Resounding Visions

Resounding Visions

I have just finished Jeremy Begbie’s latest book-length treatment of the music-theology relationship, Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music (Baker Academic: Grand Rapids, 2007), a penetrating but accessible exploration of a wide range of musical and spiritual issues destined for a educated but non-specialist readership which has merited strong endorsements from the likes of contemporary heavyweights such as Rowan Williams and NT Wright. As some of you will probably already know, Jeremy Begbie, currently Thomas Langford Research Professor of Theology at Duke University, is without doubt one of the foremost figures in the interdisciplinary conversation between Christian faith and the arts, a compelling writer and dynamic speaker who brings his understanding of music as a trained practitioner to bear on his theology in highly creative ways.

After an opening section outlining a basic approach to looking at music as ‘art in action’ (drawing on the work of Nicholas Wolterstorff) and dealing with music in Biblical times, Resounding Truth embarks on a concise but far from superficial history of the sometimes stormy relationship between music and theology. The journey from Pythagoras and Christian neo-Platonism through the Reformation, Bach and Schleiermacher through to Barth, Bonhoeffer, Olivier Messiaen and James MacMillan is skilfully set against a broader backdrop of the search for resolutions to ancient tensions in conceptualizing the relation between God and World, matter and spirit, the visible and the invisible, nature and culture, music and text, an objectively existing world and human subjectivity. Part Three, perhaps the most original and thought-provoking section of Resounding Truth, argues persuasively that music has a positive rôle to play in a present-day context as a component of a responsible ‘Christian Ecology’ that would avoid the false dichotomies of the past with regard to human beings’ relationship to the physical world, offering neither escape from temporal embodiment into a realm of timeless spirituality, nor the idolization of the material as such.

To affirm music’s place as belonging to a broader ‘ecology’ rooted in an ultimate and loving purpose to the world’s existence requires that music has to be acknowledged as more than simply a social construct. This, Jeremy Begbie contends, is

‘arguably the important question facing the theology-music conversation in the present climate: Is music in any way grounded in or obliged to be faithful to a world that we did not make but that is in some sense given to us? Are music making and music hearing to be understood as embedded in and responsible to an order wider than that which we generate – one that is worthy of respect and trust?’[1]

One reason that this question is so significant is that we are living at a time when, because of the ambivalent trajectory of modern Western thought over several centuries, many are no longer convinced of ‘the extent to which our world is to be considered anything more than is simply there in a bare, neutral sense.’ Although not mentioned by name, it is clear that contemporary debates between reductionist materialism and a theistic world-view are in the background here: ‘Even if not raised with theological concerns in mind, this issue inevitably presses us strongly in a theological direction – if the world is given, then by what or whom, and to what end?’[2]

A core assertion in Resounding Truth is that we need to recover a sense that the universe has meaning as a created cosmos which, as modern scientific research into natural processes is increasingly showing, is an interplay of order and freedom (theologically this can in Trinitarian terms be mapped on to God’s creative activity through the Son and Spirit respectively – a line which regular readers of this blog may well recognize):

‘A stress on both Christ’s and the Spirit’s work in creation can help us here. In the New Testament, Christ is associated especially with the ordering and coherence of the world […] [b]ut along with this, do we not also need a strong sense of the activity of the Spirit, whose particular ministry is to realize now in ever fresh and unpredictable ways what has already been achieved in the Son? To put it another way, the Spirit is the improviser.’[3]

Given such a framework of creation, the structure which we discern in music is therefore not merely a projection of our own making, but is a question of the ‘grain of the universe’. Music is certainly a human activity, and many of its ‘meanings’ are undoubtedly the products of cultural encoding, but it relies at a deeper level – as Pythagoras was the first to discover – on the inherent properties of sound, without which no music would be possible. Until the late Middle Ages the link between these properties and the proportions of a ‘harmonious’ universe was assumed as the basis for theorizing about music; Resounding Truth’s contention is that the history of music in the West from the Renaissance onwards can in some respects be viewed in terms as a mirror of the gradual collapse of the belief in an objectively ordered cosmos and its replacement by a concentration on the human subject as the generator of meaning. This trend in Western art-music reaches its ultimate point in the absolute determination of the music material in ‘integral serialism’ of the avant-garde in the 1950s (the subjection of all parameters of musical composition to mathematical control). The paradoxical outcome, however, is not the apotheosis of human freedom but – as Adorno saw half a century ago – the resistance of the material, with an artistic result which is aurally indistinguishable from its theoretical opposite, randomly generated chaos. This Begbie sees as a form of ‘control at the price of destruction’, emblematic of the modern ecological crisis, which he describes in terms reminiscent of Jacques Ellul: ‘through ever stricter control we lose control of our God-given home and become increasingly alienated from it.’[4]

