“It resists classification…”

Language is a funny thing. Take my epigraph, for example: three words from the fourth paragraph of Frequencies’ project statement. I find these three words interesting—worth re-reading, even un-reading, rather than just reading—because of the contradiction that they carry along with them; for they unsay what it is that we think they just said.

Like I said, language is a funny thing.

To begin this project of un-reading, I start offstage, before the meaning takes place, and note that the removal of these words from a larger context is signaled by those three dots which, when read as a unit, indicate that something is not just passively missing but omitted (as its Greek root, ἔλλειψις , makes plain)—i.e., this notation leaves a trace of the agency, the choice, of the one who has done the extraction. For, much like the verbs “remove” or “omit,” it makes evident that a strategic operation has taken place; what’s more, the 66s and 99s that frame the text inform readers that the removal had surgical precision, for they allow them to conclude that this is precisely how it is in the absent original—“Go, find it, and compare for yourself,” they challenge. “But see here now?” they simultaneously ask, “Something new is happening, right before your eyes.”

Ellipsis and quotation marks—marks by which writers make admissions to readers (akin to Bruce Lincoln’s sense, in the epilogue to his Theorizing Myth, of how footnotes “show your work”) and by which readers are reminded that writers fabricate their texts (they don’t just happen by themselves, after all), doing so by inserting their own uninvited interests into other people’s prior situations, making texts of other contexts, thereby interrupting someone else’s work and putting to new use just this one piece of a past. And it is precisely by such an interruption that meaning is created—“This here thing is related to that thing there, but they are not the same.” Texts re-signified by their extraction from there and their insertion here; old contexts erased (yet hinted at). Nothing stands alone, unaccountable.

Our punctuation marks mark our punctuations.

When I consider the form of the text above, that’s what I come up with. This structure, evidenced but also produced by the punctuation, makes the text’s history profoundly apparent, the specified limits and the edges are there to see, and the manner in which meaning-making takes place—as a staged series of past and present relationships among interchangeable parts—remains. “I am doing something here,” these marks say, in the voice of the writer, “Watch closely.” Because of the punctuation (in both senses of the term: a marking and an interruption), the reader can’t erase the agency of the writer—the historically-situated chooser, Roland Barthes’s scriptor, the one who has set the table for the reader—any more than readers can erase the sign that there was once another place setting at which these words and other readers once sat next to each other, accompanied by no trailing dots, framed by no 66s and 99s. Yet the original is hardly original, of course, for it made reference to, deferred to, its own absent ancestors. Turtles—texts/contexts—all the way down.

 *  *  *

But let’s begin again and ask what happens if I read, instead of un-read, those words—i.e., take for granted the setting in which this language game is played, authorize its rules as inevitable and natural, thereby seeing (or better, not seeing) the spot at which I, as a reader, have been seated as invisible and limitless: Then what do I make of these three words? What if I see them as having no context? What if I drop my attention to the work being done by the quotation marks and ellipsis and, instead, hear the words speak directly to me, much like being captivated by the wit of the dummy instead of the person so successfully throwing the voice? Well, now there apparently is a thing, an “it” we’ll call it, that, like that animated dummy, has an agency of its own (for, we are told, it resists classification); by means of its own huffing and puffing, the absent signifier that goes by its pronoun defies being classed, has no context, and cannot be controlled. Its rugged individualism prevents anything from getting not just too close but close at all, with no one and no thing occupying a neighboring space.

“I can’t quite put it into words” presupposes just such an it, haunting our dreams before language gives it shape.

But if knowledge is said to be the result of the way we organize the world, the way we group things together to arrive at our judgments of similar or different, more or less, near or far—Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species—then this dearly distant Cousin It remains forever aloof, all covered in hair and a hat, infinitely removed, and thus an utterly unknowable mystery—just as the vague pronoun-of-a-name suggests. After all, “the rejection of classificatory interest is, at the same time, a rejection of thought” (as Jonathan Z. Smith reminds us in the concluding sentence to his essay “Classification” in The Guide to the Study of Religion).

One reader but two readings of a project statement (though one is an un-reading, really): one results in the trace of history, while the other is shrouded in mystery. But only one is good to think with.

*  *  *

So just what is Frequencies about then? At the level of reading, its task is to document something that defies knowledge—“spirituality” being the noun formerly known as it. The object of this online archive therefore defies language, since language is nothing but classed specificity—for good or ill, a rock is not a pebble, neither is it a stone and hardly a boulder. For whatever reason, these things matter to us and the way we sort the matter that matters is found in the specifics of language. “Over there” is the unspecified region where we ask someone to put—we wouldn’t even say “place,” since we don’t much care—something of little or no consequence. But an item that defies placement, defies relationships of similarity or difference inasmuch as it apparently occupies (of its own volition) a class of its own, is in a space where there are no relations and thus no consequences—a space beyond all places we could possibly set at all dining tables in all possible worlds. It is a space of fantasy, outside of history and thus apart from language (whatever sense it makes to phrase a claim like that within language and within this historical moment; like I said, language is a funny thing).

