CONTEXT: Postmodernism's Material Benefit to Society

When I tell people I'm a doctoral student in theology, with a particular interest in poststructuralism and queer theory, they have an inevitable follow-up question.

"What are you going to do with that?"

Sometimes it's asked with a detectable sneer, an undisguised contempt for the waste of a good brain in such an arcane discipline. Sometimes it's asked quizzically, with genuine puzzlement on the part of my interlocutor. Never is it something I want to be asked.

I mean, there are only three possible answers, right?

1. Ordination (and that one is clearly out, if you've known me for five minutes).
2. Academia.
3. "No idea. HAHA oh god you're right, I'm wasting my life, let me switch to STEM despite not having studied any science since the age of 15."

It's the people who seem to be hoping for answer 3 who really bug me. There's a broad cultural trend here in the US toward the devaluing of humanities and especially of anything with a postmodern bent. I think it's part of a depressing economism undergirding US society (even more so than UK society, in my experience): if something doesn't have an immediately apparent material benefit, people genuinely can't comprehend why you would do it.

But the fact is, postmodernism does have a material benefit, if we would only apply it. The primary lesson of postmodernism is still what it was in 1967: il n'y a pas de hors-texte. Detractors use Derrida's words to dismiss deconstruction, poststructuralism, and the whole project of postmodernism as sophistry, caricaturing our work as immaterial language games; but the point is not "there is nothing outside the text," but "there is nothing outside context."

(Yes, there's a not inconsiderable irony in the fact that a statement about the supreme importance of context is so often taken out of context.)

The lesson of postmodernism is: Everything we do, say, and think is historically and contextually contingent -- profoundly, radically so. Is that the same thing modernism was trying to say? Kind of yes; but we're trying to say it in ever new ways, because clearly the lesson hasn't stuck.

For example, I woke up yesterday to this infuriating story: "Men and women's brains are 'wired differently.'" The BBC, of all things, recites a new iteration of the same tired neurosexist hogwash that was so comprehensively debunked in Cordelia Fine's wonderful book Delusions of Gender. It's terrible science and terrible reporting on science. It's cissexist, it's reductionist, and it's just utter BS.

My criticisms are ideological, of course. That's a term lobbed at postmodernists by detractors who like to think of themselves as unbiased viewing subjects who coolly take in all the scientific evidence before forming a judgment based on the facts. What these small-o objectivists don't realize is that this is an ideology too. It's more insidious, because it's an ideology that disguises itself as an objective view-from-nowhere. Feminists have long been aware that there is no view-from-nowhere, and to claim otherwise is an at best disingenuous, at worst nakedly malicious perpetuation of oppression.

The gift of postmodernism is epistemological self-awareness. Everything we think we know as an objective, timeless truth is radically contextual, and postmodernism is the practice of constant vigilance, of consistent suspicion of truth-claims.

"Men and women's brains are 'wired differently.'" There are so many profoundly contextual assumptions packed into that short headline: that "men" and "women" are clearly definable, discrete categories; that there is meaningful difference between men and women, rather than wide variation among all people; that the wiring of the brain tells us anything useful about human personalities; that brain wiring is predetermined and perhaps immutable; that there's a "right" way to be a man or a woman; etc. etc.

And there are so many real-world injustices that are perpetuated by the uncritical parroting of this ideology. The murder of trans women, the wage gap, the war on reproductive freedom -- none of this takes place in a void. It's all a part of the context within which it's seen as acceptable to report cognitive bias as scientific fact.

Postmodernism is not a disconnected, immaterial, ivory-tower discipline that's all about proving how clever you are. It's a tool for justice, and it matters.

Deconstruction and Taylor Swift's 'Red'

Do you remember the first time you heard Taylor Swift's ubiquitous single “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”? I do. After reattaching my mandible, I laughed until I cried, and then listened to it eight more times in a row.

So, naturally, when the album dropped this week, I just had to give it a spin. Okay, a bunch of spins. And it is my contention that Taylor Swift's new album is a remarkable work of smart, self-aware, post-structuralist deconstruction.

This is what a post-structuralist looks like.

How does Taylor Swift's new album enact the destabilizing process of deconstruction? Let me count the ways:

1. It's called Red. Obviously, this harks back to King Crimson's classic 1974 prog-rock masterpiece of the same name. By recalling a landmark record of cerebral, instrument-heavy progressive rock, Swift teases the listener with evocations of a style of music quite unlike her own, perhaps inviting us to reconsider whether there is really so much difference between seventies prog and aughts country-pop. (We also are reminded of Krzyzstof Kiéslowski's Trois couleurs: Rouge, a film which focuses on the French Revolutionary ideal of fraternité and has been described as an “anti-romance,” thus hinting at the record's deconstruction of romantic categories.)