Jeremy Begbie

__________________

At the heart of post-Enlightenment modernity, it has been argued not only by Begbie but also a variety of other thinkers such as John Milbank, Charles Taylor or most recently Oxford University’s Professor of Religion and Science Peter Harrison[5], is a dualistic view of the universe as divided into an inert, demystified and ultimately meaningless material realm on one hand which is dominated ruthlessly by a seemingly all-powerful technology on the other. Developing Resounding Truth’s line of interpretation, it might be said that this outlook – which has also had a major impact on religious thought, not least through a disastrous reading of Genesis 1:26-28 in terms of domination rather than stewardship – expresses itself in (at least) three different but equally problematic ways.

A first consequence, as has just been noted, has been the steadily increasing alienation of human beings from nature, resulting in the over-exploitation of the earth’s resources, the generation of Adorno’s soulless ‘administered world’ and the ecological devastation we see all around us. That this has to a large extent become the default position of Western civilization in late modernity is something which, thankfully but belatedly, increasing numbers of people are now realizing.

The second consequence of the disenchantment of the natural realm is in some respects the opposite of modernity’s hubristic elevation of humanity to God-like status, although it follows logically from it. Once non-human nature has been stripped of any metaphysical significance (no longer ‘charged with the grandeur of God’, to quote Gerard Manley Hopkins’ famous formulation), then reductionist scientific materialism’s deconstruction of the supposed qualitative difference between humanity and nature effectively reduces human beings to nothing but ‘machines controlled by our genes’ (Richard Dawkins). According to this nihilistic scheme, the ‘ancient covenant’ of meaning is ‘in pieces’, to cite Jacques Monod’s memorable conclusion in Chance and Necessity; humanity is as much an instantiation of an underlying futility as volcanic ash or pond scum.

The third possibility arises out of a reaction to the first two: in an attempt to re-invest the universe with meaning while (understandably) accepting the continuum between human beings and the natural world, this view takes the ‘pantheist’ option of deifying nature, an option followed by much New Age spirituality. This at least restores some semblence of sense to the sphere of the material, but at the price of leaving no room either for a transcendent deity or for human culture as being somehow more than nature. Once an impersonal vitalism is embraced as a governing interpretive framework for viewing the world, it is human history and civilization which risks being deprived of any significance.

Olivier Messiaen, 1930

The philosophical interest of a figure such as Olivier Messiaen (whether or not one likes his music) is that he seems to believe that there is an alternative to all three of these scenarios, and that this alternative consists in some way of a return to a ‘sacramental’ universe in which things point beyond themselves not to a Kantian sublime of abstract concepts which relegates the realm of the senses to insignificance, but to a transcendent, loving source of all beauty, goodness and truth which imbues the material world with meaning. However, if there is an element of nostalgia for a pre-modern world-view here, Messiaen’s approach is not regressive (his belief that all times are simultaneous for God relativizes human categories of historical progress or regress). For all his frequent appeals to Thomas Aquinas in works such as Les Corps Glorieux, Messiaen is not embracing a reactionary, obscurantist agenda (his Aquinas is far closer to the holistic blend of theology and devotional spirituality promoted by the nouvelle théologie than to a dry scholasticism). Messiaen’s fantastic cosmos is certainly ‘re-enchanted’, but not by a denial of modern scientific discovery; like many thinkers at the frontier between science and faith from Teilhard de Chardin to Alister McGrath or Holmes Rolston III, he instead finds an element of wonder and mystery in modern science itself that he intriguingly reconciles with the pre-modern, with a profound meditation on the nature of number providing the most obvious common element shared between the two historically distant epochs. The musical universe that results is ‘half-medieval, half ultra-modern’, to use his description of one of his heroes and main influences, the composer and organist Charles Tournemire (1870-1939). Messiaen is every bit as much at home with Einsteinian relativity as with Gregorian chant, as a glance at the bewilderingly wide array of topics in his multi-volume compositional treatise reveals.

