Dreaming the Future Closer

(and now for something completely different)

I wouldn’t be surprised if someone already caught this, but it’s novel to me right now.  I was watching the season finale of Dexter on CBS and it dawned on me all of a sudden why, for all of the gore and sociopathy, Dexter seemed so familiar.  The plot, the character, are modeled on superhero comics.  In fact, not just any superhero, but an iconic and powerful one–Spiderman.  There are significant variations, of course, but the structural parallels are strong.

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Just something I ran across last night:  

The Dahomean believes, and will say with conviction, that each narrative “history” is fixed and unique, both in form and content.  We tried the experiment of reading to a cult head two different versions of the myth giving the quarrel of the two brothers, Sogbo, the Thunder, and Sagbata, the Earth….The unhesitating reply was that the gods do not reveal the same things to everyone, and that each narrator was telling “true history” according to the way the vodun have given it to him.—Melville J. & Frances S. Herskovits, Dahomean Narrative (18)

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Okay, so I usually don’t do the commenting on the news thing, but I’m making a special exception in this case.  Maybe it’s that I have just seen this, too.  But I want to dissect this one for a moment.  This won’t make a lot of sense if you don’t follow that first link. 

Maybe it’s just my general despair at how politicians so easily mouth ideas of republican and democratic virtues without the hard choices that would back them up when it includes treating people different than you according to those values.

First, let’s bracket the most obvious question which has not been quite entirely settled, namely as to whether this is, in fact, actual santeria ritual or something else.

Now, let’s follow out the logic of the situation a little.  The Supreme Court has established that animal sacrifice is legal and protected like other forms of religious action.  Which means that Mr. Valdez has no real legal footing here.  So, what he’s doing suggests he’s making a political statement, relying on the fact that nothing will likely come of the investigation into who left the remains. 

He gets to take a stand about “how things are in Texas” (i.e. not like everywhere else), which is a favorite posture for Texan politicians.  Score.  He gets to satisfy the conservative-ish Christians (we don’t tolerate those heathens here).  Score.  He even, if he plays his cards right, gets to satisfy the meat squeamish and vegetarian.  Score.

Hmm.  Interesting.  Now, let’s place some bets.  Will he broaden his concern about animal cruelty to target the meat production industry?  Will he make moves to put an end to it entirely?  Because if the sacrifice of chickens constitutes animal cruelty, wow, he is going to be a busy, busy man dealing with the far more inhumane situations that arise in the meat industry. 

I wonder, does he support the Texas cattle ranchers?  They slaughter animals, too.* 

What all this talk obscures is that sacrifice in general occurs humanely, with an eye to the animal suffering as little distress as possible.  Sacrifice is an inherently small-scale production with the participants putting a lot more attention on the individual animal, so it’s far easier to be humane than it is in large-scale meat production. 

If it’s the waste of those particular chickens that constitutes cruelty, well, again, Mr. Valdez will be terribly busy dealing with the waste of the meat industry.

What’s frustrating, then, is it starts to look like Mr. Valdez isn’t really concerned about the animals, but about a political opportunity out of the event.  Politicians have to do that from time to time, sure, but he’s doing so at the expense of those santeria practitioners, who are also part of his constituency. 

He’s making implied threats to them, discouraging them from the practice of their religion.  He is also, thereby, implying that they are to certain extent outside his protection, suggesting they might be more free to ridicule than others, or worse.  He has an obligation to his constituency, not just to those he imagined voted for him or who will vote for him.  He has a civic duty in which he is failing. 

I’m not saying he’s not in a hard place, but that’s why politicians used to be admired, because they stood up and did their duty even when it was hard.  They took hold of their civic duty and bore it as nobly as they could, even when that meant taking some flack from those around them.

I really don’t want this to come across as sarcastic, because this story raises some very important issues about how we treat the animals that compose our food chain.  It raises questions about how we relate to them and the obligations that we owe them.  I don’t want that to disappear beneath my frustration for how this case is being handled.

At the same time, it just feels like a knee-jerk accusation of animal cruelty is just plain wrong-headed.  The treatment of these chickens was likely significantly better than the treatment of many other chickens before slaughter. 

The accusation conceals the real problems with our (non) relation to the animals that become our food by shifting the focus away from that toward these rituals.  It projects the real ethical challenges with our food consumption onto them, merely because we have had to see these animals while we can safely ignore the other animals we eat. 

