Cultures of Embodied Experience: Technology,Religion and Body Pedagogics

Introduction

Sociological studies on embodiment continue to flourish in terms of their theoretical diversity and empirical scope, but have been characterised by a central, and as yet unresolved, problem. Drawing on such figures as Merleau-Ponty (1962), but also on more traditional sociological writings, there has, on the one hand, been an unprecedented interest in phenomenological issues of ‘lived experience’ which identify bodies as the experiential vehicles through which we exist in the world and interact with other body-subjects (eg Young, 1990; Crossley, 2001; Nettleton and Watson, 1998; Howson and Inglis, 2001; Shilling, 2001; Wacquant, 2004). On the other hand, there has also been a concentration of writings concerned with how technological advances, medical interventions and genetic engineering have both increased the scope of instrumental rationality and weakened the boundaries between humans and machines to the extent that we are all (to one degree or other) cyborgs (eg Featherstone and Burrows, 1995; Bell and Kennedy, 2000; Virilio, 2000; see also Harraway, 1994 [1985]). While the former trend is associated with the development of a ‘carnal sociology’ (Crossley, 1995; Wacquant, 2004) as a way of understanding bodies as active, sensorily and sensually experiencing phenomena, the latter emphasises our potential transformation into a post-human, technologically enhanced, performatively efficient species. The problem that has yet to be addressed adequately is this: if our bodily being is increasingly shaped and constituted by the performative demands and invasive capacities of technologies, what implications does this have for our lived experience of ourselves and our social and natural environment? This issue has not been ignored completely – especially in feminist critiques of medical technology (eg Martin, 1987) and theoretical explorations of our relationship with ‘nature’ (eg Macnaghten and Urry, 2000) – but has not had the attention it deserves as an issue of major social importance.

In addressing this problem our analysis revisits Heidegger's (1993 [1954]) discussion of the technological ‘enframing’ of humans and asks two questions. First, what have we lost experientially by being positioned as a ‘standing reserve’ for technologically driven demands for efficiency in contemporary society? Second, can the study of certain attempts to re-frame human experience in religious terms help sociologists step outside this technological enframing and appreciate the embodied experiences, dispositions and potentialities of humans in fresh ways? Our approach to these issues proceeds by way of a comparative study of the ‘body pedagogics’ of modern technological culture and two, very different, religious cultures.

We here define culture as referring to the customary bodily practices, norms, rituals and beliefs of a social group. This definition not only brings into focus the embodied as well as the ideational dimensions of culture – in contrast to those cognitive approaches to the subject which deal exclusively with the mind (eg Hofstede, 1998: 5) – but also facilitates a focus on experience. Emphasising concern with technological and religious cultures, moreover, highlights how the embodied experiences associated with distinct ways of life can overlap and interrelate within social groups. Thus, in contrast to assumptions about the all-powerful nature of ‘techno-science’ (Virilio and Lotringer, 1997), technological life in the modern age is conceptualised in this paper as one cultural framework among others (albeit an immensely influential one). ¹ The spread of technology and instrumental rationality may be dominant factors shaping our embodied experiences in the northern hemisphere. However, for a significant minority within this context and, perhaps, for the majority outside it, religious and other values continue to steer the development and deployment of technology (Parsons, 1978; Szerszynski, 2005).

The religious cultures we examine are Taoism and charismatic Christianity. We have chosen these because they contain features which throw into sharp relief the particularities of contemporary technological life, and for their general social and sociological importance. ² Taoism remains enormously influential in China (now a major global centre of industrial development), has influenced Western thought (Clarke, 2000), and was central to Weber's (1964) writings on religion and capitalism. Furthermore, Taoism's significance is growing and one sign of this is the suggestion that if Weber were alive today he would write a second volume of the Protestant Ethic, titled The Taoist Ethic and the Spirit of Global Capitalism (Žižek, 2001: 13). The importance of charismatic Christianity is equally clear: it is increasingly visible in Africa, Asia and South America, and is the only form of Christianity growing rapidly in the West (Jenkins, 2002; Mellor, 2007). With world-wide adherents of around 523 million (Robbins, 2004: 118), some predict it will soon surpass Catholicism and so ‘become the predominant global form of Christianity’ (Casanova, 2001: 435).

