The Dinnertray

Moody Moderns

Now listening: Cerys Matthew's 'Don't Look Down', especially Track 6: "Smash the Glass"

 

    'Modern' is one of those rich, annoying words - like 'Justice(1),' which I've already I think gone on about here - that's both an orientation and a data set, evidence and methodology.  Modern Catholics live in a post-VII world; this means both that they live along a timeline which follows said historical event, and that they approach said living in a way conditioned by particular forms of knowledge.   Modern scholars too, live in the 21st Century, and they school along with trends in critical, post-critical and post-ironic theory.  All so very modern.  (And I'm doing that which I hate, dividing the human world, at least in part, into thought and practice.  Ideology and observation.  It seems ...useful...to do that here, but I hope I don't have to stop with that.)  Which proves 'Modern' is a living, important bit of verbiage, one worthy of the work it puts you to.  Judging from the decade-long wrestle I've had with 'Justice,' I assume the farthest I'll every really get in terms of the ability to use 'Modern' in a way that feels responsible is a sense of resignation as I pick a use and apologize to all its disruptive supplements, like kids I'm not feeding who'll get fed somewhere else.  And maybe foment revolution when they hit puberty.

    My two projects for the next few weeks involve working through two 'Modern' moments: contemporary study of religion, and recent work in American Catholicism.  Now, neither 'contemporary' nor 'recent' are synonyms for 'Modern' in any but the sloppiest ways.  And yet.  Theories and understandings of modernity run throughout.  There's an idea that we've had a radical break with even the 'human' that came before us; and I can't help feeling that every generation ever feels that way.  That they've killed their idols.  That they've formed a distinct new branch off the evolutionary tree.  And I'm not entirely convinced by the myth of the self-made modern.  But my hermeneutic of skepticism is no substitute for looking closely at what's there, so I'll look for real discontinuities (conditioned, of course), and I'm sure I'll find them. Because if nothing else, the 'Modern,' is an inevitable comparative framework.  You can study 21st Century CE French Islam and 3rd Century BCE Chinese Ascetics in the same week because the scholars are both modern, the studies are both markedly modern in methodology.  Or, you can study Dragon King Temple resurgence in post-Communist China and Internet pilgrimage among Western Catholics because both are governed by 'popular' and 'technological' revolutions, markers of modernity as far as we've thought them.  But I'm still undecided whether 'Modern' has any good, solid use for me outside of marking off certain comparative dangers to avoid.  I'm afraid, though, that saying that commits me to a reification of discontinuous history, which just seems unverifiable.

 

 

(1) My feeling on this, basically, is that 'Justice' can be understood as a balancing of the scales, a way to restore equilibrium.  But it intervenes, makes cuts, re-organizes.  It isn't a balancing in the sense of restoring some perfect, prior, order; it builds an order it presupposes, and you could develop a system that 'restores' the equilibrium disrupted by 'Justice', and then corrects for that, ad infinitum.  I don't think that makes 'Justice' in any way unnecessary, I just don't think it's got some kind of inherently transcendent purity to it either.

Thoughts on having seen, finally, Scorcese's 'The Departed'

Now listening: Rolling Stones, "Let it Bleed"
Specially: Track 1, 'Gimmee Shelter'

I don't entirely understand the 21 gun salute for the funerals of heroes.

Why is it honor, shots fired and ungrounded? Bullets unburied, unfleshed. Ineffective weapons. No hostile intent, just wasteful excess.

Bataille would be pleased. Or curious. I've been thinking, again, about terms and rates of exchange. In the Life of Pelagia, for example, there is the translation between the prostitute's lovers and the bishop's Bridegroom. There are strict rules for throwing over Satan and cleaving unto God. There are strict regulations on what prostitution money can be spent on, can be used for. What it may touch. There's some metaphysical excess, some value sunk into the Kingdom of God, but it's really thoroughly commodified and documented and measured out in the anarchic suburbs of Eden.

Bataille's point put simply is that excess is a category of exchange, and I've almost maybe got a handle on his parameters for that category, and they may be what I want. Maybe not though, since I keep reading him as ultimately satisfied with the unformulatable 'nature' of that excess. I should read him again.

