Signs and Wonders

Theology After Modernity

Ellen Armour

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780231540940
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Theology

We are told modernity's end will destabilize familiar ways of knowing, doing, and being, but are these changes we should dread—or celebrate? Four significant events (and the iconic images that represent them) catalyze this question: the consecration of openly gay Episcopalian bishop Gene Robinson, the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison, the politicization of the death of Terri Schiavo, and the disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina.

Framed by an original appropriation of Michel Foucault, and drawing on resources in visual culture theory and the history of photography, Ellen T. Armour explores the anxieties, passions, and power dynamics bound up in the photographic representation and public reception of these events. Together, these phenomena expose modernity's benevolent and malevolent disruptions and reveal the systemic fractures and fissures that herald its end, for better and for worse.

In response to these signs and wonders, Armour lays the groundwork for a theology and philosophy of life better suited to our (post)modern moment: one that owns up to the vulnerabilities that modernity sought to disavow and better enables us to navigate the ethical issues we now confront.

CHAPTER ONE

MAN AND HIS OTHERS

A History of the Present

Classical thought, and all the forms of thought that preceded it, were able to speak of the mind and the body, of the human being, of how restricted a place he occupies in the universe, of all the limitations by which his knowledge of his freedom must be measured, but … not one of them was ever able to know man as he is posited in modern knowledge. Renaissance “humanism” and Classical “rationalism” were indeed able to allot human beings a privileged position in the order of the world, but they were not able to conceive of man.

—Michel Foucault

THIS CHAPTER TRACKS the emergence and formative effects of the fourfold of man and his others in modernity through the work of the philosopher Michel Foucault. My reading of Foucault takes off from his suggestion that much of his oeuvre could be taken as various attempts at accounting for the emergence of the modern subject, for whom he reserves the term “man.”¹ The reading I offer of Foucault herein shows that man’s emergence is simultaneous with and made possible by the other elements of the fourfold: his sexed and raced others, his animal other, and his divine other. I make this case by drawing together Foucault’s archaeological investigation into epistemic change in The Order of Things and his genealogical investigations into the emergence of disciplinary power and biopower (specifically Discipline and Punish, the first volume of his History of Sexuality, and certain of his recently published lectures at the Collège de France). I also engage with the work of Foucauldian scholars who have critiqued, nuanced, and extended Foucault’s analyses. Together, these scholarly trajectories yield an account of modernity as episteme and ethos; that is, an order of knowing, doing, and being. The modern episteme produces and comes to rely upon Man (capitalized henceforth when used in this specifically Foucauldian sense) as both subject and object of knowledge, of external and self-discipline, and of normalization. As we will see, the fourfold is integral to Man’s emergence at the center of the nexus of the particular forms of knowledge and power that constitute the warp and woof of the modern episteme and ethos.

Here, we begin in earnest the process of askesis, an undergoing I described in the introduction. Like the spiritual disciplines that askesis calls to mind, disciplined attention to the (un)makings tracked herein aims at transformation. Familiar (spatial and temporal) landmarks that have heretofore assured us of who we are and of our place in the world may recede from view, or our orientation to them may shift. The path by which the fourfold will emerge in what follows may seem indirect, at times. The elements of the fourfold are not signposts; they lack the regularity of form and appearance that characterizes interstate highway signage, for example. Nor do they appear all at once, fully formed and fully visible. Recall that I’ve described the fourfold as a hall of mirrors. What one sees reflected depends on where one stands; but what one sees is equally dependent on what lies outside one’s immediate line of sight—including the other mirrors in the hall. This chapter tracks the fourfold’s appearance and effects in relationship to the modern order first of things and then of humanity. Man comes to take center stage in each, but primarily in relationship to his divine and animal others in the first, and his raced and sexed others in the second. As I will show, however, these orders overlap. Tracing those overlaps will allow the reflective (and refractive) labor of the fourfold to come fully into view.

A few topographical reflections on how time will be (re)marked and space (re)made in and on this Foucauldian terrain to help (re)orient us. The shift from Renaissance to Classical to modern epistemes will be important in what follows. How exactly these epistemes map onto conventional periodizations of European history writ large is a question I will not address in any detail here or elsewhere. I do, however, want to alert the reader to certain features of epistemes and their relationship to time—and thus of epistemic change. Movement from one episteme into another happens piecemeal, here and there, in fits and starts, for the most part. Thus, although the terminology may be somewhat anachronistic, think of epistemic change as a matter of morphing from one to the other rather than of either gradual (logical, linear, or progressive) development or of radical endings and dramatic beginnings Some changes will seem minute indeed; comparable, perhaps, to the change in the size of beach dunes over the course of a week. Only to the attentive eye will the movement of sand from one spot to another be noticeable. In other cases, change seems more dramatic; seismic, even, we might say. In these cases, strikingly distinctive structures and concepts appear—and, with them, distinctive material practices of knowing, thinking, being, and doing. The conditions of epistemic change apply, as we’ll see, to the fourfold itself as well as to the episteme in which it comes to be.

