Dark Shapes Refer

Modernists Are Snootified Typographers

2012-01-24T09:32:00.000-08:00

Has anyone seen that Family Guy where Chris' English teacher says something like "So basically, Orwell was saying, give a little, get a little?" Anyway, This is Noah and I talking a little about Frederioc Jameson and post-Marxism.

Noah:

I guess this is what you have to do if you're a marxist, but he basically just dismissed folks who are concerned about Stalin as reactionaries and blames counter-revolutionaries for making the revolution violent.

Maybe I'm just a wishy-washy liberal, but I really don't think that's adequate. Sneering at 1984 is fine, but the thing about 1984 that I've been discovering recently is that it actually isn't as horrific as reading memoirs from the Stalin period. There's nothing in 1984 that's as hideous as the Ukrainian famine. Orwell basically seems to say that the Moscow Trials were the absolute worst thing about Stalin. I really don't think that's the case

Bert:

I don't think Zizek dismisses Stalinist mass murder. Jameson is neck-deep in academic Marxism though, Lukacs vs. Althusser etc. He illustrates, despite Zizek's best efforts, that Marxists are classic idealists- and thus somewhat fascists.

NoaH:

Yeah...it's hard to imagine Zizek downplaying Stalin, isn't it?
Anything that apocalyptic he'd like to make the most of.

I've hardly read any of the academic marxist debates, so when Jameson
gets into it at the end it was a bit of a shock. He spends a bit of
time arguing that representations of struggle interfere with the
struggle, and he means the media but it's hard not to wonder how it's
possible that his own endeavor never crossed his keyboard. He's great
and really smart, but to the extent that he thinks he's advancing the
revolution (and he definitely thinks that to no small extent) he's
kind of a clown.

Which is why people make fun of academic Marxists, I guess. Zizek and
Eagleton both manage to be public intellectuals, which makes their
pretensions to actually be talking to somebody less absurd.

Bert:

Yeah, exactly! Zizek says Stalin was a bloodthirsty criminal, and then goes on at length to talk about how interesting he was. It would mean something different to utilize Hitler in that way.

Zizek and Eagleton are also less serious-- they're less modernist. They may not reject the revolution-- nay, they may in fact pine for it-- but they are more or less willing to talk about it as a miracle on par with the Second Coming, rather than the thing that will put all of this silly capitalist nonsense to rest for good.

Noah:

It's interesting...I think that they're Christianity is actually part of their populism, isn't it? The revolution is a spiritual need, which everybody has; it's about people's souls. Whereas with Jameson — he's really insightful and smart, but the revolution never really rises above the level of a technocratic, academic fix. It's not about souls, it's about Althusser.

Bert:

Althusser would agree (about himself being the revolution, that is). Which is why Ranciere rebelled against him and said that modernists were all just snootifed typographers.

Noah:

Hah! I don't even know who Ranciere is! That makes him even more postmodern I think.

Bert:

Also unlike Eagleton and Zizek, by the way, Jameson actively sneers at scholars who take up religion as part of a philosophical/theoretical perspective.

And you've heard me talk about Ranciere before-- he wrote that Politics of Aesthetics book I've talked about. He had a great Flaubert quote about how Flaubert wasn't interested in the poor, he was interested in the lice infesting their bodies.

Some Magic Wall That Keeps His Violence and Fecundity From Being Similar To Our Own

2011-07-24T14:57:00.000-07:00

Reviewing some not-so-recent dialogues... here’s Noah and I talking about a blog post I can’t find anymore, from 2009, where I got into it with Adam Kotsko, atheist Marxist and author of Zizek and Theology.

Noah:

I went back and looked at your conversation with the zizek scholar now that I'm reading Zizek. I don't know that I understand Zizek as well as I might, but I do know that when that guy says this:

"He's not just trying to keep up his materialist cred: he actually is a materialist. He's also actually an atheist and his reading of Christianity is meant to demonstrate that the radical core of
Christianity shows us a way to the most radical atheism possible."

he is so utterly full of shit that even the absent God is going to have trouble finding room to not inhabit him.

Saying that Zizek is "actually" anything simple seems pretty fucking brash. I mean, if your atheism involves embracing the radical core of Christianity, in what sense are you an atheist? If your materialism involves sneering at naive materialists for denying transcendence, how
exactly are you a materialist? Zizek has complicated answers to those questions, but he's so steeped in dialectic and eating his own tail that I don't see how you figure out which end is up without qualifying your answers in a way that doesn't just depend on "i've read
everything he's written, nyah nyah."

For example:

""all that happens in the passage from Objective Spirit to Absolute Spirit is that one takes into account that 'there is no big Other'," in this case meaning there is no God."

But Zizek's whole point is that the big Other is *not* God, or doesn't have to be God, or isn't God after the incarnation. One of the takeaways from a Christian perspective, it seems like, is that for Christianity God is not separate from Creation/man, or both separate and not separate, so that the killing of God is both really, especially, truly the death of God (Christ dies, God dies) and not the death of God, in that God is not transcendent and distant in the first place. God is not the big Other is different than saying "there is no God." It's more like saying "there is nothing that is God," with all the ambiguity that Zizek squeezes into (or out of) nothing.

And then he does it again:

"saying there is no big Other is the same as saying there's no God."

Then why didn't he just say it, smarty pants? Did he lose the letters on his keyboard?

And good lord, could he possibly be more condescending? What a putz.

Bert:

Say what you want about fundamentalists and psychoanalysts, you can;t beat a Marxist academic for smug assurance in their totally unjustifiable faux-rational opinions.

Speaking to your "he couldn't find the keys on his keynoard" point, I really think the whole rhetorical concept of "begging the question" was invented for Zizek-style (a)theology. If you don't have the slightest suspicion that there might be some kind of God character, and you're not doing anthropology, or some hideous Joseph Campbell breathless syncretism self-help, WHY in Gaia's name are you talking about religion?

I do like Milbank, and I think I might actually be a little more behind him on the eros issue, actually, than I am with Zizek, Lacan, or Barth. I think I really am dismissing the gay utopia out of hand if I don't acknowledge the spiritual centrality of libido (which I really don't unequivocally say in my Glory and Hole essay I realize). You can't have the murderous energy of apocalypse without some white-hot repression. I'm less with Milbank on atavism and the evils of Protestantism, obviously, and some of his stuff on paradox and mist kind of reminds me of myself at age 20, but his out-materialisting materialsts thing about that one guy (Heinrich Friedrich Jacobi-- ed.) who sort of said to Kant that there are no a prioris before the existence of your body, was brilliant and really helped me think that out. And I was reading my Eckhart book at the same time as that book-- I should lend you that. What Barth is to ecstatic modern orthodoxy, Eckhart is to mystical medieval postmodernism.

You'e right, it's definitely all about love-- love cannot be easily dissociated from sin. It's almost the only reason to keep a transcendent God-- so that there's some magic wall that keeps His fecundity and violence from being similar to our own. That magic wall became the death of Christ-- it's almost as if what died on the cross was not only the certainty of a transcendent dimension, but also the banal self-identiity of the tangible world. Take that, equivocal/univocal/paradoxical academic philosophers!

And so... here’s Noah and I discussing Meister Eckhart.

Noah:

reading Meister Eckhart, who I'm not that into. But...it is interesting that he appears to be a Buddhist.

Bert:

Detachment is a Buddhist term, but it's also a Christian one. Christianity is every bit as much about controlling (if not extinguishing) desire as Buddhism is. When Christ talks about "Blessed are the poor in spirit," that's generally interpreted to mean people who aren't attached to their things and even their lives and kin. It's sort of a key feature of most modern religions.

Noah:

I think Eckhart is definitely talking about extinguishing desire. And he's not just saying that people shouldn't be attached to their possessions and kin; he's saying they shouldn't be attached to God. Which seems pretty Buddhist to me.

Bert:

I don't want to dismiss the Buddhism charge completely, because it's not totally baseless-- and it's a nice "touche" to Zizek. But what keeps Eckhart from being a heretic is his attention to grace, ethics, etc-- and his really subtle theology. He's sort of Buddhist, but he's also sort of neoplatonic, which is a weird combination, and deserves some serious attention before being dismissed out of hand. I'd kind of like to compare him and Bataille as weirdo dissident but nonpartisan believers (Bataille of a different variety, obviously)..

Noah:

Well, I'm not against it receiving serious attention from somebody else maybe. The New Ageyness of it is just really putting me off. I'll finish the book, but I don't know that I'm necessarily going to search out more....

Bert:

I love that you're calling a 12th-centruy Christian theologian New Agey. And thus tarring Milbank, Zizek, and a large number of Catholics by association.

Philosophy is really not like music for you, is it? It is for me.

Noah:

Ummm...sometimes? Like I said, my negative reaction to him is really aesthetic more than logical. So maybe it's just liking different bands?

Bert:

You know, I don't think I could have articulated my artificial/natural idea without Meister Eckhart. "God" might even be the insertion into nature of the artificial "Godhead," which is far from unimportant. It is the vastness underneath actual reality, that Badiou wants to be math-- which is an attempt to insert nature into artifice, highly useful but not necessarily meaningful.

I think you're actually somewhat allergic to ontology yourself, which is understandable. But it might be something you could think about. If not Godhead, what can possibly lend coherence to universes? Time-space continuum? Superstrings? DNA?

I'm about to read the Brothers Karamazov. Have you read that?

(P.S.: After beginning the Brothers Karamazov, I discovered the line Zizek derides, about how without God everything is permitted, is uttered by Ivan, a demagogue-ish character advocating theocracy, who is corrected by the elder Zosima. So there.)

And finally, here’s a conversation we had about a new book on evolutionary psychology that Noah handily demolishes: http://www.splicetoday.com/writing/the-recursive-mind

Bert:

I love that the evolution-psych holy trinity is comprised of groups that are not hard to cast as subhuman-- at least from an evolutionary-psych perspective. Chesterton would relish that irony.
I keep being a little amazed that you are so willing to defend Biblical truth-claims; of course the Bible is quasi-objectively far more subtle and complex that eugenics, so it's a fairly clear aesthetic choice.

Yeah-- realizing that self-awareness is hooked up with language is central to Genesis. We get language to name (and thus control) all life, but God names us and gives us Law, we break Law immediately and achieve self-awareness (naked!!! shame!!!), and then receive punishment, which essentially is the part with awareness of death and universal contingency. For all of Lacan's critique of religious types as caught up with the Imaginary, it frankly seems as if the leap of faith is really to posit a fundamental Symbolic level. The power of science involves pushing the Symbolic to its breaking point-- not in nonsense dada, but in a fundamental figuration of the Real-- the nothingness of Divinity that allows language to exist by its sheer inexpressibility. If DNA isn't concrete structuralism, What else is? Beisdes, you know, culture and everything it generates.

I have to share this John Stuart Mill gem with you that I'm glad you reminded me of-- he wrote in a letter:

"Besides these I have been toiling through Stirling’s Secret of Hegel. It is right to learn what Hegel is & one learns it only too well from Stirling’s book. I say "too well" because I found by actual experience of Hegel that conversancy with him tends to deprave one’s intellect. The attempt to unwind an apparently infinite series of self–contradictions, not disguised but openly faced & coined into [illegible word] science by being stamped with a set of big abstract terms, really if persisted in impairs the acquired delicacy of perception of false reasoning & false thinking which has been gained by years of careful mental discipline with terms of real meaning. For some time after I had finished the book all such words as reflexion, development, evolution, &c., gave me a sort of sickening feeling which I have not yet entirely got rid of."

Noah:

That's Mill quote is awesome. He and Hegel definitely deserve to make each other ill.

I'm trying to unravel your bit about Lacan and religion and the symbolic. I'm not sure I agree that the fundamental religious more is faith in the symbolic...but it seems like the symbolic has to be pretty important? The idea that there's a law...I guess Lacan doesn't think there is a transcendent law, which is why he claims that religion is in the imaginary, whereas someone with faith would argue that the symbolic is in fact from God?

Not sure I get how science pushes the symbolic to the breaking point...do you mean by pushing it closer and closer to the real, demanding that the symbolic open up directly onto the real? DNA as symbolic which creates real would then be a kind of barrier case as you say; the real as coded message creating the real.

It's kind of amazing how banal ev psych guys are when they do decoding. Corballis was talking about mystery novels and the best he could come up with was, well, they must be narratives about evil being punished which is obviously evolutionarily ideal. You sort of think, have you ever *read* mystery novels? Is it possible that treating everything as a one to one code could, conceivably, be somewhat reductionist?

Bert:

Yes, getting math to duplicate the vibrations of possibility is what science does-- but without fundamentalism. It's just that you do get totalizing dicks who write about evoliution and bell curves. Christianity holds that the Word is in the beginning. The chicken and the egg is solved in favor of the chicken. Narratives are always connected to desire and lack, but that doesn't mean Lacan isn't kind of a hermeneutically refined Protestant of sorts.

Noah:

Chicken and egg is not exactly solved; God is around there somewhere with the word....

Bert:

It reflects the entire Bible narrative. God made chickens. Adam named chickens. The Word was chicken, and it was good.

Mmmmm, chicken.

A Device That Kills With Gravity

2011-03-14T17:48:00.000-07:00

So, I decided that queerness, idealism, Plato’s world of essential forms, but also the transcendent, the conscious mind, intelligence, love, math, self-awareness, God, could all be collapsed under the term “artificial.” Sexuality, materialism, physics, death, catastrophe, the Spinoza substance, all these things can be collapsed as “natural.” Noah found this fairly grandiose and sloppy, but I still like it.

Bert:

All intelligence is artificial. That is the prime religious frustration. Also why aspects of Christian poststructuraslism are less annoying than New Age pantheist poststructuralism. But I probably never would have started attending church if it wasn't for the gay utopia.

Noah:

Isn't the Christian idea that intelligence is primary — the one thing that's not artificial? In the beginning was the word, etc.?

Bert

Artificial, as in always already constructed, and in opposition to all things that function in obedience to forces of inertia. The Word was in the beginning. Artificiality exists without and previous to nature.

Noah:

Yeah, I'm not following that. God's intelligence is before the world; it's the most natural thing. It's what creates everything else. So intellect isn't artificial, or at least God's isn't.

Or you're saying it's artificial precisely because it's previous to nature? That the Word is artificial? It seems bizarre to call god artificial...shouldn't he be the one thing that's natural if anything is?

Bert:

no, see- God as nature is pantheism. that's the transcendence thing.

Noah:

There's a difference between saying it's transcendent and saying it's artificial though, surely. If anything it should be reversed, I'd think. Transcendence means god is natural and nothing else is. Push that far enough and you get gnosticism, I guess, but gnosticism is a christian heresy...

Bert:

Heresy is heresy. Nature is trees. God is distinct from trees, although hardly irrelevant to trees.

Noah:

I deny that nature is trees. Trees come from nature. But nature isn't necessarily the natural. It could be artificial. Like in Solaris.

Bert:

Not trees. So... nature is laws of nature? Deep math? Whatever you call it, it's a process, an aggregate of force vectors, something that we are intimately part of at all times. Not our intelligence, our awareness of ourselves, which makes everything strange and secondary and reducible to deep math. The possibility of an absolute that creates nature comes from an absolute that perceives nature, which is our intelligence. Giant brains, weird bodies, straining at the surface of the shrink wrap around totality, totality itself starts to change as it is perceived and understood, and an outside seems as clear as the fact that somehow the space in our heads has become a space outside.

Noah:

Nature is Bacchus, like in C.S. Lewis. But Aslan is natural.

I was just reading Hume, who argues that procreation creates intelligence rather than the other way around. Our intelligence is as much a part of nature as our loins, surely. If we make a watch, that's artificial. If God made nature, then that's artificial. Artificial is what's built, not the builder. I guess you could say our intelligence is not part of nature since it's connected to God...but I don't think that makes God artificial still...

Bert:

Brains and loins (and lions) are natural. But, in fact, so is a watch. Metal and glass (or sand) are natural. The concept of its purpose is what even makes it a watch.

There is no outside to nature, unless you are aware of yourself, or of God.

Noah:

But putting metal and sand together into a watch is different than having just metal and sand. A watch is metal and sand plus artifice. Reading Kristeva, who seems to agree with you re consciousness being un-natural. She doesn't call it artificial though....

Bert:

Right-- the watch is natural, except for the artifice. Same with the brain.

Kristeva is writing in a different language (perhaps), but she's also an atheist. If you want to say that "artificiality" is somehow an anthropomorphic fallacy, you need to explain what the difference between "artificial" and "unnatural" might be. I certainly have no problem with de-anthropomorphizing the term "artificial." Birds' nests are artificial. Footprints are artificial. But the simple cause-and-effect logic is not enough to sustain a distinction between nature and artifice.

Noah:

So you're saying the brain is different than the rest of the world becausethe brain is the only bit that has been created using artifice?

That doesn't seem right...?

Bert:

The brain is natural, except for the artifice. The intelligence itself, that you could call a property or effect of the brain, I call artifice. It puts a hole in reality through which reality can operate upon itself. It inaugurates the possibility of a world. That's why it's like God.

Kirkegaard said "I choose the absolute than chooses me. I posit the absolute that posits me." That was my Facebook post a couple days ago.

Noah:

Hmm. Artifice still seems like the wrong word. Transcendence works better I think. Or noumenal.

Yeah, I think material and noumenal or material and transcendent is much better here than natural and artificial. The latter have too many other connotations; it ends up being confusing.

Bert:

Sometimes being confused is worth it. I'm proposing a concept, not just a definition. God and Not-God is too vague-- because either everything is one or the other. God is everything and there's no Not-God, or, well, God is just dead.

I'm talking about something that involves not cutting off spirituality from the "normal" world. That's the whole point. The cross is artificial. It's a device that kills with gravity, and spreads fear among people, and then a symbol allegedly repudiating those things. The Word (as you point out) is artificial. Language is technology. It's not spiritual, as such, when you call someone an asshole or order a latte. What makes it transcendent is the artificiality, the outside-reality. This possibility allows for a much more complicated environment that doesn't let the "numinous" be mistaken for indigestion and subsumed in DNA.

Noah:

I knew it wouldn't be that easy.

You should use whatever concepts you like...but it's just very hard for me to see how the Word which is the base of everything isn't more natural than the tree that it makes. Artifiice may make the world, but the artificer isn't artificial.

I think...maybe paradox would help? Neibuhr's idea that love is both the fulfillment of the law and the antithesis of the law...perhaps what you need is to see the Word as both the fulfillment of nature and the antithesis of nature? It's both outside nature and the definition of nature. Neither gnosticism nor pantheism but holding them in tension.

Bert:

I have fears about cozying up to paradox. William Desmond and betweenness and the metaxological. It makes me think of wholeness and wonder and following your bliss. It's as if God could only exist when you're satisfied and happy and warm-- but of course God matters most when you're desperate and hungry and crazy and sick. Balance is a supremely pantheistic notion in the first place. If you're that balanced, though, how can you move or change or think or act?

Noah:

Neibuhr's notion of paradox isn't a static whole, though. It's not between and balance, but both and tension.

For love and the law, it's the idea that love is the thorn in the heart of the law; the thing that denies the system and fulfills it. The need to satisfy love through the law is impossible and imperative. It's not a pantheistic everything is happy. It's more like Cioran; religion as unendurable ache.

For intelligence as the basis of nature and as the beyond of nature it could work somewhat similarly I think. The need to reach God and get beyond nature/the material is the impossible fulfillment an denial of our nature. It's a description of fallenness; nature holds us, but intelligence (like love) demands we wrest ourselves from it.

Maybe?

Bert:

Sure. I mean, Christ announces Himself as the fulfillment of the Law. And he is love, and of course he goes around defying the Law and ticking off the Pharisees and Saducees all day, and gets killed for it. Love is Other and irruptive and disruptive, true, and it allows healing and defies death.

What happens both in the Eden story and on the cross is that the artifice that arose from within the universe doesn't just bump into but spills over into the artifice from which the universe arose. The intelligence, which I maintain is not "false" but denies mundane ideas of reality and authenticity that are bogus precisely because they are based on phenomena that arise and dissipate, is a wound, or a thorn... love is not obviously the same thing to me, although it does work quite well as a superior substitute for "balance."

Or it's just that I'm talking about ontology and Niebuhr is talking about ethics. It may be a fine analogy.

Noah:

"The intelligence, which I maintain is not "false" but denies mundane ideas of reality and authenticity that are bogus precisely because they are based on phenomena that arise and dissipate, is a wound, or a thorn..."

This is why I think calling it artificial is a problem. You're not saying it's artificial, but that it's more real than real. It is the gnostic thing; the world is a transitory veil; the thing that is solid is god.

I'm not saying that reality is love (though that's not an unChristian idea, come to think of it...) but that the way Neibuhr put together the ethical paradox might work ontologically as well.

Maybe thinking about Eden would work? Eden is both "really" real and outside reality; it's the platonic ideal. What causes the loss of Eden is the knowledge of good and evil — so intelligence both casts you into the real (material) and causes you to lose the real (Eden).

It seems like that should sync up with intelligence specifically as well. The knowledge of good and evil is why you exit Eden; intelligence tosses you out of reality, though it is also your link to it — or at the same time intelligence hooks you to reality, though it is also your passage out of it.....

Bert:

Nature is still nature. It is what really is. That's why it's different than you saying God is natural and nothing else is. We are divided between our natural and artificial aspects, and God is as well. Nature is tangible but not immortal. God is an idea but not mortal. I'm not saying one is more real than the other.

Eden is a great example, as is the proto-semiotic state before language. Love exists naturally before language, but then must be reconstructed, artificially, both through and in spite of ethics.

Intelligence destroys us, it destroys everything around us, it is clearly not in harmony with nature. It also makes us free like nothing else around us, and capable of experiencing destruction, violation, and suffering like nothing else around us.

Noah:

Intelligence is natural though. It's what makes us mortal, first of all, if you accept the Eden story. And it's natural to us; it evolved. Our intelligence isn't *that* much different from a chimpanzees'. They can even talk to us.

And surely God is supposed to be what really is. Moreso than nature even, which is why he'd be more natural than nature, and why in C.S. Lewis the wood between the worlds is a wood.

Intelligence here is kind of becoming free will, isn't it? The thing that separates us from nature and requires from us ethics. It certainly makes us free like nothing else. I think it's maybe presumptuous to say that it makes us more capable of suffering...?

Bert:

Using Eden AND evolution against me. How diabolical. And, according to you, natural.

Evolution is natural. Creation is artificial. Brains (to reiterate) are natural. Consciousness (which still seems like something bugs might have) is perhaps also natural. Intelligence is something else, whether humans or robots or dolphins or aliens or chimpanzees have it.

And it includes free will, but that's hardly everything it means. It means limitless desire, language, problem-solving, and two big aspects of the Eden story, shame and the awareness of death. There is a site that is a subject, a space that should not be a space, that violates conservation of matter-- if it was actually matter and not just thought.

And this is not to devalue nature. The importance of wilderness as that which we are somehow in an undeclared war with, that overwhelms and envelops and, tamed or not, sustains us-- extends to our own bodies. We are not in any way better than our bodies. But we are not at one with them.

Noah:

I'm not using them against you. I am helping you clarify your ideas. Naturally.

Evolution is natural. Creating an ant hill is natural. Creating a toupee is natural (though the toupee itself is not exactly.) Creating the universe seems like it should be natural as well.

We may not be at one with out bodies, but is the disjunction there well-described by saying that our mind is artificial and our bodies natural? We're not a calculator chained to a dying tree. We're an angel chained to a dying animal. Both angels and animals have minds; just different kinds; and while you could argue that an angel isn't natural, I don't think you'd usually call it artificial.

Eden is a metaphor for the world before intelligence; prelapsarian infantinnocence. It's also a metaphor for a world outside nature. Intelligence shackles us to the world and cuts us off from it — neither of which is whole oneness happiness, both of which are crucifixion/castration. I don't deny your being in the world and not of it as our tragedy, but I think our tragedy is also being in the world and of it. We're natural and not, but that includes our minds. The binary isn't mind/body and isn't nature/artificial. God's natural but not nature, and we are too, though less naturally.

Bert:

Paul says, "If anyone be in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away. all things have become new." i can expand more later. but my goal is to deal with atheist materialism on one hand, and Zizek and Eckhart on the other, who insist that God needs us as we need Him.

Noah:

"New" isn't artificial, though. Surely the metaphor there is a
rebirth, not being smelted out of plastic....

What does the "need" consist of? Parents need children...

Bert:

Rebirth is not natural. Resurrection is not natural. You can have some issue with calling it artificial, but the whole zombie/cyborg as Messiah totally works for me-- it is a thing that should not be, except that it must be.

It also comes down to a queer thing. Not that homosexuality is unnatural (although the term itself is weird), but its very natural-ness throws off the way we equate natural with real-- and heterosexuality with procreation.

Artificial is not false. Angels are perhaps the only intelligence that is artificial, so far-- God is divided between natural and artificial, as are we, as I have stated previously.

Noah:

Yeah; zombies don't seem artificial. Unnatural, yes.

I think your terms don't really work for you if you don't want artificial to be false, is what I'm saying. Artificial really does mean false in most ways it is used.

If it comes down to a queer thing, maybe you should use natural/queer?

Bert:

I think it's perfectly fine to alternate terms sometimes-- "queer" is a pretty good synonym, insofar as "all sexuality is artificial sexuality" seems equally valid to "all sexuality is quer sexuality," and for basically the same reasons.

"Queer" is also properly a term meant to designate a specifically marginalized community, and I sort of think honoring that community from a Christian standpoint should also mean acknowledging siblinghood without wholesale appropriation.

