Does theology reflect self-interest? (another response to critics)

My recent posts described how my understanding of the relation between God and the world has changed in the past several years. One of the recurring criticisms of these posts was that my changing views were motivated by self-interest. This view was expressed by several party members of the AUFS People's Republic, as well as by some of my politically sensitive Facebook friends. A comment on my previous post states this view with admirable clarity:

Why don't you just be entirely honest with us? The real reason why you've changed your stance is because you've realized that you have a huge vested interest in keeping the status quo. I mean, you can say it's your kids and the stockholm syndrome you've developed toiling away for the system, but really at the end of the day, it's your desire to maintain your current comfortable lifestyle. Ahh, how nice it must be!

This habit of associating intellectual convictions with personal self-interest seems to be quite widespread among leftist undergraduates and other well-meaning citizens who get their Marxist theory at two or three removes.

Marx's class theory, however, was about the way broad social changes occur in history. It was not a psychological theory about the motivations of individual persons. In fact, it is axiomatic to Marx's theory that individuals are not consciously serving the interests of their class. Marx was familiar with attempts to explain historical events by uncovering the private interests of individual persons; he regarded such tactics as beneath contempt. In a letter to Engels, Marx poured scorn on a certain German historian who had reduced "the spirit of history" to "facile anecdote-mongering and the attribution of all great events to petty and mean causes" (Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence, 1846-1895, 159). Marx was emphatic about distancing his theory from "the narrow-minded notion that the petty bourgeoisie, on principle, wishes to enforce an egoistic class interest" (Marx, Surveys from Exile, 176-77).

The Marxist class theory explains the way alterations occur in vast social patterns. It does not explain why the bourgeois shopkeeper sells one kind of cheese instead of another. It does not explain why intellectuals subscribe to competing views on any given topic. It does not explain why an Australian theologian might change his mind about something. Marxist class theory is a theory of historical change, not a theory of private motivations.

One of the most brilliant and influential modern revisions of Marxian theory was Foucault's theory of discourse. Like Marx, Foucault wanted to measure large historical patterns of power and interest. His work on power and discourse, so formative for contemporary critical theory, was an attempt to lay bare the vast machinery of language and institutions, not to explain why specific individuals think and act the way they do. His theory of discourse claimed to be an explanation of the whole field within which human subjectivity operates. It was not a reductionist psychological theory, as if all one's daily choices were secretly motivated by power and self-interest.

Again, it is fundamental to critical theory that the real operations of history are hidden from historical agents. (To digress for a moment, this is one aspect of what I am referring to when I compare critical theory to gnosticism: critical theory is always concerned with the acquisition of a secret knowledge that is hidden from the masses.) A theory of discourse does not imply that individual agents (or in Foucault's case, individual speakers) are motivated by power interests. To assert this would be to miss the whole significance of "discourse" as a domain that encompasses a huge diversity of competing interests and motivations. Discourse is "a space of multiple dissensions; a set of different oppositions whose levels and roles must be described" by the critical historian (Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 173).

At any rate, Foucault's concept of power has nothing to do with sentimental moral admonitions about self-interest. Power, in Foucault's vocabulary, is a morally neutral term that describes the way a particular social order is created. "We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it 'excludes', it 'represses', it 'censors', it 'abstracts', it 'masks', it 'conceals'. In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth" (Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 194).

Anyone who has understood this theory will perceive the absurdity of the claim that the views of a particular Australian theologian can be explained by unmasking his sinister power-interests. My interlocutors used their critical theory to explain why I had really changed my mind: they might just as well have used quantum theory or homeopathy to explain it.

I have no intention of advancing an alternative account of why people change their minds. Presumably each person's intellectual convictions depend on a unique configuration of culture, education, language, environment, temperament, and experience. A theory rich enough to explain all this would have to be as large as life itself. I will only venture to say that one should take it for granted, until proven otherwise, that other people's convictions are not the product of bad motives or a wicked heart.

Introducing Giorgio Agamben: what is an apparatus?

I recently mentioned Leland de la Durantaye’s new critical introduction to Giorgio Agamben – a book which I’ve found extremely valuable and insightful. But if you’re not already familiar with Agamben’s works, you might find Durantaye’s 463-page volume a little intimidating. If you’re looking for the quickest, easiest, most accessible introduction to Agamben’s thought – an introduction that you can get through in a single hour – then there’s no better guide than Agamben’s own latest book (a tiny but potent 56 pages), What Is an Apparatus? (Stanford UP 2009).

