AKMA’s Random Thoughts

OK, this is what I have:

Postmodern biblical criticism includes a disparate array of interpretive strategies that share few characteristics other than their deliberate departure from the presuppositions of modern biblical criticism. Where modern biblical criticism strives for objectivity, one school of postmodern critics exercises their distinctive subjectivity with flair. Where modern biblical criticism eschews explicitly political interests, most postmodern interpreters acknowledge an inevitable political component to their work; many, in fact, pursue their interpretations with deliberate attention to advancing social equality, cultural diversity, and resistance to heterosexual privilege. Where modern biblical interpreters emphasize their adherence to rigorous methodological standards, postmodern interpreters emphasize the role of imagination in even the most narrowly historicist interpretations. In these and innumerable other ways, readers have propounded criteria of rigor and soundness that depart from the norms that characterize modern biblical interpretation.

For example, modern biblical interpretation tends to treat linguistic communication as optimally transparent to meaning — as though ambiguity and misunderstanding were regrettable, evitable miscarriages of expression. On that basis, biblical texts presumably equal a meaning that the modern interpreter simply restates in local languages, in contemporary terms. Such a model neglects the extent to which even the most scrupulously direct prose engenders varied interpretations (as the history of biblical interpretation amply illustrates). Linguistic expression does not evoke ambiguity as an accidental byproduct of shoddy composition, but as a necessary condition of linguistic communication. Jacques Derrida identified this phenomenon as “play,” as the semiotic slack requisite for effective communication. Biblical interpreters have seized on the discrepancy between the modern repression of ambiguity (on one hand) and the postmodern attention to linguistic pliancy (on the other) to foreground counterintuitive readings, to flout conventional wisdom. Such startling readings — however much they distress those who place their faith in modernity — rest not solely on outrageous whimsy; they articulate the latent possibilities that linguistic expression always permits.

The modern inclination to stress distinct, definite meaning at the cost of interpretive difference thus involves a determination to authorize some sorts of criticism and to exclude others. Modern interpreters defend this as a condition of rational communication: if we do not mean one thing rather than another, they suppose that it would be impossible ever to misunderstand. The willed refusal to acknowledge alternatives to modern standards of legitimacy, however, reveals a political impulse to this professedly disinterested mode of discourse. Indeed, modern interpreters who simply identify their own approach with value-neutral, rational, scientific inquiry reinforce Jean-François Lyotard’s accusation that enlightened modernity exercises a paradoxically coercive intellectual regime, “the institution of will into reason.” Postmodern interpreters typically challenge modern interpreters’ claim that their hermeneutical axioms constitute the scholarly conclusions of non-partisan reason; as male white European and North American scholars dominate the guild of biblical criticism, their social location cannot escape affecting these scholars’ interpretive reasoning. Postmodern interpreters may make their own social location the explicit criterion for their interpretive judgment; they may show the ways that dominant-class interpreters use their institutional and social power to reinforce their own interests; they may deliberately read the Bible against the grain of the dominant patterns of scholarship in order to articulate an alternative vision of biblical meaning that better coheres with the interests of women, of interpreters from a wider global community, of readers whose dissident understanding of Scripture has been suppressed in the name of cultural homogeneity.

These examples show some directions that a postmodern temper may take in biblical scholarship. Since postmodernity characterizes biblical interpretation not as a regulative method but as a sensibility, one can not set boundaries for postmodern interpretations (though one can argue the justification of applying the characterization “postmodern” to particular readings). For just this reason, postmodern biblical criticsm will probably not constitute itself at distinct interpretive practice so much as it will influence the ways that particular interpreters approach their work. Some critics will continue unaffected; others will pursue familiar methods with a different inflection; a smaller group will depart markedly from modern critical expectations.

You’ll notice that it doesn’t have a proper conclusion, and it’s already too many words. I’m hoping that if I’aid anything dreadfully off-trarget, or if someone senses an inchoate wrap-up sentence that will free me to send this off to its publisher, you will let me know. Until then, I’ll count on letting the definition incubate, and will move on to my next assignment.

