Down in a Mirror

The End Of History

2010-02-03T23:53:00.002-05:00

(Or, A Brief Overview of Information, Consciousness, and Their Implications in Terms of Eschatology, History, and Theology)

1: The Nature of Consciousness and Information
Most human consciousness appears to be a relation between a subject and an object or objects. However, the distinction between subject and object is illusory. The consciousness that exists at any moment is neither the subject nor the object but the unity of the two in experience. This experience is information. Information is any collection of perception. Information only meaningfully exists when it is perceived - thus, to talk of information not perceived is meaningless.

2: The Possibilities of Information
We could say "because we are conscious", but such a statement needlessly separates us from our experience. Rather, because consciousness exists, we know that information exists. However, consciousness seems to exist within time. That is to say, multiple moments of consciousness seem to exist, some differing from others. If it is possible for multiple moments of information to exist, what is the limit to the moments of information that are possible?

3: The Well of Information
Where can one postulate a limit to the possible moments of information? Even if one says that some moments of information are "true" and some are "false", that is a statement bound by consciousness. And even a "false" collection of information can be simulated. And, for that moment of information, it is impossible for it to determine whether or not it is simulated, as it cannot know itself. If we extend the possibilities of information to the greatest possible limit, we might say that at some point there exists a collection of all the information possible - or, all the consciousness possible. Given that we have not postulated limits for consciousness, this is an infinite set.

4: Self-Knowledge of the Infinite Set
Information is meaningful in so much that each part of a moment of information is something and is not something else. However, the infinite set of information cannot be truly conscious, as for each is it contains, it also contains an is not.

5: How the Infinite Set Operates
But because this infinite set contains all possible moments of information, all those moments of consciousness exist as part of it.

6: The End of History
Moments of consciousness exist in time and space. But the infinite set exists includes negations of time and space, thus it transcends all time and space while it contains them. Thus, it is eternal. For this reason, we call it the End of History. However, the End of History is also the Beginning of History, since it exists before and after and during all moments of time.

7: How The End of History Came Into Being
It is not necessary that the End of History ever came into being. For, being outside of time and space, it existed before all causes that could create it. However, if a cause within time and space managed to create an infinite set of information, that may have been the initial cause of the End of History. At the same time, the End of History would still have existed before the process that created it.

8: How the End of History is a Cycle and How We May or May Not Be Within It
It may not be possible for the End of History to be created within the greater sphere that contains our consciousness. However, at some point it may be possible for the End of History to be created. This means that at some point (given that the possibility of the existence of time and space reach forever) the End of History will come into being. As soon as it does, it will cause the cause that caused it to come into being, as well as contain all the possibilities of consciousness. Our consciousness may not be within the End of History. But a consciousness that is identitical to every moment of our consciousness exists within the End of History. Therefore, regardless of whether we perish in our greater sphere, an identical us will ever exist in the End of History.

The Ebb and Flow of Aesthetics

2009-11-18T23:51:00.004-05:00

Arguments of ideology are really arguments of aesthetics. What we experience is evaluated according to the our standards of "positive" and "negative." Of course, these standards are constantly changing (even if they are reinforcing themselves - one aesthetic is the belief in one stable way of perception.)

What is frustrating here is interpersonal communication. Interpersonal communication requires some form of symbolic system (usually linguistic) - however, each piece of information (symbol) triggers different portions of each individual's aesthetic sensibility. One needs only to judge the reactions of different individuals to the same piece of music to see this at work. Why do certain individuals prefer prog to punk, folk to industrial? In short, it simply doesn't matter. In long, history is illusory apart from one's own belief in history - origins of problems are less important than believed origins (or at least they are according to my aesthetic of personal histories.)

Aesthetic judgments are thus faulty in relation to any reality outside their own self-contained aesthetic reality - leading of course to the Platonist vs. solipsist argument of whether the ultimate goal of perception is to act within one's own limited means or toward some invisible ideal reality - another question of aesthetics.

Spirituality is similarly a type of aesthetic. It privileges a specific type of experience (usually anomalous ones) over types of consciousness perceived as either normal or "lower" (drunkenness, for example.) However, the critical mystic deconstructionist will come to a point where they will seek a complete liberation from aesthetics and attempt a non-aesthetic (non-judged) experience - thus undermining their own premise for seeking experience (as George Battaile says, a project that destroys project.) Whether or not mystics are successful (i.e. whether an experience of Void and emptiness is actually what it claims to be or rather simply an experience suggesting Void and emptiness) is difficult to evaluate (and only by ways of yet another aesthetic system.)

Regardless, aesthetics change, and aesthetics that seek to be honest to their own attachment to the notion of Truth must confront the fact that their perceptions of said Truth are completely mutable and their desire for that Truth is similarly mutable.

Balance and Non-Dualism

2009-11-12T00:26:00.003-05:00

"Where there is a reconciliation, Stephen said, there must have been first a sundering."
-James Joyce

Balance. Why? Platonism.

Spirituality that tends towards a standard of ideal forms, numbers, shapes, symbols, etc. is Platonic spirituality. It seeks to impose abstract patterns onto the movements of life, as though the simple experience of being is not the primary mystery (i.e. who is behind the curtain, who is running the show?)

This is a direction of turning the human subject into a reflection of a timeless and eternal world, an attempt to make the individual correspond to the ideal, attempting to turn the goal into the present tense, attempting to immanentize the eskaton. Symbols are seen as representing directions into ultimate truth, often a non-dual ultimate truth.

Here's the problem: such a non-dual ultimate truth can only exist in relation to dual and "non-ideal" perceptions. Or, should I say, perceptions - as the mode of being in any conscious state (and there is no meaningful unconscious being) must be dualistic - it must perceive some notion of self in relation to an other - even if self believes itself to be selfless.

Balance only exists in relation to things askew. Nonduality only exists in relation to perceptions of duality, and if we did not move through some stage of conscious being can we recognize the difference between conscious and unconscious modes of existence (if we actually can - note that the perceptions of nonduality is not nonduality, but in fact dual in relation to perceptions of duality, etc.)

So what fruit can we gain from experiences of "balance" of "non-duality"? Only the ability to reevaluate our current notions of being, only new ways of thinking about things - but if we mistake these new ways for Truth than we are sadly ascribing experience to the realm of ideal forms and rendering it equal to something deeper than itself.

As always, consciousness is a meaningless term, since we have no unconscious experience against which to define it. We cannot understand unconsciousness, therefore we cannot understand consciousness as a totality.

Concepts are either dual (based on other concepts) or meaningless (constant, and therefore unable to be separated from our normal mode of thought - and therefore undefinable since we can never not experience them.)

Anti-Mysticism

2009-11-10T23:02:00.005-05:00

I deliberately take "Anti-Mysticism" from the common description of George Bataille's project as "Anti-Philosophy." What is anti-mysticism? It exists in reaction to mysticisms that declare experience to be of some sort of revelatory value. Taking a cue from Zen, it seeks to render experience, especially "mystical" experience as only one form of a variety of experiences.

Note: this does not mean an acceptance of one's identity as "human" or a scientific reductionism. Rather, it seeks (via subjectivity) to uproot the claims of all states of consciousness, including the privileged one ascribed to "mystical" consciousness.

What does anti-mysticism state? Merely that consciousness is only consciousness and nothing is more or less than the consciousness it perceives itself to be. Any statements about anything other than the existence of a perceived consciousness are meaningless - this is true whether or not we wish to give language some representational value.

Why? It is an effort to correct a flaw in mysticism's goals: that is, the search for truth. For truth is only experience in and of itself, and anything that causes consciousness to change instantly becomes the new truth. We do not need to seek to find truth, it has been with us all along. If mysticism thoroughly attempts to arrive at truth, it will simply chase its tail over and over again, and never find anything other than turtles all the way down.

This brings us to the other purpose of mysticism: a self-conscious reevaluation and reordering of one's cosmos. This is usually the actual goal behind the seeking of truth. Seeking truth implies a dissatisfaction with one's current state of being (I do not like this truth, let me find a new one.)

The tension behind anti-mysticism is this. Can one self-consciously reorder one's experience without believing it to be true? In the viewpoint of mysticism, this contradiction may pose flaws. In anti-mysticism, the paradox is meaningless, consciousness is simply what it is and thus belief matters not.

Note: by mysticism I am referring to popular mysticism and spirituality.

How Feedback Loops Serve to Help Us Understand How We Perceive the World

2009-11-09T16:11:00.004-05:00

Feedback, both audio and visual, is a form of RPRE. It is the production of a signal that reinforces itself in congress with its own perceptions. I will consider both single and double feedback loops here, and how they relate to our perceptions of the world around us. Listening to feedback music is not as revelatory as creating feedback music (or just creating feedback), so I would advise everyone reading this blog to spend half an hour experimenting with feedback at some point in their life.

Single-Source Feedback Loops

A single source feedback loop may be, for example, a set of speakers that are connected to a computer. The computer is outputting sound from both itself and an embedded microphone - which is picking up the audio from the speakers. If any sound emerges from either the computer or the outside world, it will filter through the feedback loop and reinforce itself into a near-constant pitch.

Theoretically, we might expect feedback to be an infinite phenomena (since it is sound played back into itself indefinitely) - however, feedback takes on specific tones and patterns - personality. If there is no input into the feedback loop, the feedback sound ceases. However, given a sensitive enough feedback loop, the feedback will continue indefinately, merely changing tones as different inputs occur.

What does this tell us about our consciousness? Like the feedback loop, we pick up both exterior influences and the echoes of those influences projected by us into outside sound. An idealist might say that what we are is the computer that creates the system. But in reality, our perceptions are the feedback that is produced by the system. Provided there is not a significant change to the surrounding sounds, the feedback will only change as a natural process of its own nature - a particularly powerful sound will disturb the natural course of personality, but unless there is a change in the paradigms underlying the feedback loop, the loop will usually return to the same type of feedback. Feedback is an illustration of the constancy of types of human consciousness. It should be noted that we are constantly in a state of loud surrounding noise, and thus we are always in a state of feedback.

Double Feedback Loops

Now, say we take two of the computer-speaker loops mentioned above and point them at each other. We will place each computer's speakers close to that computer, but put the systems in close contact. Each computer-speaker loop will play an audio track of some sort (this represents personality).

What will happen? In this case, feedback will be a function not only of the feedback parameters in a system itself, but also in that of the other feedback system. That is to say, depending on how the speakers are positioned in relation to the computers, the other computer may be just as important in the creation of the feedback loop as the computer creating the loop itself.

So, a personality is just as much created by the adjacent personality loops as its own personality loops. Both will reinforce themselves and reinforce each other, but the ultimate creation is a singular congress of feedback. This is a wonderful experiment to try if you want to understand how people affect each other. Play around with the settings and audio playing on each computer to see how it affects the total creation of a feedback system.

Complex Systems

Theoretically, then, we may postulate a model of the universe as being created by an infinite number of feedback loops with different parameters placed in different positions. So, at different points in space there will be different regions of feedback based on the differing ripples of feedback combined with the parameters of the feedback systems in that region. (note, this works for visual feedback as well as audio feedback, though visual feedback requires a glimpse of another system by the first system.)

So, if we were to make these as audio-visual systems, perhaps with audio connected to visual aspects in some way, we can model the human experience. This system would consist of - a computer, connected to a camera and speakers, playing out both audio and video. Regions of certain types of audio and video will reinforce themselves into specific regions of feedback.

We also have the possibility of creating more complicated types of audio systems, where different channels of feedback play into output devices in different locations or play out different parts of the output, or multiple input devices are connected to multiple output devices, etc. etc.

Feedback systems allow us a physical (aural) model of personal interactions, and on a larger scale, a model of culture.

Help! and Orientalism

2009-08-06T20:11:00.004-04:00

Being that I'm sick to death of onto-theology and I have a yearning deep down somewhere for academic pretentiousness, here is a little bit of lighter fare. Help!, released in 1965, was the second movie starring The Beatles (the previous year had seen A Hard Day's Night). The plot of the film goes something like this: Ringo is given an extremely large ring by an adoring fan, who happens to be a devotee of the indeterminately Eastern goddess Kahili and set to be a human sacrifice. However, the ring is necessary for the sacrifice, and thus The Beatles are chased around the world (at least, England, Switzerland, and Bermuda) by Kahili's cult, who first seek to take back the ring, and later to sacrificially kill Ringo. They are further pursued by a mad scientist who, seeing the ring's extraordinary properties, seeks to seize it so he can "rule the world". After a number of amusing mishaps (being caught in a battlefield, nearly killed by a curling stone, attacked by a tiger with a fondness for Beethoven) the ring becomes dislodged from Ringo's finger, and all is right with the world.

The question explored here is this: is Help! actively pursuing an othering of the "East", or is it in fact undermining that understanding?

On the one hand, we may see the cult of Kahili as an obvious example of the othering of the "East". The statue of Kahili is a six-armed sitting goddess, and seems to be an obvious reference to the fearsome mother goddess Kali, which is supported by prayers that address her as "black mother". This couches the cult within Hinduism and perhaps is a reference to the Hare Krishna movement. The cult's priestess, Ahme, is often portrayed in exceedingly elaborate (and exotic) outfits, and is the main focus of the physical feminine in the movie, suggesting the foreign and exotic sexuality exuded by the female Other. Although she helps the Beatles throughout the movie (mostly out of affection for Paul) she turns on the high priest Klang at the movie's end and attempts to sacrifice him, suggesting that although the Eastern woman may appear civilized she may revert to the barbaric practices native to her at any moment. The cult is firmly identified with "Eastern" music, turbans, and generally odd, overly brutal, and bizarre imagery.

At one moment John accuses Ahme of being "filthy in her filthy Eastern ways", to which she replies "no, it is Klang who is filthy in his Eastern ways!" What I will attempt to show here is that Help! is ultimately a social critique that emphasizes the underlying similarities between East and West despite cultural differences.

First, let us compare Klang to the movie's mad scientist, "Professor Foot." Like Klang, Foot is obsessed with the ring as soon as he sees its purposes, and will take any means to get it, including threats on Ringo's life. Like Klang, he has incompetent help. While Klang receives it from a large cult, Foot receives it from his hapless and somewhat innocent assistant, Algernon. The movie makes something of a joke of the difference between the two groups, in that, when both groups are attempting to capture Ringo, it is nearly impossible to tell one group's traps from the others'. This suggests that the underlying desire to kill or pursue Ringo is inherent in both cultures, but simply manifests in different ways in East and West. In the East, religious motivations are apparent, in the West, scientific ones. Both are depicted as equally ridiculous and insane.

Then there is the running joke of religion. When approaching Scotland Yard, Ringo comments "They have to paint me red before they chop me. It's a different religion from ours. I think." The underlying similarities between the cult of Kahili and the Christian church are seen not only in this comment, but also in a running dialogue between Klang and a Christian priest, who seems to agree with Klang's appraisal of "sex is creeping in, it's everywhere these days!" Klang also mentions temple events that seem exact equivalents of Church activities, such as Bingo night.

So, what is Help! advocating? While on the surface it seems an orientalist text, it in fact does its part to undermine the distinctions of Other between East and West. While it does not destroy them completely, it still points on the irony of our commonality and instead projects Otherness onto specific portions of both societies. Ultimately, one can't tell the difference between what's "really" Eastern and "really" Western, as is seen in a scene where the band asks about the ring at an Indian restaurant whose employees are all white Englishmen. They further do not notice when the members of the cult of Kahili slowly replace the English employees. When we cannot tell the difference between one and the other, how can we have an Other in the first place?

How to Hate Philosophy and Yet Philosophize

2009-07-30T17:38:00.003-04:00

I, if I will be blunt, hate philosophy. Philosophy, I feel, is a scab of irrational rational thought. That is, it believes in an abstract approach towards a fundamentally non-abstract (though some may argue otherwise) world of experience. Philosophy is ultimately Platonic, being that it is an attempt to derive a verbal type of explanation or construction of other things. Ok, we can abandon philosophizing about the world proper, post-modern thought certainly guarantees that, but what about perceptions, what about words? Can other words actually describe words properly? Can anything be anything other than what it itself is? And here we go.

The genius of philosophy is that, in order to confront philosophy in any way constructive, you must confront it on its own terms. And once that occurs, you have already lost. Therefore, one either goes on ignoring philosophy (hardly possible in a verbal society) or forever spinning in verbal circles. One actually gets no where. Yes, words replace words, but ultimately we are still referring to reality and consciousness through words (as I just did.) This is problematic. The best way to stop philosophy is to shut up, and shut yourself up. However, this doesn't work for those already ensnared (aka, anyone reading this.)

And therefore, we come to an unsolvable problem. Destroying philosophical thought is impossible without destroying huge swaths of linguistic infrastructure, most representational thought, metaphor, cosmology, and anything that makes people feel comfortable within their reality.

That is why I hate philosophy. Or perhaps, that is how I hate it, in the same mode as I create it and further propagate it. Language, once the first communication occurred, was born as the ultimate RPRE. Once one thing is named, every other thing can be named, and once those things are named, everything must have a name even those things that do not necessarilly have the basis in concrete being or experience to deserve a name. And then names develop names, and names for names are created, and soon anything without a name is meaningless. It's an absolutely ingenious and unbreakable creation. But, of course, everything has a weakness somewhere, and certainly there is one in the structure of linguistic communication. Unfortunately, that link seems to be us and our society, and little short of destroying everything humans have ever thought, created, or remembered would be a successful effort. Then again, there is always insanity...

Job's Paradox

2009-07-28T18:16:00.004-04:00

Job's paradox draws upon oft states propositions about the nature of God to question the very veracity of those statements. We begin with the notion that God is unfathomable and ineffable, and his actions thus cannot be understood or justified by human standards. However, is not God's ineffability simply a human standard by which to understand God? Is not "God" a human standard by which to understand God? I'm not proving God's ineffability through a reverse ontological argument, and I will not argue that this merely proves that the human conception of the "ineffable" bears no relation to reality (though that is certainly part of it.) Rather, ineffability described through God in Job is in fact a human description - Job, as a book of the Bible is in fundamentally human language, and even if we are to argue divine origins of words, we may turn back to human interpretation of them as the failure of human to understand God both in the positive and negative forms of fathomableness. Simple put, we cannot understand our non-understanding of God, and from there on any other chain of actions that leads back to some sort of gnosis between human and divine.

Where does this leave us? Well, a linguistically effable God is impossible logically (though ontological proofs are about as meaningless as philosophical arguments get.) If we are to believe in a Platonic linguistic world, we must either have a God that is effable (and therefore, not infinite) or so ineffable that the ineffability attributed to God is not referring to God whatsoever, but rather the concept of God, in which case the whole human project of linguistically relating to God is shot. The only way to overturn the paradox is to insist on the failure of language to represent divinity in any way, shape, or form (or alternately, insist on the failure of language to represent anything.)

However, if we overturn language, what have we of Truthful religion? We are reduced to Discordian grids again, unable to postulate any non-subjective relation between ourselves and reality, and this hits the oft-invisible workings of the divine particularly hard. It is easy to insist on a type of meaning within everyday circles, as objects repeatedly interacting with each other over a period of time provides a precedent for belief. But of the things that defy normality, or completely encompass normality, we can say less than nothing.

To turn in a less post-modern subjective direction, what does Job's suffering at the hands of the unfathomable motives of God mean in terms of religious action and reciprocity? If Job's torment violates the ideas of just reward and punishment, what good is there in postulating a type of tenable relationship between the human and the divine? If we are not to question the ways and means of the divine, what is the point of having religion in the first place? A human postulation of a relationship between God and man that may ultimately be broken (barring supposed covenant) is not a concrete relationship at all. Man is again in chaos even in a deified world. Breaking down this way, God is either an arbitrary unbreakable law or another chaotic actor within a larger (and more supernatural) world. The other option is to call God a liar, that his motivations are known (in fact, they are told in the book of Job), and that the wantonness with which he tortures Job is in fact a specific attempt to garner ineffability. This is no better for the notion of human-divine relations, since we are dealing here with a deceiver God who is supposed to stand for Truth!

Let us try pantheism, then. If man has God implicit within himself, contains the ineffability, can he understand God? Can he know any aspect of God? On the one hand, one might argue that all knowledge within a pantheistic universe is partial knowledge of God, whether of "Truth" or deception. But then again, the knowledge of God comes here not because the self is knowing an exterior God but rather because any sort of knowledge is a type of action that is God in and of itself. On the other hand, we may ask this question. Even if God is all including human subjects, does this still mean God has the ability to know Itself? As soon as God has become anything subjective, It no longer possesses full knowledge of itself, and therefore, we might say, God is deceived in Its self knowing because Its knowledge of Itself is partial, and God is only a meaningful known object in full.

But then again, red ribbons tied around rocks completely denies this view. If we hold, instead, that God is a potentiality inherent and completely present in the minutest moment of Being or Consciousness, we might avoid silly semantic games (which really have no bearing on Christian theology, except for saying that anything that calls itself Christian theology is, in fact, not Christian theology) and postulations of divine partiality (another, worse semantic game. Is god God? How much God is necessary for God to be God?)

How do we go about this? We first take any moment of consciousness, as any consciousness is a type of informational relation (between self-and-object, self-and-self, self only, nothingness to itself, God to nothingness, God to self, self to God, God to Godself, etc.) However, within every moment of information, every other possible moment of information is implicit. The knowledge of one thing supposes the possibility of knowing things, (even if it is only knowledge knowing itself) which supposes the possibility of every collection of information, including every collection of information that could be recognized as God. Therefore, any single moment is everything and therefore, is meaningless on the one hand (Void and Chaos), and God on the other. Granted, that moment of knowledge also contains every anti-God possibility that might possibly be known (or un-known.) This locates God not as That which is unknowable, but That which is not presently known, and yet is at the same time noticed through Its non-presence in what is seen (which may occasionally manifest as presence.)

Where does this leave us? As with most paradoxes, nowhere.

Christ, Unification in Suffering, Unification in Isolation

2009-07-21T16:57:00.003-04:00

There are several approaches to understanding Christ and the nature and purpose of Christ as a person/deity/symbol depending on what assumptions one bears entering. There is the most common theological approach, based largely on Paul and the gospel of John, a death that is redemptive of sins and the allowance of salvation through faith. This places death and suffering as acts of salvation through the exertion (or submission) of divine power, and places death as thus the most important aspect of Jesus' life and teaching. Then there is the kerygmatic school of thought, popular among those who enjoy the figure of Christ but find Christian theological dogma problematic. This places emphasis on Jesus as a teacher, social revolutionary figure, rebel, etc. Christ is a divine example (in some interpretations he is just an exemplary human) for human behavior, and this results in a moral revelation in the figure of Christ. Christ becomes a sign by which good stewardship, love, and compassion are shown.

Me being myself, I am not looking at Christ in either of these lights. While someone like Nietzsche would emphasis what Christ meant to do and meant to show, I want to show how the figure of Christ becomes a figure of universal humanity.

This is not a pleasant Christ. This is not a warm, loving Christ. This is not a forgiving Christ. This is simply Christ as an icon of humanity at its unifying roots. While it does not discount the kerygma, its focus is primarily that of Christ on the cross. Christ on the cross is not a dead savior and not an enlightened teacher. Christ on the cross is human, more human than at any other moment in the gospels. Why? The cross is a place of suffering, a place where Christ is isolated, cut off from those he loved (they have fled), rejected by the people of Jerusalem, suffering despite his divinity - how else do we understand "My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Christ is alone, cut off from every support, every love, even from the earth, even from God. He is placed on a monolith, one of many monoliths of unpitied suffering upon Golgotha, the place of death.

This makes Christ unitive. How? In this Christ we see our fate, the struggle and hopelessness of humanity. Even the God-man is alone, even the God-man is abandoned, isolated, surrounded by those who torture him. This isn't the first instance of Christ's loneliness (we get the feeling often that his disciples do not understand his teaching,) but it is the most striking. What we take from this Christ of isolation depends on how we end the story. Do we follow the ressurrection narrative of the Gospels, and see this as the triumph over our isolation for eventual redemption? Or do we follow Nietzsche, and see the ressurrection as an attempt to garner an explanation for this revelation of human futility? This is our choice to make. However, I personally find the latter makes Christ more meaningful. The ressurrection is, like the end of Job, a deus ex machina, it seems to counter the significance of what came before. A death reborn is ultimately not a meaningful death, a suffering fully cured is ultimately not meaningful suffering.

The Other Problem of Evil, and a Reinterpretation of Divine "Will"

2009-07-19T15:11:00.005-04:00

Most anyone who has been party to any sort of theological debate knows the "problem of evil" argument against the existence of God (well, at least the Judeo-Christian God). That is to say, if God is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, and fully good, why is there still suffering in the world? That is to say, why would a benevolent divinity allow those it loved to suffer if it could prevent that suffering?

There are counterarguments to this argument, of course, most of them hinging on God's decision to give humans free will so they could choose to follow "Him" of their own accord. Suffering is thus a result of decisions that lead away from God, since all things good (and we're assuming "not suffering" is one of these, but given Christian ascetic practices over the years, we can't be sure) come from God. To suffer is a result of one's own choices - and to this we have the counterargument of innocent suffering (how can one "choose" suffering when they are misinformed/an infant/etc.) - to which we have Original Sin (no one is innocent), and so on, and so forth.

And then there is the argument of the book of Job - that is, God is beyond or knowing, and therefore, we cannot comprehend his plan, the role suffering plays in it, and thus questioning it is folly. We will return here later.

I am not going to deal with the problem of suffering here, at least not directly - rather I am going to deal with the problem of an existent evil presence in a world created by God and the problem of a written word of God. This argument hinges on notions of an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent God.

The problem of existent evil is as such: how can there be any sort of anti-God force within a world created by an all-powerful deity? How can Satan be a threat in any way if he is not of similar power and status to God (which would, to most - saving Manicheans - be an obvious heresy.) How can anything within the world, even free will, operate against God's will if it is designed and created by God? Even in acting against God, would be acting in a way already known and already forseen by God, and thus at the behest of "His" will. For if the very foundations, structure, and design of everything within existence is created by God - thus being God's action and thus also God's will (unless we are to deny God's infallibility) - how can anything occur that is against "His" will or "His" plan? How can "evil" thus be anything but something according to God's will and God's overall plan (the assumption of the plan other than simply "it is what it is", I must say, is a huge assumption.)

We come to two options here, both drawing from the Job argument:

First is simple incomprehensibility. That is, the nature of God is one of such an unbelievable and inexpressible transcendence that we cannot understand "Him" or the nature of the universe as his creation. What is good may appear evil, what is evil may appear good. And to root our conceptions of God in words, books, ritual, symbol, etc. is an understanding of God through human constructions, and thus only a stab in the dark, and certainly not a "true" representation of God, but instead a copy of an image of a silhouette. Alternatively, we might say that, since God creates all and is present in all, it is the very nature of both ourselves and everything else to be God, and thus we may see God within ourselves. However, for most using sin as a concept (or the Bible as a true text) this strays far to much towards pantheism. Anything that makes God ourselves, and not a cosmic Other is inherently threatening to a notion of divine Will or divine Plan, since it simply incarnates itself within human will and human plan (though Christianity should not be so quick to forget it is based on a reduced sort of this pantheism in both Christ and the Holy Spirit.) Incomprehensibility in relation to the Will of a divine Other manages to create a universe that goes according to plan even when we don't - on the other hand, it has the effect of turning humans into nothing more than continuously lost and subservient actors or sheep. While I don't oppose the notion that we should be led on principle (people often can stand to learn quite a bit about humility), the totality of the sheep principle has the effect of nullifying an argument for our free will (a problem I, personally, don't have, but many others are squeamish about.)

While the second argument ultimately comes to a similar conclusion, it takes a slightly different route, which I, as someone who believes process is more important than goal, find much more interesting. Now, this argument doesn't presume an "actual" good or evil nor an "apparent" one. It does derive somewhat from certain Gnostic reconceptions of Yahweh as a lesser God. Certain myths hold that Yahweh did not create the universe, rather this was the work of a greater God(ess), Sophia (who is not equivalent to the "Sophia" of certain Christian wisdom traditions), who also created Yahweh. In this case, Yahweh has forgotten Sophia and believes the universe to be "His" own creation, and thus "His" to rule. However, Sophia intercedes and informs Yahweh that "He" is only a lesser force within what is ultimately "Her" creation.

What can we draw from this myth that helps us redefine and reinterperet the problem of evil? Well, there may in fact be a Yahweh-like deity fighting against perceived forces of evil. However, this occurs because the Yahweh analogue is not, in fact, the all-powerful God that "He" believes "Himself" to be. Rather, both the Yahweh analogue and the perceived evil are acting in concert as part of a larger divine Will, one analogous to that of Sophia. Now, this seems to have simply replaced one God with another. What's the difference? The difference is that the good/evil binary has remained with a finite God and the universal will has been moved to an infinite God. Does this solve the problem of suffering? No. It does solve the problem of perceived antitheses to God, however. Ultimately, the argument is essentially postulating the "greater" or, to be crass, the "true" God as analogous to force that is the Tao. The Tao is Yin/Yang, it acts through both good and evil, light and darkness, hot and cold, male and female, etc. God's will (God God, not god God - if that makes things any more or less confusing) acts as forces opposed to each other.

But towards what end? A Hegelian dialectic assumes that there will be an ultimate synthesis towards complete knowledge and ultimate completion. That is to say, that there will be an "end" to history at which point all conflict is solved. Compare this to the post-apocalyptic paradise of New Jerusalem, another place of perfection in which conflict is gone and time is ended.

And yet, we must ask the question - if divinity is omnipotent, what is the necessity of the process towards the ultimate finality that ends history? It seems as though the ultimate course of history (or its small bits, at least) are insignificant if the end of history if God's will in the first place. Certainly, this argument could be levied about the need of Christ as a sacrifice. Is God bound by some sort of ritual logic in action? Could "S/He" be bound some sort of rules of existence that limit "His" actions? This seems, if not obviously heretical, more than a little strange. However, we might argue ritual action simply is a means of communication between God and humanity, and that God does not actually require these means to do what is supposedly accomplished in them. And if there is an ultimate goal or end towards which God is looking or planning towards, why aren't we there yet, could not divine Will immediately bring it into being? (All these arguments fall under Job's disclaimer: it is perfectly possible we just have no idea what is going on. However, in this author's opinion, if we talk about God at all we are ignoring Job's disclaimer by shackling our conception of God to the word "God", and therefore we might as well go on thinking about things like this. If we can take any step towards God in language, why not the next one, the next one, etc.? If one follows Job's disclaimer back all the way, it invalidates everything ever thought or written by humans about God or in general.)

The conclusion I have reached, myself, is this. We are there. We've been there. There is nothing that is not there. If God is an all-powerful being (and I would argue that at least one of my mes is living in a universe with some sort of conscious force that is everything - granted I'd also argue the opposite) and an omni-present one, our existence and contiued experience is God's will. All that we know and all that we can experience is our experience. We are experiencing ideas, beliefs, sensations, etc, but none of these could exist outside the will of this God. And therefore they occur because God wills them to. Notice I did not say omniscient. There is nothing that exists that is not a perception. Even if there is a "deep" reality, it is meaningless and exists for noone, except if we take God to be an impartial observer. I would rather say God is a super-partial observer, able of seeing things from every possible viewpoint (though not the viewpoint of no-viewpoint, because there is no non-viewpoint viewpoint [though paradoxes are perfectly possible].)

I am beating around the bush here in abstract theology. My point is this. The will of God in the universe is not towards an ultimate end of history or ultimate accomplishment. It is towards what it is right now and towards what it becomes at every single successing moment. God's will is not Becoming towards a still Being, it is rather a Being that is constantly Becoming. The end of time is a fixed point, and thus meaningless for both human and God. The conflict, the dialectic, is what inserts drama and meaning into consistant becoming, for a world without conflict is a world with boundaries and thus a world without definition, and thus is, for God as well as for humanity, meaningless. God exists by exerting Will in the Being of the universe, and perceives through the perceptions of all in the universe, both united and seperate from each other. God's Will is not that we should accomplish something, but that we should strive to acheive something and have an interesting journey along the way. For, as soon as we have acheived something, it is over, and the acheivement is done, either to become a stagnancy or the start to a new goal towards acheivement. God thus loves chaos and change, but also loves stillness and serenity as things which give chaos and change meaning (as sometimes stillness, silence, and repetition have more meaning and are more interesting than constant change.)

To surrender to God's will is to do God's Will. To oppose God's will is to do God's Will. To ignore God's will is to do God's Will. To be is to do God's Will. To cease being is to do God's Will. Is is God's Will, even when Is is Is Not.

Rational Thought as a Byproduct

2009-07-07T16:04:00.003-04:00

Often we assume that our rationales for conducting an activity are what causes our participation in that activity. We go to a fast food restaurant to save money, we feel badly because things have not turned out the way we thought they ought to have (rationally, of course), we believe in the religion we do because it makes rational sense to us (or its failure to be rational makes rational sense to us), etc. However, often these rational explanations will arise after the action has been taken, or an action will be taken without a full consideration of the idea - we will only later justify it completely through logic. What does this suggest?

Let me propose a different model of humanity, human interaction, human thought, and history than many are used to. In this model, history is a process of interchanges between wills with their own directions and slants of feelings. One will attempts to dominate another, one will attempts to court another, one desires to change itself into another type of will. Note that all these are not rigidly defined motivations: they do not propose a reason behind the action, a method of the action, or a time or place of the action. It is simply basic intent here. We might compare the interaction between wills on a large scale to what Michel Foucault refers to as "power." "Power" is one will exerted in such a way that it alters another will (although two wills coming into contact will always alter each other in some subtle way through contact), and what we call history is simply a record of these different type of interactions of will. By reducing history to the interactions of will we will see that although there are huge variations based on time, place, historical location, etc, the ultimate dynamics of will are fundamentally the same. There are the same power struggles, struggles for convergence, for dominance, for stability, etc. While this is certainly an abstraction of history it does show one thing about human action at its base: it is fundamentally the same through all epochs, and it may be based on something more elemental than the concepts and ideological struggles we often make it out to be.

