The ‘World Wide Web’ and the Utopian Imaginary

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Internet, Punk, Utopian imagination, World Wide Web

‘The Internet has empowered the marginal, the talentless, and the librarian in all of us.  If punk gave everyone carte blanche to pick up a guitar and scream at the world, so the World Wide Web has allowed everyone the opportunity to share their small world-view with anyone with time to kill’.

The writer, the journalist Dylan Jones (From ‘Icon: Frank Sinatra’, GQ July 2007, p. 68), here gets at a valuable aspect of Internet content and its seemingly inevitable trivialising nature, something I have had to grapple with while working on this site.  But he is, on a more serious note, missing something equally valuable.

It is telling to take a good look at these two sentences and the way that they ignore the often ignored fact the Internet is not really a voice for everyone, but a potential and potentially limiting voice for everyone with access to a computer and a certain degree of technical know-how.  The same is perhaps true of punk rock, his earlier referent, but at least punk, which may have been accessible to more people as creators than, say, classical piano, but which was still limited by economic and other factors, made no real claims to being a world-wide or universal phenomenon.

The idea of the ‘World Wide Web’, and the ubiquity of the term itself, is by contrast a utopian promise, a dream not only of universal access but of universal participation in a major cultural forum.  That it has failed singularly in creating this utopia is so blindingly obvious that it perhaps should pass by without mention.  The fact that it makes this promise – and the fact that this promise is so often believed – is in itself very interesting, especially if we want to draw connections between the persistence of technological utopianism and the Christian tradition of eschatology that it grew out of.

The World Wide Web, in its very name, promises the democratisation of knowledge, despite the fact that similar claims were made about the telegraph, the telephone, the printing press, the railroad, the radio, and the personal computer, and despite the fact that these claims have never been validated, at least not without studiously ignoring the facts.  Indeed, such promises were made as far back in time as the emergence of the written word, which was itself reliant upon a series of potent technologies.  All of these things, especially the printing press, have had a democratising effect on the production and distribution of knowledge, but at the same time all of these things have also played an important role in the creation of new elites as well as new forms of cultural and technological poverty.  As James Carey writes,

There is, however, a more stringent sense of the meaning of a monopoly of knowledge.  When one speaks, let us say, of the monopoly of religious knowledge, of the institutional church, one is not referring to the control of particles of information.  Instead, one is referring to control of the entire system of thought, or paradigm, that determines what it is that can be religiously factual, that determines what the standards are for assessing the truth of any elucidation of these facts, and that defines what it is that can be accounted for as knowledge.  Modern computer enthusiasts may be willing to share their data with anybody.  What they are not willing to relinquish as readily is the entire technocratic worldview that determines what qualifies as an acceptable or valuable fact.  What they monopolize is not the body of data itself but the approved, certified, sanctioned, official mode of thought-indeed, the definition of what it means to be reasonable … Instead of creating a ‘new future,’ modern technology invites the public to participate in a ritual of control in which fascination and technology masks the underlying factors of politics and power.  But this only brings up-to-date what has always been true of the literature of the future.  This literature, with its body of predictions, prescriptions, and prophecies, is a cultural strategy for moving or mobilizing or arousing people toward predefined ends by prescribed means.[1]

Incidentally, we also must keep in mind that data, the Internet’s forte, is not the same as information, which is not the same as knowledge, which is not the same as wisdom.  There are more steps in the democratisiation of knowledge than simple access, as anyone who has read an undergraduate essay which cites only online sources will readily attest.  It is indeed one of the curious paradoxes of the Information Age that there is perhaps a greater degree of access to data than at any point in history at the same time that fewer and fewer people have access to the sorts of knowledge and critical skills that are necessary to navigate the morass of rhetoric, misinformation, and simple ignorance that is characteristic of the Internet.  However, this utopian rhetoric raises a serious question that is not granted enough serious consideration: given that significant numbers of people on this planet have never even used a telephone, just how world wide can the ‘World Wide Web’ possibly be?

In fact, it is possible to argue that the label  ‘World Wide Web’ is in reality another way of distinguishing the part of the world that matters – the world of the wealthy, the (largely) white, and the self-consciously modern – from the rest of the world in all of its poverty and backwardness.  This is nicely illustrated by a popular image from 2007 showing Internet access density (thanks to the artist, Chris Harrison, for making this accessible on his website):

This image puts the lie to the idea of a truly World Wide Web, as much of the world is simply missing, or sunk in darkness.  The areas that are portrayed as blank spaces on this image are sadly predictable and follow more or less exactly the patterns laid out by economic oppression and exploitation in global capitalism.  The same is true of the following visualisation, from the same source, this time documenting Internet traffic:

Here even more of the world simply fades into the blackness of technological backwardness, raising another very real question: is the Internet a part of the solution to the staggering problems that these maps speak of, or is it simply another part of the problem, another way of delineating the haves from the have nots?

In the end, the truly marginal are not the solitary toilers sitting in front of computer screens sending out their worldview for general consideration (and, we assume, validation), but are instead those who lack access to even the basic tools that advertising and other interested cultural forces have told us are necessary for authentic communication, not to mention the billions who lack access to clean water, basic health care, or simply enough to eat.

Though this may seem to be taking all of this in the direction of conspiracy and needs a good deal more investigation to be anything more than conjecture, I want to suggest that the label ‘World Wide Web’ is both a utopian promise and a shield from precisely this sort of criticism.  This, of course, is the result of a range of factors and not simply a choice made with the deliberate goal of creating and maintaining socio-economic inequalities, but that doesn’t make it any less damaging.  There is no reason to be a Luddite about all of this, and no need to retreat to a facile, outdated technological determinism; there is, however, a real need to pay attention to the cultural and economic aspects of information technology, from the quill to the computer on which I write these words.  As Erik Davis writes, resorting to what is a not unjustified hyperbole, ‘Without turning to face our own terminal screens, without sharpening critical wisdom and cultivating compassion, the Internet may only become a new brand of bondage’.[2]

McLuhan, and those, like Baudrillard, who were influenced by him, have made this point over and over again, and made it well: technology is never ideologically neutral, and to think otherwise is indeed dangerous.