Where Messiaen’s work is fascinatingly actual is in the clue that it perhaps provides to a possible way out of some contemporary quandaries as to how our world might be ‘re-enchanted’ without relapse into superstition. Messiaen is not a fundamentalist in the sense of asserting that the modern scientific enterprise is to be dismissed en bloc as a snare and delusion. But neither does he suggest that the Biblical narrative needs a thorough-going demythologization in the light of science, of the type famously proposed by Rudolf Bultmann, whose famous essay on de-mythologizing the New Testament appeared in 1941, the same year as Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps. In that work, as in Visions de l’Amen, Messiaen appeals to a robustly orthodox over-arching framework of Creation (of an evolutionary sort, it should be said, a gradual emergence from an initial nebulous potentiality as depicted in the first ‘Vision’), Redemption and ultimate Consummation. But at the same time Messiaen approaches composition not merely as a form of self-expression – although his music can at times be extremely lush and provocatively emotional – but also as a type of ‘scientific’ experimentation with new technical procedures, mathematical permutations and startlingly original combinations of apparently irreconcilable musical materials. As a composer, Messiaen is indisputably one of the great pioneers of the twentieth century. There may be some validity to the criticism of Jeremy Begbie and others that Messiaen’s thought is too uncritical of static categories of being that set an immutable Divine eternity in polar opposition to this-worldly temporality (it has to be said that the category of becoming is not a natural one for him), but on the other hand, Messiaen’s praxis as a teacher and participant in French cultural life over six decades demonstrates that he was anything but disengaged from historical processes and the life of the world around him.

As a thinker, Messiaen undoubtedly has his limits. His written commentaries on his own music are highly idiosyncratic and frequently, if not always fairly, laughed out of court for the naïveté of theirextravagant language. For all his considerable knowledge of Christian tradition, his Biblical exegesis and use of literary sources frequently border on the whimsical. And yet it would surely be unreasonable to require of Messiaen, as someone who cautiously called himself a ‘theological musician’, the type of intellectual rigour expected either of a professional philosopher or a systematic theologian. To see Messiaen as providing the conceptual resources for a refutation of atheistic post-modern thought, as has boldly been claimed by writers such as Milbank and Catherine Pickstock in their arguments with Gilles Deleuze,[6] is perhaps to stretch the point too far, despite their many intriguing insights. Argumentative coherence is not Messiaen’s primary aim – although there are definite elements both of dogmatic theology and philosophical speculation in his work which cannot be neglected for its proper appraisal, his greatness principally lies in the richness of his musical output.

Here it would seem important to bear in mind the extent to which Messiaen’s mindset was shaped by his day-to-day experience over 60 years as a church organist in the service of the Eucharist. Messiaen’s theorizing and composing are both ultimately best seen as acts of prayerful worship; viewed in this light his intellection is essentially a ‘liturgy of the mind’ as it meditates on Creation. His music may remain impossibly arcane for some, crassly sentimental for others, but perhaps Messiaen’s greatest achievement is his reconciliation of theology as rational reflection with an authentic spirituality expressed through music, the testimony of a life which is liturgical in the sense of being shot through by wonder, lived in a spirit of ‘supernatural childhood before God’ (Romano Guardini). And at its best, as in the wartime works such as the Quatuor pour la Fin du Temps, Visions de l’Amen and Trois Petites Liturgies de la Présence Divine as in his later masterpieces such as La Transfiguration, Messiaen’s music strikes a remarkable balance between the head, the heart and the gut, offering us an inspiring glimpse of the wholeness intended by God not only for human beings but for the entire cosmos.

---

[1] Jeremy Begbie, Resounding Truth : Christian Wisdom in the World of Music (Grand Rapids, MI : Baker Academic, 2007), 307.

[2] Ibid..

[3] Ibid., 200.

[4] Ibid., 247.

[5] In his 2011 Gifford Lectures delivered at Edinburgh University, which can be viewed on-line at http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEA9467E8E8D991AE . See especially Lecture 3, ‘The Disenchantment of the World’.

[6] See Catherine Pickstock, ‘God and Meaning in Music: Messiaen, Deleuze, and the Musico-Theological Critique of Modernism and Postmodernism’ in Sacred Music Vol. 134/4 (Winter 2007), 40-62.

Jacques Ellul and the Empire of Nonsense (ii) – the modernist cookbook

In Part I of this post I introduced Jacques Ellul’s The Empire of Non-sense (1980) and his reading of the inner logic of modern art in terms of the demolition of content through technique. Here I would like to explore his view of how this despressing situation come about, before asking whether things have improved since 1980 and if so, how.

