Tuesday, May 10, 2005
(10:21 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
TV Blogging, with theology also
I've watched American Idol more times this season than I'd care to admit. I have strong negative opinions about every one of the contestants and every one of the judges. Simon provides a certain amelioration, in that he most often agrees with me that these people are terrible, but on those rare occasions when the contestants actually live up to Simon's standards, one realizes that his standard is basically "mediocrity in its pure form." Combined with the fact that the songs chosen are reminiscent of nothing so much as a CD compilation, available only through a TV offer, of All-Time Greatest Dentist's Office Hits!, the show is -- really bad. The worst part, however, for me is a man who himself embodies "mediocrity in its pure form": Ryan Seacrest, illustrated above. No actual human being can be so boring and nondescript, such an absolute non-presence -- he has to be a robot. On tonight's show, something unexpected happened, and I swear I heard him start to say "DOES NOT COMPUTE," but they cut off his mic real quick.
RIPope has a post on torture, wherein he basically follows the Žižekian party line on the matter -- this is one of those cases where the Žižekian party line is absolutely right. Torture shouldn't be legal, ever. If a ticking nuclear timebomb situation comes up, do what you have to do and deal with the consequences afterward. If people worry that the existence of laws against torture will keep people from acting as necessary in such situations (assuming they even ever come up -- not a particularly safe assumption), then they are vastly overestimating the power that the law holds over people in crucial situations. No one ever says, "Oh my God, I'm going to be late unless I drive 70 the whole way to work -- but the speed limit is 65! Guess I'm screwed!" I'm sure that in the rigorous ticking nuclear time bomb scenario, the existence of anti-torture laws and the possibility of legal repurcussions would enter into one's thinking even less than is usually the case when people are deciding what speed to drive. In these terms, I think that RIPope's analysis of the Jack Bauer character are accurate, as well as his analysis of the meaning of the fact that this one guy keeps getting put in this situation so many times. (Is Jack Bauer effectively the sovereign in 24? I mean this seriously -- in the strict Schmittian sense.)
Naturally I'm thinking of pacifism here now, given Dave's admission that his pacifist convictions would mean nothing if his wife and child were in danger -- and rightly so. Pacifism is a strategy, not an absolute law. Most of the time, Dave's wife and child are not in danger, just as most of the time one is not faced with a rigorous ticking time bomb scenario. In the gospels, Jesus is presented as effectively having no family responsibilities; even in the last gospel to be written, that of John, he easily passes on his one remaining responsibility for Mary, from the cross. This allows him to follow the pacifist strategy more radically, and perhaps this should call into question the seemingly unanimous Christian endorsement of marriage (perhaps!).
If one can say that the "point" of the crucifixion was to locate Christ outside of all human laws, and if all law is finally property law, then Christ's submission to death on a cross excludes Christ not just from the Jewish law or the Roman law (both of which condemn him), but from the very principle of law itself -- the defense of the proper, the proper of property himself. Paul the Pharisee saw a vision of Christ and comes to understand that his mission is to the Gentiles -- beause the Messiah has become identified with those outside the law, most importantly for Paul, outside the Jewish law. Good Romans who became Christian started caring for these babies who had been abandoned and left exposed, excluded from the protection of the law of the father. But if the root of law is property and possession, then Jesus, by renouncing the fundamental principle of self-defense (voluntarily, being "given up to death, a death he freely accepted" in the words of the Roman mass), is most fundamentally identified with those who are involuntarily dis-possessed.
If there is one criticism one might have of Paul, it is that he (understandably, perhaps inevitably) overdetermined his mission along the axis Jew/Gentile. The irony of this situation is that the many radical left interpreters of Paul, who see in him the archetype of a militant faithful to an event, are invoking him precisely against the current hegemony of the "cultural" over the "economic." Even if Paul did understand the "preferential option for the poor" that is present in the entire prophetic tradition of Israel, he submitted it to the project of creating communities that can only be called (again, irony of ironies) multi-cultural. (We can see this on the level of action itself -- his offering for the poor of Jerusalem is done out of sincere concern for the poor, but its primary goal seems to be to legitimate the Gentile Messianic communities he is founding.) The selection of Paul as a model -- though, hey, I like the stuff, and it gives me something to talk about -- seems to me to indicate that these radical critics of the liberal-democratic hegemony are much more fully embedded in the logic by which class is submitted to culture than they would like to admit.
Perhaps. This is only a blog post, after all -- and one that began with a discussion of American Idol at that.
