Coming home

Journal Club - Medical Anthropology

2009-05-30T20:59:00.000-07:00

Harvey TS (2008). Where there is no patient: An anthropological treatment of a biomedical category. Cult Med Psychiatry 32:577-606.

This article continues the dubious tradition in medical anthropology of essentializing both indigenous communities and biomedicine. Drawing mostly on the author’s PhD research among K’ichee’ Maya, it belabors the point that non-Western views of wellness and healing are often at odds with Western models.

It begins by comparing the dynamics of encounters with ethnomedical healers and allopathic practioners. These case studies are used to make the point that Maya models of healing involve a communal body and collaborative notions of wellness (multiple patients or family members attending a single consultation, family members standing in for a patient physically absent) while allopathic models require the presence of a disarticulated, theoretically mandated Western individual.

The author essentializes his own Western culture, theoretically demanding that all Westerners adhere to his model of individualism. Data from pediatrics (collaborative consultations with parents) and the terminally ill (therapeutic interactions with extended families) are ignored, as are Northern spiritual healing traditions (e.g. Pentecostal healing prayer), which would be much better comparisons to the data he compiles among the K’ichee’. Furthermore, it essentializes indigenous communities, denying them a priori the capacity or desire to interact with allopathic medicine in ways that are locally productive.

In the end, he perpetuates one of the most common theoretical fallacies in medical anthropology. What the author manages to criticize effectively is ‘bad doctoring’—but he conflates ‘bad doctoring’ with allopathic practice per se, thereby shutting the door on any analysis of how to engage in effective, cross-cultural allopathic practice.

Finally, the article is deficient in parsimonious political economic or materialist analysis. Does the fact that multiple members of a family attend a consultation really say something about their wellness model, or does it rather imply that their lack of facility in Spanish requires that an entire family’s combined linguistic ability be employed in order to understand what the doctor is saying? Does the fact that a relative stands in for a physically absent patient imply a collective body, or does it implicate a lack of job security and labor protection that does not allow individuals time off from work in order to attend a medical consultation?

"Your being over there tonight..."

2009-05-03T04:33:00.000-07:00

Paul Celan - "Dein Hinübersein heute Nacht..." translated by John Felstiner.

Your being over there tonight.
I fetched you back with words, here you are,
all things are true and a waiting
for trueness.

The beanstalk climbs
at our window: think
who's growing up near us and
watches it.

God, so we've read, is
one part and a second, dispersed:
in the death
of all who've been reaped
he grows whole.

Our gaze
leads us there,
it's this
half
we deal with.

Assisi - Paul Celan

2009-04-21T18:49:00.001-07:00

Umbrische Nacht.
Umbrische Nacht mit dem Silber von Glocke und Ölblatt.
Umbrische Nacht mit dem Stein, den du hertrugst.
Umbrische Nacht mit dem Stein.

Stumm, was ins Leben stieg, stumm.
Füll die Krüge um.

Irdener Krug.
Irdener Krug, dran die Töpferhand festwuchs.
Irdener Krug, den die Hand eines Schattens für immer verschloss.
Irdener Krug mit dem Siegel des Schattens.

Stein, wo du hinsiehst, Stein.
Lass das Grautier ein.

Trottendes Tier.
Trottendes Tier im Schnee, den die nackteste Hand streut.
Trottendes Tier vor dem Wort, das ins Schloss fiel.
Trottendes Tier, das den Schlaf aus der Hand frisst.

Glanz, der nicht trösten will, Glanz.
Die Toten - sie betteln noch, Franz.

Current Reading List

2009-04-21T14:14:00.001-07:00

Things I have been reading in the last few weeks.

1. Robert Pinsky (1996). The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996. The Noonday Press: New York.

2. Martin Buber (1953). For the Sake of Heaven. Meridian Books: New York.

3. Carmen Martinez Novo (2006). Who Defines Indigenous? Identities, Development, Intellectuals, and the State in Northern Mexico. Rutgers University Press.

4. Ernesto Cardenal (2007). Poesía Completa: Tomo 1. Editora Patria Grande: Buenos Aires.

5. Jacques Lacan (1999). Écrits. Norton: New York.

From 'A Love of Death'

2009-04-21T14:02:00.000-07:00

A small excerpt from my favorite Robert Pinsky volume, An Explanation of America (1979).

