Critique of Pure Interest: On saying "Shhh…" – The onomatopeic name of Christ

Friday, November 4, 2011

On saying "Shhh…" – The onomatopeic name of Christ

“Shhh…” Apparently this has a calming effect on babies because it resembles the elementary monotonous noises in which the fetus is immersed. One could say: babies are calmed by it because it instills in them the momentary illusion of being in the womb again, where the ‘oceanic feeling’ of the ‘original tensionless state’ prevails (Freud).

But from the point of view of Gestalt psychology and phenomenology, it is perhaps more to the point to say that babies are calmed by saying “Shhh…” because it thwarts the differentiation of figure and background. After all, by saying “Shhh ...” you evoke in the baby the memory of the vanishing mediator of the mother’s voice, i.e. the noise of the flowing blood, the thumping heart and the gurgling digestive system that must recede to the background so that the mother’s voice – or any other particular sound – may appear to the fetus. In “Shhh ...” that background noise returns to the foreground, so that no other noise can grab the attention of the fetus. Perhaps it is this relief of attention which is calming?

But is “Shhh…” then not one of the most mysterious expressions in our language? An expression referring to something that systematically withdraws from consciousness, namely the vanishing mediator, the receding background that makes everything appear? Is “Shhh…” the onomatopoeic name of the unnameable? Should we say that Christ is actually called “Shhh …”? Is every time we say “Shhh ...” a prayer?

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The (onto)logical monstrosity of the placenta

According to Luce Irigaray: “One of the distinctive features of the female body is its toleration of the other’s growth within itself without incurring illness or death for either one of the living organisms.” (Irigaray 1993, Je, tu, nous, p.45) The toleration by the mother’s body consists in the fact that it renounces the immediate relationship with the fetus and allows this relationship to be mediated by a third, the placenta, which is related both to the mother through the uterine wall and to the fetus through the umbilical cord. The placenta can play this intermediating role thanks to its special anatomic status as a hybrid, a fusion of fetal and maternal tissues. From a biological viewpoint, the placenta is a synthesis of mother and fetus – a synthesis, however, which is relatively independent of both, since it functions as an external and independent organ. In one sense, the placenta is an organ belonging to both mother and fetus; in another sense, it belongs to neither, since it is literraly placed between them. It is this hybrid nature that enables the placenta to act as a filter and sluice between the separate blood circulations of mother and fetus (hence mother and fetus can have different blood types – a transfusion of foreign blood is normally extremely dangerous).

At the same time, however, this hybrid nature of the placenta seals its fate as a vanishing mediator – that is to say: its fate as waste, as the material leftover of the process of pregnancy and birth. There is a certain logic to this discarding of the placenta. The purpose of pregnancy is, after all, the production of child and mother as separate, autonomous beings. In light of that purpose, the placenta must appear as an (onto)logical monstrosity, a mythical Chimera, an incarnate contradiction that threatens the logical consistency of reality itself. This monstrosity appears concretely and strikingly in the bloody and shapeless mass which is the afterbirth. This grotesque mass cannot not be a skandalon (Greek for obstacle) for the tertium non datur of normal reality where the binary logic of A or not-A prevails: each being is one or the other, but not something in-between. Contrary to this binary logic, the placenta says insolently: tertium datur, there is a third between mother and fetus. Hence the placenta must disappear, must be buried or simply thrown away, in order to restore the logical consistency of our familiar reality. As the medium between mother and fetus, the placenta must have this monstrous character of being in-between, this incestuous fusion of fetal and maternal tissues (and in that sense, one can ask if not every medium of communication necessarily shares in this monstrosity). But for the very same reason, the placenta must necessarily disappear in the mutual mediation of mother and child as separate beings. In this mediation, the placenta is the vanishing mediator. Thus the “loss of the middle” – so deplored by conservatives – has here a positive function, constitutive of reality as such.

For the full text of this essay, see: Between mother and child: On the necessary monstrosity of the placenta

What is the Critique of Pure Interest?

How can I be free and yet do justice to the other? After all, to be free (autonomous) is to be the source of one’s own values. So how can I be autonomous without neglecting the intrinsic value of the other? Conversely, how can I respect the value of the other without losing my freedom by falling into heteronomy? In short, is there a third between autonomy and heteronomy?

And is there a better term for this new form of freedom – this third between autonomy and heteronomy – than “pure interest”? For as has been pointed out by many others (notably Martin Heidegger and William Desmond), the original Latin verb “interesse” carries a nice ambiguity. Literally it means “being between” (“inter” = between, “esse” = being). From the Middle Ages to the present, however, the verb “interesse” gained a second meaning, namely (and obviously) that of having an interest, of finding someone or something interesting. The ‘nicety’ of this ambiguity is that it suggests how our ‘interests’ (stakes, desires, investments, passions) are always expressions of our inter-esse, our being between others. Thus we already start to see how the concept of interesse can be used to grasp that sought ofter new form of freedom, the third position between autonomy and heteronomy. Being between others, we are fundamentally influenced by them, our desires and passions are directed at them, our love and energy (and not to forget a lot of money!) are invested in them. One’s ‘free will’ is therefore always already tuned to and by the other: autonomy and heteronomy mingle. Here the ambiguity of “interest” helps us even further, since it can mean both private or self-interest (autonomy, egoism) and selfless interest in the other (heteronomy, altruism, the law of the Other – compare the Kantian “interesseloses Interese” towards beauty). With “pure interest” I want to designate the coincidence of all three aspects of interesse: 1) being in-between, 2) self-interest, 3) selfless interest in the other.

