Responses to Popular Culture
July 31, 2008
The recent political ad from McCain that links Barack Obama to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton brought to mind thoughts about the relation of liberals and conservatives to popular culture. How to model this relationship is quite important because political attacks like this recent one by McCain take advantage of a faulty understanding of it.
Having grown up as a religious conservative I know that liberals are broadly equated with popular culture. Religious conservatives look out on popular culture and see "liberal culture." Since at least Dan Quayle's attack on Murphy Brown, attacks on popular culture have been heard as attacks against liberals. Something similar is going on with the connection of Obama to two representatives of vapid Hollywood celebrity culture.. Obama is "Hollywood" and "celebrity." (This in addition to the sexual innuendo angle resembling the campaign against Harold Ford, Jr.)
So how should we conceptualize popular culture in America? First, no party or group is in control of popular culture.. or has ever been in control of it. Its development (in terms of sexual practices, marriage patterns, reading and listening habits, visual stimuli, and celebrity culture) jumped the tracks decades ago. American popular culture is a result of our national fixation on technology and entrepreneurship.. our general valorization of all things new. It moves forward because of the daily decisions of millions of people who are largely disconnected from political culture.
Liberals and conservatives respond to popular culture in typical ways. Take for example the issue of teenage pregnancy.. a problem generated by teen independence and shifting social mores concerning sex. Given this problem, liberals will tend to interact with popular culture in a pragmatic way and propose the use of contraception and perhaps even access to safe means of abortion. In other words, liberals see popular culture and don't have the itch to change things.. but find ways to work with the unprecedented level of social change we have been experiencing the past few decades.
Conservatives, on the other hand, will do their best to push back and resist popular culture. Popular music promotes sex and drugs? They create a parallel Christian version of popular music that will not have any of those things. The schools teach evolution or give information about birth control? They respond with Christian schools. The preferred response is to resist popular culture.. by constructing an alternative culture.
With the rise of the religious right over the past three decades the conservative emphasis switched to the purging of popular culture. Maybe an emphasis on abstinence or teaching creationism will allow Christians to purify popular culture! This strategy is underlain by the assumption that popular culture is currently hostage to liberal values that can be fought off. That assumption has always been wrong.. and is has led not to the transformation of popular culture as much to systematic dishonesty: teens will wear abstinence rings, but empirically their rates of sexual intercourse will be virtually indistinguishable from those of non-religious peers.
The best conservatives and liberals that I have known look upon many developments in popular culture with equal dismay.. even as they enjoy it selectively. It's a shame that we—liberal and conservatives—cannot simply talk about ways to live a sensible life and deal with popular culture. The way to get to that dialogue is to get a more accurate notion of what we are dealing with in popular culture.. a social system that is a distant reflection of our own values.
Expressive Domes and Squiggles
July 30, 2008
We might be tempted to believe a dome is an architectural flourish universal in its appeal, but in fact some good work has been done on the cultural specifics of the dome in a place like medieval Cairo. First of all it should be recognized that every monumental dome in Cairo marks a burial. A very early example of this would be the dome over the shrine to the early legal scholar Imam Shafi'a. Later rulers and other high officials used domes to mark their own burials.
A classic article by Stephen Humphreys addresses the overwhelming use of domes by the Mamluks (1250-1517 AD). His argument is that after 1050 AD Muslims faced a series of issues that demanded new religious architectural forms (93-4). Sufism and the popular veneration of saints was widely accepted and became a weapon in the battle to displace the Shi'a. The dome therefore came to signal popular religious piety and Sunni orthodoxy. So why did largely secular Mamluk rulers adopt the dome? As Humphreys points out:
...these structures point to their desire to be considered members of that class of "defenders of the faith" whose memories (along with those of prophets and saints) it was proper to venerate. [94]
The dome was thus hardly a "universal" architectural statement, but a signifier associated with specific cultural values. Something similar could be said about the American use of domes in capital buildings.. only we would need to have recourse to the influence of classical Greek and Roman ideals (and not emergent Sufism) to explain them.
This is a situation that is given some theoretical backing by Clifford Geertz in his essay "Art as a Cultural System" (from Local Knowledge). In a comparative survey of the art of four cultures Geertz points out how the understanding of art is not a matter of formal appreciation of lines and pleasant colors, but a matter of understanding precisely what those lines and pleasant colors signify in a given culture:
It is out of participation in the general system of symbolic forms we call culture that participation in the particular we call art, which is in fact but a sector of it, is possible. A theory of art is thus at the same time a theory of culture, not an autonomous enterprise. [109]
That raises a lofty bar for the interpretation of any form of art. Any interpretation that relies upon universal statements of aesthetic excellence will be misleading at best. Geertz points out the misinterpretation of African sculpture in the West: "...most people, I am convinced, see African sculpture as bush Picasso..." (119). It is important to know something about the specific African culture that produced that piece if one is to understand something like its meaning.
That philosophy comes close to invalidating the place of the museum and concert hall in the West.. which are nothing less than institutional monuments for the universality of artistic expression. And this brings us to a central Old Roads point: the perception and interpretation of works from the past require effort on our part if we are to get anything out of them more than a reinforcement of what we already think.
sources:
R. Stephen Humphreys. "The Expressive Intent of the Mamluk Architecture of Cairo: A Preliminary Essay." Studia Islamica no. 35 (1972), pgs. 69-119.
