2. Marco teórico
2.1. La traducción audiovisual
Taylor traces how this “Great Disembedding” has worked out in modern social imaginaries, starting with economic life. The new modern social imaginary involves a new theory of moral order that changes our understanding of God’s providence and the nature of his benevolence.181 Taylor traces this development from previous cosmological understandings of the place of humans sustained within that creation to the addition of
180 I am mindful here of the claims of Anabaptists, and Hauerwas, along with others, who would understand the church today as an alternate community/culture. Insisting that church is an alternative culture does not make it so however; see Theo Hobson, “Against Hauerwas,” New Blackfriars 88, no. 101 (2007): 300–312. The question perhaps is, does telling a different genealogy à la MacIntyre offer
sufficient grounds for asserting an alternative identity? Maybe the genealogy can only be told in relation to the genealogy of capitalism.
181 Taylor, Social Imaginaries, 69.
160 eighteenth-century ‘invisible hands’, and the viewing of society through the lens of engineering design and ordering.182 Humans move to a society ordered around an exchange of services, with nature itself deemed to be an economic order.183 Ontological hierarchies of kingship are maintained, but with deference to how kings keep the new market economies in order.184 But eventually, the economy becomes more than a metaphor, and is established as the ultimate ontological orientation of society.
Taylor corroborates the location of market aseity highlighted in Sedgwick’s account, as discussed earlier. For we saw previously that Sedgwick describes the ontological move of aseity into the market as none other than the relocation of aseity of God into the economic. The market takes on the ontological values of God.185 Campbell also reminds us that this move into exchange and consumption is one of the imagination.186 We see the Polanyian neo-Darwinian imaginations for human nature combining with a post-Protestant Work Ethic that relocates identity creation into market activities, and the imaginations of providence of that market for identity construction. 187 Our question here again is: what is it about the nature of the market and the nature of humans that leads to this dialectic of imagination between identity and the market? Is Sedgwick correct, that it is the telos of the market, not the market per se, that is the problem requiring an alternative set of desires in response?188 Or is the market ontologically problematic, given to providing an alternative social identity, with its own ascetic and disciplining practices around the intrinsic problems of human identity? In either case, it is the ascetic nature of the market, and the ways in which desire is imagined
182 Ibid., 70.
183 Ibid., 71.
184 Ibid., 72.
185 Sedgwick. Market Economy, 120–121.
186 We have seen previously that, as Campbell explains, the middle classes in the reading of texts and novels indulge their romantic selves and develop “modern autonomous imaginative hedonism”;
Campbell, Romantic Ethic, 77.
187 Polanyi, Great Transformation, 118–121.
188 Sedgwick, Market Economy, 149–150.
161 within identity construction and market practices, that my mapping continues to direct us for further theological analysis.
This change in self-understanding can be attributed to a new spiritual dimension, one whereby Weber may be right, “even if not all the details of his theory can be salvaged.”189 A move then takes place within Protestantism away from the idea of higher vocations, with the claim upon ordinary life, work, family, and sex, as the locus for God’s activity with His people. This affirmation of ordinary life facilitates the “promotion of the economic to its central place.”190 This new idea and order of the economic gives rise to a move from management of the economic by governments, to a defining of the fundamental way in which humans relate to each other.191 In effect, other social dimensions of human existence are shifted, such that the public and private spheres of life change into new modes of agency. However, we may counter with our account from Polanyi of how this state of affairs is unsustainable. Taylor sees the disembedding of society into the market economy as one in which “society has been unhooked from
‘polity’ and floats free through a number of applications.”192 But, we have seen that society is not free floating; rather, there is a re-embedding of human relationships into the socio-logic of the market.193
Taylor continues with an extended discourse on how the public sphere develops into a “metatopical space” in which members of society could exchange ideas, i.e., as a metatopical agency, but one that exists independently of political society and completely within profane time.194 It is modern literature à la Anderson’s thesis that has allowed us to slice time vertically, holding together “myriad happenings.”195 With the economy as
189 Taylor, Social Imaginaries, 73.
190 Ibid., 74.
191 Ibid., 76.
192 Ibid., 79.
193 Taylor does draw attention to modes of re-embedding; for example, echoing Polanyi, Taylor notes that it is fascism that attempted to re-embed the society into the polis and failed. Ibid., 82.
194 Ibid., 99.
195 Ibid., 98.
162 the “first mode” of society, and the separation of the public from that sphere, the world of the family and the self, retreats into the intimate and private sphere.196 Houses are constructed to protect people from others, whilst the centre of gravity of life shifts towards seeking “the good life” with a new aesthetic, in which art and music are intended for personal enjoyment and to enrich the private sphere.197 This new understanding of human identity and private life finds its acceptance and definition in public space and in the nature of exchange in public life.198 Here, we see the nature of the oikos and polis reconfigured around the emerging aseity of market life.
The development of reformation churches into a generation of ‘free’ churches centred around voluntarist associations, reinforces and creates this metatopical common agency.199 Ironically, the intrinsic nature of Christianity to imagine one’s identity, whereby membership of church orders all other allegiances, plays out within the modern social imaginary as strong commitments to associate with others beyond traditional
“fealty”.200 The voluntarist nature of modern Evangelicalism brings us to understand God and all of life as unmediated, and collapsed into the private.201 The result is “modes of imagined direct access” that abolish all hierarchal belonging and mediation. However, this modern individualism “doesn’t mean ceasing to belong at all – that’s the individualism of anomie and breakdown – but imagining oneself as belonging to ever wider and more impersonal entities: the state, the movement, the community of humankind.”202 Imagining ourselves in this new sphere involves belonging to a new
196 Ibid., 104–105.
197 Ibid.
198 Ibid., 106.
199 Ibid., 160.
200 Ibid., 107.
201 It is interesting to note that, in response to Baptist understandings of voluntarism, some like Paul Fiddes at Oxford have suggested instead that we need to understand ourselves not as voluntarists, but in the theological concept of covenant, even as ‘Free Church’ people. See Paul S. Fiddes, “A Fourth Strand of the Reformation”, Ecclesiology, 13, no. 2 (2017): 153–159.
202 Taylor, Social Imaginaries, 160.
163 collective agency, which we can now determine takes its impetus from market imaginations for social relationships.203