Raschke, Toward Authentic Post Modern Religious Thinking

7/27/2019 Raschke, Toward Authentic Post Modern Religious Thinking

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Journal of the American Academy of Religion. LV1I1/4

ESSAY

Fire and Roses:Toward Authentic Post-ModernReligious ThinkingCarl A. Raschke

"Down the passage we did not takeToward the door we never openedInto the rose-garden . . ."

T.S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton"

At the conclusion of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Roseconsidered by many critics one of the greatest of so-called "Post-modem" novelswhat has proceeded all along as a murder mysterysuddenly turns into a revelation concerning the workings of languageand the adventure of signs.

The "discovery" of the perpetra tor of a string of baffling, andheinous, crimes inside a late Medieval abbey becomes the occasion forwhat today might be termed a "deconstructive" literary coven operation.The murders in the monastery aim out to be the artifice of the fanaticalfriar Jorge, who has connived and conspired to protect a mysterious

book in the secret chambe rs of the abbey. The "bo ok ," of course, isAristotle's legendary "lost" treatise on laughter.Jorge defends his crimes by arguing that the opening of such aa

book to the learned would transvalue all the values of classical learningand of Christian civilization. It would unlea sh the spirit of levity. Inaddition, it would set going the process of destruction for the entire

Carl A. Raschke is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Denver, University Park,Denver, CO 80208.

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metaphysical architectonic upon which holy "faith" has been erected asthe capstone. "I have been the han d of God," pro tests Jorge to hisinquisitor, William of Baskerkille. Jorge insists that the hand of Godmust conceal, and that "there are boundaries beyond which" the probeof language "is not permitted to go." But William replies: "God createdthe monsters, too. And you. And He wan ts everything to be spoke n of"(Eco 1980:583).

The saying of the unsaid, the reaching toward the unreachable, thenaming of the unnamed nameall signified by the roseis literally"the end of the book." The Name o f theRose concludes with a fire thatbu m s down the monastery and its enormous library. We may read intothe fire an eschatological eventthe apocalytpic capsizing of ametaphysical era in which God's secrets have remained closeted inforbidden book s. From a philosophical point of view, the "n am ing" ofthe rose is at the same time its dissolution; it is the semanticdisplac eme nt of the signified by the act of signification. Signification idisruption, a violation of context, a transgression.

The term "post-modem" itself has come to serve of late as a kind ofclandestine intrusion in to the kingdom of signification. The w ordconcomitantly baffles, bedazzles, and enragesprincipally because ineither denotes nor intimates anything other than an incursion acrosthe bord erlan d of sensibility. The "po st-m ode m" is everything thacannot be com pressed in back of the hyphen. Heidegger is generallyregarded as the first post-modem thinker because of his declarationabout the "overcoming" of metaphysics and the "end" of philosophyAt the "semiotic" levelthat is, in the distinctive space where languageperforms no longer as code or syntax, but as a skein of tracings, as themovement of complex and ephemeral modules of signification thacannot be repeated or circumscribedso-called "post-m ode rnitymeans much more than some ill-defined time-period.

Post-modemity amounts to a redescription of logic as "aesthetics,of message as medium, of communication as dramatics, of truth aembo dimen t. Post-mod emity is the transcenden ce, or "overc oming ," oall archaic or "legendary" orders of significance that have underwrittencultural discourse. Understood superficially, the "post-modern"represents a transition from the highly formalized, or "modem,"unde rstand ing of things to the "carnival" of popu lar culture. But thidefection is less a revolution in taste than a reappropriation of the theorof meaning itself. The idea redounds upon what Eco in one of hissemiotic treatises refers to as "camiv alization." The study of carnivalsBrazil's escloa de samba, New Orleans Mardi Gras, the ancient Roman


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saturnalia offers a glimpse into the origin of language itself as anassault upon the hegemony of silence. "Carnival," says Eco, "can existonly as authorized transgression" (Eco 1984a:6). W ith its omatepageantry of music and sensual dancing, the exhibition of costume andcolor, the exposure of bodies, the enactment of folk drama, "carnival"creates a "scene" in which the achievement of the "signifier" no longerdepends on language as social interaction, but emerges through the verydistension of the gramm ar of culture. The inquiry into po pularcultureat least from the standpoint of formal semanticshas alwaysbeen a "dangerous liason."

