Fyodor Dostoevsky, on
the eve of modernity’s pinnacle, lamented that Russians had “seized hold of
civilization and at once, blindly and devotedly, adopted the creed that it was
precisely in civilization that we could find the ‘universality’ destined to
unite humanity.”[1]
He was speaking of modernity’s creed, embedded in the rationalism of science
and math that had taken Europe and America by storm and was quickly spreading
east to Russia. Dostoevsky, the prophet, realized the fallacy inherent in
the modern creed of progress that created a Euclidean problem of asserting
universal scientific reality over and against spiritual particularity.
This artificial separation of the natural and the unnatural, duped humans into
believing that a public universal ideal could be achieved here on earth,
separate from the private (as modernists claimed) values of God.
As science encountered the intricacies of the created order, not
to mention human existence, categories and specialties were generated to
explain and rationalize the chaotic. Libraries flourished in modern times
as more and more paper was used to document, categorize and enlighten our
existence on earth. Burgeoning universities demoted Christianity and religious
study to an optional curriculum that dealt with a private sphere of
values. Philosophy became more ‘scientific’ with the introduction of
psychology. Recently rationalists created Cultural Studies theory, as
another specialty to help interpret and categorize data of human
existence. While much of Cultural Studies operates on a rational
Euclidean plane, it contains within it, a potential to critique the claims of
its source, modern rationalism. This critique provides the possibility
for collaboration between Cultural Studies and Christianity that breaks down
modernity’s Euclidean structures and re-introduces a cosmic multidimensional
view of God’s created order.
...
Christianity asserts another dimension into the
particular/universal human reality. Christianity breaks down the
Euclidean fallacy and replaces it with a multidimensional view of
history. Particulars are events that cannot always be neatly fashioned
into the horizontal universal sweep of history. The event, in fact, may
be vertically aligned to the point that it resists horizontal
integration. In this case, the particularity may only fit into a vertical
universality. When this happens, pre-modern cultures say a miracle
happens; modernists on the other hand often will adjust their universal
constructs to explain away the unnatural as just another natural event.
In most cases, however, particularities can be best integrated into a universal
when that universality is understood in both vertical and horizontal
terms. Cultural Studies oriented toward the horizontal, needs a vertical
universal in order to avoid the modern trap of hegemony.
Christianity, with its foundation in the
incarnation and its orientation towards the eschatological, supplies the
universal vertical dimension needed to counter rational modernity’s
hegemony. The incarnation of Jesus Christ is the particular revelation of
Jesus Christ within historical time of God’s universal purposes. The
universal is not presented as abstract ideas or values, but in the particular
life of Jesus Christ. The vertical orientation is always grounded in the
particular as it looks upward towards the universal. “Jesus’ meaning is
contained in the telos built into his biography; his life is lived
toward resurrection, back toward his extra human, supra-individualistic state.”[2]
The eschatological vertical dimension embraces the
fluidity of particular contracts because of the yet, but not yet aspect of
human history, while still holding to the telos of God’s universal purposes. This
eschatological promise reveals that any universal interpretations and
classifications are only temporary, and at best only partially reveal
actualities contained in particular contracts. As such universalities
that are not fluid themselves are ideologies that seek to replace the ultimate
truth revealed in God. Even religious universalities such as doctrines
and creeds are particularities that have been improperly universalized.
They have been created by a structure and are meant to reify particularities
and maintain boundaries between the structure’s insider faithful and the
outsider heretics. Does this mean that all Christianity then is
relative? On the contrary, the universal is the particular fact of Jesus
Christ that reveals vertically the universal purposes of God. This
vertical revelation replaces any horizontal universality.
...
Chakrabarty identifies modern Europecentrism as
a dominant force that shapes historical discourse and Cultural Studies. I
would add that it does so through its assertion of factual cause and effect,
which elevates the written word over oral communication. The written word
reifies individual and group contracts through its ability to chronicle events
into a historical whole. When this is done, the particular event becomes
universalized into factual history. Written history has been in place
well before modern times, but the peculiar ‘contribution’ of modernity is the
belief that all events and contracts are natural and “everything can be historicized. So while the
nonnaturalness of history, the discipline is granted, the assumed universal
applicability of its method entails a further assumption: that it is always
possible to assign, people, places, and objects to a naturally existing,
continuous flow of historical time.”[3] The logical conclusion is that
particular events and contracts narrate themselves into a universal history;
therefore they are not in need of a universalizing telos.
Within modernity’s written history, particular attempts to
re-narrate events or to shift history are judged against a norm that is assumed
to be inherent in the event itself. This modern understanding ignores
political power differentials and other variables such as group membership
requirements and status, levels of mobility, valuations of communication types,
typologies and level of enforcement. The historian is the person
responsible for laying out the facts into their natural and prescriptive universal
whole. Attempts to rewrite history by the marginalized often
generate Euclidean claims. In other words, histories run side by side
concurrently. For example in the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation
Commission process, there are two histories, one for the predominately black
participants and one for the culturally dominant white surrounding
community. The Commission attempts to bring the black history into the
white history; the problem is, however, that white history has already narrated
and reified the events in written form; therefore within a modern construct of
history, any black rewriting of the event will continue to run parallel to the
white history, as an undercurrent representative of an alternative view.
