May I Interject?

On the synthesis page, this develops into a "war of words," in which words that narrate are set over against words that affect. That's an opposition which synthesis resists sharply, noting that words are always chinging sides in this war, and pointing out the futility of being able to make any hard-and-fast identifications. I really can't commend synthesis highly enough for all of this. In such wars, as in all others, I am a conscientiously obliged to inveigh for peace and a more generous understanding of both sides.

Jeff picks up the war motif, and ponders the implications. If rhetoric and art co-existed on the side of the abyss inhabited by affective discourse, and narration and history were thereby relegated to the opposite side of the chasm, (absent the power to move) they would remain constitutively ineffectual. Again, bravo! Jeff captures just the sort of reason I lobby against certain sorts of realism; any discourse that proposes its own peculiar capacity to tell the Truth (usually by virtue of a distinctly refined and scientific method) should be watched most carefully, lest its incapacity to see the log in its proponents' own eyes blinds them to horrors they're inflincting on others (in the name of extracting a speck from their neighbors' eye).

So I heartily affirm both Jeff and synthesis. If I gave the impression that I was advocating a rhetoric that opposed "narrative" with "rhetoric," or "art" with "effect," or any of the binaries these acute commentators diagnose, then I repent in sackcloth and ashes. What I ought to have said was "the heart of the matter involves choosing words and putting them into just the right order, not simply to mean something, but to mean something and also to produce something, to effect something."

Aside to synthesis: whether you're evil or not, I urge you always to ask, "When a preacher preaches, is he telling the truth?" Few questions are more important, and not many more than that are harder to answer--honestly.
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      ( 3:01 PM )  

Ambiguity, Online and Material

Both Borgmann and Ess concern themselves with incarnation, the central Christian teaching that God became human, and tease apart the sorts of AI claims that make the body dispensible, indeed that make the body an undesirable limitation on human fulfillment. If human materiality suffuses human knowing, then we'll have a hard job wiring a computational device that can "know" in anything like the same sense in which humans know.

Some observers celebrate life online as a liberation from the limits of physical existence; on the internet, no one knows you're anything other than a "normal" netizen, unless you make evident some aspects of your identity. (Even that gesture allows persistent ambiguity; is Jane Doe really a woman, or is "she" just some guy experimenting with gender roles and identities? And what does the notion that there's a "really" involved in the discussion imply about our working metaphysics?) Borgmann and Ess raise warning flags, suggesting that dis-embodiment may cost a lot, a lot more than it offers in return.

My own experience suggests that I should welcome the ways in which netlife interrupts and problematizes the assumptions that shape everyday physical life. I appreciate the interruption not because I want to be a woman, but because the cultural shift that accompanies modulating into net-mediated identity has actually highlighted ways in which I am the body/spirit whole that lives in Illinois (rather than, say, in New England) even as I have become increasingly involved, at increasing depth, with the lives of people who live in New England, in Colorado or Georgia or California or South Africa or Australia, people whom I have never met but in whose company I have spent a lot of time.

My net-mediated persona "isn't" me, but neither can that persona be quite distinguished from me. Put differently: many of us "are" different people when we reenter the sphere of the families in which we grew up. I know I see myself segue into the habits of a seventeen-year-old eager to grow a life of his own when I visit my parents. I am no longer seventeen years old, physically or spiritually--but there I am indeed seventeen again (and if you doubt it, you may ask my parents about my visits). Now, when I walk down the streets of Evanston, I'm not the "web archetype" whom Jacob Shwirtz describes, but either a tweedy academic in a town overrun with tweedy academics or a visibly-identifiable priest (at a cultural moment when any given (male) priest bears the suspicion that he has done horrible things to children), and neither of these manifest personae bears any evident traces of whatever I may be online.

I "am" and I "know" always in relation to the particular (aging) body of a particular person.

So when I discover myself, much to my surprise, exercising pastoral or homiletical roles online, I do so not as a substitute for physically-present ministry (mine or someone else's), but as an adjunct. Moreover, that situation typically arises out of a situation where someone specifically addresses the AKMA with whom he or she has become acquainted online; in some sense, my correspondent already knows me.

