Running away from Lars von Trier’s Antichrist

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Antichrist, Lars von Trier

Lars von Trier’s Antichrist screened this week at the Rialto in Dunedin, as part of the Film Festival.  I was sitting upstairs in the theatre, and during the final (somewhat challenging) scenes, I heard a woman’s shoes racing down the wooden first-floor aisle (presumably with a woman inside them), in a desperate attempt to get out of there. This was followed by an interjection by some dag who called out, “You run, girl, run!”

The crowd laughed nervously, and the tension was broken… just a little.

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Ideology, Film Criticism and Der Baader Meinhof Komplex

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criticism, Der Baader Meinhof Komplex, ideology, Mark Jurgensmeyer

Der Baader Meinhof Komplex International Poster

As we are in the middle of our annual International Film Festival down on the Riviera of the Antarctic (one of the kinder euphemisms for Dunedin), some comments on film and criticism seem very much in order …

I want to consider here the very good German film Der Baader Meinhof Komplex (Uli Edel, 2008), which screened last night and which recounts in whirlwind style the rise of the Red Army Faction (RAF) in West Germany from the late 1960s to the late 1970s. The film gets a lot of things right, not least in its casting (Moritz Bleibtreu finally succeeds in driving his repellent Manni – from Lola rennt – out of my head after almost a decade).  Its recreation of the period is immersive, obsessively detailed, and utterly convincing.  Its intensity and its brutality are never forced, never overplayed, and feel absolutely genuine.  And, perhaps most impressively, it refuses to turn its portrait of 1960s political radicalism into facile hagiography, a tendency still pervasive in contemporary culture.  What is less impressive is that the RAF’s actual ideology is given such short shrift.  We learn a good deal about their actions, but very little about what motivated those actions.  Though we do get the occasional glimpse of the sorts of things the RAF sought to tackle – prison conditions for political prisoners, the US-led war in Vietnam, the Israeli occupation of Palestine – it would be difficult for a viewer without at least some knowledge of the history of guerilla socialist movements to really gather much of an impression of their arguments and aims; indeed, the RAF’s central trio, Ulrike Meinhof, Andreas Baader, and Gudrun Ensslin, often come across in the film as little more than invective-shouting blowhards or endlessly equivocating academics.  Adding some genuine ideological reflection into the film would admittedly be a daunting task, not least in that dramatising complex philosophies on screen is exceedingly difficult.  Doing this also places any film in immediate danger of being dismissed as either invective or as overly intellectual (particularly problematic in highly anti-intellectual places like New Zealand).  This leads me to what I suppose is my main point here; film critics need to be as careful with and as conscious of ideology as anyone else.

In some of the professional criticism of the film, we encounter examples of a standard feature of many mainstream discourses on political or religious violence; that is, a total dismissal of the meaning of those violent actions we too easily label as terrorism.  We find, for example, the following from Andrew L. Urban at Urban Cinefile, a respectable Australian website concerned with film:

If you lived through the 70s as an adult (or young adult), you will remember the name, Baader Meinhof, also known as the Red Army Faction. Perhaps like me, you’ll have forgotten what they stood for.  This film reminds us that they didn’t really stand for anything much more than anarchy, even though they – eventually – dressed it up as a desire to ‘free the oppressed’ and destroy US imperialism, as they saw it.  They wanted world peace, if you like, even it meant waging war and slaughtering civilians to get it … Perhaps the most important function of a movie about the Baader Meinhofs of this world is to reveal their hollow morality, their arrogance and their cruelty; nothing romantic here to entice youngsters to kill innocent civilians in pursuit of peace and freedom.  In this respect, the film highlights the absolute failure of politically driven terrorism as an agent of socio-political change.  Real, and really valuable change, can be bought about by societies without large scale slaughter – as they were with the fall of corrupt and greedy President Marcos of the Philippines, and the fall of European communism.

