man & his religion

	What follows is, on the one hand, a story about Man and his Religion, and, on the other, a recanting of a particular man’s lived religious experiences. It is necessarily a representation, a narrative, and so, at the same instant, reality.[1] With this work I will attempt to synthesize interesting and explanatorily powerful ideas that have not been discussed explicitly in class with some of the core ideas that have. In this way, I will hope to demonstrate an understanding of the course material without simply rehashing the ideas I have already expressed in previous papers. Drawing from Michel Foucault, I employ the Panopticon as a metaphorical lens for analyzing my own religious experiences. I then use this as a scope to view Religion. This discussion works to open up a dialogue with Jean Baudrillard, with particular respect to the organization of the simulacra, the organization of ‘hyperreality’, and how these organizations affect man. It is my hope that, though these works deal with Power and the disintegration of reality (and neither with religion as such), a careful application of various ideas put forth by our in-class authors will yield fruitful insights about Religion: E.g., by answering how it gains the Power to act on and through the individual as it does; or by showing how Religion functions as a simulacrum. Let us begin with reality.
	From what I recall of my childhood, religion was always present but not always apparent; and it was never apparently ultimate. Judgment was not reserved or deferred to God, that great gavel-wielding Arbiter in the sky; rather, a multitude of correctional adjustments acted to normalize my behavior in a sort of internal ‘moral court’, where my mother acted as both judge and jury. But my mother was herself heavily influenced by her life-long engagement with Christianity, and so the particular judgments she handed down were saturated with this ideology. Though we often went to church throughout my formative years (where I spent the majority of my time playing basketball in the gymnasium), it was always in streaks of regularity and irregularity; and it was only at the age of thirteen that I became really individually interested and involved in Christianity, since, at the time, a church across the street from my middle school was aggressively recruiting young members——many of whom were my friends, or friends wished-for. For the next two years, my Wednesday nights were dominated by God and I became somewhat of a local authority on the Bible.
	But it was precisely because of this hyper-engagement with the Bible and with our church’s teachings that I soon became disillusioned entirely with the whole spectacle. And I replaced God with yet another all-encompassing solution to my existential dilemma…in the form of a naïve and thoroughly flawed understanding of evolution. Just as the Enlightenment reignited, or rather, made visible, man’s obsession with finding origins——of the cosmos, of life, of mankind——by thoroughly rupturing the Enlightened man’s sense of ontological security, my own personal fall from faith exposed a desire to understand not only my own existence, but existence in totality, and both in an objective sense; “Because God said so” replaced with “Because Science said so”; the Father had never left, only changed masks and revitalized.
	As a child my belief in God was far from passive. But, though I had serious doubts and worries about some of the claims the church made (for instance, that I should lay down my entire life for a God who I had never seen), my disbelief was suspended out of guilt. Without ever explicitly telling me “If you have doubts about God you should feel bad”, my church worked in tandem with my mother to instill this sense all the same. And here I think it is useful to employ the metaphor of the Panopticon to my personal experience with the Judeo-Christian God. But to ensure a more cogent view, we should first visualize the Panopticon in our mind’s eye…
	A lone watchtower stands at the core of a large concrete room, surrounded by rings of cells stacked one on top of another. Each cell contains but one inmate and one window so as to allow sunlight to permeate the cold concrete room, ensuring that each individual prisoner is always clearly visible for inspection. And this is exactly what they are: Individuated and inspected. The very organization of space itself guarantees that this is the case. The Panopticon individuates by assigning individual cells to the body of prisoners, literally blocking any kind of social interaction with thick concrete walls. And from the vantage point of the cell, the prisoner can view only the watchtower that stands like a dominatrix before them. The Panopticon is always in sight. Always in mind.
