‘Agonistic’ Lives, ‘Spectral’ People, and ‘Artful’ Voices

Human life is everywhere shaped by the social and political conditions under which it is lived. These conditions invariably, perhaps inevitably, generate divisions between people such that some are culturally marginalised, economically impoverished and largely discounted as full members of the societies in which they are nevertheless obliged to live. They are forced to the margins, but unable to drop out, we might say. Such people can be described as bearing an almost impossibly burdensome share of the ‘weight of the world’. The result is that life for them is inescapably ‘agonistic’. That is to say, it is a matter of intense and relentless struggle.

A striking and powerful example of agonistic struggle with the weight of the world imposed by political structures, is to be found in the cell life of torture victims. Official, or semi-official torture, inflicted for the purposes of political security, is the imposition of truly intense burdens on a selected minority in the name of social stability. Yet this is just one, especially telling, instance of a far more widespread phenomenon. The weight of the world bears down less obviously, but no less crushingly, on the lives of colonised peoples, illegal immigrants, indentured workers, excluded groups or persecuted minorities.

Marginalised people lead ‘spectral’ existences. That is to say, though they comprise constituent elements of the societies in which they live, they are at the same time importantly invisible. They are ‘spectral’ presences because somehow they are both there and not there. So, for instance, political and legal structures create prisoners, people who are on the wrong side of the law. Having created this category, society then makes special provision for hiding them away. We know that our prisons are full, but we never see the inmates who fill them. In a similar fashion, the radically impoverished are confined to social roles and geographical areas which impact scarcely at all on the lives of most citizens.

At the same time – and this is the other side of their ‘spectral’ existence – these marginalised people constitute a ‘haunting’ presence. They exist in the shadows, certainly, but they cannot simply be ignored. Surprisingly perhaps, the marginalised even have a political voice. It speaks in distinctive, if often unfamiliar, tones. This voice can properly be described as ‘artful’ because, while it arises from and gives expression to the agonistic experience of those whom social structures have driven to the margins, it nevertheless has an ‘unsettling’ impact on those structures as a whole. The voice of spectral existence ‘haunts’ the established order precisely because, despite the radical disempowerment of the people whose voice it is, it continues to be heard. And more than that, its continuing to be heard gives it, at times, the power to ‘dismantle and erode the forces that freeze and subjugate’ (p. 16). One important opening for this erosion is the sensibility of those who come close to the agonistic experience of the marginalised, since they too experience the weight of the world, albeit in an importantly secondary way (p. 38).

Theology has long spoken of freedom from bondage. ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me’ Luke's Gospel tells us, ‘because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and . . . to set at liberty those who are oppressed.’ Theology's aim, often, has been to give adequate doctrinal expression to this ambition. Its thought and language, though, have been tied to a division between the transcendent and the immanent, and the historical shift from modernity to post-modernity means that the traditional language of theology can no longer find purchase in a post-theological world. Consequently, if there is to be a continuing engagement between the theological (reconceived) and the political (in an extended, all-pervasive sense), some radically different strategy must be pursued.

Taylor's strategy is to abandon Theology (which he distinguishes with a capital T) and to seek theological engagement with the political by means of a theory-rich exploration of the artful voice of the marginalised. Theodore Schatzski, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Jean Luc Nancy, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, Georgio Agamben and Abdul JanMohamed are prominent among the theorists whose work he draws upon to do this. The poet Robert Wright, the author James Baldwin, Joao Biehl's Brazilian woman Catarina, Sister Dianna Ortiz and the poets of Guantanamo Bay are the principal artful voices to whom he calls attention. The fact that the former list is rather longer than the latter is a point to which I will return.

