The O of Giotto

15 Tuesday May 2012

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There is a great story about the Renaissance painter Giotto di Bondone (1267-1337) who is said to have won a Vatican contract from Pope Benedictus XII by submitting nothing more than a perfectly executed hand-drawn circle. The circle became famously known as the “O of Giotto”, and remains to this day part of artistic lore. But it is not famous for its realism; realism, as an aesthetic pursuit, was not yet a virtue in Giotto’s time, even if Giotto did much to usher that virtue in. It is famous, rather, for its symbolism: the idea of perfection. The perfect circle, we know, has had a long history of expressing the perfect, the ideal, and thus the divine. Giotto’s O becomes emblematic of a Renaissance obsession with symmetry, with the aesthetics of geometry, with the unity of the whole, and with the spiritual features of the circle. And we can see this worked out in the many Roman arches and halos that Giotto painted for churches and ecclesiastical patrons. But it was more. It also became emblematic of the human aspiration to master an ideally integrated world, one in which the divine imprint on the created order not only could be perceived with the eye and the mind, but also – and this the Renaissance championed most expressly – could be replicated by an aesthetic gesture. This gesture, perfectly rendered, is what so obviously endeared Giotto to the Pope, and allowed Giotto his celebrated career. His O was an immaculate sign of a higher order – indeed, the highest.

But of course, this side of the Enlightenment, and with all our scientific advance, we have become more skeptical. We are first compelled to ask whether there is ever such a thing as a perfect circle in the natural world. And even if we admit the possibility, we preclude the chance it was made by a human hand, at least one unaided by instrument. But we go further, and ask can any symbolism be pushed beyond the platitudinous use we still find, say, within a wedding ceremony, or with such phrases as “the winner’s circle”. The question is quickly dismissed if we try to extend it to more ideal, or heavenly, spheres. For us moderns, the symbolic ideal of a perfect circle has become antiquarian, and we see it for what it always was: a doctrinal construct, a theological hope, a philosophical dream, or some form of a utopian wish. In the pre-modern West, the perfect circle found its representational power within a large schema of unity and oneness. In such a schema, which went by the name of a cosmology, the circle was a pure symbol of the one true divine perfection, not only reflected in the heavens and their movements, but also resident as the ultimate Sovereign in those heavens. So that by drawing freely his circle, Giotto proved not only his technical prowess but his theological acumen. But with the coming of modernity, we lost that ruling sense of one, or the One. It fell victim to irreparable division. It is not just that, in the Renaissance, the perfect circle was applied to humanity, as in da Vinci’s famous Vitruvian drawings. Nor was it simply that the Catholic Church lost its catholicity in the upheavals of the Reformation, and in the bloody wars that swept across Europe in their consequence. It was also that the true and perfect circle was finally seen for what it was: a spiritualized aesthetic.

The development of modern science had much to do with this shift in perspective. In the 17th century, Johannes Kepler, for example, a man who was not without a deep sense of the spiritual, wrote with great implications for the future understanding of circular movement, and any attendant symbolism:

For if it was only a question of the beauty of the circle, the spirit would decide with good reason for it, and the circle would be suitable for all bodies, principally for celestial bodies, since bodies participate in quantity, and the circle is the most beautiful form of quantity. But since it was necessary to rely not only on the spirit but also on natural and animal faculties to create motion, these faculties followed their own inclination, and they were not accomplished according to the dictates of spirit, which they did not perceive, but through material necessity. It is therefore not astonishing that these faculties, mixed together, did not fully reach perfection.*

Kepler, of course, figured for us this “material necessity” in the form of the ellipse. And to arrive at the ellipse we must distort the circle. The etymology of Greek ellipsis already shows us the radical consequence: a “coming up short”, most egregiously of perfection itself. Only a spiritualised circle can remain purely whole, as a visionary reality. As a factual reality, the phenomenal circle remains bound to “quantity”. That is, it goes beyond the singular, the unity, the idea of ultimate oneness. As Kepler says, with ramifications he probably did not intend, spirit and nature divide, and therefore so does the symbol, as the sign is rent from any divine signified. In modernity, the circle can no longer point to the One, or the One is no longer at its centre. “The centre cannot hold”, wrote Yeats in this oft-repeated quote from his “The Second Coming” poem.

In an earlier blog I had written about the slow but inexorable encroachment of the concept of nothing into our modern sensibility. I can now say that the coming of this nothing is not without its own symbols. Yet ironically, its most prevalent and persistent symbol is one that it has appropriated from its ostensible opposite: the circle that had come to represent the divine perfection in its wholeness, unity and oneness, virtues that so impressed Benedictus XII in the O of Giotto. The “O” becomes hollowed out by modernity, we might say, and in that hollowing arises the nothing that is “zero”. It is not that the symbol of “zero” entered our thinking by means of some modern form of numerology. (The symbolic notation of zero has a very different history, as we’ll see in my next blog.) It was rather that the circle had lost its symbolic sense of unity and wholeness, even in the very sphere where it once held sovereignty, the heavens. The appearances – deviation from circular perfection – no longer needed to be saved, because now science could account for them efficaciously and comprehensively. But the knock-on effects back down on earth, the material necessities that rendered the divine ideal lost to the centrifugal pull of a space emptied of cosmological unity, led to a breaking apart of the wholeness on every level. Division entered our world to a degree not seen in a millennium. And it continues to reside in our present world as a commonplace. Today we have many circles, many centres, many Os. Like Kepler’s ellipse, the O is no longer one, no longer truth with a single and perfect centre, no longer One. Its spirit has absconded, chased away by the material purpose of scientific or instrumental rationality. We must do our calculations, and we must do them now with a zero that is both functionally and conceptually necessary. We can still marvel at Giotto’s O in our museums and churches. But we marvel at a bygone theology, as much as a bygone aesthetic. The question for us now is how, in the many Os we might draw, and in the many circles we form on a daily basis, we negotiate our way across the empty spaces and the deep chasms they inevitably bring into our view. Yet Giotto’s legacy is not all lost: he at least tells us that something, even if that something is a “nothing”, remains there for our creation.

 

* Johannes Kepler, Gesammelte Werke, eds. W. Von Dyck, M. Caspar, et al. (Munich: Beck, 1938 et seq.), Vol.7, p. 330, as translated by Fernand Hallyn in The Poetic Structure of the World: Copernicus and Kepler (New York: Zone Books, 1990), p.213.

 

A week with Professor Naomi Goldenberg

27 Friday Apr 2012

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This week the Critical Religion Research Group has hosted Prof. Naomi Goldenberg from the University of Ottawa.

We have organised a staff/postgraduate seminar for her in Stirling, taken her to Aberdeen for a conference organised by Dr Trevor Stack (of the Centre for Citizenship, Civil Society and the Rule of Law) on “Modernity and the Category of Religion” (at which our own Drs Timothy Fitzgerald and Alison Jasper also spoke), and organised a public lecture for her in London. There were also a considerable number of engagements and interactions with colleagues and postgraduate students that took place apart from these public appearances.

