Research
Research Interests
KNOWLEDGE FORMATION
Socio-etymological Study of
Conceptualization
Relational Nature of Discursive
Change
Intellectual History
Post-Postmodernism /
Metamodernism
Theory & Method in the Study of
Knowledge
RELIGION, SCIENCE, HEALTH, CULTURE, & SOCIETY
Chinese, Tibetan, North American,
& European Civilization
History & Philosophy of Daoism,
Buddhism, & Science
Meditation & Neuroscience
Quantum Physics & Spirituality
Eastern Religions in the West
Religion-Science/Health
Relations
Theory & Method in the Study of
Religion
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ATTRIBUTION: JEAN-DAVID & ANNE-LAURE, LE PENSEUR, FLICKR
Research Projects
A DREAM COME TRUE: HOW DREAMS HAVE SHAPED THE HISTORY OF RELIGION AND SOCIETY*
*Working title for a book I'm currently researching. I am open to solicitation from agents and publishers.
The spiritual and religious significance attached to dreams has resulted in a spellbinding hold of dreamland on our lives, setting the course of human history in surprising ways—usurping kings, inspiring important philosophers, artists, and poets, and leading to some of our most important scientific discoveries. The introduction of religious definitions, categories, and functions of dreams throughout the East and West sets the scene. The book then turns to religious dream practices, cultural artifacts (like dream catchers), and dream-inducing consumables, looking at not only their social role in religious life but also the broader impact on society above and beyond the religious context it emerged from. This influence can be seen in social behavior, interaction, and relationships in everyday life. Delving deeper, this work then takes an original look at how religious interpretations of dreams have impacted society by upsetting power structures, by being used to maintain social control, and by emancipating individuals from gender roles. Other chapters are dedicated to how dreams have led to the very founding of major world religions and how religious interpretations of dreams have also spurred major historical figures to pivotal actions. There have been so many momentous moments when history hinged on but a dream.
HOLY SH*T: A RELIGIOUS HISTORY OF EXCREMENT*
*Working title for a book I'm currently researching. I am open to solicitation from agents and publishers.
Defecation is universal, giving excrement a substantial place in the human experience. And human waste is a topic addressed by many religions throughout time, impacting health, the environment, interpersonal relationships, and social and cultural norms and practices in the contemporary world, affecting the affiliated and non-affiliated alike. And yet, as many holes as excrement has filled, there continues to be a lacuna in the literature, soon to be corrected with this corpus on crap: Holy Sh*t: A Religious History of Excrement will explore religious views on scat and other excrement across cultures, East and West, featuring in the themes of symbolism, ritual, magic, medicine, polemics, humor and satire, art and literature, and eschatology. Disease spread by waste is the single leading cause of death worldwide. Over two billion people are in need of adequate sanitation facilities, with one billion having no choice but to defecate in the open. Diarrheal disease, largely due to issues with water, sanitation, and hygiene, is one of the main sources of malnutrition and the cause of death for 600,000 children per year. And how people respond to and deal with excrement is strongly influenced by religion, making understanding of religious view on excrement essential for the future of our world. Holy Sh*t answers that call.
RELATIONALISM: AN ANSWER TO THE POSTMODERN PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE*
*Working title for an ongoing research project.
The preliminary aim of this project is to engage with postmodern challenges to the reliability and operationalization of knowledge, positioned in the debates with modernism on foundationalism/anti-foundationalism, structuralism/deconstructionism, objectivity/relativism, and essentialism/contextualism, drawing upon Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida, Habermas, and Chomsky, among others. Postmodern philosophy has led to the contemporary academic preoccupation with: (1) the instability of meaning, seen in the ubiquitous problematization of central terms of inquiry; (2) social, cultural, discursive, etc. contingencies of knowledge, creating a conflict with the scholar’s (especially the interdisciplinarian’s) epistemic task of making knowledge operational and relevant beyond a specific context; and (3) the negation of metanarratives, shifting focus to contingencies over fundamental arguments. This has resulted in the complexification of explanation in an academic ‘tradition of dissent’ (Spencer 2011). The various epistemic turns and post-postmodernisms (hypermodernism, automodernism, pseudomodernism, etc.) do not adequately address these issues, constituting the motivation for this work.
