Racism and the Weakness of Christian Identity

Religious Autoimmunity

David Kline

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367185275
• eBook ISBN: 9780429589638
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Despite the command from Christ to love your neighbour, Western Christianity has continued to be afflicted by the evil of racism and the acts of violence that accompany it. Through a systems theoretical and deconstructive account of religion and the political theology of St. Paul, this book traces how the racism and violence of modern Western Christianity is a symptom of its failure to secure its own myth of sovereignty within a complex world of plurality.

Divided into three sections, the book begins with a philosophical and critical account of what it calls the immune system of Christian identity. Focusing on Pauline political theology as reflective of an inherent religious "autoimmunity" built into Christian community, a theory of theological-political violence is located within Western Christianity. The second section traces major theoretical aspects of the historical "apparatus" of Christian Identity. It demonstrates that it is ultimately around the figure of the black slave that racialized Christian identity becomes a system of anti-blackness and white supremacy. The book concludes by offering strategies for thinking resistance against such racialised Christian identity. It does this by constructing a "pragmatics of faith" by engaging Deleuze's and Guattari's use of the term pragmatics, Moten's theory of black fugitivity, and Long's account of African American religious production.

This wide-ranging and interdisciplinary view of Christianity's relationship to racism will be of keen interest to scholars of Religious Studies, Theological Studies, Cultural Studies, Critical Race Studies, American Studies, and Critical Theory.

Part I
Religion, Christian Identity, and political theology

1 Genre, system, observation

Sylvia Wynter and Niklas Luhmann on autopoiesis and religion

For Sylvia Wynter and Niklas Luhmann, worlds apart but also folding into and across one another, human life takes place within systems. What we refer to as society is a social system of communication, meaning, order, and differentiation. Both thinkers ground their extensive and complex reflections on social systems in the theory of “autopoiesis,” Humberto Maturana’s and Francisco Varela’s neologism for self-generating living systems of observation that operate according to their own self-produced rules and requirements.¹ In contrast to allopoietic systems (for example, a mechanical assembly line) that produce something other than itself, an autopoietic system produces nothing but itself. As Maturana and Varela describe,

an autopoietic machine [system] continuously generates and specifies its own organization through its operation as a system of production of its own components, and does this in an endless turnover of components under conditions of continuous perturbations and compensation of perturbations. Therefore, an autopoietic machine is an homeostatic (or rather relations-static) system which has its own organization (defining network of relations) as the fundamental variable which it maintains constant.²

One of the crucial concepts that the theory of autopoiesis provides is the systematicity and self-referentiality of all forms of “life,” radically expanded beyond the organic/inorganic bifurcation. As Arthur Bradley notes of Maturana and Varela’s theory, “autopoiesis recognizes no qualitative difference between organic and inorganic systems: all living systems are autopoietic, and so any physical system—whether social, cultural, artificial—can, if autopoietic, be said to exhibit life.”³ Within this autopoietic frame, social systems are “living” organizations made up of specific components and operations that, just like any other form of life, operate according to systematic laws of self-production and -reproduction. Within these laws are questions of power and violence, but also questions of resistance and creation.

Despite their shared interest in autopoietic social systems, and even though their academic projects were being written during the same time period, Wynter and Luhmann never mention each other in their respective work. This is not so surprising in Luhmann’s case, as his sources remain essentially Eurocentric and specific to sociology and the insulated and overwhelmingly white and male school of systems theory. Luhmann is also about as far away as one could imagine from the commitments of the kind of black studies Wynter represents. While it is not surprising that Luhmann never engaged one of the preeminent black studies scholars of a generation, I take Wynter’s lack of reference to Luhmann more interesting given her immensely impressive use of sources covering extensive interdisciplinary ground that engages key figures of systems theory and cybernetics and would easily suggest a broader working knowledge of the systems theory being written over the course of her decades long (and ongoing) career. It may be possible that Wynter simply has not been aware of Luhmann’s work (although this is unlikely as she cites secondary literature that includes references to him), or that she simply found him not worth engaging. Yet the resonance between the two thinker’s descriptive projects would have provided an interesting and perhaps productive dialogue in light of Wynter’s theoretical commitments.

