Challenges to Logocentric Purity

The centrality of logos (i.e., “reason,” “word” or “rational principle”) to the Christian tradition owes to Christianity's emergence in the bosom of Hellenistic culture. The most sustained meaning of logos in Hellenistic thought, particularly that of Heraclitus and the Stoics, is that of a “unity behind plurality,” the universal ordering principle and law that is as applicable to the cosmos as it is to humans.Footnote ⁶ The root leg-, from which logos derives, means among other things, “to gather”; i.e., “to pick out things which from some standpoint are alike.”Footnote ⁷ It is precisely this emphasis on ultimate identity, on samenesss or unity notwithstanding the possibility of penultimate differentiation, that has carried significant weight in the development of both philosophy and theology in the West.

Jacques Derrida calls attention to and criticizes the predominance of this and other aspects of the logos in Western philosophy, labeling the phenomenon logocentrism. On Grammatology is his challenge to those semiotic theories of language that posit a final unity between signifier and signified. Such a unity assumes a transcendental signified that escapes the perpetual “play of signifying references.”Footnote ⁸ This assumption carries no legitimacy outside of “onto-theology, the metaphysics of presence and logocentrism,”Footnote ⁹ the mode of thought that Derrida rejects. The search for an anchor or the attempted escape to a transcendental signified is the baseless nostalgia for a final, stable unity underling plurality. Derrida's rejection of this logos principle is rooted in and opens up to a concern for difference and deference (of final and fixed meaning), two meanings of the French différer that combine to form Derrida's neologism, différance. For Derrida the epoch of the metaphysics of presence is over. Logocentrism must concede to différance.

In ways that illustrate his own similar distaste for final, pure totalities, Michel Foucault (in Madness and Civilization) interrogates the conditions for the possibility of psychiatry as a discipline and madness as its object of inquiry.Footnote ¹⁰ Such an analysis, common to his early “archaeological” phase, advances his concern that critical scholarship serve as “an insurrection of subjugated knowledges.”Footnote ¹¹ Subjugated knowledges are deviant discourses. They may have once held a certain status but have since become masked and disqualified. Prior to modernity, for example, the knowledge of the madman did not warrant containment and/or banishment. Madness was not always regarded as a disease or illness. At times, it was even seen as benign and divinely revelatory. This illustrates that there was nothing logical or inevitable about its eventual disqualification in the modern epoch. Historical contingencies, not metaphysical necessities, disqualified madness, locating it “low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity.”Footnote ¹² The consequent role of the critical historian is to recognize and insurrect such oppositional discourses: “[I]t is through the re-appearance of this knowledge, of these local popular knowledges, these disqualified knowledges, that criticism performs its work.”Footnote ¹³ The mad—the loco—cannot remain forever contained and subordinate. As does Derrida, Foucault contends that the fixity of the logocentric needs to be disrupted by the dynamism of the lococentric.Footnote ¹⁴

Postcolonial theorists like Homi Bhabha and Edward Said extend the works of the French poststructuralists beyond their unacknowledged Eurocentric parochialisms. Bhabha holds that merely celebrating the fragment is insufficient without an

The margins are not merely the limits of rational discourse; they also mark the enunciative “location of culture.” For Bhabha that site is necessarily hybrid. Unity and homogeneity, propagated from whatever camp, are epistemologically and politically inadequate insofar as they homogenize and distort by assuming artificial and totalized bifurcations.Footnote ¹⁶ The “hybrid moment” calls for “the rearticulation, or translation, of elements that are neither the One … nor the Other … but something else besides, which contests the terms and territories of both.”Footnote ¹⁷ Contestation and contradiction need not be sublimated into a higher and purer unity. Moreover, the liminal space in which the colonized are forced to assimilate but never fully do (i.e., the slippage between the signifier and the signified) becomes the site of subtle forms of resistance, including forms of colonial resistance that generally did not concern the poststructuralists.

