the church and postmodern culture: conversation

Hunger and Love - The Logic of "Late Capitalism" Unwinds into the Postmodern Apocalypse

By Carl Raschke

It’s another gray and misty morning here in the second district of Vienna.  The church bells toll to invite the sleepy-eyed revelers from the night before to churches that, except for Christmas tourists, will probably remain mostly empty. 

The second district is historically the Jewish district of Vienna, where Freud lived and hung out.  For some unfathomable reason Freud is in the air, virtually “everywhere”  these days.   His books are on sale, his named invoked regularly (even in newspaper ads), and he often serves as a self-identifier, as in the case of a student I know who met a girl at a Vienna dance club who in response to the standard, get-to-know-each-other  question “what do you do?” replied, “I’m a Freudian analyst, so what do you think now?” 

Perhaps the answer was simply intended as a well-practiced feint against any presumed,  male, predatory Anmarsch, as they say here.   But the “Freudian thing,” as his “Ur-postmodernist” French psychoanalyst descendant Jacques Lacan put it, may be more the temper of the times than we care to admit.   

In Civilization and its Discontents – a text that figures such as Derrida and Deleuze, for example, tend to cite – Freud sums up what might be called the “secular eschatological” implications of his lifelong work with the following quote from the German poet Schiller: “hunger and love serve as the gearworks of the world.” 

Freud was an infamous pessimist, and he certainly had nothing to "say" directly to Christian theology these days.  You can’t “take Freud to church” – really!   But Freud was definitely someone theologians should listen to, especially if you go prowling the streets of Vienna, or any European city, or any city at all for that matter, this late autumn.  You observe the growing numbers of beggars and prostitutes and every morning.  You see a new, more disturbing headline about the slow-motion economic meltdown of the EU, not to mention the ever louder warnings from economists about its apocalyptic implications for the world economy.   

Hunger and love!  Until 2008 the “gearworks” worked magnificently to generate an ever expanding global  consumer society that was supposed  to gradually alleviate all hungers by fulfilling every symbolizable and estimable desire.   Yes, we were worried about things like climate change, prompted by our using too much energy to produce too much “stuff”.   But that could be handled by both a new consensual system of intergovernmental policies and regulations and the adoption of new lifestyles that were “post-materialist,” even if they remained highly consumerist.   “Information” and “knowledge” leave no carbon footprint – allegedly.  Our increasing consumption and production of “significations” rather than material commodities -  i.e., Baudrillard’s distinction between the “hyperreal” and the real – would solve that problem, so we were told.    

It is the hyperreal that has done us in, however, I fear.   Although Baudrillard’s term converges with many familiar,  key philosophical terms used in postmodernist discourse, such as Lacan’s “symbolic order”  or Deleuze’s “difference machine,”  the force of its meaning remains symptomatic  of why the world order today appears to be inexorably and ever more painfully unwinding.    Baudrillard a generation ago playfully characterized the hyperreal as the order of “processing simulacra”, of self-generating significations in the form of commodity images, fantasies, political and social ideas, collective idealizations,  and so forth.  He argued that these idealizations take on a life of their own, and that we become increasingly unaware that they do not somehow rest on any tangible base stratum of things, a theme popularized in such movies as The Truman Show and The Matrix.   

But, more importantly, we do not recognize their generative and addictive power to guarantee what our senses assume is “really” real.  Hence, the expression “hyperreal”, which according to Baudrillard is “more real than real.”    The triumph of hyperreality in our time can thus be considered a reversal of the old order of repressed desires, which Freud diagnosed, in the sense that their purely virtual character now function as a whole new form of “repression” or unconsciously displaced meaning (the real force of Freud’s term Verdrängnis)  .   Just as our Victorian ancestors could not confront the fact that we are intimately bound up in material reality, we cannot confront our immateriality.   

Consider derivatives.   These so-called “special investment vehicles” (SIVs) proved to be the Achilles heel of the ever exploding global economy before 2008.   Although it was the collapse of the American real estate market that technically triggered the crisis, it was the so-called  derivatives that sent the worldwide jerry-rigged system into a downward spiral, which is still continuing.   As in mathematics, a “derivative” in finance is nothing more than a set of signifying linkages, the notational equivalent  of  “difference” in the relations between two or more functions. The word “spreads”, which one hears constantly right now with regard to the European debt  crisis, has a similar set of characteristics.  Without going into the technical details of what these words mean in investment parlance, we can say that the long-standing growth of “casino capitalism” was driven by a constant leveraging of the spreads, or differentials, in the mathematical algorithms that defined the new computerized global marketplace.  Much of what people actually invested in had nothing to do with commodities, real estate, the net worth of companies, and so on.  Investment increasingly was targeted toward “speculative” interrelationships between abstract calculative processes. 

This tendency to pursue an economy of pure sign functions is not some perverse immoral imperative foisted on us by the “one percent,” the “greedy multinational corporations,” or the faceless “speculators”, as garden variety anti-capitalist rhetoric routinely intones.    It follows the “logic of late capitalism” itself, as  Jameson referred to postmodernism as a whole in his book by the same title that appeared in 1991 (See Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism: The Logic of Late Capitalism, Verson, 1991) .  Jameson was in many ways prescient, although his work was considered largely  cranky and obscurantist at the time. 

Like Žižek, who rose to notoriety during the decade immediately after the book’s publication, Jameson did not see “postmodernism” as some new, emancipatory phase in the development of politics and culture.  He saw it as a form of worn-out modernism, at least in the cultural sphere.  In the economic  realm he regarded it as the final stage of the world-historical process Marx had analyzed in Capital.   The “crisis” Marx predicted, which actually did not come ironically until the early twenty-first century after communism itself had crashed and burned, would be a result, Jameson implied, not so much of the complete “immiseration” of the working class through capitalist expropriation of the value of their labor, but the transmogrification of labor itself into aesthetic trivialities and human consciousness itself into a whirl of  frivolous enjoyments (think mall shopping or cable television), the endless production of new commodified intensities propelled by insatiable sexual appetites (think contemporary art and internet porn),  the raising of compulsive triviality and narcissistic emptiness to the level of the pseudo-sublime (think Facebook).

Jameson wrote in 1991:  “What has happened is that aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods.”  The “occupy” movement that has gained so much attention lately, like the Wall Street bankers themselves, therefore is  simply one more node in the vast global net of signifying differentia, as Ferdinand de Saussure, who along with Nietzsche birthed postmodern thinking, would have put it.  Saussure in many ways sketched out the theory of the hyperreal in his Course in General Linguistics given at the University of Geneva on the eve of World War I.   Jacques Lacan, who influenced a whole generation of French postmodern philosophers, put it into practice with his analysis of how what he called the “symbolic order” – the order of linguistic and conceptual sign interactions – not only dominates, but absorbs all our desires and imaginings.   

In postmodern culture the endless thirst for the “latest and newest” French thinker  - the proverbial haut couture splashy intellectual “fashion model” with the trendiest, most recent, most outrageous position, or proposition,  to come down the publishers’ runway – is but one manifestation of such developments.    In pop Christianity it is the rage for an ever sexier way of making Jesus seem cool and relevant.  Jesus, the historical singularity that fused the infinite Lord of time with the finite depravity of humanity, is now just an inexhaustibly mobile Lacanian “sliding signifier” in the global marketplace of commodified Christianities.

But let us return to Freud.   As the slow motion apocalypse of the global system of empty significations (i.e., “late capitalism”) gathers momentum, hunger returns.    Not only the hunger for food, but the hunger for significations that are not hyperrealities, that are not pure differentia.  A hunger for a meaningfulness that is truly transformative and “sustainable”.  Aha, say the salivating cyberevangelists, now let’s give them Jesus.  But Jesus himself condemned the Pharisees for offering hungry men snakes and stones.  We can no longer give hungry men and women Saussurian signs.   

Just as we all suffer from so many environmental disorders because of the pollution of our bodies with additives, industrial chemicals, and waste products that we can no longer even define, so we pollute our spirits with the subtle hyperrealities we have no idea are no longer real at all.  The love of God satisfies the hunger and environmental hysteria of the postmodern soul, but it is a love that does not come through the endless natterings of the “symbolic order,” let alone the political as well as the religious preachers of completely virtualized fantasies of a new heaven and earth, of a redemption that can be carried out through out through social media theater, through nothing but private and collective gestures, posturing,  or signifying inanities. 

The apocalypse that is at hand is the apocalypse of a real God who really loves us and really loves through the real love that we show in deeds rather than our gestures, our placing of our hearts along with our bodies in the space of those who desire love, who desire intimacy, closeness, and relationship.  The love of God is inseparable from the love of neighbor (and even more so the love of child, spouse, significant other). 

The second commandment is no Baudrillardian simulacrum.  The true parousia of Christ (“Behold, I am coming soon”) is not “deferred” Derridean avenir.   

