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Virtually real: Fake religions and problems of authenticity in religion

Thomas Alberts a a Institute for Comparative Religion in Southern Africa, Department of Religious Studies, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, South Africa Online Publication Date: 01 July 2008

To cite this Article Alberts, Thomas(2008)'Virtually real: Fake religions and problems of authenticity in religion',Culture and

Religion,9:2,125 139
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/14755610802211510 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14755610802211510

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Culture and Religion Vol. 9, No. 2, July 2008, 125139

Virtually real: Fake religions and problems of authenticity in religion

Thomas Alberts*
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Institute for Comparative Religion in Southern Africa, Department of Religious Studies, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, South Africa This paper offers a theoretical exegesis of fake religions, a category of phenomena that formally resembles authentic religion, except for the lingering suspicion that the intention is to satirise, parody or mock. Working from the observation that usually there is considerably more agreement about what does not count as religion than what does, I propose this putative category as a means to approach the intractable problem of authenticity in religion. The discussion begins by reecting on theoretical orientations towards this problem and notes that an approach suitable to understanding fakery must account for the subversive qualities inherent in imitation. In the main discussion, I explore registers of authenticity in fake religions. With reference to Michael Taussigs theory of defacement, Walter Benjamins theory of the dialectical image, and Peter Bergers theory of redeeming laughter, I argue that fake religions produce sacrality in their connecting the body of the perceiver with the movements of concealment and revelation. Keywords: religion; fakes and authenticity; Walter Benjamin; Michael Taussig; Peter Berger

Introduction Authenticity in religion is a focus of concern for a gamut of interests, from fundamentalist invectives that label other religions false, to a resurgent atheism that labels faith in god delusional (Dawkins 2006), to the controversies surrounding plastic medicine men (Kehoe 1990), or to the hybridising tendencies of neo-shamanic ritual and worship (Wallis 2003). Religious studies scholarship has also considered authenticity in religion, much of it grappling with how to relate religion and popular culture (Forbes and Mahan 2000; Mazur and McCarthy 2001). This paper contributes to these debates. I begin by reecting on theoretical orientations towards the problem of authenticity in religion and note that an approach suitable to understand fakery needs to account for its subversive qualities. In the main discussion, I explore registers of authenticity in fake religions, a term I will explain shortly. With reference to Michael Taussigs theory of defacement, Walter Benjamins theory of the dialectical image, and Peter Bergers theory of redeeming laughter, I argue that fake religions produce

*Email: thomas.alberts100@gmail.com
ISSN 1475-5610 print/ISSN 1475-5629 online q 2008 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14755610802211510 http://www.informaworld.com

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sacrality in their connecting the body of the perceiver with the movements of concealment and revelation. Approaching the problem This paper proceeds from the observation that there is usually considerably more agreement about what does not constitute the religion than what does. For example, notwithstanding the claims of their members, it is widely accepted that Discordianism, the Church of the SubGenius, and the various denominations of the Invisible Pink Unicorn are not authentic religions in the same way that, say, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam and Catholicism, the various denominations of Protestantism and Pentecostalism and so on, are religions. They are fake religions. Fake religion is a term of convenience that describes a category of objects, artefacts, and popular movements that look and feel like religion, but whose apparent excess, irreverence and arbitrariness seem to mock religion. Fakes may demonstrate concerns with the transcendent, the sacred or the ultimate (Chidester 2005, 1). They may posit a symbolic system that gives rise to moods and motivations and a conception of an order of existence clothed in an aura of factuality and unique realism (Geertz 1973).1 Certainly, they exhibit elements of the religious life, including veneration of deities or supernatural beings, belief in revealed texts and an array of cosmologies, eschatologies and mythological narratives. They often also conform to certain functional and psychological interpretations of authentic religion, such as community cohesion and moral edication (Durkheim 1915). And yet there persists a niggling suspicion that, as Norman J. Girardot has put it with regard to the popular veneration of Elvis Presley, so much of it seems like an Andy Kaufman-style put on (Girardot 2000, 604). As Chidester shows in his analysis of virtual religions (Chidester 2005, 197 208), the World Wide Web is a vital forum for these put ons because more than any other medium the Internet dees authenticitys demands for transparency and control. Chidester identies countless religions online that are fake in terms of the preceding denition, for example, the Church of Nothing At All, Last Chance Cathedral and Discount House of Worship, First Church of the Last Laugh, and the Holy Temple of Mass Consumption. Though the designation fake religion certainly could describe religious phenomena in the ofine world, and not forgetting that many of these online religions have their ofine expressions and vice versa, the category I am proposing has virtual religions in mind. Often interpreted as parodies, several of these fake religions reject that designation, as did the Discordian movement that famously inundated Yahoo! with complaints until the search engine offered a classication that did not prejudge Discordianisms authenticity (Chidester 2005, 199). Fake religion is not a technical term and is of very limited descriptive value. Rather, its value lies in the basic tension between this putative category and an

