On the Failure of Scientific Prophecy

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Arthur C. Clarke, Failure, Prophecy, science, science fiction, Technology, The Sentinel

Continuing an earlier discussion of the cultural and religious hopes placed on technologies, a few thoughts inspired by a recent re-reading of Arthur C. Clarke’s 1983 short-story collection The Sentinel, which contains stories written from 1946 to 1979:

Outside of the clear and simple pleasure of watching a master doing what he does best (and my criticisms here aside, Clarke was a master of hard science fiction, undoubtedly one of the all-time greats), what strikes the reader (at least this reader) about this early collection is Clarke’s persistent tendency to overestimate both the significance of new technological developments and the pace of scientific advancement.  Even the simplest developments hold the power to alter the world fundamentally, and almost always for the better.

To take but a single example, in the gripping and disquieting story ‘Rescue Party’, the development of the helicopter brings about the end of almost all the great cities, which seems laughable decades later (indeed, when faced daily with the average automobile driver’s lack of skill and discretion, the thought of the helicopter as ‘universal transportation’ is enough to cause nightmares). Since the story was written in 1946, urbanisation has continued apace and more and more rural land is dedicated to massive farming and ranching operations built on the model of heavy industry, with all of the environmental and social costs that this threatens. Far from the rural idyll that the helicopter brings to the Earth in ‘Rescue Party’, the helicopter remains of limited use and did little or nothing to curb the explosive growth of the cities which began with the Industrial Revolution and has continued with only a few and rather minor counter-trends, and these are confined largely to the Anglo-European world and the wealthier of its colonies.

Viewed from the vantage point of Clarke’s eternal post-World War II optimism, the future for scientific development is bright.  Clarke simply assumes for the sake of these stories that the exploration of space would continue and that progress towards the planets was inevitable.  It would also be accomplished by very little conflict and even less bloodshed.  The solar system was as ripe for exploration and colonisation as the New World was centuries earlier.  On this point, for all of his vision, Clarke was perpetually blinded by his British colonial ideologies, whether he was aware of them or not.  This is crystal clear in the story ‘Songs of the Distant Earth’ (and to a lesser extent ‘Breaking Strain’), which re-enacts the British encounter with the South Pacific in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and which subtly but unmistakably reinforces the myth of history as progress.

This, it turns out, is a symptom of a larger problem with the stories in The Sentinal.  At the same time that he is making huge, counter-intuitive leaps about the effects of new technologies, Clarke’s view of culture and history is strangely anaemic.  This particular blindness, in which Clarke is by no means alone among science-fiction writers, is coupled with a curious lack of imagination in the cultural and social sphere.  For he is unable to imagine a world that is fundamentally different from our own, or at least the world as Clake saw it from the former British colony of Sri Lanka, where he spent much of his life.  The Sentinel‘s stories exist in a future that looks a good like the present.  The sense of cultural, political, and economic inertia present in these stories is stunning. Clarke imagines little political upheaval and fails to anticipate developments such as the end of the Soviet Union only two decades after the last story here was written.

Clarke’s tendency towards prophetic hyperbole is thus rooted in his failure to understand that technology is at least partially cultural. Clarke’s failure, then, beside his blind belief in the inherent value of technological development, is his inability (or his simple refusal) to understand that technology, quite removed from its scientific side, is also immersed in human culture, which influences and even determines its use and reception.  Given that the Clarke who wrote The Sentinel – and Clarke was a complex, sometimes contradictory man wrote or co-wrote literally hundreds of books and stories which do not add up to a fully coherent ideology of philosophy of history – can not imagine a world without the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, consumer capitalism, and an independent mass media, his view of technology was similarly limited.

He also imagines that governments will continue to fund science for the sake of science, though he does realise that at least some of the motivation behind the golden age of space exploration was political and military.  This prediction, which is never made explicit but is present in each and every story in the collection, has also failed to materialise, largely given the limited resources governments now give to pure science and the ever more persistent demand that science and technological development serve some kind of purpose – usually economic – rather than serving the interests of disinterested knowledge.  Clarke fails to anticipate the cultural and economic forces that have brought space exploration to a near standstill or limited it to uninspiring and wasteful projects like the International Space Station. According to the timeline Clarke imagines in 2001, and in the story ‘The Sentinel’, which provided the kernel of the larger novel, there was to be permanent bases on the moon in place by the mid 1990s.  Instead, the Apollo programme has been relegated to a footnote in Cold War history ripe for re-appropriation in popular culture texts like Michael Bay’s jingoistic, neo-fascist film Transformers: Dark of the Moon.

Clarke on the set of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

Given Clarke’s often dismissive attitude towards organised religion – see Childhood’s End and The Fountains of Paradise for examples – his failure to acknowledge the failures of scientific prophecy is all the more striking. It also highlights the similarities between placing one’s hopes in the next step in scientific development and placing one’s hopes in the great coming of a saviour figure – as in Christianity, messianic Judaism, some forms of Buddhism, and countless other traditions – who will interrupt the course of history and bring about a new and better world.  Over the course of The Sentinel, Clarke simply ignores the marginal predictive value of his persistent overestimation of the power and significance of incremental scientific developments.  When one prophecy fails, he simply moves on to another tale of the partial redemption of the world by a new technology while never addressing the previous failure (it is worth noting that he did get some things – many things, in fact – right, including his invention of the concept of the geosynchronous communications satellite).

By simply ignoring the failures of his prophetic imagination, Clarke reminds me irresistibly of those Christians who have been convinced that the apocalypse was just around the corner (just as the gospels claim that Jesus promised some two millennia ago), despite the fact that this prophecy has been failing over and over again for centuries.  The fact that technology has failed time and again to live up to its promises, like so many religious prophecies, that it has failed to bring about greater social and economic equity, something we were promised would happen with the arrival of the printing press, the steam engine, the railroad, electricity, the telegraph, photography, the cinema radio, television, the personal computer, and, most recently, the Internet (or Web 2.0, which was to save us – again – from the inequities of the earlier technologies), is in itself interesting.

What is more interesting, at least in the context of religious prophecy, is how immune this belief in technological salvation is to historical realities and the complexity of human culture.  This points to a persistence of belief that is structurally very similar to the continued rationalisations of failed religious prophecy.  Even if Hal Lindsey’s identification of events in the 1970s and 1980s with the events of the Book of Revelation failed to accurately predict the beginnings of the end of times, this does not stop millions of people from believing precisely the same thing about more recent world events.

This is not a coincidence, of course, given how the structures of the Christian narrative of history persist and are transformed in the narratives of modernity, particularly in secular eschatologies like those of classical Marxism, the National Socialists, and all of those people that believe that technology is going to save us.  The real question I have here is how to begin to think more rationally about the true capabilities of science and technology, especially when the potential of both is limited so clearly and so persistently by economics and politics.  If someone like Arthur C. Clarke can get things so clearly wrong, why do we persist in waiting for the next technology, the one that is going to save us? Why do we continue on as if this were an inevitable fact?  I think some of this might be because most people, like Clarke, and unable to imagine a world that is truly, fundamentally different from our own.

In practical, this-worldly terms, if we are waiting for the arrival of that magical machine that will save us from all of our follies (many of them, of course, technological, like the internal-combustion engine) without coupling this with a serious and sustained effort to change the cultures that surround this anticipation and make it bear the burden of a dark and difficult future, we would be just as well to be waiting for Jesus (or Maitreya, the Buddha of the future in many schools of Mahayana Buddhist thought), who is coming along soon.

Any day now …

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Two Really Scary Movies for Hallowe’en

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Hallowe'en, Horror, Margin Call, Slavoj Žižek, Sucker Punch, Take Shelter, The Changeling

In the hours leading up All Hallow’s Even, I have a few recommendations for anyone looking to curl up with a truly frightening film tomorrow night.  In no particular order, here we have two really scary recent films to keep you up all night …

Sucker Punch (Zack Snyder, 2010): What is most horrifying about this film is the what it suggests about the utter bankruptcy of a postmodern imagination rooted in reference and remix rather than in telling stories.  Zack Snyder’s slickly pretty parable about a nubile young woman, Babydoll (a hyper-sexualised Emily Browning), who creates elaborate fantasy worlds to escape the appalling conditions of the 1960s-era mental hospital in which she is imprisoned is truly chilling, though it was intended to be a story of the empowering potential of the imagination.  The film unintentionally pulls back the curtain on the hollowness of genre filmmaking uncoupled from any sense of history or any awareness of the real world of flesh-and-blood human beings.

