booklogging

Tex Sample The spectacle of worship in a wired world : electronic culture and the gathered People of God .
1998 Abingdon Press, Nashville, TN. ISBN 0-687-08373-7
141pp.
I expected, because the title and cover graphics seemed to bespeak it, a book that was a bit out of touch and reactionary, a finger wag at the younger generation, technology and adapting church. What I got was actually quite delightful. I good use of some key thinkers on contemporary culture and its artefacts (Baudrillard, Postman, Marx ...) and a mind that has clearly assimilated and evaluated the issues and has reached a balanced view and is very open to the good things about both older and newer ways of living and doing. I liked the discussion of the effects of what he regards as key things in post-modern culture, and he engages helpfully with the approaches of people like Ong.

The main weakness was that I didn't find his chapter on reimagining worship as inspiring as I would hope. I think that it was still too 'old paradigm'. But maybe that's unfair.
Quotabli quotes
People like Postman seem to suggest that there are universal characteristics that will always be in place when one thinks in images. However, if I am correct about the rich particularity of practices, one cannot come to such easy generalizations about images and their place in electronic culture. We need to look at the way they are conditioned by culture and history. We turn next to the factor of Culture. 25

The point here is how much effort it takes in learning to see. We easily forget how many years it took in infancy and beyond to learn to Identify things in a visual field, not to mention the kind of reasoning and judgment that developed along with it. If culture can be defined as anything made and learned by humans, seeing is a major cultural achievement , a claim that requires no denial of a biological dimension of such socialization, so long as one remembers that our ''biological understanding'' is profoundly cultural. 26

Ron Burnett makes the point that images are hybrids. That is, they ''are hybridized agglomerations of expression. . . . They mix with language, the visual, and oral expressions.'' Images are not ''purely'' pictorial In ordinary use, but rather are ''embodied'' with other forms of expression. These, like the visual images abstractly conceived, are connected to the culture from which they arise. Burnett points out how careful analysis of images is seldom done by dealing with their ''questions of meaning, comprehension, communication, and use-value.''' Obviously, much more could be said about images and how much they are conditioned by the culture of which they are a part. My point ere Is that simplistic notions of how images operate in a culture will not do. Analyses like those of Baudrillard and Postman are too narrowly conceived. Where they are correct about their capacity to distort and mislead, we, indeed, do need to be critical and wary. But to reduce the use of images to their distortive capacities is clearly to betray an unwarranted prejudice. 26-27

Wade Clark Roof makes use of postman's work on the impact of electronic media on the religion and spirituality of the Boomer generation. While learning from Postman Its claims are more circumspect and avoid the one-sidedness of Postman and Baudrillard. Roof suggests hat the shift from being a print culture to becoming an electronic one as had an important effect on Boomers. He argues that the Boomer generation is heavily influenced by a ''visual mode of communication'' In the way they think about salvation because of a shift from the printed word to image. 32

Again following Postman, he states that in a print culture priority is ''given to the objective, to the rational use of the mind.” This fosters ''religious discourse with logically ordered content.'' Such a culture .ea s to a flourishing of ''doctrinal debate and theological reflection.'' '' This approach to religion is certainly more characteristic of my generation and of myself. I remember when I began to get seriously into the study of Philosophy how important it was to attempt to hammer out a more ''rational'' and defensible position on matters theological. 32

Roof is closer to their approaches when he suggests that in an electronic culture, where images are prominent, the subjective is more Important than the objective with the result that ''the constant flow of ever-changing images replaces the coherent, orderly arrangement of ideas.'''' This ''fluidity and instantaneity'' not only shapes what we now, but shifts the process of knowing itself. 32

Roof goes on to say that the use of fast- moving images reconstructs our ''sense of reality'' as itself in constant change, ''without permanence,'' and we are transferred ''from one psychological world to another -not unlike the images, insights, thoughts, and emotions that arlse out of the inner life of the spiritual pilgrim.'' Roof sees this shift from the world of print to that of image as one reason why ''psychological imagery is so widespread.'''' 33

While it is helptul to use oral culture as a means to reflect on electronic culture, It is important not to see electronic culture and visualization as simply I return to more primal forms of life. There art real differences in these practices. Try to imagine, for example, the sensuous difference in working with a computer and screen and operating in an oral culture that does not have a written language. Snyder, of course, knows this, but I say it so that it is clear that electronic culture is not simply some reprise of orality. 49