Along the same lines of Bhabha's critique, Said, in one of his last published books, highlights the irreducible hybridity of cultures. What makes cultures and civilizations interesting, he writes, is “not their essence of purity, but their combinations and diversity, their countercurrents, the way that they have had of conducting a compelling dialogue with other civilizations.”Footnote ¹⁸ This is a productive multiplicity that remains ever in motion, refusing resolution, embracing tension, and remaining “open to the presence and the challenges of the emergent, the insurgent, the unrequited and the unexplored.”Footnote ¹⁹ Emphasizing difference and deviance in this way, both Bhabha and Said carry forward Derrida's and Foucault's opposition to logocentrism, bringing it to bear on the experiences of formerly colonized peoples. All of these theorists challenge the hegemony of the logos in Western intellectual history, particularly its homogenizing, totalizing tendencies. They affirm differentiation over unification. They insurrect the subjugated knowledges of madness, the disqualified hybridity of the loco.

Alambrista and the Mestizaje of U.S. Hispanic Theology

If the loco, in contrast with the logos, can be characterized by its multiplicities and heterogeneities, then José Cuellar has earned the honor of his stage name, Dr. Loco, through his musical contribution to Alambrista. The plurality of musical styles, instruments and languages in the film's soundtrack is arguably the most enriching modification of the director's cut over the original release. In “Notas en el Viento: The Musical Soundtrack of Alambrista: Director's Cut,” Cuellar writes of his “language-mixing and genre-merging approaches to music generally, and to US-Mexican borderlands music particularly.”Footnote ²⁰ In the course of the ninety-minute film, the viewer enjoys a wide array of musical styles from both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border: blues, salsa, funk, ranchera, country western, funk, corrido, and others. Yet even more striking is Cuellar's penchant for bringing them together within a single piece, allowing them to play off of and enhance one another.

Such fusions are never purposeless. Cuellar employs them to accentuate themes and develop the plot. Take, for example, an early scene in which the main character Roberto, an undocumented Mexican immigrant in search of work and income in the U.S., encounters the working-class family of “Okies” facing their own set of migratory travails. Despite the language barrier and cultural differences, Roberto and the Okies discover opportunities to help one another. About the song that he composed for the scene, “The Okie-Dokie Shuffle,” Cuellar writes:

The conjoining of the steel guitar and the accordion, in this song and others, enables Cuellar to illustrate musically the hybridity, the uncommon and unexpected merging of personalities and cultures that is distinctive of this scene and the borderland experience in general. At another point in the story, Roberto finds human affection in the arms of Sharon (a white American woman), and the two overcome their language barrier enough to be able to share themselves emotionally and physically. The lyrics of the song in this scene are bilingual, as is their intimacy, serving once again to illustrate musically that the heterogeneity of the borderlands is a positive force, enabling community, solidarity and mutual enrichment.Footnote ²²

In U.S. Hispanic theology, the term for the borderland hybridities that Cuellar's music illustrates is the Spanish word mestizaje. In The Future Is Mestizo, Mexican-American theologian and priest Virgilio Elizondo defines mestizaje as “the process through which two totally different peoples mix biologically and culturally so that a new people begins to emerge.”Footnote ²³ Mexican-Americans living on the borderland underwent the process of being made “twice mesticized”: first, with the Spanish conquest of Mexico; and second, with the United States's conquest and annexation of northern Mexico.Footnote ²⁴ While taking care not to romanticize the notion—“there [is] a painful side, for it is difficult to always be different”Footnote ²⁵—Elizondo confidently expresses throughout his book the faith that “a new human group is in the making,”Footnote ²⁶ and the mestizo is leading the way.

What feeds such optimism is also that which gives mestizaje its theological, in addition to its cultural and biological, inflection. In concert with liberation theology's assertion of God's preferential option for the poor, Elizondo understands God to be particularly present among people on the margins, in the borderlands. To illustrate this he examines the significance of Jesus' sociocultural identity as a Galilean Jew. That mestizo identity (Jewish and Galilean) gave Jesus the same “inside-outsider” ambiguity of Mexican-Americans in the United States today. Elizondo contends, “As the Jews in Galilee were too Jewish to be accepted by the gentile population and too contaminated with pagan ways to be accepted by the pure-minded Jews of Jerusalem, so have the Mexican-Americans in the Southwest been rejected by two groups.”Footnote ²⁷ The dominant culture's standards of purity (and its assumption of mutually exclusive identities) marked Jesus off as a “half-breed.” Although the Christian tradition that developed tends to discard this historical fact (perhaps to warrant its own claims to purity), Jesus himself was judged by the norms of his society to be impure. As if that were not enough, Jesus' decision to accompany the prostitutes, tax collectors and other social outcasts cements his position as “the antithesis of all human quests for ‘purity.’ ”Footnote ²⁸