This pure interest is pure in three respects: a) ethical, b) transcendental, c) utopian:

a) It is pure in the ethical sense of being free from selfishness and domination of one by the other: in their being-in-between self and other exist only in relation to each other (their existence is the ‘happening’ between them) so that self-interest (autonomy) and the interest of the other (heteronomy) coincide.

b) It is pure in the transcendental (Kantian) sense: the relationship between one and other is ontologically prior to their empirical existence as different beings – thus their interrelation is the transcendental precondition their empirical existence.

c) It is pure in the utopian sense: the ethical ideal, although contained in the transcendental structure of being-in-between, is never fully reallized in practice, at the empirical level of human existence, where selfishness and domination are indeed the order of the day – in that sense, the actuality of human existence lags behind what it potentially is: thus pure interest remains pure, utopian potency.

In my view, this discrepancy between the transcendental and empirical levels of existence explains the utopian tendency in human history, the emergence and slow development of egalitarian relationships in human society – in short: from the Athenian ideal of democracy for some (not slaves) to the modern ideal of democracy for everyone to the postmodern ideal of anarchic pluralism...

The aim of the critique of pure interest is to further this utopian (messianic, revolutionary) development, that is, to fully unleash the powers of this pure potency. It is first and foremost a critique in the Kantian sense: an investigation into the transcendental interrelation that underlies the possibility of pure interest at the empirical level. The critique of pure interest, in other words, asks the question: How is pure interest empirically possible? How can autonomy and heteronomy go together to form a new form of freedom? In my view this question is crucial to the postmodern and (neo)conservative times we live in, dominated by economic and cultural crises and the growing importance of communication technology for the network societies in which we live, where to be connected (i.e. to be between) is everything.

My guideline – my original inspiration so to speak – in this critique of pure interest is what I call the Marxist Christology of the vanishing mediator. It hinges on the intuition that the transcendental precondition of pure interest should be sought in the vanishing mediator. I borrow this concept from (post)modern philospophers like Frederick Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, although I use it in my own rather idiosyncratic way. For me, the vanishing mediator is what makes the sought after third between autonomy and heteronomy possible. This third requires a reconciliation between self and other, such that the will of the self and the value of the other become mutually enforcing instead of being in conflict. And this reconciliation requires a mediator, a medium that provides the common ground on which self and other can meet. Now the Marxist-Christological wager of my critique is the claim that this mediator must be essentially vanishing in order to do its job. Otherwise the medium will remain between self and other, blocking their full coming together.

This is in fact a general truth about media: in order to function properly as media, they have to disappear in the process of mediation. Spoken language is a good example: it makes intersubjective communication possible because it disappears in the act of communiction. If it didn’t disappear, speech would literally become a wall of sound standing between us, directing attention to itself rather than to the notions and feelings of the communicating subjects. In a sense, then, the theory of the vanishing mediator is also a theory about communication and media in general. Yet my focus will mainly be on the vanishing mediator as a medium between the divergent interests of self and other, making a third between autonomy and heteronomy possible.

So what does this have to do with Marxism and Christology?

First of all, notice that this view of the vanishing mediator finds its most paradigmatic expression in the messianic figure of Christ as the divine mediator. Christ had to disappear from the midst of men, that is, he had to die on the cross, in order to reconcile mankind with God and with itself.

So is this simply a believer’s blog? Do I offer nothing more than faith, albeit helped by the handmaiden of philosophy? Do I make religion the master of rationality? Am I nothing more than one of those dangerous and potentially violent fundamentalists?

Not at all… Well, at least that’s not my intention. Note that my quest is for a third between autonomy and heteronomy (in other words: this elusive ‘third’ is my Holy Grail). And this places my undertaking squarely between autonomous, critical thought on the one hand and heteronomous, dogmatic faith on the other. That is, on my quest for the vanishing mediator I have to straddle the fine line (or war zone) between rationality and religion, between concept and intuition, between critique and domatism, between cold logic and emotion, between head and heart, between yang and yin, between modernity and pre-/postmodernity… Exactly how this balancing act will work out is something I am anxious to find out. Hence this blog.

And hence my use of the nice oxymoron “Christology” – a term that combines the autonomous rationality of logic with the heteronomy of faith in Christ (after all, “Christology” means the logos of Christ). This conjunction of rationality and religion is precisely the mode my investigation must take, as I explained above. Of course, the same oxymoron can be found in the term “theology” but obviously my focus on Christ implies the primacy of “Christology”.