While he is right to condemn some of their methods, Urban, in dismissing outright the possibility that the RAF operated with any genuine political aims, makes an all-too-common mistake in that he seeks to defuse the symbolic threat that groups like the RAF represent.  This is, perhaps, done in the service of another one of those simple stories that we are all so infatuated with; that those whose methods are questionable are following an incoherent and inconsequential ideology, if indeed they are not merely anarchists.  Is not anarchism itself an ideology?  Repellent as they may be, the actions of the RAF – not to mention those by al-Qaeda, Hamas, the IRA, and other more contemporary groups – are meaningful actions.  Why would anyone perform these actions without reason?  Would someone like Holger Meins (whose fatal prison hunger strike is brutally portrayed in the film) have acted as he did without a reason more compelling than a desire to cause chaos?  As Mark Jurgensmeyer notes in his excellent 2003 book, Terror in the Mind of God, acts of violence are complex cultural formations that cannot simply be dismissed or ignored:

These creations of terror are done not to achieve a strategic goal but to make a symbolic statement.  By calling acts of religious terrorism ‘symbolic’, I mean that they are intended to illustrate or refer to something beyond their immediate target: a grander conquest, for instance, or a struggle more awesome than meets the eye … Such explosive scenarios are not tactics directed toward an immediate, earthly, or strategic goal, but dramatic events intended to impress for their symbolic significance (pp. 125-126).

This leads me to my final point about textual criticism; it is dangerous to ignore the ideological content of films (and all text is ideological in one way or another).  Nor, it must be mentioned, is there any need to make the opposite mistake, as the film critics at the World Socialist Website do on a regular basis, denigrating perfectly fine films for the flaw that they don’t happen to agree wholeheartedly with the rather narrowly prescribed (and frankly outdated) Trotskyite socialism that the site represents.  This is not to denigrate Trotsky and certainly not to dismiss Marx, but there can be little doubt that classical Marxism has proven itself unable to grapple with a number of contemporary developments, especially those involving religion.  To judge the value of every single cultural artefact on the criteria of how well it supports one particular ideology is to in essence declare an end to ideological and political debate and to turn all art into propaganda.  And, Leni Riefenstahl and Sergei Eisenstein aside, propaganda film tends to be rather banal (if you doubt this, go out and see any film by Michael Bay, who is little more than a propagandist for the United States military).  

Proper criticism involves considering the text on its own merits as a cultural artefact and as an aesthetic object.  The mark of a good film critic is being able to admit that a film is good even if the critic disapproves of the meaning that it may be trying to convey.  As a scholar of film searching for this ever-elusive detachment, I want to recall a number of films that I have seen and admired – at times even deeply admired – whose moral or ideological structure I find repellent.  Ben Affleck’s Gone Baby Gone is one of these films.  So is American Beauty.  For the same reason, a good critic or analyst should be able to admire a filmmaker as an artist and at the same time find their films to be abhorrent – and here Lars van Trier comes immediately to mind (I am, in fact, avoiding a screening of van Trier’s Antichrist at the Festival tonight for the simple reason that I can only make it through a van Trier film if I can pause it and walk away at intervals, perhaps to take a shower).  Dismissing texts simply because we happen to  disagree with them is the worst kind of criticism and smacks of a lack of conviction.

The Dunedin School Remembers Graham Stanton (1940-2009), Subversive

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Dunedin, Graham Stanton, Sapere Aude, University of Otago

Graham Stanton (1940-2009)

The Dunedin School wishes to remember Professor Graham Stanton, who passed away on 18 July 2009, aged 69. In the early 1960s, Graham Stanton began his academic studies in Dunedin, receiving an MA and BD from the University of Otago (Knox College). In 2000, he was awarded an honourary Doctor of Divinity from the University of Otago.

Graham Stanton received his PhD at Cambridge in 1969. He later became a lecturer (from 1970) and then New Testament Professor (from 1977) at King’s College, London until 1998. From 1998 until his death, he held the chair of Lady Margaret’s Professor of Divinity, the University of Cambridge’s oldest chair (est. 1502). Graham Stanton was also President of the Society for New Testament Studies in 1996-1997, editor of New Testament Studies, and a General Editor of the International Critical Commentaries.