Hunger and love.  The real is relational and the relational is real.   It is NOW!

Carl Raschke is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Denver.  He writes regularly on religion, Christianity, culture, and postmodernism.  He is the author of The Next Reformation (Baker Academic, 2004`) and GloboChrist (Baker Academic, 2008).  His latest book Postmodernism and the Revolution in Religious Theory: Toward a Semiotics of the Event will be published by University of Virginia Press in 2012.

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.     

              

      

Do we really get Romans? A little Badiou and Žižek can help.

It's been said that reformations and revolutions in Christianity begin with a re-reading of Romans.

That is certainly true of the Protestant Reformation with Luther's epoch-shaking insight into the meaning of the phrase "the righteousness of God."   

It is true as well of Barth's commentary The Epistle to the Romans, which in the words of a Catholic commentator "burst like a bombshell on the playground of the European theologians."  Barth's leveraging of Paul's argument in Romans served, in the shocking aftermath and disillusionment of the First World War, to turn the scholarly, cozy, and complex arguments of 19th century Protestant thinkers on their head and usher in the relatively long era that we today know as Neo-Orthodoxy.

The long-tenured regime of Neo-Orthodoxy collapsed - quite quickly really - in the mid-to-late 1960s with the cultural revolution of that period, which coincided with the rise of both religious studies as an "alternative", at least in America, to the intellectual cartel of Barthianism and the Barth-based mainline Protestant establishment and the emergence of so-called "secular theology," which gradually morphed into a new establishment with its own signature and features.  Much of today's Christian postmodernism has this latter development as both its source and heritage, although it is also fair to say that its initial impulse in the form of applied Derrideanism was derived from the sense of a thoroughgoing "gappiness" in conventional liberal constructions of God along with the realization that there was room for postulating a "holiness" that could be glimpsed in all the holes of the not-so-monolithic text.  That is the genealogy of all "religion without religion."

Secular theologies, whether they be grounded in the grand narratives of 19th century bourgeois progressivism or the "apocalypse now" and "destruction of metaphysics" themes of the post-Sixties decades, are always the products of good economic times and social stability.  The varieties of "crisis" theology" - the original terminology for Neo-Orthodoxy - find fertile soil in political or economic anxiety and social upheaval.   All the current discussion of what may be coming "after postmodernism" may be setting the stage for the emergence of a 21st century crisis theology, though one completely and obviously unlike what reigned from the 1930 up to the 1960s.   

Besides Romans, crisis theologies - if that's really the word we want to use - always turn out to carry the genetics of a previous and hitherto marginalized philosophical movement.  Luther relied indirectly on nominalism for his critique of Thomism, indulgences, and Catholic sacramental theology.  Barth "discovered" Kierkegaard.  If a new crisis theology is in the making - most likely with its own re-appropriation of Romans - what might that be?  

The word "postmodern," as we have known for years, carries way too much freight if it is to be intelligible in a serious philosophical or theological setting.  The term itself was deployed by Jean-Francois Lyotard in his book The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge during the mid-1980s to provide a label for the Zeitgeist of the time, although it has been applied a bit retroactively to the thought of the early Derrida and proleptically to much in the history of philosophy since then.  The feeling that "postmodernism" is now slowly fading from the picture may have more to do with a general weariness in the face of our recent past, not to mention a growing recognition that things have significantly changed in the past few years. One needs, however, to put aside the strife over labels and ask what is happening on the broader intellectual, philosophical, and theological levels.  

There has been a larger major trend since the late 1990s in Continental philosophy, especially on the French side, that has not yet gained traction in the American theological world which may be the key to the beginnings of a new "crisis theology."  The trend is closely associated with the prevalence of two special words nowadays in our postmodernist discourse - "singularity" and "event."  The nomenclature on the main can be traced back to the writings of Gilles Deleuze (though ultimately as far back as the middle and late Heidegger) But these words have become staples in the work of Alain Badiou and Slavoy Žižek. 

Without delving extensively into the technical usage of these words in postmodern philosophy, we can make the general observation that they focus our attention on the productive power of certain nameable "phenomena" in our struggle to signify the unsignifiable. Events are "singular" incidences within our narratives and articulations of what we experience that have both broad-ranging origins and consequences, though we cannot "say exactly" what the event is "all about."   The singularity of the event both derives, and derives from,  chains, complexes, and assemblages of potentially meaningful, yet inherently indiscernible, moments of signification that run invisibly back into the past and forward into the future.  The event itself, however, is unnameable.  

Deleuze talked about the singularity of the event in terms of what he called the "virtual."  This kind of talk has deep affinities with the stock, but non-mathematical, language of theoretical physics - e.g., virtual particles, virtual states.  The event, however, is unnameable.  The visible phenomenon, which from Husserl through Heidegger to contemporary "phenomenological" theologians such as Nancy and Marion, can be named by philosophy.  But the event itself surpasses the horizon of everything that is even potentially nameable.   Just as "black holes" in physics are "singularities" with their own "event horizons" that point, without signifying, beyond the laws of nature, so events in the philosophical sense indicate, without naming, beyond the horizon of our syntax and linguistic iterability.

For Žižek the event can be associated with the irruption of the "real" in the endless, but futile, formation of the psychological subject.  For Badiou the event is always identifiable and locatable, yet not "explicable," within history.  It is a "singular truth" that cannot be achieved by philosophical discussion and controversy, yet arises as a surprising and fruitful breakage within the perceived "flow of events" to be seized by thought, which then makes it meaningful through the rigorous application of "truth procedures."

For most post-Sixties French intellectuals the genuine event - l'eventement as Badiou and others call it - was the sudden and fateful inbreaking of the student protests, worker strikes, and the crisis of the Gaullist state in 1968.  For America - at least in recent memory - it might be considered 9/11.  In one's own life, if we go with Žižek's take, the event can be a breakdown of all the cognitive and the "symbolic" routines of processing our experience in accordance with our own personal imago  that we suddenly name as a collapse or "failure" in the generation of a sense of selfhood.  From the Christian point of view the latter is close to the unexpected profound awareness of brokenness and the need of grace.  "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, to save a wretch like me."  And so forth.  The event is the moment of "crisis" and redemption that has ramifications far beyond its own horizon of nameability. 

But what does all the foregoing have to do with theology? Much of the appeal of the earlier version of crisis theology rested on its unabashed Biblicism as well as the implicit cry of "back to the Reformation," where shibboleths like sole fide and sola scriptura resonated strongly with the fast-growing, implicit critique of secular authority.  If we are living in a time of religion's return, we are also witnessing a rapid collapse of confidence, not just in America but throughout much of the Western world, in political and secular authority.  Some kind of "Biblicism" - because of the intrinsically iconoclastic register of the Biblical canon itself, which elevates the singularity of the ancient Judaic faith experience over the would-be universality of the Greek sophrosyne or the Latin ratio, the principle of measured and "enlightened" thought in keeping with harmonious living that supposedly is a mandate for all human beings.

The Pauline indictment of such "measured thought" is most concentrated in his dialectic of "wisdom" and "foolishness", or "vanity", that are found in Romans.  The same dialectic, of course, appears in l Corinthians.   "For though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking...Claiming to be wise, they became fools; and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles." (Rom. 1:21-23).  

This kind of dialectic is very familiar to theologians, but what remains unspoken is the implications of Paul's repeated use of variants on the Greek term mataioites (those things that are "futile" or "vain").  The Greek word commonly suggests idolatry, but it has the primary meaning of "lacking force" or "unproductive of sense".  In other words, Paul is contrasting the emptiness or fecklessness of Greek dianoia, or discursivity, which from Plato onward was supposed to lead under the direction of sophia (i.e., "wisdom") to the pure eidetic, or ideal, vision of universal truth.  The dianoia of philosophy, which yields a specious wisdom, results in what Nietzsche termed nihilism, the "twilight of the idols." "What does nihilism mean?  That the highest values devaluate themselves.  The aim is lacking; 'why' finds no answer." (Will to Power, 2).      

