ABSTRACT
This book proposes a thorough deconstruction and reconfiguration of ‘New Age’ in which both the label itself and the phenomena associated with it are subjected to critical scrutiny or a ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’ in the sense identified (if not endorsed by) Ricoeur (1970: 32-3). My general argument runs as follows. First, I unpack the concepts ‘New Age Movement’ and ‘The New Age’.That is, I take issue with the hegemonic view that ‘New Age’ is a ‘movement’ of some kind or even a homogeneous entity at all. Such formulations essentialise a set of mixed, meandering, even divergent social processes more akin in presentation to Deleuze and Guattari’s (1988: 3ff.) proliferating ‘rhizome’ than to a unified organic entity. I also question the covert metaphysics informing the reifying expression ‘The New Age’, which effectively periodises manifestations by assigning them to a homogeneous cultural epoch or astrological era. Both terms are unsatisfactory: ‘New Age’ as a ‘movement’ is, as I will show, a false etic category and a formulation such
as ‘The New Age’ simply reproduces an emic agenda.1 In fact, ‘New Age’ represents at its narrowest a specific millennialistic emblem, and at its most diffuse – at its most symbolically overdetermined – a loose idiom of humanistic potential and psychotherapeutic change that could be, and has been, called anything from ‘human potential’ to ‘mind body spirit’, from ‘holistic’ to ‘spiritual growth’. Asad’s call to recover the ‘heterogenous elements’ of particular religious formations is apt here, for little else in the history of modern religion turns out on close inspection to be as variegated and diffuse in character as ‘New Age’.