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opposite category of religious phenomena corresponding with authentic religion, a similarly blurry designation conjured by collective social agreement. It is the tension, rather than the categories, I argue, that is import because tension between opposite poles speaks to the crucial element of difference, the precondition for authenticity to be contested in the rst instance. At the same time, however, it is similarity, of which the perfect indistinguishable fake is the ideal form that joins fakery with authenticity. Simulation, imitation and copying, all are so many mimetic contact adhesives that keep the opposite poles of fake and authentic maintained in tensioned contradiction, pulled apart by difference, joined together by similarity. Religion and popular culture There have been several attempts to theorise the relationship between religion and popular culture (Chidester 2005; Mazur and McCarthy 2001; Forbes and Mahan 2000). Probably, the most prevalent characterisation of that relationship is popular culture as religion, a paradigm that sees the elementary forms of the religious life in ostensibly secular popular culture and considers how popular culture functions like religion for many people (Forbes 2002, 4). Much fandom scholarship, at least within religious studies, demonstrates this approach, Star Trek fandom counting prominently among examples (Jindra 1994; Porter and McLaren 1999; Wagner and Lundeen 1998), though others abound (Evans 2002; Girardot 2000; Park 2005; Price 2005). As an approach to theorising fake religions, the popular culture as religion approach has merit in that it grasps the opportunity to test notions of the transcendent, the sacred and the ultimate against new and challenging data. However, this approach is not without its problems, most signicantly parallelomania, a tendency towards connecting the facile similarities between popular culture and religious movements so thoroughly that they are perceived as being the same thing (McCloud 2003). Yet, there is a stronger argument against considering fake religions under the rubric of popular culture as religion. Whereas this paradigm tends to perceive similarities between phenomena that are apparently very different, fakes proclaim their essential identity with the authentic object of which they are a copy and therewith issue a challenge to pinpoint difference. From here stem two distinguishing features of fake religions. First is the quality of imitation. In theoretical terms at least, the perfect fake is identical with the genuine article in every way except for that ineffable quality that is the locus of its inauthenticity. But in copying, fakes hold up a mirror whose reection poses uncomfortable questions about the nature of authenticity: The ability to mime, and mime well, in other words, is the capacity to Other (Taussig 1993, 19). This leads to the second feature: fake religions deliberately, whether implicitly or explicitly, subvert the idea of authenticity in religion. On both these counts, Discordians, the Church of the SubGenius, the Invisible Pink Unicorn, the Holy Order of the Cheeseburger and countless other examples are typologically distinct from Elvis

