all brows need not be furrowed

May I point out a few quick things about this wonderful, piercing dialogue at Cambridge between Roger Scruton and Jordan Peterson? 

 
They’re right! Art is indeed that which sorts empirical phenomenon so it can address us, and much of the academy muffles the speech. (Many of my fellow academics who sneeringly dismiss Peterson or Scruton would not last ten minutes in a debate with either of them.) But the academy is – to a certain extent – already on the side of the angels. There is a post-critical theory movement that has arisen due to the sheer failure of the kind of critique that Scruton and Peterson take on. To put that melodramatically, God has his 7000 who have not bowed the knee to Foucault.

Folks like Rita Felski exemplify this, as do the folks present at the conference Jonathan Anderson organized on post-secular (Jeff Kosky, Lori Branch), as of course does Jonathan’s work. It's been a theme here for a while. Did I mention just down the way from Cambridge the Tate Modern launched a Bible commentary? That feminism has been hacked by the Virgin Mary?

While some of the negativity is still subsidized, a lot of it has collapsed or is collapsing on its own. Peterson is in a pitch battle with those who militantly cling to the old order. The battle is real. But the attack mode has serious drawbacks, and lends outsiders (those who only listen to Peterson) the impression that the entire academy is crazed and the only sane ones left are Peterson and Scruton. I am not saying Peterson should not be fighting – the fight came to him. I have listened to and read a good bit of Peterson, and I’d consider myself a selective admirer (and critic). His more severe critics should ask themselves why he can consistently fill a Toronto lecture hall for serious lectures on the Bible and they can't. Still, Peterson's is not the only, and for many of us, not the best strategy.

That said, Scruton and Peterson are right about transcendence. I can’t emphasize that enough – I’m only mentioning Peterson's tone (which is why so many academics are allergic to Peterson – a tone which, considering Peterson’s enemies, he arguably has to take on to survive). If, as Scruton so wonderfully puts it, “culture is the residue of what we have loved,” we have a shot at fortifying that residue, at "bunking" instead of debunking. Peterson and Scruton are not hidebound conservatives - they insist we need to be “building the future instead of criticizing the past.” As they put it, "there is no formula"; and because of that, some of us may choose to take a different approach. If we are to focus on particular places as Peterson recommends, strategies will differ based on locale.

So, here's to little Kings College Cambridges popping up in many unexpected places, while believers in cruciform beauty quietly find as many allies as we can.

Happy Epiphany!

a not-so-new regime of interpretation

I imagine that most college professors in the humanities in their thirties, forties or fifties were trained under critical theory. It was drilled into us whether we liked it or not, and we are therefore probably not at risk of forgetting it. The mode of furrow-browed critique towards works of art and literature will, I expect, always come naturally, even if we prefer (as I do) to fuel our prophetic stirrings more with Amos than Agamben. But it is increasingly difficult to ignore the fact that the dark night of suspicion is giving way to some kind of dawn. In The Limits of Critique (University of Chicago Press, 2015), Rita Felski explains:

My conviction - one that is shared by a growing number of scholars - is that questioning critique is not a shrug of defeat or a hapless capitulation to conservative forces. Rather, it is motivated by a desire to articulate a positive vision for humanistic thought in the face of growing skepticism about its value. Such a vision is sorely needed if we are to make a more compelling case for why the arts and humanities are needed. Reassessing critique, in this light, is not an abandonment of social or ethical commitments but a realization, as Ien Ang puts it, that these commitments require us to communicate with intellectual strangers who do not share our assumptions. And here, a persuasive defense of the humanities is hindered rather than helped by an ethos of critique that encourages scholars to pride themselves on their vanguard role and to equate serious thought with a reflex negativity. Citing the waves of demystification in the history of recent thought (linguistic, historicist, etc.) Yves Citton notes that they share a common conviction: the naïvety of any belief that works of art might inspire new forms of life. We are seeing, he suggests, the emergence of another regime of interpretation: one that is willing to recognize the potential of literature and art to create new imaginaries rather than just to denounce mystifying illusions. The language of attachment, passion, and inspiration is lo longer taboo (187).

Felski cites Michael Billig, Luc Boltanski, Jane Bennet and James Elkins as further allies in this shift. Especially helpful is Michel Chaouli's questioning the measures we take to keep the power of works of art at bay.  "How curious it is," he remarks, "that we dig wide moats - of history, ideology, formal analysis - and erect thick conceptual walls lest we be touched by what, in truth, lures us [in works of art]."  Lest we think this means we should look with dewy-eyed infatuation at any manner of artistic expression, Felski elaborates,

That critique has made certain things possible is not in doubt. What is also increasingly evident, however, is that it has sidelined other intellectual, aesthetic, and political possibilities - ones that are just as vital to the flourishing of new fields of knowledge as older ones... (190).

The antidote to suspicion is thus not a repudiation of theory - asking why literature [and art] matters will always embroil us in sustained reflection - but an ampler and more diverse range of theoretical vocabularies. And here, the term "postcritical" acknowledges its reliance on a prior tradition of thought, while conveying that there is more to intellectual life than the endless deflationary work of "digging down" or "standing back." Rather than engaging in a critique of critique, it is more interested in testing out alternative ways of reading and thinking. What it values in works of art is not just their power to estrange and disorient but also their ability to recontextualize what we know and to reorient and refresh perception. It seeks, in short, to strengthen rather than diminish its object - less in a spirit of reverence than in one of generosity and unabashed curiosity (181-182).

But a shift as major as this one is going to need some heavy theoretical cover, and Actor-Network-Theory serves this role for Felski. If you need it to get to where she finds herself, have at it. Treating works of art as non-human actors may be a helpful experiment, but not necessarily a new one. (After all, it has long been common for Wheaton students to refer to their Bibles as the living Word.) That said, perhaps this alliance will only buy us ten years or so, until Actor-Network-Theory (already under considerable fire) itself succumbs to a new regime. That is why theology strikes me (unsurprisingly) as the more field-tested warranting discourse for the post-critical moment, something that art historian Tom Crow (see his No Idols: The Missing Theology of Art) most certainly understands. 

Does a turn to theology mean that works of art will be any less pulsingly vibrant? Not in the least. Decades before Bynum showed how "Christian materiality" is far different (and more fundamentally paradoxical) than recent Object Oriented Ontology trends, John Meyendorff used the same terms to describe the kind of faith that Gregory of Palamas (1296-c.1359) defended:

We find here the elements of Christian materialism, which, instead of wishing to suppress matter which has revolted against the spirit through the effect of sin, gives it the place the Creator assigned to it, and discovers the way which Christ opened for it [matter!] by transfiguring it and by deifying it in his own body.

That Christian materiality is the ultimate warrant for interpreting works of art is old news at this old blog (15 years and counting), but as literary theory comes around to something resembling it, the warrant bears repeating. In these post-critical times, venerable figures like Wheaton English professor Clyde Kilby (see his posthumousy published The Arts & the Christian Imagination), don't look so countrified after all. Fortunately, for a school that has taken faith seriously as a backdrop for studying the humanities, Felski's wonderful book is not the dawning of a new regime as much as permission (even vindication) for what we've been doing all along.

And so, Professor Felski: Thanks!

Five More Questions on "Enchantment"

I have learned (thanks to the good Dr. Ryan Clevenger), of a fascinating corollary to Mattes's book on Luther and beauty, namely, Jason Josephson-Storm's well-crafted stake to the heart of Charles Taylor's assertion that "Everyone can agree that one of the big differences between us and our ancestors of 500 years ago is that they lived in an 'enchanted' world and we do not" (38).

