Religion, culture and society in the 'information age'
Philip A. Mellor
Over the last twenty years or so, the development of the "cultural turn" within sociological theory has sought to challenge earlier conceptions of culture as a readily circumscribed, derivative phenomenon of secondary importance in relation to the power of economics or social structure (Featherstone 1992). Sociologists of religion have not been slow to recognize the potential benefits of this development, which, amongst other things, raises questions about the reductive assumptions underpinning some conventional secularization theories and opens up fresh avenues for the exploration of the contemporary significance of religious symbols, beliefs and values. The best examples of such studies, however, while illuminating the continuing potency of religion as a cultural resource, have, nonetheless, retained a firm focus on the fact that culture must be examined in relation to society, even if it cannot be reduced into it (Beckford 1989; Hervieu-Leger 2000). In contrast, within some other areas of sociology, this focus has been lost, and "culture" has come to replace "society" as the central object of study. This has had two main consequences: first, it has encouraged the emergence of some highly idealistic forms of theorizing, typically characterized by an epistemological relativism that overrides any serious engagement with human ontology; second, and contrary to the original impulse behind the cultural turn, it has allowed for the development of new forms of reductionism where, freed from any intimate relationship with the complex reality of human society, culture turns out to be determined by something deemed more fundamental, such as technology. These consequences are especially evident in some influential contemporary accounts of the "information age."
Currently, one of the most prominent forms of the cultural turn in sociological theory is the interest in the pervasiveness and power of cultural changes arising from the development of information technologies, an interest that is closely related to a broader rejection of the conventional sociological focus on society. Indeed, for some writers there is not an information society at all, only a series of mobilities, networks and flows where everything is reconfigured in a global interplay of information. In this respect, these theories call much of the sociological heritage into question: the sociological focus on society developed by classical figures such as Durkheim is deemed to rest upon anachronistic visions of innate human potentialities and characteristics, and upon faulty assumptions about a distinctively social realm of human experience (Urry 2000:11). Instead, sociological study becomes focused upon relationships between culture and technology, and Durkheim's (1995) interest in the social origins of patterns of collective representation is displaced in favor of arguments concerning the power of information technologies to shape human thought and experience. In the words of Castells (1998:1), "A culture of real virtuality, constructed around an increasingly interactive audiovisual universe, has permeated mental representation and communication everywhere, integrating the diversity of cultures in an electronic hypertext." Within these sociological accounts, "making sense of the information" comes to replace the traditional sociological attempt to make sense of society (Lash and Featherstone 2001:16).
These arguments need to be taken seriously by sociologists of religion for two reasons. First of all, they are becoming increasingly influential amongst sociological theorists in general, where they are part of broader attempts to construct a new paradigm for sociology (see Abell and Reyniers 2000). Although very different in nature to new paradigm thinking in the sociology of religion (Warner 1993), both these developments articulate a common desire to reassess conventional sociological assumptions and arguments that appear to be called into question by contemporary social and cultural realities. Second, it is clearly the case that contemporary technological developments can have a significant impact upon social and cultural forms, and upon the ways in which people encounter and experience religious phenomena. Lyon's (2000) sensitive account of the perils and promises faced by those who encounter "Jesus in Disneyland" testifies to the importance of some of the issues raised by information society theorists. Consequently, it is not the intention of this paper to suggest that debates about the information society are unimportant: they raise significant questions about the nature of the contemporary world, and the usefulness of conventional sociological models in seeking to understand it. Rather, the argument of this paper is that the answers offered to these questions by some influential theorists of the information age are highly questionable, and that this manifestation of the cultural turn does not offer a productive development for sociology in general, or for sociologists of religion in particular. Further to this, it is argued that reflection upon the role of religion in relation to society and culture can offer a valuable corrective to some of the more extreme claims of such theories.
Here, the focus is on theoretical issues and problems, particularly as these have repercussions for the sociological study of religion, rather than the empirical dimensions of studies of the information age. This is not to say that these empirical dimensions are unimportant. Indeed, it could be suggested that the lack of much in the way of empirical evidence to support claims about the "virtualization" of reality is a key feature of such studies: for all the contemporary dependence upon computers, televisions and mobile phones, for example, empirically oriented studies have demonstrated the continuing sociological importance of embodied relationships with real people in specific, geographical locales (Jenkins 1999; May 2002). Further to this, it might also be said that information society theorists, and, more broadly, advocates of post-societal sociology, tend to ignore all evidence to the contrary and simply take for granted the decline of nation-states in the face of global information flows (Billig 1994; Urry 2000; see Fulcher 2000).
