antebellum America by Orson and Lorenzo Fowler, expressed not simply a will to measurement but the notion that there were ideal moral categories that corresponded to a universal law. Each of the faculties identified in their cognitive map were thought to be sensual components of reason. In Religion: Natural and Revealed, Orson Fowler argued that the “demonstrative science” of phrenology is extending yet also displacing the “religion of Jesus Christ” in its power to exert “an all-controlling influence over the intellects, the emotions, and the conduct of mankind—engrossing the feelings, shaping the lives, occupying the minds, and filling the souls, of untold millions of the human family.” Phrenology would prove what many Americans at the time already knew-that religion was a complex of ideas that forms habits, moulds characters, shapes and perpetuates governments, guides intellects, and governs conduct. Phrenology would also measure (and not simply declare) the failed religious mechanics of “conceited Chinese,” the “benighted Hindoo,” and the “degraded Ethiopean.”

According to Fowler, the human head was a more reliable text of universal truth than the Bible. Unlike the “Scriptures,” which demanded interpretation, the “truth” of phrenology was “come-at-able.” “Men cannot help believing it, any more than they can help seeing what they look at, or feeling fire when they touch it. All must and will admit its truth . . . It is crushing beneath the car of its triumphal progress whatever and whoever resist or oppose its advancement.”

Phrenology pictured religious experience as an interaction among various faculties, in particular, those of “Spirituality” and “Veneration” located at the top and center of the head. Together, the capacity to pay attention to things religious (“Spirituality’) and the capacity to orient oneself to things religious (“Veneration”) constituted a biological rendering of belief.

Spirituality was defined as the capacity to be attentive to the wonderful and the marvelous. It hinged upon the degree of attention one was capable of directing toward things not seen. The organ of Spirituality “adapts man to a world of spirits. It imparts the element of spirituality to his nature, and renders him a spiritual, immaterial, immortal being.” Too little of this faculty and one would be hardened to transcendent realities. Too much and one would risk being lost to the necessities of this world.

Veneration complemented Spirituality in creating “the feeling of awe” and the capacity to defer to power whether it be divine or human. “This organ is divided,” wrote Fowler, containing both the capacity for feeling amazed in the presence of God and the tendency to submit to “elders and superiors.” When proper balance was achieved both within each faculty and between them, the experience of “true religion” was all but guaranteed.

According to Fowler, the existence of God had become a matter of “ocular demonstration.” In light of the results achieved among his clients who, after receiving their initial diagnosis, had adjusted their faculties accordingly, Fowler proclaimed: “Behold, then, the true science of mind! Behold the study of this godlike department of our nature reduced to demonstrable certainty!  . . . The study of mind is, then, the STUDY OF GOD in the highest work of his hand and embodiment of his nature.”

More recently, Andrew Newberg has employed SPECT scans to argue “that transcendent and mystical experiences can be traced to specific neural processes in the brain, and that they are valuable—to anyone who seeks them, including secular individuals.” Unlike the ostensibly passive phrenological chart, single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) is a high-tech imaging tool that detects radioactive emissions underneath the skin. Newberg injects subjects (Franciscan nuns, Tibetan Buddhist meditators, Pentecostals) with a radioactive tracer at the onset of their religious experience (the threshold determined by Newberg in consultation with his subjects). SPECT scans then produce freeze-frame pictures of blood-flow patterns in the brain and have allowed Newberg to claim that “our studies are beginning to show that each system of belief, and each form of meditation, activates a unique pattern of neural activity that changes the way we perceive reality.”

According to Newberg’s comparative studies, religion happens when your capacity to pay attention increases while your sense of a grounded and bounded self decreases. In each of his case studies he has found a common thread of religious experience-heightened focus to no thing in particular (signified by increased neural activity in the frontal lobe) combined with a sense of being disengaged from all things in general (signified by decreased neural activity in the superior parietal lobe).