The concern with body pedagogics in this paper is intended to assist the exploration of lived experience in cultures, as they are transmitted from one generation to the next over the lifetime of those inhabiting them. Specifically, body pedagogics refers to the central means through which a culture seeks to transmit its main corporeal techniques, skills, dispositions and beliefs, the experiences typically associated with acquiring these attributes, and the actual embodied changes resulting from this process (Shilling, 2005a, 2007). This notion of body pedagogics inevitably simplifies the myriad processes, complexities and variabilities involved in the transmission and development of cultures, but it nevertheless provides us with a useful ideal-typical and corporeally sensitive way of accessing some of the central elements involved in cultural reproduction in a manner which renders them amenable for comparative analysis. While it has limited affinities with Mauss's (1973 [1934]) notion of ‘techniques of the body’, and Foucault's (1986) ‘technologies of the self’, its focus highlights the relationship between the pedagogies and lived experience of culture marginalised by Mauss, and the experiential and ontological dimensions of human embodiment neglected by Foucault. Furthermore, by recognising culture, experience and embodiment as analytically significant each in their own right, the concept of body pedagogics can facilitate analyses which explore how these factors interact and shape each other without engaging in discursive reductionism or other forms of conflationism (Shilling, 2003, 2005b; Mellor, 2004).

Examining the relationship between these cultures and their body pedagogics allows us to clarify key characteristics of our contemporary technologically-driven embodied condition. The enhanced efficiency and capacity associated with the technological body is associated with an historically unprecedented capacity to intervene in the external environment (a capacity also associated with the generation of unprecedented risks [Beck, 1992]). Comparing technological culture with others, however, we suggest this capacity has developed at the expense of those experiences of transcendence and immanence that, in various forms of interrelationship and complexity, are central to the embodied dynamics of religious traditions. Issues of transcendence and immanence are not usually seen as central to contemporary sociology. However, it is the exclusion of just these experiences that is signalled by Heidegger's (1993 [1954]: 311–41) focus on the absence of techne (a creative rather than an instrumental approach towards producing something new) from technological culture. This exclusion makes it difficult for individuals to relate to their embodied and external environment in a manner free from rational instrumentalism. This exclusion also underpins sociology's long held interest in the difficulties individuals confront in avoiding a sense of fracture, fragmentation and anomie in rationalised, industrialised societies and is, therefore, deserving of study.

Technological culture

In a lecture delivered in 1953, Heidegger made a distinction between technology and techne that was central to his view of modernity and continues to have important consequences for understanding embodiment (Heidegger, 1993 [1954]). According to Heidegger, the essence of technology in the modern era involves an instrumental rationalism of total mastery over nature. It involves an ‘enframing’ of nature, an approach which calls upon the environment to be ‘immediately on hand’ as a ‘standing reserve’ forced to yield its properties and potential to any efficiency based demand placed upon it. Consequently, the defining property of modern technology is the insistence on domination and control irrespective of the properties of the material it is involved with, something that reaches a point where people themselves are regarded as a standing-reserve. What is tragic about this situation is that it is unrecognised by the majority of those subject to it: people are so used to regarding the world through the prism of rational instrumentalism that they fail to see that they have become the object of this logic (Heidegger, 1993 [1954]: 320, 329, 333).

The ‘tragic’ features of Heidegger's analysis reflect his long-standing interest in the quality of lived experience, an interest closely related to his religious concerns (Elliott, 2004), but he did not develop the implications of his analysis for the bodily character of human beings. He recognised that the body is always ‘stretching beyond its own skin, actively directed towards and interwoven with the world’ (Aho, 2005: 100; Heidegger, 2001: 84–6), but he did not examine in detail the processes through which the technological enframing of the body is initiated and sustained, and admitted towards the end of his life that the ‘body phenomenon’ confronted philosophy with its ‘most difficult problem’ (Heidegger, 1979). In expanding upon Heidegger's analysis, we suggest that the central pedagogic means through which this culture is transmitted is work. In contrast to those writers who think work has lost its centrality in the constitution and maintenance of culture (Wilson, 2004: 2), the suggestion here is that instrumentally rational work has become core to the spheres of production and consumption in technological culture.

In production, work in the form of waged-labour continues to provide the means through which people acquire the skills and dispositions that discipline and mould their bodies to the performative demands of their role. Employees are increasingly expected to embody corporate ideals of efficiency and the minimisation of waste in their actions and appearance. ‘Flexibility’ has become a byword not only for manufacturers, consultants and computer specialists being able to produce what customers want, when they want it, but also for embodied subjects who are prepared to manage themselves in a manner which involves their bodies ‘standing ready’ for external demands (Shilling, 2005b: 73–100). This is exemplified by those high-flying professionals whose work requires them to travel thousands of miles a year, be constantly available through mobile phones, laptops and conference calls, and structure their domestic lives around employer priorities (Sassen, 2003). More generally, Ehrenreich (1990: 236) shows the pervasiveness within middle-class America of individual attempts to develop (through diet, exercise and various health regimes) a form of ‘physical capital’ that makes them a productive resource. The creation of performative bodies is also reflected by the increasing demands of ‘emotion work’. From C. W. Mill's (1951) identification of the ‘smiles’ and personalities sold by white-collar staff in the 1950s, to Hochschild's investigations of the ‘deep acting’ required to sustain adherence to the ‘feeling rules’ common in the service sector of the 1980s, the body has again faced growing pressure to respond to productive demands (Mills, 1951; Hochschild, 1983; see also Zapf et al., 2001). At the opposite end of the labour hierarchy from high-flying professionals, the focus on productivity central to waged-labour is evident in the millions of people who take extra shifts and extra jobs in various employment sectors and thereby embody the demands for flexibility central to technological culture (Toynbee, 2003).

