Globalization and the Great Commission in the "Postmodern Cosmopolis"

The following musing for this blog is intended to stimulate interest in both the sweep and argument of the author's new book GloboChrist (to be published by Baker Academic Books this coming summer) without going into detail.  The posting pertains primarily to chapters 1 and 5 of the book.  The pre-publication URL for the book can be found at http://www.bakeracademic.com/ME2/Audiences/dirmod.asp?sid=0477683E4046471488BD7BAC8DCFB004&nm=&type=PubCom&mod=PubComProductCatalog&mid=BF1316AF9E334B7BA1C33CB61CF48A4E&tier=3&id=D06B03B52E474DC1BD0C47845F9ECC7A

Globalization, as Jan Art Scholte in his Globalization: A Critical Introduction (Palgrave MacMillan 2005) emphasizes, in the final summation is not about the free circulation of capital around the planet and the marketization of what were previously command economies.  Nor is it some vague, internationalist notion of a “convergence” of planetary cultures and governance mechanisms.  It is not for the most part about political economy at all, although questions of human rights, wage exploitation, and the struggle for new institutions that further democracy as well as what in the West we term “civil society” are not irrelevant – obviously.  Globalization in the final analysis amounts to a “planetary moment” – and its aftermath – along the historical continuum when space comes to be conceptualized and signified in epochally different terms that it had been in the past, when the guarantors of personal location and identity are suddenly ripped from their conventional moorings. 

Globalization is about living, engaging, and behaving “responsibly” when the boundaries within which we define and orient ourselves suddenly become permeable and fluid.  Gilles Deleuze denotes this process “de-territorialization”, which applies not just to geographical determinants but to the very conceptual and symbolical matrices wherein we are accustomed to operating and navigating.     Scholte describes it as a “re-spatialization”.  In a day-to-day context globalization means we no longer view ourselves and those who are not-ourselves (the “other”) in terms of radiating circles of proximity and therefore relevance – our family, our workplace, our community, our country, humanity in general, etc.  Globalization means that increasingly the notions of the “stranger”, or the “foreigner”, become strange and foreign in their own right.   Whatever, or whoever, in the past seemed remote is now immediately present through webs of instantaneous communications.  The same communications systems assure us that all human and economic transactions now acquire their own kind of immediacy, and oftentimes a  curious sort of intimacy.

Scholte argues that globalization reshapes at every level our sense of human immediacy and intimacy.  Jesus posed the same challenge to the “expert in the law” in the parable of the good Samaritan.  The “expert in the law” had offered to Jesus the Great Commandment of loving God and loving one’s neighbor with all one’s heart as the customary answer to the question of what one must do to have eternal life.  But as a Pharisee or “lawyer” he had sought to split hairs by raising a further question concerning whom a proper Jew should consider his “neighbor.” 

With the parable Jesus deconstructed both the query and the anticipated response.  He told the hypothetical story of a Samaritan, the despised “other” from a Judean perspective in the first century.  Post-Exilic Judaism, which developed a detailed division of the holy into those who adhere strictly to the Torah and those who do not, had based its notion of religious integrity on a what anthropologist Mary Douglas would describe as a complex grid of  distinctions between the ritually “clean” and those who pose a threat.  The sense of ritual purity also had a profound spatial dimension.   Holiness was implicitly commensurate with distance from the temple at Jerusalem.  It was focused on locality rather than globality.  Hence diaspora Jews were burdened with a second-class status as a result of their lack of propinquity.  Samaritans, whom Judeans considered false Jews because from before the time of David and Solomon they had worshipped God at a shrine site other than Jerusalem, were even more outré.   They were regarded spiritually and ceremonially alien for that very reason despite their geographic proximity.  In one swift parabolic gesture Jesus sent toppling the all-too-familiar spatio-ritual touchstone of divine power and presence by reframing the concept of righteousness, as the prophets themselves had done, in terms of the ethics of mercy or what Emmanuel Levinas has formalized philosophically as “responsibility to the other.”  In the same gesture gave us a still inchoate insight into what globalization is all about.

As I stress in my upcoming book GloboChrist: The Great Commission Takes a Postmodern Turn (Baker Academic, 2008), the question of postmodern Christianity is not ultimately about the deconstruction of texts, or the critical unmasking and realignment of the signifying systems of authority and motivation.  Methodological iconoclasm, regardless of how many trendy European luminaries it can cite, is an honored “Protestant” habit of intellectual attention to both our theological legacy and the political and social issues of the day.   But it fails to comprehend the terrain of forces that are radically reshaping the very milieu in which pose our own pressing sorts of questions.  Globalization is much more than a Schumpeterian swath of “creative destruction” across the planet as the circulation of capital is rendered both borderless and stateless, while the value of labor in classical Marxian fashion deliquesces into an precedented and “hyperreal” (Baudrillard’s term) form of surplus value that can no longer even be managed or quantified, as the current crisis of international finance discloses.   As Paul Virilio in one of his more enigmatic, but highly insightful, quips tell us: “The speed of light does not merely transform the world.  It becomes the world.  Globalization is the speed of light.”