It leads to five more questions of my own, followed by Josephson-Storm's vivid, myth-crunching prose.

1. But the modern world really is disenchanted, right?

Disenchantment is a myth. The majority of people in the heartland of disenchantment believe in magic or spirits today, and it appears that they did so at the high point of modernity. Education does not directly result in disenchatment. Indeed, one might hazard the guess that education allows one to maintain more cognitive dissonance rather than less. Secularizatin and disenchantment are not correlated. Moreover, it is easy to show that, almost no matter how you define the terms, there are few figures in the history of the academic disciplines that cannot be shown to have had some relation or engagement with what their own epoch saw as magic or animating forces. This monograph has shown how different magic and spiritualist revivals entered the lives of modernity's main theorists, from Max Müller to Theodor Adorno to Rudolf Carnap. But it is not only theorists of disenchantment who were entangled with enchantment....Mechanism has long had establishment enemies. This list barely scratches the surface (304-5).

That artistic and literary movements often went together with magical rituals and spirit summoning should also be no surprise: the occult can be found from the Harlem Renaissance to the Surrealists, from Wassily Kandinsky to Victor Hugo to W.B. Yeats. What we might think of as the orthodox or establishment disciplines have been hardly less magically inclined. Spiritualism and theosophy have appealed to biologists like Alfred Russel Wallace and inventors like Thomas Edison. Nobel Prize-winning physicists from Marie Curie to Jean Baptiste Perrin to Brian Josephson have often been interested in parapsychology. Even computer scientists like Alan Turing believed in psychical powers. Moreover, despite the laments of the new materialists, pansychism has been a persistent counter-current in philosophical circles as well-known thinkers - including Spinoza, Leibniz, Goethe, Schopenhauer... Henry David Thoreau, C.S. Peirce, William James, Josiah Royce, John Dewey, Henri Bergson... Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, Albert Schweitzer.... - all argued that the material universe should be though of as thoroughly animated or possessed of mind and awareness.

2. So should we stop using the term modernity, understood as disenchantment of one kind or another?

Modernity is a myth. The term modernity is itself vague. There can be value in vagueness, but "modernity" rests on an extraordinarily elastic temporality that can be extended heterogeneously and in value-laden ways to different regions and periods. It also picks out different processes such as urbanization, industrialization, rationalization, globalization, capitalism, or various particular artistic, scientific, philosophical, or technological movements. To speak of "modernity or "modernization" is always to select from within these and to surreptitiously bundle them together as symptoms of a larger master process. It often makes an actor out of the very thing that needs to be explained. Hence, modernity is not just vague; it is doing a lot of covert work, and its main feature is its capacity to signal a rupture or breach, which it marks as the expression of a single horizon of temporality. Moreover, when described in terms of the de-animation of the world, the end of superstition, the decay of myth, or even the dominance of instrumental reason, modernity signals a societal fissure that never occurred (306).

3. But surely the term postmodernity still has purchase, right?

Postmodernity is a myth...  In Die Krisis der europäischen Kultur (The crisis of European culture), the German philosopher Rudolf Pannwitz described what he saw as a calamity in European intellectual and cultural life, arguing that capitalism, shallow materialism, and conflicting nationalism have produced an ehtical vacuum. Strikingly, Pannwitz suggested that this collective zeitgeist has spawned a new type of person: "The postmodern man is an encursted mollusk, a happy medium of decadent and barbarian swarming out from the natal whirlpool of the grand decadence of the radical revolution of European nihilism." ...Pannwitz might seem to be describing our contemporary epoch....  But Pannwitz wrote this [postmodern] account in 1917, not 1987, much less 2017. The appearance of this text and even its term postmodern a century ago allows us to see that the postmodern condition is far from new. ...The term postmodern became lexically available shortly after 1901, when variants on the term premodern appeared and came into common usage.... No sooner had "modernity' become the quintessential periodization than it was possible it imagine its future eclipse. Postmodernity is often presented as a second rift after the rift that defined modernity. Postmodernity is often seen as a counterreaction to modernism, but the two movements largely coincided. Indeed, postmodernism and modernism would seem to have the same meaning insofar as they both aim to transcend the current moment, often by looking forward. Accordingly, both periodizations rest on the idea of fundamental rupture from the past, which, while inflected differently, often rests on the very disenchantment narrative I have been working to dispel....

In sum, I have been arguing that in the hands of both proponents and critics, modernity is a philosopheme that comes with a rudimentary narrative structure attached. Every time something specific is termed "modern"," that implies a story: "First there was x, and then everything changed." The word modernity always communicated myth, and it turns out that disenchantment is one of the stories we most like having told to us. (307-308).

4. But I went to grad school where I read critical theory, so I'm safe from all these enchantment debates, right?    

The esoteric keeps appearing in thinkers we have canonized in critical theory... Critical theory's self-image is of vigilance and hyper-intellection. If you are routing it through Kant, Hegel, and Marx, you can make that boast. If you stick with Marx, you can even call yourself a materialist. If you put European mysticism at the center, however, then all those claims become suspect...

Ferdinand de Saussure's attendance attendance at spiritualist séances and writing about theosophy in the very moment he was giving his famous lectures. Gilles Deleuze's first publication, which was the introduction to a work of occult magic. Giorgio Agamben's interest in Paracelsus as a solution to the semiotic rupture. Peter Soterdijk's investment in Osho as a spiritual and philosophical precursor. Roy Bhaskar's debt to theosophy. Luce Irigaray's interest in yoga and mysticism. Even Derrida expressed an interest in telepathy and attempted to ally the pharmakeus (magician), writing, and magic against speech and logos. Not to mention thinkers like Michel de Certeau and Ernst Bloch, whose connections to mysticism are well known. I could go on (237-38).

...Critical theory is one of the central places in the academy for a left-Weberian critique of modernity. We look to critical theorists to be reminded that disenchantment has meant the domination of nature, the dehumanization of humanity, the end of wonder, and the desctruction of myth. But having read Klages, we can see the important aspects of this line of critique originated in the fin-de-siècle occult milieu. So on these grounds, all the various left-Weberian attempt to overcome instrumental rationality or the iron cage by way of re-enchantment might now seem suspect (239).

5. So, granting I don't want to conform to the new materialism, or consummate the human sacrifice ritual that George Bataille chickened out of because (although he found a volunteer victim), he could not find a willing murderer (237), is there a way out of the whole enchantment business? 

As I interpret Max Weber, we live in a disenchanting world in which magic is embattled and intermittently contained within its own cultural sphere, but not a disenchanted one in which magic is gone... (305) [And yet, for Weber] What ultimately disenchanted the world was the Protestant conception of grace - that salvation is solely due to the sovereign grace of God (sola gratia)." (281). 

While Josephson-Storm of course does not put it this way, it might therefore seem fair to argue that Christianity, which began as a disenchanting movement within the Graeco-Roman world, could continue to do similar, perhaps even increasingly necessary work today - leading to a restrained enchantment, animated by love of neighbor, on the far side of God's myth-crunching grace.

Of course, there are a variety of Christian manners of accomplishing this. Perhaps the most direct is just one post back.

The Unmappable Terrain of Christianity and Art

James Elkins, a prolific art historian at the Art Institute of Chicago, is our best cartographer of the unruly terrain of art history and contemporary art.  Due to his unusual productivity, his books tend to be reviewed in bulk - about five at a time.  Some reviewers are impressed by his baffling range, others are clearly disturbed that his books rarely bear the mark of focused specialization (though he can do that too). 

