A Note: On Apocalypse, Moby-Dick & Job

[Originally posted over at my joint, but given the meandering path it took into things religious I thought I'd cross-post it here.]

Dear _______,

Your note has made my day, and it’s only yet 9 a.m. It reminds me of a conversation I was having last night with a friend in which I tried to explain why I don’t regard myself as a pessimist, in the face of all contrary evidence and claims by others.  I am, I insisted, under the influence of maudlin-making ale, an idealist who feels there is no place for ideals in the world. Of course, I know this sounds pessimistic through and through, but in my reckoning it is what feeds the Romantic / apocalyptic experience you mention.

The failure of words (& other communicative / artistic media) is necessary to their creative function. My friend and I don’t wholly disagree on this, but he seems more inclined than I to speak of one’s engagement with art as ultimately, if not immediately, disentangled from the world. While I agree that art is not wholly determined by the limitations set in stone, some quite literally, I am allergic even to a conversational nod that it ever stands beyond the fray, disinterested, hands-clean or abstract. You and I agree, romanticism & apocalypticism are indelibly linked, and as such remain inevitably messy. This messiness needn’t necessarily be a flaw, any more than existence as a whole is a mistake. I don’t see a position from which we can make such an evaluation without, in the process, doing much real-world damage. Though this has not stopped us from doing either.

The Unruliness of Angelic Bodies

It feels at this point safe to assume that the following research proposal, like with all my of my previous attempts, has not met with success. I may at some point pursue it, but the likelihood seems dimmer & dimmer (as I am not intellectually curious enough to do it without funding).

* * *

Title of Proposed Research

‘The Unruliness of Angelic Bodies: Imagination and the Possibility of a Post-Secular Aesthetic Theology’

Beyond pretension: On the afterlife of culture

In my recent halting quest to delve more deeply into classical music, it occurs to me that I’ve been pretty trusting of people’s advice. For instance, everyone who has an opinion seems to think that Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis is uniquely worthy of attention among his works, and so I got a recording of a performance from Netflix and watched it yesterday afternoon — turns out it’s pretty impressive. Similarly, I’ve eagerly acted on recommendations of books and recordings.

Why am I so trusting? Because basically no one is going to bother even claiming to have an opinion about classical music unless they know what they’re talking about to some degree. It’s totally “voluntary” to know about it — the culture has moved on, so there’s no payoff for pretension. Someone might tell you that The Wire is great just because they feel like they “should” think that; no one’s going to pull a similar move on Missa Solemnis.

In a way, this is a basic Adorno-esque point: previously elite artforms that have lost their accustomed role have a unique potential for “disinterested” uses. I wonder, though, how many other things are like this?

A side project

The Girlfriend and I have been working on a webcomic for the past few weeks and now feel ready to make it public. Called Mammoth and Mastodon & Friends, it chronicles the adventures of Mammoth (based on me) and Mastodon (based on her) in Chicago. All the artwork is done by The Girlfriend, and the scripts are mostly based on our conversations. A special highlight is our extended parody of Watchmen, based on a brotherhood of TV neighbors, and readers of AUFS will likely be very interested in our defense of the humanities.

If you like it, I encourage you to link to it and otherwise promote it by all appropriate means.

“The Strange Contagion of Creativity: A Writing on Love” (Part Three)

The most crucial difference in view here is that between desire and love. Before the creative Word or Logos, David Clark notes, ‘there was the hunger for the Word’ (1997: 16); or, alternatively, what psychoanalysis would designate ‘the drive whose true aim is the endless reproduction of its circular movement’ (Žižek 1996: 87 n.69). Drive, then, is desire ‘In-Itself’, unactualized in the subjectless fury of the Absolute in which there is only the indifferent flux of Freedom, but no free Subject as such. With the ‘eternally past’ advent of the Word, the embodied spirit (Self) that emerges is free only inasmuch as it is not completely itself; it is, rather, an embodied spirit, marked by finitude, death, and decay.¹

Insofar as it is not itself, Schelling writes, in its embodiment this spirit is made ravenous flesh:

The spirit is consequently nothing but an addiction to Being. . . . The base form of the spirit is therefore an addiction, a desire, a lust. Whoever wishes to grasp the concept of spirit at its most profound roots must therefore become fully acquainted with the nature of desire . . . for [desire] is a hunger for Being, and being satiated only gives it renewed strength, i.e., a more vehement hunger (1994: 230).

