Individuals: The Queerist Possibility: Preface

A Somatic Theory of Religion

It was inevitable. The reality of returning to the discipline of writing is different than my plans for it. I have always been partial to ancient superstitions, and enjoy their personifications of inspiration, women, lords, spirits, voices: Muses, daemons, śruti, Thoth, the hidden variables and forces that move us to do this and not that. Any explanation of inspiration is hopelessly impoverished, so I lean poetic in my tastes, preferring frames that open rather than close possibility.

And so, in the spirit of that inscrutability, I’m writing this, a somatic theory of religion that centers embodied experience, engages various traditions, and most importantly, makes the claim that the rise of the individual, and his or her attendant agency, rights, and freedoms is not a Western curiosity, but a spiritual evolution at the crest of a 300,000 year wave. I will publish this argument in 3,000 word chunks (give or take). I intend for it to be incredibly short, closer to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus or Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy than a traditional academic monograph or work of nonfiction.

Like all monkeys, a host of vanities attend my effort, but they are nattering and subdued. My overriding motivation is to say something true, to say it beautifully, and to spend some time with You supping on this wild abundance.

Preface

Anyone who cares to know knows that the humanities are in deep crisis. It’s not simply a “right-wing” talking point. Deserved or not, what was once the locus of wisdom in the secular West has become a punchline for pundits, and an albatross for budget strapped colleges. The reasons for this development and the contours of the problem are debatable. And I have precisely zero interest in exploring them. But that doesn’t mean I have nothing to say about it. So instead of diagnosing and pathologizing, I would begin with treatment and care. I would begin with love.

I love the humanities. Not because I was born into it, or because of a stand-and-deliver teacher, but because it called to me. When I was 18, I had my first “real” job. I was a custodian at Disneyland. Ironically dressed in white, I was responsible for patrolling the park for trash, back-sweeping the lines, cleaning bathrooms, and vacuuming up horse piss in the parades. I hated it. Hated it as intensely as I’ve ever hated anything in my adult life. But I needed the money, so I showed up and did my job, transitioning from a seasonal worker to full-time employee with benefits in the way that happens when you regularly show up for a job that sucks and no one wants.

In order to get through the days I memorized poems to recite to myself as I wandered the park. “Gaily bedight a gallant night in sunshine and in shadow…” “You ask me what the lobster is weaving there with his golden feet…” “I desired my dust to be mingled with yours / Forever and forever, and forever…” “I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young…” “Though nothing can bring back the hour / Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower”… Even today, I still know many of them by heart. I don’t know why I started doing this. I mean, I know why I was doing it. I loved them. But I have no idea where that love came from. No one around me cared very much about poetry. I was a listless and uninspiring student. I wasn’t trying to fuck some cute English student. It was just me and the indignity of Disneyland’s custodial services and the poems—and the books.

I started reading privately before I started performing it for professors. Fringe books that no one reads seriously anymore. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Decline of the West (long before weirdo Neo-Nazis started tweeting about it), Hamlet’s Mill. And all the stuff we used to think you’re supposed to read: Ulysses, The Sun Also Rises, The Trial and Death of Socrates, War and Peace. My list isn’t vain. Whatever pride I felt in telling this story when I was younger is eclipsed by those I’ve met who put this habit to shame. Where I read a book and memorized a poem they’ve read ten, and memorized a score. My only point is that however you want to analyze this early affinity, whatever sociological schema you want to deploy, or psychoanalytic framework you’d like to apply, the most elegant explanation is love. I loved these books. Parsimony matters in life as much as it matters in science. I wanted to understand what the people who wrote them were trying to say about their brief time on this planet because I loved hearing them say it.

I wanted, and still want, to converse with the best and brightest from all times and places because it enlivens me. I don’t need to be black to love Frederick Douglass, and I don’t need to be Greek to love Socrates, Chinese to love Chuang-zi, a woman to love Mrs. Dolloway. I don’t need to read Classical Persian to love Rumi in translation and trust the translator loves Rumi too, and to feel a little bit bad that people who don’t read English will never know the strange and miraculous possibility of meeting him in a Borders in Brea, CA in the year 2,000 nearly 800 years after he was born. The Great Chain of Being can be applied to writers as well as salamanders and angels, so I am happy to join hands in mutual affection with those who would spend their days loving too.