But what especially disturbs some about Elkins is his refusal to light a candle at the altar of critical theory, which - until quite recently - was a prerequisite for academic success.  The reason for Elkins' demurral appears to be his frustration with theory's essential sameness:  "The wilderness of writing on twentieth-century painting," Elkins explains, "is really an orderly place where the majority of judgments are received opinions, derived from a very small number of models" (159).  Elkins' non-conformity to such models once earned him the opprobium of an Art Bulletin reviewer, who compared Elkins to more fashionable art historians, Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois. 

Most important... is the fact that Krauss and Bois consistently deny the possibility that art can be anything more than its "base materiality." Their argument is strong and consistent: a picture of mold is a picture of mold. Elkins often implies that painting can be transcendent, can move beyond the messy stuff of oil paint itself in order to show something that is beyond the picture plane.  In comparison to Formless, Elkins's book is inconsistent and even sentimental.

A more clear indication of how carefully art historians patrol their disciplinary borders is difficult to find.  Elkins is chastised for trespassing on transcendent turf, a domain which the (supposedly adventurous) methodology of critical theory deemed off-limits.  Indeed, because Elkins' prose sometimes knocks on the door of the transcendent (albeit with protective gloves), it's not surprising that Elkins has found religion. By which I mean, he has found religion to be a subject worthy of art historical interest.  This started with On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art, and has progressed into the Art Seminar Series volume entitled Re-Enchantment, which explored the art world's attitude to religion by interviewing dozens of scholars and curators on the subject.  While not monolithic, the book frequently evidenced a younger generation complaining that old guard art historians such T.J. Clark or the much pilloried Michael Fried, don't take religion seriously enough.  

But Re-Enchantment just scratched the surface.  Decades of cultural investment by Christian academic institutions, programs, organizations, and journals have paid off, making the output of Christian perspectives on art criticism, production and history almost unmappable.  As I've remarked before, Catholics are enjoying the revival of Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson, backed by the historical studies of Murphy and Schloesser, and the philosophical work of Trapani.  The Orthodox are seeing the emergence of Pavel Florensky, the 20th century art historian, theologian, priest, scientist and martyr (silenced by the very revolutionaries after whom the art history's most influential journal, October, was named).  This revival is due to new translations of Florensky's art writings by Salmond, a biography by Pyman, and a compelling advance of his ideas by Antonova.  What's more, a surprising article from a former editor of Art Forum has suggested that Jacques Lacan - a darling of critical theory - may have obtained some of his best ideas from Florensky, who was translated into French just as Lacan was developing his notion of the gaze.  One couldn't make this stuff up. 

Protestants are also making a strong showing in the aesthetic arena that they have traditionally neglected.  William Dyrness' formidable historical survey of Reformed visual culture would have been enough, but his latest work, Poetic Theology, which could fairly be called a Summa of Protestant aesthetics, pushes the project well into the 21st century.  Dyrness drives the last nail in the aniconic coffin, and argues that Calvin's prohibitions agains images, or his insistence to keep churches locked, were temporary measures never meant to be permanent features of Protestant life.  Dyrness has the panache to distinguish Reformed aesthetics from its Catholic (Thomism) and Anglican (Radical Orthodoxy) alternatives, while still arguing for a symbolically rich, contemplative Protestantism, haunted by brokenness yet socially engaged.  Surprisingly, he succeeds.

This is not to posit the Reformed tradition as the right option, but simply to show the variety of them available for those people - Christian or not - who are interested in the light that Christianity can shed on art and art history.  Theory, you will recall - according to one of its best elucidators - is inherently and consistently suspicious of the visual.  Christianity, because of the visible God at the heart of its proclamation - is much less so (though, of course, not completely).  One doesn't need a Ph.D. in art history to know that Christianity has meant much for the history of art.  But one very well may need one to come up with an intellectual justification to continue to rule that not insignificant religion out.

Centripetally, books by Wuthnow, Dyrness and Taylor have attempted to understand and encourage the state of the arts in North American churches.  Centrifugally, Siedell remains a necessary prod to engage contemporary art on its own terms without striking a Tillichian bargain.  The Association of Scholars of Christianity in the History of Art (ASCHA) evidences the new seriousness with which Christianity is taken by art historians.  Likewise, new journals that show theologically informed engagement of art seem to emerge monthly.   Consider new journals such as Anamnesis, the frequently sharp and prolific output of Transpositions, Curator Magazine, the art coverage of the Other Journal and Comment, Dappled Things and Ruminate, ArtWay, Catapult, Liturgical Credo, Cresset, St. Katherine's Review, to say nothing of the more established venues such as Image or CIVA.

The aim here is not a narrowly "Christian" art world or "Christian" art history, but the better art production and truer study which comes from not ruling out a phenomenon as massive as global Christianity - which, furthermore, frequently doesn't behave.  Many of the organizations and publications listed above are (understandably) interested in an artistically sophisticated faith, and are consequently less than eager to draw attention to the Christian kitsch they seek to, wait for it...  leave behind. But the irony is that such kitsch - the visual religion of everyday believers - has now become a subject of serious academic investigation, as evidenced by the impressive infrastructure erected by David Morgan and the journal Material Religion.  This is nicely summarized by the fact that the notorious Thomas Kinkade is no longer as much mocked as seriously analyzed by art historians.  In short, kitsch counts. 

But nor is it everything.  Take for example, the effusion of studies on religion in the Renaissance since the seventies, or the publications showing how religion persisted through the early modern world, such as The Idol in an Age of Art, Rembrandt's Faith, Art and Religion in 18th Century Europe, or Painting the Sacred in the Age of Romanticism, not to mention calls for papers like Empowerment and the Sacred or Spiritual Matters.  Modernism is not unaffected as well, as evidenced by two impressive publications (Alter Icons and Avant-Garde Icon) and an upcoming conference regarding how Eastern Christian icons influenced modern art.  One could go on.

"With a few marginal exceptions," wrote James Elkins at the end of a Books and Culture exchange, "the exclusion [or religion by the art world]... is not owned, or owned up to, by anyone. That is why it is so difficult to imagine how this state of affairs can be changed, even though it is inevitable that it will, eventually, be changed." But Christian perspectives on art history and art production are emerging more quickly than anyone - so far as I know - can reasonably assess.  I tried to chronicle this a year ago, and have tried to update it here.  The difficulty of the task makes me feel that "eventually" might be just around the corner, if not already here. 

Update:  Here's a follow-up post.

Take and Read (multivalently)

Roland Barthes may have once declared that “the text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the message of an Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash” (p. 148).  But in contemporary scholarship, Harvard's Jeffrey Hamburger counters that “medieval exegetes would be sorely perplexed at the notion that the Scriptures they treated could ever be limited to a single, literal meaning." (pp. 3-4). Indeed, for Augustine, "[N]o one ought to suppose… that we should study only the historical truth, apart from any allegorical meanings; or, on the contrary, that they are only allegories, and that there were no such facts at all..." (Civita Dei, XV:27). No one, I suppose, except for Roland Barthes.

Critical Theory: Long in the Tooth

The extremely instructive Art Seminar series record discussions on the state of art history as a discipline.  Pick up any one of the seven volumes, and you'll immediately read in the uniform preface that theory lives!

People who would rather avoid problems of interpretation, at least in their more difficult forms, have sometimes hoped that 'theory' would prove to be a passing fad.  A simple test shows that is not the case. 

After a few handy graphs, it's proven.  Theory is forever.  I guess it really is simple:  If you think rigorously about interpretation, you must be into theory.  If not, you must be Roger Kimball. 