The abandonment of Theology is a response to what Laclau calls ‘failed transcendence’. Transcendence directs our attention away from the world in which we live; immanence confines our attention to selective parts of it. The deliberately created term ‘transimmanence’ invites us to find an integrated revelatory richness in the voices most oppressed by the weight of the world. Here we discover, as it were, the harshest reality of how human life can be, and at the same time a curious intimation of how it might be otherwise. ‘Ultimately’ Taylor tells us, ‘tracing the transimmanental will offer us a way to discern the powers that sustain and liberate the world, through the at-times strange conspiring of human flesh, heart, will and mind, all of which are at work in the specters of the dying and the lost, particularly of the excluded and oppressed, in ever creative ways’ (p. 16).

The foregoing paragraphs, I trust, convey the essence and spirit of the enterprise. In the chapters which follow the key concepts of the theological, the agonistic political, transimmanence and the weight of the world are all given extended elaboration. Rather than explore these chapters in detail, however, I shall raise five questions which have general application to them all. To give these questions their full force, however, it is essential to note some central contentions upon which Taylor's analysis relies, which seem to me incontestable. First, even a cursory glance at history reveals that human societies invariably incorporate radical disparities of many kinds – wealth and power, certainly, but also health, education and opportunities for employment. These often are, but need not be directly related to disparities of wealth and power. Second, such disparities are frequently created and maintained by the way societies are structured. Sometimes this structuring is by design; more often it is sustained by unreflective adherence to conventional social patterns; occasionally it is sheer chance. Whatever the process, there are sectors of society whose existence within the whole has a strange ambiguous status. Prisoners (a category with which Taylor is especially concerned) are a particularly good example. They exist, and their existence is treated as problematic for society at large and not just for those who have custody of them. Yet, for the most part, only those who have custody of them actually interact with them. Somewhat oddly, prison populations are most feared by those who never encounter the people who comprise them. The same thing can be said about many inner-city dwellers living in conditions of debilitating poverty, mass unemployment and high levels of criminality. Their existence is known and feared by people who leave interaction with them entirely to paid officials – police and social workers for example. Taylor's suggestive expression ‘haunted by specters’ seems a wholly appropriate and memorable description of this phenomenon, and bearing ‘the weight of the world first’ seems an apt way of capturing the burdensome conditions into which they are born and from which they only rarely escape.

Authenticity and Experience

It is against this background of agreement that I raise five questions. First, how do we determine the voice of those on whom the weight of the world bears most heavily? Second, what makes this voice authoritatively revelatory of the transimmanent? Third, what is the role of theory with respect to this voice? Fourth, why call the agonistic struggle political? Fifth, and most important for the overall concern of this review, why call theorising about it theological? I shall elaborate on each of these questions in turn.

Who speaks with the authentic voice of the poor? This is a crucial matter in many important contexts. In the international sphere there is a recurrent tendency for members of highly privileged groups to depict themselves, and be acknowledged by others, as the legitimate representatives of those from whom they are in fact far removed in terms of wealth and power. The history of post-colonial Africa is replete with examples of brutal and rapacious dictators, both driven by and exploiting tribal enmity, playing the anti-colonial card successfully as they intensify the weight of the world on their poorest citizens and bring their countries to ruin. Robert Mugabe is an especially notable case, but only one of a long line that is unconfined by either geography or ethnicity. The fate that befell the Palestinian people with the creation of Israel has regularly been exploited and perpetuated by those who claimed the authority of the dispossessed, while in reality pursuing their own possessive advantage.

The possibility, and reality, of radical inauthenticity on the part of self-declared ‘leaders’ of the poor, and the further unhappy fact that electoral procedures can give a specious democratic legitimacy to them, explains why it is so crucial to ask about the voice of the marginalised.Footnote ³ Alongside an appeal to his own experience of prison as a theological intern, Taylor invokes the works of some poets and writers. How do we know, how can we know, though, that what we are hearing is the voice of the marginalised rather than, say the voice of an observer, or the voice of someone who has escaped the margins? Richard Wright, one of these poets, was born into a persecuted underclass and, orphaned at a young age. He undoubtedly experienced at first hand just how bad his world could be. Yet his life as a writer was also formed by much more personal, and particular, conflicts within his own family. Moreover, he proved to be exceptional, in several ways. How many others born into his circumstances could, even with special assistance, have gone on to win a Guggenheim award?