The centrality of work to the transmission of technological culture has extended to the sphere of consumption. During an historical epoch in the West when there has been a decline in the numbers of people who live their lives in relation to transcendent religious ideals, and a concomitant valuing of youth in a culture which seeks to shield its members from mortality, conceptions of self-identity are often associated with the aim of maintaining a young, ‘appeal-ing’ appearance (Featherstone and Hepworth, 1991). Further, as a sign of visual distinction, the size, shape and look of the individual body is regarded as being ‘on call’ to be remoulded in line with changing ideals of body fashion. This is reflected in the massive growth over the last few decades of cosmetic surgery.

If work is the primary body pedagogic means through which individuals are prepared in technological culture to be enframed by the demands of efficiency, the characteristic experience associated with the purposive orientation of this modern work is for the body to be related to as an object. This occurs in two ways. The first involves the general ‘fading away’ of an experiential awareness of the body which can occur whenever one is engrossed in an activity such as reading a book but which is also particularly characteristic of work in a technologically rationalised society in which instrumental action is prized and rewarded above other behaviour. Leder's (1990) account of what he refers to as the dys-appearing body (in which our experience of the body fades away when engaged in purposeful work unless we are subjected to some physiological or social disruption which returns it to consciousness) can be interpreted in this way, not as a universal model of body experience as perhaps intended, but ‘a damning indictment of the fate of embodiment in the modern era’ (Shilling, 2005b: 59). Missing from Leder's account is any sense of the body being either an integral and positive component of the experience of action, or intimately involved in the ‘pouring’ of the self into the tools used in craft work in which a focus on activity includes a ‘subsidiary awareness’ of the body (Polanyi, 1958: 59).

The second way in which the body is experienced as an object at work is when the body itself is a focus of employment. The spheres of fashion and professional sport provide examples of this, but the growing importance of emotion work provides this mode of experience with a more general relevance. In these examples, the body is for long periods to be worked on as an object. In the world of ballet, for example, denying hunger and the aches and pains of repetitive practice is a prominent way in which dancers objectify their bodies in order to keep them slim and prepare for performances (Wainwright and Turner, 2003; Aalton, 2005). Thus, the body pedagogics of work in technological culture are associated with experiencing the body as an absent/present object. In this context, it is hardly surprising if the mind/body dualism that dominates Western philosophy is reflected in the actual experiences of embodied subjects who feel that the mind formulates their goals, directs their activities and (when necessary) disciplines their unruly bodies.

The typical result or embodied outcome of the body pedagogics of technological culture is, as Heidegger suggested, that the body becomes a standing reserve ready to be called upon for the purposes of efficient performance. This may increase the productive capacity of technological culture, but has major consequences for the embodied personality of the individual. Weber and Simmel suggested that individuals developed coherent personalities by organising their actions and experiences in line with their self-identities by standing over, controlling and organising/dominating their surroundings (eg Weber, 1948 [1919a]). The major criticism levied against this ‘heroic’ view of personality involves its masculinist connotations and its neglect of human interdependence (Bologh, 1990). However, we can see this focus on control as an understandable response to a culture which prizes efficiency above all else. The difficulty with this response, though, is that it has become virtually impossible in technological culture: if embodied subjects have become a standing reserve, it is they who are available to being ordered and reordered on the basis of external demands. This is illustrated by the IBM computer programmers in Sennett's (1998: 132) study. Sennett relates how these individuals were made redundant and how they talked retrospectively about needing to have taken more seriously the technologically driven changes occurring in computing and to have reskilled themselves accordingly. In the absence of such action, unemployment damaged them materially and existentially. They no longer felt in control of their surroundings and were worried about being bereft of meaning and purpose.

