(no subject)
Oct. 13th, 2008 04:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tree_and_leafI do wish things wouldn't keep turning into mysticism on me. It's disconcerting. Specifically, I dislike it when they turn into a sort of pseudo-mysticism, which neither recognises what it's doing, nor seems to understand why it's worthwhile.
I was reading a volume of essays about new trends in ethnography (there was a reason for this; I'm trying to make sense of the various ways one can talk about cultural phenomena); and was battling my way, admittedly slightly inattentively, through a long and very post modern article which was arguing that science was dead and that we can only evoke meaning, rather than transmitting it fully (there might actually be something in that, though I'm baffled by how he got from that to suggesting that symbols are impermissible because they falsely claim to represent what they symbolize exactly - which is not what I understand a symbol to do), and that post-modern, fragmentary approach to ethnography is the only way to 'evoke' (not describe) the world. He then moved on to condemning writing as magic and the will-to-power, and then I suddenly hit a paragraph in which he rejected models of thought based on a Platonic ascent, and, indeed, models of thought which use spatial terms, and then said he wished to evoke
'that stillness at the centre where there is neither higher nor lower, forward nor back, past nor future, when space and time cancel each other out in that familiar fantasy we all know as the everyday, commonplace world, that breach in time, that ever present, never present simultaneity of reality and fantasy that is the return to the commonsense world, floating like the Lord Brahma, motionless in the surfaceless void, all potentiality suspended within us in perfect realization, a return that is not a climax, terminus, stable image or homeostatic equilibrium, but a reduction of tension as the moment of transcendence simultaneously approaches, draws near, and departs without ever having arrived.'
At which point I wrote in my notes 'try prayer.' Except, of course, the trouble with that as opposed to theorising about it is that if you try to look into the abyss that is God, you might find the abyss looking back, which might actually have consequences.
Then he writes 'because the post-modern world is a post-scientific world without the illusion of a transcendental, neither transcendental science not transcendental religion can be at home in it, for that which is inhospitable to the transcendence by abstraction of the one must also be unfriendly to the similar character of the other. Neither the scientific illusion of reality not the religious reality of illusion is congruent with the reality of fantasy in the fantasy reality of the post-modern world. Post-modern ethnography captures this mood of the post-modern world, for it, too, does not move toward abstraction, but back to experience. It aims not to foster the growth of knowledge but to restructure experience; not to understand objective reality, for that is already established by common sense, but to reassimilate, to reintegrate the self in society and to restructure the conduct of everyday life.'
In fact, what he seems to be describing is a sort of fantasy of an objectless religions; it all seems rather pointless. He seems to be suggesting that anthropology exists to inculcate a sort of social metanoia, but that's meaningless if you don't have a vision of what people, or society ought to be (and reintegrating people into society begs the question: it's only a good thing to do if the society in question is good). I can understand atheism, but a sort of playing at looking for union with an uncreated absolute you don't actually believe in is just perverse.
Also, treating 'religion' as transcendent is problematic: Christianity is transcendent, but it is equally and inextricably immanent. But then, that's the irritating Christian way of constantly having it both ways. God is three, and God is one†. Christ is God and human, not a demi-god, but fully and totally both at once. The Christian is both a sinner and a saint.
... hum; sorry. I think exposure to that essay* has dissolved my capacity for logical thought, or at least to make a coherent post.
† It's no wonder the Arab world was better than Christendom at maths, really.
* For the record: the essay was Tyler, Stephen A. 1986. "Post-modern ethnography: from document of the occult to occult document" in Writing Culture, ed. James Clifford and George E Marcus. Berkeley: University of California Press, 122-140. I should have known nothing good could come of it from the title.
I was reading a volume of essays about new trends in ethnography (there was a reason for this; I'm trying to make sense of the various ways one can talk about cultural phenomena); and was battling my way, admittedly slightly inattentively, through a long and very post modern article which was arguing that science was dead and that we can only evoke meaning, rather than transmitting it fully (there might actually be something in that, though I'm baffled by how he got from that to suggesting that symbols are impermissible because they falsely claim to represent what they symbolize exactly - which is not what I understand a symbol to do), and that post-modern, fragmentary approach to ethnography is the only way to 'evoke' (not describe) the world. He then moved on to condemning writing as magic and the will-to-power, and then I suddenly hit a paragraph in which he rejected models of thought based on a Platonic ascent, and, indeed, models of thought which use spatial terms, and then said he wished to evoke
'that stillness at the centre where there is neither higher nor lower, forward nor back, past nor future, when space and time cancel each other out in that familiar fantasy we all know as the everyday, commonplace world, that breach in time, that ever present, never present simultaneity of reality and fantasy that is the return to the commonsense world, floating like the Lord Brahma, motionless in the surfaceless void, all potentiality suspended within us in perfect realization, a return that is not a climax, terminus, stable image or homeostatic equilibrium, but a reduction of tension as the moment of transcendence simultaneously approaches, draws near, and departs without ever having arrived.'