I do not mean to dismiss the value of poetic utterance in this sort of connection. Indeed in my work in aesthetics I make much of the cognitive value of art in opposition to a more widely held expressivism.Footnote ⁴ But such value, I argue, derives from imaginative power, not from autobiographical experience. Suppose I am right. Why does it matter? This leads on to my second question – what makes the artful voice authoritatively revelatory? The nature of artistic utterance matters because the background assumption in Taylor's treatment of aesthetic manifestations of the artful voice requires them to have the authority of autobiography, and not the authority of truth (as cognitive accounts of art contend).

There is ambiguity in his approach at this point. ‘I seek to read The Blindfold's Eyes as a poetic and narrative art form’ he says (p. 198). The reference is to a book by Sister Dianna Ortiz, a torture victim of the Guatemalan military regime. Autobiographical authority, it seems to me, is essential here. The authority of her witness depends upon her having been there. How then could ‘reading’ its art form strengthen this? Can poetry be evidence, one might ask?

The general point can be made by invoking a historical illustration. The imaginative truth in Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness is neither confined to, nor restricted by, the historical realities of Belgium's imperial (and horrific) control of the African Congo in the late nineteenth century. That is why it could provide the frame for a quite different context in Francis Ford Coppola's movie Apocalypse Now. By contrast, Sir Roger Casement's report, commissioned by the British Government around the same time that Conrad wrote his novel, unquestionably is confined to empirical fact. Conrad's character Kurtz can be entirely fiction without significant loss to the truth of the work; the people that Casement named in his report cannot. If they were, his report would not be fiction, but fabrication.

Social Theory and Empirical Reality

Taylor's method requires him to abstract and generalise to some degree. He does not merely mean to tell us about Guatemala or the American South, but about aspects of the human condition writ large, as these are exhibited in specific times, places and contexts. This raises my third question – the role of theory. I noted earlier that the number of theorists whose work is drawn upon (and the amount of text devoted to them) considerably exceeds the number of immediate voices. This disparity underlines the need to make the message of these voices speak more widely. Consider for instance the Guantanamo poems. The creation and circumstances of Guantanamo Bay were, to say the least, extraordinary. As it seems to me, it was hastily created out of panic, without clear purpose and in a legal no-man's land. Arbitrarily populated and run in great secrecy, it rapidly became a grotesque hybrid of military action, political policy and legal process. This hybridity explains why it proved both impossible to sustain, and yet impossible to abolish. In short, Guantanamo Bay is exceptional in countless ways. There is reason be cautious, therefore, about drawing connections between it and other, long established and more standard forms of incarceration, even if many of those are highly objectionable. ‘The Guantanamo poems’, Taylor's tell us, ‘register the weight of transimmanence’ (p. 162). But how? The answer, as I read his book, is that they do this when interpreted through the eyes of theorists, and sometimes several theorists at the same time. Consider his account of ‘The Dictionary’, a poem by a physically and mentally damaged young woman – Catarina – written as she drags out her life in a Brazilian city slum. Though it is quoted at some length, we are warned not to rely too much on gifted art and writing. What is crucial to their ‘weighing-in’, we are told, is a practice. This turns out to be a largely technical term drawn from the writings of Pierre Bourdieu. It is ‘practice’ that lends such works the ‘prodigious art-force’ which enables them to dismantle and erode. Without it, presumably, they would for the most part lack impact. But to attribute prodigious art-force to them in this way relies on the coherence and cogency of Bourdieu's theory. I am unpersuaded that it is in fact cogent, but that is not the main point here. Rather, if we follow Taylor's method, it turns out that the validity of the poetic works of Richard Wright, Catarina, or those held hostage in Guantanamo Bay as a method of ‘tracing the transimmanental’ is not intrinsic to them, or even to the experience which lies behind them. The real work, rather, is being done by the networks and interconnections that Bourdieu's theory (if correct) has discerned and uncovered.