But I do think "artificial," especially post-Warhol, post-Terminator, is just as ripe as "queer" for rehabilitation as a term. Christians should be allowed some divergence of opinion on sexuality (although that's ethically uneasy, it seems as valid a discussion to permit as the one over abortion), but by no means should Christians be comfortable with the eliding of all differences between nature, reality, and truth.

Barfing into the Void

2010-12-30T14:10:00.000-08:00

Noah and I discuss the possibility of ineffable transcendent anythingness, based on his article about a philosophy book about film that argues against philosophy about film:

Albert Stabler

From your account, that book sounds like one big steaming pile of dissected cow hearts. Are you sure it's not supposed to be some big joke on his name (heap of mullarkey)? The caveman Tarantino line and the Zizek's nostril line are priceless.

But then again, I'm looking at a review in a journal (http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=16386) that contains a lot more detail about his actual philosophical orientation (Bergsonian, it would appear). That sort of dynamist vitalist evolutionary becomingness that C.S. Lewis makes fun of and Alfred North Whitehead propounds (as does Deleuze). So really, this guy has a philosophy he's imposing on film-- even if it's yet another in an endless series of examples of what Badiou in that Paul book calls "antiphilosophy."

I don't think you're someone who denies himself a cheap shot or ten, and I support you heartily. But, along with not fleshing out his probably banal point, you don't make much of an argument for your (thoroughly defensible) "nothing is new" view. For example, complaining about Sofia Coppolla's incredibly stupid interview on Fresh Air, where she and Terri talk about the bliss of watching some actor smoke a cigarette with no edits-- a reiteration of the "time-image" motif that has become an avant-garde cliche.

Noah Berlatsky

Oh...he's definitely Bergsonian. I thought about talking about that more, but it didn't really seem all that worthwhile; he ends up just saying that film is ever becoming new, film is a Heraclitan fire, etc. etc. The main point for me was the claim that film is uncontainable in thought, but that philosophy is containable, therefore philosophy contains film and not the other way around. I don't think it was unfair to make fun of him for that without necessarily making fun of him for anything else. He really makes his own philosophy secondary to claiming that philosophy doesn't get film; the second is his main point, the first gets much less attention.

I guess I felt that the fact that there's nothing particularly new under the sun seemed like a fairly obvious point....

Albert Stabler

Yeah, good-- it's basically all about narratives (which definitely distances you from Bergson and Mullarkey, as well as Kristeva and others). I appreciate your examples. I'm a sucker for hard content. Like a Tootsie Pop.

Well, far be it from me to tell you what you think. It's just that you haven't offered your own theory of how film can be theorized, other than as mere illustration of philosophical points, which is apparently what Mullarkey is saying it has been thus far. Like, how is Zizek's viviosn of narrative different than it would have been without cinema as an example?

Maybe one thing I find curious about your approach to philosophy (which is not unlike your approach to theology) is that you are consistently reverent toward historical precedent without positioning yourself as in any way participating in any tradition(s). It's sort of your own kind of pragmatism (Dewey and James et al, a recent American strain of antiphilosophy that, frankly, I imagine you would have mixed feelings about being lumped into), this commonsensical anti-scholasticism that kind of overlaps a bit with the intuitive poetics of Bergson, frankly.

I get the sense that you still think most any philosopher is basically full of horseshit when talking about film-- which, ironically, may be sort of what Mullarkey is saying. It's just that you believe in being more polite and unpretentious about saying so. In your version, film is still just film, philosophy is still just philosophy, but, you know, they represent each other sometimes, and it's all good. Which I'd certaily rather read than some Marshall McLuhan blather about hot and cool running media formats.

Noah Berlatsky

My ideas about the gay utopia are totally built on reading films. If you look through that essay, you can see me saying, "well, kristeva says this, but if you look at this film, it actually seems to say that things work more like this." Or that line about the opposite of love being paranoia; that's a philosophical point (more poetic than rigorous, but still) which comes directly from watching a movie. As does the idea that a big part of the attraction of homosexual panic is that it's pleasurable.

I just think it's an accumulation of particular ideas and details rather than through some all-encompassing traumatic mechanism. Philosophy and film just aren't that different. They're both products of human thought. It just seems bizarre to me to posit this huge rift between them which you have to overcome in order to have them communicate.

Also...not to be too grating...but the whole point of the fecund horror piece was based not so much on the narratives I picked as on the fact that the emotional identification of the narratives were intentionally binary; they read both as themselves and against themselves. So the philosophical point I was making wasn't based on the narrative example, but rather on the the an aesthetics of identification, which is based partly on narrative but also very much on image (and sexual desire, which is pretty important, is also a function of image as much as of narrative — and a lot of the way that the films read against themselves is by contrasting image and narrative, so we're told diagetically that our protagonist doesn't want sex, but the film keeps showing us semi-naked women in fetishized ways, or throwing poop/phalluses at us.)

I think one of the big methodological problems with Mullarkey's book is that in order to claim that philosophers separate out narrative to use it as examples, he forced to himself separate out narrative to use it as an example, implying that one can talk bout narrative without having other things bleed in. He also, as I said, abstracts out philosophy itself, turning it into a series of propositions or a chain of thought and thereby hiding the extent to which aesthetics is important to philosophy too, and the way that metaphor and syntax can't be abstracted from philosophical argument. Those things are what make philosophy like film in the first place, and why there isn't as much of a different between them as all that. Or so I'd argue anyway.

It's something of a traditionalist argument...except that I think many philosophers are a little chary of owning the extent to which metaphor and aesthetics is important to what they're doing. Or perhaps I'm wrong about that, I'm not sure....

I don't actually think philosophers are full of shit when talking about film. I mean, no more than anyone else. I think Zizek is often funny and insightful. Cavell sounds pretty interesting. Mullarkey had some interesting readings, even. It would really be case by case as to whether I thought they were worthwhile or not. I think it's silly to state categorically that film hasn't influenced philosophy because examples don't count as influence, though. I think there's a conversation which can be dumb or can be interesting, but dumb or interesting, it exists.

I think seeing film as unique among the arts is hard for me to sign onto. But philosophy as an art and art as philosophy seems like it's an idea that's been around for a long time, and one with a fair bit of validity.

T'aint all about narrative. The exhilaration/enjoyment of homosexual panic is mostly expressed through special effects. And I talk about the acting and the images and so forth. Narrative is pretty important in narrative film, but I think you can respond to other aspects as well.

Albert Stabler

Of course, ironic subtext is not merely the domain of cinema. Which doesn't invalidate you observing that philosophy has style. It's so content-centric, there's no wonder it keeps ending up barfing into the void. It could do a lot more with itself if it was overall less formalistic, although it then has the problem, as you mentioned, of being recognized as philosophy. But Paul still pulled it off. As did numerous film directors.

Special effects and acting and images are tools of narrative in film, as metaphors and imagery and characterization are tools of narrative in literature. I'm not saying you're saying it's all about plot or dialogue, and I'm certainly not saying your points are anything but sensitive and worthwhile-- but I am saying you might be subsuming everything to the Symbolic (storytelling) element of the experience, rather than the stuff that interrupts the experience. This email, like philosophy in general, can make gestures at describing horror, laughter, and ambiguity, but it arguably can't necessarily convey it in the same way as a virtual reading or viewing experience can.

But then again, the idealist romantic tradition, since Schlegel and Schelling and what not, have maintained that poetry is the highest of all human pursuits, for much the same reason.

Noah Berlatsky

Yeah, that's not entirely unlike what Mullarkey says. He's very interested for example in the way that people desire the iceberg to miss the titanic in way which involves them actually experiencing involuntary bodily motions. And he's fascinated by what's experienced as real or unreal. And in everyday time. And in nervous systems.

I'd say I don't have any problem with people talking about the non-symbolic aspects of film if that's what they want to do. An important aspect of the Lord of the Rings is that the films are so damn long that the need to urinate is a vital part of the experience. Or, less diuretically, the Bible is not just what happens in it or how it is organized but the fact that it's a living religious system, and people believe the word of God is there. Or lego instructions are about building something and it doesn't work and that sucks. All reasonable insights. Your world exists while you are in the world of the film (or in some ways it doesn't, which is worth thinking about as well.)

But. Two points. First, the symbolic immersive aspect of film, just because it is shared by other narratives and is not alone particular to film — that does not mean that it is not part of film. Wrting about that symbolic aspect and philosophizing about it, that's still engaging with the movie. It's not denying its particularity or filmness; it's not reducing film to a philosophical example. The symbolic is part of art; engaging with that part of art is engaging with the art. It's not missing the forest for the trees; it's just looking at these trees rather than some other trees which are no doubt interesting as well.

Second. The specificity of film as an experience separate from its narrative is specific only in the way that different symbolic content is different. That is, the symbolic content of the Bible is different than the symbolic content of lego instructions. Similarly, the specificity of the experience of the Bible is different from the specificity of the experience of the lego instructions. But specificity of experience is itself not specific to film; any aesthetic experience (very broadly defined) is going to have that content which is outside the symbolic.

Mullarkey wants film (not specific films, but film itself) to have something special to teach philosophy. He rejects symbolic content because that ends up just being illustrative. So then he goes to the time experience of film itself; the idea that film's essence is no essence or motion. But there's no reason I can see why any of those concepts is central to film in particular. You could say the same thing about lego instructions, really (I mean, I wish you wouldn't say them because the whole conversation is kind of banal and tedious — it's all like, motion, man. But the point is you could say it if you wanted to.)

So the point is: I think philosophy can (and often does) enter into conversations in which it engages with the symbolic/interpretive content of particular films. I think philosophy can (and does somewhat less often) engage with the way people engage with or experience film in an-extra-symbolic or extra-aesthetic way. I think philosophy can think about the particular formal elements of film in general and what that means and doesn't mean. All of those seem to me to be legitimate ways in which philosophy is influenced by, or is in conversation, with film. (And it can go the other way too, of course— film often picks up ideas and things other than ideas too, perhaps, from philosophy.) But I don't see why any of this has to be particularly fraught, or why one needs to pretend that philosophy is some sort of imperialist conqueror of film when it does the first but is authentically learning from film when it does the second. I'm willing to admit that having to pee while watching LOTR is as much about film as the homoerotic tension between Frodo and Sam, but I don't see why having to pee is *more* about film than the homoerotic tension.

I don't think it's true that philosophy or non-fiction prose can't convey those experiences. I really think we're just talking about different genres. I find Feyerabend more inspiring, funnier, more exciting, more ambiguous, than Gilbert Hernandez. I find much of zizek more moving than many of the films he describes. I don't think that's an especially aberrant or even unusual state of affairs.

If everything I've been discussing is the symbolic, what are you saying are the things that interrupt the experience?

Albert Stabler

Actually, I'm at least somewhat off. Maybe it's more accurate to say that the symbolic aspect of culture, which applies to all narratives equally, does more than just organize and structure reality (the realm of plot and superego), thus reinforcing or revising the order of life. It also shapes the imaginary (the flying poop and phalluses you mention, as well as the character identifications and the ineffable sense of meaning and belonging that go along with it), and generates the death drive, which is sort of the meta-symbolic level of repetition that denies orderly progress and change-- instead manufacturing more desire and lack.

But all this synthesizing and virtuality, which happens inside the experience, is (perhaps) different from the things that take you out of the experience, not necessarily by being unconvincing, but by happening to you in the everyday time of your world rather than the world of the book or movie. So, things that are uncanny, shocking, incorrect, funny, illogical, sublime. Which is tough to describe, but it matters that something separates the Bible and a sitcom and a personal letter and instructions to assemble a propane grill, other than subject matter and/or genre. They all point to things outside the text but in our nervous systems. which then refer back to the texts. Time passes in various ways all at once, and memories and meanings create feedback.

There are some very good reasons not to make film special and unique-- it's a modernist wet dream of ever-becoming. Like-- if it's all about sounds and lights and drives, why not TV or video games?

Of course the reason is that the film director has supreme auteur status to control your experience, more than perhaps any other creator before or since. I think semiotic stuff is important. Things that don't break down hermeneutically are important. But there's something masochistic, as I think you imply, about wanting Hitchcock or whoever to reach out of the screen and spank you as some kind of apotheosis of truth-excess.

Yeah, like I said, the concept of antiphilosophy makes sense to me, but film being super special is lame. So that settles that.

Noah Berlatsky

Television is a big question. Mullarkey discusses some television (a Star Trek episode) but doesn't really deal with the fact that it's got at least some decent claims to being a distinct medium. And video games don't come up.

Auteur theory is auteur theory; it's a philosophical container. Which isn't bad, but is a problematic way to claim film's special status as distinct from philosophy.

Also...I'm a little skeptical about antiphilosophy, because I think philosophy tends to include lots of antiphilosophical elements which aren't really acknowledged as such. In order to create an opposite for philosophy, you have to have a fairly reductive notion of philosophy, which assumes that philosophy has a well-defined purpose/program that doesn't include aesthetics (among other things.)

Albert Stabler

I absolutely don't think antiphilosophy is in any way separable from philosophy, It's kind of central to the project, but just comes out explicitly in some writers more than others.. That was pretty central to my spiel at the MCA-- I talked about Paul, Meister Eckhart, Jacobi, and Whitehead as a tradition of philosophers speaking against philosophy on behalf of transcendence. I personally like thinkers that deal with ineffability as something separate and supremely important, like Paul and Kristeva, rather than something that can be reinscribed into the immanence of reality, like Derrida or James. Thus my sympathy for Mullarkey.

Of course aesthetics exists as a branch of philosophy-- some obscure freaks like Aristotle and Kant wrote quite a bit about it. I think you should decide if you really want to be saying that style is really the part of reality/experience that can't be captured by systematic description. Christopher Hitchens might agree with you, but Terry Eagleton probably wouldn't.

Noah Berlatsky

I don't think I'm saying that style can't be captured by systematic description. I'm just saying that systematic description is not description alone. It has style. I'm saying they can't be separated, not that they can.

I'm not so sure that Mullarkey is claiming that ineffability is transcendent. If anything he's claiming that immanence is ineffable. He's not unDerridean (Derrida being kind of the ultimate antiphilosopher in a lot of ways.)

Albert Stabler

Okay, see, that's the thing. I know we're throwing around the "antiphilosophy" term, but I'm sticking to Badiou's use of it to describe Paul, which is pretty different, for me, than what Derrida is doing. Derrida, despite his latter-day becoming-humanist, was a nihilist. Paul was not. The sophistry Paul (according to Badiou) dismissed under the term "Greek" is precisely where Derrida discovered his Zen insights.

Again, exalting film as the Word of God is distasteful, and I haven't read the book. But if you're seeing style as the great unifier of discourse, that's an idealist move I'm not really willing to commit to. Style is different from semiotics.

Maybe we should talk about music to clarify this thing. Music cannot help but have a style, and largely be defined by it, but style doesn't capture the experience of listening to music.

Noah Berlatsky

I don't know that I think style is the great unifier; I'm not saying it's the essence of discourse. But I don't see how you have a discussion that doesn't have style. (All discussions have content too, I'd say.) Style doesn't capture the experience of listening to music, but so what? Experiences are particular; you can't transfer them from one medium to another anyway, though you can transfer bits of them.

I'm pretty sure Mullarkey is just using antiphilosophy to mean "things that are not philosophy." Especially things that are experiential rather than looking for transcendent insight. From that perspective Derrida fits and Paul probably doesn't. Which just goes to show that the main thing that unifies philosophers is that they don't want to be called philosophers.

Albert Stabler

I keep coming back to the Hegel thing about the perfect State is no State. All philosophy wants to kill philosophy. But that's different from saying that all experiences are ineffable-- like you said, it's just the actual parts of experiences (that basically everyone has) that, arguably, cannot be represented, but merely reproduced. THis has been a big frontier for antiphilosophical philosophy, since before Nietzsche. I bet that's what Mullarkey thinks he's talking about.

A Black Beacon in a Blinding Storm, or, Annihilation Irrationalized

2010-10-10T21:20:00.000-07:00

I actually finally saw the original rape-revenge cinema classic I Spit On Your Grave tonight. Not only is the cinematography lovely (not unaware of echoing the gaze of the predator, slasher movie style), but the portrait of the viciously tyrannical but ironically (and literally) castrated “primal father” after the death of patriarchy is an entirely appropriate response to the whole Othering of the primeval countryside. Here’s a statement I made on black metal that sort of applies:

“I think you could go so far as to say provincialism itself has acquired a certain globalized character-- it's the voice of negativity. Isolationism universal! And that sort of worldview has to be strictly negative. The struggle to resist the imperialist is (in a general abstract way at least) pure, but the land and invented history being defended are never pure.”

Anyhow, this whole conversation with my pal Noah was prompted by his article that is now readable here, in which he refers to the new and old versions of I Spit On Your Grave, as well as the old and new versions of Michael Haneke’s movie Funny Games.

My misgivings about I Spit are probably still relevant (for me anyway) and are enumerated below; I would add that I find dubious Noah’s claims about it being a “subtle and thoughtful” treatment of “how class works, how gender works, how that provokes violence, how that affects us and our morality.” But it’s a provocative movie that anyone who cares about radical feminism and/or likes violent movies should see.

We refer obliquely to some nice things Noah wrote on evil and pacifism, in these pieces on Spiderman, Superman, and Terry Eagleton.

And we begin…

Noah Berlatsky

I discovered that Andi Ziesler, one of the editors at Bitch magazine, apparently hates I Spit on Your Grave on the grounds that...well, you can probably figure it out. I found this more irritating than I expected, which is stupid of me. If you're going to get irritated because not all feminists like I Spit on Your Grave, you're going to be getting irritated a lot....

Albert Stabler

Feminists are probably touchy about long rape scenes and rape-revenge being yet another dom/mommy castrator fantasy thing. Which is sort of why I like absolute violence more than justified violence, in movies anyway. But I still want to see Spit.

Noah Berlatsky

I don't think you get around domination or castration fantasies with absolute violence, actually. But that's maybe just me....

I wish Andi Ziesler were smart enough to see it as castration fantasies on the part of men. As far as I can tell, she just sees it as sadism and exploiting women. Just the long rape scenes in other words. (She doesn't like the fact that Jennifer seduces the men afterwards either, which might be a dislike of castration fantasies, I suppose.)

I've probably made this clear enough...but I don't know that male masochistic investment in feminism is a bad thing. Men have an erotic investment in patriarchy — as indeed do women. It seems like if you're going to present an alternate model, you need an alternate erotics as well. I know the alternate model is supposed to be egalitarian sharing with everyone treating each other with respect, etc, but if other things work perhaps that's not so bad either. William Marston thought so, and he was a kook...but Gloria Steinem agreed with him....

Anyway, I think I Spit on My Grave has problems from a feminist perspective, and there are lots of reasons to dislike it. But it's so clearly engaged with feminism, and so clearly trying to talk about issues of patriarchy and violence...I don't know. Dismissing it out of hand just seems really wrong-headed.

Albert Stabler

So you're thinking that her critique would be that the movie is sadistic rather than masochistic, and you disagree-- and so then either you or she would be saying that masochism has more moral value than sadism. Which is pretty fair, for obvious reasons, but is interesting to just come out and say.

I was actually thinking of Funny Games being more about absolute violence, and Spit (and Rambo and every war movie ever) as being about justified violence. And, I gotta say, justified violence sounds a lot more masochistic and absolute sounds more sadistic.

Noah Berlatsky

I think Funny Games is pretty masochistic, though perhaps less so than I Spit. Haven't seen Rambo, believe it or not!

Albert Stabler
I mean, there's catharsis and empathy in every horror movie. But when that's bracketed the way it is in Funny Games, it feels more sadistic. There's more about evil in that. Power without the excuse of trauma.

Albert Stabler

The "absolute violence" thing is an idea I'm appreciating. The Old Testament (Job is a pretty profound example) locates the origins of violence in the arrogance of man and the mysterious machinations of the Divine. And then the New Testament rejects any justification of vengeance. As masochistic as "turn the other cheek" sounds, it's not a seduction strategy, it's a denial of all force.

Noah Berlatsky

Yes, the vision of justice and violence in Job is definitely congruent with that in Funny Games.

The problem with Funny Games, I'd argue, is that it puts the director in the place of God — and implicitly argues that man-made violence should be treated like divine violence. That's both blasphemous and, I would argue, unjust.

The existence of violence qua violence is a mystery. The existence of specific acts of violence by human beings is not transcendent; it's imminent and explicable. Funny Games is in a way even more of an incitement to revenge and violence than I Spit; it suggests that there is really nothing that can be done with folks like Peter and Paul except to kill them, right? Whereas I Spit offers an analysis of violence which at least suggests the possibility of interventions before you get to everybody killing one another.

I like Niebuhr's idea that mercy is the refutation and the fulfillment of justice. As a result, justice for him is not the fulfillment of divinity, but is still part of God's work.

As I sort of said in the essay, there's a way to read I Spit that suggests that Jennifer's revenge is a failure, not a triumph; acquiescence in destroying herself, which is the result of all violence. In Funny Games on the other hand, if she had shot the guy with the rifle...there's no implicit critique of violence there that I can see. When your enemies are inexplicable all-powerful demons, there's no moral stain to killing them.

Albert Stabler

Here's where I would invoke Simone Weil's reading of the Iliad. Brutality just projects itself, it's always spilling over. Which absolutely doesn't excuse anyone-- rather, it convicts everyone. It can only be tricked, as it's a function of desire.

How does Funny Games convict the killers? They're not convicted or justified, they're evil. They are sharing our pleasure. Whereas, the rapists in I Spit are justified in some small way by the trauma of their poverty and ignorance, which actually feeds into the logic of the victim's revenge.

Noah Berlatsky

Trauma doesn't justify evil. Evil is evil, whether there's trauma involved or not. But explanations allow us to intervene in evil, for prevention or justice. Human understanding is flawed, but it's also a presumably god-given tool. Job's faith is the correct response to the divine, but faith in human evil is an error.

I would argue that only God can perform evil without reason (which in that case is not evil.) Restricting evil to a definition which involves no reason is what Eagleton does in his book. It's a bad move because it simultaneously causes you to demonize your enemies (resulting in violence) or to sink into despair (which is a sin.)

I Spit doesn't make a whole lot of the rapists' ignorance, I don't think. They're definitely poor, but that doesn't justify the rape. If anything, it convicts the poverty. That is, the movie implicates us not only because of our potential as rapists, but because of our participation in a class system which generates violence.

Albert Stabler

See how it goes-- trauma doesn't justify rape in I Spit, but then you blame the poverty, aka the trauma. Your whole point about evil happening for actual reasons, versus Terry Eagleton, and focusing on the act itself, indicts the murders by the rape victim. The cycle of retribution leaves her and the blonde boys in Funny Games in basically the same place, except there's the illusion of contracts being fulfilled in I Spit.

But yes, we can intervene in evil. But the trick is in deflecting the desire to punish. That's the irony of modern therapeutic justice, is that the deflection ends up abstracting the act of evil-- essentially, the straightforward vengeance in I Spit is a relief from modern suspension of moral distinctions, just like Dirty Harry. But then the ones playing God aren't the pleasure-seeking murderers of Funny Games, but the avenging angel of I Spit.

Noah Berlatsky

I don't blame the poverty. Rape is wrong, no matter where you are or what's happened to you. Explanation isn't excuse. Or are you on to the republican talking points about how we talking about conditions in the middle east is mollycoddling terrorists?

There isn't an illusion of a contract in I Spit. There's the actuality. Violence between people doesn't come out of the sky like a hurricane; it's part of human interactions and conditions — or karma, if that's your poison.

It is hard to hate the sin and love the sinner, of course. And of course I Spit doesn't solve the problem. But I don't think incarnating the sin in human beings as in Funny Games is an especially useful fix either.

Albert Stabler

Aw heck no! So you're on the bipartisan talking point that since someone in a cave in Afghanistan told someone else to blow up our building, we should invade Afghanistan? With feminist pretensions at that?
I think Funny Games provokes worthwhile thoughts, unlike I Spit, which is basically just scratching an itch.

From: Noah Berlatsky

I really don't think we should have invaded Afghanistan. But not because we can't understand justice.

Watching Funny Games the first version again...I don't know Bert. It seems really shallow and glib to me. Very well done, but with really little to say except the usual stupid serial killer moral. "There are bad people." Oh yeah, and also "Feel guilty for watching TV."

I Spit, on the other hand, actually is interested in how people relate to each other; how class works, how gender works, how that provokes violence, how that affects us and our morality. It's really subtle and thoughtful. I don't know; maybe you'll feel differently about it if you ever see it....

Albert Stabler

But basically, I have some avant-garde-oid investment in a pedagogical approach to morality. I mean, what moral authority do these blonde young nihilism-Nazis have? None! They're not even tough-- but they're not gay either. They're ideal-- they're supermen.

Everyone loves being blamed for their privilege, EXCEPT when it's by someone who shares (and exceeds)that privilege. Basically, the beauty of Funny Games is that of a vulture feeding in the desert, not a cockfight. It's not a guilty pleasure that excuses itself with self-awareness-- it's bloodthirsty pornography that reminds you that actors in pornography have actual lives.

From: Noah Berlatsky

They're pretty tough. They're inhumanly competent, and have the keys to the universe too.

How does it remind you that the people in pornography have lives?

Albert Stabler

That's okay-- we can argue until the 8th. Hey, you should REALLY download the Stargazer/Invocation split from Cosmic Hearse.

