Wednesday, February 15, 2006
(8:50 AM) | Brad:
A Departure from Shitty Protestant Theology
I've not really participated too much in the conversations elicited by Old's very provocative posts recently, re: cells and political action. This is mostly because any number of participants voice questions, elaborations and objections identical to my own. Perhaps I'm just lazy, willing to let others do the work of typing out cogent comments; or perhaps I have too much faith in others to do things for me -- but for the last couple of Thursdays, it's worked fine. And yet, what are blogging privileges on a blog not one's own if one does not take advantage of having the stage?So. First, a quote:
One realizes with horror that earlier, opposing one's parents because they represented the world, one was often secretly the mouthpiece against a bad world, of one even worse. Unpolitical attempts to break out of the bourgeois family usually lead only to deeper entanglement in it, and it sometimes seems as if the fatal germ-cell of society, the family, were at the same time the nurturing germ-cell of uncompromising pursuit of another. With the family there passes away, while the system lasts, not only the most effective agency of the bourgeoise, but also the resistance which, though repressing the individual, also strengthened, perhaps even produced him. The end of the family paralyses the forces of opposition. The rising collectivist order is a mockery of a classless one: together with the bourgeois it liquidates the Utopia that once drew sustenance from motherly love. (T. Adorno, Minima Moralia)
Although here Adorno uses the image of "family," this really needn't be restricted to bloodline. More generally, what he points to here is the necessity of a political action based in a relationship bound together by something more, or at least more intense, than simple resistance. This is, I suppose we might say, the problematic of political engagement, that it is neither simply a violent resistance to, nor even that it is a promise of a future relationship with, the existing order -- such being the case for so many resistance movements that they come become what they oppose (e.g., Sinn Féin, perhaps). Rather, perhaps even most fundamentally, engagement is a sensual / spiritual / emotional / etc. absorption in the present.
To me, this is precisely to key to approaching the points raised by Matt below. That is, is this absorption / engagement a truly present possibility, in such a way that love (to bring it back to Adorno) is the animating spirit of our resistance, be it transcendent or immanent (depending on your perspective), that allows real change to happen -- maybe even to the point that we could not dare or possibly imagine -- that allows our resistance to be more than itself? Or is this intensity that binds our "families", i.e., that of love, by its very nature, that which eludes our resistance, to the extent that we lose control of what we're engaged with, of resistance itself, of "the Party" and politics?
Or, alternatively, is there a way to unite the two perspectives? In such a way, for example, that the "family" exists as a means (presently) to pick up what remains of a system bound for its own (future) destruction? Is this, maybe, one of the values of religious liturgy and ritual -- that it resists, almost like judo (not to neglect the non-Western commenters), by not aggressively resisting at all? By following the force of an aggressor's movement not by just taking the punch and turning the other cheek, but by fluid, traditional movements and anticipations? (BTW, Anthony, doesn't this seem like Philip G.'s political program? That "awareness" won't necessarily save the world as it exists now, but that it its inherent value is in offering a new way of thinking and recasting whatever is left?)
I'm not sure.