None of this happens precisely as I try
To imagine that it does, in the empty plains,
And yet it happens in the imagination
Of part of the country: not in any place
More than another, on the map, but rather
Like a place, where you and I have never been
And need to try to imagine--place like a prairie
Where immigrants, in the obliterating strangeness,
Thirst for the wide contagion of the shadow
Or prairie--where you and I, with our other ways,
More like the cities or the hills or trees,
Less like the clear blank space with their potential,
Are like strangers in a place we must imagine.

Tenebrae

2009-03-01T08:00:00.000-08:00

This incredible poem by Paul Celan, first in German and then an ok English translation by John Felstiner.

Nah sind wir, Herr,
nahe und greifbar.

Gegriffen schon, Herr,
ineinander verkrallt, als wär
der Leib eines jeden von uns
dein Leib, Herr.

Bete, Herr,
bete zun uns,
wir sind nah.

Windschief gingen wir hin,
gingen wir hin, uns zu bücken
nach Mulde und Maar.

Zur Tränke gingen wir, Herr.

Es war Blut, es war,
was du vergossen, Herr.

Es glänzte.

Es warf uns dein Bild in die Augen, Herr.
Augen und Mund stehn so offen und leer, Herr.
Wir haben getrunken, Herr.
Das Blut und das Bild, das im Blut war, Herr.

Bete, Herr.
Wir sind nah.

Near are we, Lord,
near and graspable.

Grasped already, Lord,
clawed into each other, as if
each of our bodies were
your body, Lord.

Pray, Lord,
pray to us,
we are near.

Wind-skewed we went there,
went there to bend
over pit and crater.

Went to the water-trough, Lord.

It was blood, it was
what you shed, Lord.

It shined.

It cast your image into our eyes, Lord.
Eyes and mouth stand so open and void, Lord.
We have drunk, Lord.
The blood and the image that was in the blood, Lord.

Pray, Lord.
We are near.

Ivy "Ivan" Rohloff c1992-2009

2009-02-01T14:14:00.001-08:00

Bartleby's Books

2009-02-01T14:00:00.000-08:00

Amazing book store day. Tripping around Georgetown enjoying the sun and pop my head into this Americana bookstore where, much to my suprise, I find three books that I have been hunting down for ages:

Adrián Recinos and Delia Goetz. The Annals of the Cakchiquels. 1953.

Sandra Orellana. Indian Medicine in Highland Guatemala. 1987.

Lilly de Jongh Osborne. Indian Crafts of Guatemala and El Salvador. 1965.

To the Virgin Mary

2009-01-26T06:05:00.000-08:00

Much I have suffered
On your account
And on your son's, Our Lady.
Since first in my sweet youth
I heard of him;
For not the seer alone,
But even those who serve
A destiny rules. Because I

And many a song which to
The Highest, the Father, I once was
Disposed to sing, was lost
To me, devoured by sadness.

Yet, heavenly one, yet you
I'll celebrate and let no one
Reproach me with
The beauty of native speech,
Now that alone
I go to the field where wild
The lily grows, fearless,
To the inaccessible
Primordial vault
Of the forest,
the Occident,

and over mankind
In place of other deities there reigned
The all-oblivious, Love.

Holderlin, from the fragment An die Madonna

Photos of the year

2009-01-09T08:21:00.000-08:00

My favorite pics from the year past.

Books of the Year

2009-01-09T07:50:00.001-08:00

Every January I make this little list for myself. These are the 10 books that I thought about most this year. This type of list is different than a "books I read" list, because often the same books make it onto the list multiple years in a row (there are a few books that I go back to repeatedly).

1. Heidegger - Early Greek Thought
2. Holderlin - Poems and Fragments
3. Gadamer - Truth and Method
4. Kant - Critique of Judgment
5. Michael Roth - The Poetics of Resistance
6. WS Merwin - The Dancing Bears
7. Rilke - Duino Elegies
8. Levinas - Humanism of the Other
9. Buber - The Prophetic Faith
10. Kazantzakis - Report to Greco

Buber on everything

2009-01-06T07:19:00.000-08:00

"But, Reverend Rabbi," the prince asked again, "how can a people enter the service of God? How can a whole people do that?"

"No one can wholly serve God," Rabbi Israel replied, "except a people. For the service of God means just this, and all individual justice can supply but the single stones toward a structure. A people alone can build justice. This is the meaning of Isaiah when he said: Intertwine not your destiny with the injustice of the mighty but build up justice with your own lives. Then will the love of the peoples rush toward you and you will become a blessing in the midst of the earth."

