‘And so I tell myself to myself’: A Dissertation!!

This [PDF warning], as it turns out, is an unpublishable book. Oh, I suppose I could keep shopping it around until something just short of a vanity press accepts it and churns out fifty hardcover editions to “sell” (in theory) at an ungodly price. Or, I could just keep sending it to more-or-less legitimate publishers, and probably drive myself batty in the process. I think most of us can agree that the end result of neither alternative is particularly attractive. Thankfully, there are are other options. (Thanks, Scribd!)

Online journals

I fully support the shift toward online journals. I have published in them and plan to continue to do so. Yet I think we are far from actualizing their potential. Above all, the self-imposed limitation of imitating the “journal issue” format is undercutting their potential relevance — and this is even the case for publications like International Journal of Zizek Studies, which claimed it would do a rolling publication schedule but does not appear to have adhered to that.

There is no conceivable advantage to publishing a huge mass of material every three months in an online format. In fact, given the reality of people’s online reading habits, that format undoubtedly makes people less likely to read the journal — they get overwhelmed by the amount of material that is there and wind up reading one article at best. Had the same material trickled out as it became available (i.e., once peer review was completed), odds are that interested readers would’ve read proportionately more articles, including articles not immediately in their area of interest (the first to go when the reader feels overwhelmed).

I understand the desire to imitate print journals, for the sake of standardizing citations, etc., but the fact is that most institutions don’t “count” online journals already. The advantage they offer, in theory at least, is greater immediacy — above all, the possibility of hooking the journal into interested blog circles, thereby generating actual discussion. In fact, trickling out articles could turn the journal itself into a discussion, as opposed to the current model of print publications, where one sends a message into the void for credentialing purposes without any real expectation that anyone will read it.

No online journal I know of is even remotely taking advantage of those opportunities. Many don’t even have RSS feeds, which is the most powerful way of integrating online journals into people’s online reading habits. In a world where online journals are fighting an uphill battle for recognition, the only advantage they have is in making themselves self-evidently relevant — in accelerating the decline of the traditional system by making themselves the center of the actual conversation. All the infrastructure for making this happen is already in place, so it’s all the more disappointing that it keeps not happening.

Tables, Ladders and Chairs: Telos, Artificial Negativity and The Big Society (2 of 2)

The second part of my critique of Telos’ theoretical inventions, the first part I posted a while back. Here I try and show how both artificial negativity and the new class are incoherent concepts – and that the examples of organic traditions Telos point to are false. I suggest, briefly (its long enough already and longer in the ‘proper’ version where I go through some more traditions!), that this shows the concept is purely polemical rather than analytic. I firmly apologise for transgressing the limits of acceptable blog post length, but hope someone, somewhere finds this a bit interesting, particularly the idea that the Tories ‘Big Society’ should be a prime example of artificial negativity thus showing the concept of artificial negativity makes no sense.

In a wonderful if hilarious article for the 1989 December issue of Telos, Timothy Luke, one of the primary progenitors of the artificial negativity thesis, writes a delicious article ‘Xmas Ideology: Unwrapping the New Deal and the Cold War under the Christmas Tree’¹, which is replied to directly afterwards by Paul Piccone². In it Luke claims that Christmas films such as It’s A Wonderful Life, Miracle on 34th Street, Holiday Inn and White Christmas are an almost perfect example of artificial negativity. Against the crass commercialisation of Christmas, they appear to offer an authentic core of love and human compassion that are unspoilt. In fact, Luke argues, they are merely a way of briefly compensating for the aggressive fragmentation of late capitalism, and actually perpetuating it. The films “generate ideologies of self-gratification and fulfilment as in the cult of Christmas, which rather than being cast as a Christian celebration of Christ’s birth, is instead turned into a fantasy of self-fulfilment and collective solidarity as part of a celebration of materialistic giving (and receiving)”.

Hence:

The Christian rituals of Christmas, then, have been remanufactured by capital and the state during WWII and the Cold War into “Xmas”. Without it, the rituals of life in consumer society might disintegrate even more than they have already, making Xmas an essential aspect of exchange. It mediates the forms of subjectivity in the intimate sphere of caring with corporate agendas of spending and having. Christmas as “Xmas” becomes in film the essential simulation of settled social traditions, family unity, and collective purpose for many modern American Pottersvilles that otherwise lack these qualities.