Edouard Manet, 'Bar at the Folies Bergères' (1881-1882)

Charles Baudelaire

The death of the symbol

Tracing his genealogy of modern art (with particular regard to France), Ellul sees the predominance of form, or rather the act of artistic production, over content as already visible with Manet, whom he contrasts with Baudelaire, who upheld Stendhal’s view of painting as la morale construite and the link between art and metaphysics. [1]  With Manet as Ellul reads him, the relationship between the object painted and the painter is no longer the principal locus of interest.[2] Objects are no longer important as symbols pointing to anything or anyone else; what is important is the autonomous image. It is not difficult to see this tendency towards a concentration on the technique of painting in the various ‘isms’ of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – impressionism and pointillism being two obvious cases in point as movements defined by their technical procedures rather than their subject matter; a parallel phenomenon of the non-referential use of words can be seen in Mallarmé’s poetry. Ellul bemoans the long-term triumph of the aesthetic stance associated with Manet, leading to a situation in which art in all its branches has been reduced to pure abstraction, nothing more than a formal arrangement of signs without meaning. Ellul here attacks Saussure’s famous statement  that ‘the linguistic sign does not unite a thing and a name, but a concept and an acoustic image’ [3] as an encapsulation of this anti-symbolic shift . The central point of Ellul’s thesis is that, whereas many artists and art theorists have regarded this radical abstraction as artistic liberation, even one with a spiritual dimension (as with Kandinsky, Malevich or Mondrian), it should rather be viewed as the capitulation of art to the all-pervasive empire of Technique which characterizes the modern world.

Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935) 'Suprematist Composition', 1916

The symbolic dimension of art has been obliterated, Ellul asserts, by modernism’s obsession with procedures and methods, its abandonment of the desire to communicate. In the field of literature, this can be seen in the French structuralist and post-structuralist debates of the 1950s and 1960s; with the New Novel of figures such as Alain Robbe-Grillet and the theories of Roland Barthes, the author is for example reconceived as ‘a transmitter of orders and a performer of calculations’ [4], generating a ‘textual machine’ which can only be deciphered by a reader equipped with an arsenal of complex interpretative techniques. A century after Manet, modern art and literature have taken the aesthetic which arguably first manifested itself in paintings such as Olympia to its logical conclusion:

‘We all now know that signs (sounds, words, images…) carry quantities of information independent of the meaning of the intended message transmitted by means of them: the task of technique is to improve these signs indefinitely. The task of modern Art is to make the radical break between the independent information specific to the sign, and the message, which in the last analysis must be excluded.’ [5]

Here Ellul notes a paradox: once meaning has been eliminated, what is left is nothing but the means which were invented to convey it, but which no longer relate to any intelligible content. Art is no longer a means of creating human community, since the latter implies commonly shared symbols which have now disappeared:

‘And so we arrive at the final level, that of perfect isolation via what ought to be a means of communication. But the communication of something. This art presents itself as a marvellous network of telephone lines of all colours and capacities, co-axial cables, automatic switchboards, but there is nobody speaking into the mouthpiece, and nobody to listen and reply. The public is simply invited to admire the art of the engineer and the skill of the workers who have been able to produce such beautiful bundles of wires.’ [6]

The irony of this situation – and its logical incoherence – is that the posture of modern art is one that ‘refuses’ meaning, a refusal which mirrors the organizing technical principles of society at large, yet this is a meaning in itself, the communication of an anti-metaphysical stance. But this return of meaning is for Ellul purely negative, since art has given up trying to find anything beyond the technical system to which it has enslaved itself: ‘if one puts oneself inside this art of non-meaning, one there again finds meaning and coherence […] but a meaning which is nothing other nor more than that included in technique itself’. [7]

Once signs have been stripped of meaning, there is only one place for art to go if it is to be consistent with its own nihilistic urge.[8] The suicidal extension of this artistic trajectory is for art to become non-art, the destruction of the  artistic sign itself, the search for pure absence. This Ellul sees as the pathological denial of all that has in human history been associated with the word art, which has always assumed its own de facto participation in an overall context of human and natural meaning:

‘If there is no subject, intention, meaning, transmission of significant information, beyond operation, there is no art. Or at least, what until now has commonly been meant by this word. If this is how things are, the movement that we have just analyzed is the negation of all that has been considered an art since the beginnings of humanity.’ [9]