In terms of his theoretical importance, I view Luhmann’s work as essential for understanding the machinery of autopoietic systems of observation, and most importantly, the technological and non-human nature of social systems and their sheer indifference to human life. I find Luhmann convincing on the point that social systems are totally distinct from human beings in their operations and therefore have nothing in themselves that would reflect any kind of essential “concern” or “care” for human happiness, ultimate well-being, peace, fulfillment, etc. In Luhmann, we hear the emphatic declaration that “society does not and cannot care about you!” While I think Luhmann crucial for a post-humanist analysis of society and social systems, he is at best neutral on questions of justice and human suffering in the face of the system’s indifference, and at worst supportive of modern status quos of normative political, economic, and racial order. While Luhmann himself might express technical accounts of certain human desires for change and justice within the cold and inhuman operations of social systems, his sheer theoretical indifference to these things, which might be summed up in the notion that he represents a clear example of a particular kind of white and western privilege that can afford to be indifferent to the system’s indifference, puts him on the side of an implicit valorization of social and political order and stability against projects of liberation and justice.

While I find Luhmann highly interesting and productive for social theory and analysis—I think of his work as a kind of thorough blue-print for the machinery and inner-workings of social systems—I still want to remain open, in faith, to an idea and a force that I will spend a great deal in this book reflecting upon: a justice to come. Trying to think along with Wynter and the broader tradition of black studies, which as we will see is a kind of non-systematic (un)disciplinary form of thought that moves within and against systems of proper identity and order, I am committed to a mode of thinking that remains open to the coming of what Ashon Crawley describes as “otherwise possibilities, otherwise inhabitations, otherwise worlds.”⁴ The coming of justice signals the possibility of creative and liberative forms of living in search of otherwise conditions outside of, underneath, and within the cracks of formalized systems of racism and dehumanization. Holding on to this possibility, I suggest that Luhmann should be approached with caution and suspicion in terms of a constructive intellectual project rooted in a commitment to the otherwise which, if it may come through the contingencies of faith and resistance, would include upending the current system(s) of racism and what Wynter calls the colonial violence of “Man.” It is toward these ends that I hope the current study can be considered.

The primary reason I am interested in reading Wynter and Luhmann together is that I believe Luhmann provides a crucial supplement and at times corrective to Wynter’s use of the category of autopoiesis that fills in and updates some of her central claims (with almost overwhelming technicality) about the nature of social systems and their relation to human beings. While Wynter does engage the technical aspects of autopoiesis and systems theory to some extent through engagements with Humberto Maturana and Francsico Varela and other cognitive, sociological, and scientific theories of consciousness such as Gregory Bateson, Thomas Nagel, D.T. Campbell, and James Denielli, she does not go much beyond Maturana’s and Varela’s initial contributions and remains almost entirely confined within the language of cognition even as she links this language to broader frameworks of social theory. Holding the two thinkers’ radically divergent theoretical commitments in a kind of unresolved tension, I suggest that reading Luhmann and Wynter together provides a path for expanding and complexify Wynter’s liberationist-minded theory of autopoietic genres of being human beyond human cognition and toward a more updated technological and ecological frame of analysis. More than any other thinker in the late 20th century, Luhmann took up theories of autopoiesis initialized by Maturana and Varela and applied them to questions of society well beyond the cognitive framework. I suggest Luhmann is most relevant for conversing with Wynter on questions of the system/environment relation and its implications for thinking through issues ranging from the production and protection of social realities and meanings to the human capacity to “steer” the direction of society. In what follows, I will pair the two thinkers on the specific themes of autopoiesis and religion with these questions in mind.