This first essay, “What Is an Apparatus?”, provides a wonderfully concise snapshot of Agamben’s entire recent project, his “theological genealogy of economy” (8). In this little essay, Agamben uses Foucault’s concept of the apparatus to classify all beings in two groups: “living beings”, and “apparatuses in which living beings are incessantly captured”. In theological terminology, these two classes denote an ontology of creatures on the one hand, and on the other hand the oikonomia of apparatuses that seek to govern these creatures (13). Between these two classes lies a third class: subjects. Agamben understands a subject as that which results from the relation between living beings and apparatuses.

This concept of the apparatus reflects Foucault’s understanding of the formation of subjectivity. Apparatuses are not a mere accident; they are “rooted in the very process of ‘humanization’ that made ‘humans’ out of … Homo sapiens” (16). They are not instruments of violence, but of governance and subjectification. The apparatus is thus always something that produces its own subject. But the current phase of capitalism has witnessed a proliferation of new apparatuses to capture every moment and facet of life; and these capitalist apparatuses subjectify only by desubjectifying (just as, for Foucault, the penitential subject is constituted through its own negation). In any case, our formation as subjects is always a process of interruption by which the apparatus separates us from our immediate relation to our environment.

Fundamentally, such separation is religion. Religion takes things from the domain of common use and places them in a separate sphere; religion consecrates. The situation of our time demands a new politics of profanation, where that which has been separated/consecrated is restored to common use. In this way, “profanation is the counter-apparatus” (19). Our capitalist world has become “a sort of colossal parody of theological oikonomia”, in which apparatuses “assume the legacy of the providential governance of the world” (23). These apparatuses can be resisted – we can intervene in their process of subjectification – only through profanation. It is profanation which brings to light “the Ungovernable, which is the beginning and, at the same time, the vanishing point of every politics” (24).

It’s a splendid little essay (the volume also includes essays on “the friend” and “the contemporary”). I’ve never come across such a concise, lucid, programmatic statement of Agamben’s project.

This essay also makes it very clear that all Agamben’s recent work on theological economy is structured at its deepest level by Foucault’s understanding of power and subjectivity (not to mention Foucauldian concepts like archaeology, genealogy, biopolitics, etc) – even though figures like Benjamin and Schmitt sometimes linger nearer the surface of Agamben’s texts. As Agamben himself remarked in a recent interview: “I see my work as closer to no one than to Foucault” (cited in Durantaye, 209).

Writing in order to change

At the recent Barth conference, there was a lot of talk about the way Barth changed as he was writing his dogmatics. Some scholars feel uneasy about this – they’d prefer to think of Barth’s dogmatics as the smooth unfolding of a single coherent vision. I was chatting to someone at the conference about this, and I referred to Foucault’s famous remarks in the introduction to his Archaeology of Knowledge (1969):

“What, do you imagine that I would take so much trouble and so much pleasure in writing, do you think that I would keep so persistently to my task, if I were not preparing – with a rather shaky hand – a labyrinth into which I can venture, in which I can move my discourse, opening up underground passages, forcing it to go far from itself, finding overhangs that reduce and deform its itinerary, in which I can lose myself and appear at last to eyes that I will never have to meet again? I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.”

'Can't you see my Church is in ruins?' The witness of L'Arche and the Barnabas Community

A post by Scott Stephens

The most venerated of all the saints of the holy Catholic Church is Francis from the Italian village of Assisi. The sheer force of his Christ-like devotion has inspired millions of Christians to ‘go and do likewise’. Equally, his transparent humility has rattled Church structures at their very foundations. Francis, more than any other single figure in the history of the Church, is a saint for all times, and a challenge for each generation.

But there is conundrum that goes to the heart of Francis’ identity. At what point did Francesco Bernadone, the lecherous and lazy son of a wealthy cloth merchant, turn his back on that life and become ‘Saint Francis’? What was his ‘Damascus Road’? Was it when the young Francis, still despairing after his dreams of chivalry evaporated, knelt before a crucifix amid the ruins of the Church of St. Damian, and a voice said to him, ‘Francesco, do you not see that my house is in ruins? Go and rebuild it for me!’ Francis obviously took these words seriously—he went and sold most of his father’s stock of fine fabrics and used the proceeds to rebuild the aging shrine.

