Abstract
Reviewed by Lucas Scott Wright , University of California, USA DOI: 10.1177/2050303217707249
Donovan Schaefer’s Religious Affects is a truly interdisciplinary work that does a good job synthesizing a range of social and critical theory, phenomenology, and religious studies material in service of its goal—namely, to affectively theorize religion beyond the confines of certain reified contemporary debates in religious studies theory and method. The book begins and ends with a concept, which religious studies scholarship has so often neglected—Animality. “Is it possible for an animal to have religion?” (2). Schaefer poses this question as a challenge to religious studies scholars who, despite the various critical and materialist shifts toward a greater reflexivity and understanding of the scholar’s own contingent—non-absolute—perspective, operate with the assumption of an ontological difference between “the-human” and “the-animal.” In short, these scholars work as if “the human” is exceptional in relation to lesser “animals.” “What would happen,” Schaefer asks, “if we subtracted the framework of human exceptionalism from religion?” (3). The remainder of the book is dedicated to moving toward an answer to this question.
Central to his interrogation of human exceptionalism is Schaefer’s identification and critique of one particular manifestation of the animal–human binary in religious studies theory and method—namely, the primacy of language as that which demarcates the human sphere from the animal. The assumption undergirding so much scholarship, religious studies and otherwise, is that animals do not possess the property of language, which is solely in the possession of humanity. Religion, then, becomes a matter, primarily, of belief and the rational calculation of nature, a way of “making sense” of the chaotic unknowns in a sphere set over and against the interiority of the human-self. Language-as-rationality: this is a notion of rationality that demarcates between innately human properties, and subordinates more “base,” affective and embodied, elements of a human as sheerly animal rather than distinctly human. In short, people are not contingent embodied beings, but rather, angelic figures of reason. Schaefer refers to this operational assumption as the “linguistic fallacy,” and proceeds to critique this fallacy through his use of “affect theory”—a theory that posits rationality itself as a contingent phenomenon in relation to affective forces, which are “over and above” a rationally organized response or an evolutionarily implanted cost-benefit calculation” (3). With regard to the concept of” religion,” affect will turn out to be the substance of power, which discursive and social calculations merely work out after the fact (39).
One of the strengths of this book is how Schaefer builds the terms of his arguments by doing several things at once. From the opening pages Schaefer takes great care to posit his critical comments regarding the gaps in certain trends in the theory and method of religious studies, while simultaneously anchoring his critique, and subsequent constructive proposals for an affective theory of religion, within the history of the discourse he is criticizing. At times, this method tempts the reader into thinking Schaefer is, perhaps, being overly repetitive. Yet, the result of his method is that at each turn in the text, the reader is clearly aware of what is at stake for all of the involved parties—theory and method in religion on the one side, and affect theorists and a host of other disciplines on the other.
Regarding the history of theory and method in religious studies, Schaefer situates himself as a continuation of the turn toward ideology critique, analytics of power, and the materialist shift toward analyzing the lived religion of people in-the-world. Where Schaefer breaks with these trajectories is in the move to affect theory and the critique of the aforementioned linguistic fallacy. Citing JZ Smith primarily, Schaefer notes how Smith focuses upon the importance of interpretation bias in his repudiation of the alleged political neutrality of the religious phenomenon (6). According to Schaefer, Smith and those who follow after him, including Russell McCutcheon, Bruce Lincoln, and Tomoko Masuzawa, are beholden to a “linguistic-conceptual method” that primarily engages in “reading texts, in questioning, challenging, interpreting and valuing the tales men [sic.] tell and the tales others have told about them” (6). 1 Schaefer seeks to sublate this notion of critique through “showing the multidirectional vectors of influence between embodied emotions and politics” (8). Schaefer's is an expansion of the critical project, a recovery of a phenomenological notion of normativity grounded in-the-body, that is also critically aware of how bodies are enmeshed with power-relations.
