St Matthews Christmas Billboard Vandalised: Catholic Fundamentalist Portrays Animals Emerging Two-by-Two from the Virgin Mary

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Advertising, Arthur Skinner, Catholic Action, Christmas billboard, Church, Humour, St Matthew in the City, Virgin Mary

In what was an almost inevitable development, fundamentalist Catholic Arthur Skinner, of the reactionary Catholic Action group, has vandalised the Christmas billboard erected earlier this week by St Matthew in the City, Auckland, New Zealand. Taking a pair of scissors to the billboard to reveal another picture below, Skinner has made it appear as if the Virgin Mary is expressing shock at various animals proceeding forth from her eternally intact vagina:

Original St Matthews Christmas Billboard

Vandalised St Matthews Christmas Billboard: Arthur Skinner (Catholic Action) makes it appear as if the Virgin Mary is shocked at animals proceeding two-by-two out of her eternally intact vagina

 

Arthur Skinner’s unusual alteration to the Christmas billboard appears to be unintentional, rather than a work of artistic creativity. TV3 reports Skinner ranting, “Everyone knows instinctively, you don’t muck around with God’s mother. This is devil’s work. This is luciferian. The attack on the blessed virgin.” Stuff reports that Skinner called church vicar Glynn Cardy the day he cut the poster to tell him he would “roast slowly in hell” for the billboard.

As Eric commented in respect of a similar rant by Family First’s Bob McCoskrie against St Matthew’s 2009 Christmas billboard,

There is a long-standing tradition in Christianity to immediately condemn any connection between Jesus and sexual activity of any kind. Whether this is due to a perceived need to defend the ludicrous doctrine of the virgin birth from critique (is the NT wrong?) or simply another aspect of the long historical tradition that claims the elevated, the divine, or the righteous are not subject to the same bodily weaknesses and urges that the rest of us are endlessly plagued with (for Deane’s thoughts on this, see here and here), remains an open question.

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A Single-Sentence Post (one)

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assertion, one sentence, the obvious

Anti-intellectualism is cultural suicide.

Sigmund Freud and the Animal Farm School of Intellectual Inquiry

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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 …

The ‘World Wide Web’ and the Utopian Imaginary

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Internet, Punk, Utopian imagination, World Wide Web

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

George Orwell Was (Mostly) Right: Newspeak Today

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

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

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

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

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

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

War is Peace

Functionality is Magic, or Consumption is Rebellion

The Shoah, Rationalisation and the Haunting of Modernity

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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.

Family First NZ: Jokes About Sexy Jesus Still Not Funny

Tags

Advertising, Church, Humour, St Matthew in the City

And now for a fascinating example of the recent reception history of a religious figure …

St Matthew in the City, a progressive Anglican church in Auckland (the biggest city – not that this is saying a whole lot – in New Zealand), is planning to erect a controversial billboard to raise awareness of the ‘Christ’ part of Christmas and to provoke discussion about the holiday and its meaning.  The billboard shows Mary and Joseph in bed and makes a cheeky, glancing reference to the Virgin Birth:

Billboard for St Matthew in the City, Auckland, New Zealand

The billboard, before it has even made its first public appearance on the street, is being roundly decried by Family First New Zealand, a conservative Evangelical group in the mode of the American Focus on the Family.  Family First’s Bob McCoskrie had this to say about the advertisement:

The church can have its debate on the virgin birth and its spiritual significance inside the church building, but to confront children and families with the concept as a street billboard is completely irresponsible and unnecessary … The church has failed to recognise that public billboards are exposed to all of the public including children and families who may be offended by the material.

The assertion that children could possibly be offended by the material is simply nonsensical, especially in a heavily secularised (and often illiterate and anti-intellectual) place like New Zealand, where a fair percentage of the people who see the billboard will be rather likely not to even understand what it is referring to.  If this really is offensive, than all the better, as being offended is tantamount to having to think seriously about something.  On an incidental note, the consequences of this last sentiment – that advertising that offends should not be allowed – are vast when we consider that there are people out there, me for instance, who find mediocrity of any kind offensive.

There is a long-standing tradition in Christianity to immediately condemn any connection between Jesus and sexual activity of any kind.  Whether this is due to a perceived need to defend the ludicrous doctrine of the virgin birth from critique (is the NT wrong?) or simply another aspect of the long historical tradition that claims the elevated, the divine, or the righteous are not subject to the same bodily weaknesses and urges that the rest of us are endlessly plagued with (for Deane’s thoughts on this, see here and here), remains an open question.  We saw similar tendencies in reactions to the rubbish novel and film The Da Vinci Code and to the brilliant novel and film The Last Temptation of Christ.  Despite all of the ballyhoo to the contrary, I want to suggest that these negative reactions were related more to the idea of a sexual Jesus (which Martin Scorcese’s film showed in some detail) than to any of these texts’  other criticisms of the churches.

In a final note, the billboard, by a mainline Christian church, is in some ways far more subversive, and certainly far more intelligent, than the recent advertising campaign by the New Zealand Atheist Bus Campaign, which raised $20,000 from donations to place advertisements on  a number of public buses that read ‘There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life’.  That this is a cliched and seriously tired sentiment (though one that still applies most to a certain breed of Calvinist) need pass by without mention.  That they feel the need to add the word ‘probably’ reveals either that they are  deliberately trying to tone down their message or are simply unsure of themselves makes them both bad provocateurs and bad atheists.   This kind of waffling undermines the whole of the campaign.  True atheism needs to be both bold, unequivocal, and, as I’ve written elsewhere, historically aware.  The billboard, on the other hand, is thought-provoking, even to someone who has already in this post declared the idea of virgin birth as ‘ludicrous’.  It also has the distinct advantage of actually being funny – I love the wistful look in Mary’s eyes as she gazes heavenward and thinks what are most likely very impure thoughts about her God – and of using humour to a far more serious purpose than a knee-jerk appeal to a bland and poorly understood atheism – without God, are we completely free from any obligation as moral agents, free to simply enjoy our lives, or (to employ a much-used and ultimately meaningless word) are we finally free to be happy?