Or was it when Francis abandoned the familiarity of human society and made his home in a leper commune? According to Francis himself, this event was decisive. He reflects in his Testament, written shortly before his death: ‘for when I was in sin, it seemed too bitter for me even to look upon the leprous. But the Lord himself led me among them and I showed mercy to them. And when I left them, what had seemed bitter to me was turned into sweetness of soul and body. And afterwards, I delayed a little and then left the world.’

We tend to forget the place lepers occupied in the early Middle Ages. In the 12th century, those with ‘leprosy’—a designation that covered a range of deformities and communicable diseases—were restricted to decrepit communes outside city walls. By decree of the Church, they had to cover themselves entirely to prevent contact with others; they had to use clappers to warn whenever people came near; they were banned from speaking to children; they were even consigned to their own churches, their own sacraments, their own cemeteries.

Doesn’t this cast the command that Francis heard in St. Damian’s in a whole new light? The Church which had fallen into ruins was not the dilapidated, crumbling shrine, as Francis believed, but rather the very Church that had forsaken its Lord by segregating and abandoning the leprous. Thus Francis’ act of rebuilding the Church wasn’t his repair of St. Damian’s, but rather his establishment of a community with the lepers themselves.

So who today are ‘the lepers’, into whose company the Church should follow its Lord? As Michel Foucault chronicled in History of Madness, the sad story of the Church’s treatment of the leprous took a truly horrific turn in the 15th century. The Church liquidated the leper communes, and used those now vacant hovels to house the mentally disabled—out of sight and away from human society.

There are communities today who, like Francis, have set about rebuilding the Church. Such communities are nothing less than sacraments, testimonies of grace, which bear witness to a Church that similarly finds itself in ruins. The Barnabas Community in Durack, Queensland, was founded in 1995 as an act of obedience to Jesus, and in solidarity with L’Arche, the network of communal homes established by Jean Vanier in 1964.

Barnabas House is a suburban home in which residents with a disability are enveloped by a loving community of people who live and eat with them, who share life with them, who celebrate the beauty of God in them. As Vanier has often said, it is the presence of such communities in which the able and those with a disability live side-by-side, eating together and celebrating the holiness of one another, that comprises our best picture of what the Kingdom of God looks like.

The infectious joy and warmth of the Barnabas Community is not just in stark contrast to the sterility and institutionalized ennui to which people with a mental disability are subjected in Australian society. This community is also a living protest against the suppressed resentment that our society feels concerning the very existence of the mentally disabled. Stanley Hauerwas is surely correct when he claims that the mentally disabled embody the ethical limitation of our liberal humanism. ‘Our humanism entails we care for them once they are among us, once we are stuck with them; but the same humanism cannot help but think that, all things considered, it would be better if they did not exist.’

In our time, not only is the Barnabas Community an unforgettable protest against the institutionalized death and decrepitude of federally funded disability services; it is a powerful witness to a Church that has abandoned its Lord by placing its confidence in its buildings and in the idols of investment and in the immoral practice of usury—all the while outsourcing its care of the mentally disabled.

And so our Lord addresses us with the same summons that haunted St. Francis: ‘Do you not see that my house is in ruins? Go and rebuild it for me!’

If you would like to find out more about the Barnabas Community, or how you and your church can support its communal life, you can contact Glenda Hall or Scott Stephens.

Five quotes on language

“We live in our language like blind men walking on the edge of an abyss.” —Gershom Scholem to Franz Rosenzweig, 26 December 1926.

“Language is the language of Being as clouds are the clouds of the sky. In what it says, thought leaves inconspicuous furrows in language. They are even more inconspicuous than the furrows that the farmer, slow of step, draws through the field.” —Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Pathmarks (Cambridge: CUP, 1998), p. 276.

“The origin lies at a place of inevitable loss, the point where the truth of things corresponded to a truthful discourse, the site of a fleeting articulation that discourse has obscured and finally lost.” —Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 143.

“The Wittgensteinian definition of the mystic as the appearing of what cannot be said is literally a definition of the gag. And every great philosophical text is the gag exhibiting language itself, being-in-language itself as a gigantic loss of memory, as an incurable speech defect.” —Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2000), p. 60.

“In the beginning was the Speech.” —John 1:1.