the church and postmodern culture: conversation

Reflections on the Summer of 2010, by Daniel A. Siedell

Reflections on the Summer of 2010

Daniel A. Siedell

Classes start next week.  As I hustle to put together course syllabi for the fall semester my work this summer has forced me to reconsider the contours of my academic vocation.  We academics live in bubble.  We live in a world in which seminar rooms, the lecture hall, faculty meetings, academic conferences, and "close readings" of the latest commentary on the work of this philosopher or that theologian, tend to take on an exaggerated gravity and relevance.    We believe that we're engaging, critiquing, or transforming culture in the seminar room and we surround ourselves with those who believe likewise.  We are rarely forced to leave this bubble in order to test whether our work has, could, or even should have value outside this admittedly narrow professional world.  For many of us the most challenging form of cultural translation in which we will have to participate this coming academic year will be to explain our work to a colleague in another department before or after a committee meeting.  Even for those academics who see beyond the bubble, the relationship is often a one way street, in which "we" are the ones delivering truth to power, "we" are the ones who are engaging, critiquing, or transforming whatever needs engaging, critiquing, or transforming "out there" in the world, or in the Church.  Rarely, however, does what happen "out there" challenge or test the value of our commitments, the relevance of our work, outside the hermetically sealed envelope of tenure and promotion, sabbaticals, leading student study trips abroad, and, perhaps most perplexing to the world "out there," summers off.

My summer was framed by two stiff challenges to my work that will significantly alter my academic vocation and perhaps even its content.  The first was my participation in Veritas Riff, the brainchild of Veritas Forum Executive Director Dan Cho, Silicon Valley consultant Curtis Chang, Rice University sociologist Michael Lindsay, and Christianity Today editor Andy Crouch.  Veritas Riff invited thirteen early to mid-career scholars to Cambridge, Mass. During the third week of June to participate in a series of seminars and meetings intended to challenge us to think more expansively about participating in and shaping the cultural discourse in different and broader ways beyond the limits and comforts of academia. The group featured, among others, a philosopher at Cornell, theoretical physicist from Oxford, political scientist from Vanderbilt, sociologist from Harvard (who received the news that she had been given tenure during our meetings), a Duke physician with a dual appointment in the Divinity School, an op-ed writer for the Washington Post and former speechwriter for George W. Bush, and John Skeel, who holds an endowed appointment at the Law School at Penn. 

Clearly informed by Crouch's Culture Making, and Lindsay's The Halls of Power, the meetings were intended to give us encouragement and the resources to take our projects outside our disciplinary silos and into the larger and more messy and challenging arena of cultural work.  I certainly had my doubts about Veritas Riff and I spent several months considering whether I should even participate.  Although we were all coming from academia, the Riff organizers made it clear that this was not an academic conference.  It was recognized that we were most definitely in academia, but the meetings drove home the fact that we should not be of academia.

John Skeel focused on one of these devices, our improv lessons led by L.A. actor Marianne Savell, and offered a humorous account in an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal (Read it here.)  The improv exercises and the Second City metaphors were intended to force us academics, who have been trained to regard our bodies as means to get our brains from one class or meeting to another, to consider how and in what other ways we communicate.  The basic theatre and acting exercises we were taught can be helpful tools for us as we step outside the confines of tweed jackets and Burkenstocks into a world in which first impressions and non-verbal communication play fundamental roles in creating the space necessary for the positive reception of our work.  Skeel's description of these exercises seem to have captured the imaginations of some very serious-minded evangelical bloggers, perhaps overly influenced by James Davison Hunter's new book, To Change the World, who think that Veritas Riff is evidence of the low brow anti-intellectual gene resurfacing in evangelicalism.  (Read some here.)

The person that tied the Veritas Riff together wasn't Tina Fey, it was the prophet Daniel.  Mark Lamberton, Director of the Lloyd Oglivie Institute of Preaching at Fuller Seminary and former pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, led daily meditations on the book of Daniel focusing particularly on his faithful witness at the highest levels of secular power.  In addition, Andy Crouch offered a meditation on power drawn from St. Paul's journey to Rome in the Acts of the Apostles.  Crouch and Lindsay also offered disarmingly honest discussions of the challenges they faced in their own work as they sought to expand the scope of their projects.

The stiffest challenge to our academic comfort zone, however, wasn't the improv, it was from Jody Hassett Sanchez, former reporter and producer at ABC News and CNN and President of Pointy Shoe Productions, a documentary and long form production company that explores issues of faith and culture.  She studied each of our projects and interviewed us formally about our projects on camera.  She then gave us brutally honest feedback about the form and content of our deliveries.  It was during this excruciatingly painful process that I realized not only the potential of my work to reach an audience beyond academia, but also how ill-equipped I am to do it.

I cannot be content to let our work be defined entirely by the academic institutions that shape me.  Especially for those of us concerned with serving Christ in culture, we must find ways to test our ideas, commitments, our projects outside our academic bubbles.  Although I believe that my writing about paintings has relevance outside academia, Veritas Riff has shown me that it is not obvious and that I must continually put it to the test beyond the seminar room, lecture hall, or conference.

