Dreaming the Future Closer

As in, getting it right in the here and now.

This entry will probably be short and sweet, but I’ve been chewing on this one awhile and it feels like it is precisely the principle I’ve been looking for:

Lived spirit, lived religion, cannot be satisfied with an understanding of its past as the past.  It must have a sense of its present and its future, as a trajectory, as a vector for growth.  Getting it ‘right’ must never be reduced to reproducing it right after some model from the past.

This insight comes to me courtesy of Walter Benjamin’s meditation on history.  Contemplating them closely helped me realize what was missing in much of my historical study of the past: I lost the sense of the religion as lived in favor of a series of frozen images of one moment of its past life.

In the present, all religions are related to each other, not by virtue of some deep, common archetypal source, but by virtue of their shared presence with each other.  We don’t need correspondences (science before the fact) but ‘reports from the field’ (facts without the presumption of science), where we can discover the real encounters between spirits and peoples.

That sort of spiritual history is a lot harder to do in public, a lot more exposed.  It demands finding an active, ethical core (not just an ethical code, a list of morals) from which we can derive a path, a direction, to carry the religions forward.  That is firstly a personal project, a constant reflection on what has brought me to this point, but like all personal questions it has a social aura.  To speak of my destiny (destination, destiny) is also speak of who shares that. 

It’s also, in the end, to acknowledge that there are many with whom I share a present but with whom I must diverge.  We may share a present, a past, even a future, though we do not share a destination.  We may, too, share a destiny without sharing a present or past, just as two arrows may meet in the same target.

I just finished working my way through Simone Weil’s Letter to a Priest. It, like so much of that writing at the end in which she seems to be desperately racing against her own mortality, glows with insight and honesty.  It does not erase her shortcomings, but quite the opposite throws them up into clear relief.

Her account of Judaism, her distrust of it, is nowhere more elaborated.  It’s even understandable, but it’s shot through with ignorance.  She has no understanding of the complex apparatus of commentary in which the Tanakh is situated, no awareness of the mystical dimension of the Jewish religion that is not so far from her own, that is not a mere expression of ethnic nationalism.

I think of another soul swallowed up by that war, Walter Benjamin, and wish so much that they could have crossed paths.  His personal approach to the Jewish notion of the messiah, his Marxism, is different from Weil’s republican leftism, her Christian charity, in just the right way.  They both might have thrown light upon each other.

This is one of those things that drives me forward intellectually, the hope that through my own intellectual work I might be able to foster the encounter between the ideas of great thinkers that were not to be in their life.  There’s optimism there but it’s tinged with melancholy because any staged encounter I can manage is only the play of ideas, not of their persons. 

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.

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.

I have more than once encountered people who seem to think that the growing presence of documents on the internet will lead to the disappearance, or at least decline, of the modern library.  They gladly welcome an era in which all written text will be digitized, archived in cyberspace.

Of course, those in the know get pretty tired of this.  It takes an obscene amount of time and money to digitize old works and even more time and money to maintain them.  Questions of file types becoming obsolete, of the need for migrating files, of the care required to prepare and actually scan old works, all come into play. 

It seems both responses miss something important: namely, that digitization isn’t really about archiving and storing files.  It’s about providing access to them.  The two concerns, while overlapping, are not identical and may even oppose each other.  In the more extreme cases, you find archivists rigorously limiting access to fragile manuscripts in order to maintain the text.

There is something quite interesting about digital access which provides clear advantages over ‘hardcopy’ access.  First and foremost of these is that a digital copy of a work is far more reproducible than a hardcopy work.  Moreover, that digital copy itself is easier to convert into a new hardcopy version of what it mimics.  This feeds back into archiving in an interesting way, multiplying the locations where the material can be found.

Let’s imagine a rare manuscript that can only be accessed by going to Oxford University with your list of credentials and letters of introduction.  Digitize it.  Now, the original remains quite important in itself for a number of studies that just require the material object itself.  However, if made accessible through the internet, it can now be reproduced, in content, at hundreds of different locations. 

Individuals don’t just access it, but occasionally copy and store it themselves.  If this habit gets cultivated, then you begin to create the groundwork for a second order, distributed, back up archive.  Moreover, the individuals accessing have the option to reproduce it.  All they need is a good printer, some ink, and paper to create an alternative hardcopy of the text.

This also makes it easier for those with more resources (like large publishers) to engage in high quality republications of major works that are rarely seen.  Which in turn find their ways back to the libraries…

Digitization isn’t a replacement for traditional archiving, but it is a powerful supplement to it.  It creates a more accessible double of the original archive.  Consider Walter Benjamin’s famous observations about the aura of a work of art.  Then consider that the actual situation is more complicated, that the aura is not always lost but sometimes intensified, the original becoming more valuable for its distinctive material uniqueness which the copies do not capture.

In the case of texts, their pure materiality comes into question.  Some studies depend not upon the content of the book, but on its substance and form.  They raise questions about how the book was made, what materials went into it.  They also depend upon the original to underwrite the copies.  For example, the age of a text can often only be firmly established by a physical analysis of the original itself. 

The primary archive then becomes something like Fort Knox, the place where the ‘real’ money is.   With more and more people accessing the content through the reproduction, the originals are in turn less likely to be exposed to the sorts of access which degrade them.

Dated 11/28/2005 (Edited to clean up a few typos) 

Rereading Adorno and Benjamin has brought to mind several important things.  First and foremost, that a philosophical account must not rest entirely upon an account of the subject, of the subject’s relationship to the world.  It must encompass the objective and not merely as the shadow of the subject’s actions. Second, that so much modern philosophy does just this, dwelling upon the ceaseless permutations of the Other rather than taking the steps required to place the self and other in the broader field of objects.  This lack of placement gives the Other and Self no content, makes of them empty forms that can sustain both too much (i.e. support multiple contradictory alternatives) and too little (provide no means for selection between competitors).  It strikes me that Deleuze, too, has some savviness in this regard, a concern for the object that is not reduced to the subject, although pursued quite differently.

It would be meaningful, I think, to revisit some of the ’sexy’ elements of Deleuze’s thought—the mistake many make with them may be the manner in which they eagerly seek a human, subjective face for them, entirely ignoring the way in which the model reaches out to highlight the ‘reality’ of the object—masochism not just as the relation of self and other, servant and mistress (as early Deleuze) but as an effort by the masochist to situate himself or herself among the world of objects, to speak to them in their own tongue, if you will.