What is clear is that the results of my reading and un-reading are rather uneasy partners. For on the one hand, we have framed three words and three dots that show the work, that stand for the happenstance, always changing relationship between text and context, writer and reader—how each are always the other too. Meaning historicized. No text stands alone. Yet on the other, we have three words, alone, referring to no writer, no reader, but to the absent, incomparable noun that apparently moves under its own steam. A stand-alone text. Sui generis religion by another name.

A contradiction presents itself (or is presented by another?).

For when the reading is judged from the vantage point of the un-reading—and meaning historicized, I would argue, is the only vantage point to be had for those who name themselves historians—then the writer of the project statement (for there is always a writer, right?) is implicated in an effort to hide footprints, to sweep clear the evidence, and to leave the scene of the accidents of history. For, much like the passive voice, having set the reader’s table with the words of his or her choosing, such a writer then makes a dash for the exit, erasing all evidence of the choices he or she has made, leaving the reader to assume that the table was set by itself. And thus we arrive at a situation comparable to the old dine and dash, a situation where our choices appear free of cost—but only if we get away with it.

Three words—“It resists classification”—followed either by three dots or a dash. Between these two options we have a contradiction in styles at the very heart of Frequencies. Is our object of study incomparable or infinitely comparable?

*  *  *

To be fair, the entire paragraph (one of six, in fact) from which I excised those three words that became my epigraph reads as follows:

Frequencies seeks to commence a genealogy of spirituality. This project approaches spirituality as a cultural technology, as a diverse reverberation, as a frequency in the ether of experience. We begin in a moment when novelists wonder about the divine, psychological counselors advertise as spiritual advisers, and scholars seek to capture spirituality’s ephemeral nature through survey research. Spirituality abounds, even as it is unclear what it is. Whatever it is, it seems hard to capture. Spirituality takes hold beneath the skin and permeates below the radar of statistical surveys. It resists classification even as it classifies its evaluators and its believers as subjects of its sway. Frequencies will focus this profusion into an epic anthology of wide-ranging analysis.

A genealogy of the discursive object “spirituality” is, for me, far different from a genealogy of spirituality—they cannot sit easily beside each other, at the same table. Suggesting that claims of spirituality, in fact the very use of the term itself, is a cultural technology—a technique, used by someone, a technician perhaps, that does something within culture, within history, I gather—is far from seeing spirituality itself as such a technology. But reading the paragraph I am unsure which we are talking about. I fear that what the site might understand as a productive ambiguity, capable of attracting a multiplicity of views, or layers (to stick with the notion of genealogy), is, for me, a paralyzing cacophony. The trouble? In genealogy the pronouns and the nouns alike—things like justice or marriage or gender or civility or self—refer back to historical practices, habits, institutions, ways of organizing, and the agents who made (and, yes, were made by) these contingent structures. Yet in this paragraph, the source of the Nile too often seems to be the ungenealogized—the un-un-read—noun spirituality; like a rumored and alluring Big Foot marching through the woods, looking back at us, coming in and out of focus, the fabricated object is our target, and not the situated discourse that brought us to the edge of the woods and made us look.

And so, reading that project statement, staring at all those trees, those posts, and thereby missing the structure that the un-reading sees as managing the profusion, visitors to the site likely assume that all of Frequencies’ parts naturally and comfortably fit together—a searchable crazy quilt whose busy mosaic hints at a transcendent whole that’s bigger and thus more significant than the sum of its parts. Only in this way would we assume that (to name but three entries) Martin Marty’s interest in the “most sustaining and inspiring elements of what we can call post-modern spirituality…” and Lee Gilmore’s use of language to point toward some unspeakable thing (“that mysterious ‘more’—an ineffable sense of something larger than ourselves”) could somehow inhabit the same space as Gabriel Levy’s entry, in which Frequencies’ main noun appears in ironic quotation marks and, dare I say, reduced to waves. Only by occupying some god’s eye vantage point, where the omniscient narrator sees into the hearts of all those blind monks, groping around that poor elephant, would we think that these three entries had something in common—instead of seeing the former two as data for the third. To rephrase: that we would likely never assume that assorted mediations and lamentations on, say, this or that sense of justice, would appear side-by-side with a genealogical analysis of the discourse on justice itself, yet freely assume such a comfortable fit when it comes to this thing called spirituality is, I think, the problem that requires attention. For, with my earlier reading and un-reading in mind, “a digital compendium in which the ideals of spiritual self-expression and individual flourishing are held in tension with the historicity of those conceits”—to quote from the opening to the project statement’s fifth paragraph—is  one where the tension is so great as to shatter the archive itself. After all, a house divided against itself cannot stand.

Three words. Three dots. Three examples.

A dash. A tension. A contradiction.

Three dots and a dash is, of course, Morse code for the letter V, and V—as every Beethoven fan knows, as does any World War II history buff—also stands for Victory; to have it both ways, to hold both a reading and an un-reading in the space of one epic anthology, would indeed be a victory—a victory over making choices and living with consequences, a victory over History, even Death (“Where is thy sting now, eh? For this very critique will be posted at the same site as its object!”). But the historian in me can’t imagine such a totalized scenario, in which we can have our cake and critique it too—leaving a trace of agency and choice while simultaneously obscuring both. No, we have to choose, and live with the consequences.