At we approach the speed of light time condenses and space contorts.  Globalization yields an instantaneity of both communications and relationships, a transcendence of the simply cultural and the merely social.  We do not live in strictly a postmodern world, but a “globopomo” world.  We live in the postmodern cosmopolis (comparable to the Romanitas of Paul’s epoch) where the civitas Dei and the civitas terrene are diffused together.   In the postmodern cosmopolis relationships are radically “deterritorialized” (Deleuze).  Postmodern Christianity is the “radical relationality” that the postmodern cosmopolis makes possible. 

As I stated in my last book on this subject (playing on Hegel), the “relational is real and the real is relational.”  This radical relationality is the immanent – perhaps we might even say “eschatological” – derivation of the Christian revelation itself, which at the ultimate level is neither a book (the Bible) nor a doctrinal proposition (“Jesus is truly God and truly human”) nor an ecstatic experience of the kind both esotericists and charismatics frequently reference.  The theological anchor for the “archae-ological” reality of the relational in the postmodern cosmopolis is the Johannine prologue itself, on which the doctrine of the incarnation (“the logos made flesh”) rests.  “And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth” (καὶ ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο καὶ ἐσκήνωσεν ἐν ἡμῖν, καὶ ἐθεασάμεθα τὴν δόξαν αὐτοῦ, δόξαν ὡς μονογενοῦς παρὰ πατρός, πλήρης χάριτος καὶ ἀληθείας. John 1:14).  

The “dwelling” or “tabernacling” of (Greek=σκήνεω) the divine among or with us is what makes the Christian revelation both radical and distinctive at the same time.  It distinguishes the Christian revelation from all other revelations.  The Being of the Christian God is inherently “with us” (Emmanuel) and “for us.”  As Luther put it, God is always für uns (“for us”).  Or in the language of Jean Luc Nancy, the Sein, the concrete reality of, God is not so much Dasein as a Mitsein that is at once Fürsein. 

In the global postmodern cosmopolis the “Great Commission” for Christians constitutes the enactment of Levinas’ “responsibility to the other,” insofar as the “paradoxical” signification contained in the concept of the Christian God necessitates that the “face” (Hebrew=pani) of the infinite present in the gaze of the finite other be regarded at the same time as a dynamic ethical relationship, the radical relationship to the “neighbor.”  The statement of a dynamic and radical relationality that also undergirds the “categorical imperative” of the Great Commission can be found in Luther’s famous statement from The Freedom of a Christian, the 1521 tract that encapsulates both the historical and the “new” postmodern Reformation: “as our heavenly Father has in Christ freely come to our aid, we also ought freely to help our neighbor through our body and its works, and each one should become as it were a Christ to the other that we may be Christs to one another and Christ may be the same in all, that is, that we may be truly Christians.”   

A "political theology" of the postmodern cosmopolis would adduce the question of a global social ethics (an "ethics of responsibility") from the incarnational "truth" of the Christian revelation. I argue that the nebula-like explosion and rhizomic spread of the new "indigenized" Christianity of the global South, documented and analyzed in the well-known work of historian Philip Jenkins and Yale theologian Lamin Sanneh, is because of this "globopomo" incarnational dimension of the faith that goes back to Jesus' own final words to his disciples.   I do not analyze the political forms of the new "globally emergent" Christianity (that is a subject for my next work of this sort) as I show the inadequacy and subtly "Eurocentric" myopia of the more familiar forms which are endlessly debated, sometimes even on this blog.   The choice is not between the old confessional Protestantism of the modern era (which in the decades following the Sixties became a kind of privatized, evangelical Gnosticism" tailored to the developing global consumer society) or the new Protean, "everything must change" sort of neo-Protestant (but equally consumeristic and Eurocentric) Christian eclecticism of  more familiar "postmodernist" discourse.   The dilemma is whether one goes on "shopping", intellectually as well as spiritually, among the many varieties of the stylishly configured (Western) "Christ of culture" or one responds in radical and reverent obedience to the one who summons us to "make disciples of all nations" - in other words, the GloboChrist who "draws us to him," the One whose kingdom is both in our midst ("God with us") and (soon) "to come" (avenir).  

Comments

[The Finally Simulated]

This would be all very interesting if it were not the case that the very relations between peoples that is the result of the space/time compression of globalisation is mediated and expressed only through the medium of money, that is ultimately an acid to all real human relationality. You may brush it aside, but it is a matter of historical record that globalisation is only the result of such money relations, rather than any cosy beliefs in the linking of nations by other means. Much handwaving regarding the Levinasian other and its relation to Christianity does to erase this fact.

What you seem to have missed is that the fluidity and permeability you embrace is nothing more or less than the mirror of capital, the capital which flows without end and border, destroying communities, places democracies under its abstract control, removes power from nation states. It is not something that Christianity should embrace, but declaim along with all rational people, not in the name of a reactionary localism, but in the name of its true universality, that is far from the flattened universality of capital merely a parody of. Capital that is incapable its absolute lack of differentiation, from differentiating between an short-term ecologically and socially destructive change and a less harmful long-term one, when the only principle of decision is the former yield a far greater profit.

[Spiegel]

Ah, yes, capital, capital everywhere, but not a bit of human decency to acknowledge. None of us can have a meaningful conversation because capital corrodes it. Ah, well. Das Kapital, the foolish boogie bear of the abstracted political romantic. Did you put your internet subscription to get into this blog on a credit card? Probably did.