Thanks to Stuff.co.nz for the image and the quotations (without their permission, of course, this is the Internet).

On the Origins of Management Science

Tags

education, fraud, Frederick Winslow Taylor, management, PBRF, scientific management, The New Yorker

As has been noted here in the past,and more than once, by other members of this site, business-inspired organisational models based on esoteric ideas like ‘performance’ and ‘results’ have permeated and even come to define the contemporary university, much for the worse of everyone involved.  We know it here in New Zealand chiefly in the form of the much-maligned Performance Based Research Funding system, which has given many scholars a new four-letter word, ‘PBRF’.

Illustration from The New Yorker, 12 October 2009

Not only is this style of management and organisation leading to a fundamental change in the way that universities are staffed (more and more people are teaching part-time with little access to benefits, research funding, or other essential things), but it also discourages innovation (many scholars will only publish in the highest-rated journals, which tend towards conservative content in areas that are well established and amply covered), takes valuable time away from teaching (which causes students, who have already been severely let down by performance-managed primary and secondary schools, to suffer as well at the altar of the management ethos), and causes scholars to spend an inordinate amount of time justifying their existence (or at least their dwindling salaries) rather than doing to kinds of work – reading, writing, thinking, teaching – that they should be doing, the kinds of work that they have been doing for centuries.

All of this, it turns out, and as a great many of us have long expected, to be rooted, fundamentally, in very bad science and on the worst kind of exploitative capitalism.  On a recent read through a recent edition of The New Yorker, I happened upon an article discussing the beginnings of the ‘scientific management’ craze in the early twentieth century, a movement that has led, and fairly directly, to the universities of today, which are run like businesses, despite the very obvious fact that this is a very bad model for running an educational institution.  The founder of the movement, which has now pervaded the social sphere to an alarming degree, one Frederick Winslow Taylor, an industrial engineer from Philadelphia who later earned the nickname ‘Speedy Taylor’, based his work on a series of studies that were badly flawed or simply fabricated.  Jill Lepore writes:

Whether he was also a shameless fraud is a matter of some debate, but not, it must be said, much: it’s difficult to stage a debate when the preponderance of evidence falls to one side …  Taylor’s enemies and even some of his colleagues pointed out, nearly a century ago [that] Taylor fudged his data, lied to his clients, and inflated the record of his success.

So all of this – the publishing quotas, the rating of journals, the need to court and treat students as customers – is based on lies, on inflations, and on the sort of sloppy, dishonest science that we in the academy should be dedicated to combating.

Again, to the surprise of very few people, the decision to apply capitalistic models of what is valuable and, thus, ultimately is allowable within society, is as disastrous for education as it is has been for health care and the environment (carbon-trading schemes, anyone?).

What the solution is for universities, save for open revolution, is anyone’s guess – and who has time for rebellion when trying to publish books and articles that no other scholar is going to have the time to read?  If anyone out there has a brilliant idea as to how to begin to undo the damage that Taylor and his later supporters – like Louis Brandies (and the trade unions called foul on ‘scientific management’ from the very first, which in itself is damning) and Lillian Gilbreth, who for unfathomable reasons brought the principles of scientific management into the home – have inflicted on the universities of the world, I’m all ears.

Top 11 Religiously Themed Films of the Decade

Tags

Children of Men, Fall, Heaven, Jesus Camp, Spirited Away, Spring, Summer, Sunshine, The Dark Knight, The New World, The Passion of the Christ, The Proposition, There Will Be Blood, Winter... and Spring

As it seems that every other film critic or keeper of a weblog that deals with film is compiling a ‘best of’ list as the end of the Noughties approaches at speed, I feel compelled to offer one of my own (which might mean I am conformist at heart, but I hope not).  In no particular order and in full recognition of the futility of the exercise, eleven of the best films from the last ten years that touch on matters of religion or the religious:

Frame Capture from Sunshine

Sunshine (Danny Boyle, 2007): Working from an unusually thoughtful script by the novelist Alex Garland (who in The Tesseract gives us a compelling distillation of the fractures of the contemporary world), Boyle gives us another science fiction meditation on the possible end of the world.  The film is also a haunting allegory for the deep darknesses that still exist out there waiting for us to find, whether that darkness is the relentless, uncaring power of nature or the madness of believing one to be uniquely chosen by the divine for a mission of extreme violence.  At the same time, it is possibly the most taut, visceral and simply exciting film on this list.

Children of Men (Afonso Cuaron, 2006): This is the most chilling and most believable of any of the dystopian futures we have seen in a century that seems to be revelling in the fact that it may or may not have much of a future. The quick glimpses we get of the religious reactions – hopelessness, self-flagellation – to a potentially world-ending crisis are telling and perfectly in line with what could happen.  This is stunning science fiction at the same time that it is a deeply felt and well-considered meditation on the way we live now, and the ways we may not live in the future (it is also the only film on this list whose DVD special features include a documentary starring Slavoj Žižek rambling on about the sorry sate of the world, which makes it worth a rental even if for no other reason).  In the end, chilling as it may be, the film’s only fault is that it may be too hopeful, too firm in its affirmation of the human capacity for good.