The second stiff challenge to my academic vocation came during my two-weeks at Whale & Star, the Maimi-based studio of artist Enrique Martínez Celaya, where I serve as Director of Special Projects (see www.whaleandstar.com).  However, I will reflect on this particular experience over at my blog in the weeks to come. 

by Daniel A. Siedell
(www.dansiedell.typepad.com)

 

 

Clark Pinnock, 1937-2010

[Cross-posted from Fors Clavigera]

Many of us have intellectual debts that never surface, as it were. They are not the sorts of debts that one could track in the footnotes of our work. They are more submerged and subterranean than that. Such debts are often accumulated early on in one's formation; indeed, they are often catalytic influences that impacted us in a malleable, impressionable period when we were just beginning to think that theology or philosophy was our calling. And because we so often look on our younger selves with such "enlightened" disdain, we are--if we're honest with ourselves--often just a little embarrassed by these influences since we think we've "outgrown" them. And yet, without them, we wouldn't be who we are.

We are often awakened to such debts in tragic situations. When Stanley Grenz died so young (already five years ago?), I was reminded how much I owed to him, recalling the really pivotal experience of reading his little book, Revisioning Evangelical Theology, during my first year of graduate school. One would never guess from the footnotes of my books how much this little book set an agenda for my career. (This is partly why I was happy to endorse Steven Knowles' recent study, Beyond Evangelicalism: The Theological Methodology of Stanley J. Grenz, which begins to give Grenz his due.) Donald Bloesch is another figure who actually plays a towering role in my early formation, though I don't think anybody could know that from the written record.

The sad news of Clark Pinnock's death is a similar reminder and wake-up call to what I owe.

I first encountered Pinnock's work while at Bible college, specifically his early apologetic work in The Scripture Principle. I then recall a symposium on contemporary theology in Christianity Today, right around the same time, that featured him as a "progressive voice," and I found myself listening to him carefully. (I think the fact that he was Canadian also gave me a sense of implicit camaraderie.) While my professors were railing against him as a "liberal" (a charge that looks laughable from where I now sit!), I found in him a theologian willing to go where the truth led, rather than someone who felt compelled to think the same thing for 40 years. This spirit of faithful curiosity and disciplined exploration was captured marvelously in another book that impacted me more than I might want to admit: Barry Callen's intellectual biography, Clark Pinnock: Journey Toward Renewal. Callen painted a picture of a Christian thinker characterized by both humility and courage--a model that became iconic for me. Clark Pinnock was one of the saints.

I was especially encouraged that he was willing to follow the Spirit into foreign territory, and as I was making my pilgrimage to the pentecostal tradition, I remember hearing reports of Pinnock's visits to the renewal happening at Toronto's Airport Vineyard--a sure sign to other theologians that Pinnock had gone over the edge. But the fruit of his pilgrimage was Flame of Love: A Theology of the Holy Spirit--a book that quite simply gave me hope.

While Pinnock and I would disagree on all sorts of matters, I'm grateful for his model of courageous, faithful curiosity in the service of Christ.

Specters of Rage in an Age of Change - Sloterdijk and the "End" of the Postmodern

Multiple Specters

Perhaps we can adapt just one more time Marx's well-known and overadapted opening to The Communist Manifesto that a "specter is stalking" us. It was this same "specter" that Derrida back in the mid-1980s adapted in Specters of Marx to rejuvenate what by then was his already aging project of deconstruction to produce first the "political", then the "religious" turn.  It is from this particular "turn" that so much theological pomo derives.      

Another specter, however, today is haunting postmodern religious thought itself.  It is the specter of irrelevance. Or better yet - the specter of an irrelevance nurtured, especially in America by faddism, mindless Francophilia, and academic navel-gazing.  As recently as two decades ago Christian thinkers shied away from postmodern philosophy because of the silly and groundless canard that it was "nihilistic", or that it was noxiously inhospitable to "faith" (if you were conservative) or "social action" (if you were liberal).  

Today most educated Christian scholars have probably read the entire postmodern "canon" from Derrida's Writing and Difference to Zizek and Milbank's Monstrosity of Christ.  That you can take courses with the same basic reading list in contemporary theology at Fuller Theological Seminary and Harvard Divinity School tells you how times have changed, does it not?  

But Nietzsche's underlying point in most of his late career tirades that when things have ripened over time they become essentially wormy at the core does not should not be overlooked when it comes to postmodernism itself.  Nietzsche understood that even his own future legacy, which so much of postmodernism happens to be, would not be immune from the same kind of jeremiads he hurled at his own generation.  I myself, as someone who for more than thirty years has crawled along like some tiny, clueless gnat on the vast spherical surface of this gigantic and now multi-generational, slowly ripening, pomo passion fruit, acknowledge this fact with a certain nostalgia of loss, if not a very un-Derridean Angst about what is avenir.  Christian academics, evangelical and mainstream alike, were slow to jump on the postmodernist bandwagon, and they will be probably be just as reluctant to climb off.     

It is not simply a matter of philosophy - and theology for that matter - "painting its gray on gray," as Hegel famously described the end of a theoretical epoch.  Nor is it merely an effect of the scholastic haute monde wearily deciding that "time's up," and summoning the taste-setters and market makers to define the next great thing. Intellectual fashions, unlike whatever is worn by runway models, don't come about that way.  Furthermore, the legacy of the "high postmodern" will not fade away.  It will most likely be aufgehoben in the same way as structuralism, phenomenology, Freudianism, ordinary language philosophy, and existentialism were all folded into and "taken up" into the "post-structuralist" revolution of the 1970s that came somewhat later to be named postmodernism.  