But why a Marxist Christology?

Well, first of all, notice that my problem statement – “Is there a third between autonomy and heteronomy?” – is decidedly dialectical. The reconciliation of the opposition between self and other (or thesis and antithesis) is nothing more or less than the core business of the dialectical method as practiced by Hegel and Marx. In fact, the very term “mediation” derives from the dialectical tradition in philosophy, from Plato and Aristotle to Hegel and Marx (all four philosophers will figure prominently on this blog).

By developing a Christology of the vanishing mediator, I am decidedly on the side of the materialist Marx as opposed to the idealist Hegel. As an idealist, Hegel wanted to think the Absolute (that is, God) as subject, not as object (see Hegel’s preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit). In contrast, the Christology of the vanishing mediator aims to understand the Absolute neither as subject (as Hegel did) nor as object (as Hegel accused Spinoza of doing) but rather as what happens between subject and object (or self and other). In this perspective, dialectical negativity – which Hegel saw as the fundamental activity of the subject towards the object – turns out to be an autonomous process that constitutes and therefore precedes both self and other. Hegel’s notorious negation of the negation can thus be reworked as the self-negation of this absolute negativity (in Christological terms: the self-sacrifice of God) which thereby functions as the vanishing mediator in the meeting of self and other. As I hope to make clear in the rest of this blog, this is all in line with Marx’s turning inside out (Umstulpüng) of Hegel’s dialectic.

But in order to give a preliminary clarification of the Marxist aspect of my Christology, it is perhaps better to focus on the ethics that follows from it. This is an ethics of imitatio Christi, the passionate imitation of Christ as vanishing mediator. Following Christ, we should spend ourselves, give ourselves completely as vanishing mediators for those around us. More generally, we should let all vanishing mediators do their job, that is to say: we should let them vanish. Unfortunately, due to its greed and idolatry, mankind (and Western man in particular) is often unable to let go, to accept loss as an inevitable, necessary part of reality. We hold on to the vanishing mediator, turning it into our possession, thereby frustrating its proper function. People are generally unreconciled because they make the mediator their private property, which thus becomes a stumbling block rather than a reconciler. For many centuries the Church has done this to Christ himself, unable to accept the vanishing nature of Christ, turning him into an idol justifying the Church’s imperial claims. But in modern times this sickness of mankind, the inability to let go of the vanishing mediator, has taken the form of capitalism. For in modern social life, money is the means of exchange, the mediator par excellence (next to language). And there is nothing wrong with that as long as money is allowed to do its job: to vanish from one’s pocket during one’s exchanges with others. But in capitalism, money is accumulated in capital. The vanishing mediator no longer vanishes but keeps returning for ever growing profits. Thus robbed of its proper function, the mediator adds to the strife among men instead of solving it. Hence our duty to spend ourselves with revolutionary passion, to give ourselves as the vanishing mediators of modern social life by breaking the stiffling power of capital. In that sense, Marx was the greatest imitator of Christ in modern times!

This Marxist commitment adds a second meaning to my critique of pure interest, which is not just a critique in the Kantian sense (an investigation into the transcendental condition of freedom between autonomy and heteronomy) but also a Marxist critique of pure interest in the economic sense, namely the return on investment.

In my future posts, I will publish fragments that elucidate different aspects of my Marxist Christology. I have been working on this theory for more or less ten years now, originally inspired by the Dutch philosopher Henk Oosterling and his musings on “the between” (though he would probably recoil in horror if he saw the direction I am taking with this concept). Some of the other thinkers that inspired me were Martin Buber on the dialogical between, Heidegger on the ontological between, Heraclitus, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer on the agonistic between, Voegelin and Desmond on the Platonic between (metaxy), Kant on imagination as the mediator between understanding and sensibility, Derrida on différance, René Girard on the scapegoat mechanism, Sloterdijk on intersubjective spheres, Plato on dialogue, Aristotle on topos and middle term, Žižek obviously though I find his treatments of the vanishing mediator to be far from systematically satisfying (which holds for all of his thought), and last but not least Hegel and Marx. All these philosophers (and many others) will be discussed in future posts. Finally I would also like to mention Taoism as major source of influence.