Unlike Fowler, Newberg defers on questions concerning the existence of God.  Instead he emphasizes a more pressing matter—the existence of religion, itself. According to Newberg, his images portend the creation of a religionome—similar to the human genome project—defined as a way to “begin to look at all of the different beliefs and practices and traditions and try to evaluate and understand them not just from a spiritual perspective or a subjective perspective, but from physiological and biological” perspective. And as Newberg has already made clear, such evaluation and understanding will confirm  that “humans, in fact, are natural born mystics blessed with inborn genius for effortless self-transcendence.”

This is certainly an argument to be taken seriously and one that has been made countless times, perhaps most vividly at the World’s Parliament of Religions in 1893. But to not recognize that this gesture toward biological essentialism is, in fact, an argument, and not a truth waiting to be discovered, risks something, dare I say it, essential to the human.

But from the perspective of history, Newberg’s images do not suggest the enduring presence of religion so much as they confirm the persistent metaphysics of brain imaging techniques. For what is most remarkable about Newberg’s SPECT scans is that they capture images of the afterlife of phrenological concepts of religion. For is it not the ready acceptance of phrenological notions of Spirituality and Veneration that helps produce Newberg’s SPECT scans and precipitate the “aha” moment? Truth is there to see in plain sight. What is visible corresponds, if not directly, then allegorically, to invisible laws of being.

More provocatively, I want to suggest that Newberg’s pictures capture something that has already happened—the rupture of secularism in American religious history. This rupture was (and is) all but invisible, having created in its wake a discourse which has set the terms that all arguments about religion must adopt in order to become intelligible. Newberg’s particular version of secularism goes something like this:

When properly cultivated, religious experience will allow us to transcend the culture which contains us. For if we can produce a clear enough picture of religion, if we can rehearse our attention enough so as to capture an image of the brain in the heights of rehearsing its attention and losing its earthly orientation, then we are that much closer to “knowing ourselves” and therefore “becoming ourselves.”

Questions concerning the metaphysics of technology come into fleeting focus here. But might Newberg’s deployment of single photon emission computed tomography possess more than a metaphysical dimension? Might his machines be assuming a kind of divinity in their ability to direct our attention in particular ways? Might they, as well as other technologies of vision, be creating us in their capacity to imprint themselves upon the human? Do the ways in which the human brain is imagined and visualized affect the ways we use our brains, not to mention our bodies? To what extent have we begun to see what our technologies see?

I am stubborn and remain skeptical of aggressive truth claims accompanying various technologies of locating and dissecting religion. I am, instead, committed to the indefensible and ridiculous proposition that the human is a malleable thing in the world, that neural activity is dependent, in part, upon the degree to which words, ideas, and particular bodily actions that accompany such activity are shot through with lines of force. In other words, different vectors converge upon the individual at any one time. And to begin to measure what is happening on the inside of the brain without accounting for the various combinations of what Durkheim called “moral forces” seems to me to be a project doomed to success. Although seeing religion as it truly is may feel like the right thing to do, such vision risks affirming the universalism of those words, ideas, and bodily actions taken by the investigator to be precisely what his or her account of neural activity is meant to explain in the first place. There is an ominous circularity here, or more precisely, a feedback loop between phenomena and explanation that does not simply avoid the reflexivity demanded by genealogical excavation of one’s own categories but aggressively defends against and casts aspersions toward the critical enterprise of what John Dewey once called “severe thought.”

Perhaps I, in my humanistic plea, am guilty of casting a different set of aspersions. So be it.

For in fooling myself with the conceit that the emergence of secularism happened sometime in the nineteenth century I am all too aware that I am its victim, enveloped by its swirl of indefensible claims about the way reality is in essence and habits of defending those claims in the name of a reality that is essential.

But even though the atmosphere of secularism may have conditioned the trajectory of my words and the arc of my thoughts, perhaps even molding their content, I insist that such power is not to be taken lightly or without a degree of tactical resistance.

In his lush, cinematic rendition of Eliade’s 1976 novella, Francis Ford Coppola offers a different answer than those hinted at by Eliade’s oeuvre or even by his most vicious critics. For Coppola, Eliade’s version of the sacred is not so much bound up with the Logos as it is with the technics that have made the Logos a thing in the world. Rather than engage the real reality of the sacred (Eliade’s major fault within these skeptical times) Youth Without Youth, instead, suggests that the sacred is real, for better or for worse, because we want it to be and, more importantly, because we make it so. From this perspective, Youth Without Youth becomes a rumination on the ethics of making distinctions between the sacred and profane as well as the consequences of those choices.