In summary, technological culture is not simply the contextual background within which individuals and communities construct their identities. It is also the source of a particular body pedagogics that seeks to shape lived experience in accordance with instrumentally rational demands. However, while we have emphasised its potency in this regard, in line with the ideal typical nature of our analysis in this paper, its effects are neither guaranteed nor unchallenged. The are not guaranteed as the centrality of work in technological culture does not always result in the experiential and instrumental objectification of the body. People can seek to relate to their embodied selves in different ways, while the body's own frailties and capacities sometimes exceed and escape the disciplining effects of technology. Neither do the body pedagogics of technological culture exist unchallenged by other pedagogic forms, particularly with regard to religion. Heidegger himself looked to Taoism and Christianity to find resources to mitigate the negative aspects of technological cultures (Petzet, 1993; Chan, 2003, Parkes, 2003; Elliot, 2004), and these religious cultures remain significant today.

Taoist culture

For Heidegger, Taoism was of interest because, in contrast to the technological desire for mastery over all things, it sought to promote a way of being in harmony with the world (Chan, 2003). Similarly, Weber's (1964) analysis of Taoism and Confucianism focuses on an explicit contrast between the major values informing Chinese civilization and those promoted by Puritanism (for him, it was the world-transforming rationalism of the Puritan ethic that preceded the contemporary dominance of technological instrumentalism). Whereas Calvinist Protestantism disenchanted the world, introducing an unbridgeable rupture between God and humans and a doctrine of predestination that isolated the individual and committed followers to a this-worldly engagement with their environment according to God's ethical imperatives (Weber, 1991 [1905–05]), neither Taoism nor Confucianism introduced such tension between humans and their environment. Instead, they promoted norms encouraging people to live in the world as a well adjusted part of that world (Weber, 1964; Kirkland, 2004). Without any ‘satanic force of evil’ against which to struggle, and living in a cosmos characterised by a harmonious order in which it was ethically improper to be an ‘expert’ or make oneself an ‘end’ for any external goal (especially by pursuing profit), there was no moral basis on which instrumental or technological rationalism could flourish (Weber, 1964: 160, 246).

Central to Taoism (and Confucianism) is the notion of the Tao, ‘the immutable order of harmony, tranquillity and equilibrium underlying the universe and human society’ (Yang, 1964: xxix). One of the classical texts of Taoism, Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching, explains that while words are unable to describe adequately the Tao, it possesses an essence that initiated and perpetuates the universe (Tzu, L., 1963). Generating the continuity that underpins all material and immaterial phenomena, the Tao is also responsible for the universal forces of yin and yang (the distinctive energies that give rise to all differences and oppositions in the world, yet which form an integrated whole). It is this view of essential cosmic harmony which underpins the Taoist emphasis on adjustment in the world. While the cosmic pessimism of Puritanism resulted in an ethic of world domination to be accomplished through working, what Weber regarded as the ‘radical world-optimism’ of Taoism eventuated in a body pedagogic emphasis on wu wei, non-action or what Palmer and Breuilly translate as ‘actionless action’ (Tzu, C., 1996). This is the main pedagogic means through which Taoism is transmitted.

This notion of actionless action may be difficult to grasp from a Western perspective. It refers to not interfering with the natural workings of things, to not expending unnecessary effort, and to acting in line with the nature of things (Capra, 1999: 117). It is in this context that Taoists are said to reject the trappings of worldly knowledge, striving and affluence, and embrace instead simplicity and a life in which egoism is rejected in order to achieve a ‘oneness’ with the universe (Weber, 1964: 182). As Graham (1989: 186) explains, this simplicity involves an ‘intelligent responsiveness which would be undermined by analysing and choosing’ but which approximates instead to the instinctiveness of the swimmer able to stay afloat by acting with, rather than struggling against, the forces and currents of the ocean. Thus, actionless action is not a matter of laziness, but involves cultivating a relationship with the world aligned, rather than in tension, with its inner workings. Part of this involves the cultivation of one's own bodily self (Kirkland, 2004: 202), and Weber's (1964: 191) analysis of Taoist culture refers to ‘the gymnastics of breathing’ as a means of harmonising the embodied subject with the principles of the cosmos. Methods of breathing have for centuries and across a number of religions been seen as a technique that yokes together body and mind in promoting new levels of embodied consciousness (Mauss, 1973 [1934]). This process is identified in the Taoist classics as a means of bringing into equillibrium the yin and yang energies of the body with the natural order (Graham, 1989: 197). Forms of exercise like Chi Gung and the martial art Tai Chi Chuan are intimately related to this goal, and the Taoist view of energy and harmony is also closely linked to traditional Chinese medicine and acupuncture (which seek to realign and order the flow of energies in the body that become disrupted in illness; Liao, 1990; Ots, 1994). A final point that should be made about actionless action is that while its focus is on the individual's relationship with their environment, it contains an ethics which extends beyond the embodied subject (see also Foucault, 1988). As Chuang Tsu (1996: 83) writes in one of the Taoist classics, actionless action is not only beneficial for individuals, but involves a regard for the physical and the social body that is the best course for governors of the world (see also Kirkland, 2004: 208).