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Presley fandoms, Superbowl Sunday and y shing (Girardot 2000; Price 1992; Snyder 2007). The transgressive element in fake religions is not shared with most examples of popular culture as religion. Rather than an approach that accommodates and assimilates fake religions, an approach is needed that understands the challenge posed by fake religions to the discursive ways religious authenticity is imagined, maintained and defended. A different way of thinking about the relationship between fake religions and popular culture is suggested by David Chidester. Fake religions can be usefully thought of as a kind of popular religion, a grouping of religious expressions and formations originating in the organic religious life of the ordinary people rather than the clergy, the lower classes rather than the elite and the rural peasantry rather than the urban citizenry (Chidester 2005, 191). As a kind of popular religion, fake religions subvert the authentic religion of privileged elites, a transgressive act of resistance that gives further hints as to the wellspring of their power. Fake religions therefore stand not only at the intersection of religion with popular culture, but also at the intersection of religion with power; as Chidester has observed, indigenous, popular, and folk religions have always borne the burden of authenticity (Chidester 2005, 191). Yet of all their imitations, fake religions imitation of authentic religions claim to being authentic is the most important. Whether as popular religion, a kind of indigenous religion of cyberspace, or an invented fakelore for late twenty-rst-century technocounterculture, fake religions deect the burden of proof in the same instant that they questions authentic religions exemption from providing the same. When related to questions of power in this way, it is not surprising that problems of religious authenticity are evident at the origins of the discipline of religious studies. As Chidester has argued, comparative religion was born not only of the European Enlightenment, but also of the histories of conquest and domination on colonised peripheries; secondly, comparative religion was practised not only by intellectuals aloof from the world at metropolitan centres, but also by ordinary people engaged in conicts on the ground and, thirdly, an undercurrent of laughter reverberates through the interplay of comparison (Chidester 1996, xiv xvi). This last point might seem out of place amid the serious business of recalling disciplinary complicity with imperial conquest. Yet, as I intend to show, laughter has its serious side too and 200 years later remains implicated in ordinary peoples practices of comparison and resistance. In all this, the metaphor of the frontier is important. But it is a mixed metaphor and is inherently ambiguous, being variously a threshold, a limit beyond which different norms, conventions and rules hold sway, and a spatial zone to be entered, an inbetween space of unexpected contacts, exchanges, and interchanges . . . (Chidester 1996, xv). As I hope to show, the metaphor of the frontier remains an apt characterisation of the problem of authenticity in religion. This paper begins by considering the body, the site of all human action and experience, and reects on the benets to a theory of fakery in religion that emphasises the relationship between the body and the movements between

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concealment and revelation. Here, the theorist is Michael Taussig and the discussion considers the transgressive quality of fake religions in the light of Taussigs work on defacement and the labour of the negative. The second part of the discussion considers Walter Benjamins theory of dialectics at a standstill, specically his demand for bodily involvement in the image of critique. Finally, I relate Taussigs emphasis on transgression and Benjamins emphasis on bodiedness with Peter Bergers theory of the numinous meaning of laughter.
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Transgression Taussig is aware that by looking at transgression he is moving on the terrain of the extraordinary and from the outset frames his endeavour in terms of the sacred, stating his subject as the characterisation of negation as sacred surplus (Taussig 1999, 3). Taussig observes that in defacement, in the act of negation, there is a suddenness of movement, the negated object being activated and becoming animated. By way of example, he looks at monuments. Pointing to how these usually large, cold, inanimate objects become contested and charged in the moment of their defacement, Taussig notes that this uncanny capacity to animate dead matter works by magically fusing the representation with what it represents (Taussig 1999, 52). Here, Taussig looks at statues that special kind of monumental representation. A particular example catches his critical eye in the incident of Australian artist Greg Taylors statue of the British royals naked. The statue of the queen and her consort were created in cement, painted with iron oxide to promote the onset of rust and decay and installed beside the waters of Lake Burley Grifn, in front of Australias two houses of parliament and on the opposite shore from the National War Memorial. On the one side stands the High Court and National Gallery, and on the other, the National Library and National Science and Technology Centre. Installing a representation of naked and rusting British royalty on the landscape of Australian colonial history and postcolonial nationalism clearly sharpened its comment, Taylor summing up: Theyre just sitting there rusting away and I love it. They dont even know they are irrelevant (Taussig 1999, 24). Herein lies the magic that fuses the representation with what it represents: Taylor loves that the Queen and her consort are irrelevantly rusting away in the centre of Australian nationalism, as if it really is the queen and her husband sitting naked besides the lake. It is in this magic, in this fusing of the represented with the representation where we nd surfacing a power that animates inanimate objects, presencing the real thing behind the object-representation. Greg Taylors sculpture provoked a nationwide outrage and was variously described as profanity, vulgar, grotesque, rot, a distasteful efgy of my queen and a revolting display (Taussig 1999, 26). Then came the attacks. Typifying the kind of response in the popular press at the time, one journalist wrote: The attacks began on Thursday evening when the queen was beheaded. By early yesterday she had lost her legs. On Friday night vandals attacked Prince Philips head, leaving it dangling until