There's something graceful and horrible about bullets fired for a shot body but into no skin of their own. It's a weird ritual. I've looked up the history, and I know there are reasonable explanations. But it's Kafkaesque as well. A remainder of the process of reason - I mean, there's the process, and then there's also a remainder. An apple sunk into an abdomen, a whipping in a closet, a needle run off its groove. When kids read Kafka, he's presented as a weirdo. You don't start with Kafka. You wait til you've been brought through weird by Faulkner, maybe, or Melville. Perhaps then you go through some Flannery O'Connor, whose world at least looks plausible. Kafka's world, made plausible by your reading of it, denatures plausibility. I need to find the Kafka of terms of exchange/ritual studies.

Heaven is a Track

Now : Andrew Bird, 'Armchair Apocrypha'
'specially : Track 2, "Imitosis"

I've been thinking a lot about 'Deathcab For Cutie' lately. About how they barely feel like a band to me -- and not (entirely) because they mix the (lovely!) Gibbard vocals so high, though that could be a whole 'nother thing. I mean: they feel like music that happens, not that's made.

There's the possibility that they've been a mainstay of my listening pleasure since college, and I have so many memories built around hearing them over headphones as I walk places, or seeing them play, or thinking along to their melodies as something else - otherwise unrelated but now inextricably meshed -, actually takes place. So they're an always-already, 'cause I'm just so used to them bein' 'round.

That's a far easier position to prove (for all y'all working on the response paper) than one dependent on some essential characteristics of 'Deathcab-for-Cute'ness, but I wouldn't foreclose the possibility that there is some metaphysic peculiar to their sweet-yet-uncuddly punk. A thing to communicate, or a method of communication, that is a messenger, angelic, ideally suited for my ear.

I would not like to meet them.

Have you ever been to a show? And stood near the front, and closed your eyes? And danced a little bit, but mostly in your head? And then opened your eyes? And met those of the band?

It's jarring. Uncomfortable. They're playing, and you're listening, so contact should be incendiary, right? The gaze itself burning the (ocular) offering? But they're making the music, and you're hearing it. These are essentially different modalities, and my reception can't conceive of the mechanics of their emission; their creation can't conceive of the imperfections (i'll get there in a minute) of my re-creation. I watched a tour documentary on the band over Christmas, and there's a point where Gibbard says something about liking to write songs sometimes because the girl in the song is prettier than she ever was in real life.

There is an essential disconnect between the written/controlled/complete and the real life/overdetermined/ongoing. Artists, god love 'em, really do communicate something -- but it is not a dialog. It is not intersubjective.

Individuality (i'm supposing) is imperfect repetitions of the past - of histories/ideologies/biologies and suchall. It's a wonderful, empowering feeling to re-create. But it requires previously created material for substrate. We make gods of those(/That) who create(s), because we can't make partners of them. Freewill requires some vacuum, some withdrawal of the origin to make space (fall) for our own imperfections. Our changes. Our particular invocation of Something to enact some things.

To sum up, religion - like fandoms of a more indiepop variety - depends on an entirely absent beloved. The ethics of engaging that beloved within the actions of this world is centered (at least functionally; theologically, we'll leave for another field) in the head of the believer alone. When we talk about religious action - whether in the interest of social justice or electioneering or other - one of the most crucial elements to consider is the power in re-creation of the original transmission, and of the concomitant pangs of separation sensed in that movement. The Gap in which they Stand.

Origin Sins

Now : New Pornographers, "Challengers"
'Specially : Track 3, 'Challengers' (I am a sucker for both Neko Case and the Banjo; this was predictable)

(Excerpted from a paper, in progress, on a heresiologist (Irenaeus) in the early church who was sort of freaked out by childbirth. Seriously.)