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[1] James Carey, Communication as CultureEssays on Media and Society(New York: Routledge, 1989): 194-195.

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[2] Erik Davis, TechGnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2004): 380.  He elaborates: ‘In the long run, I suspect that some of the most valuable and productive aspect of postmodern thought may lie in its confrontation with digital technology, whose alien cunning it helped to articulate and whose posthuman possibilities it helped to unfold … cyber-culture also embodies the channel-surfing decadence, depthless fragmentation, and smug obsession with self-referential codes and jargon that characterize postmodern culture at its worst.’  Davis, Tech, 388.

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Cinema as Exorcism (One): The Case of (White) Australia [Repost]

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Australia, Balibo, Film, Spectrality, Van Diemen's Land

Frame capture from The Proposition (2006)

In honour of the wide New Zealand release of the excellent Australian film Balibo this week, I am going to re-publish the following piece, which originally ran in August of last year, at the end of Dunedin’s International Film Festival.  This is also the first episode in the ongoing (and marginally popular) series ‘Cinema as Exorcism’, more of which can be found here, here, and here).  Balibo tells the story of a number of Australian (and one kiwi) journalists who get caught up in Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor in 1979 and tells that story with a keen eye for both detailed realism and for the ways in which the most important lessons about national identity are often learned far away from home.  If you want to support the existence of tightly-crafted,  t0ugh-minded, politically and socially relevant cinema, go and see Balibo, even if its portrait of journalism as relevant social action, sadly, appears badly dated.

Inspired by two very good Australian films that screened down here at the International Film Festival, this is the first of what will (hopefully) be a series of posts dealing with film and various aspects of spectrality (and thanks to Deane for this last word).

These two very different films hammer home something that has been increasingly clear in the past few years: Australia, as a nation, is attempting through the cinema to shed the shackles of its national ghosts, or at least bring these spectres into the full, harsh light of day.  This is more than simple katharsis, it seems, bridging over into some more elemental; expiation maybe, even exorcism.  Australia – or at least Australian art, as the Australian government seems to be committed to continuing its long history of criminal behaviour – is engaged in a collective exorcism.  This is true, I suppose, of only those people who make these films or the people who choose to see them instead of Transformers. Perhaps this needs a further clarification, as this exorcism is largely confined to the ghosts of Australia’s European past.  The long plight of the Aboriginal peoples is still largely consigned to the darkness, or is subject to well-meaning but ultimately hollow official attempts at apology.  Something like Philip Noyce’s film Rabbit-Proof Fence, for all its striving nobility, simply doesn’t pack the emotional punch and the raw sense of wrongness that characterises the film-as-exorcism.

Jonathan auf der Heide’s remarkable debut Van Diemen’s Land recounts the story – such as it is – of eight convicts who escaped from the brutal penal colony at Macquarie Harbour in Tasmania in 1822.  Of these eight men, only one, an Irish thief named Alexander Pearce, would be found a number of weeks later, claiming to have killed and eaten a number of his fellow prisoners to survive.  The authorities were loath to believe Pearce, choosing to believe instead that Pearce was covering for his friends still at large.  It muddied the water considerably when Pearce escaped again a few years later and was found with human flesh in his pockets, despite the fact that he still had other things to eat.  He was hanged.  Almost two hundred years later, the filmmakers take Pearce at his word, taking us with the group as they are slowly whittled down by hunger, by malice, and by the sheer fact that they were all city-dwellers in the wilds of an unforgiving, uncaring island.  Eschewing the temptation to hammer the scant source material into a standard narrative form, the film instead evokes something of the experience of the men involved: the days bleed into another endlessly; the men themselves remain largely indistinguishable; the world is reduced eventually to an endless tract of damp forest; the bursts of violence are sudden, messy, and uncomfortably brutal.  It is an unsettling vision of the world, made all the more alien by Pearce’s Gaelic voiceover.  This is harsh, essential humanity at its very worst, the long, sad plight of imperfect men placed into an inhuman situation by circumstance and by the ambitions of others.  This is, the film makes very explicit, what made Australia, and by extension the whole of the British Empire; it was built on the suffering of untold hundreds of men like Pearce, sent to the ends of the Earth for the heinous crime of stealing six pairs of shoes.  Pearce is neither villain nor hero.  In the film, he simply is, and the film confronts the audience with his image, his voice, and his ghost, perhaps hoping that it will simply fade away now that its eternal bloodlust has been dramatised and made clear for all to see.

The other film that leads me in this direction is Robert Connolly’s Balibo, based again on historical incident and on the lives of real people.  The film tells of six Australian journalists (one of whom was a New Zealander) on the ground during the 1975 Indonesian invasion of East Timor.  The film is structured almost as a mystery, following the journey of Roger East, played as both a lion in winter and as a faded revolutionary by a superb Anthony LaPaglia, as he follows the trail of five younger colleagues, who witnessed the early days of the invasion.  In stunningly recreated period detail, we see these hapless young men struggle to capture evidence that would prove to the world that Indonesia was ramping up an illegal invasion of a sovereign nation that had only recently gained its freedom from Portugal.  They paid for this dream with their lives, and the film spares us very little of their terror and the ignominy of their final moments in a deserted cinder-block house.  The film is as much about Australia turning a blind eye to the invasion (in which as many as 183,000 people were killed) as it is about the invasion itself. At the end of Balibo, East is captured when the invasion begins in earnest.  He chants a desperate mantra – ‘I’m an Australian, I’m an Australian’ – trying to save himself from execution.  He fails and is gunned down unceremoniously.  He fails also to convince the audience that his nationality can (and should) save him, and Connolly leaves little doubt that some of the responsibility for the invasion should be laid at the feet of Australia and its opportunistic foreign policy.  The final images, triumphant archival footage from East Timor’s eventual independence from Indonesia in 1999, do little to erase the feeling that this film, like Van Diemen’s Land, is grappling with the ghosts of colonial guilt and with Australia’s uneasy relationship with its past.  The film opens with a title card that is rare in that it is so unequivocal: ‘This is a true story’.  Not ‘Based on true events’ or ‘Inspired by actual events’, but a blunt assertion of historical truth, making this even more of a punch to the gut, even purer an act of exorcism.

