response with free quiz

My response to Jonathan's comment below got so long that I had to post it:

I'm afraid postmodernity can mean anything you want it to mean. I particularly liked your version: "the rape child of existentialism and modernism." The reason I write about it so much however is because I'm pushing mine, which is:

1. The Enlightenmenet sidelined God and deified reason.
2. The general consensus that this arrangement produced can be called "modernity."
3. Our time has come to see reason unable to bear this divine status, in consequence the modern project collapsed, and thus we live in "post"modernity.

You asked if I'm for or against it. I am for postmodernity in the sense that it liberates us from modernity's overblown take on reason. I am against postmodernity in the sense that it thinks liberation from modernity's reason means abandoning reason completely. That would be swinging to the opposite extreme, and just letting modernity call the shots once again. But this is, regretfully, what too many people mean when they refer to postmodernity. And my hope to correct this mistake is another reason why I write about it so much.

To use an analogy, being released from a straight jacket is a good thing - but if that means you're gonna act all crazy you might as well keep it on.

Your point that postmodernity is a temporary phenomenon is well taken. And this is why, again, Christians eager to marry it need keep in mind the phrase (which I've dual-genderized for wider circulation):

"She (or he) who marries the spirit of the age will soon become a widow(er)."

Or as the same idea was put by C.S. Lewis (I believe),

"The only fish that swim with the current are dead."

From this academic vantage point I indeed get the sense that people are ready to move beyond the postmodern moment, forward to a normal, yet chastened, view of reason. (But even if they weren't, the church should.) This has partly to do with the realization that "postmoderns" who claimed they had rid themselves of absolute truth claims were in fact using the smokescreen of postmodernity to conceal some frighteningly absolute assertions - often on notoriously complex political and social issues - which were all the more dangerous because they weren't admitted.

To put it another way, here's a quiz:
Find the absolute truth claim in the following statement:

"There are no absolute truths."

As it may be impossible to go through life without basic claims about reality, why not just admit them? Mine can be found in the two hymns quoted below.

Die horse, die!

Considering my past remarks (surely you've read them), this may sound like the beating of a dead horse - but oh how I wish it were dead. The horse being the strange idea that creativity, hymnody, imagination and liturgical panache are behind one door, and dry dull dogmatic "orthodoxy" is behind another - and you only get to open one.

Take the words in the foreword to an otherwise excellent collection of excerpts from the works of John and Charles Wesley:

"I am convinced that, should I be sentient at death's door, the last words on my lips will not be words of scripture or creedal formulation but the half-remembered words of some hymn deeply engraved upon my heart... If it is somewhat heretical for a preacher to concede that hymnody is more important than theology in the shaping of belief and experience, I confess that I was a church musician before I was a minister" (xi).

I'm sure the remark was merely rhetorical, but it illustrates a thoroughly Kantian division of form and content that I just can't swallow. I'm too, yes, here he goes again, get ready, wait for it... postmodern for that.

As a rebuttal to this strange dichotomy between dogma and art, a dichotomy which by the way can only make sense of approximately (to be generous) 0.02% of art in the history of human civilization, allow me to call to mind a couple of tunes myself. Paul, in encouraging the church in Phillipi and Collasae (both times surely to avoid being considered a theological bore) quotes hymns. And both of the hymns are (like Charles Wesley's!) impregnated with theological claims, dripping with orthodox affirmations of, dare I say, doctrine.

In fact, one might suggest that it is the very beauty and wonder-inspiring quality of the theologically orthodox claims that inspired such worthwhile hymns. Good beliefs then make for good art. (Yes I know that such is not always the case, but my point I think still stands.)

By the way, because both Phillipians and Colossians can be dated from the mid to late 50s, and because in both cases the quoted hymns were quite likely in circulation well before the letters were produced - we have testimony to a very high Christology (e.g. "in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell" Col. 1:19), very early on (less than twenty years after the crucifixion).

No word yet on what that does to Dan Brown's thesis that the divinity of Christ was invented by Constantine in 325AD.

event

I would never have gone so far as to say that the contemporary art produced today is "trash," but perhaps my reservation has been unjustified.

