The Mourning Cloak

In reference to the insatiable thrust of Capital running rampant over livelihoods, and of the political directorates continued subservience to financial interests (in this case the European Union, but just as well America or Canada) the Italian philosopher and media theorist Franco “Bifo” Berardi has this to say:

“Peaceful demonstrations will not suffice to change the course of things and violent explosions will be too easily exploited by racists and criminals. A deep change in social perception and social lifestyle will compel a growing part of society to withdraw from the economic field, from the game of work and consumption. These people will abandon individual consumption to create new, enhanced forms of co-habitation, a village economy within the metropolis.”   

Bifo charts the devastating strain of overwork, particularly in its more cognitive forms under late capitalism or as he likes to put it “semiocapitalism,” not only on the individual psyches of capitalism’s cognitive employees – those workers engaged in the constant accessing and organizing of the seemingly endless pieces of information – but also on the “social brain”, that is, the space of collective consciousness where all these bits of information interact creating the symbolic backdrop for our lives together as human organisms.

The result of this immense emotional and cognitive strain, suggests Bifo, is the increasing potential of exhaustion as a, not so much revolutionary, force that nonetheless engenders an incredible passivity (beyond passivity?) that points the way forward past the impasse of liberalism.

While Bifo’s thought on this last point is slightly weak, it is not entirely clear how exhaustion can provide an organizing force for a different type of life, there is still some incredibly poignant insights into the nature of the farce we sometime call “reality.” To suggest that we need a radical re-envisioning and restructuring of the ways in which we produce, consume, and just generally organize ourselves as humans in communities and in the world is no more than needs to be said.

One final note: Can we not find, in Bifo’s imagery of the village economy within the city, a powerful restatement of the Christian parish? A gathering of people, not disparate in place from others who participate in games of power and the incessant feeding of the flesh, and yet a people who are peculiar in the way they perceive the world, in how they live and how they consume. It is instructive that the people in Bifo’s village in the city withdraw not from society but from the economic field, which is to say, that they have found a God to serve other than Mammon.

One of my initial reasons for starting this blog was as an impetus to write and to sort out my thoughts, particularly with reference to Maurice Blondel’s philosophy of action. Here’s an interesting link to a piece in the Guardian newspaper which very effectively illustrates the perils of blogging, particularly about action, as blogging has effectively become a trendy substitute for action without the political affects or symbolic efficiency of real political and social movements. The piece itself is just a random collection of mass protests described by the author as “the best and most significant.” The last protest listed was the Athens Polytechnic occupation, wherein the protestors insisted that an element of what they were protesting was precisely the virtual culture of blogging instead of acting thereby making an  “assertion of the real thing against virtuality.”

That being said, I don’t believe that a protest, even a mass protest is necessarily any less impotent a factor of shaping reality than a blog post. I know people who have gone to protest rallies primarily for the “experience” which represents not so much a concern for social life as a desperate plea to feel some kind of emotion. To paraphrase a tired Marxist maxim: “Experience is to philosophy what masturbation is to the sexual act.” Neither, however, should we get caught in the trap of visiting intentions. The road to hell…

One should certainly stand by the protestors in refusing the pseudo-experiential nonsense of virtual reality (mimicking experience in a disembodied medium). Rage is a consequence of social oppression and brutality. But in a precise sense it is misleading to call the events of the protest “the real thing” which expresses a kind of banal “look at us we actually did something.” Slavoj Zizek, in his essay Organs without Bodies – Gilles Deleuze, points out, following the work of Deleuze, the importance of the reality of the virtual, which is to say the real effects and consequences. Zizek is referring here to more than merely the electronic-scape of the internet or blogosphere or something. What is meant by the virtual (or Virtual) should be understood, in a sense, as the realm of the Possible as distinct from that of the Actual. And here Zizek makes the very Blondelian point that how this virtual realm is actualized (through human action/perception) is at once reductionary and expansive. He uses the example of how the human eye perceives light to make the point: The human eye reduces perception because it has to process or actualize light in a certain way, and yet the human eye expands perception by inscribing “what it really sees into the intricate network of memories and anticipations.” 


