An Excursis: Reading Adorno And Why I Started This New Site

Sing to him a new song;
play skilfully on the strings, with loud shouts. – Psalm 33:3

O sing to the Lord a new song;
sing to the Lord, all the earth. – Psalm 96:1

[A]nd they sing a new song before the throne and before the four living creatures and before the elders. No one could learn that song except the one hundred forty-four thousand who have been redeemed from the earth. – Revelation 14:3

I. Introduction

Perhaps this belongs at Reflections On, at least the part about reading Adorno.  At the same time, why I’m reading Adorno, what I’m learning by reading Adorno, and my reasons for starting a new site, and this site in particular, are linked far more closely than simple reflections on reading.  Rather than split these things up, I thought it best to include it here.  Of late I have become a bit too single-minded in writing about the United Methodist Church and our current struggles.  This single-mindedness, along with my current weakened state of mind due to chronic depression, has limited my ability to do more than one thing at a time.  I do wish to continue to engage my fellow United Methodists as we move toward what we all hope is a resolution to our current state of disarray.  At the same time, this particular site, and its title, were created with a purpose in mind.  To whit: I wanted to explore the theological, doxological, and liturgical possibilities of one of my pet projects, which is knocking down the wall between what we call sacred and what we call secular music.  To that end, last Christmas I asked for and received several books on church music, two books on music and theology, a book exploring the theological depth of hip-hop, and two books by Theodor Adorno on music.  More than all the others, it was Adorno with whom I wanted to wrestle the most precisely because of the depth of his thought as well as his love for and knowledge of music.  What I have learned along the way, and how it might impact what I do and how I think about it and write about it going forward in no small part will be influenced by Adorno.  So let’s begin with him.

II. Reading Adorno

Before the substance of Adorno’s work can be tackled with any understanding, a few words on reading his prose need to be said.  In his long Introductory essay, Richard Leppert makes it clear that Adorno’s style was purposely not easy.  While certainly not as nearly-indecipherable as Immanuel Kant or Martin Heidegger, Adorno nevertheless suffered from what I have come to think of as “Teutonicitis”.  German is a language that lends itself to complex constructions, the long sentences with confusing directions, and paragraphs that can go on for pages.  While also an aficionado of the epigrammatic style – used in both The Dialectic of Enlghtenment  and Minima Moralia – these essay by and large rest more comfortably with the complications due in no small part to the grammatical and structural rules of German.  At the same time, like his friend Ernst Bloch, there is a rhythm to the writing, a stylistic uniqueness with which the reader becomes familiar.

Which is not to say that one can peruse Adorno.  On the contrary, despite stylistic specificity, Adorno sometimes is at great pains to strip the materialistic from his subject matter, leaving what should be concrete abstract, while conretizing the abstract through a stray example or reference to a piece of music, a passage, or whatnot.  That these are always unexpected, they definitely demonstrate his dialectical style of thinking, working from opposites inward toward a center that can never be found.  The reader needs to pay attention to each phrase, each sentence, sometimes this or that word, how they all fit together to make the whole that is and never can be quite whole.  This openness, this sense of incompleteness, is as much a conscious part of Adorno’s style as everything else, reflecting his own determination that “the whole”, particularly the whole as described by Hegelian dialectics, is false.  What Adorno called “negative dialectics” is only Hegel without a final synthesis.  Thus, the opposites, sometimes appearing simultaneously, seeming to move toward one another, yet never quite getting there.

III. The Limits Of Adorno

While I am grateful for the gift of these works, and am actually enjoying each essay as I read them, one each day, I have come to learn, fairly quickly, that what Adorno has to say about music is both narrow and impossible to transfer – save for generalizations about its historical embededness and the limits of transcendence and the commodification forced upon all production through what Adorno would call the Culture Industry (CI) – to other styles.  Precisely because Adorno is wedded both to a particular style of music, viewing the avante garde of the early 20th century both as revolutionary and the epitome of “the next phase” of modernist composition, there is little room to take what he has to say about compositional techniques, about music as art, and even about the growth and decay of music qua music and transfer it to other settings.  In this sense his work is as much a product both of his history and the times in which he lived as his method is to embed all human life within a historical framework.  It would do violence to the truth for which he struggled so hard and so long to rip out of context Adorno’s approach to music, applying it to a completely different historical, social, and cultural locus.

