New age spirituality and cultural logic of late capitalism

Abstract

Starting with the interrelated notions of globalization, postmodernism and neoliberalism, relying on their theoretical overlap, we suggest possible directions of inquiry that would clarify some aspects of the specific and today omnipresent 'New Age' spirituality. Individualistic and eclectic, New Age spirituality arose in the context of countercultural movements of the sixties. It includes various kinds of metaphysical syncretisms combined with elements of modern science and humanistic psychology. We will try to show how this type of spirituality corresponds with the dominant cultural logic of the late capitalism (which we understand as global, postmodern, neoliberal, multicultural, multinational, etc). We proceed from the assumption that there is a number of points of correspondence and that it is possible to create a New Age genealogy that would clarify them. That would create prerequisites for the analysis of transposition of countercultural legacy in the neo-liberal narratives, and enable us to address the role of spirituality as a mediator in this process and as a specific mechanism of interpellation. In this way, we will deal with the reproduction and social functions of specific ideological forms in the dominant motifs of contemporary spirituality. Distributed across the growing market of the mind-body-spirit literature, the New Age worldview appears as a specific technology of the self and as an ideological aggregation point. In this point, the boundaries between market ideology and conception of reality as a hidden order/conscious self-organizing equilibrium disappear. The deification of being as 'a market ontology' results in theodicy and produces self-accusing subjectivity. This opens the door to engaging in political neoliberalism theology within an already wideranging discussion that replaces the secularization theory with the idea of history of political societies as a succession of different forms of sacralization.