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.     

              

      

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. 

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.

God in the Gallery: A Symposium, ch. 6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

God in the Gallery: A Symposium, ch. 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

God in the Gallery: A Symposium, ch. 3

Today's engagement of Daniel A. Siedell's God in the Gallery: A Christian Embrace of Modern Art comes from Bruce Ellis Benson. He is engaging chapter 3 entitled "Enrique Martinez Celaya's Thing and Deception: The Artistic Practice of Belief." Bruce Ellis Benson is Professor of Philosophy at Wheaton College (IL). He is the author of Graven Ideologies: Nietzsche, Derrida and Marion on Modern Idolatry (IVP, 2002), The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue: A Phenomenology of Music (Cambridge, 2003), and Pious Nietzsche: Decadence and Dionysian Faith (Indiana, 2008). He is co-editor of The Phenomenology of Prayer (Fordham, 2004), Hermeneutics at the Crossroads (Indiana, 2006), Transforming Philosophy and Religion: Love’s Wisdom (Indiana, 2008), Evangelicals and Empire: Christian Alternatives to the Political Status Quo (Brazos, 2008), and Words of Life: New Theological Turns in French Phenomenology (Fordham, forthcoming 2009), in which his essay “Chrétien on the Call That Wounds” will appear. He is an editor of the new Eerdmans book series titled “Envision: New Trends in Christian Theology” and Executive Director of the Society for Continental Philosophy and Theology (SCPT). He will be a visiting professor at the University of Leuven in the 2009-2010 academic year.

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Recently, a colleague from the English department at Wheaton made the point in conversation that a novel has a way of getting at the reality of ethical life in a way that philosophy generally cannot. In watching a character forced to make difficult ethical decisions—with all their varied gradations of “good” and “bad,” not to mention conflicting demands—one gets a much more profound sense of the complexity of trying to live virtuously than a philosophical theory can provide. One can, to be sure, cite a text like Jacques Derrida’s The Gift of Death as providing a particularly nuanced moral account. But, as if to prove my colleague’s point, Derrida needs the story of Abraham and Isaac precisely in order to tease out those complications.

In effect, Dan Siedell employs Enrique Martínez Celaya’s painting Thing and Deception to complexify such assumed binaries of belief and unbelief (as well as such opposites as banal and profound, truth and superstition—though here I will focus on belief and its supposed antonyms of unbelief or doubt). By observing what Martínez Celaya both does and says, Siedell shows us that defining “belief” and “unbelief” is, to say the least, complicated. One can hardly do Thing and Deception justice by way of description, so I urge readers to study the image for themselves. What is one to make of this veiled chocolate Easter bunny that has clearly been broken yet reassembled? That the words “Needed Proof” are inscribed below the bunny makes this even more complicated. Now, it’s important to know at the outset that Martínez Celaya is not just trying to be “clever.” As he says elsewhere: “So many contemporary paintings have this wink to say we’re both in on the joke. Any time I find myself being witty or clever, I paint over it” (see “Layers of Devotion (and the Scars to Prove It)"). So one needs to take Martínez-Celaya very seriously.

One of the complications here is that Easter bunnies are, in one sense, like Santa Claus: they are the secular counterpart to Jesus’s resurrection as Santa is the counterpart to his birth. But, since one can talk about “believing” in either Santa or the Easter bunny themselves, there are at least two levels of belief at stake in this painting. Siedell says that the words “needed proof” are “ironic, for who ‘needs proof’ when trading in the currency of chocolate Easter bunnies?” True, no “proof” is needed for the existence of a particularly chocolate bunny, but there is something like “proof” involved for the existence of the Easter Bunny. As it turns out, children do come to doubt both Santa and the Easter Bunny, so the secular symbol (if that is the right way to put it) can itself be doubted and thus be the subject of unbelief. Given this, it is interesting that the painting is titled Thing and Deception—not Bunny and Deception or Christ and Deception. We are not really sure what this “thing” is, and that makes the counterpart “deception” all the more enigmatic.

Yet now we face a further ambiguity, for Thing and Deception was first exhibited in an installation titled “Saint Catherine Watches Over Me.” That Saint Catherine is remembered for converting fifty pagan philosophers who were commissioned by a Roman emperor to convert her puts yet another spin on this piece. How exactly is Saint Catherine “watching over” Martínez Celaya? Is she trying to convert him? One might be tempted to ask who is trying to convert whom. It is significant that Martínez Celaya chooses a piece of kitsch related to his childhood “framed by kitsch” (as he puts it), though he later comes to see the painting as more about his future than his past. Siedell interprets this as moving from more explicitly religious subject matter to a more explicitly religious overall structure of his work and thought.