Which is not to say I have not learned much that is useful.  On the contrary, Adorno’s view of music, his commitment to music both as art and as the most fully human expression both of beauty and truth precisely because it is the most historical of the arts, I find not only uplifting but agreeable.  It is important to remember that, even as he dismisses popular music, jazz, and even some classical music (he is dismissive, for example, of Rachmaninov), he does so for clearly stated reasons.  In true dialectical fashion, I on the other hand stand with Louis Armstrong, Thelonius Monk (who said “There are no wrong notes.”), and even Ozzy Osbourne, refusing to adhere to labels, and insist there really are only two kinds of music – good and bad.  What constitutes these aesthetic decisions are both objective and subjective, in need precisely of a dialectical analysis that is also beholden to musicological understandings that consider the sounds themselves, as British musicologist Allan F. Moore has written.  A strict adherence to such a principle – seeing stylistic, timbral, functional, and even temporal differences as more those of degree than of kind – takes a great deal both to defend and explain.  Through reading Adorno, I am learning how to do this in a way that is both thorough and uncompromising, although my position is exactly the opposite of his.

IV. This Site

When I started this blag back in April, I did so for several reasons.  Just beginning a journey out of a near-suicidal depression, I knew that writing is therapeutic.  My old site had become, well, old.  I decided that if I was going to start again, I needed to start fresh.  A new platform, a new name, a new set of rules, and a new goal; these were my watchwords.  I spent time reading John Wesley and Walter Benjamin.  I reflected on Christian worship, on music in worship, on the liturgical needs for a changing church in changing times.  I have avoided secular politics almost completely, precisely because I no longer wish to involve myself, my time and energy, there.  My interests now are the future of The United Methodist Church, in particular how we can offer worship worthy of being called true praise of God even as we take risks both in our liturgy and our mission, our ministry and our private prayer and meditative life.  To that end, I have tried as much as possible to concentrate my efforts on those themes and subjects.  Recently, however, the controversy over LGBTQ people and our denomination has taken pride of place, even as I would much rather be doing other things.  I wrote yesterday, reflecting on some words from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, that our best hope as the Church is to let Christ be Christ, to be the Church of God, always at the foot of the cross, which is always planted firmly in this world.  Thus it is that I think taking the stands I have taken is justified, at least to the extent that I have made clear my view of what the Church is, or least should be, perhaps even can be.

All the same, my primary interest is now, and has been from the beginning, to work on knocking down those walls I talked about between sacred and secular music, between all those labels that prevent us Christians from really singing a new song, from hearing music all around, over our heads, and from allowing music not only to be functional within the liturgy of the faithful, but to reflect the eschatological vision contained in the Revelation to St. John on Patmos.  To do this interest justice, I need to spend time reading and learning, reflecting, getting some things right and other things wrong.  I keep this site closed to comments because it is in comment sections that the toxicity of the Internet exists most clearly.  My own experience with this toxicity is such that I prefer to offer these pieces without an opportunity for constructive dialogue to be broken down by the omnipresent trolls.

At the same time, there’s no reason any this shouldn’t be fun.  Thus I try to include photos, music videos, and other things not only to hold the reader’s interest, but to make sure the reader knows that while I take the subject matter seriously, I do not take myself seriously at all.  My own ignorance on so much needs to be kept in mind as you read.

Thus, we return to Adorno.  Despite what seems at first blush to be the limited utility of his approach to music, I look forward to continuing to read and reflect upon his essays, a project I see taking a while considering the number of essays in the Leppert anthology.  I will also try to refocus my own energies here on what was the original impetus behind it all: To destroy the barriers between what we call sacred and what we call secular, a project begun the moment Jesus died and, according to the Gospel of St. Matthew, the curtain in the Temple separating the people from the Holy of Holies, was torn asunder, breaking forever the transcendence of God and inaugurating the age of Divine Immanence.

I hope you keep reading.  I hope you don’t get bored.  I hope you have as much fun reading as I have thinking and writing what appears here.  And you can always get in touch with me by email – gksafford@yahoo.com.  Thanks for sticking with me, and I look forward to what’s coming.