I have lost all taste for critical theory, Marxist or otherwise. I offer no broadside against it. At one point in my life I found Frederick Jameson and Jacques Derrida thrilling. Paul DeMan and Mike Davis were regular companions. Nearly every paragraph in my copy of One-Dimensional Man was underlined and notated. Foucault and I were intimates.¹ I will not “take on their arguments” and demonstrate their limitations, though there are many, because there’s no end to the regression. Reading arguments that deploy critical theory to say something about [fill in the blank] is like watching a poorly attended dramatic reconstruction of the least significant skirmish in the Revolutionary war. The one where you’re a little embarrassed and a little charmed by the players’ earnest grievances.²

I know that’s not fair. And I’m tempted to include another footnote (like 1) that says, “Look, I don’t mean all critical theory. I don’t mean every paper. And here are the list of thinkers I still like,” but I’m not going to do that. I, of course, don’t mean all critical theory, but I do mean a lot of it. Modern academic humanities’ misanthropy is clear, even if it should be carefully diagnosed where it’s found. But we’re friends, right? You’re here with me. We don’t need the syntax of a frock coat to talk seriously about scholarship. And no golden handcuffs limit my range of sentiment, so I can say what many of you know or at least suspect.

But I can’t emphasize this enough. I come to praise Caesar, not to bury him. There’s no rhetorical sleight of hand here. I celebrate the full range of the human intellect. What is a gravestone but an earnest protest against the dust? Objection, indignation, the bloodhound’s hunt for hypocrisy: Socrates, Gautama, Jesus, Rabbi Akiva, Martin Luther King, et al., this was their fuel, and it propelled—in function if not always in fact—the aspirations of countless civilizations and billions of souls. I don’t begrudge, and more than a little admire, Foucault’s commitment to the archive. But to dwell forever in the swamp of human frailty is to commit oneself to dissatisfaction and abjection, and I will not do that.

There are practical and spiritual reasons for this.

Spiritually, I embrace your body’s electric possibility as much as I celebrate mine. I am in awe of the people who designed and built handicap ramps, invented branches of medicine to treat non-human animals, and transacted with shells along the Dnepr thousands of years before there was a US, a China, a Haudenosaunee, or a UN. I know our list of sins is long: slavery, poverty, war, smallpox blankets, rape. But perception matters. As the proverb goes, “when a pickpocket sees a saint, all he sees is a pocket.” Trite? Sure. Limited? It is. This is not advice to offer a refugee or the victim of a landmine or famine. But, also, are you sure? Do those who suffer crave hope’s succor less than the privileged? Is agency harmful in that pursuit? I doubt it, but maybe. Let’s agree to set that question aside for now. I’ll speak only for myself. I prefer to collect and amplify the lumens of our better nature, so that’s what I aim to do with my time here.

Practically, I’m an active investor in the project of civilization and I have no interest in shorting it. I know an argument can be made that a fundamentalist’s morality is no further from the summit of human beneficence than the Declaration of Independence, but I don’t believe it, and I don’t think you do either. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Yes, we’d probably want to sacrifice a little rhetorical beauty for philosophical rigor and replace “men” with “human,” and maybe (maybe) “nature” for “Creator.” But there is no creed anywhere, in any language, that more clearly enshrines the worth of the billion, billion youes who have been or will be. I’m one of those youes, and I’m all in on the project.³ I’m an evangelist for individual human rights because I am one. Civilization and material prosperity have been the single best guarantor of individual human rights in our 300,000 year history, so I’d like to do my part in boosting it.