What has been put in place of meaning? Theory. Modern art has surrounded itself with a complex, opaque theoretical discourse, contends Ellul. It has a compensatory role, in that its function is to mask the vacuity of the art itself (which can only be enjoyed by the circle of initiates familiar with the theory), its incapacity to produce meaning (‘the gravity and depth of the theory is only there to veil this incapacity, this impotence’). [10] Paradoxically, the more intellectually and technically accomplished the work, the greater its emptiness: ‘an extraordinary complexity, prodigious means, an unrivalled intellectual and technical prowess, producing negativity. The most perfect organizational theory produces an incredible disorder.’ [11]

Jacques Ellul

The modernist cookbook

The only way in which such art is able to legitimate itself is by re-writing existing aesthetic norms and ‘educating’ the public as to the new canons of art in an effort to show that the Emperor is not naked, despite all appearances to the contrary. But this strategy is misguided and self-deceptive; here Ellul reaches for a strikingly blunt example demonstrating the limits of this kind of revisionism in order to show that his argument is not merely reactionary but possesses an objective basis. There is one art which cannot simply be re-defined arbitrarily according to a logic that says that ‘anything goes’ – cooking! Ellul’s analogy with modern art is consciously provocative and exaggerated, but nonetheless thought-provoking:

‘Apply for example the following recipe: take a glass of paradichlorobenzene, add a big tube of neoprene glue, sharpen it with a touch of ascorbic acid. Cook at a low temperature. Then cut some large slices of expanded polystyrene, heat it up in industrial oil, cover with sauce and serve hot … You can torture the ear and assault the eye, but you cannot taste just any old thing: that is the limit of reality.’ [12]

Ellul is of course arguing with characteristic sarcasm that aesthetics have an objective foundation, which modern art is only able to flout because the human spirit does not react immediately as the throat does to sulphuric acid:

‘Painting, literature, and music – [classed as] modern for their obedience to ‘anything goes’ are of the same order as my cooking recipe, but because their effect is only on the nerves, then the psyche, then it is intellectual, ethical and finally spiritual, and because nothing registers on a seismograph at any of these stages, we don’t care.’ [13]

With regard to music, Ellul clearly follows Adorno’s penetrating analysis (1941) of the inner logic of twelve-tone composition as a system designed to organize the free atonality of the revolutionary (and in my view the finest) compositions of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern in their expressionist period. Adorno shows how the dodecaphonic system, intended to provide the composer with the means of total mastery over a raw material become ‘blind’ (since the twelve tones have no innate properties, being essentially equal, undifferentiated from one another except numerically), cruelly turns into a set of rules paralysing the imagination, a compositional straightjacket.[14] Where Ellul is perhaps more remorseless than Adorno is in showing that this mirrors exactly the modern world’s relationship to technology. The dissonances of Schoenberg’s music on one level speak of humanity’s condition in the twentieth-century, of the trauma of alienation in a world where human community has been replaced by machines. Yet on another level the mechanical procedures governing twelve-tone music reflect the extent to which this very music has been invaded by the technical environment, Ellul contends. Even those who protest against it, or try to expose it by replicating it (as in the case of Andy Warhol), end up having to work with this environment’s categories, which places modern art in a terrible bind.

What does Ellul offer by way of a remedy? He concludes by asserting that

‘art can only retrieve its critical force and word if it breaks radically with the system of technique, stops functioning with raw material and permutations, stops being enthused by materials and new machines etc.; there is no avoiding a return to values, ethics and meaning. Herein lies the choice. This does not of course mean repeating traditional values, returning to a meaning already affirmed previously, bourgeois ethics! No, art must precisely be inventive (beyond modernity), but inventive of that [i.e. values, ethics, meaning] and nothing else. The rest is comedy.’ [15]

One may criticize Ellul as being at times excessively pessimistic, cantankerous and unnecessarily confrontational;  his analysis of artistic modernism is undoubtedly one-sided, his treatment of the spirituality of artists such as Kandinsky excessively dismissive, while twelve-tone music is certainly susceptible of other interpretations (it is worth noting that Anton Webern was a key influence not only on the Western European post-war avant-garde, but also on figures such as Pärt and Gubaidulina). Ellul seems too to have overlooked the link between John Cage, roundly attacked in The Empire of Non-Sense, and meditative spirituality, a connection made explicit in American minimalism in the works of figures such as Tom Johnson.