Major shifts and sea changes are more a matter of a widespread changing focus that recognizes how patterns and networks of ideas tended to be embedded in an underlying social and cultural reality, and that this reality is now somehow missing.  They arise from the dim, but unavoidable, awareness that these ideas have now been gradually hollowed out through both overuse and an altered context.  They are in their "twilight," as Nietzsche put it, and it is in such crepuscular times that the thinker begins to test the idols, to tap them to see if they are solid, and force into the open certain questions that one's contemporaries remain uncomfortable asking.  That is what Nietzsche really meant by philosophizing "with a hammer."  It is similar also to what Heidegger meant when he wrote during the 1930s that the philosopher announces how "all the gods have fled" and one must wait for der letzte Gott ("the last God") to "pass", as he said in his Beiträge ("Contributions").

The Times They Are A'Changing

Yet a shift is on, and in many ways it is eerily similar to the 1930s.  I am not referring merely to what we now call the "Great Recession" that is slowly, like a toxic chemical spill, seeping out of the US where it first happened and spreading slowly, sometimes with indecipherable long-term effects, across the planet.    I am referring to a gathering "great recession" in mood and outlook that has changed the culture of the West and starkly affected the politics of the world's own recent historical pace-setter - the United States. 

If postmodernism , in hindsight, looks more like the happy, playful, effervescent, and disseminative "superstructure" (in classic Marxist terminology) of the rising economic and social order of post-70s that came to be termed "neo-liberalism" with its innovative and entrepreneurial energies, hyperindivindualistic ethics, and "post-secular" spiritual and religious proclivities, the era after postmodernism may mirror the pre-1940s preoccupation with issues of social justice, aggregate action and responsibility, and an intellectual confrontation with human complacency, self-deception, and the diverse and competing threats of collective violence against both groups and persons. Reinhold Niebuhr's famous attacks on liberal optimism may have to be brushed off as well.  The familiar political romance of the "just cause" against injustice, shared by "progressives" and neo-conservatives alike that often disguises itself as righteous religious and theological critique, will have to give way to (perhaps even an updated Niebuhrian) to a neo-realism that profoundly recognizes the bankruptcy of both facile certainties and the avante-garde cult of indeterminacy, while at the same time affirming the necessity of conscience, action, and resistance - and the appropriate context for their application and deployment - nurtured by a mature intellectual caution and skepticism of the latest enthusiasm.   .

Which brings us to another specter that is stalking the postmodern - the specter of rage.  The specter of rage historically has always stalked ages that follow upon a sudden and unanticipated collapse of every "proud tower" of collective illusions that were once thought to be the great ideas that animated an age. This particular specter has already hovered routinely around the celebrity status of Slavoy Žižek in the past year or so.  Žižek's own "rock star" image, fostered earlier on through his rhetorical panache with dissecting commonplace issues of pop culture within the framework of Lacanian theory, has more recently tapped into the congenital rage of the American intelligentsia at the outsize global ghoul called "capitalism", especially after the financial crisis of 2008 and the unravelling of economic systems, mainly in America and Europe. Žižek's recent routine summons to reclaim the banner of hard-core revolutionary Marxism a la Lenin, even if such a clamor no longer has any resonance outside of Latin America and perhaps political nostalgia buffs in Russia, in the face of his predicted "end times" collapse of the world economy, is consistent not only with the intellectual Zeitgeist in the West but also with his accompanying fulminations against the post-structuralists and their legacy.  In bad times the self-styled philosophical "bad boy" is all but assured of having an attentive audience.

Rage and History

But there is another, perhaps more telling current of rage, brilliantly diagnosed by another contemporary European "bad boy", the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, in his recently translated Rage and Time (Columbia University Press, 2010).  Rage and Time is far more thana a somewhat sophisticated commentary on the temper of our own time, even though Sloterdijk himself has gained fame in Germany over the past decade as a controversial television commentator and talk show host. Reaching back all the way to the Greeks, Rage and Time seeks to lay bare the "deep structure" of the modern as well as the postmodern.  

Perhaps a better phrase would be the "deep economy" of things.  "Rage" (Greek=thymos) is the "force" from the heroic age of the Greeks onward, according to Sloterdijk, that "holds the world together."  Rage "preserves in its essence the unity of substance in the multitude of its eruptions.  It exists before all the manifestations and survives unchangingly its most intensive expenditures." (p. 7).  If Christianity with its crucified and unconditionally self-giving deity "removed rage from God" and handed it over to the work of the Devil, the growth of capitalism brought it back in spades.  The "creative destruction" of capitalism, as the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter called it, bears a certain resemblance to the wrathful Yahweh of the Bible. It was not accidental that Medieval Christianity denounced competition and acquisitive behavior in the name of a higher morality and divine justice.  

Capitalism was only made possible, according to Sloterdijk, by the "thymotization" of social economies that had previously been made the exclusive prerogative of divine providence.  The supposedly God-ordained, non-competitive order decreed by the Medieval church as both divine and natural law was revealed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as a total sham, and became instead a cynical rationale for nobility and clerics to preserve their own special status in an egregiously corrupt order of things.  Even Plato's ideal republic required the thymos of the guardians to keep the state functioning.  The thymos of the ascendant capitalist classes engineered the unravelling of the Medieval fabric, and Weber's newly minted Protestant ethic" ensured what Deleuze would later describes as the "chaosmotic" dynamism of the modern eon, propelled by the violence of history itself and Hegel's celebrated "power of the negative." 

