What do we do when the narratives run out?

Jean-François Lyotard in his The Postmodern Condition (1979)—the book that (for better or worse) brought the term “postmodernism” into common usage—defines postmodernism as  ”incredulity toward metanarratives.”  He claims that the very nature of knowledge has been changed by the developments in technology and information theory since the 1950s; the goal is now exchange rather than acquisition of knowledge.  He sees a move from scientific knowledge to narrative knowledge, since the scientific method can no longer legitimate itself in such a world.

So, does this paradigm shift point to the same changes that Hayden White and Elizabeth Clark are demonstrating in history and texts?  Does White presuppose (a few years early) the postmodernism that Lyotard names?  What are the consequences when/if narrative knowledge can no longer legitimate itself?  (Perhaps see the Annalistes like Febvre and Braudel as analyzed in Elizabeth Clark’s History, Theory, Text.)

 

Independent Study Absence

You might notice a gap in time here.  The following list should explain my absence over the next few months– the following are the texts I have chosen for a comp exam in Cultural Theory. I am interested in studying the bible as a cultural icon, a sacred object, and a piece of literature.  This list has been honed to help me become conversant in cultural theory and its insights into these subjects.

1- Interpretation/Hermeneutics

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method (focus: 265-307, 381-491, Supplement II)

Heidegger, Martin. “Discourse on Thinking”

–,“Phenomenology and Theology”

–,“The Question Concerning Technology”

Long, Charles. Significations

Ricouer, Paul. Figuring the Sacred

–, Interpretation Theory

1-Materialism

Marx, Karl. The Philosophical and Economic Manuscripts

Althusser, Louis. “Ideological State Apparatus” in Lenin and Philosophy

1-Psychological Critique

Freud, Sigmund. Future of an Illusion

Zizek, Slovav. Reading Lacan

Nietzsche, Fredrick. Genealogy of Morals

2-Frankfurt School/Cultural Studies/Post-colonialism

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Illuminations

Nandy, Ashis. The Intimate Enemy

Said, Edward. Orientalism

Horkhiemer, Max. “Traditional and Critical Theory”

Adorno, Theodore. “The Culture Industry” and “How to Look at Television”

Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization

Hebdige, Dick. Subcultures. “Meaning of Style”

De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life

Tong, Rosemary. Feminist Thought 

Surber, Jere. Culture and Critique

3-Structuralism/Post-structuralism
de Saussure, Ferdinand. Course in General Linguistics (focus: 1-25, 65-70, 111-127)

Jameson, Fredric. “Introduction” in Postmodernism: The Logic of Late Capitalism

Barthes, Roland. “Myth Today” in Mythologies

–, Elements of Semiology

Delueze, Giles and Felix Guattari. Neitzsche and Philosophy

–, “On Nomadology” in A Thousand Plateaus

Derrida, Jacque. On Grammatology

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish

Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition

 

Rules for Constructively Reading Someone Else’s Writing #3

(an ongoing series of tips for helping people talk to students, peers, and even bosses about their writing in helpful ways)

#3) Make your markings clear.

Nothing is more frustrating than finding a mark that you don’t understand.  In written comments, explain your abbreviations the first time.  Make them simple and obvious: “W.C.= word choice.”

Then, explain how to fix the problem the first time so that the marking is extra clear.  ”Instead of ‘sidetrack,’ did you mean ‘soundtrack’?”

Keep your handwriting legible. No one likes having to translate your creative m’s and n’s.  You are not Thomas Jefferson.

If online, make sure you don’t comment with shorthands that only you understand.  Typing can make your communication sloppy.  Don’t let it!  Just because the letters are clear doesn’t mean they make sense.

 

Text and Self

The conclusion of Paul Ricoeur’s Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning gave me goosebumps.  After a very dense 90 or so pages that drops words like langue and ‘distanciation’ and a hundred other $100 words left and right, Ricoeur brings the whole thing to an existential climax.

Just a few quotes out of context won’t really mean anything, but this is a commonplace book– dropping these quotes in here naked is part of the beauty of the task.  In that spirit, I am not going to interpret them for you, except to choose the quotes.  You probably won’t find these words as beautiful as I do, but if you get a tinny echo of something like a vision of reading being a path to a new and better self, you have succeeded in getting the point.