In contrast, Paul goes on throughout the rest of Romans to explicate the mystery of the Cross, the importance of what he calls the "obedience of faith" in the gospel that is "the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith (Rom. 1:16)," and the subtle and rather complicated of the relationship between the Jews, "entrusted with the oracles of God", and the role of Christ followers.  What makes Christians special?  It is not that they have a "knowledge"  of God (gnosis), which is reserved for the "Greeks", or a special relationship to God through the Torah, which is reserved for the Jews.  The "obedience of faith" specific to Christians consists in a complete re-orientation of our lives and the formation of our hopes around a once-and-for all event, the event for which the horizon is Christ death and resurrection.  This event can be discerned neither through sophrosyne, which leads to futility, nor as part of the (Jewish) awareness of one's own distinctive election in the economy of God's Heilsgeschichte, which leads to "boasting" and arrogance.  It can only be discerned through the "weakness" (astheneia) of both our philosophical and religious understanding that finds the Cross intelligible only as a pure singularity that remains otherwise impervious to the inferential capacity of our computative minds (dianoia).  "But we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles." (1 Cor. 1:23)

For the event Paul, of course, employs the term kairos to indicate this singular and infinitely productive event, which can never be named per se.  "For while we were still weak, at the right time (kata kairon) Christ died for the ungodly." (Romans 5:6).   The kairotic character of the event is only perceptible to the "weak", who experience overwhelming "power" while right-minded Greeks sense futility and conscientious Jews a total humiliation, which was the Roman aim in crucifying their victims.  A crucified messiah?  How absolutely insulting to the divine majesty!  Indeed, the Cross signifies not just abject failure, but absolute nihilism so far as Western "ontology" is concerned.  "God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not (ta me onta), to reduce to nothing things that are."  On the face of it, what Paul is saying is the most shocking thing that the "onto-theological" version of Christianity can beard - God himself is the author of a strategic historical nihilism that is totally necessary to reveal the "power of the Gospel" in all its fullness and immensity.  

The fascination of today's would-be "atheistic" French philosophers like Žižek and Badiou with the singularity of the crucified Christ is not accidental.  So much of postmodern thought is not merely an "overcoming of metaphysics" and ontology, but a quest to penetrate to the singularity that is neither logical, ethical, nor ontological, but (as Heidegger would put it) the "origin" of the intelligibly determinative. Beginning with Heidegger himself, whom Derrida never really understood and who inaugurated the quest itself, we find a struggling to find some kind of "name" for this origin.  Heidegger calls it the "Being" that can "be" only by crossing it out.  Derrida names it khora, Deleuze the virtual, Badiou the event.  It is a quest for the name of the origin of the "universal."  As Badiou the  tells us, however, the event can be discerned, though not named, in the very "name" of Jesus - not the historical Jesus, not the Jesus of Christology qua onto-theology, but the event to which we give that name, and from which all names emanate.  "He is the name for what happens to us universally" (Badiou, St. Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, 60).  

A "crisis theology" would be concurrent with a new explication of the original sense of the Christ event. But postmodern thinking has already brought us to that crisis.

Hence, we need to re-read Romans. 

Carl Raschke

          

 

 

 

        

Frederick Douglass on the Economics of Human Stock and “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”

The following post comes from Cynthia Nielsen who is a PhD candidate at the University of Dallas and blogs at percaritatem.com.

By the shedding of whose blood have we become one of the wealthiest nations in the world?  To begin an answer, why not turn to one whose back bore many a bloody lash for the sake of the so-called “American dream.”  In his 1852 oration, “The Internal Slave Trade,” Frederick Douglass offers his own analysis and stringent condemnation of America’s participation in the trafficking of human beings for economic gain.

Behold the practical operation of this internal slave trade—the American slave trade sustained by American politics and American religion!  Here you will see men and women reared like swine for the market.  You know what is a swine-drover?  I will show you a man-drover.  They inhabit all our southern states.  They perambulate the country, and crowd the highways of the nation with droves of human stock.  You will see one of these human-flesh-jobbers, armed with pistol, whip and bowie-knife, driving a company of a hundred men, women, and children, from the Potomac to the slave market at New Orleans.  These wretched people are to be sold singly, or in lots, to suit purchasers.  They are food for the cotton-field and the deadly sugar-mill.  Mark the sad procession as it moves wearily along, and the inhuman wretch who drives them.  Hear his savage yells and his blood-chilling oaths, as he hurries on his affrighted captives.  There, see the old man, with locks thinned and gray.  Cast one glance, if you please, upon that young mother, whose shoulders are bare to the scorching sun, her briny tears falling on the brow of the babe in her arms.  See, too, that girl of thirteen, weeping, yes, weeping, as she thinks of the mother from whom she has been torn.  The drove moves tardily. Heat and sorrow have nearly consumed their strength.  Suddenly you hear a quick snap, like the discharge of a rifle; the fetters clank, and the chain rattles simultaneously; your ears are saluted with a scream that seems to have torn its way to the center of your soul.  The crack you heard was the sound of the slave whip; the scream you heard was from the woman you saw with the babe.  Her speed had faltered under the weight of her child and her chains; that gash on her shoulder tells her to move on.  Follow this drove to New Orleans.  Attend the auction; see men examined like horses; see the forms of women rudely and brutally exposed to the shocking gaze of American slave-buyers.  See this drove sold and separated forever; and never forget the deep, sad sobs that arose from that scattered multitude.[1]

This is simply one among many scenes depicting the hardships African American slaves endured on a daily basis as a result of the institution of chattel slavery.  Enslaved by the love of money, the master’s vision becomes distorted.  Not only does he see human beings as things, but the sounds of suffering fall silent to his ears.  Deafened to the wailing of mothers’ torn from their children, he transposes the dissonance of clanking chains into gold-en keys, which like the dual cut of a double-edged sword open the door to his future and secure the bonds of his brother. 

To add to their humiliation and degraded status as mere property of the white man, slaves were subjected to public auctions where they were ordered to stand, often naked or nearly so, and allow the potential buyers to examine their bodies to ensure their suitability for long-term servitude.  If a slave’s body showed signs of illness, disease, or possible weaknesses, they were passed over as bad investments, unprofitable for the master’s business.  Scar tissue on a slave’s back—the number of scars, whether the scar was old or relatively fresh—became the subject of a mythology employed to determine a slave’s character.   Too many scars indicated a rebellious spirit, whereas having few scars meant that the slave possessed a docile, obedient spirit.  “As they worked their way from inflicted scars to essential character, buyers fixed slaves in a typology of character according to the frequency, intensity, and chronology of the whipping apparent on their backs.”[2] While the slaves stood humiliated, exposed and wondering what kind of master might purchase them on that particular day, the slave buyers paraded themselves before the crowds as augurs who “could read slaves’ backs as encodings of their histories.”[3] 

 

Undeniably, the United States has come a long way from the days of chattel slavery, and we can be encouraged by the positive strides made in racial relations and equality; yet, it is important to remember whence we came in order to avoid repeating past mistakes and so that we might become critically alert to new manifestations of racism. Here we would do well to heed the words of Frederick Douglass’s 1852 oration, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” Having accepted an invitation to speak to a largely white audience in celebration of Independence Day, Douglass, as master orator and rhetorician, turns to a Psalm of lamentation—a passage with which his audience was thoroughly familiar—and interprets it as analogous to the situation of American slaves.

“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.  If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth” [Psalm 137]. Fellow-citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions, whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are to-day rendered more intolerable by the jubilant shouts that reach them. […] To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world.[4]

Although chattel slavery and slave auctions are no longer part of America’s daily routine, in what ways do we continue to act as augurs de-coding and constructing the Other?  What kinds of actions can we, as Christians, take to change, subvert, or expose such practices?

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[1] Douglass, “The Internal Slave Trade,” 436–7. 

[2] Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul, 145. 

[3] Ibid., 145. 

[4] Douglass, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” 431-2.  

Ecclesiology as a Rival "Ascetic" of Desire

(I have edited this post realising my most of the content was pre-mature, and please forgive any consternation this causes.  And apologies where the comments do not align with this truncated version)

Within my PhD work I have ben trying to understand how capitalist markets affect Christian identity formation.  Within the work of Bernd Wannenwetsch, William Cavanaugh, Reinhard Hütter, Daniel Bell, Vincent Miller, Stephen Long etc, I have come to three understandings about how late capitalist markets function:

1) The market is a form of "ascetic" practice, disciplining our bodies and inducting us with habits and practices in contrast with ecclesial practices.

2) The market then sets up patters of desire through these ascetic practices in contrast to the church in its ecclesial forms and worship and orients us around desire.

3) That comes together in embodiment and social relationship, and individually around desire, of how the market makes a false form of universal communion.

Cavanaugh, Miller, Wannenwetsch et al, have set up an inherently conflictual and rival relationship between the church and the market.  Within these accounts the problem is they present an over dichotomized account.

What ways might we respond to this?  One way I would suggest is a more nuanced reading, and Augustinian reading of the condition of modernity as a saeculum.  
 
A large question I am asking is if an Augustinian reformed account of a missional ecclesiology in relation to capitalism can be made. 

Fundamentalist Inversions: Some Postmodern Variants

I want to put on the table some recent inversions of fundamentalism expressed under the guise of postmodern re-alignments.  By fundamentalism I'm referring to the Christian fundamentalism created in the wake of the modernist debates in the US around the 1920 (a fun genealogy is here), not fundamentalism in 'general' if there is such of thing.  I want to speak about three specific invesions of fundamentalism regarding inerrancy, biblical primitivism, and anti-intellectualism. 