... A quick note about my use of the term ‘obvious’ here. One element of literary analysis is the examination not just of what an author writes but of what she leaves out – either because introducing this into the text may highlight a flaw in (or completely undermine) her argument, or because it is so obvious as to be an unnecessary inclusion. For example, if I tell a story about my summer vacation and do not end it with a reference to my return to school, this may be because I am done with school, which thereby changes the nature of summer vacation from interim relaxation to post-graduate aimlessness; what I wanted the reader to understand as ‘summer vacation’ in the general sense of that phrase is actually not ‘properly’ understand in this category. More information would cripple my project. On the other hand, I may not have mentioned it because the very category of ‘summer vacation’ implies that at the end of it I naturally returned to school; this return is obvious, and to include it in my narrative would be a redundant waste of my reader’s time. The work of, among others, Rene Girard and Jacques Derrida has shown how useful analyzing for the former case may be for textual analyses; it is the second case that more directly informs my argument here, and for that the ideological theory of Louis Althusser is more directly applicable. Althusser defines ‘my’ ideology as my imaginary relations to the real conditions of my existence. That is, the manner in which I relate to the physical, social and economic realities with which I negotiate for my living. These negotiations are more conscious and explicit the more they deal with new and unfamiliar relations; old relations are often near-automatic repetitions of familiar negotiations, and therefore take less attention.

A basic component of an ideology is the collection of questions it forecloses – in the 2nd scenario above, my not ‘asking’ my narrative to specify that I came back to school is such a foreclosed question. Ideology makes social communication possible by establishing certain certainties: we are not constantly required to ask each other what ‘hello’ means and how best to respond to it; we are not constantly required to test the sidewalk with a stick to make sure it won’t fall away underneath us if we put our weight on it. While neither of these situations is absolutely certain (‘hello’ may be a distraction in order to initiate a mugging; flooding may have knocked out the support of our walkway), they are certain enough that we can usually disregard the possibility of their acting in an unexpected way unless foreign details (a furtive glance or a recent rain) have been introduced to make us wary. In persuasive texts such as the heresiological writings of Irenaeus, the ‘obvious’ points, the truths too certain to need examination can give as much insight into the world he imagines as the explicit points of his argument do to the world he advocates. He argues for a world where the transmission of the knowledge revealed by Christ is limited to Apostolic succession; he imagines a world where procreative transmission is an essentially destabilizing process, not only because desire is chaotic but because desire generates new meaning. It is fertility, not only lust, that makes up the immorality of desire. ...

Rites of Exchange

Now listening: Billy Joel, "The Stranger"
'Specially: Track 5, 'Vienna'

I am beginning to think about the Weberian thesis on the relationship between protestantism (calvinism) and work ethics and modern capitalism (free market), and wondering if the nature of exchanges, of purchases isn't the real interesting change - not the invention of worldly 'vocations', or even the now-moral trappings of seeming successful.

The Indulgence controversy hinges on the off-pissing absurdity that one could buy anything Godly or from God. Because there is absolutely no kind of exchange possible between our two spheres, right? No connection. One of us is effable, one of us is an apophatic blinding. Can't count that on your rosary, can you?

God has no economy (except trinitarian; and, maybe soteriological, but only when we're feeling hopeful and full of election), so any economy there is is UTTERLY distant from whatever metaphysical guarantees ground non-economic behaviors.

This is interesting.

Progressive, and indubitably civilized.

And a little dualistic; I wonder if I can deconstruct down to 'meaning' for economy, and how it functions to serve and extend the Reformation/CounterReformation. And I have this sense that that's what we're seeing, in part, in the anemic American response to the global climate crisis -- this idea that creation cannot be purchased on the human scale.

Canonoclasm and Canonophilia

Now listening: Nanook of the North, "The Taby Tapes"
'Specially: Track 12, 'Forget it Jenny, Love Is Just A Privilege For The Rich'

I sat in the gradlounge this late-afternoon, writing paragraphs for a paper on narrative techniques of conversion (again? again.) in early christian proselytizing literature (and NOT coming up with a clear and concise explanation of the differences/relation between the terms mishnah, gemara, torah, tanakh, penteteuch, midrash and talmud, which lead to some stuttered stumbling in review session this evening). While sitting, I overheard some other loungers discussing the 'hipster' catgory, and why they hoped they weren't in it. One criticism they leveled was that 'hipsters' start out anti-establishment, but end up establishing their own rigid hierarchicality anyway; specifically with regards to music. I believe the band they used as an example of this rigid secret knowledge structure was Dinosaur Jr., which I? Know not a thing about. So obviously I am not the problem.