There has been considerable interest in her proposal that religions can be thought of as “vestigial states”, and we look forward to her further development of this work. There are various audio items relating to these themes available on our website. This should enable further dissemination of her ideas.

In the meantime, we would like to thank Prof. Goldenberg most heartily for her incredible energy and engagement this week: her readiness to debate so freely and so profoundly with us and so many other people in many different contexts, her graciousness with regard to the punishing schedule we organised for her, and her warm support for our work in the context of the Critical Religion Research Group – as well as her great sense of humour that encouraged and enriched us throughout the week.

We also want to record our sincere thanks to Simon Barrow of Ekklesia, our partner organisation, for his great engagement and support of this week – he has enabled so much to happen for us in relation to Professor Goldenberg’s visit, and we are immeasurably grateful to him. Ekklesia co-sponsored the public lecture in London, and suggested Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church as a venue, who welcomed us warmly and to whom we are also grateful.

There are a number of our postgraduate students who have helped with promotion and publicity, teaching cover and various other tasks: in particular, Sean Frye, Shani Zour and Chloe Erdmann deserve our thanks. Finally, for much “behind the scenes” support and assistance, we are immensely grateful, as ever, to our wonderful secretarial team, and in particular Jane Barber-Fleming, without whom so many things we have sought to do for this week would simply not have happened.

Timothy Fitzgerald, Andrew Hass, Alison Jasper, Michael Marten

Female Genius

16 Monday Apr 2012

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“Women today are far better off than women in the past. It’s time they shut up and stopped making so much fuss!”

Many things have changed for the better over the last couple of centuries, but the evidence that women are especially at risk simply because they are women is still available on a daily basis: In 2009-10, for example, about 9 incidents of domestic violence a day were recorded by the Central Scotland Police Force. Of these reported incidents – to say nothing of those that remain unreported – 88% were perpetrated by men against women.

A common response to this kind of evidence is to shift the discussion into comparisons. The suggestion is that much worse violence against women exists in “war-torn Africa” or “Islamic communities” or with people in “fundamentalist sects.” The thought that sexist structures that can breed violence on this scale, continue to characterise even so called progressive societies is quickly displaced, in this example, by a convenient connection between ‘religion’ and patriarchal oppression. In other words, progressive societies are seen to be essentially secular.

Of course, this represents a genuine dilemma for feminist theologians and critical scholars of religion because the case against Christianity is compelling and as feminists, they generally have no desire absolutely to deny this. And yet, dismissing Christianity simply as something to be thankfully consigned to history, means consigning all the achievements of women who have identified themselves as Christian alongside it; from this perspective, all Christian women are victims if not collaborators. Yet in its effects, this approach hardly differs at all from previous attempts by men to deny the achievements of women because of their gender.

To address this dilemma we first have to go back to the relationship between feminisms and the Western Enlightenment. This movement, celebrating the power of human reason to explain and harness the forces of nature, gave a powerful impetus towards feminist thinking by severing the connection between social order and a patriarchal God; without God the Father to give a warrant for the whole hierarchical order of being including women’s subservience to men, there was no reason why women should any longer buy into the myth of male supremacy. On the other hand, the key architects of the Enlightenment were far less successful in taking the divinity out of the human male and all things masculine, including a masculine distain for Christianity as a dangerous and irrational (feminine) superstition.

Moving back to the 1970s and 80s, feminist biblical critics, were still struggling to resolve the dilemma even as they worked to apply second wave feminist theory to Christian scripture. They were stll caught up in the double bind; struggling to draw attention to biblical women and women readers in a positive way, whilst at the same time trying not to let either patriarchal texts or the guild of (male) biblical scholars that interpreted them off the hook. Thus their readings of the bible recorded the presence of biblical women, yet very often these accounts focussed on the Bible’s “texts of terror” – its stories of casual violence, its reduction of women to mere objects or to the empty “otherness” that defined a real male presence. In other words they often ended up playing more strongly on the sense in which Christianity was unsympathetic to women than on the sense in which women might justly take their places as its crafters, sustainers and reformers. Yet, looking at the situation more positively, this was exactly what those scholars were doing in trying to address a complicated set of issues that didn’t respond easily to one approach. Sometimes in the hard-won pleasures of dialogue with these problematic structures they did manage, as writers and readers, to overcome all the built-in disadvantages with which they began as women in the male normative context of Church and academy.

In the last sixty years, there has been a vigorous growth in the kind of work that focuses on the lives of women. And, having so many more narratives about women to draw on, our imaginations are fed and our view of what women can do is dramatically widened. In this way, the scenario with which this piece began is also sharply challenged because we can begin to show that the contrast between the situation of women in the past and in the present is nothing like as polarised or final as this suggests.

Arguably, over the centuries, women have found many ways to negotiate problematic structures such as Christian patriarchy, crafting courageous, creative and at some level, pleasurable forms of engagement without necessarily rejecting it outright. Following the philosopher Julia Kristeva, I would call these women ‘female geniuses’ and have written about four such female geniuses in a forthcoming book Because of Beauvoir: Christianity and the Cultivation of Female Genius to be published this year by Baylor University Press. Look out for it!

Gender and the Vestigial State of Religion

10 Tuesday Apr 2012

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This is a guest posting by Prof. Naomi Goldenberg, introducing some of the themes she will be addressing when she visits the UK in late April 2012.

 

My interest in critical religion originates in my wish to restart the radical feminist work that used to be done in the subfield of “women and religion.”  For years I had been attending academic meetings in which scholars who spoke about the topic saw themselves as representatives of their own traditions or as apologists for traditions that were the subjects of their research.  Far-ranging critiques of sexist ‘religious’ beliefs, policies and practices, such as that of Mary Daly, had fallen out of favor.  In its place was a quieter, more respectful spirit of reform.  ‘Religious’ history was searched and mined for accounts of women who could be seen as clever agents within their traditions, as heroines who made the best of what was at hand, and as creative interpreters who found sustenance and inspiration in the seemingly oppressive texts and rites of their ‘faiths.’  Although the field of women and religion was flourishing in both divinity schools and secular universities, I was losing interest in an enterprise that I thought had abandoned the objective of political critique and embraced what I consider to be an attitude of advocacy for traditional thought and behavior.

I now think that feminist critical analysis in “women and religion” was blunted because the category of religion was not interrogated.  While deconstruction of concepts and politics related to gender and sex continues to foster exciting theory with significant social impact, religion itself remains largely an under-theorized given.  I believe that this tacit reification of  ‘religion’ works both to undermine women’s recent political achievements and to hinder further advancement.

Consider just these two examples: 1. From the U.S.: Citing the right to ‘religious’ freedom, Republican candidate Rick Santorum proposed allowing states to ban women’s access to contraception, a right won by means of court decisions in the late 1950’s.  Similarly, both Santorum and Mitt Romney, the front-runner for the nomination, objected to the new US health care law’s funding of legal abortions on the grounds that it could cause employers’ to compromise their religious beliefs.  Several newly-enacted state laws now restrict women’s access to health care related to reproduction on religious grounds.