From inerrancy to pure errancy:
This has been around for awhile so I won't spend too much time on it.  From an ideological commitment to inerrant orginal documents which contain the word of God comes the inversion of the pure errancy of the Bible.  By errancy I don't mean full of errors (although that might be claimed also), but rather that scripture is mark as errant, as somewhat lost, or at least meandering, never quite landing anywhere, that there is no cohesive theme, plot, narrative, or character.  Rather than a legal document we should think of the Bible as a communal library (McLaren's new proposal).  I think this inversion is the triumph of a certain hermeneutics deployed against modern literalism.  And as such is merely an inversion of fundamentalism, rather than a break or overcoming.

From biblical primitivism to rabbinic primitivism:
Old time fundamentalists always want to get back to the beginning, to return to what the Bible said and just do it.  Who wants to be an Acts 2 church?  The inversion of this, I submit, is a return/recovery of rabbinic primitivism.  As the story goes, because the church became so thoroughly Hellenized so quickly (just see the Gospel of John) the only way back into an authentic Jewish mindset reflecting that of Jesus is to look at early rabbinic Judaism, circa 120 C.E, after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem.  Hebrew midrash, mystical uncertainty, the dissemination of the Torah without a final interpretation, even by God, all of these are taken as a better way of believing/knowing/living with Jesus on his way, rather than the orthodox of Greek thought forms.

On one level, I have nothing against any of these and I think indeed they might help us in a life of faith.  But the only problem is that rabbinic Judaism was already itself a reactionary movement against an already Hellenized Judaism, and secondly, to use it as an interpretative devise for authentic Christianity is to join Enlightenment racism started over 200 years ago.  Let me explain.  The Apostle Paul was not such a strange mixture of Greek and Hebrew culture as so often portrayed.  He was rather the more typical expression of Diaspora Judaism of the time.  While Philo was a particularly spectacular attempt to harmonize the Torah with Plato, when you look at the intertestimental literature (of course the Septuagint, but also the Wisdom of Solomon, The Book of Enoch, Baruch, etc) your see various assimilations of Greek throught via wisdom and apocalyptic literature.  Certainly I'm not saying it was monolithic in nature, but Hellenistic influences were already prevelant well before Jesus came on the stage, even if they weren't as dominant in Palastine as they were outside it.  But secondly, the attempt to find a primitive expression of Judaism through which to funnel Christian theology, which on the surface seems very open and welcoming to Judaism (which I would advocate), it inadvertently falls into a line of thought which began as anti-Semitic polemics (see Dale B. Martin, “Paul and the Judaism/Hellenism Dichotomy: Toward a Social History of the Question,” in Paul beyond the Judaism/Hellenism divide).  As we all know, the Renassaince and Enlightenment idealized ancient Greece (its art, culture, politics).  This created a mirror through which to view the problems/solutions of European cultural, and the foil for this became a backwards Judaic thought.  Two intellectual  poles were created for understanding thought, religions, politics, and society: the Greek and Hebrew.  We have been oscillating back and for between the two poles ever since.  Now I could go on about this, but suffice to say that I'm not convinced this is the best way forward (recovering a primitive rabbinic Judaism) because while definitely worthy as a way of life, I just don't think it will help us better understand the origins of Christianity, just like getting back to Acts is no good.   So, let's avoid this primitivist inversion.

From conservative anti-intellectualism to liberal anti-intellectualism:
This one has me the most frustrated.  I was drawn to the emerging church conversation because I saw vigorous questioning and thoughtful exploration.  And I certainly don't mind disagreements over quesitons and answers. And certainly there are several young, postmodern emerging/emergent theologians who are making rigorous arguments and thoughtful claims.  But I've become more and more concerned at a creeping anti-intellectualism among some of the loudest voices who rest on rhetorical questions, anecdotal evidence, and communal experiences over philosophical and theological articulation and argument.  This, I believe, follows from the previous inversions because your don't have to really say anything or land anywhere because we are all merely in an endless conversation.  Essentially, everything is a rhetorical display without any real substance.  And really, you can only score so many rhetorical points before you are only preaching to the choir (which is a form a fundamentalism itself, is it not?).  I have been a part of numerous conversations that only go so deep before an implied anti-intellectualism takes over.  If one probes too deeply all of a sudden you are part of the establishment, you are on a heretic hunt, or you are defending an ideology which we are trying to overcome with our radical questioning.  Well, that can only go so far.  When a certain form of radical questioning takes the well worn paths of protestant liberalism, or mirror forms of Hegelianism, it does not good to just assert that "we" aren't doing that old thing, you have to actually show how things are different, you have to defend and articulate what is going on.  This is the role of an 'organic theologian', to both articulate within a community what is happening, and express to larger communities why it makes sense.  To only do the former without the latter is to perpetuate a fundamentalism on the other side of the equation.  Hence my claim of an inverted anti-intellectualism.  Fundamentalist, Evangelicals, Hippies, the Seeker-Church, and now many Missional/Emergent types play this card as a way of calling into question the power of the establishment.  Now I'm not saying there aren't issues of power going on, but have faith in your ideas and practices, show the world, make your case, and make a difference.  Don't just claim that the powers are keeping you out without even actually making an argument so saying that others won't understand.

So, I just wanted to get these out there, that what is thought to be after/beyond fundamentalism might just be its inversion. 

Have any of you experienced this? 

Do any disagree with my typology of what's going on?

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Geoff Holsclaw is a co-pastor at Life on the Vine, and blogs over at for the time being.

The new German postmodern Christianity - beyond deconstruction

The new German awakening

Unbeknownst to most of us who try to keep albreast of these things, Germany – the largest nation in the European Union, the site of the Protestant Reformation, and the historical homeland of modern theology itself – is stirring and awakening when it comes to what is distinctively Christian as well postmodern.   The main reason this development is largely off our radar is because the German-speaking churches and the German universities have not exactly been pace-setters in the postmodernist movement over the past three decades.  In addition, most of the blogging, publishing, and other forms of “conversation” is in German, which American academic read less and less (don’t we all speak English and French?) 

But in Karlsruhe on the Rhine a few weeks ago Alan Hirsch, one of the most familiar faces of the global postmodern church movement, keynoted a the second annual Novavox conference that drew the largest ever audience from Protestant, Catholic, and  the German “Free Churches” around Germany.  So-called “emergent cohorts” have sprung up all over Germany in recent years, most notably in such cities as Marburg and Erlangen.  As one Novavox conference attendee put it, “now I’ve got all the buzzwords and the concepts.” 

When we say "postmodern" we don't tend to think of the Germans.  Even though virtually all the streams of postmodern philosophy cascade directly down from the intellectual heights dominated by the great German philosophers Kant, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, it was the French "post-structuralists" who, starting in the 1960s and commandeered by Derrida and Deleuze, cleared and built out the vast terrain with which most of us in the academy and in the church are now familiar. 

The word "postmodern" itself was minted by the French academic Jean-Francois Lyotard in the early 1980s in an effort to assess the changes in the culture, values, and education of the Francophone peoples in the wake of the social upheavals of the Vietnam era.  But it was the "ontology" of Husserl and Heidegger, to which Derrida reacted during this early period,and which he sought to de-Teutonize in order to accomodate the new forms of cultural and social-psychological critique that had emerged with figures like figures like Louis Althusser, Julia Kristeva, and Jacques Lacan and to re-invigorate the deeply embedded tradition of  structural linguistics, invented by Ferdinand de Saussure, in France as central to philosophy. 

Most of what we know as "deconstruction" had this largely linguistic, neo-Marxist, anti-phenomenological, a-theological origin.  As a footnote it is highly ironic that what in the past decade has become known to theologians as "postmodernism" tends (with the exception perhaps of Žižek) tends to be highly idealistic, phenomenological, anti-linguistic, anti-psychological, and a-political.  

The tables have been turned completely, and your typical reader of this blog would have little knowledge of, or interest in, the early French figures that pioneered the phenomenon. So much of the "theological turn" in philosophy, which has generated what we know as "Continental postmodern theology," is influenced largely by French thinkers such as Jean-Luc Marion and Jean-Luc Nancy, but the tradition of French phenomenology going back to Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Maritain, to whom these thinkers belong, has a solidly Germanic coloring and background, which the early "deconstructionists" thoroughly rejected. 

While French ideas and trends have largely shaped postmodernism, the now vaguely defined "postmodern church" is almost strictly a product of the American evangelical identity crisis that surfaced in the mid-1990s.   Trends in youth culture were the catalyst during this era, but it was the presumed "authority" of figures such as Derrida in challenging the authority of the kind of inerrantist fundamentalism that had overshadowed  the evangelical agenda for a generation that drew interest from progressive-minded church leaders. 