What does this have to do with rational thought? Well, let us use an example, preferably a complex one. In this case we will use the Crusades. Yes, while the Crusades may on the surface be an ideological conflict based on notions of proper worship and religion, we may see will operating on a much more elemental level. What is occurring here is a power struggle, a dominance struggle between two wills manifested on larger levels, those of medieval Christian Europe and that of the Islamic Middle East. The Middle East, and Jerusalem in particular is perceived in both cases as a place of power, and therefore the land itself serves as a perceived impetus for competition. Similarly, control of the Middle East is also control of trade routes from the Far East, and represents a type of economic power. So, two larger social wills, composed of smaller individual wills, and identified as fundamentally separate from each other, are struggling for dominance: in this case the struggle is being carried out in an arena identified as "economic" and "religious", but these are only the rational dimensions of the conflict. It might more properly be said that the Crusades are a result of a condensed European will (or just European nobility's will) that perceived a potentially dominating force outside of itself and sought to dominate it. Now, we may see this type of interaction taking place daily between competing individual wills: people who consider themselves to be rivals, potential company hirees, students identifying each other with rival schools of thought (perceived sources of power), etc.

What this example is meant to illustrate is this: that the rationale used to justify our actions may, in fact, be a later byproduct. That is to say, rationality is used as a mode of comprehension for feelings and actions, even though they may operate without it. How often have you tried to come up with a rational explanation behind an idea you believed because it just felt right? How often do you feel in opposition to the rational system you have used to explain the world? How often does an ordinary moment seem not to make any sort of sense? All these are slips of rationality, rationality being unable to come up with a justification for what the will desires/does/is doing/has done. Let us take theology. Theology is a rational justification for a feeling of the will, a structure of the nature of God, of sacredness, of moral action, whatever, all based on the perception of the "more" by our will. It attempts to make some sort of sense out of a "useless" (that is, non-competitive) type of desire. But we should not say that a type of action only represents one type of will, as the same type of activity's purpose may differ depending on what the will wills: for example, one may use theological ordering as a way of placing rival wills below one's own will.

So, what does it say if rational thought is a byproduct? Is it an attempt to keep the sleeper sleeping, knowing that he cannot handle an un-caged reality? Is it an occupation of a completely separate mind trying to make sense of what it believes to be itself, despite that it has no affect on them?

Getting Down to Truth

2009-07-06T17:41:00.005-04:00

This is perhaps the apex of a long percolating struggle with abstraction, language, and certain types of representational thought. By now we are all probably all acquainted with the notion of the reality "grid", that is the personal ideas and viewpoints that are used to interpret an otherwise chaotic "objective" or "deep" reality that is ultimately unreachable. This is only vaguely related to the grid, but it is an attempt to overturn that which leads to large-order grids (though I know this must entirely be futile).

Let us take, for instance, scientific thought. What does scientific thought set as its goal? A model attempting to represent reality. Experiments are used to derive mathematical or logical principles by which we may see the natural world operate. These principles are ultimately used predictively. That is to say, they are used as a means by which to anticipate what will occur using a given system. Predictive principles also lead to constructive thought: that is to say, predictions allow relations of objects between each other to create effects predicted by the models created by scientific thought. But not only is scientific thought predictive, but so is philosophical thought and dogmatic religious thought. These systems attempt to create a model of reality, not by experimentation, but through reasoning and personal experience. These thoughts lead to models of the supernatural (theological thought), models of human nature (behavioral thought), and models of thought itself (meta-predictive thought.) (This paragraph, and the one that follow it, are both examples of predictive thought.)

But, what does predictive thought do? Because the purpose of predictive thought is to create a model of reality that may be used to anticipate future courses of action/reaction, predictive thought is pragmatic but does not represent reality at its most nitty-gritty is-ness - Being. All predictive thought, and this includes nearly every thought we have of what reality is - is being the important word - is Platonic thought. That is to say, predictive thought represents not reality itself but an abstraction of reality through a series of ideal conceptual forms: we call these forms "language", but it is more accurate to say that they are "predictive language." This is all well and good, but we must realize that such language is ultimately only partially effective at communicating what reality is. Even if we do not postulate deep reality as an illusion, any experience of objective or subjective reality still cannot be communicated because the words used to communicate it represent only themselves. Perhaps the only pure form of communication is that of words describing worded thoughts - but then again, how much subtext does each word bear in our minds when we think it? - and this is not even considering interpretation of meaning on the other end of the line.

This is not a plea for communication - communication, ideal communication (a predictive concept anyways), is impossible. But those of us who are, for some reason, sticklers for getting at truth beyond words and concepts may want to think of new ways of approaching our communications of our experiences of reality. How we communicate is also how we think, since our communications to others are created by/create (in a process of RPREs) how we communicate with ourselves. It leads us then to try to create new experiential languages that do not seek the creation of an abstract reality outside of reality in which we may communicate (and live in more than our "real" reality). This process is ultimately asymptotic, and fruitless as a pursuit for its own ultimate conclusion. We may approach closer and closer to reality, but this will necessitate increasingly complex communication, and we never will reach an actual communication of what we are experiencing. But perhaps such a mode of communication will help us understand each other more fully (or perhaps it will simply confuse us more than we were originally.) I will now turn this over to The Third Walking Path, with an example of one such type of communication, pure representational language.

The Respect For Truth

2009-06-24T22:31:00.003-04:00

This is a working out of a thought process, and I do not know where it will lead, only where it begins.

God/gods. Do I think some sort of gods exist? Perhaps. An ultimate "God"? Perhaps. But, as soon as I speculate about its nature, I am wrong. Why? Simply because I am thinking, I am understanding. But I am understanding my thoughts, and not God. Any of my approaches leads to a false God, an image of God other than the truth.

Therefore, if I want to respect the true nature of God, I cannot have any sort of conception of this God, or even the idea "God". Therefore, I cannot truly believe that God exists at all, attempting to reach God only ends up reaching "God" (see here Meister Eckhart and Heidegger.)

But if I am to apply this principle to "Truth" as a whole, I realize I can truly know nothing, for I am only knowing false interpretations of them through myself, and even worse, I can say nothing, for words give no true description of objects unless I mean no meaning by them, but if I mean no meaning, there is still a meaning. This doesn't discount nonsense speech (something I've had the fortune of experiencing several times), speech without thought or intent, speech as a function outside of any purpose. Nonsense, then, is the best description of reality? Or must I committed to consistently lying in order to remember that truth is fouled by my intent? But of course this only concerns "deep" truth, something I have been avoiding for quite some time.

Back to God. If any belief, and thought, any verbal description of God is false because it is a non-divine's attempt to comprehend the divine (and what does it say that I am willing to apply that same standard to cars, trees, rocks, etc?), then divine understanding is impossible. But, if understanding divinity is impossible, true understanding of divinity is not-understanding. And while we have a finite degree of perceived understanding, do we not also have a boundless degree of that which we do not understand? And because we do not understand God (the true God being imperceptible), at the same time as we understand "God", at the same time as every other one of our perceived understandings, we in fact have a perfect understanding of God. It is just that our perfect understanding of God depends on our non-comprehension of God, and even if we mistake "God" for God, we still understand God through non-understanding. No matter how we try to foul up Truth with "truth", we ultimately are present at every moment of truth, though every moment of truth is contained in our non-being. Non-being is not what we perceive ourselves to be, but it is also not what we perceive ourselves not to be. Non-being is what we do not perceive ourselves to/not to know (since the contradiction is meaningless outside of perception.) Any amount of information also contains the information of what it is not (as well as the information of what it thinks it is not - which it also is), and though the information of what it is not cannot be seen in the information, it is that which exists everywhere but the information.

The Great Deceiver

2009-06-16T22:11:00.002-04:00

The concept of a deceiver within a religious tradition poses huge problems for its existence as a tradition, a consequence that has not been fully recognized by many such religious groups. Let us take the archetypal deceiver, Satan. If Satan is a figure who attempts to disorient humanity away from the path devised by God, then how can one believe one's religious tradition to be sacrosanct from his influence? That is to say, why is the church perceived to be immune from the machinations of deception? Is it not possible that the belief in holy objectives is the perfect means by which to mislead humanity from the "godly path"? There certainly are enough warnings of false prophets in the Bible, especially in its apocalyptic incarnations (Christ warns about listening to those who say "I am he!") We are being told here not to listen to those self-professed as speaking for the divine, so how is the church an authority immune from such a taint? Even more disturbing is its relation to a traditions texts - certainly the Bible has undergone significant changes through the years as a result of dissemination, interpretation, translation, etc. How can we say these processes are the result of the divine and not of the demonic? Taken even farther, might it be possible to say that Satan wrote the Bible? This is not an advocacy of this position, but a reminder that we should not take things at their face value.

But what does it mean if our holy texts are works intended to deceive us from some sort of true religious path? A perrenialist might argue that their deception lies in the idea of "one true religious path," a distraction from the ultimate unity of all spiritual effort and a cause of needless suffering and strife. But, if we are not to simply surrender to this uncritically accepting viewpoint (which is legitimate in its own way), we might perhaps instead analyze texts as though they were written to deceive - and presumably in clever ways (though this again might be our belief of deceit, and a false one.) And does the greatest deception lie in a total lie or in a partial truth? Would the text ignore the truth or instead obscure it and twist it, opposite of its own nature (what Nietzsche claims Paul did to Christ's message)? Might it be a sort of historical revisionism, in which certain powers exist in much more substantial ways than in actuality - for example, could Satan's biggest trick be his ability to convince the world he exists as something threatening, despite only being an author? Are certain books (Job in particular seems of interest) statements of fact immersed in and among false currents? These are possibilities we must consider, at least from a theological standpoint, for a theology containing a deceiver cannot presume any reliability of text, and a theology without a deceiver is ultimately missing something (in some cases, the deceiver is God himself!)

Contextual Definition and Void Consciousness

2009-06-15T16:17:00.002-04:00

This is the closest I will venture towards the sticky sticky ground of essentiallism, and this only comes at the end of at an attempt to find something universal among consciousness.

Let us start here: consciousness only is something in relation to a perceived object. That is to say, our being as "selves" is nothing if we are perceiving nothing. This includes not just physical objects of the "outside" world but also our own interior states. However, the question arises, just who is perceiving our interior states? If we are to attempt to strip away these interior states and reveal their viewer, what to we reveal?

Well, we can't remove our perceiver from the perceived, the perceiver is both perceiver and perceived. Any consciousness only emerges as a perceptual relation between an object and itself. Any moment of consciousness is defined only by perception, but it cannot know itself fully, for that would be to know its knowledge of itself and so on ad infintum (this is, theoretically, the uniqueness of the position of "God")

But, and this is the important part, if we do postulate consciousness perceiving nothing, we find the result of consciousness perceiving nothing (not no thing, but literally a lack of perception) is not consciousness, or non-existance. That is, that a consciousness perceiving nothing does not exist. On the one hand, this might be seen as a simple tautology of the definition of "consciousness", however they are several other conclusions to be drawn here if we do not take non-existance as an exile from reality (that is, if we consider the Void to be some sort of entity that simultaneously exists as a nonexistance).

Think, perhaps, about individual consciousnesses of various perceivers. If that consciousness if put into a state of non-perception, it becomes nothing. But this will be true of every other consciousness, and therefore every consciousness has an essence of non-existance within a specific state of perception. If we do simple addition from here, we must realize that any consciousness will essentially be the same so long as it has the same perceptions. And what this means is that we are all, ultimately, the same conscious entity. That is, if we take all dimensions of existance to be perceptions of consciousness, then the essential unity of consciousness points to no differance between one individual to another other than their perceptions (and self-perceptions.) This acts a proof for a Brahmanic theology: one in which individual moments of consciousness all emerge from a single source, like the fingers on a hand, or the hairs on a head. Or we might see a similar corillation in the DNA of different cells within an organism - all bear the same blueprint of Being, only articulated in different ways.

A Philosophy of Aesthetics, and an Announcement

2009-06-01T16:43:00.003-04:00

As far as I can tell, the main purpose of Down in a Mirror has been a deconstructive one: I feel what I have done here is rip up certainties, pull the rug from under foundations of thought, and the like - if I may be so grand, certainly I think what I have done has been in the same deconstructive mode of discourse. I am struck, however, by the feeling that this blog hasn't done anything useful - that is, productive (though at the same time I wonder if usefulness is even possible in any context.) Coming out of the in depth writing of this blog I have felt such a tremendous confusion surrounding identity, theology, ontology, etc. that recently I have desired to simply latch on to some mode of identity that is stable - hence my current fascination with magic and magical modes of thought (though, to be fair, magic has some very strange ontological properties.)

Therefore, I am starting a sister blog to Down in a Mirror, titled The Third Walking Path. This blog will cover what Down in a Mirror does not: Aesthetics.

What do I mean by aesthetics? Beginning with the idea of consciousness as a type of entertainment, aesthetics is the type of entertainment we desire. Each individual has a certain type (or types) of favored aesthetics: while one may enjoy rock music, soccer, and the color blue, another may favor jazz, badminton, and maroon. But this is not simply limited to types of activities, but types of feelings and identifications. The "emo" identity is a perfect example of an adoption of a feeling aesthetic: it is an aesthetic that favors the experience of suffering in a certain form. A different aesthetic of suffering may be seen in the asceticisms of medieval mystics, another in extreme athletic exertion. However, these are all types of aesthetics, and individuals have their own personal preferances for experience.

So, adressing aesthetics is not just adressing specific pieces of art (though this will be the largest part of The Third Walking Path,) but also adressing how sensory aesthetics fit with aesthetics of emotion and identity, and how to cobble together interesting and satisfying types of aesthetics from these elements. There are nearly an endless array of identities to create, so aesthetics as a type of philisophical (and psychological) science has a huge range of experience to examine.

This is not the end of Down in the Mirror. Rather the two blogs will work side by side in different areas and different directions, hopefully producting some interesting results. Let's cross our fingers and see what happens!

Deserving.

2009-05-26T19:37:00.002-04:00

You are constantly told by advertisements, your friends, your politicians, your parents, your co-workers - that you deserve something. That you are somehow entitled to certain experiences, certain rights, certain possessions, certain leniencies. This is pervasive.

Some will tell you that you are entitled to these experiences, some will tell you that your existence in the world, your existence in the world, comes with a natural price. You exist, and thus you owe something.

There is no difference between entitlement and debt. Both expect something of you just for existing. Yes, one gives to you, and one requires you to give, but both are limiting factors of existence. That is to say, they prevent us from seeing our existence as just existence, and our ability to be in various ways to just be that being. Both are ways of making existence signify more than itself - and thus they completely miss existence itself. Life becomes an effort to repay debt, or an effort to accumulate that which you have been told is the invisible standard for your existence.

What happens when we cut our existence from the necessities of debt and desire? We cannot do this purposefully, can we? Why would we desire to? To do so is to seek some sort of "freedom," to recognize freedom of thought and action as an inherent right, an inherent obligation either. But the desire for freedom is another form of slavery, and the choice to embrace slavery is itself a type of freedom.

Beware of those who believe you must accept their opinion, but also beware of those who believe you should accept no one's opinion.

Purity Rings: Silver Ring Thing, Marketing, and Foucault

2009-05-19T14:14:00.002-04:00

Recently, the current trend of the “purity ring” among celebrities has come under criticism from certain satirists. British comedian Russell Brand poked fun at popular Disney supergroup The Jonas Brothers’ wearing of purity rings first at the 2008 MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs), and later in his 2009 Comedy Central special Russell Brand Live in New York. In March of 2009, the animated show South Park debuted its thirteenth season with an episode titled “The Ring,” also concerning the Jonas Brothers. Both Brand and South Park associated the Jonas Brothers’ wearing of the rings with an effort to market sex while at the same time denying practices of physical sexuality. In his special, Brand explicitly stated that his comments at the MTV awards “implied that the Jonas Brothers’ chastity rings and virginity might in fact be a cynical marketing plot utilizing the theories of Michel Foucault.”

In this paper I will utilize these critiques in order to analyze the abstinence promotion group Silver Ring Thing. I will seek to show that, with the Silver Ring Thing program, the elements towards which Brand’s criticism is targeted are ultimately key elements in the signification of the purity ring. Both the ring’s location as a site of Foucaultian discourse and its participation in the strategies of marketing serve to make the ring a focal point of meaning. This meaning serves as a means of endorsing and enforcing a specific type of sexual practice: that is, abstinence. The signification of sex through discourse and the use of the easily recognized and familiar language of commercial advertisement are exercised in order to promote and reinforce this abstinent identity in the youth consumers of Silver Ring Thing’s programs.

What are Purity Rings?

Silver Ring Thing hosts a number of large number live events to promote abstinence, at the end of which participants sign a pledge, reading:

In signing this covenant before God Almighty, I _______, agree to wear a silver ring as a sign of my pledge to abstain from sexual behavior that is inconsistent with Biblical standards. On my wedding day, I will present my silver ring to my spouse, representing my faithful commitment to the marriage covenant. (Rosenstein, 92)

Silver Ring Thing was founded in 1995 by Denny and Amy Pattyn in response to a growing number of teen pregnancies in Yuma, Arizona, and moved to Pittsburgh in 2000. Since then, it has hosted over 650 events in 8 countries, claiming “nearly 325,000 total attendees,” of whom “over 110,000 have received rings.”

Silver Ring Thing only distributes rings upon the completion of a live event or participation in Get It On, a program consisting of a DVD and resources for discussion. The Silver Ring Thing website justifies this distribution stating that “wearing a ring should be connected to an experience and understanding of what it really takes to live out this abstinence commitment every day.” However, while Silver Ring Thing restricts its distribution, other retailers have jumped on the bandwagon. In an article for the New York Times, Stephanie Rosenbloom notes, “Once sold mainly in Christian gift shops, the rings are now offered by retailers like Zales and Amazon.com.” However, one might just as easily find purity rings at sites such as “JuliesJewels.com” and “Scripturejewelry.com.”

The rings themselves and usually adorned with Christian imagery, such as a cross or a crown of thorns, but may also include messages such as “love waits,” or “one life, one love.” The rings distributed by Silver Ring Thing are, appropriately enough, silver, and are inscribed with “1 Thessalonians 4-3,4,” representing the verse: “God wants you to be holy, so you should keep clear of sexual sin. Then each of you will control your body and live in holiness and honour.” Silver Ring Thing rings are priced at twenty dollars, though Rosenbloom notes that some rings sell for up to three-hundred dollars.

Rings are predominantly a Christian phenomenon. Silver Ring Thing promotes an explicitly Christian message, though it also acknowledges that the majority of its live events are secular: according to founder Denny Patten “only the last 20 percent of the Silver Ring Thing program presents a Christian message.” (Rosenbloom) While the phenomenon of the purity ring began as a small movement within a specifically Christian community, it has achieved wide cultural recognition due to celebrities who wear rings. In addition to the Jonas Brothers, teen superstar Miley Cyrus and American Idol winner Jordan Sparks both wear purity rings. (Serjeant) The purity ring achieved even more publicity after Russell Brand’s mocking of the Jonas Brothers’ rings during the VMAs, which ignited a heated debate over the rings themselves. (Kaufman)

Critiques of Purity Rings

Russell Brand initially addressed the Jonas Brothers’ wearing of purity rings while hosting the VMAs, stating “I’d take it a little bit more seriously if they wore it on their genitals. …it is a little bit ungrateful, ’cause they could literally have sex with any woman that they want…they’re just not gonna do it.” Later on in the VMAs, Jordin Sparks responded to Brand’s critique, “I just have one thing to say about promise rings. It’s not bad to wear a promise ring, because not everybody—guy or girl—wants to be a slut” Brand’s performance at the VMAs sparked much negative attention, including a significant amount of hate mail. In his special Russell Brand: Live in New York, Brand re-articulated his critique of the purity ring in response to some such mail, stating:

…I implied the Jonas Brothers' chastity rings and virginity might in fact be a cynical marketing ploy utilizing the theories of Michel Foucault who said that in Victorian society the repression of sexuality was just another way of bringing sexuality to the forefront of our consciousnesses. It's a marketing technique. By saying that the Jonas Brothers are virgins, you can't help but think about them having sex. The Jonas Brothers are not having sex. The Jonas brothers are not having sex. The Jonas Brothers are not having sex. As long as you're looking at the rings on their fingers you're not wondering where those fingers ain't straying.

At each articulation of “The Jonas Brothers are not having sex,” Brand thrusts his pelvis forward, more dramatically with each repetition, implying a physical display of sexuality created by explicit statements of sexual abstinence.

Brand’s critique is both based in Foucaultian theory and the marketing of celebrity. Taken alone his comments at the VMAs may seem philosophically innocent humor. However, in light of their Foucaultian basis, they instead form a criticism of the revelation inherent in the purity ring. By stating it would be more convincing “if they wore it on their genitals” Brand critiques both the visibility of the purity ring and its lack of relation to the practice of sex. Worn visibly upon a hand, the ring serves as a public statement of sexual identity, and thus draws attention: if it were worn on the genitals, no such public discourse would occur. Thus, on the one hand, Brand’s criticism is that the purity ring is a deliberate tool to draw attention to itself, and from there to draw attention to the sexual nature of the one who wears it. But Brand’s criticism also lies in the non-relation of the ring to genitals themselves: that is, the ring has nothing in and of itself to do with sex.

This also amounts to a critique of the marketing implicit in the ring: the visibility and importance of the ring serve as a means by which the Jonas Brothers are publicly recognizable, and thus are marketable consumer products to be sold for profit. The emphasis placed on the wearing of purity rings by celebrities may be seen as the result of the fascination with any sort of sexual discourse – especially one out of the social norm, such as one that denies the act of intercourse itself. We need only think here of Foucault’s description of the Victorian fascination with strange and “perverted” sexual expressions. (1990:31) Thus, for Brand, the purity ring is a tool to sexualize the Jonas Brothers in a unique way, thus leading to interest and consumption.

South Park offers a more explicit critique of marketing strategies surrounding the purity ring. The Jonas Brothers are portrayed as the underlings of the Disney corporation, represented by an abusive Mickey Mouse. Mickey explains the purpose of purity rings:

You have to wear the purity rings because that’s how we can sell sex to little girls. See if we make the posters with little girls reaching for your junk, then you have to wear the purity rings or Disney company looks bad.

Throughout the episode, Mickey is portrayed as ruthlessly money-hungry, and the ultimate motivation for the use of purity rings is simply the profit of the Disney corporation.

The purity rings serve as means to profit by allowing the Jonas Brothers to be publicly sexualized while explicitly stating their opposition to sexual practice. In several portions of the episode, the Jonas Brothers’ explicit statements of chastity are contradicted by the visual content of their actions. During a concert, they sing several songs whose message is waiting for marriage – this is juxtaposed with images of young girls sexually rubbing against chairs, fainting, and screaming. Similarly, during an appearance on a morning show, the host applauds the Jonas Brothers: “It’s good that little girls can see a concert and not have it be about sex. We understand that at the concert tonight you’ll be dousing girls in the audience with white foam.” The explicit statement of abstinence is thus contrasted with the implicit sexuality underlying the consumption of the Jonas Brothers’ music by young girls.

The purity ring is also critiqued as a cultural trend. In the context of South Park, the dedication of an episode to a specific item is an implicit portrayal of it as a temporary fad. For example, episodes have been dedicated to trends such as metrosexuality, reality TV shows, and boy bands. Specifically in this episode, the Jonas Brothers give a group of girls purity rings, telling them “it’s the hip new way to roll.” Groups of those who wear purity rings are also portrayed as being part of a social group differentiated by normal children. Upon hearing of “a ring that says you’ll be together but not have sex” one boy asks, “isn’t that called a wedding ring?” Those wearing purity rings are portrayed as stereotypical married couples, and the episode emphasizes such life as boring and unfulfilling in comparison with normal childhood pursuits. In one montage, Kenny, who has been convinced to wear a purity ring, watches wistfully out the window as his friends throw toilet paper over a house. The purity ring is thus seen as a commitment to the boredom of married life, and unnatural in comparison to childhood delinquencies.

South Park’s critique of the purity ring is less explicitly Foucaultian than Brand’s. It emphasizes the presence of sex in a place where sexual practice is explicitly cautioned against, but the purity ring is only an excuse to market underlying sexuality, and does not serve as a tool of creating sexual discourse in and of itself. The chief criticism of South Park is rather aimed at corporate greed and the stupidity of accepting corporately constructed fads. Cultural trends are only the means by which companies make money, and their effects upon those who follow them (shown by Kenny nearly becoming a zombie) are harmful – something unimportant to the interests of those in power.

However, Brand and South Park do share two important aspects of critique. First, that purity rings represent a discourse that purposefully generates thought about sex, rather than opposing it, and second, that this discourse is used ultimately for purposes of marketing. That is to say, that the denial of sex involves sex itself, and sex itself is titillating enough to encourage commerce and ultimately profit.

Applying Marketing Critique to Silver Ring Thing

But how are we to apply critiques aimed at the Jonas Brothers, a celebrity group created as a product of the Disney Channel, and Silver Ring Thing, a self-described “non-profit organization?” Other than an implication of unlawful conduct without basis, there seems little reason to use a critique of marketing in relation to Silver Ring Thing

However, this only applies if we take financial gain as the only type of profit that may be addressed through critiques of marketing. If there is no financial motivation in the marketing of Silver Ring Thing, what is its motivation? Again, assuming no duplicity, we may take the statements of “Mission” and “Vision” given to Silver Ring Thing on its website. The self stated Mission is “to motivate, educate, support and transform generations of young people to embrace a lifestyle of Christ-centered sexual abstinence until marriage,” and Vision expresses a desire “to create a culture shift in America where abstinence becomes the norm again rather than the exception.” Rosenbloom notes that the ultimate goal of Silver Ring Thing is “to persuade 20 percent of the world’s youth to abstain from sex until marriage.” Therefore, we may see profit of marketing strategies as instead representing the ability of Silver Ring Thing to successfully promote abstinence. In fact, the success of any Silver Ring Thing event is determined by the number of participants who purchase a ring. (Rosenstein 100) Thus, we cannot help but see that the ring and the identity of abstinence itself are both things marketed by the programs of Silver Ring Thing.

The purchase of the ring itself is only one aspect of the discourse of consumption within Silver Ring Thing. The organization is ultimately used to market a specific identity, one of abstinence, and this through specific means drawn from larger structures of capitalism. The necessity of participation in either a live event or a home program in order to purchase one of Silver Ring Thing’s rings is tantamount to producing recognition of brand quality. That is to say, by limiting the distribution of rings to those participating in specific rituals or learning events, Silver Ring Thing displays its product to be a more “authentic” and “reliable” in comparison to a ring bought without such an initial introduction. The celebrity participation in the purity ring culture further serves to identify brand, but this can be risky, as Denny Pattyn states: “when a celebrity has maybe put the ring on without the right education and inspiration and then they go out and do something crazy, then it’s a reflection on us.” (Serjeant) This is an explicit statement of the importance of positive brand association: celebrities may be a helpful tool for promoting the cause of abstinence, but their failures reflect poorly on the larger cause. Silver Ring Thing also keeps pages on the social networking sites Facebook and Myspace. We may also see attempts at producing positive brand recognition in the programs of Silver Ring Thing after the purchase of the ring itself. Individuals are assigned an “accountability partner” of the same sex, and are sent e-mails and devotionals by the organization. Such a structure of post-purchase commitment may be seen both as a positive aspect of the program as well as means by which to continuously reinforce the marketed identity, and hence prevent those involved in the program from reflecting badly upon it.

While branding assures the quality of the product through positive association, Silver Ring Thing’s most comprehensive strategies of marketing occur during its live events. These live events are combinations of skits, music, special effects, video, comedy, and personal testimonies, culminating in the choice of purchasing a ring. However, within these means, the live event uses specific images from advertising and popular culture in order to explicitly market abstinence. For example, the current tour of live events is entitled “Mythbusters,” taking both its name and premise from the Discovery Channel show, and skits include references to easily recognized symbols from popular culture, including popular songs such as “Barbie Girl” and “Billie Jean,” as well as video games such as Guitar Hero. (Rosenstein 76) Similar references are found in products offered on the Silver Ring Thing website. For example, a bumper sticker advertises Silver Ring Thing as the treatment to STDs, using the template and font from advertisements from motor oil company STP.

However, the use of marketing is most explicit in a series of advertisements included as part of the live event’s video program. These are parodies of easily recognized commercials, altered so as to promote abstinence. Rosenstein describes a parody of the recent advertisements for Apple Computers, which show a conversation between a “Mac” and a “PC.” The commercials portray the “Mac” as attractive, young, and “cool,” while the “PC” is old, unattractive, and “nerdy.” Throughout the series of advertisements the “Mac” observes the problems suffered by the “PC.” However,

In the Silver Ring Thing’s version, the younger, more attractive man told us, “I’m Waiting,” and an older, less attractive man told us, “I’m Not Waiting.” In short segments throughout the night, they encountered different problems. Not Waiting spun a jeopardy-style wheel of STIs—the whole while cheering for himself to land on the sole segment that read “clean.” When he tried to commiserate, Waiting told him, “My girlfriend and I are waiting, so I don’t have to worry about that.” Later, Not Waiting was swarmed by a half-dozen infants and complaining children, evidence of the potentially unpleasant, unintended side effect of his sexual activity. Again, Waiting told him, “I don’t have to worry about that.” (77)

Other such advertisements include a parody of E-Harmony commercials (advertising STDharmony.com) and a variation on the formula of MasterCard commercials narrating a young man dropping off his date at her front door: “Night out on the town: $55, one silver ring: $20, one flower bouquet: $13, always knowing how the night’s going to end: Priceless. There are some things money can buy, for everything else there’s SilverRing.”

In each of these cases, abstinence is explicitly marketed using the common cultural language of advertisement. It is transmitted to the participants in the live event using the method associated with selling a product, using a set of symbols most likely known to them. Interestingly, the arguments made by these ads are not ones based in religious language. Rather, the majority of the live event encourages abstinence through the possible negative consequences of sexual activity: STIs, pregnancy, low self-esteem, and the suffering caused by the loss of a sexually active relationship. However, all these tactics approach abstinence as ultimately a choice of utility. That is to say, the participant is urged to choose abstinence due to the likelihood of negative consequences in pursuing a sexually active lifestyle. But this, again, is marketing language, and not religious language. While Silver Ring Thing’s website declares an abstinence lifestyle to be “centered in a relationship with Jesus Christ,” it is ultimately economics, and not morality, that is primarily used to promote the abstinence lifestyle within its live events.

Silver Ring Thing is then, quite obviously, using the same techniques of mainstream advertisement and culture in order to promote its abstinence message. The website seems to acknowledge this, stating “the only way to reverse the moral decay of any youth culture is to inspire a change in the conduct and behavior from those within the culture.” The live event is quite obviously structured to appeal to the youth and be “cool,” from its no-parents environment (parents participate in a separate education event) to its cultural references, to the integration of video and special effects into the overall performance. But at the same time, the decision to adopt abstinence is described as “so counter-culture.” This assertion is similar to the assertion made at the beginning of the live event, that “we’re in this world, but we’re not of this world. We do not have to conform to the standards that it sets for us.” (Rosenstein 74) But the live program uses what might be called “the tools of ‘this world’” in order to market its identity as a product. One might argue that this is simply turning the enemy’s weapons back on themselves, and that this marketing is counter-media, opposed to “the media” so often vilified by the abstinence movement. Yet, the fact that the ring is ultimately purchased, and promoted through both promises of increased utility and advertisement suggests that we cannot simply divorce the selling of abstinent identities from any other consumed identity.

Foucaultian Discourses of Sexuality

We now move to Brand’s critique of the promise ring based in the theories of Michel Foucault. Brand links the prohibition the purity ring symbolizes to the prohibitions of Victorian culture as described by Foucault. We may indeed see in the Silver Ring Thing program a similar sort of “discursive explosion” (Foucault 1990:17) as that represented by the enormous volume of literature on sex created during the Victorian era. Indeed, Silver Ring Thing is not silent on the subject of sex, in fact it does little except talk about sex.

Silver Ring Thing does, in fact, blatantly locate itself within the language of sexuality and does so as a type of alternate sexuality. The website’s store includes t-shirts with slogans reading “How to have the best sex ever” and “Safe Sex Isn’t.” An emcee at the live event jokes “your parents, you know, probably on your couch at some point…” (Rosenstein, 78) specifically implying the sexual practices of participants’ parents. The parody ad for STDharmony.com presents a couple recounting their shared attributes (diseases,) and talking about the various locations they have had sex. Silver Ring Thing is, then, certainly not afraid to talk about sex.

But Silver Ring Thing does not treat all sex equally, nor does it perform all discourses concerning sex. Primarily, the focus of the live event seems to be the consequences of being sexually active outside of marriage. The emcee asks the crowd to repeat after him “SEX IS GREAT!” but then adds “in the context of marriage.” (78) Further presentations within the live event further this location of proper sexuality. One male, accompanied by three female volunteers, is asked to come on stage and is given a heart painted on a piece of wood. The male is explained to be a “ladies man,” and has “crossed the line with all three of them [the female volunteers], so when [they] broke up, they took a piece of [his] life with them.” Immediately after “the lights dimmed, scary music played, and a man came onstage wielding a chainsaw and dramatically cut three triangles out of the wooden heart, leaving it with jagged edges.” (81) This forceful demonstration is used to emphasize the penalties received for crossing the proper boundaries as created by sexual discourse. That is, it serves to re-inform a specific notion of sexuality – one of abstinence until marriage. Similarly, possible consequences of STIs, (82) and pregnancy (84) reinforce the problem of stepping over the boundaries of action permitted.

We may compare these prohibitive methods to those taken to monitor “the sex of the schoolboy.” (Foucault 1990: 28) On the one hand, there are explicit controls and perceived punishments built into the social system. While the schoolboys were restricted in action by the design of dormitories, the participants in Silver Ring Thing are instead restricted through the placement of a specific type of sexual action as impermissible within discourse. At the same time, there is an effort towards education: in the case of the schoolboy it is an anatomical and scientific explanation of sex, (29) whereas the participant in Silver Ring Thing is expected to know the consequences of premarital sex.

This brings us to what is silent in Silver Ring Thing. Foucault argues that,

There is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say; we must try to determine the different ways of not saying such things,…There is not one but many silences, and they are integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses. (27)

We should thus not only examine what is silent in Silver Ring Thing, but its relation to the rest of the discourses involved in the program. What is notably silent in the program presented by Silver Ring Thing is the sexual act itself as experience. That is, it is talked of in the past tense, as when a woman in a sketch yells, “I gave you my virginity!” (Rosenstein, 86) and it is talked of in the future tense, as in a letter presented that is addressed to one’s future spouse. (84) But the present is never addressed. Sex is either something to look forward to in the distant future or something in the past that has caused negative consequences. But it seems that, within the scope of the presentation, what actually occurs during sexual intercourse is silent apart from the significance given to it by all of its potential consequences. The discourse of Silver Ring Thing circles around the act closely, but never quite reaches it. In fact, we are given everything but the “bodies and pleasures” that Foucault sees as the only possible exit from discourse. (1990:157) The website presents three reasons behind the lack of “graphic” elements in the live events: age differences in audience (Silver Ring Thing encourages those ages twelve and over,) the responsibility of such discussion to the parent, and belief that this discussion is best limited to a one-on-one setting.

