consuming the self, new spirituality as mystified consumption

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DOI: 10.1177/0037768611412137

2011 58: 309Social CompassAndrew Dawson

Consuming the Self: New Spirituality as ''Mystified Consumption''

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socialcompass

58(3), 2011, 309315

DOI: 10.1177/0037768611412137 The Author, 2011. Reprints and permissions:http://scp.sagepub.com http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav

Andrew DAWSON

Consuming the Self: New Spirituality asMystified Consumption

Using the analytical lens provided by late-modern social theorists (e.g. Bauman,

Beck, Bourdieu and Giddens), the author explores the hermeneutical value of

regarding particular forms of new religiosity/spirituality as typically commod-

itized expressions of contemporary consumer society. Regarded as modes of self-

assertion, new spiritualities are first held to promote the cosmic aggrandizement

of the late-modern self. Second, new spiritualities may be seen as discontinu-

ous with certain contemporary dynamics and, thereby, to comprise a reflexivelyorchestrated rejection of modern consumer society. Synthesizing these opposites,

it is argued that new religiosities neither wholly affirm nor entirely reject late-

modern society and might best be regarded as forms of mystified consumption.

Key words: commoditization consumption late-modernity new religiosity new

spirituality self

Partant des perspectives des thoriciens de la modernit tardive (par exemple

Bauman, Beck, Bourdieu et Giddens), lauteur explore lapport heuristique

de lhypothse suivant laquelle les nouvelles formes de religiosit/spiritualitseraient des expressions typiques de la socit de consommation. Dans un pre-

mier temps, ces nouvelles spiritualits, conues comme des modes daffirmation

de soi, apparaissent comme des promotions de lagrandissement cosmique du

soi propres la modernit tardive. Dans un deuxime temps, ces nouvelles spiri-

tualits peuvent tre considres comme en rupture avec une certaine dynamique

contemporaine, donnant ainsi lieu un rejet rflexif de la socit de consomma-

tion moderne. En synthtisant ces oppositions, lauteur avance que les nouvelles

religiosits naffirment, ni ne rejettent compltement la socit moderne tardive

et reprsentent plutt des formes de consommation mystifies.

Mots-cls: consommation marchandisation modernit tardive nouvellesreligiosits nouvelles spiritualits soi

Introduction

This chapter contributes to ongoing discussions in respect of religion andconsumer society by engaging new spiritualities through the analytical lensprovided by theorists of late-modernity such as Bauman, Beck, Bourdieu andGiddens. In respect of new spirituality, what follows need not apply to all forms

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310 Social Compass 58(3)

of new religiosity and, where applicable, does not necessarily apply in the sameway. In respect of late-modernity, the term signals a belief that contemporaryurban-industrial society is notas some would have itin radical discontinuitywith what has gone before. Rather, contemporary society is held to be constituted

by the radicalization of the same kinds of processes (e.g. individualization,detraditionalization, and pluralization) responsible for the emergence andconsolidation of modern urban-industrial society as it has occurred over thecourse of the last 150 years. As contemporary late-modern society is, at least toa meaningful extent, in continuity with what has gone before, critical analysisof ongoing socio-cultural transformations assumes that we are not witnessing afundamental break with established processes of modernity but rather a series ofvariations on the modern theme. Relative to what has gone before, contemporarysocio-cultural transformation is, then, understood to be more a difference indegree than a difference in kind.

Ulrich Beck argues that the late-modern social landscape is, among otherthings, characterized by a tendency to compel peoplefor the sake of theirown material survivalto make themselves the center of their own planning andconduct of life [... to make the individual] conceive of himself or herself as thecenter of action, as the planning office with respect to his/her own biography,abilities, orientations, relationships and so on (1992: 88, 135). With the currenttreatment of new spiritualities in mind, one might justifiably complement thephrase material survival with terms such as psychological health, emotionalsafety or spiritual well-being. For the sake of their spiritual well-being, then,people are or feel compelled to make themselves the centre around which all else

is held to revolve.Although not agreeing with everything Beck says, I do believe that manyforms of new spirituality have at their core a conception of the self as the centreof their own planning and conduct of life. Indeed, I have argued elsewherethat a fundamental concern of much new religious discourse is the cosmicaggrandizement of the late-modern individual. By cosmic self-aggrandizementI mean the discursive universalization of the individual and his/her reach, which isachieved, among other things, by the rhetorical conflation of self-knowledge withuniversal comprehension and self-governance with cosmic mastery (Dawson,2007). To this extent, then, I hold the overwhelming majority of new religiosity to