[The Finally Simulated]

Well done Spiegel. Ignore the content of my posting, which I think was clear enough, and go straight for the sub witty comment. Did you have anything constructive to say to further the 'conversation'? Perhaps you would do better to challenge what I say that simply throw childish ya-boo insults at it. Here is a start: "Your history of globalisation is off. Nation states can still act with some degree of control over markets"...etc.

As for the abstracted romantic, I could apply this label far more to the text above than to Marx, who spent considerable time working with the empirical statistics and systems on the ground - his theory comes from Ricardo as much as Hegel. The only thing showing really is you ignorance. Who is the more abstracted romantic: the one thinking Marx might have something to say (not that I mentioned Marx in my post, of course, something you might have missed) or the person who ignores the proper constitution of globalisation for a Christianity glossed Derridian/Levinasian ethic divorced from any actually existing geo-political and economic reality? In fact your 'hilarious' point is actually more true than you realise, and goes further to firming my own point than another, in considering that without its political expression in the form of money, invested or otherwise, any ethic of the type the above text describes is utterly impotent - in short, it would need to cross into the sphere of economics you seem to think irrelevant to globalisation. Since under the current system the ethic will be never implemented until found profitable, it will most likely never occur.

[Joshua Brockway]

And alas we come to the problem with faceless communication, where words are typed and the computer shut off without any engagement with the humanness of our conversation partners.

Why is it that the argument of the post is dismissed with a flourish of deprecation and self aggrandizement? What is it about the conversations about Post-Modernism that gives license to such chest beating and demeaning of another? (See my exchanges with Eric Lee on a similar topic.) Somehow you both effectively shut down the conversation with quips about the ignorance of the other. Nice way to account for the critiques of any Post-colonial thinkers by seeing the "other" as infantile or sub-standard.

So, can we move on into a collegial discussion?

[The Finally Simulated]

I thought my point, although somewhat polemical, was surely worthy of some degree of discussion, at the risk of further self-aggrandizement. I was simply critiquing the core of problem, as it seems to me, about this paper, book and books like it.

When the paradigm is 'conversation', then if someone takes someone else to task then there will be this flurry of posts declaiming people who actually want to take the ideas by the scruff of the neck and rough them up a bit and actually get beyond liberal niceties. This is particularly important when the issues at hand - the perfect storm of global poverty, ecological destruction, rabid consumerism, capital fluxes and resource depletion - could not more pressing.

Yes, so, with no retraction, onwards to discussion.

[Carl R.]

It's too bad what I hoped was a serious discussion of globalization got off to this kind of rocky start, but I can't say I didn't expect it. The word "globalization" is one of those hot-button terms that by its very mention - sort of like "postmodernism" - evokes immediate visceral responses. I think "The Finally Simulated" has a point, namely, that trendy theological "conversations" tend to ignore the macro-factors that all play into how we take on these issues.

Derrida had an emerging and very interesting take - which I adapt in my new book - on the meaning of globalization, something which Derrideans themselves tend to shove over to the margins of their own peripheral vision. The book by Scholte which I reference in this post actually starts from a broad macro-analysis of the global economic field and the divergent and mingled "flows" of capital, commodity exchange, Baudrillardian "signs" that stimulate desire and guarantee desire, etc..

You can't talk about globalization, however, merely from the economic standpoint (on that point I believe I sympathize with Spiegel), nor merely from the religious standpoint (which is not what I'm actually saying in the book). You need to map a precise and articulated "kinetic grid" of forces.

Neo-liberalism (which is on the defensive worldwide, but was supreme in the 90s) mapped this grid in terms of the expansion of "free markets" and the unrestrained flow of trade and the deployment of stateless investment. Neo-Marxism (which is achieving a louder voice, but lacks a coherent theory) maps this grid in terms of ecological depradation and income inequality, which gives the lie to the cheery "end of history" view of the neo-liberals right after the collapse of Communism. And then there is the "Islamic revival" (read Islamism as a worldwide religio-political movement which Derrida recognized in "Faith and Knowledge") which has its own powerful vision (which is wrongly dismissed in the secular West by both conservatives - it's just "terrorists" - and by progressives - it's just collective anger at colonial exploitation.

One thing that is most interesting about the present world situation is that we indeed are in a "crisis of capitalism" for the first time, much like Marx predicted. The irony is that Marx's vision of history is taking on a certain credibility ironically when "Marxism" with its state actors has indeed not only vanished, but gone the other way. The fate of China is the most compelling irony of the twenty-first century (read the series in last week's THE ECONOMIST about China, "The New Colonialists.") One forgets, however, that Marx was not "anti-capital," though he was of course "anti-capitalist."

In the classical Marxian vision capital indeed had of necessity to inundate the earth - as it is now - so that expropriated labor would coalesce in "revolutionary" solidarity and seize the "means of production" (i.e., capital)for the sake of the working classes themselves. That "omega point" of history (the Marxian version of the "end of history"), of course, never seemed to arrive. A revolutionary seizing of the means of production at a territorial level has happened time and time again (the Russian Revolution of 1917,the Chinese Revolution of 1947, the Cuban Revolution of 1959, and to a certain extent Chavez' Venezuela), but the effect has been the opposite.

