the church and postmodern culture: conversation

Conference: "Teaching, Learning, and Christian Practices"

In October, my colleague David Smith and I will be hosting a conference exploring how Christian practices might inform the educational project (broadly understood).  Given that this intuition resonates, I think, with some discussions that traffic under the "postmodern" banner, I thought I'd share information about the conference here.  Do consider attending!

Teaching, Learning, and Christian Practices

October 29 - 31, 2009
Prince Conference Center at Calvin College
Grand Rapids, Michigan

Hosted and sponsored by the Kuyers Institute for Christian Teaching and Learning

There have been substantial theological discussions in recent years concerning the nature and significance of Christian practices such as hospitality, Sabbath-keeping, forgiveness, intentional community, healing, prayer, worship, liturgy, spiritual reading, and so on—emphasizing that faith is not reducible to a mere system of ideas and beliefs. There has also been significant discussion in the world of education regarding the nature of educational practice, and of teaching and learning settings as communities of practice. The Kuyers Institute for Christian Teaching and Learning will host a conference in October 2009 that seeks to address the intersection between these discussions, asking how Christian practices illuminate, challenge, or contribute to Christian teaching and learning.

Keynote Speakers: Paul Griffiths (Duke Divinity School) and Rebecca DeYoung (Calvin College)

For more information, including a complete schedule and registration details, visit http://www.calvin.edu/scs/2009/Conferences/Kuyers/

Vanity: a position of last resort

(A Preliminary Consideration)

          Assuming that advent is essentially “impossible” (in that its possibility lies outside of the categories of experience), I am interested in attempting to describe the last intentional position or posture human being can take in seeking the divine. I would like to propose that vanity is just such a posture, a position of last resort. From the perspective of vanity, humanity moves from its easy habitation of the possible and into the difficulty of dwelling in openness to “something else,” i.e. that which is impossible, divine advent. Vanity is recommended to us in this regard from several sources: scripture, philosophy, and the history of Christian practice. However, before undertaking an analysis of vanity’s potential as a religious posture, it is necessary to supply a preliminary definition of the term.

            The biblical book of Ecclesiastes serves as a fitting introduction to vanity. Ecclesiastes’ place in the cannon of biblical literature is illustrative of its central theme; it is an anti-wisdom book. Traditional wisdom books, like Proverbs, present universal truths as suggested by specific observations from daily experience. For example, “As a dog returns to its vomit, so a fool repeats his folly.” (Proverbs 26:11)  The form typically calls the reader to survey an particular instance from which a universal, moral principle will be drawn. Ecclesiastes however, is a book about exceptions. It reads as a ledger of examples in which experience does not add up, leaving our best intentions to fall short. Therefore, Ecclesiastes delivers a single judgment: vanity.

            The word “vanity” is an interesting one. In English, the most common meaning of vanity is excessive pride or egotism. While this is not the meaning intended by the author of Ecclesiastes, the ambiguity is helpful as the text is driving at crisis of human agency which in the end is nothing less than a criticism of the autarkic self. In his book, A Time to Tear Down and a Time to Build Up: A Rereading of Ecclesiastes, Michael Fox concludes his analysis of the term (hebel) by correlating it closely with “absurdity” as employed by the existentialist philosopher Albert Camus. ^[1] According to Fox, vanity is best categorized as an irrational disconnect between cause and effect which results in indifference (Fox, 30). In making the correlation between absurdity (in Camus) and vanity, Fox suggests that vanity is a disappointment with the expectation of order and a criticism of the human ability to bring order about. When the ability to reasonably predict outcomes is challenged, the result is indifference toward worldly circumstances.

            Jean-Luc Marion employs the term similarly to Fox in his philosophical work. Because it renders all difference indifferent, vanity denies human being its means of orientation in the world.[2] In this way, vanity is not an objective observation, but rather a subjective judgment; circumstances are not absurd, as much as the human position in relation to them is absurd (Fox, 31). In his later work, Marion accurately voices the accusation of vanity with the insistent question, “What’s the use?”^[3] The thread of meaning that connects human beings to the world is frayed to the breaking point by vanity. Fox writes, “When the belief in a grand casual order collapses, human reason and self-confidence fail with it.” (Fox, 49). In this way, vanity criticizes the autarkic self as futile.

            In taking “all” under its indictment, Marion finds that vanity encompasses a “tearing away” or separation from the worldly “spectacle.” (Marion, 119) Fox agrees with this assessment, describing “vanity” as a disappointment with the world as such, i.e., existence as a whole (Fox, 32). Fox comments that Ecclesiastes presents the absurdity of vanity as an “alienation from the observed world; a distancing of the observer from the event; alienation of the observer from the self.” (Fox, 31) As a subversion of the human relationship with the world, vanity represents a separation of humans from the world. It follows that vanity establishes an exteriority. Yet here Marion makes a careful distinction. The judgment of vanity is not directed at what-is or even a sum of things that-are. Rather, vanity takes aim at the world as creation (Marion, GWB, 121-122).           

            Introducing creation at this point in his interpretation, Marion suggests that the world is a limit that can be exceeded; the concept of creation circumscribes the world, but at the same time it represents an extension beyond the world’s horizon (Marion, 109). According to Marion then, vanity does not have the last word on creation, merely the first word; the idea of creation in excess of the world enters our vocabulary by way of vanity. In this way, creation provides the “space” in which the distance of vanity can be thought. In turn, vanity offers an exterior view of the world as creation.