In Lacanian terms the “Virtual as such” is, in fact, the Real. One might say “the Real Thing.” And here we should think of Thing as possessing a very slimy and alien quality. In Franco Berardi’s brilliant essay Cognitarian Subjectivation, which delineates the relationship between labour and capital in the information age and poses the question as to whether an autonomous, collective self-definition is even possible, this Real is described in the following way: “Capital becomes the generalized semiotic flux that runs through the veins of the global economy, while labor becomes the constant activation of the intelligence of countless semiotic agents linked to one another.” 


This semiotic flux, according to Berardi, leads to a hyper-accelerated sphere of stimuli which cannot be processed in the “organic time of attention, memory, and imagination” with the result that the emotional sphere linked to cognition is cracking with devastating consequences. One might indeed say of the Athens protest that it is one of the fatal consequences of the “Real Thing” that is Global Capitalism. 


We live in a world that is panicked and confused. We have become ungrounded and need to land. By writing this post I add to the confusion. This is not the autonomous place. The cognitive overload on the social brain as well as the particular brains of people do not need yet another blog effusing scattered information and a randomized perspective. Yet, as a particular choice, in the matters selected and the perspective shaped, perhaps this will prove enriching. If only to say that we need to slow down, we need to learn to process the world with a greater level of intensity lest all our emotional energies be drained on the vacuous pursuits of infomational/emotional commodities.  

 Growing up C.S. Lewis Chronicles of Narnia were a staple fare in my literary diet. I was familiar with, and largely uncritical of, the standard evangelical interpretation of these works, namely that it was the story of Christ transposed into an imaginative and magical world and good triumphing over evil and so forth. Later on I came to resonate with Tolkien’s critique of the works – that they made the Christ-analogue too explicitly and literally thereby weaking the literary effect. Recently however, the Chronicles have returned to my thoughts, this time as an exemplary case of British Imperial propaganda. I have not developed a thorough reading on this level, it is more a series of thoughts, some of which may be slightly incoherent. One of the reasons I have been reflecting on this though is that I do think Lewis articulated, in the Chronicles of Narnia, a vision of North American Christianity that has been very destructive and continues to hold the Church in its thrall. It is a vision which disposes of traditional and indigenous forms of knowledge and expression and subordinates them to a particular kind of imperialist Christianity.

The character Aslan, on a facile reading an analogue for Christ, is in some ways much more in line with a certain rendering of the Arthurian myth, or some of its historical suppositions. One of the accolades Aslan receives -son of the Emperor across the Sea- suggests the figure of a Romano-British Arthur. At another level the accolade lends credence to a British ascendancy in North America, particularly in Canada. Aslan the ruler of Narnia(i.e. the colony) is the legitimate authority because he is the envoy of the Emperor from across the Sea (i.e. Britain.) The fact that Aslan is a (British) lion is not amiss here.

Under the auspices of this same lion the British are present at the very creation of this world. There are, notably, differing views among those present as to how this world is to be shaped. The (evil) magician Uncle Andrew sees it as an opportunity for exploiting wealth, whereas for the child Digory it is a much more wholesome fantasy. In the The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe British children once again make it onto the Narnian scene this time as its destined rulers.The Land of Talking animals, which is a northern woodland and reflects certain First Nations stories about Raven, Coyote and so on, is created and ruled by a foreign animal associated not only with Christianity but also with British Imperial rule. The tie with British children and fantasy makes the connection even more explicit. Narnia is an analogue for North America, which Lewis sees as rightly under the rule of the British empire not only politically but also religiously and mythologically. Though here it is a particular rendering of British history that Lewis employs and it is one where the figure of Arthur and Merlin are conflated in Aslan thereby rendering null the indigenous history of England itself, that is, if one is to allow that Arthur represents Roman Christianity and Merlin an indigenous Celtic tradition. I think there is some warrant for such a reading even aside from the dubious history of Arthur and Merlin themselves.

Thus, in a nutshell, Narnia is not so much the story of Christ the Messiah, as it is the saga of European/British rule in North America not only politically but culturally/spiritually. Aslan, representative of a Britain whose entire history and tradition was subsumed under the colonization of Rome, is the author and guarantor of Narnia, representative of a debased North America created entirely in the image of the old Empire. Thus the myth of the New World perpetually denying the voice and history of what went on before it was “discovered.”