Now, as I agreed above, "knowing" is an intrinsically physical thing--but then, my online persona has distinct physical characteristics (that one infers from the way this webpage looks; if my webpage were exactly like Gary Turner's, say, then people would have at least a slightly different notion of who I am). It's slim evidence, but it's evidence nonetheless (as, for example, the handwriting on which experts persistently base conclusions about people's personalities), and it becomes less sparse the more we know about webpages, HTML, and the politics of webpage design (is that a "font size" tag, in relative size, in points, or in pixels? Does he verify?). If CARP doesn't win out, you might someday overhear the MP3s I'm playing as I type. Add in the picture to which one can click from here and a reader knows more about me than just bare words on a featureless background ("way too much," as Trevor Bechtel solemnly assured me when he stopped by this afternoon). (Hey, Trevor, will you be able to keep your page on the Loyola server when you come to work here?)

It's in an new, freshly ambiguated zone between full physical presence (and I've learned enough from my postmodern studies to doubt the obviousness of "presence") on one hand and merely-verbal communicative absence (on the other) that we wrestle with the messages that come to us from we-know-not-exactly-where. As we learn how to live appropriately, I might say "authentically" to bring us back around to the topic we were talking about when I first met many of you, under these unfamiliar conditions, we will find neither that "religion" is passé, nor that we are truly immaterial beings trapped in decaying flesh, but that there's more to cyberplace than just immaterial or physical existence, more even than we have dreamed of. Permalink -Main Page-
      ( 8:17 AM )  

Who else are you?

Beginning a few years ago, I've made these for my Early Church History class.



Hey, I'll trade you two St. Ambroses for a St. Macrina. . . . Permalink -Main Page-
      ( 7:58 AM )  

Non-Binary

But the true function of human intelligence is to confront precisely the complications, the ambiguities, the non-binary possibilities. However frustrating that may be, however headachey, however antithetical to the kinds of certainty people crave, that capacity to stare resolutely into ambiguity constitutes one thing that makes us different.
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      ( 7:48 AM )  

Complications

Holding on to the Web

In his lecture "Artificial Intelligence and Robotics: Promise and Peril," Borgmann sketched the spiritual-machines/robotic model of human intelligence that such technology theorists as Kurzweil, Moravek, and Tippler propound, and illustrated ways in which (a) he thinks it unlikely that they're right, and (b) what that might imply for theologians (such as his audience--mostly Garrett faculty, me, a smattering of Garrett students, and a friend from the old days at Duke, Brent Laytham, with some of his students from North Park Theological Seminary. He stuck pretty close to material one would have recognized from his books, which was both good (he kept everyone with him) and a little disappointing (I appreciate his writing most when he's at his most subtle).

As a result, the lecture left something of the impression of a binary distinction between technology (identified with hard-core AI advocacy), which was bad, and reality unmediated by technology (which is good). That's obviously too simple, and he didn't try to persuade anyone that these alternatives exhausted the possibilities--but he didn't have the time to go into enough detail on how people might negotiate the tricky twilight area between machine spirituality and anti-technological human spirituality. More's the pity because once you;ve cleared the table of extreme-instance distractions, the tougher and more nuanced interactions, the ones more like those we face day-to-day, remain as challenges. Borgmann has plenty to say on the this penumbral zone, but didn't get to much in the lecture; the closest he came was the heuristic for distinguishing appropriate from inappropriate uses of technology entails reflecting on the extent to relation to practical and principle in doing without the technology. "If," he offered, "your loved one were to die in a traffic crash, you would assent to that death practically--you wouldn't pretend someone was still alive--but you might push for more effective technological measures to diminish the likelihood of traffic accidents. On the other hand, the importance to family life of having people eat meals together means that one accepts neither the practice of teenagers' absenting themselves from dinner because they're web-surfing, nor the principle." It sounded very good and clever, and as it was the very last comment, he couldn't expand on it, but it left me no more certain I knew what would count for an appropriate use of technology on Borgmannian terms. (I know, back to the books. Unfortunately, my low-tech bookshelves are mostly double-shelved, so it's devilishly hard to find anything.