Clifford Geertz. "Art as Cultural System" from Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic Books, 1983.
Tokyo Chorus by Ozu
July 27, 2008
Tokyo Chorus from 1931 is the earliest of the newly released "Silent Ozu" films from Criterion. Missing in this early film is the central focus on the marriage choice and generational conflict. The postwar period brought on massive changes in Japan and Ozu explores those changes through his steady gaze at intergenerational conflict. But that doesn't mean this earlier style of family comedy, based on Chaplin-like farce, does not leave a tangible influence on his later work. Tokyo Chorus appears to be the precursor for the late comedy Good Morning—which had previously struck me as anomalous in its comedy.
Much in later Ozu appears to arise as a whole from nowhere: the still camera, the low level of the camera, the still-life transitions. The silent films are valuable for allowing a glimpse into the development of a film style that would become fixed and classic. I noticed in Tokyo Chorus no consistent use of still-lifes in the transition.. but on occasion we see the tightly composed images that would mark transitions.
At a couple of points there were even realistic street scenes of a type that Ozu does not use in his later family dramas. The early use of still-lifes is perhaps best understood as a development out of a concern for social realism.. although this technique later gets recast in a more formalistic manner.
Even in this early silent film there is a key emotional drama that I find moving. In this case it concerns the decision by a young worker to question his boss about an injustice toward an older worker. The young worker is fired for questioning his superior and suddenly he faces the necessity of finding the money to keep his middle class family afloat. I found this a moving meditation (even though often cast in the broad comedy of farce) on the conflict between ethical action and responsibility for a family.
One scene that makes particularly good use of the medium of silent film is when the wife of the young worker discovers that he had paid the medical bill of their young daughter by selling her kimonos.
As in all good silent films, the emotional situation is clearly reflected by the face and body language of the actor—thus using expression in replacement of voice. Her disappointment and sense of loss is easily read on her face. And the viewer understands: this is what poverty and lack of a job brings.
She rejoins her husband and young children, who are playing some kind of patty-cake-like game. At first she looks down and cannot smile. But then she lets go and finds a way to accept the situation. The transfer of emotions is carefully represented by Ozu:
The kids are oblivious to the economic pressure upon their parents.. and don't even notice her earlier tears. But although it takes a minute, the parents learn to slough off the pressures and embrace the pleasures of family.
Essays, Sideroads, and Detours
July 25, 2008
In the introduction to Local Knowledge, anthropologist Clifford Geertz sketches the convenience of the essay as a form:
For making detours and going by sideroads, nothing is more convenient than the essay form. One can take off in almost any direction, certain that if the thing does not work out one can turn back and start over in some other with only moderate cost in time and disappointment. Midcourse corrections are easy, for one does not have a hundred pages of previous argument to sustain, as one does in a monograph or a treatise. Wanderings into yet smaller sideroads and wider detours does little harm, for progress is not expected to be relentlessly forward anyway, but winding and improvisational, coming out where it comes out. [6]
That is a nearly perfect statement of the utility of the essay.. and it explains why even videos here are labeled "essays". Mind you, Geertz is not talking about the "personal essay".. whose value is strictly pegged to the nature of the writer's experience of the world. He means something more like "interpretive essay." The goal is to examine specific cultural texts.. and through a repetition of the act of interpretation come to some ideas about the world.
Geertz mentions that the essay is convenient since it is the default form of the academy. When one is asked to present a paper or contribute an article.. the result will be an essay. So an academic tends to have a growing file of essays stashed away. His notion is that to turn this situation to one's advantage means to actively cultivate the essay.
That is a pragmatic conception of the essay. The internet.. specifically the format of the blog.. allows for an even more open view of the essay. It does not have to be a form that gets trotted out for an occasional conference or book contribution.. but can be an organic part of everyday work: daily interpretive explorations into the jungle of texts to which we have access. The goal not being to provide a final answer, but to sharpen a critical approach to the world—which in my opinion is the end goal of humanistic work.
Native Interiors
July 24, 2008
In my Intro to Religious Studies class I use Clifford Geertz's definition of religion as a "system of symbols".. and try to convince the students that they are immersed in a dense system of symbols. I introduce the idea that we could "read" their dorm rooms and learn something about their religious values. The upshot of this approach to religion is that religion is not segregated into what goes on in a place of worship at a certain time during the week. Our fundamental convictions are set right out for everyone to see.. if they know how to read the texts we constantly produce.
I thought of this recently when I began to work through a photographic biography of the Sioux chief (Red Cloud: (Photographs of a Lakota Chief by Frank Goodyear III). The book is theoretically interesting as it proposes a new way of presenting a life.. not through words and a constructed narrative, but through images and interpretations of those images. It is a method that could be quite useful when thinking about doing biography on the Internet.
One of the photographs caught my eye, that of the interior of Red Cloud's small house in South Dakota. Since any personal space will come to reflect personal identity, this room is of more than documentary interest. It was Red Cloud who saw that cooperation with the Americans was necessary and inevitable—opposite the stance of Crazy Horse. His bedroom (shown here in 1891) clearly reflects that spirit of cooperation with the multiple American flags (four) and Christian icons (at least four). Symbols that evoke his Native American heritage are fewer, limited to a bow, a pipe, and a belt with knife holster.