If the cultivation of actionless action and its various techniques constitute the central body pedagogic means through which Taoist culture is transmitted, we can characterise the major experience associated with this form of learning as being; a process in which embodied subjects achieve the sense of an increasing connection to, and interdependence with their surroundings. Weber (1964: 182) describes this somewhat dismissively as ‘contemplative mysticism’, but his interpretation is based on a contestable view that the march of scientific reason leads to the inevitable disenchantment of the world. Weber's interpretation also neglects the effects that Taoist exercises related to posture, breathing and movement exert on physiological processes (there is growing scientific evidence that tai chi chuan, for example, can have significant effects on blood pressure, respiration, balance and affect control); processes that can shape the somatic dispositions with which one relates to the social and natural environment. ³ There is a stilling of disruptive passions in the Taoist experience of being, as well as an absence of the egoism that Durkheim (1952 [1897]; 1984 [1893]) viewed as an increasing problem in fast growing rationalised economies bereft of appropriate moral structures. There is also a redirection of existential focus away from an efficient and productive doing and towards achieving an alignment with one's surroundings. This is quite different from the objectifying absence/presence of the body in technological culture, and involves instead an extension of embodied experience unlimited by the exterior topography of the flesh.

The result or outcome of this experience of being associated with Taoist body pedagogics is that the embodied subject is turned not into an instrumental object, a standing reserve for efficiency, but exists in a state of immanence with respect to the environment. This notion of bodily immanence has not been subject to much exploration. Deleuze and Guattari (1988) approach part of what is involved here in developing their concept of the ‘Body Without Organs’; a metaphorical way of talking about how the relations we establish as organic beings are not limited by our material bodies. More specifically, the immanence experienced by the embodied subject of Taoism involves an alignment with the energies and forces that constitute all social and natural phenomena; an alignment that facilitates an emboldening of the individual enabling them to develop the full potentialities of their embodied self (Kirkland, 2004: 203). In Weber's (1964: 200) terms, the world becomes a ‘magic garden’ in which people are no longer restricted by the visible features of rational-secular existence. Once fully developed, indeed, the belief is that the immanent individual will have ‘reached a state that will not be extinguished, even when the physical body ceases to be one's form’ (Kirkland, 2004: 189). While there was no transcendent sphere into which all Taoists passed with death, the alignment of their energies and being with the wider cosmic harmony of the universe meant that the individual ‘lived on’. Whereas the demands of efficiency characteristic of technological culture resulted in lives ‘constantly surrounded by anxiety … worn out by concerns', those able to dwell in the sphere of immanence recognise that differences, oppositions, hardships and challenges should be met with calm equanimity as integral parts of existence (Tzu, C., 1996: 149, 18). Having reached this stage, there is no limit to existence, no reason why one should not be a person who ‘rides the clouds and mounts upon the sun and moon, and wanders across and beyond the four seas’ (Tzu, C., 1996: 18).

In summary, what Taoist body pedagogics seek to instil is a type of lived experience at odds with that characteristic of technological culture and, while there is obviously no guarantee that this will be the outcome for all of those immersed within this cultural tradition, Weber was clearly right to identify it as inherently inhospitable to the technological rationalism that came to dominate the West. In contrast to the objectification and commodification of work and natural and social environments, with their attendant truncation of lived experience (Polanyi, 2001 [1944]), Taoism promotes an ethic of embodied immanence. While Weber contrasted Taoism with Calvinist forms of Protestantism, however, more recent Protestant developments offer a type of body pedagogics thoroughly different to and at odds with that outlined in his Protestant Ethic.

Charismatic Christian culture

It is not uncommon to contrast the ‘somatic practice’ of Taoism with belief-centred religions such as Christianity (Parkes, 2003: 20–1). This contrast is misleading, however, not simply because of the importance of body techniques across Christian history (Mellor and Shilling, 1997), but because of the body's centrality to the recent resurgence of certain types of Christianity. Indeed, a key feature of the late twentieth century development of charismatic cultures of Christianity (centred on intense experiences of being filled with the Holy Spirit, manifest in ‘speaking in tongues’, sacred ‘swoons’ and ‘gifts of healing’), which has grown so rapidly that there have even been claims of a ‘new reformation’ (Cox, 1995), is the spread of similar forms of embodiment across otherwise very different societies (Beckford, 2003: 207; Mellor, 2007).