However, this very refusal to speak in the public venue of the Silver Ring Thing’s events is what makes sexual activity so significant within it. Foucault states, “by making sex into that which, above all else, had to be confessed, the Christian pastoral always presented it as the disquieting enigma.” (35) While Silver Ring Thing does not display the sexual act, it shows everything but. It emphasizes the significance of sex and sexual relationships but never addresses the cause of the inherent significance in sex. We might almost see that sexual practice is made significant through the signification of its possible consequences, which in turn re-inscribe their significance onto the act that created them, presenting it with a social significance it did not previously possess.

But does Silver Ring Thing recognize itself as speaking about sex? Somewhat ironically, Denny Pattyn lauded a crowd at a live event, “You’re the generation that finally got fed up with the safe sex, sex-obsessed culture and began an abstinence movement.” (Rosenstein 87) Similarly, a testimonial from “Julie” reads:

I refuse to conform
To a world built on sex
That simply isn’t me
My values won’t flex

But does not the silence of sexual acts within a larger discourse concerning sex represent a portion of sex-obsessed culture? By explicitly stating the need for overcoming a culture based on sex, does this not pose those of the abstinence movement as also sex-obsessed? Silver Ring Thing is nothing if not a lengthy discourse about sex, promoting an alternative sexuality, one based on a strict restriction of the practice of sexual acts. It is a discourse in response to a perceived culture of sexual promiscuity and licentiousness: that is, it is in response to another discourse of sex, one that is perceived as “meaningless” – that is, it does suit the proper means of discourse to make sex “meaningful” enough to be acceptable to Silver Ring Thing’s members.

Conclusion: The Signification of the Purity Ring

We have addressed both the aspects of Silver Ring Thing as an attempt at marketing an identity of abstinence and as an attempt to create a successful discourse for controlling the sex of the adolescent. While both of these efforts are critiqued, they ultimately serve as necessary portions of fulfilling the group’s vision: that is, the spread of sexual ideology. We will now observe how marketing strategies and sexual discourse combine to signify the ring, a process necessary if it is to be a successful means of marketing identity: the ring does not work if it does not convince its wearer of its weighty meaning.

First, and perhaps foremost, is ritual action. The ring is purchased at the end of a live event or film-based home program. In the case of the live event, this has occurred after two hours of skits, marketing strategies, music, and testimonials. Provided they are entertained and engaged by the spectacle that is the live event, the purchase of a ring at the end of that event will represent a significant life action.

Both branding and advertising also serve to signify the ring. Silver Ring Thing’s branding draws upon the necessity of ritual practice to purchase the ring: by making the ring exclusively available to a certain group (those who have gone through the program), it is given and inherent meaning as it confers an “insider” status to the individual who wears it. Celebrities' consumption of purity rings in general both brands and advertises them as a portion of a significant social trend: they are given additional significance through their associate with certain aspects of popular culture. In the same way, the use of mock advertisement in the live show gives meaning to the ring through its connection to a recognizable symbol set: that is to say, the language of marketing.

The ring is also given meaning through discourses of sexuality. The silence given the performance of sex within Silver Ring Thing is made meaningful through its extended discourses concerning sex. It is the elephant in the room. However, by naming the ring as a specific approach to said elephant, the ring must become signified. That is to say, the possibility of the purity ring’s ability to overcome the meaning given sex throughout the presentation is what, in fact, gives it its meaning. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy of meaning. We may see here the ability of branding and marketing to interact with sexual discourse: positive imagining of the purity ring may increase the possibility of it becoming a meaningful symbol.

The ring is also simply given meaning because it is bought, because it is marketed. The purchase of the ring at the end of the live event must ultimately be a choice of action, but a choice of action imbued with some meaning. By selling rings, rather than giving them away, Silver Ring Thing both prevents consumption by those who are uncommitted to the abstinence pledge but also provides locus of meaning through exchange. Exchange is a necessary component of meaning – would one value the purity ring more or less if it required the spending of money to obtain? The exchange of something meaningful (money) for the ring, the ring is thus given the significance associated with the spending of that amount of money, the significance associated with consumption at a certain level of cost.

Finally, the ring is given meaning because it is a form of visible consumption. The ring serves as a visual marker of identity by being something worn on one’s exterior. It becomes a sign and a source of discourse in a public context: it is a confession of one’s abstinence to a total public. We may see the ring’s revelation of abstinent identity as analogous to the early monks mentioned in Foucault’s “Christianity and Confession.” (1993) While the wearing of a small silver ring is certainly not as dramatic or extravagant as the theatrics of exomologesis, it does still represent a more modest type of public confession. In both cases, confession is based in part on one’s “duty to know who he is.” (211) But the ring, while providing identity also provides a potential for attack and negative reaction. A testimonial on Silver Ring Thing’s site tells of a friend’s mom who criticized those wearing promise rings as “insecure sluts that needed attention.” While I will not speculate to address the security or insecurity involved with participating in such a program, attention is, in fact, part of what gives the ring its signification: it draws public reaction because it is an exterior display of an alternative sexuality – abstinence. It is, in fact, performing in precisely the method of Brand’s critique by drawing attention to itself.

But what is the purpose of all this significance? What ends does the signification of a sign of abstinence fulfill? This significance comes together as the means of a larger strategy of marketing identities. The ring is a physical locus for meaning that serves as part of the Silver Ring Thing’s goal: that is the transformation of identities into abstinence identities. The ring is initially a focus of attention as it is consumed (purchased) after a ritual that both affirms its message (abstinence) and its value as a purchased product. But the ritual of Silver Ring Thing’s live event also serves to create a discourse that signifies sexual practice through a comparative silence, and to imbue a more permanent meaning upon the ring – which is then supported through accountability programs. The permanent meaning of the ring then allows it to serve as a reminder of identity, that is, it visually apparent on the body, and thus constantly reinscribes the identity that accompanied its purchase. Thus the ring is first the focus of attention that overcomes the barrier to the consumption of the identity of abstinence, but then transforms into a device for maintaining that identity. Thus, the ring ultimately serves as a tool within the larger marketing strategy of ideologies represented by Silver Ring Thing’s “Mission” and “Vision.”

Thus, the discourse of sex, the symbols of popular culture, and the methods of marketing are utilized in order to create a signification of the purity ring, and thereby the ideology and identity it represents. But do we take Silver Ring Thing as a successful attack on mainstream culture using its own tools, or a selling-out of other Christian values in order to market a specific agenda of abstinence? If we measure success by the terms Silver Ring Thing has set for itself, they seem to be successful, having sold 110,000 rings, with no signs of stopping anytime soon – “The Twister Tour” is scheduled from August 2009 to May 2010. While satirists like Brand may critique the inherent contradictions underlying the abstinence movement’s approach towards sexuality, such criticism only seems to spur to publicity, and thus popularity, of purity rings.

The Body of the Ghoul: Abjection and Post-Apocalyptic Signification

2009-05-14T02:51:00.004-04:00

Within Fallout 3, the symbol of the ghoul is used to articulate discourses drawn from racial sites within our world. Ghouls are segregated, targeted for extermination, used as slaves, and treated as subservient sidekicks by racially unmarked heroes. But the fact that all these instances of signification are articulated racially suggests that the difference between the ghoul and human is a physical one: race is a form of discourse ultimately based in signified bodies. But what signifies these bodies? What sorts of discourses surround the body of the ghoul, a living body altered by radiation that appears to be the walking dead? How does the body of the ghoul cause its separation from “humans” as something monstrous and frightening?

I will first address the body of the ghoul in relation to theories of disorder and abjection. Why are ghouls associated with dirt, filth, and feces? How are ghouls threatening to normal concepts of order? Why does the body of the ghoul relegate it to the position of either the monstrous or the super-human? I will then address the religious symbols surrounding ghouls, and the notion of the ghoul as a type of post-apocalyptic body. What does it mean that ghouls are created by contact with radiation? Why are ghouls linked with symbols associated with the occult and the afterlife? How does the ghoul’s relation to apocalypse and post-apocalyptic time differ from that given by the game as a whole?

From these discussions I hope to show the signification given the body of the ghoul, and the way this signification ultimately leads to the game’s discourses based in racial language. I also will address what separates the ghoul from the common image of zombie, and how the apocalyptic zombie film is translated into the world of Fallout 3. Ultimately, however, I seek an answer to the paradox of the game’s outspoken DJ, Three Dog, who in the course of one PSA manages to claim both that ghouls “are people too,” and yet that they are those who “haven’t had the good fortune to die.”

The World of Fallout 3

The world of Fallout 3, is introduced in the game’s manual, titled “Vault Dweller’s Survival Guide”, as such:

Imagine if, after World War II, the timeline had split. Our world forked into one branch, the Fallout universe the other. In that other branch, technology progressed at a much more impressive rate, while American society remained locked in the cultural norms of the 1950’s It was an idyllic “world of tomorrow,” filled with servant robots, beehive hairdos, and fusion-powered cars. And then, in the year 2077, at the climax of a long-running war with China, it all went to hell in a globe-shattering nuclear war.

The game itself takes place 200 years after this nuclear conflict, in the ruins of Washington D.C., now known as “The Capital Wasteland.” The little that was not destroyed by the bombing is scorched and polluted by radiation. Trees are lifeless husks, houses are reduced to their frames, water sources are dried up or hopelessly irradiated. In addition, the radiation has mutated animals into massive versions of themselves; the player character faces constant danger from giant ants, scorpions, bears, and crabs.

The Wasteland’s surviving humans are few and far between. Settlements are highly fortified to protect against the myriad dangers outside their boundaries. Settlements are thus constructed wherever there is an area both sheltered and defensible, whether it be on a wrecked overpass (Arefu,) in a network of caves (Lamplight,) or in the crater surrounding an undetonated bomb (Megaton.) Only an intrepid (and heavily armed) few attempt to journey between these clusters of civilization. In between settlements lies rough terrain and dangerous foes: vicious animals, psychotic raiders, hyper-aggressive Super Mutants, and malfunctioning robots.

Fallout 3 ultimately presents an anarchic world of independent settlements, lawless “wastelanders,” and unforgiving natural forces. The Wasteland’s challenging physical location makes organization on a large-scale level nearly impossible, and thus the post-apocalyptic human is left squabbling with his neighbor over the meager food, water, and ammunition that he can salvage.

The Body of the Ghoul

The ghoul of Fallout 3 is depicted in one of three forms, all closely related to the image of the zombie. The ghoul is visually marked using the image of the zombie: skin flaking off exposing the muscle underneath, patchy hair, and deeply shadowed eyes. However, they are otherwise presented as similar to other people: their visual differences are little more than skin deep. The feral ghouls who live in caves, sewers, and the abandoned subway are differentiated more dramatically: their skin is stretched tightly of their bones, making them appear to be fleshy skeletons. The glowing one is a type of ghoul explained to have become “a living conduit of radiation.” They are, like feral ghouls, incredibly gaunt. However, they glow from within with the color of green light consistently associated with radiation throughout the course of the game.

Ghouls are explained as those who have “endured an ungodly amount of radiation,” and “ghoulification” is seen as one of the potential dangers of radiation exposure. The ghoul is closely linked with radiation not only in its creation, but also in its continued life. Ghouls are healed, rather than harmed, by radiation; hence their proclivity for otherwise irradiated areas of the Capital Wasteland. Glowing ones, having become living sources of radiation, are able to send out waves of radioactivity, which both damage human enemies and heal any other ghouls in their vicinity.

The ghoul is also endowed with an extraordinarily long lifespan. Several of the game’s ghouls are “pre-war,” meaning they were born before the nuclear war of 2077. Fallout 3 occurs in 2277, giving these individuals a lifetime of over two hundred years! There is no indication given that ghouls die “natural deaths.” Decay does occur, as evidenced by a ghoul name Patches who complains of constantly losing his body parts – granted, he is also the town drunk. However, while ghouls have long lifespans, they are unable to bear children. Underworld is one of the few sizeable settlements in Fallout 3 in which there are no children. Thus, the ghoul population has no way of propagating itself other than the gradual inclusion of the few humans who becomes ghouls.

Ghouls inhabit the marginal spaces of the Wasteland, outside of the visible spaces of large human settlements. The largest population of ghouls is located in Underworld, a community located on The Mall in what was once the National Museum of History. It is of comparable size to many of the smaller human settlements in the Capitol Wasteland, sporting a shop, a bar, a clinic, and an inn. Other populations of ghouls are few and far between. Several small communities live in shantytowns or abandoned metro tunnels, such as the group that seeks entry to the gated community of Tenpenny Tower. Ghouls rarely live in the company of humans, and the few that do occupy positions of subservience. Feral ghouls are more common than their literate counterparts, and live almost entirely in darkened areas – they are particularly common in the abandoned metro systems of Washington and Arlington. Generally, however, the infertility of ghouls makes them a comparative minority in relation to humans, super mutants, and other inhabitants of the Capitol Wasteland.

Ghouls and Abjection

The residents of Tenpenny tower associate ghouls with “stink,” “dirt,” and “feces.” The leader of the fascist Enclave, President John Henry Eden, declares:

The good people of this country cannot regain control while mutation runs rampant through our land. Mutations like the Super Mutants and ghouls must be purged from our society, our world, before we can proceed anew.

The knightly Brotherhood of Steel fires on the ghouls of Underworld because they either aren’t able to tell them apart from the monstrous Super Mutants, or simply “don’t care.” A hair stylist is rejected from a human community after his “change” into a ghoul. The DJ Three Dog, while arguing against ghoul bigotry, states that their survival is “unfortunate,” and later shudders when considering the thought of “ghoulification.” In each of these cases, the ghoul is associated with either the “dirty,” the “disordered,” or the “monstrous,” all types of what Julia Kristeva calls “abjection,” “the place where meaning collapses.” But what is the abject, and why are ghouls seen as abject in relation to the other inhabitants of the Capitol Wasteland?

We might link abjection to unheimlich, which Timothy Beal describes as “what endangers one’s sense of at-homeness, that is, one’s sense of security, stability, integrity, well-being, health and meaning.” For Beal, unheimlich is what monsters personify: a threat to one’s normal order and mode of being in the world. Unheimlich destabilizes distinctions between right and wrong, inside and outside, life and death. Mary Douglas notes a similar transgression in her discussion of cultural notions of purity: “pollution dangers arise when form is attacked.” She notes that, in structures of cleanliness, dirt “is essentially disorder,” (2) as well as being “matter out of place.” (44) In both the case of Beal’s monster and Douglas’s dirt, what is at stake is order and boundaries: the same problems of Kristeva’s “abject,” which “disturbs identity, system , order.” (Creed:8)

What sort of abjection is present in the figure of the ghoul? Douglas notes that “our pollution behavior is the reaction which condemns any object or idea likely to confuse or contradict cherished classifications.” (45) In the case of both the ghoul and the zombie, this abjection lies foremost on the boundary between life and death: the ghoul appears to be dead, but is alive. It lies in the prescient observation offered by Peter in Dawn of the Dead – “They’re us.” They are “the same, yet not identical.” Indeed, this is where Beal locates the nature of monstrosity. Monsters are “paradoxical personifications of otherness within sameness.” (4)

This type of monstrosity and abjectness lies in both the ghoul and the other “monster” of Fallout 3, the giant green Super Mutant. While the mutants’ otherness is a product of their extreme violence, the ghoul is abject in more subtle ways. In addition to violating the traditional categories of “alive” and “dead,” the ghoul also violates visual categories of organization. The unsightly appearance of ghouls violates notions of what people look like: that is, notions of beauty and ugliness. They are, in the words of Steven Shaviro, “at once grotesque and familiar.” The ghoul forces the human to confront what is ultimately his own body decaying. The abjection of the ghoul is a result of human vanity: the unwillingness of the human to part with his beauty and accept that he in fact contains muscle, sinew, viscera. It is a fear of the revelation of the interior ugliness of the physical form. We are reminded of the feral ghoul here. Carol, one of the founders of Underworld, mentions of the initial population of ghouls “some of them went crazy,” and it is to be presumed that these individuals became feral ghouls. The feral ghoul may be taken then as a human who, after having been transformed into a ghoul, was unable to accept his new “ugliness,” and went out of his mind as a result.

From the exterior, the abject state of the ghoul explains their associations throughout the game. The association of ghouls with dirt and filth is not only a stereotype based on their typical living conditions (in underground areas,) but is also a comparison of their disordered nature to the pollution represented in dirt and excrement. In the case of The Enclave, abjection takes a political form: ghouls (and mutants in general) are seen as threatening of proper social and moral order, and thus must be removed in order for American society to be re-established. The Brotherhood of Steel, locating itself in opposition primarily to the “monstrous” Super Mutants, also shoots at ghouls who are similarly “monstrous.” Douglas also links abjection to magical power, as purposeful creation of pollution is often linked to witchcraft, the evil eye, and other such practices. (124) In Fallout 3 we might see the link between magic and abjection located in the Dunwich Building, an abandoned structure filled with ghouls, whose basement contains a glowing obelisk that suggests occult proceedings.

However, the signification accorded to that which is disordered is not inherently a negative one. The power granted by defying categories may also one of beneficial power. Douglas notes that the Lele tribe in Africa does not reject the abnormality of twins and the pangolin, or scaly anteater, but instead see both as possessing powers of fertility. In the case of Fallout 3’s ghouls, we may see this is the figure of Argyle, the manservant of adventurer Herbert “Daring” Dashwood. Argyle is skilled in combat, stealth, and intuition (being able to sense the ill intentions of a woman accompanying Dashwood.) Argyle’s disordered nature makes him a figure of power, a character analogous to the “magic negro,” a racially signified character who uses his superior skill to aid a racially un-marked character. Disorder, while usually signifying abjection and threat, may occasionally be the source of power used for positive ends. However, disorder is never ignored, and never left un-signified: the ghoul is racially marked wherever it comes in contact with the Wasteland’s humans.

The Post-Apocalyptic Body of the Ghoul

While the body of the ghoul is abject within the systems of order created by the Wasteland’s humans (and within our system of order itself,) the body of the ghoul also reflects the post-apocalyptic world in which it is located. In fact, we might say that the body of the ghoul is a post-apocalyptic body, both abandoned by time and coded by religious symbols.

The post-apocalyptic setting of Fallout 3 serves as a template for the type of apocalypse that will be seen later in the ghoul’s body. The narration accompanying the game’s beginning describes the nuclear war of 2077:

The world was plunged into an abyss of nuclear fire and radiation. But it was not, as some had predicted, the end of the world. Instead, the apocalypse was simply the prologue to another bloody chapter of human history. For man had succeeded in destroying the world – but war, war never changes.

This resurgence of temporality violates the traditional religious notions of apocalypse as signifying “the end of time.” In this way it functions much the same way as David Pagano’s estimation of George Romero’s Dead series, in which “time and futurity always come back.” (75) There is no ultimate end to humanity, no ultimate end to territorial squabbles and conflict, no end to time. We are reminded of the end of Day of the Dead, in which “the final shot of the calendar insists on the continuation of time towards a precisely indeterminate future.” (79)

We may see the body of the ghoul as undergoing a similar apocalypse. It begins as a human who, by some chance of fate, is bathed in radiation and does not die. The cause of the ghoul’s transformation is the same force that engenders the transformation of the world as a whole: radioactivity. This invisible force of radioactivity transforms both the world and the body into a tattered and torn up version of what it once was; the ghoul’s crumbling skin is the bombed out buildings and irradiated water of the wasteland. Not only does this transformation scramble the physical form of the ghoul, but it also robs them of time itself. It removes birth, age, and natural death from the ghoul, placing them in a world where time stretches on meaninglessly to infinity.

We may see this approach towards time in the behavior of the residents of Underworld. Snowflake, the previously mentioned hair stylist, states “I just took up Jet. At least it passes the time, you know?” and “what else do I have to do except get high?” We may see a similar approach in Patches, the town drunk, and should note that one of the most frequented services in Underworld is a bar. In these cases, a chemical approach is taken to forget the loss of time and curb ennui. A similar complaint is issued by Carol, who, after recounting her life, remarks: “you tell the same story for 200 years and it’ll seem boring to you too.” In other words, the continued plodding of time serves to remove the significance from the stationary life within the bounds of Underworld.

The post-apocalyptic status of ghouls is also articulated in Fallout 3 through religious symbols. Radiation is portrayed throughout the game as a force verging on the supernatural. It not only transforms humans into ghouls, but it also mutates other animals into larger, more aggressive versions of themselves. The mysterious obelisk in the basement of the Dunwich Building emits radiation, and a group called the Church of Atom worships an undetonated atomic bomb, and reveres “the glow” – that is, radiation. Therefore, the ghoul is created through contact with the game’s closest equivalent to divinity: a powerful, invisible, destructive force.

But even more significant is the symbolism generated by Underworld itself. Underworld is located in an exhibit in the Museum of History titled “Underworld Journey,” which documented various notions of the afterlife (particular attention is given to Paradise Lost). The entrance to Underworld is through the mouth of a giant skull, and its primary defenders are a robot named Cerberus and a hired gun named Charon. In other worlds, by entering into Underworld, we are metaphorically entering through the mouth of Hell into the afterlife: that is, a world of the dead without time. In this way, we may actually see ghouls as those who have died and “haven’t had the good fortune” (or perhaps the bad fortune?) to stay dead. Underworld symbolically casts ghouls as a group only marginally contained by the normal workings of time, and yet within the borders of underworld there is a constant struggle with the boredom that the endless march of time entails.

Within the world of Fallout 3 it is ironically enough the ghouls who are placed in the situation of the humans at the end of Day of the Dead. Their safety ensured in a relatively out of the way part of the wasteland, they must face their “precisely indeterminate future.” Unlike the humans who age, give birth, and die, the barren ghoul sees no change upcoming and no future generation to succeed him. It is this same futurelessness that is feared by the soldiers of 28 Days Later. But while the soldiers may hold out hope for a woman, there is no hope accorded to the ghouls. Perhaps it is this utter abandonment that determines the attitude most often seen in the game’s ghouls: a mixture of sarcasm and irony. The transformation of the ghoul places him in a post-apocalyptic reality analogous to that of his environment: the ghoul is the perfect counterpart to the post-nuclear Capitol Wasteland.

Conclusion: The Trials of Ghoulness

We might now examine the two contradictory statements given by Three Dog. How can we acknowledge ghouls are “people too” while stating that their continued existence is a sign of their bad fortune? What trials are bad enough to warrant the wish for death itself?

The first is social, that is, the ghoul bigotry that Three Dog’s PSA addresses. The ghoul, marked by the abjectness of their body in comparison to human standards of organization, is feared, shunned, hated, killed. With few exceptions, being transformed into a ghoul means the end of one’s human life. The ghoul’s physical abjectness, articulated through discourses we recognize as racial, causes their isolation: and in the wasteland, isolation often means death.

The second trial also hinges on abjectness, but this abjectness is seen by the ghoul himself. The ghoul must endure the decay of his physical form, the loss of the face he recognizes as “himself,” and his human standards of understanding himself physically. In other words, he must be able to endure a dramatic change of form without being driven insane by it. For the ghoul, insanity means becoming feral, and this notion alone might seem to be the most frightening aspect of ghoulness. We see a similar fear of becoming the other in both Haitian culture and Romero’s films: the living do not want to come back as the mindless, polluted zombie, and would rather choose death than a second life of an unfamiliar sort.

Finally, the ghoul must be able to endure life in post-apocalyptic time. While the humans of the Wasteland attempt to organize, improve, and rebuild their various corners of territory in preparation for the future, the ghoul sees time plodding on towards nothing. Unmarked by age, the ghoul must be able to endure the timelessness that occurs in a symbolic afterlife. One wonders if this is just as much a cause of insanity for the ghoul as the second trial: are feral ghouls simply those unable to live consciously in post-apocalyptic time who escape by reducing themselves to animalism? Do ghouls in fact choose to become equivalent to the desire-driven zombies of Romero because their existence is otherwise meaningless? It is the consciousness of the meaningless passing of time that separates the ghoul from the his feral counterpart, the film zombie, and the Super Mutant (whose general lack of intelligence prevents his realization of his own immortality.)

From the outside, the ghoul becomes an intelligent zombie: perhaps more “like us” than those of Romero, but still abject and monstrous nonetheless. If not for its intelligence, it would be startling to think that the ghoul was given any consideration in a social system of meaning. But, the closeness between humans and ghouls on a behavioral level enables their relation to humans using the discourse of physical abjection that places them closest to the “normal human”: that of race. But from the inside, the ghoul lives in a world of designified time, which has lost all its meaning due to its endless continuation without event. The ghoul has survived the symbolic death given by the “divine” force of radiation, and now must face an eternity without guiding purpose and without a generation to follow it. While from the outside the body of the ghoul signifies a chaos monster that must be removed in order to preserve order, from the inside it signifies an existence without age or signification of time. From the outside, it appears as a symbol of abjection threatening the normalcy of life, but from the inside it is a post-apocalyptic wasteland to be distracted with idle pursuits.

The Anticlimax

2009-05-13T21:39:00.000-04:00

Right after the climax comes the anticlimax.

The moment right after everything's place within the pattern, every piece in the puzzle comes together - but what is the puzzle? And the puzzle is shown as just another thing, the divine plan another drop of water in an endless ocean, everything built up to by that moment ends once that moment is over - the strands of thought and experience, symbolism, fate, drama, they may meet their meaningful ending in climax, but as soon as the climax passes, they are just the bit players of the past, facts, useless garbage. Nothing ever ends, there is no end to time and no beginning to time, and hence no point of meaning where things become as they "should be", for the "should" is only one of the many, the "should" is only the eon we aspire to at this moment - a realm of peace, but given peace war is inherent, we desire what we are not, we cannot be what we are or we die. Constancy is slow, silent, meaningless contagion. Each climax is a wave that breaks upon the shore, but while the wave may shift and alter the sand, it changes nothing. There will be waves upon that shore until the end of time, there will be sand upon beaches until the end of time, and those molecules that reached their white-capped heights of glory at its crest flow back to the sea from whence all drama begins.

Ghouls and Racial Discourse

2009-05-05T16:56:00.003-04:00

Bethesda Softwork’s Fallout 3, released in 2008, adopts the image the zombie, in the figure of the ghoul, as a means to explore dynamics of race in an environment that appears at first glance to be post-racial. The simultaneous sameness and otherness of the ghoul is utilized to create a dynamic between ghouls and humans that mimics certain discourses of race in our world. Within Fallout 3, the ghoul is specifically placed in positions within the dialogues of the “gated community”, the “magic negro”, fascist notions of racial purity, and tokenism. The game does not present solutions to these situations so much as it explores the varying viewpoints in question, and disentangles them from our social structure by placing them in a fictional context. In other words, the game uses the ghoul as a means to “play” with the discourses surrounding race which we are familiar with.

The instruction book that comes packaged with Fallout 3, titled “Vault Dweller’s Survival Guide”, describes the game’s history as such:

Imagine if, after World War II, the timeline had split. Our world forked into one branch, the Fallout universe the other. In that other branch, technology progressed at a much more impressive rate, while American society remained locked in the cultural norms of the 1950’s It was an idyllic “world of tomorrow,” filled with servant robots, beehive hairdos, and fusion-powered cars. And then, in the year 2077, at the climax of a long-running war with China, it all went to hell in a globe-shattering nuclear war.

The game itself takes place 200 years after this nuclear conflict, in the ruins of Washington D.C., now known as “The Capital Wasteland.” Settlements are few and far between, fresh water is scarce, and danger emerges as soon one steps outside: the wasteland is filled with giant mutated insects, psychotic raiders, malfunctioning robots, and hyper-aggressive mutants.

It is the creation of this world that the ghoul is born. As explained by the game’s outspoken DJ, Three Dog: “Ghouls are simply humans who’ve been exposed to an ungodly amount of radiation and haven’t had the good fortune to die.” The ghoul is visually marked using the image of the zombie: flaking or rotting skin showing sinew underneath, patchy hair, and deeply shadowed eyes. These features are exaggerated in feral ghouls, who bear more resemblance to skin stretched over a skeleton. Feral ghouls are explained to have gone insane due to their transformation, and in the course of gameplay they bear little difference in behavior from other video game zombies: they will ferociously attack anything that comes nearby. However, the general ghoul is portrayed as no different from any other human, except for their extremely long lifespan and resistance to radiation.

The ghoul may be seen as an extension of Peter’s observation in Dawn of the Dead – “They’re us” – taken to its logical conclusion. Here we have the living dead, who have died figuratively, not literally, and who seem fundamentally no different from their human counterparts. As Three Dog notes: “Sure, they may look like hideous zombies from an old monster flick, but their hearts, their souls, their tears are all very much human.”

Despite its 50s cultural milieu, there is no sign of racism in the world of Fallout 3. Thus, while the player might choose to play either as a Black, Asian, Caucasian, or Hispanic character, this will not render them racially marked within the world. In fact, these various “races” cohabitate in nearly every human settlement without any sense of racial difference - in fact, race is never even mentioned in the game.

However, this conglomeration of races instead leads to a new sort of dominant identity: that of the human. We might see racial harmony among humanity as a result of its confrontation with mutants, androids, and other types of “post-human” beings. Interaction with a type of being that drastically challenges what “humanity” is creates the opportunity for the construction of a unifying notion of human-ness in response. But, within the world of Fallout 3, this humanness is not a category of definition, but rather an ill-defined basis for excluding certain other types of beings. In other words, the “humanness” of Fallout 3 may be seen as analogous to the “whiteness” that Richard Dyer is attempting to trouble. As Dyer notes: “there is no more powerful position than that of being ‘just’ human.” The “human” majority of Fallout 3 possesses the definitional power by which it labels ghouls “zombies”, and super mutants “freaks”, and yet says little to nothing about what it actually means to be “human.” To be human, perhaps is to not be a “mutant”, but where does mutation begin?

It is this figuring of humanity that places the ghoul in the position of the racially marked character. Robots and super mutants are almost certainly not “human”, but where on the line do ghouls fall? The juxtaposition of human consciousness and bodily deformity leave the question ambiguous. Ghouls are thus both human and not “human”. They are “the same, yet not identical” to us. The ghoul thus becomes a site of social relations that attribute some sort of significance to their changed nature. Nowhere is the ghoul a neutral symbol. Because this signification occurs on a purely bodily basis, its manifestations in the game world occur in modes of discourse particular to our bodily form of othering: race.

Let us first observe how this operates in the realm of the game’s language. Ghouls are described both using their own set of racial slurs and a discourse of stereotypes connected with certain real-world modes of conceiving racial marking. Non-ghouls often refer to ghouls as “zombies” or “shufflers.” Ghouls in turn refer to non-ghouls as “smoothskins.” In both of these cases, the epithet is based on an exaggerated physical trait – we might compare this to a real-world racial epithet such as “knuckle-dragger.” However, other language used to describe ghouls is based more directly in the racial language of our world. For example, several humans describe ghouls as foul smelling. The language of smell is a familiar one in racist discourse, and to see it in relation to the ghoul is to create an obvious relation between these discourses and the perceptions of ghouls.

Fallout 3 presents several specific interactions in which the relation of the ghoul to the human resembles a specific type of real-world interaction. We will begin with an example tying together fears of racial violence and a desire for racial exclusivity. Tenpenny Tower is a posh hotel run by the wealthy Aleister Tenpenny, inhabited by a wealthy group of renters and a sizeable security force. Its stylish interior décor and lounge music mark it as the height of luxury and exclusivity, especially within the unforgiving wasteland. However, a group of ghouls requesting to live in the hotel is forcibly barred from entering due to the general fear and disgust felt by the tower’s residents. Taken with the 1950’s cultural context of the game, the exclusion of ghouls from the tower may be seen as akin to racial exclusion from country-clubs and other such institutions.

However, Fallout 3 does not simply present this situation but also the possible modes in which it may be resolved. At the time of the player character’s arrival, the ghouls are planning a raid upon the tower. The character is given the choice either to help the ghouls kill the residents of the tower, kill the ghouls at the request of Tenpenny, or to convince the tower’s residents to accept ghouls into the community. If the player chooses the third of these options, some of the tower’s inhabitants less friendly to ghouls will abandon it entirely –mimicking “white flight” due to increasing minority populations in urban communities. However, the ultimate consequence of this approach suggests that the tenants’ fears may not have been misplaced: a dispute erupts among the tower’s residents while the player character is absent, and the ghouls kill the tower’s human residents. These varying possibilities of outcome for this relation do not serve to offer a solution to the problem of integrated communities, rather they illustrate, like Fallout 3 itself, alternate histories that may emerge from a specific site of racial discourse.

A more ambiguous signification of the ghoul is found in “The Adventures of Herbert ‘Daring’ Dashwood” is a radio drama that periodically plays on Three Dog’s station. The show is introduced thus:

You’re listening to the adventures of me, Herbert “Daring” Dashwood, and my stalwart ghoul manservant, Argyle.

The radio drama presents one of the two portions of the game in which ghouls cohabitate with non-ghouls. The other ghoul in question is Gob, a slave bought by a bar owner in the town of Megaton. In both Gob’s case and Argyle’s, the ghoul is ultimately an inferior to the non-ghoul in social dynamics of power. Gob is the “punching bag” of the town, and Argyle consistently calls Dashwood “boss.” The roles of Argyle and Gob are analogous to the model of the black servant or racially marked sidekick. Argyle in particular occupies the same role as a character like Tonto in The Lone Ranger, a skilled warrior but one that must ultimate be placed secondary to the hero who is not marked as raced.

However, Argyle also serves to illustrate another sort of conception of race, the idea of the “magic negro.” The “magic negro” is a racially marked character who bears an uncanny degree of skill or intuition, which is usually used to aid a character not racially marked. In the case of Argyle, this is represented both by an innate skill in combat (he is able to sneak a live grenade onto a super mutant) and his ability to sense danger and duplicity. After Dashwood has rescued a woman calling herself “Miss Chase” from slavers, he insists on taking her to the hidden city of Rockopolis. Argyle cautions against such action, but Dashwood ignores him, prompting “Miss Chase”, now revealed as the “Black Widow of Paradise Falls” to state “I find the ghoul’s instincts to be frighteningly accurate” (after which Argyle rips out her heart with his bare hands.)