2. Self-awareness. In the second verse of “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” Swift sings about a lover who copes with fights by “hid[ing] away […] with some indie record that's much cooler than mine.” The way she sings it, you can positively hear her rolling her eyes. Similarly, in the impossibly infectious “22,” there's a laugh-out-loud spoken-word moment as Swift sings, “This place is too crowded, too many cool kids,” and a voice in the background asks, “Who's Taylor Swift anyway? Ew.” Swift is well aware of her general perception as deeply uncool, and she's not afraid to laugh at both herself and her haters, breaking the fourth wall in endlessly recursive ways.

Swift also displays a strong self-awareness of the public scrutiny of her romantic decisions, and the fact that she is perhaps most famous for writing songs about breakups. “I Knew You Were Trouble” is fairly self-explanatory, and could be a sequel to “22”: “You look like bad news – I gotta have you.” There's a degree of maturity here, a sense of taking responsibility for one's own decisions while still lamenting the more regrettable consequences thereof.

3. Self-contradiction. From start to finish, Red is shot through with ironies and contradictions. Here are just a few hand-picked examples:

• In “22,” Swift sings about “dancing like we're 22.” Of course, Swift is 22 (holla at a fellow '89 baby! – though the Berlin Wall was still up when I was born, and had fallen by the time Taylor Swift entered the world), so these words seem puzzling until you remember that she's been in the public eye since she was 17. The years since high school, which I spent studying and privately figuring out my many issues, are the years Taylor Swift spent growing up very publicly and documenting it all in song. No wonder it takes a special occasion to make her feel like an ordinary 22-year-old.
• “I Almost Do” addresses an ex-lover for whom the singer still has feelings. These feelings are expressed through a striking inversion of the expected order of events. To tell an ex that every time you almost call them, you don't, would have the nuance of a kiss-off, an assertion of proud singledom; Swift sings instead, “Every time I don't, I almost do.” The hysteron proteron stresses the strangeness of this phrasing, which is much more memorable than its inverse, and highlights the singer's understanding that her feelings make no sense.
• On its own, “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” is rich with irony: everything about the song, but especially the gratuitous “ever”s in the chorus and the repeated verbal tic “like” in the spoken-word break, suggests that the singer doth protest too much, and will very likely get back together with the song's addressee. This idea is heightened by the song's placement in the album's running order – in between the wistful longings for an ex expressed in “I Almost Do,” and the bubbly love song “Stay Stay Stay.” The segue from the closing “We are never ever getting back together” into “I'm pretty sure we almost broke up last night” raises intriguing questions: Are these songs addressed to different lovers? To the same lover at different stages of the relationship? Or is it that they simply are, coexisting in the post-structuralist tension of self-contradiction and inviting a neverending cornucopia of interpretive responses?

In short, this is a record of which Foucault and Derrida would be proud, and I strongly urge you to at least listen to the three standout tracks – “I Knew You Were Trouble,” “22,” and “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” – and to consider the multiplicity of hermeneutic possibilities as well as the layers of deconstructive tensions contained therein.

On Writing

Historically, speech has been privileged over writing.

Plato said writing weakens the memory, ruining true reminiscence and true wisdom.

Socrates said writing is static, etiolated, defenseless.

Rousseau blamed writing for isolation, domination, and inequality.

Bergson said writing is dull, empty, dead.

They all thought spoken discourse was the site of real meaning. Speech is the genuine, immediate, meaningful expression of interiority – the true way of bridging the fundamental isolation of one human from another. Writing is exterior, passionless, hopelessly distanciated from both reader and writer.

(I'm cribbing all this from Ricoeur's Interpretation Theory, btw, chapter 2: “Speaking and Writing”.)

We're living in an age where the distinction between speech and writing has been thoroughly blurred. (I dedicate all my Facebook chat logs to you, Derrida.) In fact, so much of our “spoken” discourse is now written or in some way recorded – on an almost daily basis I have conversations via text message and Facebook chat, and I don't even remember the last time I used my cell phone to call someone – that maybe it's a whole new category of discourse. People are discussing this, and I hope with a bit of time and effort on JSTOR and at the university library I can find a lot more stuff on the philosophy of internet-age discourse (recommendations are always welcome, friends!).

That said... writing is still my primary mode of discourse.

Writing isn't just the fact of putting words down on page/screen. It's a whole way of thinking. I write when my pen meets the paper and when my fingers strike the keyboard, but I also write when I construct passages of text in my head (whether they wind up actually written down or not).

In writing I can express myself without the impediments of physicality. In writing, no one expects me to decode all the mystifying subtleties of body language and facial expressions, and no one imputes to me implications I did not intend based on such subtleties that I was unknowingly expressing. In writing, no one will call me out for mumbling, or confuse me with an unexpected question, or look at me funny because I missed a social cue.