Constituted as a free subject by virtue of its inherent lack of self-presence, the desirous Self cannot be satisfied. On the contrary, its desire, because historical and subjectived, is ‘always and by definition unsatisfied, metonymical, shifting from one object to another since I do not actually desire what I want.’ (Žižek , 1997: 80). Be careful of what you wish for, so the saying goes, because you just might get it. The same logic is at work here: ‘What I actually desire is to sustain desire itself, to postpone the dreaded moment of its satisfaction’ (ibid.).

* * *

‘I’m so tired. I can’t deal with any of this anymore. All your staring, your silence, your — Wait, now I remember: you wrote it. At the end of a letter. Do you remember? You said it. I have proof. Ha! I got you this time, don’t I? You shouldn’t write it if you don’t mean it. Didn’t anybody ever tell you that words mean something, that words are something? You should be more careful with your words.

‘You’re so fucking blind sometimes. You don’t think. I sometimes think you’re dead. I look at you, and I see an axe through your head, or a bullet in the wall behind you, having passed through your stomach, kidneys, and spinal cord, leaving you crippled at first, crumpled and alone until I show up too late, and I see you lying there, looking alive, eyes wide open. Staring.

Why can’t you see? Why don’t you look? You never look. If you would but once, just a peek, you’d see the tear. Right here. It’s sad, isn’t it? You did that. It’s your fault, all your fault, all yours. How does it feel? Feel it . . . feel it . . . touch it . . . taste it . . . just a sip . . . just a peek . . . look at it . . . think about it . . . its yours . . . you did it.

‘Now do it again.’

Every day the same —

* * *

For Schelling, if desire is related to a certain will-to-contraction, and thus to identity and wholeness, love is related to a supplementary will-to-expansion, the emergence of the free Self that is not itself. After the primordial deed of (self-)Creation, the quintessential, eternally past moment of love and freedom, the (contractive) desire for wholeness can only ever be frustrated by the (expansive) love that, as with Brooks’ depiction of the United State’s military operations in Iraq, must lose.

All this is to rearticulate Schelling’s critical point about evil. Namely, that evil is only truly possible in a free subject who has ‘lost’ itself; that is to say, evil as such must be freely chosen.² For Schelling, ‘the general possibility of evil . . . consists in the fact that, instead of keeping his selfhood as the ground or the instrument, man can strive to elevate it to be the ruling or universal will, and, on the contrary, try to make what is spiritual in him into a means’. (1936: 68). Evil, then, emerges from the subject’s misguided sense of having ‘fallen’ from itself, and thus believing it has lost something that can be regained. This, Schelling notes, is the root of the free subject’s ‘spiritualized’ desire to ‘return’ to its status as (contractive) Universal / Ideal:

For even he who has moved out of the center retains the feeling that he has been all things when in and with God. Hence there springs the hunger of selfishness which, in the measure that it deserts totality and unity becomes even needier and poorer, but just on that account more ravenous, hungrier, more poisonous (ibid: 69).

Evil, in other words, can be said to be at the very heart of the free subject’s actual existence.

^{* * *}

[A little more to come ... one more post, maybe two, if it turns out as long as this one.]

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Notes

[1]Even the most romantic of Romantics, Goethe, shared this ambivalence about nature:

Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by her – without being able to exit from her or to enter into her more deeply. Unasked and unwarned, we are taken up into the circuitry of her dance; she has her way with us, until we grow weary and sink from her arms. . .

We live in the midst of her and are foreign to her. She speaks to us ceaselessly and does not betray her secret to us. We work our endless effects on her, yet have no dominion over her.

She seems to have invested all her hopes in individuality, and she cares nothing for the individuals. Always she builds, always she destroys, and we have no access to her workshop.

