Nothing To Fear Except Water and Socks

Bruce Schneier points to an article that suggests (absent any specific examples) that terrorists have taken advantage of bomb anxieties to heighten fear and waste resources by leaving fake bombs in public places. Since security mania requires citizens always to be vigilant (or paranoid) about the possibility that anyone’s backpack might be full of C4, the terrorists thereby underscore and reinforce the fear reflex and keep security forces busy on needless errands — and in the long run, may perhaps diminish suspicion of a package that contains an actual bomb.
 
If on the other hand we just acknowledged that we and the world are better off if we refuse to be terrified, if we support ordinary good police work, if we prepare to sustain some casualties in the interest of continuing as an open society that shows the world what kind of community sensible, confident, reasonable people of goodwill can build up — nah, that’s crazy talk.

Cures Your Asthma, Too

It turns out that my dear colleague Doug Gay has inveigled me into giving a talk at the SOLAS Festival in two weeks. I’ll rehearse my survey of problems relative to the theological criticism of popular music; should be fun to present that to a less sober-sided audience than at the SBL meeting last year. Doug’s publicity release about my appearance does make me sound a lot more interesting than I am in real life, but I guess that’s why I never had a career in PR.
 
I’ll be carrying along my iPhone with a playlist of songs I might use to illustrate the points I’m making. In the presentation, I’ll highlight nodes where the theological criticism of popular music needs to do better, or to pay more sustained attention — such as

  • mediocrity of musical-theological reflection
  • Pervasive sexism in popular music (industry)
  • Pervasive racism in popular music (industry)
  • Status of diabolism in popular music
  • Non-Christian religions and popular music
  • Faith/spirituality as a lifestyle accessory
  • Religiosity and atheism among non-“religious” artists
  • Consumerism and popular music (industry)
  • Hermeneutics and popular music
  • “Christians” as stock figures in popular music
  • The ethics of affinity to (sexist, racist, consumerist, atheistic) popular music
  • The ethics of unwillingness to exercise theological discernment

Now, because I can’t carry all my songs to SOLAS, I need to make a capacious playlist of possibly-relevant tracks. I’ll put my starters in the comments (based on a list I’ve posted here before), but if any of you wants to propose tracks that align with one or another of these nexuses of theology/rock, please do leave a comment for me.

Twenty-Four Hours Of Lecture

Well, two lectures and a seminar over the course of a day, not 24 solid hours (even Jack Bauer isn’t that cruel). I’ll give a capsule summary, and perhaps add details later.
 
Monday evening I went to W J T Mitchell’s talk about idolatry and the examples of Blake, Nietzsche, and Poussin. I’d been looking forward to Mitchell’s lecture all year; interested as I am in visual communication, I anticipated an illuminating exposition of picture theory. As it turns out, Mitchell devoted the first portion of his talk to his book — forthcoming in the fall — about the role of images in the social construction of the so-called War on Terror. This was mildly interesting, though people who pay attention to propaganda won’t be too startled about most of his conclusions. He did, however, signal his commitment to a point with which I disagree fundamentally (namely, that the images used in the propaganda conflict involved certain intrinsic characteristics that affected their reception).
 
After he modulated back to the designated topic for the day, he discussed the Second Commandment (against making “graven images”); at that point he began a series of misstatements about the Bible that had my colleagues and me squirming. He suggested, for instance, that the Second Commandment forbids all representational art and commands that everyone who violates this mandate must be killed, and all their children and subsequent generations. A cursory glance at Exodus 20:4-6 (the text he ostensibly was citing) reads as follows:

You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.

 
(He omitted verse 6.) Now, to be fair to Mitchell, he was using the King James Version, which renders the “image” clause as “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth” — but the sense of the Hebrew construction that the KJV renders “or. . . or. . .” is more correctly represented in the NRSV as “either. . . or. . . .” In other words, Mitchell’s reading of the commandment depends on his relying on the KJV rather than the Hebrew or a modern, more precise translation. That needn’t be a problem; the KJV certainly has an important effective-history. But Mitchell leaned on the premise that the KJV he quoted was what the Second Commandment says, which is an inaccuracy at best.
 