be in keeping with the modern paradigms elevated estimation of the individual asa sovereign self (Taylor, 1992).The sovereign self of the modern paradigm, however, traverses a late-

modern terrain in which the radicalization of processes such as individualization,detraditionalization, pluralization, commoditization, and globalization hasreshaped the contemporary social landscape. Whilst to a large extent in continuitywith the sovereign self of classical modernity, the cosmically-aggrandized selfchampioned by new religiosity likewise exhibits a range of characteristics typicalof the late-modern environment through which she now moves and by whichshe is now shaped. The most noteworthy of these characteristics are: a holistic

worldview in which a universal force underlies and unites every individualcomponent of existencesuch that particular beliefs and practices are butrelative (and, thereby, interchangeable) expressions of the cosmic whole; anindividualisticemphasis upon the self as the ultimate arbiter of religious authority



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Dawson: New Spirituality as Mystified Consumption 311

and the primary agent of spiritual transformation; an instrumentalizedreligiositydriven by the goal of absolute self-realizationto which end an eclectic rangeof spiritual knowledge and mystical techniques is employed; an expressivedemeanour through which inner states of being are externalized by verbal and

practical means tending toward the dramatic; a meritocratic-egalitarianismwhich is both inherently suspicious of religious hierarchy and expectant of justrewards for efforts expended; and an immanentistspirituality whichalongsidethe avowal of transcendent transformations and rewards (e.g. reincarnation andcosmic merit)valorizes the pragmatic implications of self-realization (e.g.psychological and material well-being).

Together, these factors combine to engender a religious worldview inwhich the individual has the right, if not the duty, to pursue his absolute self-realization through any available means and at any possible opportunity. Such isthe self-orientated nature of this pursuit that prevailing narratives and customary

practices are evaluated relative to their perceived support for or hindrance ofindividual fulfilment. In the same vein, the enchantment of the world wroughtby the combination of these characteristics involves, among other things, thefusion of the experiential realms traditionally designated the material and thespiritualspheres regarded by modernity as otherwise discrete. The collapseof modernitys spiritualmaterial dichotomy occurs because each realm is nolonger regarded as categorically distinct from the other. Instead, each is treatedas a differentiated and thereby contingent representation of an all-embracing andabsolute, overarching reality. Mediated by the overarching ubiquity of the Whole,each sphere is internally related to the other such that what belongs to the material

pertains to the spiritual and vice-versa. As the material realm is sacralized andthe spiritual arena materialized, the spiritual sphere is rendered immanent by itsgrounding in material processes and the material realm is valorized as a means tospiritual realization.

An important adjunct to the elision of the material and spiritual spheres ofexistence is the increased estimation of the body and its physical environment asprincipal loci of spiritual fulfilment. This, in turn, requires that the material aspectsof life which nurture and allow the body to flourish become significant means ofspiritual expression. Underwritten by and expressive of late-modern processes,this line of reasoning functions as a kind of commodicy in which the things of

this world (e.g. material success and psychophysical well-being) become botha medium for and a barometer of spiritual well-being. (1) As a consequence,material goods are no longer treated, as with traditional spirituality, as potentialimpediments to spiritual realization but are instead regarded as expressive of, ifnot intrinsic to, the success of the spiritual quest. As with Webers understandingof Calvinist preoccupations with visible signs of election (1992), the materialwell-being which is so central to contemporary consumer society resonatesdirectly with new religiositys articulation of the cosmic aggrandizement of thelate-modern self.

We must not, though, fall into the reductionist trap of treating new religious

adepts as mere cultural dopes, washed along by the flows and currents of late-modern social processes. For, it cannot be ignored that for many adherents of newspiritualities, the discourse of new religiosity articulates a self-conscious rejection



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of what are held to be typically modern socio-cultural phenomena. Immorality,shallow positivism, violence (domestic and political), environmental degradation,and lack of respect for non-mainstream opinion are just a few of the many tropesemployed by new religious practitioners to underwrite their critique of the

system and all that allegiance to it entails (Dawson, 2008). Indeed, one of themost recurrent themes cited by new religious adepts in support of their rejectionof modernity is that of its unrelenting materialism. Modern society, it is said,is acquisitive, avaricious and commoditized. Modern society is criticized, then,because it holds self-realization to be attained through the pursuit, appropriationand consumption of goods external to the self. In reflexive contrast to modernmaterialism and its commoditization of human existence, new spiritualityemploys a process of re-signification which inverts contemporary value systems.Hierarchizing the inner precincts of the individual over the outer environs ofsociety, this re-signification posits the privatized interior of the self as the preferred

vale of soul-making. To this extent, then, new era spiritualitys valorization ofinner-orientated significance underscores its anti-consumerist credentials in that itembodies the reflexive disavowal of neo-liberalisms consumo, ergo sum.