The blond predators are clever enough, but they sucker-punch all the way through. And, as good as that keys line is, they don't control the universe- someone gave them a remote, like someone gave them everything else they have. Because it's a fable, a parable, an allegory. It doesn't have characters (even caricatures) like realist/fantasy cinema.

And this is what makes the movie a way to think about the traumatic Real, the contained impenetrable actuality of the people involved. It's a distanced Brechty thing, but with a different kind of materialism-- the figures' physical/cognitive autonomy (or lack thereof) is only elliptically relatable to anything having to do with socioeconomic circumstances. Everyone is wealthy and guilty, but not everyone is a torturer.

Noah Berlatsky

I don't know, Bert. The stuff about the media and violence is really heavy-handed. It's winking and ironic. Brecht is Brecht because he has an ideology; he believes in a Real, which is why there's a distance and something to be distanced from. If it's an allegory, it's an allegory of finger-wagging.

It's well done, and the first time I watched it I was disturbed. But the second time through the glibness got to me. Again, there's a connection to the Eagleton book; I don't actually think the idea of evil as without motivation is either true or helpful. The universe is without motivation that we can parse, and there's certainly a ineffable core of human beings as well. But evil isn't some transcendent projection. It's involved with us. It leaves prints. Their gloves are too white.

Albert Stabler

What stuff about the media? Looking at the camera and using the remote control? No one after Samuel Beckett (or John Hughes?) is allowed to mess with the fourth wall?

I think the truth of evil is sort of banal, as they (all those Hannah Arendts) say-- thus the rather odd dramatic flaccidity of trying to isolate it as a positive force. It's an attitude toward desires and prohibitions, though, more thana cause-and-effect narrative. Those narratives are the stuff of ideologies (laws) that simultaneously proscribe and encourage violence.

People don't really need a motivation to kill, just need permission and an opportunity. It's like sex. And, on that level, that base unspeakable level of evil, white-gloved unending expanding brutality is more interesting than the tired cyclical economy, the historical morass of triggers and targets that feeds on resentment and retribution. But on the level of drama, the cyclical economy is where it's at. The fingerprints are what stoke the promiscuous furnace of endless punishment.

Noah Berlatsky

There's lots of stuff about television and entertainment in that movie, Bert. The first thing Anna does after her son is killed and she gets to her feet is turn off the tv. Haneke's said it's about media violence in interviews too, I think.

I'm really not sure that it's true that people don't need a motivation to kill. There's always a motivation for sex; there's a fairly clear biological imperative. And, you know, even with wars and all, people have sex a lot more often than they kill each other.

Evil is a negation, not a cause and effect; I agree with that. Male bonding doesn't make those men rape. But I Spit acknowledges that; it specifically makes them individually responsible for their actions, even as it shows the way that that individual responsibility is expressed and takes on shape through a social world. Funny Games just abstracts evil — which to me makes it a lot less interesting — especially when the abstraction ends up being recursively about media-images self-generating their own violence and guilt.

I get what you're saying about law being the cause of crime and crime being the cause of law in an endless circle. Obviously, that's part of what rape/revenge is about. At the same time, I don't think justice or the desire for it is evil. Justice and mercy aren't opposites.

Albert Stabler

Justice and mercy are totally connected. But it's not like commenting on abstract evil is some kind of tired trope, in the way rape vengeance is (lynching?).

I mean, FG is a meta movie-- that's its genre. I can imagine he said it's about "media violence." But, like the Iliad, it's also just about violence. Do you think any media isn't "about" other media? The family having NASCAR on while they're being tortured is a pretty fantastic mise-en-scene (if I'm using that right), but the rape-revenge conceit is absolutely about other narratives, even if it's not trying to provide a "meta" perspective (which it ends up doing anyway, I think you'd agree).
You think people have sex (or kill) for primarily (or even vaguely) rational reasons? Come now.

Noah Berlatsky

Sure, I Spit is about other narratives. It doesn't explicitly suggest that violence is caused by viewing media, or that the primary way we're implicated in violence is through watching TV. Funny Games comes awfully close to suggesting both those things.

Biological imperatives aren't rational in the way such things are usually understood, are they?

Albert Stabler

I think it's worth bringing in Quentin Tarantino here. His movies are full of consciously aesthicized brutality that comments on aestheticized brutality, and he takes a lot of flak for it. But his end result is humor, not horror. Not that I object, quite the opposite. But he uses humor, as well as the righteous vengeance fantasy, so that probably makes him more palatable.

Biological imperatives are seperate from vengeance. It takes a complex (if not always human) mind to come up with vengeance. Killing and fornicating are pretty universal to life. It's worth thinking about what a motive actually adds to that equasion, especially in a voyeuristic situation.

Noah Berlatsky

Tarantino is very interested in reasons, though, and in individuals. His characters are never just supercompetent avatars of evil; on the contrary, his evil characters tend to be doofuses and fuck-ups. He has a sense of karma, too; not just vengeance — that is, one's actions tend to have an effect. You get what you do.

I'd say that Funny Games obviously owes something to Tarantino's films — Funny Games is definitely very ironic, and not entirely unfunny. I find it a lot thinner, though — precisely because the iconic treatment of evil seems to add little to the insight that killing is something some (bad) people do.

Albert Stabler

Quentin Tarantino makes his women wild and mean-- but his movies are a lot more fun than Funny Games. I agree. They're partially comedies-- action comedies, basically, with romance and a lesson at the end. The plot lines and elements are strictly humanist realist-- so you get dipwads blowing off someone's head when the car hits a bump. Funny and not funny. You feel bad for laughing, but you laugh.

Whereas the Funny Games comedy, such as it is, is Osama bin Laden (or Dick Cheney, pick your cave-dwelling mass murderer) doing standup. So when you feel bad, it's not because you laughed, or because you actually wanted the family to be humiliated and tortured and murdered, or even because you can't help them, but because it's just straightforwardly pleasurable to witness cruelty-- and easy to not really care about perfectly normal, non-quirky, sympathetic characters.

And, when you root for the underdog, or seek justice, or pray for karma to punish the wealthy, at bottom it's the same drive. We are people who took picnics to watch Civil War battles, and now we get the same pleasure from watching the news. And it's not the excusable swaggering pulpiness of Tarantino, or Natural Born Killers, but a long static silence as a woman who could be your co-worker weeps quietly over the corpse of her only child. Lots of people get angry at the director, but that just seems like one way to cope with the complicated experience of watching that undeniably beautiful scene.

Noah Berlatsky

But a lot of people just find the film irritating or unpleasant...or a little boring my second time through. I don't think it is straightforwardly pleasurable to witness cruelty at all. I mean, it might be masochistically pleasurable — but that's almost by definition not straightforward.

I think the movie may posit that it's straightforwardly pleasurable to witness these acts; that's the implicating the viewer part. But just because it wants it to be true doesn't make it so.

Albert Stabler

Well, that's the sublime for you. People aren't accustomed to thinking of a hurricane or a volcano or a wildfire as beautiful, but that was once the fashion. It's kind of the way tragedy was translated into Romanticism, and then tragedy became horror.

It's not entertaining, it's beautiful. There's a difference. Slow-motion kung fu is a lot different than a landslide.

I don't think the viewer is really implicated, for the record. I think the viewer is included, but the space of the movie is an extraordinary space of bloodletting. There's just nobody who wants to stand around and watch a hanging anymore. Which would be fine, if we didn't pretend we were past it, while consuming the agony of the Other in various sublimated forms in everything from rap music to National Geographic.

Noah Berlatsky

But a hanging is about vengeance and just deserts. It's not random cruelty. And, conversely, I think people are quite used to thinking of a hurricane or a storm or a volcano as beautiful, actually. We're not that far form the romantics.

Funny Games doesn't fit either of these analogies. It's deliberately unreal villains given the power of a force of nature. It undermines genre tropes and narrative closure in the interest, not of the sublime, but of an ironized accusation of cynicism. My dislike of it isn't because I refuse to embrace the suppressed sublime death instinct, but because I'm tired of embracing the not at all suppressed political exhaustion and wise-guy pragmatic nihilism which has been a staple of our political life for decades.

Albert Stabler

Eh. Attending a public hanging (if you're not connected to the victim of the crime or the victim of the hanging) is about having a permission to watch a person twitch on the end of a rope.

This is why I brought up Tarantino. Everyone says, "Oh, he's so ironic and postmodern and glib." And yet he is saying "interracial relationships and loyalty and mercy are good." And Haneke is saying "Rich alienated white people are alienated even vicious to each other." Where are the air-quotes? You think people aren't supposed to feel anything when they see the slaughter? The smug Hitler guy is the hero?

In the like three times the killer looks at the camera? How does that make him our buddy?

Is the movie telling us to vote for Sarah Palin? What's the issue?

Noah Berlatsky

The reason that they feel they have permission, though, is because there's the claim that justice is being done.

The smug guy isn't the hero or our buddy, necessarily. But he's definitely right, in some sense; the filmmaker is on his side, his vision of the world is the correct one (literally — he knows he's in a movie.) And that vision is one which specifically mocks the desire for justice as impotent and naive. The media violence which is denigrated is just violence — and I think the film makes little effort to separate the justice out from the violence.

I'd agree that the film makes some effort to show that rich people torture each other and are miserable. I don't actually find that argument all that persuasive — I don't think rich people are especially more likely to torture each other than poor people, nor that they are more sadistic, nor certainly that they're less happy. It seems like a sop, really, to replace the idea of justice which is so roundly sneered at.

I mean, I don't hate the movie or anything. It's well acted, well directed, and well constructed, and the masochistic tension is really well done. I even like the idea of subverting the rape-revenge narrative, since, you know, I'm kind of a knee-jerk pacifist and I think revenge narratives are really problematic. But, again, I have a real problem with abstracting evil in the way this movie does it.

Noah Berlatsky

You know, it's not entirely different from Baldwin's critique of the Exorcist, now that I think about it. The portrayal of evil as separate from motivations and cause/effect (literally linked to transcendence in both Exorcist and Funny Games) ends up seeming evasive. I think both the Exorcist and Funny Games point in some interesting directions with their evasions — reveal tensions and issues around those evasions — but ultimately they both still feel duplicitous, at least to me.

Albert Stabler

Just for that, I went back and read the Baldwin essay. I see your point-- the evil is banal and unmotivated in Funny Games, just like in the Exorcist, and I think we both appreciate the Exorcist more than Baldwin did. But Baldwin talks about the evil in the eyes of the white sheriff, the housewife, etc., and frankly, I think the white privileged environment is les of a sop than you claim. It's not an excuse for evil-- it's precisely the absence of an excuse for evil. And there's nothing sci-fi about it (except for the remote control thing, which is just an acknowledgement of movie-ness)-- there's no question that the active pleasure-seeking of elites (the torturers) and the insular passivity of elites (the family) has caused a great deal of the world's misery.

So, again, making something a parable does not, to me, make it abstract.

But one point on which I'm sort of with you is that there's a pretty defensible argument that the lead torturer is (if self-consciously so, post- Natural Born Killers) something of an antihero-- "This is the real world, jackass! Eat lead!" I feel like the evil in his eyes is the same blue-eyed evil of the hate-mongering one-man black metal band, though, that stands for something awful and profound even if he's just whaling on a guitar and a drum machine and spewing noxious pablam.

Noah Berlatsky

Yeah, I like the Exorcist more than Baldwin does.

The problem is that the active pleasure seeking and the insular passivity doesn't, I don't think, primarily make the elites miserable. Cutting out the rest of the world makes it hard to see what's at stake. It doesn't excuse evil (which I don't think the exorcist does either) but it doesn't really grapple with what evil is in the world. It's not demons possessing your child or sociopaths taking your golf clubs, you know?

I'd argue that the best black metal actually isn't stupid or banal. Pyha has content, damn it. (Pacifist content at that.)

Albert Stabler

I guess that's sort of the difference between morality and ethics. If you chop down a tree in the forest and nobody sees you, are you still despoiling the environment? Or if you kill a man in the forest and nobody cares, are you still a murderer?

What kind of horror movie would Baldwin like? Night of the Living Dead?

I wonder how he would feel about Rosemary's Baby, or Stepford Wives. Or Turn of the Screw. Insular and claustrophobic is actually really important in horror. That's the nature of the Law. It's moral.

He actually mentions Wuthering Heights disparagingly in the Exorcist review-- there's this idea that the only responsible movie is an edifying portrait of existing social relations, sobering yet inspiring meaningful change. .I'm sorry, that's not horror. It can be drama or comedy, or some kind of cleverly compromised quasi-horror fantasy, but it's not truly dark if it has a clear ethical beacon.

Noah Berlatsky

The opposite of transcendent evil doesn't have to be a story of moral purity, or a story in which there's a clear moral beacon. And I don't think claustrophobic has to mean insular.

The version of the Exorcist that Baldwin would like is Angel Heart. Which is a fantastic movie.

And yeah, I bet he'd find something to like in Night of the Living Dead too.

Albert Stabler

Angel Heart is a really good movie, as I remember it, and as psychological thrillers go. And it has many plot parallels with the Exorcist-- there's possession of secondary characters reflected in a main character.

And yet, I really think of Funny Games and the Exorcist (and probably I Spit) as being (if arguably) not really the same kind of movie. All of these movies are closer to horror than thriller, I think, because of the lack of ethical direction in the plot. Horror, like metal, is at its purest when it's emphasizing a highly symvolic internal experience-- a nightmare-- that the viewer (listener) is supposed to be experiencing as well.

Romero zombie movies and Angel Heart are completely great-- they're just completely transparent. Order is in some way restored at the end, and was never truly absent. I Spit is on the fence, because I imagine the bloody revenge can be, despite its satisfying qualities, experienced as a step further into the abyss, rather than out of it.

Noah Berlatsky

I need to see Angel Heart again. I think it's as much horror as psychological thriller, though. Certainly, order isn't restored in any sense more than it is in the exorcist. In the Exorcist, the demon is expelled; though the main character is killed. In Angel Heart, the devil is revealed to be the main character — only after he's killed just about every other main character, and fucked and killed his own daughter. It's a pretty bleak vision.

Order is ritually restored at the end of slasher films as well. Or in Alien, or Terminator, all of which are arguably horror films. Not so much in The Thing...but again evil there is very much in relationships and anxiety about relationships, not
it isn't postulated as transcendent.

I think there's a way in which Funny Games is actually *less* horror than all those examples. Carol Clover argues that masochistic identification is central to horror. Funny Games is definitely ambivalent
about whether it wants to be sadistic or masochistic. You see that not only in its looks to the camera, but in its careful construction — the focus on time, the playful, icy control with which it puts all the
violence off screen. Even the repetition suggested by the precise remake; there's a rage for order there, an insistent control, that's different from the anxiously abject spewing of horror films.
Funny Games comes off as auteurish in a Hitchcock way.

Albert Stabler

Yeah, Hitchcock has some pretty harsh control, as does Haneke, and Haneke's protagonist antihero. And plenty of people die in thrillers/slashers (Psycho, Blue Velvet, I Spit, Angel Heart), or sci-fi-noir (like Alien and Terminator), but the nature of a movie where everything is revealed to be a torrential void of power lust and total chaos, which may borrow nearly every trope, has an important distinction in terms of content and thus the overall level of despair. Which, yes, is sadistic, I think. Also in The Thing-- there is awe before the monster, and Kurt Russell conquers it like Moby Dick, or a colonized population in Kipling.

Masochism is always about wrapping up loose narrative ends-- wearing costumes, delaying gratification, and looking forward to relieving the anguish. It recalls the distinction you once made between metal and other rock music that metal (like sadism, I would say) absolutely denies erotics-- libido is directed toward destruction. Sadism is ultra-male, always about a sensation of pitiless mastery. It's perhaps the most despicable side-effect of desire, but once you see it, it does (as in the Funny Games antihero) carry a sense of thunderous truth. Tree of Knowledge-- freedom and self-awareness are always about shame and perversion, dissonance and strife, as well as sublimated access to a silent place outside conscious everyday reality.

Queering the Eschaton

2010-07-08T21:18:00.000-07:00

I'm reading Oscar Cullman's Christ and Time, about how "Primitive Christianity" regarded the Crucifixion as the midpoint of the history of Creation, and the action if Christ's redemption in the world as part of a human time frame that was drawing to a close. And I'm also skimming online the book No Future, by Lee Edelman, about how the queer death drive, the jouissance of the Real, ironically interrupts the future-narrative of endless social reproduction, the foundation of all politics always.

Following a Lacan quote Edelman says: "Truth, like queerness, is irreducibly linked to the aberrant or atypical, to what chafes against normalization, finds its value not in a good susceptible to normalization, but only in the stubborn particularity that voids every notion of a general good."

Also "queerness can never define an identity; it can only disturb one."

I'm kind of interested in the extent to which one can go around switching the word "Christ" and "Queerness." "Jesus" is a specific person, which seems a little awkward. But saying that Christ is essentially not an identity, but the disturbance of identity, that makes sense. Having a really skinny "Christ Pride" parade in between the gay pride people and the gay hate people makes sense.

Not that hate is out of the love equasion. Luke 14:26: "If anyone comes to Me, and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be My disciple." Which vibes pretty well with the skepticism of the family expressed not only by Edelman, and Andrea Dworkin, and Shulamith Firestone, but St. Paul as well. "Let those with wives be as if they had none."

Another example, with "queerness" replaced... he's talking about queerness as the indigestible supplement that allows the Symbolic to function:

"Christ as name may well reinforce the the Symbolic order of naming, but it names what resists, as signifier, absorption into the Imaginary identity of that name. Empty, excessive, and irreducible, it designates the letter, the formal element, the lifeless machinery responsible for animating the 'spirit' of futurity. And, as such, as a name for the death drive that always informs the Symbolic order, it also names the jouissance forbidden by, but always permeating the Symbolic order itself."

He then goes on to say that, despite queers (Christians) disidentifying with queerness (Christ) in order to enter politics: "the structured portion of queerness (Christ), and the need to fill it, remains."

And his answer to the radical vision of a gay utopia (and any earthly paradise): "In the beyond of demystification, in that neutral, democratic literality that marks the futurism of the left, one could only encounter a queer dismantling of futurism itself as fantasy and a derealization of the order that futurism reproduces."

the black scab over our birth wound

2010-05-16T14:58:00.001-07:00

More Kant-roversial Kant-versation between Noah and Bert about the feasibility of faith. It gets acrimonious, I promise!

Bert:

Here's the thing I've realized I can't resolve satisfactorily, which may please you. Law, difference, multiplicity, all emerge as secondary, albeit essential, phenomena-- because essence is meaning, and meaning is symbolic. This would include the subject, the conscience, moral knowledge, all those things. That which is primary but arises contingently is what cannot be seen or quantified-- the semiotic stew of feelings arising in the womb, when we are indistinguishable from our mother, which is synonymous with our embodiment, our meat nature, which precedes any ideas about law, which subsequently rebuilds us in its image. This could also include Darwin-- evolution is, in some way, based on everything changing imperceptibly but miraculously, beings not arising in an instant but over time, the visible product of a process of ravenous expansion.

The problem is that I end up with reason embodied in matter on one side and spirit embodied in matter on the other. So there's that. To your point, Kant is pretty much okay with the former, the symbolic realm being essential (and encased) in its absoluteness. I think he more or less expects our consciences to function as transmitters of a absolute natural force of moral truth, known as "duty."

I don't contend that this is bad or evil. I just see it as an extension of the Protestant automaton problem. Respect is a poor substitute for humility, tolerance is a poor substitute for love, just like revolution is a poor substitute for detachment.

I've been looking at Kant on contingency and necessity (in Critique of Pure Reason). His contingency realm is the empirical realm. endless deferral (why doesn't anyone ever accuse him of being pomo?). The necessary, the ground for being, if it existed (it's phrased sort of hypothetically), would be transcendent, separate from worldly experience-- exiled in the mind. That's language. It's inside of us.

However... in discussing hand-washing with the Pharisees, Jesus says that what is unclean is what comes out of us. Our hearts are unclean (just as the sin in Eden was not nakedness but shame). What we take in is from God. Goodness is in the world, but only in its presence, not in its symptomatic inevitability, which is indistinguishable from our understanding of its symptomatic inevitability. Same difference between obeying and judging. Conversely, I think there's not really a Spirit in Kant. "Spirit" is more like "principle," like as opposed to "practice." Moral truth exists transcendently, in your mind, but so do space and time and math.

What I was talking about with materialism was, to use Zizek's example of quantum physics, empiricism has reached a limit of comprehension, like a lo-res image blown up to a blur and then flat pixels, which are the absolute atom of the image. The perceptual apparatus is caught up in the phenomena being perceived such that you can say our brains are meat and electricity, you can say the universe is virtual reality, but either way your comprehension has allowed you to dispense with the world outside of your apprehension. Ergo, materialism is idealism.

Pragmatism, on the other hand, dispenses with comprehension, merely apprehending-- specifically apprehending possibilities, specifically those with the most authority. This isn't any less related to self-worship. If authority is mystically asserted (like people speaking in tongues in Paul), or politically asserted (like Caesar levying taxes in the Gospels), that's well and good, but hardly as important as our own responsibility to obey and love-- acts of will.

Noah:

I'm not sure what you mean by saying reason is embodied in matter on one side and spirit is embodied in matter on the other. It seems to me like reason is embodied in language — which can certainly be seen as material if you want, though is also evolutionarily so bizarre and contingent that you can fairly easily point somewhere else and say "god did it" without falling into any obvious logical fallacy that I can see. In any case, I don't really see at all why spirit has to be embodied in matter. I don't really see why the body/language split has to do with spirit at all, actually. In fact, it seems like spirit is a fairly logical other; a way out of a binary maybe?

I guess the point is that Kant is making spirit language rather than something else? Which is possible I guess...though, on the other hand — I think to me the point is maybe that if spirit is a third term, if you don't really have a binary, then everything doesn't have to be this or that, one or the other. The moral law (or language) can be connected to spirit in some cases, and not in others, I'd think. That's where contingency comes in; god intervenes in ways which aren't predictable or quantifiable. If they were, they wouldn't be contingent. When you see spirit, it's always in terms of matter — which is why we see through a glass darkly. Sometimes you can hear it in your heart, perhaps — which is what Kant is saying — though he does sometimes make it seem more rote or certain than maybe makes sense.

Sort of the anti-Einstein position; god to be god doesn't do anything except play dice with the universe.

Bert:

Saying "how you look at it" is a meaningful qualifier there. Because if "chance" is really crazy random entropy (although entropy itself isn't really random), "chance" resulting in amazing new levels of complexity and beauty maybe shouldn't be slandered with such a pathetic label as "chance."

Yeah, you could call it a Freud thing. Language and law are absolutely related. Language wires us. It is the black scab over our birth wound on which all of our reality can cohere and rest.

Morality is not optional. The difference between morality and ethics is extremely important to me, and I think one part of it is the sovereign guarantee of morality, and the fact that ethics (as in Kant) does not address free subjects, but is an primal authoritarian prop which (as in capitalism) allows no end of loopholes, loopholes so large that the rules might as well, except for their fig-leaf function, completely disappear.

Eckhart claims that justice (at least for "the just man") is more important than God. To me that means that justice is always our reponsibility, whereas we are God's responsibility.

I don't think that means that God is inside or outside the law, precisely, but it is attached to Him. But God is not the Law. The Law was the Word of God. But then the Word became Flesh.

The emperor was a motif for Paul, Jesus, etc., not Kant-- Kant is too modern for that. My Kant issue has more to do with what I would call personal responsibility. If morality is just some sort of base for logic, like exploitation is the basis for capitalism, it is a kind of Real, but an abject one that allows people to get away with what is not explicitly denied.

I am certainly not saying that language is not material. And materialists believe in the void more ardently than anyone, Zizek says that explicitly, which is also my issue with Kant, since idealists and materialists are indistinguishable in my argument. I'm just saying that there's a contradiction in the very fact of using language to push reality (the referent) further and further away from solid matter, untill even space and time start to disintegrate. The mall is now the internet. And the future of everything is heat death.

Once one has arrived at the void, why does anyone want to stay there? What are they hiding from?

Noah:

Darwin calls chance "natural selection". Probably not the different label you wanted quite, though.....

I'm not sure I get your morality/ethics distinction. I'm not sure either why you feel that ethics for Kant isn't about free subjects. As I said, Kant definitely thinks that choosing morality is about choosing freedom (or that the only way you can be free is to choose morality.) Maybe I'm wrong, but I don’t think he set out a list of ethical codes which you were supposed to follow. Morality is about conscience for him, which is also God, or God speaking in us. It's not clear to me why that involves loopholes; I know Kant is supposed to be super-legalistic, but he just doesn't seem that way to me especially.

Your arguments about morality just don't sound unKantian to me, which makes it weird that you keep disavowing him. Probably I should go back and read Kant again, is what should happen. In theory.

Why are idealists and materialists indistinguishable? And how are they pushing language further away from solid matter? I'm totally not following that.

Again, I think with Kant God is inside and outside; he's transcendent (outside the universe) but reaches inside (especially inside us). It's both/and I think, not either/or — and you need both/and if god is going to have some material affect, since if he's entirely outside he can't move anything, which is deism.

I still don't know that I'm getting the materialism=idealism thing. I guess you're saying that they're the same in that they both assume a human vision of the world is sufficient or fully explanatory (whether physical or mental)?

I'm also not sure I follow your emphasis on will precisely. Are you saying god exists through a human act of will? Or (more likely) that the important part of religion is not understanding god but deciding to follow him (which sounds somewhat like what that essayist you sort of half didn't like was saying....)