On writing too much about The Monstrosity of Christ

Since the release of Zizek and Milbank’s Monstrosity of Christ, I have written the following pieces either about it or significantly discussing it, all but the first by invitation:

• A short review for Political Theology
• A piece for a special issue of The International Journal of Zizek Studies, assessing whether Zizek’s writings since The Parallax View confirm the interpretation I put forward in Zizek and Theology; obviously Monstrosity is the focus of most of my attention (forthcoming)
• A response to a contribution to the annual Barth Blog Conference, which puts Barth in dialogue with Monstrosity (forthcoming)
• A contribution to a “roundtable discussion” on the book at the online journal Expositions (forthcoming)

As you might expect, I’m starting to run out of things to say about it. All this is in addition to an article on Zizek that is supposed to be coming out in La revue internationale de philosophie (in a special issue on Zizek) and an AAR paper discussing the concept of the “body of Christ” in light of Zizek’s work. Though I appreciate the writing opportunities that come with being a go-to “Zizek guy” — and though I also definitely feel a responsibility to be part of the ongoing conversation since Zizek is so often misunderstood — hopefully the publication of Politics of Redemption and Awkwardness will lead to more invitations to write on non-Zizek topics.

Why I Used to be Attracted to Radical Orthodoxy

As I was reading Yoder’s The Original Revolution I was struck by the following paragraph, because it crystallized for me both what originally attracted me to  Radical Orthodoxy (back in 2004, and for a while thereafter—though, to be honest, I still read them) as well as why I distance myself from that movement/book series/whatever-you-consider-it:

It is especially from the Anglican tradition that the rest of us have learned something of the pervasive intellectual power of the idea of the Incarnation.

Spoiler Alert Thursday: Mad Men and Top Shot

Mad Men

I confess I had kind of a hard time watching this episode.

Books: A semi-open thread

Readers, what is the last book you read that really “grabbed” you in some significant way? Define “grabbing” in whatever way seems appropriate for the genre and your own needs as a reader — perhaps it impressed you, perhaps it has changed your thinking, perhaps you don’t know what to do with it yet (in a good way), etc.

For me, I would say the most recent book to “grab” me was Lamin Sanneh’s Translating the Message. Although I found the style and presentation distracting throughout, the underlying thesis — that Christianity is defined by its translatability — very much meets my requirements for a good idea, namely, that it be obvious in retrospect and yet nothing I would’ve come up with on my own. Since finishing it, I’m determined to write about it — definitely an unexpected bonus from my Global Christianity research.

Yahweh Was Not (Primarily) A Divine Warrior

Once in a while I check a reference in a text, and then find myself reading the whole book because I cannot put it down—such has been the case with Anne Moore’s Moving Beyond Symbol and Myth: Understanding the Kingship of God of the Hebrew Bible Through Metaphor. This is a revision of her doctoral dissertation from Clairmont in New Testament, and her effort to correct dated approaches to discerning what the “kingdom of God” metaphor would have meant in Jesus’ day. The major problem with previous studies, according to Moore, is that they ignore the diverse meanings of this metaphor in the Hebrew Bible, making it center solely on eschatology, and making the source of the kingship of God revolve around a common stock Ancient Near Eastern idea of a Divine Warrior. This latter point is what I think is worth sharing.

Book Discussion Group: Kleinzeit, 4

 

I finished my second reading of Kleinzeit while sitting on a bed in the ER.  It was my second visit with Hospital in as many weeks.  I was waiting for Specialist to arrive because the Hobanesque symptoms I had been experiencing for the last month were baffling all the other doctors (as they would baffle Specialist and Assistant).  Sister was nowhere to be found, but three doctors took turns independently finger-fucking my asshole (to check my prostate, they said) so that’s got to count for something.  (Why is it that they all pat you on the hip after they finish?  Is that something they get taught in med school?  It’s as though they were letting me know that, hey, if I wasn’t a great lay, at least I was an obedient one and tried real hard to be good.)

Late Night Academic Confessions

We as academics (professional & independent, for-real & pretend) have all been there. Faced with a deadline and a decision: say, to blow off or not to blow off? Such a decision, like any decision, leads to another decision: in the case of our example, to lie about blowing it off or to hope nobody notices I blew it off? (The admission of guilt is rarely a viable option.) All of us here, of course, have made good and bad decisions in this general vein (to read Lacan, or to fake your way through it using an introduction?; to admit that they’ve never Iris Murdoch, or nod politely when asked? — such are the questions) — though many of us perhaps disagree about what constitutes a good or bad decision. What this means for me is that we’re all united in difference. This is what makes for the possibility of good stories: that we’ve all “been there,” but experienced it differently (often in fundamentally different ways).

Which brings me to a new semi-regular feature we’re hoping to start here at AUFS: “Late Night Academic Confessions.” Those of you familiar with the Friday Confessional at the dear-old Weblog may see instant similarities. The difference is that you will be supplying the content for this. I.e., these are YOUR academic confessions, not ours. We may sneak in our confessions about playing Wii tennis all night instead of writing a book review that was due two weeks ago, but it will be amongst and as anonymously as — yours. (ED. UPDATE: Alex has passed along a helpful, if somewhat stalkerish , site that allows one to send confessions anonymously.)