The main thrust of the critique was that 'the hipster' is more interested in having/displaying knowledge than in gleeful enjoyment of the fruits of that knowledge. I ... don't know from 'the hipster', but I could be accused of the former. I love few things more than an impassioned and specific argument about, for example, the place of Green Apple Quickstep in the history of PNW pop, jazz influence or boy/girl harmony. I'm not saying it's not elitist; actually I am. I'm just not saying it doesn't read as elitist when I get really into it and fail to notice that you? Are not so much into it.

Mixes I make, mixes I plan for the various stages in the development of my potential brood of kidlings should such things happen, play on a sense I have of the most important/soulful/satisfying/creative/creation-provoking/lyrically astute/melodically resonant/you-get-the-idea albums and artists I know so far. There is much awesomeness in the world of recorded songcraft; some of it seems . . . more important than some other examples.

Which brings us to the process of canonization. Which I explained pretty damn concisely in the review session this evening; and by 'concisely' I mean 'simplistically'. Canonization is an evil word, right? It's Authority exerting itself at the expense of unbridled democratic experience. It says that this work, copied in this hand, and not this other text, deserves to be read by future generations. We tend to think of it as a repressive political force; like hipsters denigrating some new band that's never really respected pavement (hi!), canonizers scoff into oblivion that which is heterodox, redundant and misleading when measured against their sense of the best/only that their tradition has to offer. Being forced to self-identify as a canonophile, I get a little bit of sympathy for these Mean Old White Men (that, when we teach the canonization process, is the anthropomorphism looming behind my descriptions).

I don't know that they really are rigid and anal and elitist. I wonder if maybe there wasn't some glee there, some ecstatic abandon in providing for a future where generations will always know 'There's Nothing Wrong With Love' and 'Brighten The Corners' and 'Building Nothing Out Of Something'; 'I want home' and 'Jolene' and 'We rule the school'; Rebecca Gates and Britt Daniel and Elvis Costello. They will all know these things, and they will be able to talk about them together because everyone will be familiar with and agreed on their awesomeness. This is a canon, and to the extent that I'm ever powerful I will perpetuate it. Not because I hate the heterodox (I dunno, 'Snow Patrol' or 'The Sneaker Pimps' or other things that I actually like just fine, just not as much. Not as committedly.), but because I love what I know, what I've spent my time and attention and emotion on, honing myself and my reactions on swell and pitch and string arrangement; because I have glee.

Perhaps They did too, those excisers, those other canonodules. The canonoclasts who always get my sympathy - the proponents of the Gospel of Thomas, the ecstatic utterances of disruptive mystical troublemakers - are perhaps not the only kind of committed, human, artist that there is. Perhaps everybody together is in love with the collected works. But love is not, actually, democratic. Neither, though, is it only for the rich. It is for those who take the time to communicate themselves and their projects.

That which is still standing after those who needed to see it triumph are long dead? We call the canon. There may have been passion there, but now we mostly see the hierarchy.

I am the only one searching for you; and if I get caught, then the search is through.

Now listening: Pavement, "Watery Domestic"
'Specially : Track 2, 'Frontwards'

(It makes me want to listen to the Built To Spill song, 'Carry the Zero', and the Tommy James & the Shondelles version of 'Crimson and Clover,' and Red Stars Theory's 'Think Piece,' The Places' 'Mouth to Mouth,' AND Interpol doing 'Hands Away.' I love it when all that happens.)

Now then.

Hegel, in his early theological writings says:

" Since laws are unifications of opposites in a CONCEPT, which
thus leaves them as opposites while it exists itself in opposition
to reality, it follows that the concept expresses an OUGHT. If the
concept is treated in accordance with its form, not its content,
i.e., if it is treated as a concept made and grasped by men, the
command is moral. If we look soley at the content, as the specific
unification of specific opposites, and if therefore the "ought" [or
"Thou shalt"] does not arise from the property of the concept but
is asserted by an external power, the command is civil. Since in
the latter case the unification of opposites is not achieved by
thinking, is not subjective, civil laws delimit the opposition
between several living beings, while purely moral laws fix limits
to opposition in one living being. Thus the former restrict the
opposition of one living being to others, the latter the opposition
of one side, one power, of the living being to other sides, other
powers, of that same living being. "

Is this a real, useful division of labor, civil laws (to govern two or more people) and moral laws (to govern one person alone/in her aloneness)? First off, let's forget about the obnoxiously distracting switching of former/latter that he does towards the end, and also the whole preamble (the AWESOME! one) about unifications of opposites that leave the original oppositions intact while themselves (the unifications, as concepts) existing over and against reality. These muddle.

