The Helplessness of Knowledge (Advent?)

I haven’t posted for a few weeks.  On the Friday after Thanksgiving, my wife, Margo, fell ill with a rare blood disease.  One hundred and fifty miles from home, she collapsed and over the last 4 weeks we’ve been in a hospital fighting for our lives. 

I’ve gone through things, had experiences, and felt feelings I never thought I would at this point in my life.  Three to four in a million people develop the disorder Margo has.  During the acute stages of her illness, we were walking through the shadows of the valley.  Margo’s case of TTP was critical.  She fell into the ~15% of people who are resistant to treatment….~15% of an already rare disease medicine cannot tell us a whole lot about.  

There is a fancy word medicine has when it doesn’t know what triggers or brings on a disease like we faced: idiopathic.   Science has developed a theory on what happened in Margo’s body when it started destroying key factors of its own blood.  But, it can’t tell us what triggered it or why.   As a matter of fact, it could happen again.  All we can do is watch.

Theology has fancy words, too.   I’m at home with fancy words.  But, at the bottom of it, not knowing what caused this, something that so quickly threatened to change our lives forever, brought me deep in touch with the helplessness of knowledge- scientific or theological. 

We knew the name of the disease.  We had good idea of what was happening: why her platelets were being destroyed along with some of her blood cells; why it was most likely auto-immune; why she was barely conscious.  We didn’t know why she was resistant to standard treatment.  We didn’t know, exactly, why it left her almost unable to communicate with confused speech, and then left her barely consciousness.  We didn’t know why she lost use of some of her limbs, why her muscles contorted, why she had terrifying seizures, and later awoke to be delirious, hallucinating, and confused for 82 unbroken hours without sleep.  I knew the doctors and nurses became very concerned.  But, I didn’t know why this was happening to Margo, why me, or what might become of us, especially our girls.  It’s not perfectly clear why she seems to be going into remission; why her body stopped attacking itself or if it’ll happen again….or if it’ll happen in the same way.  We don’t know if she’ll fully recover. We don’t know exactly why each case of her blood disorder, TTP, is different.   

I guess I’m some kind of theologian.  You’d think being completely helplessness, feeling infinitely small, not knowing the future or what precisely was happening to you – or what you could do about it - is something theology and a theologian would be completely at home with.   Science inevitably falls short, right?  Theology humbly stands off stage ready to fills the gaps:  God is the answer.  God is in control.  God will save you.  God always does the right thing.  We just can’t understand. 

Some people take another angle.  Their angle is that science is a gift.  It also possesses knowledge of God.  I tend to think this way.  The right way to approach this kind of situation is to realize God and science can work together.  Science provides a kind of knowledge of ourselves and of God.  But, when science can’t give effective explanations; when its logic of causality can’t posit an effective and verifiable course of treatment; when it can’t cure what could be brutalizing your wife’s brain and other organs with lack of oxygen, destroying the integrity of her blood, and maybe kill her; when there is no clear enemy, no pathogen, no clear mechanism or trigger for the disease or disorder; when there’s no sequence of events that leads to the deficiency of the enzyme proposed to be causing this disease, an enzyme only the human body can make; what then?  What good is this scientific knowledge?  What sort of hapless “gift” is this?  (You can visualize the spit loosely flying from my mouth as I pronouce the word “gift” in anguished disgust.)

Maybe theology is all there is.  Science, really, is just a distraction.  When in doubt, throw yourself back on the explanation of all explanations:  God.  Faith is a kind of willful ignorance.  Faith pushes back everything, including science.  Belief brushes everything aside.  The Word or the name “God” is the answer, the reason and our fullest explanation.   Jesus explains it all.  “God” or “Jesus” is the name that explains all things: why things happen, the human condition, why things happen to you.  “God” is the stop-gap for all human helplessness.  Just turn your eyes to the sky.  God alone is sovereignty and “His” mysterious ways are why my wife and I fought for our lives, why I knelt and sobbed and prayed at the foot of her bed, why my four and six year old daughters might face losing a parent, why we didn’t know what was going on or why.

Excuse me if I don’t talk to such a person with these answers unless they’ve been where I’ve been.  Please pardon me if I don’t want to talk to this person, who doesn’t understand the helplessness of God to do just my bidding or answer my desires in a timely manner, and perform magic in my name – for me, Margo, or my kids.  I’m sorry if I don’t understand how this is precisely the wages of faith.