But, look, if you still love all these Diogenes-come-lately who floss in public and deface the coin of the realm, then I hope you find some quiet grotto where you can sit together and watch life’s rude bloom necrotize in peace. It is pretty to watch at a remove, and it is a luxury as grand as any Sultan’s to have the time and space to do so. I don’t begrudge your pleasures. I understand them. The more ghosts we summon to our banquet of vanities the grander the party. But I guess I hope you’ll recognize these pleasures rather than moralize them because cataloging the ills of the current socio-cultural order makes you no more virtuous than a coroner.

I don’t mean to be snippy. But I do mean to highlight the pleasure young men and women feel in tearing down their forebears. It’s a pleasure that should not be elided, if we are to understand the function of critical theory in the modern academy. It’s a pleasure distilled perfectly in Graham Greene’s “The Destructors,” whose anti-hero “T.” and his gang of vandals indulge in the destruction of beauty without malice.⁴ This may sound oxymoronic, but it isn’t. For all the destruction the vandals work it is not intended to harm. The mercy they show to those who love the things they destroy is brimming with intent, carefully planned and executed. None of us are strangers to this convolution, though we may be estranged from it.

Most of us who have been encultured during critical theory’s reign do not wish ill upon the things we theorize into dust. The pleasure we feel outsmarting Aristotle, Jefferson, Hemingway, or the Bible isn’t personal. It’s a minor vanity amongst the host of heavenly vanities that accompany our species’ universal indignities—ceaseless alimentation, animal digestion, circumscribed evacuation. The higher we sit in our own estimation the greater the ruin we survey, and the more heroic we appear to one another and ourselves. The stakes must be high, or the impulse to dismantle what came before us appears adolescent—closer to Mean-Girls-style Darwinism than the urgent calling of the righteous.

The difficult part is that sometimes the stakes are high. The difficult part is that sometimes conservation isn’t the right frame. Sometimes destruction is warranted, even desperately needed. And sometimes the opposite is true. Sometimes you’ve reached the mountain top and you need to give people a generation or two to acclimate. Regardless, malice and the impulse to destruction are not the same thing. One is a constitutive universal process and the other is personal. Often we need the surge of malice to exercise the impulse, but that’s because secular culture has substituted vitality for wellness. It provides no intelligible framework for destruction as process. Progress is moral in secular culture, and so its inversion can only be understood as an aberration, an abhorrence.

Yes, the impulse to destruction cannot be indulged without consequence. It must be disciplined. But it can’t be ignored without consequence either, otherwise it curdles into sadism⁵. Indeed, one of the great innovations in the history of our species was the tribe’s ability to discipline the destructive impulse through male warrior societies—and later sports. The destructive impulse isn’t gendered exactly, but its exercise is. Our embodiment entangles us in particular ways to the ebb and flow of the material world. This is, perhaps, part of the reason why suffering morphs but doesn’t subside. Women suffer in hyper-masculine cultural frames, as men do in hyper-feminized social spaces. There is no final, settled consessus. Things are always slipping away from us. There’s nothing to hold onto for very long. It’s a fight to stay on your feet and follow true north.

Chaos lurks inside the machinery of all living things. Shiva captures this perfectly, as does Job’s Yahweh. Our negative capacity is critical, essential even. In fact, it may be the philosopher’s stone in the alchemy of self-awareness. I’d lay money on it. But Keats was right. It serves another function. Our negative capacity is the ground from which beauty is born, and all theories should be beautiful. And for their part, Derrida’s and Marcuse’s methods and theories are beautiful—exquisite. Only a lover’s fidelity could lead Paul DeMan to read Rousseau so closely. What was it that Oscar Wilde said? “For each man kills the thing he loves.” Well, I love them (and others) unequivocally for their beauty. And I will gladly destroy what they have wrought.

It’s time for their disciples to be swept aside—metaphorically, of course. Not because they are wrong, but because they are exhausted. Their time has passed. We don’t need a tome’s armor or a professional vocabulary’s defensive arms. We don’t need rigid scholarly conventions. The ground has already been swept clean. Onward. We can start again with first principles: truth, wisdom, beauty. We can leave specialization to the specialists whom I also love and will rely upon shamelessly. Risk error, fail nobly, misread generously, borrow immodestly, all of these tools are at our disposal. And I plan to use them all to construct a humanistic theory of religion that abides scientific insights even as it refuses to abandon the numinous flame passed from generation to generation.