The term "post-modernism" has burgeoned, crowded, and suffusedacademic conversation during the last decade like so much lush, greenCarolina Kudzu. Once strange and unfamiliar, if not disarming,locutions like "subtext," "discursivity," "metanarrative," and "alterity"have become their own sort of patois within the hum anities. It is asthough a philosophical irredentism had been set in motion, dislodgingthe once seemingly immoveable sovereignty of Germanic thought in amore than century-long "Franco-Prussian" war of methods,phraseologies, and notions.

Gallic preciosity and rhetorical sportiveness appear to havetriumphed over Teutonic global rationality, or any probing into whatHegel termed the "dep ths of Spirit." The distinction, as well as theantagonism, can be espied in Jiirgen Habermas' waspish dismissal ofDerrida as a nicht argumentationsfreudiger Philosophliterally a"philosopher who does not enjoy argumentation."1 Post-modern worksof scholarship, however, have deliberately avoided "argumentation,"because they are regalia of a "style" more than a discipline. In thisrespect "post-modem" reflectionparticularly the philosophical andtheological kindstands in relationship to its earlier twentieth centuryantecedents as Renaissance "humanism" compared with the earlierreligious scholasticism. In the "human ism" of thequattrocento rhetoricsupplanted Aristotlean logic, eloquence displaced inference, the

performative took precedence over the referential. Ind eed , it isthe powerof performance that appears to have emerged as the commondenominator among the variegated "post-modernisms" of art,philosophy, theology, textual criticism, and the like.

When Derrida in OfGrammatology proclaimed the end of the "age ofthe sign," he most likely did not intend to claim that the event of

'Th e remark appears in H abermas (1985). See a discussion of the problem Habermas raises inGasche (1988). See also Schonherr (1989) and Wilke (1989).


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674 Journal of the American Academy ofReligion

signification wa s now impossible. But Derridean " decon struction,"once shorn of its metonymic excesses and its tropic diffusions, isprecisely the philosophical reversal of Roland Barthes' semiotics of theeveryday. The poin t can be easily overlooked, inasmuc h as Barthes'recognition that "to signify" means todisconnect the token from theobject in the generation of a sign-system anticipates the"deconstructive" view that textuality is inseparable from temporality,from the self-erasure of language as action. The sometimes m adde ningpenchant of "deconstructionists" for word-games and punnin g besp eaksan unself-conscious mimesis of the semiotic enterprise.

Barthes' semiosis of reading, encapsuled in the slogan the "pleasureof the text," would appear to be the schema for Derrida's "supplement"of writing. Barthes'puissance as a sense of the libidinous freedom andrevelatory aesthetics of sign-production, nonetheless, is transfigured byDerrida into a "joyless" chain of paralogisms, which turn out to betransgressions without conquests, wounds without healings, lesionswithout disclosures. The irony is captured in Derrid a's own"parapractical" re-reading of Heidegger's discussion of the "work ofart." Wh ile for Heidegger Van Gogh's "peasant shoes" can be " seen "

in terms of an ontological manifestation, a "worlding," through the penof Derrida they becom e the utter negativity of differencethe "disparit yof the pair," a "separateness" that is "initself, in the word, in the letter,in the pair" (Derrida 1987:352).

Derrida himself has failed to intuit his own nihilism, the nihilism ofan ongoing textual commentary no longer capable of signification.Instead Derrida has elected to mythify his own "total eclipse" of thepower of signs in terms of the chaos mother, the Great Kali, whichabrogates even the archetypal form of "female" in the primal and eternalrecurrence of darkn ess. "No wom an or trace of wom an . . . save themother, th at's understood . . . Everything comes back to her, be ginnin gwith life" (Derrida 1988:38). But any mythopoesis of life is also a maskfor death, as Jean-Francois Lyotard, today's pre-eminent philosopher of

post-modern culture, has reminded us. The "post-modem" is, he says,"that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy thembut in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable" (Lyotard1984:81). In a later work Lyotard tells us the "un pre sen tabl e" is"Au schw itz." It is the "differend" of the silent victims. The differendas the bare negativity of concealed violence constitutes the ultimatelimits of a logocentric universe. It is, to employ Edith W yscho grod's


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color, the minimalist's reduction of the work to shapes and surfacesitransposed into the "grammatology" of the text.