What I mean by useful : The distinction between regulating living beings in relation to one another, and regulating the inconstant soul of an individual _being_ alive. Civil laws have no ground, I would think, from which to attempt the regulation of someone just sitting in a chair. How she gets to the chair, what she's neglecting in order to stay sitting there, and anything she does from the chair -- these are subject to civil legislation, right? But what one does by not 'doing' isn't. Which is why we need morals, to . . . wait, that sounds wrong. Morals guide interpersonal relations; that's actually their primary meaning. Could you argue they do so only secondarily, and are primarily concerned with putting a person's inner turmoil into right relation such that she can 'behave' morally, her being morally-constituted a prerequisite? Eh, sure. I'm truncating the passage (the rest just isn't as pretty), but I think H. was presenting a special sphere of morality, not the entirety of its influence.

But it still sounds like Hegel is here articulating the argument that often serves as the basis for proponents of the 'no morality but through religion' position. Their assumption seems to be that there are moments when we are not in relation, not in communion with other human instances of being. And that we are either utterly alone in those moments, in which case our basic constitution is untethered by anything at all; or we are in Communion (sorry, sometimes the catholicism just comes) with a religious authority/companion/sensation, in which case our basic constitution is (insofar as we commune) regulated. And regulation is the only guarantee of the good (so continues this assumption).

Much of the moral philosophy I'm familiar with at the moment is critical of the idea that there is anything but an always-already relational self. There is no one just sitting in her chair; there is no need to regulate purely internal oppositions, because the internal is always impure. If by 'pure' you meant alone.

This is where I come into sympathy with the religious. I don't buy the wholly relational self of certain modern schools. I can't get over a certain sense of solitude, which is inches away, really, from admitting to the concept of soul. You can bring up your various continental philosophies as alternatives, but I've never found them all that altern from faiths; in deployment, possibly, but not in structure.

But it's pretty late, and I'm pretty tired. And I just ran across the quote in an old email, and realized I hadn't thought about it in a while. So I wrote some things down.

Actually, mostly I just like the lyrics from 'Frontwards' that I'm using as a post title. The rest is just filler.

Religion, Fire and Dangerous things

Now listening to : Otis Redding, "Remember Me"
Especially : Track 22, 'Stay in School'

I've also been listening to Spoon's "Ga (five times)", and am thrilled beyond an organ sensitive enough to record/transmit the vibrations that a) it has arrived and b) there's a song with my name in it. I think. There's drawl involved, and I've got all kinds of yankee ear, so it may not be 'Jenny' at all. Junie. Or Gin. But it's all in the hearing, and I hear myself called.

I'm listening to the Big O at the moment, though, because I need somebody telling me to hang in there or I'm just going to bitch the Greek review session tomorrow and sleep in.

I have new books by Bakhtin, Bataille, Lang (! Adorable.), Zizek, and Smith (Johnathan Z.) to get into, but probably won't for awhile. If anyone would like to tell me which to read first, I'm open. Actually, I have started the Lang, because it's not dense at all and makes good bedtime reading. Though I should just be reading, ahem, pertinent things. Like Roper or Ginzburg on witch trials. Or anybody 'tall on Curran and the two-headed drama of American catholicism.

I've also been reading recently about that tortureporn film 'captivity.' I've come across quite a few critiques of the pointless yet horrifying sexualization of violence (Violation of sexuality? Which, here, has/is an Essence?). Joss Whedon on his website, pajiba.com. Others. The speakers are largely incensed, full-stop, but there are other viewpoints engaged as well.

The war that happens in the comments section tends to involve the debatable point that violence against women is somehow a Worser Evil than violence ungendered. And then there's the sometimes-included argument that religion is responsible, ultimately, for that violence. Mostly people use Islam for present-day cases, and Christianity for the 'historical' perspective.