	Always watching. “Inspection functions ceaselessly.”[2] Such is the Power of the Panopticon that the actual use of force against the prisoner and the prisoner’s actually being observed by a guard matter not; the Power of the Panopticon is generated by the very individual who is subjugated by it, and not by the guards or prison system as such. It is the mere threat of constant surveillance that paralyzes the prisoner. The Power over the individual arises from the individual’s knowledge of that very Power, and would only disappear[3] if the individual realized fully that they themselves give it the Power they are so immobilized by. And when viewed in this light, the Panopticon is quite literally an agent of self-control through fear.
	Fear of the big Other, this is what operated on my child-self whenever I started to question my religion: My fear of doing something ‘wrong’, viz., the fear of somebody or some deity inspecting my thoughts or actions and determining they were ‘wrong’, both repressed my doubts and subjugated me even further to the Power of God. God had a paralyzing affect. And here we see a normalizing quality: God’s “will is done”, as Foucault writes in Religion and Culture, “not because it is consistent with the law, and not just as far as it is consistent with it, but, principally, because it is his will.”[4]——If I had thoughts or acted in such a way as to contradict God’s will, which was ‘right’ because it is his will, my thoughts or actions were ‘wrong’, and so, guilt ensued. And though it was never a constantly occurring phenomenon (perhaps it was even uncommon outside of the confines of the church pews), inspection was being performed by myself, on myself, as if I were the prisoner in Bentham’s Panopticon and God himself were the watchtower.
	So we see how an applied reading of Panopticism exposes the origin of Power in my own religious experience with the shepherd God. Moreover, since the fear is of a collectively recognized, normalizing entity, and of the threat of force and not the actualized force as such, it is clear that this fear of the big Other is, in essence, a fear of the self-opposed-to-the-social: A fear of being excommunicated by one’s moral community; a fear of alienation from the big Other that binds the community together. (I am reminded of Heidegger’s Being-toward-death here: Finitude begets knowledge, knowledge begets existential dilemmas; but the existential dilemma itself is only a dilemma insofar as the Being is afraid of the immanent disconnection). And so, the self-subjugation required by religion for religion to have Power over the individual is quite clearly a symptom of the social-self conflict: The self is subjugated to the social, not involuntarily (and not necessarily with conscious intent, either), but in order to transcend ‘the’ self; the religious man subjugates himself to his God so that he may flow into the collective Being; the prisoner, an individual removed from the social, creates for himself the Other that subjugates him——but he has no collective pool to flow into.
	Of course, to condense into a couple of paragraphs the history of my religiosity, as I have done, is to give a necessarily partial, actively selected account. But this is exactly the point: It is necessarily a retelling of the constantly reformed and reforming memories that constitute what I call ‘my past’; it is a narrative of my own design. And for all intents and purposes, the narrative becomes reality.——A reality that has masked the actual reality, which eludes even representation itself due to both the aforementioned problem of memory and the limited amount of information that could even conceivably be writ on the medium through which I am delivering this narrative (viz., this paper).
Baudrillard, in Simulacra and Science Fiction, writes of the real in postmodernity: “The imaginary was a pretext of the real in a world dominated by the reality principle. Today, it is the real which has become the pretext of the model in a world governed by the principle of simulation.”[5] Of explicit significance is the shift from a world in which the subject satisfies their psychosocial and biophysical needs through personal adjustment (à la Firth), to a world in which the ‘subject’ ‘satisfies’ ‘their’ ‘needs’… Which is to say, to a world in which the ‘subject’ is but a signifier, a map, of the subject himself and both are inseparable, to a world in which real ‘needs’ are indistinguishable from artificially constructed needs, or ‘desires’ masquerading as ‘needs’, or so on. “[…] When the map covers all the territory, something like the reality principle disappears.”[6]
	But in order to have a full understanding of Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality, one must first understand the significance of the model, and thus, of the simulacra. The simulacra, then, have three distinct orders: (1) the natural simulacra, which are “based on image [and] imitation” and act as a sort of representation of, or place marker for, the real; (2) the productive simulacra, which cause the distinction between image and representation itself to break down due to the hyper-success of the imitation at mimicking the real; and (3) the simulation simulacra, “the model”, wherein the representation of the real itself precedes and determines the real, and where there is no longer any distinction between reality and representation, but instead, only the simulacrum as such.[7]
	It is this third order  simulacra, the model, that comes to mind when one thinks of the Panopticon, for the Panopticon itself is a model of Power: Its goal is to reproduce (in the mind of the individual prisoner) the Power that is part and parcel of its very existence itself; it cannot simply produce its Power, as it must be preceded and determined by its production. And so, when Baudrillard writes of the model that it “no longer constitute[s] an imaginary domain with reference to the real; [it is an] apprehension of the real”, the point is that the model itself transcends even the very boundaries of the imaginary and real: It is no longer a referent, or symbol, or sign as such, but instead, exists as a literal model of itself, and by doing so, shows ‘reality’ as it really is (via presenting a necessarily-so ‘truth’). One need only power up their television and flip to any given ‘news’ network to see Baudrillard’s point: “Here’s your news. Here’s your war. Here you are; now please, no questions.”
