The Postmodern Critique: Phenomenality and Materiality

While we are all moderns, that is, we exist in this universe, in this world, on this planet, in this environment of a natural earth under siege, technological achievements that saturate the human mind, bending it toward boredom to video games and hover boards, we nonetheless adopt a posture critical of the modern turn as a matter of survival, of assuring that what is human stays that way even as the inevitable march into the future offers few alternatives. The heady humanism that drives modernity's project creates for it the illusion of order, or better, the illusion that humans can and do impose order in our world.

Modernity's great gesture is the invention of containment, which bends the knees of those who blindly follow the big project. The invention states that we can know a thing so well as to create borders around all things that justify the essence of those things. We gather data about stuff, and determine the qualities and attributes of stuff, then tend to group stuff together in boxes, categories, that pretty much says everything about that stuff in the category, so that we can move on to put other stuff in other categories.

So, we adopt a critical posture that analyzes this rather grand gesture, the power to categorize and know. Modernity's first attempt at the grand move was political, and was designed to contain trouble. The rise of the mercantile phenomenon became the category of the 'middle class.' Science and the sciences became reason, and religion became bracketed off as the stuff of private thought (none dare call it reason), of something called faith. This strategy seemed to pay off--it worked, as the privatization of religion took its arguments off the streets and into homes and churches, and the discourse of the streets became that of commerce and economy, power and politics, and above all, scientific reason. Who can argue with success? Progress erupted and accomplished more in the new domains of the public sphere than what was accomplished in 50,000 years of homo sapiens prior to The Age of Reason. The juggernaut of modernity had buttressed its stay in human life.

The problem is this: the categories that empower the modern project are inventions whose purpose is to dominate. They say little or nothing about the objects in these categories, so long as objects behave according to the shape of the category. The very materiality of objects goes on, indifferent to the categories in which modernity has located them. The illusion of knowing trumps the freedom of objects to be what they are in themselves. The category imposes the will on materiality. A thing is what it is only in accordance with its category.

Now that effect certainly simplifies the world, and imposes digestible chunks of stuff for the sciences to investigate. The emergence of the disciplines provide ample evidence of this phenomenon. This is the driving force of progress, and we would have it no other way. Except maybe to take some wind out of those sails of hegemony over objects. The great modern shift to the subject has justified its invention of categories (even the concept of category itself), but at the expense of objects and their materiality.  Postmodernism wants to show the categorical impulse for what it is: invention and a figment of the imagination, a very useful one to be sure, but one whose imperial subjectivity tends to get caught up in itself. Where would objects be were it not for the categories dreamed up for them?

An interesting development in the categorical imagination has occurred famously in physics. Observation would have it that light behaves sometimes like a wave and sometimes like a particle (photon). This ingenious conclusion has proven to be very descriptive of general patterns observed in the universe. Nature is discrete: it seems to do things in packets and units. The computer technology that has analyzed these phenomena is itself poised to see its own reflection: its binary system, its digital configuration. Our observations of the physical universe, that is, its phenomenality, suggest that, alas, the universe, in its discrete units of energy, mass, quanta, are digital. Physics wants to tell us that the universe in and of itself is digital.

Of course, this conclusion is either true or false, but 'digital' is just another category that seems to describe the objects within it. It remains to be seen if  the very materiality of the universe is the way it is because of its phenomenality (that which appears in the experience of the observer). Either phenomenality is reduced to materiality or materiality is reduced to its phenomenality. This would mean that what we see is what it is.

At this time, I am more comfortable saying that what we see is what we see, and that which is, is what it is. We cannot conflate materiality and phenomenality without doing violence to either. We need to think of phenomenality without power if we are to allow objects to be objects, to allow the natural world to be free, if indeed it is free. Such a new phenomenology would seek out the margins of categories and look for signs of saturation and events which cannot be contained within them. What is presented to observation is certainly presented to the intuition, but the materiality of objects already saturates the categorical imagination, and the very event of materiality, of objects, cannot be released under the illusion of the hegemony of an encyclopedic modern project. Postmodernism must demonstrate that the perforations modernity has etched in reality are not real themselves. They are simply the convenience of dividing and conquering: ok for what it is, but impotent in the face of the real.