Snyder, a visual stylist of the first order, has repeatedly shown in his adaptations of other people’s work that he can unearth the dark heart of a text but lacks either the talent or the intelligence (or both) to do anything with its subtext.  In his solid, scary, but completely unnecessary remake of George A. Romero’s 1978 zombie horror masterpiece, Dawn of the Dead, Snyder evacuates the film’s setting, a suburban shopping mall, of all of its social criticism and its larger meaning.  It becomes a backdrop for the film’s action, not part of its story.  Romero made pointed criticisms of consumer capitalist culture by comparing the drooling hordes of zombies with shoppers in a mall, a sad, poignant, and utterly damning portrayal of normality as a world of the living dead.  In his adaptation of Frank Miller’s 300, Synder captures all of Miller’s unfortunate fascistic tendencies but does nothing but make them live, breath, and bleed in visceral slow-motion.  With Watchmen, adapted from Allan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ epoch-making alternative history comic book series (1986 -1987), Snyder faithfully captures and even amplifies the profound ugliness of Moore’s New York, but, unlike Moore (who has quite rightly disavowed the film), Snyder simply maroons us in this morass of grime and neo-noir pastiche.  Moore turned the tale of ordinary people playing at superheroes into a potent and cutting critique of 1980s excess as the flipside of 1960s idealism.  Synder just lets the ugliness speak for itself.  Robbed of its context, not surprisingly, it has nothing to say.

Sucker Punch performs a similar trick, but this time it is even worse.  Synder, working from his own script for the first time, gives us an utterly self-insulated and self-referential world; when Babydoll creates a series of elaborate fantasy worlds as a way to escape the very real horror of her situation, Synder is unable to give her anything to work with outside of noise and furious action (some of it, admittedly, staged quite beautifully).  She imagines first a burlesque club as a stable first layer of fantasy and then a sequence of other, more fantastical secondary levels of disassociation, featuring giant samurai robots, zombie soldiers, dragons, and futuristic trains guarded by faceless automatons.  In other words, the worlds that Babydoll creates in the 1960s are a pastiche of films, television shows, and comic books that she cannot have seen, given that they all appear on the cultural scene considerably later.  What can we make of this?  Is Snyder saying that all fan-boy culture is the creation of disturbed minds that create elaborate alternative worlds as a way of dealing with – or not dealing with – the cruel, senseless, and violent world outside the mind?  It would be comforting to believe this, but, given that the film is itself masturbatory genre-fan pornography, a melding of the extreme sexualisation of young women in Japanese manga with the spectacle of contemporary fantasy film and the dense visual dazzle of big-budget science fiction cinema (though without any of the ideas that make films like Blade Runner, Children of Men, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and Sector 9 so memorable), it is difficult to give the film this much credit.

Synder’s world, then, is just another layer of unreality, and the audience is trapped in revolving worlds of noisy, hollow fantasy, just as Babydoll is.  This is Debord’s nightmare of the spectacle taken to its horrific logical end.  Worse than this, there is a moral hole at the very centre of Sucker Punch that is truly appalling, especially given that its director and many of its cast members have painted it as a feminist work.  Most viewers do not have to escape from anything as bad as Babydoll does.  In the film’s single scariest moment, Synder takes us into a filthy room with a solitary mattress on the floor and reveals the the hospital is witness to the serial rape of its young female inmates at the hands of a slovenly orderly.  That Synder takes the silly, superficial Sucker Punch to levels of human depravity as dark and despicable as this is truly horrifying.

Margin Call (J. C. Chandor, 2011): This one is a bit unfair, I must admit, given that I am performing the lazy, reactionary critic’s move of writing about a film I’ve not actually seen (see almost any orthodox Christian critique of Martin Scorcese’s brilliant The Last Temptation of Christ for an example).  I can only ask you to cut me some slack; I live in Dunedin, where mid-level films like this arrive rather later than for most, if we get to see them at the cinema at all.  This criticism is not so much about the film, in any event, but the larger discursive structure that surrounds it.  Judging by the beautifully-cut trailer for the financial thriller Margin Call, the true horror is that, faced with another in a long line of financial crises, we are still being sold the myth that such crises are surprising, that they are the work of a few unscrupulous people working dishonestly, that they are preventable.  As the slovenly rockstar philosopher and recent al-Jazeera correspondent Slavoj Žižek writes in his incisive First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009):

The only truly surprising thing about the 2008 financial meltdown is how easily the idea was accepted that its happening was an unpredictable surprise which hit the markets out of the blue. (p. 9)

For anyone in the know, this crisis, an inevitable result of a system that is based on exploitation and the faultiest of logic, was not a surprise.  Its collapse is not the work of a few (though many of the people in charge are indeed rather despicable), but the result of attempting to create a necessary and infinite growth in a material and human field of finite resources.  In short, the system fails because it has to, because it cannot not fail.  That this mythology (and this is myth in the formal sense of the word as well as in its more commonplace pejorative sense) is still being repackaged and foisted upon as entertainment is something that will keep me up all night.

And now for two recommendations for those of you interested in actual horror films …

The Changeling (Peter Medak, 1980): This film, which I first saw with my older brother when I was about twelve, still scares the pants off of me.  The infinitely sad, haunting, and edge-of-your-seat tense story of a grieving widower (played by the great George C. Scott) who moves into a giant old house to try to put his life back together after the death of his family, this is one for those of you who think that the spooky séance scene cannot be scary after being done so many times.  There are images in this film (the well, the well!) that can give me the chills just sitting here typing this.

Take Shelter (Jeff Nichols, 2011): After their quietly devastating collaboration on Shotgun Stories (2007), director Nichols and lead Michael Shannon (so good as a disturbed evangelical Christian in Boardwalk Empire) reunite for this chilling and infinitely unsettling story of a man haunted by visions of a coming apocalyptic storm.  This one sets out to shake you and does it with infinite care and control rather than with jump-scares or people in silly masks.  This is the psychological thriller as existential horror film, an interrogation of the idea of sanity in a world that is seemingly spiralling ever closer to irrevocable madness that is on par with Lars von Trier’s Melanchlia, which asks similar questions, though in a far more global and economic context (see more on that here) than Take Shelter‘s intimate portrait of the disintegration of a single Midwestern American family.  The last fifteen seconds of Take Shelter are scarier and more deeply disquieting than any ten recent horror-classic remakes or anything in the thousands of pages of the Twilight Saga.

Sleep well, my friends …

Cinema as Exorcism (six): On Soft-Selling Lars von Trier’s Melancholia

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Another Earth, Consumer Capitalism, Depression, Eschatology, Film, Hysteria, Lars von Trier, Marx, Max Weber, Melancholia, rationalisation, The Sirens of Titan, When Worlds Collide

Picking up where I left off, and continuing our exploration of cinema and/as exorcism – see also here (on Australian film), here (on District 9), here (on 2012), here (on the wretched Avatar), and here (on Perfume: The Story of a Murderer) –  I want to branch out in new territory here and discuss the ways Lars von Trier’s utterly brilliant but utterly nihilistic new film Melancholia is being sold to the American public, a collective audience notorious – but not of course universal – for its dislike of moral ambiguity or philosophical complexity.

Kirsten Dunst in Melancholia

Melancholia is von Trier’s best film, and by a long chalk.  It is also the most purely entertaining science-fiction defence of a nihilistic worldview since Kurt Vonnegut’s incomparable 1959 novel, The Sirens of Titan.  While I have heard some (though not many) critics and fans pan the film for being too accessible and for lacking the blunt controversy of something like his 2009 film Antichrist, Melancholia succeeds in my book as no other von Trier film for no other reason that von Trier steps back from his usual strategy of rubbing the audience’s face in the depravity of humanity and simply allows the film to quietly and calmly make its points, letting the film’s preternatural stillness and its deliberate pacing tell the story far more effectively than the melodramatic mode of many of his previous films.  Melancholia, in the simplest terms, is the first von Trier film I have ever watched without feeling the need for a shower immediately afterwards.  The ability for a film to make the viewer feel literally, physically soiled is of course the mark of a true cinematic talent, and here von Trier, with his talent for evoking mood and tension to the point where it becomes palpable, can be counted among the ranks of such directors as Paul Schrader and John Hillcoat.  It is, however, infinitely refreshing to see someone as gifted as von Trier working in a different, less confrontational, and more formally Romantic mode.