Youth Without Youth tells the story of Dominic Matei, an elderly Romanian scholar who has dedicated himself to the discovery of the “proto-language.” At the beginning of the film Matei has decided to end his own life out of a sense of failure and despair. With an envelope of strychnine in hand, Matei (played by Tim Roth) walks across the street and is struck by lightening. To make a very long story very short, Matei miraculously survives and assumes the creative powers of homo religious. Temporal boundaries collapse. Matei becomes young again, his powers of memory superhuman. He is able to learn all the world’s known languages in his sleep. He has metaphysical conversations with his multiple personalities. He is able to see, for the first time, the reality of “intermediary beings between consciousness and unconsciousness, nature and man, man and the divine, reason and eros, feminine and masculine, darkness and light, matter and spirit.”

Matei, in short, has developed technics to make the Logos manifest, “to discover the origins of language, human consciousness, even time itself.” Much of the film chronicles the evolution of Matei’s quest—as he is pursued Nazi scientists and shady American agents, as he goes into permanent exile and falls in love with Veronica/Laura/Rupini—his timeless love, study-aid, and new age channel to the “proto-language.” The majority of the movie chronicles Matei coming into his own as an intellectual machine—recording, storing, and integrating data at an astonishing pace. Matei’s intellectual practice, however, is marked by a sense of profound boredom, captured in Roth’s listless portrayal of Matei sitting at a library desk with stacks of books all around him. One by one he passes each book from left hand to right. Each book is set aglow as Matei scans them and downloads their contents. In his literal capacity to read books by their covers, Matei has taken the Google Library Project to its logical conclusion. He has become a perfected computer.

Throughout the movie such epistemic boredom is emphasized by the fact that Matei is a man out of joint, living within but also in tension with the horrors ushered in by techno-modernity—death camps, atom bombs, and, most significantly, the portable recording device he carries with him throughout the movie in order to archive his journey for future generations.

Wire recorders became available to consumers in the late 1940s. The Nazis had perfected their use during World War II for the purposes of surveillance, data archiving, as well as for propaganda in the form of automated and continuous radio broadcasts. After Matei is discharged from the hospital, he receives a portable sound recorder with the instructions to record any and all of his thoughts on this machine, particularly when they outpace his ability to write them down. When Matei arrives at a new insight about his condition or the condition of linguistic origins (ever the same for homo religiosus) he ominously presses “record.”

The irony, here, is dense, particularly as Matei uses the wire recorder to mark his temporality and spatial location—“Geneva 1955” he says before committing his boundary-less existence to a tape coated with a thin layer of iron oxide powder.

“I have decided to stop making notes in English and instead to use an artificial language of my own invention.” [Coppola provides subtitles for the uninitiated] “Now I can describe paradoxical situations, impossible to express in any existing language. This will permit me to reveal facts I have not dared confess in writing. This language will only be deciphered by means of a perfected computer. So my testimony is addressed to the future, let us say the year 2010. But to whom? The coming nuclear wars will destroy many civilizations. Undoubtedly, this will unleash a wave of deep pessimism historically unprecedented. A general despondency. My testimony, deciphered in the future, could counter the despair because it shows the potential of humanity, a species superior to homo sapiens, born in a far-off future. This depends on the preservation of the material in the safe-deposit box. I don’t know how this will be assured. But I do not doubt that the material will be preserved. Otherwise, my life would have no meaning.”

Like reality itself, Matei speaks in code. His salvific secrets are too much for the present to bear, let alone understand. He has no choice but to record them and to await a post-apocalyptic and technologically advanced future. The ironic convergence between Matei’s cosmic personality and the function of the wire recorder is a recurring theme in the film. Matei recognizes that his new state of consciousness confirms the “humanity of post-historic man,” the same humanity that the wire recorder promises to liberate from the terrors of linear time and the horrors of forgetfulness.

