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.

The Liturgical Turn: Toward a Theology of Birth / An Advent Meditation

Joseph.  I’ve always found him extremely fascinating.  I guess that’s partly due to the fact that we’re told so little about him.  We know he was incredibly obedient to God.  He was present for Mary’s pregnancy, Jesus’ birth and childhood, but once Jesus grows up, he’s strangely absent.  The traditional reason is that he simply passed away.  Other renderings have him moving on to another wife and having other children in order to keep Mary pure.  Or perhaps in the end, his own doubt about the truthfulness of the virgin birth caught up with him.  Even in iconography, Joseph is sometimes rendered as a deeply troubled soul.  Rublev’s version of The Nativity has Joseph being fed lies about Mary’s virginity by Satan, here depicted as a withered old man.  We don’t why, but we know that he doesn’t play much of a role in the later part of Jesus’ life. 

But what role did he play in Jesus’ early life; specifically in the beginning?  As I was meditating on the story of the first Advent, I was struck by what’s left unsaid within the birth narrative.  Particularly, the lack of detail about the birth itself.  Now I admit that probably is best left unsaid.  Birth is messy, painful, and doesn’t really make for good storytelling.  So the silence comes at no surprise.   But we do know where. We know that Jesus was born in a place where animals are keep.  This raises the question in my mind about who else was present?  Was it simply Mary and Joseph?  What about midwives?  There’s one apocryphal story that puts a midwife named Salome on the scene.  But who knows?

Even if Joseph was able to find a midwife at the last minute, and one that would be willing to follow him to a cave, Joseph would still be much more involved in the Mary’s labor and delivery than most fathers today.  Contrast Joseph’s story with the fact that most fathers aren’t usually even present at the moment of birth of their children.  That’s usually because they would either choose to stay in the waiting room until the OB tells them it’s all over, or because they aren’t permitted in the delivery room due to hospital policy (in recent years these policies have relaxed considerably).  I think this is where my fondness for Joseph lies. 

I’m the father of four children, two of which were born at home, one in a birthing center, and one in the hospital.  My wife, herself a certified Doula, delivered all four “naturally.” I was her labor coach for all of them.  In our house, pregnancy and birth is a passion, not just for our own, but other mothers as well. We have a passion for helping women labor well.  Laboring well involves many factors.  One factor that  contributes to this is the husband’s involvement.  

Birth is a time of great silence and separation.  What women experience cannot be shared by or communicated to men.  We can’t even pretend to understand labor pain. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t be a faithful, supporting presence. 

Nor can we understand the immense rush of joy (oxitocin) that a woman experiences when she holds her seconds-born child in her arms.  That, we can only watch in amazement. 

Since there were no medical lawyers to conjure up absurd laws keeping Joseph waiting outside, I hope Joseph was fully involved in supporting Mary as she brought forth the savior of the world.  Unfortunately we aren’t are given any details.  Had we been, I believe that the church wouldn’t be so anemic in it’s theology of birth.  

What I mean is this: the church and her theologians have had a lot of great things to say about life, death, contraception, abortion, sex, IVF, etc.  We have the language and the ethics for making babies, not killing them, and helping them die well when they’ve grown old.  However, the church is completely silent about the nine months after conception, and even more (if that’s possible) silent about the hours of labor leading to the moment of birth. 

I believe this silence has been a major reason for the medicalization of the birth.  Now, before I get a whole bunch of hateful comments, let me explain that I’m not against “hospital births” as opposed to “home births.”  My wife and I are outspoken advocates for the latter, but we have seen and experienced the necessity of the former.  Where I believe our society is failing women (and their partners) is in making them believe in the normalcy of medicine’s role in birth.   In the last few years, the number one reason for hospital admittance has been labor and delivery.  The problem, however, is that pregnancy is not a sickness that needs to be cured.  It is not a disease, nor is the pain that is experienced a suffering that needs to be remedied. 

Most of all, under “low risk” circumstances, labor and delivery is not a process that needs intervention.  There are times when intervention is needed, and I’m glad that medicine can do what it can do, and do it well.  But too often the “cascade of interventions” happens unnecessarily.  But doctors and hospitals work on a time-table that doesn’t always sync with nature's processes. Moreover, they are the ones who believe they wield ultimate power and have most fully bought into modernity’s ideology of complete control. 