Tracing this trend a few years into the past, John Hillcoat’s painfully brilliant Aussie Western The Proposition, released in 2006, is perhaps the paradigmatic case of this kind of filmmaking.  Less an Unforgiven-like deconstruction of the tropes of the genre, Hillcoat’s film is more of an evisceration of every shred of dignity from the frontier.  With a script by Bad Seed singer Nick Cave (who provides the score along with Warren Ellis, the violinist from Dirty Three), the film mines an almost biblical vein of filth and violence on the borderlands of nineteenth century British civility.  The film closes on an image of two bearded, filthy Irish immigrants sitting in the sands just outside a displaced, genteel English house at the edge of the Outback, staring out into the future.  The psychotic Arthur Burns (played with a sociopathic refinement by Danny Huston) is dying slowly, facing the endless nothingness.  Arthur asks his younger brother Charlie (played by a gauntly intense Guy Pearce) the question that has plagued every modern person since Hamlet: ‘What are you going to do now?’  Charlie, having killed Arthur in a futile bid to save the life of their angelic younger brother, is left to face the future forever trapped between savagery and civilisation.  That the brothers end the film staring away from the English house and into the wilds speaks of a profound emptiness and a deep unease at the core of Australia’s sense of its own European history.   Incidentally, walking out of the theatre after seeing The Proposition, I overheard the best impromptu film review ever: a young woman behind me turned to her friend and said in a shaky voice, ‘I thought I was going to vomit the whole time that was playing’.  This is elemental, haunted, and resonant filmmaking.  This is expiation.

Australia’s spiritual and geographic neighbour New Zealand really hasn’t delved into its own past in quite this fashion – save for a few brilliant exceptions like Geoff Murphy’s Utu (1983) – and I suspect New Zealand’s puritan underbelly and its continued reverence for both the British Empire and for its own (small) part in that Empire will prevent this from happening.  While there are kiwi films that are willing to admit that New Zealand society is underpinned by an almost impenetrable darkness – see Brad McGann’s 2004 In My Father’s Den for an outstanding example of this – and even films that dramatise and make visible this dark core – see Robert Sarkies’ 2006 Out of the Blue, arguably the best film ever made in this country – there is little evidence that the wholesale historical exorcism that we see in Australian film is anywhere close to the surface.

This is a shame; we need to do this, and soon.

The only thing perhaps that we can change is the past and we do it all the time.

Ninian Smart

The News [outside the Empire’s circle jerk] – Monday 15 February 2010

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The News

Right-wing Christian leaders, mostly American, are currently attempting to gain support for a document called the “Manhattan Declaration”, which, among other things, “compares pro-choice advocates to eugenicists (and implicitly to Nazis) and equates same-sex marriage with polygamy and a gateway to legalized incest.” The backers of the Manhattan Declaration include the usual suspects of American Christian reactionism – including Focus on the Family’s James Dobson and Prison Fellowship Ministries’ Chuck Colson. The American Family Association’s January 2010 newsletter  urges members to sign the document, warning of the grave threat from “the anti-family/anti-religious radicals who control the White House and Congress.”

Shalom Goldman’s newly released book, Zeal for Zion argues that Twentieth Century Jewish Zionism is not a Jewish initiative, but rather the product of three centuries of earlier Christian Zionism within dispensational Protestantism. In the words of Goldman’s book: “As historian of ideas Richard Popkin noted in the early 1990s, ‘Much of Zionism has its roots in Christian rather than Jewish doctrine.’ Among those doctrines is the tendency in the Protestant churches to read biblical narrative and prophecy in a more literal and historical manner than had been the tradition in either Rabbinic Judaism or in the Orthodox or Catholic Churches.”

A “Museum of Tolerance” is to be built in Jerusalem – on the site of an ancient Muslim cemetery. Unremarkably, the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, which is planning to build the tolerance museum, has turned a blind eye to the interests of local Muslims.

Robert Jensen discusses the conflict of interest faced by the New York Times, when the Jerusalem bureau chief’s son joined the Israeli army, and the ensuing debate over the retention of his position at the newspaper. Ignoring the narrow confines of the controversy, Jensen opines, “As is typical in mainstream journalists’ discussions of journalistic neutrality and objectivity, the focus on an individual obscures more important questions about the institutions for which individuals work and the powerful forces that shape those institutions’ picture of the world.”

And how did the United States kill hundreds of thousands of Haitians in an earthquake? William Blum provides some of the background in Chapter 55 of his book Killing Hope: “What does the government of the United States do when faced with a choice between supporting: (a) a group of totalitarian military thugs guilty of murdering thousands, systematic torture, widespread rape, and leaving severely mutilated corpses in the streets … or (b) a non-violent priest, legally elected to the presidency by a landslide, whom the thugs have overthrown in a coup? … But what if the priest is a ‘leftist‘? … ”

And historian Howard Zinn died.

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“Most … get caught up in… the Empire’s media noise … the self-referential circle jerk of facts and figures and mainstream media citations that pass for news and information in this country …”

– Joe Bageant, author of Deer Hunting with Jesus

Narrative focalization

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b&ct, Bible and Critical Theory, focalization, judith mckinlay, Narratology

I noticed a stunning contrast between the reports on the recent Bible and Critical Theory Seminar by Stalin’s Moustache and the Dunedin School, concerning Judith McKinlay’s paper on Zelophehad’s daughters.

The contrast nicely illustrates what narratologists refer to as the focalization of objects by different focalizers – and has the result of providing two quite different impressions of events.