But - and this is very important - be sure not to continue reading past the preface.  On page ten of Volume 5, one encounters this from Rebecca Zorach (who gave a very fine lecture here last year).

It might also look like approaches driven by social and political issues - social history, feminism, postcolonial studies - are themselves getting a bit long in the tooth.  And I sense a certain impatience of late - not only in Renaissance art history but in other academic areas as well  - with the political.  We might feel irritated by what seems to be an austere moralism in feminist or postcolonial approaches; they might seem to threaten the pleasures we take in art. Or, on the other hand, we might feel exhausted by our own failures to use a politicized art history as a tool for substantive change.

But hasn't she seen the handy graphs?  Seriously though, good for the Art Seminar for permitting the questioning of its own premises. 

Advocates of critical theory continue to believe that those dissatisfied with it are necessarily "traditional" or "conservative."  But perhaps we're just bored (which is my interpretation of the empty chairs on the covers), and searching for new paradigms to help explain material that theory can't illuminate.  Aren't labels such as "traditional" and "conservative," furthermore, better applied to those defending the status quo?   From my vantage point, everyone is wondering what's next.  Maybe the place where the Art Seminar series ended up - a volume on religion (which I ransacked here) - provides a clue.

Light of the Unenlightened

Rather than bashing on the Enlightenment with a worn-out club, David Ritchie, in The Fullness of Knowing, surveys thinkers who didn't buy it in the first place (hat tip to Mars Hill audio).  Ritchie's book came from his "growing recognition as a student of the eighteenth century that many of today's criticisms of the Enlightenment are really not all that original."  Among his insights are that Edmund Burke anticipated the criticisms of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, and that Isaac Watts deconstructed John Locke in verse.

Ritchie examines Jonathan Swift, the poets Christopher Smart and William Cowper, and more familiar, recent figures such as Polanyi and Gadamer.  Of course, his is no exhaustive treatment, and Ritchie admits as much.  Diogenes Allen was up to something similar when he examined Simone Weil, Kierkegaard, and Pascal in Three Outsiders, as, I imagine, were the contributors to Bakhtin and Religion, Alan Jacobs among them. Likewise, it has been suggested that C.H. Plotkine's study of Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Tenth Muse, shows that 19th century philology was far more complex that Foucault suggests in Les Mots et les Choses.  We should make it a collective ambition to somehow extend this unenlightenment project further by discovering similar figures, if only to more fully inhabit our post-postmodern times.  (Dibs on Jonathan Edwards and Pavel Florensky.)

At any rate, after his survey of the happily unenlightened , Ritchie concludes:  "Somewhat to my surprise, nearly all of them emphasize an aesthetic element to knowledge, whether in the form of beauty or good taste, as opposed to the more narrowly rationalistic or empirical boundaries to Enlightenment epistemology."

I'm not so surprised.

The Frankfurt Fool

Adam Kirsch at The New Republic provides a very helpful review of Thomas Wheatland's The Frankfurt School in Exile. According to Kirsch, the book brings an appreciative, but more down-to-earth reading of the revered "fathers of critical theory" (Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse, Fromm, Horkheimer, etc.). Incidentally, in Seminary instead of "church fathers," we all learned to say "church fathers and mothers." But I suppose that is easier to pull off in church history than with mid-century Marxism. Here's Kirsch:

Wheatland shows how the Institute [for Social Research] came into contact with two important segments of the American Jewish community. The first were the New York Intellectuals, who were in many ways the perfect American counterpart to the Frankfurters: Jewish radical intellectuals with an interest in politics and culture. While the two groups never engaged as deeply as they mightg have - in part, Wheatland shows, due to the Frankfurters' policy of staying aloof from American politics - some relationships did form, and New Yorkers like Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, and Nathan Glazer became aware of Critical Theory.

But for Glazer, we might add, the awareness very much deepened, especially regarding Critical Theory's impact on public architecture. In his wonderful book that I continually refer to, From a Cause to a Style, Glazer is judicious about Critical Theory, but also mildly exasperated:

Young students should reach out, try, experiment. Even if the theory that speaks to them is impenetrable to me, they should try to realize the hints and insights and possibilities they divine in it. But when they design and build for the public, one factor affecting what they design must be public response... if the students empathize with the people [they build for], maybe what is necessary is not to critique it but to bring with their designs something they would not find in graceless environment[s]: perhaps humor, perhaps nostalgia, perhaps repose, perhaps even, if one is capable of it, something of beauty

But by the end of the book, the gloves come off. The sons of the fathers of Critical Theory, according to Glazer, soon became

scarcely comprehensible, and the less comprehensible... the more they engaged architects' interests, but in any case they were no longer theories that envisaged the role of the architect as enabling and improving the life of ordinary or run-of-the-mill people and communities, as early modernism did. Despite the influence of quasi- and pseudo-Marxist thinking in these advanced contemporary theories, they had little interest in the improvement of the common social life and the circumstances of the working class or low-income families, or in the social reform that is consistent with some kinds of Marxism. Rather, they showed much more interest in the catastrophism, the apocalyptic character, that is a more important part of Marxism. Theories in favor today among advanced architectural theorists and students are those that emphasize, indeed celebrate, breakdown in society and meaning, often in obscure and contradictory language.

And so, Glazer foolishly sold his birthright as the New York heir to the Frankfurt School for a mess of comprehensible language, concern for the needs of real people, social cohesion, and beauty. What was he thinking?

Will the Real Academic Growth Industry Please Stand Up?

In his not-to-be-overlooked recent web essay, Rusty Reno reports that critical theory “remains an academic growth industry.” Berkeley’s Martin Jay, a scholar who has spent his career steeped in critical theory, see things differently.

In his review of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (History and Theory, Feb. 2009), Jay describes an endless flow of freshly published religion books, such as Religion: Beyond a Concept, a tome which exceeds 1000 pages and is only the first of five projected volumes in a series entitled “The Future of the Religious Past.” After listing similar projects, Jay confesses exasperation with academia’s religious growth industry:

Clearly, whether or not religion can be said to have “returned”–did it ever really go away?–in an age that is no longer fully secular, it has generated a tsunami of scholarly commentary in many different fields sweeping over the nascent twenty-first century in the way that reinvigorated religious practice promises to do as well. The cultured despisers of yore–a few well-publicized exceptions like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins aside–have been replaced by a new gaggle of no-less cultured admirers. In the most advanced theoretical circles, it is now possible to speak, in the words of the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo, of “the breakdown of the philosophical prohibition of religion.” Making one’s way through this thicket of new interpretation and appreciation is not, however, easy, especially for those of us who remain religiously “unmusical,” to borrow Max Weber’s still felicitous phrase.

Reno and Jay are, I think, both right. The questions is whether the burgeoning academic interest in religion will tame religion with critical theory, or let religion do some of the taming.

After Theory: Religion

In his not-to-be-overlooked recent web essay, Rusty Reno reports that critical theory "remains an academic growth industry." Berkeley's Martin Jay, a scholar who has spent his career steeped in critical theory, see things differently.