What sort of marking is occurring here? Throughout the series it is Argyle, and not Dashwood, who is seen to be killing. In addition, it is Argyle, not Dashwood, who has the “instinct” noted by “Miss Chase.” On the other hand, it is Dashwood who seeks to rescue “Miss Chase” and lead her to safety. The action of killing – especially killing in extreme and exotic ways – and the possession of an almost supernatural instinct, are both relegated to the racially marked character. This has the effect of both privileging and de-humanizing race. Argyle is a super-human character, even as he is the social inferior of Dashwood, but he also shows no emotion outside of his concern for the safety of Rockopolis. It is Dashwood who loves in relation to “Miss Chase,” and Argyle is left to clean up the mess of Dashwood’s flights of fancy. While Argyle might be superior to Dashwood as a fighter, he is ultimately not allowed to be a sympathetic character.

The portrayal of Argyle, like the resolution of the Tenpenny Tower dilemma, is an ambiguous moment of discourse. Is Argyle’s depiction problematic, or is it simply a concession to drama? Fallout 3 ultimately answers neither question, but this is in fact what makes its discourse on race so valuable. Instead of attempting to produce solutions at specific sites of racial discourse, Fallout 3 places these sites in a fictional context that allows their perusal from a different angle. While the segregation of Tenpenny Tower is obviously not directly analogous to our private clubs and gated communities, its portrayal provides a vehicle for viewing similar instances of exclusion in a different light. Similarly, the possible endings to the conflict are not directly representative of what might happen in a similar situation of integration, but they do show that solutions to these kind of conflicts may not be as easy as we would like to believe.

Fallout 3 is not a text expressing a specific view on race. Rather, it recreates real world discourses of race in a fictional setting, both to create a more realistic picture of society (is one more likely to believe in a world with bigotry, or without bigotry?) and to generate new ways of viewing old problems. The image of the ghoul serves as a perfect vehicle for a specifically racially discourse, due to its ability to be both like us (intelligent) and unlike us (physically marked) at the same time – a trait it shares with its symbolic ancestor, the zombie. Ultimately, the ghoul is not a solution to a discourse, but rather the possibility of playing with already existing discourses by bringing together symbols in new ways. The zombie, sites of racial meaning, and the post-apocalyptic world (which must be addressed elsewhere) are juxtaposed to create a moment after which a new approach towards each of these elements may result.

Zombies, Humans, and the Failure of Individualism

2009-03-26T15:25:00.002-04:00

The dichotomy between humans and zombies in George Romero’s zombie trilogy, Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and Day of the Dead, may be seen as an exploration of themes of individual identity, competition, and the ultimate flaws in ego-based modes of being. While the zombie is often the instrument that brings human society to crisis, the ultimate difference between success and failure is determined not by the strength of the undead but by the quarreling of humans among themselves. While humans show higher reasoning, abstract thought, and individual will in their interactions with each other, in the life and death struggles of the zombie conflict these attributes of ego often prove to do more harm than good. Contrasted against the unified desire, purpose, and identity of the zombie, the weakness inherent in such a system of existence is highlighted. What the zombie suggests, then, is an evolution past ego-thought into a form of life not given to destroying itself.

What is remarkable in viewing Romero’s trilogy is where conflict is most exaggerated. It is not, in fact, between humans and zombies. The zombies, especially in Day of the Dead ultimately serve as the force that ultimately capitalizes upon the films central conflict: that of humans among themselves. In Night this is shown in the conflict between Ben and Harry for control of the house, and in Dawn it is seen in both the police raid of the apartment and the invasion of the mall by bikers. However, this theme is most emphasized in Day of the Dead, in which human in-fighting and pride ultimately destroy an otherwise safeguarded community.

Before addressing Day, however, we must first show the contrast made between the modes of being attributed to the human and the zombie in Romero’s films. The zombie ultimately serves as a foil to the human condition, causing us to reconsider our nature of approaching “humanity” and the world by their success in a method contrasting to ours.

The zombie is a figure without ego, abstraction, or pride. As Dr. Logan notes in his experiments in Day, the zombie operates only on the most basic instinct: the brain stem is the only part of the brain necessary for the zombie to act. It is no accident that the brain stem corresponds to the notion of the Id in Freudian psychology – the center of primal desires without an intellectual component, a leftover from the reptilian brain. The zombie acts only upon this desire (Bub being the only exception). While in most cases this is only linked to the desire for food, it does take other forms, most notably the return of the zombies to the mall in Dawn. It should be noted, however, that Romero implies this is not an intellectual, intentional return, but rather a general sense of belonging. The zombies return to the mall as of instinct.

The pure Id-ness of the zombies reveals in humans the presence of other elements of the mind, those parts described as the ego and super-ego in Freudian psychology. These portions of the brain allow higher reasoning, a notion of personal identity, and the ability to plan and create. Romero’s dialogue is split here: on the one hand, these aspects allow the humans to use complex strategies and tactics against the zombies, and ultimately find the best means for destroying them. Often, however, such schemes backfire, such as in the deaths of Tom and Judy in Night, and Roger’s infection in Dawn.

In terms of more abstract modes of thought, Romero shows these abilities as often pointless in the face of imminent annihilation. The scientists that appear on the news touting a nuclear strike upon large cities as “logical”, as well as the government officials attempting to provide a clear explanation for the crisis both show the utter failure of concepts of “logic” and “authority” in relation to the crisis. Most striking is John’s assessment of Sarah’s work in relation to the old records of the military bunker, noting the utter absurdity of stock records, business organization, and scientific formulas in relation to the physical truths of the survival. Romero makes this point especially clear in relation to money. In the early stages of Day we see piles of money blowing in the wind, and the theme of futile consumption and the worthlessness of value is highly developed in Dawn.

We may also see the futility of such higher brain concepts in relation to morality. In Dawn, the residents of the apartment building ultimately doom themselves to the violence of the police through their dedication to the “honor” of the dead, a theme also seen in the very first scene of Night. This is further expanded in Day, as shown in Captain Rhodes’s killing of Dr. Logan because of the supposed desecration of his men, despite the utter purposelessness of Logan’s death in his own survival.

Rhodes brings us to the other aspect absent in the zombie: pride. The zombie bears no need to lord over or control those that surround him. There is no need in the zombie for confirmation of his own authority through force or intimidation. However, pride is the ultimate downfall of the survivors in all of the movies. In Night, the house is overwhelmed in part due to the power play between Ben and Harry. In Dawn, the safety of the survivors is ultimately compromised by Steve’s insistence that all the property in the mall belongs to him: “It’s ours. We took it.” In Day, the bunker is brought down both by Rhodes’ need to exert his authority on those who surround him, but also through Salazar’s unwillingness to admit his own weakness, which ultimately leads to the incident in which he loses his arm, and eventually his decision to open the gates to the zombies.

We may see here, then, not only the contrast of types of desire between humans and zombies, but also contrasts of organization. Sarah often pleads the members of the bunker to work together and not quarrel amongst themselves, something that seems to be natural to all the groups of humans in Romero’s films. While humans may create an organizational structure or appoint a leader, these measures do not keep them from conflict among themselves and ultimately weakness in the face of apocalypse.

In contrast, there is little or no conflict among the zombie horde, and within the group of zombies, the identity of each individual seems to be insignificant. Zombies act together, perhaps without plan, but also without disagreement, all pursuing the same goal, and thus united in their desire. If one single aspect of the zombies allows them as a whole to overwhelm the humans, it is their unity. Interestingly enough, this does not destroy their individual identities, but rather shows identity to be circumstantial, and not a basis for conflict. Within the zombies we may find individuals from all walks of life, woman and man, black and white, young and old, and recognizable figures such as miners, clowns, and Hare Krishna. Ultimately, the zombies destroy identity (if they even recognize it) by showing it meaningless in relation to the struggle for survival and achieving primal desire.

This is further emphasized by the presence of racist and sexist dynamics in Romero’s films. For example, there is Wooley, whose berserk charge into the apartments of Dawn forces his fellow officers to shoot him. There are the implied threats of rape made by Rhodes towards Sarah in Day, not to mention the constant reference to Salazar as a “spic”. In relation to the struggle of life and death precipitated by the zombie crisis, such discrimination is shown to be utterly absurd. The threat to all humanity, should, after all, provoke cooperation among all humans for their communal survival. As Dawn’s one-legged priest states: “When the dead walk, we must stop the killing, or we lose the war.” But, in fact, the zombie crisis instead serves to break apart the fragile threads of civility holding human society together, showing the ultimate weakness of human civilization as a whole.

What the zombie may represent, then, is a postmodern evolution of human effort, one not separated by the arbitrary organizations of race, class, individual identity, or authoritarian structure. The zombie is shown to be ultimately a superior being to the human, not because of its inherent strength, but because of humanity’s inherent weakness. It succeeds us in an evolutionary context precisely because it does not possess those things that make us feel so comfortably “human”: ego, intellect, morality. The zombie is naturally a frightening figure because it appears to be a negation of everything we hold dear. Is it any wonder that every human who is given a choice in the matter requests not to come back as one of “them”? And yet, is it so bad to be a zombie? The zombies in the basement of the apartment seem to be perfectly enjoying themselves, as do the zombies of the mall and the bunker once they have gained control. The fear of the zombie is not only the terror that we will suffer as zombies, but even more so it is the terror that we will enjoy being zombies. It is the fear that a state, which is fundamentally inhuman to our view, is in fact superior to our own mode of being (a fear that also may be seen in racism and sexism). This fear is, in fact, the very ego we have the seen in characters such as Harry Cooper and Captain Rhodes: the need for us to be right and for our organization of the world to be correct. Romero’s zombie is a figure by which he inverts our perceptions of ourselves, and scares us by showing us ourselves as the monster, the beast, the cannibal. As Peter notes in Dawn of the Dead: “They’re us.”

Archetypal Histories

2009-03-23T19:51:00.002-04:00

This exploration begins from one of two conceptions of time and the universe. The first of these is the multiple-universe hypothesis of quantum theory: that at any point where two or more possibilities can occur, a different universe is created, thus there are an arbitrarily large number of branching universes that occur. However, based on a presupposition that a new universe may be created other than the branches of "our universe", each universe will occur an arbitrarily large number of times. Then, there is the other proposition that all times occur "simultaneously" in a larger dimensional structure and that the ideal of a sequential universe is only consciousness passing through these universes in the temporal dimension. The specifics of these are unimportant, except that in both cases the "same" universe can occur multiple times, in fact possibly an arbitrarily large number of times.

Now, if there are an arbitrarily large number of universes, then everything occurs an arbitrarily large number of times. However, this does not mean that all universes occur more equally. Some universes, or aspects of universes (if there are "aspects of universes" that are not merely points in dimensionality) must be more common than others. We will refer to these aspects of universes as "archetypal". Now, if we apply the archetypal universe approach to human affairs, we end up with certain arrangements of perceived successions of events, and certain of these arrangements will occur more often than others. We may call these "archetypal histories".

Now, our history is an one history, and thus there are an arbitrarily large number of universes with identical archetypal histories to ours, and many more with similar histories. If our history occurs more often than other histories and similar histories to ours occur more often than others, our history may be said to be "archetypal". However, the perfect archetype that accords to the largest number of universes will occur less often than the other universes that resemble it. The archetype is less common than its general reflections.

Here we are approaching Plato's theory of ideal forms. In the probability of possible universes, certain orders are more likely to emerge than others - some orders are more likely to reinforce themselves and propagate than others - take mineral order as opposed to biological order. So a universe created entirely in the form of one of these orders may, in fact, exist - and there will be one for each of these orders that perfectly accords itself to the order in every facet. A universe like ours is a blending of these orders. The only archetypal order that is perfectly realized in our universe is the order of our universe.

However, we may approach Plato in another means here. If certain universes/occurrences/orders occur more often than others, we might, in fact, say that those universes/occurrences/orders are, in fact, more REAL than others. We can define reality outside of universes according to a probability of universes, in which everything is true, but some things are more true, that is, more possible, than others.

The Irony of Anarchism

2009-03-22T22:05:00.002-04:00

We (or at least I), often approach anarchism as an appeal to freedom: anarchism represents a freeing of the human will from an oppressive power that keeps the individual from doing what he wishes. We should be ultimately free, says anarchism, and such government restrains freedom. But there is a simple irony that defeats such an anarchism:

We are free, and we created repression through free will.

It is not at if there is a diabolically created "order" created for us to oppose and overthrow. That which was created in human society is created by a merger of free wills. Anarchism must reach a point of sartori, one expressed by Zen and Discordianism: we are free, we have been free this whole time. Thus, an overthrow of an oppressive order for purely philosophical reasons is nonsense, just as is the imposition of government for purely philosophical reasons. If we create an anarchic state, we must destroy anything which attempts to organize into a cohesive structure in order to preserve such a state, and this in effect is again restricting freedom, only it is now justified by disordered "freedom" rather than ordered "security".

The only way we are restricted, truly, is through physical means. Yes, order creates a restrictive physical means in certain ways, but it is the same of any environment - it is merely that the conditions and types of restriction differ. We do not need to fear starvation, perhaps, but we may fear imprisonment and violence from our fellow humans. The fact that restriction comes from humans does not make it "oppression", "opression" as a term only serves to seperate "human" forms of restriction from "natural" ones.

And what does the realization that we are free mean to us? It, in fact, means nothing. We are free whether or not we realize it, our knowledge of our freedom is ultimately inconsequential, except so much as it influences our actions. This leads to an interesting query: does knowledge of freedom restrict or release? Knowing that we are free, are we suddenly released from justifying our actions philisophically? Or are we still tied by reason by needing the justifying knowledge that we are "free"? Is it really true that "the truth will set you free"? From a purely attitudinal stance, this seems entirely likely, at least for those given to justifying their actions through rationalist means. If one needs a reason, then such knowledge may indeed provide an answer and an evolution of action.

And yet, there is a further irony of anarchism in mirror image to the first irony of anarchism: it is ultimately inconsequential whether or not freedom produced the structures of government and order. If we truly are free, we may still oppose them, so long as we free ourselves from the necessity of philisophical justification. We are always able to oppose order, we are always free to oppose order: we have no need of reason or purpose - so long as it is our will, we may do it. This is not to say we will do it, but it is nothing to be rejected or opposed.

Fear, Safety, and Freedom

2009-03-21T01:31:00.004-04:00

We often talk of freedom, and how we desire freedom, but how is freedom lost? Freedom, after all, must be something lost for salvation into freedom to be possible. Where did we oppressed and put into bondage? Where did we lose our way?

The answer is quite clear: we did it to ourselves. Freedom is an ability to act without restriction, an ability to exercise one's will in whatever way one sees fit. But we, ourselves, often enter into places that force us to give up this freedom of action for some sort of benefit. Why? Why give up unlimited movement? The answer is, security, and fear.

It should be said it is, in fact, the alleviation of fear. This is not a fear of what is clear and present, necessarily, in fact more often than not it is the fear of the possible, not the probable. We fear we will be attacked, we fear we will lose our possessions, and we fear we will lose our identity. All these fears emerge from the idea of possession, and the consequent fear that our precious possessions, health, life, self, is somehow threatened. There cannot be an idea of value without the fear of loss. If you do not fear losing something, it is either because it has little value for you, or that it represents the usual state of being in such a way that losing it is, in fact, unthinkable.

This is the root of all the great fears. When one realizes that what he has taken for granted: money, freedom of action, a relationship, an identity, can be threatened and possible taken, corrupted, or destroyed, an irrational fear grows in him. If he is of an obsessive persuasion, this fear begins to burden the edges of his mind and grow stronger until he must take all possible steps to relieve it.

At this point, we may chart the diversions of different reactions to this fear. Only a strong will can reject fear as ultimately false or improbable, such people are few and far between. Those who cannot deal with their fear become neurotic or paranoid (though we may argue that all fear - save the fear encountered in a situation of awe or mortal terror - is to a certain degree a neurosis.) However, the majority of people manage their fear through systems of bargaining. We may compare systems of bargaining with Foucaultian systems of power, though a system of bargaining is not necessarily social.

There are various modes by which bargaining takes place. The most common, in fact, is the appeal to apathy - one gives up caring for something due to their fear of losing it. This is the basic, the psychological value means, by which one may give up fear. We may tie this closely with philosophical and religious justification for a lack of fear. Both philosophy and theology let us use a rationalist method to convince us that we, in fact, cannot lose what we fear to lose, either because of good deeds done previous (moral bargaining), the state of the world (logical bargaining), or the irrationality of fear (an appeal to the ideal self.) Then, there are the more physical methods common in our day. Car alarms, home security systems, fire alarms, insurance, national armies, locks, passwords - all are means of creating an impression of security that serves to subside fear. Whether or not this produces an actual alleviation of danger is unimportant. Fear bears little relation to the danger imagined: fear results from an imagined image of danger, a distorted image of danger, and thus is a response to our logic of danger, and not danger's logic of danger.

So where does fear and bargaining subvert freedom? Fear subverts freedom precisely when we give up aspects of action in the bargaining process. This is most clear in dialogues of ritual pollution (though pollution in general is often closer to ritual than we would like to believe), where an individual or society will take highly elaborate means to subvert an often insignificant danger: take, for instance, behaviors associated with obsessive-compulsive disorder, particularly obsessive hand-washing. While such an example may seem extreme, we spend large amounts of time doing similar rituals each day. The ritual of the daily shower is such an example within our culture, and may be one of the more benign rituals: it only eats times, and comes with a noticeable physical and aromatic difference. But it is not only a matter of time - we will, for example, limit our social interactions if we have not taken a shower, we may feel a sense of pollution, a fear of ugliness, dirt, and disease. In order to test whether one of your actions is a ritual, give up doing it and see the results: if giving up such a ritual inspires in you a feeling of fear, then you have nailed the cause of that ritual as a bargaining principle between you and your fear.

But daily rituals are minuscule in comparison to the large amounts of social action that we forbid ourselves in order to ensure our own freedom from fear. The government as an institution is a huge mechanism for combating fear. The government is an appeal to a sort of protector God, a figure to whom certain liberties are given up in exchange for protection against potential threats. Notice potential threats, then think about how much of your possibilities of liberty are lost to your interactions with the institution of government. The probability that the dangers from which government protects us will occur to any singular person is quite low, however, the tax on all (not in monetary terms, money in itself is a tool to free the individual from the fear of starvation) robs us of social freedoms, freedoms of actions, etc. That is not to say that the government is repressive, hardly, it is a bargain that is made with the individuals of the land it claims to rule. However, most individuals have forgotten that this government is, in fact, a bargain, and not a fact.

An aside: the greatest cruelty of the nationalistic world is its utter enforcement of a governmental paradigm upon the rest of the world. It has gotten to the point now that any sort of anarchy anywhere in the world is considered unacceptable, and the idea of some sort of free land in which people are free to act as they choose is utterly unthinkable. It is practically impossible to act as though there is no government. We may say "I do not recognize the government", but it is hard to justify not giving the taxman his money when he bears the assistance of many men who will throw us in a confined space. But then, the fear of losing our freedom is a fear just a same, and often just as damaging as the fears of physical danger.

Perhaps the greatest exploiter of fear is the insurance industry. We take it for granted (or are forced to by law - so much as law can truly "force" one) that insurance is a good idea. But insurance is less purchased for the actual probability of disaster, and more for the likelyhood that it could happen. Is insurance actually practical? I honestly do not know the math on it, but I suspect that the payments on insurance often will add up to more than the cost of disaster itself. Perhaps I am mistaken. In any event, I do think it is the case that the reasoning behind the purchase of insurance is less financial and more fearful, though finance itself is a huge escapade of fear evovled. In Prometheus Rising, Robert Anton Wilson quite accurately points out that our fears regarding money emerge because money is essentially a substitute representing our ability to acquire food. To cut off money is to symbolically cut off food, thus to threaten someone financially is a means of threat that occurs at the most primal layers of the mind, and hence is a fantastic way to influence people.

But, above all, we should (or at least, should consider) what part fear has in our decision making process, whether the sacrifices we make to appease fear are worthwhile, and whether we want to continue making such sacrifices (though often, learning how to give these up is the most difficult part.) Is it worth sacrificing our afternoon to that nagging fear, even though we know it to be false, that we have left the iron on?

Novelty, the "Killer Meme", and Memetic Trolling

2009-03-16T18:21:00.004-04:00

The creation of a "killer meme" has both a huge advantage and a huge disadvantage in its novelty. On the one hand, the fact that a killer meme is a new phenomenon gives makes it of greater interest and thus increases its spreading potential - that is to say, the likelihood that it will be passed on from one individual to another. However, such novelty also means that it will face resistance as it is perceived to differ from established memes. Naturally, some types of people will be much more willing to accept or consider a new idea, and memes will spread through them more readily than other groups - however because of this, they are not likely to hold onto and solidify memes as personal ontologies. Such individuals are thus not the intended targets for a "killer meme", and will likely not be taken in by it, though they may be carriers of such memes.

We might suggest a type of meme that bridges the gap between the new and the old - for example, one that takes an existing aspect of an ontology and turns it against the rest of the ontology. We should turn here to the ideal location for studying memetics: the world of the internet, particularly the operation of "trolling". A troll is one who interacts with a social group in such a way as to elicit a certain response, often by masquerading as an individual who will provoke the ire of a group. While most often utilized for the purpose of alleiving boredome, trolling has some amazing practical applications outside of the world of the internet. For example, trolling in some cases is used as a marketing tactic, and may be compared to convential marketing strategies. It might be said even, perhaps to the chagrin of the anti-Scientology group Anonymous, that L. Ron Hubbard's creation of Scientology may in fact have been the most succesful instance of trolling in modern history, creating an entire religious organization as an intended farce or profit-making venture. This is, of course, mere speculation, but it could provide the clue to creating new and more powerful memes. Scientology and internet memes may be taken as examples that illustrate effective means of spreading memes in modern culture. However, as for content, we might look at the entrenched memes of our society: after all, any idea that we possess is to some degree a succesful meme. For example, memes such as Christianity, rationalism, gender roles, and moralism might all be studied to determine what aspects constitute a succesful meme. By studying the methods of trolls and the succesful memes of the past, we may be one step closer to creating the new ideas of the future.

Confession, Silence, and Freedom

2009-03-02T15:43:00.000-05:00

In both The History of Sexuality and “Christianity and Confession”, Michel Foucault critiques the idea of freedom through confession. Christian tradition emphasizes this self-reflection and self-revelation as an obligation necessary for freedom, and this has spread into many other social realms, particularly those of academic discourse. There is, after all, that common aphorism: “the truth will set you free.” But if such a discourse is an obligation, how can we necessarily call it freedom? Our ideas of confession and revelation have been created through Foucaultian power structures, and ultimately serve to define, and therefore bind us. In response to this problem we must ask ourselves: what exactly is freedom? Is it confession or silence that impinges more drastically on this freedom? Or is it the very idea that there is some significance in the difference between silence and confession, or between freedom and the influence of power, which ultimately causes the loss of our freedom?

What do we mean by freedom? It is difficult to speak of in the abstract, as freedom can only be seen in relation to its counterpart, restriction. We do not often say, “I am free” unless we wish to prove we have just escaped from such restrictions. On the most basic level we might say that freedom is the lack of physical or legal restriction - that is to say, the ability to do what one desires. However, Foucault rejects this as a total definition of freedom: “why are the deployments of power reduced simply to the procedure of the law of interdiction?” Power restrains us, but it is not merely limited to a physical and legal operation, but also a manipulation of ideas, standards and actions. Power operates not only through the operations of legal and political bodies, but also through the social creation of concepts and their imposition on individuals both from within and without: society restrains us, or hands us the tools to do it ourselves. Thus freedom is freedom from power, a nigh impossible task in Foucault’s ontology.

Judith Butler’s “Imitation and Gender Insubordination” builds on this Foucaultian concept of power in seeking a means to be free from heterosexual and homophobic forces in the creation of gender and sexual identities. For example, Butler shows the concept of “the closet” as posing homosexualness only in relation to a state of assumed heterosexuality. Thus, the creation of a sexual identity is restricted through its forced relation to previous standards of sexual norms. Perhaps then, we may develop a working definition of freedom in accordance with Butler and Foucault: freedom is that which is unrestricted by the effects of power. While we may not be able to speak of anything that is completely “free” in accordance to this definition, we may perhaps use it to illustrate comparative freedoms, as in the case of silence and confession.

We must ask, then, what is more freeing (or less restricting): revelation through confession, or obscuration through silence. We will begin with confession, and address both its freeing and restricting influences. Confession’s purpose as freeing activity may perhaps be best seen in the monastic practice of exagoreusis. Confession serves as a means of freeing the self from evil thoughts through their exposure. John Cassian describes this effect thus: “A bad thought brought into the light of day immediately loses its veneer.” What we have here is a freeing of the individual from a restrictive power. It is not the social power dynamics of Foucault, but rather the supernatural evil of Satan that is being overcome here. The exposure of thoughts allows them to be examined, and those impinging on the individual’s freedom are to be removed. Confession may also serve freedom by providing an acceptable explanation that allows behavior to move into the social sphere. For example, one might argue that the very definitions of “gay” and “lesbian” are what allow gay and lesbian practice to be acceptable in a social context. Outside of definition and confession such practices might instead be anomalous, and thus the object of a physical repression. Certainly this was the case in medieval Christendom. By providing an acceptable social definition, confession allows a regulated practice of sexuality within the greater social context.

However, such a social definition also restricts thought and identity in relation to power dynamics. The construction of homosexual identity in relation to “the closet” is certainly one example of this. We may also argue that the removal of “Satanic” desires through confession is simply a practice by which individuals are molded in relation to social power dynamics of religion and morality. Overall, confession defines the individual in a social context. What serves to provide an acceptable outlet of sexuality only exists through relation to other restrictions. The bargain of confession exchanges many possibilities of action and identity for the freedom to practice a limited number of specific identities and actions. In addition, this confessional practice is built upon a specific foundation, that of truth. Under confession truth becomes an obligation. “Everyone, every Christian, has the duty to know what is happening to him.” (Foucault 1993: 211) This is a restriction that prevents one from self-ignorance. Through the operations of power, the Christian, and furthermore the individual in our Christian-influenced ontology is not permitted the luxury of an unexamined life. The operation of confession is ultimately one of bargaining: an exchange of specific freedoms for specific restrictions. It allows a certain degree of action at the expense of certain obligations to self-examination and revelation to the social group at large.

We will turn then to silence. Silence derives its freedom from its non-definition and anonymity. Silence allows one to operate outside a certain degree of social interaction and restriction, provided one is able to keep information from being disclosed about one’s actions. In fact, Foucault identifies the strength of power with its ability to be silent: “its success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms” (Foucault 1978:86). That which is silent is unknown and unidentified, its identity is not regulated by social definitions and expectations. We may assume, after all, that there was some degree of sexual practice that might currently be defined as “homosexual” occurring in the Middle Ages. However, this practice was facilitated through its silence, in order to avoid that which would define and repress it.

However, silence also renders the self fundamentally alone. Silence does not permit discourse, and thus any communication and community is restricted to those parts that are obtained through confession. Silence isolates and threatens the extinction of types of action through their non-identity. “We might argue” writes Butler, “isn’t it crucial to insist on lesbian and gay identities precisely because they are being threatened with erasure and obliteration from homophobic quarters?” (Butler 1993:311) While Butler ultimately opposes such a suggestion as reinforcing the same sort of relation between sexual identities that already exists, it is a valid fear in relation to silence. Silence is ultimately an isolating activity that limits actions to the discrete individual and removes them from the bargains of the social confession. In addition, silence operates to some extent through non-definition; it only operates functionally for the individual to the degree that he can be silent in relation to himself. Thus silence might be permanent in activities not perceived as significant, such as the way one prefers one’s toast, but in relation to something as socially stressed as sexuality it is unlikely that the individual can avoid defining himself, which will inevitably relate him to the same restricting social systems of definition.

Which, then, of silence and confession can be said to be more “free”? Ultimately, the answer is arbitrary. While silence permits action, it does not permit social action in the same way that confession does. In confession the individual offers up himself to society, whose archetypes of identity then restrict his actions, whereas the silent individual ultimately restricts himself, relating his hidden actions to those social standards that he is aware of. We may talk about Foucaultian freedom in the abstract, but it is ultimately a somewhat absurd exercise, since no one can escape power save through living in the wilderness one’s whole life (and we might suspect that one raised by wolves would still be influenced by the power dynamics of those wolves.)

We may, however, speak of freedom as non-restriction of influence. Power operates primarily not through physical means, but rather mental and conceptual ones. Hence, power operates most strongly in how it influences our modes of thoughts. The very idea of a significant difference between confession and silence is a product of the power dynamic that originally produced confession. Therefore, our freedom from the influence of the dynamic of confession only occurs when we see no significance in the difference between silence and confession. This is not to say that we see no difference between the operation of the two, but rather that this difference is ontologically arbitrary. To attempt to fight against power dynamics through their recognition is ultimately fruitless, since it propagates their influence through ideation in a different form. Butler asks, “Can the exclusion from the ontology become a rallying point for resistance?” (Butler 1993: 312) But to resist the ontology is precisely to reinforce it. In fact, such a close examination of ontology spreads it by making it a conscious entity.

In this case, both the operations of the confessional dynamic and the desire for freedom create the supremely ironic result of restricting freedom. The confessional dynamic is, in fact, thoroughly present in both the work of Butler and Foucault. The academic dynamic is one that speaks, and in speaking hopes to create some sort of alteration of discourse. By attempting to dig themselves out of the hole of power dynamics, they rather find themselves deeper underground. Foucault at least seems to acknowledge the fruitlessness of discussion in relation to freedom: “the irony of this deployment is in having us believe that ‘liberation’ is in the balance.” (Foucault 1978: 159) I would extend this further and state that, as our freedom is restricted by the significance we place on certain differences, that the most restricting difference in terms of our thought is that between freedom and non-freedom. That is to say, it is precisely the idea of freedom that causes us to be restricted because we think in terms of an abstract standard of freedom that bears no relation to unrestricted thought or action.

We fundamentally cannot be free of the significance of differences, save by ignoring or forgetting that we ever perceived such a difference, and even this does not free us from the unconscious machinations of power. The specific dialectic between confession and silence is so fundamental to our post-Christian ontology that it will not be simply unseated through philosophy – especially as philosophy is a confession in and of itself. It is only through unconscious or non-conceptual action that we can at all be “free” of the restricting influences of power dynamics. Perhaps we should turn to silence, a non-action, or Foucault’s “bodies and pleasures” (Foucault 1978: 159). However, what is most restricting is our desire for liberation, as though freedom from social influence was something desirable, or for that matter, even possible. We may not be able to rid ourselves of the tropes of past generations, but perhaps we may be able to rid ourselves of our neurosis of liberation. All we can do, perhaps, is to paraphrase Meister Eckhart, and beseech freedom to free us of “freedom.”

Turning the System Against Itself

2009-02-17T10:43:00.000-05:00

How do we disrupt a system of memetic structures? There seem two solutions: one, to replace it with a different system, and two, to force it into an evolutionary dead end. What I mean by this is using the memetic structure's own internal logic to force it to a point of acute absurdity, where it becomes entirely untrustworthy. Hopefully, in doing so, it will reveal the constructed (and false) nature of the memetic system, which will then fall away.

The importance of making this paradox acute cannot be underestimated. The human mind is wonderfully creative, and will find ways to stretch the system in some mode of justification. Foremost, what causes the paradox must not be something "outside" of the system, since this will merely be otherized as part of the system. This is the most challenging aspect of destructive memetics. Let us take, for example, the Scientology meme. To most, Scientology's beliefs seem absurd, and perhaps they were intentionally designed as such destructive memes. A meme thus must be very careful not to ossify even at it seeks to destroy systems, hence the "suicide-bomber" meme such as Zen or Discordianism.

But what sort of input will cause a true system dilemma? It must play upon basic aspects of humanity. Given a dilemma, morality and other such systems will temporarily be suspended, and actions will be justified in accordance with them. The dilemma must be truly serious in order to destroy morality rather than to make it a convenient system that isn't practically used. Instead, playing on the self's insecurities makes a more easily created dilemma. The seven deadly sins are perhaps the key to creating such a position: it is easy to cause crisis by bruising one's pride and vanity. However, this creates a challenge of relating it back to the system.

Both cases are difficult to make work utterly efficiently, however if they are at all effective, they will have made some sort of creative thought occur.

True Deprogramming, The Suicide-Bomber Meme, and Zen

2009-02-16T11:33:00.005-05:00

Lately I have found philosophy a relatively meaningless exercise, and have been thinking more on practical application, specifically relating to how to successfully deprogram on a large scale. This is not the "deprogramming" of the 60s and 70s, which essentially was instead a "reprogramming" to social norms. I am drawing more on the work of Robert Anton Wilson, and his ilk, who intended to help individuals "self-program", essentially giving the self control over its relationship to the world. While this is on the right track, it is still ultimately flawed (though perhaps more pragmatic)-it doesn't remove the self from the equation. Essentially, I am seeking a means of annihilation that works on a large scale, without any sort of questionable essence that prevents it from being critical.

I turn now to memetics, the study of the evolution and spread of ideas. What I desire to create is a meme (a spreading idea) that destroys other ideas, a sort of virus. There are many such memes already in existence, that propagate themselves through the destruction of other ideas (othering, conquest, etc.) However, there are few memes that also annihilate themselves and question their own premise for existance. For example, Socrates's "the unexamined life is not worth living", and Freud's assertion that all behaviors are based on neurosis except psychoanalysis. What I instead seek is what could be called a "suicide-bomber meme", one that destroys other ideas as well as itself. This meme must be able to dodge the dangers of being ossified into the sort of structure it seeks to destroy-essentially, it must posess a self-destruct button. This does not necessarilly mean the meme will cease to exist (though ideally it will), but more likely is that the meme will make its hosts aware that of its falseness.