Here’s how the Dunedin School viewed Judith McKinlay’s paper (note the scholarly books in the background and Judith’s upright posture):

Judith McKinlay - Focalization 1

And here is how the same event looked, through the alkoholfrei beer goggles at Stalin’s Moustache:

Judith McKinlay - Focalization 2

Makes you appreciate how easily a little tweak in focalization can give an entirely different picture of events, doesn’t it?!

On How to Properly Begin an Academic Book …

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Edward Conze

From the Foreword to Edward Conze’s lovely translation of and commentary on The Diamond Sutra and The Heart Sutra, originally published as Buddhist Wisdom in 1958 (pp. xxiii- xxx):

‘There was a time when wisdom was prized more highly than anything else … Contemporary religious movements are equally unhelpful.  Intent on extreme simplification, they take pride in discarding the intellectual content of religion.  Whether we look to Billy Graham and Moral Rearmament, or, farther east, to Krishnamurti and the Shin-shu of Japan, the demands made on our intellect and comprehension are reduced to a minimum … Generally speaking it would be difficult to find anything as remote from the interests of the present day as the contents of this book.  This in itself may recommend it to some of those for whom it is intended’.

Indeed it does.  Thank you, Professor Conze.

Auckland Biblical Studies – Now Almost as Big a Nerve Centre of Innovative Biblical Studies as Dunedin?

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Auckland, Dunedin, Elaine Wainwright, Jesus the Bum, lyings down, nerve centre, Robert J. Myles, Roland Boer

The Dunedin School

There are rapid developments afoot within innovative biblical studies in Aotearoa-New Zealand. Robert J. Myles, of new blog Jesus the Bum, has challenged the hitherto unsurpassed supremacy of Dunedin as the seat of radical biblical scholarship. Says Robert:

“I do feel bound to challenge any claim such as this that might work to silence the “Other” innovative biblical scholarship happening around the country.”

An allegation of hegemonic supremacy, too, it seems. But Robert goes further, suggesting that counter to our ‘About’ page, Roland Boer never described Dunedin as “the great nerve centre of innovative biblical studies in New Zealand”. The obvious, even disturbing, implication is that this was nothing but a Dunedin School fabrication!

“The Dunedin School has claimed on a number of occasions to be “the great nerve centre of innovative biblical studies in New Zealand,” I believe recapitulating a claim made in an earlier post by Roland Boer, perhaps in jest (mysteriously, of course, the original post can no longer be found).”

Moreover, he labelled such a claim “pretentious” – which could only be possibly true if somewhere in the country there existed a genuine contender to our title. But… as if.

Yet Dunedin is not taking the challenge from these Northern pretenders lying down! Indeed, taking up the Levitical concern with one’s “lyings down”, we will rise to the challenge, ever more vigilant and critical. Robert has awakened Dunedin from its slumbers. Watch out.

Bible & Critical Theory Seminar 2010 Report

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b&ct, Bible and Critical Theory, Espresso Martini, The Bog

The Bible & Critical Theory Seminar, now in its thirteenth year, finally made it down to the “the great nerve centre of innovative biblical studies in New Zealand”, Dunedin. The Seminar provided two days worth of critical theorizing and jolly camaraderie, culminating in a potentially dangerous moment when a number of us were exposed to The Bog Irish Bar’s seductively smooth Espresso Martinis.

Robert J. Myles

The Seminar featured a solid core of New Zealanders and Aussies, with a couple of Kiwi expats flying in from overseas (including Stephanie Fisher from Nottingham) and one fellow from Durham, U.K. who is temporarily residing in Dunedin (John Barclay):

Stephanie Fisher

John Barclay

Conversation was lively most of the time, although the normally scintillating Roland Boer (Stalin’s Moustache) sent one particular person to sleep:

Roland Boer and Gerard Majella Ellis

Gerard Majella Ellis

The staff at The Bog provided some very good drinks and food for lunches and dinners, despite their clear suspicion that we were all completely crazy. James Harding was particularly pleased to find the menu offered congealed blood pudding and liver – always a tasty treat. On Sunday afternoon, John Barclay was astounded to observe Roland Boer, seated at the other side of the table from him, sinking half a dozen beers and still asking coherent questions of the speakers. However, as it transpired, it was alcohol-free beer. The most rapturous applause came during James Harding’s paper, as the Americans gathered in the floor below to watch the Superbowl, suddenly got excited about something. Or perhaps it was just a particularly egregious abherent decoding of some aspect of James’ paper.  The papers of course, featured a variety of critical approaches and biblical subjects. Judith McKinlay treated us to her distinguished style of biblical criticism, a genre which is widely known in New Zealand and Australia as “McKinlayic Readings”^TM.

Judith McKinlay

Yael Klangwisan provided a revolutionary mimetic approach to the Song of Songs, if not to biblical criticism as a whole, opening up the biblical text for a discursive relationship with the reader:

Yael Klangwisan

Remy Low (of Artisans of a New Humanity fame) made the radical suggestion that the textual gap which makes meaning possible also makes politics possible, drawing on Stuart Hall, Antonio Gramsci, and Michel Foucault to show how the submitting slaves of 1 Peter could offer resistance to text and political situation alike.

Remy Low

This was the second B&CT Seminar I had attended, and once again it provided a stimulating and refreshing mix of experimental approaches to biblical texts. Even better, it was a great opportunity to meet and converse with some new and some more familiar folk. Some interesting discussions were had concerning the future of university humanities departments – and ways to overturn the existing system – and were interspersed by many more light and even rude conversations. The suggestion was made that the Seminar be held in New Zealand every couple of years or so, and that it would perhaps head to Brisbane next year.

Majella Franzmann

Random Question of the Week (two)

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Buddha, Christ

While working on a series of lectures about Buddhism, the following sprang up in my head, making my life more difficult: in the various disciplines that are grouped under the rubric of ‘Religious Studies’, why is it widely acceptable to use the term ‘Buddha’ when referring to the figure of Siddhartha Gautama but generally frowned upon to use the term ‘Christ’ when referring to Jesus of Nazareth?

Both are names internal to their respective traditions and both render religious judgements; so why one and not the other?