The following is a poem I wrote some time ago. It strikes me as in keeping with the general direction of this blog, as well as to the phantasmatic and pietistic nature of the internet in general and blogs in particular. The architectural setting of this poem is an apartment.

  Well, the latest of St.Margaret’s Slater-Maguire lectures has come and gone and I am left to ponder what exactly it has to say to the current Canadian/Christian intellectual scene.
The speaker was one Father Raymond de Souza, a Catholic priest, economist and columnist for the National Post. He offered an overview of the latest of the papal encyclicals bearing upon the question of faith in the public sphere, namely John Paul II’s Centesimus Annus and Benedict’s Caritas et Veritate. De Souza, whose talk was entitled “What’s Love Got to do with It: Charity and Economics” focused primarily on the latter document.
  I must admit that the title, as well as some of the phrases that were thrown around, logic of the gift for example, sounded exciting. However the thrust of the lecture seemed to be that “people should be good and moral and that religion is important to economics” without any substantive content being given to morality or religion. Moreover although de Souza recommended, following Benedict, that charity  be considered the prime virtue to govern the market he did not give body to the notion of charity. He repeatedly stressed that economics does not know what to do with gifts since they do not follow the logic of exchanges upon which economics trades.
  I questioned De Souza on this last point, since to my understanding a gift is a type of exchange, although certainly not a fixed exchange in the sense understood in a capitalist schematic. A gift is an exchange between friends – an exchange of love, whose return is non-identical and offered in full freedom of spirit. What is given in a true gift is, indeed, the giver herself, and in giving she does not decrease but becomes more fully human, particularly as the gift itself serves to open up a space of friendship and trust. That is the space that is Charity.
  De Souza, however, stressed that a gift is not an exchange because it must be completely gratuitous. By extension this seems to mean that the gift is something which cannot enrich the giver and must, by definition, deplete and diminish her. Moreover she cannot even feel a satisfaction of having done a noble sacrifice, since such satisfaction could be classified as a return, thereby sullying the gift with an aura of exchange. A gift in short is an absolute sacrifice towards which the sacrificer is utterly indifferent. This is unreasonable. It also sounds evil.
  By the end of the talk it seemed that religion and economics had been kept comfortably apart. The good was knowable and doable apart from religion. However religion was still very important because it proclaimed some kind of truth. Perhaps the truth was that Charity is important, that part was unclear, particularly since the gift never did make it into the economy and charity seemed to mean pretty much what it has come to mean in our age the handouts of the wealthy to the poor. While mention was made that every human person has some intrinsic dignity, nothing was offered as to how this could be shored up in practice.
  My main disappoint was actually not that no critique of capitalism or even any of the practices pursued was offered so much as that all the concepts etched out were essentially reduced to sentiment and intuition. Morality and religion were invoked as good and true, but we did not learn what they meant or how they were connected. The only time an explicit example of amorality was offered was an offhand reference to pornography. The gist was that pornography is intuitively wrong. No theological explanation was proffered.
  Throughout the lecture, in fact, it seemed that the only real theological reference made was to the fall of man and original sin. This was used as a gloss to explain away systemic evils and failures – they are simply an unavoidable result of original sin.
    To argue that our faith actually makes a difference I believe that we need to start taking ourselves much more seriously. And we should not be afraid when Love turns out to be hard and not at all in line with our current practices and systems.

The character of Pi, in Yann Martel’s novel the “Life of Pi” is to my mind a brilliant subversion of the standard (bland) liberal thesis on the freedom/equality of religions. Not content with the belaboured tolerance of modernity -to each her own, I have my truth you have yours etc – Pi becomes the dedicated devotee and practitioner of not one but three very distinct traditions- Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity. In each case Pi experiences a profound and dramatic conversion tied to a specific social reality and community. The son of secular Hindu parents Pi a re-discovers  his ancestral tradition and its epic narratives. Through a friendship from a chance meeting Pi is moved by the power of the Muslim life ordered around daily prayers. And through the Christian school system in India he is drawn to the dramatic personalism of Christianity. In each case Pi’s conversion are a result of specific situations, particular practices, and real friendships. Each encounter also carries with it a history, thousands of years of choices, customs, conflicts and alliances converging to form the present that is Pi. To these three we must hastily add a fourth encounter, that of Pi with his atheist biology teacher, in whom we find, perhaps, the unspoken truth of Pi’s conglomerate belief system.

