AKMA’s Random Thoughts

OK, today I buckle down and make some headway on the preface. I plan on beginning by situating the essays in the context of my work and the field of biblical studies: throughout the twentieth century, biblical scholars have grappled with the hermeneutical problem of how to connect their technical study of the grammar and historical context of the Bible with the ways that the Bible can and should affect the lives of contemporary readers. They have suggested numerous work-arounds and improvements for hermeneutical deliberation, but none seems to have won general assent.

Some people sense no problem with the status quo; they’re content to puzzle over unusual verb forms, odd usages of familiar words, the likelihood or unlikelihood of people raising other people from death. A considerable number of readers, though, express dissatisfaction with an interpretive method that excels at retrospect, but falters when interpreters try to bring the Bible to bear on contemporary life.

In these essays, I propose that readers who want something more than, or something different from what conventional critical scholarship offers may need to rethink some deeply-held presuppositions of twentieth-century biblical analysis. The method — inasmuch as we can appropriately define this array of interpretive moves as a method — performs admirably, but it does not exhaust the work of interpretive reflection, nor does it set the terms on which further reflections may proceed.

Practitioners of contemporary technical scholarship frequently shore up the foundations of their discipline with appeals to particular axioms, axioms whose soundness I have come to doubt. Many scholars adhere to the myth of subsistent meaning, the premise that “meaning” constitutes a characteristic quality that inheres to a text. An exegete’s job, then, requires her to distill that meaning from its raw form in the text to a purer, more manifest form. Scholars often locate responsibility for interpretive conclusions in the text itself, such that they claim, “the text requires this” or “the text permits that, but not the other.” These figures of speech serve admirably when deployed as figures, but when they take on the character of literal ascriptions of agency to inert words, they disfigure our understanding of whence meaning comes and of who stands accountable for interpretive claims. contemporary interpreters tend to treat all interpretive deliberation as a more or less close approximation of verbal communication (hence we speak of “body language,” and suggest that “his expression spoke volumes”). At the same time, biblical scholars tend to operate as though one and only one interpretation rightly, finally, ascertains the [subsistent] meaning that the text expresses. Finally, the adherents of current interpretive conventions warn that if we depart from these axioms — if we allow that no lode of meaning lies embedded in our texts, that we (and not texts) sponsor and permit interpretations, that communication and interpretation constitute phenomena of far greater intricacy than the verbal paradigm allows, and that we may honestly and fairly consider the possibility that a given expression may mean several different things — if we yield on these points, the exquisite architecture of human communication (and especially, of course, of God’s communication with humanity) rapidly declines into inarticulate grunts and brutality.

The rumors of civilization’s demise, of course, would be greatly exaggerated. The essays included here explore the terrain of meaning beyond the boundaries enforced by conventional technical scholars. In various ways, with various points d’appui, the essays work toward establishing the claim that “meaning” pertains to human activity and interaction rather than textual inscription; thus, people devise interpretations for which they (not the objects they interpret) must be held responsible. These essays propose that expression and meaning involve vastly more sorts of gesture than verbal communication, such that adopting verbal communication as the paradigm for analyzing “meaning” constitutes a misleading oversimplification. Just as gestures, appearances, smells, and sounds may engender various indeterminable interpretations, so also verbal expression may issue in more than one meaning. All of this holds true not in some dystopian Looking-Glass World where nothing mean anything and everybody runs roughshod over any weaker communicator, but in the world we inhabit here and now. If anything threatens the well-being of the priase of God and the harmonious social order, it is more ominously the imposition of falsely-constricted meaning onto the demonstrably plurivalent economy of signification that prevails outside the rigidly-enforced domain of monovalence and correctness.

(Whew! That’s enough for one go. Plus, I want to say more about White Guy Theology, maybe later.)

Is “assiduous” the opposite of “basic”?

No, David, if I had expressed myself more clearly, it would have been plainer that I hadn’t thought you were arguing that art uniquely, or distinctively, fuses matter and intentionality.

Let’s look at the point where you do agree that we differ: You observe that in some works of art, “the mute is brought to speech,” that they “carr[y] more meaning than words can express,” a carved stone “speaks more eloquently than does flesh.” (Clarification: you ren’t saying this happens automatically, in every case of supposed “art” — all these examples are governed by your prefatory “sometimes.”) Yes, that’s just where our paths diverge. I don’t want to concede that the power to move you resides in some quality of the carved stone, the painted canvas, the outstanding artwork. I think that the assumption that the item in question itself moves you or me engenders the misleading impression that there’s a quality of “moving-ness” that we might separate from the cultural settings and conventional modes of expression within which we encounter the work of art. “King’s pawn to King’s Knight 7” may be a powerful move, a blunder, an illegal move, or an unintelligible gesture (as my old Flanders and Swann record said, “because they were playing bridge at the time” — what a joy, to discover that Phil Wolff loves Flanders and Swann too!) depending on the situation, the conventions and expectations that govern that move.