Martínez Celaya definitely sees Thing and Deception as part of a religious context, but then he wonders if it can find a place (to quote him) “in the new sanctitas of the Modern art gallery.” This raises the problem of the competing “religious beliefs” of the gallery and the church. In Martínez Celaya’s Guide (his own fictitious dialogue between an artist and an friend), it is telling that the friend (who is also a voice of Martínez Celaya) says the following to the artist: “For someone who claims not to be religious, you speak in a way that sounds very religious to me.” What are we to make of this “religiosity”? Siedell interprets Martínez Celaya as attempting to avoid being either a “believer” or an “unbeliever,” and Siedell characterizes Martínez Celaya’s work and thought in terms of both negative theology and spiritualistic (rather than “religious”) piety. Siedell draws a comparison to he takes to be high art’s way of belief by way of incarnation to the incarnation in Christianity. Instead of “believing” in terms of doctrines and propositions, Martínez Celaya believes by incarnational practice, what Siedell means by the “artistic practice of belief.” Analogously, Siedell claims that Christian icons and the Eucharist “not only require faith, they also generate and sustain it.” But, again, it is unclear to what extent “religious” or “artistic” belief is involved here.

One has to wonder how strongly Siedell intends to assert his closing observation that “Thing and Deception narrows the gap between belief and unbelief, banal and profound, art and religion, sacred and secular, truth and superstition, revealing each to be two sides of the same precious coin.” No doubt, these gaps are questioned and even narrowed by Martínez Celaya. Yet it all depends on what kind of “belief” and what kind of “unbelief” constitute each side of the coin. Clearly, there must be some genuine content to the belief in order for it to be the flipside of unbelief or doubt. Thus, when Siedell says that the painting and the Eucharist “require the eyes of faith to see what is truly present,” I am inclined to agree and yet also point out that what is present in the Eucharist is more defined than what is present in the painting. So the analogy only goes so far. Of course, given widely differing beliefs within the Christian community of what is “present” in the Eucharst, perhaps the analogy goes further than we might think.

In any case, once again, it is something other than a philosophical theory—here, a painting and the reflections on it by both its thoughtful painter and an astute art historian—that helps us get at the complexities of the daily reality of epistemological life, complexities that are no less real or problematic than those of the ethical life.

God in the Gallery: A Symposium, ch. 2

Today's second engagement with Daniel A. Siedell's God in the Gallery: A Christian Embrace of Modern Art comes from Matt Milliner, who writes on chapter two entitled "A History of Modern Art." [Part I by James K. A. Smith may be found here.]  Matthew J. Milliner is a Ph.D. candidate in art history at Princeton University. His blogger profile continues: "In a previous life he graduated from the same town's Theological Seminary. In the life before that he was a Youth Director at Media Presbyterian Church (PA). In the life before that he went to Wheaton College (IL). In the life before that he went to Haddonfield Memorial High School (NJ). In the life before that he was born and raised mostly in Jersey. In the life before that he did nothing, because the Origenist doctrine of the pre-existence of the soul was condemned in 553AD." Matt blogs at http://millinerd.com.

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The fact that I have no authority to make grand pronouncements will not keep me from doing so: God in the Gallery is the starting point for the future of the Christianity and art conversation, at least (or especially) in the North American evangelical, not to mention post-evangelical, milieu. I am consequently grateful to participate in this forum which, following James’ opening remarks on the importance of informed engagement, now proceeds to the topic of “modern” art, which I understand to be distinguishable from postmodern or contemporary art (beginning c. 1960), a topic which Siedell addresses in later chapters.

An analogy to describe Siedell’s aim in this chapter can be found in the task of historians, such as Edward Grant, who seeks to show the undeniable, but normatively ignored, Christian backdrop of modern science. But while there are many scholars at work correcting the doggedly secularized narrative of science, there are far fewer, if any, doing the same for the history of art, let alone the history of modern art. Siedell seeks to fill this lacuna, describing his agenda as follows: “A history of modern art can be written that reveals that Christianity in all its myriad cultural and material manifestations is never absent from the modern artist.”