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event organisers took it off with a hacksaw. By yesterday his left arm also had been severed and his chest smashed (Taussig 1999, 31). In these and similar descriptions, there is a certain playful oscillation, describing the representation in ways that draw on the powers of the represented so as to set up a humorous, if not grizzly, contradiction. And so the queen not the statue, though obviously the statue is beheaded, while Prince Phillip has his head smashed and nally removed with a hacksaw blade. Thus, is the defacement defaced in a magical suspension of disbelief that allows the statuary to really be what it formally represents. This presencing of an object behind the representation can be perplexing in the case of representations that do not have a tangible object-thing behind them, as is the case with national ags or money. Picking up on this, Taussig pointedly asks: What life, what real reality lies behind these fetish objects spoliated by the defacing act that all the more effectively establishes their fetish status? (Taussig 1999, 53) He goes on to suggest that the notion of fetish here involves an active forgetting; that through repeated usage, familiarity dulls us to the knowledge that the very facts of our existence are not facts, but artefacts (Taussig 1999, 54). In other words, the more xed and inexible these meanings attached to objects become, so do they take on a more augmented fetish character, at once both becoming what they previously merely signied, thereby establishing the given facts of existence, and simultaneously masking the artice that lies behind them. But if such a form of fetish is a mask, such a mask is also a surface, concealing depth. Taussig posits the face as an ideal type for thinking through this problem of surface and depth, because the face that is both mask and window to the soul stands at the intersection of revelation and concealment. From here, Taussig develops a notion of defacement as a crossing of the face, a tearing at the surface, a cutting across the active-forgetting that maintains the habitual and mundane, that hardens the mysteries and fragilities of fantasies into workaday facts and that fetishises artice into the given facts of existence (Taussig 1999, 54). Furthermore, Taussig suggests this notion of defacement is appealing exactly because it desires transgression. Taboo is not merely prohibition; it is the prohibition that yeans for transgression. Defacement, spoiling something precious and desecrating something of extra-ordinary power unmasks this artice fetishised as the given facts of existence in the production and reproduction of meaning. In the rush of surfacing, animating energy that welds the object behind the fetish mask to its representation is a momentary liberation from the power of the fetish that portrays itself as the given facts of existence. For in the movements of defacement, we catch a glimpse of the internal workings of objects, a momentary vision that alerts us to the knowledge that the cement statue of the queen and her consort are produced of a tension between an apparent surface and the movements within a hidden void, and that this is constantly reproducing itself as the statue that defaces British royalty is defaced to protect royalty, then in its defaced form becomes a monument to intolerance, before eventually being removed from the bench where weeks later people are still gathering to look at the empty seats.