The implications of this historical attentiveness to Jesus are compelling. Elizondo writes that, as exemplified in Jesus, “[t]he mestizo is the biblical stone, rejected by the builders of this world, that God has chosen to be the cornerstone of a new creation, not chosen for honor and privilege, but for a sacred mission.”Footnote ²⁹ God came to earth as a human being, but not just any human being. God came as a border-shattering mestizo, objectionable to the purity-maintaining border patrol of his day. For Elizondo, this illustrates that “[i]n a privileged way, God is present in the marginated, for distance from the powers of the world is closeness to God. It is consistently in the borderlands regions of human belonging that God begins the new creation.”Footnote ³⁰ Far from being the location of chaotic impurities, the borderlands are recuperated as the site of divine privilege and renewal.

This has significant implications for Christian theology. In her critical extension of U.S. Hispanic theology to account for the particular experiences of Latinas, Ada María Isasi-Díaz writes that “[i]n mujerista theology difference, then, means not otherness or exclusive opposition but specificity and heterogeneity.”Footnote ³¹ Difference is to be embraced, not opposed, policed or excluded as absolute otherness. She goes on: “But traditional theology is not willing to do that because instead of risking ambiguity[,] it rests secure in its impermeable and immutable center.”Footnote ³² That center is the logos. Mestizaje unsettles the notion that logos—ahistorical, pure and undifferentiated oneness—is the appropriate center for Christian theology. Jesus Christ, as the logos and Son of God, was also a Galilean Jew. He thus embodied all the ambiguities and contradictions that caused the dominant culture of his time, like that of today, to dismiss mestizos as impure, as unreasonable, as illogical, as loco. Also in contrast to the dominant culture, Cuellar's (Dr. Loco's) soundtrack to Alambrista makes clear that the loco is the enriched and enriching site of cultural mixing and merging. Just as Derrida heralded the end of the logocentric epoch in Western metaphysics, here we have the parallel case of U.S. Hispanic theologians, together with artists like Cuellar, heralding the end of the logocentric epoch in theology. The past may have made claims to an undifferentiated purity, but the future is definitely mestizo.

Challenges to Logocentric Textuality

The fact that Alambrista illustrates the limits of logocentrism not primarily through writing but through film and music invites reflection on the relationship between the logos and aesthetics.Footnote ³³ In his contribution to a collection of essays honoring Edward Said following his death, Homi Bhabha notes, “Polyphony and contrapuntality are among Said's most commonly used poetic and political metaphors to describe the procedures of philological reception and resistance: ‘And so multiple identity, the polyphony of many voices playing off against each other, without, as I say, the need to reconcile them, just to hold them together, is what my work is all about.’ ”Footnote ³⁴ Both polyphony and counterpoint are musical metaphors, probably derived from Said's background as a concert pianist. Might Said's connection of musical counterpoint and the contrapuntal dynamics of hybridity, multiplicity and lococentrism reveal something about the relationship between music (or nontextual aesthetics generally) and the loco? I believe it does, once again displaying the limits of logocentrism in terms not only of its totalizing homogeneity, but also of its excessive textuality.Footnote ³⁵