The totalitarian dimensions of this homology are hard to miss, the wire recorder having been manufactured in the service of military domination of Europe and the Final Solution. On a phenomenological level, the device also embodied an attempt to move beyond the vicissitudes of history by arresting time itself and making it available for continuous playback.

Seen in the context of Coppola’s The Conversation (1974), Youth Without Youth becomes a meditation on technological reproducibility; on the way things seem to repeat in our world as if they were on a continuous loop. The anxious sense of closure evoked by the film (and one shared by Eliade) has, itself, become a repeated theme within techno-modernity. No wonder, then, that such anxiety is often aligned with all manner of death: the death of flesh and blood individuals in heated fits of twentieth-century violence but also the death of place-holding concepts—the death of God, the death of language, the death of the subject and its authority, and the death of modernity itself. For both Eliade and Coppola there is something to this death. For Eliade, technology was disorienting, the engine of desacralization, the death-knell of human creativity. The experience of temporal sedation, however, of stillness and deep calm, was antidotal—nothing less than sacred life. In Youth Without Youth, however, technology is neither ontological orientation nor obstacle, neither disease nor cure. And the experiences that Eliade clung to in such works as The Sacred and the Profane become, under Coppola’s direction, nothing more than the ordinary business of being human.

Seen with a genealogical eye, Youth Without Youth speaks to the sheer danger of the sacred as the robust object of mystical longing. But whereas Eliade’s reactionary technophobia limited his appreciation for how the “countless machines mass-produced in industrial societies” were, themselves, constitutive of his experience of the sacred, Youth Without Youth suggests that technology has everything to do with our ability to imagine—whether in the service of embracing or rejecting—the sacred.

In its generous critique of Eliade, Youth Without Youth also offers insight into Eliade’s declension model of secularization defined as the appearance of cultural forms and attitudes that either competed with or came to usurp the authority of religion. In Coppola’s rendering, such forms and attitudes are themselves both enchanting and wholly technological. In the character of Dominic Matei, an embeddedness within the secular age is a peculiar mark of the sacred. Eliade’s brand of mysticism and its corresponding desire to merge with the way things—both immanent and transcendent—really are is revealed to be a tragic quest. Any attempt to rewrite the terms of the Faustian bargain—no matter how earnest or self-conscious—is a dangerous one. Both Matei and Eliade displayed a penchant for totalizing patterns. Their desire for systematicity was both computer-like and mythic in scope, a kind of original sin that could not be set aside or dreamed away. This desire could only be acted upon. This despite the fact that such desire was also the defining character of a secular age in which the root of technology (from the Greek technologia) had become manifest in the systematic treatment of the human, by the human, and for the human.

Most significantly, Youth Without Youth frames the seductive qualities of Eliade’s thought—a style of reasoning in which all phenomena make sense according to his universal map of consciousness—as precisely that which his systematic approach to religion was designed to overcome. To engage in the perennial search for origins—for meaning, for Truth, for whatever you love when you love your god—becomes the only way to put an end to this search. Failure, in other words, is the necessary outcome. This version of Eliade, I confess, is a perversion of the original, perhaps even a figment of my imagination. Nevertheless, the Eliade that emerges from the bizarre cinematic exercise of Youth Without Youth is not so much a theologian (for that case is too easily made) but a theologian in denial. This Eliade simmers between the lines of my undergraduate copy of The Myth of the Eternal Return. This is the invisible Eliade rather than the one suggested by the trippy cover shot—a computer generated image that suggests the convergence of galactic and microscopic scales. Its neon sheen screams “hey you there, don’t you just want to dive right in!”—a succinct version of what can only be called new age interpellation.

To suggest as much is neither to rehabilitate Eliade nor, for that matter, to excuse his self-indulgent approach to religion. To view Youth Without Youth as a self-reflexive commentary upon the Eliadean corpus is to invite a strange kind of self-scrutiny. To view Youth With Youth as having something to do with the seductive power of Eliade’s methodology—one that still lurks within the academic study of religion, within the secular age, and less obviously, within the study of secularity, religion’s so-called double—transforms Eliade into a disturbingly relevant thinker.