To “make one’s own” what was previously “foreign” remains the ultimate aim of all hermeneutics.  Interpretation at its last stage wants to equalize, to render contemporaneous, to assimilate in the sense of making similar.  This goal is achieved insofar as interpretation actualizes the meaning of the text for the present reader… What has to be appropriated is the meaning of the text itself, conceived in a dynamic way as the direction of thought opened up by the text… appropriation has nothing to do with any kind of person to person appeal. It is instead close to what Hans-Georg Gadamer calls a fusion of horizons (Horizonverschmelzung): the world horizon of the reader is fused with the world horizon of the writer. And the ideality of the text is the mediating link in this process of horizon fusing… If the reference of the text is the project of the world, then it is not the reader who primarily projects himself. The reader rather is enlarged in his capacity of self-projection by receiving a new mode of being from the text itself.  Appropriation, in this way, ceases to appear as a kind of possession, as a way of taking hold of things; instead it implies a moment of dispossession of the egoistic and narcissistic ego… In this self-understanding, I would oppose the self, which proceeds from the understanding of the text, to the ego, which claims to precede it.  It is the text, with its universal power of world disclosure, which give a self to the ego (91-95).

(Fort Worth, Texas: Texas Christian University Press, 1976).

 

Abstract- Erasing Slavery in Paul: (A)methodological Exploration in America

The apostle Paul uses slavery as a primary and often positive way of talking about relationships.   Paul’s insensitivity to the plight of actual slaves has encouraged many Americans, African-Americans and feminists to name Paul as an enemy to their just causes.  It is popular to ignore the problem of slavery in Paul or Paul’s writing itself in order to avoid conflict.  However, other critics have found that Paul can lend exploited people power. Paul’s imagination about the future of the world can be a great beginning for a countercultural vision that can empower sufferers. If Paul can be a tool for those exploited by slavery and slavery-like practices, then modern thinkers are obligated to find a responsible way to use Paul in this cause. I also insist that we explore how former slaves have dealt with Paul’s talk of slavery in the past.  If modern thinkers wish to make Paul an ally in their arguments to benefit those exploited by slavery-like practices, they must be wary of his potential to corrupt their message with his biases of time and attitude. There is no forgetting the slavery in Paul’s message.

In my paper I demonstrate how the postmodern concept of ‘erasure’ exists at the popular level in the way Paul and his use of slavery is encountered in America. Applying the concept of ‘erasure’ to its popular use can reveal the impossibility of forgetting American slavery.  First, I introduce what Nancy Ambrose (a woman who directly experienced slavery in America) does to Paul in her reading of the Bible as what I will name a ‘tradition of erasure.’ Second, I use an academic tradition of close reading to highlight Paul’s use of the word ‘δοῦλος’ (slave) and how the concept of slavery in his work falls into two categories: a reflection of Paul’s attitude toward slaves and a metaphor for the Christ-following life. Third, I show how Nancy Ambrose’s ‘tradition of erasing’ Paul must be addressed if Americans are to read Paul as a source of hope and guidance in a pluralistic world.  Americans are products of a history that includes slavery and live in a world where people still experience slavery-like practices in various forms of human trafficking in a range of exploitative conditions.[1] If Paul is to be used in America or be of value to those who still experience the exploitations of slavery, the tension between Paul’s use of slavery in his writing and the realities of American slavery must be addressed.  While it is tempting to resolve this tension by attempting to forget either the memory of American slavery or the slavery in Paul’s writing, the concept of erasure teaches us that no force of amnesia can allow us to forget without knowing or know how to forget.

---

[1] Maggy Lee, “Understanding Human Trafficking,” in Human Trafficking (ed. Maggy Lee; Portland, Ore.: Willian Publishing, 2007), 3.

 

Rules for Constructively Reading Someone Else’s Writing #2

(an ongoing series of tips for helping people talk to students, peers, and even bosses about their writing in helpful ways)

#2) Don’t overwhelm.

There are (at least) two ways you might overwhelm a writer: (a.) marking the same mistake too many times and (b.) marking too many potential improvements.

(a.) While editing, you might find that a writer makes the same mistake over and over again.  Rather than putting giant red bleeding blotches all over everything, mark one or two instances and then put teeny underlines or checks by the others. The writer will learn how to deal with the mistake the first one or two times and then get the exercise of correcting themselves the rest of the time.  Plus, they don’t get the visual cue of ‘bleeding paper’ to make them tear up before you can talk to them about it.

(b.) Pick your battles.  If the writer is having trouble with conjunctions that makes their paper incoherent, do not also harp on their use of the Oxford comma that you don’t like.  Mark problems that affect clarity or meaning first.  Then, if you have hardly anything to say (that means almost nothing), you may go back and forward your personal comma-agenda.