*And, to be clear here, too, I don’t think Texas cattle ranchers deserve blanket criticism, either.  While there are problems with the meat industry as a whole, blanket criticisms won’t really get us that far in making it better.  It accuses the innocent with the guilty, allows us to forget that people who raise livestock can (and often do) actually care a good deal for those animals.

Straw Dogs is one of the best works of skepticism that I have read.  I’m not talking about the tawdry I-don’t-believe-in-anything-but-science sort of skepticism, either.  This is the good ol’ Sextus Empiricus brand of philosophic thought.

Gray overstates more than a few of his points, over-relies on easy notions of natural selection, and tends to engage in the “you cannot have your cake, though I shall eat of it” problems.*  But there is a kind of cunning to all that which makes it clear that he knows this.  His style is reminiscent of moments in Nietzsche when he set outs, almost side by side, statements that suggest their own undoing.  There is a textual ‘wink’ and a sly smile behind it all.

Which brings me to what most impresses me.  The book is wickedly stylish.  Each section is, at most, a few pages long, containing tightly packed meditations that lay waste to many a cherished idol, revealing them to be, well, nothing more than straw dogs.  Each piece has been cut and crafted to say what it means and nothing more. 

The last work I read with this kind of care and craft might have been Adorno’s Minima Moralia.  The comparison is apt on many levels, too, when you consider the underlying pessimism and the easy way both have with quotation.  It’s sharp, cutting insight.

It’s inimitably British, full of easy-going pessimism and self-deprecating wit.  Sure, we humans may be headed for hell in a handbasket, but relax, we’re not really as important as all that.  Even when I don’t agree with the sentiment or the argument, I cannot but tip my hat to his presentation.

 *By which I mean that he criticizes several ways of conceiving history and humanity, while tacitly using them for his own rhetorical benefit.  For example, he dismisses the notion of ‘modernity’ as empty, a final shell for progressive morality, while making statements about polytheism being ”too delicate for modern minds.”  But, like I am about to say, there is a sense of deliberateness to that.

To every age its false idols, right?  We have to take care, of course, because the term comes loaded with implications, but its rich for that context.

We also need to be careful because, as much as I like the easy periodization, it’s not the case that one false idol simply disappears to be replaced by another.  The problem is more one of quality, of certain kinds of false idols playing a more prominent role in some times, in some places, than others.

One of our premier false idols: objectivity.  The idea of objectivity is noble and high, but the idol that has been made of it can be ugly, seductive, and destructive.  As an idol, those who rally to it believe they can lay claim to an objective truth proven by others that they can apply, almost without thought, to any situation.

Objectivity in its true, noble, form, is all about the struggle to extract from our personal struggles a lesson, a counsel, which we can offer up to another person.  It is about finding what is not just personal in our lives.  But that objectivity is passionately aware of how situated its counsel is.  It does not rule but speaks wisely.

Because being objective demands attempting to identify, to the best of your capacities, the real place from which and in which you speak.

Good science is objective in this way: here are these experiments, here are these labors, learn from them, learn how and when their lessons can be best applied.

False objectivity takes on the voice of absolutism, not speaking to but giving orders, imperative.  Those who follow this idol do not listen but demand to be listened to, they cite sources without reflection, trying to bolster their authority by proving their loyalty to their idol, objectivity.

Because false objectivity does not attempt to objectively understand its own position.  In not looking at its real place, it cannot appreciate the possible limits of the advice it comes to offer.

For this reason, false objectivity tends to swing between two kinds of lies: it either manically overapplies the advice it has to offer, conflating its truths for Truth or it veers into depressed nihilism, nothing is true or everything is true relativism.

It shows when we find people who claim to be counsellors speaking to those they counsel from scripts, when we find them working upon those who come to them, rather than listening to them, offering up what people have distilled into scripts, and then talking beyond those scripts.

We find it in the rabid atheist who denies others their experience of the divine, who reduces it to what is only one account of what goes on in the brain.  We find it in the fanatic who refuses to hear the sincerity, the humility, of someone who worships differently than them.  We find it among technicians who cannot see beyond the mechanics of their domain to the society it serves. 

Deleuze is fond of the phrase, “to be done with the judgment of God.”  This does not necessarily entail being done with either judgment or divinity.  It demands only that we cease to project ourselves into the position of “God.”  More than one soul who has abandoned God has not abandoned the position of absolute judgment.

And, luckily, we have those who, honoring the immensity of the divine and sacred world, have abandoned the judgment of God, but not judgment.  Who, mindful of their small but real place in the world, have set out to speak truly, to judge according to their wisdom, aware that their wisdom is only informed by the divine, not identical to it.