At the same time, capitalism engendered its own thymotic reaction, the revolutionary pushback of the socialist internationale and the dream of a classless society.  It has been the strange dampening of this grand historical rhythm of rage in the late twentieth century, culminating with the "fall" of communism in 1989, that a thymotic economy has been seen as a thing of the past.  The golden age of postmodernism has coincided with this historical solar minimum.  Perhaps in only such an interregnum has been it possible to imagine a "religion without religion" (i.e., a "rageless" religion) or a "messianism without a messiah."  Do not messiahs normally rage and smite against injustice, even if it is deferred rage, the rage of Armageddon?  

We are rapidly coming out of this solar minimum, according to Sloterdijk.  The theological minimalists cry peace, peace, when there is no peace; as Nietzsche might have said; the festival of peace is just a masked ball where in the back drawing rooms rage and resentment primp for their own grand entrance toward the end of the evening. Or, as Sloterdijk writes, "a wrathful God is the great impossible variable of our age.  But what if, beneath the surface, he is working on becoming our contemporary once again?"  (p. 43) Nietzsche could not have said it more efficaciously.   

Sloterdijk as Derrida's Own "Derrida"

Sloterdijk has been around in Germany as long, if not longer, than most of today's well-known postmodern thinkers.  But it is only in the twilight of the postmodern that his star has been suddenly rising.  American academic publishers with the help of the German government are getting ready to crank out a stream of translations of his writings just as the French ministry of culture did for Derrida and Deleuze a generation back.  Ironically, what can be considered Sloterdijk's first mark-making on academic thought outside Germany was his publication of a short book in 2006 (the first edition was actually in French) entitled Derrida: An Egyptian (English edition by Polity Press, 2009).  

That is not to say Sloterdijk offers us a "turn" beyond the postmodern.  Our era is not so much a turn as an "end" in the same sense that both Hegel and Heidegger used the word in talking about the "end of philosophy," and which I myself adapted in publishing the inaugural text of American postmodern religious thought entitled The End of Theology in 1979. An "end" in this connection constitutes a fruition rather than a termination, a fulfillment and maturation of thought trajectories that can now be redirected through new and equally productive strategies.  Early "deconstruction" was thus the "end" of phenomenology and the philosophy of language in this sense. Speech and Phenomena, Derrida's fascinating prolegomenon to deconstruction that is unfortunately seldom read any more, harbors all the indices. Sloterdijk does something totally un-Derridean with Derrida - he takes him to a new level.  In that respect Sloterdijk can be seen as Derrida's own "Derrida," mimicking in many ways Derrida's relationship to Heidegger.  

As a tribute to Derrida upon his death - especially the Derrida that has never really been known or acknowledged in the U.S.  - Sloterdijik's Derrida: An Egyptian is most telling, because it goes back to the latter's "pre-theological" sources in the essays of the 1960s and argues pithily that something was going on there that "immortalizes" what deconstruction was all about in the first place.  On the death of a great thinker this moment of immortalization both preserves, but also sets in motion the next great trend or wave. Sloterdijk ingeniously compares Derrida to Moses, so far as Freud was concerned in Moses and Monotheism.  

If Mosaic Judaism ultimately "historicized" as well as democratized Pharonic immortality in making the "pyramid" nomadic and mobile in the form of the ark of the covenant containing the stone tablets of Torah, Derridean deconstruction perhaps has served to pyramidize the Torah-like reading and re-reading of texts as a way of archiving the history of philosophy.  Derrida's "aporia", therefore, is not really "Jew-Greek", but "Egyptian-Jew," according to Sloterdijk.  There is no more Graeco-form "essential" meaning of the text.  There is only the strange immortality that comes from its endless de-construction and de-positioning with trace-like "deposits" of its signs.  Deconstruction was the new postmodern way back into philosophy, as Heidegger himself had sought to accomplish, if only on his own terms.  

Spectral Excess

Deconstruction created at the same time its own tensive cultural and intellectual "economy" that brought about an ever-broadening and hyperkinetic play of previously pyramidized, "traditional" significations which, if we follow this analysis beyond Sloterdijk's own somewhat technical philosophical reading, were mirrored in the post-1989 expansion of the global consumer economy.    This play of cultural signs was largely new media-driven. It was truly Jean Baudrillard's "hyperreality," fostering a seemingly limitless and purely semiotic economy of consumption and excess, guaranteed with a kind of romantic moral mandate pressed by the already comfortable, but hypercritical Western intelligentsia to disseminate the infinite, generative, substanceless surplus to every corner of the globe.  

That intoxicating sense of a burgeoning, real-life, global economy of excess, of course, was what Georges Bataille had lionized at the height of 1930s austerity and what neo-Marxist philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri had described in their book Empire as the "ripe" set of condition for a new and final "proleterian" revolution of the wage-liberated, culturally enfranchised at the turn of the millennium.  Hardt and Negri were simply the left-wing Tweedle Dums of the neo-liberals and neo-cons, prophesying an equally wrong version of Francis Fukayama's "end of history."  

It was this infatuation with excess, however (not so much the policies of either the Clinton or George Bush administrations), that led to the Götterdämmerung of the global economy in 2008, according to economist Raghuram Rajan in his recently published book Fault Lines (Princeton University Press, 2010).  Rajan, by the way, was one of the few economists to predict the 2008 collapse.  At the conclusion he writes that "progressives in the United States blame the bankers, while conservatives blame the government and the Federal Reserve.  The worrying reality is that both are to blame." (p. 228)  

Both are to blame because hyperidealized models of predicted economic performance that came from both free-market conservatives (so-called "supply siders") and the apostles of government intervention, regulation, and stimulus (the current Obama administration team) have led equally to disaster.  Both, if we follow Rajan's logic, can be attributed to what he calls the myth of "arm's length" relationships between economic players, where Deleuze's "desiring machines" are more than a kind of Weberian "ideal type" (as they actually seemed to be for the philosopher himself), but the signifying processes born of the very generative grammar of theory itself that seem to take on the curious semblance of sentient embodiment.  