But how to create such a meme? Perhaps we may look at the "suicide-bomber" memes that exist in today's world. Many magical and hermetic societies are essentially such memes. Their lower levels profess a sort of truth that destroys other memes and impressions, but once practitioners reach higher levels, the truth of the society is also pulled away, leaving nothing. However, such societies are highly specialized and exclusive - only a minute few actually experience the self-destructve function of the meme. Post-modern theory is also such a meme. By pointing out subjectivity and otherness in all processes of speech and thought, it must also inevitably discount itself. However, postmodern theory is caught be language - it is a linguistic activity, and thus produces little in the way of tangible results. The most succesful "suicide-bomber" meme is Zen Buddhism. Zen recognizes the ultimate insignificance of Zen practice. It tears apart all ideas, even its own ideas, into a state where the ultimate proof of action is absurdity, and practice makes no difference whatsoever. While Zen is to some degree an institution, it is institutionalized absurdity, which is absurd. Zen's ultimate fault is its ossification into a practice, but the practice has not necessarilly ruled the meme of Zen. My sneaking suspicion is that Discordianism is in fact a similar sort of meme. By its nature it is an organization about disorder. This alone makes it a meme that spreads chaos. Perhaps Discordianism's primary fault is its obvious expounding of memetics and metaphysics. Discordianism is naturally an outsider meme, and thus is not likely to spread to those who "need it". That is to say, it will spread to those already predisposed to free thought and outsider behavior.

What has not yet been succesful is a meme that spreads through all ranks of society and does not become ossified into dogma. While hermetic societies, postmodernism, Zen, and Discordianism allow chaos memes to spread in occult culture, academia, monastic groups, and counterculture respectively, none of these represent areas of social normality. Meme engineering must be able to not only spread chaos memes through those predisposed to creative thought, but also through those who are unaware of programming and the like. A meme's action does not need to be revealed or confessed in order for it to be succesful. Perhaps such memes already exist, and we do not know-the internet has allowed memes to spread at hugely accelerated rates, making memetics more and more of a relevant science day by day.

Mythology as Non-Philosophical Discourse

2009-02-03T11:02:00.004-05:00

More and more recently, I have been moving towards mythological language as the ideal means of communicating experience and other sorts of meaning. This is because mythology implies its own non-literalness, but also because it does not imply a specific philosophical meaning: it is open to interpretation in a multitude of different ways. Let us take, for example, the myth of Eris and the golden apple. What is our interpretation of such a myth? A classical Greek interpretation might see it as illustrative of the danger and disruptive power of chaos. However, the Discordian tradition re-read the same myth as a justified response to the prejudice of order against disorder. Given this interpretation, we may see the Trojan War as a descent into chaos from false order. A third interpretation might see Chaos as ultimately unconquerable and disruptive no matter what attempts are made to stop it. And these are only the most natural conclusions from the myth: there are, in fact many more possible interpretations of the myth that we might not normally view as coming from that (eg, that Eris was an alien attempting to disrupt Earth's civilizations so they will be more easily conquered.)

The Observer-Created Universe and Digital Games

2009-01-06T14:34:00.004-05:00

In Quantum Psychology Robert Anton Wilson discusses at length the observer-created universe. That is to say, a universe that is created by its interaction with the human mind. While not a solipsist (Wilson notes that while we cannot say anything definite about "deep reality" we can make probability statements), there is a lengthy discussion of the implications of Schrodinger's cat in terms of information and the observer-created universe. For those who have not encountered Schrodinger's cat, it is a postulation of an experiment in which a cat is placed in a box with a poison capsule that while degrade if triggered by a certain quantum operation that has a 50% chance at any time t. However, to any scientist observing the experiment, the cat cannot be known to be alive or dead until the box is open, and therefore informationally speaking the cat is both alive and dead until the box is opened and the uncertainty is collapsed into one of its forms. However, this only appears to the scientist conducting the experiment. Another quantum physicist, expanding the Schrodinger's cat paradox (which is only a paradox if one is committed to a universe that is not observer-created) noted that for an assistant waiting outside the lab in which the experiment is conducted, the cat is both alive and dead until the scientist in the lab tells him. The cat will be both alive and dead for a researcher in another country until she is informed, etc. (one wonders how this plays out for the cat-presumably, the cat must always be alive as it will not be an observer when it is dead). Schrodinger's experiment is an illustration not only of quantum uncertainty, but also uncertainty of information in general, and how such uncertainty is only revoked (at least for those who use data) upon direct contact with the observer. "Deep reality" is not self-manifest, it must be observed (and interpreted) for uncertainty to be collapsed into a single state.

At our time, we have created the perfect devices for understanding this relation to reality-the digital game. More specifically, choice-based games with branching possibilities such as Oblivion, Fallout 3, and Mass Effect. Each of these "games" is actually a system of possible information that rests upon the interaction of the "avatar" (the player-controlled character) with the programming of the game. This programming takes the form of systems of character advancement, inter-personal interaction, and exploration of the "world" of the game. However, at any point the game experienced by the avatar and the player is dependant on their choices and interaction with it. I will concentrated on Fallout 3 here as my prime example. One of the choices in this game may be used as a direct analogy to Schrodinger's cat: the choice of whether to defuse a bomb in one of the towns or to explode it. Until one of these two possibilities are performed, the town contains the information potential within the game to both be "alive" or "dead"-performing either of the actions causes the uncertainty of the town to collapse into survival or death for the remainder of the game. Most characters in such games posses the "death" uncertainty at any point (as do most living things, including Schrodinger's cat) that is only collapsed when they are destroyed. An encounter with a potential hostile may be similar: the avatar might either reason with them, fight them, or avoid them entirely. However, the programming of the game can create all these possibilities until one actually occurs. The ability to create "new games", that is, new approaches to the same informational uncertainty that is the game is the same as the creation of a new observer-created universe: the game's programming is the "deep reality", but it can only be revealed through interaction with the player-the observer.

Atheism:

2008-12-27T14:07:00.004-05:00

I'd like to take this opportunity to discuss a certain picture that I've stumbled across in several places on the internet:

Had enough time to soak it in? Good, we'll go through it piece by piece and see what comes up.

"Atheism: The belief". This is an amazingly interesting statement. The idea that atheism is a belief in something, rather than a disbelief in many other somethings is tenuous, to say the least. Atheism, by definition, is only the lack of belief in gods, or perhaps even merely the lack of belief in Gods (I would argue, a la Eliade, that everyone believes in gods in some form). So, atheism is a belief that is a non-belief. But what the rest of the definition implies has little to do with "atheism" proper, and more to do with atheists. While this is pragmatically correct (after all, there is no such thing as "atheism", there are only "atheists"), it is a fallacy-in fact, I find this the most troubling fallacy in this definition. What the picture seems to describe, instead of atheism, is the typical American (or perhaps Western) post-Christian atheist. That is to say, a scientific "rationalist" (which is another problematic term). This definition would not apply to many atheists (one thinks of Buddhists in particular) who do not identify as "atheists". This is really a problem of self-definition, and who defines themselves as atheists. The references to dinosaurs later also suggest this (a la evolution).

"The belief that there was nothing and nothing happened to nothing and then nothing magically exploded for no reason, creating everything and then a bunch of everything magically rearranged itself for no reason what so ever into self-replicating bits that then turn into dinosaurs". Actually, any mystic will tell you that this is exactly the same thing as any other religious belief. The problem here is the assumption of the primacy of divine reason and purpose. In fact, there is a nothing behind everything, even the deities of all religions (which is so handily pointed out in Buddhism and Hinduism). If it wasn't for the declaration of "everything" as opposed to "nothing", this would be a perfectly sensical definition of Buddhist approaches towards scientific "rationalism". If modern evangelical Christianity (which is where I assume this derives from) had a more active mystic tradition, it would realize that it is possible to postulate Void and Chaos behind even God, and that ultimately any cosmogeny is nothing interacting with itself to create everything, which is, in fact, nothing. As far as purpose goes, this is another assumption-abstract meaning is necessarry in order for something to happen. But if we can postulate Void behind everything, then there is a no-meaning behind all "meaning", a no-purpose behind all "purpose", and a no-reason behind all "reason". In fact, the problem I have with atheism is that it does not recognize the universality of Void and has no mystical means to access it (though in saying so I am attributing a non-existant essence to "atheism".) The word "magically" is of course pejorative. "Magic" is false, but it is only the flip side to "miracle". Actually, the two are interchangable to the rationalist, and it is the evangelical Christian who assumes the primacy of "miracle" above "magic". But how does any occurance in the world actually avoid being named as magic? If we can describe it by a scientific law? Hardly, such laws are always assumptive (we can never say anything perfectly accurate about reality) and do not explain causality-so scientific rationalism does not preclude either magic or miracle (hence intelligent design and double agency theories). My problem here is the assumptive need for a rational creator in order to produce reality. It is a causal theory of God, rather than an existential or ontological theory of God. It requires God as a causa sui, not only a causa sui, but an intelligent causa sui. This is human projection, and the assumption of order. It understands the universe as "ordered", and thus requires an intelligence in order to create such "order" in the same way as the human attempts to produce "order". There are several problems with this:

1: It assumes an essence to "order", rather than understanding order as subjective perception. Any conspiracy theorist shows that there are many more possible "orders" available to human perception and that there is no objective "order".
2: It ignores disorder, and focuses only on the "ordered" aspects of existence, as though they were the only significant ones. This is absurd, since "order" is actually only a fraction of the relations outside of the self-it is simply that we are more intent on the ordered ones, and therefore ignore everything else. Human subjectivity.
3: Most importantly, it assumes that "order" is the result of intelligent, rational activity. Even if we assume order, there is no guarantee that rationalism results in order and that non-intelligence results in disorder. How then, do we explain "scientific laws", "ordered" geometric patterns created by natural forces, mushrooms that grow in "fairy circles", etc.? In this case, the presumption is that "order" must have an "orderer". This is, in fact true, but the "orderer" is not God, but man. Because man views a reality he did not create that seems "ordered" he assumes that there must be something outside of himself that also sees "order", not realizing he is in fact projecting his own ideas onto the world.

"Makes perfect sense." Who said it needed to? The failiure of humanity is the assumption that things are rational and comprehendable. This is a huge, huge, huge assumption that is mostly based in wishful thinking. It is the assumption, hand in hand with the "ordered" universe, that rationalism has an essence that is applicable to reality. Richard Dawkins has stated his distaste with religion is that it says the universe is incomprehensible. This is what I appreciate about religion. In fact, my main quibble with the creator of this image is that they really should know better than to think that ultimate reality and causality is comprehensible in any way. Unfortunately, much religion has been infected by rationalism that assumes that there is a causal purpose behind reality that can be comprehended. But the universe cannot be understood and neither can divinity, which both atheists and evangelicals should do well to remember.

Contextualism, Universalism, and Focus in the Study of Myth

2008-12-15T12:35:00.006-05:00

In his discussion of situational incongruity in Map is Not Territory, Jonathan Z. Smith rejects Adolf E. Jensen’s interpretation of the Wemale myth of Hainuwele, which has been adopted as the general consensus within the field of religious studies (Smith, 1976:11), advocated by such scholars as Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade. Jensen’s interpretation interprets the myth as a description of “the origins of death, sexuality, and cultivated food plants-that is to say, as a description of human existence as distinct from ancient times” (Smith, 1978:303), an argument which Smith rejects due to its lack of representation in the text of the myth. While the arguments of Jensen, Campbell, and Eliade develop from general conceptions of archetypal myths that serve as ontology, Smith instead focuses on incongruity in a specific aspect of the myth in relation to the historical context in which it was recorded, the 1920s (Smith, 1976:11). Smith’s interpretation is historically contextual, as opposed to ontologically universal, but it still is based upon a universal approach towards myth as “a strategy for dealing with a situation” (Smith 1978: 299).

The problem ultimately revealed by the debate over the Hainuwele myth is that of universal definitions of mythology. Both Smith and the universalists approach the myth as though it had a specific meaning and purpose, failing to recognize the variability of myth among individuals due to their focus on specific aspects as the seat of meaning. In this analysis I will display the problematic nature of such an approach, and attempt to provide an alternate approach to the study of myth that avoids the same pitfalls while retaining a certain degree of interpretive power.

Universalist Interpretations

We will begin with the universalist approach to the myth as formed by Jensen, and further developed by Campbel. This approach treats the myth of Hainuwele as a subset of myth in general, whose purpose is generally locative. For Jensen, the “psychological potential” required to create ideas of deities “constituted the human ability to experience the divine content of the phenomenological world” (Jensen, 1963:102). Myths must in some way represent the relation of man to the “essence of reality” (67), otherwise they would be illogical and therefore not exist. Similarly, for Campbell, “mythology is an organization of images conceived as a rendition of the sense of life” (1969:179) In both cases, myth is ultimately a tool for man to locate himself in relation to the world and the cosmos. They describe in terms of deities the nature of the universe in such a way as to make it intelligible.

For Jensen, myth is also based on a certain picture of time, “the assumption of a fundamental dissimilarity between the primeval and the present condition” (Jensen, 69). Thus, myth must describe a change that caused the nature of the world as it exists today. We may compare this to Eliade’s notion of illo tempore, the time of beginnings in which the world was shaped, and that man’s rituals are an attempt to return to this era of divine presence and activity (Eliade, 1957:94).

Within this temporal and ontological conception of myth, the Hainuwele myth stands as a subtype-in fact, Jensen identifies a specific type of myth as the “Hainuwele mythologem” (Jensen, 108). The Hainuwele mythologem describes a god (which Jensen designates as Dema-deity) who is killed, their body then becoming a plant that provides some sort of benefit to humanity, almost exclusively a tuber of some sort. The myth takes place in mythological time, when “not men, but Dema” lived on earth, and the Dema-deity is murdered, causing the end of mythological time. Jensen describes that “main point” of the myth is the turning of Dema into men, “mortal and propagating” (167). Satene punishes man for the murder by transforming him into his current form (the “Fivers” and “Niners”) as well as animals, and thus he enters into the realm of death and sex. Jensen’s interpretation of the myth ultimately is also connected to tuber-growing cultures, as opposed to grain-growing cultures, whose food myth is instead one of theft – the “Prometheus mythologem” (108). There is something in the essential quality of tubers that cause their myths to differ from those of grains, so much so that tuber theft stories must have descended from grain stories (109).

Campbell ignores this distinction between grain and tubers to concentrate on the mythological significance of plants, which are linked to the moon “which also dies and is resurrected” (Campbell, 180). The myth is tied to rituals of sacrifice, which in part imitate the life cycle of the plant, sacrifice in order to produce new life (178). In this way, the myth of Hainuwele is seen as archetypal of this insight: the murder of the god produces life in the form of tubers. Campbell further relates the sacrificial aspect of Dema-deity cults to the rites of the Greek goddess Persephone. Persephone’s descent into the underworld is accompanied by a barrenness of the earth, and thus sacrifices to Persephone are an attempt to restore agricultural life. Campbell notes that the sacrifices to Persephone are either pigs or grain formed into the shape of humans, and that these rites may have been derived from a common root with the cannibalistic rituals of Dema-deities, replacing human sacrifice with animal and grain sacrifice (185). Campbell also ties the Hainuwele myth to the same “Fall” narrative as Jensen. In this case, the reference is to the Book of Genesis where the myth is represented “in inverted order, Cain’s murder of Abel following, instead of preceding, our first parents’ easting of the fruit” (182).

Both Campbell and Jensen tie the Hainuwele myth to ultimately ontological aspects of human perception. Myths are used to explain the relation of man to life and death. To a certain degree, these interpretations are derived from a comparison to similar myths with more explicit themes, such as the Genesis “Fall” narrative, and sacrificial customs from other Dema-deity societies. For Jensen, the Hainuwele myth shows the fall of man to mortality through original murder as well as the origin of tubers. For Campbell, the myth explains the mysterious nature of resurrecting plant life, and provides a template for the restoration of life through sacrifice. In both cases, however, these explanations are universal: the myth may be seen as applicable to any individual at any period in time, since what is viewed in the myth is ultimately the grandest of human concerns: life, death, and sexuality.

J.Z. Smith and Incongruity

J.Z. Smith, unlike the universalists, does not appeal to broad categories of human myth for his interpretation of the Hainuwele myth. Smith’s definition of myths as “strategies” used in interpretation does not remove him from an ontological interpretation of myth. However, in Smith, this interpretation is more related to creative problem solving than metaphorical theology. He criticizes viewing myth as either “false” or “possessing another kind of truth”, as their views both “take the primitive’s myths literally, and believe him to do the same” (1978:297). To do so, argues Smith, is ultimately Othering if we ourselves could not believe in the same myth, and defines the “primitive” as ultimately not “like us”. Instead, Smith emphasizes “incongruity” as fundamental to myth, stating that the difference between what is expected and what occurs is “a vehicle for religious experience” (301).
Before giving his own interpretation of the Hainuwele myth, Smith critiques the view as stated by Jensen. Though he does find the theme of creative murder important in the general type of the myth (307), he ultimately disagrees with the interpretation of the killing of Hainuwele as a “Fall”:

I find no hint in the text that sexuality or death is the result of Hainuwele’s murder nor that the cultivation of plants are solely the consequence of her death (303).

He qualifies this by stating that “death and sexuality are already constitutive of human existence in the very first line of the text”, citing the connection of bananas to both sexuality and death in the myths of the Wemale (304). Furthermore, states Smith, “the killing of Hainuwele does not represent a rupture with an ancestral age”, but rather “her presence among men disrupts traditional, native society” (307).

This stands at the crux of Smith’s interpretation of the myth. What is important, he states, is what naturally arouses our sense of incongruity. In this case, what stands out is Hainuwele’s defecation of valuable objects, to which both the academic and the mythological participants relate: “they thought this thing mysterious…and plotted to kill her” (304). Smith relates this incongruous aspect of the myth to “cargo cults” in the same region as the Wemale, and more specifically in relation to the influence of the Dutch in the Moluccas (306) The manufactured goods that make up Hainuwele’s excrement are likened to the problem of an exchange society interacting with a society that does not “make” their own money (305). Smith concludes:

The Ceramese myth of Hainuwele…does not solve the dilemma, overcome the incongruity or resolve the tension. Rather it provides the native with an occasion for thought. It is a testing of the adequacy and applicability of native categories to new situations and data (307).

Smith’s interpretation of the myth of Hainuwele does not come to a conclusion of specific meaning, but rather produces a general moment of incongruity that leads to creative interaction with the myth given its social and historical context.

Purpose and Focus in the Interpretation of Myth

The varying interpretations of the Hainuwele myth results from a problem of what I will refer to as “focus”, to tangentially borrow a metaphor from Wendy Doniger. Doniger refers to contextual and universal approaches to interpreting myth as “microscopes” and “telescopes” respectively, which may provide either a “close up” or a “wide angle” on the subject (Doniger, 1998:8). While Doniger’s metaphor aptly describes the varying ranges of view used by comparative mythologists, it is important to not only describe what range of things we are seeing, but also to describe what within that range is most clear. Therefore, within either a microscopic or telescopic approach to myth, we must be wary as to what specific aspect of the myth draws our attention. This aspect is our “focus”. The Buddha told a parable of five blind men who encountered an elephant, and each touched a different part of it. The man touching its stomach said “an elephant is like a wall”, the man touching his legs said “an elephant is like a tree”, and so on, each arguing fervently that an elephant is exclusively equivalent to their perception of it. The parable ends with the arrival of an enlightened man, who tells the blind men that they are all, in fact, correct. The problem of focus is not one of what is emphasized, but rather what is left out. For example, Smith’s analysis entirely ignores last portion of the Hainuwele myth, in which the goddess Satene leaves the earth and humanity is turned into animals. Similarly, Eliade’s interpretation of the same myth completely ignores the defecation that seems to be at the center of Smith’s arguments (Eliade, 1963: 103).

Focus is formed not only by our natural interest, but also by assumptions made in approaching a subject. Although Smith’s interpretation of the Hainuwele myth is located in a social and historical context, it still develops from a universalistic definition of myth in general. By defining myth as a “strategy” using incongruity in order to encourage creative thought, Smith has reduced the myth to a single aspect: the defecation of valuables. While this is not Smith’s objection to the interpretation of the myth by Jensen, it is important to fulfill what Smith is ultimately attempting in his re-definition of myth. If Smith’s critique of universalist interpretations of myth stems from their viewing of myth as necessarily believed to be true, Smith starts from the assumption that it cannot be true. If it were true, would the relation of the defecation to Dutch trade goods still be the primary locus of meaning within the myth? This is not to say that the application of incongruity made by Smith is incorrect, rather that its exclusivity is troubling if we really are supposed to view the Wemale as “like us”. We would not make the assumption that a well-written novel has a single theme of importance beyond all others, why should we make it of the myth of Hainuwele?

We also may see this occurring in Jensen’s and Campbell’s interpretations of the myth. The assumption of both is that myth necessarily is a matter of relating to the nature of the cosmos. Hence, what is focused on within their analyses are factors that lead to the reading of the myth in terms of universal human themes: that is to say, those which may be applied to any individual regardless of culture. In doing so, the universalists have removed any sort of focus that would draw attention to those parts of the myth unique to the Wemale. The interpretation of the myth must draw on the Genesis narratives of Cain and Abel and the Greek myth of Persephone in order to be “universalized” to something applicable to a general human populous.

Another problem raised by a specific approach to myth is that of “purpose”. That is to say, the assumption that there is a definite causality behind the creation of a myth that attempts to deal with a specific problem. For the universalists, this assumption is one of ontological location, whereas Smith assumes myth’s purpose to be a relation to modern situations. These assumptions are of a great magnitude, since they assume the process of myth-making to be a singular sort of activity with a singular goal. In fact, the communal nature of myth makes this a very unlikely prospect. The idea of a single meaning to a myth ignores the fact that it is not “possessed” by one individual, but rather by one or more societies. It seems somewhat patronizing to assume that there is a specific homogeneity of meaning across all the members of these societies. Rather, it seems more likely that every individual within a group will have a slightly different take on the same story. The myth of Hainuwele for example, may be a meaningful ontological statement to one member of the Wemale, and for another a pure fabrication that relates to the difficulties encountered with colonial mercantile powers. It is not that either one of these is the “correct” meaning of the myth; rather both have the potential to be correct. This, of course, raises the thorny issue of whether an interpretation of an outsider to the culture may be considered to be correct. I will not attempt to answer this question here, only suggest that “correct” definitions of a myth within a society may reasonably be limited by knowledge available to that society. For example, it seems unlikely that the myth of Hainuwele is a response to First World War.

This social and pluralist interpretation of myth requires a new definition. Myth cannot be a singular type of entity, but rather any sort of expression that has the possibility of behaving in this manner. For example, Roland Barthes’ definition of myth was, despite its pejorative nature, one that recognized myth in perception, rather than intent. However, even such a definition defines myth as “something”, which naturally causes an analysis of myth to focus on those aspects that define it as myth. I will not suggest that scholars attempt to stand outside the definition of myth for, were this even possible, any interpretive act will still be colored by the viewpoint of its creator. I would rather suggest a cataphatic approach to myth, one that uses a plurality of definitions in order to create a plurality of interpretations.

It is not that any of these interpretations are necessarily wrong, or contradictory, but rather that the idea that there is one “correct” interpretation of a myth requiring the right focus is faulty. Rather, like the blind men and the elephant, each different interpretation of the same myth can be complimentary in building a larger picture of the myth’s meaning. While it seems unlikely that an enlightened man will appear to tell comparative mythologists that they are all correct, each individual piece of the interpretive puzzle places us one step closer to a complete (though completely impossible) understanding of the myth.

Conclusion

The interpretations of the myth of Hainuwele as proposed by Adolf E. Jensen, Joseph Campbell, and Jonathan Z. Smith illustrate the difficulty that confronts the scholar in the attempt to discern the “true” function of a myth. While both suggestions seem valid in the context of a discussion of “myth” as an academic concept, what one is ultimately addressing in the subject of myth is a form of language that is told by societies and individuals. Because of this, we must address myth not as a bearer of abstract philosophical meaning, but rather as a living form, which interacts with human beings on an everyday basis. While this is essentially implied by the ontological interpretations of myth described by Jensen and Campbell, Smith comes closer to this idea of myth in his concept of situational incongruity.

The false suppositions that unite both Smith and the universalists are firstly, that myth has a specific purpose, and secondly, that myth is not easily mutable. Jensen writes that a “tremendous upheaval” is necessary to change myth, as it necessarily creates a “new world view” (Jensen, 65). While Smith is less absolute, he still describes the Hainuwele myth as though it had a specific date of origin (1973:14). These viewpoints both fail to recognize that myth is not a static “thing”, but rather information passed down from individual to individual, certainly opening the possibilities for change and re-interpretation.

If this is the case, we have two options. We can take the apophatic approach to the subject, and simply state the inapproachability of myth’s “true meaning”, as it is found only in individuals, and is hence never appropriable with complete accuracy, but this renders scholarship wholly pointless. Rather, we may take an approach that assigns a diversity of interpretations to a myth, in an attempt to deduce all the possible ways in which it may relate to the individuals who receive and transmit it. It is true that this process ultimately admits the inappropriateness of any single approach to myth, and will win few admirers among those who seek a universalist meaning among mankind’s various mythological creations. However, such an approach broadens our horizons to the many possibilities inherent in a single narrative. The various stresses placed on the myth of Hainuwele; excrement, death, and mankind’s “fall” all are demonstrations of different foci that lead to different interpretations. If religious scholars can produce such a plurality of views based on a single account of a myth, imagine what diversity of meanings must live in that myth’s homeland!

Appendix
The Myth of Hainuwele:

Nine families of mankind came forth in the beginning from Mount Nunusaku, where the people had emerged from clusters of bananas. And these families stopped in West Ceram, at a place known as the “Nine Dance Grounds,” which is in the jungle between Ahiolo and Varoloin.

Now there was a man among them whose name was Ameta, meaning “Dark,” “Black,” or “Night”; and neither was he married nor had he children. He went off, one day, hunting with his dog. And after a little, the dog smelt a wild pig, which it traced to a pond into which the animal took flight; but the dog remained on the shore. And the pig, swimming, grew tired and drowned, but the man, who had arrived meanwhile, retrieved it. And he found a coconut on its tusk, though at the time there were no cocopalms in the world.

Returning to his hut, Ameta placed the nut on a stand and covered it with a cloth bearing a snake design, then lay down to sleep. And in the night there appeared to him the figure of a man, who said: “The coconut you must plant in the earth; otherwise it won’t grow.” So Ameta planted the coconut the next morning, and in three days the palm was tall. Again three days and it was bearing blossoms. He climbed the tree to cut the blossoms, from which he wished to prepare himself a drink, but as he cut he slashed his finger and the blood fell on a leaf. He returned home to bandage his finger and in three days came back to the palm to find that where the blood on the leaf had mingled with the sap of the cut blossom the face of someone had appeared. Three days later, the trunk of the person was there, and when he returned again in three days he found that a little girl had developed from his drop of blood. That night the same figure of a man appeared to him in dream. “Take your cloth with the snake design,” he said, “wrap the girl of the cocopalm in the cloth carefully and carry her home.”

So the next morning Ameta went with his cloth to the cocopalm, climbed the tree, and carefully wrapped up the little girl. He descended cautiously, took her home, and named her Hainuwele. She grew quickly and in three days was a nubile maiden. But she was not like an ordinary person; for when she would answer the call of nature her excrement consisted of all sorts of valuable articles, such as Chinese dishes and gongs, so that her father became very rich.

And about that time there was to be celebrated in the place of the Nine Dance Grounds a great Maro Dance, which was to last nine full nights, and the nine families of mankind were to participate. Now when the people dance the Maro, the women sit in the center and from there reach betel nut to the men, who form, in dancing, a large ninefold spiral. Hainuwele stood in the center at this Maro festival, passing out betel nut to the men. And at dawn, when the performance ended, all went home to sleep.

The second night, the nine families of mankind assembled on the second ground; for when the Maro is celebrated it must be performed each night in a different place. And once again, it was Hainuwele who was placed in the center to reach betel nut to the dancers; but when they asked for it she gave them coral instead, which they all found very nice. The dancers and the others, too, then began pressing in to ask for betel and she gave them coral. And so the performance continued until dawn, when they all went home to sleep.

The next night the dance was resumed on a third ground, with Hainuwele again in the center; but this time she gave beautiful Chinese porcelain dishes, and everyone present received such a dish. The fourth night she gave bigger porcelain dishes and the fifth, great bush knives; the sixth, beautifully worked betel boxes of copper; the seventh, golden earrings; and the eighth, glorious gongs. The value of the articles increased, that way, from night to night, and the people thought this thing mysterious. They came together and discussed the matter.

They were all extremely jealous that Hainuwele could distribute such wealth and decided to kill her. The ninth night, therefore, when the girl was again placed in the center of the dance ground, to pass out betel nut, the men dug a deep hole in the area. In the innermost circle of the great ninefold spiral the men of the Lesiela family were dancing, and in the course of the slowly cycling movement of their spiral they pressed the maiden Hainuwele toward the hole and threw her in. A loud, three voiced Maro Song drowned out her cries. They covered her quickly with earth, and the dancers trampled this down firmly with their steps. They danced on till dawn, when the festival ended and the people returned to their huts.

But when the Maro festival ended and Hainuwele failed to return, her father knew that she had been killed. He took nine branches of a certain bushlike plant whose wood is used in the casting of oracles and with these reconstructed in his home the nine circles of the Maro Dancers. Then he knew that Hainuwele had been killed in the Dancing Ground. He took nine fibers of the cocopalm leaf and went with these to the dance place, stuck them one after the other into the earth, and with the ninth came to what had been the innermost circle. When he stuck the ninth fiber into the earth and drew it forth, on it were some of the hairs and blood of Hainuwele. He dug up the corpse and cut it into many pieces, which he buried in the whole area about the Dancing Ground-except for the two arms, which he carried to the maiden Satene: the second of the supreme Dema-virgins of West Ceram. At the time of the coming into being of mankind Satene had emerged from an unripe banana, whereas the rest had come from ripe bananas; and she now was the ruler of them all. But the buried portions of Hainuwele, meanwhile, were already turning into things that up to that time had never existed anywhere on earth-above all, certain tuberous plants that have been the principal food of the people ever since.

Ameta cursed mankind and the maiden Satene was furious at the people for having killed. So she built on one of the dance grounds a great gate, consisting of a ninefold spiral, like the one formed by the men in the dance; and she stood on a great log inside this gate, holding in her two hands the two arms of Hainuwele. Then, summoning the people, she said to them: “Because you have killed, I refuse to live here any more: today I shall leave. And so now you must all try to come to me through this gate. Those who succeed will remain people, but to those who fail something else will happen.”

They tried to come through the spiral gate, but not all succeeded, and everyone who failed was turned into either an animal or a spirit. That is how it came about that pigs, deer, birds, fish, and many spirits inhabit the earth. Before that time there had been only people. Those, however, who same through walked to Satene; some to the right of the log on which she was standing, others to the left; and as each passed she struck him with one of Hainuwele’s arms. Those going left had to jump across five sticks of bamboo, those to the right, across nine, and from these two groups, respectively, were derived the tribes known as the Fivers and the Niners. Satene said to them: “I am departing today and you will see me no more on earth. Only when you die will you again see me. Yet even then you shall have to accomplish a very difficult journey before you attain me.”

And with that, she disappeared from the earth. She now dwells on the mountain of the dead, in the southern part of West Ceram, and whoever desires to go to her must die. But the way to her mountain leads over eight other mountains. And ever since that day there have been not only men but spirits and animals on earth, while the tribes of men have been divided into the Fivers and the Niners. (Campbell, 173-176, quoting Jensen)

Julian of Norwich and Spiritual Politics

2008-12-14T22:01:00.002-05:00

In May of 1373, a thirty year old woman lay ill, convinced she was upon her deathbed. Instead, she received a series of visions in which she witnessed heaven and heard the voice of God. This woman was Julian of Norwich, and she documented these experiences in her Revelations of Divine Love. However, Revelations does not exist as a single text; rather, two versions are known to modern medievalists. The first is a brief documentation of the experience known as the S, or short text. The second is a more deeply theological piece of writing, nearly six times as massive as the S text-the L, or long text. But what caused these two divergent texts to emerge? Was the L text the result of progressive meditation and understanding, or does it owe its later date to the political factors of the late 14th century? What combination of personal enlightenment and spiritual politics caused these two separate descriptions of the same experience? The picture created by the setting and the execution of the two texts is one of both spiritual maturation and political strife. Julian’s book presents a woman both convinced of her contact with the divine and afraid of her vision’s possible implications.

The commonly accepted chronology of the two texts places the S text as the earlier of the two, a swift documentation of Julian’s experiences in their immediate wake. The L text, on the other hand, identifies itself as the result of a lengthy contemplation of the experience, as the parable of the lord servant evidences, “for it was nearly twenty years later before she understood this example fully.” (Julian 115) So long as we believe this statement, the L text cannot have emerged earlier than 1393. A similar late revelation is mentioned in Julian’s discussion of love as the ultimate message behind her visions, as “fifteen years and more later I received an answer.” (179) These aspects of the text are absent in its S version, suggesting the shorter text was written before Julian’s later spiritual enlightenments. In fact, it is entirely possible that Julian intended the S text to be the final version, and only wrote the L text after her further insights in 1388 and 1393. One argument contests that the earlier text possesses a more striking experiential quality, taking care to note such details as her physical orientation, “I felt I wanted to be supported in a sitting position” (44) details of which are noticeably absent in the L text. Such details thus suggest Julian’s more detailed memory of otherwise insignificant aspects that are absent in the more theological L text. In this estimation, the S text is to be seen as earlier due to its more complete descriptions of Julian’s experiences, which must have been fresh in her memory.

However, such an analysis ignores two aspects of the L text that show more detailed expressions of the visions. The first of these is Julian’s description of the bruised face of Christ:

S text: our Lord looked into his side, and gazed, and said these words...’see how I let my side be opened and my heart be riven in two, and all the blood and water that was within flow out. And this makes me happy, and I want it to make you happy.’ Our Lord revealed this to make us glad and joyful. (20)

L text: Then, with a glad face, our Lord looked into his side, and gazed rejoicing; and with his dear gaze he led his creature’s understanding through the same wound into his side. And then he revealed a beautiful and delightful place which was large enough for all mankind who shall be saved to rest there in peace and love. And with this he brought to mind the precious blood and water which he allowed to pour out completely for love. And in this dear vision he showed is sacred heart quite riven in two. (76)

In this instance, what is presumed to be the later text describes in greater detail the same image than was written when it was “fresh in mind”! In addition, three aspects of Julian’s visions are addressed in the L text that are completely absent from the S version: Julian’s vision of Hell, (87) her sight of the soul in the body, (148) and most significantly, the parable of the lord and servant. (115)

This last vision is described with more detail that any other passage in either manuscript, down the color and condition of the clothes of the lord and servant:

His clothing was a white tunic, unlined, old and all spoilt, stained with the sweat of his body, tight-fitting and short on him, only reaching about a hand’s breadth below the knee, threadbare, looking as if it would soon be worn out – in rags and tatters. (120)

Not only is this highly specific portion of Julian’s visions absent from the S text, but it also serves as the center of the theological insights in the L text: it is the longest of the text’s eighty-six chapters, and details specifically the relation between God, humanity, and love. If any passage within the text suggest an extended meditation upon the contents of the visions, this is it. While the absence of these pieces from the S text does not place the L text as an earlier version of the Revelations, it does suggest that there are other factors to the exclusion of these portions of experiences from the S text.