The general guideline is that if you tell someone that 10 things are wrong, they will remember two.  Their internal whimper will drown out the other eight.  If you tell someone three things, they are much more likely to remember all of them.

It is much easier to tell if you are overwhelming someone in person.  Their eyes well up with tears or you notice their foot start to jiggle uncontrollably.  Online, assume the writer is 10 times more sensitive than you thought.

 

Abstract- “From Seed to Plant: Using Aristotle to See Paul’s Understanding of the Relationship Between the Living and the Resurrected”

Paul uses ‘seed’ as a metaphor for the pre-resurrection state of the body at a pivotal point in 1 Cor 15 while making one of his most passionate arguments to the Corinthians.  The seed is a common metaphor for the state of people before they fulfill their promise in the Christian Testament, but Paul only speaks of seeds here. In 1 Cor 15, Paul writes an in-depth speech about the resurrection of the body as a critical point for the Corinthian community.

In all of 1 Cor, Paul’s major concern is the unity of the corporate body, and I do not think chapter 15 leaves this point. However, the language here is of physical bodies, dead and yet-to-die, which Paul must explain to the Corinthians using whatever metaphor fits best.  How the metaphor fit for Paul is different from how it fits for people in the contemporary age who have a basic understanding of genetics and usually a rudimentary biological notion of how seeds work.  Our ‘scientifically correct’ understanding of seeds overshadows what Paul saw when he observed a seed.  I will use Aristotle (384-322 bce) to show a more contemporary understanding of how seeds work. I will show how in 1 Cor 15: 35-49 Paul’s seed metaphor shows that Paul sees the physical body and the living community as ‘potential’ spiritual bodies awaiting death and God to make them whole and ‘actual.’

The seed image can give the reader insight into what Paul thought of what the body now is like and the relationship between the body now and the body to come.  There is an interesting yet confusing exegetical conversation about the nature of death that centers on Paul’s letters to the Corinthians and the seed image is a useful way to sort out this argument.

 

Rules for Constructively Reading Someone’s Writing #1

(an ongoing series of tips for helping people talk to students, peers, and even superior officers about their writing in helpful ways)

#1) Never skip talking about the strengths.

Writing makes everyone vulnerable.  If it’s good, don’t hesitate to say how.  If it’s terrible, start with something nice.  Be sincere, even if you must be brief.

 

On sticky terms

If I change one term in many heads, I am doing my job. I would like to complicate terms. Make them stick in people’s mouths. Attach (or re-attach) a whole lot of significance to them, so that when they are about to pop out of a student’s mouth they get bogged down and are forced to think about the term before they use it.  I want them to use these terms but use them appropriately and self-conciously.  Crowd their minds in order to crowd their mouths.

A short list of terms that should stick in mouths before they come out:

Seattle's Gum Wall

• Old Testament
• New Testament
• Christianity
• Judaism
• Unique
• First
• Only
• Most
• Best
• Postmodern
• Postcolonial
• Post-anything
• Same

 

Abstract- “Flying Scroll as Persian Degree: Zech 5:1-4 Seizes Persian Power for Use in Post-Exilic Yehud”

Back in ‘the land,’ as a new Persian-influenced people, Israel strives to define itself as Yahweh’s people.  During the reign of Darius, Zechariah sees a series of visions that are to guide the people of Israel away from the ways of their ancestors toward a new relationship with their God (1:4,7). Israel bows only to Yahweh but must somehow negotiate its position as subjects of the Persian Empire.  My interest in Zechariah’s vision is in delineating how writing helps these people understand themselves in relationship to their God and their foreign ruler. The object and action of writing is a method of directing power that the marginalized and the dominant can use effectively.  So, the specific powers of the written need to be organized to understand how the marginalized use it to gain power and how the dominant use it to control their power. Zechariah uses writing to figuratively and spiritually elevate Israel over the reality of Persian rule.

In Zechariah, Israel’s God’s way of addressing the world is through a strange piece of written material.  The sixth of Zechariah’s eight visions is of a flying scroll (megillah afah), flying out with a curse (ha’alah) to the whole land (5:1-4). The metaphor of the scroll shows the character of writing to be mobile, transcendent yet intimate, and powerfully destructive, characteristics shared by the royal messages of the Persian king.  I will use Zech 5:1-4 to sketch the relationship between the flying scroll and the Persian decree in the post-exilic community as seen through the eyes of the prophet. The scroll that contains the curse of God’s power appropriates and improves characteristics of the Persian decree; it takes for God’s written word the qualities of mobility, inaccessibility as it moves/flies, but intimacy once landed, and impressive destructive power (Zech 5:1-4).