The first two publications of Belknap Press were the Harvard Guide to American History (1954) and The Poems of Emily Dickinson (1955). And as its website assures us, Belknap, modeled after the Clarendon imprint of Oxford University Press, became “known for books of long-lasting importance, superior in scholarship and physical production, chosen whether or not they might be profitable.”

To make decisions independently of capitalism, to call upon the moral faculties over and against the culture that contains us, to somehow escape the orbit of secularity.

These, to be sure, are admirable goals, ones that resonate with Taylor’s desire to reclaim versions of transcendence and fullness in a world hell-bent on implosion.

I have profound sympathy for Taylor’s desire to recalibrate ourselves and our approach to secularity in light of the story he is telling. Rather than comment on the substance of Taylor’s magisterial effort, however, I want to think in and through its definitive air, and by extension, the atmosphere that quite literally surrounds its publication as well as contemporary academic conversations about secularism and secularity.

Look around you. This atmosphere is massively mediated, quite literally haunted by technology—equipment in front of you, in your ears, and perhaps, in your bones; technical practices half-way around the world that, nonetheless, register their effects; machines that think for us and machines that provide, both literally and figuratively, the language we use to account for the past, to live in the present, and to dream about the future.

Although technology may not possess a logic of its own, one would be hard pressed to deny its formative role in whatever we are talking about, right now, on this blog. To what degree are the blurry contours and devastating effects of secularism bound up with technology? To what extent does the process of providing terms for secularism and coming to terms with it run on iron-rails, inseparable from the utterly obscure relationship between humans and machines? What role has technology played in fueling the nova effect of secularism and how has it both motivated contemporary practices of naming secularism, of typologizing its seemingly endless permutations, and simultaneously rendered it impossible for such practices to deliver on their promises?

Although I do not expect answers to these questions any time soon, such retorts serve as a plea to grapple with (as opposed to grasp) the emergence of secularism as, first and foremost, a series of interlinked technological phenomena, a vast network whose nodes are connected by the common vector of systematic treatment by the human, of the human, and for the human.

What, then, are the prospects of encountering non-human otherness when the sky is the color of television? Whither transcendence within an atmosphere that reeks of burnt metal, thickened by chemical fumes, and is permeated by digital signals and waves of electricity? Not so good if we pause to survey the last 150 years of cultural criticism that have led up to Taylor’s effort to respond to the massive force that secularism has assumed in our contemporary moment.

It is my sense that current debates over secularism resemble previous efforts to name that which has stultified human expression, corrupted our capacity to change, and has become an overwhelming obstacle to transcendence, variously construed. Many a theoretical concept has been deployed in the service of grasping the twists, turns, and folds of modernity’s discursive power.

Although the names have changed, the songs about a Leviathanic discourse have remained reliably the same, at least until now: Marx’s vision of capitalism as an animistic totality, Weber’s iron cage, Heidegger’s world-picture, the culture industry of Adorno & Horkheimer, Debord’s spectacle, Foucault’s notion of biopower, to name only those currently on my theoretical iPod. Rather than claim that each of these concepts were fragmentary views of what is now referred to as secularism (although I am tempted), it is, perhaps, more productive to view this litany in terms of the their technological metaphoricity—factory and transportation networks (Marx), the smelting of consciousness (Weber), the calculating effects of a radio dial (Heidegger), cinema and public relations (Adorno & Horkheimer), television (Debord), and automation and feedback (Foucault).

Again, the names change—referring often to the after-effects of Enlightenment—but each concept evokes technological conditions that pervade their particular scene of writing. Secular, secularism, secularity—at least on their face—are devoid of such technological particularity, implying, rather announcing themselves, as the terms that encompass the “systematic treatment” by the human, of the human, and for the human. No gears, guns, steam, or electricity to mark these words as a sign of their times. No institution or style of reasoning to serve as shorthand for hegemony. But in this absence of technological residue, debates over the meaning and scope of these words do reflect, from an odd angle, the technological tenor of their time.