This leads to the central research question: if postmodernism is taken seriously, how can we theorize, justify, and operationalize knowledge? It is the primary aim of this project to offer an alternative to postmodern epistemology by theorizing knowledge as relational, justify it by demonstrating an alignment of this theory with practice, and operationalize it via the methodology of relationality analysis (RA; see below). I contend this can adequately address the above-mentioned challenges.
Taking my cue from the sociology of knowledge approach to (historical) discourse analysis (SKAD; Keller 2011), ‘units of knowledge’ (e.g., facts, knowledge systems, epistemes) are regarded as constructed. Sources of construction are multifarious, but typically the list includes texts, speech, and other forms of linguistics, signs and symbolic actions, social groups and institutions, socio-structural locations (e.g., class, culture, nation, generation), and historical context. Knowledge is more than a concept, so all relevant dispositives are considered, including the practical and material infrastructure of discursive development. The discursive infrastructure, situated in socio-historical reality, is conversely shaped by knowledge; the two are mutually constitutive, such that what we ‘know’ is based on our perception of ‘reality’ and that perception is based on what we ‘know’ (Berger and Luckmann 1966).
Yet, this research goes far beyond these standard observations in the field. In SKAD, the procedural ‘how’ of meaning attribution and the mechanism of discursive change remain open questions. Partly in response to these issues, I developed my innovative theory of relationalism and RA (Vollmer forthcoming)—previously applied to the formation of the concepts ‘religion’ and ‘science’—and thoroughly demonstrated a (dynamic) structure to the attribution of meaning and discernible patterns in discursive change involving a predictive factor. Here, the context is expanded to knowledge at large.
This research is envisioned as a contribution to social theory, intellectual history, and philosophy, particularly bridging the gap between the East and West in part by incorporating the underrepresented heritage of Buddhist relational cosmology into the discussion.
Relationalism, broadly speaking, is the theory that relations are primary, and relata are derivative, found in fields as diverse as neuroscience, sociology, and semantics (on the particularly relevant latter: Wittgenstein and ‘family resemblances’; Chomsky and syntax; Quine and Hempel on the interrelations of statements; Daoist philosophy of language). By claiming that knowledge is relational, I posit that knowledge units are derivatives of their relational position to other units: they are ‘other referential,’ and what structures meaning is the specific relation applied between a unit and its ‘other.’
RA accordingly makes relations the primary object of discursive analysis and investigates the organization and discussion of concepts in terms specific to its relationship with other concepts in a given context, examining ‘boundary work’ (Gieryn 1983), conjunctions, and relational terminology, including affinitive and comparative words. The procedure is an extension of SKAD—a deep and broad examination of terms, their uses, and material infrastructure but focuses on a given relationship(s). RA investigates the relation as the point of demarcation of knowledge units, creating novel meanings. Furthermore, it explores how these new meanings inherent the relational content of their ‘parent’ concepts and how that relational content sets the terms of engagement for future discourse, giving it predictive value. Relations are shown to evolve relationally as well, in other referentiality to preestablished ones, displaying the process of discursive change. Theorizing and operationalizing knowledge in this way addresses deficiencies in postmodern epistemology.
Anti-foundationalists claim that there are no fundamental principles of which to ground knowledge. As the common Buddhist phrase goes, ‘the only constant is change.’ Yet, this is a constant and can be taken as a departure point for analysis, constituting a middle way between modern and postmodern positions. Past foundationalist approaches use rigid analytical categories that are inherently problematic as they impose artificial limits on dynamic phenomena. I begin with the question if knowledge is fluid, how can we derive any meaning from knowledge units in an analytically valuable way? For this reason, RA examines relations as primary, shifting the focus from mutable analytical categories to relatively stable objects of analysis. Since I argue above that knowledge is based in cognition and cognition is relational, outlining relational constructs will display the fundamental meaning structures supporting the boundaries of knowledge.
