(Ir)religiosity

I’m planning to spend a good chunk of the summer researching the critique advanced by both Fredric Jameson and David Harvey of whether postmodernism, in the final instance, simply serves as the “cultural logic” of late capitalism.  In other words, is the preservation of difference and the celebration of alterity implicitly acquiescent to the ambivalent force of the global market?

Hardt and Negri, in Empire, put it this way:

We suspect that postmodernist and postcolonialist theories may end up in a dead end because they fail to recognize adequately the contemporary object of critique, that is, they mistake today’s real enemy. What if the modern form of power these critics (and we ourselves) have taken such pains to describe and contest no longer holds sway in our society? What if these theorists are so intent on combating the remnants of a past form of domination that they fail to recognize the new form that is looming over them in the present? [...] In this case, modern forms of sovereignty would no longer be at issue, and the postmodernist and postcolonialist strategies that appear to be liberatory would not challenge but in fact coincide with and even unwittingly reinforce the new strategies of rule! When we begin to consider the ideologies of corporate capital and the world market, it certainly appears that the postmodernist and postcolonialist theorists who advocate a politics of difference, fluidity, and hybridity in order to challenge the binaries and essentialism of modern sovereignty have been outflanked by the strategies of power. Power has evacuated the bastion they are attacking and has circled around to their rear to join them in the assault in the name of difference. These theorists thus find themselves pushing against an open door. (137-38)

And again, even more boldly:

The affirmation of hybridities and the free play of differences across boundaries, however, is liberatory only in a context where power poses hierarchy exclusively though essential identities, binary divisions, and stable oppositions. The structures and logics of power in the contemporary world are entirely immune to the ‘‘liberatory’’ weapons of the postmodernist politics of difference. In fact, Empire too is bent on doing away with those modern forms of sovereignty and on setting differences to play across boundaries. Despite the best intentions, then, the postmodernist politics of difference not only is ineffective against but can even coincide with and support the functions and practices of imperial rule. The danger is that postmodernist theories focus their attention so resolutely on the old forms of power they are running from, with their heads turned backwards, that they tumble unwittingly into the welcoming  arms of the new power. From this perspective the celebratory affirmations of postmodernists can easily appear naive, when not purely mystificatory. (142-43)

I think this critique, perhaps more than others, deserves to be taken seriously.  However, I am reticent to agree with Hardt and Negri (and their forebears, Jameson and Harvey) that returning to some form of (neo/post)marxism is the best answer.  I hear their worry about new forms of domination and sovereignty but I think they ultimately concede to the same type of essentialism they claim to be beyond in arguing that our situation of (postmodern) Empire is wholly pure — history, as they say, never comes with clean edges.  In other words, I do not believe that postmodern and postcolonial discourses are dead in their tracks.  These binaries and “old” versions of domination are still at work as technologies of production, it seems to me, even within more invisible forms of imperialism.

The question I have — which has led me to pursue the research — is whether there are any substantial responses to this criticism in defense of postmodern/postcolonial discourses.

Anyone know?

Conclusion: Critical Repetition

What, then, is the criterion for critical, liberative theo-political praxis today in the face of global neoliberal Empire? It is quite obvious that such an eschatology, reliant on the logic of downturn, involves incarnate bodies but what is its phenomenological structure? In his enigmatic work Repetition, Søren Kierkeegard provides, I claim, a solid heuristic through which an incarnational eschatology can generate critical theo-political praxis by modeling the gesture of the incarnation itself.  For Kierkegaard, repetition is not the simple reproduction of the past as if events could be simple carbon-copies of one another, but rather a means of recollection into the future.  He writes, “repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite direction, for what is recollected as been, is repeated backward, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forward.”¹ For Kierkegaard a true, non-identical repetition, by virtue of the absurd (or the impossible as Derrida would have it), is still open to the singularity of events themselves, yet still rooted in memory, in a recollection of the past.  Repetition is therefore a way of interacting with memory, of remembering, of re-membering, with an eye for the future.  As Slavoj Žižek puts it, this process involves a “repetitive movement of repeating the beginning again and again”² through a process of future-oriented recollection that is fundamentally rooted in the galvanizing memory of past history which becomes intrinsic to the present.  It is in this way that Johann Baptist Metz, following the lead of Walter Benjamin, can speak of the “dangerous memory” of the church, insofar as it serves as a catalyst for critical theo-political praxis, as “the public witness and bearer of the tradition of a dangerous memory of freedom in the ‘systems’ [Empire] of our emancipative society.”³  These memories are dangerous to Empire precisely because they inspire non-identical repetition into the future. In terms of incarnational eschatology this means that, in the face of Empire, one must enact a non-identical repetition of the incarnation.  In other words, this logic of downturn at the heart of an incarnational eschatology involves returning to the beginning once again, not to merely reproduce the past, but to repeat the incarnational gesture down and out toward the margins, toward the victims and the collateral damage of Empire and, in so doing, to the coming reign of God.