Reading over what I have written in the last bit, I am finding a pretty clear common thread:

Let’s be suspicious of the words we have to talk about faith.  Let’s be suspicious of the conceptual halo those words bring with them, the assumptions that are so integral to them that we frequently take them for granted.

More than anything, I’m setting up some flags, realizing that Christianity has a deep and profound influence on the discourse about religion in general.  They are deep enough that they cut across and into discourses that are explicitly trying not to be Christian.

I think, too, there is this suspicion that, deep down, the conceptual apparatus may also be bad for Christians, thatit may not be unproblematic for them to use it just because it emerged from ‘their’ discourse. 

That discourse has developed ‘internally,’ as an exercise in logic and coherence, not just as a reflection of a particular mode of relating to the spiritual world.  As it develops as an object of thought, it lost a lot of its morring in practice.  There’s much that can be reclaimed now, much that can have practical import, but mostly insofar as it is freed from the broader conceptual apparatus.

Fate conspires toward this project and now it seems more open and inviting than ever

I’m not sure how long it will take me (probably quite a while), but I want to start working on a larger scale intellectual project.  It’s been a long time coming and I am just about at the place where I can do justice to it.

The basic goal: to lay the groundwork for what I affectionately call open theology.  At its most basic, it is an effort to talk about spiritual experience in its fullness and diversity without reducing that diversity to some posited (false) simplicity.

The motivations for this project come from a few different sources.

First, reading theologically-minded modern philosophers like Gabriel Marcel and Walter Benjamin.  Their insights into the spiritual are clear, powerful, with much to tell us about the appropriate attitude to take toward modernity.

Yet, the work is flawed by a blatant Christian and monotheistic bias.  I can almost pinpoint, for example, when the spark of truth departs Marcel’s reflections when he feels compelled to assert that he speaks, ‘of course,’ of civilized modern Christian faith.

Second, I have spent some time reading contemporary ‘(neo)pagan’ discourse about divinity.  I have found much that smacks of monotheism (”all just expressions of the one god(dess)”) and much that smacks of outright psychologism (”all just ways of expressing human experience”).  The reduction that entails seems untrue to the actual experiences of many faithful and conceals more than it reveals.

In that same arena, though, I have come across a kernel of ‘hard’ polytheists who endorse an account that opposes all such reduction.  They defend the notion that Hera and Frigg, for example, are not simply expressions of the same figure (be it the ‘goddess,’ ‘hearth goddess,’ or ‘archetypes of wifeliness’) but distinct beings.

This attitude strikes me as sound, but I have some concern for the way some hard polytheism seems attached to ‘hard’ traditionalism that makes often overstates the coherence of a pantheon. 

That tendency privileges one of two problematic (not wrong, but fraught) positions of power:  (1) an outsider perspective that makes the spirits a peculiar property of a culture they objectify or (2) an insider perspective invested in centralizing and organizing the worship of spirits, often staking claims of the authority of certain worshippers over others.

Third, I have spent a fair share of time reading up on modern anthropological and historical accounts of religions.  I have found many useful models, many people starting to struggle with the interpenetration of cultures that so much 19th-century driven work elided.

However, despite the cultural insights, I remain dissatisfied with the way in which they cannot address the spiritual concerns I have. 

It is not the fault of the anthropologists, whose discourse conventions and personal attitudes prevent them from going further.  It is a problem, though, for those of us whose spiritual practice does include that personal dimension.

The anthropological and historical texts are having a profound influence on spiritual communities.  There is a growing ‘anthropological’ attitude that undermines faith from within the spiritual community.

Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, I have grown more committed to my own spiritual path in the Lucumi religion. 

This has placed me in personal contact not just with fellow practitioners, but with the orisha.  The experience of their personalities, their individualities, has been a moving and powerful one, that has put solid ground beneath my feet.

It has also put me in contact with the most pointed version of the question raised by the divergence found in the (neo)pagan community.  In the diaspora, there are several faiths closely bound together and it is far more difficult to separate out where we find separate spirits or just the same spirit under different names.

I realize that the problem there is not so unique.  While there has been much effort to divvy up spirits and divinities according to ethnic lines, in truth their existence was always more blended and cosmopolitan, and have only become more so in the contemporary context.

Which leads me to think that there must be a better way to talk about all this than having to (1) start reducing one kind of spiritual being to another, (2) retreat into narrow ideas of religious culture, or (3) rely on foreign modes of discourse like anthropology to provide answers.