For all its almost gentle touch, the film presents a view of the world – no, of the universe itself – that is bleaker and more final than anything in von Trier’s oeuvre.  Even films as stark and forbidding as Breaking the Waves or Antichrist are shot through with something resembling hope.  In Waves, Bess’ unshakable goodness and belief in love anchor a film suspended over an abyss, an abyss that von Trier, then a recent convert to Catholicism, chooses to ignore with his final – and in my mind, completely misguided – image attesting to the literal truth of Bess’ salvation.  Even the end of the determinedly repellent Antichrist offers a kind of redemption when the male protagonist, known only as He, leaves a metaphoric wilderness, having rejected his cold psychologist’s view of the world. (For a pdf of an intriguing scholarly article by Gitte Buch-Hansen offering a positive reading of the film from a feminist biblical studies perspective, follow this link; for two very good discussions of the film from a religious studies perspective by S. Brent Plate, see Religion Dispatches here and here.)

Melancholia first appears to be a riff on a theme that appears from time to time in science fiction, the collision of the Earth with another planet, but I think there is more to be learned in placing it next to the history of texts – again, most of them from sci-fi, which trace the impact of the discovery of previously unknown planets.  The best-known – and simply the best – of these stories is Isaac Asimov’s classic short story ‘Nightfall’, which first appeared in a 1941 issue of Astounding Science Fiction.  In Asimov’s spare and ultimately devastating tale, the greatest scientific minds of a complex society on the planet of Lagash discover on the very eve of its destruction that its society is doomed by the eclipse of one of its suns by a  previously hidden planet, an alignment of celestial bodies that happens only once every 2049 years.  Thrown into total darkness, unknown on the planet, which is lit by no less than six suns, the people of Lagash are driven to madness and to set massive fires to provide the heat and light that they simply cannot exist without, especially given that most of the population does not know that this is a temporary situation.  In the story, an intrepid band of scientists discovers the coming of the darkness, something that has been long predicted by the Cultists, Lagash’s dominant religious tradition, but are unable to convince the population to prepare for it.  Here we find not only the classic sci-fi conception of religion as bad science and poorly remembered history, but also a potent allegory for the futility of scientific knowledge when dealing with a fearful and undereducated public.  ‘Nightfall’ ends on a fittingly bleak note as Lagash’s society again, faced with the enormity of darkness and the devastating and sudden revelation of its own ignorance – the astronomers, working only in daylight, believed that the universe contained only six suns, but the darkness reveals that there are millions, quite unseating Lagash as the centre point of the observable world, a repeat of the Copernican revolution taking place in seconds rather than centuries – sets fire to itself and all that it has built over more than two millennia.

There are other, simpler entries into this rather obscure sub-category of sci-fi, including Philp Wylie and Edwin Balmer’s classic 1932 novel When Worlds Collide, made into a space opera-style film of the same name by Rudolph Maté in 1951.  In both, the Earth encounters not one but two rogue bodies in space, one of which destroys the Earth, though a small band of intrepid scientists and travellers manage to escape destruction and take up life on one of the new worlds, Bronson Beta, which shows clear signs of previous inhabitants.  While Wylie and Balmer’s slim pot-boiler of a novel has become largely neglected, Maté’s film is better-remembered both for its Oscar-winning special effects – including a still-stunning vision of the flooding of New York City – and for its wildly uneven tone, veering from melodrama to cheesy whimsy from one scene to the next with little rhyme or reason.  This is probably most obvious in the closing scene, played to rapturous, triumphant music and with blissful happiness from our intrepid astronauts, who are overcome with an uncomplicated joy when safely landed on the Technicolor wonder of Beta, despite the fact that billions of people have been obliterated and they are the only human survivors (this being the 1950s, they are apple-cheeked, white, healthy, and Christian survivors).  The final image says it all, really.

Interestingly enough, there is another film this year, Another Earth, which grapples with the existential questions raised by the discovery of an unknown world, this time an exact duplicate of Earth which may or may not have duplicate versions of each every person living, though this need not detain us here for long.  Where Another Earth ends on a New Age-tinged moment of self-realisation, and thus a note of hope, though not one so strident as that which concludes When Worlds Collide, von Trier’s Melancholia ends on an even bleaker note than Asimov’s ‘Nightfall’.  In ‘Nightfall’, at least, the reader is free to assume that the people of Lagash will rebuild, though this is tinged with the near-certainly that all of that newly built world will turn to ashes on that fateful night some 2000 years in the future.  Melancholia ends with the irrevocable and inescapable end of the Earth, smashed into rubble by the far larger planet Melancholia.

What is most interesting – in this reporter’s opinion, at least – is how thorough, and ultimately how brutal, Melancholia‘s social critique really is.  The film is essentially a character study of two sisters, the melancholic Justine (very nicely played by Kirsten Dunst) and the resolutely ordinary Claire (a surprising turn from Antichrist‘s Her, Charlotte Gainsbourg).  Each of the sisters gets a half of the film named after her, though, really, this is Justine’s story, and her perspective is the one the film champions in the end.  After a stunning Prologue of ultra-slow-motion images that comprise a series of vignettes of the end of the world, set very appropriately to Wagner’s ‘Tristan and Isolde’, the film’s narrative begins with the lavish and increasingly uncomfortable spectacle of Justine’s wedding reception, celebrating her marriage to the increasingly baffled Michael.  Von Trier stages this sequence, much of which is riotously if uncomfortably funny, as a piece of social-realist cinema, not unlike many of his other films.  Shot on an isolated but extremely luxurious golf resort in Sweden but set in an unidentified Anglo-American no-place, the first half of the film shows us Justine’s increasingly futile attempts to play the part of the happy bride that everyone around her (with the exception of the sisters’ acidic mother) expects her to play.  Justine commits the unpardonable sin of failing to pretend to be happy and satisfied and instead ends up rejecting not only Michael but her family and her smarmy boss, who has come to the wedding to offer her a promotion.

Claire’s section of the film is set months later as she struggles to care for the borderline catatonic Justine, who has come to live with her at the resort, and to prepare for the arrival of the rogue planet Melancholia, which experts tell everyone will miss the Earth and cause minimal damage.  As it becomes ever clearer that the planets will collide and that everyone and everything on Earth is doomed to a violent death, Justine emerges as the sanest of the characters.  Her reaction to the news of the destruction of the Earth is as much indifference as it is anything else.  While Claire fears for her son Leo and begins to fall apart psychologically, Justine has the one truly rational reaction in the film, that of resignation.  For Justine, the end of a world which is facile, inauthentic and meaningless is nothing to mourn.

Michael, Justine, and Claire in Melancholia

That the film takes Justine’s side is, of course, debatable, but I will lay out my case here: Justine works in advertising and is thus implicated in selling the world of wealth and privilege that she despises to a public that cannot afford it.  In this role, she becomes a representative of a consumer society that defines itself through a lie that it does not ultimately believe is possible.  Justine is the only one the film (again, aside from her mother) who is not buying what she herself is selling.  Everyone at the wedding is clearly invested in the mythos of comfort and happiness that such events of conspicuous consumption both celebrate and make normative, but Justine, try as she might, is unable to invest herself in the role that she and others have laid out for her.  Claire’s husband, John, the owner of the resort, is angry and bitterly disappointed in Justine, not because she is in genuine distress, but because she is a failed consumer, because she does not participate in the wedding passively, but questions its meaning at every turn, perverting the gathering with her unpredictability and her lateness, profaning such familiar ritual elements as the cutting of the cake and the reception dinner.

Ultimately, Justine is the film’s voice of reason and, oddly enough, its conscience.  Her rejection of the trappings of bourgeois respectability – and what is more bourgeois that golf? – is the film’s rejection of these trappings, especially the ever-more-pervasive discourse on ‘happiness’.  Indeed, the film is a coherent argument on the futility of the dream of happiness as an ineffective and ultimately hopeless strategy for keeping the problems of the world at bay.  In von Trier’s nihilistic universe, Justine’s choice to simply reject her role in a system of value and morality is the most rational choice and would be the most ethical one if the film had any real interest in right or wrong.  It is Justine who understands the world and the place of people within it and her heroism lies in the simple, honest, straightforward rejection of all of it.