When I was in the ICU, I realized the uselessness of theology – at least the purely academic.  I had special knowledge of theology and philosophy, and it wasn’t helping me.  What I wanted was to do something, to have answers, to get my bearings.   Science was my best bet.  But, it, too, had definite limits.  It’s knowledge was full of gaps and uncertainty.   In this way, the knowledge of science was a lot like theology.   Certainty meant nothing. 

A blessing was that Margo did seem to respond to the next line of intervention: chemo drugs.  But, these particular drugs, as far as I read, had only case-study evidence for their utility.  There were no longitudinal studies, no controlled trials.  She simply was injected.  And, we waited.  I remained in a deep sense of introspection, spiritual searching, and vulnerability.  Force-fed only one moment at a time, we waited for blood tests.  Watched for signs.  We hoped.

But, there was something else.  Something more.  Inbetween the helplessness of scientific knowledge and the uselessness of academic theology, there was a way we faced the uncertainty and the dark shadows we passed through walking in the valley.  When Margo was unrespnsive for 10 days, fighting for her life, being sent back and forth to CT’s of her head and abdoman to rule out the chance of lethal bleeding, waiting between blood cultures to makes sure she wasn’t infected by having two active ports into her bloodstream, while thrombi were causing untold damage in the organs of her body, there was something I found within the shadows of uncertain outcome and helplessness.  Sometimes, while I walked alone, something still reached me: outpouring prayer.

Prayer and worship helped me face the possibility of Margo dying.  Prayer and worship were the only thing that allowed me to leave her side many nights to go be with my two little children.   Prayer and worship, done in the physical presence of our visitors as well as with others over the internet – prayers sent from 1000′s of miles away and songs I could only hear in my heart as I read them on the screen – these more than sustained me.  They helped me remain vulnerable to the waves of panic, fear, bad news and painful possibilities.  They held Margo and I in the uncertain truth.  Prayer and worship rectified the situation for me.   Prayer and worship brought me into a presence I could barely understand or talk about.

Facing the helplessness of the highest forms of theological and scientific knowledge, prayer and worship provided hope with further prayer and guidance through unknown experiences.  Prayer and worship provided me with indescribable community.  Prayer and worship filled the air of our hospital room with a defiant sweetness in the face of our deepest fears and trust, regardless of outcome.  Prayer and worship held me open.  Prayer and worship were the only things that provided sleep at night, and the courage to face the next unknowable day. 

As I sit here hopeful that we are on the other side of this struggle with TTP, but helpless to have any sure knowledge, prayer and worship are what remains.

Thanks. Giving.

Revisionist history.  Whatever.  

I’m no historian.  However, the truth remains that our nation was established on violence, and it continues to be a major industry.  It began with a prolonged genocide of native Americans, a war against the British, chattel slavery.   Give Thanks.

I feel like a Turkey.

As I recall, the original thanksgiving was depicted to me as a meal between settlers and natives.  America’s still struggling for diversity around its tables.   Diversity has become acceptable, even in vogue, ironically on the heels of a period when affirmative action has been deconstructed and ruled obsolete.   If equality has been achieved, why the need to overcome homogeneity? 

So, while America’s culture of business and finance searches for a new American face, industrial jobs continue to be exported.  Poverty, by the numbers, remains disproportional to people of color.  However, downward mobility is increasinly less discriminate.   No female President; no person of color.   Ours remains a White House. 

We’re increasingly sensitive to the issues of race and ethnicity in our vision for human community.   For that, I give thanks.  However, it comes only as everyone has become a potential stranger.   Preemtive wars, border fences, hostile immigration policies.   Don’t we need a passport to go to Canada now?

America’s most patriotic Christians protest the proliferation of Harry Potter as well as Islam and secularity.  Their patriotism remains a kind of xenophobia;  they are perfectly at home with its logic, which carries in it the negative reflection of their religion.  Liberal Christianity faithfully seeks to build community and overcome a history of denominationalism and insularity.  Yet, they remain in decline awhile the number of conservative Christians grow with souls who don’t want to be “left behind.”

Oh, how thankful.  Oh God, how giving.

I am thankful, however, today.  I am thankful for friendship, for love, and for generative power of passion.  I’m thankful for honesty and the radical lengths it can travel to open our minds critically to the most impossible of possibilities. 

In a world where most of our relationships are based on exchange in search of profitable exploits, I’m thankful for simple giving and the gratitude that overflows our need to recieve. 

Aphorism

Any truth that must be set forth against any other cannot itself be true for it partakes in its opposite…

Addendum

…unless truth, itself, is contradiction.