I don’t have the time to search the Demotivators site to see whether they’ve already gotten there, but in a chat with a friend this morning I envisioned a new poster for them. Imagine a stirring nautical scene in the North Atlantic, with the blazon:

Ha!

Micah points me to this story about the enclosure of the open broadband spaces.

Some days, you just don’t care to blog.

Most important, Pippa last night just got up and made a big tray of fudge brownies — no prompting, nothing, just a chocolate treat for herself and surprise for her dad. She amazes me every day.

Now, I know professional writers will say that 500 words is not so much; I say the same when I have to compose one of Seabury’s five-minute homilies (I preach at about 100 words per minute). Still, I’ve “defined” topics in the field of postmodernism so very often that yet another short definition of the subject comes as a particular point of stress. What shall I say that I haven’t already said? How shall I say the same old things in a different way? Nonetheless, I’m hammering it out, and I’m determined to finish a draft of the definition here by bedtime tonight. We shall see.

Dorothy Love Coates sang it about God’s expectation that we offer our whole selves, but Pippa expects that a discount outlet offer more than fifty percent off. She noticed that a local outlet was offering a special sale on men’s blazers — my black blazers have been looking pretty shabby lately, even the ones I got new — so Pippa prodded me to go with her to look in. We made a couple of stops, the second of which brought us to one of those “please please please relieve us off the merchandise we ill-consideredly overstocked before the holidays” sales. Pippa’s eyes lit up: “Eighty percent!”

We did well. We had a lovely time together (in the non-shopping sense, although finding bargains always puts my frugal daughter in a better mood). I won’t look quite so threadbare when I stand in front of my classes. These are good things.
Continue reading “Ninety-Nine and a Half Won’t Do”

No, thank you, Kevin Kling.

OK, I said I wasn’t going to devote more energy searching for the Ray Charles appearance on Saturday Night Live, since the relevant parties were energetically preventing me from showing it to Pippa. I was wrong, though; it occurred to me, in my preparations for tomorrow morning’s class, that the “Young Caucasians” sketch would get at the precise topic I’m concerned with. So I renewed my efforts to track down those five minutes of performance.

It turns out that the Saturday Night people have repackaged various segments from their archives in a haphazard, unsystematic way. It’s exceptionally difficult to determine which of the repackages include which sketch or performance. It seems likely from the metadata, though, that the Young Caucasians appear on the first disk of the 25 Years of Music compilation. After extensive phone-calling and basement searching, though (I remembered that somewhere we have an audiocassette of that segment, which I could have played as a substitute, if only I’d been able to find it), it turns out that that item can’t be obtained in Evanston on short notice. Grrrr.

(Found it. I think this meets the requirements for demonstrating wat a stubborn cuss I am; we won’t calculate how many pages of Google search results I combed through to reach this. Also submitted for your consideration: “Hit the Road, Jack” and three performances of “What’d I Say?”)
Continue reading “Grrrrr”

I was pushing the sash of the window back up yesterday, and the windowshade fell down squarely on the bridge of my nose. I now have an angry red bruise on my nose, and it hurts. I’m just saying.

Now, to the point. This week has drawn together a variety of my interests. I’ll be talking to our Gospel Mission class tomorrow morning about Krazy Kat, I think — we need to talk about culture, purity, contamination, and authenticity, and George Herriman may provide an entree to my efforts to queer the concepts of purity and authenticity.

I was talking to Josiah about the topic last night over dinner, and he pointed me to Scott Kurtz’s recent plea to Bill Amend (“rhymes with ‘Raymond,’ ” Pippa sternly admonished us several times). I reciprocated by pointing him to the speech by Bill Watterson to which Kurtz alludes at the beginning of his post. (And as I type, the Bonzo Dog Doodah Band is playing “Mickey’ Son and Daughter” in the background — it’s that kind of day).