Most Western neo-Marxists (those influenced by Hardt and Negri) are now "cultural Marxists," meaning that they see revolution not as the seizure of capital (Marx's "expropriation of the expropriators") but as "resistance" to the power of capital itself and the adoption of lifestyles and ethics that constitute some sort of "moral" as well as "existential" form of protest. The stance is more in line with the "utopian socialists" of the 19th century, whom Marx himself had scorn for. He considered his "socialism" as "scientific" because it was based on a rational analysis of the historical forces leading to the opportune moment for the seizure of power. It was aimed at getting command of history, not withdrawing from it. I recognize that Hardt and Negri's notion of the "multitudes" seizing the global apparatus of capital for the glory of consumption follows the rhetoric of Marx, but it is in the old, Sixtyish Marcusean and neo-Bohemian school of liberating desire as the solvent of capital, something which just doesn't jibe with what is happening in the realm of political Islam and the Christianizing "global south." There liberation is more about collective identity in opposition to the "decadent" West.

The question I pose is whether Christians are primarily cultural "resistance fighters" (the contemporary version of Tertullian's "What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem"?) or engaged and savvy community activists who will take the Great Commission seriously, in a very concrete sense that combines the "spiritual" and eschatological vision of Jesus with the political experience and wisdom of on-the-ground organizers ("Be as wise as serpents and harmless as doves").

[Spiegel]

This blog is 'churchandpomo', no? If I'm trying to be a Christian in a very confusing and destructive world how will all these hip, hip analysis of capital, destruction of the environment, 'cultural Marxism' give me some kind a handle on how I react to the 'illegal immigrant' when I find him nearly dying of thirst in the desert? Isn't that what the parable of the good samaritan all about? Is all this what would Jesus do stuff now oldfashioned?

[The Finally Simulated]

> You can't talk about globalization, >however, merely from the economic standpoint >(on that point I believe I sympathize with >Spiegel), nor merely from the religious
>standpoint (which is not what I'm actually >saying in the book). You need to map a >precise and articulated "kinetic grid" of >forces.

I am not attempting to talk about it from a purely economic, that is to say, instrumental standpoint. It is precisely this grid of forces and signs that control desire, flows, that I am attempting to lay out. We must ask what underlies all of these, and is determinate, is money, and hence capital and in an extended sense economics.

My substantive earlier point was that these flows etc etc, that you describe above, are the mirror face of money itself. They cannot avoid economic analysis being the determinate, if this is the image of thought than one is using.

As for your confidence that neo-liberalism is on the defensive I need only to point to the case of France to show that it is hardly the case. As for China, the irony is not that they are becoming post-Communist, by they are employing the very measures of neo-liberalism to do so - that is the state as enabler of markets, the markets themselves derived from privatisation of previously publicly owned industries etc. This is hardly a crisis, but is rather business as usual. The cataclysm that would end capitalism in Marx is hardly present.

As for your assessment of Hardt and Negri as causing a merely cultural Marxism this could not be further from the truth - there are a move away from this cultural theory version to a more revolutionary register. While it certainly concerns itself with desire, it is not to be defined in the narrow sense of having no grip on

The Multitude finds and is precisely the on the ground resistance, enabled by the machinery of capital (for example, the internet) but subversive to it. Its not so much about desire as all that. This is is why Negri has spent time in jail for his trouble. Admittedly, the concept of the Multitude recasts the Marxian notion of class in a different manner, but it is linked very much to the classical socialist materialist analysis of history, as opposed to Derrida's followers often abstract and philosophically idealist. While it may play on Deleuzian notions of desire, these too are throughly immanentised. One would have thought, with its Augustinian leanings that this may have formed your thoughts on this matter.

This is, of course, precisely what is represented by the global south. For example, one could cite Chavez' Venezuela as an example of climbing up upon the forces of global capital (oil reserves - absolutely vital and running down) to enable the poor to be liberated. See also Indymedia type operations, The Battle of Seattle etc. Indeed, could not even the most concerning aspects of Islamic resistance to the West, Al-Quaeda been seen as absolutely this analysis, given their predication for use of the internet and sponsorship of nation states (of course, not Iran or Iraq) - though this is obviously over simplistic (as is the characterisation of "political Islam" which there are many variants).

They are not utopian socialists, although it may seem that they are for someone who has never entertained the serious potentially of the overthrow of the currently existing global economic order. Utopian socialists did not engage in mere strategies of resistance, but attempted to found communities also. Marx's problem was that Utopian socialism was overly in the service of the ruling classes and performed a similar function to religion in this regard. If anything it is the Levinasian/Derridian school that promote stratergies of resistance, whereas Hardt and Negri ground themselves in analysis of material processes like the above described.

Regardless of this, it seems a proper discussion might emerge which is excellent.

In response to Spiegel I paraphrase Dorothy Day. If I give a man a cup of water I am called a good Christian, but if I ask why the man is thirsty I am called a Communist and declaimed. In this case, and on this board, the latter question is met with "why do we have to be so obscure and pomo - this is really bad etc etc".

The point being, this hip, hip analysis of capital might help us understand how we might create a world where less people are thirsty. There is nothing stopping you feeding the poor etc, but we must ask why the poor have no food in the first place.

[The Finally Simulated]

And is the concept of The Multitude precisely not about collectivity?

I should clarify that I think you are right in the sense that adoption of certain lifestyles as resistance, which remains within the system of capital and the power of the ruling class (its just another thing to buy), and is hence analogous to Marxist condemnation of utopian socialists, but I do not lay the blame at the door of Hardt and Negri for this, or neo-Marxism in fact. I lay it partly at the door at good olde deconstructive liberals.