In view of its discursive rejection of mainstream consumer society, newspirituality may well be regarded, in Becks terms, as a highly subjectivized responseto late-modernitys compulsion to conceive of the self as the centre of planningand action. There is perhaps some justification for arguing that new religiosity, bymaking the inner precincts of the self its preferred vale of soul-making, at leastmakes a virtue out of necessity. There are those, however, who would disagree;arguing instead that the privatized preoccupations and subjectivized celebrations

of new spirituality serve only to transform a late-modern failing (that of rampantindividualism) into the full-blown vice of subjectivity fetishism (Bauman,2007: 14; see also Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002; Bauman, 2005).

Muddying the Waters

Not least in view of the preponderance of middle-class practitioners of newreligiosity, it would be naive to suggest that the discursive disavowal of mainstreamsociety equates with wholesale disengagement from social processes or that it

amounts to the complete rejection of contemporary modes of consumption. Thereare shades of grey here, as new religious discourse also comprises elements(reflexive or otherwise) of accommodation to and affirmation of contemporarysocial processes (see Wallis, 1984).

Let me give three brief examples of its affirmation of contemporary societaldynamics. First, new religiosity may be regarded as an aesthetic of distinction.Within this aesthetic of distinction, the symbolic capital which new religiousadepts believe to be accrued by their reflexively nurtured counter-cultural identityis strategically employed (by virtue of its relative rarity) to distinguish urbanmiddle-class practitioners from the vulgar masses (Bourdieu, 1984)be they

the vulgar masses of mainstream religion or the vulgar masses of secular society.A second example of new spiritualitys affirmation of mainstream consumerculture can be offered with reference to the sometimes implicit, sometimesexplicit correlation of spiritual status and material well-being. Although, for the



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most part, far from the full-blown prosperity gospel of neo-Pentecostalism, newspirituality often assumes an elevated standard of living to reinforce claims toan enhanced spiritual standing. Whether regarded as being inherited from a pastlife (as cosmic merit) or acquired in this one (as blessing), spiritual authority

is enhanced by material possession. As with so many walks of modern life, newreligiosity allows for the direct transposition of economic capital into symboliccapital. A third example treats new spirituality as a form of self-consumption.Here, the new religious quest for spiritual realization represents an interiorizedversion of what Giddens regards as the late-modern preoccupation with theself as project (1991). New religiosity is thereby regarded as a spiritualizedmanifestation of what Bauman terms the bodys new primacy (2000: 184). Inthese terms, the transformative project made possible by new religious practicalknowledge is an interiorized reflexive biography (Beck, 1992: 135) equivalentto todays gym routines, dietary disciplines and plastic-surgical solutions. Taking

these examples cumulatively, new spirituality may be regarded as somethingwhich, almost despite itself, ends up buying into and thereby reproducing thevery late-modern dynamics that it reflexively purports to eschew.

Pursuing a slightly different tack, new era spirituality might be viewed moreas an accommodation to than an affirmation of late-modern dynamics. In thisrespect we might regard new era spirituality as, for example, an accommodationto the insecurity and resulting anxiety characteristic of contemporary urban-industrial existence (Bauman, 2001; Beck, 1992; Bourdieu, 1998b; Giddens,1990). Indeed, the doyens of late-modernity would argue that, because of theever widening gap between inherited expectation and actual state of affairs, this

insecurity and anxiety is heightened for the hyper-reflexive middle-classes, whomake up the overwhelming majority of new religionists (Beck, Giddens andLash, 1994). In this line of thought, and in contrast to the reflexive disavowalnoted above, the re-signification wrought by new era spirituality does notarticulate a full-blown rejection of commoditized existence. Rather, the act of re-signification (in which inner goods are hierarchized over outer ones) underwritesa kind of mystified consumption, which informs the new religious commodicyby coupling symbolic denial with practical enjoyment. The symbolic denial ofultimate value to material goods acts as a kind of psychological prophylaxis,which guards against the anxiety-inducing implications of late-modern

prcarit. It does so by regarding the things of this world as secondary andthereby expendable adjuncts to the spiritually fulfilled life. In practice, however,the enjoyment of material possessions by middle-class new era adepts continuesto be just thatenjoyment. Caught between the Scylla of consumerist culture(to be is to consume) and the Charybdis of late-modern insecurity (nothing isguaranteed)to borrow a phrase from Baumannew era practitioners hedgetheir bets and insure their actions against the pranks of fate (2007: 86). Invalorizing the realization of the inner self over the enjoyment of material goods,new era spirituality does not disavow the latter in favour of the former. Rather,by making inner fulfilment the centrepiece of its narrative, new era discourse

downgrades material comfort to the status of optional, but not unwelcome,extra. Precarious by nature, worldly goods are welcome if they come along butits not the end of world if they dont.

