Space, Time and the Sacred in Modernity/Postmodernity

TLDR: In this paper, the authors propose a re-integration of the sociological discussion of religion with the main-line sociology, in which the traditional sub-discipline of the "sociology of religion" as largely dominated by the secularization paradigm is practised at an increasing distance from central theoretical and practical concerns of main line sociology, but it does so in an era in which, after the collapse of Marxism, and in the face of the global ‘triumph of capitalism, progressive commodiµ cation and the spread of invasive managerialism,1 main

Abstract: The recomposition of the religious Ž eld proceeds apace, but it does so in an era in which the traditional sub-discipline of the ‘sociology of religion’ as largely dominated by the secularization paradigm is practised at an increasing distance from central theoretical and practical concerns of main-line sociology. Correspondingly, and conversely, in the aftermath of the collapse of Marxism, and in the face of the global ‘triumph of capitalism’, progressive commodiŽ cation and the spread of invasive managerialism,1 main-line sociology is itself now undergoing theoretical renewal. It is also rediscovering an emancipatory and ethical role in (not least) the making visible of the constructive power of a global/local world system and the corresponding intensiŽ cation of local identities of many kinds. The now increasingly differentiated discussion of the interpenetrating representations of modernity/postmodernity which has been of central importance in the renewal of social and cultural theory thus provides a crucial factor in the potential reintegration of the sociological discussion of religion with the main-line. In this context the 20th-century transformation of the space–time matrix, traced out, for example, by Barbara Adam (1990, 1995, 1998), David Harvey (1989) and Helga Nowotny (1994) provide a speciŽ c point of access into this complex interface. In summary terms, as relentless acceleration and simultaneity becomes the goal of informational systems and spaces proliferate in virtuality, so ‘post-human’ identities compete for attention in new economies of space and time. All that is solid and indeed sacred melts,  ows and melds; the language of ultimacy, religion, the sacred (e.g. omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence) is transmuted into the functional vocabulary of informatics. In the religious Ž eld (le champ religieux) the human/post-human condition stumbles and falters on the arête between new and emergent polarities between chthonic and virtual identiŽ cations in space and place, and in time and opportunity. This might at Ž rst seem to be a very abstract way of characterizing a complex situation. We shall, therefore, set up an initial dilemma inherited from the main-line sociological tradition represented by Durkheim as reworked by the Balkan-American sociologist Stjepan Me Ïstrović, who seeks to represent the present-day human condition in the West as the ‘postemotional society’, a International Review of Sociology—Revue Internationale de Sociologie, Vol. 11, No. 3, 2001