From there, he explored ways that Blake and Nietzsche were idolatry-positive and authority-negative, and the ways that Poussin problematically represented scenes of idolatry. He concluded by proposing a deliberately antithetical reinterpretation of Poussin’s “Plague of Ashdod,” in which the averted gaze of the figure in blue exemplifies a culpable refusal to regard the afflicted mother in the foreground, whose misery was the important feature of the painting.
 
This is getting too long, so I’ll summarise that yesterday morning’s seminar with Mitchell underscored his commitment to the premise that specific features of images involve intrinsic qualities of meaning. I queried him about this during a discussion of Errol Morris’s documentary on the Abu Ghraib images. His point was that the metadata in the digital image files of the Abu Ghraib photos constituted an element of the image-text that made a connection to reality; the crowning glory of this was his showing a clip from Morris where an investigator compared the metadata from the three cameras used at the scene, and reconciled differences among the dates that the cameras reported (one was off by years, the others differed by hours and minutes), such that one could follow a timeline of the order in which the photos were taken. This, he asserted, showed that digital images have a durable connection to reality.
 
I asked whether the images were different if one stripped out the metadata; he answered that you couldn’t see the difference, but that the image-text was different. I asked what about the image was different if the image-text was different; that is, what’s the status of the difference-in-an-image that you can’t see? He answered that images are never just images, but are always products in which the elements of the image are interpreted as this-or-that, and the (invisible) this-or-that-ness of the image was a sort of soft version of metadata (I’m paraphrasing; don’t tax Mitchell for my possible misrepresentation of what he would have said differently). I then asked whether that didn’t mystify the interpretive agency of the artist and viewers, who posit certain elements and identities that are not themselves intrinsic in the image. Mitchell was quite firm that (at least some) qualities of the image are intrinsic, not simply ascribed.
 
It still seems to me that this occludes the role of the interpreter, especially the authoritative interpreter (even an interpreter who places a high value on defiance of authority figures); to return to the Abu Ghraib images, they seem to have “a connection to reality” so long as the expert changes the metadata to fit a prior set of inferences about what it really ought to be. That doesn’t sound to me like the same thing as “a connection to reality” simpliciter, but he’s a Colossus of the critical theory world, and I’m just an idiosyncratic lecturer.
 
Quick overview of Vattimo’s second Gifford Lecture, which he entitled “Beyond Phenomenology”: he meandered about the topic of Heidegger’s break from Husserl around 1927. Husserl he represented as more mathematical, committed to a single fundamental ontology that unites the regional ontologies of the divergent (Neo-Kantian) spheres; Heidegger stuck to a more (religious) refusal to historicise the Transcendental Subject, so as always to defer closure of any ontological question. That’s an oversimplified summary, but Vattimo was much less cavalier (and rather circuitous and repetitive) in this formal lecture than he was in the casual seminar Saturday. Someone challenged him with the standard anti-realist question about the reality of the Holocaust; in response, Vattimo skated closer to glibness, alas. As someone who wants not to get locked into claims about the “factuality” of this ir that — even the great That of the Holocaust — I’d wish that Vattimo dealt with the question more respectfully, even though it’s a bit threadbare (do we somehow make the Holocaust more “real” by asserting that it’s a fact, not an interpretation? Isn’t it already an interpretive decision to refer to it as a Holocaust rather than simply a massacre or genocide? Do we gain yardage on Holocaust-deniers by saying, “No, the Holocaust is a fact” (as though that will somehow thwart their determined refusal to assent to a matter which most observers regard as beyond doubt)? and so on).
 
Third Gifford Lecture tonight.

Latest From Glasgow

• I’m really enjoying living here. It’s another grey, damp day, but the plain fact is that Glasgow is sunnier than we admit, and it’s green, and friendly, and home.
 