While questions about empirical evidence are significant, however, theoretical considerations about the kind of existence social and cultural phenomena have, and how these relate to human potentialities and powers, are, perhaps, of greater importance. Here, it is worth noting that a key insight of the social realist vision of sociology is that social reality is not a one-dimensional phenomenon to be apprehended only through hard data, but is complex and multi-layered with some non-empirically observable elements that can be known only through their causal effects (Durkheim 1995:12-18; Archer 1995:50; Mellor, 2004). Further to this, I suggest that a critical re-engagement with Durkheim's (1995) theoretical account of the intimate connections between religion and society, which embodies this social realist approach, can provide a more useful corrective to some of the more extreme claims associated with theories of the information society than an account of their empirical deficiencies. Before discussing that, however, it is important to outline some key characteristics of post-societal perspectives that are beginning to have a very significant impact upon certain areas of sociological theory, and to sketch out how these relate to theories of the information society.
THE CRITIQUE OF SOCIETY
Although the conventional view of sociology as the study of society is being challenged on a number of fronts, many of them tend to congregate around the idea that "society" is an arbitrary construct of certain types of sociology, political ideologies and cultural theories, that has been imposed upon the complex, shifting and infinitely variable patterns of social and cultural existence. Postmodernist philosophy offers an influential post-societal perspective built on this type of argument. Its philosophical genealogy can be traced from Nietzsche's proclamation of the death of God and his deconstruction of all claims to truth as manifestations of a will to power, through Foucault's death of Man and the reduction of reality to competing discourses representing power interests, to Baudrillard's death of the social and the collapse of reality into the simulacra of the "hyper-real" (see Archer 2000). Not only Baudrillard (1983, 1990a, 1990b), but also Deleuze (1979), Lyotard (1984) and Derrida (1991) have all encouraged, directly or indirectly, a deep skepticism about society, suggesting that it is simply a culturally relative construction that masks the endemic plurality and indeterminacy of human life. Baudrillard's arguments concerning the death of the social, however, have been particularly influential.
Baudrillard (1983:4) notes that sociology depends upon a "positive and definitive hypothesis of the social," but considers three possibilities concerning the social that illuminate its non-existence or current dissolution, thereby marking the death of sociology as well as of the notion of the social. These three possibilities are as follows: first, that things have never functioned socially but "symbolically, magically, irrationally"; second, that the social is some sort of residue now becoming absorbed into the administrative machinery of society; and third, that the social might once have existed but has now vanished into the simulations, circuits and networks of the information age (Baudrillard 1983:68, 73, 83). Baudrillard's own position in relation to these three possibilities is not free of ambiguity, but it is generally accepted that the third position characteristically marks his "anti-sociology" (Bogard 2000:240). Within this anti-sociology, the social is displaced by a simulation of the social, since the real has given way to the hyper-real. Here, there is no ontological basis upon which to ground any notion of the real, or any form of knowledge about anything, since there is only radical, chaotic, meaningless contingency.
Such postmodern forms of philosophy have been incorporated into sociological analysis in various forms, and with varying degrees of acceptance of their relativistic logic. For example, Touraine's (1989, 1995) focus on social movements that render the idea of society meaningless, and Urry's (2000) manifesto for "sociology beyond societies," arise out of an engagement with postmodern philosophy. For Touraine (1989:15), the complex and changing fields of social relations that mark the present seriously compromise any notion of an overarching society, and, he argues, "the very idea of society should be eliminated" (Touraine 1989:11). Urry's (2000:1) "manifesto for sociology" also makes the claim that sociologists should abandon the concept of society. He argues that sociology should, instead, be focused on the analysis of "global networks and flows" which produce a "hollowing out of existing societies," producing overlapping, disjunctive orders across time and space in "a kind of hypertextual patterning" (Urry 2000:36).