Yet if his work is not immune to the charge of sweeping generalization, the force of Ellul’s cultural reading is such that once you have read him, he is difficult if not impossible to ignore. The  issues which he consistently raises are too serious and urgent to be put to one side, while his recuperation by present-day ecologists, critics of global capitalism and adventurous ‘Jesus Radicals’ of the blogosphere indicate that his analysis is anything but reactionary.

Has anything changed thirty years on? Is the artistic Empire of Technique still intact, or have we reached a time of ‘de-colonialization’? Is meaning making a comeback? These are the questions to which part 3 of this post will turn.

___________________________________

[1] ‘Stendhal said somewhere: “Painting is nothing but constructed morality!” If this word morality is understood in a more or less liberal sense, the same can be said of all the arts. As they are always the beautiful expressed by individual feeling, passion and dreams, that is to say variety in unity, or the different faces of the absolute – criticism touches upon metaphysics at every instant‘ (Charles Baudelaire, Le Salon de 1846 in Oeuvres Complètes Vol. 2 (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1868), 83). [‘Stendhal a dit quelque part: « La peinture n’est que de morale construite ! » – Que vous entendiez ce mot de morale dans un sens plus ou moins libéral, on en peut dire autant de tous les arts. Comme ils sont toujours le beau exprimé par le sentiment, la passion et la rêverie de chacun, c’est-à-dire la variété dans l’unité, ou les faces diverses de l’absolu, – la critique touche à chaque instant à la métaphysique.’]
[2] Ellul’s polar opposition between Manet and Baudelaire is borrowed from the work of the French art historian Pierre Daix. As the latter shows in his subtle account of the famous scandal surrounding Manet’s Olympia, the relationship between the two is considerably more complex than Ellul makes out; it is clear that he is using ‘Manet’ and ‘Baudelaire’ as ciphers for two opposed tendencies in art. Daix however makes a point which underlines Ellul’s judgement when he says that Manet’s Olympia, in the deliberately shock of the contrast between the crudity of the subject-matter (which Daix relates to modern pornography) and the virtuosity of Manet’s technique, is a key moment in modern art’s irreligious redefinition of transcendence: ‘Nobody can understand him because the transcendance is not in the subject-matter which the public wishes to read, but in the act of painting alone.’ [dans la seule peinture] (Pierre Daix, Pour une histoire culturelle de l’art moderne (Paris : Jacob, 1998), 204) It is of course worth pointing out that Ellul’s appeal to Baudelaire’s definition of artistic ‘morality’ has nothing to do with bourgeois ethics – Baudelaire famously having been taken to trial in 1857 for obscenity in the case of Les Fleurs du Mal, but rather in the transcendent depth beyond the visible posited by the poet. Although Ellul does not say as much, Baudelaire can be the starting-point for an interesting counter-narrative in French art based on the primacy of the imagination (as in symbolism or surrealism), with Debussy and Messiaen as its most eminent musical representatives. For a study of the powerful interaction between ‘mystic modernism’ and the French intellectual Catholic revival of the first half of the twentieth century, see Stephen Schloesser, Jazz Age Catholicism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), passim.
[3] Quoted in Ellul, L’Empire du non-sens (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1980), 192.
[4] Ibid., 193.
[5] Ibid., 191-192
[6] Ibid., 188.
[7] Ibid., 195.
[8] Here Adorno’s famous statement that ‘modern music sees absolute oblivion as its goal’ (The Philosophy of Modern Music (London/New York: Continuum, 2004), 133) comes to mind. However, Adorno still sees a redemptive potential in modernism’s apparent refusal of false meaning in the critique of the meaningless world that it implies. If modern music is the ‘surviving message of despair from the shipwrecked’ (ibid.), it nonetheless constitutes a message. Ellul’s contention is that modern art has abandoned the very notion of such communication.
[9] Ellul, L’Empire, 196.
[10] Ibid., 203.
[11] Ibid., 204.
[12] Ibid., 233/234.
[13] Ibid., 234.
[14] ‘Twelve-tone technique is truly the fate of music. It enchains music by liberating it. The subject dominates music through the rationality of the system, only in order to succumb to the rational system itself […] This technique is realized in its ability to manipulate the material. Thus the technique becomes the designation of the material, establishing itself as alien to the subject and finally subduing the subject by its own force. If the imagination of the composer has once made this material pliable to the constructive will, then the constructive material cripples the imagination’ (Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, 67-68).
[15] Ibid., 282.