It was this Golem-like transformation of theory into both politics and policy, which could only happen during a profligate planetary regime of conceptual errancy and excess - a true Bataillean economy gone mainstream.  In the economic sphere both monetarists and Keysians turn out to be fellow-travelers on the same ship of fools. As Rajan points out, the true "moral hazard" was never really the bank bailouts, mainly because the same systemic hazard can be traced to the total sublimation of investment, risk, and the seemingly boundless expansion of the capacity for consumption summed up in Alan Greenspan's memorable phrase of the 1990s - "irrational exuberance."  

As Rajan points out, however, there was nothing "irrational" about the economic expansion.  It went "unregulated" because the underlying econometric metaphysics of excess demanded it.  There was also a deep, moral, "categorical imperative" behind the expansion.  Thou shalt consume, and thou shalt be oblivious to the consequences, because justice demands it.  There shall be no more any such thing as privilege and marginality, as gain and loss, as winners and losers, so to speak.  We have now entered a truly win-win world. The "revolutionary" economy of each according to his abilities and each according to his needs is founded overthrows the "economy" of scarcity, which is what economics is all about in the first place.  The economy of excess was in vitro designed to abolish "economics" as we know it.  No more "dismal science," only liberty and justice for all! 

Such a hyperconsumptive "meta-economy" followed its own self-propelled trajectory of a new "exuberant" rationality based on the postmodern productivity of the sign process.  Technically speaking, this hyperreal economy was postulated on what a philosopher such as Alain Badiou identifies as the confusion between the virtual and the potential.  The virtual is infinitely productive of significations, and hence is - as I have lately argued - the "event horizon" of the religious.  But virtuality is not the same as potentiality. Potentiality inhabits matter, as Aristotle underscored, not form.  It was this underlying confusion of the formal and the material, the virtual and the potential, the signification and the signified (a confusion first found in DeSaussure) that has enabled both the end and the "material" crisis of the postmodern.

Is Rage the New "Rage"?

It is that peculiar sense of material crisis that animates Sloterdijk's most recent work. Rage economies, in accordance with Sloterdijk's philosophical modus operandi so to speak, are woven from the threads of disjunctions in the sign-process rather than the processes themselves.  They are fashioned from the    lesions that make up Žižek's "barred" subject, incised from the episodic events of the Real.   But unlike these events, which remain in Žižek's neo-Lacanian analysis mere fractures in an otherwise continuous "dialectical" economy, the inscriptions of trauma are stored in an underlying "rage bank" that invests in the various economies of resentment and revolt.  

Unlike Žižek, Sloterdijk is not at all impressed with Marxism, and therefore fails also to be entranced with the enduring academic fantasy of a raging worldwide proletariat, which he understands has sunk beneath the waves of history. Today's rage bankers are investing far more productively in the vengeful mobilization of traumatized collectivities who still bear memories of having been an erstwhile "universal class", whose seemingly seamless imagination, perhaps even in their lifetimes.  The new jihadist Muslim internationale is one illustration he profiles.  Another one, not yet perhaps on his radar, is the current "Tea Party"ism of the new, disenfranchised, American middle class.  But these are not really postmodern phenomena at all. Sloterdijk, in contrast with Derrida, does not view Muslim jihadism as a "return of religion,"  but as the "thymotization" - and hence the historicization - of what was previously simply the play of signs.  They are significations not in their own right, but symptoms of profound trauma.  They are indicators of the end of the postmodern.  

In his 2009 interview with the German national magazine Der Spiegel, Sloterdijk characterizes what the publication's editors call the Eingeweide ("viscera", "embowelment") of today's Zeitgeist.  The editors did not intentionally perhaps suggest through the title that Sloterdijk's philosophy of rage is the "dirty" essence of today's disenchanted politics - the term is employed more in the sense of the "guts" of the issue.  But Sloterdijk, who uses the platform to criticize the European welfare state from the standpoint of a "lifelong social democrat," makes the broad point that the dysfunctionality of the system can only be addressed by an appeal to the implicit "generous" virtues of our thoroughly thymotic culture.  In other words, "forced" taxation and redistribution only leads to evasion, criminality, and narcissistic self-seeking, which hides behind the grand illusions of state-supported architectures of "social justice".  In true Nietzschean (whom Sloterdijk routinely quotes) he calls attention to the current global crisis as a kind of apocalypse of ressentiment brought about the toxic involution of the will to power of inherently self-seeking consumerist individuals masquerading as champions of compassion.  

Sloterdijk's analysis is neither comforting nor encouraging.  It is not one more recipe for the appropriation of contemporary philosophy by the Christian conscience.  But neither was Nietzsche's.  It just happens to be philosophically provocative enough to ask questions in this Indian summer of avant-garde enthusiasms that we have never asked before.     

              

      

The Gift of Difference - Part II - Review of the Parts

(x-posted at the de-scribe)

In Part I I addressed some of the shortfalls of the overall project while affirming what was perhaps the inevitable 'shortfall' of the two dialogue camps. Putting aside any larger intentions of this collection the chapters themselves maintained a steady offering of what it means to "to be differently ethical and differently political" (5) without falling into prescribed and caricatured notions of 'purist' or 'compromised' faith. I will touch on a number of the chapters but offer more sustained engagement with the chapters by Tripp York and Peter Dula.