The most obvious explanation has already been addressed-that is, the meditation of Julian upon the experience. Certainly, the L text shows a theological depth unlike the S text. Of the additional sixty-one chapters the long text possesses, nearly all concentrate on developing greater theological understanding from the experiences described in the S text. This alone should suggest that the L text is a later expansion of Julian’s understanding based on her revelations in 1388 and 1393. It might be suggested that her vision of the parable occurred after the revelation in 1373. However, the account of the parable is contained within Julian’s discussion of the sixteen revelations which presumably end in 1373. After her description of the torments following the sixteenth revelation Julian notes: “it was all over and I saw no more.” (155) But is there something more at stake in Julian’s theology? Do the content of her revelations put her in jeopardy in relation to medieval notions of femininity, religion, and Church orthodoxy?

Most obvious in the problems facing Julian is that of her femininity. Presumably, Julian was a nun, which granted her a certain degree of education above that of the average medieval woman (Watkins 176), though this is not certain, as we know little of Julian outside of the texts of the Revelations. As Watkins notes, monastic (and particularly ascetic) life was one of the few places in which medieval women could enjoy some degree of authority (183)-it being largely denied to them in the political bodies both of governments and the church. At the same time, a certain degree of humility was required of female authors, causing either gratuitous self-effacement, or extreme rationalism (190). Julian practices both of these, but they are much more predominant is the S text. Julian describes herself as “a woman, ignorant, weak, and frail.” (Julian 11) Watkins also notes that Julian does not adopt paradoxical and often unsubstantiated statements of male mystics such as Meister Eckhart, instead delving meaning from her visions through logical process. (Watkins 190)

On the other hand, Watkins notes the comparative absence of language designating Julian as female in the L text which, “aided by Julian’s assumed masculine name, would have passed as a man’s.” (188) This argument suffers from the assumption that Julian was utterly unknown in the time of her life. Firstly, an apparent warning of celebrity appears in not only the L text, (Julian 53) but the S text as well, (10) stating that “I am not good because of the showing.” Such a statement may have been an attempt to dissuade the praise of Julian as a holy figure that could have spread even before the writing of the S text. Julian’s celebrity may also be shown through her mention in the writings of Margery Kempe. (192) In either case, it is unlikely that Julian’s writings would be unrecognized as belonging to her, a celebrated female mystic, and therefore it seems unlikely that she would attempt to hide her gender for the purposes of obscuring her identity. It is more likely that such an obscuration is a purposeful use of language to provide the universalist sentiment favored by Julian. In asking God for specific answers, she learns “it honours God more to have knowledge of everything in general than to take pleasure in any one thing in particular.” (25) Perhaps, then, Julian’s genderless L text is a more complete attempt to remove specificities from her theological ontology.

Julian’s femininity also placed her in peril in her specific timeframe, that is, late 14th century England. Her unique predicament arises from the politics of religion specific to this time and place, most specifically the heresy of the Lollards. The Lollards were a religious group that rejected the iconography of the Church, preferring a more austere and simplistic approach to Christianity. As well as shunning icons and statues, they also encouraged discussion of theology in the vernacular, as well as placing women in preaching positions. (Watson 665) As a female theologian writing in the vernacular, such a heretical movement would have posed great difficulties for Julian. In the early passages of the S text (which are notably missing in the L text) she declares:

I firmly believed in all the torments of Christ as Holy Church reveals and teaches them, and also in the paintings of crucifixes that are made by God’s grace (Julian 3)

Such a passage displays a certain familiarity with the dispute surrounding the teaching of the Lollards, and Julian’s steadfast compliance with church policy on the issue. (Watson 659) Watson notes that full persecution of the Lollards did not begin until 1382, when the Blackfriars council expressed disapproval of John Wycliffe’s teachings. (664) This suggests to him that the cautious rhetoric of the S text must have been conscious of such a problem-hence, he argues, the S text must have been written (or completed) after 1382. However, such a tense liturgical environment may have kept Julian from publishing the more revolutionary L text during the late 14th century.

Julian takes extreme care in such distinctions outside of the issue of iconography as well. In both texts her discussions of sin are given with disclaimers regarding the teachings of the Church. (Julian 24, 115) Julian seems intensely aware of the possible predicaments caused by misinterpretations of her text, and at the end of the L version she states:

I pray to almighty God that this book come only into the hands of those who want to love him faithfully, and to those who are willing to submit themselves to the faith of Holy Church….And beware that you do not take one thing according to your taste and fancy and leave another, for that is what heretics do. (180)

Thus, Julian has opposed her teaching to that which is heretical and that which opposes the Church, placing herself aligned with its authority.

While this may be a simple matter in the case of the issues raised by the Lollards, such an excuse is still incomplete in addressing Julian’s revelations on the subjects of sin and hell. The first of these is briefly discussed in the S text, (22) while the second is completely absent until the L text:

I desired…to have a complete vision of hell and purgatory. But it was not my intention to put to the test anything which belongs to our faith – for I firmly believed that hell and purgatory have the purpose taught by Holy Church – but my idea was that I might have seen them so that I could learn everything belonging to my faith…But for this desire I could learn nothing about it. (87)

In the words of Queen Gertrude, “the lady doth protest too much.” While the limited description present in the L text might otherwise suggest a failing of Julian’s vision, this clumsy disclaimer-and the absence of this vision in the S text-place Julian’s description of hell under suspicion. Why does Julian take such care to absolve herself of attempting to undermine Church doctrine if there is not something in her vision that suggests a hell fundamentally different from Church teaching? The implication is that Julian’s vision is that of an empty hell, one that contradicts church teaching of damned souls. This is stated more explicitly in Julian’s immediate response to God’s statement that “all shall be well”:

Holy Church teaches me to believe that all these shall be condemned everlastingly to hell. And given all this, I though it impossible that all manner of things should be well,…I received no other answer in showing from our Lord God but this: ‘What is impossible to you is not impossible to me. I shall keep my word in all things and I shall make all things well.” (86)

Once again, the implication seems to be that God will deliver all from hell. Julian is quick to state her allegiance to Church belief, but this is left as a paradox, “I was not drawn by it from a single detail of faith which Holy Church teaches us to believe.” (87) In either case, it is left unexplained by Julian, perhaps in the hopes that it will be taken as a mystery.

While the revelation of love and the late understanding of the parable of the lord and servant may place Julian’s L text as late due to further meditations upon the visions, it is just as likely that it was written later due to its controversial theological content that could have labeled Julian as heretical. At the time S was written, Julian may not have been comfortable describing her vision of hell, not being able to account for it in the structure of Catholic dogma, and this was only clarified during her insights in 1388 or 1393. It seems unlikely that her femininity was the prime reason behind her reticence, though it certainly would complicate her position if she presented a heretical position.

Perhaps the L text was never released during Julian’s lifetime-the only surviving manuscript of the S manuscript dates from 1413, (3) but if the L manuscript was available at that date, would it not have been published in its stead? (Lawlor 256) Lawlor concludes that the text must have existed in some form by 1413, and thus it is most likely that Julian did not make the text-in whatever state it existed-known to the general public. Watson notes that the descriptions of Julian’s thought found in her 1415 conversations with Margery Kempe, which “sound not unlike paraphrased portions of the Revelation, especially its later chapters.” (Watson 681) If we take these pieces of evidence together, they suggest that the L text was not made known until at least 1415, and possibly later. Another possibility is that of a posthumous publication-that the L text was not discovered until after Julian’s death and then released. However, it seems likely that Julian herself either did not desire the text published in her lifetime, or did not consider the L text finished, despite its rather formal ending passages. (Julian 179)

The two texts that exist under the same title-Revelations of Divine Love, seem to be products of a woman who was concerned with her involvement in the spiritual politics of her day-and somewhat afraid of its ramifications for her visions. It should be noted that Julian’s initial reaction to her visions is a belief that “I had been delirious today,” (32) and perhaps this may be a result of the unorthodox theology revealed to her concerning sin and hell. While Julian is reassured by the voice of God, (34) one can sense in the Revelations her general anxiety at what appears to be a paradox-a contradiction between her personal visions and God’s teachings. While Julian leaves this tension ultimately unresolved, following God’s cue that “all shall be well”, the texts she produces and the history surrounding them says otherwise. If the little we know surrounding the conditions of Julian’s life proves of any value, it is to suggest that the L text was not publicly known until 1415, perhaps later. Julian’s fear to contradict or challenge Church doctrine may be seen as a result of an unstable liturgical climate, a personal hesitance, or an awareness of her already tenuous place as a woman in medieval society. However, in any case, that theological content of the L text also suggests that it is a result not only of spiritual politics, but also of deep theological meditation.

New Age Appropriation, Modern Alienation and the Temporal Other

2008-12-13T18:08:00.004-05:00

How does the “New Age” movement relate to the past? As a countercultural phenomenon, “New Age” distances itself from mainstream histories and symbols, choosing to focus instead on that which is foreign both geographically and temporally. The effectiveness of its spiritual symbolisms in part derives from their otherness, as they represent what is mysterious and fascinating to their practitioners. But if the “New Age” is a perrennialist movement (as many would attest) what is the necessity of such symbols to its construction? Why are foreign and esoteric influences so prevalent in the articulations of these spiritualities? Why do the millennial portions of the “New Age” rely on ancient prophecy for their authority?

What we see in the “New Age” movement is not a purely futurist orientation, but rather one that seeks to be wholly Other from mainstream religious worlds. What is expressed by alternative spirituality is a distaste and rejection of the spatial and temporal consciousness of what are predominantly Judeo-Christian societies. The “New Age” movement draws its symbols and themes from both nostalgia and futurism due a fundamental alienation with modern religious movements and temporal constructions. They are responses to what Mircea Eliade calls “the terror of history” (2005:161), a feeling of meaninglessness due to an unsanctified modernity. “New Age” spirituality sacralizes itself through relation to symbol sets that have already been sanctified, due to their history and cultural otherness.

What is the “New Age Movement”?

In examining the “New Age” as a subculture, we must possess a certain understanding of what we are discussing. Understanding what we mean when we say “New Age” is especially important due to its lack of a distinct definition. “New Age” is not a specific organization, or even group of organizations, but a general term for a diverse number of beliefs and practices. It would be a mistake to identify membership in a group as necessary to qualify an individual as a “New Ager”. Paul Heelas estimate that the percent of “New Agers” belonging to a related organization may be as little as five to ten percent (1996:38).

What then is “New Age”, if not an organization? John Bloch identifies it as an “informal spiritual movement” (1998:38), one focused primarily on the self. (29) Heelas expands this, characterizing its essential characteristic as “self-spirituality”, an ontology based on experience and the self as the ultimate determiner of what is perceived of as real. This “self-spirituality” is opposed to mainstream culture, which is thought to have “brainwashed” the individual, who then becomes “self limiting” (1996: 18). The self is also often identified with divinity in some form. (35) Because of this, “New Age” emphasizes spiritual growth as a means of realizing a “true self”. Michael York shares this emphasis on personal experience, citing the importance of “radical mystical transformation” (1995:39). Similarly, Adam Possamai observes certain aspects of “New Age” ontology: “the self as authority”, “radical subjectivism”, and practitioners as “technical mystics” (2005: 22-23). The individualist aspect of “New Age” places it contrary to dogmatic tradition, and hence as “spirituality” as opposed to “religion”. Indeed, one of the concerns of many “New Agers” is that the movement will ossify into a religious or dogmatic structure. (Bloch, 93)

York also describes “New Age” in terms of its constituent factors, a “blend of pagan religions, Eastern philosophies, and occult-psychic phenomena” (1995: 34), as well as practicing “all things alternative-mystical religion, mind expansion, meditation, and healing” (37). Possamai abandons the term “New Age” entirely, instead choosing to classify such spiritual movements under the heading of “perennism”, whose three defining aspects are “monism, the human potential ethic, and spiritual knowledge (or gnosis)” (2005: 49). Perennism is an attempt both to remove the problematic term of “New Age” and to create a more stable philosophical description by which to classify alternative spiritualities. Both York and Possamai’s definitions are attempts to organize what is ultimately an eclectic movement, in which individuals pick and choose specific aspects on which to focus. The individual nature of both “New Age” and perennism account for a larger underlying ontology, whose individual itinerations often will contradict each other.

One important classificatory contrast that is noted by several scholars is the division between “New Age” and neo-pagan ideologies. Possamai identifies both as forms of perrenism: neo-paganism being “anti-modern” whereas “New Age”, described as “Aquarian perennism” valorizes “the future and progress” (13). Neo-paganism is more explicitly based on traditions such as witchcraft and Norse mythology (York, 124). Neo-paganism sees itself as a more balanced practice, being more materialistic, ritualistic and community-oriented in contrast to the spiritual individualism of “New Age” (147). In addition, it includes aspects of dark and harmful spirits not found in “New Age”, which centers on a worldview entirely composed of “goodness and light” (167). However, there is a significant crossover between the two movements, as both utilize countercultural spiritual practices and often contain similar subject matter (162).

The problem of definition is made more complicated as even those who belong to “New Age” organizations are unlikely to use the term to describe themselves, considering it to be either ambiguous or pejorative (Possamai, 40) The term carries with it connotations of both an overly consumerist culture and a highly superficial (and lazy) form of spirituality (42). Not subtracting from the problems is the ambiguous defining power the term: it may be used to identify a group of practitioners including Zen Buddhists, psychics, spiritualists, diviners, and magicians (14). Many simply dislike being labeled (Bloch, 36) and hence do not identify with any organization of their beliefs and practices. Ultimately, we must recognize that “New Age” is not a term of self-identification, but a colloquial term that carries with it issues of power through definition. We may appropriate it as a scholarly term, but we must recognize that it ultimately can only be used generally to analyze a varied group of practices.

For the purposes of this analysis, I will use “New Age” as a general term for alternative spiritualities, loosely following Possamai’s perennist model. This analysis does not intend to make claims about a “New Age movement” as a specific entity, but rather as an archetypal “alternative spirituality” that is practiced in various eclectic fashions. What are seen are only general trends among figures that can be classified similarly in regards to their countercultural spiritualities. However, the conclusions that result from this analysis will locate “New Age” as a specific type of spiritual and countercultural project in modern society. Essentially, “New Age” is collection of individualistic alternative spiritual practices that derive their symbology and ontology from various sources outside of the mainstream social and religious dialogue.

New Age Appropriation of Symbology, and the “Mystic Other”

If one were to walk into a store that would be classified as “New Age”, one would find a large selection of items representing varying traditions from all corners of the globe. Buddhas from China, statues of Hindu deities, tarot decks and magical apparatus descended from European occult traditions, herbs used by Native American shamans, books describing the spirituality of nearly every religious tradition. What is important here is what is not represented: namely, mainline Judeo-Christian traditions. It should be noted that all the examples used in this analysis come from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, in which Christianity, especially Protestant Christianity, is the norm. Hence, what we see represented in the shop’s merchandise are traditions fundamentally other to the mainstream religious culture of the society in which New Age operates. Nearly all symbols associated with New Age spiritual practice are hence appropriated from sources foreign to its general culture.

We may find appropriated symbols in two forms related to spiritual practice. The first of these is in physical or conceptual appropriation of symbols, such as the use of mandellas (Bloch, 74) or emphasis on theological concepts such as karma (York, 76). The second of these is the appearance of appropriated symbols in religious experiences, such as a mystical experience identified with Native American spirit quests (Bloch, 108). While it is easy to identify appropriation within the first category, the perceived inviolability of experience seems to prevent us from identifying appropriation within it. However, it should be noted that experience does not exist outside of context, and even if a mystical experience is perceived to be “pure”, this does not prevent it from being interpreted through a symbol system of appropriation. For example, one practitioner recalls evoking “an energy that I later identified as the Goddess of Ishtar…At least that’s how I identified it” (71). What we see here is that interpretation is not necessarily inherent in experience, and that the practitioner fundamentally asserts his place in the creation of meaning for the vision. Hence, New Age is fully able to use experiences that may or may not be inherently related to foreign symbol sets in an appropriative context.

New Age symbolism draws from a diverse number of foreign traditions. Perhaps most prevalent are Hindu and Buddhist influences. In addition to concepts such as karma and ritual mandalas, one highly prevalent concept is that of chakras, points of energy in the body that must be ritually cleansed (Bloch, 55). Meditation also plays a large role in many descriptions of spiritual practice. Native American symbology is also highly prevalent, including divinatory “medicine cards” (94), sweat lodges (77), and appeals to shamanic tradition (York, 164). Certain groups identify themselves with Native Americans, most significantly the “Rainbow Tribe”, whose rituals are based on Native American practices. (Aldred, 2000: 331). Other foreign symbols often appropriated include voodoo (Bloch, 15), Zen (4), and Egyptian mythology (Possamai 79).

New Age also appropriates practices and rituals based not on foreign cultures, but upon hidden or otherwise mysterious knowledge. The most well known of these are divinatory systems such as Tarot, astrology, and numerology. Such traditions derive from the occult and magical systems of Europe, and are perceived to have been created by cultural others, particularly gypsies (128). New Age spirituality is also highly influenced by groups identified as esoteric, occult, or otherwise secret. Of particular import is Swedenborg (Heelas, 17), though other significant figures include the Armenian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff (47), and Theosophist Helena Blavatsky (44). Thus, New Age is viewed, in whatever sense it is considered a movement, as a cultural descendent of these previous esoteric and mystical movements in the west, themselves practitioners of appropriation.

But why does New Age appropriation choose these symbols? Since all New Age symbols share an Otherness from mainstream religious culture, we may turn to theories of the other to explain their appeal. In a discussion of the appropriation of Native American spirituality, Lisa Aldred identifies the indigenous culture as an “exoticized Other” in relation to New Age practitioners. In addition, she describes New Age as a project of salvaging meaning from modern (perhaps post-modern?) life through “romanticizing another culture” (2000: 338). Richard King similarly links the New Age with Romanticism as two traditions in which “anti-mystical presuppositions of secular rationalism are often inverted rather than rejected” (King, 1999: 27). King also links Romanticism to the reversal of colonial Orientalist bias against Indian culture, stating, “the romantic image of India portrays Indian culture as profoundly spiritual, idealistic, and mystical” (92). What we see here in the New Age project of cultural appropriation is the valorization of the Other as superior to the mainstream culture in which it dwells, creating images such as the “mystic east”. Such an understanding emphasizes the foreignness of what is being studied in such a way as to increase its significance, to the point where its Otherness becomes a supernatural signifier.

The symbols appropriated by New Age systems are not only signified as a “mystic other” in social and geographical aspects, but also in temporal aspects. The appeal to foreign and esoteric traditions is, at the same time, an appeal to non-historical traditions. That is to say, traditions whose history is unknown, therefore allowing their origins to be shrouded in time, creating a tradition that is “ancient”. Eviatar Zerubavel has displayed how competing historical narratives attempt to place their cultural origins as temporally “first” in order to legitimize themselves (Zerubavel, 2003: 106). By aligning itself with traditions that are identified as pre-historical, New Age essentially is appealing to the ultimate primacy of its origins. In discussing Goddess traditions, one practitioner invokes the antiquity of its practice:

[A]nd the fact that there have been like paintings in caves, like statues and a lot of artifacts have been found life [sic] from twenty-five or thirty thousand years ago like that give people good reason to believe in Goddess religion with ancient humans, you know, much more than Christianity. (Bloch, 70)

This rationalization of Goddess practice clearly appeals to its comparative ancientness in relation to Christianity. Ancientness is seen as justification of spiritual authority. New Age’s appropriation of Native American, Hindu, and shamanistic symbols operates on a similar justification via the ancient.

However, this raises the problematic question of the New Age as a new social construction. If age is a justification of authority, how is a comparatively recent spiritual movement to be justified? The most simple justification supplied by New Age practitioners is in fact, that: “really it’s old age and it’s called new because they’re breaking away from the religious dogma and Christianity itself” (Possamai, 41). New Age is not in fact new, but the return to a mode of thought that is pre-Christian, and hence not related to the problems created by mainstream Christian culture. Similarly, revelations are often derived from ancient spirits such as Ramtha, a “35,000 year-old warrior from Lemuria” (Heelas, 26), who preaches New Age utopianism. Essentially, by placing its origins in the distant past, New Age movements may simultaneously display their ancient authority while at the same time being a revolutionary countercultural spirituality.

What New Age appeals to antiquity seek to avoid, then, is the historicity of modern society and Christian history, which is fraught with false rules, false dualism, and consumerism. Many practitioners express disillusionment with mainstream religion (in which many were raised), due to factors such as its “racism, patriarchal bias, and lack of attention paid to the earth” (Bloch, 17). Aldred argues that this is in fact an “alienation” due to the “horrors of modernity”, and that New Age spirituality is an attempt to appropriate other traditions to replace the shared history no longer present in modern society. (340) While Aldred sees New Age as ultimately futile consumerism, this point is ultimately moot. Whether or not New Age performs a “true” spiritual role must vary from individual to individual, but the popularity of certain appropriated symbols is evidence that they have some efficacy in generating a temporal structure that aligns the practitioner with a tradition outside of the mainstream history. The preoccupation of New Age symbology with themes deemed “ancient” is not merely a justification of its existence as a historical countercultural force, but more significantly as a spiritual movement. As we will see, New Age not only uses these appropriated traditions to construct spiritual origins of their ideas, but also to justify their models and predictions of the future.

Prophecy and Tradition: an Analysis of the “Stargate Mystery School”

The very term “New Age” suggests a movement that is not located in the past, but rather one that looks to the future. While the term has been used in many contexts, it is primarily identified with the “Age of Aquarius”, an astrological prediction of a coming era of prosperity and greater spiritual awareness (Possamai, 94). The “Age of Aquarius” is one of many New Age predictions that are essentially millennial, predicting overwhelmingly positive results. It is perhaps best described by the song that bears its name from the musical Hair:

When the moon is in the seventh house/and Jupiter aligns with Mars
Then peace will guide the planets/and love will steer the stars

As opposed to apocalyptic millennialism, the New Age sees a future of love and peace, guided by an enhancement of spiritual consciousness. York quotes actress Shirley MacLaine, who states that the New Age is “a spiritual shift in consciousness which will benefit humankind” (75).
However, it should be noted that even this futuristic vision of the New Age is, in fact, based upon “ancient wisdom”. The idea of an “Age of Aquarius” is derived from astrology, specifically from Hipparchus, who lived in the 2nd century B.C.E. (Possamai, 88), and was reintroduced to modern society through an esoteric source, the Theosophical Society (89). Once again, knowledge must come from a source in antiquity in order to be legitimated. A further justification of the ages describes their effects in the various historical time periods; for example, Jesus of Nazareth was the prophet of the “Age of Pisces”, as seen through his relation to the symbol of the fish (87). The “Age of Aquarius” is thus justified through an appropriated symbol system (astrology) that is made mystically other both socially (as a magical or occult practice) and temporally (due to its origins in ancient Greece).

The need for antiquity is also seen in appeals to other millennial prophecies. José Argüelles has written extensively on a similar new aeon to occur in 2012. While Argüelles emphasizes the need for a shift in human behavior if the change will occur properly, he does predict that:

Instead of going to a job at nine o’clock every morning, we shall prepare each day for the celebratory task of ritual sensory attunement to solar galactic pulsations. (York, 81)

Once again, the New Age is imagined as a time of increased spiritual attunement and divine presence. Like the “Age of Aquarius” the 2012 prophecy is derived from an ancient source, in this case the Mayan calendar, identifying 2012 to be the beginning of a “great cycle” (83). The 2012 prophecy follows a similar “mystical othering” to that of the “Age of Aquarius”, perhaps rendered more effective due to nature of the Maya as a more distant other in relation to the somewhat domestic astrology. Once again, a prediction about the future is rendered significant due its location in the distant past.

An excellent example of New Age millennial prophecy as located temporally may be found on the website of the “Stargate Mystery School”. A large banner with astrological symbols is displayed at the top of the page, followed by an advertisement of a seminar titled “2012 Prophecies Fulfilled”. Following this is a list of locations in Egypt and a picture of an Egyptian statue. Whether or not the ancient Egyptian sites mentioned relate to the prophecy discussed is somewhat moot, as they immediately tie the page’s symbolism to a world that is temporally other.

This temporal other will be again taken as authority in the site’s primary prophecy: “Mayan, Egyptian, Sumerian prophecy says it [stargate technology] will return by 2012”. This date is not only significant astronomically but will also “bring the birth of a new matrix and a new human”. Here again is the theme of a new age of consciousness, as “Maya prophets claimed 2012 would be a moment of new creation resulting in the transformation of our world.” The millennial prophecy appeals to ancient authority in order to justify its claims about the new aeon, which will involve the “opening of a wormhole to Heaven”, and result in “an era of spiritual initiation and awakening sparked by a new light emerging from the galactic core that will soon have a major impact on the consciousness of Earth.” These claims are further justified as “Mayan, Judeo-Christian and Templar symbol systems are loaded with stargate imagery.” What we see here is again a compilation of temporal Others used to convey mystery and authority. The Stargate Mystery School exemplifies the optimistic view of New Age millennialism justified through selective appeal to certain schools of “ancient wisdom”.

The New Age justification of prophecy as revealed through temporal Others is something of a paradox. How is a “New Age” to base itself upon ancient prophecies? What we see here is ultimately the contradictory nature of New Age symbolism. It is the use of appropriated portions of symbols of the “mystic other” in order to construct an individual spiritual ontology. It is this spiritual aspect that is key in understanding the relation of New Age millennialism to the past. While essentially looking towards the future, it is also attempting to repeat the past. The very fact that New Age derives it symbols from sources assumed to be “ancient” suggests that there is something spiritual in their estimations of the distant past. What millennialism ultimately reveals is a dissatisfaction with the current spiritual state of existence, the “Old Age” (York, 75). In the symbols and traditions of foreign nations, New Age millennialism sees worlds alive with spiritual meaning. Essentially, a spiritual reality is “not here, not now”.

We may see the New Age practitioner then as being of an Eliadan philosophy, a homo religiousus stranded in a modern world that is commercial, mechanistic, and fundamentally material. Alienated by the chaos of modern historical life, he seeks to return to a pre-historic illo tempore through imitato dei (Eliade, 1957:100), drawing his influence from those aspects of human thought that appear to be “pre-historical”. The practitioner does not follow one itineration of religion as dogma, but rather sees “religion” as imagined by Eliade: a relation of the self to a sacred cosmos. Possamai’s identification of New Age as perennism is related to both Eliade’s conception of “primitive” religion, and Aldous Huxley’s “perennial philosophy”, which “recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds” (Possamai, 49). All three ideas of “religion” see a universal essence to the various spiritual traditions of the world. However, the New Age practitioner sees this philosophy absent from his current historical location, and thus seeks either to return to pre-modern traditions that acknowledge such a divine reality, or to progress to a new spiritual era that is a reflection of these original spiritual “golden ages”. The former is more likely to concentrate on the appropriation of symbols that are temporally Other, the latter is more likely to await or help create a new spiritual aeon. However, in both cases the ultimate conflict emerges between New Age spirituality and mainstream modernity.

Conclusion

How do we address the paradox created by a counterculture that derives its legitimacy from the past despite its novel claims? It should immediately be apparent that counterculture is not a reaction to the past as a whole, but rather to the specific social and cultural context in which it exists. In this aspect, counterculture serves as a critique of modernity, a suggestion that somewhere along the line we have taken a wrong turn.

In the case of the “New Age movement”, such a critique is spiritual. The New Age’s appropriation of religious symbology from nearly every culture but its own suggests an alienation with its spiritual life, and ultimately a flaw in the ability of modern conceptions of religion to provide individuals with a satisfying spiritual experience. The New Age is essentially an Eliadan critique of mainstream ontologies that fail to adequately locate themselves in time in space. By removing spiritual content from modern understandings of time and space, they expose contemporary culture to the “terror of history”, an existence without spiritual meaning. New Age attempts to relieve by abandoning mainstream culture’s symbols (which have failed it) and appropriating symbols that are “mystical”, “ancient”, and “esoteric”. In doing so, the New Age homo religiousus locates himself in time and space, and returns to a sacred existence.

The millennial aspects of certain New Age ontologies suggest an attempt to resanctify modern society through a movement forward rather than a turn back (though this is also the difference between New Age and neo-pagan spiritualities), a modernist project that ultimately will result in a spiritual world that is fundamentally futurist and a product of spiritual evolution.
Ultimately, the New Age movement is a revolution of individuals, single people who consider themselves to be connected to the spiritual aspects of the universe. The movement as a whole is evidence of a large number who consider modern society to be alienating, and who locate themselves temporally and spatially through symbols appropriated from that which is Other to the society in which they live. The New Age movement is a collection of individual locations that serve as the basis for the spiritual efforts of those who inhabit them.

Intellectual Belief and Intuitive Belief

2008-12-09T15:25:00.000-05:00

What is the difference between intellectual belief and intuitive belief? Essentially, this is the difference between having a functional abstract understanding of something and a gut understanding of something. In logic, this operates as the difference between knowing something might happen logically and know something will happen through "feeling it", instinct. In belief, this plays out slightly differently, in ontological construction. That is, the difference between constructions of "reason" and instinctive constructions that do not operate on any abstract level. Intellectual belief is found in ideas such as causality, the idea that one thing must be caused by another. We take this as a logical truth and acknowledge it-one thing must be caused by another. However, there are also intuitive beliefs, which operate largely through association. Intuitive beliefs are not noticeable, and do not function along logical terms. For example, an intuitive belief might link a color to a specific emotion, morality, image, shape, etc. Intuitive beliefs structure the invisible world of our psyche-our subconscious.

Constructivism, Perrenialism, and Conceptions of Mysticism

2008-12-07T21:50:00.003-05:00

In his Orientalism and Religion, Richard King discusses at length the conflict between constructivist and perennialist ideas of mysticism, and the relation of these to Western constructions of the East. While the Orientalist aspect of conceptions of mysticism is a deep subject, it is not to be discussed here. Rather, I will address the problematic nature of both schools (especially constructivism) in relation to the experiential nature of mysticism.

Between the two camps, my understanding of mysticism is closer to the perennialist school. Perrenialism states that all mystical traditions are essentially progressing towards the same goal, and that this common experience of the "transcendent" is common to all traditions, as it is fundamentally the nature of humans. Perennialism is characteristic of the New Age movement, and includes such proponents as Aldous Huxley. My personal conflict with perennialism does not lie in the idea of a common ineffable type of experience that is human. Rather, it is the idea that there is a single type of ineffable experience. In this aspect, I agree with R.C. Zaehner's characterization of different types of mysticism: I would make a distinction between non-Othering mysticism and Othering mysticism. Non-Othering mysticism is that which is commonly characteristic of "monistic" mysticism, whereas Othering mysticism recognizes some sort of awesome other-whether God, Kali, etc. But the essential similarity most pereniallists is the idea of an ineffable type, which cannot be explained verbally.

Constructivists, on the other hand, believe all experience to be fundamentally affected by historical and cultural influences-that is, there is no sort of experience that is not affected by the individual's context. The idea of some sort of universal ineffable experience behind all these experiences is absurd-even if there is some sort of kernel essence, it will never be directly experienced, it must always be couched in the worldview of that who experiences it. One constructivist states that mysticism, being something understood in some way, is not free from interpretation (ineffable) but is a reinterpretation of context.

This is the crucial flaw of the constructivist-he mistakes the interpretation of the experience for the experience itself. Experience itself is ineffable-mystical or not-its interpretation in conceptual terms is absolutely not the same as experience itself. This is to mistake the idea for the thing, the approximation of an indescribable thing for the thing itself. Fundamentally, the transcendent experience is ineffable, but it also is the one that challenges context-the constructivists have mistaken that which changes context for being contextualized. The reason mysticism changes context is that it does fundamentally destroys context. While the mystical experience must still contain some sort of context in nearly all of its itinerations, it still devalues contexts and causes the reinterpretation of the self. Essentially, mysticism is (for a moment, the natal moment) a pure experience undiluted by language and concepts, but even this exists in a context-a non-intellectual context, but a temporal and historical context, one of time and place.

What the constructivists do recognize, that is noted as "ineffability" by the perrenialists. The commonality is that once experience has past, it can only be intellectually understood in a fashion that is not alike to the experience. As soon as the experience is over, it must be fundamentally sorted in some fashion to become intelligible to the mind-therefore, the mystic deceives himself by saying that experience is anything but "unspeakable". The mystic experience is fundamentally chaotic, and purely a matter of experience.

Genesis 1:2 and Consciousness

2008-11-24T13:17:00.006-05:00

The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.
-Genesis 1:2

Genesis 1, and Genesis 1:2 specifically can be read not only in a mythological context as creation myth of the universe but also as a creation myth of consciousness-both human and divine. Essentially, the structure of the myth is this: there are only two things in the universe, the spirit and the deep. What this suggests is a primordial mode of being. That is to say, it is a mode of existence without structure-there is consciousness (spirit) and subconsciousness (the deep). The process of creating the universe is thus the process of creating order out of the second part of this binary. It is not that the nature of consciousness changes-what it perceives necessarily changes, but consciousness as a pure "thing" remains.

What does God create out of the deep? What does consciousness create out of the subconscious? The answer is ego and identity. The conscious self (the spirit, as opposed to the ego) creates a structure in order to stabilize it for a practical existence in reality. In the case of God, what is created is a universe with form, in the case of the human what is created is a constant structure by which to identify the continuity between moments of consciousness. This does not destroy the deep: this structure is Atlantis, the island surrounded by the deep. Similarly, the earth as created by God is separated from the void, but the void is not destroyed-it is organized and collated. The infinity of void still must be somewhere-it must still remain in the biblical cosmology-either as the heavens or the waters.