As the film draws to its inevitable conclusion (the Prologue leaves no doubt as to what is going to happen), Justine is also the only one to show any true selflessness, distracting and comforting Leo with the task of finding and carving a set of ‘magic’ tree branches that she says will protect them from Melancholia.  Claire, who has bought into the fantasies that Justine makes her living selling, struggles against her fate and rails against the absolute meaninglessness that it reveals.  She is also unable to offer any comfort to her son and thus abdicates her final responsibility to the sister she has been unable to convince of the value of the life of luxury which she has built and in which she is has invested so much of herself.

In the end, then, given the utter finality of its situation, Melancholia is as damning a critique of contemporary Anglo-American-European values as can be imagined and as thorough a skewering of the consumer mythos of a never-defined ‘happiness’ lying just around the corner as has been committed to celluloid for years.  It is an articulate, clear-eyed, historically and culturally astute fable for a world and a closed system of value that is in the process of perhaps inevitable and irreversible decay.  A world as hollow and as lacking in conviction as this, the film intimates, is better destroyed, echoing again von Trier’s fondness for Nietzsche, to whom Antichrist is also deeply indebted.  To this world, literally nothing is preferable.

Melancholia‘s marketing, on the other hand, does everything it can to soft-sell the film, to exorcise it of its very real demons.  The marketing scheme chosen for the film is ingenious, consistent, and systematic.  In short, it runs something like this: Melancholia is a metaphorical film about depression.  Though this is a perfectly defensible interpretation, this is also the safest and most palatable way possible to read the film and its allegorical structure.  In the press kit issued for the film, both the studio’s voice and that of von Trier emphasise that Justine has the measure of the world only in a state of crisis, something the film nullifies by setting the first half of the film at a time when much of the world is unaware of the coming of Melancholia.  In a short promotional video released via the Apple Trailers site, Dunst underlines this, saying: ‘Justine is a very sensitive, creative human being that felt things maybe sometimes more than other people.  To me, her relationship with the planet turns into almost her being a representation of the planet’.

This gesture, to dull the edge of genuine (and almost always systematic) social criticisms by accusing the critic of insanity, is, of course, a common strategy in the mainstream media when dealing with acts of violence – often labelled selectively as ‘terrorism’, though rarely when such acts are committed by anyone other than a Muslim – whose political or economic subtext is uncomfortable.

While it is easy enough to understand why the film’s distributors would be interested in reading the film’s allegorical construction in the narrowest, most private, and thus least threatening manner, we, as viewers and critics, need not feel the same compulsion, given that we have no financial stake in the film itself.

For, lurking not far outside of this metaphorical reading of the film is a far more radical critique of contemporary Western societies.  As the film draws to its conclusion, it becomes apparent that it is not only the ludicrously elaborate and costly wedding reception that is hollow and ultimately empty; it is the whole of Claire’s bourgeois world.  When Claire invites Justine to wait out the end on the patio overlooking the golf course with a glass of good wine and some classical music, Justine’s refusal of this idea as ‘shit’ is more than a simple symptom of her state of mind, it is rather something more, an admission of the futility of Claire’s entire life and the entire world of privilege and taste that it represents.

Claire’s husband John, a stock von Trier character, the resolutely rational man who is utterly unable to make any sort of the sense of the world around him, which makes him something of a personification of Max Weber’s ‘iron cage of rationalisation’, takes the only route that his character could possibly take: he commits a sad and sordid suicide in the stables, even robbing his wife and child of the painless poison that Claire was relying on as a last resort.

John, Melancholia‘s Weberian Fool

In the end, all that Claire, Justine, and Leo are left with are the sort of simple, intuitive magical lies that people tell their children.  In the indelible final image, as Melancholia looms ever larger in the background and begins to quite literally devour the Earth, we are left with the image of three lonely people sheltering under a tripod of dead tree branches, helpless in the face of the meaningless destruction of a meaningless existence.

It is in this final moment – and in the diegetic world of Melancholia, this is an absolutely final moment, the end of life in the universe – that von Trier makes his kindest gesture to date, that he allows the three last people on Earth to hold hands, to face the end together, even if it means less than nothing for them to do so.

Make Your Own Snapshot of Mainstream Culture!

Tags

Google, Internet, Job, Pornography

An experiment for all our fair readers, though not one to be conducted at work: turn off all the ‘Safe Search’ options on your browser and do an image search for ‘Job’.  At least on Google, this yields a fascinating slice of the mainstream culture – at least that part of it that is online – in the English-speaking world.  I’ve done this a few times after stumbling upon it looking for a painting by Marc Chagall last year and the results, though always shifting, are always about the same.

Well over half the images involve employment or ‘jobs’ in some way:

The other half are split more or less equally between illustrations from the Hebrew Bible book of Job and various pornographic categories – ‘hand job’, ‘foot job’, ‘boob job’, ‘blow job’, and the like (in the interests of propriety – I am an American citizen, and America owes a good deal to Puritan morality even today when so many other element of Puritan culture has passed into the mists of memory – I will leave the illustration of this final category to your imagination, which is filthier than anything I could find anyway, I reckon):

An illustration from Job by WIlliam Blake

There is something about this juxtaposition of the religious, the economic, and the pornographic that seems to perfectly capture our present cultural moment and its inherent contradictions.

It will be fascinating to do this on occasions over the coming months and even years to see if shifts in the larger culture alter the mix I found this morning (these two were taken from the first two pages of a Google image search results), or alter the proportions in which these three things appear.

Sigmund Freud and the Animal Farm School of Intellectual Inquiry

Tags

Animal Farm, Animal Farm Tendency, George Orwell, Sigmund Freud

Deane, having been back from a trip to Australia for about three hours, has already at least doubled the number of words posted to this record that I managed to post in the entire two weeks he was gone.  I am well and truly shamed and must endeavour to do better …

In the very appropriate spirit of shame, a few thoughts on reading Sigmund Freud, which I am doing in preparation for teaching a class on religion and modernity in which the poor students will have to take Freud seriously.  In his 1927 book on religion, The Future of an Illusion, as translated by James Strachey in The Complete Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: The Hogarth Press, 1961), Freud writes,

Sigmund Freud in The Hague in 1920

If all the evidence put forward for the authenticity of religious teachings originates in the past, it is natural to look round and see whether the present, about which it is easier to form judgments, may not also be able to furnish evidence of the sort,  If by this means we could succeed in clearing even a single portion of the religious system from doubt, the whole of it would gain enormously in credibility.  The proceedings of the spiritualists meet us at this point; they are convinced of the survival of the individual soul to demonstrate to us beyond doubt the truth of this one religious doctrine.  Unfortunately they cannot succeed in refuting the fact that the appearance and utterances of their spirits are merely the products of their own mental activity. They have called up the spirits of the greatest men and of the most eminent thinkers, but all the pronouncements and information which they have received from them have been so foolish and so wretchedly meaningless that one can find nothing credible in them but the capacity of the spirits to adapt themselves to the circle of people who have conjured them up.

I must now mention two attempts that have been made – both of which convey the impressions of being desperate efforts – to evade the problem.  One, of a violent nature, is ancient; the other is subtle and modern.  The first is the ‘Credo quia absurdum‘ of the early Father of the Church [Tertullian].  It maintains that religious doctrines are outside the jurisdiction of reason – are above reason.  Their truth must be felt inwardly, and they need not be comprehended.  But this Credo is only of interest as a self-confession.  As an authoritative statement it has no binding force.  Am I obliged to believe every absurdity?  And if not, why this one in particular?  There is no appeal to a court above that of reason.  If the truth of religious doctrines is dependent on an inner experience which bears witness to that truth, what one to do about the many people who do not this rare experience?  One may require every man to use the gift of reason which he possesses, but one cannot erect, on the basis of a motive that exists only for a very few, an obligation that shall apply to everyone.  If one man has gained an unshakable conviction of the true reality of religious deoctrones from a state of exstasy which has deeply moved him, of what significance is that to others? (pp. 27-28).

That I find myself in more or less absolute agreement with most of Freud writes here is disturbing on a personal level, as I find Freud to be a load of destructive nonsense and antinomian conjecture; however, on closer inspection, there is something glaringly off about this passage in light of Freud’s larger project.  This is an instance of what I want to call the ‘Animal Farm Tendency’ within intellectual inquiry.  Recalling the bitter climax of George Orwell’s masterpiece Animal Farm, first published in the UK in 1945 as Animal Farm: A Fairy Story, the modification of the original credo of ‘all animal are equal’ to ‘all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others‘, this tendency, endemic within many fields of academic inquiry, is the tendency to be blind to the lapses in reason in every system of thought but one’s own.

