Murdoch University
The Krishna Somers Foundation presents the year’s fourth lecture.
The lecture will be given by
Dr Em McAvan.
Please come to the lecture, enjoy debating with Dr McAvan and drink some excellent wine (or orange juice).
When: Thursday May 15 4.00 PM
Where: Education and Humanities 3.041
Title: "The Postmodern Sacred"
Abstract
God is no longer dead. When Nietzsche famously declared his death toward the end of the 19th century, it seemed possible, even inevitable, that God and religion would die under the rationalist atheist onslaught. That, however, was clearly not to be, instead we find the religious an ever-more vital concern for every subject.
The return of the religious in postmodern culture has been in two forms the rise of so-called fundamentalisms in the established faiths—Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, even Buddhist—and the rise of a New Age style spirituality that draws from aspects of those faiths even as it produces something distinctively different. I argue that this shift both produces postmodern media culture, and is itself always-already mediated through the realm of the fictional. Secular and profane are always entangled within one another, a constant and pervasive media presence that modulates the way that contemporary subjects experience themselves and their relationship to the spiritual. I use popular culture as an entry point, an entry point that can presume neither belief nor unbelief in its audiences, showing that it is “unreal” texts such as Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, The Matrix and so on that we find religious symbols and ideas refracted through a postmodernist sensibility, with little regard for the demands of “real world” epistemology.
It is in the interplay between traditional religions and New Age-ised spirituality that the stream of spiritual popular culture that I call the postmodern sacred finds itself. The question I ask, therefore, is how exactly does the sacred appear in the postmodern world?
Em McAvan is a lecturer and tutor and Murdoch University, where she has recently completed her PhD. Em has already published a strong body of work on such topics as transgendered subjectivity, and popular music after September 11.