• Margaret and I have been fascinated and impressed by seeing urban foxes, but the news over here for the past few days has been dominated by the story of twin girls who were attacked in their nursery by a fox. The fox evidently came in by the patio door, climbed the stairs, and attacked one of the twins. (Don’t worry, Margaret and Pippa, it was in London.)
 
• Aware that Margaret is fascinated by crime in general and Glasgow’s gangster culture in particular, I saw the following placard the other day as I was running errands:
 

Headline Offline

 
Of course, I didn’t buy the paper; I figured I’d watch the BBC or look it up on Google news. But despite my persistent attention, I’ve seen not a byte of information about this story online. So — is this the result of the UK’s outlandish slander laws? Or was the placard perhaps just plain wrong? Remember, we’re talking about Scotland’s Number One Gangster; if he’d been a dancer or a model or a celebrity stranded in a desert oasis, we’d never hear the end of it.

Best Ever?

The fact that I know Tom Coates (digitally) makes it even better, but even for strangers — is this not among the greatest wedding pictures ever?
 

Incoming!

 
It’s even better at larger sizes on the photographer’s Flickr page. I can’t look at Tom’s intense concentration without laughing.

Relics of Obsolescent Technologies

A few weeks ago, the hard-to-believe he’s Rev. Richard Easterling posted a query to his Facebook account, asking which recordings truly demanded the purchase of the whole album, rather than just selected tracks. Ah, these youngsters and their mp3s!
 
His question, though, intersects with my hobbyhorse about the arbitrary nature of the commercial-technological-ideological construct of the “album”; which of those complete-albums truly warrants its claim to being an integrated composition? Some come to mind almost instantly: Pink Floyd’s albums mostly fit (paradigmatically, and probably The Wall, but most of them really); Richard excluded Beatles albums, but we should note that the Beatles did a great deal to advance the idea of the album-qua-oeuvre. The Who’s Quadrophenia more even than Tommy (which sounds to me as though Pete was still just working out the idea of weaving the songs together). Some albums had to fade out and restart, either because particular tracks lapped over from one side to another (Emerson, Lake, and Palmer’s Brain Salad Surgery, in which “Karn Evil 9 – 1st Impression” was split between sides one and two) or because the whole album was through-composed (Jethro Tull’s Thick as a Brick and A Passion Play come to mind). And on eight-track cassettes, the order of songs was frequently altered to fit the peculiar track arrangements, as well as having songs split up between tracks (with a loud “thunk!” when the tape heads switched around). Et cetera.
 
I recall Richard’s post, though, because I have an even more archaic question: namely, which album sides work together especially well? Now, many of you kids may not realise this — it’s sometimes hard for me to recall, and my life was powerfully shaped by listening to album sides well into the 90’s — but one’s musical recordings used to stop and you had to go over to the stereo and physically turn the record (or tape) over to hear the other side. Since many of us had many different albums and enjoyed hearing a wide selection of them, I rarely listened to two sides of the same album consecutively in those years. That meant that in many cases, the arbitrary construct of the album side was even more powerfully impressed on me than the “album” as a whole.
 
For example, side one of Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life belongs together in my memory. The Beatles and Pink Floyd feature strongly in this category, too, of course. Each side of David Bowie’s Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust has its own continuity (the second side always strikes me as a series of conclusions, each more encompassing and satisfactory than the last); the first side of Hunky Dory works very much more cohesively and impressively than the second, though I like the second as well. The giveaway, for me, is the experience of hearing a song in isolation and feeling a frisson of disappointment not to hear what-comes-next; each side of Jeff Beck’s Blow By Blow, but especially the second. (Interestingly, one side effect (sorry) of this phenomenon was that I heard some less-favored songs more often than I would have chosen, since they were on sides with songs I loved, and some wonderful songs less often, since they were on otherwise weaker sides.
 