The first two chapters highlight the movements, tensions and unresolved thinking represented within the book. In chapter one Peter Blum draws out a Derridean account of a metaphysics of violence as actually offering a greater possibility of peaceful practice as opposed to Milbank's ontology of peace which, with Derrida, also assumes the inevitability of violence in the present and so its discerning use on the part of the Church for the purpose of peace (for more on the Blum chapter see here). Then in chapter two the positions are flipped as Kevin Derksen accepts Milbank's critique of Derrida and illustrates it in showing that even in offering our death (Derrida's Gift of Death) this act "paradoxically reinscribes itself as the moment of purest ownership" (31). In light of the resurrection even the sacrifice of life must discerned and not given in its ethical value. This critique is then leveled against certain Mennonite accounts which seem to make peace a stable category from which other theological claims can be made. These chapters set the tone for the book. This will not be for or against the two traditions but simply difference, engaged and explored.

Tripp York's "The Ballad of John and Anneken" was the most clear and straightforward account posing the simple question, "Does [Milbank] deliver an account of witness that is capable of producing witnesses" (53)? York questions Milbank's discriminate use of violence as simply re-framing the often used 'myth of redemptive violence.' York calls for a rise in 'witnesses' if Milbank's work is to gain any lasting traction. Where even is the witness of the life of Jesus in his account? Where are the stories that flow from and reflect his ontology? York introduces the witness of Anneken Heyndricks from the Martyrs' Mirror. Anneken was to be burned at the stake for heresy. At her questioning she did not recant though neither did she curse those around her but blessed and gave thanks. York says, "such a story represents the faithful who, rather than accepting tragedy by conceding its viability, absorb tragedy as Christ-absorbed evil" (64). It does not pass through her life onto others but ends with her though she does not end, as the resurrection promises. York then asks how Milbank might respond with such an account and then adds with some bite, "Were [the civil and ecclesial authorities] not practicing dominium, and, therefore, both extending and preserving the social harmony for the good of the commonwealth" (64-65)? And further with, well, a little more than bite, "Though Milbank is not here talking about ecumenical disagreements, as charitable as I would like to be, I fear Milbank's theology would have easily been placed in the service of ecclesiastical forces that would have resulted in a number of writers in this volume, had they lived centuries ago, being burned at the stake" (65). Snap.

New for me was Peter Dula's account of "Fugitive Ecclesia" that develops Sheldon Wolin's Fugitive Democracy. It is worth citing Dula's initial quote of Wolin in full,

I shall take the political to be an expression of the idea that a free society composed of diversities can nonetheless enjoy moments of commonality when, through public deliberations, collective power is used to promote or protect the well being of the collectivity. Politics refers to the legitimized public contestation, primarily by organized and unequal social powers, over access to the resources available to the public authorities of the collectivity. Politics is continuous, ceaseless, and endless. In contrast, the political is episodic, rare (104).

I take the political expressed here to be those 'moments' when motivated, intentional figures also have the stars align allowing for something to happen. "[T]heir power sprang from grassroots . . . they were not political actors coming together but individuals formed into political actors through their common deliberation" (105). The question Dula asks is whether the church as it is conceived in theologians such as Milbank, Hauerwas, Bell, Cavanaugh, and Yoder is actually best described as a type of 'fugitive ecclesial,' that is a church that for the most part does not actually exist as it is called but for moments does exist as such. If this is the case why are they not more up front about it and what then does this mean for the church in the mean time if in fact the church remains episodic, rare? It seems necessary for these theologians to travel back to some pure conception and expression of the church while remaining at the point of despair with regards to the contemporary western church. This leads to the further question of whether or not there is some external some actual alternative to the structure of late-modern capitalism (or whatever else our state might be characterized as). Is there any longer space for the political in the midst of our current ongoing politics? The prospects, as Dula sees them, are not particularly hopeful. He offers six.

• We can accept a fugitive ecclesial and "celebrate the moments of fugitivity rather than mourn that that is all there is" (124).
• We can turn to being more 'realistic' acknowledging that our condition robs 'us of some possibilities of faithfulness" (124).
• We can, with Barth, relieve the church of so much responsibility and place it on Christ making ecclesial defenselessness possible.
• We can, with Hauerwas, acknowledge that we lack necessary skills and remain blinded to what we are called to, but hopeful that we can perhaps learn.
• We can become more open to what is going on outside of the church. "If it is true that we need to try harder, then outsiders may be able to teach us how" (126).

The sixth option appears to be Dula's own offering,

[F]ugitive ecclesia could also create the space for a renewed attention to friendship. If the church is as rare as these theologians think, then all their reflections on the church, while important, also make room for greater attention to pairs instead of communities. We may even want to revive the long discredited epithet 'organized religion.' It may suggest all we can hope for is the occasional intimacy of two or three (127).

This is an intriguing offering. It at once calls up the criticism of those fighting to change the structure but the question becomes whether this offering is from those who have been worked through the structure and understand it as perhaps one of the only alternatives left, and a theologically faithful one at that.

I will not continue reviewing each chapter at such length. The former chapters (York and Dula) strike me as the most suggestive and also, potentially, the most constructive. That being said many of the other articles offer helpful nuance to long established debates. Such is the case with Long's article "Desire and Theological Politics." Long argues that violence is as much about the desire for non-violence as it is about greed or power. In addition to suppressing violent acts pacifism has also tended to suppress the desire that may have motivated the act, a desire that may indeed have been godly. And I will leave it up to someone more qualified to engage with Pauls' chapter "Harmony in Exile: Rest in its Embers" which uses Berio's sequenza IV (for piano, 1996) as a mode of understanding Radical Orthodoxy's theological and liturgical aesthetic. The language in this chapter was highly evocative but slightly too technical in musical theory for me to fully grasp the force and implications of her work.