Nevertheless, this Thursday Sept. 29th there will be an open studio in NYC with some, shall we say, more serious artists connected with MoBiA.

I'm it

I remember when men used to compare engines, but alas, I've been tagged - so I'm popping the hood:

1. Total number of books you own?

Enough to not have to decorate.

2. What was the last book(s) you bought?

Not too exciting on that front. Yeah - history of the Balkans!

3. What was the last book you read?

If you mean completed, see below.

4. List five books that are particularly meaningful to you (in no particular order):

1. Thomas Merton's Raids on the Unspeakable for shaking me up when I needed a shake.
2 and 2.5. Jack Kerouac's On the Road and James Michener's The Drifters for shaking me up when I didn't need a shake. (They both had particularly bad effects on me.)
3. Kierkegaard's Either/Or specifically the Letter to Wilhelm for setting my mind right about marriage enough to give it a try.
4. John Henry Newman's Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine for confusing me permanently.
5. Nicholas Wolterstorff's Art in Action for getting over Immanuel Kant and productively thinking about art.

I know there should be more fiction. It's shameful.

5. Tag five people, any five people who read.

Can't pick. If you read this consider yourself tagged.

post-postmodern.. again?

Okay, call me ignorant. I had thought that in finding George Steiner (who was a fellow at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study at the age of... wait for it... 27) I had made an isolated discovery. Maybe that's why I got so jumpy about it. He is an extremely intelligent person who has so imbibed postmodernity that he has moved beyond it, towards in fact, a reappraisal of God.

Must have been a fluke.

Turns out however he's not alone. Another person immersed in postmodern literary theory (who got his doctorate from Cambridge at the age of... wait for it... 21), and who has similarly evolved (minus the God bit) is the eminent theorist Terry Eagleton. But of course you probably knew that. And if you didn't, let me remind you that the reason literary theorists matter is because literary theory is where postmodernity began.

"We are living now in the aftermath of what one might call high theory, in an age which, having grown rich on the insights of thinkers like Althusser, Barthes and Derrida, has also in some ways moved beyond them" (2).

But this is no retreat - he, like Steiner, has learned much from the great (and gone) generation of pomo thinkers - learned enough, that is, to progress.

"The West, then, may need to come up with some persuasive-sounding legitimations of its form of life, at exactly the point when laid-back cultural thinkers are assuring it that such legitimations are neither possible nor necessary. It may be forced to reflect on the truth and reality of its existence, at a time when postmodern thought has grave doubts about both truthy and reality.... The inescapable conclusion is that cultural theory must start thinking ambitiously again - not so that it can hand the West its legitimation, but so that it can seek to make sense of the grand narratives in which it is now embroiled" (73).

Chapter titles in After Theory such as "Truth, Virtue and Objectivity" and "Morality" might give you an idea of what Eagleton (who literally wrote the book on theory) is intersted in recovering.

By the way, this ain't your garden variety "Neo-con" aversion to postmodernity. Would that Eagleton, a senior academic theorist with no attachments to Christianity whatsoever and a bona fide Bush-despising progressive, would be that easy to dismiss.

But no need to worry. It must be just a fluke... again.

Click here for some more Eagletonian gems.

On Fundamentalism

Fundamentalists want a strong foundation to the world, which in their case is usually a sacred text. We have seen already that a text is the worst possible stuff for this purpose. The idea of an inflexible text is as odd as the idea of an inflexible piece of string... Fundamentalism is a kind of necrophilia, in love with the dead letter of the text (206-7).

On the Bible

The Book of Isaiah is strong stuff for these post-revolutionary days. It is only left in hotel rooms because nobody bothers to read it. It those who deposit it there had any idea what it contained, they would be well advised to treat it like pornography and burn it on the spot (178).

On Marxism

Now, however, it looked as though what had started life as an underground movement among dockers and factory workers had turned into a mildly interesting way of analyzsing Wuthering Heights (44).