It is an interesting enough metaphor on the human level, but when the metaphor is reversed and applied to God, it suggests a wildly alternate sort of theology. If the spirit creates the ego in order to "live in", to have structure, then God creates the universe to "live in", to give Him structure. It is precisely the play of lila, where Brahman becomes the world in order to play with himself and identify himself. For if there is no separation between the identity and the other, even the spirit will lose knowledge of itself as an individual being. Therefore God must have a world in order to be God. If God does not create the world, He is not God, he is merely an existence in opposition to chaos, that is, being. But if the self's only other is chaos, then one is only "not chaos", but this tells us nothing as chaos is also undefined! There must be fixed, knowable things in order for the spirit to realize itself as consciousness. There may be many universes in which God or Being did not create any sort of fixed reality-however these realities are completely unknowable, for there is no difference in definition within them. God must create the world, the "city of God" out of the deep for there to be anything but chaos and spirit perceiving chaos-which essentially is nothing but chaos itself. Therefore, is God anything besides chaos which realized separated consciousness?

This brings us to the Daedra of Oblivion who are said to have emerged from the void itself. The daedra are immortal, as they are always able to return from void, being merely a probability within the chaos of Sithis. It is the creation of identity that allows the spirit of a specific daedra to emerge from the void, it literally is a "cogito ergo sum", a portion of chaos imagines itself to exist as a defined form, and therefore emerges from the primordial sea of randonimity. To send a daedra back to the void is not to kill it, it is to return void to void until void realizes that specific instance of identity. And since void is infinite and infinitely undefined, anything may emerge from it so long as it imagines itself to. Does this suggest existence in our universe as being a matter of consciousness? That is, is all that properly "exists" conscious? This seems to be something of an exaggeration, but the principle of consciousness emerging from void, and then creating structure to survive outside of void, suggests a radically different type of universe than many of us perceive to be true.

The Information Explosion and the Stretching of the Mind

2008-11-18T20:52:00.004-05:00

In Prometheus Rising, Robert Anton Wilson describes "real capital" as being not land, labor, or wealth, but instead information. Due to the increasing size of the world's population and its previous wealth of technological advances, capital as information is increasing exponentially, thus making each generation more "wealthy" than the one that preceded it. Wilson ultimately sees this as Utopian (citing the psychedelic generation as the one leading the information charge-granted, Prometheus Rising was written in the late 70s and published in 1983), which I must take issue with-the explosion of the psychedelics is simply a relative one in relation to the population, and has dissipated. However, it remains a fundamental truth of our society that there is much more information available now than was available to past generations.

How this is perceived varies: a positive viewpoint says we now have the whole world at our fingertips, a negative one says we are bombarded by more information than we can handle. Both are true. On the one hand, modern information allows anyone to access much more information than was ever available before: this means that we are more selective about information-on the one hand, we learn to tell "good" information from "bad" information, on the other we may systematically block out that which we do not desire to see. Aldous Huxley's Heaven and Hell argues that this superfluous information has dulled our senses, making us accustomed to bright colors and spectacle.

On the other hand, such a superfluous amount of information also expands the mind, forcing it to encounter more than it would in its natural circumstances. If you are reading this, you most likely have taken in the information necessary to navigate the internet, perhaps the most complicated of modern media. Compare the internet to forms of media available 50 years ago-books, radio, and television: the internet displays as much information as all of these simultaneous. The computer as a machine allows an exponential increase in the amount of information available to modern man-multitasking has become a hallmark of modernity. The brain of the hacker may be the ultimate example of such an expanded mind-it is able to process many more trains of thought than an ordinary mind. To a certain degree, any member of our generation is living with a brain that simply does more than that of their ancestors 1000 years ago.

Hiatus

2008-11-13T03:50:00.002-05:00

This blog is on a brief hiatus, due to the recent collapse. of my desire to use academic discourse. It will be back as soon as I have enough sense and urge to write, which should be within the month. We shall see.

The Natal Moment of Being, Creation, and Change

2008-11-07T02:40:00.001-05:00

I have often talked about how the transgression of identity serves to create change, but there is the question of how. Certainly, by transgressing identity, one is forced to reevaluate one's ontology-both in conscious and subconscious fashions. However, I would suggest that there is something else going on in the precise moment of transgression that allows radical shifts in identity and perception. This is the "natal moment".

The natal moment is the moment where identity and ontology fall away, leaving only perception. In other words, when this occurs, one is completely stripped of one's perceptions of both identity and context. The natal moment serves to change the individual because it is a return to a state of ambiguity: and starting from this state of ambiguity, the self is free to reform itself in a completely different form. Now, why do transgressive moments not completely turn the self into a differently identified self? Theoretically, this could occur given a circumstance where the self has no reminder of its past selves through external sources. That is to say, if the self has left artifacts of identity: whether possessions, others who know him and interact with him, or even his own memories. For the identity of the self is to completely changed all context must be completely re-imagined, otherwise the new identity will bear similarities to the old self.

How do we see this occurring in the real world, and not simply in the abstract? This is the cause of change through spiritual revelation: the thesis behind all religions based on divine illumination. To be more specific, this may apply both to "born again" Christian narratives as well as "moments of clarity" in the context of an addiction. The revelation can also be artistic: a sudden return to the natal moment of ambiguity can cause the artist to completely recreate his perception of reality in such a way as to allow new creative insight.

Agency, History, and the Universe as Process

2008-11-05T14:07:00.002-05:00

Today I will discuss individual agency within history, the notion of history as a tangible continuum, and the implications of the universe as a process. Of course, the elephant in the room here is the election. While I don't usually talk about politics (or enjoy talking about politics), I feel this is an important crystallization of group consciousness and identity. Not in that there is an actual change so much as there is the perception of a momentous event in history that, due to its individual specificity, is some sort of messianic turning point. Frankly, I think this is ridiculous. The idea that the combined effort of individual wills to produce "change" in the abstract has some tangible effect is only literal within their own conceptions of reality. That is to say, people feel "changed", and thus act "changed". Whether this causes any physical effects is debatable, but the messianic vision that has been accorded to Obama is almost certainly hyperbole on a massive scale.

So what is the efficacy of a single individual as agent within the course of history? On average, nil, or so close to nil that the individual no longer matters as anything but a statistic within larger social forces. I would state that these non-purposeful social forces are in fact the driving force behind most action and change within the world. Any specific attempt to change the world actually lies in changing the parameters on which these social forces operate. For example: while the Fed may be able to change rates and the like to cause economic change, the actual change only occurs in the reaction of the market as a group of individuals to these attempted changes.

Now, what of a figure such as Obama, who is imbued with "historical" significance? The power of any politician is not his ability to cause change in the abstract as an individual, but rather his ability to influence the opinions and actions of others through these changes. To a certain degree, Obama acknowledges this, hence the "yes we can" mantra. But to believe that change occurs due to the desire for "change" in the abstract is absurd. One must decide what "change" actually means, because "change" purely as change seems undesirable-it is change towards some sort of more ideal mode of being that would actually be efficacious for his supporters. One imagines a change for the worse would not be appreciated by the supporters.

There also is the notion of the election as a "historical moment", and that this historical moment serves as a turning point: the moment itself causes change. This is partially true, so much as individuals believe it is true and hence change their actions. But if there is no alteration of individual perception and action because of the moment then it has not actually changed anything. It is an empty symbol within history. Here we have the difference between "perceived change" and "actual change", which lies on the difference between "perceived reality" and "actual reality". To most, the "actual" side of the coin is less significant than the perceived-to be perceived is, for all practical purposes, to be actualized.

This understanding also derives from a specific notion of history, one that is comprised of specific "moments", rather than a continua of unabated action-and certainly not undifferentiated time. There is in our cultural perception of time the idea of continual advancement-the combination of modernism and our linear imaging of time. But this is only an abstraction of time, one that has superseded circular modes of time. History as a creation of events is only the past reduced to a number of specific moments, ignoring much of the larger context-or exploring context only in contrast to those moments. And this context is also abstracted-into the "50s", the "Middle Ages", the "Renaissance", etc. I would suggest a different mode of time as more in accordance to reality, time as a non linear process. Such an understanding, unfortunately, cannot gain wider acceptance because of how it images the human-not as a being of progress, or even a tangible self-but rather a process in and of itself. Essentially, time is not a constantly advancing force, but rather the continuum on which the process occurs. This is more understandable if understood in non-human term, for example the temporal imagining of an ecosystem. A lake ecosystem is not thought of as a linear narrative, but rather a general type of system in which fluctuations may occur: some permanent, some not. While populations may increase, decrease, or become extinct due to the influence of outside forces, there is no idea of there being a linear narrative of the lake. Time is no different for humans, there is a certain type of reality in which we exist, and there are similar temporary and permanent changes within this mode of existing.

Comparative Mythology as Art

2008-11-04T00:13:00.003-05:00

In The Implied Spider, Wendy Doniger states that: “The comparatist is part scientist, part artist, but this is too seldom acknowledged.” This challenges many of our common notions of the academic. Certainly we have some understanding of the comparatist as a scientist-an “objective” observer seeking to divine some manner of truth in the study of various religious subjects. But what of the artist? What role does personal vision and creativity play in the study of comparative mythology? Is there are an aesthetic element to scholarship that goes largely ignored? If we take these creative and aesthetic elements as the work of the artist, do they serve any function in an academic context?

We must first make sense of Doniger’s conception of the comparatist as artist. For Doniger, the artist is one whose acknowledged subjectivity allows the relation of the self to the audience. The artist is able to “see connections (however subjective) between phenomena that are really out there.” (77) In doing so, the artist appeals to his or her audience by pointing out the complex interrelations between various parts of experience, much in the same way as Claude Lévi-Strauss’ bricoleur gathers scraps of myths which may be reconstituted in many different forms. (145) Essentially, using the combinations of symbols and meanings around themselves, artists create structures of symbolic relation between already signified components. Doniger compares such a comparatist to a surrealist, and the simile is apt: one is immediately reminded of Dalí’s complex symbolic system of watches, ants, grasshoppers, and lions that graces many of his early paintings. While these structures are based in already meaningful signs, they gain a meaning of their own through their new positions in relation to each other. The artist is at once both a creator and an interpreter.

We may observe this process at work within the work of both Doniger herself and other scholars of comparative mythology. Doniger compares her scraps of meaning in such a manner as to show many different aspects of the same symbol within different contexts. For example, in her discussion of the “implied spider”, she references the spider as symbol within such varied sources as Shakespeare, (19) the Upanishads, (20) and Kierkegaard. (21) Doniger as a bricoleur is an advocate of multiple viewpoints and understandings, and her placement of related symbols side-by-side without detailed analysis shows her goal as one of creating thought rather than the advocacy of a specific interpretation of the meanings within. It is an approach that “might allow us to advance the comparative enterprise without lapsing into the follies of universalism,” (46) observing the relation between individual contexts without subjugating them to the structure of an all-encompassing explanation.

However, such universalist sentiments also fall under Doniger’s definition of the comparatist as artist. The work of both Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade is that of the bricoleur, but in this case the scraps of meaning gathered from around the world are stitched together in such a way that they can make a single intelligible whole. Both Campbell’s monomyth and Eliade’s ideas of the sacred and profane are assembled from a variety of sources brought into conversation. For example, in Eliade’s discussion of the axis mundi as the connection between Earth and the divine realm of the sky, he draws examples from a host of traditions from around the world: the sacred pole of the Achilpa of Australia, pillars of the Celts and Germans and the Nad’a of Indonesia, (35) to name a few. Of course, this process involves an editing of the scraps of meaning-the subjectivity that the universalist brings to the comparative approach must necessarily stress some elements over others in the creation of one all-encompassing explanation for a multitude of varied forms. In a sense, this makes the universalist more of Doniger’s subjective artist than Doniger herself. By stressing certain elements above others, the universalist not only subjectively arranges the scraps of his quilt, but also stresses which elements within them are most important.

The process of the comparatist can thus be seen as analogous to the process of subjective interpretation found in Kirin Narayan’s Storytellers, Saints and Scoundrels. In a chapter entitled “The Listeners”, Narayan describes the purpose of a sadhu’s stories as seen by a diverse audience. Interpretations storytelling’s purpose range from the social, “The stories are nothing but the morals on which our society is based” to the personal, “Through stories he tells us of our own feelings” (103) to one based on comparative universalism: “These stories are archetypes. They are energy patterns coming out of the void.” (103) Similarly, the totality of global mythology on which the comparatist’s efforts are founded can be arranged subjectively in many possible ways ranging from the contextual and specific to the universal and paradigmatic. Oftentimes such varying explanations of one story are not mutually exclusive, but represent multiple views that can coexist within one structure. We cannot see the entirety of a tree from one angle, it takes a multitude of different positions to understand the tree as a whole. Similarly, one subjective interpretation of a myth or other story can only hope to show a single dimension of a much more complex object. Thus to a certain degree any personal interpretation of myth is also artistic in Doniger’s terms, as it must relate to personal context (even the absence of context, which a context in and of itself) and thus make the individual some sort of bricoleur. She would most likely argue that such interpretation is artistic so long as it has an audience-for Doniger, “artist” is primarily a professional distinction. (76)

While it might be argued that such an interpretation of art ignores art as the creative process of the individual, what is most lacking in Doniger’s description of the comparatist artist is a conception of aesthetics. This is not to say that aesthetics is lacking in scholarship, quite the opposite. One might argue that scholarship is indelibly influenced by the aesthetic principles behind cohesive writing, and no doubt this is a fair estimation. However, the comparatist may be an aesthetic not only through writing, but also through his or her ideas. This may partially be called to account for the prevalence of universalist explanations within comparative mythology. There is a certain elegance to the idea of a single all-encompassing explanation that lies at the root of all myth or all religion. Such elegance may partially be responsible for the wide dispersion of the ideas of Freud, Jung, Campbell, and Eliade. However, there also may be elegance within the universal idea that is espoused. Eliade’s division of the world into sacred order and profane chaos is simple, but serves as a general mode for all religious and moral dualities. Campbell goes one step further and reduces the essential problem of myth to an explanation of that which is beyond duality. In both cases, the explanation is elegant not only in its universality, but also in its simplicity. A simple, yet highly charged explanation serves as the prime cause behind all of humanity’s religious understanding.

Doniger’s estimation of comparative mythology as art holds true not only in the position of the comparatist as interpreter, but also in the aesthetic elements found in explanations of the structure behind myth. While every comparatist may be a bricoleur, some (like Doniger) prefer to keep their scraps as scraps, whereas a universalist such as Eliade assembles these same pieces of cloth into a grand quilt. What is at stake then is not the position of the comparatist as artist: this is the reality. What is instead at stake is the comparatist’s understanding of his or her own enterprise. What Doniger is encouraging is a self-understanding that acknowledges the subjectivity and limitations of the comparatist’s perspective while retaining its interpretive power. The projection of individual interpretation onto the myth is not problematic so long as it is acknowledged and recognized as such.

Telescopes and Microscopes-the Archetype Paradox

2008-10-30T09:38:00.007-04:00

In her book The Implied Spider, Wendy Doniger identifies the separate levels on which myth operates. While myth can be used to see the big picture (telescopes), it is also useful in application to a specific situation (microscopes.) Moreover, the two are related: the action of the microscope may be emblematic of the action of the telescope, merely on a smaller scale. But both levels exist at the same time: both on a cosmic and a specific level.

This brings up the problem presented by abstract archetypes and their application to an understanding of the world. The problem presented here is that of Plato's idea of "ideal forms". Plato's "ideal forms" represent types of objects within the physical universe-such as a table-however, the "ideal form" of the table is perfect and emblematic of everything that can be considered a table. The problem with Plato's theory is this: it removes the true nature of Being from the physical world and places it essentially "in the sky." It mistakes archetypal understanding for literal truth, where archetypal understanding is a tool for understanding patterns. Similar structures do not necessarily mean similar origins, there is always the possibility of convergent memetic evolution. This possibility is lost on many universalists-Jung (and Campbell following him) views archetypes as resulting from the void of the mind's physical construction. Eliade sees the similarities between "primitive" religions as the results of a specific archetype of relating to the divine. Archetype, for a universalist, must have a literal meaning.

But this misses archetype as a purely theoretical concept, one that is used for comparison, rather than explanation. To see the same symbols occurring in different myths does not mean that there is an underlying concept common to all of them, but rather that there are varying contextualizations of the same sort of mythological symbolism. Context is the specific light that is shed on the archetype: an archetype can be used to compare specifics, but this does not mean the archetype is a physical fact. This is not to say that there is not a common cause of a specific archetype (I would hesitate to dismiss Jung or Campbell specifically), it is certainly possible that similar contexts or underlying aspects of humanity are common to us all. The problem occurs when the archetype becomes the goal, rather than the specific context. The idea that everything is reducible to an archetype is only true so much as everything is infinitely specific to itself. If there only is what is, specificity can not be anything but what it is. Reality's similarities to itself may be explainable on an archetypal level, but it only physically exists in the specific.

The Group, Crisis, and the Past as Justification of Identity

2008-10-29T20:29:00.001-04:00

The phenomenon of identity is one that stretches to accommodate all scales of human existence. We may say that there is an identity of the self, an identity of the group, an identity of the society or culture, and perhaps even an identity of the species as a whole. We are seemingly constantly defined by some sort of notion of “self”, no matter how much we magnify its size. One must wonder then what the correlation is between the identity of the individual and that of the community. Is it the same sort of action that creates both of these entities? Though this analysis will not assume such a correlation, it will analyze group identity as though it operates under similar principles to individual identity. Specifically, it will address how the past influences and justifies a certain type of identity, and how such history is used to maintain identity in periods of crisis. To this effect, it will analyze Jewish identity both in moments of crisis and in formative (or re-formative) periods.

How are group and collective identities similar? Both perform the same task: the definition of an entity and separation of the unit from some sort of Other. In the case of the individual, such a separation creates the idea of the self as independent of external influence. The self is perceived as a continuous identity that proceeds from day to day with a largely static set of characteristics. Hence, self is an abstraction of individual experience into a stable entity. Such a rigid definition of identity is somewhat absent from the group’s conception of itself. A group must, to a certain extent, recognize change within itself. While this may not represent a change in monolithic portions of identity (such as laws, dogma, or history), it does represent recognition of change within the building blocks of the community. For example, a church may not change its theological stance, location, or affiliation with other churches, but it will recognize a change in local leadership or the general makeup of its congregation. The identity of the group is less of a rigid entity than the self, and more of a template: one that structures the general type of identity of the individual within it. Here we may draw another parallel: the individual who exists within the group defines themselves to a certain extent according to the nature of the group. Similarly, a group that exists within a larger society or culture defines itself to a certain extent according to that society-even if society largely becomes an Other, as was the case for Jewish communities in medieval times.

Here we must ask how the past is related to the construction and maintenance of identity. Since identity is an abstraction derived from experience, we may say that the past is the store or information that the individual uses to create the self, or the group its social order. Such a creation, however, requires an alteration of specific portions of the past so as to make them more significant. To some extent, the creation of identity and the shaping of the past must occur simultaneously, as the question is one of the chicken and the egg. Eviatar Zerubavel’s Time Maps details extensively how groups create certain significations of portions of the past, in such fashions as “mnemonic cutting”, which separates time into portions before and after a significant event, such as Columbus’ arrival in the New World. While Zerubavel’s work primarily concerns itself with the past in relation to group identity, it also draws parallels between the individual and the group, such as “zig-zag” narratives common to both conversion experiences and large-scale economic movements. It is this version of the past, conditioned by identity, that ultimately justifies its existence as such-actual events are signified in such a way as to be congruent with the perception of self, whether that of the individual or the group. We may see how important the past is to our identity in the importance we place on artifacts, museums, and ruins. That which is in the past is emblematic of a certain unchanging entity of identification.

What occurs to identity, then, if its artifacts and past is threatened? How does identity respond to a crisis experience? A crisis experience is one that robs identity of its power as an abstract construct: hence, it is one that either threatens the past on which it is based, or threatens those who possess the identity themselves. In the first case, the destruction easily becomes ensconced as a new sort of past: for example, the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem takes on a highly significant, if catastrophic role in Jewish memory. The destruction of the temple defines the Jewish community as one in exile due to its expulsion from its homeland: the destruction of a stable seat of identity in fact becomes part of identity itself. A stronger sort of crisis is presented to identity is that which threatens life. Not only does this serve as a threat to those who carry identity, but also the very nature of crisis can cause identity to disappear. Identity being an abstraction, the very primacy of survival and other immediate concerns can cause it to temporarily disappear. How can one hold on to and reconcile identity in such a situation?

To this effect, we turn to Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s analysis of Jewish history and memory in Zakhor. Yerushalmi’s analysis suggests an Eliadian solution to the problem of threatened identity, namely the alignment of contemporary threats with those found in scriptural sources. For example, the symbolical “Gog and Magog” was given as the interpretation of various large wars, ranging from the conflict between the Persians and the Byzantine Empire in the sixth and seventh centuries to the Napoleonic wars in the nineteenth. Similarly, past experiences also served as archetypes for new adversaries: Christianity as “Edom”, and Islam as “Ishmael.” In these two examples, we see the threat subsumed into archetypes already present in the collective identity, and hence justified in accordance with the collective identity. It is not that these new emergences threaten identity; rather they are in accordance with identity. Crisis is thus no longer a threat to the collective identity, since all that occurs occurs within the structure already established by identity. The crisis is no longer one of justifying identity, but one of proper action-whether survival or suicide.

Here we see an example of crisis within a group identity: such group identities differ from individual identities in their flexibility. Since the group’s memory and past is not the literal remembrances of the mind, it can be changed through the desire of the group to change it. A group may selectively discard portions of its past in order to create a new image of itself. We see this action in process within the Zionist drive to shift its identity as presented in Yael Zerubavel’s Recovered Roots. Zerubavel is largely concerned with how the Zionists signified portions of the past in order to create a new group identity for the fledgling Hebrew nation. The most dramatic instance of this process is the attempt of the Young Hebrews, or “Canaanites”, to completely divorce themselves from the legacy of European Judaism. Such an effort is the most extreme example of a general attempt of the Zionist movement to distance itself from the tradition of the Exile, which it perceived as weak and miserable. What the Zionist movement shows us is the ultimate efficacy of the group’s efforts (and no doubt this applies to the individual) to remove from its identity those portions of the past that it perceives as distasteful. Ultimately, the past is the justification for the identity of the group or the individual, but if the identity changes, the past necessarily must change in order to accommodate the new perception of the self or the group. Identity needs the past only so much as it justifies its conceptions of itself.

What is common to both the group and the individual is the abstract sense of identity, and its relation to the past. A signified past is used (sometimes unconsciously) as a foundation on which the structure of identity is constructed. When the foundation changes, so must the structure, and when the structure is renovated, the past often must be re-built in order to make its new itineration stable. When the structure is attacked in periods of crisis, it must alter to a fortification, or take in its attackers as part of its architecture. The conflicts encountered by collective Jewish identity over millennia have manifested themselves in the alteration of its structure over time, both for purposes of defense and aesthetics.

The Divine Lover, Lila, and Angela of Foligno

2008-10-23T09:09:00.003-04:00

We have already seen the identity of a physical human disappear in the creation of the transcendent lover. However, what we have not discussed is the possibility of the lover outside of human form, a divine lover without a physical body. To analyze this type of identity, we will examine the experiences of Angela of Foligno, and then compare both the divine and human agents of the lover to the idea of the play (lila) in Hindu cosmology.

Angelo of Foligno is the type of figure who would most likely be considered schizophrenic or bipolar by modern psychoanalysis. We will not discuss the problematic nature of psychological reductionism in regard to mysticism here, but to state it bluntly: mental illness is not a specific entity, it is not a germ or virus, it is a way of grouping similar mental operations. If some of those "abnormalities" predispose one towards mystic experience, can we not say that this is not reducible to illness? We still do not know the cause of mystical experience, we only know specific triggers that can cause it. To deny any sort of experience resembling mysticism is to deny one type of experience that is inherent in certain types of human consciousness.

Angela's relation with the divine lover is precisely that of the hide and seek (fort/da) game. Her consciousness of union with God and Christ is interspersed with periods of aridity and want: her consciousness of God is so great that it causes a deep pain when it is not present. Here one can see the similarities between mystical life and drug addiction. She is in perpetual withdrawal. But this is not what we are concerned with-what is more important is the advance and retreat of mystical consciousness within Angela's experience. God is constantly coming and going, in the forms of visions, voices, and the spiritual consciousness of union. No matter her desire for the presence of God, it does not remain within her. And, perhaps, it cannot remain in her. Mystical experience is an experience of coming and going: it is not an experience that can be constant, since it is so ecstatic. For it to become stable is for it to no longer be especially "mystical"-one wonders whether our "normal" consciousness could be considered mystical in comparison with something else. For an experience to be "mystical" is for it to be one of flux, something outside of the norm. Mystic experience must be fresh and new, ebbing and flowing.

Here we come to lila, the play of existence. In Hindu mythology and cosmology, lila is the rediscovery of Brahman by itself through interactions of parts of itself (existence) with each other. We might theologically interpret the purpose of mysticism as the will of a divine force to rediscover itself by hiding itself. It is playing hide and seek with itself, playing lover to itself. In the case of Angela, universal consciousness makes contact with the ultimate, playing with itself by advancing and retreating from a single nexus of existence. We can interpret both the human and divine lover as this force interacting with itself, the only difference with the human lover is the dissolution of the notion of identity, a notion that is not there in the divine lover. The divine lover represents an interaction with the transcendency of existence (which may either be one of nature mysticism or "Being" mysticism-though the difference between the two is largely arbitrary and a matter of scale.)

Individual Experience and Group Experience

2008-10-15T11:53:00.001-04:00

One of the oft maintained conflicts between psychologists of religion and anthropologists of religion is the emphasis on the experience of the individual versus the experience of the group. The psychologist will emphasis the individual's ontology in relation to the cosmos, while the anthropologist will emphasize the power of the group in collectively creating this same ontology.

This is, to put it bluntly, a false dichotomy.

The individual is a unit within the group, and hence we may understand the action of the group through the actions of all the individuals within the group. In this case, the experience of the group may be reduced to the total similarity and formation of all individual experiences. However, the relationship of the individual to the group is the same as that of the cell to the whole organism. We may talk about our actions as the work of many different cells, but to do so is needlessly specific when what is in question is the operation of the group as a whole-that which occurs between cells my still be understood in the relation of the cell to its environment, but it is much simpler to describe it as part of the organism's total experience.

This being said, I do fall under the side that favors the experience of the individual, since I am primarily concerned with the individual experience of religion, and not its social being. That is to say, I am concerned with cell biology, and not the organ which the cell is part of. This is not to say one can ignore the organ as a whole, but the organ will only be rendered important to studying the cell in relation to the cell. At the same time, it is possible to study experience in even smaller units than the individual-through the action of different parts of the mind and body, or even on the bio-chemical level, as is neurology. This is not a question of different types of experience, but different magnifications of the same experience.

Bias in Scholarship

2008-10-14T17:32:00.006-04:00

"Nowadays, we generally discredit this claim [in the superiority of Christianity] as naive at best, disingenuous at worst. We behold in disbelief the seriousness with which some of those comparativists with strong dogmatic views pronounced that their surveys of other religions were-not just in principle, but in actuality-"fair," "sympathetic," and "impartial." And since we find ourselves incapable of taking these pronouncements seriously, there is little incentive today to reexamine the nineteenth-century reasoning that might have made it feasible for those authors to advance such an argument in earnest. But this may be our loss. Surely, our thorough lack of interest in their logic is ultimately to the detriment of our own historical understanding."
-Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions

One of the constant "threats" perceived by academia is bias. Bias undermines the identity of the academy as an objective institution, and hence threatens the validity of whatever is said with bias. This is bullshit, and for two reasons:

1:A biased viewpoint does not preclude useful insight
2:Everyone is biased

We may shudder to think of accepting anything intellectual said by a biased individual (after all, how can one trust them?), but we have no choice. In fact, the illusion of an objective academy is ridiculous. In order to study something, one will have a certain proclivity towards it in some fashion: whether positive or negative. What scholarship then emerges out of such an activity will thus be colored by that individual's ontology.

This is only problematic if we do not recognize this as the case, and if we take scholarship to be a pure description of the world. All scholarship is interpretive. This is inevitable, since there are such a huge multitude of factors involved in any event that one cannot address them all. To study and write is to ignore some facets: naturally, the ones the scholar finds unimportant. We absolutely must recognize this as the case if we are to have any respect for Truth (this is a much different issue, however.) So long as we recognize the limitations of scholarship, we can view our own reading of them in subjective, and not objective, terms.

Furthermore, I would actively encourage bias within scholarship: not as a purposeful leaving of things in and out, but the acknowledgment of one's own opinion and goals within the study of religion. Reflexively examining oneself and one's writings allows self-critique that exposes personal biases, which can then be acknowledged, broken down, and used as fodder for new ways of thinking about a subject. Bias is not to be taken here as stubborn grounding in ontology, but a statement of personal opinion liable to change and malleability (though this is my own bias towards the chaotic.) Perhaps a greater understanding of the necessity of bias (as bias is nescessary for interest) will allow the academy to more critically examine past authors.

Particularly prescient to this concern is the ghost of Christianity within academia, particularly in the study of religion. Masuzawa's work centers on how predominantly Christian scholars of religion organized the discourse on the category of "world religions"-and she makes a point of noting the reversal of academic opinion against said bias. In this, Masuzawa fears, we will lose a certain part of scholarship which, while certainly dogmatic, was highly important to the development of the field and the assumptions therein. We cannot simply ignore the bias of the past and let it be, it is something that should be constantly reexamined, as it still colors our attitude today to a certain extent.

The Quandry of Hermetic Discordianism

2008-10-09T09:25:00.002-04:00

"It is my firm belief that it is a mistake to hold firm beliefs."
-The Principia Discordia

The problem of Discordianism is identical to that of Zen:

That is cannot possibly be what it claims to be and still be organized, and yet that if one is what it claims to be it matters not whether one is organized or not. In fact, treating Discordianism or Zen in the "proper" way is wholly irrelevant. It simply doesn't matter.

That doesn't say my undue dogmatism doesn't color my perceptions of what Discordianism should be. I am an Episkipos and not a Pope for a reason, after all. As far as I am concerned, "true" Discordian practice is necessarily solitary. Not to say that there cannot be multiple Discordians, but that once they become a community, Discordianism proper is finished: it becomes another idea - and a dogmatic one at that. The Principia may be brilliant, but a Discordian should just as easily ignore it as take it as any signifier of anything. Individual practice prevents the creation of a group identity. Group identities have a habit of solidifying: it is much easier to keep the self in flux than the general comminality of a group. As a jazz great, whose name I can't remember, said when he was told the new style of jazz was now called bebop: "Once you've named it, it's dead."

I would reduce (if that can be done) Discordian practice to flux. One must constantly be in a state of flux, except when staying the same is flux in relation to constantly being in flux. It is to stop thinking of oneself as oneself (to borrow from Pseudo-Dionysius: "he is neither himself nor someone else".) Discordianism as a philisophical system is nearly identical to Zen, except that perhaps it is not perceived of as having a goal, which is wholly to it's advantage.

And yet there is a particularly Discordian "flavor" of things, a sort of absurdist collage. This cannot be said to be part of its essence though: after all, we know it has no essence.

Black Iron Prison, and the Fractalization of Discordianism

2008-10-08T01:10:00.001-04:00

"So, now you’re wondering why you feel trapped here, in your own life. Why now, why today, can you see the bars of a Black Iron Prison that you made for yourself?"
-Black Iron Prison

Black Iron Prison is essentially the pessimistic offshoot of the Discordian tradition. It is not the joyful chaos of the Principia Discordia, it is modern alienation, a cosmization of society as an oppressive machine. It is fiercely individualistic and accords a great deal of importance to a sort of lunatic fringe proselytization. It accords some sort of a moral responsibility to freedom from the social grid. In a sense, it parlays the disorder of Discordianism into an organized structure of network. It becomes Evangelical. At what point does disorder become ordered, and can a religion with no principles contradict its own principles? There are layers of paradox here.

My primary problem with Black Iron Prison is it that it turns Discordianism into a social phenomenon, and a true religion. In order to gain influence, it must institutionalize itself. Of course, I myself have always figures myself as the head of an Episkipos and not a true member of POEE. What I would suggest is essentially a monastic, or mystic tradition - which frankly I feel is more true to the Principia than an attempt for social change. Of course, this is my own bias, and to say that one kind of Discordianism is not "true" Discordianism is ridiculous. Discordianism, in its nature, cannot be anything institutionalized, otherwise it may fall into the same sort of trap as Zen institutionalization. Zen is the direction I would take Discordian practice ideally, I feel as though the BIP has taken the Discordian tradition in a very Enlightenment Protestant direction (and hell, the BIP talks about the failure of enlightenment values - how much more mainstream thought can you get?)

One might argue that the BIP is the natural change from the optimism of the 60s to the disillusioned new millennium. However, it should be noted that the 60s Discordians are not true hippies. They are the Zappa counter-culture, the culture against counter-culture, the culture that is no longer culture. I take this as evidence: "A Sermon on Ethics and Love." This is not the work of hippies. It is far too joyfully pessimistic. It is not the love as optimistic change of the hippies. And the BIP is pessimistic, but it seems to gloss over joy for imprisonment. It is the "sick soul" compared to the "healthy mind" of Discordianism.

The Academia of Flux

2008-10-07T09:13:00.003-04:00

When in doubt, fuck it.
When not in doubt, get in doubt!
-The Principia Discordia

I must apologize for my last few posts, as they have been simple restatements of papers I have written for various courses. However, I would like to expound on them in order to make a point about academia and academic thought (my current area of interest.)

Especially in my paper on Discordianism, my general effort has been to create a method of academic thought that is in some way congruent with my own adherence to Discordian thought in general (whether or not congruence is actually important is debatable.) The conflict, of course, is between Discordianism's theories of grids and disorder, and the implicit attempt by academia to order things in such a way as to approach truth. The Principia denies the possibility of using a grid to approach Truth (no grid is any more True than any other), and grids are arbitrary and have different uses. So in a grid-based consciousness, what is the Discordian to do with academic thought?

There are several approaches that have come to my mind, and I make a slight reference to one of them in my paper. This is the use of conflicting grids in order to create critical thought, and annihilate parts of each other in order to approach Truth in a fashion similar to negative theology. However, this still belies an underlying assumption of Truth as the highest value (but this is somewhat moot.) The other idea that I developed in relation to this grid-criticism is the creation of new grids: grids that can be beautiful, pleasant, or useful. Certainly this seems the more mainstream approach in academia: the attempt to organize. Except, in this case, it organizes precisely through its consciousness of the arbitrary nature of organization. It becomes a meta-grid. Discordianism itself is one such a grid: a grid that recognizes itself as grid, does not value itself as in absolute, but as a tool, and most of all does not take itself seriously either way.