It seems reasonable to believe that the majority of crime victims are male (I don't care quite enough to find some quotable, legitimate sources). Most of the crimes I know about personally had male victims, and most violent death statistics I hear are weighed down by the category of young men. So if the argument for allocating 'violence against women' a special place is going to be persuasive, it can't be dependent on sheer numbers. And it can't trivialize the violence against men. Against soldiers, for example, which is still a largely masculine category.

The issue with gendered violence is that, in simplified semiotics, it is female to suffer violence and male to enact it. That's a culturally created association, but its not ex nihilo. That is, it's not unrelated to the real conditions of an existence where females do trend weaker and more conciliatory (whether that's biological, spiritual or socialized). This can mean both that women expect/accept more violence than is strictly necessary, and that men feel compelled to make use of it, which can a) put them in more dangerous situations and b) desensitize the culture at large to their ensuing victimization.

So I'm not doubting, at all, that violence against men is an issue. I do doubt, however, the sometimes-related argument that the same speakers often make: that there's something silly and self-indulgent to the female claims of sexualized psychological violence by 'stares' or 'heckling' or such. I can't say it's commensurate with death by gun violence, but it's not nothing. It's an additive to the girly constitution. It causes the contrarian to take walks she shouldn't; it makes a reductio ad corpus of even the most intellectual female heads. It's a real issue, related to the more obvious incarnations of sexualized violence against women, is all I'm saying; so long as I can, saying it, also be understood to stand adamantly against any violence towards boys as well. I'm not saying violence-against-women deserves more government funding than violence-against-men, just that it is its own (real) creature.

So what role does religion play in violence against women, now that it's a real creature? As a metaphysical guarantor, of course. I do think it's a bit oblivious to say it's 'religion' (as a monlith) that creates/incites anti-female violence. I think there's a real (good) social function to being more-than-normally protective of the childbearing population, and religion will always support the continued existence of the community of its adherents. And childbearing is at the existential core of community. So of course religions sanction any violence that ensures a regular and productive reproductivity. Since I'm not one who thinks there's something necessarily or specially moral about religions, even monotheisms, this doesn't seem odd.

The mere assertion that religion sanctions violence against women doesn't horrify me as much as the mere fact of said violence existing, so the interesting question is more, 'how is that violence framed by religion?' 'By virginal 12 year-old martyrs or honor killing (which, as far as I can tell, is a cultural institution that predates Islam, and is highly conditioned by political instability/occupation and resource-poor environments)'? The religiously guaranteed/narrated violence against women is all tied up - even more explicitly than in general culture I think - in fertility. That doesn't excuse it (at all), but it makes the argument complex because the discussants don't stand on the same premises.

To oversimplify, feminists care about the integrity of the female person; religious traditionalists care about the embedded child-potential. Both sides are horrified by the moral misaprehension of the other party. Most of the time, they're going to agree on condemnations of real examples of violence against women, but their theories of justification for that condemnation are wholly distinct; and that's a tension that will sometimes explode (see: martyrs-for-virginity, honor killings, the right to choice/life).

The Violent (that) Bear it and Grin

Now listening: Explosions In The Sky, 'Those Who Tell the Truth ...'
Especially: Track 2, "Have You Passed Through This Night?"

There is, perhaps, some relation between religion and violence?

This statement does not perturb me. Exchange the interrogation mark for one of more conclusive punctuation, and I'm still fine. It does seem to perturb (some) others, though; specifically in the western/american context? that christianity could sanction such things. I think one benefit of having been exposed on the hill of catholicism as a child is that this particular relation feels obvious. How many steps into the long, contiguous (and fractal) history of the church can you go before hitting an Inquisition, a Martyr or a Crusade? A religion with an obvious authority structure is easy to peg for the legitimation of violence.

The magical, mystical, ecstatic ascesis of the passion is one obvious source for the (here in a specifically christian language) link between faith and fuckedupedness. Another is the Augustinian theology of the ghetto: he wrote that the Jews should be protected but constrained - as an eternal example of God's wrath towards those who would not take up the new covenant. To his credit, he was arguing against their genocide, so it's a 'frail theological lifeline,' to quote some guy.