On Culture Replacing Religion

It is no wonder, then, that culture has been in perpetual crisis since the moment it was thrust into prominence. For it has been called upon to take over [religious] functions in a post-religious age; and it is hardly surprising that for the most part it has lamentably failed to do so. Part of religion's force was to link fact and value, the routine conduct of everyday life with matters of ultimate spiritual importance. Culture, however, divides these domains down the middle... [but] In most stretches of the globe, including much of the United States, culture never ousted religion in the first place. Even in some regions where it did, religion is creeping back with a vengeance... The age in which culture sought to play surrogate to religion is perhaps drawing to a close. Perhaps culture, in this respect at least, has finally admitted defeat (99-100).

On Absolute Truth

Some postmodernists claim not to believe in truth at all - but this is just because they have identified truth with dogmatism, and in rejecting dogmatism have thrown out truth along with it. This is a peculiarly pointless manoeovre... They reject an idea of truth that no reasonable person would defend in the first place.

In less sophisticated postmodern circles, holding a position with conviction is seen as unpleasantly authoriatarian, whearea to be fuzzy, skeptical and ambiguous is somehow democratic. It is hard in that case to know what to say about someone who is passionately commited to democracy, as opposed to someone who is fuzzy and ambiguous about it... For this strain of postmodernism, claiming that one position is preferable to another is objectionably 'hierarchical'. It is not clear in this theory why being anti-hierarchical is prefereable to being hierarchichal (103-104).

'Absolutely true', here, really just means 'true'. We could drop the 'absolute' altogether, were it not for the need to argue agains relativists who insist, as their name implies, that truth is relative... Nothing of world-shaking significance is at stake here. That truth is absolute simply means that if something is established as true - a taxing, messy business, often enough, and one which is always open to revision - then there are no two ways about it. It does not mean that truth can only be discovered from some disinterested viewpoint. In fact, it says nothing about how we arrive at truth. It simply says something about the nature of truth itself. All truths are established from specific viewpoints; but it does not make sense to say that ther is a tiger in the bathroom from my point of view but not from yours. You and I may contend fiercely about whether there is a tiger in the bathroom or not. To call truth absolute here is just to say that one of us has to be wrong (105-106).

The claim that some truth is absolute is a claim about what it means to call something true, not a denial that there are different truths at different times. Absolute truth does not mean non-historical truth: it does not mean the kind of truths which drop from the sky, or which are vouchsafed to us by some bogus prophet from Utah. On the contrary, they are truths which are discovered by argument, evidence, experiment, investigation. A lot of what is taken as (absolutely) true at any given time will no doubt turn out to be false... Not everything which is considered to be true is actually ture. But it remains the case that it cannot just be raining from my viewpoint (108-109).

On Moving On...

Postmodernism has an allergy to depth, as indeed did the later Wittgenstein. It believes that part of what is wrong with fundamentalism is its pitching of the arguments at a universal, first-principled, a-historical level. In this, postmodernism is mistaken. It is not the level at which fundamentalism pitches its claims which is the problem; it is the nature of the claims themselves (191).

The generation which followed after these path-breaking figures did what generations which follow after usually do. They developed the original ideas, added to them, criticized them and applied them. Those who can, think up feminism or structuralism; those who can't, apply such insights to Moby-Dick or The Cat in the Hat. But the new generation came up with no comparative ideas of its own. The older generation had proved a hard act to follow. No doubt the new century will in time give birth to its own clutch of gurus. For the moment, however, we are still trading on the past - and this in a world which has changed dramatically since Foucault and Lacan first settled to their type-writers. What kind of fresh thinking does the new era demand (2)?

We can never be 'after theory', in the sense that there can be no reflective human life without it. We can simply run out of particular styles of thinking, as our situation changes. With the launch of a new global narrative of capitalism, along with the so-called war on terror, it may well be that the style of thinking knows as postmodernism is now approaching an end. It was, after all, the theory which assured us that grand narratives were a thing of the past. Perhaps we will be able to see it, in retrospect, as one of the little narratives of which it has been so fond (p.221).

Art History?