Signature and Worship

The ‘flying spaghetti monster,’ the marginalization of religion and faith in secular society, contemporary atheism and scientism, and the horrors of this world conspire against believers of the Word. Accused of childishness and other forms of psychological immaturity, believers are on the defensive to prove they are not mad, and to earn once again a place at the table of reasonable human discourse. The triumph of science as the standard by which all things human are measured and judged has limited all human knowledge to what can be accessed by the scientific method: humans can know only one way, and knowing in any other way is falsehood and a danger to the current world order. So, then, what  justification can believers give before the bar of science and empiricism for what they have judged to be knowledge of God? Aquinas was able to say that there is nothing in the intellect that is not first in the senses, but the angelic doctor admitted  that the intellect is capable of knowing beyond experimentation. Today’s atheists want to the know how God can be concluded from the evidence, how claims made for God are formulated, and how ‘worship’ is the response proper to the reality of God. They are unmoved by the analysis of Christian realism, and as such, cannot connect things human to divinity, nor are they disposed to recognize the categories of theology and psychology as compelling avenues to a God that creates nature but  exists outside it.

The problem of immanence and transcendence in Christian thought does not dissolve in the discourse of postmodernism. Perhaps the problem becomes even more acute as this binary opposition resists any kind of satisfactory synthesis in theological statements about God: there is no peace in thoughts such as ‘the hidden presence of God,’ ‘immanence in transcendence,’ “God is everywhere.” Indeed, the corollaries of such statements would seem to be, respectively, the hidden absence of God, transcendent immanence, and God is nowhere. Indeed, uncertainty is at work here. God cannot be located in space because, among other reasons, God is not physical. God is not in the universe, and does not answer to the laws of physics; nor is God contained in celestial bodies, taking a free ride courtesy of the laws of physics. As the creator of the universe, God is already not in creation; but this creation is, in effect, God’s signature.

 

We can illuminate the relation between God and creation with the analogy of a simple signature at the bottom of a letter, business document, rent check and the artist and her painting, with or without her signature at the bottom. Signatures confer originator status, authority and authenticity in the absence of the signer. Sometimes the signer exhibits an idiosyncratic appearance in his written signature, which confers its own kind of authority, authenticity and even security in the fact that the signature is 'real.' Idiosyncrasy in style or manner is not required: a bank teller will cash a check with a signature it has not seen before, even if it has a policy of keeping a 'signature on file' of its own members. Regardless, the signature empowers a transaction, authenticates a document, in the absence of the agent authorizing, authenticating, etc. The signature in a painting is interesting because painters, through the very nature of art, imbue their work with characteristics that are familiar to viewers: mannerisms, techniques, color patterns, etc., that are so closely tied to a particular painter that they identify, authorize and authenticate even in the absence of a signature at the bottom of a painting. When a painter signs her work, that signature certainly functions as a regular signature, but sometimes it is a marker of a built-in redundancy. Musical art can have similar effects: we can 'recognize' the authenticity of a work by a composer via a signature that is 'heard', even if we never heard the work before, or if the work was just discovered and performed for the first time.

 

These observations summarize several aspects of signatures that are familiar to us. The effects and consequences of signatures are conventionally understood, even when a signature is figurative. We expect authority, authenticity and guarantees of origin. These notions of the guarantee, authenticity and authority breed a kind of 'faith' in signatures, and in the reality governed by them. When we speak about God's signature, we are not speaking simply about matters of immanence and transcendence; we must transition to another problematic, albeit familiar, binary pairing: nature and grace. On the one hand, we can stipulate that nature is all that is good yet anterior to grace; on the other hand we can admit that nature is already poised to be graced, on the verge of grace, built to receive grace. Grace then is the freely given self-communication of the divine, imprinted, as it were, on a template already positioned to receive it. When we speak specifically of the rational subject as human person, ‘grace’ is the name of the divine signature within the human soul, the human psyche. God remains radically absent,  but grace inheres in the human person.