Meanwhile, the most recent issue of the Society of Biblical Literature’s imaginatively-named Forum (to which there’s evidently no distinctive entry-page or archive, alas) features two short essays on the Bible and comics. Greg Garrett writes about allusions to biblical myths in superhero comics, and G. Andrew Tooze cites instances in which a Bible appears in superhero comics. I’m delighted that they’re bringing these topics to scholarly attention, although both tend strongly toward the “Look! There it is!” genre. Of course, there’s a ton more to be said about this general phenomenon; we could start by discussing comics other than superheroes (both articles not only omit mention of other sorts of comics, but treat the superhero subgenre as though it were a privileged representative of the medium — a highly problematic gesture not only for what it neglects, but also for its tendency to play to dismissive observers’inclination to write off comics as a playground for adolescent power fantasies). We should likewise go beyond exercises in Bible-spotting toward a more adventurous analysis of what’s going on when [superhero] comics show us a Bible, or invoke a biblical trope.

All of this is progress, though. People are beginning to think provocative things in public, even in the field of biblical scholarship. Guild disciplinarian Ignatzes may lob bricks at us, but krazy interpreters have begun to claim some off-center discursive terrain from which to renew interpretations with strange fire.

When power meets resistance, the step that seems most logical, or obvious, or necessary usually entails amplifying the coercive force that power can bring against the resistance. History suggests that this tactic doesn’t succeed well enough to justify its status as “necessary,” or “obvious,” or even “logical.”

I’m not thinking about Iraq, or Star Wars (the plot of the film; in a sense, I am talking about the film as an entity), or Lord of the Rings (ditto); this afternoon, I’m thinking about the recording distribution companies’ escalation of their battle against technology. Recently, the RIAA launched a mind-bogglingly high-stakes lawsuit against allofmp3.com, a Russian enterprise that takes advantage of Russian laws to distribute digital music recordings at a cost vastly lower than that required by (for instance) the iTunes Store. As best I understand it — and I’m likely to be missing important elements — Russian law treats the transmission of music recordings over the Net as equivalent to the transmission of music recordings by radio waves; hence, for the equivalent of a customary licensing fee of a few cents, a Russian “broadcaster” can legally “transmit” a digital version of “Stardust” to your hard drive. Allofmp3.com then charges its subscribers on a per-megabyte scale, so that a lower-quality copy of “Oops, I Did It Again” might cost about fifteen cents (though one could order a higher-quality copy — higher quality of encoding, that is, not an improvement on the music — for proportionately more).

OK, let’s bracket the arguments over whether the peculiar circumstances of the music-performance industry between the invention of the Edison cylinder and the Napster revolution constitute an eternal model of how the financial arrangements for rewarding artists and distributers must be organized. Let’s note several pertinent facts.

First, Allofmp3.com seems to be wildly successful. Moreover, it’s success hasn’t cost RIAA companies a penny in direct costs — so that (speaking rough equivalences) if the RIAA had offered the same recordings under the same terms as its Russian counterpart, it could have collected all the profits that Allofmp3 has garnered. The RIAA is doing fundamentally the same thing as Allofmp3, but Allofmp3 is doing it for less money, and in a way that responds better to customers’ interests (more flexible recording options, with no intrusive DRM). Yes, there would be server and bandwidth costs, but Allofmp3 faces those costs, too. Yes, there would be issues with how much one pays performers, but that’s always a problem for the music recording industry. My point is that if the RIAA companies offered the same service that Allofmp3 has offered, they would have stood to make a lot of money that they have lost. (Imagine how much business they’d have done if Allofmp3 weren’t less well-known, operating in a country whose security environment makes credit-card transactions a risky proposition.) Note that people are going out of their way to pay for an insecure-but-currently-legal alternative to simply downloading music without paying from the numerous file-sharing networks.

