Panel: RELIGION AS "SITUATED KNOWLEDGE" IN SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION



392.13 - THE STUDY OF RELIGION AS "SITUATED EPISTEMOLOGICS": WHAT THE NEW MATERIALISM AND THE NEW SEMIOTICS CAN TEACH US ABOUT RELIGIOUS LANGUAGE

AUTHORS:
Raschke C. (University of Denver ~ Denver ~ United States of America)
Text:
This paper will explore the range of multiple and variable methodological pathways - what I term "epistemologics" - for answering the underlying question(s) posed for this panel: in what sense can "religious" knowledge be regarded as "situated" knowledge, and how might such an approach illuminate the means by which such knowledge serves the purpose of social transformation? It will argue that such "epistemologics", first alluded to in Donna Haraway's renowned 1988 essay but also prefigured by, or correlated with, other late modern and contemporary ventures in linguistic theory such as Edward T. Hall's The Hidden Dimension, Julia Kristeva's Revolution in Poetic Language, Karen Barard's Meeting the Universe Halfway, and Carl Raschke's Postmodernism and the Revolution in Religious Theory, can have a powerful and "transformative" impact on our understanding of both religious knowledge and religious language. These epistemologics are derived from what are often called "the new materialism" and "the new semiotics". At the same time, the paper will focus on religious language per se as the cipher for decoding forms of religious knowledge as "situated". It will argue along the lines that Kristeva once contended that religious, or "spiritual", language must be regarded as systems of signs rather than symbols. Signs are "embodied" and "heterological" (per Haraway) and "relational" rather than "referential" (per Barard). The cultural differentia that are responsible for the production of diverse religious ideations, legacies, and practices can be traced to the disparate material processes of semiotic production that manifest in what is mistakenly termed the "sacred" or the "transcendent". Per Raschke's book cited above they should be construed instead as "singularities" around which sign systems circulate.