Admittedly, ‘Christ’ has a stronger religious association attached to it because of the central tenets and doctrines of the Christian tradition, but I have an inkling that this disparity has far more to do with our incessant need to prove that we are not really theologians than with any consistent methodological concerns.

Silencing the Past: P-Money and Teenage Girls

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Christine Cynn, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, P-Money, screaming teenage girls, silences

In Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995), the Haitian historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot lists “four crucial moments” at which silences “enter the process of historical production” (26):

1. “the moment of fact creation (the making of sources)”;
2. “the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives)”;
3. “the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives)”; and
4. “the moment ofretrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance)”. 

Trouillot’s position is in opposition both to those who consider it possible to neatly distinguish real history from our knowledge of history (i.e. “realists”) and those who believe the two are hopelessly bound up together (i.e. “constructivists”).  Focusing on what historical production does rather than the “abstract concern for the nature of history”, Trouillot notes:

“what history is changes with time and place or, better said, history reveals itself only through the production of specific narratives. What matters most are the process and conditions of production of such narratives. Only a focus on that process can uncover the ways in which the two sides of historicity intertwine in a particular context. Only through that overlap can we discover the differential exercise of power that makes some narratives possible and silences others.” (25)

So Trouillot’s purpose in listing the crucial moments at which silences enter the making of history starts to become apparent. According to him, we must broaden the scope of our understanding of the way in which history is made, by considering all of history-making’s actors, all of its processes, not just the professional historian or academia. Most importantly, for Truoillot, “participants in any event may enter into the production of a narrative about that event before the historian as such reaches the scene.” We like to tell stories about ourselves. Applying this critical viewpoint to participants in a media-saturated world, it must be acknowledged that an academic study of the media and its participants is already limited by the stories they tell others and also tell themselves. Trouillot provides a concrete example:

“How much do narratives of the end of the cold war fit into a prepackaged history of capitalism in knightly armor? William Lewis [in “Telling America’s Story: Narrative Form and the Reagan Presidency,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 73 (1987): 280-302] suggests that one of Ronald Reagan’s political strengths was his capacity to inscribe his presidency into a prepackaged narrative about the United States.”

And as a result…

“professional historians alone do not set the narrative framework into which their stories fit. Most often, someone else has already entered the scene and set the cycle of silences.” (26)

Feminist scholar Christine Cynn makes a similar point in her discussion of Haiti’s “Raboteau Trial”, which involved some remarkable testimony from two massacre survivors, Rosiane Profil and Deborah Charles (“Nou Mande Jistis! (We Demand Justice!): Reconstituting Community and Victimhood in Raboteau, Haiti” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 36 (2008)). She concludes:

“I close by reiterating the importance of attending to sites of knowledge and history that do not register in the official record … I would argue that these events only emphasize the importance of thinking through the effects of how forms of gendering are strategically deployed or elided in attempts to obtain justice both in and outside the courtroom.”

A recent New Zealand example can be found in a blog by producer/DJ, Peter Wadams, better known as “P-Money”. If you were trying to build up biographical notes from what he shares on his blog, you might find, for example, that P-Money is close to his family (“we do like to celebrate our Christmas by spending time together, exchanging gifts and eating a lot of food. This year I’m off to the beach to kick it with my sister and the fam and do more of the same”), he has “rallied together” with other New Zealand entertainers to support tsunami relief for Samoa, and he displayed his sensitive side talking about the death of those he had felt close to. 

But you won’t read any advice P-Money offered to young teenage boys on scoring girls. You won’t read why P-Money’s suggests that “high school age dudes” should attend his concert, because the crowd is likely to be “overwhelmingly filled with screaming teenage girls”. And you won’t read his advice to these “high school age dudes”  to “just tell the girls that you know P-Money and you’re in bro!”

That’s because he deleted those comments. Yet could he delete the effects of his comments on those “high school age dudes” he was addressing? I don’t think so.

This is P-Money’s original post from March 3, 2009, which Tumeke! noted on November 27, 2009:

P-Money's original post, including the words, "The crowd was overwhelmingly filled with screaming teenage girls in Auckland tonight (great crowd by the way, cheers). So if you're a high school age dude I HIGHLY recommend you get down to one of these gigs. Just tell the girls that you know P-Money and you're in bro! lol."

And this is how it looks now:

P-Money's expurgated post

Historical accounts cannot merely restrict themselves to paraphrasing the available historical sources, but must also consider the traces of its silences, the people (often the marginalized, often women) whom history tends to silence, and the reasons history’s actors have narrated their lives in one way but not another.

George Orwell Was (Mostly) Right: Newspeak Today

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Apple, Barack Obaom, George Orwell, IPad, Nineteen Eighty-Four

First British edition of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four

In his visionary 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the science fiction pioneer George Orwell lays out a vision of a terrifying dystopian future where everything, even thought, ispoliced and monitored by Big Brother, an oppressive and virtually omniscient government.  The diegetic world of the novel is dominated by Newspeak, a new propaganda language in which everything has at least two meanings and which uses language to obscure rather that communicate meaning and truth.  Living in a world increasingly dominated by meaningless Managmentspeak – ‘going forward’, ‘learning outcomes’, ‘consultation’, etc., etc. – and by an equally meaningless and equally damaging antinomian Therapyspeak – ‘bipolar disorder’, ‘happiness’, ‘ Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder’, ‘life goals’, etc., etc. – it is very difficult to escape the impression that Orwell’s future is closer to the reality that we are facing than most people would like to believe.

A few examples of very real Newspeak from contemporary history: 1) An American president dedicated to continuing the aggressive, imperialistic campaigns against the Middle East launched by his much-hated predecessor is given the world’s highest honour for peace.

2) A new piece of technology that is simply a new way of doing the same old tasks is marketed and received as both a magical and a revolutionary device – the image below is from the official Apple website.  The special irony (and equating pure functionality with enchantment is indeed a fine irony) here is that Apple made a famed advertisement that aired in 1984 which claimed that arrival of the personal computer would be the reason that ‘1984 won’t be like Nineteen eighty-Four‘ (the ad is available here).  Anyone who says that the world is fully disenchanted world has obviously never really looked at contemporary advertising practices, which enchant the world for the mercenary aim of profit.