On being awarded the University of Otago’s Doctor of Divinity degree, Graham Stanton made some subversive comments on the University’s motto, Sapere Aude (Dare to be Wise). As they reflect the heart of the Dunedin School ethos, let’s give Graham the final word:

“I think this admirable motto has something to say to the new graduates, and also to the senior academics here this afternoon. “Dare to be wise”. Not simply, “Be wise”, but “Dare to . .” “Dare to” suggests that one is doing something that is difficult, off-beat, even subversive. Yes, the University’s motto is potentially subversive, for it subverts many of the values taken for granted today by Governments, opinion formers, and even the educational elite the world over.”
– Graham Stanton, 1940-2009

Ignorance of half the Old Testament’s Umwelt

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Genesis, Gian Conte, Greek, Intertextuality, Morton Smith, Roman

Buried away in a footnote to Studies in the Cult of Yahweh (1996), Morton Smith laments the days – from about 100 years ago and before – in which Old Testament commentaries regularly examined Greek and Roman parallels to interpret the book of Genesis.

“The earlier commentaries, especially, cite numerous Greek and Roman parallels, reflecting the happier days of Biblical scholarship, before the specialization of ‘ancient near eastern’ studies had entailed ignorance of half the Old Testament’s Umwelt.” (Vol 1, p. 235, no. 37)

If we accept that “a text can be read only in connection with, and in opposition to other texts” (Gian Conte), then in effect Morton is saying that, for the last century, Old Testament scholars have largely missed the boat.

The Seductions of Simple Stories

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Baudrillard, Butler, Human Bombing, Meaning, Narrative, Radical Thought

Continuing with the theme of narrative …

In his last post, our erstwhile School friend Deane asked, ‘don’t stories constantly seduce us? Don’t they constantly dull our sense of the inexplicability of existence, of the event itself, offering us their comforting patterns like a mother’s warm nipple offers its soporific milk?’  There is something to this, but there is also something more that needs to be made explicit: Aren’t we more completely and willingly seduced by simple stories, especially by those simple stories in which we – and people who look and think as we do – come up roses?  It is the simple stories, those with clear-cut moral divisions and unequivocal messages, that speak the most clearly to us: Jesus was a prophet fully aware of his own role in the salvation history of mankind; Muhammad was a morally pure religious and military leader, an unimpeachable exemplar for Muslims at all times and in all places; the United States and the United Kingdom are innocent victims of acts of terrorism perpetrated by those who hate the West for its freedoms.  And on and on it goes …

This is a matter that finds resonances far outside of biblical studies and religious fundamentalism.  Indeed, it is possible to find evidence of our love of the simple tale in the ways in which we organise and understand ourselves.  On the academic front, Paul Ricouer and Charles Taylor have convincingly argued that the ways in which we approach the world and even our own identities are fundamentally narrative in nature.  That we love simple stories that iron out the bumps on the road of human progress and show us that what lurks in the shadows is an absolute other – or something we need not worry ourselves about – is also evident in the ways that certain academic or quasi-academic narratives make their way into the wider culture.  Narratives that make the world simple – not to mention those that lay the blame for the world’s problems on the shoulders of people who do not look or think like we do – are the ones that find the biggest audiences.  Why else would we still be hearing about Joseph Campbell’s (frankly idiotic) theory of the ‘monomyth’ more than sixty years after it first appeared?  Why else would Bernard Lewis’ and Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisations’ model, which has distinct narrative elements, have been accepted by so many people, and put to such repellent uses (such as justifying the drive for ethnically pure states in the former Yugoslavia)?

Herr Galbraith, in characteristic deadpan fashion (deeply offensive to a closet conservative like myself), concludes with what I suspect, without wishing to engage in too much pop psychologising, is the answer to my question: ‘It’s just easier to get by, I guess’.  For those people who are merely interested in getting by, this would be fine; however, for the rest of us – including those of us in the Dunedin School – there needs to be something more.  Intellectual and academic iconoclasm demands that we strive always to complicate stories, to at least be willing always to ask difficult questions: Is that all that happened?  Are there other explanations?  What if things had in reality been otherwise?  Isn’t it more likely that Jesus – and Muhammad for that matter – made mistakes?  Would people be willing to sacrifice their lives and willingly embrace brutal, violent deaths simply because they hate freedom?  And whose idea of freedom are we talking about here, anyway?  Is this the freedom that comes from absolute submission to the divine, or is it the freedom to make a narrowly-prescribed choice in a national election?