Of course, Derrida himself was always far more far complicated and opaque than he was understood to be as the would-be icon of the new, typically American anti-authoritarianism. Even those semi-academic types who helped make the master of deconstruction a household name among pastors as he had been earlier among humanities scholars barely realized that Derrida himself had emphasized repeatedly that deconstruction was not the same as critique and that it had much more to do with how we read texts while unlocking the signifying power of the seemingly unsignifiable in our thinking (e.g., God as the "not-God" of negative theology, the messianic or the unrepresentable that is "to come").

Postmodern Christianity and American anti-authoritarianism

It has been said wryly that since the American project started (not counting the Puritans) in the seventeenth century as the true revolution of the subject whose insignia were always the "axe and the Bible," the Bible became the true canon katholikon that was never ever really challenged, even after the Scopes Trial in the late 1920s.  The axe was really not turned against the Bible in mainstream Protestantism until the late 1960s and against "fundamentalist" evangelicalism only at the end of the millennium.  

But the result of this anti-authoritarian and anti-fundamentalist revolution, or "reformation", even in the churches, was a pure rootless and largely contentless subjectivity that could be sustained only by endless variations (including "spiritual" versions) of the old Romantic idea of limitless freedom and the inexhaustible possibilities of "personal liberation" and lifestyle choices, which back in the 1980s were dubbed "New Age;
American  postmodern Christianity, while it seeks nowadays to be "socially engaged" and  "missional-minded" in current parlance, has always been a form of "me-Christianity," a sophisticated Christian-tinted personal experientialism. 

That is not to say the old evanagelism was not that much different.  'Seeker-sensitive" megachurches followed the same pattern with a different appeal to a different generation.  But if the "missional turn" in American postmodern Christianity is ever really going to happen in substance more than in rhetoric, there will have to be a serious prophetic challenge to the kind of cultural DNA church structures in this country that forever configure the Gospel as a form of personal self-enrichment, not so much in terms of wealth but in terms of distinctive Christian cultural or intellectual "experiences." 

In the American and (to a lesser extent) the British scenes, where postmodern Christianity as we know it has both its roots and its contours, there is a significant disconnect between theology, philosophy, and Christian praxis.  Pastoral types, with the exception perhaps of those who read this blog, don’t pay that much attention to serious philosophical trends and ideas, and when they do often become involved in The Conversation, they make the familiar point that they are doing so for their own self-improvement and are frustrated by the utter lack of interest in these topics on the part of the Christian communities – even the most hip – that they work with.  

I’ve lost count of how many inquiries I, as a professor of religious studies at a major university in this country with a significant PhD program in philosophy and theology, have received even in the past decade from “burned out” pastors who are tired of ministering and “just want to study and teach exciting ideas like you do.”  

In the more distant past theological revolutions in the American church have more often than not been imported from Germany.  That was true not only in the nineteenth, but also throughout the twentieth century.  Since the 1970s, however, the flow of philosophical and theological products for import has been coming from France and the UK (the Germans at one time gave us “neo-orthodoxy”; then the Brits invented “radical orthodoxy”).   But it was always the genius of German theology that it could be theoretical and practical at the same time (look at what happened to neo-Kantianism up until the First World War).   

However, in recent years most of the postmodernist agitation in the churches of Germany, which is still statistically the most “religious” EU nation, if one does not count the cultural Catholicism of Italy and Spain, has come from American groups who want to “evangelize” those neo-pagan Europeans.  The Novavox conference itself was co-sponsored bv a California-based “missions” organization.   American groups often try to persuade the Germans to adopt their own version of fad-driven, practical, pop theological approaches for the primary purpose of “planting and growing” churches, but the results are not very effective.  Germans prefer their Christianity heavier and stronger than we do, like their beer.

From deconstruction to "globopomo"

When it comes to current philosophy, however, Germans are not all that interested in “deconstructing”.  The well-known, early putdown of Derrida and Derrideans by Jürgen Habermas during the 1980s left long-term marks, even though the two philosophers eventually became good friends and collaborators.   But there is another key underlying condition – a Grundzustand, as the Germans would say – that explains this reluctance.  Hitler and the Holocaust essentially deconstructed the entirety of the German conceptual landscape.   The postwar German theological preoccupation has been the task of coming to grips with its monstrous, recent political and cultural past.  Germans never really needed to “postmodernize” in the loose sense of having to problematize modernist progressivism and rationality, because history did it for them. 

But this now more-than-half-century of self-doubt, self-pity, and endless national self-reflection is coming to an end.  Germans are looking outward and pondering what one scholar privately referred to me as a “new global Christian thinking” that is radically and globally engaged at the same time it is disengaged from all parochial, cultural, and identity-obsessed forms of purely “critical” postmodernism.  There are no German Derridas yet on the scene, though the so-called “public philosopher” Peter Sloterdijk, who himself is based in Karlsruhe, late in his career is starting to gain a certain European notoriety for his own distinctive take on postmodernity, globalization, and the current world financial crisis.  

Sloterdijk in his own way is challenging Germans, and his readers outside Germany, to think beyond the kind of self-referential postmodernism that through new media fosters a hypersubjectivity and esthetic inwardness that effectively cancels the earlier globalist thrust of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism toward a unified sense of humanity.  Today’s apparent new “cosmopolitanism” is one in name only, he insists, because it is constituted primarily by the intricate and patchwork parochialisms that together make up what he dubs das Weltinnenraum (the “world private space”), which global consumer capitalism has seeded, “malignantly” perhaps, in religion, ethics, the arts, and philosophy.  

Sloterdijk’s theory of a “mediated” cosmopolitanism, which like Gilles Deleuze’s earlier theory of nomadology represents an effort to map all concepts and signifying processes in terms of spatial relationships and spatial flux, confronts the runaway differentialism of postmodern thinking along with the very hypersubjectivity that in age of collapsing global consumerism may be on the verge of extinction.

Since late last summer I have been in conversation with a German academic, who is also a pastor, in Marburg named Tobias (“Toby”) Faix, who can be considered one of the leading lights of the indigenous German-speaking “new wave” of Continental Christian postmodernism.  We have only exchanged a few thoughtful emails, but I have been tracking down and reading his blog posts, essays, and books, all published in German, which are both extensive  and provocative.   

Whether he has read or been influenced by Sloterdijk is immaterial, because Faix has much of the same take on the global as the latter, albeit from a Christian theological perspective. Faix is currently Dozent or Lecturer in Practical Theology and Sociology at the Marburg Bibelseminar, a state-accredited professional school for pastors that corresponds to the American version of the theological seminary, as well as director of Empirica, a research institute specializing in youth culture and religion.

In his institute’s most recently published volume entitled Zeitgeist 2: Postmoderne Heimatkunde (“Zeitgeist 2: Postmodern Local History”, Francke, 2009), Faix and his co-contributors asks the question where the postmodern Christian can find a sense of place with which to identify themselves, a site of particularity, a  Heimat or “homeland.”   

Contrary to the consumer-based “identity politics” or “identity religion” that has been the hallmark of global consumerism, the authors argue in different ways and with differing rhetorics that our only “homeland” is the world and its openeness, what in The Creation of the World, or Globalization Nancy terms “the world of singularities, without their plurality constructed as a unitotality.”   

Instead of seeking a “private space” of singularity as a point of retreat in our radically “disenclosed” world, as Nancy would say, the Christian finds his or her singular, or heimatlich, identification in the world-historical purpose of God through missional service both in our immediate communities and abroad.  That is the kind of Christian postmodernism that I have written about in my own book in this series entitled GloboChrist (Baker Academic, 2008), a Christianity that is not only "postmodern" per se, but "globopomo."

Challenging comfortable Christian "identity theology"

In his most recent email describing the pastoral situation in Germany, Faix notes that the recession of the past year, which has produced massive unemployment in Germany as elsewhere, has generated a crisis for the comfortable “postmodern pluralism” of Western nations, including Germany itself, whose complexion has been altered irremediably by immigration and the democratic mingling of peoples and cultures.  Suddenly the presence of economic stress everywhere, not just among the marginalized but among the once well-established middle class, reveals the “otherness” of the other in our midst rather than as a piece of a pretty pastiche of society’s “diverse” elements.  

The crisis, according to Faix, has also exposed the the white middle classiness of the church, even that part of the church which is theoretically conscious of the need to serve the other.  This kind of “social change brings with it [the need for serious] theological change,” Faix writes in his email, a change that may have “painful” (schmerzlich) side effects.   

The pain of the new world disorder we are facing today will force sweeping theological change throughout the theological spectrum of the West, even the postmodern sectors of it.  As it has been said, there is no gain without pain, and of course no change without pain either.  

If Faix’s typically German practical-theoretical vision for the current need to re-invent theology, the country that has experienced much historical pain – unlike America – may be the place where it will begin to happen.  