I’d be happy to have any other examples of Newspeak from out there if you know of any …

War is Peace

Functionality is Magic, or Consumption is Rebellion

Exciting Bible and Critical Theory Seminar Programme! Are you coming? [FINAL PROGRAMME, PROBABLY]

Tags

b&ct, Badiou, Bible and Critical Theory, Christina von Braun, Dale B. Martin, Eco-feminism, Gospel of Judas, Gramsci, Irigaray, Judith Butler, Kevin Rudd, Last Temptation of Christ, Marcella Althaus-Reid, Marx, Monstrosity of Christ, open texts, Passion of the Christ, Queer, submission, timespace, Umberto Eco, Zelophehad, Žižek

What a programme!! Sad Marxist biblical scholarship, Monstrous Christs, Irrupting Badiouan Events, Hysterical Women, Cosmic Gnostic Spaces, KRuddy Christian Nazis, Emancipatory Submission, Postcolonial Daughters of Zelophehad, Jesus’ Queer Disciples, Matthaean Timespace, Žižek Getting Violent with Job, an Irigarayan reading of the Song of Songs, and David and Jonathan’s openings. All washed down with a few local Dunedin brews.   

 

The Bog

 

The Bible & Critical Theory Seminar
February 7-8, 2010
The Bog, Cnr George and London Streets
Dunedin, New Zealand

Printable BCT2010_Programme

February 7, 2010

0930-1015       Roland Boer, University of Newcastle, NSW
The sadness of Friedrich Engels

Focusing on the early letters of Friedrich Engels, this article explores a little known but exceedingly important aspect of his life: his deep and heart-rending struggle as he gradually lost his Reformed (Calvinist) faith. The issues that confront the young Engels concern the Bible, especially its contradictions (with a focus on biblical genealogies), the relation between reason and faith, and the issue of reading the Bible properly. Engels was a self-taught biblical scholar, but a strikingly informed one. He kept up with the rapidly developing historical critical study of the Bible (newly established in Germany at the time), current issues in philosophy and theology, and he was able to read the New Testament in Greek. We find him debating all these issues with his close friends, Friedrich and Wilhelm Graeber, who were to become pastors in the German Evangelical Church. As he does so he continually shifts positions until he reluctantly gives up his faith. Eventually he would come to terms with his Christian background, offering striking analyses of the revolutionary origins of Christianity.

 1015-1100       Eric Repphun, University of Otago
The Monstrous Cinematic Christ: Biblical Narrative as ‘Supplement’ or ‘Multiple Opposite’?

This will be a study of Last Temptation of Christ and The Passion of the Christ and the way both use source material (including the Gospel narratives), all in light of the Zizek/Milbank debate in The Monstrosity of Christ.

Break

1130-1215       John Barclay, University of Durham, UK
Paul and Alain Badiou

This paper discusses the reading of Paul offered by the contemporary French philosopher, Alain Badiou.  Badiou’s emphasis on event and unconditioned grace is supported by readings from Galatians, such that his philosophical notion of ‘event’, with its militant and universal effects, may claim real consonance with Paul.  However, Paul’s strong notions of divine creation from nothing, and of the benevolence of the Christ event, require that God be reinserted into Paul’s theology, while Badiou’s focus on the resurrection, rather than the cross, misses the social radicalism latent in Paul.

Lunch at The Bog
Menu: http://www.thebog.co.nz/dunedin/menu_breakfast.html

1300-1345       Christina Petterson, Macquarie University, NSW
Spirit and Matter in John

German feminist and cultural theorist Christina von Braun’s work on hysteria and logos from 1985 contains a fascinating chapter on writing, patriarchy, spirit and matter, which draws heavily on John’s word made flesh to argue for the ‘logical’ outcome of the abstraction process of Western philosophy. In this paper, I want to present and explore this argument, bringing it into discussion with a recent PhD dissertation in Biblical Exegesis on the stoic pneuma in John in order to look at the negotiation of matter in the gospel narrative.

1345-1430       Majella Franzmann, University of Otago
Personal and Cosmic Spaces of Salvation in James and Gospel of Judas in Codex Tchachos

In this paper, I provide a study of the characters of James and Judas in James and Gos. Judas in Codex Tchacos by investigating some personal and cosmic spaces in which the characters move, which they influence, and which produce certain effects upon them in return. I use critical spatiality as a means of studying the spaces inhabited by James and Judas, the spaces between them and other characters, especially Jesus, and the cosmic spaces that they must enter and/or cross on their journey to insight and perfection to attain the heavenly home they are seeking.

Break

1500-1545       Holly Randell-Moon, University of Newcastle, NSW
Left or Right? Religion and politics in Australia under the Howard and Rudd governments

A number of scholars, such as Ghassan Hage and David Harvey, have argued that conservative nationalisms often emerge as responses to the alienating effects of neoliberal economic policies. In my previous work, I have argued that the former Howard government’s (1996-2007) promotion of “Christian values” in its public policy and rhetoric can be understood as an attempt to reconcile, or compensate for, the individualising effects of neoliberal economic policy. In this paper, I will compare the Rudd government’s use of a social justice view of Christianity and national culture to shift economic policy away from neoliberalism. However, the Rudd government’s differentiation of its own policies as socially based, in contrast to the non-interventionist and individualist policies under Howard, takes at face value neoliberalism’s claim to limited governance and indifference to social relations. There can be no real engagement with the political effects of neoliberal policies if neoliberalism is simply understood as supporting a neutral conception of the individual or economy. For this reason, I question whether the emergence of a progressive Christian nationalism significantly changes the way neoliberal policies are conceptualised and implemented.

