The political meaning of the moonshot

Jodi Dean puts it better than I can:

http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/2009/07/we-were-promised-the-moonwe-got-lolcats-instead.html

Defending what?

I’ve been thinking lately about the phrase “defending the faith”. I’m assuming that it attained common usage during the time of the Crusades when kings would take ”Defender of the Faith” as part of their nomenclature. In more modern times it seems to have been used more frequently within the context of apologetics. In our present cultural setting, though, the phrase represents an attitude and approach that is increasingly suspect. In other words, I can’t imagine taking seriously someone who presented him or herself as a “defender of the faith”. I would probably assume that the person was simple-minded.

However, I do think that the underlying frame of mind associated with such a phrase is still very pervasive. In evangelical circles especially, churches convey the idea that they are the “possessors” of the faith, and that they must “share” it with others on the outside, who might then become joint-owners of a common “faith”. ”The faith” is then usually subsumed under whole subsets of cultural presuppositions, with the result that faith itself takes on an reified ontological aspect (or becomes indelibly subsumed under a particular ethnos) that must be guarded in the interests of maintaining group identity. Such Christians might not consider themselves to be “defenders of the faith” in the old sense of the phrase, but they are just as ready to become (culture?) warriors in the cause. Therefore, when faith becomes “ontologized” in this way (as reflected even in the seemingly innocuous phrase: “a person of faith”), there is a good chance that some sort of violence is coming down the road. 

As I will write in my next post, I don’t think that faith is the type of thing that needs defending. Furthermore, it is a category mistake to think so.

Rexroth’s Autobiographical Novel, part 3

Again, this quotation speaks to a sense of Modernism that was eclipsed by the more reactionary versions:

“People like my parents had a moral confidence in the future that is incomprehensible today. They and everybody like them believed that soon all life from clothing design to the game of chess was going to change for the better. It wasn’t a political attitude as we understand that word today; in fact, nobody I knew until after my minority was over thought politically in the present meaning of the word — except the Russians who began showing up in American radical circles after the first war. This moral content of the old radical movement has vanished altogether. The classics of Socialist and Anarchist literature seem at mid-century to speak a foolish and naive language to minds hardened by two generations of Realpolitik.”

I love that phrase: “moral confidence”.

Educating for the Real?

This was my proposal that was accepted for the Baylor “Secularization and Revival” conference in October:

Slavoj Zizek has gained a lot of scholarly attention over the last ten years for the “theological turn” that he has accomplished in his post-Marxist, Lacanian critique of global capitalism. Theologians and Christian thinkers have been intrigued by this development in Zizek’s thought – while being either fascinated or repelled by his manic persona and style. Many have seen in his work a possibly fruitful new formulation of the political meaning of the body of Christ. Others have expressed wariness towards his claim to have made an atheistic recovery of Christianity’s subversive core. A smaller number have even seen him as a reactionary in sheep’s clothing. My own view is that Zizek’s ability to maintain a complex coherence while taking new and surprising leaps with each book makes it fairly impossible to pin him down and dismiss him through reductive labeling. As Lacan might have said, there are not enough words to say the truth about Zizek.

In my paper I would like to apply Zizek’s theoretical critique to the phenomenon of the contemporary Christian college. Some of the questions I hope to elucidate are:

• How can the contemporary Christian college be understood as a social phenomenon within the present formation of global capitalism with its postmodern ideological supports?
• What is the particular libidinal economy of the Christian college in relation to the larger material forces of the culture?
• How does the Christian college relate to the basic antagonism or social deadlock created by the Real of Capital?
• How are Christian colleges’ libidinal investments concretized in the administrative and bureaucratic structures of the schools?
• What is the status of belief within Christian colleges which want to promote practices of piety while also being expected to provide entrée for their graduates into the global economy and its attendant ideological atmosphere?
• What are the possibilities for creating new critical spaces within Christian colleges that might allow for a faithful reclamation of their tradition’s subversive core?

 One area I particularly want to focus on has to do with a recent development in Zizek’s thought, in which he distinguishes between a “subjective” violence that is visible and can be tied to particular actors in discrete circumstances, and the “objective” violence that is involved in the maintenance of the present society.  While Christian colleges are often progressive in their illumination and analysis of the systemic causes and manifestations of subjective violence, they do not take the next (and truly radical) step of confronting the objective violence that inexorably keeps things from changing. Like most other professionals in the secularized west, Christian intellectuals gain a perverse jouissance from critiquing the present system while dwelling comfortably within its parameters.

 Ultimately my paper will call for an analogous action to what Zizek calls for when he claims that any rejuvenation of the Left must pass through the Christian experience of “un-plugging” from the primal violence that founds, or acts as a “vanishing mediator”, of the symbolic realm of Law. I believe that Christian colleges should embrace Zizek’s illumination of Christianity’s “perverse core” so that they might “pass through Zizek” (which is probably an irredeemably discomfiting phrase) in order to confront (the Real of) their own libidinal investments in the present society. Yet I think that Christianity provides even richer resources than Zizek admits, in that it posits a post-resurrection reality that allows for interactions with the world that are not awaiting a new break but are actually able to embody a break that has already occurred and that is not only accessed by faith, but may create the Real of faith itself along the way.

