Buddhism and Cultural Studies

A Profession of Faith

Edwin Ng

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781137549891
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137549907
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Ética y filosofía moral

This book explores the reciprocity between Buddhist, Derridean, and Foucauldian understandings about ethics, subjectivity, and ontological contingency, to investigate the ethical and political potential of insight meditation practice. The book is narrated from the perspective of a postcolonial 'Western Buddhist' convert who, despite growing up in Singapore where Buddhism was a part of his disaporic 'Chinese' ancestral heritage, only embraced Buddhism when he migrated to Australia and discovered Western translations of Buddhist teachings. Through an autoethnography of the author's Buddhist-inspired pursuit of an academic profession, the book develops and professes a non-doctrinal understanding of faith that may be pertinent to 'believers' and 'non-believers' alike, inviting the academic reader in particular to consider the (unacknowledged) role of faith in supporting scholarly practice. Striking a careful balance between critical analysis and self-reflexive inquiry, the book performs inall senses of the word, a profession of faith.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Edwin NgBuddhism and Cultural Studies10.1057/978-1-137-54990-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Edwin Ng¹

(1)

Deakin University, Burwood, Victoria, Australia

End Abstract

I write this book as a profession of faith. It professes within the context of the academic profession an encounter with faith that reverberates through my coterminous practice of Buddhism and cultural studies. By interweaving autoethnographic reflections with critical analyses of the contestations shaping the emergent ‘Western Buddhism’, as well as the tensions circumscribing this authoring-I’s attempts to work across multiple cultural and intellectual borders, this book will develop a generalised, non-doctrine-specific understanding of faith that is pertinent to so-called believers and non-believers alike. In particular, it invites the academic reader to consider the (unacknowledged) role of faith in supporting the making of a profession in the university and beyond.

This book’s understanding of faith is shaped by the three main sets of discourse I engage with—Buddhist teachings, Derridean deconstruction, and Foucauldian critique—from the position of a postcolonial ‘Western Buddhist’ convert. Despite growing up in Singapore where Buddhist customs were part of my diasporic ‘Chinese’ ancestral heritage, I attended a missionary school and self-identified as Christian until I turned to atheist outlooks in my late teens. I migrated to Australia as a young adult for undergraduate studies and shortly afterwards discovered Western translations of Buddhist teachings along with a passion for academia. This profession of faith bears witness to the unseen and unsaid movements of this spiritual-scholarly profession. It testifies to the fact that I cannot tell where the spiritual ends and the the scholarly begins when I sit on the meditation cushion to cultivate an embodied understanding of Buddhist teachings about existential discontent, impermanence and not-self, or when I study and articulate Derridean and Foucauldian ideas about ethics and ontological contingency. The question of faith emerges from this space of undecidability. I invite you to consider this profession of faith in relation to your own experience, whatever your existential orientation or creedal commitment may be.

Faith is professed here as an affective response of trust that necessarily accompanies the performative experience of making decisions to pursue any course of action, including the making of a profession in academia. I profess faith as that solicitation and gifting of trustworthiness that enables a communicative or reciprocal relation with the other, and which inspires and sustains our hopes and aspirations as we steer our decisions toward a future that may or may not arrive: faith as the movement of an open question. I feel compelled, find it compelling, to speak of this elementary faith as the gifting and inviting of unconditional unconditionality, unconditionally. Unconditional unconditionality, unconditionally is the leitmotif, the call and the response, of this profession of faith.

To make a profession of faith in the names of Buddhism and cultural studies, I cannot shirk the responsibility of staging an exchange of intellectual hospitality between the two traditions, and of allowing the two to mutually invite and host the truth claims of the other in good faith. This book will narrate a dialogical exchange between Buddhist teachings and poststructuralist-inflected cultural theory because the process of mutual hosting and reciprocal learning is necessary for the ongoing vitality of the emergent Western Buddhism. The scene for this encounter opens with the question: ‘What is the ethical and political function and transformative potential of meditation practice in a Buddhist art of living?’ This question arises out of renewed scholarly and political debates about religion, secularism and the function of ‘spirituality’ in contemporary life, and it is especially pressing for an emergent ‘Western Buddhism’ that needs to negotiate the neoliberal governmental logics that target ‘spirituality’ as both object and objective in the exercise of power.