Adorno: Self-Referential Truth, or Buying into the Surface of Things

The old idea, I thought, was that that tautology was sophistry.  In other words, A=A didn’t say anything: anything profound, meaningful, or interesting.   It only stated the obvious, what was only itself anyway.  All sorts of camera tricks, smoke and mirrors, $64 words, and twists of logic could lead up to great prolix and seduce us with a sense of profundity and complexity.  But, with a little un-sophisticating of the sophistication, if one could prove that the point one was making came down to A=A, the great mind saying it wasn’t really saying anything….or wasn’t saying anything that A=A couldn’t say by itself.

Another way to say this is to demonstrate that truth is not ultimately self-referential.  In other words, if A=A because, “like ‘A’ really does mean, like, ‘A,’” then it is impossible to penetrate the deeper meaning of things.  That’s it.  A=A.   Form without content.  Representation without meaning.

wow.  sign me up.

Yet, this is precisely the dominant logic.  Take, for instance, religious thinking.  God=God because God is Holy and only God is Holy, my gosh!  Ao God=Holy because God=God.  The point of reference comes back to itself.   No content ever enters the equation.  It evaporates in self-reference.  In other words, A=A because B=A so A=B, which is the same thing as saying A=A.  The truth of it is itself: self-referential.   It is “true” because it comes back to itself.   It is truth, but without substance.  It is its own origin.  One can think without thinking, without any doubt or critical capacity.

Everyday example #1:  Buy product “A” because it is good and will save you money.   [Now notice a person with product "A" smiling and happy and with sex appeal.]   Ooohhh.  Product A=good.  Me want product “A.”  [Consumer imagines him/herself happy and with sex appeal....Oh, and s/he has also bought product A!]  Consumer subsequently goes to buy product A.

Nevermind that spending money doesn’t save you money.  This contradiction doesn’t even enter thought.  Such a thought would not be consumer thought: the thought that our consumer culture is unabashedly based on.  Our self-delusion is no longer in hiding.  You and I both aready know: it is already assumed you will spend money, so the idocy of saving money by spending it goes utterly unnoticed.  You were going to spend it to begin with.   Why not save it by spending it?  What magic!  What a deal!  From a different historical vantage point, this is the accomplishment of being convinced that your s&!t doesn’t stink and putting it on your skin or breakfast cereal is healthy because its “all natural.”

Example #2:  Be yourself!  (psst: because everyone’s doing it.)  Umm.  Ok.   By the way, this product, product “B,” will make you the real you – a better you.  Now, if you don’t buy product “B,” you won’t be the real you, only a shabby you, and *everybody’s* doing that.  [Notice everybody can be used for making you do something or not do something; it works either way.]  So, now that everybody is being themselves, so are you.  Awesome!  But, you are not only being yourself – which is what *everybody* is doing, pshaw! – you are being the real you:  the better, good looking, more tidy, younger, dashing you.  No one else is really doing that.  You are doing what everyone else is doing, but better!   

What is it exactly that you are doing, but better than everyone else?  Not being yourself.

This is an example of not-A=not-A because A=A, which is what everyone is doing.  And, to be better you need to be not-A.  So, if you are A, product “B” will help you become a better A or not-A.   (You are not supposed to notice that everyone else saw that commercial and they are being not-themselves, too.)

Now no one is being themselves.  The only way to be the real you = being a better you.  Either way, its not you.

A=A: who wants it?  I am A.  I am sophisticated.  I want not-A.  That is the real me, a better me.  And, I can become it by saving money if I spend just this much.

Here, too, the tautology is not hidden.  The idiocy is obvious.  We want it and have faith in it. 

This logic is the logic of what Adorno called the culture industry: its unadorned make-up.  And, it ain’t going away.

Remainder and Reserve: An Initial Exposition

The legacy of Western Thought has been its concepts.  One way to understand postmodern interventions is their attempts to articulate how these concepts have simultaneously been a ruse or trap.

We might make the leap to suggest that the variations of postmodern discourse itself are the result of modernity’s inherent critique turned back on itself, i.e. modernity’s critical project to unite knowledge and truth turned on its own categories.  Outside of this definition, any truly “post-” modernity seems at best a hopeful gesture.  It remains a question whether the “post” of postmodernity signs the subsequent possibility or impossibility of truth in Western thought, or whether it is possible at all to transcend or release our thought from its Western traps.