There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007): This is a bluntly subversive film, an argument in narrative form that American capitalism and American Christianity are two sides of the same corrupt coin.  Told in the from of a character study of the most deeply and convincingly misanthropic figure in contemporary popular culture, Anderson’s best film to date tells the story of the intertwining of the religious and the economic that can be read as a condemnation of the Prosperity Gospel movement or as a critique of violence perpetrated in the name of profit that is given a slickly religious gloss. or even as a repudiation of the whole language of family values.  Regardless of how you look at, this is strong stuff, the kind of challenging, socially aware cinema that we can never have enough of.

Frame Capture from Heaven

Heaven (Tom Tykwer, 2002): Working from a script by Krzysztof Kieslowski and Krzysztof Piesiewicz, originally intended as part of another trilogy for Kieslowski, sho gave us the lovely Trois Colours, the great German director Tom Tykwer turns this simple tale of two damaged people in love and on the run into something altogether remarkable.  It resonates with biblical and Christian themes and language and offers a very strange and very effective kind of aesthetic redemption to its protagonists, both of whom are murderers.  At the same time, this is no simple religious parable or morality play; there is so much going on here below the surface of what seems to be a very simple story that it is almost staggering.  The second script in the series, L’Enfer, a bitter tale about the hell of other people, was made into a film in 2005 by Danis Tanovic.  The third, dealing with the theme of Purgatory, sadly, remains unfilmed.

The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008): This might seem like a stretch, but bear with me for a moment or two.  When the butler Alfred tells Bruce Wayne, Batman’s playboy alter-ego, that some men – the Joker in this case – just want to watch the world burn, he nails the character of religiously-motivated violence in the contemporary world, which is more performative and symbolic than strategic or tactical.  In the final analysis, this is a startling depiction of the deep irrationalities and the dark magics that underlie the surface of the rationalised modern world.  It is also a striking visualisation of the things that modern societies must do to combat these forces.  On this front, see also Tykwer’s brilliant 2006 adaptation of Perfume: The Story of a Murderer and to a lesser extent Nolan’s own 2006 film The Prestige.

The New World (Terrence Malick, 2005): Though it does branch over into Orientalist fantasy on occasion, this retelling of the seminal American story of the colonial captain John Smith and his relationship with an Algonquin girl, usually given the name Pocahontas, is a distillation of Malick’s decades-long meditation on modernity and its deeply destructive relationship with nature.  This bears as little resemblance as possible to the deplorable Disney film dealing with the same story.  In The New World, he does this primarily through a comparison, never forced, between the enchanted world of the Algonquin and one that is being violently disenchanted, and this with the help of the church that we see the British colonists building in their mudpit of a town, built for the film a few kilometres from the site of the historical Jamestown, first settled in the early seventeenth century.  It is also one of the most visually stunning films on this list, even if cannot compare with Malick’s 1978 Days of Heaven, arguably the single most beautiful movie in the history of movies.  For the curious, I’ve written more on Malick here.

Jesus Camp (Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, 2006): The only documentary to make this list, Jesus Camp, and one which is a little suspect in its own implicit claims towards objectivity, Jesus Camp, like no other film, gives us a window into the world of fundamentalist Christianity (and I know this is an unpopular term in the academy, but here it fits like a glove) in the United States.  That the film renders this world as one that is alien and largely incomprehensible to much of the world beyond the American heartland is only to its credit.  These people are out there, and there are more of them than we might care to think.

Frame Capture from Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring (Kim Ki-Duk, 2003): This is, I do realise, a cliché, and a film that seems to go out of its way to pander to Western preconceptions about Buddhism, but it is also a lovely little piece of work, a gentle but powerful parable about the weight of suffering and delusion that so many of us seem to carry with us.  It also features the single best cinematic use of a cat in recent memory.  See it as a double feature with Ki-Duk’s 3-Iron, which is just as much a parable and perhaps even more a Buddhist film than Spring, though in a far more subtle manner.

The Proposition (John Hillcoat, 2005): With the possible exception of the very different The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Hilcoat’s Old Testament inflected story of the Australian Outback in the middle of the nineteenth century is the finest Western of the decade.  Working from a script by bad seed Nick Cave, the film takes on a veneer of biblical darkness and inhabits a moral universe that owes far more to the logic of the book of Job than to the myths of civilising European colonialism. At the end of the film, when two men, one barbaric and dying, the other alive and vaguely more civilised, sit facing the future, the film suggests that this is the heart of where we are now, and that heart lies in large part informed by the bloody stories of our past, both biblical and colonial.  For further reflections on the film and its place in contemporary Australian cinema, I’ve written more elsewhere on this site.

Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001): Miyazaki is one of our great filmmakers, a fiercely original voice and a deeply moral commentator on the world at large.  A classic story of a haunted amusement park and a paean to the complex spirit world of the Japanese religions, this is amusing, touching, terrifying and intellectually engaging all at the same time.

Frame Capture from The Bothersome Man

The Bothersome Man (Jens Lien, 2006): Another dystopian film that suggests that the modern city with all its cleanliness, order and impeccable taste, just might be hell (and I had such fond memories of Oslo, which this film has truly interrupted).  This little Norwegian gem is one of the few really original visions of the afterlife that we’ve seen in years and it is one of the most blackly comic films in a decade full of pitch-dark humour.  It is also a stirring demand that we all become bothersome to those things that require bothering (rationalisation, commodification, etc.).