Reflections On

I doubt anyone else will ever say that Theodor Adorno acted like what my daughters would call a “fangirl”.  So I have that going for me.

Reflections On

Among other things, I compare Theodor Adorno to Lester Bangs.  That alone should make this interesting reading.

Reflections On

It was nice to read Adorno last night.  It was even more nice to write about him this morning.

Reflections On Theodor Adorno’s Defense Of The Philosophy Of Music

The kind of thing that makes me itch all over.  Still, an important exercise through which to move.

Why Is Some Music So Hard To Listen To?

From Reflections On, thoughts on Adorno’s explanation for the alleged “difficulty” of “the new music”.  I bounce ahead almost 80 years to use a completely different example to demonstrate Adorno’s main point.

Music, Ecstasy, & Christian Worship

It is precisely modernity’s incomprehensibility that art confronts, in one of two ways: either by attempting to stuff modernity back into the clothes of the pre-modern, pretending to a familiarity that is only ideological – in other words, denying reality –  or by acknowledging modernity’s radical strangeness (and estrangement) by direct confrontation via art techniques up to the task,, thereby making critical sense of it.  But to accomplish the latter, new art must make itself strange, because the techniques of old no not permit access to modernity, and this fact results in art’s distance from an audience that social conditions regressively shape.  In an art worthy of the name, production and consumption cannot be productively brought together, Adorno maintains, unless society itself changes.  And he is clear that art itself is not going to change the wordlld – its role is principally diagnostic. – Richard Leppert, “Commentary: Locating Music”, in Leppert, ed., Theodor Adorno: Essays On Music, p.95

Have you ever been to a concert?  Rock, hip-hop, country, jazz, classical, it doesn’t really matter.  Just being together with other people to enjoy the performance of music.  If the music is done well, and if the performers are reaching the audience, something magical can happen: there’s this flowing back and forth of energy and emotion, in which each drives the other forward and upward, making the music better and better, pushing the audience even deeper in to the experience of the music.  You close your eyes and let the sound wash over you; you clap your hands to the beat, sing along, even at heavy metal shows you bang your head and wave your hand in the air with the “devil’s horns” sign.  At its best, music as a communicative art form should transport listeners to the place the music is.  That is why it is such a demanding art form; for all its contingency and the limits on its ability to communicate more than mere emotion and feeling, its purpose is to move listeners and performers alike, only the listeners have further to travel.

As Leppert makes clear in this overview of Theodor Adorno’s general thoughts on music, our modern age has made this all the harder.  First, it has stripped our ability to place what we hear in some kind of historical context.  Music is little more than a product now, and even those most devoted to any particular style of music are still kept at a distance from it by the fact of exchange.  Furthermore, modernity forces even the most “radical” music either to move backwards (Adorno considers Stravinsky to be this kind of primitivist) or make listeners comfortable with the status quo (Adorno considers the neo-classical composers, particularly of the post-WWII era to be this kind of comforting friend of the bourgeoisie).  When music confronts us with the real disjunction and dysfunction of our modern, late capitalist age, it can become almost impossible to listen to precisely because it offers us a view of reality that we understand is true, but do not confront in the normal course of events.  Thus it is that 20th century composers such as Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, and their followers in composing using 12-tone and serial style are difficult to hear precisely because they are, to use Leppert’s term, diagnostic.

Yesterday, a friend of mine posted a link to this article, in which the author states that, for some Christians in some traditions, music has taken on a priestly function, even a sacramental one, which in the author’s words makes it more akin to “ecstatic pagan practices than to Christian worship.”  The biggest problem with this article, besides offering no evidence whatsoever that this is actually happening, beyond a few fliers and some quotes from a book, said quotes also having no actual evidence, is that defining “ecstasy” as “pagan”, and akin to a priestly, sacramental function denies not only the experiences of two thousand years of Christian experience, but even evidence from the Scriptures themselves.  Furthermore, he makes the category mistake of insisting that an expression of deep emotion during hymn or praise singing is what we should experience during the declaration of God’s Word and in the sacraments.

From Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel to Sts. Peter and Paul, the Bible has numerous instances of reports of ecstatic experience.  St. Paul’s is actually first hand, in which he writes about being lifted up to heaven.  In the centuries that followed, the anchorite St. Anthony often reported ecstatic experiences.  Martin Luther claims to have encountered Lucifer in his monk’s cell.  St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila, Hildegard of Bingen, St. Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Merton and more all have left us vivid accounts of ecstatic experiences that have shattered their understanding of the world and planted their faith in a place far different from that of the rest of us.  To claim, then, that ecstasy is “pagan” is to deny our collective history as Christian believers.

Furthermore, when it comes specifically to worship, the best worship services are those where all elements combine to bring the congregation out of the world, out of our mundane worries and fears and joys and in to the presence of God.  The altar is a stand-in for the throne we read about in Isaiah and Revelation.  The hymns we sing are echoed in heaven in the praise of the cherubim who sing eternally before the throne of God, as St. John of Patmos reports in his ecstatic experience of Divine Worship in heaven.

I’m guessing that Adorno wouldn’t quite know what to make of music in Christian worship.  Whether it’s the use of historical artifacts such as ancient hymns, or the cozy, comforting sounds of contemporary “praise” music, both I think would raise his hackles as attempts to avoid the needed confrontation with our modern age that real music, real art, should present the listener.  The problem, of course, is that it is the whole worship experience that should, in fact, present this confrontation precisely by moving the congregation out of this world, offering the stark contrast between what God promises for us and what we experience.  In this way, Christian worship is little different than Adorno’s understanding of music, except that it is more than “diagnostic” precisely because we Christians are called to go forth and offer others the vision of faith and hope and love we receive in our worship together.  Prayer, our offerings, music, the preaching of the Word – when done well and with the presence of the Spirit, the congregation is moved.  And music is a part of that.

The first video above is of a traditional African-American Ring Shout, an ecstatic expression of faith still practiced in some part of African-American churches.  To deny ecstasy in Christian worship is to deny the very real experience of African-American Christians who experienced the freedom they didn’t have in this world; the love they shared for one another as a bulwark against the hatred of a society that consistently denies their humanity; to celebrate their love for God and God’s love for them when there was little more to celebrate.  The ring shout is more than ecstasy. It is more than just a part of worship.  It is God moving the people to express the freedom and joy that comes to a congregation that believes they are named and loved by God, the Creator of the Universe, and that no amount of dehumanization can take that away, at least at this moment.

The second video, of Freddie Mercury leading a crowd chant at the old Wembley Stadium, is an example of how, when musicians and audience connect through the music, it becomes possible to act as one.  When music in corporate worship moves us to see ourselves before the throne of God, that altar up front, we become like that crowd at Live AID, ready to follow the lead together in the faith that is communicated through song.  Our secular experience of music as an emotionally communicative medium (thus all the discussions about “is music language?”) occurs in our worship as well, readying us by dragging us out of our lives in this world and syncing our voices with those angels singing, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts and the Lamb who was slain.”  When we give ourselves over through music in worship, we confront the disjunction and dysfunction of our world with the present and coming Kingdom of God.  This is more than mere political or social ideologies clashing with a sudden insight in to the contradictions of these systems; this is the radical break between our sinful world and the hope and faith and promise of renewal through the power of the Spirit.

To dismiss all this as pagan is not to understand that Christian worship is supposed to grab hold of our whole lives, using all the elements possible, place us really and truly before the throne of God, so that we are ready to go back to our lives in our sinful, broken world and be the hands and feet and voices of God.  If our music isn’t doing this, if it is little more than stately, quiet recitation-in-harmony-and-rhythm, what, then do we do with King David, wearing only a loin cloth, singing and dancing and leading the procession on the entrance in to Jerusalem?  We should never deny the very real place ecstasy has in Christian worship, or the role of music in making this possible.

You Have To Have Tradition To Overcome It

One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly. – Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 52, quoted in Richard Leppert, ed., Theodor W. Adorno: Essays on Music, p.81

Properly, this post belongs on my other site.  Yet as I was reading Leppert’s interpretation of Adorno on tradition, I couldn’t help but find parallels to our on-going discussions in The United Methodist Church.  Precisely because Adorno insisted that all of us, including this author and Adorno himself, were inescapably involved in the compromises and contradictions of late modernity, the best he believed was ever possible was to highlight those contradictions without offering a resolution, precisely because that inferred some kind of clear-sightedness past our current dilemma that isn’t possible.  For Adorno, this offered at least the hope, the Utopian promise that, as commentator Richard Leppert says, things could be better than they are.

