Subject: Re: The Goths
Date: Sat, 16 Jun 2001 17:29:56 +0800


>The kind of religion I am talking about as post-modern religion is
>closer perhaps to what the media would label cultist in a pejorative
>way.  It is religion that tends to be marginal rather than conventional,
>not so much theistic as exotic, not so much moralistic as therapeutic
>and one that allows its participants to playfully explore new
>possibilities of self outside the confines of the mainstream worldview.
>(By self here, I do not mean the self as an ontological or metaphysical
>principle, but the self as a kind of style, a rewriting of one's
>inscribed identity, the self as a signature. - "signed, moi!")

Lawrence Grossberg talks of the rise of the 'neo-conservative.' I am pretty
sure he means that with the large scale questioning of the "authority of
authority" which becomes a "crisis" for those who are in the business of
producing social order. Those who want control, who exhibit the will to
power, will always attempt to redefine, reconstruct the 'questioners.'
The questioning of the "authority of authority" I think is similar in
process to Lyotard's end of the meta-narrative.

But if Lefebvre is right and there is always an everyday life that cannot be
escaped, or viewed from purely objective position (or rather the
communication of that position can not occur), then there are
meta-narratives being constructed continually. I am talking about the
chaotic-feedback kind, like religion. The kind of meta-narrative that can
accommodate every subject position. That is, in the case of Christianity, if
you don't believe, you don't have faith, or worse you are a sinner, or worse
you are Satan's spawn, or something like that.
So if any subject position can be reiterated (which on the lowest level is
simply being defined or named) by these meta-feedback-narratives, then how
can we ever name the whole system?
I am thinking along the lines of Baudrillard's "...Or the End of the
Social."

Glen Fuller.