His proposal did suggest to me that one way to deliberate about the appropriate uses of technology might involve wondering whether one would willingly accept the more technologically involved tool as a substitute for doing something one's own self. I would rather not eat a simulated tofu stiry-fry, even if it were a "perfect" sensory simulation; I prefer the material thing, its nutrients, and the random oddments that growth and preparation have interpolated into the proper recipe. That's not to say that, lacking adequate tasty food, I wouldn't try a simulated stir-fry experience, just that I'd be unwilling to substitute the sim for the handmade equivalent. That's still not quite right, but it helps point toward the direction I might want to go.

Anyway, good talk with a gracious thinker. Permalink -Main Page-

Bloggers of the World, Unite

Happy May Day, laborers. I wish I could say I took a light day of blogging today in solidarity with the international Labor Day

or the Internet Radio day without music--but instead I was just swamped.

More guests than usual, thanks to Jacob Shwirtz, and people beating a path to my blog now that they know I'm Si's father; sorry not to have anything novel, but I had a grant proposal to get out this afternoon, and my PowerBook got a headache from a nasty crash (been having USB glitches lately), and these ate up all my coherent time. Please come back tomorrow, and I'll try to serve something interesting and new.
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Tuesday, April 30, 2002
      ( 9:06 PM )  

Like father, unlike son

I am Doc Searls's father. . . .

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I've hesitated to say it for a long time--it sounds awfully pretentious, and I've known people to say it for whom it's manifestly not an apt claim--but Joseph Duermer (links to April dates not quite funcitonal) has outed me: composing sermons is the closest I get to writing poetry, and it has a lot more to do with writing poetry than with either writing theological tractettes or telling stories. That's not to say that one could never detect any narrative element in my sermons, 'cause you certainly could. Rather, the heart of the matter involves choosing words and putting them into just the right order, not simply to mean something, but to mean something and also to produce something, to effect something. When Joseph (by the way, congratulations!) cites my brother in Holy Orders John Donne as an example, of course, he makes it all the more difficult to confess that that's the field of endeavor on which I presume to play; but he's got me dead to rights.
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      ( 4:17 PM )  

Cool. . . .

Both Tom and David blogged about postmodernism this morning, and both are so right on it makes me want to grin one of those big goofy smiles that only the hopelessly unselfconscious can cut loose with. Being hopelessly unselfconscious, I am grinning one of those biggies now. Don't even try to imagine what I look like, if you've eaten recently.

They speak their minds beautifully and clearly, and I'm with them all the way. They drive toward a tremendously important point: that "postmodernism" isn't a very noteworthy thing in and of itself. I hate the feeling that I have to stand up for "postmodernism" when someone derides instead of criticizes, when someone mocks rather than wrestles with the intensely insightful, provocative (if often limited, as who's aren't?) minds that get lumped together under this unwieldy designation. It's not that I care about "postmodernity"--it's (ironically) that I care so much about truth, about telling the truth about people we disagree with. That truth often (not always) involves admitting that we don't fully understand what they're on about, and that we're not interested enough to try to understand better. There is something going on over there in Postmodernia.

David (yes!) picks up the neuralgic problem that postmodern inquiries often have the most leverage right where we least want them to: where "what counts as 'reasonable'" comes into play. His point matters so much, since many of the common rejections of postmodern discourses depend on appeals to "common sense" or "reasonableness," when it's just those ideas that postmodern theorists work hard to complicate. It doesn't mean that there's no such thing as being reasonable, or that one reason is as good as any other--but that we can't simply appeal to "reason" or "common sense" as though these were impartial arbiters (who, purely coincidentally, side with us).