[Spiegel]

Da,Simulated, so for the good of conversation can you really, really 'help us understand how we might create a world where less people are thirsty?' What do I have to do other than I'm doing to create such a world? Do I have to read a lot more Deleuze? Should I be shipping copies of Deleuze's books to Zambia instead of Bibles? Are you a Christian in any sense of the term. I won't be judgmental. I'll let you define yourself however you want.

[Jason Hesiak]

Well this has been entertaining.

Outside of the heated argument over "deconstructive liberalism" and capitalism and such, I am reminded of McLuhan's comments (can't think of where, its here and there and everywhere) on the fact that the Incarnation and its power utterly changed the face of history...and is/was ultimately...what he refers to as a "force" if I remember right...that brings the entire globe together in a way that would have never been possible previously. If find it interesting that McLuhan is hovering around similar issues and that for him it all points ultimately to the Incarnation. Speaking of immanence.

PEACE!

Jason

[The Finally Simulated]

I am not stating that I have any final answers or fully met practical solutions to problems of world poverty and hunger. But what solutions might emerge would most probably come from careful economic and geo-political understanding first. So in short, yes you might well have to read and understand quite a bit of Deleuze, or any number of political theorists and critical economists. What alternative, precisely, are you suggesting? That we don't understand the situation and blindly go in with ignorance. Though I disagree with his analyses, this is at least what the above author is attempting to do.

The answer to your last question is yes I am, but what relevance that has to your point is somewhat questionable, other than to shure up your own confidence that you are right and that if I were not a Christian then these analyses might be summarily dismissed. As a rhetorical tactic it is perfect for destroying any person who does not have any backbone and probably plays well in evangelical circles to reign people back into your narrowly defined orthodoxy, but some of us are made of stronger stuff.

I suppose what you are trying to intimate is that the Bible is the only resource one needs or some such evangelical platitude and that I am privileging the analyses of a philosopher over it? On the contrary, we can only place into motion the demands of the Gospel narratives and the subsequent Christian tradition once we understand the world as it is. Therefore these philosophers are entirely necessary, and I think the most perceptive of any facet of the Christian tradition would agree.

[The Finally Simulated]

And in future, rather than launch into a pietistic ad hominem, perhaps you could consider what I am actually saying and respond to that with some substantive arguments?

[Joshua Brockway]

I think this discussion is precisely the conversation the Church must have. That is why Day's comment is exactly on point. If we are to ask the pointed question of Christianity and its relation to the poor, suffering, and thirsty we have to ask how the Church relates to the both economic and idealist structures (not to mention the government). I think the profound truth that Christianity offers to both Marx and Derrida is the incarnation. In other words that one cannot divorce the ideas from the material (almost in a Chalcedonian sense, where the two are present at once). The precise place of intersection is, then, in the human person. Hence ethics should never be distinct from the expectations of "conversion." In fact ethics is the exact category for much of what we are talking about, where the rubber meets the road, or ideal the material.

[Jason Hesiak]

Oh that reminds me...I forgot to mention...part of McLuhan's comment was also about the identity and metaphysical make-up of the human being. It wasn't just about history and globalization. Which I would think would be obvious considering its McLuhan. But I just wanted to clarify.

[Joshua Brockway]

Jason,

Is there a particular title you (or others)would recommend by McLuhan. This is what happens when a Church Historian jumps into the Post-anything conversation...I just don't know the breadth of the corpus!

[Jason Hesiak]

Josh,

Well if you are asking for a title that would most likely contain my referenced comment about the Incarnation, I would go with "The Medium and The Light." Which is really a collection of essays, letters and interviews on by or of McLuhan on religion and its relation to his "communications" theories. And I recommend that title in that regard only because that's the one I've been reading most recently, and I remember his mentioning it there.

If you are looking for that one McLuhan book of all McLuhan books to read...I just don't know. I have yet to read The Gutenberg Galaxy, although it is sitting on my shelf. I have only barely opened The Mechanical Bride (although it was a good opening). I have read much of probably his most famous work - Understanding Media, and it is very good (as far as I'm concened). Then there is of course "the medium is the massage," which can be read rather quickly (like between getting off work and eating dinner...at least almost).

Although...and I say this tongue in cheek :)...some would probably say to go to Deleuze for McLuhan :)) Although that would not be my recommendation. Then suddenly the Incarnation is about God's "desire" to be with us (which I hear all the time, actually :)

Thanks,

Jason

[Jason Hesiak]

Now that I think about it McLuhan would probably be annoyed at the idea of "that one McLuhan book of all McLuhan books to read." He himself gave a copy of one of his books or other (I think Understanding Media) to a friend (I think a member of the "media"), and told him to "jump and skip around. All of it says the same thing anyway." And he himself also said that he never knew what he was going to say before he said it. Which indicates to me that he wasn't trying to encompass anything. Which means there is no "McLuhan book of all McLuhan books."

One additional note...I was reminded of a particular scripture when I read both this original blog post (beofre I got to the comments) and McLuhan's commentary on the Incarnation's role in history (and how it effects/effected our idea of who we are as human beings)...