[Incidentally, this is what I take to be behind the provocation of Gil Anidjar’s equation of secularism, Christianity, and orientalism—a way of pointing to the fact that techno-modernity is more than the sum of its parts given how these “parts” endlessly morph into one another. Having melted into the effectual air, such nominal bulwarks are now all but impossible to pin down, ontologically speaking.]

Today, if pressed to choose any one machine or technical application that is either formally or effectively dominant, one would be at a loss to name it. Even the connotation of “World Wide Web,” however Weberian in its simplicity, fails to do the job. The Internet is merely a piece (albeit a vastly complex piece) of an even vaster network of human effects that feel as though they come from nowhere in particular.

Feedback or networks, however, given the strange loops often identified with secularism, could be seen as having a degree of nominal traction at this point in time. Indeed, there is something to be said for how automatic control and emergent conditions of technological practice have, themselves, pointed to the limits of human control over technology. It is not surprising, then, that Foucault’s notion of biopower, with its evocation of mechanisms of power being both the effect and cause of human relations, inflects much contemporary discussion of secularism. But as Deleuze reminds us, social experience cannot be reduced to the technologies that inform that experience. “The machines don’t explain anything,” he writes. “You have to analyze the collective apparatuses to which the machines are just one component.” In other words, machines alone cannot explain how secularism insinuated itself into the very pores of social being, making certain sensibilities feel right and rendering particular feelings non-sensical.

Technology, then, like Emily Dickinson’s railway train, is both “docile and omnipotent.”

The secular age, I suggest, with Deleuze and Dickinson as my witnesses, cannot be reduced to its machines, technics, or institutions. There is much more, and much less, involved. More, in the sense that the human has not become automated or fully incorporated into a network. Human agency, however bruised and beaten it has become over the past few centuries, still plays some obscure role in history. Less, however, in the sense that agency has become wholly irrelevant to the extent that the very binary between human and machine can no longer be secured. Yet attempts to demarcate the province of the human run rampant in the secular age. Such attempts emerge as a central preoccupation of the “buffered” self, whether they are pursued under the auspices of Christianity or Islam, new age therapeutics, foreign policy, or scholarship.

To glimpse the impossibility of such boundary-making, however, to sense the way in which human and machines are both effects and causes of one another, is a moment of disabuse, vulnerability, deflation.

To engage a secular age in a secular age by way of secular modalities of sustained objectivity, taxonomic desire, and feverish archiving is, perhaps, the fundamental irony of our present conversation. Whereas our enlightened forbearers once confidently waged battles against revelation—the proto-professional ethnographer or historian making the case for the centrality of the human—we are now ensconced professionals who, perhaps, have glimpsed the practical, and perhaps even logical folly of such demystifying enterprises. Perhaps the “docile and omnipotent” presence of technology has forced us to realize that simple unmasking will not do, that, God forbid, there is nothing worthy of a name lying dormant behind the pasteboard masks we have collectively constructed. Do we now, one is tempted to ask, not feel the breath of empty space?

Consequently, contemporary discussions of secularism have the potential for profound disturbance. For to go back, as it were, and to reclaim the Latin letters that simultaneously structured the desires for, enmity towards, and analyses of modernity, is to admit a certain degree of categorical exhaustion. Such projects announce the arrival of a limit situation. They also invite opportunity for a different kind of reflection. For what happens after we have unscrewed our navel?

“And then a Plank in Reason, broke,” wrote Dickinson. “And I dropped down, and down—/ And hit a World, at every plunge, / And Finished knowing—then—.”

The utter blurriness of the contemporary moment owes much to such irrevocable brokenness. This rupture, in turn, is bound up with the continual and technological envisioning and revisioning the human, a process when glimpsed becomes its own sort of revelation. Perhaps even a source of renewal.

Which brings me back to the dust jacket of A Secular Age, a deliberately incomplete sheathing. My copy is written by “Charles Taylor” yet untouched by him and, most likely, by anyone else before I turned back its cover. Certainly not the encounter with radical otherness envisioned by Taylor or that which opens up to transcendence. But an encounter, nonetheless, one that, at least for me, fails to put a definitive stamp on the problem of secularism, no matter how much it appears to be the case. Which I take to be a mark of its success.