An outbreak of awkwardness at The Guardian

I have a piece up at The Guardian to help you prepare for your New Year’s Eve party tonight.

AUFS 2010 Wrap-up

This was a good year for An und für sich. Our traffic nearly doubled compared to last year, and we received almost five times as many visits as during our first year of operation (2007). In addition, we ended the year with our highest-traffic month ever (despite the impact of Christmas), which also included our highest-traffic day ever (December 3). Our top posts were mainly dominated by my controversies with Milbank and the OOO crowd, but our most-read piece of the year was my post entitled The ritual satisfaction of stating the Grim Facts about the job market.

We had events for three books: Malabou’s Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing, Gaddis’s The Recognitions, and Gabriel and Žižek’s Mythology, Madness, and Laughter.

We also had a banner year for print publications among our circle. Just in terms of book-length projects, Anthony’s volume (co-edited with Daniel Whistler) After the Postsecular and the Postmodern made a significant impact out of the gate, being used in John Caputo’s final graduate course along with his translation of Laruelle’s Future Christ, and is now going to be put out in a more affordable paperback edition, and I published Politics of Redemption (my dissertation) and Awkwardness, along with a translation of Agamben’s Sacrament of Language.

Finally, we all wrote some good blog posts. Below are highlights chosen by the three primary front-page authors, and others should feel free to link to their own favorites in comments. (See also our wrap-up for last month for more recent highlights.)

Adam’s Highlights:

• On the Critique of Religion by Dan Barber — an elegant and controversial post that anticipates the argument of Dan’s forthcoming book, On Diaspora (for which see also Dan’s post Models of Theological Discourse).
• On Male Culture: Some Thoughts by Adam Kotsko — my moderately successful attempt to open up the conversation here to women, paradoxically by talking about maleness.
• Good Theology and Bad Theology by Adam Kotsko — my definitive skewering of the hegemonic discourse among theology bloggers.
• The Sermon on the Mount: Continuing the conversation — a summary of some weird thoughts I began to have about the Sermon on the Mount while teaching Intro to New Testament
• A Prophet, the better Cool Hand Luke by Anthony Paul Smith — a great analysis of a great film.

Anthony’s Highlights:

• Letter from a Migrant Student Hostile to the “Democratic institutions” of “British society” by Anthony Paul Smith — My anger and hatred at the stupidity of mainstream British political culture is on full display here.
• Red Tory: The Ghosts of Neoliberalism by Alex — Along those same lines is Alex’s response to Red Tory by Phillip Blond, the untrustworthy snake that is now the court theologian for the ConDem coalition. Here Alex shows how the Red Tory programme is fully in line with neoliberalism of the past. A prognosis that has been borne out by the recent cuts in the UK.
• AUFS for the Uninitiated by the contributors to AUFS — This was a series of posts by a number of contributors to the blog outlining the books that have impacted their thinking the most.
• Two posts on Grey Ecology: The Amphibology of the Greenest Green and the Blackest Black and Think Biospherically, Act Ecosystematically by Anthony Paul Smith — In these two pieces I lay out a few principles of an environmentalism rooted in ecology that would move beyond the sentimentalism of localism and bourgeois green politics.
• Draft Translation of the “Introduction” to Malabou’s Changer de la différence by Nicola Rubczak — A guest contribution making available the introduction to a very interesting extension of Malabou’s project into feminist concerns.
• On How To be Dogmatic by Brad Johnson — An intense and revealing reflection brought on by Brad’s adventures in church attendance.
• Good and Joyful Hatred, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Enjoy Killing Nazis by Anthony Paul Smith — Though it wasn’t universally loved or even particularly popular, this is a piece of writing that I’m most proud of. An investigation of Jewish-Gnostic hatred through Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. A kind of internal debate with myself between Gnosticism and Spinozism.