The critique of pure interest – that is, the Marxist Christology of the vanishing mediator – is still in statu nascendi. This blog traces its development. Hence, the fragmentary nature of what I am about to offer on this blog. It is systematic, but it is not a system. In a sense what comes out on this blog is a procession of the many turts I have accumulated over the years… Not a very refreshing image, but to the point nevertheless. Shit is one of the most important vanishing mediators in human life. No good metabolism can do without it. In that sense Christ can be defined as divine Shit…

Marx on "sensuous activity"

The notion of praxis enables Marx to conceive of the interrelation between human subject and material object as a fundamental, ontological interaction, in which neither is primary and on which both are dependent. It is this ontological orientation that allows Marx in the first Thesis on Feuerbach to refer to “the thing, reality” itself as praxis, as the realm of sensory activity in which man and nature determine each other reciprocally. Thus the relation between man and nature (subject and object) should, according to Marx, be understood as an internal relation, where the relata do not exist independently, in contrast to an external relation, where the relata influence each other alternately while actually remaining separate. This ontological significance can also be seen from Marx’s notion of “sensuous activity” if it is taken in the epistemological sense of sensory perception. One could say that this epistemological sense is integrated in the comprehensive social-practical sense of “sensuous activity” as the human collaboration in working upon nature. After all, in his labor man also senses himself and his encounter with the world: he sees his objects and tools, he experiences fatigue and the resistance of matter but also the pleasure of his activity and the beauty (or ugliness) of the worked upon object. This esthetic aspect of labor is important to Marx: truly human, ie unalienated labor is for him as much artistic activity as it is the satisfaction of basic human needs, and the unalienated product of labor is ultimately also a work of art. Thus aisthesis (Greek: sensory experience) forms an integral part of Marx’s notion of praxis.

The ontological ambiguity of sensory qualities
So what about the ontological interaction between subject and object that occurs in praxis? Does this also occur in the aisthesis of sensory perception? In fact, it does. This is exactly what Kant tried to explain when he focused on the interaction of receptivity and spontaneity in sensation, where a fusion takes place of subjective activity and passivity before the object. This fusion is shown in the ambiguous nature of sensory qualities such as color, sound, smell, taste, warmth and tactility. On the one hand, such “qualia” are inherently subjective because they exist only in a subject’s perceptual awareness of them. Thus Berkeley’s idealistic formula esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived) surely applies to qualia, which is the reason why the philosophical tradition speaks of them as mere “secondary qualities” (as opposed to an object’s primary qualities, ie those that exist independently of the perceiving subject). Yet, on the other hand, qualia also have something undeniably objective about them, bound as they are to some external object whose properties they are (thus we say: the rose is red, the water is warm). Thus qualia are like a joint membrane between subject and object where they meet and enter into each other. William Desmond, the author of Being and the Between, is one of the very few philosophers who notice this strange ontological status of qualia between subjective and objective. He writes: “secondary qualities have an unyielding equivocity, since their ontological status is finally uncertain. For this status is distributed between “something” in the thing itself, its powers, and the relativity of that “something” to mind.”

Marx’s rehabilitation of the sensuous
The fact that this intermediate status of qualia is rarely observed, has everything to do with the traditional opposition between idealism and materialism – precisely the opposition Marx wants to overcome in the first Thesis on Feuerbach. Because traditional materialism stresses one-sidedly the passivity of man with respect to nature, it can understand qualia only as secondary, ie as mere effects in consciousness caused by external objects. And because idealism, in contrast, stresses one-sidedly the (mental) activity of the human subject, it cannot understand qualia as coming from external objects. The result is that materialism and idealism, precisely because of their opposing positions (passivity vs. activity), come to a surprisingly unanimous opinion about the ontological status of sensory qualities: they are merely subjective and not objective. Thus the traditional contrast in philosophy between materialism and idealism has led to a systematic disregard of the true in-between status of sensory qualities. Marx was in a sense the first to rehabilitate that true status of the sensory by taking up a position between materialism and idealism. That seems to be one of the main reasons why Marx in the first Thesis on Feuerbach focuses specifically on sensation, that is, on “reality, sensuousness” which in traditional materialism “is conceived only in the form of the object or of intuition, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively”. Marx’s point is therefore not that man as part of nature is a sensuous being, rather his point is that reality as such is sensuous, i.e. praxis, the reciprocal determination of subject and object that takes place in sensation. For Marx, the sensuous is the medium (ie the middle, the “between”) in which subject and object – man and nature – meet and determine each other.

White page anxiety

Is the blank white page – as the abyss of meaninglessness into which the blocked writer falls – not a perfect image (an imageless image) of the nothing in contrast to which something can appear? Is the tumbling of the blocked writer into this white abyss not a kind of death, a ‘symbolic’ death, in which on the one hand the authorial ego disintegrates, but which at the same time opens up in the writer a radical freedom – the freedom to create sense out of the nothing of non-sense? And the writer who in this way conquers his writer's block, precisely by embracing it, by writing from the depths of the abyss of meaninglessness that lies before him – is this liberated writer than not also an accomplice of Being? Doesn’t his disintegrated ego become an empty space – as a kind of internalization of the white page – in which reality can come to appearance? Doesn’t his writing then coincide with the ontological productivity of Being itself? And doesn’t this explain the pure desire to write, to write for the sake of writing, as a desire to participate in Being, to let the blank page be the place where the Event of reality can take place, no matter what happens exactly?

