Through an interpretation of New Age spirituality, this article is concerned with how cultural studies – as a discipline that emerged in the shadow of secularization theory – can be involved in the reappraisal of religion. At once part consumer culture and part counterculture, the New Age is something of a conundrum that raises alluring questions about social and cultural change. In the name of re-enchantment and taking back control of one’s life through inner spiritual power, it appears to be aimed precisely at those forces of social rationalization that are seen to engender secularization. The piece suggests that such emergent religious movements not only challenge us to rethink the frameworks through which religion has been conceptualized, but that they provide multiple possibilities for the examination of the sacred in light of cultural studies’ disciplinary concerns with contemporary sociocultural dynamics, in particular as they are experienced within the ambit of everyday life.
Reality TV is a distinctive mode of television programming that has developed exclusively in the last twenty years, raising the question of how it is of its times. Reality shows have often been described as “neoliberal” in their logic. They typically present participants as self-responsible enterprising authors of their own lives in ways consistent with the valorization of market relations by neoliberal theorists. I argue for and expand on this interpretation, arguing the role of the “ordinary people” they feature largely is to perform competitive entrepreneurial subjectivity without expectation of fair recompense, but in the hope of attaining extraordinary rewards. Hereby media industries construct narrative worlds consistent with the economic basis on which they employ, but also with recent neoliberal political economy that has been marked by the decline of collective social support and rising inequality among citizens.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.