Saturday Night Jazz: Mingus Mingus Mingus

3000 Years of Nonviolent Resistance

Here is a short but fascinating article by Judith Mahoney Pasternak
from the War Resister’s League, which identifies the first (known) workers strike in history (12th century BCE in Egypt), as well as snippets about US and UK unions in the modern period. I was previously unaware of the prominent role music has played in worker and/or union movements– “an important tactic in labor’s nonviolent toolbox,” as  Pasternak puts it. Many of the songs union workers wrote can be found in The Little Red Songbook. My education at two Wesleyan institutions made me aware of the role of hymnody in disseminating theological ideas among the masses (mostly miners, textile workers,  and other laborers–in the case of John and Charles Wesley), but I had not yet considered the historic role of music for labor activism. Can this be seen as a forerunner for (some forms of) rock ‘n roll?

“To them I dedicate the effort represented in this book”

Suffice it to say, I hope, that I have nothing against this author or book. In fact, the book itself seems pretty interesting, and I may very well track down a copy. BUT . . . is it it just me, or does the final paragraph of the Acknowledgments page seem a bit, shall we say, much?

I know this bit of snark borders on being distasteful, due both the author’s earnestness and the motivation for his being so earnest. And perhaps I deserve your scorn more than he or it. But it is a risk I’m willing to take.

Foot in door syndrome

I have watched with interest and, at times, horror the slow demise of journalism, as the situation seems to be parallel with my own idealistic, short-sighted, and quasi-professionalized “profession.” One of the most discouraging recent developments has been the New York Times‘ decision to expand local coverage by using unpaid labor, a practice that it is now extending into particular New York neighborhoods.

The rationalization for this behavior is, as ever, that it’s a wonderful opportunity for student journalists to learn their trade, get their name out there, get their foot in the door, etc. But what exactly is this “door” if the single most prestigious news outlet in the country is using unpaid student labor as a permanent part of its offerings? One could hope that this would finally make it clear that the “wonderful opportunities” for students are directly undermining their chance at future gainful employment, but I fear there will always be saps for whom writing for the New York Times is sufficiently cool that they’ll be willing to do it for free, and probably a good number of them who will still believe the myth that doing their job for free is the path to doing it for pay.

In academia, the system hasn’t yet broken down that badly, although it is increasingly the case that even the exploitative adjunct positions are very competitive — all my attempts to find teaching while ABD in Chicago were unsuccessful, for instance, although I was admittedly very choosy in which schools I approached. How long will it be, then, until grad students are advised to teach for free as a way of getting their foot in the door for paid adjunct positions? It’s so eerily plausible that I’m almost afraid to post this, lest some administrator read it and think, “Hmm….”

Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing Response: URA Fever

So, I’ve come down with a rather nasty flu in the midst of preparing for the upcoming Laruelle events at Warwick and Nottingham. I haven’t been able to give much thought to the Malabou book besides my initial impressions which are likely not so interesting. As it has so far played out in the comments, especially between Adam, Bruce, and Clayton, there has been a real excitement over Malabou’s work. While her What Should We With Our Brains? did very much excite me I think I’m not as enthusiastic about this work because my own interests do not lie so heavily with Hegel, Heidegger, or Derrida. In some ways it strikes me as an oblique way to investigate the problem of change as she has to excavate the idea from the forms of the negative that seem to dominate dialectic, destruction, and deconstruction. So, in my slightly feverish state, my only real question is how the concept of plasticity is determined, if at all, by the negative? Would it take a different shape if she were working more closely with Spinoza, Bergson, and Deleuze? That is, what tests can the affirmative present to plasticity?

Appeal for Conference Funds

I recently posted something about the upcoming Religion, Literature, & the Arts Conference at the University of Iowa. indicating at the time my interest in attending. I was supposed to attend a couple of years ago, but unfortunate financial circumstances that I won’t go into caused me to have to back out. I’ve long regretted this — not simply because there are lots of fine people at in the Religion dept. at the University of Iowa,  nor because at least a few of the guest speakers are friends of mine, but because I never got around to presenting a paper I’ve just been sitting on for a couple of years.  The proposal is below:

Title: Theology After the Catastrophe: An Evaluation of Evil in the Recent Fiction of Thomas Pynchon & Cormac McCarthy