Yes, that's what I'm studying. Don't laugh. Not unlike Hansel, art history is so hot right now.

Not only did royalty himself choose the this princely discipline as a major, but Brad Pitt endorsed it in no uncertain terms this summer in Mr. and Mrs. Smith. And I quote,

Brad Pitt: I never went to MIT. Notre Dame. Art history major.
Angelina Jolie: Art?
Brad Pitt: Art History. It's respectable.

Today was grad school orientation at Princeton, and after being told, among other things, that 80% of the cost of acupuncture was covered by the University health plan, we were informed that we were to ultimately "surpass your advisors in knowledge."

I hope acupuncture helps with that. During the question and answer session one student asked innocently,

"What does the inscription on the school motto mean?"

A panelist finally replied,

"The open book is for the New Testament, symbolizing the Biblical foundations of early American Universities, and the motto Dei sub numine viget means 'Under God's power she flourishes.'"

Awkward silence.

Awkward indeed. What does God have to do with art history anyway, one might ask a Seminarian who now is in training to be an art historian? Well (he might respond), everything and nothing. Everything in the sense that God cannot be obviated from any discipline, God being last time I checked Lord of all creation. But nothing in the sense that in order to function effectively as an art historian my faith does not need to be frontlined. To quote the historian Herbert Butterfield,

"While we have Marxists and Wellsians, Protestants and Catholics with their mutually exclusive systems (historical assertion confronted by counter-assertion), many people, confounded by the contradictions, will run thankfully in the last resort to the humbler academic historian - to the man who will just try to show what can be established by the concrete external evidence, and will respect the intricacy and the complexity of events, bringing out the things which must be valid whether one is a Jesuit or a Marxist."

Of course I understand that the possibility of such neutrality is a matter of dispute today - as my primer "Art Theory" readings have repeatedly informed me (by the way Derrida and Foucault are much less exciting when assigned than when read out of curiosity). But the postmodern critique undermines the hope of understanding perfectly what happened, not the humbler vision of understanding better what happened. And doing that well has little (directly) to do with faith.

Regarding higher matters, such as the notion of beauty so essential to my discipline, such neutrality is much harder, even impossible to produce (nor would it be desired). In fact I doubt (along with Steiner) whether any account of the experience of the beautiful is ultimately possible without God as an ultimate horizon - so Dei sub numine viget indeed - but in the meantime my aim is to be a good art historian, period.

But, what, one might then ask is the purpose of the pure study of history? Commenting on the maturity and perspective that this discipline alone seems to often provide, the great art historian Erwin Panofsky (my hero) quoted one who wrote,

"If a man of seventy is considered wise because of his experience, how much wiser he whose life fills a span of a thousand or three thousand years! A man may be said to have lived as many millenia as are embraced by the span of his knowledge of history."

And what is so for history is all the more for art history because everyone knows it's more exciting.

Furthermore, seeing that so many in the logorrhea-stricken field of theology are finally conceding art's potential for serious theological insight, shouldn't at least one of us study art history in depth?

Sounds like a plan.

millinerd recommends...

for probably the most resolution available this side of the Tiber.

remix

Here are two other (and shorter) ways of making the point I tried to make below:

1. Jesus had a great imagination. He loved parables. And as we all know, when the disciples asked him what these parables "meant" he said:

"Quit harshin' my mellow with your abstract reasoning bra. I'm playin' with evocative images to stir you up, so stop trying to tie me down with your cold logical ways."

Right? Uhh... Wrong.

2. Or if Jesus doesn't work for you, here's the founder of (American) pragmatism's Charles Sanders Peirce on his use of "abductive," as oppose to deductive or inductive, logic:

"It must be remembered that abduction, although it is very little hampered by logical rules, nevertheless is logical inference, asserting its conclusion only problematically or conjecturally, it is true, but nevertheless having a perfectly definite logical form."
(Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism, CP 5.188-189, 1903)

Fans of abductive logic - more power to ya, but please do keep that in mind.

Despite the recent turn of another intellectual season (i.e. modern to postmodern), the thinking cap is still in style.