As I stated in part I of my review this book is not constructing some theological or ecclesial project. It is however engaging in a hopeful practice. It is a practice that does not believe one's tradition has the corner on a given expression, or even fully understands said expression. It is a practice that believes that learning may in fact be possible across traditions even if the learning means that you maintain or strengthen your opposition to another tradition. It is also a practice that has no interest in overcoming another tradition through rhetorical force but allows expressions to have their own say and persuasion. I would conclude that these are good practices for our time and place.

A Material Semiotics?

An attempt this week to organize some thoughts, inspired by my work on Bruno Latour, about how to describe my approach to hermeneutics.  

1. Material Semiotics

Broadly, my hermeneutic approach could be described as a “material semiotics,” but the kind of material semiotics I’ve got in mind requires us to read the relationship between the “material” and the “semiotic” as working in both directions at the same time.

It is pretty banal (though still important) to point out that signs are themselves material and, thus, have a kind of life and independence of their own.

Signs, as obstinately material, never quite do what we want them to do, never quite say what we want them to say, never quite go where we want them to go. There is always some gap between what we thought we meant to say, what the sign does, and what the other receives. There is always a bit of “creative” translation involved as these gaps are negotiated. Meaning is the concrete result of this often ad hoc, material process of semiotic compromise and negotiation.

But the materiality of signs is only half of what I mean by “material semiotics” and, I think, the more familiar, “post-modern” half.

It is true that signs must be qualified by matter – we must recognize their material autonomy (and, hence, their “errancy”) – but, I’m claiming, it is perhaps even more important to recognize the semiological character of matter itself.

2. The Epistemological Trap

If we recognize the material character of signs but not the semiological character of matter, then we’ll remain stuck within a “representational” notion of signs.  That is to say, we’ll end up thinking that the “gap” between me, the sign, and the recipient is an epistemological gap.

This, I think, is not the way to go.

If the gap is fundamentally epistemological, if the gap is fundamentally a mark of my inability to ever really know or say or articulate the solid and unified reality of the world as it actually is, then every negotiation and compromise necessitated by the material character of the sign will always indicate a failure on our part. If our willful, material, and compromised signs are about representing the uncompromising reality of the world, then they will always and inevitably fail. Such is the much ballyhooed postmodern predicament.

3. A Semiotic Materialism

Enter the qualification of matter by semiotics. It’s my claim that not only are signs material, but that matter is itself semiotic. (Or, perhaps more modestly, that semiotic relationships are not different in kind from any other kind of material relationship.)

This is to say that, when we speak and use signs, we are not engaging in a practice that is foreign to the materials of which speak. Signs are not a way of “overlaying” material reality with a “representational” system that will hopefully more or less “fit” the way things actually are.

Rather, signs are just another variation on the way that all material things - that is, all real things – interact with and relate to one another.

Any entity really relating to any other entity in any conceivable way is doing essentially the same thing that signs do: they are crossing gaps and creating relationships by compromising, translating, and negotiating a relationship that produces a connection between the parties even as it fails to exhaustively unify them.

Here, the gap between a sign and a thing (or a thing and a thing!) is not a representational or epistemological gap. Rather, the gap between signs and things (just as with things and things!) is ontological in character.

In this sense, a material semiotics breaks with a classical understanding of the “material” world on a key point:

Where a classical materiality assumes the automatic, underlying, and substantial compatibility of all material things with one another - such that Nature is always already treated as a single, unified field and our representations of it can only weakly and unsuccessfully hope to mimic this original unity in a fragmentary way – a material semiotics assumes that matter itself (not just our representation of it!) is fundamentally multiple, fragmentary and heterogeneous.

On this view, material stuff can be brought into relationship with other material stuff, but only with a great deal of work and only by way of translations, compromises, negotiations, etc. that respect the multiplicity, autonomy and material irreducibility of each existing thing.

When a carpenter builds a house, when a tree makes sap, when a bacterium reproduces, they each must engage in the same difficult work of negotiation and translation and this work is always only tentative, fragile, and in need of repetition.

Here, hermeneutics is not qualitatively different from photosynthesis.

4. The Upshot

The upshot of this position is that if matter is itself semiotic, then when we negotiate and translate by way of signs we are not betraying reality but engaging in the very same work that makes anything that is real be real. In other words, in a material semiotics, hermeneutic compromise is not a failed representation of the real but just another mode of more or less successful engagement with it.

Because reality itself is not already a smooth, unified field but a broken and fragmentary network of heterogeneous matter, the broken and fragmentary character of signs and hermeneutics positively confirms rather than negatively denies the legitimacy (and necessity) of the interpretive endeavor.

5. Implications

What does all of this have to do with hermeneutics? Here is a brief summary of some critical implications that follow from a material semiotics:

1. All interpretive work is inherently creative and productive. It may involve repetition, but it must repeat with a difference. It doesn’t just represent something that is already there, but always makes something new. And, crucially, this making something new is now understood as a good thing.

2. Interpretive work is real ontological work, not just representational, epistemological work. It is as real as building a house or running telephone wire. It gathers, collects, collates, aligns, translates, negotiates differences, creates alliances, defines oppositions, sets up tensions, lays out networks, and demands perpetual upkeep just like any other material endeavor.