I harp on this point because in my field, people persist in ascribing agency to words and artifacts in ways that mystify a more precise characterization of what’s happening, and in ways that direct attention away from human responsibility for those happenings. When someone says, “The Bible demands that I stone an adulterer to death,” such a person exculpates her- or himself for the blood of the transgressor, rather than acknowledging that a myriad of very pertinent human considerations affect every judgment about what the Bible says. They don’t render the Bible “meaningless” or permit people to cite the Bible as a warrant for just any action — but the constraints on interpretation (I repeat) derive not from inherent qualities of “the work,” but from the patterns of social interaction within which we judge particular interpretations justified and other outlandish.

Or as Cole Porter might have said if he were a technologist-philosopher or -theologian, “You say ‘Heidegger,’ I say ‘Wittgenstein,’ let’s call the whole thing drawn.”

First, did the national “Do Not Call” list eliminate your unwanted phone calls? Not ours. In fact, if there’s a single Student Loan profiteer in the United States who hasn’t called us, you can be confident that they will call shortly. The Do Not Call list only gives me something to talk to them about; it doesn’t impel them not to call me in the first place.

They always seem astonished when I ask whether we have an existing business relationship. “What?” So I repeat the question. “I don’t think so,” they answer, “We’re just calling because it’s important that you consolidate your loans before. . .” Un-huh; you’re blanketing the population of student-loan borrowers out of the purely altruistic interest in their getting lower interest rates. Right.

Second, I’m linking again to Fred Clark’s Slacktivist site. I don’t know of anyone who engages popular culture, public policy, faith, and politics with such attention to detail such clarityt, such exemplary strong theological grounding. Updates to his reading of Left Behind come less often these days, but I read them avidly, and his commentary on immigration and legality illustrates his wondrous gifts as an articulate participant-resister to some of the ways America impedes the gospel (often in the name of the gospel).

David Weinberger reviews Paul Bloom’s Descartes’ Baby (come on, David, use some <cite> tags) this morning, with predictable insight. I appreciate the way David declines to let Bloom off for sloppy arguments (assuming David is correct) in a popular work; it’s always worth arguing carefully and precisely, especially in writing for a general audience. (If you’re going to oversimplify or
advance an under-argued claim, at least signal that you know what you’re doing.)

I felt particular sympathy with parts of this point:

More important, art refutes dualism. As Bloom acknowledges throughout the chapter — belaboring the obvious — we react to objects differently if we know they were created as art. So, here’s a physical object that embodies something mental and intentional. The artwork has no inner life, but it can’t be understood apart from the intentionality it embodies. Art and all objects we create are inseparably infused with matter and spirit. Monism is far more important to our experience than dualism.

As David surely anticipates my saying, I hesitate to go all the way with his “it can’t be understood” and “infused”; I argue that we can indeed understand them apart from inferring that they represent gestures in the discourse of “art.” (Indeed, I suppose that the category “art” involves judgments and conventions that militate against David’s ascribing “infusion” to the objects in quesstion.) He’s entirely right that art-stuff doesn’t differ in obvious material ways from “use-stuff” (Duchamp’s point?) or “nature-stuff” (the problem of driftwood, sea glass, `mountain landscapes: they’re beautiful, but under what rubric do they enter the discourse of “art”?), but we can differentiate art from urinals from driftwood not by a mystified infusion of artistic intention, but by the conventions we observe in how we live with them. We treat art differently; in my hobby-horse language, we participate in the signifying practice of artistic production by receiving certain objects as more valuable, more thought-provoking, than other very similar objects. The difference lies not in the material manifestation of the item, nor in the “artistic intention” that supposedly infuses it, but in the transactions by which we propose and accept meanings that the involve the object in question.

Apart from that, David sounds essentially right to me.

As I gear up for the coming series of da Vinci Code response gigs, it occurs to me how strange it is to live in a culture that exercises such thorough-going critical skepticism toward the Jesus traditions on the gospels, but that embraces such a ludicrously improbable conspiracy theory as Dan Brown and the Priory of Sion credulists propound.

I did survive unto Reading Week (or “Writing Week,” as Susie suggests that it be more appropriately known). I preached yesterday, and will go over the sermon text, then promulgate it here, and I will respond to the comments on my St. MacGyver post and, God willing, sketch out as I write the opening essay to Faithful Interpretation.