All sorts of critical terms have been deployed to indicate what is left of the Western project.  Attention has been turned to what is suppressed, submerged, and relegated by the hegemony of Western thought:  subjugated knowledge, the subaltern, abject, remainder, the Other.   Of course, not all of these terms speak to the same thing.  Certainly, to think so would be to perpetuate the Western mistake, i.e. to tidy up things by declaring identity over the intervals of difference that make “things” what we think they really are. 

But, we cannot assume that in this turn of attention to the perforations and promulgation of discourses on difference that the same Western conceptuality – its covering capacity, its ability to gather in and separate, to organize and intervene, and stake critical claims or put forth totalizing critiques of representation - is not at play.   The contradictions that haunt all claims to truth in conceptuality remain implicit in the very function of discourse: writing, translation, and speech. 

Nevertheles, the topic or thrust of Western discourse has invariably shifted.  This turn has been from totality to infinity, from universality to particularity, and identity to difference.  In theology and philosophy, there is a simultaneous search for the conceptual “beyond” and certain limits.  In queer theories, the dialectics constituting the method of critique are also being suspended.  The structure of difference, itself, is no longer confined to binary oppositions, but are seen as in ways necessarily indiscernable in moments of simultaneity, disruption, and transgression in the lived experiences inbetween categories. 

What I am trying to zero in on is some general sense of this transition.   As stated, its indications are set forth in the (already passe?) modern/postmodern discussion.   The subject, if there remains such a thing, has shifted.  The quest for truth set forth by Western epistemology and its philosophical concepts, remains amidst the play of representations.  However, the project concerns what remains, the remainder. 

The remainder concerns what modernity has both created and subjugated in its hegemony and systemization.  The remainder is essential to the deconstructive and disruptive tone of postmodernity.  The remainder, if it can be identified, carries with it productive capacities in that it holds the truth of what truth holds within itself in reserve.   Conceptually, truth is difference. 

Perhaps, it is difference unfolding.

Remainder and reserve are now our discursively productive concepts in postmodernity.  The remainder is a helpful heuristic for deconstructive and critical thinking.  It is what is left as non-identical in identity-thinking, identity being that which unites concept and object in the representations that make thinking, speaking, and writing possible.  In this way, the remainder is perpetually productive.  It is what is held in reserve of an object once its concept(s) has been exhausted.   

What remains is the reserve truth holds within itself in thought.  It is that which will always be outside: the light which illuminates thought is always that which remains.

Met Rick Perlstein at my Local Cafe

So I ran into Rick Perlstein at my local java joint this week.  He was a familiar face to me; however, we never previously talked.   Our conversation started over seating.  We shared mutual feelings about how the cushy-chairs under HVAC have a tendency to either chill or dry you out, depending on the season. 

That day, we were seated across from each other.  I was reading Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution; he was enjoying Harry Potter.   I learned later this author and blogger was on a long-deferred vacation.   Looking back, I think it ironic that I was reading “the” philosopher of the old “New Left.”

Making Mr. Perlstein’s acquaintance was a treat for me. Rick is a senior fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future, where you will also find his widely read blog, The Big Con.  A self-professed liberal and atheist with affections for Christianity, he is also author of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus.  It’s sequel, Nixonland: America’s Second Civil War and the Divisive Legacy of Richard Nixon is due out next summer. 

We introduced ourselves.  I explained I was a PhD student in theology and ethics, and immediately we began to talk politics.  I consider myself a far-left leaning Democrat and social progressive - somewhat driven there by my disgust for the Religious Right.   I was in good company.  

More pertinent to our discussion, I’ve always been fascinated by how present politics, especially the Clinton and Bush years, is haunted by the 1960′s.   On the one hand, I think its pretty obvious.  The 60′s aren’t over; they never came to a close.   We hear it all over again every time the Right puts God and America back in bed together.  Iraq resembles Vietnam – imperial, distant, still in our living rooms.  Except now, war protest has gone international.  Neoconservatism has capitalized religiously and politically on September 11th with Bush’s “us vs. them” rhetoric and the spin of terrorism + Islam.    Plus, without the Soviet Union as it once was, America is now an empire.

America obviously remains conflicted on how to remember the 60′s.  Many Christians would like to bring WWII and Leave It to Beaver back again.   Sure, we agree it was a time of change.  The upheaval of that period was shared internationally.  Yet, this nation remains perpetually tortured – tortured over the disconnect of its moral and political compass.  The directional debate continues through the political.  Our “issues” get aired at every national election and through congressional legislation.  The symbolic winner gets to occupy the oval office.  The critical issue holding the center for those who lean to the right is “moral values,” which has proven to have much more to do with sex (abortion, homosexuality, Presidential indiscretions) than with discerning any political substance in our nation’s actual sense of morality or values.  To do that, of course, we might have to actually talk about the promiscuity of religion in the intercourse of war and economics. 