In chapter 1, Schaefer provides an overview of two strands of affect theory he utilizes in his argument—namely, a Deleuzian theory of affect and a phenomenological theory of affect. On the Deleuzian side, which Schaefer represents through his explication of Brian Massumi’s essay “The Autonomy of Affect” (1995), affect precedes not only cognition and the self-certainty of the “I” but also the emotional register of human being. Affect is, in the first instance, a pure intensity, and “Conscious awareness is structurally incongruent with the overwhelming intensity of affect in this plenum of intensity” (26). Schaefer then turns to Eve Kosofsky Sedwick and Adam Frank’s edited volume Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, noting how they theorize affect phenomenologically as “affects woven into the textures of experience, hovering around, rather than beneath, the line of ‘conscious’ awareness” (28). Two different relations between affect and emotional and linguistic consciousness are on display, and in the end, Schaefer opts for a synthetic notion of affect that is closer to the phenomenological enmeshment of affect and consciousness than the Deleuzian autonomy of affect, while noting the usefulness of retaining the language of the “agency of nonhuman forces” from the Deleuzian side (32).
In chapter 2, Schaefer reaches the first of his key constructive concepts—intransigence, the notion of bodies as “semi-plastic biological structures,” (38) through which affect flows, “producing semistable structures that become the tough, raw materials of religion” (39). Bodies inherit through evolution “embodied histories” and systems of affect work through the affective pathways created in bodies by these histories (57). Schaefer conceives “religion” as “systems of practice” that work in, on, and through these affective pathways (56). He applies this theoretical construction of intransigent bodies to the question of how to conceive the transmission of knowledge and religious ideas once one dispenses with the conceptual-linguistic notion of the human in chapter 3. Here again, Schaefer takes up Sedwick, deploying the notion of “bricolage” alongside as a model for how people communicate practices and ideas. Schaefer notes that with regard to issues of globalization and global religion in particular, “global religion is a bricolage, a compendium of locally available forms resonating with textured bodies” (62). He concludes that affects that occur at the level of bodies are the raw materials, which media networks and power dynamics direct (88). “Religion circulates images and affects, composing a global dance of imitation, repetition, reconfiguration, and transformation” (91).
In chapter 4, Schaefer explicates in more detail how exactly religion works in and through the aforementioned affective pathways described in chapters 2 and 3. Bodies are at base, according to Schaefer, “compelled to form relationships with worlds” (93). Here the aspect of compulsion is that aspect of human being through which affects appear. The compulsion to form relationships with worlds, discloses the inability of one to not be in-the-world with-others and the inability to jettison the emotional register. This compulsory character of human being, which precedes and exceeds the scope of rational calculation, is precisely the affective point—“affects are compulsory” and religious discourse simply directs bodies “not by explaining things but by instrumentalising its own regime of compulsions” (118).
Schaefer further takes up this theorization of compulsion in chapter 5 where he seeks to analyze the issues of racism and religion. Rejecting a purely linguistic, ideological, theory of racism, Schaefer instead conceives of racialization—in this case Islamophobia—as possessing an erotic, affective origin. “Religious machines are built out of affective technologies,” and “ideology, especially radicalized ideology, is a technology for the production of affects” (144). Ideology is compulsion (145), insofar as ideology plays upon pre-existing capacities for the reception of particular affects that are the result of evolutionary histories and the bricolage of one’s being in a specific lifeworld. Schaefer explicates this pre-existing character of compulsion, which ideology preys upon, in chapter 6 on “Accident.” Schaefer emphasizes the element of contingency of human being, drawing on a range of philosophers from John Protevi, Sedgwick, Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida, and Malabou, arguing against the notion of a rational economy of bodies and evolution put forward by Daniel Dennett. In short, “bodies just aren't that smart” (176). Keeping within the tension between activity and passivity, order and chaos, that his other key chapters chart, Schaefer concludes that religious affects are neither rational nor completely random, but rather “accidental,” as revealed by his previous analyses of how religious language makes use of the pre-existing raw material of bodies and their inherited histories (177).