But it’s Reading Week, I can sleep and write and relax and reflect on a schedule [mostly] not determined by meetings and classes, and then Margaret and Si come home next Monday, then only ten days of classes to the end of term.

The Dean just added me to Seabury’s Long-Range Planning Committee, so I suddenly have an extra two-hour meeting on my schedule. That’s in addition to the theses I have to read, the sermon I’m preparing for Friday morning, and the letter I must write agreeing to preach at a Milwaukee ordination in June. And this morning my editor from Fortress Press called to inquire about when my preface to Faithful Interpretation will be ready, and I just received an email message from the production editor saying that the proofs are coming here overnight and I must have them back on May 19, with my preface.

Urgh!

Well, at least I have a sermon premise that I like (one of the readings is Acts 9:1-20, and I’ll preach about Paul as the Apostle of inflection points), and I’ll work on transmuting my comments at the CSBR meeting of ten days ago into a Preface. This will work out.

Next week is called Reading Week, but I have a feeling that it will be Writing Week in my office.

“Thomas says, the critical thinker who is at the same time a believer is to be compared with the martyr who sheds his blood, who refuses to abandon the truth of faith in spite of the ‘arguments’ of violence.”

Josef Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1997) 72f.

or, “Why White Men Can’t Do Theology”

Theological deliberation has for a long time benefited from leadership by White Men*; their privileged cultural position has offered them access to learning, to leisure, to others’ complementary service, to the critical interaction of other privileged scholars. Some of these privileged White Men have put their advantages to the service of the church’s self-understanding, a laudable self-offering (when they might pursue so many more rewarding activities), and we may not underrate the extent to which their efforts have clarified and illumined the Truth to which the whole church strains with eager longing. Well done, good and faithful servants!

All the same, White Men’s theology involves a deeply problematic architectonic flaw. This flaw affects both “conservative” and “liberal” theologies. Indeed, some of its most devastating effects arise in “liberal” theological discourses; the “conservative” inclination to minimize the importance of gender and privilege as categories of theological thinking keep their Whiteness as the prominent visible characteristic, whereas the “liberal” interest in remedying the pernicious effects of White Men’s dominance ironically perpetuates and more deeply embeds the White presuppositions in their theological endeavors.**

But I have put off too long my characterization of the constitutive flaw of White Guy theology. The problem I have in view involves the relation of White Men’s cultural privilege to the theological standing of justice and grace. In a few words, when culturally-dominant figures speak about either “justice” or “grace,” they almost necessarily presuppose the practical possibility of effecting a just situation, or an appropriately gratuitous gift of Truth. But observation suggests that human efforts to bring about “justice” tend to incorporate elements of [well-intentioned] coercive power, and coercion itself militates against “fairness” (and is antithetical to grace). In other words, when White Men (and their allies) try to fix things, to bring about just social arrangements, the very gesture of fixing entangles them again in the coercive use of privilege that constitutes the White problematic.

This is why I invoke St. MacGyver in the title of the post. I never watched the TV series, but the general premise has seeped into cultural currency. Resourceful hero, trained in covert operations by a national security agency, goes from place to place getting into dire predicaments in his efforts to Do the Right Thing, and he always manages to set matters straight with the clever manipulation of two or three ordinary household implements (and his Swiss Army knife).*** The figure of MacGyver epitomizes the White Man’s impulse to fix things and the White Man’s capacity (and resources) actually to make things right. And not everyone has access to those resources, to those capacities, as White Guys do.

If you don’t have access to the means of “making things right,” though, the whole question takes on (we might say) a different complexion. If you know in advance that important, effective forces stand to prevent your making things right, fixing things, you have a very different relation to the prospect of fixing. Sure, you still hunger and thirst for righteousness — but you know that effecting righteousness lies outside your power. The dominant forces in culture, the ones that limit and constrain you, have made that lesson inescapably clear. By the same token, the more ardently one hangs onto the prospect of fixing, the more clearly one identifies with the White Guy’s power.

In order truly to apprehend grace, one must move out of the world in which our striving constitutes the effective power by which God’s justice becomes manifest in the world. In this sense, one more truly accepts God’s grace as a gift when one adopts a practice of patience rather than an impatient determination to attain right answers, correct social practices.

I say this not out of lack of concern about injustice, but (so far as it’s given me to know) out of a particular grave concern. I fear that our appropriate vexation at evident, appalling injustices tends to compound these problems by instituting a new “improved” situation that itself entails new unfairnesses, but with the aura of sanctified immunity that derives from its status as a deliberate step toward justice. “Conservative” participants in social processes may experience the injustice of the loss of their cherished way of life, the disregard of the authorities upon which (and whom) they rely. Those who experience a different sort of injustice from that which is being remedied may experience the unfairness of having their trials disregarded out of triumphal confidence that “justice has been done.” Certainly many have observed (in others, of course; never in oneself!) the way that well-intentioned justice-doers can be more resistant than anyone else to perceiving glitches in their plans to fix the world.