 1545-1630       Remy Low, University of Sydney, NSW
Submission in the War of Position:  Towards a Neo-Gramscian Reading of 1 Peter 2:18-21

There have been endless skirmishes over the New Testament’s injunctions to submission (or ‘to subject’; Gk: hupotasso) in the realm of Biblical studies and ethics. In this paper, I engage in a close reading of one particular usage of the term in 1 Peter 2: 18-21 from the rubric of a neo-Gramscian theory of hegemony. Drawing on the work of Gramsci, Gadamer, Laclau and Unger, I argue that the mobilisation of the term has to be understood as a military metaphor mobilized within a specific spatiotemporal context: i.e. for the purpose of presenting an exterior semblance of ‘normality’ in a hostile situation while actively anticipating total liberation with the apokálypsis of the Kingdom of God. I propose that the exhortation to ‘be subject’, far from being an essentially oppressive and/or conservative ethico-political signifier to be at best avoided, can be re-articulated strategically for the purposes of emancipatory struggle in multiple sociocultural spheres.

Drinks and dinner at The Bog
The Bog has live music from 2000 on Sundays

 

February 8, 2010

0930-1015       Judith McKinlay, University of Otago
The Daughters of Zelophehad hanging out with Edward Gibbon Wakefield: What am I doing with them?

This paper endeavours to introduce a postcolonial reading of the texts concerning Zelophehad daughters alongside a consideration of the settlement of Post Nicholson by the New Zealand Company, and the issues such a reading raises.

1015-1100       

Robert J. Myles, University of Auckland
Dandy discipleship: A queering of Mark’s male disciples

This paper involves a re-reading of a selection of texts from the Gospel of Mark employing the socio-rhetorical method combined with queer and gender criticism as informed by the works of Judith Butler, Marcella Althaus-Reid, and Dale B. Martin. Particular attention is given to the ways in which the gender and sexuality of the male disciples has been constructed in both the world behind the text and the world in front of the text. The paper examines how the masculinity of the disciples is performed by placing the texts in dialogue with dominant discourses from the ancient Mediterranean context. While conventional readings unambiguously presume the normativity of heterosexuality and binary categories of gender, this paper challenges such modern assumptions by purposefully and strategically reading the texts sexually. In the process of applying a provocative queer imagination, underlying components of erotophobia and homophobia within conventional hermeneutical filters are also exposed.

Break

1130-1215       Elaine Wainwright, University of Auckland
From Wilderness to Waterfront: The Play of Time and Space in an Ecological Reading of Matt 3-4

One aspect of the ecological reading process that I am developing is the intertextuality that lies ‘in front of’ the text. This paper will dialogue with emerging theories of time and space/place or Time/Space as May and Thrift call it and how these might inform an ecological reading of selected segments of Matt 3-4.

Lunch at The Bog

1300-1345 Kirsten Dawson, University of Otago
Systemic violence in Job 1-2

Using Žižek’s threefold schema of “subjective”, “systemic” and “symbolic” violence, I will examine the violence apparent in the prologue of the book of Job. While the subjective violence that befalls Job is well-recognised, this paper will investigate the systemic violence in which the prosperous Job is enmeshed, and will suggest some of the implications that these observations might have for interpreting violence in the book as a whole.

1345-1430       Yael Klangwisan, Laidlaw College, Auckland
The Marine Lover & the Song of Songs

In the Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche Luce Irigaray formulates a poetic way of reading and critiquing Nietzsche’s Thus spoke Zarathustra. In the Marine Lover, Irigaray enacts her metaphor of water and its relationship to the feminine while simultaneously creating a Nietzschean persona with which to engage face to face. This aesthetic, homeopathic and poetic form of interrogation enables Irigaray to envelope herself around Nietzsche’s words, washing against and permeating the weaknesses in his claims resulting in a particularly triumphant and brilliantly subtle riposte. Irigaray’s way of reading (in the Marine Lover) provides possibilities for reading the Song of Songs, especially in her use of poetic forms, her treatment of the text as “person” and thus the potential for face to face encounter and lithe dialogue with a biblical text that is notoriously evasive.

Break

1500-1545       James Harding, University of Otago
The David and Jonathan narrative(s) as open text

This paper attempts to move beyond approaches to the David and Jonathan narrative that try to circumscribe the meaning of the text through appeal to word statistics (cf. Zehnder 1998; 2007; critiqued by me at last year’s B&CT seminar) by focusing on the relationship between the constraints of the text, that is the “linear text manifestation,” and the intentions of its readers. Based primarily on Jonathan Culler’s work on the semiotics of reading (Culler 1981) and Umberto Eco’s on the limits of interpretation (Eco 1990), this paper seeks to determine what elements in the text and what interpretive conventions enable the David and Jonathan narrative to produce meaning. My case is that the narrative, which itself is made up of at least two redactional layers, is an “open text” (Eco 1962; 1979) that has been artificially “closed” by the construction of a biblical canon and the imposition of a closed range of interpretive conventions. It is only this move that has made it possible to delimit the work’s meaning by appeal to Lev 18:22; 20:13 (e.g. Gagnon 2001; Zehnder 1998; 2007; etc.) or to the completion of the Old Testament in the new (e.g. Vischer 1946).

Drinks at The Bog
Depart

Also:

Transport and Accommodation details
Venue
 

Registration: email either James Harding (james.harding(at)stonebow.otago.ac.nz) or Roland Boer (roland.t.boer(at)gmail.com) and let them know that you’re coming.