Theological and religious studies in the academy have long operated with a persistent and pervasive favoring of the text. In “Seeking an End to the Primary Text,” Lawrence E. Sullivan argues that the bias in religious studies “that regards scriptured expression as the primary mode of intelligibility is misguided and distracts from the issue.”Footnote ³⁶ This is especially so in consideration of “unlettered peoples” whose reflections on and expressions of meaning exceed the bounds of texts, especially of sacred texts. Even in highly literate cultures, textuality does not exhaust the expressions and manifestations of religious meaning. This emphasis on the text owes in large part to the Christian (especially Protestant) milieu of nineteenth-century Europe in which the academic study of religion emerged. In Christianity the written text of the Bible carries revelatory authority, is a closed canon, and holds foundational status. Furthermore, the Gospel of John opens by proclaiming, “In the beginning was the Word [logos].” This logos signifies Jesus Christ, although by placing the logos “in the beginning,” the crucial point is that the logos pre-exists the historical Jesus. It is the proclaimed word, the word spoken by God to the world.Footnote ³⁷ Therefore, the pre-existent quality of logos in the Gospel of John lends a verbal force to Christianity. An emphasis on the verbal, of course, does not equate to an emphasis on the textual. The logos is the divine word spoken, not written.

Nevertheless, the authority of the spoken word eventually gave way to the authority of the written word. “In the beginning was the logos” became easily conflated with the notion that in the beginning was the written text, the closed canon. The Protestant Reformation (particularly Luther's principle of sola scriptura) contributed significantly to that shift, as did another event of the sixteenth century: the invention of the printing press. Walter J. Ong argues concerning the shift from writing to print:

The invention of print technology had dramatic consequences for all humanistic studies, especially in fixing provisional meaning as final truth and making the fluidity and adaptability of oral expression a deficiency rather than an asset. The effects were also profound in Protestant Christianity, which came to associate the pre-existent logos with the pre-existent Bible as the Word of God. This contributed significantly to the textual emphasis of theological and religious studies.Footnote ³⁹

In challenging the exclusively textual approaches to religious studies, Sullivan calls for greater attention to the ways in which “the religious conditions of humanity lie largely beyond the sacrality of scriptures.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Christian theologians have also begun to recognize this and call for alternate ways of understanding the sources of theological construction. Robert Schreiter is one of the earliest to argue that context is as meaningfully intelligible as text. He developed what he calls a “semiotic study of culture” in recognition of the fact that theological meaning is not absent in oral cultures.Footnote ⁴¹ Sheila Greeve Davaney argues that the contemporary scholarly shift away from cultural production at the level of the elites toward the “popular” level requires attentiveness to non-textual and even non-discursive sources.Footnote ⁴² For such nontraditional theologians working at the intersection of theology and cultural studies, there is a deep recognition that privileging the text exclusively is not helpful for understanding the life-worlds of people in oral cultures, nor even of the majority of people in literate cultures.

What such scholars are promoting is the recovery of an early meaning of logos in the Gospel of John: the Word as an oral and aural pronouncement. The spoken logos is much more fluid than the written Word. Ironically, a return to the logos of the biblical text invites us to shift attention from the pure fixedness of textuality toward the hybrid dynamism of orality. In that way, the logos itself calls forth the loco.

Alambrista and the Theopoetics of U.S. Hispanic Theology

The film Alambrista is rich in theological meaning. A strictly textual approach to the study of religions would prohibit us from seeing that. The visual and oral media through which the film's message is conveyed require that a theological analysis of the film adopt a theopoetical methodology. U.S. Hispanic theologians argue that such a turn to theopoetics and aesthetics is essential for experiencing and expressing the religious dimensions of Mexican-American life.

One need not look far into the film or listen long to the musical soundtrack to find explicit references to faith and trust in God. One of the opening scenes takes place in a local chapel, in which Roberto and his mother kneel and pray before a statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe.Footnote ⁴³ God's name is frequently invoked in the musical lyrics. Though the phrase “si Dios quiere…” (“if God wills…”) and its variations are rather commonplace among Hispanic people, it is not a thoughtless expression. The particular songs in Alambrista in which such a divine invocation appears illustrate a powerful theology of hope for the migrants. For example, the song “Adios, California” (heard during a deportation scene) includes these lyrics: “Si Dios me concede/Muy pronto regreso” (“If God will allow me/I'll return very soon”).Footnote ⁴⁴ Again, in “El Venadito,” we hear: “Si con el favor de Dios dejo de ser alambrista/Cuando cruce otra vez ya sera como turista” (“If with the favor of God I stop being alambrista/When I cross again it will be as a tourist.”)Footnote ⁴⁵ Return and deliverance (as in the Hebrew slaves' deliverance to the “promised land”) is always cast as conditional upon God's will. Deference to God does not equal defeatist resignation. It does nothing to diminish the resilience, cunning and bravery displayed so movingly in the characters of the film. God is invoked at moments of hardship in order to prepare spiritually for another round of struggle. Calling God to mind enables one to maintain hope in the face of grave disappointment. It may, after all, be God's will that “I cross again.” If so, one does not (and indeed cannot) stop trying.