For him, we now "inhabit an indeterminate, ambivalent and semiotic risk culture where the risks are in part generated by the declining powers of societies in the face of multiple 'inhuman' global flows and multiple networks" (Urry 2000:37). This focus on inhuman flows is, however, allied to a highly problematic view of agency. Indeed, Urry (2000:14) argues that "the concept of agency needs to be embodied," but simultaneously suggests that "there is no autonomous realm of human agency." Thus, he draws attention to the significance of the senses in relation to the emergence of distinctly modern forms of life and to the experience of contemporary post-societal flows and mobilities, but distinguishes this from the assertion of any specifically human society, reality, essence or powers in a world where inhuman objects constitute social relations through phenomena such as technologies, texts and machines (Urry 2000:14, 77; 2003:56). For Urry (2000:15-16), the idea of a human agency that produces a social reality is absurd: "the ordering of social life is presumed to be ... irreducible to human subjects."
The only things that appear to have a real existence in this post-societal vision are machines: transportation systems, cable and wireless networks, microwave channels, satellites and the Internet are the "scapes" that "constitute various interconnected nodes along which the flows can be relayed" (Urry 2000:35). Real human beings are no more than ghosts in these machines, which means, for example, that Urry's examination of the notion of citizenship in a post-societal era ("a citizenship of flow") has to skirt around the absence of any ontological foundation for the balance of rights and duties he seems to believe is desirable. Furthermore, it is notable that, although religious issues are hardly mentioned by Urry, his brief references to the Islamic jihad against the West suggest that fundamentalist organizations should be seen as "virtual communities" constructed through cultural discourses and media images (Urry 2000:43, 209; see Barber 1996; Rose 1996). Here, Al-Qaida is not an embodiment of a radicalized interpretation of Islam, but a "chaotic" phenomenon representative of the "emergent global fluid of international terrorism" (Urry 2003:132). This easy association of social movements with fashionable notions of virtuality and global fluids, which puts Muslim terrorists on a par with New Age newsgroups, is surely a massive simplification of real social dynamics. In denying a specifically human agency, it also means that we cannot even begin to consider why such people might be prepared to die, and to kill others, because of the religious values their membership of a particular community entails.
TECHNO-SOCIETY
Craig Calhoun (1998:380) has noted that the excitement of new technology can lead researchers to start with computer-mediated communication and then look for communities associated with it, rather than studying the role of computers and other communications media within communities that already exist. Following this, as May (2002:85) suggests, calling communities that have a presence on the Internet "virtual communities" ignores the degree to which face-to-face encounters, pre-existing traditions and networks, and enduring forms of social solidarity can be much more important than electronic communications media. Such unqualified excitement about technology is, however, a characteristic feature of many writings about the information society.
Where Touraine's (1969) early account of the "programmed society" offered a critical vision of the dehumanizing aspects of contemporary social and cultural changes, more recent accounts have exhibited what Calhoun (2000:47) has called a "failure of imagination" in their presentation of such changes as inevitable. As David Lyon (1988:8) has suggested, a common orientation that has developed in accounts of the information society is that of technological determinism, where human beings have to adapt to changes brought about by technological and scientific developments, resulting in new social and cultural processes and patterns. As he suggests, the danger here is that moral and philosophical questions about the human condition become displaced by assumptions about the technological possibilities of social engineering (Lyon 1988:158; see also Webster 1995). Similarly, May (2002:21) identifies in notions of the information society a "shift from engagement to passive accommodation ... by presenting these changes as epochal rather than merely taking place within contemporary society." The notion of an information age, like that of a postmodern age, in fact, exhibits a neglect of enduring questions about being human in favor of a focus on novel, large-scale transformations to which people simply must adapt. In particular, questions about the non-reductive materiality of embodied being, and the sensuous or emotional potentialities and powers inherent to humans, get lost amongst some highly idealistic visions of the power of machines to reconstruct what it is to be human (Archer 2000:316).
Castells's (1996, 1997, 1998) work on the information society is instructive in this regard: not only does he believe that the powers of individual states necessarily wither in the face of global information networks (May 2002:34, 94, 120), but he also claims that the instantaneous exchange of information through computers has led to the collapse of past, present and future into the "timeless time" or "virtual time" of information exchange (Lyon 2000:121; see Castells 1996). Furthermore, the technologically induced reconfiguration of the social transforms humanity. For Castells, social networks now operate on the basis of humans who are configured like computers and, as such, have no means to make a necessary linkage between knowledge and experience (Castells 2000:21). This is how it is that the Internet becomes the principal metaphor for the contingent, fluid character of contemporary social life (Urry 2000:40-1), and how sociology becomes divested of much of its human content in favor of talk of the programs, nodes, grids, networks, virtualities and hypertexts of communications technologies. In so far as people figure at all, they are disembodied minds assimilating codes of information and images of representation (Castells 1997:84). In this respect it is notable that Castells touches upon knowledge and experience, but does not grapple with the embodied dimensions of being, which might encourage him to question the extent of this transformation of human beings and societies, or, at least, to grasp more fully the de-humanizing aspects of some of the processes he considers.