One conclusion would be that Red Cloud was largely cut off from his cultural tradition.. adopting wholesale the symbolic culture of the United States. A further question would be what kind of Native American symbols could possible have adorned a square wooden room like this? It is not that the Sioux had no system of symbols (see my discussion here), but it was not a system that could find expression in western clothes and a tiny room of a house. The act of moving into a certain type of space can force the abandonment of a previous symbolic world. If this seems strange, imagine re-creating your life in a tipi. All those framed pictures are not going to work!
But what about the dreamcatcher?
These popular Native American decorations would look swell hanging on a wall in a house. But perhaps that is just the point. In a website devoted to Native American crafts and languages, the history of the dreamcatcher is recounted. It turns out that dreamcatchers were historically connected to only the Ojibway tribe. Then:
During the pan-Indian movement in the 60's and 70's, Ojibway dreamcatchers started to get popular in other Native American tribes, even those in disparate places like the Cherokee, Lakota, and Navajo. So dreamcatchers aren't traditional in most Indian cultures, per se, but they're sort of neo-traditional, like frybread. Today you see them hanging in lots of places other than a child's cradleboard or nursery, like the living room or your rearview mirror. Some Indians think dream-catchers are a sweet and loving little tradition, others consider them a symbol of native unity, and still others think of them as sort of the Indian equivalent of a tacky plastic Jesus hanging in your truck.
The dreamcatcher was a later adoption on the part of Native Americans who were forging a pan-Native American identity. Such a movement would need symbols that could hang on walls in a standard American house.. and the dreamcatcher is particularly effective in that way. It is the sort of thing that Red Cloud lacked.
This has been a way of getting at the way space makes demands on religious practice. Some religious developments can even be traced to changes in the spatial patterns of living. It appears that Native Americans were conscious of the change to their traditions that was a consequence of living in a differently organized space. As James Mooney investigated the Ghost Dance religion inspired by the Paiute prophet Jack Wilson, he found that:
...they preferred to live in traditional wickiups. Only Paiute baskets furnished Jack Wilson's home; no beds, no storage trunks, no pots or pans, nothing of alien manufacture except the hunting gun and knife lay in the wickiup, though the family could have bought the invaders' goods. [The Ghost Dance: Ethnohistory and Revitalization, Alice Beck Kehoe, pg. 3]
So notice that a claim to a traditional lifestyle had to entail not just an exchange of symbols, but the preservation of a specific space for living.
Freeway Meditation
July 23, 2008
This latest video focuses on a small walkable area just off highway 41 here in Wisconsin. This is the first of what may be a series of "significant landscapes"—small areas that contain several points of symbolic interest. My idea is to walk around this area and film what I see. Then after some reflection on the experience I will put together a narrative video.
In a way this project reminds me of Frank O'Hara's lunch poems, which read as an "I did this, I did that" kind of progression. They are obviously composed on the fly, but they also show a sensibility to the symbolic importance of ephemeral sights and sounds (which takes reflection). This is evident in a poem such as "The Day Lady Died".. where hum-drum events are set against news of the death of Billie Holiday. Or note the beginning of "A Step Away From Them":
It's my lunch hour, so I go
for a walk among the hum-colored
cabs. First, down the sidewalk
where laborers feed their dirty
glistening torsos sandwiches
and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets
on. They protect them from falling
bricks, I guess. Then onto the
avenue where skirts are flipping
above heels and blow up over
grates. The sun is hot, but the
cabs stir up the air. I look
at bargains in wristwatches. There
are cats playing in sawdust.
Those lines could be transposed into a video. It would have been difficult in O'Hara's time, due to bulky cameras, but now it is simple. A lunch poem can be a lunch video.
I find it challenging to walk around a confined area and collect images.. and then to process those images and meditate on what they have to say about America. I like it because it forces me to be aware of my surroundings during my exploration.. and then to think through a layer of interpretation that can work as narration.
It's All Happening at the Zoo
July 15, 2008
In an effort to give Aurora the chance to see live the animals we point to in books or toys, we took a trip to the Milwaukee County Zoo. She liked seeing the animals but she was most struck by the fish and the wealth of babies and young kids running around in the zoo. She would be happy if we could arrange a series of baby exhibits that she could touch and point at and say (in her inimitable way): "BEBI!"
It had been a long time since I visited a zoo.. and I went in pretty excited. But mostly it was a let down. There is no thrill that can compare to seeing an animal in the wild. The zoo settings were mostly plain. Many of the animals were content to sleep away the day—which makes sense since many are nocturnal. And the crowds were always there. Long story short, I think the zoo is a great idea for children, but animals should be seen and observed in the wild.
I had an issue with the signage for the various animals. The text on these signs leaped out at the viewer: "Here's a cool fact" or "Guess what..." Even as a kid I disliked these kid signs. I want denser text and less emphasis on the "amazing facts" of the animal. Tell me how it lives and its history. I want to imagine the world inhabited by this creature and all I get are curiosities. Signs should be more grown up..