Authentic "post-modemism," on the other hand, involves a recoverof the richn ess of "na tura l" signifiers, if not a return to the "natur alismor "realism " of the late classical era. In art so-called " pos t-mo dem ismhas actually meant a "return to content," as Charles Jencks has so aptl

put it, along with a rediscovery of "historical continuum and the relatiobetween p ast and p resen t." This renaissance of classical figuration, proportionality, and stylized elegance has at the same time taken placwithin the "modernist" setting of cultural pluralism and representational heterogeneity, so that post-modernism generates narratives without plots as part of a world of "divergent significations" compelling"multiple readin gs" of the familiar (Jencks 1987:338). Post-m odemstyle enfolds within itself tradition without canonicity, form without formality, beauty without monumentality, coherence without symmetryThe two most popular and powerful editions of visual "post-modemism"pop art and so-called "earth art"have been self-cognizanefforts to revive the aesthetics of signification, the one through the commercial replication of popular culture icons and the other through aalmost magico-ritual expression of earth lines, geometries, and energiesIf, from a semiotic point of view, there is a deeper-lying "post-modemprinciple of interpretation, it is simply that the w orld glitters with signsand the signs belong to an encompassing and polyvalent harmony osemantic signs and whispers.

Unfortunately, p ost-m odem ism as a religious, or theological, libretthas all too often been assimilated to what are patently at best modemand at worst pre-m ode m, types of discursiviry. The crypto-m odem ismof what purports to be post-modemism can be inferred from the ideological continuity between "deconstructionism" and late Sixties deathof-God theology, which in turn derived from the post-war fashions oEuropean religious existentialism.

Another "post-modern" feint has also been devised for what iprima facie a pre-m odem gnosticism, or "perennialism." Huston Smithas an illustration, has characterized the "post-modem" mind in almosarchaicist terms. The genuine "po st-mo dern ist" is the devotee of th"sacred unconscious"; he or she is an Oriental adept on the path to aenlightenment, ajivamukti, one who "lives in the unvarying presence ofthe nu mi no us " (Smith 1982: 182). The same leanings can be glimpsein the "post-modem" theological program of David Griffin, which ilittle more than process thoughta modernist metaphysicleavenewith the politics and eco-mysticism of the aging Sixties counterculture


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More recently, as the word "postmodernism" has come to refer inthe literature to post-structuralist kinds of philosophical and literaryarguments, Smith has turned his wrath against the conceptitself. In aplenary address to the American Academy of Religion at A naheim, Cali-fornia in late 1989, Smith has dismissed "postmodernism" as merely adegenerate form of modernism, which arose when science and empiri-cist epistemology supplanted revelation and what Smith calls "the wis-dom of the ages" as the fountainhead of truth. The sin of post-modernism, according to Smith, is its denial of "ontological transcen-dence," by which he means the hierarchical metaphysics of religiousesotericism tracing back to ancient Vedantism and h ermeticism. Smithhas urged that "postmodernist" impulses be judiciously dislodged by "areturn to the truth claims of our field as impounded in the world's greattraditions" (Smith 1989).

The upsho t of all this, however, is that a serious post-m ode mis m hasnot left its stamp on religious thought. The impasse m ay have more todo with the poverty of academic theology than with the "theological"promise of post-m odem ism per se. If theological thinking is not a taskbut an oeuvre or "work" in the Ricoeurian sense, then in order to

become post-modem, it must become what Eco dubs the "open work."In the open work, according to Eco, "the signs combine like constella-tions whose structural relationships are not determined un ivocally, fromthe start, and in which the ambiguity of the sign does no t. . . lead b ackto reconfirming the distinction between form and background" (Eco1989:86). The capaciousness of post-modem theological thinkingwould, like the artwork itself to which Eco applies such a hermeneutic,be both "informal" and "c ultural" in a comprehensive sens e. It wou ldno longer emanate strictly from arcane conversationalists, who claim tobe avant-garde and trend-motivated, but who in actuality have contriveda curious, convoluted, and overdetermined scholasticism of the aca-demic left. It would becom e "po pular " in the sense that po p art, wh ichin many respects launched post-modemism, has served as an aestheticidiom of mediation between familiar representational systems and theimagism of urban folk culture. Just as the movement over a generationago from abstraction to "pop" can be construed as a revolt against thediscreet nihilism of purely formal painting, so post-modem religiousthinking no longer takes as its "texts" the recondite writings of the so-called "deconstructionists."