At which point I wrote in my notes 'try prayer.' Except, of course, the trouble with that as opposed to theorising about it is that if you try to look into the abyss that is God, you might find the abyss looking back, which might actually have consequences.
Then he writes 'because the post-modern world is a post-scientific world without the illusion of a transcendental, neither transcendental science not transcendental religion can be at home in it, for that which is inhospitable to the transcendence by abstraction of the one must also be unfriendly to the similar character of the other. Neither the scientific illusion of reality not the religious reality of illusion is congruent with the reality of fantasy in the fantasy reality of the post-modern world. Post-modern ethnography captures this mood of the post-modern world, for it, too, does not move toward abstraction, but back to experience. It aims not to foster the growth of knowledge but to restructure experience; not to understand objective reality, for that is already established by common sense, but to reassimilate, to reintegrate the self in society and to restructure the conduct of everyday life.'
In fact, what he seems to be describing is a sort of fantasy of an objectless religions; it all seems rather pointless. He seems to be suggesting that anthropology exists to inculcate a sort of social metanoia, but that's meaningless if you don't have a vision of what people, or society ought to be (and reintegrating people into society begs the question: it's only a good thing to do if the society in question is good). I can understand atheism, but a sort of playing at looking for union with an uncreated absolute you don't actually believe in is just perverse.
Also, treating 'religion' as transcendent is problematic: Christianity is transcendent, but it is equally and inextricably immanent. But then, that's the irritating Christian way of constantly having it both ways. God is three, and God is one†. Christ is God and human, not a demi-god, but fully and totally both at once. The Christian is both a sinner and a saint.
... hum; sorry. I think exposure to that essay* has dissolved my capacity for logical thought, or at least to make a coherent post.
† It's no wonder the Arab world was better than Christendom at maths, really.
* For the record: the essay was Tyler, Stephen A. 1986. "Post-modern ethnography: from document of the occult to occult document" in Writing Culture, ed. James Clifford and George E Marcus. Berkeley: University of California Press, 122-140. I should have known nothing good could come of it from the title.
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(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-13 05:21 pm (UTC)I wonder if the 'occult document' in the title is an intentional or unintentional self-reference... I find the quoted passages obscure as well as occult. ;)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-13 05:34 pm (UTC)...and you need not fear for your coherence!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-13 05:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-13 06:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-13 06:28 pm (UTC):)
(sigh, I was just thinking: and we could argue this out later over beer, but...)
neo-Gnosticism?
Date: 2008-10-13 06:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-13 06:34 pm (UTC)Oh well. Argue over beer.
Re: neo-Gnosticism?
Date: 2008-10-13 07:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-13 08:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-13 11:54 pm (UTC)The current trendy thought does seem to recognize that we have to worship something without ever daring to suppose that said worship needs an object. That's the definition of gibberish, words being divorced from meaning.
What do you suppose is the writer's difference between "evoke" and "describe"?
Re: neo-Gnosticism?
Date: 2008-10-14 09:27 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-14 09:44 am (UTC)That was one of the few bits that approached sense, actually, though I'm not sure evoke is quite the best word. He meant that because human knowledge and language is always insufficient, it is better to admit that your writings on a subject can't fully describe, but only suggest (aspects of) it, because otherwise your claim to completeness is a lie. This actually makes sense to me, at least as a way of doing theology, but I don't think the author would appreciate 'See! This is why you need word and sacrament!' as a response
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-14 09:45 am (UTC)Indeed - I think it must be unintentional - no-one who writes as pompously as that can have a sense of humour, at least not directed at himself!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-14 09:47 am (UTC)Heh. No, I think it clearly isn't just you!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-14 09:49 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-14 09:57 am (UTC)Rather harder if you're a literary critic (actually, I like to think of myself as a philologist, but my supervisior keeps disagreeing with me).
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-14 05:02 pm (UTC)Quite. This is why, as well as being amazing and wonderful and the cornerstone of my spirituality, the Eucharist also scares me rigid.
Re: neo-Gnosticism?
Date: 2008-10-15 10:30 am (UTC)That sounds like it should be part of a tongue-twister.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-15 11:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-15 11:51 pm (UTC)Thank you, but it's not exactly difficult - shooting fish in a barrel, or something like that.