Wynter on autopoiesis

Engaging various streams of cognitive and biological science, anthropology, and philosophy of religion, Sylvia Wynter theorizes the origins of human social systems in evolutionary terms. Going all the way back to the emergence of identifiable human culture “some fifty-thousand years ago”⁵ in the upper paleolithic period, human beings are described as a “hybrid-auto-instituting-languaging-storytelling species” (homo narrans for short)⁶ that have spread out and manifested in distinct cultural forms of life across the geographical landscape of the earth. She calls these forms of life “genres of being human,” which are performed and communicated through a range of distinct languages and cultural significations, including origin stories, cosmogonies, symbolic codes of life and death, and communicative systems of social meaning informing identities of kinship, sex, gender, social hierarchies, economy, political forms, and so on. The theory of genres of being human provides an account of human being that is pluralist, non-essentialist, and grounded in local, non-universal, and non-idealist productions of meaning and knowledge. While all genres of being human are grounded in the same basic species condition, each is self-referentially autonomous and unique in its own particular cultural production. Wynter’s foundation for this ontology of human plurality are theories of human cognitive and biological functionalism—namely, the cognitive systems theory of Gregory Bateson and Maturana’s and Varela’s theory of autopoiesis. The importance of the theory of autopoeisis for Wynter cannot be understated, as it provides the theoretical foundation upon which almost the entirety of her later intellectual project is built. Autopoiesis provides the means for conceiving human beings and their cognitive agency as determined by a whole range of immanent and contingent processes, forces, and relations that environmentally ground human agency and capacity, forms of meaning, and social production. For Wynter, the turn to autopoiesis foregrounds a methodological concern with the relationship between human cognition and mediating apparatuses of immanent social organization and meaning-production. Wynter’s primary methodological question is how human communities and their perceptions of reality are harnessed and controlled by various autopoietic forces and networks (biological, neurological, social, religious, political, etc.) that are entirely self-produced and that capture human beings within a given system of meaning and knowledge. Describing her interest in Maturana’s and Varela’s theory of autopoiesis for genres of being human, she says,

they wanted to think about the idea of biological organisms as autonomously functioning, living (i.e. autopoietic) systems. And this is related to our human social systems—a point they also put forward in their later work. Now if you look at living systems such as the beehive, they are purely biological eusocial systems. Our human eusocial systems are instead hybrid languaging cum storytelling (if biologically implemented) living systems; but they function according to laws analogous to those regulatory laws of the supra-autopoietic system, which is the beehive. So I call these the laws of hybrid human auto-speciation, thereby of autopoiesis.⁷

Wynter divides human autopoiesis across three specific levels through a combined reading of Maturana and Varela and Frantz Fanon: 1) the level of ontogeny, which is determined by laws of sheer biological production and reproduction; 2) the level of phylogeny, which follows laws of evolutionary adaptation and development; and 3) the level of sociogeny, a term coined by Fanon which links 1) and 2) to social, cultural, and religious codes of meaning (language, stories, myths, etc.) as “lawlike” forces (equal to those of ontogeny and phylogeny) governing human cognition and behavior.⁸ Together these three levels provide Wynter with the “sociogenic principle:” human beings are “hybrid” autopoietic beings of both “bios” and “logos.” Contrary to the purely biological human subject of the natural sciences, the origin stories, myths, and semantic codes of meaning invented by human beings play just as much of a crucial role in human autopoiesis and evolution as do biological processes. It is culture (as storytelling) that makes the human difference, allowing for endless variations of forms of life grounded in phylogeny and ontogeny but also set loose by particular stories of origin, representation, socio-political differentiation, and so on. Human societies are like a beehive in that they operate around genetically determined laws of biological and social reproductive behavior. Yet, unlike a beehive, human beings have the capacity to override their genetically predetermined instincts of social behavior through the phenomenon of culture. Following sociologist D.T. Campbell, Wynter notes, “our genetically determined mode of primate competitiveness and its correlated ‘animal type’ mode of instinctual and narrow kinship must be continually overridden by the process of cultural conditioning effected by the culture-specific systems of representation that can alone induce the modes of altruism on which our social orders are based.”⁹ Each genre of being human, conditioned by its specific environment and the contingency of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Religion, Christian Identity, and political theology
• Part II Apparatuses
• Part III Thinking resistance
• Index