I happen to think that the keys to all this ideal/practical/economical/"immanence" conversation are found in Revelations 12: 5-13: "12"For this reason, rejoice, O heavens and you who dwell in them. Woe to the earth and the sea, because the devil has come down to you, having great wrath, knowing that he has only a short time." It is notable to me that, in that series of verses - "arehe-ologically" you might say - the birth of Christ preceeds that scripture.

[Carl R.]

I appreciate the way in which Jason and Josh have steered this conversation. In fact, the thrust of my book is about what it means to be "incarnational" in a global sense. There is a profound difference between a Christianity - and a Christian politics for that matter - which is "idealistic" and one that is incarnational. Incarnational Christianity is not "touchy-feely" do-goodism. It is not about "waving a flag" for Jesus. An incarnational Christianity has to be tough-minded, analytical, patient, and realistic. But it can't be simply an ongoing "critique of domination." It always involves, as Levinas would say, the "face to face," the ethical gesture of responsibility to the other, even the etranger. Sometimes this ethical gesture is extremely messy, risky, and awkward, if not in the short run politically ineffective, though it categorically must be taken.

I've been reading Panayiotis Nellas, a contemporary Eastern orthodox thinker, on the incarnation. The orthodox often get the incarnation in way that we "globo-Latinists" (Derrida's term) don't. "Christ has...renewed within His flesh the specific mode of functioning of the human person. He has recreated not only the cosmological but also the anthropological structures...The Creator of the ages has clothed Himself in human flesh, uniting to Himself the nature of man. By this union He channeled the life of God into the human nature which he assumed, renewed it and spiritualized it...The saint becomes a 'likeness of Christ.'"

Trotsky had this concept of "permanent revolution." Perhaps ours is a "permanent incarnation." The incarnation is not simply a spectacle to behold or meditate upon in the act of communion, nor is it a theological conundrum that perennially teases out the "Jew-Greek" conundrum in our thinking. The incarnation is a permanent injunction to get "down and dirty" in a miscellany of different senses.

"When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his throne in heavenly glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left. Then the King will say to those on his right, 'Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.' Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?' The King will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.' Then he will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.'" (Matthew 25:31-43).

[The Finally Simulated]

This is all fine - clearly one of Christianity's great spiritual innovation, which draws through politically, is the incarnation - as someone like Chesterton clearly understood - indeed, it is the incarnation that informed his distributist economics as it did the politics of someone like Sergei Bulgakov. Yet with its "analytical, patient, and realistic" spirit you surely need to get the geopolitics and economics right, which you seemingly have failed to do, and failed to argue about.

[Joshua Brockway]

Finally Simulated said: "clearly one of Christianity's great spiritual innovation, which draws through politically."

I think this still divides the two elements, the spiritual and the ethical, too cleanly. Hence my comment that this should be understood in Chalcedonian terms. From my perspective it seems like the Church, as in the thinking of Yoder and Hauerwas, ought to get its own ideal/ethic practice right and live it within the world. Why care so much about the way the world worked it out anyways, it clearly doesn't do economics or ethics right, especially as is seen in the case of the thirsty and hungry as was noted above. (See Hauerwas' After Christendom where he makes interesting use both of Cyprian's "Salus extra Ecclesiam non est" and de Certeau's tactics and strategies to descibe the Church's political life within a world that can no longer be described as Christendom.)

So my question for you is what would getting the "geopolitics and economics right" look like, especially in terms of the Church? I get that you find this absent from the primary post, now construct what it would look like.

[Sarah]

I have been reading this blog for about six months now, because I miss the academic discourse around theology, philosophy, and the work of the church. Many of these postings I find are very engaging, and to some extent all point to similar visions of the world that I hold close.

After reading the comments on this particular post, I realized that one of the areas of life that I see rarely shared here is that of the social and cultural. Not that they do not enter in here and there or connect to these conversations, but I am curious as to how the participants of this blog are able to live incarnationally in the world.

It would be greatly helpful for me to read accounts that weave in the analysis along with personal stories of how folks have experienced their ponderings in the day to day. I greatly enjoy the rigorous discourse, but I too need tangible visions of where this discourse takes us daily.

Maybe this blog was not initially for such discussion, but I find it just as important and could possible bring another layer to the conversation.

[Geoff Holsclaw]

While globalization can't be reduced to economics, I too feel that 'flows of capital' should not be so easily dismissed in our analysis of the "church and postmodern culture" as we call it here. I say this because 'money' is the neglected religion, or might I say metaphysical doctrine, around which much of the world of power works.

Also, much is made of the opposition between 'resistance' and 'revolution', between guerrila tacits of resistance and frontal revolutions, and the theoreticl polemics between camps (i.e. whether Negri is merely an extension of cultural marxism in the form of resistance, or rather a revolutionary via the multitude).

For me, we have to build another society within the dying carcass of this old one (call it resistance or revolution).

So along with sarah's suggestions, here are some stories:
1) our family buys milk/meat from an organic dairy in Michigan and we get our veggies from a local community supported farm. We do this both to support the local economy and to eat foods that are health and don't rape the earth.
2) We make some of our own clothes and we buy second hand. And when we buy new clothes we aim for fair-trade/sweatshop free by boycotting many brands. On top of this, our church shares and passes along innumerable amounts of children's clothing. We do this because we don't want to support the global exploitation of labor.
3) We, along with several families in our church, choose to live with other families instead of pursuing the American Dream of single-family detached housing.