While sometimes dismissed as a distinctively modern form of worship, devoid of traditional foundations, charismatic ‘spirit possession’, trances and other altered states of consciousness have been traced not only to the ‘pentecostal’ Christian churches of the ‘Acts of the Apostles’ in the Bible, but to Jesus himself (Davies, 1994). In direct contrast to the asceticism of Weber's Puritans, charismatic Christianity encourages individuals to find God through all five senses (Poewe, 1994: 249; Coleman, 2000: 68). As Jonathan Edwards's Treatise on Religious Affections (a text which exerted a decisive influence on modern evangelical, pentecostal and charismatic churches) notes, true religion is not just a matter of mind, but a matter of heart based on experiences approximating to palpable sensations (Schröder, 2000: 1940). The foundation for this experiential focus is an intensely emotional encounter with Christ and the Holy Spirit.

The primary body pedagogic means through which charismatic Christianity is transmitted is that of communion. Communion refers here not to the processes surrounding the administration of the Eucharist, as in Catholicism, but to a range of activities involving prayer, touch, and song, united by their aim of enabling embodied subjects to contact and commune with God. This is evident in the hugely successful ‘Alpha Course’ which, after its development in London, has become a major evangelising programme across a range of churches in Europe and the U.S.A. This course aims to educate individuals into the basic truths of Christianity but ‘its underlying intention is to create an emotional experience which encourages personal identification with Christianity’ (Watling, 2005: 92). As such, it has much in common with the emotional communion promoted by charismatic Christian evangelisation such as the ‘Toronto Blessing’ associated with John Wimber and the ‘Vineyard’ churches. Crucially, the pedagogic device of communion has to be deployed repeatedly. The process of education into the truths of charismatic Christianity takes time in order that the embodied subject is prepared for their reception. Thus, at the heart of the Alpha Course is the communion-focused ‘Holy Spirit Weekend’. Here, individuals have the opportunity to ‘abandon themselves to the spirit’, an ‘abandonment’ carefully prepared for earlier in the course. Furthermore, the weekend itself involves a structured pattern of prayers, videos, and discussions helping individuals to become sufficiently open to bodily, psychological and spiritual transformation that they can receive the outpouring of the Holy Spirit during the culmination of the course (Watling, 2005: 98).

This pedagogic mode of communion is not designed to stimulate just any intense emotional experience, however, but a specific feeling of transcendence. The experience of transcendence is key to Durkheim's (1995 [1912]) explanation of how individuals congregating in the presence of what they consider to be sacred feel ‘swept up’ and ‘overcome’ by an intense experience that ‘takes them beyond themselves’, making them feel part of a wider, moral order. The individual is ‘added to’, distanced from egoistic appetites, and comes to inhabit a transcendent sphere characterised by shared moral categories and emotions. The encounter with transcendence encouraged by charismatic Christianity shares these general features, but it is an experience of contact with a transcendent God, incarnate in Christ, and made immanent through the Holy Spirit. Charismatic prayer, for example, evokes a feeling of ‘other worldliness’ but also involves the individual in a particular ‘effusion of a soul’ that attaches those who ‘abandon themselves to the Spirit’ to an experience that has been ‘the fruit of the work of centuries’ of Christianity (Mauss, 2003: 33; see also Csordas, 1994).

The embodied outcome intended to result from this body pedagogics is very different from the instrumentalism of technological culture or the immanence of Taoism. A form of religion ‘integrated around the key notion of transformation’ (Martin, 1990: 163), and productive of ‘rituals of rupture’ that seek to reconfigure an individual's habitus (Robbins, 2004: 128), it aims to bring about physical and spiritual rebirth. The body has always been central to Christian practice. The Apostle Paul, for example, attacked those who lived according to ‘the lusts of their hearts’, thereby ‘dishonouring’ their bodies (Romans, 1: 24–6). He also repudiated those early Christians who sought to accommodate the gospel to ‘philosophical ideas about the transcendence of crass bodily existence’ on the basis that if Christ was God incarnate as an embodied, fully human being, then human bodies contain religious potentialities that can be developed by imitating him (Hays, 1997; see 1 Corinthians, 15: 12–19). Nonetheless, this potential can only be developed fully through a re-formation of the body involving in charismatic Christianity a religious rebirth. In Biblical terms, followers must become ‘imitators of God’ who walk, talk, desire, think and feel in a way that is entirely at odds with their previous existence (Ephesians, 4: 22, 5: 1). This is clear in the ultimate aim of the Alpha Course, which is to enable individuals to ‘embody the attitudes of Jesus’ and become Christ-like (Watling, 2005: 101), while an even more distinctive example of the charismatic Christian search for physical rebirth concerns a painting displayed among the Swedish Word of Life community that shows Christ with the physique of a body-builder (Coleman, 2000: 147). Coleman notes the prevalence in sermons of the theme of the ‘spiritual body-builder’, exemplified in this depiction, and explains how World of Life members seek to refashion the flesh through a form of mimesis where Christ's body is the model for spiritual ‘pumping iron’.