The cover of the first British edition

For example, Freud’s entire system of thought, impressively involved as it is, is instantly undermined by the simple fact that Freud is as indebted as any Christian to the acceptance of certain assertions based less on reason than on other factors.  If one rejects as rank assertion Freud’s sacred trinity of Mother, Father, and Child (and all of the implicit sexual tension within this trinity) and the whole apparatus of his symbolic interpretation of dreams, the whole of the Freudian structure of though becomes largely untenable.  This is especially glaring given his arrogance and his pretensions towards science.  After all, he did write that many of the things plaguing humanity, religion among them, would eventually be ‘destroyed by psychoanalysis’ (31).

Freud is not alone in this sort of thinking.  We need think only of any of the predestinarian theologies, which assert a standard of evidence that neccessarily excludes those who are disinclined to believe in such theology.  This is even more true among the many theologians who have adopted a putatively – but poorly understood and lazily formulated – postmodernism.  Here we need only think of someone like Jean-Luc Marion, who uses the language of open inquiry to mask what is in reality a simple assertion of the truth of Christian Revelation.  John W. Cooper gives us another example:

In response to modernist claims of rational autonomy, some Reformed apologists have so strongly emphasized the relativity of reason to true faith and uniquely Christian presuppositions that the universal availability of any truth whatsoever has in effect been denied. What results is a kind of religious relativism. Truth is admitted to be completely system-relative, but only (Reformed?) Christians are acknowledged to have the right system.

The logic, undoubtedly given a boost by the language of the postmodern movement, goes something like this: ‘in a relativistic world, there is no such thing as thought free from presuppositions; therefore, everyone must be obliged to respect the presuppositions of others’.  Fair enough.  As far as this goes, we are still within the relatively respectable territory of ‘all animals are equal’.  However, the next step within the Animal Farm Tendency is to add a further phrase: ‘there is no such thing as thought without presuppositions; therefore, everyone must be obliged to respect the presuppositions of others; therefore, we are justified in claiming that our presuppositions are superior (or more equal)’ to those of others.

Animal Farm illustration by Jim Conte

Other scholars in many disciplines, biblical studies and broader religious studies among them, have used a similarly uncritical relativism to support absolutist claims or to simply and without reflection claim the truth of a given set of presuppositions. Much as it may pain me to say this, there are many examples of the Animal Farm Tendency within contemporary Marxist thought; in fact, anyone relying uncritically on Marx’s materialist meta-narrative of history is guilty of walking on two legs after denouncing walking on two legs.

Such thinking, whether it aimed at religious, historical, ethnic, or scientific ends, reminds at least this reader unavoidably of the immortal Leninist slogan delivered the pig Napoleon at the end of  Animal Farm.

Let’s have some more examples, this time from the audience …

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

Tags

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

Silencing the Past: P-Money and Teenage Girls

Tags

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.

Shocking News of the Day: Hollywood Makes a Decent Film About Islam

Tags

2012, Avatar, Hollywood, Islam, Morality, Traitor, Violence

International Poster for Traitor

‘I’m a free man?  This doesn’t feel like freedom to me …’

In what is easily the most surprising piece of cinematic news I’ve heard in a while, and the most comforting (especially given that James Cameron has just won the Golden Globe for Best Picture for the racist Orientalist manifesto Avatar), I’ve just stumbled on Traitor, an American film from 2008 that treats Islam, Muslims, and political violence with sympathy and a  remarkable level of respect for moral ambiguity and religious difference.  Not only is the film a taut, decent little thriller, but it manages also to give a morally nuanced and complex portrayal of a Muslim protagonist.  This in itself is, sadly, still extremely rare, as Muslims are still dominantly represented as violent, backwards, and misogynist Arabs (though only 20% of the world’s Muslims are Arabs).

That the film manages to do this in a narrative that grapples with violence, patriotism, economic oppression, and serious questions about the ethics of sacrifice in the modern world is nothing short of revolutionary.  In the film, the viewer gets to see Islam as a part of everyday life for people in all walks of life in many parts of the world, not as a monolithic and misguided irrationalism held over from the Middle Ages (incidentally, this persistent stereotype about Islam ignores the crucial role that Muslim scholars played in helping Europe itself escape from the religious and cultural torpor of its medieval period).  More importantly, the film addresses the often-ignored fact that there are many different kinds of Islam, that not all Muslims believe the same things about their faith and what it demands of them as moral agents.

It’s a shame that the film was given a fairly modest release and limited advertising in 2008 (did this ever play in Dunedin?), as opposed to the gigantic wave of publicity that accompanies bottom-feeding dreck like 2012, but tonight I’ll take solace in the simple fact that Traitor exists in the first place.  So, cheers to writer/director Jeffrey Nachmanoff, Paramount Vantage – the short-lived ‘independent’ arm of Paramount Studios – and anyone else who got this film made.

In the film, a devout Sudanese-born American Muslim named Samir – beautifully played by Don Cheadle – plays a dangerous game with a group of Islamist extremists.  Other than that, I will say nothing else about the film so as not to spoil it.  So, strike a blow for intelligent cinema and for more reasonable representations of Islam and track down a copy of Traitor.  And while you’re down at the video shop, strike another blow for sense and steal or destroy a copy of Navy Seals, True Lies, or any of the countless Hollywood films that perpetuate anti-Arab and anti-Muslim stereotypes.

At the end of Traitor, we even get to see that Samir is wrestling with the consequences of his own actions, and wrestling with them honestly from within the structure of his own complex understanding of his faith.  As Zamir and an American FBI agent part at the very end of the film, the agent wishes Zamir salaam and Zamir delivers what is possibly the best last line in recent cinematic memory, one that many people still need to hear:

‘And you shouldstart the conversation with that’.

Religion is the Number One subfield in the History Department

Tags

American Historical Association, Barack Obama, David A. Hollinger, God and Jesus stuff, History, Jeremiah Wright, Jon Butler, militants, Religion, Sarah Palin, secularization thesis

From Inside Higher Education (21 December 2009): “Religion is the most popular theme studied by historians, according to a new survey of members of the American Historical Association.”

The association surveyed some of its members working in religion to ask for theories about the revival of interest and heard four common explanations:

• Interest in the rise of “more activist (and in some cases ‘militant’) forms of religion.”
• An “extension of the methods and interests of social and cultural history.”
• The impact of the “historical turn” in other disciplines, including religious studies.
• Increased student demand for courses on the subject.
  (Inside Higher Education, 21 December 2009)

Religion displaces “cultural history” as the most popular research area for the previous 15 years – the two categories heading out “women”, “intellectual”, “African-American”, “gender”, “political”, “diplomatic/international”, “military”, “science and technology”, and “social” themes in historical research. Looking at these survey categories, however, if they were grouped differently – say if “women” and “gender” history were grouped together, or “cultural” with “social” history – the survey conclusions would differ. But there has at least been a steady increase in the study of religious history since 1992, most of it occurring in the 1990s (before 9/11, not lending much support to one rationale given in the news reports).

“I do believe that the increased attention to religion comes primarily from the obvious inadequacy of the secularization thesis to explain world history since 1945 or, at least, since 1970. Events in the middle east, from the long-standing argument about the founding of Israel to the Iran-Iraq war to the rise of the Taliban to the now several American military ventures there and the political effects of an expanding radical Islamic terrorism, then to American politics since the Civil Rights movement and its conservative “Christian” sequel, all suggest the centrality of religion in making modern events, at least in the United States and many, if not all, areas of the world.”
(Jon Butler)

“Religion is too important to be left in the hands of people who believe in it. Finally, historians are coming to grips with this simple truth … Having argued in workshops and symposia over the course of many years that religion needs to be studied more extensively (see, for instance, the Journal of American History, September 2003), I found that a major obstacle was fear on the part of my colleagues that they would be taken by others to have bought into all that God and Jesus stuff. Nonsense, was my response; there is room for all honest scholars. What turned the tide? Not my argumentation, which long fell on deaf ears. I suspect the big thing has been the increased role that publicly displayed religious faith has played in American politics during recent elections. Religion is harder to ignore if it keeps coming back and hitting you again and again. Thanks, Sarah Palin (and Rick Warren, and Rev. Wright, and yes, even Barack Obama).”
(David A. Hollinger)

The Shoah, Rationalisation and the Haunting of Modernity

Tags

Omer Bartov, rationalisation, Reenchantment, Shoah, Siegfried Krakauer

A Poster for Resnais' Classic Documentary

While doing some research for a lecture on Holocaust films (which included a minor Holocaust film festival at my house, including Alain Resnais’ Nuit et Brouillard, without a doubt one of the toughest 31 minutes in the history of cinema), I’ve been pondering the question as to why people still insist that the Holocaust is so impossible to understand, when on so many levels, it is a fully explicable episode in the history of modern Europe, a history that remains haunted by it past and by the irrationality and brutality that all our talk of progress has failed to eliminate from the cultural landscape.