Paul Virilio's (2000) analysis of these developments, on the other hand, offers a much more robust critique of contemporary developments, particularly with regard to their dehumanizing consequences. Furthermore, he links dehumanizing processes with a corruption of knowledge that alienates us from our own being rather than simply talking about the circulation of knowledge within technologically constructed domains. In fact, Weber's (1991) concerns about modern science as a stimulus to the dominance of instrumental over value-rational action is multiplied several times over in Virilio's (2000:1) view of twentieth century science's "pursuit of limit performances, to the detriment of any effort to discover a coherent truth useful to humanity."
For Virilio, this absence of any connection between techno-science and common, human values is relentlessly enforced by the way in which global networks of information increasingly disconnect us from the Earth, bringing about "an end of geography," as time and space become warped by the cybernetic interactivity of the contemporary world (Virilio 2000:9). Within this cybernetic reconstruction of reality, the global becomes the center of things and the local the periphery, as virtual geography starts to dominate the real dimensions of the Earth (Virilio 2000:10). This domination is apparent in the construction of Internet communities, where the neighborhood unit is no longer local, but an elective, global association mediated by technology (Virilio 2000:59). Such communities operate on the basis of a "tele-presence," rather than an embodied encounter with others, across virtual time and space. In short, this lack of an embodied co-presence in our encounters with others means that we are increasingly deprived of our sensuality, and that our old "animal body" is increasingly out of place in this emerging symbiosis between technology and the human (Virilio 2000:40).
In broad terms, these developments signal a loss of faith in the social; a loss of faith also exemplified, and sometimes celebrated, in the more nihilistic elements of postmodern philosophy. This postmodern view, however, is strongly opposed by Virilio, who reasserts the importance of the social in the face of Baudrillard's nihilism, and rejects the concept of "simulation" in favor of that of "substitution" (Armitage 2000:43). For Virilio, there is no collapse between representation and the real, only the substitution of a virtual reality (with its own, technologically mediated, representations) for the flesh and blood reality of human interaction. This substitution is also, however, a religious substitution: the collapse of the social is tied to the gradual elimination of traditional forms of the sacred from the contemporary world, and the emergence of techno-science as a new, surrogate religion. For Virilio, genuine religion, along with humanity and society, is being systematically eliminated (Virilio and Lotringer 1997:124).
In contrast to many techno-society theorists, then, Virilio's vision is a passionate, immensely powerful depiction of the contemporary human lot, which does not simply accept contemporary technologically driven social and cultural changes as inevitable, let alone desirable. Furthermore, in contrast with much postmodern theory, he does not doubt that embodied human beings, natural and transcendental realities, and society have ontological substance to them. Likewise, there is a keen sense of the moral capacities and potentialities of humans that informs his work, and stimulates the outrage he expresses in relation to many aspects of techno-science. What he shares with writers such as Castells and Urry, nonetheless, is the belief that a radical reconstruction of such things is taking place. Thus, what alarms him is the dehumanization, disembodiment and moral anaesthetization that is now, he believes, accompanying the substitution of virtuality for reality.
REPRESENTING SOCIETY
Nonetheless, as challenging as Virilio's work is, the idea that society or even the social has now vanished into the simulations, circuits and networks of the information age finds its most robust challenge in Durkheimian social theory, which might explain why post-societal theorists tend to define themselves against Durkheim. Touraine (1989, 1995) and Urry (2000), for example, single out Durkheim's vision of society as the most influential source of sociology's anachronistic concern with society, even if the Durkheim they reject is often something of a sociological parody, wherein his arguments are characteristically reduced to a neo-Parsonian concern with the Hobbesian problem of order (see Mellor 1998, 2002; Morrison, 2000). What Durkheim's work alerts us to, however, is the fact that questions about society necessarily raise questions about human potentialities and limitations; questions that are ignored in much of the information society literature. It is the Durkheimian tradition, in fact, that expresses most forcefully the idea that being part of society is inextricably tied to our humanity, an idea that is of fundamental importance if we are to continue to study what societies really are rather than succumbing to technologically driven fantasies about what they might be.