And the worst (and this one was easy): The Passion of the Christ (Mel Gibson, 2004): Gibson’s infamous film is riddled with problems.  It is historically inaccurate (Jesus and Pilate conversing in Latin rather than Greek (the language that two men in their traditional positions would have had in common), the executioner’s nails being driven through the palms and not the wrists, etc., etc.), which is really only a problem given that the filmmakers made such a big noise about being historically accurate.  It is brutally, cruelly sadistic and in its cruelty becomes deeply suspect on a theological level, given that it transforms the suffering of Jesus into an endurance test that no man (not even a white guy with digitally-altered brown eyes and a prosthetic hook nose) could have survived such torture for so long, essentially denying the messianic figure the divinity that has so long defined Christianity’s theological understanding of its own textual history.  This is a Braveheart version of Jesus that avoids deeper questions and goes for the dubious pleasures of reveling in the torture, though crucifixion was absolutely a form of torture, something the film actually gets right.  Despite removing the vaunted ‘blood libel’ from the Gospel of Matthew from the finished film (though they did shoot it), it is also rabidly anti-Semitic as well as being deeply misogynistic – Satan takes the form of a woman who we often see stalking unseen among the Jewish crowds. It makes the Roman authorities into enlightened and sympathetic humanists while at the same time transforming the occupied Semitic peoples of Jerusalem into a vacuous rabble that is violent, backwards, bloodthirsty and in need of some civilising.  If this isn’t what a colleague here at Otago calls ‘a theology of empire’, and a thinly-veiled defence of the American occupation of Iraq, I don’t know what is.  It is also guilty of the most grievous of all cinematic sins in that it is flat-out boring and at least an hour too long.

Perhaps even more so than Jesus Camp, the film is a crystallisation of all that is perverse and troubling about Evangelical Christianity in the United States in the twenty-first century.  That it became the rallying point of an election and that any criticism of the film was labelled anti-Christian regardless of its source or motivation, made the very existence of the film deeply disturbing.  It was shot in part in Matera (in the region of Basilicata), the same Italian city as Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1964 masterpiece Il vangelo secondo Matteo, but the two films could not be more different.  That this, still by far the best film about Jesus ever made, was made by an atheist who portrayed Satan as a Catholic priest, says something very interesting about the place of the story of the Gospels in Western culture.  If you’ve not seen Pasolini’s take on Jesus as a socialist revolutionary, you should.

Dysenchanted Worlds: Rationalisation, Dystopia, and Therapy Culture in Ninni Holmqvist’s The Unit

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Children of Men, commodification, disenchantment, dystopia, Georges Bataille, Henning Mankell, Jean Baudrillard, Kurt Wallander, Logan's Run, Max Weber, Never Let Me Go, New Age, Ninni Holmqvist, PBRF, rationalisation, Sweden

Proving that we here in the Dunedin School are interested in books other than the Bible, we turn our attention in quite another direction and continue our ongoing discussion of rationalisation – or disenchantment – and human society (see more on this here, here, here, here, and here).

Whoever pushes rationality forward also restores new strength to the opposite power, mysticism and folly of all kinds.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

Right now, no-one else is doing fictional social commentary about the continuing process of rationalisation quite as well as Scandinavians.  From Jens Lien’s lithe, brilliant 2006 Norwegian film The Bothersome Man, which envisions the afterlife as a sterile, highly controlled modern city, to Let the Right One In, which unearths an unspeakable, timeless evil living on the perfectly planned streets of Stockholm (or perhaps this evil is created by or drawn to the city because of its inhuman perfection), there is a whole host of powerful narratives emerging from the northern reaches of Europe, narratives which seriously question the social costs of quantification and reduction of all things, human life included, to exchangeable commodities.

To these more fanciful works, we need to add the growing numbers of excellent Swedish crime fiction, a list which must include Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (along with the two other titles in his Millennium Trilogy), which puts a very human face on the immense suffering and violence that goes on, unnoticed and unremarked, in the interstices of rationalised societies.  The gold standard here is probably set by Henning Mankell’s brilliant Kurt Wallander detective novels, which are so popular in Germany that Mankell outsells J.K. Rowling.  Over the course of nine novels, Wallander, a kind of dishevelled, stoic, and utterly baffled Everyman, fights a losing battle against a tide of violence and senseless crime in what should, by all accounts, be an earthly paradise of social planning, a triumph of the welfare state.  The Wallander novels are shot through with a crawling sense of dread that is shocking not because it is so out of place in the quiet towns of southernmost Sweden, but because it quickly becomes so natural,  because it feels so familiar.  Mankell turns what could be boilerplate police procedurals into both a highly-nuanced character study and a far-ranging, even courageous theodicy that could only have emerged out of one of the most secular nations on earth.  The Wallander novels amount cumulatively to a systematic interrogation of the failures of the welfare state and a deconstruction of the social engineering promises that were made so easily, and with remarkably little foresight, in the 1950s, 60s and 70s.  (Incidentally, for the uninitiated, the suburb English-language BBC production Wallander, with a doughy and heartbreakingly human Kenneth Branagh as Wallander is a great point of entrée into Mankell’s world; for those of you who still read books,  I’ll recommend 1995’s Sidetracked as a personal favourite among the novels).