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Conclusion

By and large, late-modern theorists argue that the individualizing dynamics oflate-modern society have set its citizens an unachievable task. On the one hand,

late-modern citizens are imbued with a sense of individual responsibility for allthat happens to and around them in respect of private and professional, family andsocial, and local, national and (increasingly) global affairs. As Beck puts it, thecontradictions and conflicts arising from these matters are dumped at the feetof the individual who is left with the well intentioned invitation to judge all ofthis critically on the basis of his or her own notions (1992: 137). On the otherhand, and having imbued the newly emancipated individual with a sense of dutyto resolve these matters, late-modernity fails to deliver the necessary tools andsupport by which this new found responsibility can be met. According to Bauman,there is a wide and growing gap between the conditions of individuals de jure[i.e.

what is expected of them] and their chances to become individuals de facto[i.e.what they are actually able to achieve] (2000: 38).For these authors, the aporia formed by the shortfall of de factopossibility

relative to de jureexpectation can be resolved only by the overhaul of societalinstitutions and the reclamation of the public sphere as a fully functioning valeof citizen-making. Although mindful of the contribution of micro-dynamics,the prescribed solution is ultimately one of mid-range and macro-structuraltransformation. Not so for many forms of new spirituality. Faced with theintractable irony of heightened expectation versus what are felt as progressivelyprecarious prospects, new religiosity by and large eschews social-political activism

as a viable means of solving this dilemma. Unable or unwilling to entertain social-political activism as a remedy for societys illsor simply indifferent to the ideamuch new-era spirituality posits an uncompromisingly biographical solution tolate-modernitys systemic contradictions (Beck, 1992: 137). Furthermore, formany new religiosities this biographical solution involves the consumptionof much that our late-modern, commoditized society has to offer. Of course,this biographical solution smacks to some of narcissistic, if not solipsistic, self-preoccupation. To others, though, it may be read, if not as a means of resistance orsurvival, at least as a holding pattern until something better comes along.

NOTE

1. I use the term commodicy in a very different sense from that used in economics.As a self-justificatory rationale for particular modes of consumption, commodicy here

parallels Bourdieus notion of sociodicy (1998a: 43)itself a play on Webers analysisof theodicy (1991, 3589).

REFERENCES

Bauman, Z. (2000)Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.Bauman, Z. (2001) Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World. Cambridge: Polity

Press.



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Bauman, Z. (2005)Liquid Life. Cambridge: Polity Press.Bauman, Z. (2007) Consuming Life. Cambridge: Polity Press.Beck, U. (1992)Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Newbury Park.Beck, U. and Beck-Gernsheim, E. (2002)Individualization: Institutionalized Individualism

and its Social and Political Consequences. London: Sage.

Beck, U., Giddens, A. and Lash, S. (1994)Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition andAesthetics in the Modern Social Order. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London:Routledge and Keegan Paul.

Bourdieu, P. (1998a)Acts of Resistance: Against the New Myths of Our Time. Cambridge:Polity Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1998b)Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action. Cambridge: Polity Press.Dawson, A. (2007)New Era New Religions: Religious Transformation in Contemporary

Brazil. Aldershot: Ashgate.Dawson, A. (2008) New Era Millenarianism,Journal of Contemporary Religion23(3):

26983.

Giddens, A. (1990) The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Giddens, A. (1991)Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age.

Cambridge: Polity Press.Taylor, C. (1992) Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.Wallis, R. (1984) The Elementary Forms of the New Religious Life. London: Routledge

and Kegan Paul.Weber, M. (1991) Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions, in H. H. Gerth

and C. Wright Mills (eds)From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, pp. 32359. London:Routledge.

Weber, M. (1992) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London: Routledge.

Andrew DAWSON lectures on religion at Lancaster University, UK.He has degrees in religious studies, theology and social science fromuniversities in England and the United States. He researches and publishesin the area of religion and society. His most recent book, New Era New Religions (2007, Ashgate), examines the rise and spread of newreligiosity in Brazil. ADDRESS: Department of Politics, Philosophy andReligion, Lancaster University, Lancaster, LA1 4YN, United Kingdom.[email: [email protected]]


consuming the self, new spirituality as mystified consumption

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