Concept Mapping and Critical Theory

What can it mean to "map a concept", or "trace the history of an idea"? It might be best to begin by stating my presuppositions. My approach is thoroughly materialist. By this, I do not mean a metaphysical commitment to reality which claims that all is matter, the opposite position to which would be forms of hard realism or idealism of various kinds whose claims are opposed to such a reductive claim. Rather, the materialism which I advocate is OPERATIONAL. It is a form of SITUATIONAL ANALYSIS, the major principle of which is that scholarly work is a form of practice, and like all practices it must start somewhere. It does not search for a fundamental or a foundation, as much as the pragmatic point at which work must start. In my work, this means starting with a situation, and that situation is the one that we all find ourselves in: as embodied and socio-historically situated persons. As persons, we are not strictly individuals, although our embodiedness has limits which, so to speak, "rub up against the world" in ways which we call "being an individual". We are also formed by the language, symbolic systems and relationships which can be designated as "the social". Such relationships are highly complex, cut through and criss-crossed by varieties of influence and forces beyond our direct perception. Such forces can be purely perceptual (I can not see everything at once, or the obverse side of an object directly in front of me I do not perceive directly); or it can be the much more complex set of factors: socio-political processes and influences which operate "behind the objects" or “behind my back” in a way which is analogous to the absence of direct perception that obtains in cognition itself.
One of the ways that we can deal with this complexity is through practices of mapping out concepts in order to situate them within our analysis. Such mapping helps us to come to grips with the territory, so to speak. But we must remember that maps, as such, are NOT the territory, merely ways of exploring it better. This relation between mapping and territory is complicated by the fact that we must already know the territory in some way prior to mapping: this activity, what I call following Tim Ingold, 'wayfinding', is something that we all know how to do very well. It it what we do everytime we enter into a situation with which we are not familiar. The mapping of such a situation occurs almost immediately. In this case we are engaged in a dialectical practice, going on all the time, between the situation as we explore it, and the conceptualisation of the situation so that we can understand it. A lot of intellectual work has this character. I want to make the strong claim, in fact I am committed to it, that the connection between bodily, physical and material activity and the activities of the intellect, are strongly bound together and that this binding happens in what is usually termed "situated practice".
In order to map concepts, they need to mapped in "cases" : a case in this instance is a situation. But situations are various, and their boundaries can be fluid. This comes to light in considering the tricky concept of 'theory'? Do we understand theory through a distinction to 'practice'? Or is theory something that does on IN practice? Theory is then a kind of practice, a practice with its own specific requirements and trajectories. This way of thinking, what Max Horkheimer (the founder of the influential Frankfurt School for Social Research) called "critical theory" distinguishes itself in the following way. Whereas "traditional theory" is substantive, wanting to get at content, usually through description or explaination or by positing a POSITION (perhaps by way of argument), critical theory is a form of mapping of positions themselves. It is concerned with how positions of various kinds, of the positions that people, and groups of people, take as substantive argument and theory ("I believe that such and such") come about and what the consequences and ramifications are within social reality. Critical theory of the type I am advocating asks, what kind of social reality is established by the alternative positions thus being posited, and how are the positions thus posited determined and constrained, on the one hand, and elicited and afforded by, on the other, that social reality? It seeks, in the sense of critical theory proposed by Horkheimer, to act in the name of a rationality able to critique itself, to "de-mystify" social reality, to map out the ways in which such a social reality is structured. I am proposing here that conceptual mapping is the front end of a kind of critical theory of social reality in which the concept 'imaginary' has some strange functions, not least because in Horkheimer’s formulation, critical theory is seen as a critique of ideology, and ideology as often been treated as a form of imaginary or illusory discourse.