It is also a matter of allowing stories to begin where and when they actually begin, not merely where we want them to begin.  The story of an anti-American human bombing doesn’t begin on the morning of the day when the bombing took place.  It might not even begin in living memory.  As Judith Butler writes about the attacks of 11 September 2001:

There is as well a narrative dimension to this explanatory framework.  In the United States, we begin the story by invoking a first-person narrative point of view, and telling what happened on September 11.  It is that date and the unexpected and fully terrible experience of violence that propels the narrative.  If someone tries to start the story earlier, there are only a few narrative options.  We can narrate, for instance, what Mohammed Atta’s family life was like, whether he was teased for looking like a girl, where he congregated in Hamburg, and what led, psychologically, to the moment in which he piloted the plane into the World Trade Center.  Or what was din Laden’s break from his family, and why is he so angry?  That kind of story is interesting to a degree because it suggests that there is a personal pathology at work.  It works as a plausible and engaging narrative in part because it resituates agency in terms of a subject, something we can understand, something that accords with our idea of personal responsibility, or with the theory of charismatic leadership that was popularized with Mussolini and Hitler in World War II.[1]

In the end, aren’t difficult stories with roots that trail into the murky past more interesting at the same time that they are more troubling?  Aren’t confused and convoluted narratives of history ultimately more convincing, even if they are less comfortable?  Taking a cue from the late philosopher and cultural critic Jean Baudrillard, I want to suggest that the goal of any truly engaged thought is not clarification and it certainly isn’t utility, but is rather to maintain the mystery of the world and to revel in, rather than try to explain away, its complexity:

Radical thought is at the violent intersection of meaning and non-meaning, of truth and non-truth, of the continuity of the world and the continuity of the nothing.  It aspires to the status and power of illusion, restoring the non-veracity of facts, the non-signification of the world, and hunting down that nothing which runs beneath the apparent continuity of things … The world was given to us as something enigmatic and unintelligible, and the task of thought is to render it, if possible, even more enigmatic and unintelligible.^[2]

This of course does not mean that we need to reject offhand any simple narrative accounts of history, merely that we always be suspicious of stories, especially those comforting tales that we know and love best.  If I may perhaps suggest a mission statement as we pursue the truth of the world through its stories (if indeed these last two are not one and the same): If a story is too simple, then it probably isn’t true.

If you’re supposed to die, could you tell me first?

‘Cuz I would like to be one step ahead of the hearse

Such a perfect day today, it seems such a shame

It seems such a shame to die …

Is this what you need to hear, Heaven’s real and you’ll make it there?

And when you do, could you put me and you plus two on the door?

And I thought God loved his children, but I don’t know how

And I can’t see why or where …

From the Minuit song ‘I Hate You’

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[1] Judith Butler, Precarious Lives, 5.

[2] Jean Baudrillard, Impossible Exchange, 150-151.

Crypto-Fundamentalism and De Wette’s Error

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Crypto-fundamentalism, Deuteronomy, Ernst Axel Knauf, Jean-François Lyotard, Josiah, Judah, Kings, The Event, Wilhelm De Wette

Folk such as Philip Davies and Kurt Noll have been arguing for some time that Wilhelm De Wette’s 1805 theory (that the “book of the law” found in Josiah’s reign was the core of the book of Deuteronomy) is wrong. Not utterly wrong – it is true that there are obvious connections between the reforms of Josiah told in the book of Kings and the laws and preaching found in Deuteronomy. But historically wrong. The connections which De Wette observed are all only a part of the story told in Kings. The connections are based in the literary fiction told in Kings, not in history-in-itself (whatever that may be). That is, the story in Kings is an idealistic one (told about a king who follows what the priests and prophets have to say, and reforms his kingdom accordingly). Furthermore, the presentation in Kings of “the book of the law” as a document which is prescriptive for king and country is more historically explicable as a reactive description of ideals which were held in some quarters once Judah/Yehud had lost its king and was subject to the fantasies of priests and prophets.