Brad’s Highlights:

• Scenes from a Conference by Brad Johnson — my best blogging tends also to be my most confessional, and this report from a conference at the University of Iowa was no different.
• The Recognitions Book Discussion by Brad Johnson (& Poseur Prophet) — I so enjoyed this series of posts that I went ahead and assembled them into a PDF; however, I do wish I could have figured out a way to seamlessly work in the comments.
• ‘And so I tell myself to myself’: A Dissertation! by Brad Johnson — my melancholic tale of publishing peril, and a link to a life-changing doctoral thesis on Herman Melville.
• The Future, or The Society of Looting by Adam Kotsko — as Dan Barber pointed out in an email, this post is basically the commentary I didn’t provide on the long quote about panic I recently posted.
• Audio from Apple 6: “Is the City a Machine for the Making of the Gods?” by Anthony Paul Smith — the awesome title was rivaled only by the great talk.
• Heresy and the Godhead by Tom Altizer — still divisive & heretical after all these years.
• Sermon: “What’s Really Wrong With Sodomy” by Christopher Rodkey — one of those times we long for where the comments live up to the post.
• Book Discussion Group: Kleinzeit, 2 by Robert Minto — our guest bloggers know how to bring it.

Specimen Texts for Speculative Medievalisms

One of the interesting aspects of the upcoming Speculative Medievalisms conference is the use of “specimen texts” (presumebly this is why it the organizers are calling it an atelier). Some texts I’ll be using for my paper, “The Speculative Angel”, have been uploaded now. In addition to Thomas’ now standard angelology of purely spiritual beings and their basis in Pseudo-Dionysius, I’ve included a short text by the Islamic thinker Ibn Khaldun and three selections, in draft translation, from French thinkers Henry Corbin, Guy Lardreau (with Christian Jambet), and Gilles Grelet. If you’re interested in contemporary forms of gnosticism operative in philosophical theory you may find those short translations of interest.

2011 Prediction Thread

As the year winds down, I’m feeling pretty good about my life for the near- and medium-term, but more and more pessimistic about the world — and since job prospects in my chosen field are closely tied to university endowments, that pessimism leads to long-term pessimism about my life prospects as well. Perhaps writing about my negative presentiments will help?

Predictions for 2011:

• Fillibuster reform will fail — and even if it succeeds, it will be abusable and therefore still abused.
• The government will figure out some way to paper over the foreclosure crisis — the banking system will stumble through this one, even if the concept of property rights will be fundamentally altered for the worse. This is my most optimistic prediction, actually.
• All protest movements will fail to achieve their goals — everyone will be really glad that the spirit of protest is still alive, etc., but the austerity plans will go forward regardless. This will accelerate the next step, given that austerity actually hurts the economy and therefore makes it more difficult to pay off government debt. (It’s kind of like if I lost my job, then decided that part of my debt-payment plan was to stop wasting money on food and basic hygene — that’d really help my long-term income prospects, right?)
• Sovereign debt problems will get worse in Europe — I’m not ready to predict a full-blown crisis, however, because the European Central Bank can continue to do just barely enough to keep the system going. Unfortunately, since many of its actions appear to exceed its official mandate, the ECB will probably not be able to aggressively get ahead of the problem and head off needless human suffering — but we don’t really care about “needless human suffering” anymore, right? It’s more important to make sure that the accounts balance properly.
• The Republicans will do something stupid with the debt ceiling — Obama will broker a brilliant deal made up of 99% of what the Republicans want and 1% of what centrist Democrats are arguably maybe willing to accept, then he’ll publicly complain about the doctrinaire liberals who are threatening to ruin his presidency by complaining about stuff.
• Pope Benedict will continue to say really stupid things — maybe something along the lines of “child abuse is a horrible crime, but what critics fail to recognize is that some of those kids were actively trying to seduce the priests.”
• House and Cuddy will break up — House will be tempted to go on the drugs again, but at the last minute Thirteen will show up and reveal she has always loved him.

Overall, the world will continue to be pointlessly cruel as our moneyed masters make it ever more clear that they hate us and begrudge us our every small comfort. Companies will continue to take advantage of mass unemployment to discipline their current workers through fear, and knowledge of this dynamic will allow them to lay off more people than necessary. Vital public programs will be gutted while state and local governments squander public money trying to bribe companies into hiring people. The life prospects of millions will be pointlessly ruined through short-sightedness and greed.

Populist rage will continue to be directed toward the lower classes rather than the actual perpetrators, because populist rage still hasn’t reached a point where it’s more potent than the fear that our rulers will force us down to that lower level as well — as is often the case in America, what appears to be populism is actually a roundabout way of sucking up to the powerful.

But on the other hand, smart phones will continue to improve, with enhanced touch-screen interfaces, a mainstreaming of features like built-in wireless hotspots, and longer battery life. I’m excited about this, because I now qualify for an upgrade every year.