In his review of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age (History and Theory, Feb. 2009), Jay describes an endless flow of freshly published religion books, such as Religion: Beyond a Concept, a tome which exceeds 1000 pages and is only the first of five projected volumes in a series entitled "The Future of the Religious Past." After listing similar projects, Jay confesses exasperation with academia's religious growth industry:

Clearly, whether or not religion can be said to have "returned" - did it ever really go away? - in an age that is no longer fully secular, it has generated a tsunami of scholarly commentary in many different fields sweeping over the nascent twenty-first century in the way that reinvigorated religious practice promises to do as well. The cultured despisers of yore - a few well-publicized exceptions like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins aside - have been replaced by a new gaggle of no-less cultured admirers. In the most advanced theoretical circles, it is now possible to speak, in the words of the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo, of "the breakdown of the philosophical prohibition of religion." Making one’s way through this thicket of new interpretation and appreciation is not, however, easy, especially for those of us who remain religiously "unmusical," to borrow Max Weber’s still felicitous phrase.

Reno and Jay are, I think, both right. The questions is whether the burgeoning academic interest in religion will tame religion with critical theory, or let religion do some of the taming.

critical theory on the ground

R.R. Reno (Teaching in the Twenty-First Century) explains why the Scholastic method as exemplified by Thomas is the quintessence, not the bane, of critical thought. Along the way, he puts his finger on the very different nature of critical theory,

an intellectual project, the main goal of which is to show that conventional ways of thinking are hopelessly naïve, if not malign and corrupt. It is a deck-clearing operation - not to prepare students for truth, but to prepare them for life without truths.

Let me provide an on the ground example of how the expose-the-power-structures project translates into the life of a bright Princeton undergraduate. I'm at the Bookeye today (the Gandolph the white of your tired gray xerox machine), and a previous student of mine casually asks an acquaintance,

"You're majoring in comp lit!? Why not politics?"

"Comp lit is interesting," she replies.

"Yeah, but politics is everything. I majored in art history, but switched to politics, because that's what art history was really about. For my art history papers I just talked about how art was a way for the gringos to keep those Native Americans down."

Hoping for backup, he looks to me and says, "That's art history, right Matt?"

I smiled and responded, "Some would say."

2009: After Postmodernism

In a presidential address at the AHA last Saturday, Gabrielle Spiegel bid farewell to postmodern theory: "We all sense this profound change has run its course." All of us, that is, except for cutting edge Christians. (Don't say you weren't warned.)

As to where the field is going, Spiegel is not sure. One can always look at other AHA presidential addresses, such as Kenneth Scott Latourette's, for suggestions.

Theory Weary

Terry Eagleton, the Marxist who has taken to dismantling Dawkins in the public square, has been mentioned here before. Eagleton's suspicion of critical theory didn't start with After Theory (2003). In The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990) he wrote that

it is difficult to read the later Roland Barthes, or even the later Michel Foucault, without feeling that a certain style of meditation on the body, on pleasures and surfaces, zones and techniques, has acted among other things as a convenient displacement of a less immediately corporeal politics, and acted also as an ersatz kind of ethics There is a privileged, privatized hedonism about such discourse, emerging as it does at just the historical point where certain less exotic [i.e. classical Marxist] forms of politics found themselves suffering a setback.

This could be compared to another Nathan Glazer quote, one that encapsulates his perfectly entitled book on modernism.

Architecture in recent years has turned away from the pragmatic social and behavioral sciences to the wilder reaches of critical theory because its early efforts to design better housing turned into a failure...

In both cases, prominent thinkers (both dissatisfied Marxists to varying degrees), without dismissing theory completely, identify it with an escape from action. This is not regrettable. It is a mercy that graduate students inhale the thick smoke of theory instead of the tear gas of the riot police, and that aggressive modernists are no longer trying to reinvent the world.

If - as theory's defenders would have it - theory merely involves a disciplined reflection on one's academic methodology, then fine. Long live theory. Just as nearly everyone is a feminist if feminism is "the radical notion that women are people," so too all but the most unreflective dogmatists are "theorists" if that's the definition of theory. But there are other ways of disciplined methodological reflection. One of them is theological, which, properly understood, always leads to action. Christian theology, for example, has a proven track record of spilling over into soup kitchens.

Icons and Absolutes

One irony of the postmodern fascination with icons is that the couch and candle crowd would likely be horrified at the theological firmness - the metaphysical guts - necessary to back them up. Rather than providing a break from the rigor of language and doctrine, icons are equally as binding. The Second Council of Nicea (787) insisted that the icon's purpose was,

in accordance with the narrative of the proclamation of the gospel, to ascertain the incarnation of God the Word, which was real, not imaginary.

Icons stand by the gospels as witnesses to objective, actual persons and events. The icon, properly understood, is no friend of ambiguity. Icons then are a trojan horse in the New Age giftshop. Be sure not to tell, but the icons for sale to disgruntled Evangelicals on that book table at the From Fundamentalism to Foucault conference, are smuggled absolutes.

A further irony of postmodern fascination with icons is that few things could be less conducive to the "visual turn" than classic postmodern thought. Consider Martin Jay's magisterial study, Downcast Eyes, a sweeping summary of which can be found in this whopper of a paragraph:

Virtually all the twentieth-century French intellectuals encountered on this voyage were extraordinarily sensitive to the importance of the visual and no less suspicious of its implications. Although definitions of visuality vary from thinker to thinker, it is clear that ocularcentrism aroused (and continues in many quarters to arouse) a widely shared distrust. Bergson's critique of the spatialization of time, Bataille's celebration of the blinding sun and the acephalic body, Breton's ultimate disenchantment with the savage eye, Sartre's depiction of the sadomasochism of the "look," Merleau-Ponty's diminished faith in a new ontology of vision, Lacan's disparagement of the ego produced by mirror stae, Althusser's appropriation of Lacan for a Marxist theory of ideology, Foucault's strictures against the medical gaze and panoptic surveillance, Debord's critique of the society of the spectacle, Barthes's linkage of photography and death, Metz's excoriation of the scopic regime of the cinema, Derrida's double reading of the specular tradition of philosophy and the white mythology, Irigaray's outrage at the privileging of the visual in patriarchy, Levinas's claim that ethics is thwarted by a visually based ontology, and Lyotard's identification of postmodernism with the sublime foreclosure of the visual - all these evince, to put it mildly, a palpable loss of confidence in the hitherto "noblest of the senses."

I think that might be about all of 'em. Small wonder that those who forget how to speak, soon forget how to see as well. If Martin Jay is right, Christians unduly adulating postmodernity might consider doing away with paintbrushes altogether, and pick up the Iconoclast's hatchet instead.

-----
References:
Daniel J. Sahas, Icon and Logos: Sources in Eighth Century Iconoclasm (p. 178).
Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (p. 588).

Luke University

Luke chapter 20 could be subtitled "Christ among the academics," especially religious academics. Like anyone claiming religious truth today, the accusation from the worldly wise - as from the Sophistichristians - is, "Who is it that gave you this authority" (20:2)? In other words, "How dare you traffic in metanarratives?"

Realizing that the perpetual questioning of authority is itself a uniquely oppressive authority (Chesterton's reply to Nietzsche's "Question authority" was "Say's who?"), Christ throws in a wrench to stall the scribal gears. Lacking the metaphysical guts to answer a simple question - whether John's baptism was from God or man - the religious academics give up. Christ thereby proves to the crowd that their chief teachers, by virtue of their supreme sophistication, have become incapable of making any pronouncements at all. We imagine Christ smiling as he says, "Neither will I tell you by what authority I am doing these things" (20:8). How can you have a conversation with someone who is unable to speak?

Example: Are you a believer or not M. Derrida? Sorry, I'm far too sophisticated to answer that, and anyone who can is "naive." (Hear it in his own words here.)