            Further, if vanity addresses a concept of creation, then it implies the idea of a creator. Fox agrees, finding that the totality of the conclusion “all is vanity” is aimed ultimately at God (Fox, 49). The exterior quality of the totalizing pronouncement of vanity assumes an other-worldly perspective: not simply distance, but a distinctly different viewpoint (Marion 128-129). Marion writes, “The black light of vanity already testifies to the fact that another sun can light the totality; that this other sun should render any novelty in this world unthinkable attests already that this world admits an outside.” (Marion 122-123) Vanity glimpses a glint of another light in its view of creation. While the indifference of vanity cannot admit divine advent, it peripherally presents the possibility as an alternative.

            As read by Fox and Marion, vanity describes a separation of the human self from the context of the world. Having experienced this separation from the world, the self gains an indifference toward the world. From this distance emerges the potential to readdress the identity of the human self. Therefore, I propose that vanity, as described above, is a figure of separation from the world (a perspective on the world) which predicates the turn from that which is possible to the impossibility of divine advent.

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[1] Michael V. Fox, A Time to Tear Down and a Time to Build Up: A Rereading of Ecclesiastes (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 30.

[2] Jean-Luc Marion, God without Being (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 122.

[3] This phrase appears in The Erotic Phenomenon.  Jean-Luc Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, trans. Stephen Lewis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

Ernst Bloch's Atheism in Christianity: A Review

The following review of Ernst Bloch's Atheism in Christianity comes to us from Dr. William Keenan, who is Senior Lecturer in Sociology in the School of Social Sciences, Nottingham Trent University. He has published extensively on aspects of culture and beliefs and is currently engaged in research projects on atheism and on art.

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Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom
Ernst Bloch
With an Introduction by Peter Thompson
Translated by J. T. Swann
2009 (July)
288 pages
ISBN: 978 1 84467 394 0 Ppk
Price: £14.99
ISBN: 978 1 84467 371 1 Hbk
Price: £55.00

Since its original publication in 1968, Ernst Bloch's Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom has been the book to deal with by any serious quester after knowledge of the deep symbiotic relationship between those über-'Others', Christianity and Atheism. As an unabashed utopian Marxist thinker, Bloch (1885 - 1977) eschews that 'excess of hyper-rationalism or dogmatic materialism' his more prosaic atheist stable mates generally bring to discussions of religion. In the words of Peter Thompson, Director of the Centre for Ernst Bloch Studies at the University of Sheffield, in his excellent Introduction to this long unavailable classic, 'Ernst Bloch and the Quantum Mechanics of Hope' (i – xxx, i):

(R)eligion as both debate and way of life has not crumbled in the face of an apparently inexorable rationalist, scientific, modernising Enlightenment and the globalisation of the market economy, but retains a potency and strength which remains far in excess of its ability to explain.

Bloch himself rubbed shoulders with that unique coterie of enlightened radical Marxists - Brecht, Adorno, Benjamin, for example. Perhaps we have the embryo of some such today in Eagleton, Badiou, Žižek, Habermas and others for whom religion-averse aggressive sorts of atheistic fundamentalism are as intellectually uncongenial as the 'exclusively modern phenomenon' (Habermas 2001: 10) of their religion counterparts. Marx's own dialectical understanding of religiosity, captured well in his open-minded insight into 'the opium of the masses, the heart of the heartless world' pervades Bloch's 'detective work', as he himself called it, on the emancipatory – for which, read 'heretical', a favourite Blochian trope – potential within Christianity. Bloch's exegesis of the Bible is an insider's hermeneutic, unlike that verstehen-free religion-cynical spleen of Hitchens, Dawkins, Gray and other high priests of resurgent Darwinism.

For Bloch, scripture is soaked through with hope-filled narratives of transgression that challenge the cold moralistic pieties and hot consumer excessess of the modern world driven by the Puritan ethic and its capitalist manifestations. Not only were Amos, Jeremiah and the psalmists of yore wont to sound war trumpets against greed and godlessness, Christ's life was a continual battle against systematic brutalization, exploitation and hubris, whether incarnated in, for instance, temple-franchised money lenders, pharasaical pride, or denial of the human rights of widows, prostitutes, lepers and the anawim of the earth. Before liberation theology, Bloch was. Before feminists picked up the revolution power in the peasant girl Mary's prayer, the Magnificat, with its promise that the Almighty will 'cast down the mighty from their seats … exalt the humble … send the rich away empty', Bloch was affirming the capacity, inbuilt within humanity since the Creation, to create Kingdom-life now, on earth.

As a thought mode, atheism is commonly understood to be radically different in domain assumptions from 'religion'. '(C)ompeting caliphates', Peter Thompson calls them (xiv). Bloch's approach is deeply imbued with his strong humanistic Marxist conviction that dogmatic forms of both atheism and church-orientated Christianity simply talk past each other in a dialogue of the deaf. His 'utopia of the light', as Bloch refers to it (p. 231), is, to borrow a Habermasian expresison, the 'ideal speech community' of the Enlightenment, not in the 'half-baked' (p. 7) compromised version found in 'rationalistic bourgeoise' (p. 8) contexts that fall short of his messianic vision of full-blooded participatory democracy in which all voices, including religious ones, might be heard and respected. He writes (p. 10): 'The Enlightenment, therefore, will be all the more radical when it does not pour equal scorn on the Bible's all-pervading healthy insight into man.'