Against the backdrop of neoliberal governmentality, this book will elucidate the ways in which ethical self-cultivation, with the contemplative technique of insight meditation, may undercut and transform habitual thought and action. Using an approach to Buddhist meditation called Vipassana as an example, I will examine how the practice holds the potential to defuse normative modes of subjectivity and catalyse the transformative processes of un-becoming. My analysis of Buddhist spirituality will show how the transformative potential for becoming-other is immanent in the vicissitudes and mutualising dynamics of embodied sensibilities, ethical decisions, and performative faith. This analysis would contribute to larger debates shaping the cultural translation of ‘Western Buddhism’. More specifically, my hope is that by the end of the book, fellow academic readers will become curious to explore together how these mutualising dynamics relate to the vicissitudes of the academic profession.

Refusing the Presumptive Secularism of Cultural Studies

There has been a general neglect of the topic of religion and related questions about spirituality and faith in the field of cultural studies. ¹ John Frow (1998: 207) articulated this when he argued that an axiomatic reliance on a fallacious secularisation thesis has resulted in ‘the failure of cultural studies—with rare exceptions—to come to terms with, to theorize in any adequate way, what is perhaps the most important set of popular cultural systems in the contemporary world, religion in both its organized and disorganized forms.’ Frow’s argument about the failure of a presumptive secularism in cultural studies is one voice amongst others in broader debates about the totalising operations and conceits of the prevailing regimes of secularism. Commentators like Jürgen Habermas (2008), John D. Caputo (2001), and Hent de Vries (with Sullivan 2006; see also Gorski et al. 2012) have evoked the notion of the ‘postsecular’ to question these problematics, while others like Charles Taylor (2007, 2011), Talal Asad (1993, 2003), and William Connolly (1999, 2005, 2008, 2011) address the same set of challenges without employing the term. Regardless of whether the notion of the postsecular is used or not, the overarching concern is not to abandon or ‘leave behind’ secularity, but to question the totalising effects of disembodied reason and the attendant normative regime of the resolutely rational modern subject. This book accepts, as these scholars do, the impossibility of securing a unified political project without negating difference. Taylor’s and Connolly’s work, and the ‘religious turn’ in Derrida’s writings in particular, are helpful in clarifying the importance of the question of faith for the present conjuncture.

Dominant accounts of secularisation conceive of the secular as the what is left over when the human estate has been purged of so-called religious illusion. With different inflections, the works of Durkheim, Freud, Marx and Weber gave impetus to this ‘subtraction’ narrative, later developed by sociologists of religion into a secularisation thesis of inexorable religious decline (Berger 1967; Wilson 1969); though some of its leading proponents, such as Peter Berger (1999: 2), have now recanted their views (Hadden 1987). The ‘subtraction’ narrative of secularisation, however, continues to circulate in the contemporary mediasphere via the ‘new atheism’ of, for example, Richard Dawkins. Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007) critiques the ways in which ‘subtraction’ accounts efface the extent in which the reorganisation rather than the inexorable decline of religious functions facilitated the secularising trend. ² He narrates an alternative account of the ‘move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace’ (2008: 3).

By examining ‘conditions of belief’, Taylor refutes the ‘epistemological’ approach, which, in reducing belief to conscious assent to truth propositions, overlooks how rational-propositional assertions of (un)belief are necessarily conditioned by our embeddedness in language and culture and, more importantly, by dimensions of tacit knowledge we do not typically recognise, since they serve as the background against which conscious reflection is formed. Our secular age is experienced within an ‘immanent frame’, a natural order without necessary reference to anything outside itself. Religion and exclusive humanism are two possible existential orientations amongst others for the pursuit of the good life. Within the immanent frame, ‘believers’ and ‘non-believers’, ‘theists’ and ‘non-theists’, share a basic existential dilemma: that ‘going one way or another requires what is often called “a leap of faith”’, because even if we can articulate the considerations motivating our existential stance, ‘our over-all sense of things anticipates or leaps ahead of the reasons we can muster for it […] we might better speak here of “anticipatory confidence”’ (Taylor 2007: 550–551).