"But how can an oppressed people, unable to determine the foundation of its own existence, conceivably build the structure of justice?"

"Every man who lives among men, though he be a slave, has the choice between justice toward them and injustice. Nor is it impossible for any people, even though it be sorely subjected to an alien will, to build up that twofold justice: justice among its own members and justice with its neighbors. The measure in which it can do so fluctuates. But the measure of your ability is precisely the measure of God's demand upon you. Not more - nor less..."

"We at all events do not demand what the world calls rights. All that we need is that the people Israel have the right to arrange its life according to the directions of its God. Long, long ago God scattered us over all the earth because we had failed in an earthly task, and since then He purifies us in the fires of suffering. You He has partitioned among your enemies. But you are permitted, unlike us, to continue to dwell together. Nevertheless, you are beginning, even as we do, to perceive that in the lives of peoples there is a mystery of suffering which is allied to the mystery of the Messiah. In the depth of suffering the return to good is born and this return it is which evokes redemption. Now this return is the beginning of justice of which redemption is the completion. You tell me, Prince Adam, that you can find no thread. You can see none so long as you are willing to try nothing less than the disentanglement of the whole. The beginning and the beginning alone is placed into the hands of men. But it is placed in them. Simply make a beginning and at once you will see all about you, in the very circle of your personal activity, all kinds of threads. You will have to grasp but a single one of them and it will be, if God wills it, the right one. Others will do even as you have done and what will come to pass, will come to pass."

Job

2008-12-26T12:09:00.000-08:00

Suppose there comes a day in height of
summer, with grapes still new and lightly
shaded, the stammer of infant cattle
coughs past imagined men who bending
trouble the soil and wait for rain.

Out walks the singular man, him
the usual carrier of daily sorrow
a lighted candle moving slowly
through the stations of his fear.

And that should arrive at some great distance
the final rider weary, cloaked in sighs, at last
before a blue and solemn castle dismounting.
Horse hooves ringing unsettled thrusts by
ancient spirits the throng the awful dream

an impertinent adoration I have
traveled long, far from the breath
of your nostrils blowing, to another
land of small trees

Of late returning. To ask who is this one who
daily waking the unborn hopes of widows
and children dares to remember another day?
And so begins the great inversion as from
the castle hordes descending rivers of ice

in nearly summer lands arriving
yellow grapes on vines congealing,
mares in barns untimely foaling,
so begins the awful year.

Old poets - contemporary thoughts

2008-12-25T16:04:00.000-08:00

I am rereading a bunch of old poetry lately. I am not a fan of much old poetry - poetry dates itself, it seems to me, more quickly than prose. It is too dependent on spoken rhythms and sensibilities, which change over time. The situation is made worse by the need for translation - Romantic German poetry might seem dated in German but it is just really odd in English. There are, however, some perennial standouts for me, which seem always amazingly contemporary and full of fresh insights.

1. John of the Cross. Only in Spanish. All of the English translations are terrible, because they focus too much on an accurate theological translation and less on rhythm and style.

2. John Milton. A hopelessly pedantic, conceited poet. And yet Paradise Lost is amazing. Especially once you grasp the central fact that Satan is the hero of this poem.

3. Holderlin. Revives the entire genre of neoclassic Bacchanalian poetry. Amazing and insightful stuff, at the brink of estatic madness (which he was, in the end). There are good English translations.

4. William Blake. The entire "Death of God" genre that swept American academic theology a few decades back would have been entirely unnecessary if only folks had been reading Blake.

Living with tension

2008-11-17T05:25:00.000-08:00

Dan, who is by far the most interesting and challenging theoblogger that I read these days, has an good post on tensions in life and theory that you can read here. I would like to engage the questions he asks a bit, although I don't really have time to do them justice.

My initial impression when confronted by these questions is that they are particularly insoluble when approached theoretically or in the abstract. For example, when approached from a distance the tension between being forsaken and delivered by God becomes "The Problem of Evil." There is no approach to such an approach, if that makes any sense. When viewed without commitment or without the benefit of a specific instance, there can be no answer to such a question. On the other hand, the problem of picking a dead baby off of its mother's bed and turning toward her with it in hand is quite different. There is hopelessness here. But it is also quite clear what one's actions should be. Forsakenness, and all such tensions, are only paralyzing in the absence of the presence of another. When, however, we are faced with the face of the poor, orphan, and widow it seems to me that there is always something that we are called to do.