Radical Amos
July 15, 2008
I would love to see the conservative media come up against the rhetoric of the Hebrew prophets. Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah would all be dismissed as "Bush-haters" and engaged in "class warfare." Read through Amos and let some of the radicalism sink in:
I hate, I despise your festivals,
and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them;
and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals
I will not look upon.
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
I will not listen to the melody of your harps.
But let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an everflowing stream.
Amos 5.21-24
Ouch.. This is a frontal attack on the symbolic and religious system of ancient Israel. Amos presents God as decisively turning away from his people and their practices. I like to imagine what the dynamic equivalent of this kind of statement would be.. and most likely it would get you dismissed from respectable media sources.
Modern readers have developed a number of defense mechanisms with respect to passages like this. The main trick is to impose some kind of unspoken deep sin to explain why God is so angry with his people. But the situation is much more hum-drum, actually. Amos and the early prophets are responding to rising social inequality. It was not a matter of the rich doing anything particularly wrong; it was a case in which a new social context (monarchy and new wealth) brought about a situation which was intolerable to the poor. The wealthy had custom and law on their side. Rainer Albertz writes:
We must not allow the deliberately one-sided prophetic polemic in this social crisis to make us see a horde of godless evildoers and violent men at work here. Rather, we must begin by recognizing that the upper classes used largely legal means for securing their interests. Though breaches of law and deception may have occurred in individual cases, what happened here was predominantly the effect of structural violence which had its basis in economic and social developments under the monarchy. [161]
So Amos and the other prophets were not attacking people that were conscious of doing wrong to the poor, but people who could note that every step of the way their actions were legitimated by custom and courts. This makes the statement by Amos more radical than some readers might want to allow.. and should push us to be more conscious of the ways that actions that are 100 percent reasonable and allowed by the law might be condemnable by a higher law.
My interest in the Hebrew prophets has come to center on the space within a society from which criticism can be launched. Every society, of course, will do its best to plug those holes and not allow critical voices to get a hearing. We see this now as their are more calls to cut off alternative viewpoints about America and its place in the world.. and the Hebrew prophets were also elbowed out of public discussion. But despite attempts to silence these individuals, their critical position seems to endure from culture to culture.
Excavating a Dylan Source
July 14, 2008
On the song "Oh Sister" from the album Desire (1976) there are some lines that have always been mysterious to me: "Time is an Ocean/ But it ends at the shore/ You may not see me tomorrow." I have taken the line to evoke the infinite depth of the emotional experience of time and then its finite temporal extent. In reading The Instruction of Amenemope I came across the following lines:
Do not say today is the same as tomorrow,
Or how will matters come to pass?
When tomorrow comes, today is past;
The deep waters become a sandbank. [stanza 5]
The lines are concerned with notions of time, and then comes the final metaphor about deep waters becoming a sandbank. "Time is an ocean but it ends at the shore" appears to be a poetic re-working of that line.
Could Dylan have really stumbled upon that line? Absolutely. The anthology in which I discovered that line (The Literature of Ancient Egypt, ed. William Kelly Simpson) was first published in 1973.. so it would have been possible for Dylan (or collaborator Jacques Levy) to pick it up in a bookstore in a convenient time frame.
Consider also two other Egyptian allusions in "Oh Sister." The reference of a beloved as "sister" is a standard convention in Egyptian poetry (see "Love Songs and Song of the Harper" from same anthology). The reference to dying and rebirth should be understood from the standpoint of Osiris.. the god who died and was reborn "mysteriously saved". Recall also that the song "Isis" is on Desire—the Egyptian influence was not hidden.
Figure and Ground in
Marie Antoinette
July 12, 2008
I was not expecting to blog about Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette (2006).. but I was surprised by the film. And what is more, it turned out to be an Old Roads film because of the way it works to recreate in the imagination the vast and intricate world of French royalty in the 18th century.
As a rule I dislike historical movies. I can never shake the feeling that modern characters with modern outlooks on life are simply being dressed up in stage clothes. The setting of historical films is often just a pretty backdrop. Sofia Coppola decides to downplay character development in favor of a portrayal of the overwhelming setting of Versailles (which she films on location). The characters seem to get lost in the immensity of the buildings and the lushness of the rooms.
The characters in Marie Antoinette are oddly withdrawn and passive. These are not people who shape their world; they are those formed by their world. This appears to be the point: Marie Antoinette could not be realized as a person (and was lost in idle dreams as a result) because she was framed in a world that could not allow for self-formation. The setting was too overpowering.. and a good portion of the film works to stilt character development in favor of scenes that allow us to feel what it might have been like to walk around in this grand vacuum of royal life.
Two important predecessors in this project come to mind. The first is her father's Godfather series, whose tone is set by means of lengthy and much populated ceremonies. It is almost as if that pageantry—a small part of her father's work—fascinated Sofia Coppola and led her to make a film that was entirely pageantry.. and thus much more ambiguous with respect to the importance of characters.
A second influence would be Fellini Satyricon. Fellini's film takes up the same imaginative project of portraying a time period while downplaying character. The film is a long round of parties and pleasure-seeking that keeps its interest by constantly changing scenes and faces. Marie Antoinette has some of that same drive for constant invention and color.. seeking through style to hold the interest of a viewer who does not have strong characters to grasp hold of.