Bert:

Okay, let's deal with one thing at a time. Marxist materialism, which is really what we're talking about nowadays, says that history reflects a shifting set of relationships that boil down to who controls material resources. What keeps this from being just a pure power analysis is that there is a progressive teleology, an emphasis on economic production as the engine of that teleology, and a strong emphasis in production on the human source of value, known as labor. Marx inverted teleological Hegelian idealism, interestingly enough, rather than borrowing from Hobbes or Bacon or Epicurus or something. Hegel the idealist basically boiled the universe down to irony, and Marx the materialist made it tragic irony.

Materialists now cling to the notion of relations (social relations in the case of Marxists) because of (note the root) relativity, which sort of equates, or at least problematizes distinctions between, matter and energy. What makes it materialism is really its hard core-- phenomena are evidence of causes, and these causes wind up with some Ultimate Cause-- whether it's technological appropriation of resources for Marx, or the monad for Spinoza. Or, for idealists, it's the void of multiples (Hegel), or the a priori (Kant). So, to continue to cling to either mind or substance as the only truth (after relativity and neuroscience and quantum physics), you end up with mind and/or substance dissolving before your very eyes.

There is no inside God and outside God. Those are all arbitrary designations (inside, outside, and God). There is only the Absolute, and then there's the phenomenal smokescreen that obscures our clear perception of the Absolute. Language has some connection (often through math) to the fabric of reality. So relations are real, relativity is real, but not relativism. That's where pragmatism comes in, and the whole embracing (rather than denigration) of arbitrary terms, but I'll stop there for now.

Do you see where I'm coming from?

Noah:

Well, I see where you're coming from more or less. I don't know that I'm coming from quite the same place.

"There is no inside God and outside God. Those are all arbitrary designations (inside, outside, and God). There is only the Absolute, and then there's the phenomenal smokescreen that obscures our clear perception of the Absolute."

I mean, sure, the distinctions are arbitrary. They're metaphors, which is language, which is what we have to talk about the world. When you say "Absolute" and "phenomenal smokescreen", you're not getting anywhere outside of metaphor, though. You're just using a gnostic metaphor rather than a Kantian metaphor. I actually think Kant, who doesn't break things down into perception and absolute, but rather places absolute in a (confusing, metaphorical, but nonetheless) relationship with the world we've got is more subtle than the idea that the world simply obscures our idea of the absolute. The absolute is in the world too, though not the same thing as the world. We see through a glass darkly...but maybe not always, and we do see something.

Perhaps you're saying that as well, I'm not sure....

Bert:

How Wittgenstein. Just throw up your hands-- "it's all metaphors, you say God, I say potato salad."

In Kant, God is a limiting principle of possibility. Space, time, morality, it's all projected by the subject, that's what makes it transcendent. God is what a "thing in itself" would be.

I don't dismiss C.S. Lewis' Christianity, so I don't dismiss Kant's. But Kant ABSOLUTELY breaks things down into two categories: phenomenal and noumenal. There is only contingent and necessary, conditional and unconditional. It's entirely a logic founded on an empty center.

Noah:

It is all metaphors...but that doesn't make me throw up my hands. God is in metaphors too...very much so in Christianity, which is based on a book. You're the one who seems to think that metaphors, or the physical world, is somehow keeping us from apprehending God.

You're really demanding I read Kant and refute you (or else cave, as the case may be.) Unfortunately, I'm reading more Niebuhr now, so it'll take me a while to get to some other theology....

Bert:

Noah my friend, I don't need you to go back and read Kant, but you want to focus on him as a problem in my (thoroughly seat of my half-assed pants) attempt at a divine ontology. Which is totally reasonable of you, and I'm sorry if I was snide, but I am trying in my own bumbling way to respond.

And, speaking of ontology, it may be what philosophers mean when they say metaphysics, since Kant was trying to dispense with both of those things centuries before Nietzsche and William James and Heidegger. Milbank rather sympathetically reads Zizek trying to use Hegel as a way to have a metaphysics after metaphysics (via nihilism, quoth Milbank). Similarly, I think "God is dead" is not a meaningless soundbite, and there's some plane in which resurrection needs to be re-enacted, although, as with metaphysics, I think it actually probably has to happen all the time, every century or generation or decade.

Not to be a jerk, but Kant really does open up Chapter III of Pure Reason talking, with very self-conscious metaphors, about truth and illusion. "We have now... traversed the region of the pure understanding...But this land is an island, and inclosed by nature herself within unchangeable limits. It is the land of truth (an attractive word), surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean, the sea of illusion..." He then goes on with the topical metaphor of colonial exploration, sort of as a rather futile exercise in adventurism and blind alleys, which is a great way to use that metaphor. However, all of this truth about the transcendent schemata of knowledge are inherently without content, which is where the phenomenal world comes in. It may be futile to leave the island, but it is utterly barren, so there's sort of no choice. It's like Plato, but more tragicomic and less heroic.

I'm still figuring out what I think. But your third option is definitely where Milbank is. Hegel submitted that the Divine was in Being rather than Essence, the void of multiplicity, which is Deleuze's thing as well. My thing is definitely to go with Jesus on the point that nothing pure issues from us, and the mind is definitely the seat of Essence. There is something dangerous in idealizing the Stoics, which Paul was very cautious about, but, liike Kant, he was not trying to abandon language and knowledge and reason. Unlike Kant, I thnik he was much more willing to turn them back against themselves.

A God that pursues us, that moves in and out of us, is not an abstract principle of wisdom, nor a form of primal electromagnetism, but something else that contains elements of both of those things. Our wanting and changing and experiencing and relating are the things that are most relevant to God and to faith. I'm not totally satisfied with the way Kant addresses this, but he certainly tries, and for faith after the death of God, that's an important start.

Noah:

I need to lend you this Niebuhr book, maybe. He's really smart — he has fun things to say about the stoics for example, where he argues that obviously they're wrong in many ways, but that Christians can learn from their refusal to believe that God has given them a special dispensation.

He's also way more concrete than Kant/Zizek/etc.; more concerned with Christians relationship to God and to the world in a somewhat straightforward way than with the questions about ontology and language and reason — which I think may be helpful.

Bert:

I would, as a perhaps petty parting shot, mention that bracketing off those murky abstruse topics (from something as relevant as theology), is a pragmatist take, which Kant can certainly underwrite, even if it's not exactly what he's doing.

Noah:

I guess it is pragmatist. I wonder though...is there a theological imperative of some sort to talk in a way so that some non-negligible group of Christians can actually understand what you're talking about? This is actually a real problem for Kant and later Hegel — they were both thoroughly elitist, and not at all interested in having anyone except university professors understand what they were talking about. C.S. Lewis is obviously very different from Kant in that way, if not in others.

Niebuhr is very concerned with politics, and many of his essays in the book I'm reading are sermons, so there's definitely some effort to talk to other people. And Zizek obviously doesn't necessarily care whether anyone understands him or not, really.

I guess I feel like you seem to be in a position where you're pushing God away from the world in a way that looks somewhat like gnosticism, and then you're coming down hard on the idea that you can approach god through metaphor. That seems to be cutting God off from everybody, especially from everybody who doesn't have some fairly extreme interests/training in philosophy. How does that fit into an idea of a Christian community, is the thing I guess I'm wondering about.

Or, to put it maybe another way...

human beings pretty much have to be pragmatist in a lot of ways. Being a pragmatist is another way of saying you're in the world, or subjected to the world. I don't really see how you get out of that, or find an intellectual position that doesn't rely on pragmatism to some degree, without an appeal to grace.

Bert:

Okay, now you're ragging on Kant. I'm definitely having fun now.

I don't know that, if we're speaking pragmatically about my religious ideas, that my words are the place to look. My practice is that I attend a church every week, I participate in church activities, I'm working on a project with my church, and my job, whatever its gaping flaws, is vaguely philanthropic, if it has any redeeming quality whatsoever. I also write about contemporary art, a somewhat obscure topic to many people, in a pretty populist idiom. Hardly a crusader for the underclass, but not an ivory-tower pundit wank either.

My words reflect something other than practice. They relfect inner experiences, and an attempt to put them into words. And I beg to differ with that highly pragmatist last assertion of yours, which attempts to assume that strange tautological authority, "Everyone is doing pragmatism even if they think they aren't." How humanist can you get? "You're a human, so you must be humanist. Your profoundly demystified self-awareness told me so." I don't want to just accept that. I have other things on my mind.

Religion is where everyday people go to process deep issues of the cosmos. Certainly there are some lower- to medium-educated people, whether or not they read William James, who have no time for issues like death and existence and morality and truth. But I find it far more elitist to presume that a "community" of people don't care about the nature of love.

And I'm inquiring about these things on my own behalf. I am perfectly willing to try to explain my philosophy or my beliefs to my custodian, if he cares, but he really isn't that kind of guy. I probably wouldn't use the word "ontological." I would use metaphors.

Which brings me to that point-- I would care about my metaphors. I wouldn't say, "oh, they're just metaphors." If they were inadequate, then I would try to find better ones. Such os language. My probelm is with calling the whole thing a big game (or mall) and just throwing the whole thing back on some sort of question of "efficacy." I'll worry about my own efficacy-- but ideas are important in a different way.

God is in the world, all the time. He is in me and outside of me. But he's not in what I perceive. He is in the impossibility of my perceptions being somehow "true," and in the impossibility of communicating my perception to anyone else. He is in me wanting to perceive true things and share those perceptions. He is very, very hard to describe. He is just, but he is not utilitarian.

Noah:

I don't disagree with most of that. I will point out that when you were sneering at my metaphors, you were sneering at them as far as I could tell because they were metaphors, not because they were inadequate metaphors.

I didn't say everyone was doing pragmatism. I said that pragmatism — a basic interest in how things work, in how we feed ourselves, in how we find a place to go to the bathroom — is pretty universal; it's what the philosophical movement glommed onto, rather than the other way round. I think I reject the argument, which you seem to be inching towards, that pragmatic concerns can't have anything to do with god, or are by their nature less true, or more corrupt, than other kinds of concerns or ideas. I think there's maybe an effort to get away from Marxism there which I'm not entirely on board with. People do worry about the nature of love, but they worry about other things too. I don't need to privilege the second, but I'm leery of privileging the first all the time at the expense of the second too.

I do like Niebuhr a lot on this sort of thing. Basically, he adopts relativism through universalism. He sees god as an ideal, and human actions and ideas and points of view can participate, or really look towards that ideal, though they're always partial and corrupt.

Niebuhr talks a bit about a utilitarian perception of God (I will pray and God will help me.) He points out that it's a pretty natural take on religion, though not a Christian one. But he also talks about self-preservation and really capitalism and democracy as having a place and a kind of justice, though never as much of divine justice as its proponents like to tell themselves it does.

"God is in the world, all the time. He is in me and outside of me. But he's not in what I perceive. He is in the impossibility of my perceptions being somehow "true," and in the impossibility of communicating my perception to anyone else. He is in me wanting to perceive true things and share those perceptions. He is very, very hard to describe. He is just, but he is not utilitarian."

Why isn't he in what you perceive? Who made your eyes? Who made the light? Who made the computer screen you're staring at? How can the created world be good if you have no access to it?

You can't see all of what's true, because you're not god, but that doesn't mean you're isolated in some sort of blank bottle with your eyes taped shut. I feel like in your eagerness to reject materialism in its various forms (utilitarianism, pragmatism, etc.) you're drawing some sort of impassable border around your brain. It's like in trying to outfox the enlightenment you've decided to be more cartesian than descartes. Is that really where you want to end up?

Also, I don't mean at all to say that you're somehow not sufficiently involved in your community — I mean, obviously you do way better than that than I do. But it seems like you're really bracketing that kind of experience when you talk about this stuff in a way that seems limiting to me.

It could be that I'm just not understanding you, though.

Bert:

Au contraire, good sir. Allow me to point out who was sneering at whose metaphors:

"I mean, sure, the distinctions are arbitrary. They're metaphors, which is language, which is what we have to talk about the world. When you say "Absolute" and "phenomenal smokescreen", you're not getting anywhere outside of metaphor, though. You're just using a gnostic metaphor rather than a Kantian metaphor."

I merely sneered back. And I certainly didn't cal you anything on the scale of "gnostic." That's a low blow. And "elitist?" "Cartesian?" I just compared you to Wittgenstein, who is widely respected. And potato salad, a perennial picnic favorite.

Now you can call me a martyr.

Remember that Ambrose Bierce quote about reality as it really truly is, seen through the eyes of a toad? Pragmatism is (in a way) like that, or like Paul Fussell's "Class X"-- the modest observer seems transcendently immanently value-neutral, until you really think about it. Making acknowledgement of the divine something special is very important to lots of people. They use special words, they go to a special place, they do special things.

But, back to the profane, I brought up going to the bathroom before you did. The whole thing about how Jesus says everything that comes out of us is unclean. Doodoo!

When Chesterton has that thing in "The Man Who Was Thursday" about the anarchist exulting the tree over the streetlamp, and the protagonist points out that right now you're looking at the tree by the light of the streetlamp, or the miracle of good digestion, I think one legitimate way to see that is that everyday reality is more meaningful than fantasies about magical primeval nature. True enough also for your point about my eyes or the computer screen. But it's also the case that Chesterton, as with the sun rising every day in "Orthodoxy," emphasizes the way in which everyday things are viewed, and the fact that they exist, quite in opposition to their mundanity.

Gratitude, obedience, and responsibility are essential. Those all have to do with the everyday. I'm not denigrating the world, but rather our way of knowing it.

I'm a Zizek fan. Of course I don't hate Marxism. Marx, Freud, and Jesus are my modern Jewish troika of anti-humanism. But I don't see the death of God (or the Big Other) as a trivial issue or a desirable state of affairs.

If you want to talk about economics, let's talk about economics. But that's at least somewhat changing the subject. There is basically no attempt to deal with religion progressively other than as a model for economic or legal liberation (civil rights, liberation theology), and when God becomes a stand-in for Human Rights, I think it's a problem for many people. Not that pursuing justice has to be a religiously inspired pursuit, or that justice cannot subsume all other aspects of God for the just person (after Eckhart). But justice is not my only interest in religion. It connects to lots of internal questions, and I don't think that makes me elitist.

Simply put, I reject an instrumentalist God. Or an anstract God. They don't appeal to me. And that may form some political opinions, but it doesn't make me reject the world.

Noah:

You sneered first!

Besides, I said sneering at particular metaphors made sense. The point was that you appeared to be sneering at the use of metaphors at all, which I think is really problematic.

"Simply put, I reject an instrumentalist God. Or an anstract God. They don't appeal to me. And that may form some political opinions, but it doesn't make me reject the world. "

I presume that's abstract God?

You say that rejecting an instrumentalist God doesn't make you reject the world...but I'm not sure that quite lines up with claiming that you're unable to perceive anything. Denigrating "our way of knowing" the world — whose way is that? Where did it come from? How is our way of knowing the world not part of the world, and how is rejecting the big part of the world we call "knowing the world" practically (there's that word) different from rejecting the world?

I don't think religion has to be only about justice...but I do feel like it should probably be about people (at least insofar as it involves people.) And if it's going to be about people, it really has to exist in language, because that's where people are. I don't know; maybe you agree with that. But it seems in part like you want to get out of language, or put god outside language, or make language equivalent to the law which christ unravels (back to eden.) Which is mysticism, basically, which certainly has a long pedigree and, as they say, a witness. At the same time...I think you maybe get it right when you say "it doesn't appeal to me." I think there are maybe other witnesses you could have too, and I don't think they're necessarily more corrupt.

I guess I just don't see calling language corrupt, or duty corrupt, or the law corrupt in an absolute "this is not what god is about" way. In part because it seems like there's a suggestion there that outside duty and the law (and perhaps language (in the womb?)) there's a place which isn't corrupt, which I would say isn't true.

I guess the point is, you can certainly reject an instrumental god on the basis that that isn't the god you want...but it's not clear to me that everyone should reject that god, or that liberation theologists are really substantially on the road to hell more than most people. I think it's definitely worth pointing out the downsides — self-righteousness probably being the big one. But I think there can be problems with entirely rejecting an instrumental god too (which I think does maybe involve losing touch with or rejecting the world.)

And it is limiting, because everybody's limited, because that's the thing about not being god. Certainly I remain extremely limited by, in this instance, still not being entirely sure I know what you're talking about. And the whole not being a Christian thing, making much of my dialogue here more than a little absurd....

Bert:

I can see how you took my Kant critique as a sneer at you, since you are a quasi-autistic philosopher who never left Konigsberg and has been dead for centuries.

For the record, I do not think that liberation theology is the road to hell. And I do not hate the law. Quite the contrary. I'm just trying to say that progressive people who can handle Christianity when it means overthrowing oppression but not when it means identifying with a charisma that recognizes and nurtures people-- maybe can't handle Christianity.

God exists in language, but not owing to any lack of people trying to purge him for hundreds of years. I'm using language right now to try and understand things. But, as they say, "it ain't all good."

Do I really need to justify that for me, as for lots of people, the internal part of trying to understand God relates to my external activities in the world?

Noah:

You're welcome to sneer at poor Kant. I promise not to take it personally. I'm not sure who it is who you think can handle Christianity exactly, though. I'll agree progressives have their troubles...but I understand from reliable sources that it is in general a narrow road.

I think I said it wasn't all good. I said it a bunch even.

You certainly don't have to justify anything to me. But in general throughout this conversation, I've had a lot of difficulty figuring out what was at stake for you. I don't doubt that there's something at stake, and that it relates to how you deal with the world, but either because of a problem of language or simply a failure of understanding on my part, I'm really not getting it. You can try to explain again...or you can drop it and maybe try again later. But it's pretty clear that I'm not following you.

All right; I have trouble letting something go when it finished so unsatisfyingly.

So the thing is; I understand that what's at stake broadly is your understanding of god. I don't understand why the particular issues you're circling around are so compelling for you, perhaps because I don't really understand what they are.

Might it be helpful to talk about a concrete example? I'm reading about pacifism currently, which it seems like falls in an in-between place in at least some of your categories. That is, it is, or can be seen as instrumental on one hand (the best way to deal with resolving conflicts) while on the other hand it can be seen as about obedience/faith/love regardless of instrumental consequences. Is there a way to think about your concerns about materialism and idealism in relation to arguments about pacifism? Or am I totally on the wrong track?

Here is some shithead explaining that we need to update our ideas of

peace because now we have evolution:

http://www.enlightennext.org/magazine/j26/pacifist.asp?page=6

"This evolutionary vision has already begun to impact the work of a

number of pioneering philosophers, mystics, and theologians, who see

in this conception of nature not a pacifist God, but a creative,

self-transcending divine impulse seeking ever higher expressions of

itself in this world. And as this vision begins to work its way

through our culture, many believe we will see paradigm-changing

effects on the way we think about a host of issues, not the least of

which are war, peace, and conflict resolution. As Thomas Berry points

out, “Everything depends on a creative resolution of our present

antagonisms. I refer to a creative resolution of our present

antagonisms, rather than to peace, in deference to the violent aspects

of the cosmological process. . . . Neither violence nor peace in this

sense is in accord with the creative transformations through which the

more splendid achievements of the universe have taken place.”"

We are progressing ever forward....

Bert:

See, this makes me want to start our argument all over. Of course this is bullshit. Anything involving Carl Sagan and spirituality is automatically bullshit.

But what makes it bullshit has a lot to do with who God is. I guess if we all have the Ten Commandments programmed into us (or beamed into us from a satellite outside of reality) that's one way to dispute his idiot argument. But obviously that dude can feel self-assured for the exact same reason. We have natural selection programmed into us, so that trumps your ethical programming. We're back to competing arbitrary dogmas, allegedly bolstered by some kind of (if you will) gnosis.

Force and destruction are absolutely a God thing, and so is pacifism. Sorting it out involves reflection of some kind, or so I claim.

My response to that pseudo-Hegelian quasi-Norse nonsense begins to get at this, but (to use a fictional example) how do you deal with Aslan as a non-tame lion?

But I have zero problems with pacifism. There are the various just-war scenarios (as in Niebuhr). At the same time I think there can be good actions undertaken in a violent situation, which might of necessity involve non-passive behavior. The thing that crank is right about is that violence is a fact. But it's worth recognizing that the reason why a person's life is worth more than an animal's is connected to the fact that peace is a choice a human can make.

Noah:

See, I'd argue that what makes it bullshit is the usual progressive fallacy — i.e., things are getting better, everything is improving, original sin doesn't exist. You don't need the Ten Commandments to see that this is silly, do you? Surely you can just use your eyes.

(I mean, it's a little unfair, because this guy doesn't even understand evolution as far as I can tell, since evolution itself is not a progressive theory and transposing evolutionary theory to spiritual truths just proves that you don't understand elementary logic. But presuming he could make a better case, he'd still be wrong.)

Are you saying you can't dispute him without referring to a God whose existence you can't demonstrate? Because that seems weird to me; I don't at all think you need to be a Christian to believe he's full of shit.

I mean, yes, there's no way to prove him absolutely irrefutably wrong in such a way that he will confess himself and fall on his face — but you never get that sort of victory in ethical or philosophical arguments. I don't even know that I'd want that kind of victory, really....

Bert:

And why does the progressive fallacy make him wrong? It doesn't make Marx wrong. I mean, Marx can't really be called right or wrong. This shmuck is wrong because he thinks you can justify violence transcendentally using common observations (things blow up, cats eat birds) and pretending it's specialized knowledge.

He is stupid, evil, incorrect, and misguided. We do agree. Now, do you care why, beyond that? Or is that as far as it goes for you?

Noah:

The progressive fallacy is a real problem for Marx too. It does make him wrong, and evil as well (not just evil, of course, but still.) Marxism's belief in human perfectability — progress — has killed a lot of people. I mean, even compared to the number of people killed by social darwinism, it's killed a lot of people. (Has it killed more people than capitalism's various idols to progress? Hard to calculate, there.)

I probably am willing to rest the charge of wrongness on "killing millions of people = bad" more or less, which is an ethical argument which I presume you will dismiss as hopelessly material. I mean, I can probably go beyond that metaphorically and say that worshipping human beings (i.e. progress) is essentially blasphemous and a sin, since it puts human beings in a divine position that they aren't meant to occupy. (This is why I don't think I would ever vote for Zizek for anything, incidentally. A smart guy, someone I admire, not someone I want anywhere near actual power ever. (Presuming he acts on his philosophy, which is actually an uncharitable presumption, and one which probably isn't necessarily true at all.))

I'm curious what you feel the why beyond that is, though.

Bert:

Man, you just can't decide on Marx. I attempt to deconstruct the moral logic of revolutionary massacre, and you don't like that. I say his theory of history isn't right or wrong (which it isn't), and you don't like that.

But I'm willing to say, yes, he's evil, and yes, it's because millions died because of his calls for revolutionary massacre, but not because he's incorrect. Because it's all just metaphors. The workers' utopia isn't going to happen, but it's an unprovable Messianic assertion (ask any Marxist if the "real" revolution has happened yet). On the other hand, his analysis of how capital abstracts and concentrates power has hardly been disproven by history.

People are always trying to dismiss religion on the basis of the suffering inflicted in its name. It's not a trivial or irrelevant charge. I think it's less applicable to Christianity than to Marxism, but that's not prima facie obvious, especially to Marxists.

The social Darwinism Carl Sagan guy (can I just call him a Saganist?) really was trying to say three things are the same which (to almost everyone) aren't: evolution, violent actions of any kind in the universe anywhere, and the nature of the divine. Progresivism seems to be the ideological.rhetorical fuel for that mistake, and it might have some evil consequences, but I doubt you would reject human perfectability if it were renamed human improvability. You and Niebuhr seem to like capitalism and democracy just fine-- which, compared to pre-industrial society, Marx did too.

Noah:

I think I mentioned that capitalism had killed maybe as many people as Marx. And I'm curious as to when exactly I said that human improvability was something I even remotely believed in. I think that we've got better medicine now than we used to, but I don't think people are any better morally. We've gotten rid of slavery, which is good, but we seem on the way to making the planet uninhabitable, which is bad. I think democracy is a better system of governing nation-states than many, and I think to the extent that we've moved towards equality before the law that's a good thing — but it won't necessarily last forever, a, and b, there are always trade-offs (see possibly destroying the world above — also, certain amounts of misery in other locations round the globe.)

Metaphors can be wrong or right, in a metaphorical way, surely. And the Christian church really isn't Christianity in a thoroughgoing way that I don't think works for Marxism, precisely because Marxism is materialist. For Christianity, you don't get perfection on this earth, for Marx you do. Marxists can say, "hey, whoops, that wasn't really Marxism," but 5-year plans are in fact what Marxism is about, in a way that it's really hard to pin the inquisition on actually striving to attain Christian goals (because Christ really was not especially goal oriented.)

I think the point would be that, while you can say Marx was using metaphors, it's very unclear that Marx thought he was using metaphors. Thinking reality should conform (over time) to the inside of your skull in some sort of one-to-one way is the problem I think we're discussing.

It's worth pointing out too that, since humans are corrupt, everything they're involved in is going to be evil. It's about degrees and trying to figure out, with the corrupt thinking apparatus you have, which you think is worst and what you want to do about it. I certainly don't hate Marx or marxists in general, though. And I'm not sure what I'm supposed to decide upon in relation to him either. I mean, it's Marxism. It's a fairly complicated and influential system of thought. I can't have more than one thing to say about it?

I don't think his theory of history is right or wrong. It is progressive though, which, as I said, seems problematic to me. The class analysis stuff and looking at economic causes, though, seems right to me, for what that's worth.