At the same time, one of the least edifying features of postmodern discourses involves (as Tom notes) the tendency to devote lots and lots of energy to figuring out who's really postmodern and who isn't, or who's modern and who's postmodern, and so on. Indeed, the impulse to set up binary alternatives and squeeze all the world into one slot or the other runs antithetically to the postmodern attention to nuance and to apparently trivial detail. So Tom's right that we oughn't invest heavily in a fight over whether Joyce was modern or postmodern--quite so. And we're also both right to say that Rushkoff's glib categorization of Joyce as postmodern justifies a sensitive reader's uncertainty that he knows what he's talking about.

Anyway, thanks to both Tom and David. It's great to hear this from you, especially given the candid reservations you have about the whole topic. I'll come back to Tom's quibbles sometime later, but for now I'm just beaming like a fool.

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I do intend to get back to David and Dorothea (sorry to hear the bad news that you are AKMA according to the "What Web personality are you?" quiz) and now others too (in offblog email) about accountability and forgiveness, but it's too important to just whip something onto the web, then see the million ways in which I misrepresented what I'd want to say. And Dave Rogers had a great long flash on thinking the Web as a dream, that I want to play with someday. And props to Steve Yost, who blogged about Web, community and theology without my appropriately noting his bracing reflections, and who helpfully blogged my postmodern book in the context of a discussion of lucidity in academic prose (the late lamented Lingua Franca devoted an article to the topic, and Jeff Ward often writes about teaching about writing). Permalink -Main Page-
      ( 7:50 AM )  

In Anticipation of Bloomsday

Not that Douglas Rushkoff is booting up his browser this morning to check my latest musings, but I was pleased to notice (from a link at Liberal Arts Mafia, but I thought I got it from wood s lot) in Umberto Eco's review of Trailer, spot, clip, siti, banner: Le forme brevi della comunicazione audiovisiva the following line:

Today, as always, there is a segment of the public (a scant portion of the planet's six billion inhabitants) that has access to the complex forms such as the modern (James Joyce, for example) or postmodern novel.

That was Joyce, in contradistinction to the postmodern novel (but only according to Eco).

Warning: observations below based on erroneous research! I looked for the Rushkoff entry, Googled for his observations on Joyce and MTV, and came up blank--but Tom Matrullo sought and found the blog entry in Rushkoff's April archive. My bad--with no hiding my folly post facto. In self-defense, I will note that the link this technology guru originally supplied for the entry no longer leads to the page that actually has the Joyce entry.

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Searching for a link to the relevant Rushkoff blog entry, I discover that he has removed the entry that gave evidence of his literary and theological sophistication; luckily, Google cached it. Scroll down to the April 11 blog.

Am I "neener-neener"-ing Rushkoff? Perhaps--but it's worth remembering that when we spout off in public, we're accountable for what we say. Who knows why Rushkoff deleted the post? I can hardly imagine it was because he incurred rebukes from Tom Matrullo and A K M Adam. In her temporarily inaccessible Blogicon, Burningbird has recorded the phrase "Do a Dave" in honor of Dave Winer, who generated some controversy by editing his weblog retrospectively to delete an entry that he later regretted; I commonly edit my blogs to correct typos, or fix ungrammatical spots, or add links, or fine-tune my composition. In our hyperlinked world, however, the "hyper-" indicates not only that the link gets us a long way fast, but that we're linked to within an inch of our lives. We're radically accountable for what we say online, and we'd better get used to it.
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Monday, April 29, 2002
      ( 10:50 AM )  

All is vanity, especially me

Okay, it's atrociously vain of me, but I do get a charge out of the fact that at this particular moment, a slight book about the unlikely interaction between postmodern theory and biblical interpretation popped up on the Onfocus Weblog Bookwatch, nestled among titles by such web visionaries as Weinberger and Locke, and pop-culture heavyweights as Michael Moore and Dave Eggers. A new documentary: "Michael and Me."

How bizarre.

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Well, that didn't last long (anyone who feels an irresistible urge to link to my book at Amazon, thus lifting me over such minor literary entities as Lawrence Lessig, should feel free--it'll only take a couple). But as a consolation, Jacob Shwirtz over at Fuzzy Blogic has identified me as a member of the "web elite" (obviously straining his definition of "elite"), such that one can now take one of those innumerable Daypop attention-getter personality quizzes to find out "What Blogging Archetype Are You?", and if there's a windy theological academic within your online persona, Jacob's quiz machine will tell you that you're an AKMA.