The attraction of the abyss
In the light of these questions there is a remarkable agreement between writer’s block and what Sartre calls the “attraction of the abyss”. Sartre describes the well-known experience of standing in front of a gaping depth (e.g. before a ravine in the mountains or on the roof of a tall building) and having the seemingly irrational inclination to go to the edge, to defy the fear and vertigo and to look straigt into the deep – an inclination which can even take the frightening form of an urge to actually throw oneself into the depth. The abyss repels but it also draws us. Thus we go back and forth, oscillating between safe distance and deadly closeness. Sartre explains this attraction of the abyss in a semi Heideggerian (for mainly Hegelian) way, such that it is our own groundless freedom that attracts us in the abyss: by defying death, we prove our freedom, our radical independence from all external authority, even the authority of biological life as such. In a more Heideggerian way we can understand the attraction of the abyss as not just revolving around our freedom but also – in relation to that freedom – as revolving around the experience of Being itself, of the miraculous fact that there is something rather than nothing. In the liberating light of threatening death, our being in the world here and now appears so much more intense. This intensity of the experience of Being – this ontological “Steigerung des Lebens” (Nietzsche) – is the ‘object’ of our desire as we approach the edge of the abyss.

It is, I think, the same desire that binds the blocked writer to his blank page. His suffering is exactly the oscillation described by Sartre, between revulsion and rapprochement, between getting up and walking away from the white abyss on his desk and getting back to it in order to finally write something – the oscillation between the apparently sane thought “Isn’t it better to call it quits? For I have nothing to say” and the seemingly aburd thought “I can’t stop, for I have nothing to say”. What repels the blocked writer in the white page, the senseless nothing that emerges out of it, is also what attracts him, because the Being of beings is experienced all the more lively in contrast to the nothing. This is one of the paradoxes of being a writer, of being someone who experiences his “Steigerung des Lebens” by withdrawing from the bustling life (the vita activa), retiring into a lonely room, reducing all his movements to the the minimal movement of a pen on paper or fingers on a keyboard. Behind this solitary confinement in a room, however, lies an even greater paradox, namely that the “Steigerung des Lebens” in writing becomes that much greater the more the act of writing itself fails, the more the writer runs aground in writer’s block. The more intense the blank page as the abyss of meaninglessness reveals itself to the writer, the more intense his experience of Being becomes. The more blocked he is, the more ‘in touch’ with the Event he becomes. The less he can say, the more his words express the ontological productivity of Being as such.

A clearing in a forest of letters
Heidegger describes thinking about Being as a Holzweg, a dead end ‘wood’-road through a forest, made by foresters and leading to an empty spot, a clearing (Lichtung) where the trees have been felled. Heidegger’s point is that ontological thinking is a similarly dead-end road, in the sense that it does not lead to rational conclusions about ‘things’ (beings) that can be put into words. Ontological thought rather results in a conceptual void or silence in discourse. Like the empty, bright spot in the forest makes – by way of contrast – the dark, dense forest all the more present, so the silent void in which ontological thinking results makes the experience of Being all the more emphatic. But the writer who runs aground in writer’s block – isn’t he travelling a similar dead-end Holzweg? The blank page at which the blocked writer arrives after struggling through a forest of text – is this not also a kind of clearing? And here of course I do not primarily mean the clearing left by the actual trees that had to be felled to make the paper possible. Although that’s surely a nice image of what I mean.

Communism as a loss of center? “...we are right in the middle of the middle that connects us.” This reminds me of the famous thesis of the heretical Dominican and priest Giordano Bruno, to the effect that in an infinite circle the center is everywhere. Impressed by Copernicus' discovery that the universe revolves not around the earth but the earth around the sun, and on the basis of the hypothesis that our sun is only one star among many other stars, Bruno arrived at the idea that the universe is infinite and consists of many solar systems similar to our own. To compensate for the earthly loss of the center position as it were, Bruno implied that the earth is still in a sense the center, because “we can assert with certainty that the universe is all center, or that the center of the universe is everywhere and its circumference is nowhere.” (1584)

Isn’t this a comforting thought? The center is here and now. I am the center of the universe. Everything revolves around me. And yet everything revolves not around me but around you and him and her and them... At the same time the center is always elsewhere. Wasn’t it because of this revolutionary idea that Bruno was burned as heretic at the stake? Officially, he had to burn for the heresies of docetism (the denial of Jesus' humanity) and pantheism. But didn’t his Copernican heliocentrism and decenterment of the earth play some rol in his condemnation by the Church, as is often suspected? That the earth – and hence man – is not the center of creation was something the Church could not accept. Thus, however, the Church ignored the essential ambiguity of Bruno's thesis that in an infinite circle the center is everywhere – so always elsewhere, but also always here. The center position is shared with others – and that's exactly what the Church could not and still can not do: share the centre. Or is my reading of Bruno's thesis too hippie-like, too multi-cultural, too positive, too optimistic, too communist (shared ownership of the medium)? For how can the center be both here and elsewhere? Is this not the same thing as saying that there is no center at all? Isn’t Bruno’s thesis the beginning of the modern “loss of the center” which in later centuries has been and still is so regretted by conservatism? Because - oh Lord! – without a meaningful, powerful, commanding, controlling transcendent center so-called “permissive society” degenerates into the chaos of anarchy! Just read Yeats’ The Second Coming:

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

The empty throne in modern art In fact, I never really understood the conservative jeremiad about the loss of the center. Of course, I also see that our society is in serious difficulty: on the one hand there is shocking self-enrichment, on the other hand there is poverty, hunger, war, alienating individualism, loss of self in drink and drugs... “The ceremony of innocence is drowned” indeed. But is this due to the loss of the center? I doubt it – and I doubt it especially in the context of Christian conservatism, where the topos of the lost center originates. One locus classicus in this regard is the book Verlust der Mitte (1948) by the art historian Hans Sedlmayr. In this book he analyzes how the central position of man – religiously founded in the divine status of the man Jesus – slowly disappeared from modern art. Was every art form until the 18th century part of a sacred Gesamtkunstwerk in which divine man occupied the central place (a Gesamtkunstwerk formed by the complex of church and palace), in the following centuries the various art forms gained a life of their own: they became ‘autonomous’ by breaking away from the sacred and humanistic context of Christianity. Harking back to Blaise Pascal – “Leaving the middle means leaving humanity” – Sedlmayer analyses this development as a dehumanization of art. From then on, the inhuman comes to the fore in modern art: the indifference of nature and matter, the rapacious development of technology and industry, the self-reflective and abstract forms of autonomous art. In this way, Sedlemayer says, art reflects a broader social process of loss of the center, the downfall of Christian humanism. Art is not able to reverse that process (with respect to underlying social processes, art is powerless). Nevertheless, according to Sedlmayr, modern art has the crucial task of keeping the memory of the lost center alive for future generations: “Then at least the awareness must stay alive, that the lost center is the throne left empty for the perfect human, the Godman.”

I must admit that I find this a beautiful, fascinating image: the lost center in modern art as an empty throne – a throne that by its very emptiness refers to the missing king. But it is also this image which for me manifests the paradox of Christian conservatism. For the lost center as the empty throne of the divine man? Is this not par excellence the empty cross, referring to the removed, dead body of the Godman Christ? Is this divine throne not Golgotha, the “mountain of skulls” on which the crucified Jesus throned, crowned with a wreath of thorns? (And this in turn reminds me of the negative theology of the Indian logician Adi Shankara, who paints a picture of Nirguna-Brahman as a God without attributes, sitting on a mountain of negations. Isn’t Golgotha that mountain? Isn’t the cross of Jesus precisely the cross of negation, referring back to the crossed out being of his mortal flesh?) A picture means a thousand words, they say. Is this not true here? Doesn’t the picture of Golgotha make clear in one stroke that the center as the throne of the divine man must be empty, that this emptiness necessarily follows from the core of the Christian doctrine? For was the sacrifice of Christ as Mediator not necessary to eliminate human sinfulness, to reconcile man with God and thereby with his fellow man? Is the loss of the center in this sense not precisely the condition of the unity of the Christian community, its unification in the Holy Spirit?

Hegel on Christ In this regard Christian conservatives should have listened better to one of their heroes, namely Hegel (who could sublate all earthly contradictions in the thought of the Absolute Spirit, thereby in practice leaving everything as it was, to the delight of the Prussian regime). In the Geist des Christentums Hegel explains that as long as Jesus lived among his followers, he formed a “dividing wall” (“Scheidewand”) on the one hand between the followers themselves, and on the other between them and God:

“As long as he lived among them, they were only believers; for they were not based on themselves; Jesus was their teacher and master, an individual center on which they depended; they did not yet have their own, independent life; the Spirit of Jesus ruled them; but after his removal this objectivity, this dividing wall between them and God, also fell away; and the Spirit of God was able to revive her whole being.”

In this regard Hegel was undoubtedly one of the German children of Luther, who deprived the Catholic priest of his mediator function in order to make the relationship between believer and God im-mediate. In this Protestant sense, Jesus is portrayed by Hegel as “the good priest” who makes himself superfluous and disappears into the relation between God and man (in other words: the only good priest is a dead priest, or in terms of Yeats: the only center is a good dead center). But one would underestimate the importance for Hegel of Jesus as vanishing mediator if one sees here only the influence of Luther. In fact, the concept of the vanishing mediator is an intrinsic part of Hegel’s dialectic, which is after all the atoning mediation of opposites. To truly bring opposites together, the mediator must – like Jesus – disappear from their midst. This is clearly argued by Herbert Scheit in his book Geist und Gemeinde: Religion und Politik von Zum Verhältnis bei Hegel (where I encountered this link between Hegel’s dialectic and his conception of Jesus for the first time). Concerning the above passage of Hegel on the necessity of Jesus’ disappearance, Scheit notes:

“This applies to every mediation, if it really wants to earn that name: mediation implies not just a third, a middle, it sublates itself in the unit of the mediated ones, which is then a “mediated immediacy”.”