The strategy can be adduced in part from the theory of cultureadvanced by Jim Collins in his insightful study of what empirically fallsund er the heading of "pos t-mo dem ism ." Collins faults what he terms


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678 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

the "grand hotel theory" concerning mass culture, which has been awhipping boy for choleric Western critics from the Frankfurt School ondown through the existentialists. Grand hotel theory is a kind of surrogate canon for those intellectuals who despise the "canonism" of theclassical human ities. It looks down u pon the whole of popular cultureas crude exploitation and the purveyance of alienation, all the while

ignoring the su btle modes of intelligibility inherent in its different functions and genres. As Collins notes: "W hen the pun k rocker tears holein her jeans and closes them with safety pins, or when the fashiondesigner adds a mink collar to a purposely faded denim jacket, bothconstruct specific signs with quite divergent ideological valuesbut ineach case, the meaning produced is predicated on the violation of thesign's earlier incarnations" (Collins:17-8).

In other words, the notion of the "popular," according to Collinssuffers from "oversim plification." Popular culture, as opp osed to theimage of the "grand hotel" in which cultural elites dominate over a masconsumer population of untutored kitsch-mongers, can be viewed as amulti-centered dynamic in which sign-manufacturing and semiotic performance have the effect of bo th exp ressing and differentiating. Semiotics, therefore, should be understood as a veiled praxis of "liberation,"whereby deeper values of freedom can be decoded from the would-bvulgarisms, or even the apparent "crass commercialism," of quotidiansocial representation s. It is in this connection that we can begin tounderstand the hostility of Frankfurt School followers toward the veridea of "post-mode rnism." For post-modernism no longer presumes an"avant-garde" of cultural opposition in much the same way that thepost-Marxist politics of Eastern Europe today has dispensed handilywith the paradigm of the party as the "vanguard" of revolutionarychange.

For example, in his influential Theory of the Avante Garde Germanphilosopher of culture Peter Burger dismisses what we have called post

modernism as "commodity aesthetics" designed to "enthrall" and concoct "a false sub lation of art as institution" (B iirger:54). From the semiotic standpoint the postulate of post-modernism unmasks the hiddenand one might even go so far as to say "hypocritical," elitism in theconventional "grand hotel" reading of the role of cultural elites. Asocial semiotics needs no longer to presuppose that significationequalsoppression, that it is invariably a vertical imposition of symbol-controllers upon the mass, but that it may also be a kind ofcri de coeur of thedisenfranchised. The horizontal dissemination of sign-performan cethrough a "decentered" popular culture does not necessarily legitimat


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either their moral or ontological character, but it reframes their purpose,primarily in terms of the categories of regimentation, subv ersion, "c ere-mo nial" articulation, and ideological oscillation. Acco rding to the soci-ologist Erving Goffman, who in his more recent work has co-opted thesemiotic method, the "commercialism" of so much popular culture canbest be considered a complex set of typificaa'ons that are not so far dis-tant from ritualized, everyday language and behavior (Goffman:84).Sign-events cluster around "displays," which in turn coalesce arounddifferent social codings, not to mentioncodings of difference, which mayor may not be co-ordinate with the insignia of class.3

In the post-modem context the sign becomes, to use Lyotard's term,more "pres entation" than representation. The semiotics of presentationdemands the differend, which in turn yields a query more than a direct,"metaphysical" statementeven if it be the sort of metaphysics thatmasque rades as critical sociology. "In the differend," says Lyotard,"something 'asks' to be put into phrases, and suffers from the wrong ofnot being able to be put into phrases in the right way" (Lyotard1988:13). The differend is, in effect, the Heidegerrian "unsaid ," or, at adeeper, "speculative" level, the "unthought"; it is the speaking of the

unspoken that writhes toward articulation in the wilderness of contem-porary culture. It is the "sem iotic" reminder of social contradiction thatreveals itself in the face of the homeless wanderer at the New York PortAuthority. It lingers in the midnight offer of the streetwalker in Guada -lajara. It is both Moral Majority and MTV. It is the dea th of an abusedchild. It is the "Velvet Revolution" in Prague. It is also, strangely,Mickey Mouse and Goofy. But it is the crystal draped a rou nd th e nec kof a Santa Fe socialite, and the blood on the back of an Indianpenitenteas he follows the "stations of the cross."