And 2. – From Afghanistan: According to reports from the Guardian News Service, in March of this year, the Karzai government issued a statement asserting that women are subordinate to men, should not mix with men in work or education and must always have a male guardian when they travel.  The statement thus suggests that the Afghan constitution that enshrines the equality of men and women is flawed from a religious perspective.  Furthermore, violence against women as long as it is “sharia compliant” appears to be condoned.  Such news supports the opinion of Fawzia Koofi, the brave woman campaigning to be Afghanistan’s first female president, who says that David Cameron and Barack Obama are supporting the Karzai government in talks with people who want to bribe the Taliban by limiting women’s freedom using ‘religious’ justifications.

By proposing that religions be considered vestigial states at least in regard to law and public policy, I hope to suggest one way of countering arguments that restrictions on women’s rights and freedoms for ‘religious’ purposes deserve more respect and attention than if such limits were to be put forward for merely ‘political’ reasons.  Throughout most of history, governmental organizations have been based on masculine hegemony.  According to the argument I am advancing, when governments are displaced they can persist within contemporary states as ‘religions’ that maintain their patriarchal origins and character.  Since women’s challenges to male domination have only met with some success in recent times within fairly contemporary forms of statecraft, if earlier states known as ‘religions’ are allowed too much authority over domains such as ‘the family’ or ‘the home,’ women will be the losers.   The two examples from the US and Afghanistan provide support for this line of theory.

Media representations of ‘religion’ in the Middle East

26 Monday Mar 2012

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It is almost a truism to note that if the mainstream media is our only source of news regarding anything to do with religion (however that might be conceived) in the Middle East, or even the Middle East in general, we are in deep trouble.  Two acute reminders of this in the last week indicate to me just how problematic these things are.  Confusion about what is and what is not ‘religious’ is one of the key issues here.

The death on 17.3.12 of Pope Shenouda III, the leader for four decades of the Coptic Church, resulted in considerable confusion and demonstrable ignorance from many.  For example, an otherwise excellent Egypt correspondent for Al Jazeera, Evan Hill, put out this message on Twitter:

Shenouda’s house arrest in a desert monastery played a key role in defining the way he interacted with the political hierarchies and the importance he gave to monasticism.  Shenouda’s reluctance to criticise President Mubarak until shortly before his downfall is in part, no doubt, related to the fact that it was Mubarak who restored Shenouda to his former position, as I noted here.  Evan Hill, and Al Jazeera in general, are excellent sources of Middle East news – but this kind of thing does not reflect well on him or the network (though see my additional note below).

My second reminder concerned the BBC and UK broadcast news in general: on Thursday 23.3.12 I had the privilege of chairing an event for the Scottish Palestinian Forum at which Professor Greg Philo of the Glasgow University Media Group discussed the new book he and Mike Berry have written, More Bad News from Israel (2011) – a follow-up volume to their ground-breaking Bad News from Israel (2004).  The book covers UK TV news, and addresses the ignorance and imbalance in reporting that is anecdotally obvious to many, but substantiated with detailed statistical analysis by Philo, Berry and their team: even the audience at Thursday’s event, many of them already knowledgeable about the situation in the region and aware of the bias in the media, were shocked by some of the data that Philo discussed in his presentation and the questions afterwards.  Philo argued that a central issue is the failure to explain, or explain adequately, the context for news stories: the terms ‘military occupation’, ‘land expropriation’ and so on are hardly ever mentioned.  One of the most remarkable findings that emerged from the first edition of the book was that a significant number of people in the UK, from all socio-economic backgrounds, thought the Palestinians, not the Israelis, were the ones illegally occupying territory – an astonishing success on the part of the Israeli propaganda machine.

Of course, it is not only interesting to observe such bias and ignorance, but to ask where it originates.  After all, the Israeli government knows what it is doing, and has always done so: the issue of stolen land is key.  Philo cites Moshe Dayan in his book (and did so in his presentation), one of the key Israeli military figures in the early years of the conflict, who in 1956 at the funeral of an Israeli soldier famously said:

Let us not today fling accusation at the murderers. What cause have we to complain about their fierce hatred to us? For eight years now, they sit in their refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we turn into our homestead the land and villages in which they and their forefathers have lived.

This kind of discourse is almost completely absent in the contemporary news media in our country.  It is certainly not a part of the BBC or ITV; Channel 4 News is slightly better.  In part, Philo explained, this is because the media reframe the conflict in terms that distract from the core issues of occupation, irredentism and discrimination.  One part of this reframing is to put it in ‘religious terms’ – the most common being that this is a conflict of Muslims against Jews.  Of course, this not only ignores the Christian Palestinian population who suffer under the occupation as much as their Muslim neighbours, but it also makes the conflict seem irrational: the Israeli propaganda enterprise (led by the Israeli government’s Orwellian-sounding ‘National Information Directorate) helps to further the notion that there is an intrinsic, irrational hatred on the part of Muslims against Jews: that if only the Palestinians would stop firing rockets, the Israelis would not ‘need’ to take reprisal action. That the Israelis tend to be the ones to instigate each round of the conflagration is ignored: my students are shocked when I tell them that the 2009 attack on Gaza by Israel, dubbed ‘Cast Lead’, began the previous year when the Israelis initiated an attack on Gaza on the day of the US presidential election – of course, the world’s media did not notice!  Instead Palestinian rocket attacks are presented as ‘irrational’.  Whether we approve of the use of violence or not, they are anything but irrational: under international law, resistance to illegal occupation is permitted, including through the use of force, and the rockets are an expression of that resistance when few other avenues for resistance appear to have any effect on Israel’s ongoing dispossession of Palestinians.  There is, of course, a connection here to Naomi Goldenberg’s idea of religion as a vestigial state: if the conflict is about Muslims (a ‘religion’) against Jews (another ‘religion’) rather than Israelis oppressing Palestinians, it plays into the static and ahistorical nonsense propagated by the supporters of the ‘clash of civilisations’.

Such a reframing is in part, at least, a category error: not so much in that it wrongly ascribes the conflict to the ‘religious’ rather than the ‘political’ sphere – as much discourse has it – but in that it creates a distinction between these two as if they are opposing aspects of a self-contained and ontological binary.  We do not see such a distinction in other areas.  For example, economics correspondents reporting the UK budget last week explicitly discussed the party political consequences and not just the economic impact of the government’s decisions.  But the division between ‘religious affairs’ and ‘current affairs’ in media reporting is deeply problematic, and is surely in part a factor in Evan Hill’s ignorance about the profound importance of Shenouda’s relationship with Mubarak, as well as the distortions that emerge in reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  We need a media that not only has the courage to address issues appropriately – the BBC, for example, as a public service broadcaster, is legally obliged to discuss Palestinian and Israeli views – but that also understands the damage that is done to media reporting when distinctions are made that reinforce or reify category distinctions, rather than diminish or subvert them.