Our nation’s current political situation takes is shape in the wake of a powerful and political generation – one that is still working out its religio-political issues.   As such, national consciousness remains sucked in to an ambivalent conscience, a conscience at war with itself over the sexual revolution, pop drug culture, and war protests and its undone consequences.  The rift that defines current affairs and its political spin penetrate deep into America’s churches.   The nation’s rent political fabric, one might argue, first began to be felt so deeply there.  The “moral majority” – so major and so moral - had to be declared.  America’s evolving sense of freedom, shaken sense of national identity, even our trust in government has both religious dimensions and religious consequences – all, of which, were first shaped in the 60′s.  Two subsequent generations, whose formative years are separated by the onset of MTV and AIDS crisis, on the one hand, and a booming economy and Christian music market in the 1990′s, on the other, are forever shaped in their wake.  

In sum, the divide defining America’s politics has a genealogy.  

And Perlstein gets it. 

Panological Negation – peeling back internalized heteronomy

Panological Negation.  If the idea belongs anywhere, it’s existentialism.  Accept, no one is listening.

Catch the play on meaning?

The idea came from an image that came to me while I was reading Foucault’s Discipline and Punish.  I was at the section on Bentham’s panopticon.

I saw in my head a morbid scene of myself, rotating 360 degrees and exhaling with all my might an apocalyptic scream.    I was in my late 20′s and working fulltime in the ministry.  The image depicted my feelings obviously, which were themselves a reflection of the contradictions I felt myself immersed in – contradictions I could neither resolve or transcend personally.  It was a feeling everyone has at one time or another, if one breaks with appearences and turns oneself inward for a moment to consumate an affair with the harlot honesty.

The significance of the image was its intensity: one sweeping (e)motion.  An (e)motion that held together in simultaneity, freedom and tragedy.  The of coming of age.  What I realized was that, if I was going to have any sense of self-identity, I had to find a way to panologically negate the forces that colonized my lifeworld with a sense of somebody else’s history.  

If panological negation means anything, it is initiation to the existential experience of self-reference: the break with asking someone else if everything’s OK.  Some people have to come to the realization of this sooner than others.  Others feel panologically negated by the world or others early on by virtue of their historical circumstances.  Others pass as what everyone else thinks of them, well, consistently.

From within, panological negation might mean the beginning of a semblance of self.  It begins with a sense or (e)motion.  A sweeping apocalyptic ”No.” and the silence that follows.  It’s the end of a world.   

Quote: A “Palatable” Karl Marx

I ran across this quote in Marx again today.  It bears sharing.  It comes from the early Marx, particularly, his dissertation.  I’ve taken it out of context, but in such a way, I beleive, that on its own it still retains credibility – credibility for Marx and for us. 

“What was inner light becomes consuming flame turning outwards.”

Marx, of course, was describing the movement of dialectics.  He clearly remained under the spell of Hegel’s system, which absorbed the world into the philosophical, and made it spiritual, or ideal.  It was Marx, however, who desired to turn such idealism and its philosophical-spiritual worldview on its head, retaining itself as philosophy, but united with a constellation of concreteness, truth and human praxis.

Definitions of “spiritual” notwithstanding, isn’t that something of the spirit of the Restoration?

Today is my birthday.

Children Preachers: A Little Child Shall Lead Them?

Have you seen this?  (Sorry, you may need a yahoo id to see it.)  It’s a news feature on kid preachers.  This one shows a 7-year old and 9-year old.  Randall Balmer, a scholar of Christian Evangelicalism and guest at the Community of Christ’s Theology and Ministry Forum in 2005 was also interviewed. 