In the end, humans and animals share the same affective configuration upon which exercises of power are built. Animals and humans alike are compelled toward other living things—a concept called “biophilia” that Schaefer receives from evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson—accidentally colliding with and responding to other living beings and the environment as intransigent bodies. Exercises of power lock into this embodied matrix of affective force, each exercise of power utilizing the pre-existing affective capacities of others to achieve affective satisfaction. So too does religion emerge as a phenomenon that exceeds the reduction to pure ideology. What his analysis gains is an understanding that religion is an affective dance, and not a fundamentally discursive construction. “Religion as dance is a bricolage of available element, not a field of formless static noise…the play of articulated embodied histories in an accidental dance with the world” (182).
The import of this book is clear. The turn to affect is an attempt to cut through stalemated debates between what is critical and what is not, to halt the fideistic retreat into sub-disciplines that occurs alongside this stalemate, and to forge a common language with other sciences. Schaefer succeeds in this regard, successfully identifying an aspect of critique that is undertheorized and introducing his reader to the pertinent debates therein. He charts a possible way forward. This last aspect, the hypothetical nature of Schaefer's constructive claims, is perhaps the most refreshing aspect of the book.
Yet, in the spirit of testing hypotheses, I found myself questioning some of the operative concepts and distinctions Schaefer relies upon in his argument—namely, the appeal to affect contra cognition. Throughout the text Schaefer navigates the relation between the “raw” material of affects, and other modes of human being such as cognition and sociality. He does a good job avoiding the outright onto-theologization—the making into a causally prime entity—of affect. Yet, I am still not sure how the appeal to affect is possible without admitting that the appeal itself is only a concept-operation, a virtual marking in-thought of a phenomenon, which we can only encounter through that which it is not—namely, consciousness. Despite the attempt to not betray the commitment to a pluralistic notion of the affect-consciousness relation, I am worried that the making of affects and bodies, the “raw” material runs the risk of repeating the reifying logic that Schaefer criticizes within certain strands of theory and method. This danger perhaps pertains more to the reception of the book than for Schaefer himself, given the latter’s insistence upon a “hybrid complexity” (49) between affects, embodied histories, and culture. Just as critical religion scholars risk lapsing into an onto-theological hypostatization of “critique,” a sphere allegedly outside the complete corruption of being-confessional, so too is there a danger in charting a causal mechanism that would, even if only virtually and with the admission that it is a messy ordeal, distinguish between affect and the capacity to dialectically name this sphere as such. 2
A more precise investigation, then, is perhaps the order of the day, building upon the work Religious Affects does in charting a new theoretical space. Here a dialectical conception of the relation between individual bodies and consciousness can, I think, help illuminate what is at stake in naming unconscious forces through the prism of conscious reflection and language. What Theodor Adorno calls the “preponderance of the object” in his Negative Dialectics, the notion that at base, human beings are only ever primarily “objects,” but that this base-objectivity is never apparent as-such in-abstraction from the activities of subjectivity, gives voice to this dialectical tension with which affective theorizations of religion must contend. Adorno (2007: 185) writes, “Only because the subject in turn is indirect—because it is not the radical otherness required to legitimize the object—it is capable of grasping objectivity at all,” that is, objectivity as constitutive of the subject's basically objective character. Here there is only the mediation of the relation-itself between object and subject, even as objectivity constitutes subjectivity, just as affects constitute human-being—neither is nameable outside this mediation. 3 Without the maintenance of this tension between the two constitutive poles of the relation, one runs the risk of hypostatizing one of the poles, lapsing into the kind of bad normativity that Schaefer seeks to avoid while critiquing critical religion scholars.
In conclusion I am asking, what would it look like to bring affect theory into dialogue with critical theory more broadly, and by extension the entire intersection between affect theory and religious studies that the book invites? How are we to think affect theory alongside the concerns of those critical theorists who seek to preserve the relation-itself, the plurality of affect and consciousness, rather than hypostatizing either term in our theorizations of religion and society? I think Schaefer will have much to say on this topic in the future, given how well Religious Affects prepares the ground for such an interaction between these discourses.