 

——

 

Additional note: I stated above that Al Jazeera is an excellent news service for the Middle East and global news.  There is one important caveat to this praise: it has significant failings in reporting on its immediate home turf.  Critical engagement with Qatar, or even near neighbours such as Bahrain, does not happen.  This is not unlike Russia Today: a serious news service for anything other than internal news about Russia.  It is notable, however, that the BBC’s failings extend beyond reporting on issues in the UK (a whole other issue!), but also to areas such as the Middle East.

The Archbishop Resigns

19 Monday Mar 2012

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What seems to have crystallised as the key to Archbishop Rowan Williams’ somewhat early resignation from his job as head of the global Anglican Communion is the issue of sexuality. Over the last ten years a great deal of heat and not much light has been generated around this question in Anglican circles. We have seen socially conservative Anglicans continue to realise and idolise the heteropatriarchal symbolism of traditional Christian theology while socially liberal Anglicans, in contrast, stress its prophetic nature at the same time remaining individualistic in their visions of freedom. African clergy sense the force of former colonial relationships at work in criticism of their stance on gay clergy and marriage, while gay Christians feel viciously stripped of their humanity and similarly betrayed. It is no wonder, that his latest attempt to promote the spirit of cooperation and the Gospel through a global covenant having failed, Rowan Williams felt a wish to move on. Reconciliation, in this context, seems an impossible task.

Yet as more than one commentator has noticed, an interesting fact about all this internal Anglican sound and fury is that it has continued to be focussed on essentially ‘domestic’ issues. Though Rowan Williams has certainly spoken out in the last ten years about economic questions and matters of foreign policy he has remained an outsider looking in; one generally well-respected person commenting from a largely personal perspective, rather than the head of the Church militant advising the prime minister on policy and expecting to be heard. Although the Roman Catholic Church is a far bigger affair, much the same can be said both of it and its leadership. As Professor Naomi Goldenberg said in this blog recently, even this limited role as social commentator is always at risk of ‘being delegitimated in relation to the category of religion’. In fact the fate of the Archbishop provides a good illustration of what she writes about vestigial states, caught up as he is in this acrimonious and most unloving dispute over custom and law pertaining to the ‘family’ both as a social institution and in relation to the Church’s own economy or inner arrangements.

To apply Professor Goldenberg’s analysis to this situation, Anglican Christianity, at one time, a fully integrated element of government, is now increasingly cordoned off from day to day influence by the deployment of the discursive category ‘religion’, that is defined in terms of its own insignificance in relation to the ‘secular’ state. Meantime and in some ways as a consequence of this cordoning off, the ideological character of the foregrounded and ‘secular’ state operates increasingly across the Western world by means of its own closed and self-referential system of economic and managerial justifications. Not really open to criticism, the secular state has acquired a normative status. So it is a matter of simple common sense that the Prime minister is not advised by an Archbishop guilty of ‘partisan posturing’ who should be cheered when he defends Christians but sent back to school when he suggests the Church might actually have something to say about social justice.

Applying Professor Goldenberg’s analysis, the Anglican church as a vestigial state will probably continue to be eager to take on ‘whatever social, cultural and/or managerial functions the recognized state cedes to them’. So the wrangling over gay bishops will probably continue. Perhaps it is a good thing that the Christian Churches as a whole do not function non-vestigially in British society any more, and certainly, for Archbishop Williams it must be something of a relief not to wield that kind of power and responsibility. At the same time, it is also important to recognise that just because it calls itself ‘secular’ this in itself does not exempt the British nation state from criticism of its own decidedly ideological stance on matters from the special relationship with the United States and the future of the NHS, to the role of ‘religion’. One has to ask, what is it about Christianity and the Christian Churches that our so-called ‘secular’ government is so keen to hide from sight?

 

An Argument for Thinking of Religions as Vestigial States

12 Monday Mar 2012

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This is a guest posting by Prof. Naomi Goldenberg, introducing some of the themes she will be addressing when she visits the UK in late April 2012.

 

My work at present is focused on developing the hypothesis that religions can be productively thought of as vestigial states.  I consider this to be one way of de-essentializing, demystifying and deconstructing the category of religion.  In general, the concept directs theory along two trajectories: one is the analysis of particular histories in which ‘religions’ are formed or solidified in distinction to ‘states’; another is a focus on classifications which current governments use to delineate spheres of power.  I understand that if the term vestigial state has any resonance, that it will be as a temporary, partial and provisional tool for building theory in critical religion.

My work draws on James Crawford’s discussion of what defines a state in the latest edition of The Creation of States In International Law (Oxford: 2006).  Although not without its critics, Crawford’s articulation of the contingencies attached to the idea of a ‘state’ remains an important touchstone in international law. I also refer to texts by Max Weber and Louis Althusser to make my argument that the control of violence is a basic tipping point between what I want to call a vestigial state and a fully empowered government.

Vestigial states tend to behave as once and future states.  They are always somewhat restive and are generally eager to take on whatever social, cultural and/or managerial functions the recognized state cedes to them.  For example, presently in contemporary nation states, categories of custom and law pertaining to the ‘family’ are considered proper spheres for ‘religious’ authority.  In contrast, economic policies and most forms of violence are currently placed outside of religious control.  Nevertheless, in some jurisdictions ‘domestic’ violence done in the name of religious practice is tolerated at times.  In general, whenever religions, i.e. vestigial states, claim rights in regard to police or military action, they risk being delegitimated in relation to the category of religion.  Thus, in regard to Islam, for example, terms such as ‘political Islam’ or ‘Islamist’ are invented to cordon off appropriate forms of Islam from those that contemporary nation-states consider inappropriate. I argue that Islam is in the process of being turned into a ‘religion’ – i.e. of being made ‘vestigial’ – within some contemporary nation states at the same time that it functions non-vestigially in other parts of the world.  Debates about Islam illustrate how ‘religion’ as a discursive category is employed as a means of control in Western democracies.

My hope is that scholars who specialize in particular historical periods and geographical regions might find the concept of vestigial state to be useful in a range of contexts.  Currently, I have a particular interest in the shrewd initiative by the Dalai Lama to separate his ‘political’ functions from his ‘religious’ ones by encouraging the democratic election of a political leader of the Tibetan people.  Thus is Tibetan Buddhism being constructed to conform ever more coherently with the category of ‘religion’ as a way of limiting the powers of future Dalai Lamas whom China will try to name and control.  In my terms, the Dalai Lama is defining himself as a leader of a vestigial state in order to create a separate sphere of ‘political’ leadership that might escape Chinese influence.