While dealing with aesthetics, specifically with music, the aphorism above applies in all areas of life.  For Adorno, tradition, like everything else, is no longer a living thing, a historical, social, political, human reality, but a commodity to be purchased.  We believe buying antiques, or listening to an older piece of music puts us “in touch with tradition” when in fact we are only consuming a product sold to us as fulfilling a need.  Late capitalism has stripped the living human world and reduced it to products to be packaged and sold.  We are no longer in touch with our past because it has become commodified.

Adorno was critiqued, in particular by Georg Lukacs, for living in what Lukacs called “the Grand Hotel Abyss”, never once disturbing the quiet of his thought or the pleasures of his retreat from the Abyss in to which he would gaze.  Yet, Adorno was always consistent that action, even in his youth, went against the historical realities, which Leppert described as fascist on the one side, Stalinist on the other, and neither attractive.  In the years of his American exile, Adorno didn’t so much come to despise the United States as he came to understand how it was the epitome of all that was both great and terrible about modernity in its dotage.  Even in his late years – the mid- to late-1960’s – Adorno refused to become involved in the student protest movements in Germany and elsewhere, because he believed the students had become far more enamored of praxis without thought, whereas for Adorno, thought either guided or reflected upon practical action or the action became little more than mob violence, serving the ends of modernity’s real goal – making even revolution a product to be sold.

For Adorno, the most difficult thing in late modernity was to think.  More precisely, whether it was fascism, Stalinism, or the totalizing tendencies of the Culture Industry in the United States all worked against thought.  Nothing was more revolutionary than to think, specifically to think about what is and more importantly what could be.  In order to do this, one has to be aware of the past in a way that late modernity’s political systems worked so hard to prevent: the past had to become a part of one’s life, a living thing against which one struggles in thought first.  You cannot overcome a past you do not know, but only own, offered to you at 20% off.

We United Methodists have an abundance of multiple traditions from which to draw.  Some of them overlap.  Some of them contradict.  All of them, however, need to become part of our marrow, part of our heart and life if we are to overcome them and become the United Methodist Church for the present and future.  Yesterday, I offered a Moltmannian approach to our problems, in which we dared to be a church that could stand before the cross, emptying ourselves of pride, of power, of our reliance upon doctrine and the Bible in order to be what God is calling us to be – those willing to die in order to follow God’s call.  Today, I’m insisting that there are things we need to do before we take this via Dolorosa.  We need to acknowledge that our traditions are, by and large, no longer a part of who we are.  Oh, we mouth platitudes toward John Wesley, toward Bishops Coke and Asbury.  We talk about the Holiness movement and how it changed and electrified our churches.  Do we also acknowledge the depth of Boston Personalism, a religious/philosophical system developed by United Methodist theologians to respond to the perils and problems of Gilded Age Christianity?  Do we even remember the multiple threads of tradition from what was the Evengelical United Brethren Church, its deep German pietism and commitment to congregational autonomy?  Are we willing to embrace the history of racism that still infects our church?

We are confronting not just our recent history of refusal to acknowledge the full humanity and dignity of sexual minorities, and all they can and do offer our churches.  We are confronting our own forgetfulness, our own refusal to understand this as part of a real, living, human tradition called the  United Methodist Church that has always tried to overcome its worst demons while never doing so completely.  We cannot take the steps necessary unless we first acknowledge, and then repent, our forgetfulness, our traditions of discrimination, of bigotry and white supremacy that still exists, that these traditions are a living part of who we are.  We cannot become who we should be until and unless we are willing to acknowledge who we are.

I want to end with an apologia for Adorno’s overall philosophical project, written by Neil Lazarus, from an essay entitled “Hating Tradition Properly”, originally published in No. 38 of New Formations in the summer of 1999 and included by Leppert on pp. 81-82, at the close of his general introduction:

The point for Adorno . . . is that while the tradition of European bourgeois humanism has always insisted upon its civility , has always gestured toward – even made a promise of – a unversalistically conceived social freedom, it has never delivered on this promise, except, arguably, to the privileged few, and even then only on the basis of the domination of all the others.  To have tradition properly is in these terms very different from championing this exclusive (and often excluding . . .) tradition; on the contrary, it is to keep faith with true universality, with the idea of a radically transformed social order, and to oppose oneself implacably to the false universality of modern (bourgeois) sociality.  It is to use one’s relative class privilege to combat all privilege, to shoulder the responsibility of intellectualism by “mak[ing] the moral and, as it were, representative effort to say what most of those for whom [one] say[s] it cannot see.