There's always something really, REALLY bizarre about a christian typological reading of Hebrew scriptures, I gotta say; it's a visceral punishing god through a new loving revelation. But still visceral and punishing. But as a type. Perhaps brilliant, definitely fraught, this sanctions the suffering of life's torments by good christians themselves, since God obviously directs those toward his chosen people (this is especially pertinent in a culture only a few hundred years out of some pretty hardcore Puritanism; and mythically, there's some of it to us still.) It also, historically, sanctions slavery, torture and some pretty bloody warfare against the enemies of christendom. This isn't news, good or otherwise.

As for original explanations of the modern americhristian mindset? In their theo/ideology? To be simplistic, let's look at two rituals of judaism and christianity, respectively: passover? reminds the guests at table of the horrors of slavery and oppression. communion? reminds the queued communicants that this flesh was given up for all. In the latter case, violence buys redemption in an ongoing exchange. In the latter, it was a long-ago suffering to be avoided and lamented. This, again, is an oversimplistic read on my part; but it's not wrong. Christianity can take (some of) the same scripture that yields the passover meal - which narrative could dwell on the bloody, but often, for whatever overdetermined practical reason, doesn't in a jewish context - and type it with a crazy Mel Gibsonian hand. And not just catholics, is what i'm saying. Y'all. This confuddles my point, because I can't think of an iconic christian ritual that really draws on passover per se, (since old testamentry tends to play a larger part in protestantism, where rituals? don't so much); but I'm gesturing towards something, I think.

Religion and Violence more generally? Sure. Everything is violence. Everything that almost isn't? Legitimation. That doesn't mean everything isn't lots of other, happier, healthier things too. And it doesn't make me heartsick or disappointed, or even convicted and contrite. It makes me wary. And as ways to fare forth? I'm good with that.

In other news: I'm pretty sure that had 'Hotblooded' been released in Athens around 5th/4th Century b.c.e, it just might have been attributed to 'Ksenos,' though the press release might have spelled it a little different.

I Seem To Have Given Up On the '& Politics'

Now listening to : Arcade Fire, "Neon Bible"
Especially recommended : Track 6, 'Oceans of Noise'

The bassline is just so undulant. It makes me think of fish. Fish with hips. Minnows? Winnowing as they go.

I also like that it opens with a storm.

I have created, from thin air, grades for 20 essays since 4pm this afternoon. By 4pm tomorrow, I will need to create another 22. Grades from air. Appropriately insubstantial.

I feel like I will never get to an in-depth discussion of my new working definition of religion ("an ideology is religious to the extent that its metaphysics is explicit and (anthropo)morphized,") if I wait until I have time and energy to do it justice. Justice is yet another of those words that is its own opposite, I think. It implies a completion, a correction, a re-joinder. But it itself joins in. It's a new spur to more action. An interpretation, but also a text. So anyway, doing my justice is a piping dream, (hot) air through flutes, and instead I'll just take the occasional unjust stab. When I need to procrastinate.

You'll note I'm making some fairly hardcore use of metaphysics. I'm still so fascinated by the term. I take it, mostly, to mean that which one is sure is ground. The obviously unquestionable. The imaginary relation that you take to be a real condition; and everyone does that. Even scientists do that. The scientific method is so frustratingly smirky; I want to poke it, and that's always been part of my project -- not that I doubt what science has shown, just that I doubt science, as a monolith, guarantees anything. You cannot, ever, get your money back (not from metaphysics); it's not an economy of exchange. And I do not buy that science is all liquid assets. Does this make sense? Anyway, the susceptibility of science to my poking is far and away the least well-defined part of my argument, so: moving on.

Metaphysics is important to my study of religion. As the point where questioning stops, or at least changes. That's not exclusive to religion, and there are definitely scholars of religion who would hate to make that an integral part of the subject. But I will not be inviting them to my brunches. Metaphysics, the intangible but obvious; ideologies have varying attitudes towards how much of metaphysics can be engaged in conversation. The better the conversation, the more religious, and the more interest it holds for me and my irreverent eye. So if the conversation leads to explicit admission to the metaphysics ("I admit that this is so obvious it cannot be proved"), and an articulation of the inner dynamics of that metaphysics ("From the visible, we can infer the unseen"), then the conversation qualifies as a religious one.

Which means I? Can study it.

But not right now. I need to be a responsible grad student, strung between the dual responsibilities of grading and being graded. It's nice to feel needed, yeah?