Why do we do these things? A combination of reading my bible, learning theology, learning about economics (via Marx and others), reading philosophy (Žižek, Badiou, Negri, Agamben, Derrida, Heidegger...), and being convicted by the Spirit.

For Spiegel, I guess I would say that if you don't want to or can't read these things then find someone you trust and them what to do. And it is perfectly alright to do this. (I don't know how to fix my sink, but someone in my church and he fixed it for me. I could have spent hours reading books on plumbing and then figured it out, but I didn't. And that's OK). But for those call to minister and lead in all levels of the church, we probably should read all this stuff and come up with a reasonable judgment and some practical options.

[Joel A. Eaton]

Some American communities (http://www.schumachersociety.org/) have gone as far as making a local currency. Have any of you read E. F. Schumacher on economics?

[Geoff Holsclaw]

Joel,

I haven't heard of E. F. Schumacher. But I have heard local currency, espectially "local exchange trading systems" (LETS for short) inspired by Micheal Linton (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LETS).

I'm glad you brought them up b/c I think that a deep analysis of current economies coupled with a concern for justice and sustainability will move toward local/productive economies rather than global/consumptive economies.

But I was add, and this is the great contribution of the Church (although rare actualized), living in Grace is already an alternative economy (of plenitude) where we give without necessitating a return. two exmples: caring for another family's children without getting payed for it (notice I say 'caring' not merely 'watching'); or, on a larger scale, buying homes together or for other people who can't afford to.

[Carl Raschke]

Hi everyone. I use Wednesday and Thursday to do all my traveling and teaching, and am back. The discussion seems to have gone in some interesting directions since Tuesday night, and I wanted to return to Hardt and Negri, where the "debate began." I really don't think there's any "dialectical" conflict here between the different positions and queries that have been thrown out, but there are clear tensions. Hardt and Negri are not necessarily or economic determinists or "materialists" in the conventional sense of the world. They see the "disciplinary regime" of global production/consumption as equally constitutive as the postmodern etherealization of accumulation("capital", or more specifically, finance capital). These disciplinary regimes belong to what Lacan calls the "symbolic order," and religious beliefs and theological discourses belong to that order.

Hardt and Negri envision a global revolution through the mobilization of the creative powers of the "multitudes" with "the discovery of the fullness of the plane of immanence." (EMPIRE, p. 73). Such a revolution would purportedly overthrow the disciplinary regimes that are the power of "empire". The virtue of this argument is that it follows the classical Marxist argument that we must have globalization of the "alienated" constituents of production/consumption - the global conditions that make revolution "ripe" - before we can talk about any form of genuine liberation. H&N call this the "ontological" condition of revolution.

Along these lines H&N are highly critical of "localists", who want to resist globalization, as any revolutionary "internationalist" would be. H&N see the symbol-producers of the world as the new "internationale." Thus they are the high-water mark and consummation of cultural Marxism. They want to keep the globalist logic of classical Marxism without the classicla proleteriat. Localists, or what Scholte terms "rejectionists" (small as beautiful "opt-outers", for example) are utopian.

Now let's look at Christianity. The problem I have with H&N is that as cultural Marxists they do not recognize the depth of their own "classism," i.e., the privileging of the academic elite and "creative types" of the world. There is a reason this sort of thing is laughed at in the global south. But Christianity is not. It indeed is embraced, often as a "revolution" against the disciplinary regimes of the old authoritarian (including Marxist) elites.

H&N want revolution to happen at the plane of immanence. However, they don't understand immanence. They see it primarily in old Reichean and Marcusean terms as the "desublimation" of the disciplines of capitalist asceticism. They laud all revolutions of "pure immanence". In the context of the global south this "liberation" is the opposite for the "multitudes" (we don't talk about "masses" any more). Hence we have the great growing re-regimentation of desire (under the dark sign of "sexual liberation") that is devastating the developing world - human trafficking and sexual slavery.

Incarnation is the divine activation in its full revolutionary potential of the "plane of immanence." The logos become flesh in its radical relational and rhizomic dimensions (Christian activism) reveals that the creative powers of the multitudes can only be actualized through the divine in-filling of dynamic social and historical processes. It is not about "fleeing Babylon" but rebuilding Jerusalem. The revolution is not one of "immaterial labor" (H&N's term). Tell that to an African peasant farmer or a Sri Lankan fisherman. This "permanent incarnation" where radically relational and revolutionary Christianity ("incarnational Christianity") brings down "empire" just as it did in the first four centuries. That is the the world-historical dynamism of the living "GloboChrist".

Sara, I think you are a true revolutionary.

[Jason Barr]

Unfortunately, I've no time for a substantial engagement with the comments on this posting so far - so it's all too likely my comment will be far more shallow than I would like.

Geoff - I highly recommend checking out E.F. Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful. In many ways it's a masterpiece of alternative, practically anarchic, economic thinking.

Josh - At the risk of recommending a "McLuhan of all McLuhans" book, you might be interested in Paul Levinson's Digital McLuhan particularly because he explores lines of continuity in McLuhan's thought that (some of which) have not been adequately explored by post-McLuhan media theorists and the relation between those lines of thought and the advent of the digital world. That being said, I think Levinson fails to grasp a number of ways in which the digital world essentially (though not simply) replicates certain aspects of the flesh-and-blood world. danah boyd's discussion of the online replication of offline social classes is one example - though this is certainly not to say Levinson is inadequate as an interpreter of McLuhan for the digital culture.