Note: photos above are those of Peter Sloterdijk and Tobias Faix, respectively.

Nada Dada - Pete Rollins and The Iconics of "Failure"

This week's buzz on the hip Christian blogs are basically two events in, I think, the following order of importance - (a) the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States (b) the American tour of Irish "ikonic" neo-Derridean phenomenologist cum emergent pastor phenomenon Pete Rollins.  If, unlike this old horse of many different colors, you happen to be under 30 and qualify as what the demographers have dubbed as a "millennial," this was indeed your week.  This was your time, as the saying goes, and you had a lot to do with bringing it about.  I myself watched a lot and wondered even more.   Maybe that's why God scheduled things so I would just barely miss everything, although of course I could always watch it on CNN (in the first instance) or read about it all on the blogs (in the second instance). 

As it turned out, I got into Chicago for the American Academy of Religion meeting a few hours too late to hear Jack Caputo and Rollins start up a whole new conversation in the ongoing pomo conversation.  Rollins, in case you're not completely familiar with him, has taken the former's Derridean prayers and tears and turned them into the hottest new style of "post-Christian" Christian teaching, preaching, and Existenz since maybe Thomas Merton.  I know, I know, who's Merton?  All I can say is "google 'im."   Andrew Jones really likes him, and Andrew Jones really likes me, and I really like Andrew Jones, so I guess I can really say I really like Pete Rollins, though I've never met him and I didn't get to hear him.  And I'm going to also be a day late in being Dallas when he comes to Dallas this week, which is where I live, but I won't be there, because I'll be teaching philosophy and religion in Denver, where I do my work, even though I don't live there, though of course I once did live there .  Hey, I think I'm getting it down.  I quote Rollins on the front end of his homepage:  "We must avoid confusion between remaining silent and saying nothing. For while the former is passive the latter is active. By saying nothing we endeavour to speak of that which manifests in our world as a no-thing, as an absolute mystery which infuses our world with light and life." 

Say nothing and carry a big shtick.   That the no, not, nothing of Derridean apophaticism that's been on the scene since Derrida authored On the Name two decades ago and it was through a reputedly (not true, though) "atheistic" deconstructionist French philosopher that a generation rediscovered negative theology and Buddhism.  Christian Buddhism.  That was Merton's shtick, and he carried it well during the Vietnam era.   Merton was a trappist monk,  theologian,  and scholar of comparative religions with a special interest in Buddhism.  He found the profound meaning of not saying anything, or saying no-thing,  from the study of Buddhist meditation and the ancient Madhyamika philosophy of South Asia rather than any deconstructive readings of Medieval Christian thinkers, or taking Marion "to church", as Rollins does.

Oh, yea, about Obama. I don't know anybody who's not excited, although there's a lot not to be excited about, such as the world depression into which all the nations are currently spiraling.   The first thing Obama said in his post-election public statement was that we had to lower expectations.  I guess he meant all that "messianic" stuff which he himself didn't really seek to promote but now had to deal with.  Messianism without a messiah.  Sort of like religion without religion.  Or God without God.  You get the picture.  Not!  Welcome to the new millennium.  By the way, I also missed Obama's Grant Park speech by less than a day.  The AAR was over the day before election day and I couldn't change my plane ticket, unlike someone else I knew who didn't have to teach on Tuesday night in Denver and had a non-refundable fare paid by the university.  I keep missing all the important events, even though when 9/11 happened I could say proudly, "I was always there".  September 11 is my birthday, even though before 2001 it was one of the most inconsequential days on the planet.  Call it living "in not quite such a time as this."

When I talked last week to my young, millennial friend who is studying in Boston all things emergent along with all things Continental and philosophical, I was amazed, however, that he never once mentioned the election of Obama.  He was excited, however, about the American tour of Pete Rollins.   I think he was rather disappointed when I had to inform him that I missed him in Chicago, and that I would again miss him in Dallas, since he perhaps was hoping to experience him through my experiencing him and thus commenting on him.  The phenomenology of Pete Rollins who urges us to say nothing!

What does my young friend saying nothing about Obama but all the while saying a lot about the non-American post-Christian non-theological Continental philosopher who wants us to say nothing at all ("actively," he emphasizes) say about what we all are saying these days?   Post-phenomenological tongue-twisters, anyone?   Rollins' most important book, by the way, is How (Not) To Speak of God.  It was published about two years ago and has been both praised and damned - praised by Andrew of course for challenging us, which it does, and damned by others for engaging in all dat damned Derridean deconstructive de-speaking, which they claim just says nothing.  Of course, that's exactly the point.   

Unlike Brian McClaren who has double-digit names for his "generous orthodoxy" (I won't rehearse here all his "Why I Am a...Christian" sobriquets that subtitle his book ), Rollins has only five modifiers:  "iconic"," apocalyptic", "heretical", "emerging", and "failing". 

The first term really captures what I think Rollins is (not) doing, as I will explain in a minute.   The fourth is purely gestural - like postmodern.  The third is the ceremonial academic version of kitsch, or what I call "high hackneyed,"  as anybody who says anything, or nothing, that doesn't sound like it was sound-bite-engineered is deemed heretical these days, not by the authorities, who don't really care, but by us academics ourselves who like to believe everybody out there is intellectually afraid of us.  The second is  a term I myself will fight for intellectual property rights over, since I was in Berkeley in the late 1960s and was one of a trifecta that founded The Eschaton Society with the aim of bringing down the apocalypse once and for all, as was everybody else actually in those days.  We will be celebrating the 42nd anniversary of the apocalypse next spring.  All are welcome.  The fifth is, well, about why you have to say nothing at all after all, because any attempt to speak amounts to the f-word.   As Lao-Tsu put it, "those who say do not know, and those who know do not say."  I learned that in Berkeley.

The iconics of failure.  We need to develop a sense of where all this not-talking is headed, because sometimes it seems that Rollins' appropriation of the Derridist strain in postmodern thought is a bit gamey.  Unfortunately, that is the case with our current infatuation with Derridean apophaticism.  As less sophisticated critics of the emergent movement have carped, there is so much emphasis on what's not right rather than what's right - less in say in Paul's idiom Christ's "righteousness".  The apophatic moment is sometimes underwhelming, because it comes across  as nothing more than simple critique.  Critique qua critique can get boring after a while.  There is a tendency to stand back, to weave in and out of predicating because "we don't want to sound like those worn-out Christian proclamationists, those heavy-handed gospel-plumpers.   So we say nothing.  Our negative word-space, our language sous erature, is not a pregnant silence but a barren one. 

That has become the fate of the apophatic for the most part in the academy.  It is not not-saying, but having nothing to say.  I hope that Rollins' exposure to the US during this Obama-moment will be far more meaningful.   In reality, his "silence" is,  as I understand those who've taken part in his performance, or what he calls "transformance," art, rather than listen to him theologize,  in Ireland is breathtaking.   I quote from the self-definition of what he does on one of his websites.    "Inhabiting a space on the outer edges of religious life, we are a Belfast-based collective who offer anarchic experiments in transformance art. Challenging the distinction between theist and atheist, faith and no faith our main gathering employs a cocktail of live music, visual imagery, soundscapes, theatre, ritual and reflection in an attempt to open up the possibility of a theodramatic event."  

Rollins does not derive the strange trope of the "theodramatic" from either Caputo or Derrida but from Marion.  But it is playful Marion, joyful Marion (is that an oxymoron?), a God-without-being that is more a Nietzschean, Zarathustrean becoming, the chaos/creativity that gives birth to a dancing star.  One does not need to say anything when one dances instead.  Deconstruction is the elision of the concept.   The dance - Nietzsche's Fröhliche Wisseschaft - is the liberation of the sign.  Worship amounts to what Rollins terms "iconics."  Here we have to dig back into Marion to think Marion, as Heidegger might say, that Marion himself could not think. 

Consider Marion's analysis of the icon.   The icon is the visible "sign" as opposed to the "idol," which is the visible representation.  The idol entices the noetic gaze, arrests it, and encloses the infinity of the divine within a visible framework, similar to Heidegger's Gestell, that cannot penetrate any further.  The icon, in contrast, allows the divine to "saturate" the visible.  The icon allows the gaze to roam across the boundless spaces of the unpresentable.  It defies re-presentation.  The idol is an image/concept.  The icon constitutes an image/sign.  Thus Marion's approach amounts to what we might term a pure semiotics of the visible.  It is the somewhat loose architecture for an explication of what the painter Wassily Kandinsky, the theoretician of the "modernist" aesthetic which prefigures a postmodernist semiology, dubbed the "spiritual in art."   