3. The measure of an interpretation’s success is not its representational “correspondence” with an already smoothly connected reality, but its ability to produce stable and durable (though not perfect or effortlessly permanent) connections between hetergeneous and “naturally” fragmentary groups of stuff. The larger the scale of the connections and the more durable and self-sustaining the connections, the more successful, real, and truthful the interpretation is.

A key caveat, here, to this third point: the success of an interpretation is not just dependent on the number of humans that it is able to effectively convince but (at least as importantly) on the number of nonhumans that it is able to effectively gather, connect with, and persuade. If all human beings (perhaps even together with some gods and angels!) agree that dogs can fly but neither the dogs nor gravity are convinced by your proposed interpretation, then it’s not a very good reading. Because material relations are themselves semiological, all the material stuff out there in the world has to be persuaded by your reading as well.

You may offer a brilliant, popularly-supported reading of Genesis 1 as requiring that the earth be 6000 years old, but if 4.5 billion years worth of rocks and weather disagree – well, sorry, but you’re out of luck.

6. Conclusion

What I like about this approach is that (1) it removes from the hermeneutic endeavor itself the stain of any “original sin” of representational betrayal, (2) it takes hermeneutic work seriously as real ontological work, (3) it takes seriously and positively the need for ongoing interpretive network building, (4) it doesn’t arbitrarily insulate our interpretive work from the real world but, instead, construes it as just another variation of the only kind of work that is real, and (5) it allows us to view this ongoing, interpretive work of building larger and larger networks of material (human and nonhuman) things as part and parcel of that divine work of that God is himself perpetually engaged in.

The Gift of Difference - Part I - A Review of the Whole

(x-posted at the de-scribe)

Jaime's previously posted blurb gave me a shot in the arm to offer my first post here at church & pomo.

The Gift of Difference is perhaps best understood in its ambiguous subtitle, “Radical Orthodoxy, Radical Reformation.” Just what is the relationship between these two expressions? Any number of conjunctives or disjunctives could have been used; on, against, and, etc. But this volume neither set out to define the relationship nor did some definitive view emerge. In many ways the comma, noting a pause and space, a fragile jot, in the end may be all that is holding these traditions in sort of relationship. While this volume at times offered an invigorating maybe even synergistic exchange where a “\” could have been the best syntactical divide, however, for the most part I was not convinced anyone came out of the exchange changed. In trying to clarify my view of this work I realized that my criticisms are with the whole while my great appreciation comes in the parts. I will begin with the whole.

There are several criticisms that can be leveled against this work as a whole. First and foremost is the almost complete absence of contributions from anyone directly associated with Radical Orthodoxy (RO). John Milbank offers the foreward and D. Stephen Long, a contributor, could perhaps be called a friend of RO (though I can’t claim to know who is in and who is out). It is then in many ways Radical Reformation (RR) on Radical Orthodoxy. Even within this initial limitation there is further narrowing of the conversation. Most articles focus on an exchange between Yoder and Milbank. This is to the exclusion not only of other modern RR thinkers (though the contributors themselves constitute this in some ways) but also a complete absence of historical RR figures (though a martyr does show up). What is more is that there tended to be a focus on Milbank’s contentious understanding of pacifism. Milbank rejects pacifism because of its posture of gazing. If you look at violence you are being even more violent. If you look away from violence you betray the victim. Numerous articles within the collection address this exact point and accept some value in critiquing a ‘secular pacifism’ but reject it as a model for understanding Jesus’ incarnational peace. Milbank appears unmoved by these various critiques and in his foreword he makes a point of re-emphasizing “the uncomfortable historical fact for contemporary Christians [which] is the debt that they owe to kings” (xvi).

Milbank’s foreword and Chris Huebner’s concluding chapter form a dissonant inclusio to this precarious relationship. Milbank asserts the role of the kings (and therefore the sword) in the preservation of Christianity. “For the survival of Christianity was enabled by acts of military defiance and its survival otherwise would have been marginal or non-existent” (xvi). This provides a type of historical justification that says because we still exist and in the past we used the sword to survive therefore the sword was necessary to exist. Contrast this to Huebner’s closing paragraph, “[Mennonite theology] more appropriately embodies the essential riskiness of a theological vision. Its appreciation of theological riskiness can be seen in its refusal of the temptation to make Christianity necessary, and its corresponding embodiment of an ethos of dialogical vulnerability that cultivates a readiness for the Radical Reformation” (216) [emphasis mine]. The logic here is almost inverted. Christianity exists as a gift from God. To the extent that we seek to secure it by violence it already ceases to exist. Therefore Christianity only exists as a gift from God.

Perhaps these initial comments indicate that I did not enjoy or appreciate the book. That would be entirely misleading. While there were some definite limitations I did find the content, the parts, of this work invigorating. And perhaps I am too harsh on it as a whole. What should I have expected from encounters with some of the ‘highest’ and ‘lowest’ church expressions? Would I have been happy with a tepid ‘middle’ church? Perhaps the whole accomplished exactly what it should have namely a respect for difference and openness to any gifts involved even if the gifts were meager or even non-existent. I imagine this is necessary to except and even celebrate when we hope that the theological agenda is set outside of our own agenda. I am not saying that the contributors did not receive from their encounters only that ‘middle ground’ was never presupposed or aimed at. Hmmmm, I recant. I now endorse this work as a whole.

In the next post I will move to direct engagement with particular chapters of interest.