To accomplish this, Siedell begins by relating modern art’s introduction to the American public in Manhattan’s 1913 Armory Show. He then takes two figures who bookend modernism - Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) and Alfred J. Barr Jr. (1902-1981) – and highlights the overlooked Christian aspects of their given perspectives. Likewise, Siedell marshals Peter Berger’s post-secular sociology, and theologian Graham Ward’s contention that “the saeculum [has] no autonomous existence” to buttress his transcendent reading of modernism. Siedell has just scratched the surface. We can hope that he, or someone inspired by his account, will extend this traditionally religious (not merely “spiritual”) reading of modernism into the book length treatment it deserves. New Republic art critic Jed Perl seems to already be moving in that direction, as has Steven Schloesser with his book Jazz Age Catholicism (albeit in a way that encompasses literature and music as well as art). However the religious account of modern art is broached, an inevitable discovery awaits: A double-barreled attempt to reconcile Christianity (specifically Catholicism) to modern art has long been on offer in the careers of Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson.

And yet, these figures have long been outside the Protestant purview, making Siedell’s Protestant reading of modernism unusual. Perhaps overly determined by the more negative Protestant perspective (Siedell seems to have Hans Rookmaaker’s Modern Art and the Death of Culture in view), God in the Gallery aims to actively oppose it. Siedell contends that when Christians adopt a negative stance towards modernism, they play into secular hands: “Neither secular scholars nor conservative Christian critics want Christianity in the history of modern art.”

Still, as Siedell unfurls his more positive take on modernity, he does not strike a Tillichian bargain, that is, he refrains from writing a theological blank check to high culture. Instead, Siedell actively opposes the Liberal Protestant paradigm that he has criticized in this forum before. To use a familiar analogy, Siedell founds his cultural engagement upon the rock of the Seventh Ecumenical Council’s iconic Christology, in contrast to vague theologies of culture which have, in retrospect, proven to be houses built on sand. In practice, this means Siedell both permits a quintessentially modern artist such as Mark Rothko only an “undetermined iconicity,” while allowing Rothko’s participation in the economy of the icon nonetheless. While some might suggest this is not dissimilar to Maritain and Gilson’s modernist reconciliation strategy, the case could also be made that it constitutes an improvement.

Refreshing as I find Siedell’s perspective to be, I conclude with a criticism: A student who reads this chapter and plunges into (what’s left of) the world of modern art in search of - to use the book’s guiding analogy - altars to an unknown god, would be like a young evangelical who reads his way into Anglicanism through the poetry of George Herbert, only to then open last week’s newspaper. St. Paul may have found one agnostic altar amongst literally thousands of Athenian idols, but Siedell seems to take this exception to be the rule. He cites Augustine and Origen’s strategy of “despoiling of the Egyptians;” but it should also be noted that heated debate with Varro (constituting a hulking chunk of City of God) and Celcus (Origen’s longest treatise) were their more normative modes of cultural engagement. Many modern artists knew exactly what God they were seeking to offend. Accordingly, an equally appropriate exemplar to illustrate Pauline engagement of modern art would be not only the altar to an unknown God from Acts 17, but an approximately contemporary creation: The famous “ass-Christ” graffito, (beating Serrano to the punch by two millennia), instructively inscribed, “Alexamenos worships his god.”

But to press this point too hard would be unfair: Siedell, who has himself admitted “sharp sympathy pains” with those who dismiss the art world wholesale, anticipates it. He is, of course, aware of modernism’s anti-religious strain, but suggests we don’t take the bait: “Even as rejected, [Christianity] lingers to haunt the avant-gardist, for it will not be rejected completely. Ultimately, it cannot.” Still, the Christian must reserve the right to reject some strands of modern art (due, perhaps, as much to boredom as offense). This is to say, Siedell’s positive perspective should be read alongside, not in replacement of, the previous, more dismissive accounts of modernism that he seeks to correct – accounts which, I like to think, retain their value.

Please note: My more full-length review of God in the Gallery can be read at First Things.

Derrida, Kandinsky, and the Force of Art

By Carl Raschke

Deconstruction and the Force of Language

Ever since I finished with my graduate seminar on Derrida this past spring I've been looking quite differently at what was always at stake in "post-structuralism" - what years ago we called postmodernism in philosophy before the latter word took hold.  The term "postmodernism" gained currency after Lyotard published The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge in the mid-1980s.. In this particular seminar I had some of the best and the brightest, and a few of them in their innocent enthusiasm for exploring the giddy vastness of "Derrida-world" called my attention to some important misuses of the evolving Derridean canon that became necessary in their own right to deconstruct.