Like Taylor, Connolly repudiates ‘subtraction’ accounts of secularisation. In Why I Am Not A Secularist (1999), he rejects the dead-end debates between dogmatic secularists and theists, coming down hard on ‘secularist conceits’ despite being unreservedly committed to the promise of secularity over any sociopolitical arrangement by ecclesiastical sanction. The position of the hubristic secularist, he claims, is ‘insufficiently alert to the layered density of political thinking’ and harbours ‘unacknowledged elements of immodesty in itself’ (Connolly 1999: 4). Inasmuch as secular conceits presume to provide ‘a single, authoritative basis of public reason and/or public ethics that governs all reasonable citizens regardless of “personal” or “private” faith’, they in effect discard ‘a set of nontheistic orientations to reverence, ethics, and public life that deserve to be heard’ (1999: 5). Connolly envisions a yet-to-be-actualised ‘deep’, multidimensional pluralism that would be hospitable to non-secular conceptions of the good life. A key challenge is how we might become more mindful of the ‘visceral registers’ of experience devalued by modern secularism’s overdetermination of the rational and aseptic. Mindfulness of the visceral registers is important not only because they prime and infuse conscious intellectual activity, but also because they may ‘be drawn upon to thicken an inter-subjective ethos of generous engagement between diverse constituencies or to harden strife between participants’ (Connolly 1999: 3).

Connolly elaborates on the ethicopolitical significance of the visceral registers of experience in A World of Becoming (2011), cross-fertilising continental philosophy, cultural theory, neuroscience, complexity theory and theoretical biology to explore a micropolitics of affect/perception that might actualise a deep pluralism. This open-ended work of (un)becoming requires sensitivity towards the contemporary function of spirituality, which is defined operationally as the embodied sensibilities by which one’s existential orientation or becoming-with-the-world is cultivated with varying degrees of hospitality/hostility towards immanence and/or transcendence. Connolly too regards faith as an elementary force sustaining any given existential orientation, explaining that his faith in ‘radical immanence’

touches but does not correspond completely to some transcendent readings of it. Faith to us means a contestable element in belief that extends beyond indubitable experience or rational necessity but permeates your engagement with the world […] These deposits of faith can shift as new evidence, inspiration, and experience surge forth to put pressure on them. (Connolly 2011: 30–40)

Taylor and Connolly, whilst diverging in their appraisals of the relative merits of immanence/transcendence, both underscore the constitutive role of tacit knowledge and the visceral registers of experience. My analysis of Buddhist meditation will explore how it may sharpen sensitivity towards such embodied, ‘backgrounded’ dimensions of subjectivity. Taylor and Connolly also do not conflate faith with a reductive Euro-Christian-centric definition of belief-as-conscious-assent (see Lopez 1998), nor regard faith as inimical to rationality. In drawing attention to the circuits of feedback and interferences between milieu and embodiment, the folds of materiality and conceptuality by which un-belief is (de)sedimented, their work disrupts the habitual understanding of faith as synonymous with creedal commitmen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Towards a Spiritually Engaged Cultural Studies
• 3. Methods, Traditions, Liminal Identities
• 4. Of Intellectual Hospitality, Buddhism and Deconstruction
• 5. The ‘Religious Question’ in Foucault’s Genealogies of Experience
• 6. The Care of Self and Spiritually Engaged Cultural Studies
• 7. A Foucauldian Analysis of Vipassana and a Buddhist Art of Living
• 8. Buddhist Critical Thought and an Affective Micropolitics of (Un)Becoming
• 9. A Profession of Faith
• 10. Conclusion
• Backmatter