Tensions cannot be thought through -- they can however be lived through. My actions in the face of some concrete instance of such tension cannot always be theoretically synthesized, nor are they always consistent. That is the nature of "tension." I do find, however, that specific situations always do call forth specific actions. In short -- for me, living-through tensions requires living-with those lives are most affected by them. Thinking about living-through tension is thinking about solidarity.

Violence- Guatemala

2008-11-12T06:58:00.001-08:00

Arriving Wednesday evening in Guatemala City, I was picked up by our friend Ernesto and we quickly made it to Antigua. The mood of the city has noticeable changed since last I was here. Folks are tense and uneasy. When I rang the bell at our hotel, instead of opening the door, Raul shouted “Who is it?” over the wall, and he would not open the door until I yelled back, “Raul – it’s Peter.”

After safely transferring my belongings to my room, I came back downstairs to ask him how things had been going. He tells about the troubles of his tomato-growing business, how prices of fertilizer have gone up 10-fold, how the price of tomatoes has fallen by more than 50%, how he has had to fire workers. How the hotel is empty and tourism is faltering due to several episodes of violence against tourists on remote roads. How two of his own guests were assaulted last week near the hotel either by Antigua police or thieves wearing police uniforms. He fears this is only the begininng if “delinquencia” as prices of food rise and jobs become ever more scarce.

It is the same theme everywhere. In our Santiago clinic on Saturday Wicha asks me if I have something to help her nerves – her nephew murdered and his body burned just days after his wedding. In Comalapa walking home in the evening after our clinic has ended Magda insists we take a different road than our usual, because the usual way is “too dark.”

On Monday night a drunken thief tries to force his way into our hotel. Raul sends him packing with a loaded pistol. The other two or three guests in the hotel watch this transaction nervously. “Don’t worry,” says Raul, “if he steps inside the door I will shoot him.”

Reading the newspapers this week, one notices that the usual parade of front page violence has been expanded. In yesterday’s Diario, the first 15 pages are devoted exclusively to “massacres,” “fire-fights,” and “assassinations.” They are diverse in nature. A woman, likely a prostitute, assassinated in an alley in Guatemela City. The picture shows her body stuffed into an overturned garbage can with just the feet sticking out. A taxi driver is shot down on the job, Diario again shows just the feet, protruding from behind the front wheels of the taxi, blood running out in a small trail from between the tennis shoes. 15 Nicaraguans on tour are robbed in Zacapa by a gang of delincuents. Things apparently get out of hand, and they are all shot and then loaded back into their bus and burned. The picture shows the white burned-out shell of a camioneta in the background, and a line of 15 black bags with yellow numbered tags in the foreground.

It is difficult to know whether there is more violence now than there has ever been, or whether it is just that there is a general sense of unease, triggered in part by the poorly-performing economy, which leads to increased reporting of the violence. Nevertheless, the uneasiness and at time fear is palpable wherever I go in a way that I have not seen in a long time.

Living for what is beyond-my-death

2008-11-03T18:00:00.001-08:00

Then the Work must not be thought as the apparent agitation of a stock that afterward remains identical to itself, like an energy that remains equal to itself through all its manifestations. Nor must the Work be thought as similar to the technique that, by well-known negativity, transforms a strange world into a world whose otherness is converted to my idea. Both of these conceptions continue to assert being as identical to itself, and reduce its fundamental event to thought that is—and this is the ineffaceable lesson of idealism—thought of itself, thought of thought. The attitude, initially attitude toward the other, becomes, to employ Eric Weil’s terminology, totality or category. Whereas the Work thought radically is a movement of the Same toward the Other that never returns to the Same. The Work thought all the way through demands a radical generosity of movement which in the Same goes toward the Other. It demands, consequently, ingratitude from the Other. Because gratitude would in fact be the return of the movement to its origin.

Moreover, the Work must differ from a game played in pure expense. It is not an undertaking of pure loss. Its identity bordered with nothingness does not suffice to its seriousness. The Work is not pure acquisition of honors, nor pure nihilism. Because the nihilist agent, like a person given to hunting honors, immediately takes himself for term and aim, beneath the apparent gratuity of his action. The Work is a relation with the Other who is reached without showing that he is touched…

However, a departure with no return, that does not fall into the void either, would also lose its absolute orientation if it sought compensation in an immediate triumph, if it impatiently awaited the triumph of its cause…As absolute orientation to the Other—as sense—the work is possible only in the patience that, pushed to the limit, signifies that the Agent renounces contemporaneity with its fulfillment, that he acts without entering the Promised Land.