The aim of this paper is two-fold: first, to introduce a theological subtext of recent novels by two of America’s foremost novelists of the past fifty years, Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road; and second, in doing so, to meditate on the significance of their shared vision of a world facing catastrophe. For Thomas Pynchon, the catastrophe (specifically, World War I) has yet to happen, but it looms throughout his novel. Indeed, the full weight of what is to come manages even to pierce the time-continuum and forcibly project to the past emissaries of this futuristic world upended by humanity’s self-made destruction.  Pynchon’s novel is a meditation on technological and economic aspirations that instrumentalize individuals, their labor, and most fundamentally, the very core of existence, time.  For Cormac McCarthy, the catastrophe has already taken place. A piercing white light in the distance, a self-made disaster once again, is all that is disclosed about it. The effect, however, is clear—the body itself becomes instrumentalized as food for the cannibalistic gangs of survivors. While both Pynchon and McCarthy offer insightful critiques of the self-destructive tendencies of contemporary culture, they do so most powerfully in their theological evaluation of human sociality. Each are less concerned to demonstrate a hope that such relationships might save us, either from what comes or what has already come, as they are to intimate an immanent, transgressive power to such relationships actually occurring. That is to say, for Pynchon and McCarthy, to resist instrumentalization and thus to exist in any meaningful sense, is in a sense to transcend those existing powers whose authority extends even to their own self-willed destruction, and is possible only in the midst of the seemingly miraculous bonds and acts of love that occur within and in spite of their instrumentalized debasement.  In this I identify in Pynchon and McCarthy a theological register for an alternative ontology of subjectivity and survival that moves beyond the concern for the maintenance of the individual self.

My financial situation has not changed markedly in the past two years, but I am determined to get to Iowa City this time around. Perhaps you would like to help!  I am estimating my costs to be between $300-$500, depending on the price difference between flying into Chicago (via Oakland) and renting a car or flying directly to Iowa City, and would definitely welcome any assistance you might be able to extend me. Many of us are in similar financial situations, and I approach you now respecting that. In return, I will attempt to provide my own take of the happenings, as I’ve done at least once in the past (Link & Link).

Should your generosity overflow my humble needs for this trip, I will direct all extra funds to Partners in Health.

If you can & wish to help, you can click here to do so via PayPal. Alternatively, let me know via comments and/or email if you prefer a different way.  Thanks.

Models of Theological Discourse

As part of a project I’m currently working on, I’ve been thinking through the various presently-existing models for thinking about theological (or more ambiguously religious) discourse.  Specifically, what I have in mind here are ways in which theological discourse is positioned with regard to philosophy.  There are, as far as I can imagine, four models:

(1) Philosophy as condition of possibility for theology.  Here I have in mind the approaches of figures such as Heidegger (especially in his “Phenomenology and Theology” essay) or Bergson.  Theological or religious discourse is admitted, but only when it is understood that that such discourse is a specific borrowing or deployment of a more fundamental and generic mode of thought that is properly philosophical.

(2) The cultural-linguistic model.  The common assumption, following in a Wittgensteinian vein, would be that there is a basic incommensurability between various cultures and their respective discourses.  Theology, in its particularity, is thus granted a specific autonomy that does not need to pass through more generic conditions of possibility or thinkability.  Exemplars would include Lindbeck, Hauerwas, and Barth (and his followers).

(3) Postmodern Thomism.  Shares with (1) the desire to speak generically—i.e. at the level of the ontological or whatever, but also shares with (2) the desire to make theological discourse primary.  This is accomplished, of course, by claiming that it is only (or it is preeminently) with theology that one finds the proper means of thinking being.  Milbank, of course, is the one who has pursued this project most extensively.

(4) Theology as unthought remainder.  This model is distinctive in its unwillingness to position theological discourse at the level of the generic or the particular (or some combination thereof).  It might be best to say that theology functions as a coefficient that enables a paraphilosophical discourse.  Only by encountering theological discourse more seriously does it become possible for philosophy to fulfill its innovative tasks, which have been hampered by a premature jettisoning or overcoming of such discourse.  While their operations are singular, this model is common to Agamben, Žižek, and Derrida.

What do you think?

Fragments for a study of Gnosticism and Revolution

“In Gnosis the cosmos is seen as a world and an order devoid of meaning. [...] This is not just a piece of Gnostic eccentricity but part of the underlying sense of rebellion to be found in Gnosis, as well as in the radical pathos of revolution in general. This becomes apparent in a comparison with contemporary movements which claim for themselves signifier “left”, despite or because of the ominously negative ring of the word left in all languages. Obviously, it is not for external, coincidental reasons, such as the seating arrangement in parliament, that powerful contemporary movements choose to be called the “left”. Rather these movements affirm and embrace all that the world decries when it utters the word left, which has such an ominous ring about it. They engage with all the questions and afflictions which are left by the established order of the world; that is, they side with those who are cast out and despised.” – Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology pp.38-9.

Ontology of the boudoir

Dominic Fox’s Twitter feed is quickly establishing itself as one of the most important philosophical documents of our era. Recent selections:

Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing §§5-8

§5. Dusk and Epoch
In this section Malabou considers the meaning of dusk. Going through the multiple meanings it may take in an investigation of plasticity from the positive where it “might seem to suggest that plasticity is the dialectical sublation of writing as a motor schema” to the more negative signaling of the “onset of insomnia, the melancholic state into which the psyche of someone cannot mourn the lost object descends” (15). Dusks populate philosophy almost as a transformational mask that “reveals nothing, says no more, and does nothing but point to the silent enigma of its profiles” (17). Yet, though Malabou recognizes that these discourses on the dusk will remain like a shadow, she nevertheless holds out the hypothesis that plasticity may bring about a different meaning of dusk.