Again, I’m grateful for hospitals, but one of the main reasons that I personally am an advocate for  homebirths, in particular, is the community that it allows to be created.  Birth is an incredibly intimate experience and one which revolves completely around the needs of the mother.  In our experience, Laura had complete control over everything.  The few of us that were present, by her own invitation, were able to give her full support, love, and comfort. Most of all, since I was able to play an important role in her process, I believe our marriage is stronger because  of it.   

There’s more that needs to be said on this topic and I’m currently working on a series of essays that I hope will begin to break the church’s silence on the issue.  The church needs a theology of birth.  The church needs to find a language that helps women labor well.  It needs this not because I want most women to have homebirths.  That’s not the ultimate goal.  But because birth is an important moment in a woman’s life, and the church has no idea what role it plays in her discipleship.  Birth is a milestone in a couple’s marriage, and the church lacks a theology of marriage strong enough to give voice to the husband’s role in the process.   

Most of all, because God himself “became incarnate from the Virgin Mary.”  What that means is that pregnancy, labor, and delivery have been redeemed.  {That which is not assumed is not sanctified}

This is why I wish the Bible would have been more detailed, especially about Joseph.  I can speculate that Joseph would have set the example for husbands to follow in how to support his wife while she gives birth.  This Advent season, apart from Christ, Joseph is the one character who has most caught my attention.

And now a word from Monty Python:  

Home Waters: Soul as Watershed

Spurred by George Handley’s eco-theological reflections in Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River, I’ve been reading Wallace Stegner. Like Handley, Stegner is interested in the tight twine of body, place, and genealogy that makes a life. On my account, Handley and Stegner share the same thesis: if the body is a river, then the soul is a watershed.

Like a shirt pulled off over your head, this thesis leaves the soul inside-out and exposed. You  thought your soul was a kernel of atomic interiority, your most secret secret – but shirt in hand, everyone can see your navel.

Stegner’s novel, Angle of Repose, opens with the narrator’s own version of this thesis. A father, writing about his grandparents, names the distance between himself and his grown son:

Right there, I might say to Rodman, who doesn’t believe in time, notice something: I started to establish the present and the present moved on. What I established is already buried under layers of tape. Before I can say I am, I was. Heraclitus and I, prophets of flux, know that the flux is composed of parts that imitate and repeat each other. Am or was, I am cumulative, too. I am everything I ever was, whatever you and Leah may think. I am much of what my parents and especially my grandparents were – inherited stature, coloring, brains, bones (that part unfortunate), plus transmitted prejudices, culture, scruples, likings, moralities, and moral errors that I defend as if they were personal and not familial. (3-4)

Right off, Stegner fingers what is different about this notion of a soul: time. Thinking that souls are tucked away inside us generally goes hand in hand with thinking that they are untouched by time. Dammed up inside, the soul, unmoved, is safe from the perpetual rush and tumble of Heraclitus’ panta rhei. 

But wrong-side-out, the soul has no such repose. Here, nothing is still and the soul’s “I am!” is both compromised and constituted by its temporality: it moves but its movement is “composed of parts that imitate and repeat each other.” It moves, but it moves as a gathering litany that channels the same brains, bones, scruples, and prejudices through the narrow straits of varied bodies and lives copied from the bodies and lives of parents and grandparents.

As Handley points out, “this is the way with watersheds. They gather tributaries from upstream and connect all that is above, beneath, and beside and give life through unseen processes of exchange” (xv). Downstream, the river appears self-sufficient, its banks clearly defined, its water an unremarkable grace. But the accessible obscures the obvious. “A river is water, yes, but it is also soil, plant, and animal life – a watershed” (128). A soul is a body, yes, but it is also a place and a time.

A soul, like water, “seeps through the edges of stone, leaps out of rocky walls, or surges from beneath the soil, and it grows in size and momentum as it flows downward from the tops of the mountains. Little capillaries of water meet up with others to form small rivulets and streams, which meets others still in naturally formed transepts, until a river takes shape and creates inverted mountains to aid its way down. Down to the sea or directly to the clouds from where it drops on the mountains again”  (213).