I was going to say, too — I think there are metaphorical, or spiritual uses of evolution that appeal to me. I think you can look at evolution and say, this means all creatures are related to me — or look at it and say, I'm contingent and really unimportant. It's like anything about nature I guess; it can head towards a pantheism that seems to me (with my corrupt brain) a lot less objectionable than shiny progress, both in its hippieish we are all one implications and in its more naked reveling in blood sacrifice. I think pantheism is a lot easier to square with Christianity than progress as god, in any case, since god made creation but didn't make humans perfectable (which is why C.S. Lewis has Bacchus rather than Superman acting as a servant of Aslan.)

Bert:

"Thinking reality should conform (over time) to the inside of your skull in some sort of one-to-one way is the problem I think we're discussing." Bingo, yes. My interest in figuring out God definitely has something to do with figuring out the difference between reality and the inside of my skull.

I think evolution (and pantheism) have appealing attention to the nature of a life-force that exists through particular organisms, but can only be understood as necessarily outside of (bigger than) all organisms everywhere always.

But violence doesn't go away. The most reasonable progessives (Obama) seem somewhat fond of war and capitalism. The fact that we are so urgently obliged and so pathetically unable to reject violence represents something about both our alienation from nature, and our alienation from God.

Someone told me that the Dalai Lama was a Marxist. I should look that up.

Noah:

I wonder if Niebuhr's ideas about love and the law would be helpful to

you. He argues that divine love is both the fulfillment of the law

and the ultimate contradiction to the law. So divine love (and divine

mercy) are a stinging rebuke, opposite, to human justice (and

presumably to language)...but at the same time, human justice (and

presumably language) look towards, or take part in divine love as

their ideal and the ground of what worth they have in their

provisional human way. The contradiction is unresolvable — which is

where divine mystery (or spirit) comes in.

The language bit is me not him, but I like it. It points to the way

that language is a connection and a prerequisite for love rather than

a chain which keeps us from love, the latter being maybe

overemphasized by structuralism to the extent I understand

structuralism.

Bert:

I got a Kirkegaard book-- I went for Fragments of Philosophy and now I think I should have gotten his love book. He definitely has thoughts on language and love and law-- love is a duty, a matter of conscience, but it also does impossible, indescribable things. Structuralism is a nicely weird counterpoint-- arbitrary and contingent and momentary, utterly and hermetically immanent, rather than universal and eternal and anchored transcendently.

Everything's at the Mall

2010-05-04T05:57:00.000-07:00

Not that there are real malls anymore, but ghost malls are better anyway.

So, my buddy Noah wrote an interesting response to this guy on his blog, R. Fiore, who thinks that we should all "act as if" there is no God.

http://www.tcj.com/hoodedutilitarian/2010/04/worship-of-nothing/

I talk again about Slavoj Zizek and John Milbank's book The Monstrosity of Christ, and I also talk about this guy Philip Kenneson's article-- he writes about pragmatism being good for Christianity because there shouldn't be any objective truth anyway. Thanks to Randall Szott for sending it to me. http://www.kevers.net/pkenneson.html

Here's me ruminating. I think my "mythology shopping mall" lines up nicely with William James idea of a "shared corridor" between all worthwhile forms of reflection----

Reagarding the moral center of Christianity... there is that Michigan Christian militia that really did want to kill cops and start Armageddon (I kind of wondered if Doc Dart was involved somehow), and the Catholic Church has recently been feeling the pain of transparency, but there is no fundamental static with Christianity and humanism. This guy Randall Szott sent me an article by a pragmatist theologian who denies the Enlightenment categories of objective and subjective truth, so that God can exist on the basis that nothing is true without language. Which is somewhat compelling, but it doesn't really deal with the fact that modern subjects are merely the blank stain left by the negative force of their own self-awareness. It is the same belief but with no ground underneath, no Holy Spirit.

But what is the cost of, instead of accepting some kind of Holy Spirit, leaving Christ to rot on the cross instead? Zizek sets up Kant as the poster example of the Enlightenment trying to overcome faith with reason and then having to restrain reason with something transcendent, so that both faith and reason exist under this condition of repression. But Christianity was born in the context of repression, and has operated in the logic of repression ever since. Eugene O'Neill has some quote about how we are all looking for a door to an mystical land to which we have are entitled but have been denied access all our lives.

So, instead of coping with trauma as trauma, we incorporate it into our modern self-decimation, so that the idea of faith becomes something that could be accepted in principle but, in practice, is impossible. Or you have God as the great justifier of irreconcilable empirical facts, which unites Kant with Milbank with evangelical fundamentalism.

But the thing Zizek says (and does his best to disavow elsewhere) is that there is a gap-- a wide-open door, if you will-- between the group that believes and the world that suggestively hides the object of their belief. The Holy Spirit is the God of peace, in between the God of anger and the God of suffering. The chickens at least can remember that they have a home.

The obvious/weird thing about the pragmatism-materialism split is how interdependent it is. Just to spell it out in my reliably jejeune fashion, when you are claiming all truths are not objective, we're all in some kind of mythological/ideological shopping mall, how can you do that without claiming an objective viewpoint (no matter where you go in the mall, you're in the mall)? This is underscored by the pragmatist fetishization of "ethics." This perfect contingency is anchiored in necessity, just as materialists always wind up anchoring their stable cosmos on the basis of thoroughly contingent empirical observable reality.

Anyhow, I'm rereading Monstrosity of Christ, in preparation for reviewing it for that Lutheran journal-- I'm at the part where Zizek defines the "monstrosity" thing (Thing)-- it's a Hegel idea about how an excessive, unnatural intermediary is required to allow a passage from the transcendent God (Father) to the community of believers (Holy Spirit)-- a transition that Marx, Feuerbach, and Judaism in general are able to make "directly," although the role of Christ is probably achieved largely for Marx by revolutionary consciousness and for Jews by Law.

I'm currently hung up on the issue of what is at stake in belief-- Saying "nothing" or "your eternal soul" are the only easy answers, and it is nice how symmetrically unsatisfyingly hollow and arrogant they are. I mean, behavior toward your fellow creatures is a non-trivial result of beliefs, but the same beliefs can inspire extremely different actions, and really different beliefs can result in the same actions. I have to acknowledge the marketplace of mythology, and just affirm that Christ is the best product because of His attributes, and that seems like a non-presumptuous way to express it. Just like in the Old Testament-- your idols are not meaningless, but they are merely utterly (perhaps abominably) inferior. But I don't know if I believe in Him precisely for that reason myself. I like to think of Jesus smashing all the cash registers in the mythology shopping mall.

I'm regressing, I know. I sound a sixteen-year-old reading John Stuart Mill.

It's true, the pragmatist guy is a good writer. It has the whole above-it-all charm of the unbuttoned academic, which makes me want to shake him.

It's interesting (and isn't everything just ever so interesting?) that economics (having enough to eat) is the only legitimate response to claims of universal contingency and freedom? Materialism is useful in arguments (pragmatically speaking), but if one follows it, one can wind up saying that workers should own the means of production, or that life is nasty and brutish and we need a strong leader to maintain order at all costs, or that the nation or the institution demands endless sacrifice. Alternately, if one just brings it (food, justice) up to get folks to back off of one's essentially lassez-faire meta-theory, there is some possibility of hypocrisy.

My whole point is obviously not that people literally go to the mall instead of church. My point is that the freedom we think we have is supported (quite materially) by a structured set of presumably value-neutral options. If church is in the mall, going to church does not get you out of the mall.

Which gets us to Foucault, who is perhaps the most astute critic of pragmatism I know. Of course you can't wish yourself out of your culture, but it's important to notice how your culture encourages the illusion that you can.

I just realized what the R. Fiore comment about "acting as if" reminded me of. It's a total lift from St. Paul (unintentional no doubt)-- from 1 Corinthians, about everyone behaving as if they have no more spouses, families, jobs, attachments of any kind.

Whether or not Zizek's reading of Hegel as contingent accident (Being) as the basis of all Essence is accurate, it actually seems completely reasonable to dismiss the world on that basis rather than God. Hegel says that the king exists as a contingent personality to ratify the essential nature of the law (rather than vice-versa), which is why Paul can dismiss the Law the same way he dismisses family and economic ties.

The idea that capitalism (civilization, modernity) can be overcome, violently or otherwise, is getting it backwards. Everyday reality is essence, and it is an empty hole. The act of recognition of and faithful obedience to the Divine is not transcendently ordained (as Kant would hjave it), but an act of will. Self is asserted by overcoming of self, like Lacan says, but that declaration of freedom is freedom from what you see and touch, not from the specters of conformity and divine truth.

Oops, I transcended myself.

2010-04-08T18:04:00.000-07:00

My friend Noah, with whom I banter and then post on this here blog, wrote an excellent article on the new Terry Eagleton book about evil, here: http://www.splicetoday.com/writing/small-triumphs

We discussed his article, and evil, in a meandering, unfocused, and roundabout fashion, because evil has no boundaries. Slayer said so.

Well, no, actually it was pretty much all about Kant. Here:

Bert:

I think you nailed it. The ending is extra sharp. I especially appreciate sounding smart-- that's a fine point I don't remember making.

That Kantian notion of the moral law is something I fret about. It makes morality/spirituality materialist (and thus ethical-humanist), essentially suggesting a neuro-anatomical DNA connection to moral truth. It's the mirror-inverse of Whitehead's positing of perfection as an end toward which striving is justified-- "strive, automaton, strive!" So the highly unsatisfying absolute truth (evil is a force)- personal motivation (evil is a viewpoint) split ends up being reflected in Eagleton's wickedness-evil split. Karl Barth sees evil as absolute absence. The empty space around goodness, truth, growth, life, and peace. For Bataille, it's the anguish that drives drama, and the conundrum of finitude.

But I think you got it right-- evil is in people, and is seen in the acts of people.

Noah:

I don't think Kant's moral law is materialist. Kant thinks the moral law is transcendent, like God; people have a connection to it because there's something in people that is transcendent (the soul.) It's not about DNA, which is why C.S. Lewis is able to put it in talking animals or aliens or what have you.

I'm not sure I follow the Whitehead comparison exactly. Maybe you could explain.

Bert:

Hegel's biggest contribution may have been reconciling idealism and materialism, science and theology into one thing, which I call materialism. A certain institutional understanding of science and theology, that is-- science and religion are bigger than philosophical reduction, but I buy the fusing of idealism and materialism. "The Spirit is a bone." What difference does it make if I say the Moral Law is a law of science or a law of nature or a law of the spirit? It precedes existence-- just like the multiplication tables. That's not God, that's anchoring everything you don't know in something you know. God is apprehended, not known.

The pragmatist view is that your Law, your God, whatever you like, it's great if it gets you whatever you're going for (beatitude, happiness, ambition, etc.). But ultimately it's about actions rather than words. There is no fixed outcome, but a proper method for assessing and describing experience. This is the other side of science-- the experimental method-- and religion-- the sense of trying to understand the incomprehensible.

Noah:

Have you read any Kant? It's been a long time for me and maybe I'm misremembering, but your take on the moral law is nothing like my recollection of it.

The moral law does precede us, but it's way more like the superego, or like God, than it is like the multiplication tales. The moral law isn't this thing out there in the world; it's inscribed on our hearts. Or, really, it is our hearts; for Kant it's the transcendent part of us, the part that's outside time and connected to God. It is the soul, in a lot of ways; the conscience, not a list of rules. It's absolutely not a bone. Hegel's fusing of materialism and idealism happened later; for Kant, transcendence is a really big deal.

Bert:

I've read some middling portion of the Critique of Pure Reason, yes. I don't want to make it sound like I have some huge beef with Kant, because I don't. If anyone made it possible to resuscitate faith within the post-Enlightenment logosphere, it's him. I think there's something to the categorical imperative. But it's not what the philosophers call "sufficient."

What it lacks is what it explicitly rejects, the notion of contingency. "Whatever number of motives nature may present to my will, whatever sensuous impulses, the moral 'ought' is beyond their power to produce." It's absoluteness, its static-ness, its materiality *as an idea* denies a motivation other than some abstract "duty." There is no love. Rather, "(r)eason..., with perfect spontaneity, rearranges (the order of things) according to ideas, with which it compels empirical conditions to agree."

The will and the soul are unknowable, bracketed out of existence, so hope, freedom. and faith have no philosophical value. Jacobi phrased his objections to Kant as confusing conditions of conceptualization with conditions of existence. Individual, specific, subjective experience is merely phenomenal to Kantian Platonism. Which is why, it can be a bone or it can be multiplication tables, either way it's what everyone can affirm when flesh is turned to dust.

Noah:

The duty is something that speaks inside you, with God's voice, though. I think there's love there, or at least a way to get to love.

Kant has a notion of freedom too, though it's more a freedom from (sensuality, sin) than a freedom to (do whatever you want.)

I don't know. I think there's an idea of Kant as moral automaton which is not entirely false, but not entirely true either. Maybe it's because I read the Critique of Practical Reason instead of the Critique of Pure Reason or something, but I always felt like there was more of a sense of Chrisitian spirituality, including love, in his work than people sometimes give him credit for.

Bert:

Do you think Kant deals with evil outside of intentionality? As you point out, organized genocides have proceeded apace under a shared misconception of duty (sustained by violent pleasure). In fact, you might remember me mentioning Zizek mentioning Lacan mentioning Sade and Kant as sharing a similar conflation of desire and duty. People are ends in themselves, true, but what if the people in question are considered subhuman? The subject disappears in the face of a Law impossible to satisfy-- like Paul saying that "With the Law, sin revived, and I died." The threat of punishment provokes evil. And the absent Father who issues the Law is a merciless torturer, and mocks us in our weakness. It actually seems like everything you dislike about the Old Testament God.

Noah:

You're right that I'm being inconsistent with Kant — more evidence that I contain multitudes!

The thing about Kant's God that's different from the God in Job is really that it's an internal dialogue. That is, it's not God speaking from on high and telling you you suck; rather it's your own true self speaking form your heart and telling you you suck. I guess you could say it's a distinction without a difference...but it seems to me that there's something important happening when Kant locates transcendence and God not in a voice from the clouds, but in the self. It's really not an impersonal law; it's a personal conscience — or it's both, and the connection Kant makes between the two kind of scrambles Paul's distinctions. You can certainly argue that scrambling them like that is nonsense or (with Nietzsche) that it only makes the tyranny of the law more tyrannous to see it as an individual, internal truth rather than an external command. But...I don't know. I think Kant gets at something that rings true to me, at least, about the moral experience — something which I think C.S. Lewis takes from him, at least to some extent.

Bert:

According to Zizek, the sublime thing in Kant's Law is that it makes the individual responsible for her own decisions, since the Law does not give specific instructions-- which addresses your idea of the Law being in one's heart. But paradoxically (surprise!), that's what takes the responsibility out of the person's hands, since they're acting in the name of this nameless, faceless injunction, in which all desire and pleasure is pathological, and pleasure comes from and desire reaches toward humiliation (punishment).

The nature of morality as existing in Reason, in (specialized) Knowledge is my entire problem with modernity. Foucault and Nietzsche are right to distrust the rampant hypocrisy of technical-spiritual power-disguised-as-objective-truth. Which doesn't mean that I want to get rid of consciences or human rights or anything of the sort-- cynicism is the ultimate capitulation to modernity. But pragmatism and materialism as a pair are an empty excuse for philosophical choices, and that's the legacy I'm frustrated by.

Have A Poignant Day

2010-03-30T10:09:00.000-07:00

This is another conversation about pragmatism and materialism with my buddy Noah. He edited this conversation and posted it on his blog. Here's the link--
http://www.tcj.com/hoodedutilitarian/2010/03/dyspeptic-ouroboros-have-a-poignant-day/
Extensive comments follow, so, if you care, go forth and read! But commenting here would be great too. It wold be, in fact, a first.

Bert: Random conundrum… I know Eugene V. Debs is one of your favorite punchlines. Did you know about Jane Addams passionately condemning the Pullman strike? Do you have any thoughts on that, now that you’re feeling sympathetic toward teachers’ unions?

Noah: I didn’t know that about Jane Addams. I don’t know much about her. Checking Wikipedia quick, I see that her father was a banker, though, which makes her anti-union sentiments not all that suprising….

Bert: I ‘m deciding to suck on the idea of non-revolutionary radicality as a coherent thing, if it is. Nonviolence is clearly a great solution (especially when you have a strong central government and TV), but Eugene V. Debs was certainly not opting for that, which Jane Addams was deploring him for, as an ultra-pacifist.

In one sense, Jane Addams is Obama and Debs is a Tea Party protester. In another sense, Debs is an isolationist and Addams is a free-trade advocate. It’s definitely a great example of the materialist-pragmatist split I’ve decided to harp on as the key divide of liberal democracy.

Noah: That’s interesting that Jane Addams was sticking to pacifism. Debs actually went to jail as an opponent of WWI — though he wasn’t a pacifist in all situations, obviously.

You can also see it as part of the ongoing battle between marxism and feminism….

Bert: Well, a pragmatic Marxist is a democratic socialist, and a materialist feminist is (often) a psychoanalysis-ist, but it’s obvious that neither precludes pacifism. Bertrand Russell was a pacifist too, and he was as materialist as humanists come (bowing before the altar of math is absolutely the variety of gnosis materialists favor)– his association with Whitehead and Wittgenstein must have frustrated him terribly.

Materialists and pragmatists can disagree about desirable outcomes, but means and meaning are likely to be strikingly different. That’s why Marxism really is never capitalism by other means– it’s freedom through law rather than outside of it.

Noah: I think Marxism and capitalism are maybe closer than you’re allowing for here. I think there are materialist capitalists — which I take to mean ideological capitalists, at least to some extent. The invisible hand isn’t that much different than the impersonal forces of history. I think C.S. Lewis would see both as giving up your will to the demonic, essentially. Putting your faith in material processes is putting your faith in material processes. Whether or not those processes are supposed to work through freedom or dialectic doesn’t necessarily make that much difference.

And on the other side…it seems you could fairly easily be a pragmatic Marxist — someone like Gorbachev, basically, working within a Marxist system but who didn’t want to be all ideological about it and hoped to basically make things better by getting them to function better. Or there’s China — lots of pragrmatic marxists there, yes?

I wonder if the pragmatic/materialist vibe you’re seeing is more pragmatic than materialist in origin. That is, capitalism throws up a lot of folks who are pragmatic because, well, they’re in power, and folks in power tend to be more interested in manipulating power than in ideology.

Bert: Capitalism is pure ultra-organized de-ideologized biopower. Chinese capitalists and Russian capitalists just aren’t real Marxists. Hardcore American conservatives– Sarah Palin, Francis Fukayama, that fairly smart pastor who ran for President– don’t believe in modernity. They believe in a halcyon era without all these competing cultural narratives. Their urge to dismantle the central government is a negative response to biopower. It’s neo-agrarian retrenchment, just like Mao.

C.S. Lewis is a Christian materialist, and, like all materialists, he’s a pessimist. In a sense all materialists are conservatives, but calling Marxists conservative kind of stretches the definition of the word. He deplores modernity for its ruthless worship of power, which is certaily how Marxism can seem from the outside.

But Marxism is not nihilistic, capitalist, or pragmatic. Marx loves capitalism, make no mistake. But there is no reason the workers should take over, except– they just should, damn it! They do all the real work, they shovel shit, they are the last that are to be first according to, well, the Christian tradition.

Dialectics are, other than being a description of the magical astrophysics of history, a pale imitation of the invisible hand, despite being more elegant. Hegel is much closer to Kant’s moral law, which Lewis loves.. a real solid thing– the spirit as a bone. The invisible hand isn’t really a concept at all, it’s just a throwaway line. Capitalism knows that all language is a transparent game, a marketing ploy– you can write rambling psychotic poetry about it if you want, or you can just get a job and claim what’s coming to you.

Eschatology is the materialist core of Christianity– the present is in flux, but the future is solid. And this element is in capitalism– it can market the hybridity, the expansion of decentered homogeneity. it promotes, but it can also market the exact opposite. Capitalism doesn’t care. In a way, Christianity is proposing tangibility as existing exclusively outside of lived immaterial reality. Immanence isn’t tangible- only the infinte really exists. The Kingdom of God. But this is Caesar’s world here and now, which deserves our patronage but not our respect.

Noah: I think that’s right about Christianity; the world is worthwhile because there’s a real outside it that exists. I guess if you go far enough that way you get gnosticism.

There is a way in which Marxism is more like that than like capitalism; there’s a belief in something that’s real (the revolution.)

At the same time…there are people who really believe in capitalism. I wonder if Milton Friedman can get into heaven just like the people who sincerely worshipped the vulture headed god in Narnia? Or are you saying that you can’t actually belief in capitalism in that way?

Bert: You’re going to get gnosticism either way, of a sort. Capitalism offers a final referent– all outlooks and experiences are valid insofar as they are “cashable”– a term William James used as philosophical terminology. Or perhaps, as long as they promote “buy-in” to the larger project of individual striving. Absolute knowledge is outside any one experience, but is manifest in a thousand professional specialites. Milton Friedman just slapped a label on this, “neoclassical economics,” and his professional specialty threw Nobel Prizes at him. As opposed to Adam Smith, who probably had to have someone else brand his genius for him after the fact. Tautologies are the only arguments pragmatists can make, like a bunch of sparks that can’t make a circuit. Beliefs are anathema.

Whereas in materialism, tautologies are anathema. As you suggest, there is a hidden authority, a genuine thingness, lurking beneath and beyond the everyday, in the more perfect past from which these mere shadows were spawned. But the true scholar can hermeneutically divine essential being.

People combine these all the time, perhaps everyone always. But it’s a major source of hypocrisy, slippage, differance, however you like it. Being pragmatic and being material seem equally transparent. They are both branches of humanism. And they both only (but continuously) allow the supernatural in bracketed forms.

Noah: There’s something profound about the fact that there is no actual Nobel Prize in economics; only a simulacrum created by bankers. The soul doesn’t exist, but the body is created by money, and that ends up being the same thing to everyone but dyspeptic cranks. I mean, Milton Friedman I’m sure felt more validated by getting a banker’s money than he would have by receiving the philanthropy of some guilty do-gooder.

Bert: Milton Friedman creates theories about how it is inevitable that a corporate-academic state infrastructure will pursue its self-interest by not interfering with its own free desire to congratulate Milton Friedman for theories such as this.

Noah: What about a caveat “unless evil uinons interfere”? Isn’t there something like that?

Bert: Closer to your sphere of interest, I just read this Matthew Collings thing in Modern Painters about how the Turner Prize (the big British art award) is going to second-rate hack entertainers instead of real artists who have been dead for half a millenium like Fra Angelico.

The classical-standards-of-beauty argument is like the forces-of-history or the nature-of-drives or the power-of-math arguments. It’s materialist, it’s pessimist, it’s always backward-looking. It’s somewhat impossible to be a critic (or a philosopher) and not be caught up in materialism, even if the critic is mouthing all sorts of statements about “effective” and “successful” art (or truth, or therapy, or politics). In fact, I admire Matthew Collings for straightforwardly doing what a critic does– offering a standard in plain, fluent, and even amusing terms. And, in the end, that’s what he’s banking on, to give him his edge in the marketplace of ideas, which does undermine his materialism to some degree, Language is frustratingly imperfect and ultimately should be unnecessary for materialists, whereas it is disposable and superfluous for pragmatists.

At the same time, it’s naked hypocrisy dressed up as plainspoken wisdom (a handy definition of ideology, perhaps)– if Collings’ only positive example is a Renaissance painter (with some grumbling token acknowledgement of Chris Ofili), it seems quite possible that his standards are not actually objective. As with this guy Bret Schneider on the dismal Chicago Art Criticism blog, who writes at staggering length about the aesthetic bankrupcy of relational art practice (and, while we’re at it, contemporary sculpture), with no structural insight whatsoever, there is just no firm foundation for big general complaints about the relentlessly capitalist cultural milieu without some kind of appreciation of what it is that art is supposed to be doing now. All art now is conditioned on the fact of art being absolutely anything. And really, the least attractive responses to that situation are generally the conservative ones– cf. my broad general complaints about fine art photography.

Noah: Ideology doesn’t have to be plainspoken, though. Marx writes ideology, but it’s not necessarily framed as plainspoken wisdom…. Same with any economic thoery, really. Or much theology.

“All art now is conditioned on the fact of art being absolutely anything. ”

I think this is true of visual art, maybe. Other things (comics, books, even film) much less so. I mean, there aren’t any laws about what art can or cannot be, but there are historical expectations about materials, context, even subject matter. And those expectations tend to have ideological components which you can contest or not. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to look at photography and say, in general this medium does this and that and the other and I don’t like that for this reason or that reason.

I mean, you’re not saying photography isn’t art. You’re saying it’s bad art. I guess you could argue that since there’s not really any agreed upon actual value in the arts, then distinctions like good and bad don’t make sense — but then that leaves you merely talking about utility or other pragmatic concerns…or not talking about anything at all, I guess.

Bert: My whole argument about Fine Art Photography (not all photos– quite the contrary) is that it’s tethered to classical painting ideals, technology fetishism, and exploitive sociological tropes in order to validate itself in the anarchic ocean of photography in the unwashed techno-universe. Art has to represent its context, and representing by repressing is generally quite unattractive– as is the case with literary comics, which are all about not being comics while being comics.

I’m not talking about utility, I’m talking about pleasure– which has surprisingly little to do with attempts at metaphysical content.

And Marx is absolutely writing ideology, insofar as he is saying this and that are scientifically valid claims about society, which is a load of hooey, versus this and that are worthwhile principles on which to organize society, which has more than a little merit. This can basically be extended to other forms of modern writing– it’s just crystal clear in Marx and Freud, both of whom I admire.