Moana’s paper was sadly cancelled:

Moana Hall-Smith, St John’s College, Auckland/University of Otago
Divine colonization in the Book of Judges: A Maori woman’s ecological reading of Judges 19

This paper is exploratory. As part of a larger project, I am working towards developing a paradigm[s] for reading the biblical text and in particular Judges 19 ecologically. In this paper I propose to use a Māori woman’s postcolonial lens and a Kaupapa Māori framework to foster a new ecological -feminist reading of Judges 19 as a way of liberating the text from its colonizing and patriarchal orientation. I will draw on the issues of land exploitation, patriarchy, gender inequality and colonial dominance to qualify that a Māori eco-feminism is integral to postcolonial thinking. From this dialogue I will draw on Māori conceptual lenses for reading which might guide an ecological reading of Judges 19. Within the confines of this paper a detailed reading will not be possible but simply the proposing of a Kaupapa Māori framework for more indepth interpretation. I will investigate the pilegesh; as the “other” to men; “other” to the sons of Israel; “other” to the non-human and “other” to the divine through a number of Māori conceptual tools. Firstly,  whakapapa which is the systematic and orderly record of human, cosmic and primordial causes and effects. It is based on a genealogical and spiritual relationship to the universe; to the landscape and to stones, rocks and other things seen and unseen, therefore, an association between the female body and the land is invoked and the woman’s decapitated body portrays the ordering of the cosmos; death – death – new life. Secondly, whenua translates both land and womb that are symbolically connected by the birthing cord. Thus the woman’s dismembered body has a strong umbilical attachment to all the lands in Israel. Whenua also provides the interpretive tool that demonstrates the abuse and violation of land was/is intrinsically linked to the abuse and violation of women. Wheiao another conceptual tool, is the liminal space situated between the life and death; the realm of the divine “other”. The battered woman is in this place when she is cut into twelve pieces and sent throughout the territory of Israel. By using Māori conceptual and postcolonial interpretation lenses, I will try to offer a new way of reading the biblical text that challenges those who insist on interpreting through Biblical historical scholarship. This paper’s particular concern will be how attentiveness to the “other” in the text while highlighting the interconnectedness of the land and its community may bring new questions to the interpretation of Judges 19.

Lingering Questions about God’s Providence (1): Destroying Illicit Cult Places

Tags

Assyria, Babylon, Hezekiah, Israel, Josiah, Judah, Persia

The Bible reliably informs us that all of the great empires of antiquity – such as the Assyrian Empire, the Babylonian Empire, and the Persian Empire – only really existed to do God’s bidding. And what God’s bidding typically involved was giving Israel, or Judah, a comprehensive pants-down spanking. As a historical explanation, what such an account lacks in socio-economic realism it certainly makes up for in bold imagination.

But one thing, especially, puzzles me: why would God bother getting Kings Hezekiah and Josiah to destroy all the illicit cult places in the land, given that the Assyrian and Babylonian armies which he was controlling were doing just that, at much the same time?

“[King Hezekiah] removed the high places, broke down the pillars, and cut down the sacred pole … “

” … In the fourteenth year of King Hezekiah, King Sennacherib of Assyria came up against all the fortified cities of Judah and captured them.”

(2 Kings 18:4, 13)

“[King Josiah] … commanded [the priests] to bring out of the temple of Yahweh all the vessels made for Baal, for Asherah, and for all the host of heaven; he burned them outside Jerusalem in the fields of the Kidron, and carried their ashes to Bethel. He deposed the idolatrous priests whom the kings of Judah had ordained to make offerings in the high places at the cities of Judah and around Jerusalem; those also who made offerings to Baal, to the sun, the moon, the constellations, and all the host of the heavens … He brought all the priests out of the towns of Judah, and defiled the high places where the priests had made offerings, from Geba to Beer-sheba; he broke down the high places of the gates that were at the entrance of the gate of Joshua the governor of the city, which were on the left at the gate of the city … The king defiled the high places that were east of Jerusalem … He broke the pillars in pieces, cut down the sacred poles, and covered the sites with human bones. Moreover, the altar at Bethel … he pulled down that altar along with the high place. … Moreover, Josiah removed all the shrines of the high places that were in the towns of Samaria … He slaughtered on the altars all the priests of the high places who were there … “

” … [But 3 years after Josiah’s death and 2 kings later] … Yahweh sent against him bands of the Chaldeans, bands of the Arameans, bands of the Moabites, and bands of the Ammonites; he sent them against Judah to destroy it, according to the word of Yahweh that he spoke by his servants the prophets. Surely this came upon Judah at the command of Yahweh… “

(2 Kings 23:4-20; 24:2-3)

A puzzling divine redundancy? A coincidence that might provoke a more economic and mundane explanation? Well… so it might justifiably appear to our admittedly finite minds.

Rationalizing the Ridiculous (1): Post-Rapture Pet Care

Tags

cellphones, Haredi, Jack Kelley, pet care, Rapture, Shabbos elevator

Jack Kelley - author of “Children’s Stories of the Bible, The Adult Version”

I love the way that religions carefully compile the most rigorous rationales for the most ridiculous notions.  

The special Jewish halakhic ruling which allows emergency operation of Haredi-friendly cellphones with one’s teeth is a great example. And the recent scientifically rigorous rabbinic investigation of whether the kosher elevator is “working” on the Sabbath or not is another very rational response to the rather odd idea that God gets really quite angry if people work on the Sabbath.

But the following piece of post-Rapture advice, from Christian writer and online “Bible Teacher”, Jack Kelley, is just priceless:

Post Rapture Pet Care

Q. I’ve read your response to a previous writer who expressed fear about his/her pets once the Rapture happens. I understand that we have no need to fear about missing our pets and/or whether pets will be with us in heaven because the Lord wants only our happiness when we come to be with Him, and am comforted by that. However, my real fear pertains to what will happen to our pets once we are gone?

I don’t have any relatives or friends near by and I live alone. I’m assuming after the Rapture, it will be each man for himself for those unbelievers left behind, so I don’t have much faith that those left behind would be kind enough to look for pets in abandoned houses. I envision that after the Rapture, my pets (who are strictly housebound) will just be left to starve to death.

Do you have any words of wisdom or thoughts about this for me?

A. Have you ever considered what a witnessing opportunity this could be? If you have friends who are not believers, have you considered asking them to take care of your pets in the event of your sudden disappearance, even if they don’t live nearby? It’s sure to start a discussion about why you think you might be disappearing.

If they don’t become believers after seeing your sincerity about the Rapture, they almost certainly will after you’re gone, and will adopt your pets. If they become believers before the Rapture, then pick someone else and repeat the process.

Hat-tip: Erica