Setting aside the somewhat outmoded sexist language in Bloch's expression here and leaving the matter of biblical 'health' to one side, an 'Amen' to that tolerant sentiment seems theologically and politically appropriate when pursuing a sense of atheism in a multi-faith world that would not take the form of an anti-religious knee-jerk reflex. Nevertheless, as we might expect of a believer but not a belonger, Bloch's nuanced analysis imports a pervasive anti-institutional religion refrain: 'the Church is the institution least founded on enlightenment' (p. 9). Bloch's desire for a 'processual' approach to the 'end of alienation', in critique of the 'programmatic' emphases of Heidegger, Bultmann and Barth, is to see 'an end to static metaphysics' (p.54). Writing in 1968, significantly enough, he remains pretty much silent on how the institutionalization of such logocentrism within anti-utopian – read, hope-less – forms of life wherever they be found are to be effectively contested.

Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom is a tough read, made so by the author's intellectual capaciousness and capacity to range cavalierly between the languages of theology, philosophy and critical theory of his times. Perhaps discursive modes, even thought styles, have moved on apace since the post-war period in which Bloch embarked on his courageous adventure to put the best fruits of Christianity and Marxism in the same basket. Though an Index would have been a useful resource in a book of such range and intricacy, the republication of this sparkling study is timely and sure to launch a new wave of interest in bridge-building – or bridge-destruction - either side of the religion-atheism gulf war. Bloch's approach is literary, elusive, lyrical and, at times, a tad, it must be said, lugubrious and long-winded. He does not provide a clear map of a road to reconciliation between Atheism and Christianity, the two great roaring beasts of the modern jungle. But that is not Bloch's intention in any case. Nor does his book necessarly help us re-examine the role of Marxism in the postmodern era. As a 'classic' it is too time bound for that. We need to read it in context. It maybe a tract more for its times than ours.

We do, however, obtain from the book what is of lasting value, namely, a sense that if we look for it we can rediscover within either of the caliphates of religion and atheism redemptive illumination and empowerment. Taken together, as Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom reaches out to do, there is potential for a new world in the making. This is a richly evocative, demanding book to think with about massively important matters at the heart of human culture. In a characteristic Blochian Christo-Marxian, therefore fully, radically dialectical, sentiment (Bloch 2009, p. 166):

(T)here seems to be quite as much love here for the oppressed as there is justice for the evil-doers and salvation for those who have been freed … the same apocalyptic light which shines with anger on the wicked also lights the way to the wedding feast of the elect.

In his novel The Enchantress of Florence, Salman Rushdie (2009: 55) has an interesting, ironic take on atheistic colonialization:

'If you were an atheist, Birbal, the emperor challenged his first minister, 'what would you say to the true believers of all the great relgions of the world?' Birbal was a devout Brahmin from Trivikrampur, but he answered unhesitatingly . 'I would say to them that in my opinion they are all atheists as well; I merely believe in one god less than each of them. 'How so?' the emperor asked' All true believers have good reasons for disbelieving in every god except their own,' said Birbal. 'and so it is they who, between them, give me all the reasons for believing in none.'

Reference

Habermas, J. (2001) Glauben und Wissen. Frankfurt am main: Suhrkamp.

Racial Conditioning

In my previous post, I engaged Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the White-Man face.  I was not simply claiming that we need to repaint our images of Jesus.  Rather, I was pointing out that such images have an oppressive quality to them.  Imagine a world in which your God does not look like you.  Mother Mary looks nothing like your mother.  Most of those in authority do not look like you or your siblings.  The people on your currency do not resemble your father.  Santa Clause looks nothing like your grandfather.  And so on… Perhaps there would be cause for you to think that you were in some way inferior.  The real point here is that “the Church” has been guilty of following suit with racist ideology.  In order to retain power within a white-world, “the Church” has whitewashed itself.  Catholicism is facing this issue at the present moment.  Most Catholics live in the so-called “third world.”  Yet, Catholic leadership is dominated by Europeans.  It should not be difficult to realize where this becomes a matter of conflict.  I raise this as a concern so that Christians in general will be sensitive to ways through which we perpetuate racial oppression.

 

Racialization, the systemic and systematic oppression of persons according to racial categories, not only affects those typically thought to be the “oppressed minorities.”  It bears down upon the identity of all persons living within a racialized system.  In other words, racism cuts like a double-edged sword that conditions both the oppressor and the oppressed.  The negative affects conditioning the oppressed, no doubt, are more obvious to us.  However, within certain projects rests an implicit conditioning of the oppressor as well.  For example, in 1712, South Carolina passed An Act for the Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes and Slaves.  Despite the title, the emphasis of the act is on the treatment of “negroes,” who, at the time, were considered synonymous with slaves.  Let’s focus on the first four paragraphs of the act:

Introduction: Negroes are unsafe for civilized society.  “Negroes and other slaves brought unto the people of this province for [labor] are of barbarous, wild, savage natures, and such as renders them wholly unqualified to be governed by laws, customs, or practice.”

I. Declared slave or free by the government: Even if a slave owner grants freedom, the government still has the final say. “And in case any negro, mulatoe, mustizoe, or Indian, doth lay claim to his or her freedom, upon all or any of the said accounts, the same shall be finally heard and determined by the governor and council of this province.”

II. Permission to move: Negroes must attain a pass to leave the plantation.  Failure to have a pass will result in being whipped.  White men (not the owner) who see a negro without a pass and fail to whip the negro “shall forfeit twenty shillings, the one half to the [parish].” 

III. Inspection: “That every master, mistress or overseer of a family in this province, shall cause all his negro houses to be searched diligently and effectually, once every fourteen days.”  Note that at this point, negro and slave are synonyms.               