She lives in a profusion of children, and their mother, where is she? –

She squirts her children out of nothingness, and does not tell them where they came from and where they are going. Their task is to run; hers is to know the orbit (qtd. in Krell, 1998: 3).

[2] Žižek is especially clear on this point: ‘On the one hand, nature can spiritualize itself, it can turn into the medium of Spirit’s self-manifestation; on the other hand, with the emergence of the Word, the obscure principle of Ground and Selfhood which hitherto acted as an anonymous, impersonal, blind force is itself spiritualized, illuminated; it becomes a Person aware of itself, so that we are now dealing with an Evil which, in full awareness of itself, wills itself as Evil – which is not merely indifference towards the Good but an active striving for Evil’ (1996: 64).

“The Strange Contagion of Creation: A Writing on Love” (Part Two)

‘You’re always staring. What are you starting at? Is it me? No, it can’t be me. What is it? Why aren’t you talking? You never talk. Are you listening? I’m not talking to myself, am I? You’re doing it again, that staring that I hate – stare at me, goddammit! I’m here! You’re not fucking listening, are you? You’re just staring. Stop. Please, don’t stare — just for once, please. What do you see that I don’t?’

 

I’m letting be —

‘You – Don’t let go of me! You’re not allowed. That is completely unacceptable. No. No. No. Absolutely not.

‘I don’t want to fall. I don’t want to die. I just want to drown. You understand that, right? Of all people, you must. So please don’t let go. Say you won’t let go. Promise me. Look at me — but don’t stare, you’re always staring — and promise me that. You owe me that much. You know you do. After all that I’ve done, you owe me this. So do it, promise me. Do it.’

I’ve decided to let go —

* * *

We are, in a sense, already more than comfortable with the paradoxical self-generation I am suggesting here. As a matter of fact, the related notion of having to lose something in order to win something greater is such a natural commonplace as often to be simply taken for granted. Consider, for instance, the clichés of ‘no pain, no gain’; the romantic idealizations of artistic madness – i.e., the tortured artist, who either commits suicide or dies prematurely, thus solidifying their place as a legend; or the special veneration most ascribe to martyrs like Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Jr., or, even Jesus. Much can be said, too, of the Hollywood archetype exemplified by George Bailey (played by James Stewart) in It’s a Wonderful Life, who only truly knows himself and the importance of his having lived when he is presented with what would have happened had he, per his expressed desire while weighing the decision as to whether he throw himself from a bridge, never have been born. Do we not have here a story of redeemed identity, in which wholeness is snatched from the depths of a self-shattering loss? The story of good old George Bailey is a modern myth, to which millions of weary Christmas and New Years celebrants each year appeal as a temporary respite from the family and friends who probably are not nearly as compassionate and helpful in the end as Bailey’s; and thus, too, as a ritualistic dream for something better than the oppressive capitalist ideology that Mr. Potter represents, for the personal wholeness, health, and safety of Capra’s socialist salvation in which the value of family and friends is greater than that of money.

More recently, David Brooks of the New York Times employs a similar logic, but to a very different effect, when he describes the politically charged paradox of the most recent U.S.-led Gulf War:

Now, looking ahead, we face another irony. To earn their own freedom, the Iraqis need a victory. And since it is too late for the Iraqis to have a victory over Saddam, it is imperative that they have a victory over us. If the future textbooks of a free Iraq get written, the toppling of Saddam will be vaguely mentioned in one clause in one sentence. But the heroic Iraqi resistance against the American occupation will be lavishly described, page after page. For us to succeed in Iraq, we have to lose. This means the good Iraqis, the ones who support democracy, have to have a forum in which they can defy us. If the insurgents are the only anti-Americans, then there will always be a soft spot for them in the hearts of Iraqi patriots (2004: A23)

In other words, for the United States’ (stated) goal of freedom and democracy to be achieved in Iraq, authentic anti-Americanism must not only be allowed, but actually fomented. What I wish to suggest is that, appearances (and undoubtedly Brooks’ conservative revulsion to my interpretation of his editorial) notwithstanding, we are far more justified in thinking of this ostensibly cynical suggestion, at least theoretically, as a more profound example of theological love than the depiction of self-redemption in, to wit, It’s a Wonderful Life. It is in this sense of love as loss that we can suggest a truly perverse gospel: in which salvation of self is theologically less redemptive than the sin (of the word / of the voice) that sets us free.