The task of the faith collective, then, is to, like Christ, be fully present and incarnate in the world such that the reign of God is being realized in the very presence of the violence of Empire, to be the eschatological sign of the impossible, of that which is “to-come” in the face of totalization and in the very bowels of illegitimate power.  In this way, Žižek provocatively speaks of the incarnation not as an act of sterile emptying of the divine, but an act in which God “identified himself with his own shit”⁴ and through genuine kenotic love for the Other — that is humanity — became fully present in the suffering and anguish of the world — and did so on the fringes of Empire.  In other words, God rolled up God’s sleeves and entered into the muck, the mire, and the messiness of the finite world as the ultimate expression of divine love and the initial inauguration of the reign of God. An incarnational eschatology enacts a critical repetition of this gesture; here persons are not reliant on the ahistorical other-worldly ideals of Empire but are fully present in the evil and violence of the world, bearing faithful witness to the incoming of the impossible and the advent of divine transcendence which pierces and violates the immanent normalcy of the status quo.  Indeed, rather than an eschatology, one might speak of an incarnational (e)sc(h)atology that is so invested in the material world that is it committed to identifying with its own shit, the shit of Empire, of being incarnate amidst the messiness and ordure of the world as the sign of another possible reality that is within yet not fully realized, absent in its very presence, a reality that is always already here yet always already “to-come” in the future, a future which transforms the present and ruptures the mundane.

In the final pages of their sequel to Empire, Hardt and Negri note the difference between linear chronos time and its unexpected fissure with the arrival of káiros, the moment in which an emancipatory politics is initiated through the ambivalances and antagonisms of Empire.

Káiros is the moment when the arrow is shot by the bowstring, the moment when a decision of action is made.  Revolutionary politics must grasp, in the movement of the multitudes and through the accumulation of common and cooperative decisions, the moment of rupture or clinamen that can create a new world.  […] The bowstring shoots the arrow of a new temporality, inaugurating a new future. […] We can already recognize that today times is split between a present that is already dead and a future that is already living—and the yawning abyss between them is becoming enormous.  In time, an event will thrust us like an arrow into that living future.   This will be the real political act of love.⁵

It is hard to overlook the theological tone permeating Hardt and Negri’s prose here.  Indeed, their description of the revolutionary future is not at all unlike the hope of an incarnational (e)sc(h)atology.  There is, however, a crucial difference — and this is why Kierkegaard notion of repetition is so vitally important.  For theology, the event that Hardt and Negri believe will propel us into the living future as already happened, indeed it was the Christ Event!  We are living and participating in the future of which they speak.  By repeating the gesture of the incarnation, by following the logic of downturn, the theo-political subject lives in the liminal space between what Hardt and Negri call the “dead present” and the “living future,” what Paul calls the already and the not yet, even in the bowels of Empire.  It is in this way that an incarnational (e)sc(h)atology, perhaps more effectively than Hardt and Negri’s multitude, summons the rupture of the present chronos with káiros, of the violation of Empire’s socio-political fabric with the liberative incoming of the reign of God through intentional and tangible movement toward the fringes, toward those the Empire itself has violated…“for such a time as this” (Es. 4:14).

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1. Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition: Kierkegaard’s Writings Vol. VI, ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983), 131. Emphasis mine. [↩]
2. Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, 87. [↩]
3. Johann Baptist Metz, Faith in History and Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology, trans. David Smith (New York, New York: Seabury Press, 1980), 89-90. [↩]
4. Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2006), 187.  This phrase need not be read as complicit with a negative, essentialist theological anthropology.  Rather it involves reliance on the logic of downturn, a gesture toward the margins where one finds herself wholly present in the world amidst the pain and the mundane, the suffering and the profane.  This does not mean that God created shit to begin with, rather it asserts that wherever shit is there is God siding with those who have no way out.  An incarnational eschatology enacts a critical repetition of this gesture. [↩]
5. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 357-58. [↩]