We can see that this act mentally and socially conditioned both the slave and the free.  It not only states what a slave may legally do, it also enforces the way in which whites are supposed to act.  It states the way(s) in which whites should socially engage "negroes"/non-whites.  The racism here affects both parties.  It provides reinforcement for racialization.  While this may seem to be a remote, historically old illustration, projects like these have, over time, shaped identity.

 

In Idea for a Universal History (1784), Kant, writing about political formation, claims that

If we finally add the political history of other peoples episodically, in so far as knowledge of them has gradually come down to us through these enlightened nations, we shall discover a regular process of improvement in the political constitutions of our continent [Europe] which will probably legislate eventually for all other countries (Kant: Political Writings, 52).

Kant, like many other Aufklarer, held the Eurocentric view that only persons descending from Europe were governed by laws.  Governance by law was understood to be superior to governance by custom or opinion.  Does "the Church" function in a similar way?  Is white Christianity (or white Christianities) the norm?  Who determines the modes of discourse and action for "the Church"?  Who controls doctrine?  

 

This hierarchy is most clearly seen in Linneaus’s The System of Nature (1735).  Linnaeus thought that humankind was mandated to understand and classify nature as a means of bettering its knowledge of God.  God had, in fact, ordained the alleged culturally elevated to classify all living things.  He states that five types of humans exist.  The first we would consider to be chimpanzees, gorillas, etc.  With the other four, Linnaeus describes physical appearance, clothing, and personality:

1.       Four footed, mute, hairy. Wild man.

2.     Copper-coloured, choleric, erect. American

Hair black, straight, thick; nostrils wide; face harsh; beard scanty; obstinate, content, free. Paints himself with fine red lines. Regulated by customs.

3.     Fair, sanguine, brawny. European.

Hair yellow, brown, flowing; eyes blue; gentle, acute, inventive. Covered with close vestments. Governed by laws.

4.       Sooty, melancholy, rigid.

Hair black; eyes dark; fevere, haughty, covetous. Covered with loose garments. Governed by opinions.

5.       Black, phlegmatic, relaxed.

Hair black, frizzled; skin silky; nose flat; lips tumid; crafty, indolent, negligent. Anoints himself with grease. Governed by caprice.      

Notice the stark differences between each category.  While these distinctions are overly simplistic, they retain some importance for racialization.  In the end, they help affirm white privilege and the status quo.  This is not to deny the importance of customs or opinions.  Rather, I am noting that when our predecessors speak of “law” or even “reason,” they are speaking of European law and rationality.  They assumed that there was only one proper form of reason, one proper notion of law.  Those who do not follow the one proper form are deemed deviant.

 

I think it would be safe to say that most people are unaware of this sort of conditioning.  Nevertheless, projects like these have helped shape our society.  So what are we to make of these things in our contemporary time?  First, there is a need for us to understand the history that we have inherited.  Second, we must be cognizant of the various ways that conditioning still occurs.  Third, racialization must be dismantled, while still embracing both identity and diversity, and white privilege reformed into an order of equality.  The latter seems to be the more difficult process—one to which I am open to suggestions for proceeding. 

God in the Gallery: A Symposium, ch. 6

The final engagement of Daniel Siedell's God in the Gallery comes from Kevin Hamilton. He will be talking about chapter 6 entitled "Art, Liturgy, and the Church." Kevin Hamilton is an artist and researcher at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he heads the New Media Program in the School of Art and Design. He works in gallery and public settings in a variety of media, and also writes on interface history, mobility, creativity, and cybernetics. Past projects can be viewed at www.kevinhamilton.org, and he blogs at www.complexfields.org.

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Chapter 6 of Dan's book outlines an ambitious and urgent task, a radical proposition for a project that is without precedent in my lifetime. "The task then," writes Siedell, "is to articulate the expansive aesthetics of the church." Key here is that he chooses to use the word articulate, and not invent, create, or transform. Also crucial here is the inherent failure built in to the act of articulating something that is also "expansive." Unlike so many (academic) efforts at articulation or description, the project Dan outlines is one that will remain incomplete, transitional, contingent. 

At the risk of merely rehashing Dan's fine work, I would like to underline some of the ways in which this call is likely to be misunderstood. The radicality of Dan's project might be overlooked by those for whom the church is a restricted space and time, a set of rituals and practices, rather than an expansive, inhabited manifestation of the Kingdom of God. If, like myself, your spiritual formation has been lacking in Ecclesiology, you might easily miss the excitement, urgency, and relevance of Siedell's call. Here are some points I'd like to stress as a cheerleader for this cause - perhaps others will disagree with my take on Dan's sketch.

1. God in the Gallery does NOT call for a new aesthetic that will "set apart" churches from secular institutions in matters of branding, education, art collection, consumption, or commission. To ask of the Lord "How should we see, and how should we see together?" is different than asking "What should I look at?" or even "What should the church look like?" We start from the bodies we have, the sensory experiences granted us by God's revealed Word and the Church's sacramental postures. From these rhythms and habits of perceiving, the senses we utilize or neglect as we reach to serve God and God's beloved ones, we will explore the aesthetic of being the church. Since we best understand these sensations and postures by living with others who also sense and sense differently, we will discover the "aesthetics of the church" in conversation with other aesthetics. But we will not orient ourselves according to any aesthetic product or affect.