In the work of Durkheim, the notion of society is examined and reconsidered repeatedly, but in general it is used to address the "supra-individual" elements in social life relating to social actions, feelings, beliefs, values and ideals (Lukes 1973:115). Furthermore, these elements are understood to be emergent from, and central to the development and flourishing of, individual human beings: it is in this sense that he identifies society with "an immense cooperation that extends not only through space but also through time," combining ideas and feelings in a rich and complex set of processes through which we become "truly human" (Durkheim 1995:15-16). It is in this sense that, for Durkheim (1974a:27-8, 34), sociology's object of study, society, is not simply a set of institutions but a collective way of being emergent from diverse forms of human relationships. Consequently, although he is attentive to the great variety of forms that societies can take (and criticized Comte for failing to deal with this adequately), and although he is attentive to the fact that particular forms of society can emerge and decay, he is also clear that, so long as there are human beings, the notion of society will remain sociologically and philosophically important (Durkheim 1974b:197; 1995:315).
It is this focus on the human dimensions of society that shapes Durkheim's (1995: 438) view of culture: the collective representations that emerge from society but act back upon it have to be assessed in relation to broad issues concerning human capacities, agency and the ontologically open dynamics characteristic of society as an emergent reality. In this respect, it is worth noting that the enthusiasm with which some sociologists have embraced Durkheim as someone who prefigured the cultural turn has to be tempered by a recognition that culture cannot be studied separately from real social relationships (see Alexander 1988), a fact that is especially evident in relation to Durkheim's analysis of religion. Indeed, the idea that religion can simply be a cultural resource is quite alien to Durkheim's thought: on the contrary, it is his focus on humanity's social potentialities that also defines his distinctive understanding of religion as a "fundamental and permanent" feature of human society, since human interaction does not simply broaden our horizons beyond our own immediate perceptions and desires, but transforms them under the influence of an energy peculiar to collective life (Durkheim 1995:1,34). In short, Durkheim's sociology of religion does not equate religion with culture, even if he argues that religious beliefs can be regarded as collective representations. Religion, for him, is a phenomenon that embraces culture and society: it is a system of ideas, but is also a form of life emergent from the embodied potentialities of human beings (Durkheim 1995:309; Mellor and Shilling 1997).
Durkheim's arguments have, of course, aroused considerable debate, and even some of his admirers have expressed doubts about many aspects of his interpretation of religion (e.g. Pickering 1984). Nonetheless, in broad terms, the value of Durkheim's work is that it grounds sociological analysis in a form of social realism that takes seriously the human basis of religion, society and culture (see Jones 1999). More specifically, whether sociologists are inclined to agree with the details of his arguments or not, he reminds them that however significant a particular set of historically variable institutions, ideas or processes might appear to be, they have to be assessed in relation to more basic questions about what it is to be human. In this regard, it is clear that Durkheim's understanding of religion, culture and society offers an important challenge to many contemporary accounts of the information age, not least because it throws into sharp relief their highly questionable assumptions regarding the "post-human" direction of the world.
POST-REPRESENTATIONAL SOCIETY
The fact that theories of the information age are often tied to a notion of a "post-representational" society, would, on the face of it, appear to call Durkheim's arguments into question. Lash and Featherstone (2001:15-6), for example, have argued that we now live in a "de-traditionalised, transformed and fragmented" world determined only by the information flows of the communications order. Here, "the social bond comes more and more to resemble the communication," standing apart from everyday social relations in the compressed, machine-mediated flow of information that "avoids completely the question of representation," taking place "outside of symbolic structures--in the real" (Lash and Featherstone 2001:16; Hardt and Negri 2000). In fact, in this post-representational world, recognition "becomes making sense of the information and communicational flows," values "are disengaged from structures and are set free into the general flows," and intersubjectivity becomes mediated through technology (Lash and Featherstone 2001:17). In Hayles's (1991) terms, representation, grounded in human relationships, no longer works in a post-human world.