Jacques Ellul and the Empire of Nonsense (i)

I sometimes ask myself what I would miss the most if I left Paris for good. Certainly not the strikes, nor the indescribable but unique odour [read: stench] of the metro, nor stale baguettes – although certainly useful for whacking cockroaches -, nor even the Eiffel Tower (I tend to concur that the best view of it is from the top, as then you can’t see it). Despite all the manifold attractions of the city of light, my vote might well go to the French capital’s wonderful system of public libraries, a dense and extremely well-stocked network from which anyone can borrow up to 40 books, musical score CDs and DVDs at any one time. Without it I would certainly have gone bankrupt long ago, especially given that the price of sheet music has now increased to such an extent that it is advisable to consult one’s bank manager before making a trip to La Flûte de Pan, a mythical music shop near the  former Paris Conservatoire from which it is all too easy and tempting to return euroless.

Jacques Ellul

The Paris library system has a central reserve which I find especially useful for consulting obscure works of theology which have probably been stocked away in a secret bunker somewhere for the rather depressing reason that keeping them on general access in the absence of interested readers is a waste of shelf space. I have however realized that there is one twentieth-century French theologian whose work seems to be in increasing demand among library users, and whose writing provides much food for thought with regard to the dialogue between theology and the arts, among other things: Jacques Ellul (1912-1994), a brief biography of whom can be found here [1]. It is not necessarily his overtly Christian books which are gaining Ellul a wider readership, although in theological circles there are signs that some people at least are beginning to take notice of Ellul’s powerful if disturbing analysis of Church history in titles such as The Subversion of Christianity. [1] Just as the seminal work of anthropologist René Girard (whose thought Ellul in some respects parallels) in relation to the cultural roots of violence has stimulated debate beyond Christian circles, so the force of Ellul’s argumentation in his sociological writing is such as to command the interest of those who may find his Barthian theology puzzling or even alien. Ellul is posthumously becoming increasingly well-known as having been one of the first thinkers to pinpoint the phenomenon of technical progress as the defining mark of modern Western society and to subject it to a penetrating critical analysis, beginning in the 1950s with his landmark study La Technique et l’enjeu du siècle. The recent book by Jean-Luc Porquet entitled Jacques Ellul: l’homme qui avait (presque) tout prévu (‘Jacques Ellul: the man who predicted (almost) everything’) shows how history is tragically vindicating the prophetic voice of the writer who orginated the maxim ‘think global, act local’; latter-day crises associated with climate change, the problem of nuclear waste or the development of genetically-modified organisms can all be regarded as having been foreseen in his work.

In the years following World War II Ellul began to warn that technical progress, conceived by many as humanity’s liberator, has on the contrary become a prison within which Western society is trapped, and which it has become heresy to question. Technological advancement has reached the stage where it develops independently of human needs as a runaway train with a momentum all of its own. There is no longer any point in deluding ourselves by thinking in terms of technology as a multitude of techniques (plural) seen as value-neutral tools for the enhancement of human happiness. What we are dealing with is something far larger and more pernicious, akin to what the New Testament would term a ‘power’ (exousia) [2] – a Technical System (‘le système technique’) not wholly penetrable by rational analysis, which influences every aspect of modern life. We may think that we control it and can direct it to serve our ends, but as Ellul already saw in the 1960s, its dynamic is such that it is actually in control of us and we serve it:

‘A technified world is constructing itself around you at an increasing rate. An organisation which is ever more rigorous, precise, constricting, exact and multiple is enclosing each person and every moment of human life within an ever more densely-meshed net. And we can do nothing about it. Nobody is steering or in charge of this proliferation. The operation set in motion 150 years ago [by the industrial revolution] carries on by itself. Nobody is responsible anymore. Chemists, sociologists, urbanists, engineers, organizers and economists find themselves engaged for a thousand reasons connected with social cohesion, instruction, prestige and money, in an irreversible process which makes them serve technical progress; their connection with everyone else occurs independently of their or anyone else’s will. Technique, in its development and application to humanity, is the most complete mechanism of necessity’ [3]