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Taussigs larger argument is considerably more detailed than this brief description allows. For present purposes, I want to extract from it a reading of transgression that emphasises, rstly movement, both as theatre and as uncontrolled rush of animating energy that transforms as it bursts forth; secondly, the body as metonym for these transformations and, nally, the quality of sacredness that is implicated in the movements of concealment, revelation and transformation, and amplied by both the yearning to deface what is prohibited (and sanctied by that prohibition) and the multiplying riot of transgressions that yearning ignites. These elements, movement, body, and sacrality, are each important to a critical interpretation of fake religions because each is implicated in fakerys subversions of authenticity. I will return to the transgressive quality of fake religions in a moment. First, however, I want to consider fakery as a form of critique. Dialectics at a standstill Hannah Arendt noted that Walter Benjamin was the most peculiar of the Frankfurt scholars (Arendt 1969, 11). Indeed, this is surely one of the reasons he continues to attract new audiences nearly 70 years after his death. If Benjamin agreed with the Marxist reading of modernity, that the conation of nature and history into the modern concept of progress fullled ideological functions so that progress referred to the progress of humanity itself rather than merely advances in ability and technology, his unique methodology stemmed from his reading of the critical possibilities both precluded and made available by capitalist society (Benjamin 1969b, 260; 1984, 25; Buck-Morss 1989, 58 59). Benjamin thought that industrialisation had brought about a re-enchantment of the social world and with it a reactivation of mythic forces (Benjamin 1999, 391).2 The advent of capitalism and its plethora of commodity fetishes meant that Europe had fallen into a new dream-lled sleep in which commodied objects appeared as dream images (Benjamin 1999, 391). For Benjamin, this signalled a threat of the greatest magnitude because not only did it subvert the ideals of reason, but also it imperilled the very possibility of criticism. In an often quoted fragment from One Way Street, Benjamin writes:
Criticism is a matter of correct distancing. It was at home in a world where perspectives and prospects counted and where it was still possible to take a standpoint. Now things press too closely on human society. The unclouded, innocent eye has become a lie (Benjamin 1979, 89).

Benjamin characterised as dream consciousness the uncritical, nondialectical mode of thinking that confused technical progress with the nature of history and accordingly acceded to a mythical, predetermined notion of progress. Dream consciousness then is a kind of false consciousness. If the evercloser pressing of modernitys dream images meant that gaining an appropriate critical distance had become impossible, the Marxist critique, with its overwhelming valorisation of rational forms of representation similarly

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became impossible (Cohen 1989, 87). As such, the Marxist critical enterprise had reached an impasse and was unable to proceed with rational demystication in the orthodox Marxist mould. Benjamin saw a way forward in the immanent method of surrealist art whose writings he distinguished from literature; demonstrations, watchwords, documents, bluffs, forgeries if you will, but at any rate not literature (Benjamin 1986, 179). These forgeries, in Benjamins analysis, were not to be read in the sense that one reads literature, but instead were geared for experience, specically, for what Benjamin termed profane illumination, a materialist, anthropological inspiration, to which hashish, opium or whatever else can give an introductory lesson (Benjamin 1986, 179).3 Rather than correct distancing, critique now required immersion in the object of critique and Benjamin praised the surrealists imagistic techniques of deliberate anachronism and montage by which they entered dream consciousness and made a home on the threshold of waking. Benjamin likened this kind of immersion to intoxication and regarded it as necessary if one is to trace the dialectic to its ssion where it comes to a standstill in a moment of critical recognition, at which point one is awakened from dreaming and is able to step outside of intoxication. This kind of loosening of the self by intoxication that then allows one to step outside the domain of intoxication4 Benjamin uses as a metaphor for the Marxist revolutionary project: To win the energies of intoxication for the revolution this is the project which Surrealism circles in all its books and enterprises (Benjamin 1986, 179 and 189). Immersion is Benjamins alternative to rational demystication. The critic should appropriate the authority of such mystications for deployment against ideology, and should appropriate the distorted and distorting powers of ideological transposition for ideologically disruptive ends (Cohen 1989, 103). Accordingly, Benjamin intended to articulate his critique with the material objects of progress themselves: The work must raise to the very highest level the art of quoting without quotation marks. Its theory is intimately linked to that of montage (Benjamin 1984, 3 and 5; Meltzer 1996).5 Benjamin wanted to constellate critical images by quoting the material objects that gave life to myth and thereby exert a critical leverage in the multitudinous images ooding back and forth to awaken from dream consciousness (Benjamin 1986, 178). The tensions and contradictions inherent in these montage-like compositions are inherently self-perpetuating, folding in on themselves, doubling up and multiplying in a ood of contagion, until a critical moment of recognition when the dialectic is saturated with tensions. In this moment, found wherever the tension between dialectical oppositions is the greatest, the conguration will ash into a constellation, marking the caesura in the movement of thought. Thus, Benjamin says: The utilisation of dream elements upon waking is the canon of dialectics. Benjamins notion of dialectics at a standstill marks the moment when the dialectical image appears, a moment identical with the moment of recognition, in which things put on their true surrealistic face (Benjamin 1984, 7, 9, 10 and 24).6