Vinculum vincolorum For Hegel, then, the goal of every mediation is what he calls “mediated immediacy”, the synthesis of opposites between which the mediator has disappeared. In that sense one can say, referring to Hegel, that the vanishing mediator is a universal given, or rather a universal absence, a disappearance that is ‘active’ in every process of mediation. In the light of this universality of the vanishing mediator, should we not also say – to return to Bruno’s thesis – that the center of the universe is not everywhere but nowhere, as a constitutive loss that connects everything? In that respect it seems significant that physicists refer to the four basic forces underlying the universe (gravity, electromagnetism and the weak and strong nuclear forces) preferably as “interactions”. This is because the “forces of nature” alsways manifest themselves as interactions between objects, reciprocal mediations in which energy is exchanged. If we take the idea of the vanishing mediator seriously, should we not say that these interactions, which form the causal network of the universe, presuppose just as many vanishing mediators? And should we not also say that these mysterious media are as many incarnations of God, the dying middle that holds everything together, precisely through his death? Do we not arrive here at a Christological cosmology, in which Christ – the dying God – acts as the universal mediator? As Paul says about Christ: “In him all things hold together.” (Colossians 1: 17)

This is admittedly not a very original idea. To my knowledge, a similar cosmological interpretation of Christianity can already be found in the work of the French Catholic-pragmatist philosopher Maurice Blondel, who in this context spoke of “panchristism” – an idea that only rarely shows up in his published work, however, and exercised little influence on other thinkers (an important exception is Teilhard de Chardin). From the little that Blondel has written about it, it becomes clear that he assigns to Christ a cosmic function: without the intervention of the Incarnate Word, nothing in the universe can have a stable existence. More interesting than Blondel’s rather vague and inchoate ideas about panchristism, however, is his reference to Leibniz in this context. Blondel used Leibniz’s notion of the vinculum substantiale – the substantial chain – to denote the cosmic, connecting function of Christ, who is the vinculum vincolorum, the chain of chains.

The God of Leibniz and the surplus value of Blondel For Leibniz, the vinculum substantiale is the extra relationship added by God to a collection of monads to forge them together into one substance. The fact that Leibniz had to resort to such an emergency measure – for that’s what it is, of course – has to do with a peculiar aspect (a weakness, if you ask me) of his philosophy, the monadology. On the one hand, one finds in Leibniz the famous thesis that every monad reflects all other monads. In that sense, every monad exists only in relation to others, and for Leibniz this interrelationship constitues the harmony of the universe. Thus Leibniz: “Now this coherence or congruence of all created things with each other […] means that each simple substance has relations that express all others, and that it is consequently a perpetual living mirror of the universe.” On the other hand, one finds in him the equally famous assertion that the monads are windowless, because they are the basic units of reality and are as such timeless, unchangeable and therefore closed off from one another, incapable of mutual influence (because that would imply change in the monades). “The Monads have no windows through which anything can go in or out.” The difficult question then arises, of course, how – if communication between monads is impossible - they can nevertheless stand to each other in harmonious relationships, to mirror each other and form connections in compex substances. Here Leibniz invokes God as the solution (always useful, such a miracle worker). According to Leibniz, it is the Super-Monad God who establishes all relations between the monads. As he writes in the Discourse on metaphysics: “Hence God alone brings about liaison and communication of substances, and it is through him that the phenomena of the ones meet and agree with those of the others and consequently that there is reality in our perceptions.” In short: God is the universal medium of communication! But doesn’t Leibniz make a category mistake when he interprets this mediating God as a Super-Monad? Although God is by His omnipotence distinguished from all other monads, He basically remains for Leibniz a monad among monads, their primus inter pares. Should we not, on the basis of the universality of the vanishing mediator, say that God can perform this mediator function only by escaping the order of the monads? Should we not make an ontological distinction here between on the one hand the ontic order of (complex) substances and on the other the transcendent order of the vanishing mediator, which is constitutively lacking from the ontic order? Isn’t this the surplus value of Blondel's panchristism, his identification of Leibniz’s vinculum substantiale with Christ, the Godman who died on the cross?

For the references to the relevant literature in this essay, see: A rather associative and inquisitive journey to the dead center of the earth (and beyond)

Medium as milieu, milieu as medium

Of course, language is not our only medium. We relate to others by means of numerous media, from the light that allows us to see and be seen to the clothes through which we express our public personalities, from the music that synchronizes dancers to money as a medium of exchange between individuals... In this respect, the postmodern, mediatized network society is nothing new. Digial media are merely the high-tech continuation of the typically human, mediated relation to the other. As embodied, sensory beings, we need to rely on material means in our dealings with others. This contact is never direct, never im-mediate: there is no telepathy. The communication of ‘spiritual’ contents (meanings, intentions) is always materially mediated. The only direct contact possible for us is exactly the contact with the material means or medium through which we reach for something or someone else. The contact with the medium itself cannot be mediated, at the risk of an infinite regression of media (which would make mediated contact with something else entirely impossible). Marx formulates this insight with respect to the technical means of production as follows: “The object of which the laborer takes immediate control [during the proces if production, PS] is not the worked upon object [Arbeitsgegenstand], but the means of production [Arbeitsmittel].” In this sense we can speak of the immediacy of technology to humans.