*  *  *

“Scott for gods sake write and write truly no matter who or what it hurts but do not make these silly compromises.”—Ernest Hemingway to F. Scott Fitzgerald (May 28, 1934)

Victory for those unwilling to compromise, those with an eye toward the situation, cognizant of the inevitability of choice, aware that “ineffable” is a word like any other and that “the big picture” is every little picture’s fantasy, is therefore not three dots and a dash; instead, it’s three dots or a dash—either we live with the historicity or make a mad dash off the stage of context, of consequence, of accountability. That’s the choice—between the satisfying (but false) closure of Beethoven’s long fourth note or the utter indeterminacy (and thus possibility) of his first three—his three dots, his ellipsis—followed by not just a rest or a pause, but a silence of who knows what length…

leaving us not sure whether to applaud or…

I wonder, however, about two things. One is about form and one is about content.

1. The question about form: Is this a genealogy?
2. The question about content: What are the avenues of spirituality that the project maps?

With respect to the question about form, I wonder just what kind of genealogy the project traces, and if genealogy is the right word for the project at hand. The collection reads more like a buckshot of spirituality. Or a scatter graph of spirituality. It is—and maybe this is appropriate—too broad, too idiosyncratic, too peculiar, too diffuse to tell us anything at all about spirituality, except that those are the terms on which it makes itself clear to us. I could have written my essay about any number of things (to limit it to just record albums, I could have written about Radiohead’s Kid A or Coltrane’s Live in Europe 1964 or the seminal praise and worship recording: 1971’s The Everlastin’ Living Jesus Music Concert). If spirituality is really as vast, encompassing, and peculiarly populated as all that, then I’m not sure a genealogy is useful. Or even possible. It might be interesting, as the contributions here certainly are, but it doesn’t necessarily tell us anything about spirituality as a singular phenomenon or as an aspiration or as a very real element of people’s lives.

Certainly, the general leaning of the project is toward the spiritual-secular, anyhow. But, if you’re really going to trace the genealogy of this thing, we might want to include more avowedly “religious” voices here too. Not because they have a monopoly on the stuff, but because those of us who are secularists might yet be able to learn a thing or two from our counterparts who occupy other pews. One might conclude that religion and spirituality ought to be joined at the hip or that they represent separate phenomena or maybe that they were separated at birth, but however you genealogize, they are certainly related. It’s one thing to hear spiritual overtones in books or people, historical events or concepts of our choosing, but it might be something else entirely when one attempts to square the spiritual with the theological.

To be sure, squaring the religious with the theological won’t answer the genealogical question, and I don’t mean to suggest that we might find a genealogical answer to spirituality’s questions by looking to religion. Instead, I hope that my invitation might open the investigation even further—beyond the boundaries of social secular culture and curios. If we’re going to lead this conversation with such loose reins, the discussion might benefit from looking or listening to voices from religion—where spirituality seems so genealogically related, but so difficult to find.

With respect to question number 2, I keep coming back to something I read in a New Yorker article a few years back. It was a profile of David Simon, co-creator of HBO’s The Wire and now, Treme. Simon’s brother, explaining their Jewish upbringing in Baltimore, observed that they felt traditional, but not religious. This spoke to me, growing up in an observant-ish Jewish household where we were steeped in ritual, but certainly not in spirituality. If God were to have shown up on some occasion or another, my mom would have set God a place at the table and asked if He or She had any food allergies.

Traditional but not religious. Simon was talking about avoiding pork or performing ritual, but without the trappings or limitations of religion. It’s a powerful inversion of the preference for things “spiritual but not religious” that has become a refrain of postwar American religious preferences. The taste for the spiritual over the properly religious (whatever that is) has become a nearly orthodox, practically fundamentalist statement of faith for both Baby Boomers and those who study them.

Somehow, opting for spirituality over religion seems to create opportunities that religion closes off. Spirituality seems to suggest syncretisms and recombinations and possibility, while religion appears to offer little more than dogma, discipline, and the routine denials of the syncretisms that we all kind of already know are there.

And so, we have spirituality manifest in everything from pubic hair to Mark Twain’s Palestine with a freedom and writerly panache absent from the literature of most houses of worship. This, I think is a good thing, but moving so fully toward the spiritual and leaving the religious behind seems to accept too readily the overtones of the “spiritual but not religious” chorus. What about David Simon’s formulation of being traditional but not religious? What about being religious and not spiritual? Surely there’s something beneficial, helpful, even redemptive in those recombinations—even if we don’t call them “spiritual.” But the decision to avoid connecting one’s affinity for certain behaviors to something called “religion” seems questionable. As my friend and teacher Steven M. Cohen once said, “God is too important to leave to the religious.”

Surely there are other ways into and through the currents of transcendence, depth, and meaning-making that don’t approach religion and spirituality as an oppositional pair, or that don’t privilege spirituality as religion’s younger, hipper, cooler sibling. According to the implicit logic of Baby-Boomer religious tastes (as articulated by those who don’t define themselves as religious, of course), and by the framing of Frequencies, we might want to sleep with spirituality, but we want to avoid waking up with religion.

My two questions—about the genealogical nature of this enterprise and about the other avenues that spirituality might take—led me back, almost inevitably, to a single concern: the separation of religion from spirituality. The multiplicity of voices and phenomena captured in the essays, the multiple frequencies and resonances of the broader project, the dualities of form and structure, have led me back to the singularity of my question. And what more could I expect from an investigation of spirituality than that?