In a recent issue of the New Left Review I came across a delightful anecdote about Diogenes the Cynic. Meeting the Oracle at Delphi Diogenes is entrusted with the task of falsifying, or defacing, the common currency.
Upon further research of this story the details became murkier. Variations of the story run that Diogenes, or his father, were engaged in a literal defacing of coinage, and it was only afterwards – and after being exiled- that Diogenes was entrusted with his mandate by the oracle. Other readings go that Diogenes was supposed to “adulterate the political currency” but misunderstood and wrecked some money.

The version I like best is the one where Diogenes commits the  crime (defacing a coin) is punished with exile but learns from the Oracle that his petulant act is symbolic of an entire life of philosophical pursuit. The act, undertaken in haste – perhaps rage, perhaps confusion- takes on a life of its own. Or we could say, why not, that Diogenes act retroactively creates the possibility of the Oracle’s command – or even of Cynic philosophy as such. What is inconceivable in philosophy – that is that falsifying or defacing would even have value as a philosophical pursuit- becomes possible after the act is undertaken by the philosopher.

In the aforementioned article – a review by Michael Hardt of Foucault’s last lectures- Hardt follows the story with Foucault’s interpretation of it – which takes the perspective that the slogan “falsify the currency”- is meant conceptually, playing on the similarity between the Greek words for currency and law. In other words the slogan means to revalue or “transvalue all values” so as to transform society.

As true as Foucault’s rendering may be it does downplay the irony of the narrative. This great transvaluing begins with a simple and  petty crime – an act of defiance.
And in that small gesture we hear the voice of the gods.

It is not from thought that faith passes over into the heart, it is from practice that it draws down a divine light for the spirit. God acts in this action and that is why the thought that follows the act is richer by an infinity than that which precedes it. It has entered into a new world where no philosophical speculation can lead it or follow it. -Maurice Blondel 

The quote above, taken from the English translation of Blondel’s dissertation – Action(1893) Essay on a Critique of Life and a Science of practice, drives to the heart of Blondel’s philosophy. A philosophy that posits neither a priority of theory nor of practice but a seamless unity which finds itself always-already infused with God/grace/Being. John Milbank dubs Blondel’s philosophy a “supernatural pragmatics” stating that for Blondel the logic of every action demands the supernatural.

 But just to back up, why bring up Blondel at all? One could state a number of reasons. Blondel was instrumental in shaping the nouvelle theologie. Yves Congar, one of the theologians of that tradition, referred to Blondel as “the philosopher of Vatican II.” No less significant was Blondel’s contribution to philosophy -Oliva Blanchette notes that before Blondel “action” had all but disappeared from the philosophical vocabularly. In fact his thesis proposal was initially refused on the grounds that “action” was not a matter of philosophy. (Oliva Blanchette Translator’s preface to Blondel’s Action(1893)

No less important than Blondel’s contributions was the hostility he met both from the religious and philosophical establishments. Berated as overly religous by many philosophers, and as intruding on the domain of the theology by many theologians, Blondel found himself besot on all sides. Because his philosophy stressed action as it did it also ran the risk of being written of as anti-intellectualism. It is this, perhaps most of all, that leads us to the crucial import of Blondel’s lesson. In a time when anti-intellectualism is an increasing reality -culturally, politically, economically – and when the intellectual traditions, especially the universities, appear  disinterested in action, particularly as it relates to thought, Blondel’s philosophy is timely once again.

 In what follows it is my intention to engage on this blog in a systematic study of Blondel’s thought, through his dissertation L’Action, with the hope of framing the discussion -for today- of a supernatural pragmatics, a deepening of every action/thought. Life is not intended to be a stupid fragmented acts, yet it is also not a structure entirely determined before we walk it. With every good act our thought deepens, and as it does we are able to act better and in more fullness. Thus the gateway to faith is not merely belief in a set of principles, but an ever-deepening practice and rule of life.

It is up to us to work out our salvation in fear and trembling.