Omer Bartov, in his excellent study Murder in our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), gets to the heart of the reasons for this disconnect, when he argues, if implicitly, that we are still beholden to the myth of progress, still blinded by the view of history that insists on seeing an ongoing process of growth and development (both moral and scientific) rather than embracing the chaos that is the hallmark of all authentic human history.  What Bartov argues so clearly here that the Holocaust was a part and parcel of rationalisation and modernity, not an anomalous eruption of the irrational, bur a simple surfacing of fact that modernisation and rationalisation have no necessary moral value, either good or evil.  A few excerpts:

War, slaughter, and genocide, are of course as old as human civilization itself.  Industrial killing, however, is a much newer phenomenon, not only in that its main precondition was the industrialization of human society, but also in the sense that this process of industrialization came to be associated with progress and improvement, hope and optimism, liberty and democracy, science and the rule of law.  Industrial killing was not the dark side of modernity, some aberration of a generally salutary process, rather it was and is inherent to it, a perpetual potential of precisely the same energies and ideas, technologies and ideologies, that have brought about the ‘great transformation’ of humanity.  But precisely because modernity means to many of us progress and improvement, we cannot easily come to terms with the idea that it also means mass annihilation.  We see genocide as a throwback to another, premodern, barbarous past, a perversion, an error, an accident.  All evidence to the contrary, we repeatedly believe that this time, in this war, it will finally be stamped out and eradicated, never to reappear again. (p. 4)

It would seem that our main difficulty in confronting the Holocaust is due not only to the immense scale of the killing, nor even the manner in which it was carried out, but also to the way in which it combined the most primitive human brutality, hatred, and prejudice, with the most modern achievements in science, technology, organization, and administration.  It is not the brutal SS man with his truncheon whom we cannot comprehend; we have seen likes throughout history.  It is the commander of a killing squad with a Ph.D. in law from a distinguished university in charge of organizing mass shootings of naked women and children whose figure frightens us.  It is not the disease and famine in the ghettos, reminiscent perhaps of ancient sieges, but the systematic transportation, selection, dispossession, killing, and distribution of requisitioned personal effects that leaves us uncomprehending, not of the facts but their implications for our own society and for human psychology.  Not only the ‘scientific’ killing and its bureaucratic administration; not only the sadism; but rather that incredible mixture of detachment and brutality, distance and cruelty, pleasure and indifference.  Hence the genocide of the Jews, its causes, and its context, must be seen as part and parcel of a phase in European civilization that blended modernity and premodernity into an often dangerously explosive mixture (though, of course, also a highly creative one, not only in the science of murder) (p. 67).

The Holocaust can therefore be seen as the culmination (but neither the beginning nor the end) of a process begun the late eighteenth century and still continuing, whose first paroxysm of violence was the Great War, and whose subsequent repercussions can be seen among the millions of victims of the post-1945 era.  It is characterized by the missile-wielding religious fanatic, or the cool-headed scientist directing a slave colony of rocket builders, the brutal guard with a given quota of bodies to be disposed of on a daily basis, and the official busy with his schedule of trains bringing anonymous masses of passengers to destinations from which they never return.  It is also characterized by two types of professionals essential to the fabric of modernity – the physician and the lawyer (67).

Oddly enough, Bartov makes a point similar to one I’ve made elsewhere about the ways in which we react to suicide bombing in the contemporary world – not that suicide bombings are on any level equivalent to the Holocaust.  It is not too much to suggest that the horror that people feel when faced with modern violence is perhaps largely due to a simple and sustained failure to grasp the fact that modernity is not morally on the side of the angels (at least not necessarily).  Additionally, like so many before him, Bartov makes the failures of representing the Holocaust into a moral issue:

Western representations of the Holocaust fail to recognize that this extreme instance of industrial killing was generated by a society, economic system, and civilization of which our contemporary society is a direct continuation.  In other words, we can note a powerful reluctance to admit that industrial killing is very much a product of modernity … while the Holocaust belongs both its past and its future – our present – and can therefore not be marginalized as an aberration representative only of itself, at the same time, it must not be contextualised to the extent that it becomes part of a general history of progress or degeneration, heroism or atrocity.  The centrality of the Holocaust for the human experience of modernity has been recognized even by those who seek to deny that it had ever happened … There may perhaps not be any lessons to be learned from the genocide of the Jews; but, all the same, we must know that killing goes on, and even if we are safe from it today, we may become its victims tomorrow.  This is not a memory, not even a history, for the murder is in our midst and our passivity will be our nemesis (pp. 9-11).

Others have made a similar point, though too many of them insist that the proper response to the Holocaust is a reverential silence.  Siegfried Krakauer, in his classic book The Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), argues that the cinema, whose relationship to reality he perceives is more chemical than interpretive – something that many critics Bazin among them, have long insisted – is a mirror for the realities of human history:

The mirror reflections of horror are an end in themselves.  As such, they beckon the spectator to take them in and thus incorporate into his memory the real face of things too dreadful to be beheld in reality.  In experiencing the … litter of tortured human bodies in the film made of the Nazi concentration camps, we redeem horror from its invisibility behind the veils of panic and imagination.  And this experience is liberating in as much as it removes a most powerful taboo.  Perhaps Perseus’ greatest achievement was not to cut off Medusa’s head but to overcome his fears and look at its reflection in the shield.  And was it not precisely this feat which permitted him to behead the monster? (p. 206)

So what does all of this mean?  It remains an open question, though we must not neglect the fact that so many of the things that shock us about the modern, rationalised world should not be, in the end, all that surprising.

The First (Surviving) Filmic Version of American Jews

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A Gesture Fight in Hester Street, Film, Jews, Judaism, Racism

Though I do prefer to be more long-winded than this, I had to share something I discovered while researching a new class on world religions in film.  For your viewing pleasure, the earliest surviving – and very short – film depicting Jews in New York City, A Gesture Fight in Hester Street (1903), which most likely is a filmed sketch from a vaudeville performance.

Compare these two with Mel Gibson’s Caiaphas in The Passion of the Christ and despair at humanity’s inability to learn a single damned thing from the past.

Cinema as Exorcism (four): Avatar as European Orientalist Fantasy

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Avatar, colonialism, Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said, James Cameron, noble savage, Orientalism, Racism

Continuing my series on cinema and/as exorcism (see more here, here, and here), some thoughts on James Cameron’s Avatar, one of the worst Orientalist fantasies in recent memory (though I don’t want to waste many thoughts on such a facile and deluded piece of rubbish) …

Poster for Avatar showing Jake as both colonised and coloniser

I would give a synopsis of the plot, but I don’t need to if you’ve seen Dances with Wolves, Glory, Seven Years in Tibet, Blood Diamond, The Last Samurai, The Children of Huang Shi, or any other film where a white European character stumbles into a culture of noble but blinkered primitives and then proceeds to save them not only from his (and it is always his) fellow Europeans, but also from themselves.  In Avatar, the protagonist is an ex Marine named Jake, who is sent to a lush planet called Pandora to help run the Na’vi people (essentially three metre tall humanoids with better abs) off of their sacred land so a nameless company can harvest the minerals that lie beneath it. This is that same story, again, though done without any of the subversive gestures that distinguished the recent District 9, which shares a good few plot elements with all of these films but manages to be something other than the standard Orientalist bullshit.  From the opening generic tribal drumming, Avatar confirms every last sentence of Edward Said’s Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism.

Argument one: Avatar is the most astonishingly racist film since Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, perhaps worse even than 300.  The film’s noble savages, the Na’vi – many of whom, though they are computer generated motion captures of real actors, are played by non-white actors – are an amalgam of all the noble savage clichés dating back centuries.  They are in touch with nature.  They believe, in fact, that their planet, Pandora, is one he living organism (Pandora’s bookshops must sell a lot of James Lovelock).  They are violent but admirable.  They like to hold hands and dance.  They are sexually ambiguous. but still sexually appealing.  They are superstitious and reliant on magic and all sorts of often brutal rites of passage.  These may be noble savages in the film, but they are still savages and the film treats them as savages, as lesser people.