To speak of knowing and thinking as material practices may seem counterintuitive. After all, while the objects we know and think about are often material (books, paintings, plants, bugs, furniture), the frameworks and concepts by means of which knowing and thinking take place (which can become objects of knowing and thinking themselves) are not. At least, so common sense would seem to suggest. Foucault, however, would argue that the frameworks and concepts are not just means-by-which we study material (or nonmaterial) things; the frameworks and concepts produce what we know and think. I do not mean by this that by thinking about a rose, I can make one materialize out of nothing; rather, I mean that the framework within which I consider the rose will materially effect what I see as the rose; what features I highlight, which I ignore; and the meaning I find in those features. These material effects are not limited to the objects of knowing and thinking; they affect the one doing the knowing and thinking, as well. Epistemic shifts produce material changes in knowers and thinkers; in their relationships to what they know and how, in their sense of their place in the order of things and of humanity. The knower and thinker of the Renaissance (or Classical) episteme is not the knower and thinker of the modern episteme. For this reason, Foucault reserves the term, “man,” for the modern knowing and thinking subject.²

Foucault also comes to see that knowledge is inseparable from power; not so much in the sense of the familiar adage, “knowledge is power” (i.e., the more we know, the more we can control) but in a much more pervasive sense. The production of knowledge, the framing of what is knowable, is one of the chief forms power takes. Understanding this requires that we think of power in more complex terms than we are used to. Power is not only—or even primarily—coercion or domination, nor is it solely the province of governments or judicial systems or their functionaries. Power operates on, in, and through the body politic writ large; through its institutions, to be sure, but also in, on, and through groups and individuals. Power is, then, first and foremost productive—of the subjects said to wield it (whether kings or scientists), of the objects said to bow to it (whether serfs, flora, or fauna), of the schemata that order them and their relations to one another. That includes human beings and the institutions that govern them, nourish and sustain them, oppress and constrain them. We come to be who we are in and through our interactions with one another and the institutions that shape our world. Those interactions can be malignant or benign, violent or gentle, but they are ubiquitous. We can and do capitulate, cooperate or resist, but capitulation, cooperation, and resistance are all part of the network of relations that constitutes power (it is, quite literally, a grid).³

Modernity as Episteme: The Order of Things

Originally published in French as Les mots et les choses (Words and Things), the explicit subject of The Order of Things is the human sciences—that is, those sciences that consider human beings as users and producers of language (e.g., philology), of labor and exchange (economics), and as occupiers of a particular place in the natural order (physiology, psychology, biology). These sciences do not appear out of a vacuum, of course; they are made possible by larger cultural shifts. It’s tracing those cultural shifts—changes in the ways Europeans understood the relationship among things and, significantly, the relationship between words and things—that occupies the bulk of Foucault’s analysis. And central to the account he offers is the emergence of the subject (and object) of the human sciences, Man. Indeed, one could argue that the primary artifact uncovered by this archaeological exercise is Man—as both knowing subject and known object.

But why speak of this project as an archaeology rather than a history? The English translation includes a foreword not present in the original French edition that tackles this question directly. Order is not, Foucault tells us, a project in the history of science—at least, as such projects are usually carried out (in France, anyway). Those projects take as their objects the “noble sciences, rigorous sciences, sciences of the necessary” and trace the progress of discovery while attending as well to what eluded scientists at a particular time.⁴ They are, in other words, histories of the work of the scientific consciousness and its limits (construed as what it could not know at the time), which Foucault calls science’s “unconscious.” In these histories, science’s unconscious is a negative; it is “that which resists [science], deflects it, or disturbs it.”⁵ The Order of Things differs on all counts. First of all, it includes in its scope academic disciplines, the human sciences, whose claim to the title “science” is contested. These “sciences” do not admit to the same regularity of method and purity of data that constitute mathematics or physics, for example; thus, whether their history constitutes a history of science is a matter of debate. Second, The Order of Things is a “comparative study”—that is, rather than remaining inside the boundaries of one scientific field, it considers together the sciences of language, human labor, and economic exchange, as well as of nature. Finally, The Order of Things reveals what Foucault calls the “positive unconscious” of the sciences: the largely unexamined and unthematized organizing principles, if you will, that enabled these fields to produce what they knew and how they knew it; a set of “rules of formation” shared by those studying nature, human labor and economic exchange, and language—largely unbeknownst to any of them.⁶ Foucault adopts the term “archaeology” to describe his method of approach, and the term captures well what The Order of Things yields. Foucault unearths, if you will, an epistemological scaffolding erected in and by these fields of study that produced the artifacts they subjected to analysis and shaped the larger framework of that analysis.⁷ That scaffolding (episteme) becomes visible only in hindsight. It is not the deliberate, intentional production of any particular scholar or field, but rather it reflects deep and lasting—even epochal—shifts in ways of knowing—that is, in ways of thinking, seeing, doing, and being.