* * *

‘You said it at least once, didn’t you? You said it, sometime, in a whisper, I heard you so don’t try to deny it like you always do — you’re always lying, you know that?. You said it or you wrote it — what’s the difference? Is there a difference? You said it – I know you did. You said it and I was alive. The sun was brilliant like Baal emerging from the earth in the east, and the waves, they were calm and we were one island, us against them, and we were singing those unchristian songs you knew by heart to that insouciant city on a hill wearing its sinside inside without a soul in sight.

‘What do you need now? Don’t you see that I have it? Don’t you know that I dream of you every night? I dream of ripping myself open, my chest, cracking the breast plate, howling under the weight of the pain, my heart pounding, blood gushing, all for you, begging you to peek inside, and when you do, you gasp because you’re ready to drown in all the blood and the pain and the love, oh yes, the love. And you pull away with blood on your hands, because I did that for you, pulled myself apart so that you might see, and touch, and taste the blood, all that blood and pain for you — you didn’t know a heart could pump so much blood, did you? You didn’t know this, did you?

‘Do you know I wake up wanting to dream that same dream all over again? I don’t want to wake up. I don’t ever want my eyes to open. I want to dream blind, with my eyes hollowed out. I want only to hear that crack and feel your fingers against me, inside me, pulling me closer, your face against the tear, peeking, staring, at the love that gave this to you.’

Don’t you know it’s all the same —

* * *

[more to come]

“The Strange Contagion of Creation: A Writing on Love” (Part One)

When thinking about creativity – how it emerges and is sustained in living discourse – we must I think begin with a question: what is the character of creativity? This question, however, is itself riddled by its own obvious equivocality. Is it the question asked of creativity; or is it the constitutive question of creativity? When we dare to think about the character of creativity theologically, a ‘transcendental’ analysis in so far as we are thinking about the beginnings and endings that condition our understanding, how do we begin at all, i.e., when the questions we ask in and of our own creative enquiry proliferate beyond the tether of their original intention. Divorced as it is from any traditional metaphysical verity, the (theological) question of creativity I wish to explore here, in both philosophical and narrative prose, can but beg that we always begin again, as a cathartic consideration of our creation’s problematic beginning.

As such, a theological assessment of creativity is an engagement — a violent battle as much as it is a formal promise. But with or to whom? Charles Winquest’s description of theology as a ‘lover’s discourse’ is especially apt:

Love is an intense valuation of specificities in the finite display of experience. It is precisely because finite experience is highly variegated that the ‘yes’ to the importance of any specific person or object is meaningful. In Love, we are making life meaningful, but it is a meaning that can be neither contained nor controlled. Love makes life unsafe. This is its frightening and wonderful transformational power (1995: 149-50).

Clearly, this question of love – i.e., of theology’s identity or character, beginnings and endings – is not an easy one. It is, nevertheless, the one that will also most concern me here, this most characteristic question of creativity. Too often confused as an irrational discourse of mystical silence or an irrelevant discord of ecclesiological excess, the creative character of theology / the theological character of creativity must be given voice, even if we must begin with the echo of a god who may or may not be dead.
* * *
‘Are you listening? You never listen.’

You never talk —

‘You’re never here.’

You never look —

‘I love you, you know that? Are you listening to me right now? Do I have your attention? Do these words make sense? How can they when you don’t listen? You don’t see what you ought, what you must. ‘I am not unclear: I am to the point. Are you so blind as not to know? How could you not? Do you need me to rip open my chest — do you need to peek inside? Am I not transparent enough already? You look through me so well, can you not also see inside?

‘Look at me!’