Christianity, which comes to us in written form,
is particularly susceptible to modern Euclidean history. The Christ
event, as recorded in the New Testament is an event that can be reified into a
modern historical fact separated from its divine telos; modernity separates the incarnation from its
divine source and purpose into a Gnostic parallelism of natural human Jesus and
unnatural divine Christ. The natural human Jesus becomes the possession
of humanity under modernity as a material process to protect, interpret and
control. The incarnation of Jesus Christ is intended less to
inspire eschatological imagination and is destined to be a controlled cultural
artifact used in the production of meaning. This meaning runs within
human history while the divine Christ runs in the modern parallel Euclidean
dimension just above human history. (See figure 1). Its parallelism
prevents the divine Christ from ever intersecting and disturbing human
history.
The Euclidean dilemma of modernity is broken
through in the apocalyptic vision of God’s in-breaking eschatological Kingdom
as witnessed in the particular life incarnation of Jesus Christ. Is the
incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ a fact? Yes, but it
is a fact that is both natural and unnatural, human and divine. It is the
vertical and horizontal intersection of God’s purposes with human
history. At this intersection, the two dimensional plane is exploded into
an endless multi-dimensional possibilities. (See figure 2).
“…Paul Minear makes the
point that John’s cosmology in the book of Revelation is not dominated by the
(Euclidean) categories of time and space but rather by heaven and earth, with
primacy accorded to the heavenly realm. Furthermore, there is not merely
a ‘first’ heaven and earth (ta prota, 21:4, which ultimately passes away), but also a
‘new’ heaven and earth, which constitute the decisive frontier of the old – not
in terms of temporal succession (though the new heaven and earth do not pass
away) but as an alternative cosmic order and community in which God dwells and
is worshipped as Sovereign.[4]
How then does this new
understanding of Christianity shape the prophetic role of Cultural Studies
within this new understanding of Christian theology? It is one that is
clearly apophatic, rather than universalizing. Its purpose is to expose
and rid narratives that are universalizing and hegemonic. It is not to
interpret or reify, but to point to intersections where the vertical universal
purposes of God intersect with the horizontal particularities of human
reality. When this happens, the Euclidean planes that separate narratives
merge, not into a modern rational universal, but into a narrative that provides
a telos that breaks any human attempt to claim universal meaning and
purpose. It is a telos that is particularly witnessed from a slave’s
point of view.
“…the slave’s perspective require a discreet
view not just of the dynamics of power and domination in plantation societies
dedicated to the pursuit of commercial profit but of such central categories of
the Enlightenment project as the idea of universality, the fixity of meaning,
the coherence of subject, and, of course, the foundational ethnocentrism in
which these have all tended to be anchored.”[5]
Christian apocalypticism
exposes the lies of modernity and the chaos it has created, as represented in
Turner’s “Slave Ship.” In the midst of the chaos of death and despair,
there is a vertical ray of light that represents God’s eschatological light
that illuminates the evil of modernity, stripping it of its power and revealing
the true telos of all created beings. Far from creating
meaning through material processes that reify particular contracts into archaic
cultural artifacts, Christianity transcends modernity and celebrates where the
horizontal particular meets the vertical universal of God.
In this multidimensionality,
the prophetic purpose of Theological Cultural Studies is to follow
Chakrabarty’s lead and begin to challenge modern assumptions and universalizing
narratives without specifically knowing what the new narrative will look
like. The task is particularly at this moment a prophetic call to
repentance. Modernity has been a force that particularly lined up well
with Christianity. It will take a lot of deconstruction to untangle their
closely-knit narrative ties. Once deconstruction is completed, I cannot
predict whether Theological Cultural Studies will survive, after all it is a
modern construct itself. Perhaps culture, and the individual will remain
distinctive, but with new ways of relating to each other; perhaps they will
disappear. Whatever the future holds, God’s narrative of what it is to
creatively live into God’s eschatological and multidimensional historical
intersection has always been in conflict with earthly narratives; therefore,
God has always been in need of particular prophets to remind creation of its
universal telos.
[4] P. Travis Kroeker and Bruce K. Ward, Remembering
the End: Dostoevsky as Prophet to Modernity (USA: Westview Press,
2001), 100.
[5] Paul Gilroy, The
Black Atlantic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 55.
[3] Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Time of History
and the Times of Gods” Lisa Lowe, ed. The Politics of Culture in the
Shadow of Capital (Durham: Duke University Press: 1997), 36.
[2] Michael Holquist, Dostoevsky &
the Novel (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1977), 111.
[1] Fyodor Dostoevsky, A Writer’s
Diary: Vol.2, Translated and Annotated by Kenneth Lantz
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1994), 831
Photo Credits:
JMW Turner Slave
Ship: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Slave_Ship