Second, they could have done so for a long time. Allofmp3 started in 2000, according to the Times. Instead, the titans of industry have tried to hold this different business model at bay, and now are trying to quash it in favor of a business model that’s more expensive, less convenient, less flexible, and less suited to the medium in which the business is taking place. It’s as though an early recording company required that one buy a ticket to listen to a record, or sit still in a special auditorium-style seat to an entire unit of music — or as though CDs weren’t allowed to hold more recordings than an LP would, and the recording must be interrupted halfway through.

Third, there’s no earthly reason for restricting this mode of transmission to music recordings. Movies, audiobooks, ebooks, all sorts of media could very simply be sold on the Allofmp3 model. Allofmp3 importantly proves that a significant proportion of possible customers would prefer to buy a recording (at a fair price) than acquire it illegally, and if the Allofmp3 model were legitimized, we have every reason to expect that sales would boom.

Fourth, all of the music enforcers’ energies (and legal expenses) will not stop, but only complicate and redirect users’ interest in obtaining recorded works at a time, a rate, a price, and in a form that they have chosen. The vast sums that the RIAA has spent on fighting file-sharing have only slowed the growth of file-sharing; they have not diminished it, and certainly have not brought it to a stop.

“But what about the artists?” The sole effective bastion behind which the RIAA rallies even modest public support involves the premise that their model alone provides for the well-being of hard-working musicians. By riposte, one might note that the RIAA is the last place one should look for conscientious concern for performers’ well being. Apart from ad industriam challenges, though, we have to un-bracket the question of how we know what constitutes a fair reward for performers’ efforts. To this, we can most forcefully respond that we can’t know in advance how the Allofmp3 model will affect compensation for performers. We can, however, note that internet buzz (fueled by file-sharing) contributes to thriving live-music performance scenes around the world. We can note that Allofmp3 apparently does pay the transmission-licensing fee, the same as if it were a radio station, so artists stand to benefit directly from sales at that rate. We can note that digital distribution at a very low cost increases the likelihood that particular selections will be bought, rather than downloaded from a file-sharing network or ripped from a physical copy of the recording. We can note that music distributers can continue the practice of offering “enhanced” packages, to encourage customers to buy the physical products as well as their digital counterparts. And we can note that as music performers were paid before the advent of recorded music, so we have every reason to expect that they will continue to be paid after the heyday of the LP model of recording sales.

The RIAA, however, would rather fight the future than cooperate with it.

Last night Pippa made pita sandwiches for us. We had to shop for groceries to prepare for the feast, and we chose a brand of pitas with which we were hitherto unfamiliar. As she chopped vegetables, crumbled feta, mixed herbs, and toasted pitas, I heard her say, “Hunh!” I inquired as to the cause of her bemusement, and she said, “This must be special pita for seminarians.”

“Why, honey?”

“Because it’s perforated down the middle, to make it easier for them to practice breaking the bread.”

Let me illustrate one aspect of the problem with the current hysteria over DRM.

Tonight Pippa was telling me about Dreamgirls, which she saw with Jennifer and Mile over the break. She commented on the incident in which white artists cover [awkwardly] the Dreamgirls’ hit record, and I pointed out the SNL sketch in which the “Young Caucasians” cover Ray Charles’s “What’d I say” (“What Did I Say!?”in the Young Caucasians’ version). I pulled the laptop over to track it down on YouTube or Google video, or even for pay on the iTunes music store. NBC has successfully kept the sketch off the free channels, and hasn’t released it on iTunes.

I’m not supposing that Pippa and I had any kind of right to find that clip if we want to; I wonder, though, whether anyone profits from making us wait to see the sketch. Frankly, I’m not about to pursue that clip any further; I’d have bought it (or the show it appeared in) at a reasonable price if NBC offered it, and if it were available on one of the free services and I’d shown it to Pippa, when she enjoyed it, we might have made it a priority to buy the episode some other time. Because it’s not available, no one makes an easy dollar from Pippa and me. That just doesn’t make sense to me.