Writing is something I know. Writing is something I am comfortable with. Writing is something I feel I can control.

In writing I have time to pause, to reflect, to choose the right words. Writing slows me down, forces me to be self-critical – not, of course, that my written discourse is free of error and bullshit; but it's measurably more so than my spoken discourse. In effect, speaking merely voices my thoughts: writing shapes them.

The Gospel of the Living Dead

I just read a book called Gospel of the Living Dead, in which theologian Kim Paffenroth analyzes five great zombie movies (Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead 1978, Day of the Dead, Dawn of the Dead 2004, and Land of the Dead) from a Christian perspective. Though he stops short of making this explicit, Paffenroth traces a through-narrative of the four Romero films that pretty clearly mirrors the trajectory of Jesus' death and resurrection.

A crucial theme of Romero's first four Dead films, and something very few of his disciples have ever picked up on, is the development of the zombies. Night of the Living Dead presents the ghouls as nothing more than the mindless flesh-eaters we all know and fantasize about shooting; Dawn begins to hint that there is something more to them than just the cannibalistic instinct; Day portrays a zombie beginning to develop rudimentary skills and basic emotional ties; and by Land of the Dead the zombies have their own more or less functional city alongside the humans. Paffenroth reads the movies as increasingly optimistic, traveling from the utter bleakness of Night's wonderfully nihilistic ending to a degree of hopefulness for human/zombie coexistence by the end of Land.

This also is pretty much how I read the crucifixion and resurrection.

Consider: the death and descent of the zombie uprising, with all the hellishness that entails, is the very thing that undoes materialistic, capitalistic, kyriarchal society – Romero is famous for his fierce social critique, and Paffenroth does a fine job of unpacking the films' criticisms of racism, sexism, class inequality, rampant consumerism, and so on – and ultimately allows for the rebuilding of a better world. Now this could be read in the traditionally eschatological way (there's a reason we call it zombie apocalypse), but I prefer a non-eschatological theology that sees this death-and-resurrection narrative as the narrative of the daily taking up of the cross.

Redemption only comes through the utmost suffering. The zombies, like all of society, must lose their souls in order to regain them. They die to self in order to be reborn as a new community. Only by losing our lives can we gain life; only by dying could Jesus defeat death.

Compare Mark C. Taylor's Erring, a “postmodern a/theology” which declares the post-Hegel world to be a world without God, self, history, or book. These four concepts are dead, and something new must be built in their place – something radically new: an erring, mazing, de/constructive, relational freeplay that does not resort to oversimplifications or hierarchized oppositions. Something, in fact, rather like human/zombie coexistence.

I've never understood why Nietzsche's “God is dead” pronouncement shocked anyone. I mean, what do Christians believe happened on the cross? Isn't the crucifixion really the moment that kills God, self, history, and book; that kills the transcendental signified, the ultimate referent, the Logos? And isn't it only by this death that it can rise again, new and different and wonderfully strange?

Fictioneering #1: It Looked Like Spilt Milk

This is the book that made me a reader and a writer. Long before I learned to read, this was my favorite book and I knew it by heart. I'm going to spoil the shit out of it, so if you want to experience the finest picture book in the English language as it was meant to be experienced, hie thee to eBay, and don't read the rest of this post until you've enjoyed It Looked Like Spilt Milk in a pure, unsullied state.

So, let's talk spilt milk. The book, which I will describe in detail for those of you too Philistine or cash-strapped to follow my advice from the previous paragraph, is magnificent in its simplicity. On a uniform background of rich cyan blue appear white figures, alongside text that both identifies and unidentifies them: “Sometimes it looked like spilt milk. But it wasn't spilt milk.”

That's some proto-Magritte shit right there. If it looked like spilt milk, but it wasn't spilt milk, what the hell was it? A picture on the page, a shadow on the wall of the cave; ceci n'est pas un pipe (and, bearing in mind Freud's considerably greater credibility in literary theory than in psychoanalysis, does spilt milk not share the Freudian connotations of pipe?).

As the book progresses, the disorienting sense of deconstruction intensifies. The forms on the page shift – it looked like a rabbit, an ice cream cone, a great horned owl (my favorite, and my father still delights in mimicking my toddler's rendition of the words “great horned owl”) – but the unidentification remains constant: it wasn't, it wasn't, it wasn't, and before long the repetition, both verbal and visual, reduces all the forms to the abstract interplay of white on blue. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. (Following Iser's concept of blanks in the text allowing for reader-author interplay, it's particularly significant that it's the changing forms that are the white of the blank page whereas the unchanging background is inked-in blue.)

The book also provides an excellent introduction to the Derridean concept of différance (sorry, this is just getting Frencher and Frencher). In Derridean semiotics, to oversimplify appallingly, meaning lies in the relationship between signifier and signified; just so, in It Looked Like Spilt Milk, the story lies in the relationship between the signified (whatever it is that is the subject of the book, the repeatedly un-/misidentified “it”) and the assorted signifiers that are applied and then immediately disavowed.