Marie Antoinette ends not with her beheading or anything about her time in prison. It ends with a scene of a room in Versailles after it has been stormed and wrecked by the revolutionaries. It is a fitting end for a film that was more about the ground than the figure. Here is a summary of the ending to Fellini Satyricon: "...in the film's final shot of a ruined villa whose walls, painted with frescoes of the scenes we have just seen, are crumbling, fading and incomplete." That is a suggestive parallel to Marie Antoinette.
Dreaming Scripture
July 10, 2008
used under Creative Commons License, by Flickr user Sbisson
In the United States there is no choice but to interact over the Bible. Because of well known historical contingencies the Bible is the culturally approved text around which both conservatives and liberals meet. The language of politicians and activists will necessarily be drawn from this text.. at least if they have persuasion in mind.
This necessity of touching base with the Bible seems silly to me (I would not make a good politician), but it is important to think about what is going on here. Cultures and sub-cultures need scripture.. that is, texts that define a community by their broad acceptance and allow for the mediation of conflicts through the process of interpretation.
The usual model for scripture is the adoption of some collection of foundational texts (Old and New Testaments, the Constitution of the United States, the Quran, etc..). These texts become a repository of vocabulary, rules, and stories to be drawn on by the group. Other models for scripture are possible. In the case of the early Quakers there was an emphasis on the continuing revelation of God.. and visions recounted in their meetings could be used by the community in determining a course of action.
Another model is that of the Sioux with their dream visions. The biography of Crazy Horse by Kingsley Bray gives a couple examples of scripture generation.
Constantly Worm advised Crazy Horse to apply clarity of thought and attentiveness of mind to the revelations of his guardian spirit. Visions were not only for the moment but should be afforded lifelong contemplation. Much as we today may ponder a favorite text or work of art, establishing an interactive relationship that will continue and develop through life, recurrent contemplation established the vision as a locus of evolving regenerative thought. [64]
So we could say that these visions become textualized. They become more than passing scenes, rather something recounted to the group and thereby created as a formal text that can be commented upon and re-interpreted. Because of the authority that accrues to elements of the dream, it can be thought of as a form of scripture. As the Bible is for American society, dreams were for the Lakota Sioux (and other tribal groups as well).
Another form of scripture for the Sioux were petroglyphs:
The party camped below the Painted Cliffs, a tall bluff marked with ancient petroglyphs believed to be the work of wakan beings. Lakotas believed that the designs changed to foretell coming events. Crazy Horse and several followers solemnly smoked and made offerings to the power that etched the rock drawings. The following morning they returned to take a reading and were disturbed to make out markings that suggested they would get the worst of any encounter. [154]
As many contemporary Christians turn to the Bible and its portrayals of ancient events to get a glimmer of understanding about current events.. the Lakota Sioux looked to ancient petroglyphs. The similarity is that both are externally fixed texts that can be used as a site for debate and interpretation. The element of randomness can be seen as a plus since it allows for a greater level of creative interpretation.
One can imagine how difficult it would be to keep a group together if there were no mutually agreed upon texts around which interpretation could take place. If one group among the Sioux recognized the petroglyphs as a source of knowledge while another group believed in, say, reading the stars.. well, there would be no way for these two groups to mediate any disputes. It is likely that pretty soon we would be talking not about one group, but about two.
Heavenly by Way of the Earthly
July 9, 2008
When human beings ponder why certain social practices occur, they often as not find some ideal pattern that serves as a reason. The notion that the state or the body mirrors the macrocosm is a powerful legitimizing argument for whatever readings of the state or body are current. If a certain form of government is a reflection of the government practiced in the heavenly realms.. then how absurd would it be to question such traditions?!
These arguments work, I would argue, because they make intrinsic sense to us. Cultures/religions are in the business of presenting themselves as if they descend from a deep and ancient past. In other words they hide the ball and don't easily allow people to see how the direction of influence is generally not from heavens to earth, but from earth to heaven.
In reading a couple of books about religion in ancient Israel I came across two examples of the way religion moves from the earth to the heavens—the opposite of what one might expect. The first is from A History of Prophecy in Israel by Joseph Blenkinsopp:
The standard introductory formula "thus says Yahweh" is taken from the protocol used in official oral and written communications emanating from a royal court, which suggests that the prophets understood themselves as emissaries of Yahweh. [29]
This, by the way, makes sense as to why the prophets attach such importance to the narrative of their calling. It was important to affirm that the prophet had been in the presence of God's court and was a legitimate bearer of a message.
If we think about this situation a little more it may start to seem odd that a position of such importance in religious history should be modeled after a specific social pattern that was not destined to last. The concept of prophecy was mapped onto a pre-existing social institution. Then as centuries passed and that social institution faded away, the religious model continued and came to look like a heavenly model for future religious leaders.
A similar passage occurs in A History of Israelite Religion in the Old Testament Period by Rainer Albertz (best book I have ever read on the Hebrew Bible). Discussing the title "Yahweh Sabaoth" (Lord of Hosts) Albertz writes:
Just as the political power of the earthly king is shown in a host of officials and subordinates, so the power of Yahweh who has risen to be king is shown in a host of heavenly beings who obey his will. And here there is a parallel between divine and kingly rule of the world... [133]
Thus the representation of God in the Hebrew Bible originates from ideas about the earthly king. Which only makes sense since human beings know nothing about the heavenly world and so when it comes to representing that world they inevitably model it after the closest earthly parallel at hand. Albertz is particularly strong at sketching the theological changes that the introduction of kingship brought to the traditional religion of Israel. A new social situation will mean that the heavenly spheres are re-imagined or re-interpreted according to these new realities.