Because it signals that such extraordinary events are also part of real history; that they too deserve our attention, remembrance, and analysis; that they are not simply a function of cranks and frauds. The New Hampshire road sign is jarring precisely to the extent that it brings the impossible into conjunction with the utterly solid and banal—all that metal, all that paint, and all authorized by the official Seal of the State of New Hampshire. With its appearance, American history suddenly becomes much more interesting, more alive, and way weirder. I am delighted not because I am persuaded or convinced by the factuality of the sign’s iron presence or the matter-of-factness of its words, or, for that matter, because I “believe” anything at all (I don’t believe in belief). I am delighted because the sign functions as a historical marker, that is, as a recognition that something strange and uncanny happened there, on that same road, a little over fifty years ago.

Something.

As I read through the posts of Frequencies again, I am reminded of the impossible road sign up there in New Hampshire. Each post, after all, similarly functions as a sign that strange and uncanny things happen all the time to all sorts of people—automatic writing and poetic visionary experience, light sabers and mythical mashups, religious openings through sex and LSD, a new revelation channeled to a professional psychologist (at Columbia no less), six druids standing against an ethnographer’s window above a London street, and on and on and on. Really, we could do this for decades, no? Taken together, the entries make an utter mockery of any simple notion of religion. As if there were any. What there so obviously are, of course, are people. And people are different, really, really different.

Ah, you say, this is because of our postmodern, post-industrial, post-capitalist, or post-something-or-other culture. But no one who has taken a close and serious look at, say, the history of Hinduism or early Christianity can possibly believe that one. It seems much more likely that this is what religion is anywhere we look, if only we would look—a New Age marketplace, a mythical mashup, a collection of “wild facts,” as William James called psychical and mystical phenomena, or of wild talents, as Charles Fort called paranormal powers (“wild” being the key qualifier here). Sometimes a tradition is able to gather together a few of these wild facts and talents, shape them into something useful through myth, ritual, and art, and hold it all together for a time. But only for a time.

I suspect this most basic of observations—that things are wild and plural everywhere and everywhen we look—is also the most basic reason “the spiritual” is so resisted in conservative and traditional circles, be they religious, political, or academic. Basically, the category is code for “It’s way more complicated, and way simpler, than that.”

On the complicated side, the category is subversive to religious identity itself, any religious identity. And God only knows what it could do to our flatland histories, as if kings, presidents, nation-states, and religious institutions capture what really goes on in human history. I listen to the news each morning on the radio and think, “Really? This is really what I am supposed to identify as ‘what happened yesterday’ to all those billions of people? Really?” It’s all just completely ridiculous. There are other histories, much more important hidden histories that we have only begun to note and trace.

On the simpler side, it is not all wild buzzing and blooming, nor is it all hidden. Not at all. Indeed, these Frequencies posts reminded me again that scholars of religion know far more than we are often willing to admit, even if this “far more” is usually implicit and seldom, if ever, rendered explicit. We know, for example, that religious identity is constructed, like every other aspect of the ego. We know that religions are historical phenomena, constructed again by enough social, political, linguistic, cognitive, and biological processes to make anyone’s head spin. And—and here is the Big Simple One—we know that, wherever and whenever they are found, all religious experience shares one indubitable universal ground: human nature. So it’s all different, and it’s all the same. That is really complicated, and that is really simple. Can we hold these two in balance now?

Finding a thing means finding a problem, a hook, an angle. Is this what we look for when we look for the spiritual? Or is this collection more accurately seen as an opportunity for a fairly small group of (mostly) scholars to flex just a bit, to entertain a different style or genre for a weekend dalliance? We seek scholarly effervescence with and through the investment in projects like these, with their promised new formats and genres. Some authors are perplexed to find or not find “the spiritual,” while others are (sometimes frustratingly) un-perplexed. Some seek to close the distance between subject and object and context, others to widen it, each approach proclaiming itself a felt register of something called “spiritual,” where the most minute detail becomes luminescent or, alternately, very nearly lost in the vastness of things.

To make this observation, though, is not to find in these writings the conceit that anything non-institutional that “smells” spiritual is fodder for rumination. But nonetheless, there is some interesting signifying with the terms archive and genealogy. The boundedness of an archive suggestively contrasts with the openness of this project, while the Nietzschean/Foucauldian resonance of genealogy is largely absent from these considerations. Frequencies also describes itself as “collaborative,” even though it seems more accurately to be an anthology of individual reflections that might constitute a family tree of styles, subjects, and angles all wrestling with a related thicket of questions. These efforts generate a varied offspring that only occasionally wrangle with officialdom (traditions, boundaries, etymologies).