It’s all the same —

* * *

‘Why might God be laughing?’ Milan Kundera wonders, as he reflects on the Jewish proverb, ‘Man thinks, God laughs’. He concludes that it is because ‘man thinks and the truth escapes him. Because the more men think, the more one man’s thought diverges from another’s. And finally, because man is never what he thinks he is’ (1988: 158). The joke is on humanity, he concludes, in its expectations of structure, of beginnings and endings that stabilise and congeal meaning and significance, that seek to fill an absence. The laugh, in other words, is on humanity insofar as it continues to think, thus missing the joke — i.e., the ‘sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing’ that Kant ascribes to laughter (1951: 177). As we will see, though, this excessive ‘nothing’ is a joke that quickly gets out of hand. The punch line of reality is simply too much, leaving us in stitches with our most insane of laughs, in which we snort inappropriately as though an animal, or weep in spite of ourselves, screaming ‘Stop! No more!’ — unsure if we mean it or not.

The comedy, as I see it, emerges from the peculiarity of God’s primal desire for a voice. Namely, that in finding his voice, i.e., in the Word, from which the whole of Creation is made real, God is not completely Himself. In fact, in even more scandalously theological terms, it is only in ‘original sin’ — the Fall of God from God, as it were — that God is at all.

Though his later thinking is riddled with ambivalence, to the extent that even Tillich could appeal to him as faithfully as I am now, in Philosophical Inquiries Into the Nature of Human Freedom and Ages of the World, Friedrich Schelling is particularly unambiguous on this point. The God that makes reality intelligible in the decisive act of love, i.e., in speaking himself into existence, must also relate to the Ground of his own existence. The God of Creation, therefore, ‘is not God viewed as absolute’ (1936: 32). The Creator-God, rather, the God of the Word, is God only insofar as He speaks. For Schelling, this explains ‘the veil of sadness spread over all of nature, the deep, unappeasable melancholy of all life’ (ibid: 79) — when the eternal-divine sine qua non of God only is inasmuch as, in the decisive act of divine creativity, it ‘contracts’ its (finite) existence, in the decisive act of its speaking, its self-creative Word.

On Craftsmanship [Part 2]: The Formal Proposal

This project comes in the wake of the successful ‘Arts and Crafts International’ exhibition assembled by the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2005-06, but it most fully emerges from the attempts in my doctoral thesis to think aesthetically about theology. Such theorising was crucial to a materialistic re-imagining of theology, but in such abstraction I homed in on the aesthetic self-reflexivity of theology more than on its inherent creativity. My aim now is to explore an aesthetic theology that not only extends theology (confessional or otherwise) beyond itself, but also informs the extension of aesthetics beyond its traditional limits.

I will argue that in the artisan of the Arts and Crafts movement of 1875-1920 we find the aesthetic subject at its most dangerous, but also at its most vital. As envisioned by John Ruskin and embodied by William Morris, the artisan’s attention is set beyond the productivity of her work; set beyond, that is, the work’s objectivity as a work (a chair, a rug, etc.). The artisan’s attention, rather, is on the ‘poietic’ value of her craftwork, whereby the very activity of her craftsmanship involves her in the opening of the world to something truly new. Craftsmanship, in short, is attuned to the creation of something whose value is precisely and fully the act of its creation, and not its productive capacity for exchange, consumption, or use. As such, the craftsman’s attention is directed toward the fashioning of a radically new existence, one incommensurate with the present order of reality and its existent horizon of expectations. For Ruskin and Morris, life is only possible when its labour participates in the infinite act of crafting finite creations. In this conception of craftsmanship I locate a concrete enactment of non-confessional, materialistic theology.