This picture of culture is something like a reverse Platonism. History constantly throws up unique and even exotic social situations.. which then migrate heavenward and define that upper world for us. If we liked we could work through our modern overgrown notions of heaven and trace all of them back to actual conditions somewhere at some time. The elements of heaven are like space junk and retired satellites in space.. they are the floating debris that no one has the time or money to bring back down to earth.
The New Japan in The End of Summer
July 8, 2008
The End of Summer (1961) is the penultimate film by Yasujiro Ozu. Ozu would die from cancer in 1963.. and given the importance in the film of coming to terms with death, it is hard not to understand this film as a meditation on his own mortality. "Meditation" may not be the right word since the movie throughout keeps up a humorous and even bantering facade. But at the core of the film is the patriarch (Ganjiro Nakamura) of a large family and his two heart attacks, the final one of which kills him.
The film opens with a familiar issue: the possibility of marriage for two daughters. One of the daughters must decide whether to remarry and the younger one has a suitor but is in love with a young office mate who has just been transferred. Should these two make a choice based on familial expectations or according to the dictates of their own hearts? It sounds like many Ozu films.
What really sets this iteration apart is the lack of a weighty older father (contra, say, Late Spring). After opening with these standard plot themes, we feel something missing at the heart of the film. Soon we see the heedlessness of the father who despite his age wants to live like a happy-go-lucky youth. After the death of his wife he resumes an old affair.. and absents himself from his family. The first heart attack sets him back only for a brief period.. and then he is at it again, sneaking out of the house again to see his mistress. Sadly it is while he is spending time with his mistress that the second heart attack kills him. When his children ask about his last words, they learn that they were: "Is this it? Is this really it?" —embarrassingly empty final words.
As the father pursues his own pleasures at the expense of the sensibilities of his family, it seems that Japan as a whole is following a series of ephemeral pursuits. Ozu communicates this through an unprecedented (for him) number of visual references to cultural borrowing. Below are three instances of this borrowing:
1. Coca-Cola signs in the hall of a Japanese restaurant. This is hardly a case of paid product placement.. but a comment on the presence of American products in Japanese life.
2. The date for the bouncy daughter of his mistress arrives.. and he is an American named George who even gets in a few lines of Japanese.
3. After his first heart attack.. and before sneaking away to see his mistress.. the father plays catch with his grandson.
These scenes could be supplemented with others.. such as the walk through a gallery showing obviously Western paintings, the bike race, or the singing of a song to the tune of "My Darling Clementine" at a meeting of office buddies. America is everywhere.. and that seems to be the point.
So what happens to moral values when the patriarch is unable to take life seriously and culture as a whole tosses aside its own values to chase after American pastimes? The two daughters at the heart of the film are enabled to make their own decisions.. based on their own feelings and sense of right. A sense of careful freedom thus pervades the film.. albeit with a strong sense of the threat of unmoored chasing after ephemera. There continues to be a space for moral choices.. just on a more individualistic basis.
Happy Birthday Emily!
July 6, 2008
It's hard to believe that four years ago I was in Damascus, Syria, writing long daily e-mails to Emily. We both knew pretty quickly that our futures would be intertwined. And now here we are in Appleton, Wisconsin with a little girl just about 18 months old.. and we are about to buy a house! We have been through lots of changes—even evacuated once. But here we are still in love and still figuring things out.
I was thinking that on the occasion of her birthday I might note four of my favorite things about her:
1) Her love of a peaceful house. In every way possible she works to keep us calm and unstressed.
2) Her mothering ability with Aurora. I don't think it is possible to care more for a child than Emily does for Aurora.
3) Her emphasis on health. In the background of the above photo you can see the vegan cookbooks, including my favorite: The Veganomicon. Emily cares about her own health and that trickles down to the rest of us.
4) Her attempts to construct the perfect schedule and menu. She is always fiddling with the world to get it just right.. and even though something always pops out of place, she continues to work to get the balance right.
That is not a complete list of things I love about Emily.. but it is a start. I have years to go if I want to figure her out.
Patriotic Frames
July 5, 2008
I thought I was done commenting on patriotism, but some comments by Matt Yglesias on the similarity of conservative and liberal versions of patriotism got me thinking some more:
As a July 5 observation on patriotism, it's become increasingly common to think that there's a liberal form of patriotism and a conservative form, and that the liberal form has something to do with a self-critical spirit whereas conservatives take on a more of a "my country right or wrong" attitude...
Increasingly, though, I think this is wrong and would instead describe the liberal attitude toward patriotism as a special case of the kind of thing Richard Rorty deals with in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Up on a terrace yesterday with a bunch of somewhat buzzed people watching fireworks and shouting taunts against England and Canada and extolling the virtues of America as seen in explosions, loud noises, old TV theme songs, and grilled meats it seemed to me that the liberal experience of patriotism is really just the same as the conservative one.