The so-called "post-modernism" of certain contemporary theologi-cal writers who have somehow cornered the word, therefore, is butshadow ballet. W hen som eone like Griffin asserts that "p ost- mo demtheology rejects the extreme voluntarism of supe matu ralistic theism and

the atheistic naturalism of modernity, replacing both with a naturalisticform of theism" (Griffin 1989:138), he is not brushing oils on the c an-vas of a genuine post-modernism, but merely hooking on a voguish

3Hei nz-G uter Vester (1989) has very insightfully and effectively analyzed Goffman's contr ibutio nto "post-modem discourse" in his article on recent trends in both structuralism and semiotics."Our understanding of a sign, a sign system, or a text is a developing proc ess of unlimited semio-sis" (191). The theory of unlimited semiosis through cultural elaboration a key element in theframing of a post-modem schema of interpretationis made possible, according to Vester, throughthe "playfulness" and "intertextualiry" of popular productions, as Goffman analyzes them .


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label to the kind of standard American "empirical theology" that hasbeen cu rrent for man y generations. Similarly, in the book of essays bydiverse authors entitled Spirituality a nd Society: Post-modem Visions,"post-mod ernism" becomes nothing more than a buzzword for the sorof "New Age" utopianism spun from the cerebra of many Californiadream ers dur ing the Sixtiesa folio of themes a nd, notions that arealmost a generation outdated now (Griffin 1988).

The contribution of a semiotician like Eco, however, to an authenticpost-modem idiom lies in his recognition of the intimate linkagebetwee n "the ological" reflection and aesthetics. Eco lays the ground -work for his post-modernist, aesthetic "hermeneutic" in an early workentitled Art and B eauty in the Middle Ages. It is the task of historicalanalysis, Eco points out, to scrutinize how a particular epoch "solved foitself aesthetic prob lem s" within the syntax of its own cu ltural organiza-tion (Eco 1986:2). Although medieval thought has often been regardedas inordinately "metaphysical" and obsessed with questions of super-sensible cognition at the expense of intramundane concerns, the inwardlegacy of the culture itself was always, according to Eco, the search for aplausible "ontology of concrete existence." Such an ontology Eco finds

in the medieval emphasis on the power of color, proportion, and sym-bol. The gran deur of the Chartres cathedral, the scientific interest in theproperties of natural light and the effects of luminosity, the detailing ofboth the sublime and the grotesque in what have wrongly come to betreated as "fanciful" clerical accounts of both geography an d natura l historythese "aesthetic" preoccupations were actually the philosophicasubcode for a later grammar of signs and modes of signification whichflowered both in Renaissance humanism and the style of artistic expression known as "mannerism."

The School of Chartes, for example, held that God is essentially anartist and that the world could be conceived as a grand artwork. Intel-lectual contem plation was compared to aesthetic appreciation. Thenotion of "beauty" was closely connected to the classical ideal of the"goo d." In the words of Albert the Great,non est aliquid de numero exis-tentium actu, quod non participet pulchro et bono? ("There is no existingbeing that does not share in beauty and good ness "). For Eco, one of thgreat theoreticians of cultural "post-modernism," the aesthetic con-sciousness is wrapped up with a philosophical grasp of the lability andevanescence of sign-activity. Texts are no longer bare rune s to be p uz-

4Quoted in Tatarklewicz 1970:288.


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zled over. They are at once an intricate braid of the latent and the ma ni-fest, of form and function, of intimation and opacity, of word and image,of graphem e and difference. Indeed,textuality and culturerega rded inthe primitive sense of all that is somehow is "in di ca tiv e'^ no w emergeas reciprocal constructs.

Ill

The pre-eminence of an aesthetic "post-modernism 'is. underscorednot simply by the origin of the word in contemporary art criticism, butby the striking similarity between the new artistic values and certainstrategies of interpretation in the human ities. The so-called "concep tualart" that flourished in the 1970s disengaged the effort at aesthetic crea-tion from its actual output, much in the same way that "authorship" andwriting were separated within the deconstructionist m oveme nt. Post-modem architecture has been characterized in one recent historicalaccount by its "color, variety and capriciousness" that is not so muchdecorative as texturally light and elusive (Cole and Gealt 1989 :333). Ifpost-modemism as a discursive design is marked in Lyotard's terminol-

ogy by the "end of grand narratives," then as cultural episode it is whatJulia Kristeva has called thetheorie d'ensemble, an "intertext" of hetero-geneous, yetsignificant, mom ents of disclosure. According to David Car-roll, post-modemism can be summed up in the German termBegebenheit, which may be translated as "givenness," albeit in thedynamic sense. Another rendering is "mere occur rence ."5 Post-modemdiscourse itself "is concerned with theorizing the historical moment"(Merrill 1988:151). According to David Levin, post-m odern ism consti-tutes the "critical deconstruction of the essence still at work in the mod-ernist." It is a weave of "aesthetic mo me nts," each of whic h performsas a "critical commentary" on p ast aesthetic mome nts (Levin 1990:221).