It is not only in the references, verbal or visual, to explicit religious symbols that theological meaning is made and expressed. In his essay contribution to the anthology on Alambrista (an essay subtitled “Religious Dimensions in the Film”), Davíd Carrasco focuses on the less overt displays of religious signification. To do so requires locating the religious in terms of an orientation toward that which is of ultimate significance.Footnote ⁴⁶ The characters in Alambrista express and exert their religiosity; that is to say, they

Carrasco's argument is that religiosity is expressed in terms of the orienting and life-sustaining function of productive work, food consumption and reproductive childbearing. The theme of childbirth frames the film, relating the birth experience to the hardship lived by migrants; the first birth in the film propels Roberto into migration to find sustenance for his family, while the second elicits a cry of delight that the baby, born just north of the border, is not “illegal.” These film-framing geneses demonstrate “how these Mexican families are oriented toward crossing borders of poverty, labor opportunities and U.S. citizenship”Footnote ⁴⁸ in a religiously significant way. Carrasco's essay makes evident that the theological expressions and religious dimensions of the borderland require looking beyond overt shows of religiosity.

Carrasco's success in probing the film and its characters for their religious dimensions depends on a methodological innovation theorized by various U.S. Hispanic theologians: the turn toward nontraditional media as legitimate sources for constructing and expressing theology.Footnote ⁴⁹ In “U.S. Hispanic Popular Catholicism as Theopoetics,” Roberto S. Goizueta challenges the devaluation and marginalization of non-conceptual forms of knowledge such as “symbol, ritual, narrative, metaphor, poetry, music, the arts.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Goizueta recovers the importance of popular religiosity and challenges theologians not to engage exclusively in abstract conceptual discourse, thereby disconnecting themselves from lived faith communities. This warning applies particularly to Hispanic theologians because “Latinos and Latinas live in a world where God is revealed primarily in flesh and blood, in symbols and images; in Anglo society and its forms of Christianity, we are faced with a God who is revealed primarily in clear and distinct ideas.”Footnote ⁵¹ While so absolute a demarcation between Latinos and Anglos goes too far, Goizueta is certainly correct to point out that, especially for a theology grounded in the lived experience of a particular people, the form of theological expression is as important if not more so than content.

Ana María Pineda offers some historical observations that clarify the importance of oral and aesthetic sources in the elaboration and construction of a U.S. Hispanic theology. In the Nahuatl culture that preceded the European invasion of Mesoamerica, it was not the written word that enabled communication. The two figures responsible for knowledge construction and transmission in that context were the tlacuilo, the artist who painted codices, and the tlantanime, “the guardian of the oral history of the people.”Footnote ⁵² Pineda challenges those who wish to theologize out of the U.S. Hispanic experience to do so as their forebears did:

To perceive the theological wealth of the Nahuatl people's descendents, one must seek out modern-day tlacuilos (such as the anonymous painters of public neighborhood murals) and modern-day tlantanimes (be they grandmothers and mothers, poets or educators) in Hispanic communities.Footnote ⁵⁴

The aesthetic turn to theopoetics in U.S. Hispanic theology, together with Carrasco's analysis of Alambrista's subtle yet powerful religious dimensions, turns up the limits of traditional theology's textual emphasis. Orality, music, art, poetry, and other means of expression are valid and even privileged forms and sources of theological expression. Insofar as textuality is connected to the privileging of the Word—of the logos—this critique of textuality also is a further critique of logocentrism. This critique relates to logocentrism's homogenizing tendencies. Unlike printed words (which allow facile systematization and clarity of meaning), aesthetic experience often is messy, unsystematic, and irreducibly complex. Its inclusion demands a theological model that affords at least as much space for the heterogeneous, oral loco as it does for the homogenous, textual logos.