The hypothesis that religions be thought of as vestigial states works well when applied to Jewish history in a manner consonant with the work of Daniel Boyarin in Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Un. of Pa.: 2004) and Seth Schwartz in Imperialism and Jewish Society 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. (Princeton: 2001).  Boyarin argues that ‘Judaism’ as a religion is created over the centuries in dialogues with Christian theologians.  I argue that such discursive production is perhaps secondary to the machinations of state powers that had to deal with Jews as a conquered ethnic group within their jurisdictions.  Schwartz’ hypothesis that the village evolves as a ‘religious community’ within a state supports my argument that ‘religions’ arise as ways of granting attenuated powers to displaced governments.

Groups aspiring to have the status of ‘religions’ often use narratives that identify with former sovereignties both real and/or semi-fictional. Contemporary forms of Wicca, for example, posit an ancient history in which governments were organized according to the principles Wiccans now follow.  Thus, Wiccans might be seen as imagining their covens as vestigial embodiments of previous sovereign governments.

The nostalgic reference to a former deity or deities as a means of supporting current governmental power is a common theme in Western history and literature.  I draw on my background as a classicist to highlight this trope in the Theogony of Hesiod in regard to how the reign of the Titans is cited when the Olympians triumph over them.  I also mention Athena’s treatment of the Furies in Aeschylus’ Oresteia.  In both cases, although the term ‘religion’ is somewhat of an anachronism in ancient Greece, the succession of sovereignties is nevertheless marked by relegating former ruling orders to the status of a cult, i.e, a vestigial state.

Examples of the ritual citation of religious vocabulary as a way of authorizing so-called secular governments abound.  President Eisenhower’s move in 1954 to add the words “under God” to the US pledge of allegiance is one instance of how religion is conjured as a type of previous sovereignty on which present powers are based.

Conceptualizing religions as vestigial states has value for clarifying matters pertaining to supposed qualitative differences between ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ law.  According to my reasoning, such a distinction is more productively thought of as occurring between two forms of ‘states’ with markedly similar processes involving contingency, debate and compromise, something I will draw out further in my forthcoming presentations.

Simone de Beauvoir and Mary Daly: Impact or ‘Impact statements’?

21 Tuesday Feb 2012

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In the run up to the next round of assessment in UK Universities (the ‘Research Excellence Framework’ or REF, 2014) research is routinely being framed in terms of its ‘excellent impact’ as well as its academic value and viability. Impact is defined as the research’s ‘excellent’ contribution to national UK ‘growth, prosperity and well-being’.
To improve their chances of getting a slice from the £3billion pie of research funding available, researchers must be able to produce evidence of this ‘excellence’; completing ‘impact statements’ that show what they are doing has changed or influenced lives, with an emphasis on lives outside the world of Higher Education and with more than a nod in the direction of government policy on economic and social benefits. 20% of the value of research submissions in 2014 will be related to this kind of measureable impact.
Patti Lather, an American cultural critic situated in the field of education, connects this notion – being presented as a matter of common sense – that academic research needs to be measured on the basis of a calculation of economic and social benefit, with a ‘turn to policy’ detectable now over a number of years and closely related to ‘neoliberalism with its managerial and instrumental demands’ (Lather, Engaging Science: Policy from the side of the Messy 2010). Whether or not it is true that – aside from policy makers – people are widely demanding measurable indications of knowledge as a transferable or exchangeable product from Universities in the UK – it is clear that these Universities have also had a long and proud tradition in the past, of fostering the kind of critical impact that throws ‘common-sense’ notions – about the nature of women as inferior to men and gender more generally as irreducibly heterosexual, for example – out of the window.

At the moment, UK Universities still appear on the surface of things at least, to be relatively upbeat about ‘impact statements’. For example, Dr Nadine Lewycky, Arts Impact Officer at Warwick University said recently that many researchers are already making a real impact. She was employed at Warwick University to help academics identify new ways of building ‘impact’ into their research and in the podcast, she claims all she was really doing in many cases, was helping her academic colleagues find the right language to make existing ‘impact’ more apparent in order to bring ‘academia into the public domain’.
Reading between the lines, however, this seems strongly to suggest that academics, are being required at the same time, to bring their research into line with a particular kind of language that defines knowledge in terms of a regulated domain or economy of transfer and exchange. The knowledge that is produced by research becomes framed as something essentially to be managed, measured and marketed. Ideas that academic research could also contribute to processes of individual or communal becoming, transformation or a matter of following the dictates of human curiosity in order to reveal something previously undisclosed or unsuspected or even as a means to great pleasure and delight, are increasingly likely to be met with raised eyebrows and the accusation that we are being naïve.

Common-sense dictates after all that people want to see what they’re getting for their tax-pounds – especially in a time of economic crisis – so ‘impact statements’ are one way to achieve the necessary transparency and accountability. But common-sense – which typically denies that there is any need for further analysis – is notoriously amenable to ideological manipulation. Common-sense dictates that taxpayers demand something they can see or point to for their tax-pound, yet this may not be true, or it may not be any more true than the fact that tax-payers also belong to complex networks of diverse and interrelated factors and forces in the context of which, determining what they want or need is a messy, untidy and hugely difficult business. What about our accountability to multiplicity and difference (Lather 2010, 14) to all those things that don’t fit neatly into the impact statement grid?

The idea that there is something wrong with an ‘impact imperative’ is not simply to dismiss the attempts of the research councils, or people like Dr Lewycky, to draw attention to the many wonderful things that are done in UK universities – for example, to help those who suffer from cancer or dementia or in all kinds of synergies with the work of the arts and forms of technology. Nor am I arguing that academics ought not to concern themselves with the lives and concerns of people outside their ‘ivory towers’. Arguably, it is very important to ‘reinscribe an applied edge to’ (Lather 2010, 28) the work we do. In this sense, being encouraged to go outside the university and talk with people about what we – collectively – do, can only be a good thing. The problem is the way in which the value of what we do via these processes is then being framed.

There are different ways to understand the impact of knowledge that is cultivated in Universities. Just to take one single example, in 1949, Simone de Beauvoir, Sorbonne-trained philosopher, posed the question ‘What is a woman?’ and came up with the disturbing answer that ‘she’ was effectively a male invention. A woman was not born as such – somehow ‘essentially’ female – but became one in conformity to the philosophical assumptions that framed the whole of European society and those global contexts colonized by it. The world was normatively male and women as well as men saw themselves very largely through the fantastical lenses of powerful men, buoyed up by the assumed superiority of their culture and education. Whatever could not be conformed to this view was dismissed; women were discounted as either bad or mad. Beauvoir’s book – The Second Sex – was controversial and upset people. It was scandalous and subversive. Yet within a couple of decades, these ideas had had an enormous impact and they were being widely applied in every conceivable context, ushering in a whole new wave of feminist thinking.