The man for whom the whole is the lie, desire only to save the spirit of the Enlightenment, from which the Methodist movement, arguably at least, was born, from its actual history.  Its tradition, you might say, a tradition with which Adorno was intimately familiar.  In the same way, I have no idea what the specifics of the future for the United Methodist Church will be.  I only know there is much in our past to overcome, to stand against, with the guidance of the Holy Spirit giving us the courage to set it all aside and stand at the foot of the cross and say, “Yes”.  Not only for ourselves, but for the whole Church and the world we are called to transform.

The Limits Of Transcendence

Creation, from the ceiling of The Sistine Chapel

As I noted at Reflections On, I’m reading the long introductory essay to a new edition of Theodor Adorno’s essays on music.  A key feature of Adorno’s criticism of late capitalism is the limitations placed on such a criticism precisely because of the totalitarian nature of capitalist ideology.  Because it pervades and insinuates itself in to all aspects of human life, one cannot stand outside, above, or beyond it in order to get what Hegel might have called “an angel’s eye view”.  Adorno did not exclude his own criticism, remarking that it was just as flawed and limited as all others for the same reasons.  Adorno insisted the effort was necessary, however, precisely because of the demands of justice, heard in the voices of the suffering, voices history (as viewed through the lens of Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History) insists of quieting in the name of progress.

Culture, or as Adorno called it “the Culture Industry”, is no different.  The possible transcendent beauty of Michaelangelo, say, or a piece of music is always compromised because of the demands of late capitalism, the commodification of all objects in the pursuit of exchange, what Adorno referred to as the demands of the bottom line.  The distinction between what some analysts insisted was “high” and “low” culture was false precisely because it was a function of the market demanding distinctions to drive sales and profit.  Something as beautiful and significant as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel becomes little more than a thing valued only for the price reproductions can achieve in the market.  So, too, a piece of music, even something as inventive and new as Gru’s “Djent”- inspired guitar instrumentals, can only take one so far precisely because it is nothing more than a product, created by an Industry to fill a particular market niche for the profit not of those who produce it but who market and sell it.

I believe this same limit applies no less to our churches than to anything else.  After all, consider how too many of our fellow Americans (to use one national example among many) consider it perfectly appropriate to “shop around” for a church that “fits” them, that “fulfills their needs”.  It is nothing for many people to hop from a Baptist Church to a Lutheran Church to a United Methodist Church, perhaps even then to a Roman Catholic church, never once considering the vast differences among them, the doctrinal and theological divisions – some of which have resulted in wars and death and terror in the past – meaning little to those for whom “religion” is a market no different from any other: something to fill a need, to satisfy an individual need.

So much of the discussion within denominations these days revolve around these very issues.  How do we “market” our churches to get the word out to the people to “choose” ours over another?  As individuals consider churches as something to fill a need (often artificial, created by the larger religion-culture-industry), churches too often neglect the reality that they are there for God, to bring people together before God, to do God’s work in the world.  Whether or not that fills any individual or even collective need is irrelevant.  Yet, this transcendent position is limited even its truth-value precisely because it is no less embedded within the society of late capitalism, with its totalitarian demands.  Like Adorno, the churches cannot not continue their appeal to the Gospel, to the transformative possibilities of a life lived with Christ, in the Spirit, for the Father, even thought understanding and lived out this will never be fully what it we claim it could or would be.  Thus the struggles in the emerging post-Christian America for an identity among denominations that strikes the balance between our mission and ministry and appealing to the needs of people for whom religion is just another product to be purchased in order to fill a need.