As you suggest, a real utility argument isn’t really even an argument. It’s a true/false hypothesis and thus pointless to speculate on.

Your “like this for that reason, like that for this reason” approach is absolutely pragmatist. Nothing has to cohere– as long as the argument is elegant, functions on its own terms. My approach is always somewhat mired in materialism, on the other hand, because I want to suggest some larger picture– that’s a limitation I’m trying to deal with somehow.

Noah: Okay, two things.

First I got a little confused earlier. You said:

“All art now is conditioned on the fact of art being absolutely anything. And really, the least attractive responses to that situation are generally the conservative ones– cf. my broad general complaints about fine art photography.”

I thought you were saying that your complaints themselves were conservative, and therefore unattractive (it seemed odd for you to be dissing yourself in that manner, but not impossible or anything.)

Anyway, I think it’s kind of an interesting confusion. To the extent that you’re right and art can be anything, then any negative response ends up being conservative; an effort to proscribe the jouissance or to sit in judgment on the gay utopia. I see what you’re saying in general — if anything is possible, then you should take advantage of that, not hanker after a past when fewer things were possible. But…that starts to look like a fairly pragmatic argument, doesn’t it?

I guess the question is, if art can be anything, what’s the point of criticism? From your material standpoint, it seems like art is too amorphous and empty and, ultimately, predicated on and redolent of capitalism to really even bother with. Whereas, from a pragmatic standpoint, it’s use is in its existence, and arguing about whether it’s good or not is pointless (except for the phatic pleasure of argument itself, of course.)

I think that ties in with your point here:

“Language is frustratingly imperfect and ultimately should be unnecessary for materialists, whereas it is disposable and superfluous for pragmatists.”

You could substitute “art” for “language” there, right? Christians or Marxists shouldn’t need art, ultimately (except as a mistrusted venue for propaganda or apologetic), whereas pragmatists don’t need art except as another exchangeable commodity. For materialists, only the meaning matters, in which case you should say what you mean and not dump it in this odd container; for pragmatists, only the form matters, so you’re reduced to figuring out whether it “works”, i.e. “sells”. There doesn’t seem to be a place from which the melding of form and content, which is what matters in art, can be said to matter to anybody else.

Bert: Ooo, nice move on the “art” for “language” swap. Yeah, the form/content problem is really tough for critics, especially since they keep trying to interpret form *as* content so that they have something to write about, here in the endless suburbs of customized big-box mass hallucination.

But materialism ruins art, as in the case of Fine Art Photography. I don’t necessarily think materialist criticism has to ruin art, since art can mine that as well as anything else, but beauty requires motion, the self-overcoming that pragmatism is always failing to express in its transparency-fetishizing penchant for klunky descriptiveness.

The trick is to find material in practice that is actually material, not just a flat deism of the ephemeral. Setting out to whittle a Christian twig will just yield a shitty twig. But what if you point out the twig and call it Christian? Criticism might actually work best if it is pragmatic– but treats its content as a meaningful part of its form.

Noah: Form is content in art, though. I mean, that’s what separates art from religion or political statement or anything that actually matters, is that the form bleeds into the content, so what’s important isn’t “love God!” but that you’re saying “love God!”

Does materialism always have to ruin art? I mean, the point of materialism is that the content matters more than the form, so you’d think that Marxist materialism would have a different formal effect than a materialism that was about how great old paintings used to be. I mean, Brecht is cool.

It seems like pragmatic art is going to be soulless art, which is the quandary of capitalist art in the first place. That is, art’s pragmatic function is to deliver soul — or to convert soul into value. But you can’t get soul through a pragmatic operation (in part because soul is pragmatically defined as “that which you cannot get through a pragmatic operation”.) So for pragmatism to function in art, you need to pragmatically commit to, or search out, materialism (or authenticity.) I think the point is that, rather than art being pragmatic (capitalist/jouissance/moving) or materialist (static/proscribed/unitary), in capitalism art is the intersection of those two modes. Art is kind of capitalism’s safety valve; the place where pragmatism acknowledges and integrates its repressed other. (Which ends up making art look like an opiate from a materialist standpoint.)

In a similar vein…I think criticism has to “work” best if its pragmatic, just because “working” is a pragmatic yardstick. If you want to tell somebody whether they’ll enjoy a movie and/or whether they should shell out 10 bucks to see it, I think it’s clear that you want a pragmatic criticism that isn’t wandering off to talk about whether the twig is Christian and how many Marxists can dance on the head of Art Garfunkel. On the other hand, if you’re a materialist, you could judge criticism on the basis of truth…which tends to make criticism as a discipline or a coherent form vanish, since everything is judged on the basis of truth.

Bert: Sure, form is content. And I’m more than happy to let Marxists dance on Art Garfunkel without interference– I would even offer mild encouragement. But you haven’t described or related or conveyed or reproduced anything by saying either “infectious pop hooks,” or “buy these two tracks on iTunes but by all that’s holy ignore the rest of the album.” The ideologically naturalized role of the cultural product is reasserted, but the ineffable jouissance, the nature of the power of the cultural product isn’t amplified or expanded in any way.

Chesterton said that people who reject belief end up believing in anything– while that may sometimes be the case, I would say that people who reject belief are the ones who are the most fixed in their ideas. Nobody knows what God thinks (to the extent that statement makes sense), even institutional religious authorities. But the Institutional authorities of instrumentalized culture can prescribe proper therapeutic remedies for the entirety of reality– or they can refer you to a specialist, or they can reassure you that your concerns are meaningless.

Still, the role of criticism is pragmatic. Art doesn’t need criticism to create content, but it needs something like criticism to cultivate a receptive community. It’s like a friendly parasite that helps exfoliate dead skin cells. It’s okay as long as art doesn’t pay too much attention to its parasites. That’s how you end up with moribund pretentious crap like high-end photography and alternative comics.

And, in much this same way, the freedom required for functional capitalism is fenced in by guns and cameras and touchingly ironic signs saying “Please ignore and love the nonexistent and revered guns and cameras Have a poignant day.” Perhaps making the signs more enjoyable to viewers is a worthwhile task, since we certainly aren’t going to get rid of the guns and cameras with our own signs, let alone our own guns and cameras. I just would like there to be something else for signs to say, as well as a reason for people to read the signs.

I’m meandering into the imagery of “They Live,” so I’ll just leave it there.
__________________

It occurred to me that the primary target of most modern philosophy is religion (even if God is okay), and that the way you can tell whether a thinker is pragmatist or materialist is whether she makes religion a purveyor of illusion (materialism) or of reification (pragmatism).

Another critical moment I thought worth mentioning was the discussion in Artforum about this Seth Kim-Cohen review of a Doug Aitken piece (originally proposed by Bruce Nauman) where he dug a hole a thousand feet or so into the earth and then hung a microphone down into the hole, to the very bottom, and set up speakers in a small room at the top of the hole to transmit whatever sounds were audible at the bottom of the hole. Because he was all, “this is cool, but it’s so reified.” And this other art historian wrote in to argue and called Kim-Cohen an idealist and was like “our physical being has meaning.”

And Artforum had another battling critics thing where they published a piece of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s book all about the forging of dynamic future communities of niche utopian resistance via the magic of love and Spinoza, and this Marxist responded that he didn’t know about all that, but perhaps it’s that kind of fluffy thinking that caused the financial derivatives mess.

One lesson is that materialists always win if they get to be negative. Another lesson is that Deleuze can be interpreted as a materialist (as he was in the first discussion about Doug Aitken) and a pragmatist (as he was in the Negri book). But even though I kind of like that Heideggerish guy who stuck up for Doug Aitken (mostly because I like that piece and I like the earth not being meaningless), Deleuze is totally a pragmatist. Desiring machines? Come on, Madison Avenue, dig him up and have him lead a creativity seminar!

Noah: I think my ability to respond to all of that is limited by my not knowing much about any of the artists in question. But I’m curious about reifying religion. Who do you think does that? I’m also curious as to why the digging hole thing is supposed to be reified.

Does Deleuze call individuals “desiring machines”? That is totally something you’d think an economist would say. I’ve often thought it’s kind of funny how Freud and Adam Smith are more or less obsessed with the same thing; for both of them and their heirs man is defined by desire.

Bert: Desire– Of course Freud and Adam Smith are not the only people who ever wrote about desire. But they are both uniquely influential secular modern theorizers of the politics of the individual in society. Bataille seems like the obvious go-to guy for analysis of the “libidinal economy,” in which he does a good job of talking about how aspiration manifests itself in history, and the tension between power and law. Adam Smith is much more interested in aspiration and power, and Freud much more interested in history and law, but Bataille and Lacan use the idea of libido not as a fragile emotional category, or even just an empirical fact of existence, but as an unstoppable force, the power that changes everything, the sun and everything it stands for, the positive matter existing in the void of time.

Soul– Meister Eckhart talks about soul on one hand as totally passive utterly detached completely naked zero ground of existence, and also as completely embodied and expressed in the will. Art has to deal with being a representation of the soul in language (not that the art has to use language, but it is never without symbolic context), which is the ego, and the soul in imagination, fantasy, aspiration, which is the superego, and the soul in lizard-brain id, material physical existence and, importantly, mortality and self-negation. Art wouldn’t be recognizable as art if there wasn’t a component of mirroring the soul in material, symbol, and fantasy, but very few people mistake a mirror for an alternate dimension.– except, of course, philosophers and political figures. Does capitalism change that in some way? Yes– it makes the mirror look at itself, since the only pragmatist knowledge is self-evidence. There is no materialist capitalist art that “succeeds” as art in a capitalist context (critically or commercially or whatever) and remains materialism. Criticism can mirror that mirror-mirroring, or it can critique it.

Which beings us to Brecht. Who was certainly a materialist in his philosophy, but in his art could only trumpet the values of experimental progress by self-consciously mirroring the tropes of literary forms. Was he not a postmodern auteur ahead of his time? Him and any number of modern auteurs– Tarkovsky, Bunuel, and everyone Deleuze writes about in his Cinema books. Did he break through boundaries and smash sacred antiques? Indeed he did. Did he thereby impede the cause of capitalism? I should think not.

Noah: I don’t disagree about desire or Brecht.

I wonder about soul. I don’t know that defining soul or breaking it into different Freudian manifestations really makes a ton of sense to me. Freud doesn’t believe in the soul; people that do believe in the soul aren’t so sure about Freud.

Perhaps relatedly…I’m not so sure that the point of art is to represent soul. And I’m really not sure about this: “but very few people mistake a mirror for an alternate dimension.– except, of course, philosophers and political figures.”

I think lots and lots of people see/use art for soul. Art is really central to the identities of lots of folks. Terry Eagleton talks about how art has become a substitute for religion. In societies that aren’t capitalist, art often doesn’t just represent or point out soul, but actually is involved in soul more or less directly — the ideological/material implications just are a lot clearer (whether it’s the Odyssey talking about Greek gods or Brecht shilling, however ineffectively, for communism.) It seems to me that the dilemma of capitalist art is in fact that art does not represent soul, but actually is taken for/is supposed to/must be soul. It’s function is to embody the ineffable so that the ineffable can be safely ignored. That’s why it can be the site of so much angst/energy/conflict while simultaneously being completely beside the point.

Bert: I don’t need Freud to believe in soul or Christians to believe in Freud. I live in a capitalist anarchosphere of ideas. You seem perfectly happy to engage both of those idioms in your own arguments, sir.

And, as long as you’ve reduced me to second-person attack, you, YOU, (or should I refer to you by your last name to a projected reader of your blog?), Berlatsky states that the point of art is not to represent soul. Or at least to him (you). But then he/you say/says it IS to represent soul, — at least to pre-industrial societies– or it is to embody soul– at least to the false-consciousness modern herd described by Terry Eagleton.

I think you really hit it at the end, though, when you talk about it being meaningless and controversial at the same time. Its appeal has a lot to do with its safety. Like that thing Zizek says, as a true materialist, about how culture is everything that we revere without believing in it– which he contrasts with the Taliban blowing up the Buddhas in Bamiyan.

But I don’t know if I really go all the way with the Frankfurt commodity-fetish argument about our collective stupidity. Appearances and representations are different from mirrors of reality, but they can approximate reality in a very appealing way, Mirrors of soul are sort of the same. But neither materialists nor pragmatists believe in souls, because for there to be a soul there has to be something intangible that both “is” and “does,” and I’m contending that that is an either-or distinction in our current milieu. If people overinvest in culture, either in an aesthete or a fundamentalist vein, it’s because they’ve been deprived of the option of believing in more than two options.

One more thing– Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15 that if the dead cannot be raised, then Christians “are of all people most to be pitied.” There’s something in there about holding an impossible beautiful thing directly before your eyes without blinking, as a liberating act of will, that could definitely be reflected in rational reverence for culture.

Living In A Pragmaterial World

2010-02-15T14:22:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow I'm going to be giving a short spiel at the Chicago MCA on "Heinrich Freidrich Jacobi, Alfred North Whitehead, and the theological libido of time travel." It's part of a program of performance/lectures on philosophical pragmatism. I will be talking about the aspirational dynamism of the aforementioned apologists, St. Paul, and James Cameron, but not about this idea I have of how the history-is-dead consensus of contemporary philosophy has two poles to tend toward: pragmatism and materialism. I posted this on my friend Noah's blog.

It seems to me that the only current philosophical alternatives among your educated power class types are materialism, which sees ideology as central to modern existence, and pragmatism, which sidesteps ideology completely.

Materialists enjoy reterritorializing, redrawing boundaries dissolved by the Industrial Revolution– a chair is not a computer is not a consumer is not a politburo. And Christianity works with this– there is a moral center in the universe, a body is required for resurrection, the last shall be first.

Pragmatists are in harmony with capitalism on the other hand, saying that what works is what is true. There are no clear borders in the world or in the body or in between bodies. This also works with Christianity. There is no clear boundary between the divinity and the humanity of Christ, just as there is no clear distinction between the soul and the body, or between souls, or between the soul and God.

Marxists and conservatives indeed appreciate the former, community activists and hybrid Presidents favor the latter, but each at the expense of denying themselves an empty set, a third term, a hol in the sky.

A writer like Slavoj Zizek aggressively resists lining up with the new pragmatized academitariat. There really is a need for revolution. Lenin is preferable to Habermas. Global capital flows have only underscored the irrelevance of Richard Rorty-type culturalist liberalism. We need ideology. Something he and Frederic Jameson can agree on, although the Frankfurt folks might not approve. Which is not to say that he’s a Christian– the Hegelian Spirit he favors is the one that is also a bone– but the category of transcendence is one he disavows with more than a hint of protesting too much.

Inglorious Humanists

2010-01-27T13:27:00.000-08:00

I just ran across this today in Zizek, and thought it would add to the pondering of the mystical Quentin Tarantino. Zizek explaining why "Sade is the symptom of Kant." There's a "paradoxical reversal," so don't be startled.

"Lacan's key result of his reading of Kant is that Kant's unconditional moral Law is (one of) the reading(s) of pure desire, so that desire and the Law are one and the same thing. In his 'Kant with Sade,' Lacan does not try to make the usual 'reductionist' point that every ethical act, pure and disinterested as it may appear, is always grounded in some 'pathological' motivation...; the focus of Lacan's interest, rather, resides in the paradoxical reversal by means of which desire itself (i.e. acting upon one's desire, not compromising it) can no longer be grounded in any "pathological" interests or motivations, and thus meets the criteria of the Kantian ethical act. so that 'following one's desire' overlaps with 'doing one's duty.'

So "Inglorious Basterds" is self-aware wish-fulfillment, an alternate history where instead of the Allies winning the war, Jews/women (and one poor white dude and one black dude) won it. It is kind of a way of reinscribing the apex of American moral supremacy for the 21st century as a transparent fiction, but a fiction with a positive ethical cast, which is totally an interesting project. It's basically what makes revolutions okay, regard and pogroms not okay. But then there's the specter of Israel (and our constant legalistic meddling), and their massive civilian displacement, repression, and killing. directed nominally against people who blow stuff up in the name of their land.

I'm inclined to be impressed at that statement, and at lots of nuances about the movie-- like the Nazi casually comparing King Kong to the black experience in America. In my isolationist mood, though, I still have some wish to see the imaginary fantasy of colonial liberation meet up with some limit. My appreciation of Funny Games is due to my own distaste for "modernity" (hopefully from a less problematic place than Drudkh), in which the space opened up between individuals becomes a space for evil, in which the acquisition of land or property (a ubiquitous but not explicit part of the movie) is the transparent fiction, the pretext for pursuing power/duty.

I'm watching a show with ecological architect> geniuses, one of whom said, "So they're not making a> building, they're making a process, that's in> flux...> kind of like the world." Just earlier, he had said> something was "an unpredictable system... kind of> like> life."> > This one UT professor did a project with the Yaquis,> which admittedly seems thoroughly worthwhile, the> Yaquis love having toilets-- but somehow they're> just> changing the universe. This is exactly what I'm> trying to talk about. Officially designated> speakers> are able to invest and create social capital> through being self-refective on their obsession with> moralized formalism. But toilets are good.> > Oh, now they're comparing a local Houston ghetto> (Austin?) to the Yaqui place. Then they cleaned an> alley. I mean-- why is it that regular people can't> just do this? I think it's about access to a> technique of speech, a thoroughly abstract gesture. > Yet it always has to be grounded in some version of> priveleged actuality, to which they have elected> access. I know, I reek of ressentiment.> > I still need to eat less, again.> > I like everything you're saying (wimpy, yes). I> like> that you're willing to provide the proper kind of> nonperversion. Particularly the insights on> abstraction. And yes, medievalism is problematic,> as> Reinhold Niebuhr constantly points out. He is a> fine> Kantian representative.> >But, more than Lewis, I think Kant is moreinterested in extinguishing> that> which Zizek/Lacan call "the sutainable Other." Did> I> say "sustainable?" I meant "Gingundus." Anyway,Kant is the savior from all outer laws.> > Bataille also criticized Tibetans, though Zizek> calls> him "premodern."> > On the doctors thing. Okay, scrutinizer of> discourse,> yes, > "doctors" have been around a long time. But the> word> stayed the same, whiile changing "wizards" to> "scientists" maybe still isn't a big deal. But thenagain,> things> are SO different with the way doctors wield power> now, in a way> that they never have, if even by sheer numbers. Roman doctors were not Senators, to say the least, Ihave the impression.And> psychological is different from biological (a point> worth making-- I just don't know that people have> either not enough or way too much affection for> psychology, and frequently are willing to infer> brain> trauma if someone is drifting slightly from median> discourse. Which is a good thing to have some kind> of> limit around, but maybe not in quite that way.> > "Speech is action"-- I'm maybe saying it's at some> angle to Zen, more like speech being not a fog of> confusion but rather a crystal lens onto the> winningly-delineated scene. Speech, by organizing> ideas in public, can create a future of courteous> melancholy. But then there's the kind of thing that> begins as a bid or a brainstorm or a business ploy> or> a grant application or a gift, and then takes on> this> life as an inscribed missile of directed activity.> > Are you a Derridean neometaphysician? Do you think> that the empty center presents possibilities for> radical alterity? I certainly think people should> continue to weat attractive and delightful garments.> > That's sort of Catholic. > > It depends on what you think happens to content now> maybe. Is it annihilated? To me, it seems speech,> "like other things," gets shunted into a system of> consequences and interpersonal inferences-- its> content is deferred, in a sense, but, as time> passes,> though, it has to continue to exist. > > I keep trying to use inelegant shorthand to refer to> the strange fiefdoms of material power people have> through learning-- which is now such an abstract> process, peole can learn in a million different> contexts, all the time, using language. Language is> coextensive wth civilization. Dead or never-alive,> like hair. Which brings up the technology issue--> the> other ubik-quitous place that ideas are habituallydirectly instrumentally> applied.> > I say it's people that have less power. Everyday> people are not worthy to speak real material> language-- though everyone is constantly trying to> convince each other of their authority, it's an area> of thorough discomfort. While people are materiallybetter> off> than ever, there are more miserable people now than> ever before no matter how you're counting.> > Wait, maybe it's words (parole) that don't have> power.> It's somehow the person and the speech as belonging> to that individual that are in the bottom spot-- it> is> either acting on the world (if he is sane and> knowing)> or he is acted upon (if he is pathological, or just> uneducated (Kantian inner/outer subjects?).> > I say (in my understanding) Kant brackets things (I> can do it too, see?) like numenal deity type speech,> off from everything else, unconditional versus but> coexistent with conditional (science) knowledge. > Lewis doesn't, and mixes everything up in hisessays, coming off as somewhat> unappetizing in some ways, but also quixotically> endearingly nonpsychological. He and Bataille areboth masochistic backward-looking thrill-seekers.> > Thanks for spending so much time with me-- I hope> I'm> not a pest. I like your son very much,> PS: I got a brand new free copy of Far From theMadding Crwowd. I'm inordinaely delighted.> ---

Noah Berlatsky wrote:> > > I'm not sure we're disagreeing because I'm not> sure> > I follow every point > > you're making.> > > > Insanity isn't necessarily biological; it can be> > psychological, too, which > > isn't exactly the same thing. It's less heinous> in> > some ways (it's not > > evil), but it's more overwhelming -- heresy> presumed> > that the individual is > > in control of what they're saying. Insanity> > presumes that the speech, or > > discourse, is more powerful than the speaker. The> > person isn't responsible; > > the discourse has overwhelmed them. But it's> still> > the discourse itself -- > > it's form -- which matters, not the content.> > > > I don't know if pre-enlightenment was really more> > democratic, or even > > better, necessarily. But it's helpful to look at> > just because it defines > > our own problems for us. Hard to get a grip on> > what's going on without an > > other to refer to.> > > > I really don't think there's much point in> > separating off Kant and C.S. > > Lewis. I think they're really coming from much> the> > same place; the real > > difference is that Lewis is a better writer and> > maybe a less clear > > thinker.... which does have some implications for> > their relationship to > > language, I guess....> > > > >From: Albert Stabler dreaming> > >Date: Fri, 1 Sep 2006 14:15:13 -0700 (PDT)> > >> > >You're irrefutably right about the> heresy/insanity> > thing. But isn't > > >insanity more heinous, really, because of being> > biological rather than a > > >free decison? That's the whole thing about> freedom> > of speech not being > > >actually free, since you aren't allowed to mean> > anything. There's some > > >kind of shift-- placing a particular value on> > language with language may > > >always be kind of iffy. It's really more about> > logic and language and > > >reality all coming to occupy different channels.> > >> > > Since college I've always had the vision of> the> > religious versus the > > >psychological intermediary, in which there's> > something more profoundly > > >"democratic" in the old way evertyone understands> > that everything comes > > >from someplace unknowable. Of course in that> > medeival utopia there's still > > >hierarchy (to the max), but only in things> worldly.> > When you get a doctor > > >who can name your internal functions, language> has> > multiplied and split > > >apaprt and gained authority over matter itself. > > C.S. Lewis, as an educated > > >polymath throwback, tries to inhabit the role of> a> > scholar who can, like > > >Paley, infer God from a pig's eyeball. Kant and> > Lacan are on the same > > >page, dealing with the split in language, Lewis> > tries to ignore it, but you > > >can see why, as a retro renaissance man, he wants> > to believe tht you can > > >still speak that way. But the language he has to> > work with is the message > > >of pragmatism. Speech is supposed to be action. > > Which is very not-Zen, > > >but endearingly klunky perhaps.> > > It's a good moment of involuntary religious> > self-awareness, not > > >disappearing into the reified woodwork..> > >> > > The language has more authority than the> people> > who think they can use > > >it. That's what I mean.> > >> > >Noah Berlatsky wrote:> > > I was thinking about what you were saying re:> > post enlightenment,> > >literalism, loss of metaphorical language in> terms> > of religion, etc. I'm> > >not sure I agree with you (if I understand you.)> It> > seems to me that> > >post-enlightenment, the fate of language has been> > to become more, not less,> > >metaphorical. Metaphysical statements used to be> > seen as literal truths;> > >thus, the characteristic crime of heresy. As> > rationalism took over,> > >reasonable language was seen as separated from> > metaphysics; thus allowing> > >freedom of speech, and replacing heresy (lying> > about the metaphysical) with> > >insanity (confusing the metaphysical with> reality.)> > In this context, it> > >seems to me that Lacan and C.S. Lewis are oddly,> > more or less on the same> > >side; both separate reason and the metaphysical> â€”> > Lacan explicitly> > >separates language and reality, while Lewis (or> > Kant) subordinates> > >metaphysics to reason. It really seems like> > capitalism relies not on a> > >greater power for language, but rather on a> > dissipation of language's power> > >-- essentially, capitalism really privileges> doing> > over saying (which is > > >how> > >it jibes with Zen, I guess â€” though I'm still> not> > convinced that the> > >outcome is quite the same. I mean, was Tito a big> > Zen enthusiast?)> > >> > >Maybe that makes sense. Who knows....> > >> > > >

From: Albert Stabler> > > >To: Noah Berlatsky> > > >Subject: Re: have I reached my potential?> > > >Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2006 03:54:27 -0700 (PDT)> > > >> > > >Yeah no... there's an earlier moment where> > Michael J.> > > >Fox puts Van Halen in his Walkman, puts> > headphones on> > > >Crispin Glover, dresses up in his fallout suit,> > and> > > >plays it, stopping and telling his "dad" that> his> > name> > > >is Darth Vader. That part is the awesome minor> > > >prequel to the famous solo/impotence moment.