There is a long tradition in Christianity centred on this theme of physical and spiritual rebirth. Late nineteenth century forms of ‘muscular Christianity’, as well as links between sport and contemporary evangelical groups such as the ‘Promise Keepers’, indicate the endurance of this form of Christian body pedagogics (Hall, 1994; Higgs, 1995; Clausen, 1999; Ladd and Mathisen, 2002). In the Bible itself, Paul refers to how Christ ‘will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body’ (Philippians, 3: 21) and charismatics understand the various forms of communion and the experience of transcendence to have the power to bring about this transformation. Thus, the outcome of charismatic Christian body pedagogics neither instrumentalises the embodied subject in relation to technology, nor results in an immanent relation with the energies and forces of the cosmos as a whole, but strives towards a rebirth of human being.

Given the immense importance of this religious form in the world today, the implication of this pedagogic emphasis for body studies and sociology is that the Puritan asceticism Weber associated with the origins of modern instrumental rationalism has now given way to a re-formed ‘Protestant Ethic’, both newer and, in its recovery of Biblical body symbolism, older than the model he envisaged. The fact that this religious form is, perhaps, uniquely comfortable with the evangelical deployment of technology (Noll, 2001), yet thoroughly committed to its contextualisation within a Christian framework, suggests it is particularly worthy of sociological attention in terms of questions about lived experience in societies dominated by technological culture. Further to this, we can now return to the two questions posed at the beginning of this paper: what have we lost by becoming a standing reserve for technologically-driven demands, and can the study of religion help us step outside the technological enframing of human experience?

Technology, experience and the loss of Techne

Heidegger (1993 [1954]) addresses the question of what we have lost with the advance of technological culture by contrasting technology with techne. Techne referred in Ancient Greece to the creative, even poetic, ‘bringing forth’ involved in the skills of craftwork, the fine arts, and philosophy. It entailed not just the ability to work on nature, materials or ideas in a sensitive, skilled manner, but the cultivation of bodily techniques and responses within a method that facilitated this art of ‘revealing’. This was reflected in the body pedagogics associated with techne. In cultures that value techne, the education of the body is regarded as complementary to the education of the mind and spirit. Socrates and Plato, for example, extolled the virtues of training the body as well as training the intellect. Gymnastics and sport ‘moulded character’, helped produce a ‘well rounded personality’, and cultivated self control and courage in thought, word and deed (Brasch, 1990).

The importance of techne went beyond exemplifying a particular mode of ‘being in’ the world, however, as those who possessed the capacity to reveal the potential of what inhered within themselves and other ‘this worldly’ phenomena were able to participate in the spheres of immanence and transcendence that were the province of religion. This was explicit in the public displays of physical control and competition in Ancient Greece. The Olympic Games were understood to have originated as sports between the gods, for example, and maintained their religious character: gods and heroes continued to compete in them, albeit sometimes in disguise, and the Games were structured on the basis of sacred oaths, prayers and dedications (Golden, 1998). The Games thus possessed elements of both the immanent and the transcendent. More generally, techne involved a cultivation of the body which facilitated contact with the sphere of creation in the same way as did poetic processes of ‘bringing forth’ involving other raw materials. As Heidegger (1993 [1954]: 339) put it, such creativity could help illuminate ‘the presence of the gods and the dialogue of divine and human destinies’.

Heidegger emphasises that while techne has historically been key to many cultures, contemporary technology sought to eradicate it. The potential experiential effects of this become clear if we compare the body pedagogics of technological culture with those of Taoism and charismatic Christianity. What distinguishes the former from the latter above all else is that technological culture seeks to exclude individuals from contact with either transcendence or immanence. Technological culture seals the world within a self-referential frame in which instrumental efficiency is the criterion for action. Never have humans been able to manage and manipulate so much. The problem with this, for Weber (1948 [1919b]), was that the instrumental rationality of technological culture eroded values and left individuals struggling with existential questions of ultimate meaning. This fate was not just to do with the absence of a religious framework of values or cognitive meaning systems, however, but involved a qualitative difference in lived experiences, a diminution of embodied potentialities in terms of experiences of transcendence and immanence.