This thought, it seems to me, is entertained very briefly in the epilogue, where we find an acknowledgement that there is a risk that the ‘poetry is [being] rendered sterile by more formal concerns of theory’ (p. 221). Suppose this risk is somehow avoided. We arrive at my fourth question. Why call the agonistic struggle political? For Karl Marx, the forms of social life that we commonly distinguish – politics, business, art, religion, science – are only superficially distinct. At some point or other, all are manifestations of economic structures. Come the crisis of capitalism and its resolution, politics and the state would gradually wither away to be replaced by purely administrative systems. Curiously, perhaps, Marxist and especially post-Marxist social theory often supposes that political power is socially more significant than economic production. The result is a tendency to reverse the relationship – relegating economic factors and identifying political structures and forces as the primary determinants of social phenomena. I am myself deeply sceptical about reductive analyses of this kind, regardless of what they identify as base and superstructure. To title his book ‘the theological and the political’ and thereby use the word ‘political’ as a category which encompasses all social networks raises a question as to whether some such arbitrary reductivism is at work here too.

Let us suppose it is not. What then is the intended connotation of the word ‘political’? What's in a name? it may be asked; let us not get trapped in merely linguistic disputes. Still, there is textual ground to think that the language we use here matters very much to Taylor's project. Since ‘domination’ is a recurrent theme in the book, this strongly suggests a more specific connotation to the classification ‘political’ than simply ‘social structures of all kinds’. Even leaving this aside, however, ‘political’ has another important connotation in this context. Given the liberationist aspiration of this kind of writing, it can be taken to mean that some kinds of programme and action are more pertinent, because more promising, than others. To describe the book's engagement as one between the theological and the political is to imply that theological reflection can call for distinctively political action. If, following the tradition of Thomas Hobbes (as I think there is good reason to do), the institution of the state and the legitimacy of its coercive power is key to action properly called ‘political’, then this requires action beyond such institutions as the church and/or NGOs. Yet if the instrument of ‘liberation’ is indeed the state – or even the democratic process – this raises a whole set of different issues. Anarchist anxieties (on which I have written elsewhereFootnote ⁵) rightly bring to our attention the extent to which political programmes of reform are themselves deeply prone to a certain kind of corruption by which inequalities of power are rapidly generated. History shows that the capitalists of Marxist analysis are by no means guaranteed to lose their self-serving instincts on becoming democratically elected rulers.

Theology and ‘Transimmannence’

Finally, there is this important question. Is this book truly an exercise in theological reflection? Taylor expressly addresses this issue. It is one which could scarcely fail to arise because, as he himself admits ‘the theological of this book . . . is closer to the atheistic rejections of theology’ (p. 24) than it is to the Theology of ‘the guild’. Indeed he explicitly rejects ‘the doctrinal matrix of beliefs and concepts that are structured into theologians’ language and customary expression’ (p. 21). But why then call the investigation ‘theological’? Or as he puts it, ‘Why keep the adjectival form at all?’ (p. 10). We are offered three reasons. The third of them appeals to a Platonic pun in Greek to suggest that ‘theology’ need not follow its standard (and obvious etymology). It seems unpromising to me to seek to liberate modern meanings by appeal to uses (at best) long since dead. In fact, Taylor concedes that his third reason ‘is not the most significant’. So the other two must make his case. I shall consider them in reverse order.

One reason for ‘preserving the term the theological’ we are told is that, ‘there is no antitheological anti-space that might be counterpoised to the cultural history that has been shaped and stamped by Theology . . . [E]ven those who reject it must work in the ruins of its failure’ (pp. 10–11). The precise meaning of this sentence is unclear, but in any event it seems to amount to simple assertion. Is the assertion a plausible one? In the light of comparable intellectual shifts, the answer seems to be ‘No’. Alchemy preceded chemistry. In what sense does chemistry still need the alchemist's concepts? Did it ever? Must astronomers work in the ruins of astrology's failure? There seems no reason to think so. Why should we conclude otherwise for theology?