What, then, is preserved or can be read among these outpourings from a hundred authors? First and foremost, the authors preserve themselves by foregrounding their own presence in their considerations. Littered through the contributions are scholarly self-locations of the sort that is de rigueur in the humanities: an academic tell whereby we establish authenticity and methodological non-causality by performing an experiential collusion with those we study. Omri Elisha says “I’ll pray for you.” Susan Harding returns to Thomas Road, and finds there the “spiritual” practice of ethnography (that gives one “entry into another reality”). Yet these normalized practices of religious studies are paired alongside a different kind of self-location, functioning in many ways more like a journal entry. Many entries focus on a personal remembrance of moments of intense sensation or aesthetic piety: this band, novel, painting, landscape, exchange, or drug changed my life. Many are captivating and marvelously written, miles away from the kind of dull re-enchantment parable one might encounter in scholarship or Sunday papers’ magazines. And while many entries here cannot refrain, also predictably, from referring to the author’s current research (perhaps this is our own form of prostration to a cosmos which would swallow up yet another chunk of text read by a tiny cloister), I found so many others quite arresting, especially Chip Callahan’s musings on highway travel, Finbarr Curtis’s piece on his father’s death, Vietnam, and the American dream, and Julie Byrne’s gorgeous “Saint February” (among the many I could possibly name).

A second impulse moving through these wavelengths is the lure of new objects. What is it (if indeed there is an “it”) that connects Allan Chumak, the Burning Man, fast food chicken, iPhones, espresso, LSD and dope, automatic writing, pubic hair, and Avatar? What imagined properties does the adjective “spiritual” possess, enabling us to recognize something common to Alcoholics Anonymous, yoga, Philip K. Dick, school retreats, companion animals, German women’s magazines, and Neutral Milk Hotel? Perhaps we might think not of substance, locable object, or essence but instead, digesting these offerings, consider whether the “spiritual” archived here is this very impulse to locate the new and escape the confines of the recognizable. While there are still plenty of texts here (some, like the Whole Earth Catalog, we might have expected and others, like John Lardas Modern’s obsession with the DeLillo corpus, less anticipated in an index of things “spiritual”), what is more common is a focus on the investment of meaning in objects and lifestyles.

But what does the move outside of conventional objects of study portend? Does a redirected attention impel us to the dazzling, the quirky, the hip, or does it provoke new questions that might be formulated when reliable contexts and connections are absent? Does the authorial attempt to locate the new—that overtone you hadn’t heard before, that detail tucked in the corner of the canvas—represent our own search for authenticity, paralleling the search for the real, the élan of connectedness, the ontological authority of either roots or rootlessness? Yet though it might be reasonable to think these questions alongside Frequencies, it’s also reasonable to wonder what is not a potential topic. The coffee I drink has been written about (though not craft beer). The music I listen to has not been written about (though other tunes have). The academic questions I pursue resound in this expanding discursive universe of secular/spiritual studies too. So perhaps it is the very superabundance of the category that is this archive’s most salient feature.

What really compels me, though, is the problem and possibility of medium and genre. If something about the “spiritual” recedes continually despite the urgent use of authorial radar, perhaps we might think less about shared properties and connections and more about common breakdowns of signification. David Morgan writes about the “aura” of the spiritual. Jeremy Kessler meditates on “secret connections” between things. We read about unseen networks of the uncanny, paradoxes, and aporiae. Amidst such ruptures and breakdowns of signification, some of these pieces flirt with new forms and new genres.

There are poems, literary recreations, a lovely Top Ten list, and a healthy variety of photos and graphemes. But still I wonder why there isn’t even greater playfulness and abandonment of customary authorial gestures. Why, to put it bluntly, has nobody played around more mischievously (but also perhaps literally) with the notions of frequency and resonance in pursuit of the “spiritual”? After all, as Nancy Levene so cogently writes, this very project amounts to chasing an impossibility, exploring the tensile relation between thinking about something while simultaneously trying to experience it.

So what would happen if, instead of looking to a different kind of writing that would provide release for the author and diversion for the reader, we thought seriously about the vibratory, circulatory dimensions of this project and dove headlong into the possibilities of this format. Perhaps a second 100 might avoid words altogether. Let there be sculpture, sound, and dance. Let there be video, collage, and cooking.

Duke Ellington once responded to an Icelandic student’s overly serious question about “art music” by reaching into his pocket and unwrapping a pork chop he’d stashed there. This is a gesture that does what words cannot. And something about the “spiritual,” with no stable referent available to us, invites us to think about improvisation. What if we were to propose only in sound, not trying to recreate its sensualism through our words or document its structure but to offer sound and nothing more? Is such confidence in sound’s power, or submission to its inevitable disappearance, the spiritual?

Keith Rowe spins the radio dial alongside his tabletop guitar and, amidst a swirl of noise, he stops on “Bang a Gong (Get It On).” These echoes within echoes, scramblings of signals and receivers, seem as evocative of something I would call “spiritual” as any combination of words could be. Does the abundance and everywhereness of “spirituality” create a kind of discursive overdrive, a distortion of the signal (referent)? What are the means by which we amplify, creating feedback and ghost tones, exulting in their release while at the same time craving their capture in the drive of a lone medium (whether sound or image or word)? The spiritual aspirant becomes a no-input mixing board, a resonating wire, a struck membrane through which such questions project.