West Michigan

Okay, we’ve lived in West Michigan for five years now, but only recently have we explored some places that we should have experienced at least four years ago. First: last week we finally visited the Gerald Ford Presidential Museum. It was nicely organized (although the room on “The 70’s” was really about “the 60’s”) and I saw a lot of things that helped to flesh out my understanding of that era. I was especially impressed by the replica of the Oval Office, the newsreel coverage of Watergate, and the items pertaining to Betty Ford. One wouldn’t have known that she ever had any substance abuse problems, though, from the exhibits. I guess that’s understandable, but it seems short-sighted to me. Wasn’t it part of her legacy to encourage others to stop hiding, overcome their shame, and get help? Why shouldn’t that be celebrated?  

Then last Wednesday Beth and I went to Saugatuck, and we liked it so much that we brought the kids and Beth’s parents the next night. It wasn’t anything like we expected. Almost everyone who has said anything to us about Saugatuck over the last five years has mentioned the large gay population, sometimes in a positive way, sometimes in a slyly negative way. I don’t know why everyone feels the need to mention it. I mean, it wasn’t like it was the Castro. It was mainly just quaint and charming.  

Unfortunately, the sunset as seen from Oval Beach was not so good the second night. I want to go back during the day next time, so that we catch all the shops when they are open.

Finally, yesterday the whole family went down to South Haven for the afternoon. The walk down to the pier/beach from the town is just plain wonderful, especially on a day with yesterday’s weather.  Another place where we wouldn’t mind living during the summer.

Rexroth’s Autobiographical Novel, part 2

I thought this quotation was especially apt for the Fourth of July, when something called patriotism is celebrated by “the bulk” who have no clear sense of what it means to actually work to “determine their social environment” as if the country truly belonged to them.

“Most American families that go back to the early nineteenth century, and certainly those whose traditions go back to the settlement of the country, have a sense of social and cultural rather than nationalistic responsibility. The sense that the country is really theirs, really belongs to them, produces radical critics, rebels, reformers, eccentrics.

“The conviction that they have the right to demand their society live up to their expectations does not necessarily mean traditional Americans are crackpots or cultists, or even odd at all. True, an obstreperously pluralistic society shades out through Brook Farm, the Oneida Community, the Fourierist phalanxes of the early nineteenth century into all sorts of cults both political and religious. On the other hand, people who insist on exercising their right to determine their social environment are eminently normal. This does not mean they are common. Most people in the world, anywhere, any time, just make up bulk.”

Now that I have typed this out, I realize that it could be taken in the wrong way by right-wing types like Glenn Beck to justify their own agendas. However, even though I believe someone like Glenn Beck is totally disengenuous, self-serving, and disconnected from any sort of sustainable community — the fact that he is so popular probably betokens that he is tapping into something genuine and true in the American mind. And I use a phrase like “the American mind” not to point to some hegemonic ideological order that all must buy in to, but simply in the historical sense that explains why someone like Martin Luther King, whose family was not “traditional” in the sense Rexroth references above, could still express that sense of promise better than any Yankee blue-blood could/did.

Rexroth’s Autobiographical Novel, part 1

I want to start posting quotations from Kenneth Rexroth’s introduction to his  Autobiographical Novel because I find them to be fascinating. He seems to combine a startling naivete with a deep profundity, so that his words are actually neither. They are simply honest and sincere, in the oldest senses of those words.

“Each of us is a specific individual, that one and no other, out of billions. I think each of us knows his own mystery with a knowing that precedes the origins of all knowledge. None of us ever gives it away. No one can. We envelop it with talk and hide it with deeds. Yet we always hope that somehow the others will know it is there, that a mystery in the other we cannot know will respond to a mystery in the self we cannot understand. The only full satisfaction life offers us is this sense of communion. We seek it constantly. Sometimes we find it. As we grow older we learn that it is never complete and sometimes it is entirely illusory.”

This was one of the bedrock themes of Rexroth’s entire life and work: the possibility, and mystery, of communion. He intently prepared himself to find it, and never saw it as a means to something better. It was the end.

Writing productively

Great post yesterday by Graham Harmon on being a productive academic writer. He spoke to just about every difficulty I’ve ever had in this area.

Hebrews

I read the book of Hebrews this morning, hoping to gain a little more clarity in my mind regarding the question of the theological meaning of Jesus’ death. I have great sympathy with those who emphasize that it brought an end to the sacrificial system (indeed, to all sacrificial systems); but whether this view then entails that Jesus’ death was not a part or culmination of the Jewish sacrificial law, but was rather a repudiation of it, or somehow both, is something my reading this morning did not entirely settle. Especially since Hebrews tends to focus more on priesthood than on sacrifice. I am such a theological neophyte. In my searching for answers I did find a useful link, though. It is www.ntwrightpage.com.

If Paul Krugman is right, we’re all in big trouble

See his column in today’s New York Times, which, if correct, makes me think that Obama’s impulse towards conciliation may be a fatal, if sometimes necessary, weakness.