So, on the terms I’m setting out, our response to injustices that we perceive is neither a determination to remedy them (tacitly: “at any cost”), nor passively to say, “well, the poor will be with us always,” but to endeavor to live in ways that (imperfectly) bespeak God’s equity and truth: within the ambit of our capacities (patiently), subject to criticism and correction (humbly). To the extent that we attain such a life, we do so not through the power of our own wills or intellects, not through the purity of our intentions, not through the guaranteed inerrancy of our authorities, but solely through a grace that does not originate with us, that refuses coercion, that invites correction and cooperation (even when these involve a departure from the corrective program we devised).

In all this, then, it’s time to recognize that White Men have given great gifts to the church — but inasmuch as they participate in privileges that inhibit their realization of the actuality, the humility, and the patience of grace, they need to step back a few paces and not try to tell the world how God wants things run. St MacGyver’s legacy is ambiguous, because White Guys really do accomplish some good things, they often have their sights set squarely on justice. Nonetheless, God’s grace wants spokespeople who know that sometimes you can’t get the justice you want, that coercion institutionalizes un-freedom, that God’s justice is greater and truer and more reliable than human justice, better even than White Guys’ justice.****

This claim, of course, enmeshes me in a performative contradiction. I can’t very well persuade you that I’m right without arrogating to my claims about justice an authority that my argument rules out. And if you point out that a White Man shouldn’t be talking as I have, your resistance tends to affirm the thesis of my argument above. I have no wisdom by which to rectify this, unless it be: By saying this out loud, I may lend some measure of the dominant culture’s power to similar arguments made by people who don’t have the full panoply of privilege that I’ve enjoyed.

Or not. I’d be interested to learn from interlocutors by exploring this premise together, though.

* For casual purposes, I’ll say just “White Men” or “White Guys” here, though a more precise analysis of power and privilege would take account of class distinctions, of sexuality, of a variety of inflections of “whiteness” and masculinity. My point is not that these are irrelevant, but that the nuanced account depends first on naming the structural problem with White Guy theology. Once we reach that point, we can begin tracing the various manifestations of, resistances to, and correlates of that problem.

** I don’t exclude this short essay from the category — though, as I will try to show, it occupies its problematic status self-consciously, deliberately, and patiently, tentatively, with the hope that such an intervention provides the occasion for corrective responses.

*** I’m uninterested in arguing here over whether I’ve got MacGyver right — I would be interested to learn more, but he’s functioning as a metonym here, not as the invocation of the Actual Fictive-Historical MacGyver.

**** I don’t think this involves an advantage to “left” or “right”; I know plenty of “conservative” people outside the sphere of White Men’s privilege, along with plenty of “liberals.” And if we suppress the noisy clamor of White Guys who think they have the correct answer, we may begin to undo some of the stereotyping that results when Others get squeezed into the roles and positions that a dominant discourse constructs for them.

[Now see also More On MacGyver]

You may not have noticed, but I love my daughter very much. I usually make her pancakes on Saturday, but this morning she apologetically asked if I would make French Toast. I allowed that I’d do anything for her, so she volunteered to walk the dog while I cooked, and she fished out our battered copy of The Joy of Cooking to help me with proportions.

“Hey, look at how you make Garlic Bread,” she said, and headed off to leash the dog.

“I don’t understand why you want Garlic Toast for breakfast,” I observed, “but I’ll make it if you want.”

“No, no, I want French Toast,” she emphasized.

“French Toast with Garlic sounds strange to me, honey, but I’ll make it for you.”

“French Toast! French Toast! Anything with garlic is banned!” she called, as she headed out the door.

Dave points (with surprisingly little comment) to the disheartening convergence of two corporate interests both of which think that the next business model involves control, control, and more control.

No one should take what I say as though I were an MBA from Kellogg School (where I had a cup of coffee this week, and felt as though I’d entered the Bizarro-World opposite of the tech conferences I’ve been to: almost all ThinkPads, with an occasional rare iBook). On the other hand, my ideas aren’t peculiar to me — people who’ve best-selling business books will tell you the same thing.

The next business model may not be located in the sun-shine-y, mellow, free, oh wow, give-it-away, “We’re all feeding each other” territory that I envision, but the path toward the next business model passes through there.

And it surely doesn’t lie in the highly-controlled environment where MSFT and the NYT are building.

Does anyone have any suggestion relative to a collaborative scheduling/task-process application that’s OS X compatible? Is there a way to use iCal to construct a shared calendar?