Lash and Featherstone's arguments, which complement many of the views of writers such as Urry (2000, 2003) and Castells (2000), exhibit some of the general characteristics of theories of the information age, notably the tendencies towards technological determinism and the adoption of grand claims about epochal transformations in Western societies, allied to a false restriction of Durkheim's notion of society to the modern nation state. What is of particular note, however, is their evacuation of the human from "the real:" here, the human is identified with the realm of the symbolic, while the real is identified with information flows. This takes the cultural turn in a new direction: culture no longer has any connection with humanity (which is not real anyway, but relegated to some insubstantial realm of the symbolic), but is defined through machines. Under the circumstances, while they are full of praise for his helpfulness in making sense of a now vanishing modern culture and society, it is not surprising that Lash and Featherstone find Durkheim is no longer a useful theoretical resource for making sense of the contemporary world: how could he be, since his sociology remains tied to the anachronistic idea that society and culture are human realities?
Nonetheless, the theoretical sources Lash and Featherstone draw upon in developing their account of this post-representational world are often expressly hostile to such an interpretation, and can help illuminate important weaknesses in such approaches. One of their sources, Slavoj Zizek (1989), for example, has recently argued in very clear terms that using the notion of the "real" in this sort of way actually obfuscates the reality of the human condition in the contemporary world (Zizek 2002). It is also notable that Lash and Featherstone's arguments rest on a misinterpretation of Bataille's notion of the "general economy," which they define as "the space in which the social bond has broken down." Indeed, contrary to their suggestion that Bataille was "Durkheim and Mauss's most important opponent" (Lash and Featherstone 2001:16), he quite clearly followed Durkheim is his argument that the general economy is not the space where the social bond is absent, but where it comes into being, expressing the exuberance and effervescence of life (Bataille 1991:10).
Rather than offering visions of a post-representational world of excess, what Bataille and Zizek share is a commitment to a fuller sense of what it is to be human than that acknowledged in modernity, and in much modern social theory. Indeed, while Lash and Featherstone (2001:16) reference Zizek and Deleuze together as advocates of a notion of the real "in excess of Durkheim's symbolic," Zizek (2002:30) attacks Deleuze for occluding the real forces within society. It is also notable that, unlike Lash and Featherstone, Urry, Castells and Touraine, Zizek emphasizes the importance of religion in these terms; that is, he emphasizes the necessity of assessing contemporary cultural processes and changes within the context of a firm grasp of the intimate connections between religion, society and the real dangers and opportunities facing human beings in the world today. This emphasis, however, is strikingly different from the general neglect of religious issues in accounts of the information age.
RELIGION AND THE INFORMATION SOCIETY
The neglect of religion is well exemplified by the writings of Castells who, even while introducing a book centered on the notion of the millennium, appears to see religion as an archaic leftover from a previous age. Indeed, Castells's (1998:1) manifest inability to take religion seriously is signaled by his dismissal of Christianity as "a minority religion that is bound to lose its pre-eminence" as representation becomes shaped by "real virtuality" rather than religion, and by his failure to even consider what Virilio (1984) envisages to be the dangerous and inhuman consequences that flow from the attempted elimination of modernity's religious origins. Here, it is important to note that Virilio clearly stands apart from other theorists, offering an interpretation of the information that is more theological than sociological. For Virilio (2002:10), the history of the modern West can be read as a striving to be "rid of God." It is in the modern techno-scientific imagination, however, that this striving reaches its most extreme, "Satanic" form since humanity becomes enslaved to the pursuit of an immortality, beyond good and evil, that ultimately results in the elimination of the human (Virilio 2002:16, 19, 28). While these arguments have a characteristically apocalyptic tone, it is important to note that Zizek's more measured reassertion of the importance of religion nonetheless has a number of similar features.
Zizek's (2000) The Fragile Absolute is, uniquely, a Marxist defense of the West's Christian legacy. This defense takes seriously the increasing power of technologies to reshape cultural forms and experiences across the globe, but he is also concerned with the violence and corruption that often goes with this, and the fact that postmodern theorists of culture collude in such processes through their failure to engage with the questions about human nature and destiny that are as important now as they have ever been. Further to this, he is also highly critical of certain aspects of the apparent resurgence of religious factors in the contemporary world, since they often simply reflect, rather than challenge, broader patterns of de-humanization. Thus, for him, the return of the religious dimension in much contemporary social and cultural life is, in many respects, deplorable because it is manifest as an obscurantist postmodern spiritualism that dissolves social reality into a multiplicity of meaningless subjectivities. In contrast, what he finds in Christianity is a certain kind of social realism where, contrary to postmodern theory, people cannot be reduced into symbolic codifications of "otherness" which offer opportunities for self-realization, but are real, unavoidable neighbors whose very particularity confronts the individual with universal demands and obligations that cannot be ignored (Zizek 2000:109). This is why, for him, a proper engagement with the nature of culture and society in the contemporary Western world necessary involves an engagement with its Christian legacy.