In fact, as well as demonstrating the gulf between signifier and signified – between language and reality – the book can also be read as an affirmation of larger ineffables. What is “like” many things, but is not actually any of those things? Why, any great indescribable of human existence. Pictures, texts, music, art, creativity, love, very God.

In this instance, “It” is revealed as – have you guessed it? (if so, you're not a toddler) – “just a cloud in the sky”. From such mundanities comes the sublime: from words come texts, from ink come pictures, from a cloud come all the forms in this book. Free association with other things “in the sky” (pie, castles, Lucy) causes me to read the cloud as a symbol for the human imagination, and so to see the story as open-ended, inviting the reader to keep mutating the cloud, and thence the story, into every form ey can think of.

Furthermore, the book's title offers another affirmation of the human power of imagination. “Spilt Milk”, as well as being titular, is the only form to be repeated in the book, appearing both times in places of prominence as the first and last incarnations of the cloud. The trite lesson of “things aren't always what they seem” is deepened by the proverbial implications of “spilt milk”: what may initially appear disastrous may, with imagination, be construed as any number of exciting possibilities, and thus shouldn't be cried over. This story affirms not only the power of creativity but also the uniquely human concept of crisitunity.

“Amusing intellecrobatics,” you are perhaps thinking, “but it's still just a frickin' PICTURE BOOK.” Not so: it's a text that has been imprinted in my mind since before my skull was fully formed, and you can't carry that around without powerful ramifications. This, I insist with my tongue still half-out my cheek, is the book that first made me a fictioneer.

Derrida, Christ, and the meaning of the text

Derrida hurts my brain. Luckily, Yahoo Answers is there to help. Sally H asks:

When I think of the word 'dog' and have a concept of a dog in my mind - say a dog I saw yesterday, why is this not a correlation between signifier and signified for Derrida? Why is meaning deferred from signifier to signifier and where does this leave the signified? After all I still have the concept in my mind? No Derrida haters please, just a simple explanation. Thankyou x

I find this quite amusing, because my experience with Yahoo Answers until now was limited to mockery on the Never SFW Something Awful, where the questions (and indeed all SA content ever) tended less toward complex philosophy and more toward racism and comprehensive misunderstandings of how sex works.

My favorite answer to Sally H’s query begins “well, i am a ‘hater’” and ends “this guy has always confused the crap out of me.” However, if you want a decent explanation of some of Derrida’s thought, you’re probably better off looking elsewhere on the web.

How about Theoretical Semiotics on the Web? Semiotics for Beginners? There’s really no way to summarize Derrida’s ideas on semiotics. You have to get into Saussure, Plato, Lévi-Strauss; logocentrism, structuralism, deconstructionism; a whole host of complicated concepts and even more complicated chains of thought.

Like most of philosophy and literary criticism, Derrida’s theories focused on the relationship between language and thought. It’s a good place to start if you’re going to study anything in depth. Perhaps it’s just scholars making everything complicated as usual, but there’s an astounding wealth of theories about what the relationship is between language and thought, and how it works. I don’t begin to have an understanding of all these theories, but I do know that it often seems to come down to a fundamental, yet curiously modern, opposition: that of universalism vs. relativism.

Of course, I’m simplifying everything hugely, because going into detail would tax my brain beyond its limits this late at night, but it seems that the Christian is often a moral universalist, while the feminist is a moral relativist. As a Christian, one is supposed to subscribe to the notion of absolute truth; but it doesn’t take much critical thinking to reveal how many of our absolute notions are in fact the product of our culture and upbringing. Two thousand years ago, Pilate asked Jesus, “What is truth?” (John 18:38), and people have been asking him the same question ever since. He never answered.

I’m still figuring out my personal beliefs on the issue of universalism vs. relativism. My first two years as a Christian were spent at a conservative evangelical church, and I knew going in that I was neither conservative nor evangelical. Sometimes it feels as though life would be a lot easier if I were. Conservative evangelical Christians study the Bible a lot, but they do it from a perspective of comfortable universalism. To them, the text comes straight from God, and it is the highest authority.

To me, this viewpoint fails to take into account all the complexities of textual interpretation. To claim that the text is the highest authority implicitly assumes that the text has meaning independent of any reader’s interpretation – that there is a single correct reading of the text – and moreover that this meaning can be discovered.

I suppose I want to believe that. As things stand, I certainly don’t believe it of any text other than the Bible. As for the Bible itself, well, I’m not sure.

Christ is the text. He is the logos (John 1:1, 14). Perhaps his divinity – God’s divinity – lies in his being the one text that does have meaning independent of any reader. Perhaps that’s one definition of what God is.