Regarding the sort of wider discussion about capital and globalization, I agree that any discussion of globalization that does not at least consider the implications of capitalism and (possibly) the nature of capital itself is deficient.

With "The Finally Simulated" I agree that it is probably a mistake to view neoliberalism as in decline. At best I think it's taken a bit of a breather to try and work up a good head of steam in the near future. While I have virtually no faith in American partisan politics to enact substantial change in the world in a manner consonant with the Christian hope, it is nevertheless entirely possible that whoever wins the Presidential election this fall will have a significant effect over how neoliberalism recalibrates itself (as if it were a monolithic entity with self-aware consciousness) and attempts to move forward in the future. Indeed, to say it's taking a breather may be a bit too much - there is a fundamental sense in which neoconservatism may really be neoliberalism in military-imperial clothing. For an excellent eye-opening exposition on the neoconservative "free trade by force" policy at work in Iraq, see Antonia Juhasz' The Bush Agenda: Invading the World One Economy at a Time. One cannot help but see quite basic similarities between the end goals of both neoconservatism and neoliberalism - which should not surprise us if we accept the "postmodern" claim that 20th-century "liberalism" and "conservativism" are largely two sides of the same coin, based on classic liberal presuppositions.

Regarding the fundamental nature of capital itself and its relation to globalization... my thoughts on the matter are somewhat nebulous. On the one hand, capital is perhaps the transaction medium par excellence precisely because of its ability to be (in theory) converted to and from anything into anything else. The liquidity inherent to the term "liquid asset" insures that it can seep, flood, or in some in-between way get through political and social barriers in order to convert cultural and other types of capital (see how pervasive is the economic metaphor!) into currency, which then becomes capital, which then... and so on.

Derrick Jensen says "[The] conversion from living trees to lumber, schools of cod to fish sticks, and onward to numbers on a ledger, is the central process of our economic system." This conversion is related to various modern assumptions that are too numerous for me to cover here - but perhaps the most fundamental for the purpose of this discussion is the assumption that desire is fundamentally to provide something which the desiring person lacks. If we take seriously the Augustinian notion that desire will manifest itself either in an Orthodox or in an idolatrous direction, then perhaps we should pose as Christians that authentic desire is not for that which is lacked, which culminates in a destructive desire that seeks to fill the void within with something that is created and thus by definition less than God, but rather as desire for the overabundant givenness of God which not only satisfies desire but fills the human person in such a way that s/he enters into a community whose fundamental structure is not based on idolatrous desire and fundamentally nihilistic emptiness, but on abundance and the gifting of self to others in order to imitate and participate in God's very givenness.

When viewed this way, it seems to me that a crucial vision Christians must access in the emerging world is of the fundamentally opposite trajectories of the Christian hope and of the capitalist creed of the "rising tide of globalization lifting all boats" - and not just responding to it by building boats for those who have none and are threatened with drowning in the flood (the totalizing aspect of globalization not bothering to check first to see whether all people involved HAVE boats) but by creating in the world through participation in God's givenness an alternate economy that enables people to stay out of the water, to belabor the metaphor a bit.

That is not to oversimplify and say an easy distinction can be made between categories of desire and the manifestations of those desires in a complex world and even in the complexities of single individuals and of communities - as a Dooyeweerdian thinker might say, we ought to consider ways that the fundamental structure of desire might be so ingrained into the created-ness of human beings that it becomes difficult to discern the difference, in the real world, between redeemed and reprobate desires, and at the same time we ought to recognize that actions based on desire grounded in good intention might have adverse consequences for numerous, complex reasons.

If I had more space I'd like to discuss Bruno Latour and some ways I think his conceptualization of modernity as primarily a mode (or aggregation of modes) of analysis could be helpful in our task, but a) my thoughts along that line are not concrete enough to be worth sharing and b) this comment is already way, way too friggin' long.

Shalom,
Jason

[Geoff Holsclaw]

jason,
i love it. thanks for the great comment.

[Anthony Paul Smith]

Dr. Raschke,

Cultural Marxists (you do know that Negri himself fought against Marxist elites in Italy, right?)? It seems that you haven't understood the meaning of immaterial labour. Or what a "creative type" is for Hardt and Negri. For instance the example they use the most is the Zapatista rebellion. The rebellion has used information as a way of protecting themselves from the Mexican government. They use the techniques of theater in the first armed part of the conflict (some Zapatistas had toy guns) and stories to get out their message. No one is questioning that material labour still occurs, Hardt and Negri are very clear on that, it is a question of which kind of labour is determinate on the global situation for revolution. This is no different from Marx's analysis of industrial labour. Of course he didn't deny that people were still farming! That wasn't the point.

Hardt and Negri also quite clearly come out against the misnomer of "sexual liberation". It's in the book.

Now, I have to ask, since you fault Hardt and Negri with classism, who are you hoping will read this book? Do you think the fisherman will have time to? It seems to me that this book, like all Emergent Church books, will be read by a bunch of white people trying to convince themselves that their beliefs are relevant and revolutionary. Which I get! I do! But I fear we're not being honest with ourselves and failing to do rigorous academic work. (And we are academics. Perhaps we need to accept and forgive that rather than ignore it.)