The simile is striking but I don’t want to leave it as such. Handley’s attention to the force of place insists that we are dealing with more than metaphor. The soul names both the body’s place and that body’s being placed. There are no souls without bodies, but a body, in itself, is a wire unplugged. Souls socket bodies into the place of their time.

Ungrounded, we lose track not only of place but of our bodies as well. It is in this sense, Handley suggests, that “geography teaches us the first lessons of being”: that every kind of being involves a being there (38). Every life must make and take place.

Religion is revealed geography.

The first lesson of religion is that our bodies not only have a place but are a place. The body is the place where life happens. The body localizes the extended geography of the soul. “The body is the cup in which to drink the world” (42). This cup always runs over, but without the body life won’t hold water.

We stuff, abuse, and ignore our bodies at our own peril. The soul as watershed feeds the body’s current through the capillaries, rivulets, and transepts of sensation. “Sensation is what one needs” (57). A respiring body, a sweating body, a wind-chapped body, a sun-kissed body, is what one needs. A body in open air. We forfeit our souls, our place, if our bodies become just “excess baggage, things to be maintained so that we can continue to live as if they were irrelevant, as if we were not embodied biological matter” (34).

Handley climbs mountains in order to pace out the dimensions of his watershed and it is the work imposed by the slope that wakes him to it. “The mountain,” he says, “stirs me from strange and varied slumbers of the body” (187).

None of this is to deny that we are “insufficient vessels,” that our bodies are “not built to withstand [even] the daily tremors beauty offers” (162). But this insufficiency, this dependence of the river on a watershed that spreads from view, is the whole point. The body that I am, the repetition of blood, faith, and sin that I am, is necessitated only by this insufficiency. This insufficiency is the tie that binds work to time, body to place, and child to parent.

A soul is the sharing of this insufficiency in a common place. It is the wakeful shouldering of its displacement from one body to the next.

Towards a New Missional Mapping?

Jason Clark will be presenting this recent digest of missional theology later in November at 'Seek the Welfare of the City'.

We thought that it would be helpful for you all to engage it here. 

Is there any pointing mapping the missional church? Is there a future for Evangelicalism?

Let us know.

Towards a New Missional Mapping?

Existential Multitasking

"They call it Christianity. I call it consciousness." —Emerson

You are going to miss it. You’re distracted. Sit up straight. You’re not paying attention.

God does not come and go – your attention does.

All sins are just variations on that same desire to do something else when you’re already doing something. Multitaskers are children of the devil. You can’t serve two masters. Divided attention is just dressed up inattention.

“Hear, O Israel,” the Shema begins, “the Lord our God is one Lord!” (Deuteronomy 6:4) But are you one? Or do you keep getting shucked, splintered, and spread by every distraction that wanders by?

Put your phone away. Recent studies agree with Jesus. In their distressing 2009 paper “Cognitive control in media multitaskers,” Ophir, et al. found that heavy media multitaskers (or HMMs) “have greater difficulty filtering out irrelevant stimuli from their environment.” They are “less likely to ignore irrelevant representations in memory.” And they are “less effective in suppressing the activation of irrelevant task sets.”

Does this remind you of anyone? Do you know anyone who can’t filter out irrelevant stimuli? Do you know anyone who keeps getting sucked down black holes of memory and fantasy? Do you know anyone who can’t suppress the impulse to do something other than what they’re supposed to be doing?

Hmm. Do you know anyone who doesn’t fit this description?

Such is the human condition: unable to filter stimuli or shunt impulses, everyone sins. “There is none righteous, no, not one” because sin beds down in the distraction of our day dreams (Romans 3:10).

Jesus’ canonical take on multitasking looks like this:

No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon. (Matthew 6:24)

When Jesus says that “no man can serve two masters,” I understand him to mean that no one can pay attention to two things at the same time.

Serving means paying attention. You serve by attending, by giving your full attention to even the least little thing at hand. And, when you attend to the least among these things, it is the same as attending to God himself. “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me” (Matthew 25:40).

How freely Jesus allows you to substitute even the least little thing for himself!

Jesus doesn’t worry about these substitutions. He encourages them. He doesn’t worry about you serving mammon because “mammon” just names your avoidance of service. “Serving mammon” is oxymoronic because serving mammon is just a way of serving yourself and serving yourself isn’t actually service.