For what it's worth, it took me five minutes before Jacob's quiz told me I was anyone but

You are a David Weinberger.

You are smart, savvy, interested in why people do what they do,
enjoy questioning yourself and are not balding.
Take the What Blogging Archetype Are You test at GAZM.org
David Weinberger. Who is surprised? How surprised are they? Why? And if I'm David Weinberger, can I get his travel-and-speaking gigs while he grades papers for me?
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      ( 10:13 AM )  

Welcome home

Parenting is a tricky endeavor, rarely receiving appreciation in any way comparable to the demands it entails. Although comparisons are odious, I admire David W. as a father, and hope that the local offspring--Nate, Si, and Pippa--recognize in me some of what impresses me about David. It's good to see you back in circulation, David, even if you're groggy.

We'll talk about expiating sins later (now also with Dorothea). Why am I as hopeful about the Web as David is? Because despite the flame-wars and miscellaneous other nonsense, I find that other folks want to talk about important topics, folks with whom I'd just not have been falling into conversation in any other context of which I'm aware.
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Sunday, April 28, 2002
      ( 10:51 PM )  

Guilt, Forgiveness, and Postmodernity

I fear that the Tutor is vexed (along with his Dick) with me, for my dalliances with some of his French rivals; alas, I may not find a way to console him. The Tutor files two main complaints against me: first, the deceptive simplicity of my prose, whose thin ice conceals the abîme, the abyss, over which my readers skate when they follow my arguments. Second, by leading people out onto the ice in the first place, I take them to a forbidden world where intellectual vice arrogates to itself virtue's reward, and where it shoos virtue away in disrepute.

If I have transgressed, I am penitent indeed. Sadly, part of the differend that sets me at odds with the philanthropic dispenser of salutory bun-warmings concerns his unwavering certainty that my education at Paris and Vincennes has corrupted my faculty of discernment, such that I no longer recognize the corrosive effects of postmodern discourse. Though he recognizes my good intentions, he grieves that they lead me on a broad, easy road with a wide gate that opens to the maw of destruction. Indeed, at least the Paris Deconstructors can be marked and avoided at a distance by their hypersophisticated, self-consciously precious prose--whereas I seduce readers by disguising the rotting stench of foetor with the appealling aroma of fresh-baked bread and clean linen.

My own sense of what I have learned as I lingered in the discursive byways that interlace the Rive Gauche, the University of Paris VIII, and even the Black Forest (and who can tell the truth about her or his own heart? The Tutor? I?) encourages me to pursue my plain-spoken way in the company of such other travellers as fall in with me. If the Tutor is right about the company I keep, I have at least the precedent of my Teacher, who reminded us that it is not the well who have need of a doctor.

Years of pastoral ministry confirm what Lyotard et al. posit: that human creatures and their notions and practices are more complicated than any facile division of good versus evil (again, who was it who advised his servants not to uproot the threatening weeds too hastily, lest they be found to have harmed some of the wheat?). I admire the Tutor's heroes; but if I think highly of Giamatti's accomplishments (as I do), am I not permitted to discuss some possible hitches in his metaphorical swing? If the Tutor despises my instructors, am I not permitted to have learned some subtleties and wisdom from them? If I study to learn the guilelessness of a dove, ought I (contra Jesus) forgo serpentine cunning?

If the Tutor thinks I visit his establishment merely to place a cheap nihil obstat on his books, and to asperge his flagellants for instant absolution, he may be mistaking sermo humilis for naive bonhomie. Since he accuses me of a deceptive rhetorical practice, he may ask whether he has deceived himself. Permalink -Main Page-
      ( 10:49 PM )  

Preaching, Illustrations, and Retreat

I've said before and I'll say again that one of the great gifts of the Web, indeed of blogging in particular, comes as one's interlocutors gently and charitably help you recognize ways that you have expressed yourself imprecisely or flat-out erroneously. So I'm definitely in retrenching on the sermon-illustration topic, although (like a sullen teenager) I still have some last-gasp rationales for what I'll probably back away from in a short while.