Hence Marx sees the superstructure as basically mirroring or reflecting the material means of production or the economic base. It is a brilliant formulation, and one that explains much about a society. Nevertheless, he did not give adequate attention to other practices, Such as cultural ones of a non-economic kind, and their formative role, except as rejections of the more basic economic realities.' 60

Culture is reduced by Debord to intellectual activity, a notion that erases a host of other practices across an enormous range of concrete lived life. Raymond Williams, however, demonstrates that cultural activity must be seen and understood in terms of the ways it is produced and reproduced. When examining spectacle it is not enough to analyze the influences of economic factors, but it must be understood in terms of Its own concrete practices and how these shape our lives in their own terms.' 60

In her study of music in the English town of Milton Keynes, Ruth Finnegan maintains, quite effectively, that what people do with their free time in both leisure pursuits and volunteer activities is more important in shaping their ''pathways'' than what they do for a living. This declaration is a good corrective to a Marxist position that focuses too exclusively on productive relations and sees cultural practices as too simply reflective of more basic economic relations and activity. 66

Finnegan found that people in her study gave expression to heir basic ethical stances in and through aesthetic judgments. While some will bemoan such emergent patterns, and we do not have to be uncritical of them, I am interested in the new context that a soul music may bring to the work of ethics. 68

I maintain that electronic culture is one where at least three processes are characteristic of the ways people so acculturated engage the world today. These processes of imaging, of the percussive use of sound, and visualization are deeply encoded in the concrete lives of electronic generations and contribute to the social construction of who People are. 74

his experience with so much mendacity in the national life left him looking for something real. I had too much ''reality'' and a good deal of it was bad. He had too much falsehood and it was distortive and misleading. In these ways he has participated in his generation as I have participated in mine. The power of electronic culture left its effect as well. If my world -certainly since I began higher education- has been one of theory, conceptualization, and discourse, his has been one engaged through image, sound as beat, and visualization. In these senses he looks for meaning in experience. He looks for a rush while I ask why. 81

I think here of the kind of spiritual ''hopscotch'' people play with world religions. Some people, for example, choose some fascinating aspect of different faith commitments and ''adopt'' it as a part of their ''cosmopolitan spirituality.'' As they say, ''taking the best of all the religions and choosing my own.'' Using this approach they may ''pick up'' in hopscotch fashion a “piece'' each from Zen, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, or New Age. Wade Clark Roof has described this as multilayered spirituality.' Typically these ''cosmopolitan spiritualities'' are exercises in mere belief, that is taking some series of ideas that are appealing and used to shore up their consumerist subjectivity.' When challenged, one finds that these devotees usually do not know much a out these various religious practices and certainly do not engage them much more than they do in choosing the brands of cat food they purchase for their feline accessories. 90

Well, what's wrong with it? Apart from the reduction of ultimate commitments to mere belief, apart from the trivialization of a rich religious tradition, apart from an imperial and colonial grabbing up of abstract notions from the verdant land of a religious history, nothing much is wrong. Except this: Consumerist spiritualities do not fill or satisfy the human heart any more than do other commercial purchases riven by the emptiness of a commodity culture 91

much of electronic culture is based in a consumerist story that has crept Into a host of the forms of life at work in the wider society and In the church. This is a profoundly distorted story. It will require a alternative, oppositional, and subversive resistance. But such resistance cannot be simply based in a negative of opposition. The resistance will need a story of its own, one more powerful than the consumerist. This story will be one that gives an ultimate Significance to human beings, to social and historical life, a story a equate to the haunting reality of death that cannot be overcome by technology. It will be a story that addresses the human limits and failure that dog every step of electronic ''progress.'' It will be a story adequate to the longings and yearnings of human beings, one not lost finally in despair or in the self-deception of arrogance. The story will be one that combines the vision of justice, peace, and genuine freedom. Electronic culture has enormous capacities for inequality, for sanitized violence, and for the reduction of freedom to ''personal choice.'' Any story that does not address these matters is an ideological fiction designed to serve the interests of the principalities and powers. 121-122



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