2. Dan's project is also not a call for a visible, aesthetic or stylistic influence by Christians in the secularized spheres of Contemporary Art. If the goal of inventing an aesthetic risks missing the improvisational revelation of the Holy Spirit, then the goal of transforming an aesthetic risks adopting the body of the colonizer, for whom the senses are dulled, instrumental, and lacking in empathy. The "expansive" aesthetics of the church do not confine themselves to sanctuaries, to daily prayer, to Sabbath time. But neither do they aspire to transform "other spaces" into the domain of church - because there is no space outside the domain of the church. In seeking to "articulate" the church's expansive aesthetics, we will move into multiple spheres of influence and exchange, where Christ is recognized as Lord to differing degrees, but where Christ is King nonetheless. We can neither withdraw as a church from participation in defining art, nor can we approach this process as one to be commanded for God. 

3. Lastly, I don't think Dan's call requires that church members embrace the languages and postures of Contemporary Art. As Dan's own critical/hermeneutic work on the artwork of Celaya demonstrates, we will discover the aesthetics of Christ's church throughout creation, wherever humans struggle to understand the potential of molded matter for communication, revelation, celebration. We will have to remain in relationship to multiple and diverse aesthetics. There is much to be discovered in this task through engagement with "low" culture as well, in the design of everyday consumer products, in mass media. Potential for discovery lies even in an individual church body's vernacular history of struggle with color, light, shape and form. I agree with Dan that many Christians have lost out in their ignorance of the worlds of Contemporary Art, where expert craftspersons have been learning for decades about how aesthetics emerge. But if the church is to remain in conversation with multiple sites of origin in the articulation of aesthetics, then the worlds of Contemporary Art will comprise only part of these important sites. In fact, one topic worth discussing is whether the church's most focussed engagements with Contemporary Art - organizations like CIVA or IAM - might be too narrow in scope (as broad as they are). Though I wholly concede that there is too little knowledge of Contemporary Art within the church, I submit that the church should avoid mimicking existing disciplinary structures. 

As a young art student first introduced to Modern Art as a collective process of invention and discovery, I was thrilled by the "blank slate" of it all. After Duchamp, it seemed, after Lenin's revolution, after Picasso, Pollock, or the Critical Art Ensemble, Art could be ANYTHING. Late-modern criticism of this project helped me better see the destructive nihilisms of this project, the impossibility of a blank slate. Even better, re-engagement with the church has shown me the strongest living example of humble discovery in relation, over hubristic invention from scratch. If, as Yoder said, "there is no scratch from which to start," then the project proposed in God in the Gallery stands to serve as a radical answer to modernism, and the current place of art in global commerce. 

There is a nagging, and ominous problem here, however. If there is no domain that is outside the church from the perspective of a body of people seeking revelation, there certainly are "outsiders" to such a body. The church can only be the church as its doors are open to all God loves - and so the project of "articulating the expansive aesthetics of the church" will only happen as the body is, well...expansive. For all kinds of reasons that are outside the domain of Dan's book, the church I know seems closed to many with whom we should be in conversation. I hope that humble confession and prayerful correction of this will be part of the project, as I approach it.

Appropriating Zizek for the Christian Theo-Political Task - Assuming Milbank is Right

By David Fitch

As has been hotly debated on the church and pomo blog too many times already, Zizek’s political ontology poses problems (at least for some of us) that make his work incompatible with doing Christian political theology, at least as traditionally conceived.  So, instead of rehashing the Milbank versus Zizek debate, I’d like to ask the question – for those who already agree in essence with John Milbank’s assessment of Zizek - is there still a way Zizek’s massive corpus can be put to the service of a Christian political theology?

To repeat some of Milbank’s complaint with Zizek’s political ontology, in his essay in Theology and the Political, Milbank labels Zizek “a mystical nihilist” (423) – not an unusual charge for Milbank. He asserts that Zizek’s version of dialectical materialism provides no “ontological basis” for a progress that can lead to a stable political practice (393-395). For Milbank, this can be seen in both Zizek’s ontology and in his theory of subjectivity as well.

On an ontological level, Zizek’s Hegelian negative dialectic is trapped within an immanence from which it cannot escape. Since Zizek’s Hegelian dialectic is basically an ever unfolding of the negation of the negation, his politics, according to Milbank, cannot in essence get anywhere (Monstrosity of Christ, 120) Trapped within the material, there is nothing that can take it beyond itself. Antagonism and negation are inscribed into its very being. (Monstrosity, 138). The Real is after all an antagonism - a void at the core. As a result, Zizek’s ontology, according to Milbank, reduces the goal of politics to an “agon around an empty fetish.” (Theology and the Political, 395). Political reality cannot sustain the reality of a peace of justice.  It is ‘hell-bent’ on “mutually assured destruction” (Monstrosity, 166).

In the same vane, subjectivity and consciousness for Zizek, are projected from within the material out of this same antagonism. Desire is born out of lack and is impossible of fulfillment. Yet it must tragically be persisted in for to not do so is the suicide of the self.(Monstrosity, 120). Our subjective identity therefore, Milbank says, is created ever always out of conflicts and negations. Our organizing “fantasies” can only ever cover over antagonisms and repressions. Desire can never go anywhere. And purpose is at best a superficial illusion. There is therefore no basis for progressing forward.

