Fallen Into Knowledge

I have again picked up Zizek’s Parallax View, in hopes of finishing it this time ’round, and also because this passage has been on my mind since I first encountered it months ago:

So what is the Master-Signifier?  Let us imagine a confused situation of social disintegration, in which the cohesive power of ideology loses its efficiency: in such a situation, the Master is the one who invents a new signifier, the famous “quilting point,” which stabilizes the situation again and makes it readable; the university discourse which then elaborates the network of Knowledge which sustains this readability by definition presupposes and relies on the initial gesture of the Master.  The Master adds no new positive content - he merely adds a signifier which, all of a sudden, turns disorder into order, into “new harmony” as Rimbaud would have put it. […] all fears are exchanged for one fear; that is to say, it is the very fear of God which makes me fearless in all worldly matters.  The same reversal that gives rise to a new Master-Signifier is at work in ideology: in anti-Semitism, all fears (of economic crisis, or moral degradation…) are exchanged for the fear of the Jew…. And is this same logic also discernible in a horror film like Spielberg’s Jaws?  I fear the shark, my friend, and have no other fears…. -Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View, pg 37

it would be easy to see the Master-SIgnifier as relating only to ideologies we don’t like - political ideologies - democracy, freedom, terrorist all have approached the status of Master Signifier in recent memory. We fear the terrorist in large part because he (presumably) is unknown, a shadowy figure.  This is the genius of the horror film; the monster we don’t see is scarier than the monster we do see because we can project all sorts of anxieties on the unseen and unknown.

I wonder, however, if it is nearsighted to see the master-signifier as only a way to criticize political ideologies we don’t like.  Nearsighted firstly because such use tempts us pretend that there are areas of life that external to ideology - the objectivity temptation.  But nearsighted also because Christian Theology spends much of its time explicating the meaningfulness (readability) Christian Discourse in light of its Master Signifier, and that crises in Theology are most often crises in the content of the Master-Signifier.  It is just this content which at once is so important and is normally treated as a given (what is the definition of terrorist - or of freedom?).  To be a heretic, also, is to be differently disposed as to the content of the Master-Signifier - Jesus was not wholly Man, etc.

What other areas can be explicated by means if this Master-Signifier, and what are the limits of this idea?

I’ve stopped using the concept of inerrancy in discussions about the Bible; mostly because the way I describe the Bible’s authority and God-givenness do not require me to make reference to inerrancy.  It just isn’t a question I am forced to ask.  Even for people who do talk about inerrancy, usually to affirm it, it is not an essential doctrine; that is, it is required only in conjunction with particular arguments for the authority of the Bible.That being said, and in light of this, I ran across a couple of interesting passages in the fourth chapter of Schmitt’s “Political Theology” that casts the relationship between inerrancy and authority in a new light:

Infallibility was for [De Maistre] the essence of the decision that cannot be appealed, and that the infallibility of the spiritual order was of the same nature as the sovereignty of the state order.  The two words infallibility and sovereignty were ‘perfectly synonymous.’

And,

In practice, not to be subject to error and not to be accused of error were for him the same.  The important point was that no higher authority could review the decision.

For myself I have taken to using the word “normative” to describe the Bible’s authority, as in, “when we say that the bible is scripture we are making a claim about its authority for our community.”  But I think what I am trying to get at is that last point; that there is no higher authority to which we might appeal.  This distinction between capacity for error and being subject to criticism is an interesting one, is is sustainable?

I have been thrilled to find theo-bloggers discussing contemporary European Philosophy, if for no other reason than because I comfort myself saying, “you’re not crazy afterall.”  Agamben, Zizek, Badiou, Schmitt: just jumping right in to these can present a challenge to someone whose education has been primarily theological; heck, they are challenging for anyone!  At the request of Adam, and because I have been too long absent from this blog, Here is a reading list for those theology students I know who are getting interested in Cultural Studies / Frankfurt School / Leftist Literature / Theory / Whatever We Call This Body of Literature:

Start With Marx!  Really this whole thing builds upon Marx (and Freud). Even those who think Marx is wrong are disagreeing with Marx. He provides the framework that the discipline of Cultural Studies is based. So where it start? Start with the earlier works, especially the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the Grundrisse. Norton’s Marx-Engels Reader (edited by Robert Tucker) is the preferred text.

Next Up, Some essays:

Antonio Gramsci, “The Formation of the Intellectuals”

This is the first chapter of his Prison Notebooks

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of art in the Age of Mechanical Representation”

Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, “The Culture Industry as Mass Deception”

Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”

Some More Books:

Michel Foucault: If you haven’t read anything by Foucault, start by reading The Foucault Reader (Pantheon), and then move to these: Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Power/Knowedge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, and The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences.

Jean Baudrillard, Simulations. This slim volume provides for us a definition of his term, Simulacrum

Roland Barthes, Mythologies

Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

What have I missed? What books and essays are essential for theology students trying to grapple with the current body of literature on Paul and Christianity by philosophers? I know Lacan is missing, but alas, I haven’t read any of his work.