The Future for which such an action acts must be posed as indifferent to my death. The Work, distinct from both games and computations, is being-for-beyond-my-death. Patience does not mean that the Agent tricks his generosity by giving himself a time of personal immortality. To renounce contemporaneity with the triumph of one’s work is to glimpse this triumph in a time without me, is setting sights on this world without me, setting sights on a time beyond the horizon of my time: eschatology without hope for self or liberation with regard to my time.

Being for a time that would be without me, for a time after my time, beyond the famous “being-for-death”—this is not a banal thought that extrapolated y own duration, it is passage to the time of the Other. Should we call eternity that which makes such a passage possible? Or at least the possibility of sacrifice that goes to the very limit of this passage, discovers the non-inoffensive nature of that extrapolation: being for death in order to be for what is after me.

Levinas, "Signification and Sense"

Development and postcolonial studies

2008-10-29T07:34:00.001-07:00

This great one liner from an article by Christine Sylvester - Third World Quart 20:703 (1999).

"Development studies does not tend to listen to subalterns and postcolonial studies does not tend to concern itself with whether the subaltern is eating."

On speed and reading...

2008-10-25T07:11:00.000-07:00

Technology and capital bring the world into the guiding power of a totalizing principle...Every effort at securing the dominance and mastery of the transcendental signifier will result in failure at the hands of the unstable things that bear out the world. Things are too wild, weird, and unpredictable to be harnessed by the theories and frameworks of metaphysical epochs. It is therefore "bad" to desire to constrain things in this fashion. And what is more, it is even worse to be in a hurry to do so. We have seen both Heidegger and Derrida make reference to a technological emphasis on speed, where speed is supposed to make things nearer to human life, to reduce the distances between things. Such speed fails to bring things closer. Instead, it makes nearness impossible by way of alienation through universal imposition (Gestell) and decadence into commodities for exchange on an open market: things, under the auspices of speed, become less and less thinglike and farther and farther from human being. Technological "mankind" is always in a hurry, and its haste is spurred on by its failure to get near anything at all. The more human beings hurry, the more they must hurry, the more important it becomes for them to be even faster in their decision-making capacity and arrival at their prearranged destinations. We are an epoch of bad readers and our badness is self-escalated, making us worse readers until we eventually stop reading at all.

From Michael Roth, The Poetics of Resistance: Heidegger's Line

Imagining a Stateless World (V)

2008-10-18T08:30:00.000-07:00

“I am disgusted with poetry, art, and books,” I said. “They all seem without substance to me, made of cardboard. It’s as though you were hungry, and instead of being given bread, wine, and meat, you were handed the menu, which you chewed up like a goat.”

I don’t know what had come over me to make me angry. Perhaps it was the fact that I fancied the girl who was standing in front of me, but could not touch her.

She resembled a Russian peasant lass: pale, with pronounced cheekbones and a broad mouth. As I looked at her, my anger increased, I was holding a rose, and I began to pluck out its petals.

“That’s how our enfeebled souls satisfy their hunger—like goats!”

The girl winked her eye roguishly and answered with a laugh, “You speak angrily to me, but actually I agree with you. The only real book is the Old Testament, because it is not made of cardboard but is all flesh and bone, and dripping with blood. To my mind the Gospels are a cup of camomile tea for the simple-minded and bedridden. Jesus was truly a lamb; they slaughtered Him on the green grass at Eastertime and He bleated away docilely, without resisting. Jehovah is my God—severe, heavy Jehovah, dressed in the skins of the wild beasts He killed, like a barbarian coming out of the wilderness, a hatchet passed through His waistband. With this hatchet He opens my heart and enters.”

She remained silent for a moment, her cheeks blazing. But the flames had not subsided, and she continued.

“Do you remember how He speaks to men? Have you seen how men and mountains melt in His hands, how kingdoms are engulfed beneath His foot? Man shouts, weeps, begs, hides in caves, burrows into ditches—struggles to escape. But Jehovah is planted in his heart like a dagger.”

This passage from Kazantzakis’ pseudo-autobiographical Report to Greco is remarkable. It will serve to help us think through the transition from our first line of inquiry into the second. We have seen how the quest for self-identity is Christianly an empty one—here Kazantzakis describes this eloquently. The fixation on identity-making and the inner personal life is a goat-like behavior—eating the menu instead of the food. We have asserted that identity ultimately is empty because it is a laying-hold-of, a emphasis on personal choice, when the gospel calls instead for a being-laid-hold-of.