Jean-Francois Lyotard is the most consumnate of allthe postmodern post-structuralists-- all universalreified things are false, all particularmicro-communities shoudl freely express theirindividual languages. Neoclassical economists are clearly humanists. Letindividuals make free choices in a market structurereflecting common usefulness. Marx is less clearly ahumanist. People act (consciously or unconsciously,it doesn't matter) in their class roles, sometimes intheir class interests, but essentially theirproduction defines them, not their preferences andbeliefs. You could definitely point out that modernity andhumanism, in my definitions, are somewhat at odds. Marx is certainly a modernist, as is Freud-- but asdisciples of scientistic mysticism, neither one reallyseems to believe in the potential or interiortiy ofindividuals. Unlike Jeremy Bentham. If you watch people sometimes,they learn to watch themselves all the time, Shulamith Firestone, on the other hand, despisededucation and all legalistic forms of social control. What they had in common was a generalized sense ofgender semi-equality.You could compare Lewis and Bentham, since they bothbelieved in animal rights, But there's not a wholelot more there. Lewis and Freud, ironically enough,share a similar fascination with childhood and theirrational, a belief in essential gender, and adistrust of most people's ability to comprehend orgovern themselves. Lewis also rightly distrusts theprofessional oligopoly of psychology, and Freudiansrightly distrust the mytho-heroic powers Lewis, in hisKantian moments, gives to mankind. But they bothreact to the excesses and oversights of theEnlightenment by attempting to reinvent transcendence.This is not to say that they don't have some drasticdifferences. Or that C.S Lewis wouldn't prefertalking to Orwell, a rabid humanist, over any feministwho ever lived.This is really taking up a lot of time. I hope thisis something other than racquetball to you.---

Noah Berlatsky wrote:> > I don't even know who Lyotard is, unless you're> referring to the gym attire.> > You think Lewis believed that the modern individual> is fabricated? In what sense? I think Lewis, like> most Kantians, had a fairly universal sense of what> an individual is. Nor would he have believed that> the modern individual is somehow better or worse> than other historical individuals (different, yes;> worse, no.) > > I'm not sure that humanism and rationalism are quite> the same kettle of fish. Are economists humanists? > Behavioral scientists? I guess if you're arguing> that a belief in human reason is the same as> humanism; I generally take humanism these days to> mean a sense that human nature is universal and> lovable, though. If human reason is the standard,> though, I don't know how you can argue that> Firestone isn't a humanist — she's a Marxist and a> believer in the ability of science to recreate> social truths. She's Jeremy Bentham, basically. > >

Post-structuralist does not mean> anti-structuralist.> Thomas Aquinas was certainly> among the first> humanists, and would probably have> been unimpressed> with my manhandling of equivocal> terminology. Free> will, the pluralistic coexistence> of language regimes,> and the particularity of> individul experiences was a> big deal for him, as it> was for Lyotard.>> Derrida argued with Descartes for> being insufficiently> precise with his terms.> Tirelessly tracing back> statements to their> assumptions and castrating their> ideological> underpinnings is entirely in the tradition> of> rational disputation. Feel free to explain to me>> how that is not the case. "Justice is the>> undeconstructible condition that makes> deconstruction> possible." Sounds like Kantian> ethics to me.>> Foucault is another matter. For me,> he makes> reterritorialization possible, by getting> away from> ideas and individuals and turning toward> history and> objects.>> Reterritorialization is not> about forgetting or> purging humanism. But the> possibilities created by> Christianity, all the> contradictions Christ embodies,> have resulted in a> ruthless and rationalized> civilizational pride that> He and his earlier> interlocutors would deplore.>> I> would never argue that Lewis isn't a humanist in>> some capacity. He loved Plato (though more than>> Aristotle, I think), but he also believed animals> had> a moral character (which Aquinas did not). The> modern> individual is not gendered or created, it> is> instrumental and fabricated, and Lewis stood> against> that, as have various justice-minded> Christians and> non-Chriistians of the modern era.>>> Isolationism Now!>> ---

Noah Berlatsky wrote:

If you>>> talked about Lewis and Firestone too that'd be> cool.>>>> Ah, I hadn't realized that> deconstructionism was now>> humanism. I'm not sure I> entirely buy it, though -->> nor necessarily the> idea that Lewis isn't a humanist>> in some sense (I> mean, the first humanists were>> Christians too...)> And seeing Firestone as someone>> who reconstitutes> gender seems bizarre, since she>> seems to want to> abolish gender distinctions>> altogether. But> perhaps I can wait for your>> argument and all will> be explained....>>>> I don't think Serrano is> arguing that they don't>> have some connection;> maybe more that they're not>> determinative of each> other and can vary in many>> ways. For instance, a> person could see herself as a>> woman, be attracted> to other women, and have many>> gender hallmarks of> maleness (she could dress like a>> man, work on> cars, be large and hairy, etc.) Or any>> other> variations

My contention is that> deconstruction is an>> essentially> humanist> analytical endeavor. A>> metarhetoric to end> all> metarhetorics. Which>> doesn't mean I don't admire>> it-- it's just that I>> see it, like humanism> generally,> as an essentially>> destructive> enterprise.> Deterritorialization is not>> used by> Deleuze to refer> to humanism-- it means>> taking> one mountain and ending> up with "A Thousand>>> Plateaus" (the title of a book of> his), or taking>>> an arboreal root network and repacing> it with a>>> rhizome (everything connected to> everything).>> I>>> could maybe take a different topic if you wanted.> I>>> would like to write about Nudd and Barrow in> terms>> of> their maleness, and for that to make> sense, I>> would> like to talk about what I learned> from Lewis>> and> Firestone. Although I can't help> but bring in>>> Sedgwick when talking about the way> their>> effeminacy> reinforces their gender.>> I> find it>> highly doubtful that "subconscious sex"> (a> very>> useful idea) is unconnected to someone's> gender>>> (behavior and perception). Who they want> to sleep>>> with sems far less a part of their> everyday>> existence,> or anyone's business.>> I'm> listening to>> your slightly-un-recent Random show.>> That was a>> fanatastic Aphex Twin song you played.>> It's al>> great.>>>>

--- Noah Berlatsky wrote:>>>>>> I>> listened to Between the Buried and Me; need to> do>>>> so again.>>>> Okay; sexuality *is* the> identity (or>> refusal to>> identify, I guess); sex> is actually>> putting the>> parts together, or> discussing the>> parts in social>> isolation.> Deterritorialization>> sounds like>> humanist> deconstruction; weird.>>>> I>> mean, is this> Bordorowiz bigger than Baumgardner?>>>> Or Dame> Darcy? I've got a bunch of big names>>>>> (relatively)...don't know if I need to go asking>>>>> people I hate just for the PR boost....>>>> If I>>> remember right, Julia Serrano says that>>> everybody>> has sexuality (who they want to sleep>>> with);>> gender traits; and a subconscious sex> (what>> they>> see themselves as, male or female> or>>>> indeterminate.) All of them vary and none of> them>>>> are dependent on each other (though I> assume they>>>> can affect each other in various> ways.)>>>> I may do>> a thing with quotes from> Firestone and>> Lewis. I>> wish I could get somebody> to write an>> essay about>> them, but I don't know> that I>> necessarily want to>> do it myself and> you've got>> enough on your plate.>> I am going to> reread Dialectic>> of Sex, though,>> after I read> this Eve Sedgwick book>> I got.>>>>>>>>>

Well, we'll>>>> see.> Reserve your right to bitch and> moan. I hope>>>>> Mary Patten responds.>> Have you listened to>>> Between>> the Buried and Me? What> an insanely>>> weird/unweird>> brilliant tour de chops.> Make> sure>> you hear the>> hidden track at the end.>>> Right-->> sexuality as a>> thing you own and> represent and>>> observe, a personal>> Jesus in your> genitals. The>>> genitals are much more>> mysterious> as social>> objects> than mere badges of>>> pleasurable>> entitlement. Homo and> hetero, it's> a>> sorry>> substitute for gender as a way to>> confrint>> the>> world. Gregg Bordowitz says "All>> sexuality is>>>> queer sexuality" (you shoudl> totally try> to get>> him>> to contribute, it would> raise the profile>>> quite a>> bit, though you would> be totally annoyed>> by> him)-->> which is true,> insofar as it implies>> all> sexuality>> is> meaningless. It's a synonym for>>> "lifestyle,">>> essentially, and thus a stand-in and>>> facade for>>> economic, historical, and gender>> relations.>> Like>> "spirituality" attempts to hide>>> "religion.">>>> Deterritorialization (a Deleuze>>> term) describes the>>> fundamental disintegrative>>> force of (humanist)>>> modernity, in which depth> and>> centrality and>>> "verticality" are turned> into a>> flattened grid,>> there> is iteration and> "play,">> boundaries are>> absent,> identity is> consumed and>> consumable,>> everything is>> marginal.>> Reterritorialization, a>> more murky> term,> (in my>> head) refers to an attempt>> to deal> with> artifacts>> instead of rhetoric,>> establish> new> boundaries and>> a new relevance for>> old> discredited> forms,>> re-energize large-scale>>> affiliations.> Shulamith>> Firestone is all about>>> saying gender is>>> essential, and looking at> concrete>> social forms,>> and> inventing weird new> arrangements>> for things.>> Lewis is> attempting a> reconception of>> the human>> and animal> cosmology,> magical and divine,>>>> abjection and>> beatification. They both seem like>>>>> reterritorializers> to me, which is why they> piss>>>> off the humanists.>> I saw an incredible> John>>>> Bellows performance last> night. He played> last,>>>> because he had to take his> girlfriend to> the>>>> hospital for a brown recluse bite> (she's>>> recovering>> and okay). He did my favorite> songs,>>> including "The>> Straightest Lines," some old>> stuff>> I never heard, a>> Kinks cover ("we are not> two,> we>> are one"?), and a>> Nirvana cover (the> hidden>>> Nevermind track with all>> the> screaming).>> Whew. I>> may need to use some of>>> that for my next>>> statement of universal>>> macro-insightfulness.>>>>>>>>>

Welcome to the Desert of the Ragnarok

2010-01-14T06:43:00.000-08:00

The monotonous pastoral-historical apotheosis is what characterizes black metal lyrics, which is more Heidegger than Zizek. Zizek brings the blood, the repetition, and the abstraction, but not a ton of historical and not really the pastoral. He's like one of those West Coast college-boy black metal bands. Wolves in the Throne Room or Unexpect maybe.

Zizek groupies would probably hate Judith Butler's groupies. They would rumble by throwing raw food and B-movie DVDs at each other.

--- On Tue, 1/12/10, Noah Berlatsky
I'd agree that Zizek isn't any more egotistical than the average academic rock star...but that's pretty egotistical. There isn't really a way to be an academic rock star and be faceless and inhabited by form in the way that black metal is, is the thing. He ends up writing a jazz solo to black metal, which can't help but undermine itself, in some sense.
On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 8:15 AM, Albert Stabler wrote:
I would never imply that horror movies are meaningless. Rather, I would say that they are apocalyptic, and thus have a complex relationship to intentionality. It's an allegory of the world turned upside down, which can represent lots of fears and desires, as well as beliefs, but it's tricky to read it straightforwardly as, say, satire-- or ironic utopia.

Speaking of reading people straightforwardly, I looked at the section in Puppet and Dward on Chesterton, and Zizek (along with reviling liberatory sexuality) actually says that, in giving up an ideological big Other, we give up ourselves, our truth, and our world (he even quotes "1984"). He compares his liberal poistmodern enemies (who often sound like Dick Cheney) to the "anal character" in Freud, the miser who will not give up anything, and lives a life of fear and alienation.

Which is pretty much the vision of the solipsistic Satan you have Zizek cast as. Which isn't to say you can't defend that version of him, in the admirably Zizekian/Hegelian dialectical funhouse you have going there, but he would reject it completely. And you would really be back to a false consciousness angle-- which is one venomous aspect of humanism that Freud and Marx include in their worldview, but, really, not Christ so much. Nonetheless, I myself am troubled by Zizek extolling Lenin and then denouncing torture-- he is constantly having his cake and eating it too, which does seem like the miserly figure he deplores. But it does also seemn a lot like Chesteronian Christianity-- orhtodoxy is romance, faith includes atheism, civilization needs anarchists.

I still have a lot of sympathy for your decoding of Tabico, though, and I think Zizek and Chesterton might as well-- if it really is a utopia, it is a fascistic one that both those guys could get behind as a critique of modernity. Shulamith Firestone might be the audience to read it as an actual happy ending, but that happy ending is never going to be the primary reading.

I don't think Zizek actually is more egotistical than any other academic rock star-- I prefer to give him benefit of the doubt a lot of the time, and think that, when he says that he believes in environmental crisis, and yet he sees environmrentalism as having a reactionary aspect, I am okay with letting him say those things. I think he worships the Act (revolution, communal effort, the space between people) rather than the sovereign individual. At least most of the time.
Materialist indeed. Materialist Marxist machismo. I wonder if Zizek has an SUV? Just to piss off the Environmental Science grad students?

--- On Mon, 1/11/10, Noah Berlatsky

I think horror movie plots are pretty important myself. I mean, as these things go. More so than Westerns, though that might set Zizek on me. In corpse paint. In that the abject visions are precisely visions of totalizing utopias. Alien is entirely a fantasy about capitalism. You can see it as a parable about the failure of capitalism (coming apart/unable to deal with the primitive other.) But you can also see it as the Malthusian evolutionary final success of capitalism; the aliens as us, and both as capitalist apotheosis in a maelstrom of bloody pleasures.

The thing about the gay utopia, and the way it links up with Tabico and horror, is that there's a sense in which it's its own obverse. That's the thing about the Thing; it's an image of gay utopia and a hysterical homophobic reaction to gay utopia. I'm thinking about James Bond a little here, which is very much the capitalism that is about blood and money...but it's also predicated on male/male repressed lust that's almost diagrammatic of how Eve Sedgwick sees the world. Zizek's repeated, really excessive denunciations of multicult identity politics can be seen as just, you know, he's an academic and it irritates him because he's there -- but I think there's also some sort of attraction there, maybe. What is Zizek's writing if not a constant, neurotic assertion of identity? I mean, the whole point of his flirtation with Christianity is essentially that he himself is the Big Other; it's philosopher as Christ, his identity as the only identity. In what way does Zizek, worshipping man as God, get away from the idea of humanism? Wouldn't Chesterton see him as the egotistical devil incarnate, as a kind of reductio ad absurdum of the multicult relativism he claims, via Chesterton, to transcend? Zizek ends up with, "What I say is true!", which is the perfect opposite of "What God says is true!" and not the opposite at all of "There is no truth" or "what anyone says can be true."

Which is why, to come full circle in my wishy-washiness, I'd argue that the gay utopia is arguably both a end result or apotheosis of capitalism and its perfect opposite, in that, unlike Zizek, it's not materialist. The big other in the gay utopia is love, which (re Tabico) is both terrible and beautiful — and also not unrelated to Christ (who, like Tabico, urges the abandonment of family and the following of a (in social context) monstrous morality.) If you believe in the gay utopia, you believe in something. I think Chesterton would really rather work with Tabico or the gay rights movement in a lot of ways than with Zizek, precisely because the gay rights folks are less wrapped up in identity and humanism.

On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 10:25 PM, Albert Stabler wrote:
And all of their songs could be about scary multiculturalist toilets.

I don't think the gay utopia is the only shade of capitalism.

Despite what David Brooks may think, there's also a highly weaponized consolidated institutionalized blood-money strain, as opposed to the lovable dispersed entrepreneurial trust-fund swinger variety (their children?) that it uses for ideological cover. Recognizing that those groups are inextricably linked is not the same as claiming that the latter is merely the rarefied version of the former. Gay people being tormented throughout the allegedly free world are under no illusion that their fellow citizens envision the same gay utopia they do.

I'm not sure that you acknowledge that humanism is an ideology among ideologies (although its viral nature makes it a perfect complement to capitalism, it is ideology, just as capitalism, after everything, really is an economic system (that may have cancelled out all others ever). That's the common ground that Foucault and Zizek (and E.M. Cioran and Bataille) all, in some way, are trying to express.

The Tabico story is fantastic, but it is a horror movie plot-- i.e., a myth of abjection. Humanism has no greater fear than the loss of personal identity (pod people and such), and the loss of humanity (turning into bugs)-- which is ingeniously linked up with woman-power (itself a worthwhile humanist trope). It suggests a hellish image of the womb-massacre as the underside of castrating technocracy, which certainly has some irony, but then again isn't all that different from Alien. The protagonist just falls into rather than overcoming the nightmare, like with James Hogg, with a similarly Swifitan connotation of allegorizing the essence of our culture. Zizek would probably just read it as a wry condemnation of Guattari-era Deleuze.

And "false consciousness" is really only a problem when someone is telling me how I've been duped. It's not the same thing as disagreeing with someone, But it is, of course, a way of avoiding having real values, which works fine for humanism in general, and the gay utopia in particular.

Can a virus ever choke on its own emptiness?
--- On Mon, 1/11/10, Noah Berlatsky

There needs to be an Eastern European metal band called Slavoj Zizek. Ideally Serb, since I think that would apocalyptically piss him off.

Yes, it makes sense to oppose the gay utopia and Communism if the gay utopia is capitalism...though, simultaneously, it also makes sense to think of Communism as a kind of end result of the gay utopia/capitalism. Again, Tabico is kind of the ur-text here, with total communitarian mindless assimilation into the big Insect Other as the end product of fetishistic self-aggrandizement. And of course the final result of both communism and capitalism as the destruction of the nuclear family, freeing incestuous jouissance — which is perhaps the Real itself in some sense? The lust for the real is a lust for the destruction of the individual, a subsuming of the individual into the big Other?

I agree that Zizek wouldn't admit to inegalitarianism — but that's what's so great about false consciousness, right? We know what he wants better than he does, he knows what we want better than we do, and everyone gets to pleasurably enjoy their knowing superiority. And you know what? That's a kind of gay utopia too.
On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 4:15 PM, Albert Stabler wrote:
To bring home my oppostion of the gay utopia and Mao; he once said "IA revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery." Not to mention, "Communism is not love. Communism is a hammer which we use to crush the enemy." Which was apparently most of China.

He also felt strongly about power coming from the barrel of a gun. Although, he was a feminist, and distrusted the wealthy almost as much as Jesus.

Is the reinserted-ethical revolution a Chestertonian move because it's ironically counterintuitively intuitive and unironic? Or did Chesterton have a macropolitical vision, other than "conservative?"

Do you think that, as more of a pragmatic pacifist than Chesterton, you are less of a radical? That would be quite the badge of honor.

I don't know that Zizek is willing to admit that his egalitarian political ideology has truly inegalitarian results. I think that's part of his weird coked-up Eastern Bloc grampa vibe: "We only had toilet paper once a year. And we LIKED it!" Having privilege of any kind would put a dent in his plainspoken bearded cranky sage shtick.

And his charisma almost makes it all worth it. But then you end up with a beautiful argument for God with no God at the end, Lacanian flashes of glory without a frame of political reference, a cultural-studies Marxist who hates cultural studies. He is truly the empty chocolate egg of which he writes.

He admires Lenin for following through on his abstract principles, although he admores Heidegger, in the same way, for being a Nazi. There's the lust for the Real of which you spake. Or, if you like, nostalgia for the Act.

Nonetheless, your sensibility for his maneuvers is great. I think you probably could summon your black-metal roar and do a pretty awesome Evil Slavoj Zizek call-in show/ lecture circuit.
--- On Mon, 1/11/10, Noah Berlatsky

Yeah, I think gay utopia= capitalism is pretty much the equation.

In re an earlier point about Zizek getting rid of ethics and then reintroducing ethics and that not being revolutionary; I think the actual Zizekian move there (via Chesterton) would be to argue that that is exactly the essence of revolution. That is, the purpose of revolution is precisely to reinscribe inegalitarian hegemony, but harder, and in blood.
On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 8:00 AM, Albert Stabler wrote:
Sorry that last thing was a bit incoherent. I was trying to multi-task. Fortunately I wasn't driving.

The good things Communism did was to industrialize the Thiurd World and check Western expansionism, Nazis included. Alternately, one could argue that the Communists marooned their subject economies with backward technologies, encouraged Western expansionism (and many related ugly little wars), and provoked fascistic resistance.

But the pleasure-seeking "desring machines" of the gay utopia are a Euro-American humanist export for whom economics means bartering boutique handicrafts to pay the property taxes they caused to escalate. Who are they NOT scapegoats for?
--- On Sun, 1/10/10, Albert Stabler

I'll give you the gay-utopia bloodbath. I guess we're sort of living it. There are serious problems with the idea of sex supplanting violence.
Maybe the dirty underside of teh gay utopia is more or less the same as that of capitalism. Since the gay utopia is sort of "hot" embodied capitalism, rather than "cold" disembodied capitalism, In particular, maybe it makes sense to oppose it to "cold" institutionalized Third World autocracy, as opposed to the "hot" theocracies which seem more like obverses than inverses.

So maybe the Asian autocracies are the bloodbath, the 9.11, of gay utopianism-- the flip side of the groovy Buddhist community mind expansion. And, as such, their isolationism made them autonomous and strong, at the same time it produced a stain on world history that cannot be wiped clean.

--- On Sun, 1/10/10, Noah Berlatsky
I don't think it's exactly right to say that the gay utopia is necessarily not a bloodbath. Remember Tabico or Shivers or the Thing. I think those folks are all onto something — though, I agree, too, that there is definitely a vision of gay utopia which is pacifist.

That's interesting about Jesus; somebody should pay you to write something about that. Or give you tenure, or something.

Your examples of situations in which pacifism seems problematic are reasons why I"m such a wishy-washy pacifist, as well as being wishy-washy everything else.

Zizek seems to be bracketing Stalin when I read him. If not...I don't really see how he's an alternative to capitalism, really. But I don't see how communism is an alternative to capitalism; as we've discussed, it really seems more like an extension. And while it's clear to me how feminism has done some good in the world, I just don't see the upside of communism in practice (as distinct from socialism) pretty much at all. I mean, can you really lay any full scale atrocities at the feet of feminism? Wheras I was just reading a little about Cambodia... I don't know. I know you have some sympathy for Mao, and I'm willing to say I've missed something, but it's hard for me to get behind celebrating Stalin for any reason, really.

On Sun, Jan 10, 2010 at 9:41 PM, Albert Stabler wrote:
The MCA deal is going to be super short, but the InCUBATE people invited me. I'm kind of thrilled. It's based on the pragmatist Metaphysical Club, of William James and Dewey and Holmes and all those other zany bearded snuff-huffers.

It's been occurring to me that Jesus defined modern social relations-- defining a private sphere apart from state interference, rejecting traditional value systems and extended and even nuclear family relations in favor of abstract inner pursuits, extolling radically egalitarian values, dying for his principles. He despised work and ownership. And, strangely, he was completely the ideal for which our civilization continues to strive. He was a humanist, without the solipsism, nihilism, and hubris.
Armed resistance can certainly seem necessary in certain situations. It's hard to imagine being a resident of the Belgian Congo under King Leopold and not wanting to kill every white man in sight. Or a Plains Indian, or an Australian aborigine, or any number of indigenous people, for that matter.

But it seems like very little comes of that kind of resistance-- as the example of the post-Jesus Messiah character Bar-Kochba who got the Jewish insurgents slaughtered by the Romans. It could be argued that monarchies would have crumbled in Europe without violent overthrow-- which is why the overthrow was more successful, and less violent, than it might have been.

Communists and feminists-- they're both modern universalist ideologies, and thus ripe for imperialist exploitation. I don't think Zizek brackets Stalin, though. I think he celebrates him, much like Bataille does, as an appealingly brutal and comic bulwark against the ruthless alienation of capitalist life.

Feminism finds its most radical ideological stance in the gay utopia, on the other hand, which is not a bloodbath of any kind-- and not even a demand for individual or social perfection. And, while we certainly have an extended critical discussion documented online regarding said gay utopia, it never should be overlooked that, despite its unremittingly capitalist polymorphous jouissance, or maybe because of it, the gay utopia may be a more achievable vision than any workers' paradise. Or any church-based theocracy. Karl Barth's post-church religiosity is the sort of reverence that makes sense for a range of endlessly hybridized cosmopolitan identities.

--- On Sun, 1/10/10, Noah Berlatsky

How'd you get the Whitehead gig? And yeah, I'd love to come.

You have me dead to rights on the feminism, alas. I guess, backing and filling, I'd say that I think that as a resistance movement, and in comparison with Communism, feminism has done a much better job of achieving its domestic goals without being coopted for imperial ends. It's true that feminist arguments are often martialled on behalf of invasions...but they're rarely the main arguments, and there are pretty much always feminist voices speaking out against that cooptation. It's probably in part because of feminism's links to pacifism, which I'm sure Zizek would hate. But it just seems extremely dicey of Zizek to essentially bracket Stalin in reference to Communism and then claim that MacKinnon, with her much more minor sins, should be used to utterly void feminism.

Right; anti-tax mobs should be demonstrating against schools, just like they should be demonstrating against prisons. I can agree with that. (And I didn't think you were anti-democratic.)

I guess I, personally, am not sold on revolutions being all that great an idea. They seem to end up with lots of folks dead so that some different group of people can get a chance to do the oppressing. I mean, yes, there are lots of things in society and the world I would like to change — but to the extent that I'm a pacifist and to the extent that I'm a conservative, I really would rather change slow and kill fewer people than change fast and have some sort of apocalyptic bloodbath, no matter how cathartic. And I think that's pretty much where Barack Obama is coming from too (except, you know, he's not a pacifist, unfortunately.)