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Benjamins praise for Surrealism is only half the story. Though he praised the surrealists approach to history via immersion in myth and dream and drew inspiration from the surrealist techniques of montage, he was critical of what he perceived to be the surrealists inability to get out of the dream world and back into waking consciousness (Abbas 1989, 49). He attributed this inability to their failure to appreciate that the moment of waking recognition involves not one, but two transformations. The rst is the transformation of the object of perception via imagistic techniques of appropriation, quotation and montage, a transformation successfully problematised by the surrealists liminal position on the threshold between waking and dreaming. The second is the transformation of the recognising self, of the very percept of recognition (Taussig 1993, 40). Without this second transformation, the circuit between dialectical image and recognising subject is incomplete and consequently the profane illumination promised by surreal art is unfullled. The manner in which Benjamin explains this interpenetration of body and image distinguishes his originality. Benjamin thought that the new technologies of photography and cinema, with their variety of close-ups, slow motion and multiple angles, opened critical possibilities in their montage-like image of reality. Realising this critical potential requires a particular kind of perception, for which Benjamin thought Dada art gave an excellent training. With Dada, art became an instrument of ballistics. It hit the spectator like a bullet, it happened to him, thus acquiring a tactile quality (Benjamin 1969a, 238). With the advent of mechanical reproduction, lm became that ballistic instrument. It banished the contemplative mode of perception and replaced it with moving images whose motion perception cannot arrest, the distracting element of which is also primarily tactile (Benjamin 1969a, 238).7 So, too with the advertisement in a world of commodied things pressing ever closer: [The advertisement] abolishes the space, where contemplation moved and all but hits us between the eyes with things as a car, growing to gigantic proportions, careens at us out of a lm screen. Now note how Benjamin links authenticity, criticism and tactility: The genuine advertisement that hurtles things at us with the tempo of a good lm is a critical image of the most real, the mercantile gaze into the heart of things (Benjamin 1979, 89). This notion of tactile appropriation that mimetically connects image and body is missing from surrealist art. Yet tactility is very important because it signies bodily involvement in the image of critique and the crucial interpenetration of body and image, which completes the critical circuit and wakens one from dream consciousness. Benjamins theory of dialectics at a standstill offers an enticing perspective on the problem of authenticity in religion. The rst thing we note when fake religion is examined through Benjamins dialectical optic is that fake religions that are facsimile images of authentic religions are composed of elements copied quoted from authentic religion. But fake religions are not merely surrealist montages of religious elements, say the institution of a clerical order, the veneration of deities, or the afrmation of belief. Fake religions imitation

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of authentic religions claim to being authentic destabilises and subverts the power of authenticity to put forth its own image. Yet, if fake religions are understood as images of critique, montage-like constellations of elements quoted from the realm of authentic religion and constantly reconguring as the contradictions saturate the dialectic with tension (the rst transformation), then, following Benjamins critique of surrealism, it is necessary to identify the tactile appropriation that signals the caesura in the movement of thought, brings the dialectic to a standstill and involves the body of the recognising subject in the object of their perception, thereby completing the critique. Michael Taussigs work on defacement is useful here. As Taussig shows, transgression activates and animates the transgressed object so that it seemingly takes on a life of its own, magically presencing the real thing behind its object representation and actually becoming what it previously merely represented. This capacity Taussig attributes to a surfacing energy from deep within the object, a sacred surplus concealed behind or beneath the surface of appearance. When that surface is rent or torn, this surplus bursts forth, animating monumental statues, bank notes, national ags and other apparently mundane objects whose sacrality is revealed in their spoliation. But in Taussigs hands, defacement becomes a double-edged term, referring not only to violated objects but also to the face that, as both mask and window to the soul, stands at the intersection of revelation and concealment. The surplus energy released by transgression not only animates, but it is also a kind of sacrilegious unmasking, a bringing of mysterious insides outside that reveals, physiognomically as it were, a transformed self and therewith a new subject object relationship. Taussigs demonstration of the mimetic correspondence between subject and object established in the moment of transgression and theorised under the rubric of defacement goes a long way towards demonstrating how tactile appropriation might work in the case of fake religions. One can hardly ignore that fake religions are distinguished not only by their transgressive quality but also by their humour. Of course, recognising humour in fakes, as with satire and parody generally, depends on your point of view; not everyone will nd humour in the invitation issued by Landover Baptist Church to a simultaneous screening of Mel Gibsons The Passion in all 17 theatres of their multiplex cinema during which patrons will be sprayed in a mist of blood to make the thrilling torture experience that much more visceral [http://landoverbaptist.org/news0304.passionyer.html (13 February 2008)]. Those that do not will probably be more taken with fakerys transgressive qualities. However, many people do nd fakes funny; fake religions are routinely listed under categories of humour in web directories maintained by Yahoo! and Google. While blasphemous for some, fake religions are funny for others, people laugh at fake religions. This laughter-inducing effect of fake religions, I argue, is neither frivolous nor incidental, and the reader will no doubt anticipate where this argument is going: laughter evidences bodily involvement in the dialectical image of authentic religion put forth by fakes a welling of energy from deep within the body of the recognising subject and