These speculations of course are themselves analogical and rhetorical, and hence trapped in the very thing I aim to question. But playing with that is partly the point and possibility, and one inspired by the richness of these contributions. Note how Thomas Tweed’s piece on John Cage focuses on the composer’s sense that a good question shouldn’t be spoiled by an answer. Of course Cage probably had in mind Charles Ives’s “The Unanswered Question,” and what a fitting resonance that is. Like Ives’s weird vernacular juxtapositions and declamations, these entries jar the senses and scramble convention, evoking in the process their own sources and limits. But these limits, these limits, there’s something to them. Ives: “Many sounds that we are used to do not bother us, and for that reason are we not too easily inclined to call them beautiful?” “Spirituality” may be a category unable to escape its over-determination, no matter the beauty or sizzle an author intends. But in the very “ugliness” of its inevitable frames we might find the questions that bother us.

In The New Metaphysicals, Courtney Bender notes that defining spirituality is “like shoveling fog.” Indeed, a subject as intensely personal as spirituality tends to be subject to as many definitions as it has practitioners or adherents. And as Leigh Schmidt and other historians have shown, spirituality has appeared in myriad forms and meant many different things over many generations. Despite its resistance to concrete definition and operationalization, in its broadest sense the rubric “spirituality” has remained a decidedly steady component of the human condition. Thus “genealogy” seems an especially appropriate approach to Lofton and Modern’s effort to elucidate what spirituality is (and is not). Like any family tree, today’s manifestations of spirituality and its historical antecedents reach far and wide. Spirituality’s DNA also sometimes expresses itself in unexpected ways. As anyone who has tried to unearth information about his or her forebears can attest, much can be learned from discovering—or even from searching unsuccessfully—for the branches of a family tree.

I also have been struck by the cleverness of Lofton and Modern’s self-presentation as “curators” of Frequencies, rather than editors or coordinators or some other boring, bureaucratic term. “Curate” is, of course, both a verb and a noun. Thus, Lofton and Modern have curated an art exhibition of sorts (in both content and form, with visual art accompanying each entry)—but even more profoundly, they have acted as curates, taking on responsibility for the care of souls. (I cannot resist noting that the World English Dictionary also lists “assistant barman” as an alternate definition of the noun “curate.”) Because spirituality embodies something so human and alive, it is eminently sensible that Frequencies should be presented in a soulful, considerate, and caretaking manner. In a meaningful sense, freq.uenci.es is akin to ancestry.com.

Lofton and Modern received contributions from observers ranging from senior academics to DJ Spooky. Their invitation called for “fragments in a dynamic, large-scale portrait” and was accompanied by a rather comprehensive list of potential topics. It is noteworthy in the context of genealogy that the contributors to Frequencies often chose to write about topics that diverged from the list provided by the curators, much like one often is surprised by discoveries about long-forgotten ancestors. I suspect that Frequencies offered similar surprises (and delights) to Lofton and Modern as their “large-scale portrait” developed. Frequencies is richer and truer because of the tremendous latitude afforded to its contributors; spirituality’s real family tree has been allowed to take shape.

Several entries are especially resonant (referencing another term carefully chosen by Lofton and Modern) with the notion of spirituality as profoundly connected with various understandings of family. Elijah Siegler’s entry titled “Automation” refers several times to the fact that unlike other academic subjects, “the word spirituality fills [him] with anxiety.” For me, this observation reflects all the worries so many people have about dealing with immediate family members, because, like studying spirituality, doing so often is fraught with complication. (I must note that Siegler’s hilarious book-title generator is well worth investigating as well.)  Darren Grem’s lamentation on the “Chicken Sandwich,” as purveyed by the popular fast-food chain Chick-fil-A, emphasizes the very particularist (evangelical Protestant) spirituality underlying a highly profitable business. Chick-fil-A is so profitable that it retains a longstanding policy  of closing on Sunday, a “decision [that] was as much practical as spiritual…. (A)ll franchised Chick-fil-A Operators and their Restaurant employees should have an opportunity to … spend time with family [emphasis mine] and friends.” In sharp contrast with the moral questions inherent in selling chicken sandwiches are Michael Gilmour’s observations about “Companion Animals.” As I write this with one of my feline family members asleep on my desk, Gilmour’s concluding remark resonates especially strongly: “For the nineteenth-century poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, all living things reveal the creator God, with each kingfisher and dragonfly—and let us add each companion animal—offering a glimpse of the divine.” And then there is Chip Callahan’s rendering of the “Highway,” that wonderful conduit of family road trips and maker of lifelong memories. In Callahan’s case, “In the summer of 1978 … my whole family packed into an Itasca motorhome and spent six weeks driving a loop around the country…. I was ten years old, and the trip … was discovery on multiple levels…. It was history and myth come alive as we drove, walked, and slept in places we’d [only] heard and read about.”

Family ties are bound up with a lifetime’s worth of anxieties, love, and memories—and with the loss thereof. So too spirituality is inextricable from how we deal with loss. Such themes appear again and again in Frequencies. We hear from Wendy Cadge about “Spiritual Care Services” in hospitals, whose “efforts are premised on the belief that everyone has some sense of spirituality that … chaplains can tap into and work with in their interactions with patients and their families [emphasis mine].” Sarah McFarland Taylor evokes the inherent sadness of an “Estate Sale,” at which she “did not expect the intimacy with which [she] would sift through peoples’ lives.” Various contributors to Frequencies grapple with the tension between spirituality and material items, but no one can deny the fact that the physical detritus of everyday life carries special meaning to the descendents of those who owned it—whether we want to preserve such items, sell them, or destroy them. Laura Marris offers two evocative poems under the heading “Loss,” both of which clearly allude both to loved ones and to the self in days gone by. The passage of a family member of a different sort is a theme of Pamela Klassen’s observations about Max Weber’s grave. Weber is a member of our collective academic family tree rather than our biological ones, and Klassen invites us to consider the memorial to him as well as the inherent spirituality of cemeteries in general.