Armed with Beauvoir’s ideas for example, a brilliant and passionate young woman called Mary Daly turned her gaze on the Roman Catholic Church and its theology in the 1960s and came up with her own question: Why is the Church’s role in conditioning women so rarely referred to? Her answer, contained first of all in The Church and the Second Sex (1968) followed by a series of powerful discussions in subsequent books, was that philosophical assumptions that determined women’s value and role in life were woven into the very fabric of Christianity:

If God in ‘his’ heaven is a father ruling ‘his’ people, then it is in the ‘nature’ of things and according to divine plan and the order of the universe that society be male-dominated.
Beyond God the Father (1973,13)

Yet like Beauvoir before her, Mary Daly ruffled feathers and upset people. Though she had her books published and was frequently ‘in the news’, she upset even feminists and her attempts to teach men and women separately caused a perfect media storm.

In an article in the Guardian published on the anniversary of Beauvoir’s birth, Toril Moi tells us that The Second Sex was both a source of inspiration and insight for countless women – ‘ “It changed my life!” is a refrain one often hears’ – but it was also a stumbling block, something many people including women and even feminist women ignored or rejected.

In other words, there are different ways in which to understand ‘impact’ than one that is determined through the collection of measureable, marketable data in response to a ‘common-sense’ demand for demonstrability. Beauvoir and Daly initiated debates that have extended over decades and their ideas have not always been found acceptance. Yet it would be crass to claim that these debates have not been profoundly important, affecting our understanding of what gender is all about and whose interests it has served in ways that now saturate the policy world of ‘equalities mainstreaming’ or ‘gender awareness’. In other words, whilst the direction of ‘impact statements’ is all about what the public is getting for its money, it says nothing about the bigger issues of impact that offend or contest common sense and sensibility and in which universities have always, in the past, taken a leading role.

Standing in between the demands of government and the demands of senior academics within the academy, the research councils must have a difficult balancing act to achieve. Yet it is hard not to feel that they are too compliant with the assumptions being promoted as common sense, that value is equivalent to the manageable and the marketable and that to have impact, university research must be measurable; from numbers of cancer survivors for ever increasing lengths of time to numbers/examples of citations, hits on websites, completed feedback forms, numbers of tickets purchased, books sold, tv & radio interviews broadcast, related primary school activities organized, blog entries written ……

The myth of religion and the tyranny of Richard Dawkins’ discontinuous mind

16 Thursday Feb 2012

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In his New Statesman article “The tyranny of the discontinuous mind” [NS 19 Dec 2011 – 1 Jan 2012] Richard Dawkins suggests how arbitrary our classificatory dividing lines are. And yet the substance of his arguments rests on precisely such a dividing line – the one between ‘religion’ and ‘science’ or, put in a different way, between ‘faith’ and ‘secular’ reason. The heart of Dawkins’ untenable position is that he imposes on his readers the tyranny of his own absolutist distinction between scientific rationality and religious faith. When Dawkins criticises our “need for dividing lines, black-and-white answers and absolute definitions” he is not, it seems, including the dividing line which he draws between ‘religion’ and ‘science’, or between ‘faith’ and ‘politics’. In his writing it is an ‘either-or’ situation. Creationist theories of evolution might look scientific, but its not ‘real science’. The Mullah might look like a ‘religious’ leader, but he’s really a politician.

My contention is that the essentialized distinction between religion and secular reason deployed by Dawkins and fellow travellers such as Christopher Hitchens is thoroughly ideological, but its rhetorical deployment has created the delusion that it merely describes the way the world really is. Some thing or agent called ‘religion’ with its absurd metaphysical fantasies interferes with nonreligious realities such as secular states and proper knowledge. But this narrative is itself a myth.

Religion is in effect no different from a Platonic essence in Dawkins’ theories

Dawkins argues that an uncritical belief in metaphysical abstractions or Platonic essences [“…one of the most pernicious ideas in all history…”] can provide a fictitious ontological legitimation for racist categories, making the arbitrary and contingent appear fixed in the nature of things. This seems like a valid point. In a similar way feminists have persuasively shown that the typical deployment of gender categories legitimates male power at the expense of women by making gender inequality seem ‘natural’, in the nature of things. Dawkins discusses the ideological imperatives that lie behind the classification of US leaders such as Colin Powell and Barak Obama as ‘black’, pointing out that such a loaded classification could never be neutral or merely descriptive. Yet unfortunately Dawkins’ arguments rest on a similar mythical dividing line represented by a series of either-or binaries: religion and nonreligion, the natural and the supernatural, faith and scientific knowledge, God and the world. However, there is nothing given in perception and empirical observation that corresponds to any of these binary reifications. These are mutually parasitic reverse-images which, when studied in the multiple contexts of their actual uses, can easily be seen to have no clear dividing lines between them. There is no possible authoritative pronouncement about what does or ought to fall on either side of the binary apart from an arbitrary exercise of power.

The distinction between ‘religion’ and the nonreligious secular is itself a pure abstraction with no basis in empirical reality and very little meaningful content outside the shouting space of public rhetoric. When courts have to decide if a particular group is eligible to be classified as a religious charity the results are arbitrary. To take one example, the Church of Scientology is a religion in California but not in the UK. But both the respective courts which made these different decisions are classified as ‘secular’. But then why is the realization of justice in our lives, and the faith we have in the solemn procedures of the courts, not itself a form of religious practice? Does Dawkins really imagine that sharia law is essentially religious but the judicial system in the UK is essentially secular?

Religion as a malevolent agent stalking the peace-loving secular state

The religion which Dawkins attacks from his base in secular reason, and which he and Hitchens seem to imagine as a purposeful agent, is not a real target. But it is required so that the equally contentless idea of a nonreligious secular domain appears as something essentially different from religion in the way that paranoid fantasy is different from sober reality. Belief that there is something clearly distinct in the world called religion disguises the ideological commitments of the classifiers behind a façade of apparently neutral, objective description. The ability to point at Muslims as religious fanatics is subtlety linked to a wider discourse in, for example, International Relations, that wherever we look religion stalks the globe like a malevolent agent intent on doing harm to the peace-loving and only reluctantly violent secular state. It provides an ideological legitimation for progress and the belief that ‘science’ and secular politics is what will save us. Science (and politics) is what religion is not, just as religion is what science is not. But this is to reify two domains which are both imaginary and to badly confuse the logic of the concepts he is deploying.

The religion about which Dawkins claims to be an expert does not actually stand for anything real in the world. It is a general category with a complex and contested history and I challenge him or anyone to come up with a satisfactory definition of what the term means. The religion which Dawkins and fellow traveller Hitchens despises is in effect no different from a Platonic essence in Dawkins’ theories, a Form which manifests in the different empirical ‘religions’ which he assumes without much thought are instantiations of religion itself. Dawkins’ notion of the relationship between religion and the religions is not much different from an incarnation or avatar theology.

Worse, by supposing an essential difference between religious faith and secular reason, secular science itself inevitably acquires an essence of its own, to distinguish it not only from religion but also from things that may look like science but are not real science.