What my students showed me toward the end of the term is that we have misappropriated the fashion of "deconstructively" reading texts as some new kind of critical theory, which we regularly, and sometimes ruthlessly, apply to structures of meaning and authority as well as forms  of organization.  That would of course include the church, and the ongoing effort to "deconstruct" Christianity, or "churchianity", is one of the things I have in mind. 

We have developed the bad habit of regarding deconstruction as an active intervention, when in fact Derrida seems to use the word all along in the intransitive sense.  We confuse deconstruction with the Marxist or Freudian critique of ideology, when in fact something quite different is involved.  Deconstruction is not any kind of "work" itself, like a work of art, literature, philosophy, or theology.  It is always a "working through" of some thread within the text (which is what Derrida is always doing in each of his "books"), or of an indeterminate yet potentially fruitful insight. If I may paraphrase Derrida as closely as I can to one of his well-known remarks, the "work" of deconstruction is always, and has always been, at work within the work itself.  

What does this mean?  Put simply, deconstruction is not a methodology, or unmasking, of those ideas and assumptions which we hold dear, or by which a quotidian reverence for the "tradition" of theology and philosophy has kept us from seeing the the underlying truth. Deconstruction is no "hermeneutics of suspicion," as Paul Ricoeur once referred to critical theory. Deconstruction, insofar as it is always "at work" within the work, amounts to what in German is called a Wirkung, one common translation of which is the English word "force".

Derrida makes a lot out of the concept of "force" in his early writings, particularly those authored in the  1960s, but not translated into English until the mid-1970s.  He also revived the phrase when he launched into the question of the "religious" around 1990.  In many respects one can derive a sense of Derrida's whole life project from a careful reading of the very early essay "Force and Signification" (force et signification), published in 1963 and contained along with other essays in English translation under the title of Writing and Difference, which appeared under a University of Chicago Press imprint in 1978.. 

"Force and Signification" is a gold mine when it comes to unearthing the "roots" of deconstruction. But what is even more interesting is the way Derrida, in "inventing" deconstruction, appears early on to be re-inventing Hegel.  Now that is not at all suprising since Derrida (like most of his generation in Paris) was considerably impacted by the neo-Marxian Alexandre Kojève's seminars on Hegel. 

Deconstruction is often considered radically un-Hegelian, which in its outworkings it of course is.   But if we inspect scrupulously what Derrida is saying in this very early article we find that deconstruction seems to be curiously birthed by, though driven in an entirely different direction from, the Hegelian dialectic itself. We can glimpse the parthenogenesis of deconstruction in the highly obscure early section of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit on the concept of force. We can also find it in Hegel's discussion of language in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, on which Derrida comments extensively in the various essays he published in the 1960s.

I am developing this argument in the first chapter of a new book manuscript which I began this summer, and will not venture to lay it out in all its philosophical arcana and complexity on this blog.  But the upshot is that deconstruction should not be viewed as any kind of "taking apart" of the idols of language so much as it is an ongoing, mobile disclosure of the force of language.   Every moment of deconstruction is a force-event, a reading of Derrida of course that puts him closer to Deleuze than we might be accustomed to acknowledging.  

Kandinsky and the Force of Art

But the purpose of this post is not to pursue some highly technical roadmap for revisionism regarding Derrida.  I have realized that something even more significant might be afoot in the Hegelian/Derridean/Deleuzean concept of force after reading of the French philosopher Michel Henry's  Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky, just recently translated, though it was published in French much earlier.

I acquired an interest in Kandinsky's art, and theories of art, long ago.  Kandinsky, by the way, was the artist who not only set in motion the imperatives of so much of modern art, but whose radical "abstractionism" was aimed at painting the power of creativity itself.  According to Henry, in Kandinsky "'abstract' no longer refers to what is derived from the world at the end of a process of simplification or complication or at the end of the history of modern painting: instead, it refers to what was prior to the world and does not need the world in order to exist." (p. 16)  According to Kandinsky, the painter paints art's "inner necessity". 

Kandinsky's well-known On the Spiritual in Art, which came out on the eve of the First World War, lays out the theory of painting according to the composition principles of inner necessity. The representational and reflective character of the painting, which compels us to see the visible world as it is, or as we have so far missed seeing it, must give way to the invisible force of the painting per se. 

According to Henry, Kandinsky's radical abstractionism regretably failed to outlive him.  So-called "abstraction" in modern and post-modern painting does not really focus on the inner necessity of the painting, but flits around the myriad pragmatic, programmatic, ideological, material, and compositional problems the artist in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has encountered - the so-called "painterly" challenges.  Even if it is neither representational or figurative, art remains "pictorial", Henry tells us. 