To this illustrious list we should now add Ninni Holmqvist’s compelling and unjustly overlooked first novel The Unit (2006), an examination of the failures of the present through the classical allegorical strategy of the dystopia.  The story is told by Dorrit Weger, a fifty-year-old woman who, as the novel opens, has been moved to something called ‘the Unit’, about which the reader knows nothing.  As the story unfolds through Holmqvist’s quiet, precise, understated prose, we learn only gradually what the Unit is and why Dorrit finds herself there.  In the future Sweden in which the novel is set – and its exact timeframe is ambiguous, though it is not too far in the future – anyone who has reached the end of their usefulness to society is taken to the Unit, where they are used for medical experiments and as living organ banks, forced to donate their organs one by one until they donate a vital organ, say the heart or the lungs.  ‘Final donation’ is in fact the Unit’s callous euphemism for death.  Dispensable Elsa, in an attempt to be light-hearted about her fate, jokes with her friend Dorrit, ‘We’re like free-range pigs or hens.  The only difference is that the pigs and hens are – hopefully – hopefully ignorant of anything but the present’.[1]

This is no prison camp, however, at least not in the traditional sense and this, for some reason, just makes the fate of Dorrit and her fellow ‘dispensables’ all the more repellent.  The Unit is an immaculately constructed alternative world with no view of the outside.  It is a prison, without question, but it is a comfortable prison.  There are shops, gardens, healthy restaurants, and plenty of amusements.  Everything is clean, rational, and as humane as such a thing could possibly be.  The dispensables, within the confines of their role as human capital, are treated with respect and encouraged to pursue their own interests and look after their own (decidedly relative) wellbeing.  Neither is the selection of people for the Unit random or unexpected; the selection criteria are highly rational, highly quantified, and systematised to remove those all-too-human elements of chance and luck.  Anyone who does not work in a vital field – teaching, nursing, etc. – and who remains childless is destined for a one-way trip to the Unit when they reach a certain age.  For women, the cut-off age is fifty, while for men it is sixty.  Even this has a rational justification; male sexual function has a slightly longer life-span than female, thus men retain their usefulness for longer.

The Unit is many things: it is a moving study of the intense and genuine friendships that quickly develop within the pressure cooker atmosphere of the Unit among people who know they have, at most, a few years left to live; when Dorrit meets Johannes and falls in love, it is a refreshing (and refreshingly frank) study of a sexual relationship between two characters past middle age, a time of life that most popular fiction, Harold and Maude notwithstanding, renders oddly asensual; and, in the end, it is simply heartbreaking, especially when Dorrit reminisces about her simple life outside the Unit and about her dog Jock, who she was forced to leave with friends when she taken to away.

In the final analysis, what The Unit, with its focus on the usefulness or utility of human beings, is criticising is rationalisation, the increasing dominance of instrumental reason, and how this effects people living in rationalised societies.  What matters in a rationalised or disenchanted system is what works, not what has meaning.  Only that which conforms to a narrowly-defined idea of function has proper, demonstrable value.  Those in Holmqvist’s dystopian future who find themselves in the Unit fall outside the brutal calculus of value that equates usefulness with the biological necessity of reproduction.  The world that supports the Unit is thus in this sense a subsistence economy that places the highest interest in its own survival.  Holmqvist makes it apparent that members of the Unit have internalised this value system, as we see Dorrit fretting, even after being labelled as dispensable, about being ‘unusable’ as a medical commodity within the Unit itself.  She also spends much of her time – tellingly, she follows standard week-day working hours even while inside the Unit – writing a novel about a mother who gives birth to a deformed baby, in which she muses, ‘The question was: Is this mother to be regarded as a parent in the practical, concrete meaning of the word?  Is she to be regarded as needed?  The question was: Is a person needed if she gives birth to a child that will never be able to bond with her, and will never be able to make any kind of contribution?’[2]

Rationalisation, first theorised by the sociologist Max Weber in early years of the twentieth century, has arguably held up better than its contemporary, the secularisation thesis.  There are a number of sociologists, theorists (including yours truly), and philosophers who have done some very interesting work within a Weberian framework, working with what Weber famously called ‘the disenchantment of the world’.  One of the more prominent of these thinkers is Georges Bataille, who captures the long and ultimately indeterminate struggle between instrumental and values-based rationalities when he writes of ‘the poverty of utility’.  Bataille’s related concepts of accursed share and sovereignty have strong resonances with both Weber’s disenchantment and Jean Baudrillard’s concept of symbolic exchange.  Bataille’s concept of the sovereign is also related, not coincidentally, with his challenging theory of religion, which in turn owes a good deal to Weber’s narrative of rationalisation and its identification of religious and economic history.[3] Echoing Jean Baudrillard’s concept of ‘symbolic exchange’, which celebrates the extra-economic and extra-instrumental use of goods, Bataille writes critically of the ‘servile man’, who ‘averts his eyes from that which is not useful, which serves no purpose’.[4] He opposes the servile to the sovereign: ‘The sovereign I speak of has little to do with the sovereign of States, as international law defines it.  I speak in general of an aspect that is opposed to the servile and the subordinate’.[5] The sovereign, then, stands apart from and opposed to the closed system of political economy, as does symbolic exchange; indeed, Bataille champions the ‘opposition to the mercantile spirit, to haggling and self-interested calculation’ that is embodied in true exchange.[6] In the world of The Unit, human beings are understood only in relationship to their use value and are thus granted different levels of exchange value in a brutal, mercenary logic where a single older woman is worth demonstrably, quantifiably less than a young single mother of young boys.  There is a good deal that this kind of instrumentalisation misses, of course, and Weber, when formulating his theory of rationalisation, noted that disenchantment carries with it necessarily a dehumanising element.  When Dorrit finds out her sister had been in the same Unit and had died a few years previously, she rages against the narrowness of this calculus of value: ‘But what about me?  Perhaps I needed my sister, why doesn’t anyone think about things like that?’[7]

Though exploitative medical practices and the disposal of the aged are classic themes in dystopian fiction, from Michael Bay’s patently awful film The Island to the classic (both in novel and film form) Logan’s Run, to Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go (soon to be released as a film), The Unit is still compelling, neccessary reading, due in no small part to the fact that it is far more grounded in the realities of the disenchanted, rationalised world than many of these other texts. After all, what makes any dystopia work is that it is believable.  This is why Alfonso Cuaron’s film Children of Men is so striking, so haunting: it is chillingly plausible; its account of the future is so convincing as to seem almost inevitable.  What makes Holmqvist’s nightmare so recognisably grounded in our reality is that she draws out the connections between rationalisation and commodification, which are inextricably linked in consumer capitalism.  Dorrit tells a friend:

I used to believe that my life belonged to me … Something that was entirely at my disposal, something no one else had any claim on, or the right to have an opinion on.  But I’ve changed my mind.  I don’t own my life at all, it’s other people who own it … Those who have the power, I suppose … The state or industry or capitalism.  Or the mass media.  Or all four.  Or are industry and capitalism the same thing?  Anyway: those who safeguard growth and democracy and welfare, they’re the ones who own my life.  They own everybody’s life.  And life is capital.  A capital that is to be divided fairly among the people in a way that promotes reproduction and growth, welfare and democracy.  I am only a steward, taking care of my vital organs.[8]

As a condemnation of an increasingly rationalised world where everything and, more importantly, everyone, can become a unit of economic value, The Unit is a very fine novel and a nice bit of social criticism.  However, there is something going on further in the depths of the text that should be immensely troubling to anyone invested in the idea of therapy.  That the usual therapies of our world go on unhindered with the Unit, that Doritt regularly visits a psychologist, or that art therapy is available to the doomed residents, suggests something deeply subversive; that the whole therapeutic ethos that dominates contemporary European cultures, with its rhetoric of healing, wholeness, mind-body unity, self-awareness, and self-fulfilment and its social structure of support groups, twelve-step programs, talk therapy, is nothing more than an integral part of the rationalised and rationalising apparatus that prepares and maintains human capital.  That very few of the people who work at the Unit (though they live outside of it) have any intimation of the sheer hypocrisy of the whole enterprise is telling of the perverse coexistence of the recognisable world of therapy and the utterly ruthless logic of exploitation and violence that exists behind the whole edifice of the Unit.  Slavoj Žižek gets at this point in his contributions to the recent The Monstrosity of Christ:

Spiritual mediation, in its abstraction from institutionalised religion, appears today as the zero-level undistorted core of religion: the complex institutional and dogmatic edifice which sustains every particular religion is dismissed as a contingent secondary coating of this core.  The reason for this shift of accent from religious institutions to the intimacy of spiritual experience is that such a meditation is the ideological form that best fits today’s global capitalism.[9]

This paints the whole of The Unit in a new light and draws out the fact that the novel voices a criticism of the whole edifice of contemporary spiritual/therapeutic culture, most visible in the New Age movement, which often calls for a reversal of disenchantment and the creation of a ‘reenchanted’ world (and here Thomas Moore’s best-selling book The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life is but one example).  Viewing it from the angle set out by Ninni Holmqvist’s The Unit, what is going on in the development of the whole therapeutic ethos is in reality very different.  In important ways that go largely unspoken, the world of universal individual achievement, the world where we can go to a yoga class or purchase ancient Mayan herbs to mediate the effects of a stressful life, is a world not unlike that of the Unit, and we, as its residents, are not unlike the human capital that is corralled there to serve a purpose and then to be discarded when our usefulness is finished.  All of this raises a series or vital, necessary question: Is therapy really just another management technique and, worse, one that many people gladly submit themselves to?  Are we concerned with all of this healing and wholeness because it allows us to more effective employees, voters, and consumers?  Is all of this a symptom of the commodification of the human subject?  Is the New Age, rather than a new era of freedom and respect for the individual, in reality an ideal embodiment of disenchantment and a pathway to an even more dysenchanted world?

Sheer pointlessness is a deeply subversive affair.

Terry Eagleton, After Theory

Brief excursus on rationalisation and the contemporary university: That this poverty of utility has permeated the contemporary academy to an unprecedented degree goes perhaps without saying.  That the value of university research and teaching is now primarily filtered though economic concerns is immediately obvious to anyone working within the Performance Based Research Funding (PBRF) system in New Zealand, a system which imposes an inappropriate and ultimately harmful standard of ‘excellence’ and ‘performance’ drawn from the business world and situated within a narrowly-prescribed system of valuation.  Education is not a product, nor is it a service and to treat it as such has serious detrimental consequences, such as the need to court and treat students as customers.  On the reverse side of the coin, we find significant numbers of students who are unwilling or simply unable to make the intellectual leap to find the value in studying something that will not help them find a job or in studying for a purpose other than gathering marks towards a degree.  The great tragedy here when thinking about the value of the study of religion, or any of the Humanities for that matter, is that, in spending time and energy attempting to prove their worth in the narrow strictures of utilitarian and economic value, scholars are distracted from doing work that is truly valuable (Mark Bauerlein has an excellent piece on this in the Chronicle of Higher Education).  Perhaps all of this ultimately breaks down to a question of belief; either one believes that the pursuit of knowledge is valuable in its own right, or one does not.  This may be one of those things about which one must square one’s shoulders and declare, ‘Here I stand, I can do no other’.

As the Unit’s librarian Kjell tells Dorrit early on in her stay, ‘there are so many intellectuals here.  People who read books … People who read books tend to be dispensable.  Extremely’.[10] That the Unit is also home to a number of artists and writers should perhaps come as no surprise, for the arts, like the pursuit of knowledge, are formally – and often economically – useless.  That these things make life worth living is, of course, of no consequence.

---

[1] Ninni Holmqvist, The Unit, translated by Marlaine Delargy (New York: Other Press, 2006), 52.

[2] Holmqvist, Unit, 93.

[3] See Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, trans by Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 35-42 and 90.