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released in an uncontrollable bodily eruption that transforms the surface of the body therewith revealing, physiognomically as it were, a new self transformed by a new subject object relationship. When this line of thought is developed further, however, we come to an unexpected conclusion. Following Peter Bergers theory of redeeming laughter, this humorous quality may indicate a locus of authenticity in fakery itself. Redeeming laughter Berger observes that comic experience presents a counterworld, an upside down world, a different reality in which the assumptions and rules of ordinary life are suspended (Berger 1997, 205 and 207). For a brief moment, what was previously natural and familiar becomes unnatural and unfamiliar. There is nothing overtly religious in this kind of transcendence; it is a transcendence of a secular kind, transcendence in a lower key (Berger 1997, 205). It is also transitory; ultimately, the painless world of the comic is proved illusionary by the hard facts of tragedy that reassert the empirical world. In this transitory moment, however, one stands in another reality, in a world without pain. People speak of redeeming laughter, meaning that jokes make life easier to bear, because they recognise in the transitory comic moment qualities of redemption. There are then two meanings attached to the comic: one secular and the other religious. Though there is no automatic nor necessary passage between them, there is a basic link that might or might not be recognised in that brief moment, which is the intuition in the lower key of transcendence in the higher key. Berger suggests that changing key depends on an epistemological reversal brought about by faith (Berger 1997, 210). The world from the perspective of faith is a world redeemed, is a world where peoples alienation from god is overcome and is a world without pain. Faith reverses the reality illusion dualism so that the empirical world appears to be a temporary reality that will be superseded in due course. Seen from the perspective of faith, the counter-empirical world of the comic anticipates the redeemed world posited by faith. To laugh, therefore, is to see the world as if from Gods point of view. Berger illustrates his argument with the pratfall, jack-in-the-box and peekaboo, three archetypal instances of the comic. He suggests that the pratfall is an exemplar of the incongruence between human pretensions and human reality and illustrates his claim with the example of Thales of Miletus who fell into a ditch while pondering the stars. Jack-in-the-box is the reverse gure. Jack denies the pratfall by repeatedly jumping up, no matter how often he is pressed down, a soteriological paradigm that stands in contrast to the pratfalls anthropological one. But it is peekaboo that is most interesting. The game involves a child and a mother; the child sees the mother, then the mother disappears; the child becomes anxious until after a brief moment, the mother reappears and the child expresses their relief by laughing or smiling. This scenario, for Berger, contains in a wondrous nutshell the drama of redemption as seen in the light of faith.