For Milbank then Zizek is hardly a basis from which to construct a positive Christian theology or politics, for a Christian politic is not empty at its core, it is formed around the fullness of Jesus Christ. A Christian politic is not driven therefore by conflict but rather by reconciliation. To be sure Zizek has responded to this critique. (Monstrosity 235-303, For a related more direct engagement of the nihilism charge that has sympathies with Zizek - see Alain Badiou’s Manifesto for Philosophy, ch. 4). If we however sympathize with Milbank’s argument, how do those of us who appreciate Zizek go on to put his compelling political and cultural theory in service to the task of Christian political theology.

Simple! Let us accept Milbank’s characterization that ideology as Zizek has fashioned it, is a fallen politic, a politic that is on its way to collapse if not visibly in the process already. Zizek’s political theory of ideology then in essence becomes the means for diagnosing a fallen politics. Similar to the way Milbankians appreciate Zizek for his political critique of capitalism, let us shine the light of the Zizekian political critique upon the church itself as a politic. Let us do a  Zizekian examination of the church’s political fantasies, whereby master-signifiers are revealed and irruptions of the Real are exposed, and these theories are the means to diagnose where, when and how our own politics as Christians is showing signs of being an ideology as Zizek has defined it. Let us use Zizek to understand the various ways Christian politics has taken on the fall and become an ideology itself, unfaithful to its call to be the authentic political formation around the living Christ in the world. Let us use Zizek to do some social psychoanalysis on the church, for “Lord knows” the historical church has regularly shown itself to be capable of succumbing to an “empty” politics. It could use a Zizekian check up from time to time.

This suggests of course that Zizek is at his best as a political theorist of ideology in critique of faulty political systems (as opposed to an ontologist of religion and subjectivity). Surely Zizek would be unhappy at such an appropriation of his work. In fact, on the back cover of Adrian Johnston’s book Zizek’s Ontology, Zizek bemoans people who do exactly what I am proposing, people who take him seriously only for his political and cultural theory and ignore his more recent theological moves.

Nonetheless, the results I suggest would be compelling. Take for example an examination of the politics of evangelicalism, or what has become of evangelicalism in N America over the past thirty years. Zizek can help us see - like few other theorists can - what drives evangelicalism as a political entity coalescing for worship, way of life and engagement with society. His political analysis can expose the inner contradictions and the desires (jouissance) that shape much of what has become the evangelical way of life in the last thirty-forty years. Even better, perhaps such a political analysis could make way for a Badiou-like Event where a new faithfulness could be birthed.

So with apologies to Zizek, and all Zizek purists, and to all who see Zizek’s political ontology as ‘lacking’ (pun intended), Zizek can still aid us in furthering a more faithful church as a politic i n the world.

Speculative Grace: Decentering

A short, belated post this week on the topic of porting grace onto a non-theistic platform - the Fall semester is hard upon us!

Thesis: Let's say that sin is being centered on oneself. (Clearly this isn't the only possible definition, but it is, I think, an operational one.)

Let's say, then, that we are saved from sin to the degree that we have been productively decentered from ourselves.

Granted these two points, such a decentering may play out in a number of different ways in a number of different contexts. Three scenarios interest me in particular today:

1. For instance, it may be the case that I am a soul that is indivisible, independent, and autonomous, (i.e., I am and do have a center) but that I, nonetheless, ought not to be centered on myself because there is something greater than I am (i.e., God - the center of everything) upon which I ought to be centered. 

2. Or, it may be the case that I am not indivisible, independent, and autonomous (i.e., I am not and do not have a center, but am split, looped, and distributed), that sin is trying to pretend that I am nonetheless a center, and I need to stop pretending and acknowledge that there is only one thing - even if infinitely Other than me and everything in this world - that is indivisible, independent, and autonomous, a real center: God. 

3. Or, it may be the case that I am not a center and that pretending to be a center isn't sinful because there is one true center but because there is no real, ultimate center. Here, in this third scenario, God would be God not because he is the real center, but because he himself refuses to pretend that he is a center. God himself would be divine in that he himself perfectly exemplifies the work of endless kenotic decentering.

In light of these three scenarios, I'll venture three broad and (indefensibly?) over-simplified characterizations:

1. The first scenario is roughly equivalent to many classical approaches.

2. The second scenario is roughly equivalent to a "postmodern" approach to theology.

3. The third scenario is roughly equivalent to the way that sin and salvation play out in a non-theistic ontology.

The Liturgical Turn: Music In A Time Of Mourning

Life always takes a series of unexpected turns.  And seeing how way leads on to way, I suspect that I’ll later return to my original intention of delving deeper into an interaction with William Desmond’s metaphysics and liturgy (which began with my previous post).  For now I’m going to change directions slightly and share with you something that I’ve been thinking about over the past few weeks. 

This past month has been a very interesting month for my church because we experienced together a time of great joy and a time of sadness.  In the middle of July we participated in a missions project with World Vision, which was the first time my church had done anything like this in its life together.  The day after we returned from the Appalachian mountains, while the excitement for seeing the Holy Spirit’s power move in the life of our church was still fresh, the husband of one of the team members suffered a fatal heart attack.  Excitement quickly turned to mourning. 

Even though I’ve been leading music in church for a while now, this was the first funeral I’d ever had to plan for and, quite frankly, I wasn’t really too sure what to do.  The funeral liturgy in the Book of Common is a beautiful liturgy whose theology of resurrection, hope, and future glory says all there is to say.  So along with asking “what songs do we sing while we’re all grieving”, I was also asking “why sing at all?” 