[4] Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, vol. 2, trans. by Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 15. Emphasis in original.

[5] Bataille, Accursed II, 197.

[6] Bataille, Accursed II, 42.

[7] Holmqvist, Unit, 136.

[8] Holmqvist, Unit, 103.

[9] Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?, edited by Creston Davis (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009), 28.

[10] Holmqvist, Unit, 48.

Dunedin’s own Pruitt-Igoe: The Burns Building

Tags

Arts, asbestos, Burns Building, Dunedin, Otago, Pruitt-Igoe, sewerage, sheep's arse, traumatized

Perhaps the most famous urban housing project was St. Louis’s Pruitt-Igoe – a paragon of modernist vision, theoretically perfect in conception, and – as a result – an unmitigated disaster for human habitation. Built in 1954, the multi-story housing was such a failure that it had to be demolished by 1972.

But here in Dunedin, we have our own monument to modernist vision. And it has survived!

Dunedin’s own Pruitt-Igoe is known as The Burns Building, and is home to the outcasts and pariahs of academia (practitioners of the Arts). While Pruitt-Igoe was unable to withstand the postmodern turn of the latter Twentieth Century, the inhabitants of The Burns Building (and in particular the long-time prior inhabitants of the fifth floor) have blissfully ignored such passing trends. Despite the lingering asbestos, the sewerage smells which waft up from the ground floor, and a design which shows all the aesthetic flair of a sheep’s arse, The Burns Building has withstood the test of time!

Today, the legacy of Pruitt-Igoe survives only in photographs and the trauma-plagued eggshell minds of its former inhabitants. But The Burns Building survives and continues to traumatise its own inhabitants to this very day.

But let these pictures speak for themselves:

Pruitt-Igoe:

Burns:

Pruitt-Igoe:

Burns:

Pruitt-Igoe:

Burns:

Pruitt-Igoe:

Burns:

Pruitt-Igoe:

Burns:

Pruitt-Igoe:

Burns:

Microscopic Pornography: Public Enemies and the Problem of Detail

Tags

Ill-conceived reactionary nostalgia, Jean Baudrillard, microscopic pornography, Pornography, Public Enemies, Robert Frank, The Americans

Last night, I attended a screening of Public Enemies, Michael Mann’s retelling of the final months in the life of the Depression-era bank robber and working-class hero John Dillinger.  As a cultural artefact and an example of the new digital cinema, the film is a fascinating if problematic iteration of an emerging cultural tendency towards overdetermination and a pathological need to reveal the world in all its detail.  The film, as an aesthetic experience, is deeply frustrating.  The script is economical and propulsive, while at the same time it allows for enough space to effective engage with ideas of celebrity and the necessary role of violence in the maintenance of order.  Across the board, the performances Mann gets out of his actors, especially Stephen Graham as a cackling, sociopathic Baby Face Nelson, are compelling.  The period recreation is convincing and the film makes an extraordinary stab at realism by shooting in many of the locations across the American Midwest where the events recounted in the film actually took place.

The problem lies in the fact that Mann shot the film digitally, as he did with his last film, the laughably bad Miami Vice.  Had he shot Public Enemies with the same care for composition and lighting that are needed for celluloid, something Mann is in fact very, very good at (see Heat or Manhunter if you don’t believe me), this could have been a truly great film.  As it is, it just looks cheap.  Not gritty and realistic, just cheap, unfinished.  This kind of digital aesthetic can be and has been used very effectively, in films as diverse as Cloverfield and Che, but here the off-the-cuff cheapness and inconsistency of the whole affair – and a few of the scenes are stunningly beautiful – seriously undercut Mann’s attempt at historical truth and his striving for mythic resonance.  Maybe this is an indicator that filmic convention hasn’t quite caught up with the technological changes and that it will be some years before old-fashioned people like myself will be able to accept period cinema told without the warmth and depth of film.  On the other hand, maybe the film points, to a larger problem (or consideration, if we want to use neutral language) with digital media.  Ignoring entirely the question of quality – at points, the film looks like it was shot with a cell phone, and a cheap one at that – and the still-unsolved problems of digital cinema – the artefacting, the choppy movement when the lighting is less than ideal, the lack of real depth of field – the film renders the world in excessive detail.  Mann’s cameras render the world flat, uninteresting and completely exposed, stripping out the shadows, revealing the hidden and robbing the world of its mystery.

In a pleasing moment of syncronicity, upon arriving home, I ran across the following quotation from Robert Frank, the great Swiss/American photographer whose 1958 book The Americans gutted the American mythos of the 1950s, showing, over the course of only 83 images, that Americans were not contented suburbanites living the good life of the post-war boom but were something altogether darker and more interesting.  Frank, speaking about the rise of digital media, said in a recent interview:

There are too many images.  Too many cameras now.  We’re all being watched.  It gets sillier and sillier.  As if all action is meaningful.  Nothing is really all that special.  It’s just life.  If all moments are recorded, then nothing is beautiful and maybe photography isn’t an art anymore.  Maybe it never was.

The Americans: Parade — Hoboken, New Jersey (1955)

From a man who turned the everyday life of America as a corporate entity in a stunning work of art, from a man whose vision of America is as influential as that of Elliott Erwitt or Walker Evans, this is more a requiem for a lost aesthetic age than a mere criticism.

Turning our gaze outward, it is interesting to note that the late French cultural critic and philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote a good deal about the problem of overrepresentation and overdetermination in a media-saturated world, which he captured in his enigmatic  yet highly evocative phrase ‘microscopic pornography’.  He writes, ‘This is what we have forgotten in modernity: subtraction brings force, power is born of absence.  We have not stopped accumulating, adding, raising the stakes.  And because we are no longer capable of confronting the symbolic mastery of absence, we are now plunged in the opposite illusion, the disenchanted illusion of profusion’.[1] There is an argument to be made that Public Enemies takes this disenchanted illusion and transforms it into an aesthetic strategy, perhaps a historical-film analogy to contemporary horror film’s tendency to show too much, too be too generous in its telling.