Kazantzakis’ passage is also remarkable because it underscores how this being-laid-hold-of is a violent encounter. Jehovah is planted like a dagger in my heart. There is no alternative, there is no escape. The girl mocks Christianity for being, in contrast to the deadly reality of the encounter with Jehovah, like weak camomile tea. How are we to make sense of this contrast?

Kazantzakis’ criticism of the Gospels is a criticism of Christianity as it is—Christianity as it is configured, as it has become. As such his criticism is really identical to that of Nietzsche, who has illuminated for us painfully all the ways in which we have diluted, reduced, and reconfigured the Christ into a psychologized, tranquilizing projection. But no, Kazantzakis reminds us (and Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, and Flannery O’Connor as well, if we can listen), the true Christ and his Jehovah are not our friend, not ever. They are a dagger buried in our heart.

Imagining a Stateless World (IV)

2008-10-15T06:56:00.001-07:00

Imagining a Stateless World (IV)

what I live for I can seldom believe in
who I love I cannot go to
what I hope is always divided

but I say to myself you are not a child now
if the night is long remember your unimportance

WS Merwin

In younger days each morning I rose with joy,
To weep at nightfall; now, in my later years,
Though doubting I begin my day, yet
Always its end is serene and holy.

F Holderlin

In our discussion so far of identity, we have been guided in part by Baudrillard’s conception of the simulacrum, which allows us to see the ways in which identity rewrites itself through the iterations of uncontested consumerism. Thus emptied of content, it nevertheless remains controlling for our lives. Identity becomes a simulation of identity. We have gone far afield with this analogy, and it has allowed us to see in part the ways is which this identity in its various modes sublimates right actions by mitigating risk and falsely amplifying the meaningfulness of personal choice.

Finally, we can say that the simulation of identity, above all through its uncontested emphasis on choice, creates an irreparable distance between ourselves and Others. Here Baudrillard’s assertion that identity is something we pursue when we have nothing better to do comes to full force. We can perhaps restate Baudrillard in a more theological way by saying that we focus on our own choices because we ourselves have not been chosen by anyone else. But what does this mean?

As we have previously discussed, the logic of consumption and choice is closely tied to the myth that our personal actions are instantaneous, effective, and measurable. Locked in this mode, we simulate personal responsibility. We drink fair trade coffee. We ride our bikes to work. We go to war protests. We adopt-a-child. These actions, and others like them, are fundamentally without risk. They are therefore, Christianly speaking, fundamentally meaningless.

Furthermore, the logic of personal choice is an antagonistic logic. When we engage in the simulation of personal identity, we are always engaged in defining difference, in determining who we are not. We are not those who eat meat. We are not those who vote for Republicans. It is important to recognize that this antagonism is absolutely determining for an ethic of choice. The logic of the market is a logic of making-oneself-different. It is no wonder then that we cannot arrive at the psychic preconditions for new Imaginings. We are too busy thinking about who we are not to bother thinking about who we are. We try to stand out – but standing out is equivalent to standing down. It is motionlessness.

In contrast to the motionless, distant logic of market and choice, the gospel advocates for a logic of encounter. Encounter is a being-taken-hold-of. It is the realization that there is a choice, but it is not ours. It is a word of command to which we listen and to which we may response. But what does this mean? Who is choosing, and by whom are we taken-ahold-of? To answer this, we will need to turn to the next statement:

(b) I am not the one Jesus came to save.

Imagining a Stateless World (III)

2008-10-14T22:24:00.001-07:00

Imagining a Stateless World (III)

(a) “Identity is a dream that is pathetically absurd. You dream of being yourself when you have nothing better to do.” (Baudrillard)

(b) “I am not the one whom Jesus came to save.”

(c) “Action is worship. Worship is not action.”

Reading over these three statements after having written them down makes the task of talking about them seem even more difficult. These three statements say the same thing, which makes it difficult to talk about them individually; and yet I can’t think how to talk about them together entirely. They are each iterations of what I feel to be a central movement in Christian spirituality – that of self-effacement. They are statements that must be written with one hand and erased with the other. As such they are conscious over-statements, untruths that are true precisely because they are over-stated. Additionally, I am very aware of the limited utility of discussion and argumentation if what we are really trying to do is articulate a way of living and not just a way of thinking. Therefore, I do not attempt to “prove” the statements in any rigorous way. For me they have been revelations, which can be taken are left for what they are at the discretion of the reader.