 

Creation—the natural world/universe--then, is imbued with the presence of its creator, who vacates each passing microsecond of the creative act. This presence is either simply hidden (traditional concept of grace), or truly absent yet authenticated by a signature pointing to the divine/creative authority/authenticity/bona fide-security of origin. If nature is intelligible, it is intelligible as signature, and as signature points to the rationality of the signer. I am not suggesting that such an intelligence is immanent in intelligibility, or the only possible outcome of the comprehensibility of nature. Instead, I am suggesting that nature bears a signature which authorizes and authenticates it, even as the signer remains both transcendent( 'absence') and in an immanence of ‘already’ been there, only the familiar signature remaining.

 

Nature is not so other that we see it as purely divine, and therefore outside the conceptual space of inquiry: to the contrary, nature's very intelligibility subjects it to human inquiry and reason. The signature itself is not open to the scientific method, which lacks the tools for proper inquiry and whose existing tools obscure rather than discover; and we must therefore  be careful not to confuse the apprehension of the intelligibility of nature with crass notions of 'intelligent design’ (the pseudoscientific theory of creationism). Metaphysics and physics cannot be synthesized in this or any other application. We can admit, however, that intelligibility's trajectory is the rational intelligence of the signer: the logos. The signature within the intelligibility of the natural world is the grace through which the logos is made known (I realize I have not been making the classical distinction between the universe as natural world and human nature (properly so called), but I do this not only at my own peril, but to underscore the fundamental connection between the human subject and the natural world; simply stated, human beings and the fundamental particles of the universe are made of the same stuff and share a common origin. As such the physical universe and human nature receive grace in a similar and gratuitous way).

 

God’s self-communication is given to us through the logos, in all its forms, even in revelation through the divine signature, grace. At creation, the signature is written throughout the universe; in revelation through human history, first in the theophany on Mt. Sinai, and finally and definitively in the incarnation of the logos itself: the signer itself appears in history in the flesh. For Christians, the Christ-event is the aperture on the truth of God. It is difficult to see much past the aperture, so the focus is on the in-breaking of God into creation---the second person of the trinity incarnate and historical. This is the historical moment that corresponds to psychological moment of the experience of being fully human and fully alive. It is the experience of God within us, yet not a part of us, even as he became one of us.

 

God's signature then is more than his hidden presence, which is tied more to grace than to ill-conceived ideas of God-in- nature, God ‘localized’ in nature. God is radically absent from the universe. Because God is radically absent, existing apart from creation, in eternity outside time, space and other physical, measurable entities, we become aware of him by his signature. In this sense signature is a sacramental, but not limited to the sacramental. But that we are predisposed to recognize his signature, suggests that we share that negative capability of nature to receive such self-communication.

That self-communication in and of grace opens us to the horizon of worship. What is worship if not the honor due the creator by the created. Poised always to seek our origin, we are oriented toward God through the signature. Believers honor the signature as anyone might honor a signature on a check or letter. We act in response, though, to the signer. Give a check to the bank teller and he disburses cash in response to the authority---the ‘worth-ship’---in the signature. Believers do that too, but in proportion to the profundity of the nature of that particular signer. They honor all the predicates of God not as abstractions but as the truth of God. This action in response to the  truth of God is worship. And though God did not create a perfect world, he did create an imperfect one for us in which we are responsible for cooperating in its perfection. Could God have created a finished world free of every evil? The answer is obvious. It would appear that he chose to create this world, and chose to partner with us in the work of finishing. Responding to the call to cooperate in the on-going creation of the world is also worship, and faith in action.