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Institutional Dreams
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 December 2014
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In Institutional Dream Series (Sleeping in Public), 1972–73, Laurie Anderson slept in eight different public places in order to measure their institutional impression. In her experiment Anderson used dreams—ostensibly her own—“to see if the place can color or control my dreams.” The short answer was—yes. Institutional Dream Series is an exploration of the self as medium. In sleeping and recording her sleep on the beach at Coney Island, in the halls of night court, at the bureau of immigration and naturalization, and in the women's bathroom at Columbia University Library, Anderson's performance suggests that vulnerability to bureaucratic structures and organizational schemes is not something to be avoided but studied. For there is pleasure, fear, and wisdom to be found in such exposure.
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- Forum on “The Burdens of Church History”
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- Copyright © American Society of Church History 2014
References
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10 Ibid., 355.
11 Ibid., 353.
12 Ibid., 355.
13 Ibid., 355–356.
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15 On the discourse of non-specific protestantism, see Fessenden, Tracy, Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007)Google Scholar. Cultural analysis seems to be a fruitful approach to the shadowy Christian character of American society, with its local and general styles of piety and practices of solidarity, for there is a voluntarism at the heart of liberal subjectivity as well as an evangelical public sphere. In order to even begin to gain analytic purchase on the common sense epistemics of white protestant masculinity, even an expanded understanding of religious institution must be supplemented by questions of ideology and discourse.
16 Although I do not have space to address the occlusions at work in the use of church as an analytic in the institutional setting of church history, I wonder whether a séance table could become the subject of sustained scrutiny in Maffly-Kipp's renewed church history paradigm? Could an auditing session of early Scientology or an instance of Reichian group therapy at Esalen? What about online activity that is at once most intimate and particular and already a focus on institutional reform, i.e., the totalizing schemes of predictive analytics? (See “Predictive Analytics,” IBM, http://www-03.ibm.com/software/products/en/category/predictive-analytics.) What about watching an episode of Oprah with the secure knowledge that millions of others are or have or will be watching the same episode and feeling the same kind of thing? I would hope that these examples be included in a comparative frame—for these too are part of an institutional history of American religion.
17 Maffly-Kipp, “The Burdens of Church History,” 360.
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21 Such a line of inquiry would be attentive to market rhetorics, political economy, and scientific theories of management. See, for example, Scientology's construction of a “leading edge[] of Christian experience” (Maffly-Kipp, “The Burdens of Church History,” 366) in the 1950s. See, also, the relationship between religion and the language of systems management in “Strength and Weakness of the Popular Religion and of Liberal Christianity,” Christian Examiner 64 (March 1858): 209–233Google Scholar; Weeks, Louis B., “The Incorporation of the Presbyterians,” in The Organizational Revolution: Presbyterians and American Denominationalism, Coalter, Milton J., et al. , eds. (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992)Google Scholar, and Corrigan, John, Business of the Heart: Religion and Emotion in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002)Google Scholar. For perspective on the institutional difference that modernity makes, see Wagner, Harvey M., “Practical Slants on Operations Research,” Harvard Business Review, Vol. 41 (May–June, 1963): 61–71Google Scholar; Chandler, Alfred, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977)Google Scholar; Haraway, Donna J., “Signs of Dominance: From a Physiology to a Cybernetics of Primate Society,” Studies in History of Biology 6 (1983): 129–219Google Scholar; and Hughes, Agatha C. and Hughes, Thomas Parke. Systems, Experts, and Computers: The Systems Approach in Management and Engineering, World War II and After (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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24 Walter W. Powell and Paul J. Dimaggio, “Introduction,” The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, 11.
25 Maffly-Kipp 361.
26 Ibid., 362. For promising lines of inquiry into the institutional expanse of American religion, see Michael Warner's work on transnationalism and the evangelical public sphere, Susan Harding's analysis of the force of linguistic networks, Jason Bivins' anatomy of the institutional lives of fear, and Courtney Bender's mapping of new age social networks in Cambridge, MA. Michael Warner, “The Evangelical Public Sphere” [http://repository.upenn.edu/rosenbach/2/]; Harding, Susan Friend, The Book of Jerry Falwell; Fundamentalist Language and Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Bivins, Jason C., Religion of Fear: The Politics of Horror in Contemporary Evangelicalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bender, Courtney, The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Other works that betray more than a casual reading of Foucault and Marx but nonetheless address the methodological problems at hand include Keane, Webb, Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Engelke, Matthew's God's Agents: Biblical Publicity in Contemporary England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hazard, Sonia's “The Material Turn in the Study of Religion,” Religion and Society 4 (2013): 58–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.