The New Testament advocates urbanization? In what sense?

On Sun, Jan 10, 2010 at 5:23 PM, Albert Stabler wrote:
Hopefully I will be talking about Whitehead in the context of American pragmatism. You're welcome to come!

Now I've gone and lost the clip-montage I watched on Youtube. Here's another one, "Barack Obama Versus Religion": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXcvbnzNIjg But it includes Abraham. It is noteworthy that, based on Youtube video titles I searched, both faithful and atheist folks seem to consider him an atheist.

Feminism is usually applied to Western contexts? Is that right? Because I seem to recall Elie Wiesel beating the drums of war with the Muslim state on Oprah's decidedly feminist TV show. Feminist arguments have been used to decry the Taliban, and other brutal Islamist theocracies, for over a decade, as well as genital mutilation in Africa. The intersection of feminism and colonialism could potentially look like the encouragement of women's suffrage, which just happened in Kuwait, or it could look like the image of white women providing an excuse for lynching. It's a real debate-- but Zizek could certainly be more perspicacious in decrying relativism in one breath and then advocating for a certain amount of toleration of oppression in the next (which I would advocate as an isolationist)..
And I wouldn't call myself anti-democratic. I don't have a utopian vision. Zizek believes in dictatorship because he believes in false consciousness. I'm a populist. I am far more able to put up with anti-tax mobs than an expiring public education infrastructure-- the links between those things are not as simple as some might think.

Zizek is totally black metal. That is a delicious insight. Both are so blindingly Calvinist it's amazing they don't recognize it in themselves. And there is certainly something deeply troubling about Calvinism, as James Hogg illustrates so amazingly. But it should be noted that in England Calvinism was a revolutionary position, literally. What's so amazing about revolutions, after the English, French, and American ones of the Enlightenment, is that they have been not elitist but populist, not bourgeois but agrarian, not deist but nationalist. That's the part Barack Obama needs to deal with.

The ideologies today's masses reject are from the distant centers of power, but if the New Testament is a model for anything, it would seem to advocate urbanization, separation of church and state, justice being promoted over tradition. Zizek needs a different lens to examine this. Merely rejecting ethics and then re-introducing ethics in the back door is not revolutionary. But deploring biopower and colonialism is a relevant political starting point.

--- On Sun, 1/10/10, Noah Berlatsky

Barack Obama talks about Abraham losing his son to DCFS? Holy crap that's amazing. Do you have a link?

To be fair, Zizek was attacking MacKinnon for her racism — she said something about Serb's being rapists by genetics. And sneering at that is obviously fine. But pretending that that's some kind of summary of feminism in general, or even a metaphor for it, is ridiculous. The thing about western feminism mainly is that it doesn't really care all that much about the third world; never has. It's much more focused on Western culture...which is probably for the best, ultimately.

In what context are you talking about Whitehead? That sounds great.

I think I've thought this before, but one of the things that really seems to be a major weak point in Zizek's theology is original sin. He just doesn't have anything to say about it — and, in fact, it cuts against most of his major insights. He sees the incarnation as the death of God, but also as man taking the place of God, which can only be inspirational (as he sees it) if there's some kind of faith in a this-world perfectionism. That's also important if you're going to put people up against the wall for liking the wrong Westerns — Zizek's attack on wishy-washy liberals is predicated on the belief that somewhere out there (like in the mirror) there stands someone without sin.

Your point about individuals organizing is well-taken — but it's a democratic argument, isn't it? And I don't have a problem with that myself; democracy isn't a cure-all, because cure-alls don't exist, but it's kind of amazing system for allowing (some) change without revolutionary bloodshed. Revolutionaries often sneer at if because it doesn't allow enough change — but also, and not even all that surreptitiously, for not involving bloodshed. It's the lust for the real that Zizek talks about, and then seems to forget when it's him doing the lusting — in a lot of these discussions, hurting and killing people is the point, not a bug — it's what lets you know that the speaker is serious and ethically sound. That's definitely where Zizek is coming from; at some point, the problem with liberals is not that they prevent change, but simply that they're unwilling to kill. In fact, the willingness to kill becomes the sign of sinlessness; you end up worshipping force. Which is more or less the definition of demonic — and thereby not, actually, transcendent, but just kind of stupid and pitiful. You can see Zizek putting on corpse paint and burning down some random church, explaining that it's in the interest of world revolution as he's carted off to spend the rest of his life cared for by the liberal state while music reporters write slightly amused articles about how nuts he is.

Which isn't to say that I don't like either Zizek or black metal...but if there's an election, and either one is running against Barack Obama, I know who I'm voting for.

On Sun, Jan 10, 2010 at 3:08 PM, Albert Stabler wrote:
The thing about bad movie taste getting you lined up against the wall is genius. Zizek is sort of like George Lucas, in an appropriately creepy way. Lack of humility is a very real problem.

I definitely remember that book -- I think it was the third one of his I read-- giving me the uneasy feeling that this guy I found all inspiring and profound was actually sort of a repressive fascistic crank. Still, in his artless way, he deserves some slack.

I mean, Catherine MacKinnon is not the greatest spokesperson ever for feminism on a philosophical/theoretical angle-- obviously it would make much more sense for Zizek to take on Shulamith Firestone, who is interested in Marx and Freud and revolution and biopower, or Julia Kristeva, who really really cares about Lacan. On the practical side, did you support U.S. intervention in Bosnia? I think it's chalked up as a Clintonian success story. It is undoubtedly an example of what colonialism consists of in our era. Eastern Europe is being gentrified, just as, in America, Eastern European neighborhoods have been, and the descendants of Eastern Europeans have been. This certainly means something to Zizek.

Radical academics deserve critique from anyone with a platform, even if it is other radical academics. Like, the Foucault-Chomsky debates aren't moot just because they're both radical academics and neither is self-aware. Your point is taken, though.

There is just something about politics that is untheorizable. It may be the inherent incompatibility of justice and earthly power (which Christ was on top of). Zizek, falling into the false-consciousness trap, thinks that there is some kind of end run around ideology-- and, to be a responsible Marxist, that end run must be force. Bataille's appreciation of Stalin is much like Zizek's appreciation of terrorism; the dark side of our system must yield some glimmer of hope. I would argue that capitalism is not fragile in that way. The hope for the wretched of the earth is not going to either be the triumph or the collapse of capitalism, both of which the Marxists have covered. It is their own ability to organize, through institutions both economic and ideological.

Alfred North Whitehead (who I need to read a lot more of, since I'm going to be talking about him at the MCA in February) is someone who is perhaps tainted to Zizek fans by his preference of William James over Hegel, but he's also an contra-Kantian who sees all knowledge as embodied, and all embodiment as incomplete-- he spoke, in a nice simplification, of civilization moving from force to persuasion-- the rise of modernity for which Christ was the model. Salvation in the future is to come about through free will, the initial source of mankind's suffering.
Barack Obama spoke in 2006 on the role of religion in democracy, saying that the arguments of the religiously motivated must be amenable to reason-- his pragmatism is absolutely about persuasion, and thus capitalist ethics, and he cites Abraham losing his son Isaac to DCFS. It's really compelling. But it brings up the issue of what is a principle so valuable that force is required to protect it?

--- On Sun, 1/10/10, Noah Berlatsky

I see why you dislike this desert of the real 9/11 book. It's prettyinsufferable. Honestly, Zizek taking a strong stand against thehypocrisy of radical academics — he didn't notice how ridiculous thatwas?Basically, he's a better theologian and cultural analyst than he is acommentator on the current political situation. There's just howlerafter howler. Feminism is a joke because Catherine McKinnon gotreally pissed off at rape during the Serbian conflict; democracy isnot to be trusted because Democrats are more corrupt than Republicans,so we should set up a radical leftist Communist government, because,like, *those* aren't corrupt at all; it makes sense politically tocomplement the statement "if you save one life you save the world"with the statement "If you kill one evildoer, you save the world;"fascism stole everything from communism, so don't criticizeproto-fascism because you might end up criticizing communism; It's alla farrago of self-serving nonsense, the basic point of which is"relativism is bad, so let's have a bloody revolution right now — andI'll pick who will die! Like all my fellow radical academics, who arenot quite as radical as me because they don't like the rightWesterns!"I mean, there are worthwhile insights throughout, of course, butoverall it's not an impressive performance. Maybe people reallyshouldn't talk about 9/11 at all; it seems to just be mostly an excuseto say "my dumbest prejudices — they are all proven true! Let me goforth and spew dumb shit!"

Moot-Irrealist meat-aphysics: Zizek as apostate apologist

2010-01-07T18:49:00.000-08:00

Speaking of Niebuhr, Obama made some speech as a senator on the role of religion in American politics-- I only saw the beginning, but he kicks it off by speaking of green-Christian environmental stewardship and religious-public social entrepreneurship as nice but mostly irrelevant. I'm still glad I voted for that guy.

In talking about the null-set third term I only meant to refer to your concept of a neutral ground outside of culture where culture can be evaluated. I was trying to comment about that as well on your blog when I talked about (Z. talking about) the Holy Spirit, and my own belief in art as a socioeconomically-determined (material) zone of (immaterial) transcendence.

But also I'm in the part of Puppet n' Dwarf where Zizek is talking about God as the gap from Himself, and the Lacanian Act as apart from ethics, but distinct also from nihilistic mysticism, relating to his description of Zen capitalism (being at one with your sword, your marketing platform, etc.). He has that thing with the emphasis changing meaning, changing "Call me Ishmael" to "call me, Ishmael!," and "Nothiong is without reason" to "Nothing(ness) is without reason," and "Don't kill" to "Don't! ...Kill!"

Which brings up the example of Abraham and Isaac, as I did earlier-- Lacan apparently sees Abraham as fighting "the temptation of the ethical." One of Z's psychoanalytic critiques of Buddhism is the mistake that all sentient beings are truly seeking happiness, which we aren't. But he likes the idea that we are stuck in suffering because the first Bodhisattva was dumb enough to be compassionate and come back from Nirvana to try to bring other beings along with him.

For me it goes back to my vision of a universe eternally out of balance. I remember in college one time I was telling Bill that I had once seen the universe as a black and white yin-yang in a gray field absorbing all the gray, but now I see the yin-yang shrinking and the gray expanding. God is who we thank for our blessings, but never who we blame for our troubles. Morality is not optional, but it is human. Calling it transcendent just doesn't seem right to me.

--- On Wed, 1/6/10, Noah Berlatsky wrote:

I think you mean something by floater null-set third term that is technical and beyond my ken. Expound?

Yeah; using morality is kind of lame. But I'm an atheist, so what can you do.

Niebuhr is pretty fun to read on Catholicism. He's definitely of the opinion that the Pope is setting himself up in place of god in some sense (though it's Neibuhr, so I'm sure he'd say that Catholicism can also offer partial and valuable glimmerings of the divine.)

On Wed, Jan 6, 2010 at 4:30 PM, Albert Stabler wrote:

The point about transcendence as a floater null-set third term is really fabulous-- although how null it truly is is the tricky part. If it's humanist ethics, that may be transcendent for Kant, but not for me. I think being bound by morality/law is part of our lived libidinal contingent experience, not a condition of the universe on every level.

I definitely have problems with Catholicism-- although Chesterton himself was a Catholic, and in Orthodoxy describes the Church itself as a teetering sculpture in time, always making mistakes and trying to fix them, embodying the struggle of the individual sinner in a contingent community of souls. I can definitely see where Zizek is coming from in interpreting Christianity as materialist in that sense-- there is no perfection that we can truly know or even comprehend.

When you hate the body too much, when you're a dualist Manichean Neoplatonist alchemist wizard whatever, you start to think you're God. When you love the body too much, you start to abandon God. And I think I'm wiling to map that on to anthropomorphization as well. God does and does not have a body. Time is and is not eternity. That's the half-humanist thing I used to always to talk about with Freud and Marx... their transcendent terms are the superego and history respectively, but you can't deconstruct away the Base.

--- On Wed, 1/6/10, Noah Berlatsky wrote:

I don't know that the perverse core is exactly what I resent. Or, at least, I resent the anthropomorphizing of the perverse core, not necessarily the perverse core itself (at least in Job). If that makes sense, which it may well not.

I was reading a Catholic bishop recently arguing that no suffering goes to waste, that it's all stored up and used for salvation. Which does sort of evoke God as some sort of giant sybaritic vampire, sitting there sucking up suffering until he's got enough in his belly to let you into heaven. That is perverse, I suppose.

"only the Christian God appreciates a universe of multiplicity, shattered into individual souls (through whose contingency Zizek says God is made complete)."

I like the idea that you need a transcendent background in order to appreciate, or even allow for, multiplicity. I'm thinking about this a little bit in terms of culture and art, and the impulse that I think most everyone has to want people to consume/listen/read/whatever the right thing. It seems like that's coming from a place where the transcendent is material; that is, your worshipping the art itself, therefore moral choices become essentially consumer choices. Alternately, you just cut culture and morality apart altogether, and argue that neither has anything to do with the other. Whereas if you have a transcendent ground of some sort, you can say, well, culture connects up to morality and or important things in various ways, and you can talk about it in those terms, but choices about art are not in themselves good or evil.

Maybe that's somewhat the confusion with Zizek too? And perhaps the bishop as well. Suffering is linked to the divine, but that's different than saying "all suffering is good (or as the bishop seems to be saying, useful). It's also different than saying "all suffering is unrelated tot he divine." Having a transcendent other actually invalidates those kinds of sweeping statements; instead, you need to look at each particular case and figure out how, or whether, the transcendent seems to appear in this particular case.

You could make that a critique of Catholicism in general, right? The Catholic insistence on God's immanence in the Church results in a failure to take transcendence seriously...thus all the universalizing dictats.

On Wed, Jan 6, 2010 at 8:35 AM, Albert Stabler < > wrote:

So, the perverse core of Christianity is exactly the thing you resent in Job, and perhaps throughout Scripture. It's what Zizek quotes Kirkegaard as calling "the religious suspension of the ethical," supernatural superceding natural virtue. It's what causes Jesus to allow (or even ordain) his own martyrdom by Judas, it's what causes the Tree of Knowledge to be planted as temptation to Adam and Eve-- and one could certainly argue that it is taken to excuse theocratic or terrorist bloodletting. Or, in Zizek's case, the bloodletting of the Revolution.

Zizek has Paul standing in for Judas, or James Earl Ray-- the catalyst, the boot heel history uses to crush the righteous and thereby spread their fame and establish their significance.

In light of that, it is amazing how Zizek can not only atheistically celebrate transcendence (even its descent to the earthly cross) but also insist upon the meaninglessness of suffering. The fact that suffering is unrelated to divine judgement (even sometimes in the Bible) is a far cry from seeing suffering as empty. He also quotes Chesterton on Buddhism (speaking of emptiness) saying his thing about how only the Christian God appreciates a universe of multiplicity, shattered into individual souls (through whose contingency Zizek says God is made complete).

--- On Tue, 1/5/10, Albert Stabler wrote:

Apparently it is true, I just feel like I'm treating Zizek as entertainment. Which, essentially, he is-- materialistically dialectically economically speaking. Except that I think that what he says is sort of important, so he can't be "mere culture."

--- On Tue, 1/5/10, Noah Berlatsky wrote:

I think people can write better or worse books; even philosophers.

On Tue, Jan 5, 2010 at 12:05 PM, Albert Stabler wrote:

It may be weird to prefer one of a philosopher's books over another, but I am not a huge fan of that 9/11 book, relatively speaking. It's sort of scattershot and rambling. And Zizek of all people should never come across as an empathist.

Yeah, I remember that thing about how the excessive slaughter of the Communist revolution is inherently different from the excessive slaughter of the fascist autocracy. Mao is a compelling figure, as butchers go, but I really doubt Saint Paul would let him of the hook for the Cultural Revolution.

This book also has the thing about how Hegel said "The Spirit is a bone." I think he's the first Magic-Eye philosopher-- you have to squint at it for awhile, and then it's like... whoa!

--- On Tue, 1/5/10, Noah Berlatsky wrote:

I started Zizek's Sept 11 book, which I kind of like and kind of am not sure about. He's got this thing where Communism is the one true antithesis to capitalism (as opposed to fascism, which is capitalism's excess). I find that pretty hard to swallow. He also comes down on the side of something like empathy which I also wonder about. But other bits are fun....

On Tue, Jan 5, 2010 at 7:54 AM, Albert Stabler < > wrote:

I started rereading Zizek's "The Puppet and the Dwarf," since I'm waiting for my Alfred North Whitehead from Amazon, and it sure starts off great. He defines "culture" as that which we genuflect befire without believing in (although secretly we do unironically believe in it), and uses the example of Westerners being cultutally appalled at the Taliban destroying the Buddhas in Bamiyan because they actually believe they mean something. I'm going to try to come up with homework for one of my classes about the controversy about the big half-naked public sculptures in Dakar, Senegal, and maybe contrast it with the "unofficial" art of Pape Diop, the mystical graffiti guy from there. I sort of want to work in the Bamiyan thing and the Swiss minnaret ban, but that might be overkill.

Extreme-Sports Sociology, Old Testament Style (more on Job)

2009-12-23T13:09:00.000-08:00

No, God is not controlling anyone. He is a lawgiver, but pretty much never a manipulator, But in the Old Testament you really find the experiment motif, if you will, repeated throughout. Noah (!) and the ark, Jonah and the whale, but none more so than Abraham and Isaac. If God is messing with people for no good reason, that's probably the signature example. "Kill your son! Do it! C'mon!.........Psyche! No, don't do it. Aw, you were totally going to do it!"

And then, after all that, there's Jesus-- the obverse of the Abraham event. No sacrifice is asked for, but the divinity offers a son. Humanity had various chances to offer clemency, but men mocked and tormented him, on top of killing him-- to the point where the son even echoes the doubt of the freethinking being.

The echo is really the main part of the deo-anthropomorphism problem. If we are to seek something behind the universe as we see it, how can we understand it in a manner outside of our experience? Or, perhaps, if the both the means and the evidence of our perceived alienation from the world we inhabit IS our intelligence, and this is perhaps most adequately summed up in our ability to apprehend and thus be alienated from ourselves, do we have any option but to assume that the substance of our souls is the substance of the universe we inhabit?

I don't think there can be a God without anthropomorphism, no matter how bodiless or immaterial. He can be mystified or abstracted, but if he is an intelligence, he is to us a human intelligence, with affects. This is completely the case in Islam, despite the strenuousness of Muslim anti-anthropomorphism.

To the Gnostics (courtesy Wikipedia), there is a perfectly abstract, remote divinity, but also this emanation of progressively more imperfect, more material beings. The elite (the professional caste?) can ascend through the ever less screwed-up, less material layers of reality to the core, which disposes of all myths of revelation and incarnation, but presents itself to the elected individual, in the symmetrical ideal balance of cosmic forces. Protestant parallels are duly noted.

If there is love, and law, and a broken world, and there is an intelligence to the universe, there are no perfect options. If there is a symbolic structure to the universe, as perhaps stated never more movingly than in John 1, it is probably not going to fulfill our navel-gazing fantasies of omni-consensus.

--- On Sat, 12/19/09, Noah Berlatsky wrote:

Date: Saturday, December 19, 2009, 10:15 PM

Isn't God controlling Job? He gives and then he takes away and then he brags about he can do anything and Job can't. And then he breaks Job who swears allegiance. If this was a human ruler, it would look pretty sadistic.

The Eden experiment (which sounds like a Jack L. Chalker title, actually) is a good analog.

I think basically anthropomorphizing God results in a situation where his motivations look despicable, much as humans' do. Maybe I just want a Bible without God anthropomorphized. I should be a Muslim, maybe.

I'm not sure I get your gnostic point. Would you expound?

On Sat, Dec 19, 2009 at 9:54 PM, Albert Stabler wrote:

Okay, sure-- it's a fine point, but you've sort of identified a difference between STANLEY MILGRAM (had his name mixed up with our pleasant radical orthodox theologian) and Job. The Milgram episode is indeed about depriving individuality and exerting control. God is not controlling Job. The issue is that God needs to see Job as autonomously loyal without having to bribe him with favors. God is absolutely insecure, which is a meaningful point-- he is subject to doubt, just like Christ on the cross, but it may be the only way he can be powerful and not sadistic-- or benevolent and not totally impotent.

God isn't portrayed as taking pleasure in Job's suffering-- or in the universal suffering Job eloquently bemoans, now that he has his first taste of it. God was testing him, and it's assumed in some sense to have been neither moral nor amoral- but, in another sense, Job showed righteousness as well as rebellion in impugning God's behavior on moral grounds.

The Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden was an experiment too, if you want to look at it that way. But God didn't smile benignly when his orders were ignored-- he cast Satan into the dust and ejected the humans, leaving them with the freedom and knowledge they desired. The Gnostic mistake is not to see knowledge (even of justice) as a gift, but as an esoterically revealed right-- the true immaterial essence of our Godhead.

--- On Sat, 12/19/09, Noah Berlatsky wrote:

That's kind of amazing (not to mention despicable) that the NPR story didn't discuss the ethics issues. They're not obscure.

Also, as I said, the pleasure in pain isn't indirect; that is, the researchers got to more or less directly torture the test subjects.

In film theory, as I understand it, sadism is almost more about controlling others than it is about specifically hurting them; it's robbing them of individuality and bending them to your will, essentially. I would say that in that context it's hard not to see the god of Job as sadistic (experimenting on your subject for basically no reason except that you feel like it seems pretty much the definition of sadism.) On the other hand -- yes, the thing about a transcendent god I'd think would be that it's not exactly possible to apply these psychological categories, or at least there's not much point in doing so. I mean, if you decide God is sadistic, it's hard to know where that goes. Does that mean God's immoral? Or that the universe is sadistic? The answer to both of those questions is basically despair -- which may be justified, but doesn't tend to get you anywhere in particular.

I think the question of what the researchers got out of the experiment and why they think we should listen to the moral pronouncements of lying torturers is probably the most, and indeed, the only ethical issue raised by the experiment that is worth discussing.

On Sat, Dec 19, 2009 at 7:54 PM, Albert Stabler wrote:

I utterly agree about the redefinition of the moral message. And actually I really enjoy how the NPR show just barely deals with the ethics issue. It's much more of a "search for the soul of man" kind of wankathon.

The only (perhaps intractable) bone of contention is whether God is abusing his authority in the Job story. And I doubt that's a settled issue theologically. Again, I read it as a parable.

Basically, if you lose everything for no moral or practical reason, whether it's because God decides to destroy your life arbitrarily or because he can't stop bad things from happening or because it's part of some grand scheme for the betterment of the universe, we cannot ultimately hold God to account. He's God, he's not a limited being with petty motives. God is like a petty dictator, but he's also not. He's not a transparent, contingent demiurge-- he's a remote yet ubuquitous source of energy.

But on the other hand, no matter what shit the world serves us, we are at least ultimately immune from the judgement of our neighbors.

Anyway, Katie just compared Milgram to performance art. I think there's a question about sadism here-- does making torture more remote (having it done by someone else) make it more sadistically pleasurable? And also, if God can be insecure, can he be saidistic-- i.e., is sadism an intrinsic aspect of all power, even if it's attributed to an entity without a body or a brain?

--- On Sat, 12/19/09, Noah Berlatsky wrote:

Did they mention on the show that Milgram did a bunch of experiments like this? He was like Mr. extreme sports sociologist. I think some of his experiments involved having his students defecate on people in public places and then measuring the severity of their beatings, then graphing the results based on socioeconomic status of the defecatee. He was a dreamer; I think there's a movie coming out where he's played by Robin Williams.

--- On Sat, 12/19/09, Noah Berlatsky wrote:

One of the things about the Milgram experiment (which perhaps they covered) is that it's pretty widely considered unethical. They didn't adequately inform the participants of what was going to happen, and many of them were in fact traumatized (not sure to what extent, but apparently many exhibited serious signs of stress.)

Which also fits with the Job comparison, in that the real ethical failing is, in some sense, not that of the participants who "did the wrong thing" by not obeying the secret moral code. Rather the failing is of the person in authority, who flagrantly abused his power to indulge in a basically arbitrary and worthless experiment for no reason, randomly hurting people in the process. And reaped fame and profit from it to boot.

It's especially apt because the Job story does read as an experiment; the parallel is kind of perfect.

Basically, the people who participated in the experiment are guilty of nothing except being duped, while Milgram and company are guilty of diabolical cruelty and attempting to take the place of God. It's a parable not about willing submission to authority, but about hubris and man's tragic refusal to submit to/leave a space for transcendence.

On Sat, Dec 19, 2009 at 6:43 PM, Albert Stabler wrote:

So I was listening to an NPR sound-collage docutainment show about the Stanley Milgram experiments at Yale, you know the one, where subjects thought that they tortured an actor, and then everyone genuflected about the Holocaust? They covered a diversity of viewpoints, all of which essentially somberly agreed that self-knowledge comes at a great price indeed.

My issue with that is not one of experimental ethics, but really, the displacing of authority. I create this situation in which I am pretending to order you to do this evil thing, and you are therefore the one being tested by torture, to see if you can tell the difference between fake authority and real authority. The real authority is the ethical code by which you are secretly being judged.

Which brings up some nice Job associations. God chooses to test Job's loyalty, and Job responds with outrage, rather than wallowing in the guilt that his friends tell him he should be feeling. And ultimately, he learns that his outrage is just, but not his presumption to judge. It's kind of the same situation, except that men are explicitly told that they aren't allowed to judge the way God is. That's the transcendence wall, that is lacking both in nineteenth-century metaphysics and twentieth-century pragmatism.