Yglesias concludes that conservatives and liberals differ on politics but that their version of patriotism is mostly indistinguishable.. as evidenced by his experience in a bar with a bunch of liberals on the 4th of July.
I would argue that there is a qualitative difference in the place of patriotism within conservative and liberal experience. First note the quotation from John McCain that I cited yesterday:
Patriotism is deeper than its symbolic expressions, than sentiments about place and kinship that move us to hold our hands over our hearts during the national anthem. It is putting the country first, before party or personal ambition, before anything.
This definition of patriotism counters the example used by Yglesias. McCain recognizes that symbolic expressions and common phrases go along with a common love of country.. i.e. that some liberals may have a grand ol' time on the 4th of July and perhaps even shout positive things about the US. Everyone feels a certain tug of the heart with respect to a place of birth. But true patriotism—according to McCain—goes beyond that.. and he defines it as an internal alignment. This patriotism is an identity that dominates any other possible identity. And while a patriot is therefore difficult to define exactly, he or she is marked by a consistent internal frame of reference.
That is the patriotism I am against, believing that it is necessary to judge every action of my country by the standard of what is good for the earth and humanity as a whole. It goes without saying that the United States has never completely hewed to that standard. My allegiance to the United States is not qualitatively different than what I feel toward the city and state where I grew up.. that is to say, I love these places, but they have no trump over my personal judgment.
Conservatives have been effective at promoting a version of patriotism that is analogous to the devotion felt by a sports fan.. only projected out upon the international stage. The patriot—again, as defined by McCain—actively roots for the United States (which partially explains the rhetorical reliance on the idea of "victory" in the Iraq War.. even when that is an absurd measure for our current situation). The Republican Party specifically has also played up the symbolic content of its version of patriotism.. and thus allowing voters to identify with their party in a way that the Democrats can't match. This symbolic approach to elections also makes it difficult to convince voters with arguments.. after all, who has ever been argued out of being a fan of a particular sports team?
The Republicans thus push an identity frame, buttressed by a system of symbols that allow people to visibly connect that identity frame with a particular political party. Democrats, by contrast, are a hodge-podge of smaller groups that have their own identity frames. Whether environmentalists, African-Americans, GLBTQ activists, labor unionists.. and the list could go on.. we find groups that have their own strong identity frames. These groups come together every couple of years to make common cause for candidates that support their mutual interests. And there is a constant effort to brand the Democratic party in a way that can compete with the Republican brand. But it will always feel defensive because Democratic groups mostly have no interest in buying into the monolithic identity frame that is promulgated by Republicans.
If this analysis holds, then I think we can say that yes, there is a huge difference between the conservative and liberal experience of patriotism.
Fount of Every Blessing
July 4, 2008
As I write I can hear the occasional boom of fireworks let off in celebration of this Fourth of July. Not too long ago I could see through the curtains the bright sparklers held by our neighbors. A couple of days ago John McCain released an essay on patriotism that included the following paragraph:
Patriotism is deeper than its symbolic expressions, than sentiments about place and kinship that move us to hold our hands over our hearts during the national anthem. It is putting the country first, before party or personal ambition, before anything. It is the willing acceptance of Americans, both those whose roots here extend back over generations and those who arrived only yesterday, to try to make a nation in which all people share in the promise and responsibilities of freedom.
"Before anything"? I am perplexed at how so many religious people in the United States buy into this line of thinking. As I think about the New Testament I am struck by just how anti-patriotic it is. "Render to Caesar what is Caesar's" is what Jesus said.. and Paul writes about respect for earthly rulers.. but that's it. What stands out is the call for complete dedication to live for the next world.. to be "in this world but not of it." It would seem to me that this calls believers to wear their country pretty lightly. But here we are in 2008 in the United States.. and I can hear now the multiple dull booms that tell me a fireworks show is nearing its climax.. and God and country are remarkably fused in many minds.
Sufjan Stevens is the artist most able to surprise me these days. His project to record an album for all 50 states sure sounds patriotic on its face.. but on his albums for Michigan and Illinois he zeroes in on a common American tradition that is at once liberal and evangelical (not so easy to pull off). The following video is an example of his recent work:
It is a video that makes me want to cry for its juxtaposition of a gently rendered traditional hymn with black and white images of scenes from the African savannah. What is one to make of the experience of listening to the lines: "Here's my heart now take and seal it/ Seal it for thy courts above" while looking into the hoary eye of an ancient elephant? The message of human redemption is suddenly applied into a wholly different domain. Perhaps the images are meant to anthropomorphize the animals.. but I think it more likely that theyare used to lend the song a greater-than-human perspective. The message of redemption that could well draw a listener to think about personal salvation is pushed out to embrace a much wider perspective.
That defines what I am listening for in the current political debate: a universal perspective that does not address us citizens as the end all and be all of human history. I want to hear some words that rightly put us in context and align our thinking toward our role handing over this world to future generations. That would mean less "we are the people" or "we are the greatest generation" and more extrospection directed at the parts of the world that have no voice.
It is 11:30 pm now and I can hear only a very occasional pop of fireworks.. undoubtedly set off in a distant backyard or driveway.