A Trajectory of Enquiry

That we live in a troubled world is something that very few people would dispute. Whether we look at the symptoms of violence, conflict, the decay of the social fabric, inequality of means, injustices, or the fragmentation of local relationships, the tribalisation in our communities; or even if one considers the successes of contemporary capitalism as a source of opportunity for growth and expansion of economic possibilities as a first step towards building a more secure society, one will likely be troubled by institutional or political issues of a more abstract, but no less problematic kind, the removal of which would allow the renewing forces of the market to work their magic.

How do we sort out the various theories of decay and renewal? Are we basically pessimistic or optimistic? What I want to address, however, is the way in which certain ideological figments still haunt the political and social imagination. The path of enquiry I am taking is one which takes the sheer gamut of theoretical positions as a problem: that the choices of interpretation and course of action in tackling social and political problems is itself a factor in the problems themselves. We do not have hegemonic policies: what we have is a hegemony of the multiple, a hegemony of options, a pantheon of choices.

I choose this last term deliberately to indicate the religious dimension to all of this: what we face has a quite theological twist to it. It depends on what functions as our 'God' concept.

The Basis for Materialist Theology

The question of the status of material reality, that which resists our attempts to have a completely rational grasp of things, remains a methodological problem for theology and philosophy. The usual theories and speculations of how to go about dealing with materiality have been characterized by claims for transcendent principles of causation or an ordering power, as in onto-theological conceptions of 'God', or in transcendental schemata of various kinds, 'forms' or 'archetypes' in which matter participates in some kind of determining relation. Little progress has been made in showing how that aspect of materiality which is its most prominent and unavoidable characteristic --that of its resistance to conceptuality-- can be explicated with reference to such principles or ideal schemata. It is my claim that this is because the metaphysical, ontological and philosophical bases on which such efforts have been working is incapable of doing so. Our ontological systems have failed to account for what is the most 'basic' aspect of materiality: its inherent density and opacity to thought.

The essence of materiality is its resistance to conceptuality. In order to think such resistance we must have a way of mediating between matter and thought which allows the inherent characteristics of materiality to be retained, something which is only possible through the most intimate contact between human physicality and the resistance of the material world. Marx was entirely correct to assert that the only way that such contact with materiality can be understood philosophically, with the intention of developing an understanding with positive implications for the state of humankind rather than as ideology, is through abandoning the epistemological, representational and idealist approach: in other words, by trying to find a manner of philosophizing which more closely approaches materiality in its own terms. That is why the essential insight of Marx's materialism is the central role played by praxis.

Rather than locating the principle of organization of his philosophy in some transcendent space, this principle is that with which human beings come into most intimate contact with materiality: with their hands, feet and corporeal embodiment. It is as embodied that human beings touch the world, mould it, shape it, and engage with the immediate circumstances in which all thinking, all thought, takes place. By bringing the starting point and principle together rather than radically separating them, Marx indicated a new direction for a philosophy of the future. It is in this more ordinary place, at the point in which hand takes spade to till the earth, to shape clay, wood and stone into dwellings and human structures of all kinds, into artifice as well as technological sophistication, that this philosophy is most at home.

Even the most intricate systemisation of thought start in this place for they are born out of the human drive to understand the conditions of existence in which humans find themselves. Since this contact between hand and world is not something which is conceptual but which is a practical shaping of material conditions, praxis serves to indicate this contact whilst remaining close to its origin. Theory of praxis is itself born here.

The notion of an inherent 'logos' to thought dies hard though. We seem to want to deny that our physical existence has its own kind of logic not appropriated from something which transcends it, whether metaphysically, or as a schemata determining the shape of our conceptual resources. Such reluctance to give up this notion of the 'logos' is certainly inherited from our religious traditions as well as our Greek philosophical heritage.

Much critical attention thus needs to be paid to ways in which these religious traditions have informed such conceptions, as well as to the philosophical traditions from which the vast majority of Western thought builds. We need to ask whether religious and theological thought requires the maintaining of such ways of thinking. Although we may not need to jettison the notion of a 'logos' entirely, as the post-structural critiques of 'logocentricism' unsuccessfully attempted to do, we must begin to account for materiality in material terms, rather than by evacuating what is most proper to it in the attempt to explain it. 'Logocentric' critique failed precisely because this evacuation still occurs, whether in the thinking of difference and otherness, or in some kind of transcendental structure, context, or a-causal 'gap' from whence manifestation erupts chaotically.