From the costume and character design, the Na’vi are evidently supposed to represent a smattering of oppressed indigenous peoples on Earth, from New Zealand Maori to the Navajo of the American southwest, but in blending all of these cultures into one, the film is guilty of doing exactly what it thinks it is condemning.  That each of the cultures that Cameron borrows from the create the Na’vi are vibrant and complete in their own right simply does not matter.  What matters is that they aren’t European and thus are an open resource to plunder when trying to define Europe over and against what it is not.  This is Orientalism par excellence.

In a final insult, the Na’vi’s beliefs about their planet being a living organism are given endorsement in the film only when these beliefs are proven scientifically.  This is the evolutionary narrative of history – out of darkness and into light, ironically, an idea that is deeply rooted in Christianity – in a nutshell.  The Na’vi religion is nothing more than primitive science, an accident of insight that needs European systems of valuation for its legitimacy.  This is, at the very best, a backhanded compliment and at worst an absolute repudiation of what the film intends.  Final thought: if the humans – as one of the generic corporate faces notes – have nothing to offer the Na’vi, then why does Jake, the sympathetic white human Marine, become the long-awaited saviour of the Na’vi?  Why tell the story from his standpoint at all?  Why not make Neytiri, the main Na’vi figure, the film’s centre?  Why not allow the Na’vi to fulfill their own prophecies?  Why not allow them to save themselves?  Why force them to end the film in a cold-hearted fashion, sending most of the humans home ‘to a dying world’?  Why not grant them the courage of their own ecological convictions and allow them to take a hand in saving the Earth?

Argument two: to say that Avatar is ideologically inconsistent is to make a molehill out of a mountain.  This is the perfect film for our times, when Barack Obama can make a speech defending a policy of perpetual war while accepting the Nobel Prize for Peace, when there is endlessly debate about climate change that touches on everything except the actual problems behind the crisis (the market is not the solution, people; it is the problem).  This is a film that appears to want to be an endorsement of peace but that ends in a fierce and very bloody battle for territory  and resources that the audience is supposed to  get behind.  In a similar fashion, Avatar makes every gesture possible towards valuing nature and the Na’vi are shown – over and over and over again – being ecologically minded and treating Pandora’s animal life with respect; however, in the film’s climactic orgy of violence, Pandora’s Gaia analogue sends all manner of creatures to their deaths in the name of preserving the Na’vi, who are thus obviously the most important creatures on the planet.

This is a major Hollywood studio film – and I do know that Cameron is actually Canadian – that is trying hard to say something genuine about ecology and capitalism but doesn’t know how to say anything that hasn’t been said for the last four or five hundred years.  Perhaps, more worryingly, it cannot, given that it is also one of the most expensive films ever made and it will need to recoup its costs largely in the international market, and thus cannot do anything but pander to the lowest worldwide common denominator.  This is a deeply confused film that reflects in every surface the convoluted and confused nature of our culture.  It is everything that it believes that it is not.  We deserve this film, though I wish I could say with any confidence that we deserve better.

Argument three: Avatar is the ultimate in Orientalist fantasy.  When Jake opens his eyes at the end of the film, having defeated the Europeans and sent them packing and having fully, literally become one of the Na’vi, he is living out the dreams of every white neo-pagan, Druid, or Wiccan out there who wants to truly recover a past that is, for the most part, a Romantic fantasy that has no roots in history.  Unlike Wikus in District 9, who also becomes an oppressed alien but takes up arms against the oppressors because he is a selfish git largely concerned with saving his own ass (a fact that the film is smart enough to admit), Jake is a classic Hollywood hero who is able to be both coloniser and colonised at once.   He is a coloniser without the need for guilt or any serious reflection on what he has done (he is instrumental in destroying the Na’vi’s village) but he is also colonised in that he can take part in a fantasy culture where everything is sunshine, simplicity, and sacredness.  Jake is liberal guilt made flesh.  In all of this, Cameron is  ideologically at least the equal of the great Orientalist novelists, from Rudyard Kipling to Joseph Conrad, though these two have the distinct advantage of having been able to actually write.

Zoe Saldana as Neytiri.

The film, on a technological level, is a game-changer, as they like to say.  As a narrative and as an example of the colonial gaze, there is nothing in Avatar that is any different, or any better, than eighteenth-century missionary and colonial writings about Egypt or India.  This does nothing to exorcise the demons of colonialism or imperialism; indeed, it is a wholehearted embrace of both of these things cloaked in the shell of a protest against them.

To be fair, I’ll throw in a few positives: everything in the film from the production design to the intricately imagined and convincingly rendered worlds, looks amazing (even in two dimensions, as we down here at the ends of the Earth still don’t have a 3-D theatre) and the climactic battle is a stunning achievement in editing, effects, and pacing.  Finally, Zoe Saldana as a nine-foot tall Smurf?  Still hot as all hell.

A Modest Plea for a Historically Responsible Atheism

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Atheism and Agnosticism, Christopher Hitchens, History, John Milbank, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Slavoj Žižek, Terry Eagleton, The Monstrosity of Christ, Theism

The Monstrosity of Christ, by Slavoj Žižek, John Milbank, and Creston Davis

Some half-formed thoughts on the contemporary debate about atheism, sparked in large part by a recent reading of Slavoj Žižek’s and John Milbank’s new book, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009 [a review copy courtesy of the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies]):

The Monstrosity of Christ documents a debate between Milbank (a highly influential Catholic theologian and a founding member of the Radical Orthodoxy movement) and Žižek (a philosopher, intellectual celebrity and professional madman) about the nature of Christianity, or at least about Hegel’s interpretation of the nature of Christianity, largely as mediated through the central figure of Jesus as Incarnation.  There is a good deal of interest in the book and both authors make some pointed criticisms of the other – Milbank accuses Žižek of being little more than a heterodox Christian, while Žižek claims that ‘it is Milbank who is guilty of heterodoxy, ultimately of a regression to paganism: in my atheism, I am more Christian than Milbank’ (248 – all page numbers in this post refer to Monstrosity).  If for nothing more than watching two brilliant if equally flawed minds at work against one another, Monstrosity makes for very good, very fun reading.

However, what stuck me as the most intriguing point of all of this was Žižek’s simultaneous defence of an essentially materialist (and thus atheistic) view of the world and his continuing interest in Christian intellectual history.  In doing these two things at the same time, which might seem to be wildly counterintuitive, Žižek makes some tentative first steps towards establishing a viable and historically responsible contemporary atheism.  He by no means settles the matter and by no means even thinks out his own argument through to the end (always a problem for Žižek), but what he does do is present a potential means of arguing for an atheistic worldview that properly acknowledges that such a stance occurs against a deeply-rooted religious milieu dominated by Abrahamic understandings of God.  In Žižek’s view – and here I am extrapolating on his work here – atheism in traditionally theistic cultures is always already a matter of religion, but atheism is in itself not necessarily a religious position (though in some cases it must be).

Žižek here pushes us towards a different and more substantive version of atheism than that being offered in the populist work of Christopher Hitchens, Bill Maher, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins.  Regardless of what one thinks of these arguments from a philosophical or logical standpoint, the overarching point of much of this work, that religion in all of its forms – though they all, as a rule, focus on theistic traditions – is illogical, destructive, and misguided and should, therefore be discarded, or at least ignored, is eminently impractical.  Firstly, people are rarely swayed by rational arguments in such matters.  It is very difficult to imagine a new-earth creationist being swayed by Dawkins’ recent book defending evolution, The Greatest Show on Earth, particularly in a cultural climate where the teaching of evolution has again – and bafflingly – become a matter of controversy, in American schools at least.  In such a highly emotional and frankly juvenile sphere of debate, Dawkins is going to be dismissed before his arguments are ever even voiced.  Given this, such attempts at the reasonable assertion of atheism are preaching largely to the choir. If modernity has taught us anything, it should be that people will persist in all manner of irrational and illogical behaviour, no matter how rational our picture of the world may be.  Secondly, and ever more so since the late 1960s,  many froms of religion have shown that they can co-exist quite happily with the modern.  Religion in its many guises is not going anywhere – though it will very certainly mutate into new and at times surprising forms – and to argue that it should (no matter how valid the reasons for making such a suggestion might be) is to argue in essence nothing at all, at least nothing with any social utility whatsoever.