Dawkins writes as though the natural world is available for empirical inspection, while the supernatural is a purely imaginary domain. But which world of nature is available for empirical observation? Where would you point if you wanted to show someone nature? ‘Nature’ has no clear referent. Terms like world and nature are general categories and if you eliminate the terms that give them a meaningful context there is no way any human can observe ’a world’ or ‘nature’. God might be able to see a world, I don’t know. But Dawkins and I most certainly can’t. And the interesting thing is that Dawkins’ category of nature and world is parasitic on a discourse about God and the supernatural. Just as the idea of ‘atheism’ is dependent for its intelligibility on the idea of ‘theism’, so also his claims about the essential difference between faith and empirical reason is essentially no different from an anti- theological metaphysics. Religion is Dawkins’ target because he needs it for self-definition. Dawkins is confusing his own subjective emotional needs for objectivity.

Dawkins needs a historical perspective

Dawkins works with a series of essentializing binary oppositions which are at the heart of his whole argument about the irrationality of religion and the rationality of secular science. In this he is not original, but on the contrary is blindly reproducing the framework of liberal capitalist ideology which underlies western public rhetoric and foreign policy since its birth during the era of colonialism

The essentialized distinction between religion and nonreligious secular domains such as science or politics seems to have been invented in the late 17th century within the combined contexts of Non-Conformity and colonial interests, but has taken on the unquestioned appearance of inevitability. A series of other binaries step in as equivalences: the natural and the supernatural, spirit and matter, faith and knowledge, God and the world. One side of all these binary essentializations is rational and real; the other side is unreal and deluded. But this itself is as much a delusion as ‘the God delusion’.

Despite the argument that biological evolution has no direction, concepts like religion, secular, science, politics and the state are impregnated with ideological nuances which Dawkins seems unaware of. For example, as far as I can see, the earliest consistent usage of the term ‘politics’ as a domain separated from another domain called ‘religion’ dates to the late 17th century. The reified opposition between religious and secular domains arose historically out of an Enlightenment myth of human progress from the darkness of religion and superstition into the light of scientific reason. And his unexamined presuppositions are not essentially different from the dubious secularization arguments that legitimate the social sciences. The latter have acted as ideological agencies which transformed the meaning of ‘society’ from identifiable relationships between specific people (‘I was honoured to be in the society of the King and many eminent philosophers at Christmas’; or, at a more generalized level “I am a member of the Royal Society”) to the globalised metaphysical abstraction ‘societies’ which are in principle countable and measurable like organisms. This is the world of abstractions in which we all feel intuitively compelled to think today.

Of course, without general categories we could not think at all. But there are relative degrees of disinterestedness and neutrality in the way we classify our world. The binaries that appear throughout Dawkins’ preaching against ‘religion’ and ‘superstition’ may use old words but the classificatory deployment – and therefore the meaning – is modern. They form a semantic configuration of categories which is profoundly different from late medieval and early modern meanings, and different again from the many complex collective representations of non-European peoples. But Dawkins writes and speaks as though ‘religion’ and its binary opposite the ‘nonreligious secular’ is an intuitive universal, applicable to all languages, peoples and power formations at all periods of history. That those people did not realize that they were in the grip of religious illusion is irrelevant. Now that Dawkins and others have finally attained the truly rational and the really real, they are in a position to make judgements about the predicament that the deluded are not yet ready to understand.

Cranes and sky-hooks

On the one hand, according to Dawkins, evolution proceeds through the on-going construction of cranes rather than by way of metaphysical sky-hooks; yet the idea that ‘religion’ (irrational faith) is something essentially different from ‘science’ (rational knowledge) derives from an enlightenment discourse on the progressive advancement of humankind from lower to higher stages. Dawkins may vehemently deny that evolutionary biology is akin to the myth of human evolution from lower to higher stages; yet though he has ostensibly dropped the purposive element of the myth, he has uncritically incorporated some of its fundamental mythemes. He has uncritically adopted a version of secularization which portrays the light of science as a doctrine of salvation by secular reason leading us out of the darkness of religious stupidity. And this self-serving ideology, heavily inflected with liberal Protestant supremacy, legitimized tutelage of non-European peoples by colonial civil servants, politicians, missionaries, and capitalists. Of course, Dawkins denies purpose or direction in evolution. Yet in his own evangelical texts, Dawkins is actually setting up the metaphysical parameters which he claims to want to expose as hollow.

What does ‘religion’ mean?

Since the Reformation the Anglophone term ‘religion’ (presumably much like the term in German, Dutch and French) usually meant Christian truth as distinct from pagan falsehood, and this distinction in turn was as much about dominant claims to Christian civility and rationality as it was about abstract theological disputes concerning ‘God’. Christian preachers have always been as concerned with whether women of a certain class have the right to wear large hats as they have been about the correct articulation of the Trinity. Protestant missionaries have been as concerned that the savage natives live in ‘proper’ houses and speak a proper language as they have been about defining the complex (and some would say polytheistic) Trinitarian and Incarnational doctrine which supposedly defines the nature of God for such Christians. Evangelical Christians today construct their own missions of conversion on the basis of this opposition between civility and barbarity. Religion in this more historically specific sense was not an object in the world to be researched, described and compared alongside other so-called ‘religions’, but the truth about the world, including the proper or improper disciplines of civility. In this older discourse there cannot be more than one ‘religion’.

But the historically more recent modern discourse on ‘religion’ – and ‘religions’ in the plural – has been reified and universalised as a generic category, lacking clearly specific content, opposed to the equally modern generic category the nonreligious secular. Terms which still have specifically Christian meanings in some contexts are being deployed by Dawkins (and many others) as though they are neutral, descriptive and self-evident.

Part of a wider ideological discourse

The mythemes embedded in Dawkins’ arguments for the supremacy of something called nonreligious secular science over another unanalysed abstraction called ‘religion’ are part of a much wider contemporary discourse which is being reproduced in one way or another by academics, politicians, media commentators, by courts of law, by constitutions and the general public. This discourse is now so dominant that to challenge its basic categories appears counter-intuitive and even eccentric.

This appearance of inevitability has been powerfully strengthened by its internalization and reproduction by leading members of those institutions typically classified as ‘religious’ themselves. A good case in point is the invention of ‘Tibetan Buddhism’ as a religion, and the relatively recent adoption of this global discourse by the Dalai Lama. Yet the news agencies report that the Chinese and the Americans differ absolutely on whether or not the Dalai Lama is a real religious leader who can safely visit Taiwan, or a political leader hiding behind the cloak of religion and therefore an agent of mischief. The success of Dawkins’ arguments depends on turning a blind eye to the historically contextualized, constructed and contested features of such powerful categories, and to the wider but not so obvious interests which they serve.