Levin distinguishes between the "analytic post-modem" and the"metaphoric post-mod em." The analytic post-mode m should be con-strued as the formalist re-appropriation of the anti-metaphysicalpropensities within modernist culture and thought. W he n, for instance,Stephen Moore brands Mark Taylor as a thoroughgoing "modernist"installed as an apostle of the post-modem because of the latter's undueattention to "horizontality" and "surfaces" (Moore:548), he is inadver-tently acknowledging that post-modemism itself rests on an interior act

5See Carroll (1987). For other recent philosophical, or theological, attempts t o epitomize the post-modern, see James (1989), Crownfield (1989), Morris (1989), and Kay (1988).


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of reinscription covering all mat has bee n "m od em " in the most fruitfulsense of the word. One problem w ith Taylor's work, and with the nowexpiring fashion of "deconstructionism" in religious writing for thatmatter, is that it has reached a seemingly insurm ountable impasse, so faras the critical task is concerned, largely as a result of its inability toembrace the "m etaphoric post-mo dem," which ultimately harks back tothe desire of Nietzsche's Zarathustra todance. The metaphoric post-modem rests on a profound post-metaphysical insightwhat the Czechnovelist Milan Kundera has called the "unbearable lightness of being."The metaph oric post-m odem is Eco's "travels in hyperreality." It is thetranscendence of nihilisma nihilism that is the hidden agenda behindwhat Derrida calls the "truth in painting," the emptiness of all framesand representations, including die dys-representative entropy of thedeconstructive campaign.

The end of deconstruction, strangely enough, is not the freedom ofthe text, but a totalizing twilight, aGdtterddmmerung in which philoso-phy and theology no longer paint even a gray on gray, but recede intothe ice-entomb ed, ink-black night of exhaustion. Deconstruction con-stitutes die universal "closing rime" diat Heidegger has termed the "end

of philosophy." It is the veritablesumma of the analytical post-modem.It is die reduction of the sign to an anonymous exterior, to the uni-dimensional word-canvas upon which its cracked and discolored oilshave left dieir crepuscular impression.

The m etaphoric post-modem, on the other hand, arises phoenix-liketo recover the power of signification in an even more radical fashion.The metaphoric post-modem can best be described asa fundamentalontology of the body where metaphysics, now dismembered and disassembled, can be "rewritten" as pure somatology, as the deciphering ofthe "aesthetic" or sensate markings we know asworld and as culture. AsJencks notes with respect to post-modem architecture, it is an aestheticincorporating "ornaments and mouldings suggestive of the humanbody" that also "humanises inanimate form as we naturally project ourphysiognomy and moods onto it" (336).

Eco's understanding of semiotics as "carnival" in the sense of ribaldand "polyform" aesthetic display anticipates such ahermeneutic of themetaphoric post-mod em. But die same presentation more appropriatelycan be identified with wha t Kristeva has spiritedly termed "G iotto's joy,"die dissolution of the space segregating signifier and signified in thepainting, or image-texture. The racinatory symbolism of die medievalGiotto constitutes a narrative of die incarnate signifier, of semiology asaesthetic encou nter and appreciation. It is also proleptic widi respect to


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the post-m odem revelation of the body. Just as Giotto's joy is derivedfrom the holy yearn ing of the supplicant for immane nt fulfillment, sothe metaphorical post-modem hinges upon what Kristeva acknowledgesas the ontology of "desire" that grounds not just aesthetic discourse, butthe signifying act itself. While Kristeva's somatology is, unfortunately,still circumscribed within a late psychoanalytic grid-language of paternalwish, displacement, substitution, transgression, and repression, the cod-ings for her own version of a metaphoric, post-modem grammatology ofboth masculine and feminine are inherent in her own semiotics. Semio-tics, for Kristeva, is "polylogue"where the "speaking subject" isunmasked as body, as "bursts of instinctual driverhythm," as "hetero-geneous strata . . . that can be multiplied and infinitized" (Kristeva1980; 1986).