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He explains that Gods dealings with humanity amount to a cosmic game of hide and seek. We catch a glimpse of him and then he promptly disappears. Religious faith, in this scenario, is the hope that he will reappear, providing that ultimate relief, which precisely, is redemption. Existence then is the pain of estrangement, to which reunication is the joy of redemption. It is in this sense that Berger makes his argument for the comic experience as a signal of transcendence: . . . the painless worlds of the comic can now be seen as an adumbration of a world beyond this world. The promise of redemption, in one form or another, is always a world without pain (Berger 1997, 210 211). This image of a cosmic game of hide and seek dramatised in the game of peekaboo is exactly the image of movements between concealment and revelation that has been this discussions recurring theme. For Taussig, the everyday world of workaday facts is a concealing surface that fetishises artice into the given facts of existence, while the sacred surplus that bursts through the tear inicted on this surface by defacement reveals with it the mysterium tremendum of a primal religiosity, which, following Rudolf Otto, Taussig regards as the base of holiness itself (Taussig 1999, 53 54; Otto 1958, 79). For Benjamin, the world of dream consciousness is a kind of concealment for which deeper immersion in the dream images of commodity fetishism is a technique that induces an interpenetration of body with dialectical image such that the transformation of the object via critique is revealed on the surface of the body, therewith revealing a transformed self. For Berger, the empirical world is a painful illusion that conceals the fallacy of separation from God, but will ultimately be superseded by the counter-empirical world of faith and the joy of reunication with the divine. Each of these theories has an important bearing on how we understand fake religions. Whether as defacement, critique or humour, each offers a register of authenticity in fakery. From the perspective of Taussigs work on defacement, fake religions perform a kind of authentic work in their negative labours that in their transgressions reveal a primal mystery concealed behind the disenchanted surface of appearance. From the perspective of Benjamins theory of critique, fake religions nd their authenticity in an uncontrolled bodily irruption that completes the dialectical circuit between object and recognising subject, thereby authenticating the critique issuing from the critical image of authentic religion put forth by fakes. Seen from the perspective of Bergers theology of humour, the laughter-inducing effect of fake religions indicates a locus of authenticity in fakery itself. The realms of the sacred and the profane, Durkheim tells us, are irreducibly distinct and separate. He characterises the distinction in terms of prohibition: Sacred things are those which are protected and isolated by prohibitions. Profane things are those to which the prohibitions apply, and must keep their distance from sacred things (Durkheim 1994, 117). The problem of authenticity arises when profane things do not keep their distance and instead approach or seek admission to the bounded space of the sacred. Moreover, when profane things

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trespass on the realm of the sacred, they are not only violating the prohibition but also transgressing the very distinction that gives order and coherence to reality. From a Durkheimian perspective, fake religions are always profane and can never be admitted to the realm of the sacred. Not even their satirical qualities can redeem them; . . . the prohibition on criticism is a prohibition like any other (Durkheim 1994: 132). This is not surprising; the broad denition of fake religions given at the beginning of this paper deferred to the collective social agreement that presumes one can easily distinguish fake from authentic, or in Durkheims language, the moral force conferred by opinion that distinguishes the sacred from the profane (Durkheim 1994, 131). This discussion has tried to show that these separations are less exclusive than regimes of authenticity would have us believe. Even Benjamins unusual Marxism is by his own admission saturated with messianism (Benjamin 1984, 18).8 The boundary between the sacred and the profane is not dened; where religion begins and ends cannot be xed by criteria, and authenticity in religion is not a status to be determined. Rather, the distinction between the sacred and the profane is better characterised as an open frontier, a porous contact zone of tensions, contradictions and possibilities in which the problem of religious authenticity beckons as an invitation to comparison and interpretation. Notes
1. Geertzs famous denition has been both criticised and defended. See for example Asad (1993), Frankenberry and Penner (1999) and Schilbrack (2005). 2. K1a.8. See also Buck-Morss (1989), 253 254. 3. On Benjamins interest in and experiments with hallucinogens, see Benjamin (2006). 4. On the question of intoxication in Benjamins work, see Schweppenhauser (1988). 5. N1.10; N1a.8. 6. N10a.3; N2a.3; N4.4; N3a.3. 7. For a discussion on the endurance and relevance of Benjamins theorising of the revolutionary potential of lm, see Koepnick (1999), 213238. 8. N7a.7. For more on the theological aspects of Benjamins work, see Buck-Morss (1989) and Wohlfarth (1978).

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