What is it that makes African witchcraft beliefs, Japanese public street festivals, Theravada meditation, Scientology, the Indian caste system, devotion to Elvis Presley, water divining, yoga, the Aboriginal Dreamtime, Catholic monastic communities, and Calvinist attitudes to work and productivity ‘religious’ or ‘religion’ according to very widespread contemporary usage? And why, given this eclectic bunch, should we exclude devotion to capital, private property, the accumulation of money, or the ultimate act of self-sacrifice for the glory of the nation state? Why do we lump together such a vast spectrum of human practices globally into this simplistic either-or binary opposition: it is either religion or it is science? It is either ‘religious’ or it is ‘nonreligious’? It is either religion or it is politics? It is either spiritual or material? These are the mythemes of modern ideology which Dawkins innocently spins, imagining he is telling it ‘like it is’.

The very idea of ‘religions’ in the plural suggests the sharing of a common essence ‘religion’. But that in turn implies that the ‘nonreligious’ also has an essential dividing boundary. The reifications that Dawkins’ has unconsciously adopted (though he certainly didn’t originate them) are the mythemes on which his essentializing discourse depends and which are being reproduced by a whole range of agencies including the State and its educational and legal systems. Dawkins is ideological state apparatus. His arguments against the irrationality of something called ‘religion’ do not only and heroically reproduce that abstract and invented object, but simultaneously reconstruct the equally mythical secular basis of his own rational superiority.

The Coming of Nothing

13 Monday Feb 2012

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“Nothing will come of nothing.” We have all heard this phrase before. It takes many forms, and has a history that precedes Plato. But we know it most familiarly as the words of Shakespeare’s Lear, that king who foolishly turned the measure of his daughters’ love into pageantry and farce. When the daughter truest to her father refuses to say anything, and in fact, literally, says “nothing”, Lear draws on the ancient lineage of self-evident wisdom: nothing comes from nothing. It’s what the logicians call a tautology, and perhaps the purest of tautologies: since the formula A=A adds nothing to the argument, and simply loops us in a circle, so we end where we began, this nothing is most in play when itself is made the subject – nothing=nothing. Nothing could seem more obvious.

But there is something to the phrase that keeps coming back to haunt us, as if it contains an element of irresolution, something other than pure tautology. And keep coming back it does: philosophers, theologians, mystics and artists have all been fascinated with the concept of nothing, and with the ways we can and cannot speak about it. Something does seem to linger about as added, something that stands outside of the circularity of “nothing is naught” or “from nothing comes nothing”. Perhaps this is because the notion of nothing, whenever we try to articulate it, trips over the language we have at our disposal. The phrase “nothing is…” is part not of a pure tautology but of a pure contradiction, since the verb to be, however conjugated, denotes existence, the very opposite of nothing. Likewise the verb “comes” denotes the arrival of something. If nothing were to come to us, what would have actually arrived? If it really is nothing, how can we say it comes?

All this would be merely semantic aerobics, of the kind that, at best, simply tones our mental muscles for issues that really matter, were it not for the fact that the notion of nothing has made a significant incursion into our modern world recently. We might think of modern mathematics, for which the concept of zero has become indispensable. (In fact, modern calculus, on which so much of our modern technology, economics, etc., is dependent, is inoperable without it.) Or we might think of modern astrophysics, where the concept of vacuums and black holes are crucial. Even in the world of modern art and music, nothing has become an important “subject” – one thinks of John Cage’s notorious 4’33”, a composition of silence. Or Hans Freeberling, an artist who opened a gallery installation in 2001 entitled “The Art of Nothing”, which consisted of an empty gallery.

On a general cultural level, nothing makes its presence felt under the increasingly visible banner of “nihilism”. Now of course there are many kinds of nihilisms. There is the philosophical kind that says there is no such thing as reality, and everything is merely one big illusion. (Few in the West subscribe to this version, unless it comes in a form of Buddhism.) There is the existential kind that says life has no intrinsic meaning or value. There is the ethical kind that says all morals are ultimately a construction of power, and therefore no morality can ultimately or absolutely exist. There is the linguistic or semiological kind that says language or signs carry no meaning in and of themselves. There is the political kind that says no form of governance or social arrangement is viable without inherent and self-destructive violence, and therefore chaos or anarchy is inevitable. There is the economic kind that says there is no system available, locally or globally, that does not leave us in psycho-social impoverishment and with a self-divided spirit. Or there is the religious kind that says either God is dead, or faith in the divine has always been the stuff of superstition and delusion, and humans, metaphysically, are bound for nowhere. And in each of these cases, the nihilism, as general conception, can either assume that such a state is reality, or can desire to achieve such a state. (And both the assumption and the desire take manifold forms.)

Now why this growing prevalence of nothing and nihilism, in all their forms? Is it because, as many conservatives believe (“conservatism” being by definition an embattled stance against the coming of nothing in one form or another), we continue to witness the erosion of many of our most cherished, and “proven”, foundations of society, beginning with, most decisively, our belief systems? Or is it, as many liberals believe (“liberalism” being by definition the emancipation from old and constraining forms in the name of a self-inherited freedom), the result of disaffection towards and disenfranchisement from the ruling structures of power, which leave the coerced and the down-trodden in despair? Or is there something about the project of Modernity itself that, in its aggrandisement of the new, whether now in its neo-conservative or neo-liberal dress, has always invited the nothing perilously into our space and our experience?

I’ll have more to say about this last possibility in subsequent blogs. But for now I think it important to consider that many of the events we are presently witnessing in our world, from fundamentalist terrorism, to the Arab Spring, to government suppression in Syria, China, etc., to the (perhaps now sublimated) Occupy Movement, to the worldwide austerity measures and the backlash they have provoked from the populace, to the implosion of Churches under the divisive issues of sexuality and gender – all of these come from a negative impetus. That is to say, there is something about the ruling states of affairs, whether political, economic, military, social or religious, that invokes, and increasingly invokes, the reaction of a certain gesture towards nothing, or making nil. More than a gesture, often – a force. But how can nothing be instigated as a force? Nothing is, well, nothing. Yet in the name of nothing, much seems to be happening.

Lear had a hard lesson to learn about the nature of this coming of nothing. He, the old sovereign, was to be reduced, out in the tempestuous emptiness of the heath, to what his Fool would call an “O” – “Now thou art an O without a figure. I am better than thou art now: I am a fool, thou art nothing” (I.iv.183-185). The old sovereignty was giving way to something new, and in a folly that, at the outset, precluded the wisdom of nothing, he refused to see the truth of that new something – his one true daughter, Cordelia – until it was too late, and too late for all. Something might have come from nothing, if he was “Fool” enough to see it.

Nothing, we might say, gets bad press, and deservedly. For nothing strips away, tears down, erases. And we want a positive society. Yet there is always a substantive way to render nothing, and make it work for something. We see this even in the claim that “nothing gets bad press”: differently construed, we also know that, in today’s media-saturated world, no matter how negative certain press coverage might be, no publicity is bad publicity, since even bad press is somehow good for the cause. This is part of the perverse state of the world we live in, and may be the very thing we wish to eradicate. But to do so we’d have to negate the negation. And this is why nothing is becoming more and more a feature of our Late Modern world.