The strong Christian sensibilities that shape the work of Zizek and Virilio give a particular character to their assessments of contemporary social and cultural changes. Both of them refuse to accept the reduction of human social and cultural realities to information, and in Zizek's case in particular, find in the Christian tradition a focus on charity, on love as social solidarity, that confronts the de-humanizing processes of the present with a universal obligation transcendent of cultural differences, technologically mediated or otherwise (see Zizek 2000:146-7). Nonetheless, while these explicitly theological commitments might place these writers outside the taken-for-granted methodological atheism of many sociologists of religion (Berger 1990), they can usefully remind sociologists of some of the dangers inherent in some forms of the cultural turn in sociological theory, and can contribute to a productive reassessment of the continuing value of classical theorists such as Durkheim. By way of a conclusion, in fact, it is possible to focus on two key points of continuity between the arguments of these writers and the social realism developed by Durkheim.
First, Virilio and Zizek, like Durkheim, locate the origins of social life in distinctively human capacities and potentialities that are able to develop and flourish through our relationships and interactions with others. It is this human focus that is most lacking in many accounts of the information age, where the notion of some sort of shift towards a post-human world is almost taken as given. The frequent failure to deal with such notions critically is not only a betrayal of the sociological tradition developed by Durkheim, but also neglects the traditions of critical sociology introduced by Marx, Weber and Simmel. All of these writers, albeit in different ways, developed their visions of the contemporary world through an engagement with the human and the moral dimensions of social realities (Shilling and Mellor 2001).
Second, the writings of Virilio and Zizek, despite differences in other respects, follow Durkheim in understanding the social context of human development in religious terms. For these contemporary writers, these religious dimensions have a specifically Christian character, while, for Durkheim, the social significance of religion rests on a more general capacity to confront individuals with universal demands and obligations expressive of a sui generis reality transcendent of particular interests. Nonetheless, in both cases a concern for the human basis of culture and society necessitates the serious engagement with religious factors, particularly with regard to the notion of transpersonal obligations and demands. The absence of a serious engagement with religion in much of the information society literature, on the other hand, is expressive of a lack of interest in such moral obligations, a lack of interest evident in Baudrillard's (1990:104) claim that anyone wanting to understand America should ignore its churches and, instead, watch TV or visit Disneyland (see Lyon 2000). Under the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that such writers cannot even begin to appreciate the importance of religious factors in confronting the dangers posed by those social and cultural forces that threaten a post-human world. More fundamentally, it is also clear that such views betray a highly selective appreciation of how people really live.
Taken together, these two key areas of continuity between Virilio, Zizek and Durkheim help illuminate the inadequacy of those theories of society and culture that ignore the human and religious dimensions of contemporary life in their intoxication with machine-mediated flows of information, and point towards a more productive way forward. In particular, although Durkheim could not have anticipated the development of the types of technology central to the information society, the social realist focus on the emergence of society as a phenomenon contingent upon the embodied potentialities of human beings, and characterized by inherently religious dynamics, remains as relevant today as it was at the turn of the twentieth century. Indeed, Durkheim's critiques of the utilitarianism and individualism of his time offer models that can usefully be applied to theorists of the information age: challenging the artificial vision of human beings implied by such philosophies, he emphasized the need to take full account of the interrelationships between religion, politics, family, nationality, geography and historical location that shape the complex realities of human social and cultural life (Durkheim 1970:85). In this respect, it might be said that he anticipated aspects of the critiques of contemporary realities developed by writers such as Virilio and Zizek. If we are to develop these critiques further, and avoid the extremes of technological reductionism or social constructionism which have marked many contemporary forms of the cultural turn in sociological theory then further reflection on these concerns can make for a more productive start than losing the sociological focus on society in our intoxication with the programs, networks and hypertexts of communications technologies.
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