It is impossible, then, to serve both God and mammon because it is impossible to serve mammon. Mammon names that bifurcation of attention that follows from your failing to serve and attend. To serve is, by definition, to serve God.

When Jesus says that no one “can serve two masters,” which two masters does he have in mind? The particulars of the first may vary – doing it unto the least of these is the same as doing it unto God –  but the second always seems to be the same: you.

You are mammon. You can either serve God by attending to others or in attending to others you can try to serve yourself.

Self-interest is this second master that halves your attention. You double your interest in every least little thing with an interest in yourself. Before it even pops up you’ve already started to ask: how might this little thing either harm or benefit me? Will I love it or hate it? What does it have to do with me?

Often, your double vision is so bad that you can barely even see that little thing because you’re so intent on seeing yourself. Then, having failed to see the least among these, you inevitably fail to see God. And you’re sad.

Trying to serve two masters, attention falters. When attention falters it bifurcates into love and hatred. “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other.”

Instead of serving things in terms of what they need from you, you end up judging them in terms of your own preferences, in terms of your own likes and dislikes. This bifurcation of attention into modes of preference – that is, into modes of loving or hating – is the root of sin because it turns attention back on itself.

Attention neither loves nor hates. It serves.

And, in serving, it even loves what it hates by serving it.

A Call for Guest Posts: Violence and Christian Holy Writ

The relation between violence and the Christian religion or the role of violence in Christianity is of course not a new problem. However, like other difficult, controversial, and incredibly important issues, it is often left unaddressed or given scant attention in Christian circles including Christian seminaries.  Thankfully, at least some modern and postmodern theologians, philosophers, and other Christian thinkers—Frederick Douglass, Jung Mo Sung, James Cone, J. Kameron Carter, William T. Cavanaugh have engaged the subject of violence and its relation to and manifestations within the Christian tradition.  Because I personally find this issue difficult, important, and extremely relevant to our current (post)modern context, I have decided to host a series of guest posts on the topic.  My interest in this series, however, is somewhat narrowly focused in a biblical hermeneutical direction.  That is, in dialogue with other Christians via this guest post format, I want to have a conversation about what Scripture itself says, promotes, prohibits, permits or seems to say promote, prohibit, permit about violence, majoring on those difficult passages dealing with genocide, slavery, and the like—all with a view to developing a Christian hermeneutical trajectory that would enable us to intelligently and compassionately engage contemporary issues.  

I have listed below specific topics for engagement and hope to receive two to three submissions per topic presenting different and perhaps even opposing perspectives. I welcome Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant contributors, liberal as well as conservative. (Recently, a number of thoughtful non-Christians and atheists have written excellent works dealing with violence.  As a philosopher, I find these works incredibly valuable; however, for this series, I am looking for contributions exclusively from Christians, as I want the series to serve as a resource of sorts for Christians interested in this subject area and who also find it a challenge to their faith. 

Generally speaking, the posts should be between 500–1500 words, with a strict maximum limit of 1500 words (see below for contact information and topics for proposals). I've already received several excellent proposals; however, there are still slots open for mini-essays for (2) and (3)--African American or Afrocentric hermeneutical readings are especially welcome.  Regarding (4), I need a counterpoint mini-essay arguing against an Anselmian-based view of the atonement--Eastern Orthodox and (post)modern theological readings are especially sought, though other views are welcome as well. Thus far, I have not received any proposals for (5), but my hope is that posting the announcement here will generate a few Girardian-related proposals.   

Specific Topics

1. How should a Christian interpret the divinely commanded mass killings (genocide) commanded of the Old Testament (e.g. Joshua 6, 10, etc.)?  Should we read these allegorically, literally, or what? Other passages on violence may be engaged as well.
2. How should a Christian interpret passages in the Old Testament (e.g. Exodus and Leviticus) that at least appear to permit slavery?
3. How does a Christian make sense out of seemingly opposed views on slavery (e.g. Philemon, and I Cor 7:23 verses 1 Peter) in the New Testament? 
4. Does one’s view of atonement make a difference in how one interprets the violent acts recorded in Scripture?  If so, how? 
5. A Girardian dialogue related to any of the above topics or focusing on particular passages of Scripture is quite welcome

If you are interested in participating, please send me an email or post a comment on my blog: [email protected]. 

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

(x-posted at the de-scribe)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Material Semiotics?