I pray, this is not what Isaiah had in mind when he wrote Isaiah 11:6.  (For the record, there weren’t any lions or lambs in the segment.  No leopards or goats, either.)  The whole idea gives my brain gas, a kind of mental flatulance.  I don’t know whether to laugh or stop cold in awe of stuff like this.  Should I be stupified for my spiritual immaturity, or simply hung out to dry with the rest of the heathens?  I think what sickens me most about a story like this is the need of religionists to manipulate little kids and construe make-shift spiritual signs out of them.   If this isn’t fashioning an graven image, what the hell is?  The symbolic innocence of children, I think, lends them to the idea that they are or can become spiritual oracles, diviners and perveyors of “truth,” in our secularist post-denominational sign-seeking religious age.  Religion is reduced to the proof spectacle, kind of like an infinitely bad empiricism.  The divination of kids, I think, springs from the ancient idea that knowledge contaminates and spoils the human soul.   Kids are yet exempt from this; they are our “little angels.”  Worldly experience makes us damaged goods.  (Think Christian cult of virginity, here, too.)  Children, little gifts of heaven, are still pure.  They must be somehow closer to God, which makes their “ministry” all the more powerful.   Little messengers of the truth.  Truely, a gifted 7-year old preacher spewing Biblical dogma is a miracle, a sign of God.  Only God could make this happen right?

Try, only “man.” 

Everyone has heard about the little girl who is overheard on his newborn brother’s monitor asking him, “What does God look like again?  I’m beginning to forget.”  The whole story is supposed to make us forget that this baby still poops in his pants….and someone has to change it.

The nice little southern baptist preacher in this news story, a 7 y/o, was nice enough to tell the jounalist interviewing him she was going to hell.  What good news.  What profound spiritual giftedness and intelligence.  How could he know! 

Truely gifted.

Of course, both were boys.  Little girls aren’t supposed to hand out eternal judgment like this.

The shallowness underneath all this is what scares me.  The ability of religious folk to bury their heads in the sand is one thing.  But Marx realized it over 100 years ago: religion (not God) was a delusional type of salve. This kind of dissent into an ideological worm hole of child evangelists is an amazing contemporary illustration. 

Of course, this phenomenon has nothing *at all* to do with our new age of child celebrities, pushy parents who project their dreams of over-achievement onto their kids.    Naw.

These kinds of new stories remind us that Feuerbach was a prophet. 

Let me be clear:  I’m not suggesting kids can’t be ministers.  They can be.  I’ve seen it.  I’ve been touched by the Spirit through children.  I cherish deeply, my own.  When my kids were 2 and 3, just learning to talk, I asked them unanswerable theological questions like, “Is there going to be peace someday?”  Part of me wanted them to look at me and nodd with strange confidence, as if they were spiritual crystal balls that could shine “You can rely on it” through their eyes like the little window on an 8-ball.  

What makes kids any more likely to be a portal into God’s intelligence than my 76 year old neighbor, a tree, some top 40 pop-hit, or even the occasional Baby Boomer? <wink>  The point of giving a kid a microphone to parrot well-worn religious dogmas surely is a sign – a sign of the ongoing rediculousness of Christianity in our culture, and the trivilization of the Gospel among those with no other hope than to boil it down to a few choice testimonies about the immanent end of the world and the proof of a selective literal biblical interpretations.    

Back to the story: How’d you like to be on the playground with a little boy who sent you to hell you for beating him by cheating at a game of marbles?  What’s worse?  He’s your pastor.

Maybe these Christians are right.  Maybe God is bringing the world an end.  Maybe the millenium is close.  Maybe kid preachers are a sign from God that “His” Word is being restored. 

Or, maybe we live in a world where Christianity is coming to an end, and religionists are more and more desparate.  Perhaps, alarmism and sideshows is all that’s left of what people really believe.

Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History

I’m currently reading Walter Benjamin.  While I’m not a lit guy, I see the oft commented crystalline moments of brilliance and poetry in his writing.  As Hannah Arednt wrote accurately of him, he thinks in poetics.

I have yet to finish his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” the last chapter of his most common collection, Illuminations.  I just got to them this afternoon and I am reading them slowly.   Nevertheless, I am already struck by Benjamin’s ability to infuse Hegelian ala Marx’s sense of history with metaphoric image.  His thesis #9, again oft quoted, is brilliant.  He writes:

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. 

Benjamin captures in mythical image – a use of mythical image that both transcends and haunts the philosophy of history from within – the nature of progress.  Like in other works of his I’ve read thus far, Benjamin opens up the dialectic of reason and myth at work in modernity, a dialectic Horkheimer and Adorno speak plainly about in the Dialectic of Enlightenment.  Benjamin, however, works this dialectic differently than either Adorno or Horkheimer with his sense of memory and poetics.

This dialectic of reason and myth, I believes, haunts the entire project of moderity from its philosophy to politics.   Tomorrow, I will read more of Benjamin’s concept of anamesis, his discussion of memory.   Perhaps, in the concept of postmodernity, there is something compulsary about its forward moments – something that is at once novel, yet simultaneously a betrayal of its false sense of memory.