I have grown fond of talking about religions in terms of their kinship—so we can say that Haitian Vodou and Cuban Lucumi are sister or close cousin religions.  It also allows me to talk about spirits moving between the two, just like people move between families through marriage and adoption.

While there are surely limits to that approach, it is one that starts us out on the right path.  I want to follow that path even further, see what can come of it.

This is from a notebook I used to carry around with me to write about what I was thinking about. The entry is dated November 30, 2004. There are good ideas here, ideas I would still endorse in some form or another. But it’s been a while since I really cared so much about these sorts of things as I do in this entry, and that makes me a little sad. I have left the inconsistencies of the original (typos and all) since they, too, seem part and parcel of that enthusiasm. Here it is:

A Brief Note on Sense & Reference: Too many put too much weight on the divergence of the two. At base, sense guarantees reference—a sensible phrase always has a referent, even if that referent is a fictional being (“fictional” opposing “real” only in common parlance, not in the metaphysical/ontological sense established in the “sense/reference paradox”). “The present king of France is bald” makes perfect sense and refers to an ontologically real entity (i.e. the fictional character “the present King of France”).

Consider Jed, “a poor mountaineer who could barely keep his family fed.” The story about Jed both makes sense and refers!

This goes some way to laying the framework for a public philosophy of exemplarity.

Notes toward teaching—Make clear the technical & general uses of a term so that students are prepped for vocabulary pluralism.

Emphasize the distinction between “brilliance” (rapid deployment of intellectual schema) and “wisdom” (slow, comparative work that ferrets out “deep” similarities without collapsing the compared into a single category)—especially in a 101-style course, grade according to the student’s effort toward engaging in such comparisons, even if it results in less clearly “brilliant” pieces.

Back to Sense & Reference: where reference becomes less clear, so does sense & vice versa. Sense “secures” the space for referred entities, so that the weakening of their clarity cannot but entail a corresponding loss of sense, just as a blurring of “sensible” categories makes reference more difficult. Sometimes, this blur grows into a full extension of sense, sometimes it collapses into babble, sometimes it remains unstable. (Todorov’s fantastic read back into discourse as a whole—consider “alternative logics” as attempts to claim (stretch) sense).

This is not new—it distills much of what I consider best in Deleuze—The Logic of Sense & What is Philosophy? with Guattari. The introduction of fictional entities opens the door to deeper appreciation of related (but not identical cases) to aesthetic entities, theoretical entities…and philosophic entities. But, unlike D&G, the concept need not be the primary vehicle—ethical vignettes, thought experiments, etc. are not necessarily “concepts” but nonetheless are philosophical entities. If anything, the traditional division of art, science, and philosophy may be too big, still too analogical and not comparative enough. We must move lower to appreciate the entities like Jed, Present King of France, Quarks, Superstrings, thought experiments, casuistry-crafted analogues, etc.

In this lies a criticism of so-called “interdisciplinary” work—the notion of inter-disciplinary does not go quite where we need to be—it sustains the disciplines when it should generate a space where disciplinary boundaries blur. These occur mostly at “sub-disciplinary” levels, where the topic should not “x object” from several perspectives but ”x entity” as of families of entities whose similarities and (more importantly) differences form a field that exists in no discipline but enriches many. These entities may frequently demarcate disciplines, the differences between related entities an important factor in a particular disciplinary boundary. Such entities may also, though, move between disciplines, be shared by them. In such cases, a study of their different uses may be an important aspect of cataloguing them.

Such a study should be loath to quickly categorize certain things as lacking sense and reference. Musico-poetic uses of words as well as instrumental music do not have the sorts of s&r we readers are used to, but this does not have to equate to an absence. A piece of music deploys sense (chords, notes, etc) that establish and condition reference, just as certain kinds of experimental music stretch and distort those establishes patterns of s&r.

Sense and reference here become a certain kind of entity, a conceptual relative of Jed and present king of France, that makes such sub-disciplinary fields possible—establishing conditions that make comparative endeavors possible.

It may be possible to talk about “properly” philosophical applications of terms like these, of claiming philosophical privilege to these sub-disciplinary spaces. But this misses the point: philosophy has no special access qua discipline, although it might have an accidental local privilege based on historical circumstance. Philosophy may enter into such sub-disciplinary spaces & return to its “proper” bounds with new entities or a deepened sense of its own entities (“philosophy” too vague—not philosophy as some vaguely defined aggregate, but philosophy & historical points of interacting).