In Preparation for Your New Years Eve Boozing

I shared this video in the sidebar, but I thought it deserved some main-page love as well. It’s long, yes, but well worth your time. Time can & should be made for Malcolm Lowry. This is a good rule of thumb.

(via Dangerous Minds)

A Statement About Perfection and Kanye West

Last I checked, it is the final week of 2010, which means it is time for every publication and blog to issue its annual Best Ofs and Round Ups. If time and attention allow it, we at AUFS will be no different. (We may be the most powerful theology blog on the block, but with such power comes great responsibility & expectations. My fart jokes simply will not cut it.) Of this time-honored genre, the internet has a special fondness for ranking music. That the internet has made so much different music so readily available at a moment’s notice makes this understandable and maybe even a little appropriate.

While it is by no means unanimous, one of the clear favorites this year is Kanye West’s “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.” Now, don’t get me wrong: I like this album. I like it a lot, even. Indeed, should I assemble a “10 Favorite Albums of 2010″ list (I would be incapable of ranking these ten – another of my many moral failings), it might very well be one of them. Consequently, I have no qualms with Pitchfork deeming it the best album of the year. A reasonable choice, I say, given their tastes, audience, etc. Where I depart from the  corporately cool taste makers,  however, is their decision to bestow a perfect-10 score on the album.

In internet-time, this is, of course, old news. I stewed about it a little bit at the time (late-November, right?), but decided to let it go. For some reason, though, I couldn’t help mulling over this matter of perfection. Personally, I have a particular fondness for ambitious imperfection: works whose grasp rival their reach, but slip up in some crucial way. Like a chipped tooth, I savor obsessing over those moments where things don’t quite work for me and/or things go completely off the rails. Or, at the very least, flirt with the breaking-point so decisively that I am forever unsure where or if they actually do so. Now, that’s just me, and I’m certainly not inclined to assert that aesthetic inclination as a kind of universal. My point is that regardless of your own inclination, the very best works are those you have continually to engage, rather than passively enjoy; or, to switch registers slightly, the point is that the best works are those that are just as likely to consume you as you are to consume it.

If this is true, and maybe it’s not, but I think it is, what place (if any) is there for perfection? Don’t get me wrong: I’m not prepared to give up on the idea. It’s just that I think it is something that happens rather by accident, rather than something one achieves (whether by aspiration or not). Moreover, is it just  me, or does the assessing of something as ‘perfect’, the fleshing out of the accident, let’s say, take more time than we are these days willing to allow? This isn’t to say that we need necessarily to ‘slow down,’ etc. I’m not making a strong moral argument against the pace of contemporary culture or the speed of internet publishing. Speed has something to do with, but is not fundamental to, the notion that if perfection is applicable at all, it is usually only ever so in retrospect. For is something truly ambitious if one is immediately sure that it not only ‘works’ now, but blazes a new path to future successes and alternative paths unforeseen? One doesn’t need to go along with my affection for the shaggy dogs to agree that if successful ambition takes time to suss out completely, perfection may well take even longer.

HTMLGIANT review of Awkwardness

My friend Adam Robinson has reviewed Awkwardness at HTMLGIANT.

Conventional Wisdom Parody Technique

Merry Christmas from AUFS!

Below is a little animated transcription of a conversation Adam & I had recently. Perhaps you have a few more holiday parties and get-togethers to muddle through and the conversational talking points we offer will be helpful. Or, you know, not.

Awkwardness: An Object-Oriented Perspective

Ian Bogost has reviewed Awkwardness, combining a generally positive assessment with some fair criticisms. Also, it turns out that I am, awkwardly enough, somewhat object-oriented in the book.

Hark!

For the most part, angels have been successfully downplayed in modern Christianity. There are of course the “spiritual warfare” types and the various New Age-y angel trends, but when it comes to preaching in most churches, angels are reduced to a bare minimum. That’s why it’s so jarring to realize how completely unavoidable they are at Christmas time. Virtually every religious Christmas carol at least mentions them, and there are a few that are completely focused on the angels. And of course angels figure prominently in both the “standard” Christmas story from Luke and the one in Matthew.

Since reading Agamben’s Kingdom and the Glory, I’ve been much more interested in angels, and my immediate thought when this occurred to me during a Christmas Eve service at my parents’ church is that Christmas is also the most “economic” holiday.