Post-structuralists claim contextual contingencies indicate no structure is separable from time or circumstance. Yet, both structure and dynamism are inherent to relational phenomenon because a relation indicates a change in one variable will necessarily result in a change to the second but in a structured and relatively predictable way, with the nature of change based on the type of relation in play. This means that relations themselves form the structure while at the same time inherently recognizing contingencies. In this way, the structure is both an account of dynamism and dynamic itself. This can be considered a metanarrative but one that accounts for a multiplicity of narratives while also uniting them under the purview of one perspective. It is a break from the structuralist assumption of totality/universality since there is no maintenance of the world as is, but there is maintenance of mutability and a structure to change, positioning this theory between structuralism and deconstructionism.
Anti-foundationalism and deconstructionism suggest a lack of objective capacity (e.g., Foucault), often used in support of relativism. But, again, this is a problem for relata not relations. Though knowledge is constructed, this does not eliminate the objective status of relations. On the contrary, it affirms it, as the relativism of relata is a reflection of the co-constitution of concepts and the interrelations of all things (like Buddhist ‘dependent origination’). The structure of constructed knowledge—relations—provide a ‘relational objectivity.’ Objectivity is conditioned but this does not affect validity because relationalism is not the same as relativism: the former demonstrates a differentiation of truth from the context of justification for truth claims (akin to the Buddhist concept of ‘conventional truth’).
Postmodern epistemic relativism has often led to extreme conceptual relativism, suggesting linguistic incomprehensibility (Nietzsche) reflected in prevalent terminological quibbling in contemporary academia. RA is particularly suited to answer this problem, as it involves a shift of focus to meaning-making processes to show how various products (like definitions) are produced, understood as enactments of relations. In this way, language is not entirely deterministic nor is it entirely subjective. Concepts can be used in their other-referential context, while also theoretically allowing for—indeed demanding—consideration of contending and even contradictory meanings.
Relationalism is also a middle way between essentialism and contextualism. The essence is the transitory and relational nature of concepts, and the relation employed and the resulting relata within a given historical discourse constitute the context. By shifting focus to the general relational processes that lead to the particulars, contingencies can be preserved but contribute to a larger historical picture. Comparison is also enabled—namely, regarding the type of relationship applied. Furthermore, the way contexts cross can form a departure point of analysis, operationalizing interdisciplinarity by laying out the relationalization of disciplines and novel constructions of terminus technicus with a reflexive eye. While relative knowledge is epistemologically limiting, ‘relational knowledge’ is epistemologically enlarging.
Relationalism works with modernism and postmodernism, constituting a reconciliation between the philosophical aspects of both, but historically beyond these time periods, and I have hence chosen to refer to it as ‘metamodern’ theory (van der Akker et al. 2017)—one contending descriptor for the post-postmodern era. These philosophical positions, I will argue, reflect the mood of the age.
References
Alexander, Patricia A., “Relational Thinking and Relational Reasoning,” Science of Learning 1 (2016), n.p.
Appleby, Joyce, et al., eds., Knowledge and Postmodernism in Historical Perspective (Routledge, 2014).
Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (Doubleday, 1966).
Cahoone, Lawrence, From Modernism to Postmodernism (Blackwell, 2003).
Gieryn, Thomas F., “Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science,” American Sociological Review 48.6 (1983), 781–795.
Keller, Reiner, “The Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD),” Human Studies 34.1 (2011), 43–65.
Spencer, Lloyd, “Postmodernism, Modernity and the Tradition of Dissent,” in Stuart Sim, ed., The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism (Routledge, 2011), 215–226.
van der Akker, Robin, et al., eds., Metamodernism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017).
Vollmer, Laura J., The Relational Structure of Discourse: The Case of Religion and Science [working title] (Brill, forthcoming).