Additionally, these statements will I think find hearers only in a very circumscribed circle of Christian seekers. They are directed specifically at those who are already engaged in a process of thinking and living at the margins of current Christianity. They are critical of these marginal movements, but in a way that is intended to be auto-critical. There is I think great promise at these margins and also great danger. I am trying to articulate some of these dangers.

Remember also that the dangers we are trying to articulate are those that impede our process toward a proper Imagining – ways of thinking and living that misdirect our focus and cause us to spend our energy in futile ways.

(a) “Identity is a dream that is pathetically absurd. You dream of being yourself when you have nothing better to do.” (Baudrillard)

Baudrillard has fallen out of fashion these days, and I think that is unfortunate. Central to Baudrillard’s thinking is the concept of the simulacrum. Simulacrum describes the way in which previously rich and meaningful signs become emptied of their meaning through the iterative, redundant, information-rich processes of late capitalist and post-industrial life. Emptied of meaning, the sign still persists. It still consumes our energy and attracts our attention, but it is disengaged from any form of transformative social process. It misdirects us, while at the same time providing satiety and illusions of fulfillment.

Formerly, identity could have a rich Christian meaning. It was exhibited in the life of Jesus, who embodied commitment and responsibility. It was articulated in the writings of Paul, who speaks of co-crucifixion, of drawing upon oneself the sins of an entire world. This Christian identity had three essential movements: self-lowering, self-emptying, and self-sacrifice.

As simulacrum, as consumer-saturated stand-in, identity serves an entirely different set of functions. Let’s try to enumerate some of these functions:

1. Self-lowering is at least partially supplanted by the late industrial myth of health and balance. In this mode the simulacrum of identity dictates that we “first take care of ourselves.” We are told to nurture our own spiritual resources, to eat well, to meditate. We our encouraged, first and foremost, to do our own psychic work.

This anti-Christian configuration of identity ignores the fact that the character of Jesus is, by all our contemporary reckonings, an exceedingly pathological one. Jesus is not a family man. He does not plan for the education of his children nor does he have a savings account to protect the future of his relatives. The writings of Dostoyevsky and Kazantzakis are particularly useful here for bringing out this point. Here, and also in the gospel accounts, we are forced to face a portrait of the Christ as an exceedingly sick man, fundamentally anti-social, foolhardy, and extraordinarily dismissive of his personal wellbeing.

The Christ shows us that personal spiritual resources are replenished only in the most daring, pervasive, and sustained acts of self-lowering and service to Others. For the Christ there is never any sentiment to “take care of myself, so that I can take care of others.” There is, instead, a sickness unto death that pulls him along behind it, forever in front, forever eliciting future acts of escalating acts of service. “If a man asks for your coat, give him the shirt off your back,” remains always a central movement of a true Christian identity. As simulacrum, our contemporary notions of health, balance, and psychic well-being forever attempt to mitigate this risk.

2. The Christian notion of self-emptying is persistently effaced by contamination with market economics. Self-emptying refers to a particular ethic of faithfulness, an eternal “in-spite-of” which has been eloquently elaborated by many contemporary theologians including Moltmann, who for me is very important. In contradistinction, the ethics of the market insist above all on the criterion of effectiveness. Consequently, we are told with a serious and straight face not to give money to individuals on the street as this will not “change anything.” We are forced to listen to the likes of Peter Wagner, formerly of Fuller Seminary, who tells us that churches should be economically or ethnically homogenous, as that will ensure that they “grow faster.” This market seduction, which has convinced us that our individual consumer choices are meaningful and effective in our own lives, permeates our ethic of personal and communal action. We allow ourselves to court a certain conceit of personal engagement, the notion that our actions are instantaneous, effective, and measurable.

By contrast, the Christ reminds us that the way of the gospel is always and inevitably a way of defeat. Above all, it admonishes us not to over-estimate our own worth as agents apart from and set above others. At all times, we are called to act in righteous ways, which are not guaranteed to be effective ways. The eternal “in-spite-of” challenges us to do things that should be done, regardless of whether or not they “work.”