I live by my iTunes’ Shuffle setting — but I sometimes miss the (arbitrary) unities constructed for me by the physical constraints of the LP album. Now, I think I’ll go listen to Stevie Wonder.

Pre-Gifford Seminar

One of the unanticipated benefits of working at an ancient university in Scotland is the opportunity to attend the fabled Gifford Lectures. Last year’s Glasgow series of Giffords was given by Charles Taylor (would have been great to see him!); this year, they’ll be given by Gianni Vattimo, an Italian philosopher who’s been working in the fields of continental philosophy since the 1960s. I drew on his book The End of Modernity and his article “Bottles, Nets, Revolution, and the Tasks of Philosophy” for my doctoral dissertation (= UK “thesis”), and was intrigued when, several years later, he and Jacques Derrida hosted a small conference of European intellectuals about the topic of religion.
 
Right about that time, he began developing his philosophy into what he has come to call “weak thought,” the conclusion that — absent any basis for metaphysical certainty — any strong claims to certainty or truth have to be regarded as occluded power grabs. Although I’d found certain aspects of his approach useful before this stage, I see a different status to truth-claims or certainty-claims, so I gradually lost interest in his work. Those were just the days, though, that his stock began to rise sharply in the USA, as John Caputo began promoting Vattimo’s flavour of weak thought as an aspect of Caputo’s own projects. One of Vattimo’s students and prominent interpreters, Thomas Guarino, was working on a book about Vattimo at the Center of Theological Inquiry during the year I was there; Tom did not win me back to the Vattimian fold.
 
Anyway, this afternoon Prof. (and MEP) Vattimo gave a warm-up seminar attended mostly by students, mingled with a few staff colleagues. David Jasper began the event by introducing Vattimo and asking him what he means by the catch-phrase he repeats a lot, “Thank God, I’m an atheist.” Vattimo explained (and hereinafter I invoke the Weinberger Reservation that I was taking notes as rapidly as I could, but anything you read from now on is likely to be a misunderstanding, misquotation, or just plain ornery refusal to ascribe to Vattimo the full profundity of his philosophical credentials) that he appreciates the work that Christianity did towards the end of loosing the bonds of Greek metaphysics on philosophical reflection. Thank God for that!
 
But at the same time, he (as an heir of Nietzsche) agrees that God is dead. Not that one can deny God’s existence in some sense — but that God’s function as the guarantor of metaphysical propositions is no longer necessary.
 
(At this point, Vattimo apologised for his English, noted that he doesn’t [yet] speak Scottish, but allowed that at least his English is better than Henry Kissinger’s, and Kissinger was the U S Secretary of State!)
 
Nattimo cited Heidegger and Nietzsche as his two main influences, and indicated that he shares with them the endeavour of overcoming metaphysics (by which he means “the effort to establish an objective, given, order of nature, which one must then serve and observe”).
 
He then explained that the meaning of the Death of God for Heidegger, Nietsche, and Vattimo (with an abashed reluctance to count himself in their company) is that it is no longer possible to think metaphysically. Once, we needed God to shore up the social order; now, God is an excessive hypothesis. He made a reference that I lost track of relative to Vico’s citing Thales’s “All things are full of gods,” then noted that religion no longer serves human advancement, but obstructs the progress of technology. Are we then finished with God? Well, one can say with Pascal that the God of metaphysics isn’t the true God, but Vattimo rejects that path.
 
He argues that if there is an objective truth, it is almost inevitable that there grow a caste of people who lay claim to the prerogative to adjudicate that truth — leading to authoritarianism. He notes that this principle is not just anti-religious, but also tells against such projects as Habermas’s advocacy of “ideal speech situations,” for which one still needs someone to distinguish the correct disinterested circumstances. Contrariwise, Vattimo argues, democracy at its best constitutes a polytheism of values. “No monarch ever enacted a constitution because he was convinced by Voltaire that human freedom was a necessity.”
 