In searching for answers, I was reminded of the work of Eleanor Stubley.  Stubley is a phenomenologist, musicologist and professor of music at McGill University whose work focuses on the importance of the body in musical performance as well as the disjunction between the performers’ experience of music and the theorists’ description of it.  She believes that if we are going to formulate an adequate account of music’s meaning then we need to take the experience of the physical act of music-making seriously.  In a sense, making music constitutes a fundamentally different manner of being that she describes as the “transformative powers of musical performance.” The body’s role in musical performance is more than being the machine that executes the sound. The body is that which communicates to and senses the world around it allowing for the performance of music to take place.

Anyone who has ever played in a band or sang in a choir knows that all the participants are acutely aware of what everyone else is doing.  This is essential for matching pitch, harmonizing, following changes and dynamics.  It produces what Stubley calls a “symbiotic tuning” which affects the mind, body, voice, instruments and, in turn, the actions of the others around. This creates a continuing dialectic as performers play off of each other.  As the music progresses there is bond that is created.  The existence of that bond is most keenly felt (negatively) when one of the performers falters or the whole performance suddenly stops.  We all know how awkward the moment is when we’re singing along with the radio and the power goes out or we’re playing in a band and the bandleader cuts everyone off suddenly (I’m notorious at this in rehearsals).  It’s a shocking experience that feels like one’s state of mind has just been shattered.  This is why in performing music together there is a trust that forms and is needed to sustain the flow of sound. 

In thinking about Stubley’s work, I was reminded of the unique experience of music. It’s almost sacramental (and some argue that it is). Baptism places one in the body of Christ, the Eucharist continual feeds us with the sustaining grace of Christ’s body and blood.  Singing together, which Christians always do when gathered, also creates a sense of the church as a body.  It makes us present to each other in a profound way. I suppose this is the answer to my question “why sing while we’re mourning?”  Because the music can say more and do more than words alone.  When we sing we communicate and create a togetherness.  All suffering causes alienation.  Therefore what we need in a time of mourning is not just words of comfort (sometimes we don’t need them right away), but the physical presence of others.  Singing together overcomes alienation because it makes us uniquely present to one another in a way that little else can.      

*For a good explanation of Eleanor Stubley’s work see:  Philosophical Perspectives on Music by Wayne D. Bowman (Oxford Press, 1998)

Gadamer on Hermeneutical Experience

The following post is by Cynthia R. Nielsen. She is currently a doctoral student at the University of Dallas and an adjunct professor of philosophy at Eastfield Community College. Cynthia blogs at percaritatem.com.

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According to Gadamer, experience, including hermeneutic experience, is a process which is essentially negative. By “negative,” he means that our expectations of what something is or means are regularly disappointed and disconfirmed. But if we begin with an expectation, a hope, then hope is always prior to experience and is its condition. As we move through our disappointments and struggle to understand—in light of our shattered expectations or dislodged assumptions and biases—the person or subject at hand, new expectations/hopes arise. Thus, hope both precedes and follows disappointment and disconfirmation. Experience, as Gadamer understands it, is characterized by alternating cycles of hope and disappointment, which is why it should be understood as a process rather than a staticized end.[1] Gadamer is not denying that our experience of history leads to (historical) knowledge. However, as Weinsheimer explains, “in his consideration of hermeneutic experience he is concerned to reverse the normal line of thought—that is, he conceives of knowledge in terms of experience and process rather than conceiving of experience in terms of knowledge and result” (Gadamer’s Hermeneutics, 202). The theory of induction is an example of experience conceived in terms of result or conceived teleologically. For example, I look for patterns in my experience that produce the same results. When I do X, Y results. From various similar experiences, I abstract a general concept that now applies to all such experiences. Thus, the need for further experiences of this kind is eliminated. Weinsheimer puts it nicely,

“Inductive experience is fulfilled in the knowledge of the concept—which, in both senses, is the end of experience. Thus, in the teleological view, experience finds its fulfillment in its extinction. The theory of induction implies that confirmation is the primary and most important aspect of experience. The process of experience is essentially an experience of repetition and the identity of experiences” (Gadamer’s Hermeneutics, 202).

Instead of an exclusive focus on confirmation as the important element of experience, Gadamer highlights the disappointments and disconfirmations of experience (which is not to exclude the role of confirmation) in order to show how “the negativity of experience has a curiously productive meaning.”[2] Here Gadamer follows Hegel in affirming the dialectical character of experience. For Hegel, “experience has the structure of a reversal of consciousness,” and this reversal results in the emergence of a new object, as we come to see that our former understanding was either misguided or inadequate. This new object is not entirely new, however, because it “contains the truth about the old one” (Truth and Method, 354). Yet, both the original understanding and the object encountered change, which also means that we change. Up to this point, Gadamer agrees with Hegel’s account of experience. However, he rejects Hegel’s idea that “conscious experience should lead to a self-knowledge that no longer has anything other than or alien to itself” (Truth and Method, 355). For Hegel, the goal of experience is knowledge, and “his criterion of experience is self-knowledge. That is why the dialectic of experience must end in that overcoming of all experience which is attained in absolute knowledge—i.e., in the complete identity of consciousness and object” (Truth and Method, 355). As we’ve seen, for Gadamer experience does not find its consummation in something that overcomes or staticizes it; rather, experience is a process and the experienced person is not someone who already fully possesses knowledge or even knows more that others. He is

“someone who is radically undogmatic; who, because of the many experiences he has had and the knowledge he has drawn from them, is particularly well equipped to have new experiences and to learn from them. The dialectic of experience has its proper fulfillment not in definitive knowledge but in the openness to experience that is made possible by experience itself” (Truth and Method, 355).