Kandinsky, however, wanted painting to "disclose the pictoriality" of the picture, as Henry expresses it, in its pure and dynamic interiority.  Kandinsky was a theosophist, influenced by the writings of the Russian mystic Helena Blavatsky, as were many avante-garde artists at the turn of the century and up through World War II.  Yet his project for art has stunning implications for Christian theological thinking today, especially after Derrida. It also has outsize consequences for Christian spirituality in the arts, though I like many others are reluctant to talk about "Christian art" as a whole, since the locution is really quite vapid and often connotes nothing more than the fact that certain styles, subject matters, and aesthetic methodologies find a ready audience among people who consider themselves Christians (Unfortunately, such an audience often is drawn to the uninspired, the hackneyed, or the downright kitschy).

What perhaps would a new Christian abstractionism look like?  Or at least a Christian "abstract expressionism" (since Kandinsky's abstractionism and Jackson Pollock's abstract expressionism follow similar logic of the force of the painting on to the canvas)? 

In the Derrida seminar one of my students, who was an art history and philosophy double major, asked me why "deconstructionism" seemed so unlike philosophy.  I answered that Derrida might be compared to Pollock in some ways, whose paintings were so unlike what people took to be painting.  She liked that answer, because I guess it made sense to her. Pollock called his work "gestural."  The same may be said of Derrida, who even used such a word from time to time.  The gestural is the revelation of the process by which the textual or the aesthetic "construct" comes to be, something akin perhaps to what Nietzsche really meant by Wille zur Macht, the "will to power", which manifests eminently in art.  

Many in the abstract expressionist movement of the 1940s and 1950s were fans of Nietzsche.  Deleuze derived his own "expressionist" philosophy from his youthful engagement with the sage of Sils Maria, which came forward in his ground-breaking 1962 book Nietzsche and Philosophy.

A Christian Abstractionism?

I have a personal muse as well that I might share with you, as I push forward this somewhat complex analysis, hopefully to culminate in a book for which I have already churned out almost 20,000 words entitled Force of God.  The tentative title of the book, as an aside, takes off from Derrida's seminal essay "Force of Law," which inaugurated in many respects his so-called "religious turn." The muse is my own wife Sunny Raschke, an artist of considerable gifts who revived a long dormant professional art career about five years ago after a hiatus of several decades.

Sunny has taught me to "see" the inner necessity of what might be termed the "force of Christ" in the creative expression of a painting.  The one shown here, entitled Origin I, is currently showing in a gallery in Denison, Texas.  The painting is actually three-dimensional with a kind of relief map effect that can be achieved through the use of a novel fabric hardener, invented in the Netherlands and known as Paverpol®.  The cross-like, "gestural" form in the center of the painting was inspired by the Louis Giglio YouTube message on the protein molecule "laminin", which holds the structures of life together. 

One is reminded of the opening hymn of Colossians, where Christ is proclaimed as "the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together". (Col. 1:15-17).  The force of creation is expressed in the "image" of Christ, which "holds all things together", serves to connect the myriad puzzle pieces that are singular human lives as well as the quest for God, the Infinite Origin himself, overflowing the boundaries of "two-dimensional" sight, thinking, and imagination.

Derrida discerned the messianic, the avenir, the "to come", of divine justice in the "force of law."  Can we discern the truly "originary", the protological, which is also the eschatological, the true "alpha and omega", in the force of art?  Derrida suggests early on that there is a force of art in the sense of a "force of truth" in his work of 1978 The Truth in Painting. 

In The Truth in Painting Derrida does his own deconstructive reading of Heidegger's famous essay "The Origin of the Work of Art," which binds aesthetics to ontology rather than to the "responsibility" (Derrida's term) of the artist to the force that urges him, or her, into expressive action.  For Derrida, the religious is the responsible response to the force of God in our lives, the force of response we name the "force of faith."  That is one way which we can cogently read Derrida's The Gift of Death, which serves as a memorial re-reading of Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling. In both religion and art we confront the Kierkegaardian/Derridean "secret" of the faith response, the "inner necessity" that harbors a subtle working of what is both creative and a redemptive force - Geist, the Spirit! 

As the French novelist Andre Gide once wrote, "art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better."  That perhaps is "deconstruction in a nutshell."

Notes on Paintings. (1) Top: Wassily Kandinsky, On White 2. (2)   Middle: Jackson Pollock, The Key. (3) Sunny Raschke, Origins 1.

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!