Luke 20 continues. After an infuriating parable, the academics send in their big guns, "spies who pretended to be honest" (20:20). Here are those who claim to honor the "richness of the faith heritage" for its narrative value, the ones for whom aesthetics trump truth. Christ, however, knows their hearts. The spies' attempt at entrapment leads to that most brilliant answer, "Render unto Caesar...", but no matter. In Luke 23:2, they'll simply lie about what he said anyway to get him killed.

Next, the Sadducees pipe in with a logical circus trick intended to show literal belief in the resurrection to be ridiculous. "What about the legend of the septupletly wedded wife?" These are the materialists, who will always be with us. Christ dismantles the threat only to show that yes, he actually believes in real resurrections (20:34-38). Everyone's impressed, but the show goes on.

Christ fires back with his own question, leaving them hanging for an answer. "What do you make of Psalm 110:1?" I too, Christ seems to be suggesting, am familiar with the baffling complexity of Scripture, but it doesn't lead me to worship the goddess of ambiguity, and her consort, the lord of liquidity. Familiarity with the complexities of Scripture does not leave one without an answer: They're looking at the answer.

Christ closes his speech to the religious academics - who are too sophisticated for simple belief, who know so many options that they can't pick one - with yet another possibility that they're unprepared to take seriously: Outright condemnation (20:45-7).

Today, one never quite know where the Sophistichristians will arise. Who would have expected them in self-professedly Evangelical circles and publications, but there they so frequently appear. And lo, in a frankly feminist medieval history text, one finds this from historian Barbara Newman:

Finally, and most controversially, I believe that religious experience reveals the traces, however opaquely filtered, of a real and transcendent object. This is not to exclude the possibilities of self-deception and deliberate fraud, both common in medieval Christendom as in all societies where religion is a hegemonic force... Nevertheless, I assert this conviction to clarify my theoretical stance and to overthrow the last bastion of reductionism. To leave a space for transcendence means to allow for the possibility that, when historical subjects assert religious belief or experience as the motive of their actions, they may at times be telling the truth.... It was not because of their commitment to feminism, self-empowerment, subversion, sexuality, or "the body" that [medieval woman] struggled and won their voices; it was because of their commitment to God.

While the Sophistichristians can't afford such transparency, a secular historian - no doubt at significant personal cost - can? I suppose such clarity of prose makes Newman, at least for M. Derrida, a bit dense. To the Christ of Luke, I imagine it would make her luminous. "I tell you, I have not found such great faith even in Israel" (Luke 7:9)!

---------------
References
From Virile Woman to WomanChrist (pp. 16-17, and 246).

Eat your theory!

Cultural theory is to the humanities graduate student what spinach is to most children. They may not like it, but some will consume it to please superiors who insist it's good for them. I make the connection fully aware of spinach's recently tarnished reputation.

In light of this, I'm glad to have been notified thanks to verbumipsum of a very worthwhile article entitled Christ and Critical Theory. It's a nice primer from a kind and confident Christian thinker that I wish I had read it before I started my program.

Griffiths chronicles the more familiar faith-flirtations of Eagleton and Zizek, but unknown at least to me were similar trends in the thought of postmodern action heroes Jean François Lyotard and Alain Badiou. Commenting on Lyotard's engagment of St. Augustine, Griffiths explains that

"Lyotard (in his late work, at least) was driven by hunger for the illimitable jouissance made possible only by the différend more different than which none can be thought."

Or consider Badiou's late turn to the Apostle Paul:

"The sense of loss from which Badiou reads Paul is palpable. He needs 'a new militant figure... to succeed the one installed by Lenin and the Bolsheviks.' That figure (Badiou does not say but implies) is lost, frozen in the Gulag, crushed under the tracks of the Soviet tanks as they rolled into Prague, withered by the increasing willingness of China to accept capital's blandishments, and dismembered by the breakup of the Soviet Empire. This loss can, he hopes, be supplied by Paul, but only if Paul is disjoined from the fable that is Christianity..."

Perhaps one will notice here an intriguing parallel to the later inclinations of Foucault and Derrida.

No doubt Griffiths is correct that this is stuff to which Christians should be paying attention. He also rightly indicates that such "pagan yearning for Christian intellectual gold" does not reach the point of conversion for any of the aforementioned thinkers. But because conversion is a two-way street, in my more cynical moments I wonder if Christian yearning for pagan intellectual fool's gold will.

Ah, but what is "love"?

Below was suggested, as a means of artistic renewal, advancing the only truly trangressive possibilities in a culture where transgression is the norm, i.e. those things once transgressed against like piety and love. Not "piety" and "love" mind you, but piety and love.

To give an idea of how this might be received in some cells of Art's ivory tower, behold one of the calls for papers in the 2007 annual conference of the College Art Association:

What's Love Got to Do with It? The Myth and Politics of Love in Art and Art History

This session examines the concept of "love" as mythologized fiction and rhetorical tool in art, as the notion has disguised the reality of power, whether that of men or women over their own or the opposite sex, the church over the faithful, or the state over its citizens. What social and political agendas have been masked by types of love - romantic love, maternal love, filial love, brotherly love, spiritual love, and the like? What is the concept of love meant to distract us from? Whose interests does "love" represent, and how does art support those interests? We invite papers that uncover new readings of works of art - Western or non-Western and from any chronological period - in which cultural norms and/or the overlay of art-historical interpretation have naturalized the social and political uses of this ubiquitous theme.

It's not that I think love has never been so abused, nor that this session would be uninteresting. But what better way to expose the counterfeits than by examining them in the light of the real McCoy?

West and Zizek

Count Slavoj Zizek among those putting postmodernity on endless trial. In him we have yet another high profile intellectual performing public pomo-mutiny, perhaps accounting for his popularity. He certainly filled an auditorium tonight for a dialogue with Cornel West.

But unlike the T.D. Jakes event, this time it was more of a one way conversation. Zizek spoke for so long that West didn't have much of a chance to. In a very long and meandering way "Brother Slavoj" (West's designation) groped toward what I discerned to be the following point: Belief can be good, granted you don't actually believe.

Zizek recommended the kind of Christianity that has the benefit of liturgy and ritual without taking the faith part entirely seriously. This he called having a proper "distance" (hasn't he read millinerd? That just won't do). But still, Zizek the Marxist just couldn't get away from belief. Perhaps because Christianity is a fresh blast from the past for his secularized Slovenia, Zizek is quite eager to buy the sexy newcomer a drink. While still calling himself an atheist, he's heavily flirting with the Christian faith. And though he's hesitant to go all the way, things were getting kinda steamy.

Continue...
Zizek passionately described his fascination with the fact that Christianity has no parallels. If Jesus was just another messenger of God the religion he claimed would be a bore. But in this particular faith God himself dies on the cross. He loves G.K. Chesterton's assertion that one can only find a pure atheism in Christianity, that is, in the cry of derelection on the cross and the mystery of Holy Saturday.

Critique:
Zizek then claims then that only an atheist can be properly Christian, when in fact the opposite may be true - only a Christian (who buys the mystery of Holy Saturday) can be a "proper" atheist - for at least on that day, God in the person of Jesus Christ, was indeed dead. After the standard adulations, Cornel West picked up on this, explaining that Psalm 22 is not the same thing as Psalm 14 - a very nice distinction indeed. There is room, West seemed to be claiming, for the Jacobian struggle with and even absence of God within the framework of genuine belief in God.