Experience in this sense is tied to what it means to be a historical, finite being. It means having one’s expectations upset, overturned, unsettled. Gadamer is not expressing a pessimistic view of life; he is highlighting the fact that experience and growth by way of experience—so long as we maintain an attitude of openness—involves constant confrontations with our own assumptions and convictions. When confronted with new information about a person or event, or when we are able to genuinely “see” an issue or subject matter from a different perspective, we put ourselves at risk. Why? We allow questions to be put to us, questions that can expose our own (negative) biases and misguided assumptions. Putting ourselves at risk in this way means that we are open to exposure, open to considering what it means, for example, that we hold certain views about people group X. The realization that we have been operating under counterfeit assumptions, and the uprooting and relinquishing of our former beliefs that follows, is, though necessary, often unpleasant. If we are honest, it’s actually painful. Yet, if Gadamer is right, and experience (including hermeneutical experience) is characterized by repeating cycles of hope and disappointment, then hope is on the horizon and awaits a new “fusion.”

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[1] Weinsheimer, Joel C. Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: A Reading of Truth and Method. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 202.

[2] Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 2004. Truth and Method, 2nd ed. trans. and rev. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. (New York: Continuum), 353.

God in the Gallery: A Symposium, ch. 5

Dayton Castleman is an artist who works in sculpture and site-specific installation. He grew up in New Orleans, and has large-scale public work in Philadelphia. He received his BA from Belhaven College, and his MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is currently an assistant professor of art and design at Trinity Christian College near Chicago. His website can be found at http://www.daytoncastleman.com

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"I love you, but, inexplicably, I love something in you more than yourself, and, therefore, I destroy you." – Jacques Lacan

I am in the final weeks of curating an exhibition comprised entirely of artist-made piñatas. The piñatas will be up for auction over the course of the show, and the exhibition will culminate in a public ceremony. At the ceremonial event, the auction winners will be given a choice: smash the piñata they have won, revealing what it contains for all onlookers, or take the piñata home intact, preserving it unbroken. This dilemma is heightened by the fact that the artworks of several artists in the show are valued in the low to mid five figures.

The piñatas in this exhibition are not likely to be filled with candy, but with something intended to shed light on the artist’s concept or purpose for the piñata’s external form. The dilemma for the auction winner is that getting at this “deeper meaning” of the particular art object requires its physical destruction, while a decision to preserve the piñata intact protects an investment, but limits its potential for broader societal value. Yet even if the piñata is sacrificed, the societal value of the object is left open for said society to judge. It is entirely possible that the opening up of the piñata could result in a complete debacle comprised of public disappointment with what the contents reveal, the perceived failure of the artist, and a perceived lapse in judgment on the part of the one who elected to obliterate what may have been a perfectly nice little sculpture.

Central to this simple project of mine is the question of who controls an artwork’s purpose, meaning and value—a question that I think is at the heart of Daniel Siedell’s chapter on Art Criticism. Siedell introduces the chapter by calling attention to the fact that it is the “disparity between the art and what is written about it—how it is interpreted—that is off-putting to many otherwise earnest art viewers.” If the work of the art writer can be confusing and off-putting to the art viewer, imagine how infuriating this might be to the artist whose own work is placed under the critical knife. Yet this frequently tumultuous relationship between the artist, the critic, and the public—mediated by art objects—is a central one in any engagement with contemporary art.

As a person who identifies primarily as an artist, it would be all too easy to offer a dismissive rant about the art critic’s lack of concern for the artist’s intention, or the public’s general lack of an informed interpretive framework. This would be easy, because these things are true, and Siedell devotes quite a bit of the chapter to unpacking why this is so in regard to art criticism. His purpose in this is to argue that in order for art criticism to be useful, one must be clear about what modern and contemporary art criticism’s ultimate goal is, and he acknowledges that the “history of art criticism suggests that the ultimate goal of the art critic is to achieve and then sustain authority as an art critic.”

He explores the roots of this in his discussion of the Harold Rosenberg—Clement Greenberg debate, and the eventual establishment of Greenberg as the twentieth century’s preeminent voice in art criticism, in whose work it becomes clear, Siedell points out, that “ultimately, the subject of art criticism is the art critic.” Yet central to Siedell’s argument is that while art criticism’s self-reflexivity may be a given, this should not be perceived as grounds for dismissing its central role in modern and contemporary art. He writes:

“This in no way diminishes the significance of art criticism. In fact, it reveals it to be a creative endeavor with its own genres and traditions that are parallel to—not derivative of—the art it engages. Both artists and critic are engaged in the act of creation, engaged in the act of discovery through their practice. If, however, the critic’s task is, following Edward Said, “to advance human freedom and knowledge,” the art critic’s challenge is to use art to show how both art and criticism can serve these noble goals, to use criticism to demonstrate art’s broader significance, and finally, to model how art should be taken seriously.”

Implicit in this paragraph is that what is often at issue in the art world is control and power. The trouble with a great deal of interaction around art is that, far from being simply a critical problem, each party represented—the artist, the critic, and the observer—would prefer to be the one that the whole endeavor revolves around. This may be one of the places that a “Nicene Christian faith” would offer a unique model for understanding art. Siedell, in fact, appropriately borrows Trinitarian language in referring to the “hypostatic union of form and content” in the art object—language that could be extended to the web of human relationships that comprise the world of modern and contemporary art. A willingness to “love your neighbor as yourself” would likely result in a rich and unique contribution to contemporary art culture.