The noetics of iconicity, as I have argued in my admittedly difficult earlier book Fire and Roses, can ultimately be discerned not in the chains of signifying discursivity and webworks of intertextuality that require a yes/no, a saying/not saying, but in moments of performance.   God is disclosed not in the Not, but in the event we call incarnational.  Can there be nothing more "postmodern" and "performative" than the Incarnation?  We do not speak silence so much as we ourselves live and "incarnate" in our bodies and our signifying praxis the sign of signs that is the logos/sarx   that can only be called a "theosemiophany."  Sometimes we offer up our theology by dancing to loud music. 

That goes beyond even what Rollins terms "failure."  Rollins illustrates failure as a kind of theosemiophany in his parable of the accused person who does not convince a court to convict him because of his Christian "convictions."  "In a world where following Christ is decreed to be a subversive and illegal activity you have been accused of being a believer, arrested and dragged before a court," Rollins begins.  All the evidence is presented.  The accused has been to church, done good things, expounded in terminably the reasons one should be a Christian, a Christian adherent, a "convinced" Christian.  But the judge court itself not convinced.   Much to the shock of the defendant, who was preparing himself for martyrdom perhaps, the court acquits him with these reasons:  "we have no interest in such armchair artists who spend their time creating images of a better world. We exist only for those who would lay down that brush, and their life, in a Christ-like endeavor to create it. So, until you live as Christ and his followers, until you challenge this system and become a thorn in our side, until you die to yourself and offer your body to the flames, until then my friend, you are no enemy of ours."  The iconics of failure is about disclosing the emptiness - indeed the nothingness - of convinced posturing, of hard-hitting evangelical apologetics, of orthodoxy-pushing.  It is the revelation of such failure, such as when Jesus got scourged and crucified, that counts as real revelation.  I call it empty tomb eschatology, as in the original text version perhaps of the Gospel of Mark.  Where did you go?  Nowhere.  Whom did you meet?  Nobody.  What did you say?  Nothing.  But what about this?  "Be gone, I never knew you."

I appreciate profoundly the sentiment of this now pervasive anti-orthodoxy, anti-fundamentalist, anti-establishment apophaticism. But I ask: is there nothing anymore to be deconstructed?  You can only have a revelatory negation when there is a position to be negated.  That is Hegel's ongoing dialectic, not the kingdom of God.  We forget about the total surprise of Easter morning after the long Saturday, not mentioned in Scripture, of anxiety.   When the theatarical rockers of the late 1960s and early 1970s started smashing guitars and beheading babies on stage for a season, it was sensational.  But it now bores.  The day the music died in theology was when "they" discovered deconstruction as an arcane form of philosophical baby-beheading.  Derrida as dada.  Deconstructive dadaism.  Derri-dada.  Nada Dada!

I will say something that hopefully will outrage, but when all outrages have been "outed" for the sake of finding the new and improved episode of the outre and the outrageous, I am not hopeful.  Dada is dead!  How can heretics be burned when there are no inquisitors left?  It's kind of like the puzzled look of one of my students who last Wednesday was celebrating the election of Obama and the inevitable banishment not only of the metaphysical melodrama of Darth Vader Republicanism but also of the evil Christian right, the miliatary-mongering American imperial exceptionalism,  and the now-we- are- the- world-again sort of globopomo feelgoodism.   His question.  Now what?

Perhaps they'll be back.  But as we go into week 2 we realize we are in a funk.  Perhaps my young theological friend didn't mention the election because he realized it was time to move on.  But to what?  If we no longer are not saying, but just for now, is there anything left to say?  Can Christians be burned for the sake of salvation when there is nothing left to resist, or to ridicule?

I like Pete Rollins.  I like what he is trying to do with his "transformance art," though I wish he'd, as the French say, "forget Derrida."  Time to move on, or to await the judgment of the court.

After postmodernism there is one passage in the Bible - it's actually the one is the Book of Revelation - that continues to trouble me.  It's not about the gospel as non-gospel.  It's about what John the Seer isn't the spiritual always about how we see?  - calls "the eternal gospel."  But it's neither about dancing nor silence.   "Then I saw another angel flying in midair, and he had the eternal gospel to proclaim to those who live on the earth—to every nation, tribe, language and people. He said in a loud voice, 'fear God and give him glory, because the hour of his judgment has come. Worship him who made the heavens, the earth, the sea and the springs of water.'"   (Rev. 14:6-7, NIV).

Now that's transformance art! 

 

 

The Church as "Rhizone"

Since I was already scheduled to blog this upcoming week prior to the decision to "engage" my new book  GloboChrist starting August 18,  I want to take this opportunity to talk about something mentioned in the book, but not developed as far as the actual conversation next month will probably take us.  It is something that has come up in countless conversations with new, emergent-style pastors over the past six months in one form or another, and something I also gave a serious of talks about last spring at Crosspointe Church in Dallas.   Crosspointe is actually discussed as an illustration of one of my general arguments in the book.  I want to talk about the Deleuzian notion of the "rhizome" and how it applies to the new Christianity that is  globally "to come".  Here  I am not using "to come" (avenir) in the strict Derridean manner  of a pure, floating signifier that may be considered as the operational, lexical  "deconstructor" of any particular moment in our ongoing conversations about politics, institutions, and social structures.   

When I refer to the rhizomic church "to come", I am talking about the church present and self-transforming (we could also say "emerging", though that term has become so loaded of late).   It is what was really implied in the  use of the term ecclesia militans  (normally translated as "church militant") in ancient orthodoxy, despite its later doctrinal misuse by Roman Catholicism .  It is similar in meaning to what Islam originally meant by "jihad," that is the "struggle" or "endeavors" of the faith community to grow, expand,  and carry out its mission and purpose  as ordained by God.   For Christianity, that mission and purpose is contained in what we call The Great Commission.  " Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. Then Jesus came to them and said, 'All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.   Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.  And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.'" (Matthew 28: 16-20).

In its  original orthodox context, the expression ecclesia miltans derived from the sense that Jesus had attached to  his post-Resurrection "command" with an unmistakable urgency.   Just as a military commander would order his soldier to "take that hill," and they will strive to do so, thus Jesus' disciples took away from their Rabbi's  words the obvious experience of an critical and unswerving obligation to  transform the world.  One neo-Orthodox theologian some time back described Jesus' declaration on the threshhold of his ascenion as "God's Omaha Beach."   This set of connotations  is better conveyed in the German word for "Great Commission" than the English version.  The German expression, used for centuries in theology, is Missionsbefehl, which actually has the force of an order given by a military leader to his subordinates.   

A looser, less "military" manner of talking about the Great Commission, as some Biblical exegetes have underscored, is that it literally "puts flesh" on the Great Commandment to love  God with all one's heart and one's neighbor as oneself.  Since Christ himself is the "fulfillment," that is the embodying of everything "shadowed", as ancient and Medieval interpreters put it, in the exteriority of the Torah, the Great Commission is the realization within the contingency and contextuality of human history of the not-then-but-now-complete divine presence through what might be called loosely the propogation of incarnation.   

In other words, the "militant" command is to immanentize and to enlarge visibly the Word made flesh.  As  Luther put it in his famous line (which I quote and cite repeatedly in my new book) at the start of the Protestant Reformation in what is probably his most important treatise (The Freedom of a Christian),  "each one should become as it were a Christ to the other that we may be Christs to one another and Christ may be the same in all, that is, that we may be truly Christians."      

Thus, as I argue, if we are serious about being "incarnational Christians" (as emergent types claim to be) , we cannot simply give lip service to the locution.   One of the problems that the contemporary, Western, "postmodern" Christian has - which their counterparts, particularly in the global South, don't have - is that their Christianity is not really informed by the Great Commission.  Western Christianity, especially in both a modern and post-modern venue, can best be described as The Great Option.   

That framing of matters of faith is relatively novel, if one considers the sweep of Western history. The Constantinian era marked the establishment for the first time in history of state-sponsored Christianity, which persisted even after the fall of Rome itself.  The spread of Christianity throughout the Dark Ages and Medieval period was wholly dependent, barring a few exceptions, on the strategic conversion of the tribal chieftain or regional sovereign, and this principle continued to flourish for at least two centuries after the Reformation of the sixteenth century with the practical adoption throughout Europe of the Augusburg formula of cuius region, eius religio.   In other words, the possibility of choosing one' s faith, or even choosing Christianity over other faith-trajectories,   was not even entertained.  Those who pushed the notion, such as the Anabaptists, were severely persecuted as heretics or dissenters.   

It was the Revolutionary period and the American frontier that changed everything. The  radical, anti-monarchial attitudes of the Westward-migrating settlersdisrupted once and for all both the current economies of religious life that had been largely pluralistic, yet at the same time strictly communitarian with no toleration for individual expressions of religious belief.  The fact that the original thirteen states with the exception of Rhode Island, founded by the Baptist Roger Williams, tried to maintain for the most part their own "established churches" testifies to his persistence of the Augsburg model.   