Part of the current struggle within the United Methodist Church over the status of sexual minorities is a result of precisely this: the extremes both claim absolute, transcendent truth is on their side.  The middle, represented by the Hamilton-Slaughter “Way Forward” proposal is a market-driven solution to what is essentially a theological problem that cannot be resolved within theological language.  Thus, we are at a standstill unless we take Adorno’s position: the plight of the suffering of those history demands we forget in the name of profit and progress should be our guide to be as clear as possible, even though we know we can never be as clear as we should be.  Our work in the world is for God, a God of justice, a God for full human life, a God whose love for creation demanded Divine self-sacrifice to the injustice that pervades our world in order to overcome it.  We cannot escape the pervasive dehumanization and commodification of capitalism.  We can, however, work hard to offer hope that, like all totalizing ideologies, it too will be seen through for the lie that it is.   It creates the conditions in which understanding takes place; it creates the vocabularies through which language becomes intelligible.  Through these means, it sets the limits, including the absolute limits, on any claims to transcendence.

The best we can ever hope for is to point this out, and repeat the Gospel message the we serve the God who is a God of grace, a God of justice, and the God for whom the lie of the whole is part of the sin of this world that we can at least partially overcome in this life.  We must never forget, however, thanks to Adorno, that we are compromised, and our claims to transcendence limited no matter how hard we try.

Walter Benjamin’s Secular Theology Of History

Each act of commodity exchange is at once uniquely differentiated and a monotonous replaying of the same old story.  The epitome of the commodity is thus the cult of fashion, in which the familiar returns with some slight variation, the very old and the very new caught up together in some oxymoronic logic of identity-in-difference.  It is a paradox of modernism that its exhilarated sense of fresh technological possibilities (Futurism, Constructivism, Surrealism) finds itself constantly displaced into some static, cyclical world in which all dynamic process seems permanently arrested. – Terry Eagleton, The Ideology Of The Aesthetic, p. 317

It has been a bit of a long journey, as we wound our way through Walter Benjamin’s “Theses On The Philosophy Of History”.  Before we turn to an overview, it is important that we understand when in history, and Benjamin’s life, these emerged.  These are, perhaps, the last or among the last things Benjamin wrote.  According to the Editor’s note at the end of Illuminations, Hannah Arendt writes that she received a typescript copy of “Theses” shortly before Benjamin’s death.  That sounds innocuous, but in fact Walter Benjamin was on the run from the Nazis.  In southwest France, he was hoping to cross the border to Spain in the Pyrenees.  Benjamin, however, sent his family on ahead of him and shot himself to death in his small room.  The “Theses” were published posthumously, in the German magazine Neue Rundschau, in 1950.

While shot through with a hopeful, perhaps one could even say militant, vision of the possibilities history held for those who grasped its true meaning, Benjamin himself obviously despaired both for himself and the world.  When Benjamin killed himself, the fascists were on the march across the world and there was little realistic hope they could be stopped.  One reason he and his family were fleeing France was the collapse of France with the German invasion.  It would be two years before the Nazi tide ebbed and turned, and no one should blame him for despair.

Yet, he produced what is perhaps the most vibrant set of theses, a vision of history as about to begin even as it ends, even as he and his loved ones ran for their lives.  Precisely because he recognized the fascists for who and what they were – the destroyers, the end of western civilization – he grasped the possibilities inherent in that destruction.  There is always a remnant, something Benjamin understood from his Jewish upbringing.  That remnant would, as he describes in the theses, sift through the rubble left behind and create its own future, rooted in the possibilities that have always existed, latent and untapped, in those history has left behind.  With the advent of the fascists and the coming of war, history was showing itself to be the void it has always really been.  The epitome of international capitalism. fascism demonstrated the empty heart at its center, the desire only for destruction.  History, as lived out and presented by the ruling classes and its official historians, was ending precisely because there was nothing left for it to do.

In the chapter on Benjamin in his book, Criticism of Heaven, Roland Boer claims that Benjamin reads as confused because he wasn’t sure what he wanted to say.  Yet, he goes on to demonstrate that even as early as his first published work, Benjamin was recommending theology as holding a key to understanding that was lacking in other fields.  While I believe Boer is incorrect on several levels, his greatest fault is that he accuses Benjamin of being unsure of his goal without considering that Benjamin’s goal was clear, as evidenced by the text’s Boer cites in the Trauerspiel, from the beginning.  Perhaps theology is, as Adorno would claim in his own criticism of Benjamin, not yet fully theology because it has not overcome itself to become a theology against theology; that, however, was not Benjamin’s concern.  One can criticize Benjamin for many things.  One cannot, however, claim him confused because of his use of theological categories and images, even remythologizing – a point Eagleton makes clear in his chapter on Benjamin in The Ideology of the Aesthetic – what has been demythologized.