This model borrows some material from philosophic talk about “conditions of possibility,” but is clearly more historical and materialistic: not absolute conditions of possibility but very local examinations of family relations that illuminate regions of thought they make possible. They give weight to what Foucault wanted his genealogies & archaeologies to be (his claim you can do many archaeologies on the “same” material)—not final descriptions (ascriptions/inscriptions) of how things are, but discussions about the sorts of things we are interested in and how they enable us to talk to each other without simply asserting discursive primacy of our bailywick (hence why questions of what “our” archive is are nonsensical (pardon the pun)—an “archive” is simply a local, practical means of facilitating a discussion, not a “real” thing we unearth).

Note the way this makes standard exegesis of my “favorite” figures problematic—I am neither agreeing nor disagreeing with them in any easy manner, but using their work as inspiration, as partial steps toward my project. The “towards” is complicated, because I give their work an aim it may or may not have internally and use that to drive a series of conclusions, that are only partially theirs. I use the concepts of public philosophy, communication, and sense/reference issues to develop inconsistencies from their work, these inconsistencies providing the basis for an alternative formulation (mine) that solves them.

This is “unfair” in terms of adhering to their work, but essential for making use of a thinker. And it is only in use that we begin to really talk.

The work of “use” highlights the problems with any historical discourse that assigns figures to movements and schools. Those movements and schools can too easily elide the diversity of its members, of the uses to which they are put. They become dead litanies of dogma instead of occasions for communication & use.

There are many critical discussions these days that begin with an examination of how a concept’s use comes to usurp real experience with individuals involved in what that concept ‘describes.’ 

The discussion of how images (often fictionalized or stylized) lend themselves to rigid stereotyping of races, for example, appears with frequency.  There is a naturalness to this since we think and speak in signs, which are concrete objects given meaning in language. 

However, we have this nasty tendency to replace the concrete experience with those meaningful signs.  Sometimes this happens when we don’t have enough concrete experience to distinguish the sign from the thing being used as sign.  Sometimes it happens when we have plenty fo experience but are lazy, when we just let the sign do all the thinking and don’t really attend to the concrete situation.

Enough preamble, though.  This morning I have been thinking about Walter Benjamin’s statement in “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” the one where he states that there is nothing philosophical about the bewildered “how can this still be happening in the modern world” response to terrible events.

Underlying the bewilderment is a concept about the modern world being an advancement over the ’savage’ world, that these terrible horrors are a throwback to the past.  Benjamin clearly thinks they are integral to modernity, that the horrors we are witnessing are part and parcel of the modern.

Still, what is the problem with thinking of them as throwbacks?  First, it leads us to misdiagnose their origins.  That, in turn, leads us to think that the proper answer to them is to just layer on more progress (read: technological advancement) which, in fact, only aggravates the savagery possible.

Second, it encourages us to displace our own savagery onto the savages.  We look at the Arabs or the Africans or some other group we see as less developed and blame modern savagery on them.  We neglect to look at our own actions, which often exceeds the savagery of the ’savages.’

But there is something else going on, beneath that discussion.  Displacing all that violence into ’simple’ savagery also undercuts our capacity to think ethically.  If violence is just a throwback, then it is accidental to our actions, something for which we are not responsible. 

I think, too, displacing savagery like this allows us to distance ourselves from the reality of violence in our lives, of it having a real place that we need to come to terms with rather than just flee from. 

It isn’t a matter of always ’stopping’ violence but of managing it, of giving it it’s proper place, of taking responsibility for it.  It involves acknowledging that there is a time and a place for guilt and, too, that ‘ethical’ guilt is a real and valuable motivation for action.

Perhaps the greatest failure of much latter day modernism, postmodernism, post-what-have-you-ism, is the overwhelmingly monotheism of it.  That sounds silly, given how often these discourses tend toward discussions of diversity, of mobility, of plurality, but so much of that discourse is just an effort to outdo the old monotheism on its own ground.

What do I mean by this?  Nothing fancy, really, just that the very effort to provide a unified picture of plurality, an underlying symphonic rationality, runs aground because it misses what is most essential to a picture of plurality, namely difference. 

And with difference, a sense that each explanation has its limits, that there is a point when it just makes sense to change registers rather than drive yourself batty trying to make it all fit.  Not that there is not something productive about the effort to push the envelope, see if the explanation can be carried just a little further.  But only in that limited sense, as something to push just a little further, not as an effort to reveal the truth behind it all.

Talk less about an image of thought and more about images in the plural, correlating them not according to their ‘resemblance’ to one another, but according to what they illuminate and how they illuminate it. 

This is not new, but here I am reminding myself of it.