From Nature to Life

Although Foucault does not thematize it this way, the fourfold is central to his account of the emergence of Man in Order. To be specific, shifts in the relationship between human and divine being, human and animal being, are part and parcel of the emergence of a new (modern) order of things out of its (Renaissance and Classical) predecessors. Within the Renaissance episteme, knowledge was essentially divination; discerning in things their place within a divinely established order. That order followed a logic of correspondences; the cosmos was a series of concentric mirrors linking God, human beings, the natural world, and language. So, the seven orifices on the human body reflected the seven planets (and vice versa). The nutritive systems of plants and animals both run from below ground to above (the venous system was thought to be rooted in the belly and directed primarily toward the heart and head). Earth’s rocks are analogous to bones, its rivers to veins, and its bodies of salt water to a bladder. The same logic governed the relationship between language and the material world. Words named things because they were divinely endowed to correspond to the things they name. Emplaced in and by this logic were the elements of what would become the modern fourfold: human beings, animals, and divinity. Human beings were understood to reside in the middle of that set of concentric circles linking and separating not only heaven and earth but also animality and divinity. Like animals, they sense and labor. Like God, they know and speak. Their mediating role is reflected in their role as divinizers. Their ability to decipher the divinely ordained order in things and in language mirrors a divine power.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this order of words and things begins to morph. A gap appears between God and the order of things and between words and things. Human beings—as knowers and namers—come to greater prominence. These changes are reflected in the emergence of new sciences—natural history and philology—whose very existence signifies the end of an order reflective of an eternal sameness to one disrupted by time and space. God remains the ultimate source of the order of things, but “nature” (la nature) comes to constitute the site where that order resides and “language” (le langage) the human tool used to communicate that order. Both are, to some extent, unruly objects of divine order insofar as nature and language are subject to time and thus change. Although ultimately nature’s divinely oriented telos toward perfection will have its way, climate changes or natural disasters can take nature off course for a time. Both telos and its disruption will register on the surface of things: in the flowers or fruits plants produce (or fail to produce), in whether animals are pawed or hooved (and the changes thereto). Discerning the order implicit in nature is no longer a matter of divinization but now of the exercise of divinely given gifts of perception and judgment. Natural historians used those gifts to map the similarities and differences visible on the surface of things and thereby discern the order implicit in the ebbs and flows of nature.

Knowing in the Classical episteme is less secure than in the Renaissance. Relying on human judgment to find order increases the possibility for error. It is perhaps, then, no surprise that the process of knowing itself—of sense perceptions, of imagination, of memory, “all of that involuntary background which is, as it were, the mechanics of the image in time”—becomes an object of study after 1750.⁸ So also the means of communicating knowledge: language. Words were no longer directly linked to things by divinely grounded correspondence, but by human perception and judgment. Like nature, language comes to be understood as affected by time and space. Hence, the emergence of the science of philology, the comparative study of language.

In the modern episteme, an order of things emerges that reflects shifts in all of these areas. “Life (la vie)” (bios) replaces “nature” as the space in which things are known; biology replaces natural history as the taxonomic order of things. Things are divided into organic and inorganic; things that are born, reproduce, and die and things that do not. If nature was primarily horizontal in orientation, life is primarily vertical. Whereas nature was a grid of visible similarities and differences, access to the similarities and differences among (especially living) things requires going beneath the visible surface and plumbing the depths below (think anatomy and dissection here). If nature provided a relatively stable space for taxonomies to reveal themselves to a knower with the requisite patience, the teeming profusion of the regional and relatively autonomous forms of being that comprise life fragments that space. The new order that arises is constituted by cleaner lines that distinguish (living) things from one another (e.g., vertebrates from invertebrates), but the spaces between things remains open—and necessarily so. Life is not only a taxonomic structure, but a force or power made manifest in things. The same force that propels a particular ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Man and His Others: A History of the Present
• 2. Photography and/as Bio-discipline: Photographic Askesis
• 3. Bio-discipline and Globalization: The Crisis in the Anglican Communion
• 4. Regarding the Photographs of Others: Abu Ghraib and/as Bio-Discipline
• 5. Bio-discipline and the Right to Life: Becoming Terri Schiavo
• 6. The Perfect Storm: Hurricane Katrina
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index