The epigraph for this post, taken from early in the chapter on Benjamin, echoes very strongly themes we encountered in the theses: the emptiness of “history” as presented by historicism; the place of fashion as an indicator of that emptiness; the role of the ruling classes in presenting the new as repackaged old.  Eagleton grasps the central point of the theses, even while chiding Benjamin for going to “extremes”.  Eagleton also claims Benjamin does not accept the possibility of secular salvation, because of Benjamin’s invocation of “the Messiah”.  While accepting the role of myth as necessary as Benjamin uses it throughout his works, Eagleton becomes a bit too literal when it comes to the use of this particular word.  Yet the chapter on Benjamin, critical if respectful, echoes Benjamin in what is the central point of the Theses, namely that “history” begins at its ending because it is only as Messianic time, that quality that is understood as the fullness of time, reduced to a monad, a point of decision or kairos, that both history and time truly have their existence.

Benjamin uses the words “Messianic” and “Messiah” not to demonstrate the emptiness of any promise of secular salvation.  Rather, he uses them precisely because of his own understanding of the potency inherent in terms rooted in theological understanding.  Benjamin is not so much restoring an old myth, of the coming of the Messiah, as he is reimagining that myth in secular form.  It is the oppressed class who grasp the truth of history, and as such become the Messiah.  It is the revolutionary class who understand time as Messianic, each moment filled with possibilities and ready to burst forth and end the emptiness and destruction with which we are all surrounded.  History is not the property of God, for there is no “God” in Benjamin’s thought.  It is also not the property of the ruling class precisely because it shows itself to be empty, a nihil that can only end in the complete destruction of itself.  As “Messianic time”, it is solely the oppressed who understand the dialectics of time and history and become the facilitators both of their end and their true beginning.

It is important to note that Eagleton makes clear that the mystical element in Benjamin’s work and the recovery of Kabbalah and mysticism done by his friend Gerhard/Gershom Scholem were roughly simultaneous.  Some of the themes were present in Benjamin’s early work were done before Scholem emigrated to Palestine in 1923, which is where he began his serious work recovering the tradition of Jewish mysticism.  Yet Benjamin was aware of this work and Scholem’s insights certainly play a role in Benjamin’s later, more mature work.  How each influenced the other on this matter is perhaps a subject open to more research.

Even Benjamin’s friends, including Adorno, were deeply wary of Benjamin’s insistence on including theological categories, on his persistent claim that myth, rather than needing to end, needed to be reimagined because it fills an important role in human life, and on the weaving of terms and phrases throughout Benjamin’s work rooted in theological discourse.  Yet, Benjamin did so precisely because, unlike his contemporaries or later critics, Benjamin understood the latent power inherent in this discourse.  It served a very human need, presenting possibilities and concepts that could not be grasped in a demythologized vocabulary.  Despite the contradictions of Benjamin writing such militant, even hopeful, possibilities for the future even as he approached the end of his life by his own hand, there is much that can be mined, both by theologians and Marxists, from the fruitful use of this language in a critical setting.  Contemporary theology should appreciate that a critic understood the power of its discourse even while setting aside the present content; analysts and other Marxist critics should appreciate the simple appeal to the oppressed, in the midst of that terrible war, to stand up and hope that from the rubble a new future could be built, a future that they, the oppressed classes now suffering under the heel of the fascists, would build, ending the endless cycle of emptiness. The “history” of the historicists can only create a political and social black hole that sucks in all that really exists, as was evident by the Nazi war machine.  Walter Benjamin knew his time was ending; he nevertheless gave us a way of talking about the end and beginning of time and history that could be fruitful for humanity.  It may be, as Eagleton says, extreme, but it is the product of extreme circumstances, and as such presented these extremes as colliding and cancelling one another, leaving only the future, a qualitative thing, to those who can sift through the rubble and find those bit and pieces necessary to create a truly human, truly just, future.