I will identify craftsmanship as a ‘theological poetics of resistance’ by analysing the materialistic theological subtext behind three interrelated aspects of the works of Ruskin and Morris. Firstly, their post-Romantic aesthetic appeals to nature, wherein they demonstrate their ecological understanding of nature as fundamentally creative. Indeed, for each nature is the source from which creative activity emerges, with which it participates, and into which it flows. Secondly, their ambivalent appeal to architecture and living space. For Ruskin and Morris, the strangulation of human creativity was most immediately evident in its popular architecture, for what a culture builds for itself and calls its own most clearly symbolises its perspective of nature, its place in nature, and its imaginative capacity to participate with nature. For both, only the architectural ethos of the craftsman, in all its potential imprecision, achieves this most fully. And thirdly, their critiques of the mercantilist logic of the division of labour, where mass production inevitably lead only to mass consumption and a politically-imposed impasse to imagination and life. Here, I contend, the first two aspects coalesce, and their materialistic theological subtext becomes finally indistinguishable from a political theology with clear contemporary relevance.

The proposed publishing output from the research includes at least two journal articles and a monograph at the end of the third year. One article will be on the respective theological dispositions of John Ruskin and A. W. Pugin, and will be directed toward articulating the crucial difference between Pugin’s ‘theological aesthetics’ at the service of confessional or orthodox theology, and Ruskin’s ambivalently materialistic, non-confessional rendition of ‘aesthetic theology’. My hope is to send this first to the journal Literature and Theology or Modern Theology. The second journal article will invoke William Morris in reasserting the importance of aesthetics and imagination for political theology, engaging the negative, orthodox linkage of aesthetics and ideology. An appropriate journal for a work such as this would be Political Theology, Angelaki, or Contemporary Aesthetics.

I am also interested in hosting and participating in an interdisciplinary conference on Contemporary Political Aesthetics.

Research Program

Year One: I will research the appropriate works of John Ruskin, especially Modern Painters, The Stones of Venice, Unto This Last Day, and all other relevant collections of letters, essays and lectures. For field research, I hope also to participate in (or simply observe) the practice of traditional arts and crafts in Scotland. While doing this, I will familiarize myself further with the history and evolution of the Arts and Crafts movement, especially in Britain.

Year Two: I will research the appropriate works of William Morris, especially the 24-volume Collected Works of William Morris. However, as I am most interested in Morris’s embodiment of craftsmanship ideals, my primary focus will be on his actual designs and design-process (and to some extent his later prose), and how they reflect his and Ruskin’s critical disposition. Also during this time I will begin a reassessment of the theological models that inform, though not define, the aesthetic/materialistic theology in view here: such as, Paul Tillich’s theology of culture, Hans Urs von Balthasar’s notion of ‘theological aesthetics’ in his Herrlichkeit, and contemporary developments in process theology (e.g., Catherine Keller’s ‘theology of becoming’).

Year Three: I will research the political implications of craftsmanship as a ‘theological poetics of resistance’. Here, I will engage modern theologies of resistance—e.g., the radical Christian pacifism of John Howard Yoder, Gustavo Gutiérrez’s liberation theology, and Richard Rubenstein’s post-Holocaust Jewish theology—as well as the political resistance of indigenous peoples like the Basques and Maya, noting similarities and dissimilarities with my understanding and presentation of craftsmanship.

On Craftsmanship: A Theological Poetics of Resistance

Below is a working draft of my 150-word abstract for a project I’m currently proposing.  I throw it out now (1) in order finally to post something new here, and (2) to get any thoughts or recommendations from the mases. If you’re interested enough, I might even post the 750-word elaboration.

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This project traces the theological subtext behind the politics and aesthetics of craftsmanship developed by John Ruskin and William Morris (with their American contemporary, Henry David Thoreau, in the background). I argue that the Arts and Crafts movement of 1875-1920 that they pioneered conceptualizes what we call here a ‘theological poetics of resistance’. Craftsmanship, as envisioned by Ruskin and enacted by Morris, is a means of resistance inasmuch as it aims to outstrip, if not altogether nullify, the political and economic alternatives presented as realistic and/or viable. Moreover, we contend that craftsmanship embodies a ‘theological poetics’ inasmuch as its resistance does not simply establish another position or perspective, or set itself strictly in utopic opposition to the present, but is the intentional practice of thinking and creating that is in fundamental excess to the existent horizon of being into which the present unfolds and from which all positions have meaning.