A recent article in The Journal of Hebrew Scriptures by Ernst Axel Knauf (‘Observations on Judah’s Social and Economic History and the Dating of the Laws of Deuteronomy’) warns against the “crypto-fundamentalist” tendency by which people tend to give uncritical acceptance to traditional stories when they try to interpret the events of history. Crypto-fundamentalism isn’t something that is limited to biblical scholars though – and that is so however much it, as well as full-blown fundamentalism, does seem to dominate the discipline. For don’t stories constantly seduce us? Don’t they constantly dull our sense of the inexplicability of existence, of the event itself, offering us their comforting patterns like a mother’s warm nipple offers its soporific milk? Don’t they seduce us like repeating patterns in rich textured wallpaper…

Jean-François Lyotard advocates that we remain sensitive to the sound of actual events underneath the noise of meaning-making. We must remain sensitive to the “It happens” rather than the “What happens”. “Reading is directed at the event in its singularity, its radical difference from all other events.” We must not ask what is the case, but what a “case” is before it has been accounted for, before our pattern-seeking proclivities reduce it to a concept. If De Wette had followed Lyotard’s advice (considerations of time aside), he might not have made his “error”.

“I read Kant or Adorno or Aristotle not in order to detect the request [demande] they themselves tried to answer by writing, but in order to hear what they are requesting from me while I write or so that I write” (Lyotard, Diacritics 14 (1984): 19).

Of course, I’m a crypto-fundamentalist, too (most of the time). I’m a sucker for… patterned, textured wallpaper. It’s just easier to get by, I guess.

The Unofficial City

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Living, Method, Michel de Certeau, Text, Theory, Walking

An unusual piece of graffiti found near the Dunedin City Centre not too long ago (photograph by the author).

Though I have no way of competing with cannibals, I want to begin my first entry to this record – and I simply cannot bring myself to use the repellent word ‘blog’ – with an unusual idea related peripherally to my research into religion as it exists in the nooks and crannies of modernity.  This image of hidden, marginal spaces can carry over into the physical world and, to me at least, suggests an interesting way to approach the landscape of the city.  Though the surface level of the city is interesting enough as a text to be read, what really fascinates me (as both a site for the study of human cultures and as an aesthetic pleasure) is the unofficial city, to paraphrase the great New Zealand photographer Laurence Aberhart.  While pretty much any human settlement of any size will do for this kind of exploration, a modern concrete-and-steel city is probably best, even better if it is a little run-down, lived-in, and has many strange interstitial places.  The School’s literal and spiritual home, Dunedin (on the east coast of New Zealand’s South Island), incidentally, is a very fine city in this regard.

Michel de Certeau’s two-volume The Practice of Everyday Life[1] comes immediately to mind as I try to unpack this idea a little further.  In his first volume, de Certeau lays out in some detail the ways in which people use and interact with their material culture, the ways in which people ‘make do with what they have’.  He outlines how such seemingly mundane practices as eating, reading and walking can help people to resist the ever-present tide of rationalisation.  In his essay, ‘Walking in the City’, he offers a fascinating look at living in the contemporary Western city, arguing that every city is in actuality two cities: one is the visible, functional city; the other is the city as a constant creation of those who live within it, an unofficial city that we are unable to fully explain or even describe.  De Certeau presents these two cities as engaged in an eternal and undecidable dialogue, though the official city continues to dominate the conversation.  Rationalised urban space, ‘brutally lit by an alien reason’, designed for utility and heavily quantified, strives to control the denizens of the city.  However, this control is never, and can never be, total.  The official city generates spaces and practices that run against the grain and refuse both control and quantification.  In de Certeau’s words, the city ‘makes room for a void’, ‘opens up clearings’ and allows for ‘a certain play within a system of defined spaces’.[2] He summarises:

On the one hand, there is a differentiation and redistribution of the parts and functions of the city, as a result of inversions, displacements, accumulations, etc.: on the other there is a rejection of everything that is not capable of being dealt with in this way and so constitutes the ‘waste products’ of a functionalist administration (abnormality, deviance, illness, death, etc.) … if in discourse the city serves as a totalising and almost mythical landmark for socioeconomic and political strategies, urban life increasingly permits the re-emergence of the element that the urbanistic project excluded.  The language of power is thus in itself ‘urbanising’ but the city is left prey to contradictory movements that counter-balance and combine themselves outside the reach of panoptic power.[3]

De Certeau concludes, in a manner that recalls both Jean Baudrillard’s work and my own thinking on reenchantment: ‘There is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence, spirits one can “invoke” or not.  Haunted places are the only ones people can live in’.[4]

So go out and haunt your city, inscribe into it the indelible work of being human.  If we think (and act) in this way, there is no place that is truth disenchanted, no space so completely rationalised that there is no resisting its alienation.

So say we all.

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[1] Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, vol. 1, trans. by Steven Rendell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

[2] De Certeau, Practice I, 104-106.

[3] De Certeau, Practice I, 94-95.

[4] De Certeau, Practice I, 108.

A Subtly Ethnocentric Response to Cannibalism

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cannibalism, Don Gardner, ethnocentrism, L. Daniel Hawk, Numbers

Might as well begin this blog with some thoughts on cannibalism – as good a topic as any for the Dunedin School. (Incidentally, what first whet my appetite for an exploration of cannibalism was the thirteenth chapter of the Book of Numbers, with its all-devouring landscape and giant-sized grape clusters.)

Mind you, this post has less to do with cannibalism than a typical academic reaction to it. The typical move of the human sciences, when faced with the unusual practice of eating other people, or indeed with any unusual or repugnant practice, is to ‘contextualize’ it. In this way, the practice is given an explanation within a network of cultural meanings and functions, and is fairly much sterilized as a result. But Anthropologist Don Gardner thinks that this contextualization can often be a thin cover for a subtle form of ethnocentrism. He argues the case in a very interesting article, ‘Anthropophagy, Myth, and the Subtle Ways of Ethnocentrism’ (1999). According to Don, when contextualization or thick description – and all those other standard practices of the human sciences – are carried out with the impulse to euphemize the ethical dimensions of the practices, then the initial unreflexive negative response is never really challenged. It is only buried in a network of explanation, disavowing the ethnocentric negative evaluation which prompted it. And so,

“this contextualizing move, too, can be sustained by ethical orientations uncomfortably close to those characteristic of people who would condemn cannibalism out of hand.” (36)

What also gets buried, as a result, is the possibility that the morality of a certain practice is still an open question. The impulse to contextualize can sometimes be motivated by the desire to place the offending practice beyond moral contemplation. The rationale is: this practice is obviously wrong, so how do we disarm negative reactions to it? Think of the rush to affirm that female genital mutilation is justifiable in terms of the framework of the cultural expectations of North-east African Muslim women. Think of the enthusiasm to describe the cultural significance of the genocidal Israelite ban (ḥerem) in the Old Testament conquest narratives, to ‘appreciate’ (and thereby justify?) its cultural-religious significance as a dedication to holiness. Think of the concerned attempts of many Bible Commentaries to redeem Rahab by denying her vocation as prostitute (as Daniel Hawk discusses). Gardner is right on the mark here. When the contextualizing explanation is governed by the motivation not to challenge ethnocentric attitudes, but to bracket out ethical aspects of a practice from consideration,

“there is… a kinship between those who would demonize and those who would contextualize ethically questionable practices.” (41)

It is true that contextualization can often greatly enrich our understanding and challenge our prejudices. Contextualizing can fundamentally challenge any immediate gut reaction we might experience. But as Gardner shows, the human sciences can conversely be used to protect or even reinforce these very same gut reactions.

References:
– Don Gardner, ‘Anthropophagy, Myth, and the Subtle Ways of Ethnocentrism’. Pages 27-49 in Laurence R. Goldman, ed., The Anthropology of Cannibalism. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1999.
– L. Daniel Hawk, Every Promise Fulfilled: Contesting Plots in Joshua. Louisville, Ky: Westminster John Knox, 1991: 62.