Immediacy of the medium
But this unmediated ‘contact’ with the medium makes it clear that an immediate contact is strictly speaking impossible. For in the unmediated ‘contact’ with the medium, the medium itself is not the goal of the contact, i.e. the theme of the contact-seeking attention: this intended theme is the other to be reached through the medium. The medium itself is indeed immediately ‘given’ but it is also unthematically ‘given’ to the subject using the medium. The immediate contact with the medium remains unconscious. Conscious contact, however, is always materially mediated. Once the subject becomes aware of his contact with the medium, it no longer functions as a medium but as an object of conscious attention – an object in turn given to consciousness through another medium. A blind man, for example, uses his cane to feel the environment, and in that sense the cane – qua medium – is an extension of his feeling hand and arm, like an antenna, with which he has an immediate but unthematic contact. As soon as the blind man becomes aware of his cane, however, at that moment the immediate contact with it stops and his hand becomes the new medium through which he feels the cane. In turn, the hand stops being the sensitive medium as soon as the blind man tries to feel it with his other hand: the first hand becomes an object, the second hand becomes the feeling medium through which that object is given. In this way one’s conscious contact with one's surroundings – even with one’s own objectified body – is always mediated by a more primary environment, an unthematically given “immediate milieu” so to speak, namely the material medium through which we perceive and interact with others. In the first place that immediate environment – that mediating milieu – is the ek-static body, the unobjectified body that stands out toward the world (Greek: “ek” = out, “stasis” = stand). Our focus on the world – or rather on the other in the world – always starts from the looking, feeling, tasting, smelling and hearing body. “Consciousness is”, as Merleau-Ponty writes, “being toward the thing through the intermediary of the body.” As Merleau-Ponty has shown with abundant detail, that focus on the world through the body always involves a hiddenness, a retreat, a “recess of the body” in unconscious immediacy. The body as the primary medium is never object of conscious attention. As such the ek-static body underlies all the other media we use. Obviously, we use external media always through our bodies: we press our ear to the mobile phone, we move the mouse with our hand, we focus our eyes on the screen. In this sense we can say with McLuhan that media are extensions of our bodies, like the cane of the blind man is an extension of his hand scanning the environment. This partly in the superficial sense that we greatly extend the reach of our bodies by using media: microscopes allow us to see the very small and near, telescopes allow us to see the very large and distant, cranes allow us to lift enormous weights, computers allow us to extend our memory and computing power...

Instrumentalized flesh
But media are also extensions of our body in the more interesting sense that the unthematic immediacy of the ek-static body is passed on to the external media we use. The external media share in the unconsciousness of the medial body. The cane, with which the blind man scans his environment, is not itself thematically given but ‘merges’ with the scanning hand. The mobile phone ‘merges’ with the ear through which we hear the other. The mouse ‘merges’ with the hand with which we navigate the computer screen. Even the light, when we see objects, is an extension of the eye: as the medium of visibility, the light shares in the unthematic immediacy of the eye itself – the light that makes everything visible, remains itself invisible and is ‘dark’ so to speak. In this way we can understand Marx’s claim that the entire world as man’s means of living [Lebensmittel] is his “inorganic body”. Merleau-Ponty speaks in this regard of “the flesh of the world”, where “flesh” is synonymous with the unthematic immediacy of the ek-static body. In that sense, all the media through which we relate to an other – including light as the medium of visibility – are part of this flesh: the light is luminous flesh, the crane is mechanical flesh, the computer and the mobile phone and the iPad and such are digtal flesh… This ‘mediating flesh’ – the ‘meat of the medium’ – constitutes our immediate environment, our milieu. One could even argue that this is the correct definition of “milieu” as such, namely to be our mediating flesh. A milieu, after all, is an environment in which one is immersed, it surrounds and embeds. And the primary surrounding is the immediate environment, i.e. the flesh of the ek-static body and its mediating extensions. The milieu, then, is first and foremost the environment of media in which one is immersed. From this perspective, the statement above regarding language – that the medium is the milieu – can also be chiastically reversed: the milieu is essentially medium. The above formula of “mediating milieu” is therefore strictly speaking a pleonasm. The milieu is – to repeat an earlier insight – not just a middle position in that we live in the middle of it, but also in the sense that it is our medium and as such is the middle between us and the other. That we live in a milieu, then, means something like: we are right in the middle of the middle that connects us.

Friday, November 4, 2011

On saying "Shhh…" – The onomatopeic name of Christ

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