Taoism, in contrast, seeks through its body pedagogics to cultivate an adjustment and interdependence that situates people as an integral part of a harmonic order. Embodied subjects are not instrumentalised in terms of the demands of efficiency, and avoid objectification, but develop an immanent relation with the energies and forces that infuse and surround them. In terms of Heidegger's discussion of techne, individuals cultivate within their bodily selves a relationship to the environment which adds to them by aligning them with their surroundings. Though very different in terms of its body pedagogics and aims, charismatic Christianity is similar to Taoism in reaching beyond technological rationalism. Within its Trinitarian theological anthropology, Christianity seeks to do this through communing with a transcendent God who has become incarnate in His creation as Christ and immanent now, in certain prescribed bodily contexts, as the Holy Spirit. Again, the technological instrumentalism of the embodied subject is rejected as basis for life, and action is oriented towards the imitation of Christ. Like Taoism, the embodied personality within charismatic Christianity is added to, receiving ‘eternal truths’ and working towards a perfection of bodily being through religious rebirth. In comparison, technological culture may have achieved unprecedented material success, but it endangers the individual with an emphasis on a pervasive instrumental rationalism that erodes the creative embodied potentialities underpinning techne.

Conclusion

In highlighting the specificity of modern technological culture, we have examined its characteristic body pedagogics and compared these with the contrasting pedagogic means, experiences and outcomes of two religious cultures. This ideal typical analysis obviously simplifies the many differences and varieties within cultures, and it is only possible to examine certain issues associated with the embodied transmission of these cultures within the constraints of one paper. The whole issue of those subsidiary or non-typical means, experiences and outcomes involved in cultural transmission and cultural transformation, for example, are important issues for further exploration. So too are issues regarding the precise manner in which the means, experiences and outcomes of particular body pedagogics result in cultural reproduction or transformation. Nevertheless, the notion of body pedagogics provides us with a useful, provocative and corporeally sensitive way of examining cultural issues that builds on recent work in the sociology of the body. In particular, it has enabled us to throw into sharp relief the bodily consequences of technological culture, and provide a comparative dimension to the question of what embodied subjects have lost experientially in this culture.

This is an important issue which has not been investigated by those studies of the body that exhibit a technological rationality of their own (by portraying humans as body-machine assemblages; Galison, 1994; Balsamo, 2000), or even incorporate at their centre a technological enframing portraying humans as a standing reserve (eg Butler's [1990, 1993] view of individuals as ‘hailed’ to pre-set subject positions within a ‘heterosexual matrix’ views people as an ‘always available resource’ for a sexual culture predicated on binary oppositions). Such writings constitute more of a reflection of technological culture than reasoned critical analyses of it. Focusing on culturally different body pedagogics, in contrast, not only provides us with an alternative way of exploring this issue, attentive to the different ways in which lived experience can be constituted, but raises important questions about the interrelationships between contemporary technological and religious forms.

In relation to the religious forms examined here, it is easy to dismiss the increasing significance of Taoism and charismatic Christianity merely as indications of the need for psychological coping mechanisms in the context of the stresses of technological culture (Žižek, 2001). Along with the technologically-oriented body studies noted above, however, such accounts fail to step outside the technological enframing of human experience and, consequently, interpret religious developments as reflections of prevailing cultural forms rather than as challenges to them. The fact that charismatic Christianity can enthusiastically use media technologies to spread its message across the globe (Coleman, 2000; Noll, 2001), while simultaneously promoting ‘rituals of rupture’ that seek to lift individuals out of the enframing of technological culture, means that ‘it would be a mistake to reduce it to a mere reflex of the modern’ (Robbins, 2004: 137; Droogers, 2001: 54). Similarly, despite fears amongst some Western scholars that Taoism would suffer in the face of the adoption of Western rational utilitarianism in economic practices (Parkes, 2003), the spread of globalising forms of technology, economics and culture in China have actually led to a renewal of traditional religious practices (Yang, 2000). Instead of dismissing the importance of religious cultures and their associated body pedagogics, then, it makes more sense to see their continuation and resurgence in terms of their concern to nurture types of lived experience that invest individuals with a sense of meaningfulness and connection to others and the world (Heelas et al., 2004; Szerszynski, 2005).

Our account of these issues has necessarily been programmatic, but it is not only a call for further research and analysis but also for the opening up of a new set of possibilities and research trajectories for sociologists of the body, culture and society. Sociologists have been well aware of the costs of technology in terms of environmental damage and the erosive powers that instrumental rationality has in relation to non-rational values. What we have explicated is a distinct, if related, issue: a key feature of technological culture is its promotion of a form of bodily being that can deny individuals experiences of immanence and transcendence, and it is the denial of these experiences that has been central to traditional sociological concerns about the problem of personality and the increase of anomie and suicide in industrial societies. These experiences continue to be central to a number of religious cultures that currently confront technological culture, and it is the further comparative investigation of these cultures and their body pedagogics in relation to modern technology that can open up new avenues in the study of the embodied dimensions of contemporary society and culture.