Algeria and the "War on Terror"
July 3, 2008
The principal critique of our "War on Terror" is that it managed to bundle together any number of groups that were not connected with each other.. thus doing the enemy a favor by creating a common banner under which resistance groups could be gathered. Whereas the guiding principle should have been ideological isolation for al-Qaeda, the United States (under the leadership of George W. Bush) allowed Islamic radicals of many stripes to make common cause.
A recent article in the New York Times on Algeria fleshes out how exactly this dynamic works. Through interviews with militants and intelligence officers the story of a radical Islamist group in Algeria was put together. The group moves from being an Islamist group focused solely on the Algerian cause to being a terrorist supporting group connected to al-Qaeda.. and perhaps ready to strike outside of Algeria. But the connections with al-Qaeda were not as obvious a step as many Americans might suppose:
Mr. bin Laden, in Sudan at the time, asked the militants to let him move to a mountainous area they controlled, according to Mr. Khettab, the former top militant leader. J. Cofer Black, who was stationed in Khartoum for the C.I.A., said he never heard this account, but found it plausible. “We knew he was looking for some place to go,” Mr. Black said.
Mr. Khettab said the militants turned down Mr. bin Laden. “We refused, and said we don’t have anything to do with anything outside,” he said. “We are interested in just Algeria.”
So a global terrorist came knocking and the Algerians had no interest. They had their focus on Algeria and saw little to be gained by getting involved in some more abstract global effort.
So what flipped them away from this localized stance? At least part of the answer is the rhetoric connected to the "War on Terror":
Mr. Droukdal cited religious motivations for his group’s merger with Al Qaeda. Some militants also said that Washington’s designation of the Algerians as a terrorist organization after Sept. 11 — despite its categorization by some American government experts as a regional insurgency — had the effect of turning the group against the United States.“
If the U.S. administration sees that its war against the Muslims is legitimate, then what makes us believe that our war on its territories is not legitimate?” Mr. Droukdal said in an audiotape in response to a list of questions from The New York Times, apparently his first contact with a journalist.
“Everyone must know that we will not hesitate in targeting it whenever we can and wherever it is on this planet,” he said.
From the start al-Qaeda's active concern has been to unite Islamic resistance into a global front. Although it might seem counter-intuitive, the smart play for the United States was to keep regional insurgents from building ideological ties with the purveyors of global terrorism. We needed to keep regional conflicts regional and focus laser-like on the group of people committed to international terrorism (in the scheme of things a tiny group). Algerian Islamists and Palestinian fighters (the list could go on) should not have found it conceptually easy to align themselves with al-Qaeda.. but our division of the world into "for us or against us" groups had the effect of helping al-Qaeda expand its conceptual view of the world into new territories.
[To end this on a more uplifting note I want to include a wonderful video edited by Kathleen Woolrich (whose work I blogged about here). It is a fine reminder of traditional Algeria.. and should stir us to consider how unthinkingly we change the world as we assign names to what we find.]
Flag Day Parade, Appleton, Wisconsin
July 1, 2008
I've been working the past few nights on this new Wisconsin video featuring Appleton's Flag Day Parade. Having to work through raw footage and find ways to cut scenes so that they are manageable has gotten me thinking about the experience of a parade and ways to translate that experience into another medium.
We hardly realize it, but a parade is filled with vast empty stretches that involve craning our necks to see the next band or float slowly make its way toward us. There are all kinds of stoppages in the route. As spectators of a parade we accept all this empty space because that is part of what we value in a parade: the chance to just sit and relax. The experience of a parade is about sitting in lawn chairs, looking around, and talking with family. Our attention is only occasionally grabbed with any intensity.
When it comes to translating a parade into a video or written description there are obvious problems. We expect our viewing and reading experience to be attention grabbing. We don't bring to viewing or reading the expectation of dead time that accompanies watching a parade on a brisk sunny day in early summer. This is why if we watch a parade on television we demand commentary.. something we would probably find insufferable in real life. But for the active viewing experience we need all the gaps in interest plugged with lively talk. In making my short video of the parade I cut sequences of the parade into brief sections.. thus allowing for my own narrative to gain traction and not be bogged down by the actual speed of the parade.
Writing about a parade is also tough. The example that sticks in my mind is the Grand Procession of Ptolemy Philadelphus in 285 BC as recorded by Athenaeus. The choice is made to devote a paragraph to each successive richly designed float. The theme of the float and the adornment of the gods, along with the costumes and number of attendants, are carefully laid out. But this is a boring text! It attempts to describe verbatim a showy parade.. and that is a project that fails because of the higher demand for movement within a written text. Like it or not we do not experience a written text in the lazy fun way we experience a parade.
Here is another question: Why portray a parade at all.. either in writing or on film? In the case of the Ptolemies there was obviously a desire to publicize their splendid events.. and a similar motive lies behind rich written descriptions of medieval Islamic processions (Fatimids, Mamluks). Parades and processions were important to rulers because they communicated important messages to spectators near and far. They presented an argument about the legitimacy of power and reinforced the system of symbols upon which that power was built.
In other words, parades and processions are just as much rhetorical texts as books or films.. and they can be interpreted and read in similar ways. The only difference is that parades are texts experienced at a different pace than the "literary" texts that demand a constant high level of attention. This difference in the experience of a parade often leads us to give them a free pass.. and not to inquire critically into what they are communicating.