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

1. Material Semiotics

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

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

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

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

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

2. The Epistemological Trap

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

This, I think, is not the way to go.

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

3. A Semiotic Materialism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here, hermeneutics is not qualitatively different from photosynthesis.

4. The Upshot

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

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

5. Implications

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

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

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

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

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

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

6. Conclusion

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

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

(x-posted at the de-scribe)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Speculative Grace: Compulsion & Repetition

I. Short Version

Speculating this week - with one eye on Lacan, one eye on the Buddha, and one eye on Paul - about the nature of sin. 

In brief:

1. Say that sin is "the compulsion to repeat." Or, perhaps better, the necessity of repetition experienced as a compulsion.

2. Conversely, then, salvation involves freedom from this compulsion to repeat.

3. Salvation depends on being free from the compulsion to repeat, but it doesn't mean being free from the necessity of repetition. 

Or, salvation depends on coming to relate non-compulsively to the necessity of the repetition that nonetheless and unavoidably constitutes the stuff of life.

4. A common misunderstanding of salvation from sin: that freedom from the compulsion to repeat = freedom from repetition itself (i.e., novelty).

II. Long Version

With this definition of sin as "compulsive repetition," I'm after something more basic than the characterization of any particular sin. Rather, I'm interested in what it means to be "in sin." I'm interested in the "disposition" that is sinful-ness, a disposition that is rooted in a mis-relation to the compulsive and repetitive character of experience itself.

Two general aspects of human experience are important for me here:

1. The unavoidable dimension of passivity involved in every experience.

2. The unavoidable inadequacy of every experience.

Every experience involves my being affected, impinged on, perturbed, irritated, or pressed upon by things (sensations, thoughts, objects, feelings) that are both impermanent and impersonal, things that are both passing and, in some respect, "not me." In this sense, every experience always involves an unavoidable dimension of passivity. In short, every experience - no matter how "active" I may be - unconditionally involves my being passively conditioned. 

This is what it means to be a human being: to be in open relation with the world such that - good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant, willful or submissive - we suffer it.

The passivity involved in every experience (a passivity that constitutes it as an ex-perience, even if it is just an ex-perience of "myself") is unavoidable because we are neither self-sufficient nor autonomous. In "open" relation with the world, we are conditioned by and dependent upon it. This interdependence is unavoidable and ongoing.

Sensation, thought, respiration, digestion, affection, etc. (i.e., Life) all depend on constant and never-ending processes of exchange. Every experience (every sensation, every thought, every meal, every breath), no matter how satisfactory or sublime or perfect or morally impeccable, will pass. And another sensation, another thought, another meal, another breath, will arise. None of them will be "adequate" in such a way that, in general form, it will not be necessary to repeat them.

All experience, then, is in general defined by compulsive repetition.

1. Compulsion: the unavoidable passivity involved in every experience.

2. Repetition: the unavoidable inadequacy of every experience.

As a disposition, sinfulness is a rejection of our passivity and inadequacy. It is a rebellion against the compulsion of experience and a disavowal of its repetition.

Classically, this is why sin is defined as wanting to be God. Classically, God is the one who is never passive, never compelled, never inadequate, always complete, and thus never in need of repetition. 

Or we could say: sin is a rejection of our vulnerability. Vulnerability in what sense? Vulnerability to stuff we can't control and vulnerability to our ongoing dependence on stuff outside of ourselves. That is say, vulnerability to compulsion and repetition.

Or, again: sin is a kind of "self-assertion."  As self-assertion, sin is exactly the kind of rejection of or rebellion against our passivity, inadequacy, and interdependence that I'm interested in articulating.

If the flavor of righteousness is a willingness to lose ourselves in (never-ending and ongoing) service to others - and I think it is - then it will require us to surrender wholeheartedly to the imposition of their claims on us and it will require us to perpetually confess that our response is insufficient to their need and, thus, in need of repetition. Such humble service will also require that we perpetually confess our own need for the care and response of others.

Salvation, contra sin, depends on affirming the (compulsory) necessity of such endlessly (repeated) service such that, in my affirmation of it, I now welcome the very thing I once loathed as the milk and marrow of life itself. 

In this affirmation, what-cannot-be-avoided liberates me from the disaster of my trying to avoid it.