Other Christians however have expressed even more serious concerns about Zizek's casual fling with faith:

"Does Christianity need saving, or does Marxism? Is Zizek a Bob Dylan, turning to Christianity because socialism is in decline, or is he a sincere convert to the rabbi from Galilee? I do not think that Christians need to be anxious about whether celebrity philosophers respect their faith, but I do think it is important to evaluate the future of this new alliance between post-modern European philosophy and the church. Zizek assumes that the church and Marxism can be allies because they have a common enemy in the corrosive consequences of consumerism. The question is whether they have a common hope. Given the present disarray of socialism, Zizek's ideal of absolute justice is very fragile indeed. It makes sense that he would reach out to the church to fill the vacuum left by a proletariat that has lost its voice. It would make a lot less sense for the church to try to salvage an economic ideal that has ruined many countries and countless lives" (from Christian Century).

And though I entirely agree, I'm less concerned for the church appropriating Zizek's ideas (because it's unlikely) than for the church actually appropriating Zizek, which strikes me as if not likely, at least a live possibiltiy.

Conversion?
Zizek said that in talking to fundamentalists he has ascertained that their faith in the resurrection of Jesus Christ has no element of existential angst - it is for them a fact as true as any other commonplace fact. And though of course that is true for some Christians, it is far from true for even the most mildly sophisticated expression Christianity (again, if he had only read millinerd). The fact that anyone has faith in the miracle of the resurrection of Jesus Christ is in fact part of the miracle of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. That such faith needs divine initiation is a basic tenet of Christianity that Zizek seems unaware of (and least it didn't come out tonight).

But it is a miracle that perhaps Zizek is on the way to experiencing. That is, the miracle of believing (as Christians do) that the reality of God is true independent of our belief in it, and it remains true independent of any benefit that such belief imparts. In fact, persistence of faith despite its impartation of benefit may be exactly what the "My God my God why have you forsaken me" that Zizek finds so fascinating is all about.

John Henry Newman once said that liberalism [in religion mind you, not politics] is a half-way house to atheism. Similarly Zizek's brand of Marxism may be a half-way house to actual Christianity.

Should he keep up his fascination, then "brother Slavoj" he actually might one day become.

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).

Being is Back

...though it may be news to some of you that it was even gone in the first place. If you are among those so fortunate, I recommend avoiding getting blogged down by the following somewhat tedious academic aside that seeks to recover the notion of "being." But for those who may have been told that "ontology is out," I recommend reading on. Academic seasons change, and the new line of metaphysics is taking over the scholastic runway by storm.

In order to explain why "being" needs to be recovered, I will need to start with how it got lost.

The Challenge to Being
One of the most positive developments of 20th century philosophy was when Martin Buber moved from a depersonalized frame of mind (I - It relations) to an alternative which he proposed in his book "Ich und Du" (I and Thou). Buber's inspiration for this new philosophy came from the Torah, as he was quite serious about being a Jew.
Influenced by Buber's personalism, Emmanuel Levinas (also a Jew) developed the the idea of "le different" (pronounced with faux French accents for those who want to sound academi-chic). Levinas developed this in opposition to Martin Heidegger, who was quite fond of the notion of "being," and was also quite fond of Hitler. It followed that Levinas yoked the totalizing idea of "being" with the Holocaust. As Levinas' philosophy took hold (which it did), so did the idea that "being" necessitated effacement of "the other."

(By the way, I'm aware I'm speaking in generalizations, but this is a blog.)

As we shall see, in the critique of this kind of being Levinas may have been right. But what if, rather than an abandonment of the concept of "being" altogether, we attempted its recovery? After all, Abusus non tollit usum (Wrong use does not preclude proper use). Perhaps the best way forward is an ontology which takes Levinas and other postmodern philosophers seriously, that is, an ontology of difference, a metaphysics in which the full realization of self is only possible via the other. In other words, a notion of "being" that respected the deconstructionist critique without surrendering to it.

I suspect that many theologians will spend the rest of their careers complaining that in a postmodern world such a sort of thing needs to be done... While others, like Oliver Davies, have actually begun to do it.

A History of Being
Guided by Davies, who seems to have somehow mastered the history of philosophy, the following will attempt to chart the different ways that being has been conceived. Some of these will be clearly open to Levinas' critique, some of which clearly will not. Those that survive will provide the raw material for a contemporary recovery of metaphysics, which will be touched on at the end. All page number that follow (and most of the good ideas) are from Davies.

At least four ontolgies can be detected in the history of philosophy:

1. Ontology of oneness enveloping the self and the other (Levinasian red light)
By this we mean the "totalizing" metaphysics that which Levinas deplored. The culprits are first Parmenides, who contra Heraclian flux said all things were statically united. Another "totalizer" would be the great Neo-Platonic philosopher of the mysterious "One", Plotinus. Not only did Plotinus understand the cosmos to be hyper-unified, but one could only access it in solitude. For him, "the One can be made present on earth only fitfully, in rare and solitary ecstasy"(p.61)... which doesn't sound too "other-friendly" to me.

Also implicated in this category of metaphysics is the Medieval envelope pusher Meister Eckhart. Eckhart is in fashion today because he bucked against church authorities, and everybody loves someone who faces off to the ecclesiastical "man." But Eckhart, though admittedly brilliant and well worth reading, may be guilty of "other-smothering" as well, for notion of the dissolution of the self into God like a stick into a blazing fire did little to establish le different. Next on the hit-list is everybody's favorite Enlightenment era Jewish pantheist Baruch Spinoza, and of course, Heidegger whom we've mentioned, who in his attempt to lead western philosophy back to being, provoked the Levinasian attack.

Incidentally, I wonder if Hinduism and/or Buddhism can fall into this "totalizing" critique as well. If the only reason I care for you is because of my epihanic realization that all is one, and I am in fact you - then le different becomes le meme faster than you can say millinervanna (credit to Pat for that one).

By the way, if my critique of another religion makes you think that I have an armored steed hoofing at the dirt waiting to take me on the next crusade, then I'm sorry to be so misunderstood. In my view, genuine disagreement (not jihad) between religions is all part of respecting people as different. Conversely, it's the totalizing rhetoric of the garden variety "all-religions-are-the-same" religion scholar which I find imperialistic. Claiming that all religions are essentially the same only subsumes difference and in my opinion veils a patronizing disrespect.

2. Ontology of self enveloping the other (Levinasian yellow light)
Rene Descarte's metaphysics has been called by Jean Luc Marion "an ontology by denial," because as we know he doubts his way to the bedrock of existence which is his personal cogito (I think), and only achieves God, his own selfhood and the other after this essential move. This new personal basis for philosophy would be used by later idealist philosophers to pursue their various ends, and it should come as no surprise that Descartes' after-the-fact God, other, and selfhood would ultimately get lost in the shuffle.

As the acids of David Hume's skepticism ate away at these eroded Cartesian foundations of knowledge, Immanuel Kant attempted to stem the tide by positing that knowledge of things in themselves may be impossible, but a subjective knowledge of things as they appear was. This may have bought "the other" some time - as Kant's categorical imperative was merely a creative recasting of the golden rule - but the respite wouldn't last. In fear that Kant's ideas has limited human freedom, J.G. Fichte was "concerned at all costs to lay bare the sphere of otherness, or non-self, as being in essence a modality of the self, and not extraneous to it"(p.103).

And most famously, in Friedrich Hegel, history and humans along with it would become mere vehicles of the universal spirit. Hegel, who was quite the fan of Heraclitus, gave us the great modern shift from being to becoming... and in this great process, one might suggest, what could be the big deal if the "other" gets caught in the gears? Perhaps their getting geared is in fact a step in the universal spirit's realization of itself. For Hegel the Idealist, le different could be merely

"a stage in the unfolding of the Spirit, which is re-enacted at different points in the cosmic myth but always in the form of that otherness, the overcoming of which is the dynamic life of the Spirit"(p.111).