In short, Frequencies goes a long way toward creating the “large-scale portrait” of spirituality that Lofton and Modern set out to assemble. The portrait is not defined by clean lines, but by a mixture of images and ideas. It is messy and surprising in a good way, as is any family tree. And for some reason Frequencies reminds me of one of my favorite moments in film: the closing scene of “A River Runs Through It.” This scene is glorious visually, musically, and spiritually, especially because it evokes the deeply personal complexity and pain of humans’ love for family. In the words of author and fly-fisher Norman Maclean, for whom a river is like the trunk of a family tree:

In the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise. Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.

When Thomas Tweed asks, “Is ‘spirituality’ a noun? A verb? Something else?,” I want to send him a pocket dictionary that he can consult in future moments of linguistic crisis, so that he does not produce overwrought prose that only calls attention to himself. (Confidential to TT: it’s a noun.)

When David Kyuman Kim writes, “My iPhone has saved my life. My iPhone is stealing my soul,” I guffaw at the hyperbole. (Does Kim’s iPhone double as a defibrillator?)  And I am bemused by Kim’s authorial voice. It is not novel to point out, as Kim did and should have done, that technology places the satisfaction of an ego’s desires for the world front and center; there is no magic in the iPhone that was not already implicit in Alexander Graham Bell’s “Mr. Watson come here.” But negotiating that egocentrism by compounding it—by writing about one’s own ambivalence about one’s egotism—is quite the feat.

When Thomas Csordas lionizes Blake for his love of “the slumbering creative potential of humanity as a whole,” I want to ask him how the [expletive deleted] he knows that humanity as a whole is creative and not dysfunctional. What are the grounds of his confidence? Why should I share it? If humanity were to see itself as a whole, is it really the case that no one would feel as if her or his singularity had been silenced? Isn’t “humanity as a whole” simply an imposition of Csordas’s own desire onto billions of others? Bah!

In the last post put up at the website, dating from mid-January 2012, Nancy Levene pointed out that the list of topics provided to contributors could rightly extend from what the curators suggest out to infinity; the series of stuttering J’s that make up a long series in the middle of the list (“Jarena John John John Johnny Joseph”) could go on and on. But the first hundred entries are not best figured by “JJJJJJ,” but by the self-referential “IIIIII.”

The authors have done nothing blameworthy. They have only done what the curators of the Frequencies project, Kathryn Lofton and John Modern, have asked them to do. (“What comes to mind when you think of spirituality?” can only be a question about what comes to the authors’ own minds.) Moreover, the curators had good reason to make that request, because of their interest in doing a genealogy of spirituality.

When Michel Foucault articulated his genealogical project in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” over forty years ago, the object of his critique was a metaphysical notion of truth, in which terms were seen as having ahistorical essences. The task of the historian, if she is to be truly a historian, is to show that terms, and the social processes that invoke them, can alter over time, and can be contested with no side in the contest necessarily being in the wrong. What the genealogist discovers “at the historical beginning of things is not the inviolable identity of their origin; it is the dissension of other things. It is disparity.“ To call for a genealogy is to call for individuals to dissent, to talk about echoes of spirituality where they are not always expected in our culture—in iPhones, on the floor of a John Cage performance, on a highway, in a cup of coffee, in blood. This is what most of the contributors have done. However, to call for a genealogy is also to call for individuals to dissent from each other, to contest people’s claims that they have truly found the spirit in any of these places. (Otherwise, the scholars participating in the Frequencies project simply do old-style history with a new lingo, by replacing an objective account of spirituality with a group of subjects’ spirituality-stories in which all the stories are taken as having the same objective adequacy and value.) Disparity must be produced by the reader of all of these dissenting stories, in the critique—and perhaps ridicule—of the testimonies that have been collected. For this reason, genealogy must be collaborative. There is no critique without an object. Some position must be unjustified; some argument must be malformed. Someone will get the short end of the stick, and so the critic will always be a bitch who makes someone else his or her bitch.

Nevertheless, Frequencies need not depend upon this two-stage process, in which scholars opine and then subject themselves to dissent. The goal of genealogy, for Foucault, was to confirm “our existence…without a landmark or a point of reference.” If Lofton and Modern are calling for a field to take form—for genealogists to come together as genealogists—then those people should not only dissent from the past, but also self-consciously write about spirituality as if there were no reference point in it. This means not writing in the indicative, as if “the highway is a space of potential” were a factual claim. Instead, it means writing in the subjunctive, claiming that it is possible to take the highway as such space, and that when the highway is so interpreted, certain states of affairs will result. (In this respect, Foucauldian genealogy has important resemblances to Peircean pragmaticism.)