The principal reason behind the retention of the adjectival ‘theological’, however, is the first. Ostensibly non-theological writers whose work Taylor thinks important for the task of ‘tracing the transimmanent’ – Badiou and Spivak are cited – appear to have recourse to something like the language, or at any rate the spirit, of theology. Badiou, for instance, claims to care nothing for Paul's gospel while nevertheless writing a full-length text about him. Of these authors Taylor writes ‘their sense of agonistic politics drives them to consider and deploy notions from Theology’ (p. 10). Despite the fact that they are nonetheless ‘rooted in a critical rejection of Theology and the religions’ he takes this lingering interest to be warrant for continuing to refer to work which draws upon them as ‘theological’.

It is hard not to be reminded here of Nietzsche's penetrating judgement on ‘the English moralists’.

A repeated theme in Nietzsche's writing is the difficulty that intellectuals and others have of acknowledging the full implications of the key ideas which they reject. Schleiermacher's ‘cultured despisers’, we might say, are much more comfortable than they ought to be. Nietzsche was a naturalist of a strongly anti-supernaturalist kind. His great achievement, in my estimation, was to see the full implications of rejecting supernaturalist Christianity. Among the concepts which must go is the idea of the equal moral worth of human beings – rich or poor, gifted or talentless, powerful or powerless, living in the heart of the social establishment or clinging to life on its margins. The death of God, which Nietzsche famously proclaimed, brings with it the end of a morally ordered world. To proclaim that, even with God's death, the poor can find hope in ‘political theology’, sounds like reasserting one's position as a political fanatic.

The term ‘supernaturalism’ makes only fleeting appearances in The Theological and the Political, but I think its concept of ‘transimmanence’ signals a rejection of supernaturalism. I believe it can be shown that full-blown naturalism leaves us, as Nietzsche declares, with a world that is ‘human, all too human’. He, of course, was willing not merely to affirm his existence under this condition, but to rejoice in it. Who can view the weight of the world, as Taylor depicts it, and rejoice in its humanity? Who, aside from Nietzsche and the ancients to whom he appealed, can view the political world, that we know to be all too human, with pride and joy? It is this rhetorical question which drives us back to a deep longing for the divine redemption of the world by God through Christ. Those who discount this supernatural possibility, as it seems to me, cannot do any restorative work in the ruins of supernaturalism. They can only play there.

The Hope of the Poor

One further observation is worth making. Suppose that there is indeed work to be done in the ruins of Christian theology, and that this book is a contribution to it. What is its relation to practical life? Earlier I quoted Taylor's contention that ‘tracing the transimmanental will offer us a way to discern the powers that sustain and liberate the world’. How does the tracing contribute to the liberation? What mechanism is in view here? This seems to me a crucial question for anything that might, even in the broadest way, be thought of as ‘liberation theology’.

In a short introduction to Latin American liberation theology published twenty-five years ago, the Boff brothers wrote as follows:

The appeal to Marx now seems somewhat dated, but the aspiration in drawing upon more fashionable social theorists I assume is similar. Marx, famously, regarded religion as an opiate. The image has been misunderstood. Given the pain that those who truly feel the weight of the world experience, the value of a painkiller is not to be despised, and this remains true even if the painkiller takes the form of supernatural mythologies. Liberation theologians, though, are strongly inclined to agree with Marx that a real solution to the problems of the poor must lie elsewhere – in some form of radical social reconstruction which will take place in a real rather than an imaginary future. One pressing problem is this. Assuming, not very plausibly (in my view) that such a transformation is a distant but real possibility, what makes it a real hope for those who, in the meantime, are born on the margins and, having suffered the weight of the world, will die there?