Frontier revivalism, pioneered by the Methodists and later morphing into the style of  conversion aimed at the soon-to-come immigrant masses, constituted the cultural crucible for what could be called the "decisionist" model of most Christian evangelism.  In the decisionist approach the private individual is called to account before God  to respond to the claim of salvation in Jesus Christ.   The Protestant idea of the primacy of the proclaimed truth of the preached Word of God thus combined with the moral voluntarism of the Enlightenmenet though to give us the garden variety evangelicalism that has long distinguished American culture.  So much of postmodern Christianity, whether it is "conversative" or "progressive," retains this character.

But global Christianity is not American Christianity.   As a number of well-known "post-colonial"  theorists are beginning to point out, the function of religion in the developing world, especially the so-called global South,   is not to provide a personal, consumer choice - as it is in America and to a lesser extent in Europe - but to forge both cultural and national identity.  The withdrawl of colonial rule, which according to such theorists had destroyed traditional tribal and communal self-awareness, forged the persistence of a generic and complex pseudo-cultural identity of   what Gayatri Spivak has termed the self-erasing and self-loathing consciousness of the colonized "subaltern."   In order to replace the  "unhappy consciousness" (Hegel's term) of the subaltern, both Christianity and Islam, even though they were often brought by invaders and colonizers,  have been reinscribed and "indigenized" as forces of  identity formation.   

As  African theologian Kwame Bediako  has suggested, "the contribution of African churches to the process of democratization in Africa in the 1980s and 1900s as a genuinely religous achievement, linked with 'the mind of Jesus' in the African churches."   African democratization to a major degree has been a post-tribal,  post-racial, and post-colonial movement of interpersonal connectivity and activism that has leveraged its Christian roots not for social justice crusades, as has often been the case in the United States, but for creating a new sense of a universal Christian polis that  promotes broad commitments to human solidarity where no traditions, precedents, or historical legacies exist for the same purposes. 

No institutional command centers have overseen these movements of democratization, despite the campaigns of even post-colonial power interests to suppress them.  Drawing on village-level and kinship-related, and  urban-neighborhood, and largely grass roots sources of  charisma and authority, the African Christian democratization avante-garde have been "rhizomic" in the manner I describe in GloboChrist - they go where they grow, and grow where they go.  They do not go and grow because of individual decision-making, but because of the power of relationship itself as it is Christ-infused.   There is no "map" for the rhizome.  The map comes after what Deleuze calls the horizontal "tracing" of the rhizome. 

It might be somewhat useful here to lay out what Deleuze himself had in mind when he introduced the construct of the "rhizome."   "Any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other and must be", Deleuze declares.   Both structuralism and deconstructivism in our thinking are the direct consequence of the hierarchical as well as binary grammar that characterize our Indo-European languages, what Derrida terms our "white mythology."  Even the debates over what should constitute "church,"   in both modernist and postmodernist discussions, reflect this structural bias.  When Mark Driscoll dismisses many as emergents as "whiny idealists" complaining about megachurches, he is underscoring the way in which the logic of centering and de-centering, domination and resistance, etc. which has totally absorbed the modernist/postmodernist conversation affects even our own poverty of imagination when it comes to the truly twenty-first centure ekklesia.    In Deleuze's words, "transcendence  is a specifically European disease."

It is a somewhat sad commentary on contemporary Western culture that we cannot get out of this endless loop of self-referentiality.  Churches are either too large or too small.  It is size rather than the surface reach and what Deleuze describes as virtual extensions  of rhizomic radii that count ultimately.  We swing back and forth in our loyalties between the megachurch that provides colossal theater - the "Jesus show" -  or the house church that implodes gradually from its own banal domesticity.    But the rhizomic church - I have coined the word rhizone to characterize it -  is the  network church.  It is a going and growing, connecting and disconnecting, "terriorializing" and "de-territorializing" (in Deleuzian parlance) network that is not only global, but radical, relational, and transformative.   

The rhizone is also incarnational in the sense that Frost and Hirsch use it, because it allows the global transformative Christ presence to "indigenize" in relational space without a locus of formal "Christian"  activities.  The rhizomic implications of "where two or three of you are gathered together" becomes evident here.  I have been working with a few others to engineer a blog to which we are inviting people with ministries and "rhizomic" Christian projects to participate in at rhizone.typepad.com.   

In my work and development of relationships in Austria over the past year or so I became quickly aware of how the almost instinctive notion of "going to church" is more difficult to express in European languages and cultures than it is in ours.  To start with, I  was confounded that  there is no direct equivalent to our phrase "going to church",  that is, being present at, or involved in, a local within the German vocabulary.    The phrase of course for "attending a church service" (Gottesdienst beiwohnen) is used,  but even this expression does not imply some sort of identification with a particular organization. 

Interestingly, the older meaning of the term beiwohnen is the same as "to sleep together," so its entire contemporary semantics  has more the drift of intimate communion with the divine than any kind of voluntary association.   Being a "church going" Christian signifies simply entering into the presence of God.  But we do not enter God's presence in isolation.  It is through our incorporation into what Hugh Halter calls the "tangible kingdom" of those who are "being Christs" to each other.    The meaning of the Great Commission is that is that our own relationship to Christ demands participation in an incarnational chain of connections, involvements, and relationships with others.  Through us the relational God is establishing his relational kingdom.  The kingdom ever "draws near" to us through the expansion of this relational kingdom.

Both modern and postmodern Christianity have unfortunately pushed us into the thought habit of thinking of the church as either a place, or a collection of places or sites, or even particular organizational setups, where God is supposed to be active at any particular moment in time.   But in terms of t he New Testament itself church  and kingdom are indistinguishable.  Both church and kingdom are what Derrida would call a "place without place," a full, yet fully concrete, space in which infinity flows out into the terrain of the finite in uncharted directions through what we would call "rhizomatic growth."  Just as the nutrients for the plant rhizome is not stored in the external surroundings, but in the ever-splaying, subterranean and invisible, tuber-like complexity that sends down roots where soil conditions are favorable or sends up stalks where there is moisture and sunlight, so the church also "goes where it grows" in keeping with where the Spirit blows.

When one reads the Book of Acts carefully, one detects that Paul and his apostolic crew were following a rhizomatic trajectory led by the Spirit of God.  The first-century church indeed followed the principle of going where growing and growing where going.  The rhizomatic church is neither centered or de-centered; it is multi-nodal.  From the nodes grow outward as well as inward, intersect, disperse, and rejoin while ever expanding.  The rhizomatic church is the rhizomatic presence of the who Christ is ever incarnating, becoming "all in all."

The rich incarnational texture of global Christianity in all its cultural, organizational,  and theological diversity can, and should, be understood as rhizomatic in this sense.  The rhizome-metaphor is also a profound challenge to imagination-challenged Western Christians of all varieties.  It calls us to put aside so much of our theological pettifoggery, as well as cultural and social narcissism, and see what God is really doing.     Deleuze intended the notion of the "rhizome" to provide the basis of what he called a "new image of thought" when it comes to signs and concepts as well as to the more familiar idea of history, texts, and interpretation.  Becaue we live in a global world, we live in the ever-configuring space of rhizomatic processes.  We especially need a new image of thought when it comes to ecclesiology, let alone theology.   

Why being against metaphysics is so cool-a schoolyard explanation-

It seems these days that all the cool kids are against metaphysics and onto-otheology, and all that boring stuff.  Today it is hip to talk about the betrayal of faith, heretical orthodoxy, and the  me-ontology of the Cross. 

Why is this?

Well, perhaps we could look to Heidegger or Freud and all those other folks who prepared the way for the p_stmodern.  But I suggest that it began earlier than our first reading of Being and Time (or what is Being and Nothingness, or Being and Event).  It begins before our first introduction to teenage angst and grunge music (oh how I loved the '90s!). 

Yes, our aversion to metaphysics coincides with our first glimmers of social pressure, our first awkward steps of independence, our first riotous disputes over games that didn't exist until we made them up (yes we are all social constructivists).  I'm talking nothing else but the schoolyard education into overcoming metaphysics. 

Here are my top five reasons for why metaphysics is not cool:
5) Because the cool kids always talked back to the teachers , and are always very witty (showing that we all desire to betray the master discourse).

4) Because all the cool stuff is outside the classroom, i.e. the playground (showing that the play of the signifier escapes the ground of the signified).

3) Because raising your hand to answer a question is a phallic will-to-power encouraged by teachers (showing that 'answering' is always coercion while questioning is freedom).

2) Because all the little boys chase the little girls around the playground, but don't know why they do it (showing that  flows of desire shape reality).

1) Lastly, because it is always more fun to say "Is not!" right after "Is too!" during a schoolyard argument (showing that we all intuitively know that khora, the 'is not' of reality, precedes all existences).

Perhaps I'm still dealing with pre-pubescent insecurities...?

(what are other schoolyard reasons?)