Tweed gets at this point when he claims that the noun “spirituality” has the same function in discourse as an interrogative pronoun. As David Walker—someone hire this man, stat!—makes clear, the questions posed by spirituality are questions to which we all give answers. Spirituality is nothing outside of spirituality-talk. Its questions are embedded in various conversations that have taken place and are continuing. To write about spirituality is to write about a plurality of discourses. But to keep that plurality in mind, we must love the possible validity of each of those discourses. When scholars write as if some objects of affection are better than others, or as if they have intuited Something Real in or through those objects, it is the responsibility of other scholars to yell “NO!,” like a toddler.

I believe the toddlers are our future. Teach them well and let them lead the way. Show them all the fierceness they can express to the outside.

I teach The Autobiography of Malcolm X in my introduction to religion class because it juxtaposes the racial exclusivity of the Nation of Islam—an exclusivity that the students judge as spiritually bankrupt—with the inclusivity Malcolm X claimed for Islam after his pilgrimage to Mecca—an inclusivity that is regularly hailed as the mark of genuine spirituality. Malcolm’s story is, in other words, a great way to start conversations about how we judge religion and how assumptions about spirituality affect those judgments. What did (and do) “real” Muslims think about the Nation of Islam, students often ask. There are many ways to answer that question. But none better than a story like this one. Listen to this, I say. The hat that Elijah Muhammad wore, with the symbols that defined the distinctively African-American spirituality cultivated by the Nation of Islam, was made by a doctor from Pakistan. Or by a seamstress in Lahore, as my friend pointed out last night.

Shakeela Hassan’s story is then also a story about Frequencies. Not (or not yet) a genealogy as much as a story about juxtapositions and materiality, or the juxtapositions that constitute the materiality of spirituality. It is in this form that spirituality gains contour and some specificity in 100 entries, each announced by titles that give little away, proclaiming the impossibility of containing the subject by opting for the elliptical, the obscure, the unusual, the surprising. The governing order is alphabetical; the encyclopedic logic turned inside out with series of entries that make no claim to totalizing knowledge.

Are you being ironic? A friend of mine, a musician and a funny man, is often asked because all his stories are true, and unbelievable. Are you being ironic? There’s no irony here, or there. No distance between what appears, and what is true. In Frequencies, spirituality is brought to the surface. It is all there to be seen. Described in the project statement as a digital compendium, Frequencies demonstrates the irrelevance of the weighty Latin etymology (com-pendere: to weigh together). By the same token, Frequencies rejects the linked metaphors of depth and transcendence that are conventionally understood to define spirituality. It instead presents spirituality as planar relations, a network of terms linked to one another by their coincident appearance on a screen and to other terms and images by whatever links the readers choose to follow and create.

As Jonathan Schorsch observes of the sexy angels in “The Apotheosis of Pittsburgh,” often enough “the visual metaphor of the spiritual subverts itself, leaving only carnal figures.” If this is true, Schorsch says, the joke is on high art. This could just as well mean that the joke is on religion. Teresa of Avila, designated a doctor of the Catholic Church, describes being pierced by an angel. But the marble statue by Bernini depicts an orgasmic woman. Émile Durkheim says that the totem is the sacred itself. This means the sacred is the fat of a kangaroo or the tail of an opossum. Religion doesn’t get the joke, though, because in religion the subversion often works the other way. Incarnations of Vishnu, like the discovery of a dead lama reincarnated in a ten-year-old-boy or the teaching that Christ was fully human and fully divine, are held up as fundamentals by religions that affirm that the profane subverts itself by revealing the sacred.

In Frequencies, however, spirituality is not rooted in a claim about the relationship between carnal and spiritual, or sacred and profane. Spirituality is not religion. As Kerry Mitchell says in his entry on “Paradox,” citing Niklas Luhmann, “In the realm of the observable (where else?), the difference between the observable and the non-observable must be made observable. [Religion] does not deal with the one or the other side of this distinction but with their form: with the distinction as such.” Religion is all about the distinctions that clarify relations.

By contrast, the spirituality we encounter in Frequencies leaves aside distinctions in favor of examples.

There is more than one kind of example. We could—as early modern Europeans loved to do—view examples as exemplary: understood in this way, the example is the fulfillment of what it represents. But it is now more common to understand example as exemplar: as one of many, demonstrative but not sufficient. The examples in Frequencies are of the latter sort. Avowedly idiosyncratic, these entries are presented as part of a proliferating series, requiring readers to do the all-important work of comparison to move beyond the singularity that might otherwise seem to be the only claim made on behalf of stories like Shakeela Hassan’s and the 99 others in Frequencies.

If each example is one of many, how do we understand the spirituality they are presented as examples of? Here I take my cue from Eve Sedgwick, the pioneering queer theorist whose last book, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performance, explored an alternative to the critical practices her own earlier work had championed. Much of her own literary analysis (think here of her famous article “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl”) was dedicated to exposing the hidden, the unseen, the unsuspected. Wearying of this endless cycle of exposure and wanting to find some way around the “topos of depth or hiddenness,” she focused instead on the “spatial positionality of beside.” This, I believe, is what the entries in Frequencies instantiate: the besideness of spirituality. Juxtapositions instead of depth, visibility instead of transcendence, and examples instead of distinctions. It is all on the surface, but it is not self-evident. Just as the seamstress in Lahore escaped my gaze—and my telling—so too spirituality itself as a concept might well escape the gaze of those caught in the rhythm of unexpected frequencies. The work is just beginning.