Such an approach can be discerned in the classic critiques of 'logocentricism', from Heidegger to Derrida to Lacan to Zizek: the Ürsprung of the Event of thinking, the ever receding 'call' of deferral and difference in language, the shifting parallax of the Unconscious.

Critical Theory of Religion: A Meta-theology?

These pages will feature reflections on my current work concerning the present state of philosophy of religion, philosophical theology and religious studies.

To this end, and following on from some recent currents in philosophy more broadly, the reflections here I will designiate a kind of "meta-theology". What could this possibly mean? Firstly, the designation of the prefix "meta-" indicates the strangeness of the program, since how can something possibly be "meta" to "theology"? In the past, the connection was a "metaphysical" one: certain kinds of philosophical work was done to provide a framework for theological reflection. This has been, predominantly, done as "philosophy of religion". However, such uses of "metaphysics" have been seriously challenged in the last century, not just by theologians themselves, but also by certain significant trends within philosopy itself. Secondly, it is in the character of the research program to indicate ways of interaction between the current state of philosophy of religion, social and critical theory, and social-scientific study of religion, with the discipline traditionally known as "theology". Since the possibility of using traditionally conceived "metaphysics" to anchor such work has received fatal blows from philosophers working from a social-critical theoretical perspective, then it appears that theological reflection requires some sort of framework amenable to critical work without being characterised in the old sense of onto-theology, the inappropriate imposition of metaphysical thinking upon theology.

As I see it, there are three distinct notions of the terms that can be brought into play in the contemporary context. Firstly the traditional notion of theology as a critical reflection, seeking understanding, of the claims and beliefs of a particular religious tradition. Such theology takes the form of rational working out of the structures of belief, the formation of dogmatic statements and can be characterised as a form of narrative based upon ritual practice of various kinds.

Following on from this there is a second sense which, whilst not departing too far from the first sense, adds another essential component, that of "critique" not in the sense of critical reflection on a community praxis as such, but upon the objects and trajectories of that praxis. In an older terminology, such critique usually took the form of critique of inappropriate objects within the field of devotion: ie, a critique of "idolatry". Such a critique in contemporary language might be better termed a critique of ideology, and in this sense there is a way in which theology might be seen as a variant of critical theory.

The third sense that I think it possible to isolate is more controversial, and in many ways inpinges on territory which has traditionally been understood to be within the field of "religious studies". With a focus on comparison, such studies have had strongly sociological and anthropological components, with study directed to a "neutral" description of the practices and beliefs of religious praxis. However, more recent work in critical theory, and particularly as developed in the critique of ideology, suggests that the work of comparison is severly challenged by the prevailing conditions which pertain to ethnographic and comparative work: how does one describe "from the outside" the internal dynamic of a religious system of practice? A marginal area in recent years has been the development of so-called "comparative theology" in which this ethnographic problem has been sidelined by a more philosophical study of the inner structure of religious practices as they are narrated in theological reflection. This field is one which is markedly different from comparative religion, since it takes it for granted that such study will be anchored within a particular hermeneutic tradition which itself has theological implications.

It is this latter development that suggests a form of "meta-theology". Such work would involved a kind of critical theory of theological structures, not only within traditionally construed "religions" but also in the forms of discourse which are considered to be "secular" or to stand outside the parameters of religious praxis. Such work would involved marshalling the resources of theology in the first sense, and of theology in the second sense, and bring the techniques of critical inquiry developed in philosophy, social sciences and most particularly, the critique of ideology, to bear on the various kinds of "theologies" which are at work even within areas of human endeavour not usually considered to have a "religious" component.

Such is the initial conception of a working programme in "meta-theology".