An incidental point should be made here as well: if we are to discard anything that is illogical, irrational, or responsible for violence and oppression, what would we be left with?  To carry this logic through to the end, if we are to begin by discarding those religions that do not hold up under logical scrutiny, we must continue by discarding the mythology of the nation-state and finally rid the world of any and all financial systems based on illusory, artificial conceptions such as ‘money’.  Any system that has the requisite complexity to exist in a modern society is going to be, to at least some extent, rooted in the selective application of reason and truth.  To put this another way: are the central tenets of the Christian Trinity (to take a notorious example of convoluted religious nonsense) really any more nonsensical than Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ or the belief that it is possible to have a financial system that requires infinite growth in a system of finite resources, two ideas upon which the contemporary world balances ever more precariously?  If there is going to be a revolution of the rational, it will have to be total.

Creston Davis, the facilitator and editor of the debate in The Monstrosity of Christ, like so many scholars of religion (myself included), is almost entirely dismissive of the philosophical weight of the theism vs. atheism debate as it appears in the Alister McGrath vs. Richard Dawkins title card:

But for all the pomp and circumstance of this ‘debate’, in the end, it only manages to recapitulate the same premises with which each side begins.  Consequently, the debate over the truth of either stance can never be resolved through the arbitration of speculative reason – and this because each side appears to be different, but, on a deeper level, they share the exact same version of that which underlies their very thinking, viz. secular reason.  Reason functions in this atheistic/theistic debate in a very limited, even reductionist way as it becomes the final arbiter of all truth forced into propositional form and thus sundered from everyday life … In short, although this Dawkins/McGrath debate looks genuine, and is certainly successful in terms of selling a great many books, it nevertheless is only a limited and not very intellectually significant debate.  It is more an exercise in ideological (mis)interpretation of the same premises than a real debate, because is fails to risk forgoing the very existence of what both sides presuppose. (8-10)

What Žižek argues for in Monstrosity is something else from the dismissive and reductionist arguments for atheism that are taking up so much space bookshelf space these days.  What he argues for here seems on the surface to be counterintuitive or simply nonsensical: he is making an atheistic plea for the absolute singularity and necessity of the monstrous figure of Jesus – though Žižek regularly uses the theological title of ‘Christ’, his argument is still thoroughly materialistic in a Hegelian sense and thus at least formally atheistic.  He makes this point in no uncertain terms, something which in itself isa rarity in Žižek’s work:

It is only in this monstrosity of Christ that human freedom is grounded; and, at its most fundamental, it is neither as payment for our sins nor as legalistic ransom, but by enacting this openness that Christ’s sacrifice sets us free … This is the way Christ brings freedom: confronting him, we become aware of our own freedom.  The ultimate question is thus: in what kind of universe is freedom possible?  What ontology does freedom imply? (82)

All praise to Žižek aside for the moment, there is in all of this an unresolved and very troubling tension between Žižek’s evident hopes for liberation from the excesses of contemporary capitalism and what appears to be – and this is not putting it too strongly – a refigured Christian universalism.  In all of this, when he uses the word ‘religion’, what Žižek is talking about is Christianity, the only religion he really considers in these essays.  Even when he addresses Judaism, he does so obliquely and only as it pertains to Christianity.  In doing this, Žižek is (oddly enough, given his track record) repeating a mistake made by a great many theologians, one arguably rooted in a long history of anti-Semitism in European intellectual history, and in Christian theology in particular.  There is something odd, even disturbing, in Žižek’s reaffirmation of Christian universalism in an atheist guise, though such an idea does have a fairly long history, reaching its apex in the ‘death of God’ movement in theology, which briefly caught the public imagination in the 1960s to such an extent that it made the cover of Time magazine.

Time magazine, 8 April 1966

Is this really a step away from the harm that such universalism has wrought in history, or merely a restatement of this central tenet of European superiority?  Though he makes a compelling argument later in the book that seems to address this precise point head-on, one can’t help be beset by lingering doubts at taking such a tack in a work that purports to be advocating a new and less violent world order based on a new kind of balance between the secular (whatever that might mean) and the religious (whatever that might mean).

In this book, there is a closer agreement between Milbank and Žižek than might be expected, and one of the things that they agree on is that that naïve, de-historicised atheism is of little value.  Bringing us back to my unease with Žižek’s restatement of Christian universalism, this is a position that is fiercely relevant to the contemporary study of religion, but one that no one – at least in this reporter’s opinion – has managed to convincingly lay out the reasons for, until now:

The incompleteness of reality also provides an answer to the question I am often asked by materialists: is it even worth spending time on religion, flogging a dead horse?  Why this eternal replaying of the death of God?  Why not simply start from the positive materialist premise and develop it?  The only appropriate answer to this is the Hegelian one – but not in the sense of the cheap ‘dialectics’ according to which a thesis can deploy itself only through overcoming its opposite.  The necessity of religion is an inner one – again not in the sense of a kind of Kantian ‘transcendental illusion’, an eternal temptation of the human mind, but more radically.  A truly logical materialism accepts the basic insights of religion, its premise that our commonsense reality is not the true one: what it rejects is the conclusion that, therefore, there must be another, ‘higher’, suprasensible reality.  Commonsense realism, positive religion, and materialism thus form a Hegelian triad. (240)

Žižek argues that our position is thus a precarious one that our religious inheritance can help us to understand, regardless of whether or not we are willing or able to make the leap to theistic belief: ‘we created our world, but it overwhelms us, we cannot grasp and control it.  This position is like that of God when he confronts Job toward the end of the book of Job: a God who is himself overwhelmed by his own creation.  This is what dialectics is about: what eludes the subject’s grasp is not the complexity of transcendent reality, but the way the subject’s own activity is inscribed into reality’ (244). He repeats this all-important gesture a few pages later in answering the slightly different question ‘but why God at all?’: ‘The true formula of atheism is not “I don’t believe”, but “I no longer have to rely on a big Other who believes for me” – the true formula of atheism is, “there is no big Other”’ (297).

We cannot ignore Christianity as a whole and the problematic of the Incarnation in particular, Žižek claims, because these things from an essential part of the intellectual world of modernity.  Here he also offers at least a partial answer to my own charge of universalism, despite the fact that he never bothers to articulate this explicitly.  Christianity achieves its unique position in history because it is an essential element of modernity itself, an essential piece of the dominant logic of a globalising capitalist modernity.  Given this, Žižek is quite correct when he argues that he is moving into new territory with this particular argument: ‘A new field is emerging to which the well-known designations “poststructuralism”, “postmodernism”, or “deconstuctionism” no longer apply; even more radically, this field renders problematic the very feature shared by Derrida and his great opponent, Habermas: that of respect for Otherness’ (254).  This is a hybrid (or, to use Hegelian language, synthesis) of modern and postmodern (to use two very loaded, very inadequate terms) territory that many others – Terry Eagleton, for one, in his After Theory (2003) – are also trying with varying degrees of success to define and understand.

What Žižek does here is to make atheism respectable again, after the onslaught of what Eagleton quite rightly calls ‘school-yard’ atheists, reactionaries like Hitchens and Harris as well as (slightly) better-informed critics of religion like Dawkins.  In Žižek’s arguments, we find the deeper meaning to Milbank’s assertion that ‘the supposition of naive atheists that the West can leave behind either Christology or ecclesiology is worthy to be greeting only with ironic laughter’ (181).  One cannot blithely ignore the centuries of theological thinking that lies at the back of any assertion of atheism, philosophically justifiable as any such an assertion may be, at least not if there is to be actual, productive debate – not just people shouting at each other or simply restating their own presuppositions over and over again – about all of this.

This might not be an argument that will ever be resolved, and The Monstrosity of Christ, may not document a proper argument in the strictest sense of the word – Žižek and Milbank might, as Dawkins and McGrath seem to, be simply talking past or at rather than to each other.  However, Žižek, in dialogue with Milbank, gives us a way to argue – or to at least to begin to argue – for an intellectually respectable and historically responsible atheism that both avoids the abuses of an overly prescriptive ‘secular’ rationalism that seeks to discard the past and transcends this ironic laughter by searching to explicate the present though a respectful and critical re-examination of the past.  For what has modernity taught us about history?  The past haunts the present and there can be no exorcising the spirits of History.