Baudrillard extends his argument about this paradoxical poverty of excess into the larger world and implicitly argues that the world as we know it is too visible, too well known for our own good: We are no longer in a system of growth, but of excrescence and saturation, which can be summed up the fact that there is too much.  There is too much everywhere, and the system cracks up from excess’.[2] Ours is, in a word, a world of hyperdensity, one in which people suffer from ‘an over-proximity of all things, a foul promiscuity of all things which beleaguer and penetrate’.[3] Baudrillard employs a number of techniques, phrases and metaphors to describe and critique this situation.  At turns, he writes of a ‘sidereal era of boredom’ and of ‘horizontal madness’,[4] looking always to something better: ‘Let us hope the random universe outside smashes this glass coffin’.[5] In The Transparency of Evil, he links the increasing banality of the world to the effects of technology: ‘We have left the hell of other people for the ecstasy of the same, the purgatory of otherness for the artificial paradises of identity.  Some might call this an even worse servitude, but Telecomputer Man, having no will of his own, knows nothing of serfdom.  Alienation of man is a thing of the past: now man is plunged into a homeostasis by machines’.[6] For Baudrillard, the rise of information technologies, at best a paradoxical form of plenty, serves as a primary illustration of this tendency.  In In The Shadow of the Silent Majorities, he writes,

We are in a universe where there is more and more information, less and less meaning … Everywhere information is reputed to produce an accelerated circulation of meaning, a plus-value of meaning homologous to the economic plus-value which results from the accelerated notion of capital.  Information is given as creative of communication, and even if the wastage is enormous a general consensus would have it that there is in the total nonetheless a surplus of meaning, which is redistributed in all the interstices of the social fabric … We are all accomplices in this myth.  It is the alpha and omega of our modernity, without which the credibility of our social organisation would collapse.  Yet the fact is that it is collapsing, and for this very reason.  Just where we think that information is producing meaning, it is doing the exact opposite.[7]

Bringing this insight to bear on our ongoing discussion of the unofficial record of the modern, rationalised city, in a novel extension to his neo-Romantic urge to reenchant language, Baudrillard writes in praise of a familiar form of unofficial, symbolic language as part of his critique of the contemporary urban experience, which he sees increasingly dehumanising: ‘The urban city is also a neutralised, homogenised space, a space where indifference, the segregation of urban ghettos, and the downgrading of districts, races, and certain age groups are on the increase.  In short, it is the cut-up space of distinctive signs’.^[8] Baudrillard refers throughout his work to the practice of graffiti as a means of humanising the modern city, writing for example, ‘Graffiti covers every subway map in New York, just as the Czechs changed the names of the streets in Prague to disconcert the Russians: guerrilla action’.^[9] In his famed Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard compares graffiti in the subways to ‘Symbolic ritual of incision and marks’^[10] and makes explicit a theme in many of his works by writing, ‘Only the wounded body exists symbolically’.^[11] Here Baudrillard recalls forcefully Michel De Certeau’s enigmatic statement, ‘Haunted places are the only ones people can live in’.^[12]

In an age where technology allows us to strip more and more of the veneer off of the fundamental mysteries of the world, our films, like all of our art, would do well to remember this.

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[1] Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Interviews, Essays, trans. by Ames Hodges, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 2005), 114.

[2] Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact, trans. by Chris Turner (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 191.

[3] Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, trans. by Bernard and Caroline Schutze (New York: Semiotext(e), 1987), 27.

[4] Baudrillard, Conspiracy, 109.

[5] Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End, trans. by Chris Turner (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 88.

[6] Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, trans. by James Benedict (London: Verso, 1993), 58-59.

[7] Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities or the End of the Social, trans. by Paul Foss, John Johnston, Paul Patton and Andrew Berardini (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007),99-100.

[8] Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. by Iain Hamilton Grant (London: Sage, 1993), 76.

[9] Baudrillard, Symbolic, 81.

[10] Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. by Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1981), 112.

[11] Baudrillard, Simulacra, 114. He calls back to archaic societies with this image of the marked body: ‘The savages knew how to use the whole body … in tattooing, torture, initiation – sexuality was only one of the possible metaphors of symbolic exchange, neither the most significant, nor the most prestigious, as it has become for us in its obsessional and realistic reference, thanks to its organic and functional character’. Baudrillard, Simulacra, 115.

[12] Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, vol. 1, trans. by Steven Rendell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 108.

The Unofficial Record/The Haunted City (Western Europe)

Tags

Europe, Hauntings, Unofficial Record

Furthering our discussion of the unofficial record of the modern cityscape, we move out past the borders of our own fair Dunedin and out into the wider world.  For your viewing pleasure, a few photographs of the unofficial city in the European context.

Brussels, Belgium. Original 35mm photograph ©2002 by Eric Repphun.

This is a personal favourite.  Though this may betray my neo-Romantic tendencies, there is something immensely comforting to see these two shadow people take time for something as unnecessary as a kiss amidst the rubbish of contemporary living.

Lugano, Switzerland. Original 35mm photograph ©2002 by Eric Repphun.

Granada, Spain. Original 35mm photograph ©2002 by Eric Repphun.

London, UK. Original 35mm photograph ©2002 by Eric Repphun.

The fact that this last one was taken in sight of the National Gallery makes it all the more applicable, and all the more chilling.