The concept of "body" in the post-modem context, of course, refersto something more than the mere physical agent. "Body" itself be com esa "metaphor" for the metaphoric post-modem; it connotes both theregion of alterity, of the "outlandish" and dieoutre, with respect to theCartesian, metaphysical subject; it becomes the pre-discursive horizonfor all possible significations that transcend the logic of linguistic actsand dieir applications. "Body" is a basal, "aesthetic" metap hor insofaras it correlates with Kristeva's infinity of sign-moments, with mutability,with a kind of "music ." Body becomes a metaph or for the dance ofsignification. The "da nc e" of the metaphoric post-m ode m and of thebody as infinite sign-ensemble, as "semio-text," as the cipher of cul-turesurpasses all implicit modernisms to the extent that it belies theprivatized subjectivities of the old metaphysics and the old aesthetics.The body as metaphor contravenes the totalizing force of ideologicalbelief systemseven the many neo-Marxist and crypto-metaphysicalkinds of political romance that employ the rhetoric of the post-modem.It works against die temptation, so prevalent in the contemporary agon-ism of the "cultural politics" that also calls itself "post-modem," of"hyperrealizing the social," as Steven Connor has put it (Connor1989:61). A post-m odem somatology would in this sense serve as agenuine, transfinite semiotics which is not simply a rhetorical double forMarxist criticism, or for "decon structionist" badinage. Th e language ofthe body, together with the ontological category of "embodiment," trac-ing the origin of that peculiar polylogical style of communication thatembraces psychology, philosophy, theology, and aesthetics, thusemerges as its own distinctive lingua franca for "post-modernist"conversation.

Ironically, the somatic emphasis in the development of a post-mod-


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em, aesthetic sensibility, including what might be described as a distinc-tive post-modem religiosity, brings us into the realm of "popularculture ." Many recent theoreticians of popu lar culture have concen-trated on w hat m ight be described as the different mod es of "body signi-fication," and the different styles of somatic repression and expressionthat characterize the signa populi.

Popular culture by its very nature is "exhibition ist." It seeks to ide-alize certain iconic representations of the humanfigureshamans incolorful costume, kings and queens in their finery, popes with theirtiaras, rock stars in their outrageous and often half-naked get-ups, thepresent-day postmillenial "Madonna" whose hit song "Like A Prayer"outrages the church because it is concomitantly hierophantic andcrudely sensualand to invoke these presentations as exemplary pat-terns for identification an d enactment. In short, popular culture, asanthropologists have been telling us for generations, is held together bythe power of multiple, and often ambiguous, significatory functions.Texts and other types of discursive formalitieseven the highly sophis-ticated "metatextual" operations of deconstructionist readersprovideus with only a stylized, and one might even go so far as to say "neo-

metaphysical," rendering of what persists down through the ages as"book culture."

From this standpoint Derrida's proclamation of the "end of thebo ok" is but a reinscription of the old textual ideology. A true post-modem closure of the book would involve not just an exercise in whathas become the weird, new fashion of Derridean scholastics, but a "cul-tural" or "semiotic" turn to fill out and finalize the earlier "linguisticturn" which overshadowed an earlier era in philosophy and theology. Asemiotician is interested not just in religious thought, but also in th ereligious context out of which the discursive ensembles of "thought" arecrystallized. In the same way that a Mick Farren can interpret d ie wholeof twentieth century culture through the iconics of the "black leatherjacket," so a theological thinker privy to the aesthetics and the poetics ofthe post-modem can begin to envision "sacrality" not simply as a com-plex of stock theological emblems or representations, but as a veritablemarquee flashing with the evanescent tokens and hints of religious sen-timentality in the twentieth century.6 The intertwining of religious aspi-ration and popular culture as a peculiar variant on post-modemaestheticism can be seen in what have wrongly been termed "new reli-

6See Farren (1985).