He went on, “for the same reason I say ‘Thank God I’m an atheist,’ I say ‘Thank Jesus I’m an anti-papist.’ ” He proposes that the thing that makes Roman Catholicism absolutely intolerable is the institutionalisation of the gospel. He then made a remark about regarding Deleuze’s characterisation of Kafka’s The Trial as a humorous novel; this evidently had something to do with Vattimo’s suggestion that Israel betrays the heritage of Judaism — that in face of the lack of confidence in metaphysics, the definite truth of Israel (which he seemed to associate with the Holocaust) functioned as a warrant for the use of definite power. (Since this is a delicate topic, I hesitate to report with assurance that this is what Vattimo said, although we will see further on that he comes back to this topic.)
 
We used to accept Christian revelation not on the basis of reason, but of tradition. Tradition, he suggests, is the opposite of metaphysics. At this point he referred to Benedetto Croce’s essay entitled “Why We Cannot Not Call Ourselves Christians” — Christian sensibilities permeate modern democratic ideals. Nonetheless, he pressed the case that Christianity is, in the opposite of Michel de Certeau’s essay’s title, not thinkable today. (Vattimo didn’t cite Certau; that was just me making the inverse connection.) “A God that exists, does not exist.” God is not a possible object existing somewhere as an object. Again, if there is a metaphysical revelation, that warrants an authority that mediates and enforces it. Thus, he notes, the Roman Catholic stake in defining various matters as “natural” derives from their determination to exercise control over all human behaviour, not just the behaviour of Catholics.
 
At this point he ventured into a discussion of missionary activity which, it seemed to me, did not do credit to the sophistication of his philosophy, so I stopped taking notes for a while.
 
He is more and more uneasy with the things Christians affirm, but he is outright hostile to the God of the Old Testament. The spirit of revenge in Israel (justified by the Holocaust) derives from the Old Testament; Jesus accepted the Old Testament vengefulness, but tried to deflect and diminish it. Catholics who resist papal pronouncements by citing other encyclicals and traditions are still inside a wrong-headed system; Vattimo has worked himself more and more outside of that system.
 
In response to a question about his work in the European Parliament, Vattimo observed that the economic crisis of the past couple of years has made it possible for him to be a communist. Whereas the Soviet Union falsified the Marxian prophecies of a Workers’ Revolution — and here he digressed to note that Stalin (as it turns out) was the saviour of Europe at the time of World War II, because whatever his wickedness, he forced the Soviet Union into becoming an industrial power strong enough to hold Nazi Germany at bay.
 
But the question of contemporary democracy is the possibility of true participatory rule. You need money to run for office. And then, as he was serving in the European Parliament, he was to some extent implicated in the European role in instituting the Echelon electronic eavesdropping network, which was approved because after 2001, the threat of international terrorism can be used to justify anything, “like the Holocaust for Israel.” “And now I’m anti-Semitic,” he noted, “because I criticised Israel.”
 
He was winding down at this point, and — to be candid — I was growing disheartened by his casual, shallow deprecation of pretty much anything that didn’t earn his imprimatur. I have some notes from the Q-and-A, but it’s getting late and I’m tired, and re-reading my notes increases my feeling of disappointment in him. I did appreciate, though, one of his later observations: “Every night I pray, and every night I don’t know what I’m doing.”
 
I still see many aspects of his off-the-cuff, unnuanced remarks that I’d readily agree with had they not been over-seasoned with startlingly glib misprisions of relatively simple points. I expect that he expresses himself more carefully in formal lectures. I don’t think, though, that I can identify myself as sympathetic to pretty much anything he says now, because I don’t see a clear way to distinguish his facile insults at Israel and Roman Catholicism (to take just two examples) or his stunningly naïve assessment of biblical material, from whatever he might have on offer by way of sound insight. I’ll miss the first Gifford Lecture because W J T Mitchell is giving a lecture concurrently; but I’ll go to the last three Giffords, and will share notes as I can.