Ellul’s aesthetics: The Empire of Nonsense

Ellul’s far-sighted pronouncements on the dangers of technology in the twentieth century have lost nothing of their relevance at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first. Indeed they have far many supporters now than in the 1960s. Technology seems to be more of an all-encompassing reality than ever before. At first sight it might seem that art constitutes an oasis of resistance to the power of Technique. This would however in Ellul’s view be an extremely naïve assertion; in 1980 he published a typically provocative book entitled L’Empire du non-sens (‘The empire of nonsense’) critiquing the hollowness of the greater part of modern artistic praxis which was effectively the first serious study in France of the pathologies of the avant-garde in literature, music and the visual arts.  Recouping some of German philosopher Theodor Adorno’s insights into the relationship between art and modern society (if also sharing some his irritating prejudices, for example in the simplistic and ill-directed diatribes found against popular music in the work of both thinkers), Ellul’s compelling and disturbing thesis is that modern artistic production has without realizing it become captive to the same dehumanizing technical forces that have gradually come to dominate the Western world. What these forces demolish is meaning; the growing concentration on technique which characterizes art in the modern era has obliterated art’s symbolic depth and sent it plunging into a metaphysical void, Ellul argues. According to the nihilistic aesthetic canons of high modernism, everything is allowed (echoing Ivan Karamazov’s famous remark that ‘all is permitted’ in a world without God) except the creation of meaning, which officially-approved art in the temples of modern Western culture  will not allow at any costs. Forget notions of art as a search for the Beautiful, the True and the Good. Forget human expression, communion with nature, the desire for the transcendent Other:

‘From now on it will be declared (and this is a new step on the part of theory) that there is in effect nothing ‘to say’. That you must above all say nothing, want to say nothing, because metaphysically there is no meaning. No intentionality is possible any longer. And although this art may be perfectly subjective, there is at least a component of subjectivity which is damned: intention, the quest for meaning, reason, thought. The artist must seek to say nothing. A perfectly negative asceticism. But this implies the final threshold: it is not enough for there not to be a meaning, as in spite of everything something can leak out, meaning might escape like butane out of a poorly-closed canister. Let us be on our guard. For there must be no meaning. Meaning is dead. But perhaps not quite. It therefore has to be killed.’ [4]

What does this look like when put into practice? Anyone familiar with contemporary art having read this far may already have some ideas (Damien Hirst ? Or maybe, on the level of popular culture – MTV videoclips?  Techno?). In part 2 of this post we will take a look at Ellul’s own examples illustrating his thesis.

_________________________________________________________________

[1] A stimulating contemporary retrieval of Ellul’s suggestions for the future of the Church in The Presence of the Kingdom (1948) can be found in The Provocative Church (London: SPCK, 2004) by Graham Tomlin, who directs the St Paul’s Theological Centre associated with Holy Trinity Brompton Church in London; another keen Ellulian is the prominent American pastor and writer Gregory Boyd. Ellul’s reputation during his lifetime was greater in the US than in France, not least on account of Aldous Huxley’s promotion of his work; the Jacques Ellul Papers (1936-1992), the largest extant collection of documentation related to Ellul, can be found in the archives of Wheaton College.
[2] In The Subversion of Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986) Ellul describes the New Testament concept of ‘powers’ in systemic terms (very similar to those employed by Walter Wink and Girard in I see Satan fall like lightning (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2001)): a ‘power’ is characterized by its supra-personal, seemingly autonomous dimension, one which seems to possess spiritual attributes:
‘The powers add a “plus” and a “different” factor to our history. This is why we speak about exousia relative to some expressions of human activity. This is also why Paul puts us firmly on guard against being deceived by the enemy. We recall that the state is an exousia. There is in it a plus that has to be taken into account after every sociological or political study? We certainly have to analyze the phenomenon of the state, of political power, etc. But when all is said, we perceive a residue, a kind of impregnable core, an inexplicable hardness. Why, after all, does one obey the state? Beyond factors that may be understood and analyzed, not everything can be accounted for, as in the case of the soul that the scalpel cannot find no matter how close the analysis. The residue is a spiritual power, an exousia, that inhabits the body of the state.’ (Ellul, The Subversion of Christianity, 175.)
[3] Ellul, Exégèse des nouveaux lieux communs, 173, quoted in Jean-Luc Porquet, Jacques Ellul: l’homme qui avait (presque) tout prévu (Paris: le cherche midi, 2003), 74-75. Translation mine.
[4] Ellul, L’empire du non-sens (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1980), 187. Emphasis and translation mine.