It is no accident that the thought of Fichte and Hegel led to German nationalism, for nations were sure to play a key role in the universal spirit's self-realization. "The other" would clearly not fare well in such a world.

3. Ontology of pure difference, whether self or other (Levinasian green light)
The brilliant Nietzsche laid his metaphysical cards on the table when he famously referred to the "error of Being." He would write in the Geneology of Morals that "No such substratum exists; there is not 'being' behind doing - the doing is everything." All that would be left is the will to power. Davies writes that

"Nietzsche's genealogical method makes terms such as 'the self', 'free will', 'truth' and 'morality' the playthings of a will to power exercised by hierarchical elites. 'Being' too becomes a cultural property in this way, and thus a cipher for the very processes of manipulation and appropriation to which Nietzsche is seeking to draw our attention" (p.118).

Just as an aside, Davies also calls Nietzsche "a deeply religious thinker, whose contestation of the person of Jesus can still be viewed as a kind of inner-Chrisitian critique"(p. 136). According to Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche's critique "sprang from the tension between Christian reality and Christian ideals." For those interested in pursuing this further, this might be a good place to begin.

Following Nietzche, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze (close in both thought and friendship with Michel Foucault) would revolt against any notion of being or that could stitch the world together. Refusing any ontology became his basis for rejecting both Facism and capitalism.

But I hope by now we are beginning to see that the "being" that is being rejected is quite far from the "being" that a Christian might propose. Furthermore, the best defense agains Facism and the abuses of capitalism surely is not a metaphysical void waiting to be co-opted by the next fuhrer, but the rightful detection of a universal fabric that will not permit power hoarding or greed.

But moving on, it is Davies' treatment of Derrida which I found the most interesting of all. There is an ancient Hindu tale of a farmer refusing to enter a barn because of the cobra inside... only later to realize the cobra was in fact a rope that he could use. I must admit that I've had a similar experience with Derrida. Though initially skeptical because of how some Christian thinkers used his ideas as a smokescreen for sloppy thinking, I've come to appreciate him quite a bit more. That is, he may be a rope and not a cobra. When understood as an acid against structuralism and the ideas of idealism of Edmund Husserl (which were his initial targets), then I can sign onto Derridas wholesale. Sure I'm a deconstructionsist - in the sense that I think structuralism was a bad idea in the first place.

But when it comes to Christianity, Derrida may be more friend than foe. Davies writes that

"Derrida is aware (more than Deleuze, for instance) that the very negativity which defines his semantic philosophy also offers a potential reappropriation of his deconstruction back into the reconstructive ontotheologies to which he declared himself opposed. Having been banished to the very margins of contemporary intellectual life, the deus absconditus (God in hiding) might redefine that margin as the new epi-centre of a metaphysical/postmetaphysical re-enactment of traditional theism"(p.124).

Furthermore, Derridas ends his self-described "most autobiographical" of lectures (Comment ne pas parler: Denegations) with a powerful meditation on prayer. It is a lecture which "invites the reader to consider whether Derrida's ambient exercise in denial and no-speaking may not in fact enclose the possibility of a kind of commitment of 'negative' affirmation of a final non-metaphysical theism"(p. 125)... as long of course that this theism is free to be rejected or accepted, which of course for a Christian it must always be.

So while certainly passing the Levinas test of otherness, Derridas may also be pointing the way to a renewed metaphysics of compassion with its anchor in the compassion of God.

4. Ontology of self and other in relation (Levinas never formally approved, but still avoids his critique)
Notwithstanding Derrida's openess, it will be from this last category of ontology where the most raw material for a new Christian metaphysic of difference can be found. Augustine could first be considered a culprit however, for his equation of Platonic being with Exodus 3:14 "I am" would be a key step towards the metaphysics of stasis that everyone is now trying to avoid. But Augustine moved away from this Platonism towards a more Chritian ethic of difference later in his career, making him quite the ally. Writes Davies

"Over the course of his long life, Augustine moved from a strongly Platonized world-view, governed by the displacement of being and the appetitive eros of longing, to a more kenotic (i.e. self-giving) and incarnational understanding of love, modeled upon Christ's love for us. Substantially, this was to exchange a platonic paradigm, with its account of being as immutability and source of truth, for a Christian ecclesiology, as an account of the ethical realm between self and other, opened up by the creator God"(p.81).

One can imagine Levinas' retroactive smile.

It is no secret as well that Thomas Aquinas had a concept of differentiae woven through his work. In his transfiguring Aristotle's unmoved mover, Aquinas developed an ontology quite sympathetic to "the other", for Aquinas'

"interest is not in the unity of being as a whole as grasped by the intellect, but rather in the rich interactions that inhere in the created ord... Thomas has exchanged Aristotelian friendship therefore, with its social particularity, for a universal concept of love which extends even to our enemies… an ethics of universal love..."

which follows directly from his Christian metaphysic.

And finally, it was Kierkegaard's impassioned attack on Hegel's "totalizing" certitude that recovered a radical ethics of otherness. Kierkegaard's response to Hegel was to

"impose upon the metaphysical speculation of Idealist philosophers the absolute imperatives given by the incarnation, engendering new insights into the meaning of Christian existence."

It is no surprise that the only work of Kierkegaard in which he abandoned his pseudonymity was his "Works of Love" which demanded radical service to the other, against a smug Lutheran ethos of the already justified. This is moving us towards the goal of an inherently other-centered metaphysics.

Postmodern Chrisian Responses
Davies' attempts therefore to learn from the success of Augustine, Aquinas and Kierkegaard while still moving ahead. In so doing he seeks to avoid approaches such as that of Mark C. Taylor (not to be confused with Mark L. Taylor at Princeton Seminary) who basically takes radical deconstruction and clothes it in Christian language. This strikes me, as a character in Doctor Zhivago once remarked, to be like a meal made entirely of horseradish.

But Davies is also mildly critical of John Milbank who while much more constructive, still goes just a bit too far in his concessions to the deconstruction of language. For Davies, postmodernism is pleasantly parasitic but not positive - a corrective critique and not a replacement for substance.

In his own attempts at constructing a new metaphysics and theology, Davies starts in the concentration camps. He begins with a phenomenology of consciousness for those who acted compassionately in the midst of evil. He continues with an in depth engagement with the God of compassion as displayed in the Exodus 3:14 (avoiding Augustine's overly-Platonized exegesis and drawing more upon Rabbis), and not without some very deep meditations on the eucharist - ends up with a new metaphysics of compassion.

That is, being as the fabric of the cosmos can be recovered for the twenty-first century, but not as statis - as a compassionate reaching out instead.

the development of a new metaphysical language carries with it certain obligations. In the first place, we have argued for a language of being which is both an acknowledgment of the ontological traditions of the past and an embrace of the present, with its prioritization of radical otherness. It is here that our own project can be set apart from the ontologies of Pryzawara, Rahner and von Balthasar, as well as those of Bultmann, Tillich and Zizioulas, which, for all their insights and achievements, seem out of place in the vigorously language-centred and deconstructive landscapes of the present day (p.158).

As the alternatives begin to reveal themselves, I think we'll find that Oliver Davies is not the only one among many contemporary recoveries of metaphysics to choose from (not to mention Davies' sequel to the book here discussed.

The Levinas/Derrida critique is valid, it has been heard, and the Christian tradition is once again asserting its peculiar ability to invigorate itself without leaving being behind.