Under Pressure

The ideas and arguments that I’ve been advancing here for longer than anyone cares to remember have begun to realise themselves willy-nilly, and I ache to see the engine of this change kick over and roar. On one hand, the Wall Street Journal acknowledges the effects that digital (self-)publishing has on the established industry of print publishing. It turns out that there’s real money to be made in digital publishing — who knew? The lesson swathed in all the moaning and promotional hand-waving is that one future (perhaps the only or principal future) for mediating between authors and audiences will involve making it easy for readers to find and enjoy what they’re looking for. On one hand, that means finding and promoting the right manuscripts; on another, it means facilitating the process of making them into readable digital publications. Not every author will have the determination to produce DIY digital books; few will, in fact. But a publisher who’s willing to focus on smoothing out a production flow directed principally to the digital market will steal a jump on what will be a growing marketplace.
 
But — and here’s the other side — we await an open, across-the-board format for handsome, readable digital books. For the publisher and developers who iron out the wrinkles on a simple, handsome, functional book-preparation app that produces an open digital book format, the horizons are limitless. 93.1% of the digital book market (“all my statistics have been authenticated by having been made up” — David Weinberger) could be satisfied by an application that did little more than pour text into a given page layout and output something like an open-format PDF. Bing, bang, where’s my 70%?
 
And again I say, as I submitted at Ars Electronica 2008, that if you wanted a sandbox within which to test these claims with a big audience, the readership of theologically-oriented works is vast, and there’s a tremendous base of public-domain works one could use to help seed the market.
 
It’s all going to happen; the question is, Who will make it happen first, and best, and derive all the benefits that come from experiencing that leap first-hand?

Bechdel Test Part Two

After I pointed to the Bechdel Test video a few days ago, Liz Lawley explored further and came up with a Bechdel Test website, where movies are rated by how many of the Bechdel Critera the film fulfils. This, to my mind, takes away some of the fun, since the Test gives you something additional to watch for while enjoying a film (or not); if the Bechdel Site tells you before you’ve even seen the movie. . . I guess it’s useful, never mind.
 
But once I followed Liz’s lead, I poked around and turned up the Bechdel Test blog, where they discuss movies seriatim, and links to posts from inside the sausage factory about the ways that film school and the industry itself actively function to suppress women’s roles and women’s agency.

Hurts ’Cos It’s True, Again

OK, I have to admit it, I’m an email snob too. I have my own email address at disseminary.org (and have been thinking off-and-on about buying another domain to have for the family); I use my gmail address most often, to cut down on spam; and I tend to judge people’s tech competence by the email addresses they present to me.
 
I know people have reasons for using email addresses with what we might call legacy portals (such as AOL and Yahoo), and not everyone needs to impress people with their email address. But if, for instance, you’re trying to get a job (specially with a tech firm or even a tech-aware institution) or in some other way trying to make a good impression, upgrading your email address is an easy, low-cost/no-cost step you can take.
 

Stromateis Salad

• I thought I posted this last week, so (for instance) it’s no longer true that Margaret hasn’t seen the LOST finale. I’m not going to fuss with correcting it. Here’s the salad as I tossed it last week:
 
• Had a great lunch with my new colleague, Professor Richard King. I’m delighted to be sharing the work of a Department Subject Area with him.
 
• I’m not saying anything about the LOST final episode (and, hence, the whole series) out of deference to Margaret and everyone else who hasn’t seen it yet. I understand the basis for some people’s dissatisfaction, and I understand the basis for other people’s positive assessment.
 
• I love Bruce Schneier’s story about his TSA encounter the other day. Ouch!
 
• I told us so: Dave Rogers rhapsodises about the experience of reading books on the iPad. Someone has to step up and promulgate a series of well-designed, non-restricted free or shareware eDitions (make that “eDitions™,” in case anyone gets the clever idea of using my proposal) of public-domain books — then branch out into out-of-print/print-on-demand eDitions™, then new works. Academic publishing is one plausible sandbox for this experiment, ecclesiastical publishing another; and please remember me when you start succeeding at it.