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gious mov emen ts" or "New Age" religion. So much w ould-be "newreligiosity"whether we are talking about channeling, "satanic rock,"crystal madness, or the pop metaphysics of Shirley Maclaine, J.Z.Knight, and Barbara Marx Hubbard is nothin g new at all. It is simplyold-time esotericism, and in many instances archaic superstitions ordangerous obsessions, repackaged for present day consumer tastes and

employing the semiotic conveyances of popular culture.New Age religion may in many respects be described as thecorn-

modification of the arcane and obscure, but we must comprehend its"materiality" not with the raw ideological slant that allegedly post-m od-em "political economists" adopt, but as a showing of embodied sign-contents. Sexuality and po pular religion, for instance including evendie scandals of Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggartcannot be disentan-gled from each other because of their very "camivality" (in Eco's sense),or "in-cam ality" from a broader semiotic perspective. The materiality ofthe post-modern, aesthetic mode of meaningfulness, dierefore, must beunderstood not according to some subtextual stance of metaphysicaldualism in which an "authentic" sacrality stands as a sceptre of austerejudgemen t over its popular formats. Although a respon sible "cultural

politics" does, in fact, require a self-conscious distinction betweencanonical works and the fleeting products of collective consumption, apost-modem aesthetical hermeneutics of cultureembracing the vari-ous subdisciplines of the "study of religion"must tear down the long-standing, scholarly Maginot lines barring religious thinking from pene-trating the "othe rnes s" of its own democratic milieu. The T illicheanwith its passion for workings of "Spirit" in the night ofExistenz mustdisplace the Eliadean with its historical preservationist bent for dustingoff and displaying beh ind glass the ancient, golden calves. A Tillichean"theological thinking" concerning culture comes once more to theforefront.

The post-modem era, no matter what the concept implies diachroni-cally, can best be understood as the unveiling of a new epoch in thehistoricaliry of Being, as Heidegger would claim. Yet we must now seri-ously consider taking several, giant philosophical steps beyond both theHeideggerian program of "fundamentally" re-reading the Western tradi-tion and two-dimensional Derridean wordgrams with their curious,Dadaist messages of inconsequentiality. If, as Ferdinand Saussure (thefounder of modem linguistics) and Eco (the progenitor of a comprehen-sive, cultural semiotics) stress, signs "work" exclusively because they setin motion the play of differences, then "deconstruction" can be freed


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from Derrida's hidden modernist semantics of surface.7 The mom ent ofdifference now discloses the transcendental backlighting of immanenteverydayness; it is thesignature of a pure presencing.

The "age of the sign" must no longer be conceived, as Derrida onceproposed , as merely "theological." Post-mode mly speaking, it is alsothe time olparousia. Parousia is both the closing time of modernist met-

aphysics and the final naming of the rose whereby the all that hasremained unspoken during the long exile of signifier must at last strug-gle toward speech. Most recently, Derrida himself has alluded to theend of deconstructionism itself with his cryptic discussion of "spirit" as"fire."8 Or perhaps we must uncover the essential meaning in the end-ing of T.S. Eliot'sFourQuartets , which some commentators regard as thefirst "post-modem" poem of the twentieth century.

Four Quartets is "post-modem" because it is a sweeping poesis disclosing not jewels in the lotus but "sapphires in the mud," a genuineHeidegerrian "worlding of the world" through the movements of signifi-cation that suddenly appear like a "thousand points of light" (Word-sworth) across the craggy terrain of "m ass culture." The closure of thepoem, however, is not about the "nam ing" that takes place through dis-course, but abou t fire. The discourse of the world is set aflame. As wediscover at the conc lusion ofThe Name of the Rose, the end of the book isalso the end of the world. The represen tations of the metaphysical eonbum up. For "our God is a consuming fire."

The concluding words of Four Quartets, therefore, are more thanmildly prophetic:

We only live, only suspireConsumed by either fire or fire.

AND, our task, as Eliot directs us, "will be to know the place for the firstime." It shall be , semiotically speaking, "a condition of completesimplicity," WHEN

7Says Eco: "the ele men ts of the signifier are set in a system of oppos itions in wh ich, as Saussureexplained, there are only differences. The same thing with the signified . . . The correlationbetween expression-plane and content-plane is also given by a difference: the sign-function existsby a dialetic of presence and absence, as a mutual exchange between two heterogeneities." (Eco1984b:23). The enha ncem ent which Eco's philosophical linguistics achieves in relation to Barthesrelatively naive "post-structura lism" cannot be understated. Eco's notion of semiosis as the revela-tion of a king of "un saidne ss," in contradistinction to Derrida's de-textualizingdifferance, also putsthe original aims of "deconstruction" back on a sounder philosophical, and ontological, footing.

8See Derrida (1989).


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All manner of thing shall be wellWhen the tongues of flame are in-foldedInto the crowned knot of fireAnd the fire and the rose are one . (Eliot 1971:59)

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