The religious impulse is fundamentally the ironic impulse. But not “ironic” in the everyday sense of the word, not in the lightly bemused, clever, slacker sense of the word. Ironic in the philosophical sense, in the sense that Hegel and Kierkegaard worried over. Irony as the ever present, ominous, possibility of negation. “Neti, neti, neti,” as the Advaitans say. So we will begin there in our quest to ratify the spiritual significance of the individual in the history of our species.

—Memento mori, memento vagari

1. I do not mean to imply that all critical theorists are the same. Derrida and De Man alone, both of whom were more preoccupied with literature than history, offered different solutions to the problem of textual instability. For Derrida meaning was unstable but ultimately generative, playful, and for De Man it was ossifying, closer to Nietzsche’s beautifully articulated polemic against truth in “On Truth and Lies in an Extra-moral Sense” (“Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinne”). Usually, “außermoraliscen” is translated as “nonmoral,” but I prefer “extra-moral” because it more clearly captures Nietzsche’s emphasis that morality is a kind of scrivener’s error amidst the vast and unknowable tracts of history.

Marx also falls into the category of “critical theory,” even though his framework is closer to a premise than a contestable proposition in contemporary academic oral culture. This is also true of the entire corpus of Post-colonial theory. I confess less sympathy for the latter genre because it typically ignores non-Western forms of imperialism in antiquity and post-antiquity, and then theorizes upon that ignorance.

2. Take something like “disability studies.” As a “good” and curious humanist, I spent time coming to terms with Lennard Davis’s germinal argument in “Constructing Normalcy” (1991), and also wondered over the Venus de Milo’s fragmented body. It’s a solid argument. He reads his material closely. Close readers are a pleasure. But does my understanding of his claim that “normalcy” was an invention of the 19th century help children born with biological variations that negatively impact their agency in the world? Or victims of war? Malnutrition? Isn’t it possible that a healthy baseline—“normal” in the much maligned parlance—helps us help people who are impacted by their variation. Has one disability studies conference helped the disabled more than George H.W. Bush, who signed the American with Disabilities Act into law in 1990?

I’m not suggesting you can’t have both. I’m suggesting that the framing that helps the “disabled” is more valuable than the one that “problematizes” the category, and if we aren’t able to see and say that—even as we protect spaces where that kind of thinking can be done—there’s something wrong with our mental model.

3. The nonstandard plural of “you” captures a critical aspect of my theory, and gestures towards the work of Emmanuel Levinas, who was first introduced to me by the wonderful and spritely Santiago Slabodsky. However, I’d also emphasize the dialogic exchange, and intersubjectivity you find in Martin Buber and Mikhail Bakhtin respectively, which Levinas steers away from. Indeed, for Levinas one’s duty to the other is infinite, whereas dialogic, intersubjectivity implies a circumscribed relationship—more bounded (observable) than unbounded (theoretical) manifold.

4. The gang had gathered round: It was as though an impromptu court were about to form and to try some case of deviation. T. said, “It’s a beautiful house…”

“It’s got a staircase two hundred years old like a corkscrew. Nothing holds it up.”…

“It’s to do with opposite forces, Old Misery said.”…

“There’s paneling…

“Two hundred years old.”…

T. raised his eyes, as gray and disturbed as the drab August day. “We’ll pull it down,” he said. “We’ll destroy it.”…

“They’d never know. We’d do it from inside. I’ve found a way in.” He said with a sort of intensity, “We’d be like worms, don’t you see, in an apple. When we came out again there’d be nothing there, no staircase, no panels, nothing but just walls, and then we’d make the walls fall down—somehow.”

5. Sadism and malice, cruelty, are their own kinds of pleasure, and this too is worth exploring, but it’s a byway to leave for another time.