Having been inspired by Dave’s (rather lengthy) post on hermeneutics, I would like to tell a story. So gather round, grab a cup of cocoa, because I, too, am going to tell a story of Hermeneutics.
Specifically, mine.
See, I have been driven by primarily hermeneutical questions: the directions I have taken theologically and, even the educational roads that I have traveled have been - mostly - dictated by questions that are hermeneutical in nature. So, this is hermeneutics as story. There are three parts to this story - as there must be - and three posts, starting now.

Pre-Critical: (Yes, I know. But really, did I have any choice?)

My awareness of hermeneutical questions began in high school, and while I had already spent some time teaching and even preaching, I had not considered that process between my reading of the text and understanding or “applying” it at all - let alone considering it to be fraught with problems. And so, I left for college, to study English.

During my first year at Portland State I took an upper division class entitled, “Critical Approaches to Literature,” or LitCrit. I was introduced to a plethora of reading strategies: author centered, New Critical, feminist, marxist, freudian, reader-response, deconstruction, and so on. Some of these struck me then, as now, as not having much at all with the text in question.
I came out of that class pretty confident that the New Critics (W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, and company) had it right: by analyzing the text itself, rather than the the author’s psychology or historical situation on the one hand, or trying to make the text about my pet cause on the other, I thought that by focusing on the words on the page I might avoid “reading into the text” As it turns out, at the ripe old age of 19, I was somewhat naïve.

Okay, play along with me here:  CNN reports that, according to some Scientists, in 45 years it will be possible to download the contents of your brain to a computer (for data back-up?).
Okay, so assuming that this actually were possible, and assuming that the download was in a format readable on a computer, like, say, a rich web page with photos, movies, and text, and assuming that you could not download selections of your memories - its all or nothing; the question is, “would you want to have the contents of your brain downloaded?”
What would you find?
Likely you would find lots of stuff that had receded so far into the background that you had forgotten that you know it to begin with.  Likely you would find that you know much more than you realized.  And, Likely most of you are thinking right now about all the stuff you would prefer stay in your brain and not see the light of day.
Question is, “Would this be a good thing?” (intentionally ambiguous question) and, “would the benefits outweigh the drawbacks?”
Discuss.

I have decided to start including some of my thoughts, of the academic variety here in the blog.  These thoughts are not fully formed, so take with a buckets of salt, and feel free to respond:

From Jamison:  “It is instructive here to juxtapose Auerbach’s discussion of the odyssey in Mimesis, and his description of the way in which at every point the poem is as it were vertical to itself, self-contained, each verse paragraph somehow timeless and immanent, bereft of any necessary or indispensable links with what precedes it and what follows …the historical un-naturality (in Brechtian sense) of contemporary books which, like detective stories, your read ‘for the end’ - the bulk of the pages becoming sheer devalued means to an end - in this case the ’solution…’” (126)

I know I find it difficult at best to slow down in my reading and enjoy the texture of a text - I am always in a hurry to “get to the end,” even when I am reading the Odyssey.  So the question is:  when did the primary motivation in reading become consumption?  And, Just what are we trying to gain by consuming the book?
What about the reading experience make us want to be done with it?  to get to the end?
Further, and perhaps more concerning to me, is the prevalent assumption amongst literary critics that the interesting work pertaining to a text happens after the text has been read.  That is, the text is assumed to be an object to be analyzed, and not as facilitating an experience:  the text as static and not as acting upon the reader.  Does this tendency, too, come from a capitalist / consumerist mentality?  Or, more pointedly, what would a non-capitalist reading look like (assuming we can even talk about it, enmeshed as we are in capitalist structures)?  Immediately, Marx’s somewhat undeveloped concept of the “sensuous revolution” comes to mind:  that we might relate to each other as persons, not as objects to be consumed.  I think a return (? move to ?) a model that pays attention to reading as an actualizing experience of a text would be a step in the right direction.

This beautiful quote is from the introduction to Schopenhauer’s “The World as Will and Representation:”

I am afraid, however, that even so I shall not be let off. The reader who has gotten as far as the prefaceand is put off by that, has paid money for the book, and wants to know how he is to be compensated. My last refuge now is to remind him that he knows of various ways of using a book without precisely reading it. It can, like many other, fill a gap in his library, where, neatly bound, it is sure to look well. Or he can lay it on the dressing table or tea table of his learned lady friend. Or finally he can review it; this is assuredly the best course of all, and the one I specially advise.

Jacques Derrida, the emminent French philosopher and critic, died Friday at the age of 74. He was credited with fathering deconstruction, that difficult theory that posits that all texts internally inconsistant due to the vaguaries of language itself, thus robbing texts of meaning and permanence. Though we struggle with his thought, his was surely a signifigant voice in the twentieth century.