So first of all, thanks to Victor for his initial challenge, and my special thanks to Steve for a richly-thought-out meditation on narrative, postmodernism, and theology. If much of what he says doesn't meet my expressed concerns head-on, it's because he's thinking more deeply and generally than I. My ruminations involved a single particular practice: not the general topic of "narrative in preaching," and certainly not "narrative theology," nor "narrative in general with regard to postmodernity," but only with the practice of seasoning one's sermons with an assortment of vignettes often collected and distributed in compendia under the heading "sermon illustrations." I've backed away from that complaint, somewhat, though I might still be ready to construct a case against them. Right now, I've barked up enough wrong trees that I have no business trying to justify the complaint, so I'm dropping it.

Steve is quite right to look closely at the way that narrative functions in representation of particular people and practices in anthropological discourses, and having done so to look sideward to homiletical work, and to ponder the risks and benefits that might accompany anecdotal preaching. "Representing" others, divine or human, necessarily involves a kind of assimilation of the Other to one's own capacities for appreciative observation and articulate expression. When we are unsympathetic or inarticulate-as all too many anthropologists and preachers have been--we produce caricatures. These caricatures' exaggerated (distorted) features may be more or less visible depending on the extent to which observers, readers, or congregations share the insensitivities that influenced the anthropologist or preacher.

One vital element of intellectual responsibility involves resolutely attending to the complexities of one's topic, eschewing the temptation to paint in primary colors only when little of what we study appears in such starkly simple shades.

Our narrative expositions of other peoples and cultures, of the gospel, or whatever, involve both a greater capacity for nuance than do the declarative, propositional, aspiring-to-scientific-detachment claims that often fill the publications of writers who crave definitive authority, or whose desire for truth obliges them to produce research that disregards depth in favor of quantifiable results. As Steve points out, narrative risks no less, since its apparent realism can occlude the author's selectivity and compositional determination.

In such a context, talking about "misinterpretation" or "what gets lost" leaves intact the assumption that there's an alternative, that we might somehow write a narrative that gets the Nuer right or reproduces exactly the nuances of Les Fleurs du Mal. Rather than hunting those unicorns, I encourage my students and readers to evaluate interpretations by criteria to which we have more rich and ready access. Is this interpretation interesting? Do you have reason to doubt the writer's claims? What might be her agenda in writing, or yours in embracing or rejecting her claims? Is this an interpretation for which you'd be willing to get into trouble (does it seem right enough to stand up for)?

Now, getting back to homiletics, I acknowledge that good sermons can derive added strength from the adept incorporation of sermon illustrations. But (here's a last-ditch rationale) to the extent that a preacher wants to take accountability for the theological point she or he is making, those narrative nuggets may involve more simply colorful corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative. I've heard a number of sermons that cited the famous last words of Cassie Bernall, the Columbine High School--last words that Cassie Bernall seems never to have said. What effect does it have on our claims about (for instance) modern martyrdom if Bernall died without uttering a word, and the famous confession of faith came from a nearby student who has since recovered from her wounds?

But that point shouldn't distract anyone from my readiness to admit too hasty and vehement a denunciation of sermon illustrations. I'm definitely re-thinking, thanks to provocative conversation with online partners. Permalink -Main Page-
      ( 6:56 PM )  

Copyright?

I can't believe I picked this up (from kuro5hin, courtesy of MLWebblog) before the estimable adversary of monopolistic intellectual property laws, Tom Matrullo! Macauley makes points relative to copyright that resound loud and clear today. "I believe, Sir, that I may with safety take it for granted that the effect of monopoly generally is to make articles scarce, to make them dear, and to make them bad."
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All times are local.
Local times may vary.
Minutes do not expire.

A. K. M. Adam
That which we have not yet bothered to imagine is not therefore impossible.