	And so we see clearly that hyperreality is a reality in which ‘reality’ is replaced with simulation; a state of affairs wherein the model is reality. In postmodernity, the reality is dead and a multiplicity of models of reality reign supreme. The Power of the Panopticon exists only in its ability to reproduce itself; its Power is ‘real’ because the reflexivity of its existence itself reproduces the idea of its ‘reality’. The real of authoritarian enforcement, as is embodied by the guardforce, is superseded by the hyperreal, by the Power reproduced in the minds of the subjugated, isolated individuals. The prisoners perceive as reality a reality that is designed by models. The religious man perceives as reality a reality that is constructed by standardizing worldviews and ethos.
	Religion is interesting to think of in terms of Baudrillard’s simulacra, too. To its fundamentalist adherents it belongs to the first order of simulacra, for it is a natural representation of reality. To its nonbelievers it belongs to the second, for it masks reality in actuality. And in postmodernity, it is clear that Religion is permeated by models which seek only to establish themselves (in Spectacular fashion): Though many fundamentalists resist the marriage of their religion and postmodern popular culture, we nevertheless see such things as Christian death metal——  excuse me  , ‘white metal’——bands, Bible-based toys and action figures, comics, and so on. (The Debordian phrase ‘recuperation’ comes to mind). And this is precisely what Antoun gets at when he writes of selective modernization and controlled acculturation.
	Of course, as a recanting, in part, of my own religious life, this paper deals explicitly only with Christianity. However, the ideas expressed are, I think, applicable to Religion; and certainly some religions more than others. It seems absurd to me to think that the Panopticon metaphor would apply neatly to religions of varying societies that have varying social orders, given that the Panopticon, and indeed, prison itself, arose from the Judaic world. Nevertheless, and importantly so, I feel the discussion only strengthens the idea that there exists a certain cross-cultural desire to be subjugated (due to the social-self conflict), and that this itself, the act of being-subjugated, is what gives rise to Power relations. Such Power relations cannot exist without the reproduction of this act itself: I.e., Power arises from the very reproductive relationship that it must take the form of; Power functions as a model. So, too, does Religion: As it requires the subjugation of the individual to the big Other, Religion is necessarily preceded by this very subjugation, and must necessarily, after birth, maintain this very subjugation to ensure its own reproduction.






[1]	What is meant here will be dealt with explicitly in the discussion of Baudrillard, beginning on page 4.
[2]	Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish (1975), p. ?. Retrieved from: http://foucault.info/documents/disciplineAndPunish/foucault.disciplineAndPunish.panOpticism.html
[3]	Or, rather, the Power would transform; e.g., by actualizing the force again.
[4]	Foucault, Religion and Culture, p. 137.
[5]	Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Science Fiction, p. ?. Retrieved from: http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/55/baudrillard55art.htm
[6]	Ibid. Italics kept.
[7]	Ibid.