3. A Christian ethic of self-sacrifice is forever threatened by the relativization of wealth that occurs in post-industrial society. This is in fact an ancient threat, not one unique to our own time. It is best exemplified by the encounter between Jesus and the rich young ruler. This rich young man embodies our own dilemma, which is one of losing sight of our social position and therefore allowing ourselves to countenance and in fact amplify trivial forms of self-sacrifice.

We misapply Biblical metaphors to justify our inflated notions of sacrifice. The best example is the tithe. In Biblical times, when a subsistence farmer gave 10% of his crop to the temple, that left him with 90% of the food necessary to feed his family for the year. There is a risk implicit here that does not equate to skimming off the plasma television and artesanal beer fund.

Perhaps even more dangerous than the way in which we amplify the significance of our own small monetary sacrifices is the way in which we allow our consumerism to dictate the notion of sacrifice in the first place. When Jesus proclaims that the “fields are white for harvest,” this invokes forms of labor. That we have been able to subvert discussions of labor with discussions of financial contribution reveals the extent to which our consumerism is controlling for our Christianity. Perhaps the most heterodox notion of all is that we at times tell ourselves that God has called us to make money in order to give it away. While we calculate our 10% of gross income, the Son of Man wanders under the stars, spits in the eyes of blind men, and sleeps in ditches with mud on his face.

A recovery of a Christian ethic of identity as self-sacrifice will require us to recover the notion of vocation. Healing the sick and preaching the gospel to the poor implies forms of labor and, specifically, it implies that certain forms of labor are more valuable than others. It is the height of heterodoxy to assert that all that God calls us toward is the performance of whatever we do in the most Christian way possible. It is the whatever that must be called into question. Specifically, the kingdom of God demands the enactment of the most anti-social forms of labor – life-works which call into question, undermine, and subvert systems of production, exploitation, and dehumanization. We must begin to ask ourselves if there are certain professions and life-works which are fundamentally unredeemable, and we must structure our life-planning to avoid them.

Levinas on private spaces

2008-10-11T13:05:00.000-07:00

One has to respond to one's right to be, not be referring to some abstract and anonymous law, or judicial entity, but because of one's fear for the Other. My being-in-the-world or my 'place in the sun', my being at home, have these not also been the usurpation of spaces belong to the other man whom I have already oppressed or starved, or driven out into a third world; are they not acts of repulsing, excluding, exiling, stripping, and killing?"

Hospitality

2008-10-08T16:48:00.000-07:00

Interesting article: Barnett C. (2005). Ways of relating: hospitality and the acknowledgement of otherness. Prog Hum Geogr 29:5.

Here is this quote:

In reiterative readings of the theme of hospitality in literature, policy and theology, Derrida finds that hospitality is ordinarily represented as a gift in the conventional sense,…Hospitality is therefore offered conditionally, out of a secure sense of self-possession. Just as with the deconstruction of the gift, Derrida’s reading of what he calls the ‘laws of hospitality’ finds them to be premised on a logic of unrelinquished mastery over one’s own space. This commonsense understanding of hospitality therefore amounts to an ethics of tolerance. And Derrida suggests that tolerance depends on a form of paternalism rooted in mastery and possession, and that it therefore runs counter to the imperatives of “pure’ hospitality.

This analysis seems to set up a clear opposition between two orders: tolerance, taken as a shorthand term for conditional hospitality; and pure, unconditional hospitality. Tolerance is extended to a guest whose identity is already attributed. On the other hand, pure hospitality befalls the subject as a trauma, because it is a response to an unanticipated arrival, to a visitation without invitation.

Thinking about hospitality gets me thinking this: Our discussions of hospitality, which have resurged in the emergent and new monasticism movements. We are off the mark, because our hospitality is predicated in possession. We use hospitality as a way to justify continued acquisition of possessions – just like everyone else. Our desire to welcome others into our home is not a Christian desire to be unconditionally hospitable—rather it is an American desire to own a home. A true Christian hospitality must necessarily involve the willingness to relinquish our “own space” and the condescension and mastery over the other that that entails (“our own spaces” here are not only private homes, but also church buildings, communal homes, and like). In fact, it might be correct to assert that true Christian hospitality requires homelessness. “Foxes have holes and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”

Animal casualties

2008-10-02T19:06:00.001-07:00

My sister works for a large tertiary care animal hospital in Boston. She informs me that several chart abbreviations are used to describe animal casualties.

There is, for example, the rather straight-forward "HBC" - "hit by car"

However, the gem is this one, for those of you who love Boston - "HBMBTA" - "hit by trolley"