This brings us to a more maverick approach. This is the approach of shifting grids, and is what I would recommend most highly as a Discordian system of academia. Essentially, this approach hinges on the huge plurality of grids that are possible, and hence the huge variety in the way an event or thing may be viewed. The goal of the Discordian scholar, then, is to approach the same subject in multiple, and most importantly contradictory, ways. It is the academic application of Chaos Magick, which draws its energy from rapidly shifting between contradictory poles. To do so in academia is to both reveal multiple ways to look at a subject, and more importantly breed ambiguity about both the subject and about academia itself. In either case, the theory cannot be the end of the academic process: it must either lead to a new theory, and play with grids, or back into a comparison with older grids to obliterate (or embrace) that which is contradictory within the subject.

Form and Content in Eliade and Zerubavel

2008-10-06T01:44:00.000-04:00

One of the distinctions that can be made in describing how humanity understands the past is that between the structural form of time and the content of said time. Such a distinction can be shown through the comparison of Eviatar Zerubavel’s Time Maps to Mercia Eliade’s understanding of myth and ritual. The difference between the two authors lies not primarily in their understanding of the past as such, but rather of their intention in studying it. Where Zerubavel simply seeks to provide formal models for grouping similar modes of thought, Eliade instead means to provide a universal understanding of the cultures he defines as “primitive” and “archaic.” To do so, Eliade must address both form and content in their combination as a unified whole.

However, before addressing the authors themselves, we must have a workable definition of both form and content within a narrative structure. Form is the overall structure of the narrative, and illustrates patterns of events within the overall narrative arc. In fact, the very idea of a “narrative arc” is a formal description of the traditional fictional narrative structure, with an introduction, climax, and dénouement. A formal analysis of a narrative will seek to describe the overall directions and organization of that narrative. It is, essentially, the “big picture” of the narrative. Content, on the other hand, is the specific actions, themes, and characters found within the narrative. To inspect content without addressing the overall form of the narrative is to investigate specifics outside the overall structural context that form provides. For example, a character analysis seeks to understand a character not only within the context of the narrative, but also as a timeless identity outside of its place within the narrative form. The results of studying these two areas of narrative separately should amply show their interdependence, and ultimate inseparability. The individual motions of content create form, and form in turn is the structure that guides content towards an overall narrative purpose. Perhaps we may have content without form, but this abandonment of structure leaves us with meaningless content, and Eliade’s “terror of history.”

Zerubavel clearly recognizes his endeavor within Time Maps to be a purely formal one. He explicitly states this in his introduction:

In trying to uncover the sociomental topography of the past, the general thrust of my analysis is also unmistakably structural. While most studies of social memory basically focus on the content of what we collectively remember, my main objective here is to identify the underlying formal features of these recollections.

Hence, Zerubavel’s ultimate goal is not to address the thematic issues of memory (no matter how universal), but rather the common structures of memory, as well as their formation. To this effect he employs charts of various types of motion within history, which are strikingly similar to the diagrams of narrative arcs described earlier. For example, Zerubavel utilizes historical actions of “progress” and “decline” which operate in much the same way as “rising” and “falling” plot actions. In doing so, Zerubavel brings together examples that illustrate these actions with little content in common. For example, in discussing structures of “progress” he discusses Hegel’s notion of history, Horatio Alger’s “American Dream”, and evolutionary teleology as illustrating the same narrative of improvement over time. In addition to discussing static form, Zerubavel also adresses the advent of forms, including such actions as “splitting” and “lumping” in the creation and alteration of linear timelines. Essentially, what is attempted is not only an explanation of formal structures, but of the means of their creation.

Zerubavel’s purpose in discussing memory in a purely formal manner is both sociological and psychological in nature. In commenting on the above “progress” structures he states:

Such a highly formulaic vision of the past clearly reflects more than just the way some particularly optimistic individuals happen to recall certain event. Indeed, it is part of the general historical outlook of entire mnemonic communities. Though we normally regard optimism as a personal trait, it is actually also part of an unmistakably schematic “style” of remembering shared by entire communities.

Thus Zerubavel describes the commonality of form in order to illustrate how individuals and societies construct the structures by which they understand the past. The “why” of the equation is unimportant: Zerubavel only mentions the motives behind “splitting” and “lumping” incidentally in his discussion of the creation of timelines. This is not to say that he does not value content, merely that he does not address it. Zerubavel’s “maps” are purely topographical. They address the underlying form of historical understanding without concern for the specifics present at any single point on the map.

While Zerubavel seeks to isolate form from content, Eliade’s conception of mythic time is addressed in terms of both combined into one unified whole. In his exploration of the rituals of the “primitive” and “archaic” man, Eliade seeks to illustrate the unity of content and form, rather than their disparities. This is shown most explicitly in the central theme of The Myth of the Eternal Return, the regeneration of time through the repetition of acts from the illo tempore. Both the form and content of such an act are essential to Eliade’s understanding of how ritual allows the regeneration of the world. For Eliade, the rituals of regeneration repeat actions within mythological time and in this form re-affirm the circular nature of their temporal being. Both the content (the ritual of regeneration) and the form (the repetition of the illo tempore) combine to accomplish the creation of a cosmological structure that is repetitive and ultimately allows the transcendent and timeless cosmology that Eliade so values.

We may find this means of addressing the ritual of regeneration within Eliade’s analysis of the akîtu ritual of the Babylonian New Year. The ritual begins with a symbolic overcoming of chaos through a mock battle,

Thus the combat between Marduk and the sea monster Tiamat was reactulized-the combat that had taken place in illo tempore and had put an end to chaos by the final victory of the god.

and continues with a ritual that symbolically recreates the world through a divination of the fates for each of the year’s coming months, and a repulsion of the sins of the past year. The ritual is only effective because it imitates the illo tempore in both form and function. Not only does it use the content of the mythic time, but also a form equivalent to the creation of the world out of chaos in illo tempore. While the form expresses the ultimate effect of the ritual in that it regenerates time, it is only through content that specifically represents the content of myth that such a form can be made effective.

We may see how crucial the integration of form and content is to Eliade in his criticism of the modern conception of time, what he terms the “terror of history.” For Eliade, modern man essentially lives in world of content without form; it lacks the continuous regeneration of the primitive societies, and it lacks the Divine will that is present in the linear historical structures of Judaism and Christianity. Modern man’s ontology is one that is unable to find any transcendent significance in the content of time. Therefore, Eliade asks,

[H]ow can man tolerate the catastrophes and horrors of history-from collective deportations to atomic bombings-if beyond them he can glimpse no sign, no transhistorical meaning

Without the unity of content and form, there can be no meaningful narrative or temporal structure of history: it is blind chaos. We certainly cannot live in a world without content (it would not exist), but form is necessary to give some sort of meaning to the occurrences within life. Eliade sees only one solution out of the problem of a formless cosmos:

[T]he man who has left the horizon of archetypes and repetition can no longer defend himself against that terror except through the idea of God.

It is only through archetypes that man can justify the meaning of his life, except perhaps through the itinerations of religion.

To counter Eliade’s pessimism, we may in fact turn to Zerubavel’s history of pure form. The ability of the mind and society to create such forms- transcendent or not-allows for a meaningful interpretation of the temporal plane. Consequently, Eliade’s complaint may be neutralized by the natural tendency of the mind to organize time in some sort of structure, narrative or otherwise. While philosophically the abandonment of transcendent forms and eternal nows may suggest meaninglessness to Eliade, Zerubavel’s study of form shows that there is always the potential for meaning within the “terror of history.”

Order and Disorder, Discordianism and Academia

2008-10-05T05:48:00.003-04:00

"Reality is the original Rorschach."
-The Principia Discordia

One consistent theme that appears in scholarly descriptions of cosmization is the contrast between apparent order and contrasting disorder. In both Mary Douglas’s theory of dirt and Mircea Eliade’s division between the sacred and the profane draw on this dichotomy in their understandings of how humanity wrestles with its place in the cosmos. In both cases, order is perceived as the privileged half of this binary, and disorder is characterized as “sinful” or “dirty.” In these cases the purpose of ritual is to normalize the foreign when it impinges on a specific society’s worldview. If this binary is as basic to human ontology as these theories claim, what does this imply as the purpose of scholarly thought? Can academic discourse be anything but the reflection of this primal desire for order, or does it (and should it) leave a place for disorder?

Douglas’s definition of dirt specifically states this understanding: “As we know it, dirt is essentially disorder.” Whether in the form of a foreigner in a xenophobic nation or loose papers strewn across the kitchen floor, it is that which does not fit into the order as dictated by society. While we may argue with the first example under the category of “dirt”, Douglas argues that the two examples operate under what is essentially the same principle. In her discussion of various spiritual powers in relation to the social structure, she comments: “unformed psychic powers threaten it from the non-structure.” From this follows the threat of witchcraft, which is “found in the non-structure.” Therefore, the aspect of the witch that threatens the community is precisely the disorder within the nature of the witch (usually resulting from a position that is undefined within the social structure.) This threat is exactly the same as the problem of dirt: “Pollution dangers strike when form has been attacked.”

We may find a similar treatment of the conflict between order and its opposite within the theories of Mircea Eliade. Eliade defines the consciousness of “primitive man” as being shaped by the attempt to imitate the actions and circumstances of the mythical illo tempore. The sacred is that which is ordered according to the myths, “the only profane activities are those which have no mythical meaning.” The sacred is thus that which is ordered, anything outside said order must ritually be made sacred in order to be acceptable to such a being. Once again, disorder is that which must be overcome, even outside the sphere of the homo religiosus:

It is worth observing that the same images are still used in our own day to formulate the dangers that threaten a certain type of civilization; we speak of the chaos, the disorder, the darkness that will overwhelm “our world.”

Eliade’s description of primitive ontology mirrors Douglas’s theories of dirt and purity. Order is once again the privileged aspect of a system of binaries that associates disorder with darkness, profanity, and evil.

If we are to take the theories of Douglas and Eliade as being accurate representations of the general relationship of humanity to the cosmos, we cannot help but see order as the general principal under which such a relationship operates. However, if such an ontology is an unquestioned assumption by which intellect operates, we must question whether it is in fact an accurate means of understanding. To this effect we turn to the Principia Discordia. The Principia Discordia is the central text of Discordianism, essentially a religion that combines elements of Zen Buddhism, post-modernism, and psychedelic culture in a decidedly tongue-in-cheek manner.

More important here than the religious aspects of the Principia Discordia are its philosophical leanings, specifically on the ideas of order and cosmization:

We look at the world through windows on which have been drawn grids (concepts). Different philosophies use different grids. (49)

The grid is that which orders the actual nature of reality, which the Principia names as “Pure Chaos”, into the designations of order and disorder. Both order and disorder are products of arbitrary grids, and hence arbitrary themselves. Therefore there can be no true morality associated with order and disorder:

The belief that “order is true”, and disorder is false or somehow wrong, is the Aneristic Illusion. To say the same of disorder is the ERISTIC ILLUSION[sic]. (50)

Ultimately, the conclusion drawn by the Principia is that “ (little-t) truth” is how reality appears in relation to grids, and “(capital-T) Truth” is not altered by grids and is beyond concepts.

How, then, does Discordianism justify itself as supporting disorder over order? Discordianism views disorder as a neglected binary to order, one that has systematically been repressed by human institutions and thought. Order is personified through the figure of “Greyface”, a “malcontented hunchbrain”, who

[G]ot it into his head that the universe was as humorless as he, and began to teach that play was sinful because it contradicted the ways of Serious Order. (42)

Discordianism sees this stress on order as having rendered the balance of the order/disorder binary askew. Humanity’s suffering is a result of taking itself and order too seriously: “Man has been on a bad trip for a long time now.”

While the Discordian understanding of grids as subjective and order as falsely emphasized may appeal to an idealistic sentiment of unknowable Being, how can this understanding enlighten scholarly thought? Are the two compatible in any fashion? Discordian philosophy has a certain gall towards what it sees as the general ideology behind academia:

Western philosophy is traditionally concerned with contrasting one grid with another grid, and amending grids in hopes of finding a perfect one that will account for all reality and will, hence, (say unenlightened westerners) be True. This is illusory; it is what we Erisians call the ANERISTIC ILLUSION. [sic] Some grids can be more useful than others, some more useful than others, some more beautiful than others, some more pleasant than others, etc., but none can be more True than any other.(50)

For the Discordian, any academic attempt to interpret the world along a paradigm such as Douglas’s or Eliade’s will not give an accurate picture of what actually is True. It will only be another grid through which to view reality, but it will not fulfill its stated objective. To believe one can arrive at Truth through any sort of classification is false, it is merely grasping at straws.

This perhaps is less discomforting to academia than it would have been in 1968, when the Principia was written, but it still questions the underlying premise by which it operates. If academic pursuits cannot enlighten Truth, what purpose can the theories of Eliade or Douglas serve? Is there any way to justify scholarly pursuit if it cannot touch objectivity? Yes indeed, the Discordian complaint is merely academia’s Aneristic illusion. Discordianism does not discount grids as evil or wrong, in fact it states that grids have the potential for usefulness or beauty, depending on which grid is chosen. The creation and contrasting of grids can be a mode for creative thought and exploration, ideas that are highly valued by the Principia. A grid that is not True does not preclude learning, in fact the contrasting of grids may in fact aid in it! For example, an atheist who reads a very vivid account of a mystical experience may question some of his assumptions about spirituality and its plausibility. This might not (and most likely will not) cause him to cease being an atheist. However, by exposing him to a type of experience he has not conceived as plausible before, it may cause him to re-evaluate his notions of human consciousness. Incongruity between grids leads to creative thought, which may in turn lead to new realizations.

With this in mind, let us then return to Douglas and Eliade. Both scholars address the same subject as the Principia, the relationship between order and disorder, and how such relationships affect social consciousness. However, all three of these are grids. What theory instead gives us is a means by which to think about our current grids, and their suitability. They will naturally cause us to rethink our own conceptions of order and disorder (this seems to be the primary purpose of the Principia.) Similarly, when Douglas confesses a “major mistake” in her chapter on Leviticus, it is not a mistake at all, but in fact contrasts with her new thoughts on the subject. Whereas one explanation may be taken as true at face value, two or more explanations require one to think critically about the subject. Similarly, if we contrast Douglas and Eliade, we find Douglas much more willing to ascribe “mythical” behavior to modern man, which may cause us to question Eliade’s dichotomy between “modern man” and “primitive man.”

Far from stifling intellectual thought, Discordian philosophy in fact encourages it. No longer is there the impression of a single correct theory by which to account for any given situation. Instead multiple approaches to the same subject will reveal an image with many more dimensions than any single theory could account for. It is constant creative reinterpretation and intellectual “play” that creates a health academic discourse; one that is willing to experiment, looks for new ways around a subject, and hopefully refrains from taking itself too seriously.

Robin Hood as a Christ Figure

2008-10-03T11:02:00.001-04:00

Robin Hood consistently appears as a pious figure in early medieval sources, with an especial devotion to the Virgin Mary. Despite his outlaw status, Robin Hood is reverent to both God and country unwaveringly. However, in the Renaissance play The Downfall of Robert, Earle of Huntington, Robin Hood transforms from a mere reverent yeoman into a Christ-like figure in his own right. Robin becomes the redemptive central figure of a group of devoted disciples with its own structure and moral codes. In a world that does nothing but repress him, he remains always willing to forgive. But what enacts this change from the violent, if faithful, trickster of the medieval texts, and the paragon of virtue in the Munday plays? Can the transfer of Robin’s sacredness from his outside to his inside be identified with the social and religious changes that occurred in England between the 14th and 16th centuries? In way does the core ontology of the Robin Hood mythos remain unchanged?

The medieval Robin Hood is a not class warrior: he is a yeoman who robs passerby, but is not motivated by any sense of moral duty. He is a trickster figure, one who acts primarily for his own amusement and his own ends. He is not a figure of abstract moral codes and obedience to anything but his own will. However, at the same time he is a deeply religious figure. He has a pious devotion to both the act of worship and the medieval cult of Mary. Being that this is a medieval text, the act of worship is not a matter of the individual’s desire, but the proper rites needed in order to be an “official” act. In fact, Robin’s desire to worship properly is the primary motivation of plot in Robin Hood and the Monk:

“Hit is a fourtnet and more,” seid he,
“Syn I my Savyour see;
To day wil I to Notyngham,” seid Robyn,
“With the mygh of mylde Marye.”

Within the confines of the medieval viewpoint, worship must be in the context of Church doctrine to be true worship, and hence the complication for the medieval Robin is that of being both an outlaw and devout Christian. Robin’s devotion to the church is proved by his willingness to risk life and limb to attend mass. But within this relation Robin is utterly subservient to Church authority. He must play be the rules of Church authority in order to achieve the spiritual relationships he desires.

When we observe the Robin Hood of the Munday plays, we see a much different attitude towards worship. There is no need for Robin and his men to leave the confines of Sherwood, save to rob from passing travelers. The religion of the merry men and Robin Hood, formerly requiring the official sacraments of the Church, has turned inward, into the community. One may ask how such a transformation is justified. Surely it is not through Friar Tuck who, while loyal, hints at the lecherous side of monkhood in his conversations with Jinny:

Tuck: What, wenche? My love?
Jinny: I, gee’t mee when I crave it.
Tuck: Unaskt I offer, pre thee, sweete girle, take it.

While this may be a deception of Tuck’s, it still is evidence of the duplicity, if not amorality, of the only member of a “true” religious order within the community of Sherwood. What, then, substitutes for the Church? It is, in fact, the coronation of Robin Hood as a Christ figure, who then sanctifies the merry men as his disciples.

We may see this most explicitly in the code Robin sets out for the community. Robin first removes his title as a noble, then declares the chastity of himself and Maid Marian. However, most important to the appearance of a religious community is the law of chastity to which he asks his followers to follow:

Thirdly, no yeoman, following Robin Hoode
In Sherewod, shall use widowe, wife, or maid,
But by true labour, lustfull thoughts expell.

To become a follower of Robin Hood (the Christ figure), one must give up one’s worldly attachments. In a sense, the merry men swear to be disciples by following the same regulation of chastity that Robin sets for himself. Robin becomes the archetype for proper moral behavior within the community. In addition, Robin tries to do this without title, even as he leads: hence his desire not to be acknowledged as a noble. One can certainly draw a comparison between the world of Sherwood and the Biblical Eden. As created by Robin’s code, it is a world that is not modern: there is no technology, organized church, or financial structures. The community exists in the wilderness, outside the bounds of normal, “civilized” society, and also lives without acknowledgement of class, apart from Robin as leader. Finally, the rules of chastity places the community before the events of the Fall: that is, before sex and death. In the Sherwood community, the historical ugliness of the city is replaced by a community living in mythological time.

How, then, does Robin Hood behave as a Christ figure? There are three areas in which Robin is explicitly similar to Christ: his stance as a social revolutionary, his betrayal, and his propensity to forgive those who have betrayed him. To analyze Robin Hood as a social revolutionary, we must return to his code of conduct for the Sherwood community:

Fourthly, no passenger with whom ye meete
Shall yee let passe till hee with Robin feast-
Except a Poast, a Carrier, or such folke,
As use with foode to serve the market townes

Fifthly, you never shall the poore man wrong,
Nor spare a priest, a usurer, or a clarke.

What Robin is advocating here is outright rebellion against the social authorities of both the market and the Church. One thinks immediately of Jesus’s cleansing of the temple in Jerusalem. One should that this is not an anti-religious sentiment, but a protest against the corruption of the Church: as we can see by the positive treatment of Friar Tuck as opposed to the corrupt Prior. At the same time as this revolution against authority, Robin brings to his table those who do not represent said forces. This is, in essence, the “rob from the rich, give to the poor” mentality, which is stated fairly clearly in these two aspects of Robin’s code.

Robin’s betrayal also connects him with the Christ figure, as he is living in constant flight from unjust authorities. In fact, the relationship among his enemies may suggest an interpretation in accordance to Biblical myth. One might imagine Prince John and his nobles as the Romans to which Judas (played by Warman) offers up his master, Robin Hood, for a measly sum of money. This metaphor is made even more explicit, as Warman is directly compared to Judas within the text of the play:

You Judas, villane, you that have undoone
That honourable, Robert, Earle of Huntington

This is not an isolated incident, Warman is also directly called Judas by Prince John, and is suggested as such through the metaphor of Judaism in several places. In relation to these betrayers, Robin is shown as the noble who has been betrayed by those closest to him due to their ambitions and fears. He is deified in contrast to their baseness.

However, the image of Christ would not be complete in Robin Hood if he did not in turn forgive his betrayers. This occurs systematically in The Downfall of Robert. Robin first forgives Ely and Fitzwater, accommodating them into his community, despite their involvement in his downfall. Robin also forgives his mortal enemy, Prince John, in the play’s final scene. But most dramatic is Robin’s forgiveness of his personal Judas, Warman, who is on the verge of suicide:

Disconsolate and poore dejected man,
Cast from thy necke that shamefull signe of death,
And live for mee, if thou amende thy life,
As much in favour as thou ever didst.

This is the ultimate forgiveness of Warman’s betraying act, which saves him from an identical fate as that of Judas: suicide, and then burial in the potter’s field. Robin instead invites him to rejoin the covenant the two of them once shared. He is redeemed from the ultimate sin, and is given back his place within the community of the Christ-figure.

Here we must give due attention to the figure of Maid Marian within the Munday plays, and her significance in relation to Biblical myth. There are two possible interpretations of Marian’s archetype within the Bible, both which may be illustrated with Robin’s statement about her name:

Why? Shee is cald Maid Marian, honest friend,
Because she lives a spotlesse maiden life,
And shall, till Robins outlawe life have ende,
That he may lawfully take her to wife

Marian’s virginal status immediately relates her to the Virgin Mary, and this is also suggested by the medieval sources which show Robin’s devotion to the Virgin. However, within the thesis of Robin as Christ-figure, such an interpretation leads to an incestuous relationship between Robin and Marian. Another possible interpretation of Marian is as representative of Mary Magdalene. Such an interpretation makes a relationship between the Mary figure and the Christ figure more congruent with the romantic relationship between Robin and Marian. Either way, the virgin named Mary in close relation to the Christ figure (as queen of his community, no less) places Marian in a Biblical role within the world of The Downfall of Robert, if it is a secondary one.

This ontology centered on the figure of Robin Hood as Christ is obviously a drastic change from the medieval Robin Hood, who is a pilgrim at best. What between the 14th and 16th centuries was the cause of such a change in the myth of Robin? The obvious answer is the English Reformation. The myth of Robin is suddenly no longer bound to the Catholic structure of legitimacy: therefore Robin no longer needs the authority of the Church to worship. His world is instead open to a personal, private worship that does not require an authoritarian structure: exactly the kind that can be practiced in such an environment as the community of Sherwood. Also, there is no need to avoid an outright slander of the Church itself: what was formerly a single corrupt member of the Church in Robin Hood and the Monk becomes the detestable prior in The Downfall of Robert. One may more explicitly critique the Catholic Church. Yet all of this does not explain the change of Robin from a violent trickster to a peaceful Christ-figure. Perhaps this results from the doctrine of faith, as espoused by Luther. Luther’s emphasis on the necessity of individual faith above works as a method for salvation means that Robin needs only to be a faithful Christian, and not a church-going one. To be most ideal in this respect is to be the very image of Christ himself, hence his transformation: especially considering his pre-existing role bordering on class-warrior.

If this is the change in the Robin Hood story, what is the ethos common to both the medieval and Renaissance incarnations of the myth? It is that of Robin as lawbreaker and outlaw. In medieval myth this plays out as a trickster figure, perhaps because of the more feudal (and therefore less organized) nature of the time. In the Renaissance, however, the lawbreaker becomes the just and righteous lawbreaker, the archetype descending from Christ himself.

The Death of God and Its Aftermath

2008-09-30T03:02:00.001-04:00

In the introduction to his essay New Testament and Mythology, Rudolf Bultmann explains the dilemma of modern man in relation to religious consciousness and mythology:

It is impossible to use electric light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles. We may think we can manage it in our own lives, but to expect others to do so is to make the Christian faith unintelligible and unacceptable to the modern world.

What Bultmann so bluntly states here is the alienation of modern man. Technology, science, and reason have destroyed the foundations of traditional faith and religion, and modern man is left alone in the universe. Whether intentional or not, Bultmann’s critique of myth calls into question not only the myth of the New Testament, but the plausibility of God himself. If we reduce the New Testament into an existential expression of man’s relation to a demythologized universe, as Bultmann does , have we not removed God himself from the equation? Can we save God for modern man without killing Him?
What is at stake here is the difference between a God of immediacy and presence in the universe, a living God, and a God who exists only as a concept: the Enlightenment “God of the philosophers.” For Hegel, such a God is as good as dead, being “thoroughly remote and thus unknowable.” In a similar vein, Nietzsche praises Yahweh as the Hebrew tribal god, “the expression of their consciousness of power, of their delight in themselves, their hopes of themselves.” This is a vital god, one who has a specific presence within the actions and deeds of his people, not the impersonal God of all that Nietzsche dismisses as décadence. We will take the change from the present and immediate primal god(s) to the abstraction of the “God of the philosophers” as our general definition of the Death of God. In Bultmann, as in the Enlightenment, this abstraction occurs as an attempt to protect God from scientific advancement and modern reductionism. But ironically it is exactly this attempt to preserve God that effectively kills Him. Theology has burned down the village that is God in order to save it. Taking this definition of the Death of God as a starting point, how do we relate it to the “modern man” of Bultmann and Mircea Eliade? What of Jim Jones’s rejection of the Christian “Sky God”? How do these systems cope with the hole left by the dead Deity?
Let us first return to Bultmann. Bultmann’s primary purpose is to find a means by which to relate God and kerygma to the alienated modern man. After all, in reference to mythological belief he states: “We may think we can manage it in our own lives”, his objection is introducing such a viewpoint to “modern man”, who will consider it impossible. This brings up the obvious creation of a dichotomy between the theologian (Bultmann himself) and “modern man.” What makes modern man so alienated? Bultmann replies that the most serious challenge is not “natural science” but “modern man’s understanding of himself.” For Bultmann, this means an ontology that incorporates a strongly defined individual, one that recognizes “man is essentially a unity.” He then contrasts this with the New Testament understanding of the self, which is open to the influence of spirits and other supernatural forces. He is a being that is concretely aware of spiritual presence, the same type of archaic human as Nietzsche’s ancient Israelites. The problem of modern man is this change from the immediacy of spirit to the ontology of the individual, science, and technology.
This change parallels the dichotomy between “primitive man” and “modern man” as described by Eliade. For Eliade, the primitive man is fundamentally the religious man:

…religious man can only live in a sacred world, because it is only in such a world that he participates in being, that he has a real existence.

Once again, this is the same type of existence that Nietzsche attributes to the Israelites. For primitive man, the only sort of real existence is a transcendent one. His life is structured around the ritual and mythology that places him in immediate contact with the divine essence of reality. Eliade compares this primitive man, whose life is rich in religious meaning, to “modern man”, an entity that is purely functional. In comparing modern man’s perception of space to that of primitive man, Eliade quotes Le Corbusier, who describes the house as “a machine to live in.” This conception of living space as purely functional contrasts sharply to Eliade’s analysis of the dwellings of primitive man, which are sacred in that they “reflect the world.” Modern existence, by comparison, is fundamentally meaningless compared to the transcendent existence of the primitive man. This, once again, mirrors the Death of God. Modern man has fallen from the sacred existence where the presence of God was felt in all its immediacy, and now lives in a world where the divine has been conceptualized, even for its adherence.
For Eliade, however, the sacred is not any specific type of deity, and the Death of God is not irreversible. It is possible, if not probably, that the hole left by God may have a solution that creates immediacy. It is not a specific event in history that kills God (though Eliade would agree with Nietzsche’s decline of the Christian conception of God), it is the overall process of alienation and modernization. However, Eliade states that all that is necessary for the revival of sacred consciousness is “a modern man with a sensibility less closed to the miracle of life.” For such a realization to occur would mirror Hegel’s second death of God: “through the movement in which God sacrifices his abstract otherness, that God becomes fully known or comprehended.” This is the action of the divine manifesting itself into imminence, in fact the very reverse of what we have defined as the Death of God. If modern man can remove God from His abstract nature and place Him as a fully real Entity or Presence in existence, then man has returned to his status as the primitive religious man.
We may see this occurring in the theology of Jim Jones. While we may hesitate to derive a direct connection between Hegel and Jones, Jones’s ontology is such a direct application of the conversion of God from concept to immediacy that it is hard to ignore the similarities between the two modes of thought. Jones’s theology first denies the abstract conception of God, what Jones describes as the “Sky God.” For Jones this is partially a strategy against the traditional Christian conception of God, Who Jones describes as cruel and guilty of all the suffering present in the world. However, Jones also comments on God in relation to the importance of immediacy:

You’ve got God in the sky. You’ve got God in the imagination. The only thing that’s gonna help you is something in the flesh.

This is precisely the recognition of the Death of God as His utter abstraction. It is the recognition of the intangibility of the “God of the philosophers” that renders him useless, and therefore dead to Hegel. Jones precedes then to the second step in the Hegelian process of God’s death and realization within reality, by converting God into a tangible force, Principle: “God is Principle, Principle is Love, and Love is Socialism.” Not only is God no longer a conception in a sky, but He is now a process that is occurring within the Jonestown community: it is the realization of divine force and purpose within a specific moment in history for a specific purpose.
It is at this point that Jones and Hegel differ. Whereas Hegel considers such immediacy already present due to the manifestation and death of Christ , whereas Jones identifies himself as “no longer a man, but a Principle.” Jones essentially designates himself as a new Christ to bring the same sort of immediacy of the divine into the world. He is the de-abstraction of the conceptual Divine that is expressed through Love and Socialism. In the terms of Eliade, Jones has remembered the “miracle of life” as transcendent, and hence brings into being a sacred space and time in which to live a fundamentally “real” existence.
What do the examples of Jones, Bultmann, and Eliade tell us about the Death of God? Essentially, the Death of God is Hegel’s first Death of God: that is, the conceptualization of an imaginary God, a “Sky God”, a “God of the philosophers.” This is a result of modernity in its various forms: scientific explanation and closed identity for Bultmann, pure function for Eliade, and capitalism for Jones. Each of these forces pushes the immediacy of the divine out of modern consciousness. The Divine hence must become theologically abstract to continue to be in any conceivable fashion: but the theologian has just shot himself in the foot, as this abstraction is precisely what kills God. God becomes so foreign to life, such an inscrutable Other in relation to any sort of conception of reality, that His significance is destroyed, and He dies.
However, only in Bultmann is this death of God perceived as permanent: it is true that “God is dead”, but for Eliade and Jones it is not the case that “God remains dead”. Bultmann, for his part, attempts to come to terms with the Death of God by removing everything mythological as a fact in relation to God. But this is the same as to remove any referent to God Himself, and one wonders if this does not wind up killing God all over again by turning Him into nothing but a concept.
For Eliade, redemption from the Death of God is certainly possible, but unlikely. To do so is to emerge from a modern conception of time and orientation within the universe (which has no reference points or transcendent meaning.) One may hold out the hope for the one to rediscover the “miracle of life”, but the terror that goes along with a demythologized world is intolerable. Man “can no longer defend himself against that terror except through the idea of God.” But is this still the “God of the philosophers”? He seems primarily useful only as a lifeline of meaning, and does not approach the sacred sense of Eliade’s primitive man. Perhaps such an idea may defend against terror, but it will not reignite the spirit of Nietzsche’s Israelites.
Ironically, we find in Jones our most promising vision of a living God. For Jones, this God is manifested in the world through human action, allowing all to become God through Divine Socialism. Jones himself becomes equivalent to Hegel’s Christ, effecting the reentry of God as a concrete presence in the world. It is only Jones who is able to complete the second half of Hegel’s two part drama of God’s being: both His death as an abstract concept, and his resurrection into immediacy through his manifestation within the world. Essentially, the second portion of this drama is not the Death of God at all, but in fact its opposite, the Rebirth of God.
Here we may be able to finally answer the question posed at the beginning of this essay: can we save God for modern man without killing Him? If modern man truly is, as Bultmann contests, unable to approach God because of the “electric light”, the answer is a decisive “no”. If technology has so alienated man to the spiritual immediacy of the Divine within the world, it is not the changing of His concept that will save Him. It is instead, perhaps, the abandonment of such an idea. God is destroyed by systems of certainty and definition: capitalism, scientific reductionism, the boundaries of the self, and the constant drive for utility. When confronted with a system of such definite abstraction, the concept of God must either abandon the definite conceptual world, or be turned into just another idea. What must happen to preserve God as a living Being is to place Him into reality with full immediacy in way that is not conceptual. One must realize His presence without His identity. However, this is the realm of the non-conceptual, and is thus better suited for the mystic than the philosopher.

Isness and the Problem of Being

2008-09-29T11:05:00.005-04:00

I hinted at this problem within the context of religious studies in my last post, but this will be a blatant analysis of the same problem. Essentially, it is a problem both of language and of concept. It is the problem of the inexpressibility of anything real, which puts a huge knot in the authority of academia. One can see this in Heidegger's attempts to describe Being and the failure of intellectual thought (which he calls metaphysics) which falls into the exact same pitfalls he describes. What is shown here is the impossibility of academia to accurately describe Being.

We should turn here to the definition of Being, which is an impossibility. Being is existence. Not the abstract nature of existence, but existence itself in immediacy. Is it transcendent? In can be, but we must be wary of actually taking any definition as a accurate measure of Being, even the term Being itself, which hides Being. Being is only Being, but Being itself cannot actually be what it claims to be. By conceptualizing itself it divorces itself from what it is supposed to represent because what it hopes to represent cannot be represented. Not only can in not be expressed in language, but it cannot be conceptualized in any fashion!

So does this mean that Being is hiding? If so it is hiding in plain sight. Heidegger makes the mistake of thinking that Being is difficult to find. Not at all! The problem with Being is not actually that we cannot know Being, but we believe we only can know in a specific fashion. The problem is the academic conception that we can only know in such a way as can be conceptually expressed. This is simply untrue! We experience Being on a daily basis, as we exist within Being, we simple cannot express what existence is. This says less about Being than academia's problems with expressing the nature of reality. This is the ultimate problem in both philosophy and theology, in that the methods of their study contradict the goals of their study. What is the method that does allow for these goals? Mysticism, spirituality, that phenomenological basis of Being that philosophy and theology attempt (and fail) to describe.