I begin this reflection with an apology, for both the reader and for my future self. I have just attended a major theology conference, having flown across the world to meet with strangers and friends to discuss work, listen to papers, and dare to hope that we’ll get to do this just long enough before it all burns. I am writing from a cozy café, a small reprieve from the bright artificiality of the San Antonio riverwalk, built on the ancestral home of the Payaya, while music from Gilmore Girls plays on the speakers. Post-event ennui weighs heavy, making me melancholic and therefore pretentious and overconfident: the perfect mix for a reflection that will later make me cringe. I offer my apologies as such.
The conference was fantastic, and now I’m sad—but not merely because it’s over. What is the nature of this sadness, especially in its relationship to what made this experience good? And what justification is there for this work in a world in which it feels increasingly tenuous and superficial (a superficiality which stands in some contrast to my current feelings of sad-happiness)?
No graduate student of theology—or of the arts writ large, for I take the study of divinity to be a type of humanitas—can participate in such things long before such existential dread sets in. What drives us to such expense, such excess of cost and endowed privilege, to do something that is so doomed? What drives one to get so attached to a vision of education, to participate in some conversation of the church or the academy or one’s ancestry, to work towards a dead-end career replete with failing institutions? Why torture oneself to be so drawn to such work, to sacrifice futures, time, money, energy—a cost often worn by those most close to us—when the actual places that sustain such work—universities, arts programs, seminaries—likely have no place for us? Perhaps church folk are particularly well suited for such gluttony, of working towards things which may soon no longer exist.
The entire project is enough to make one sick: the fuel burned to travel, the terraformed conference environment, the whole excess of modern academic culture and the university. And yet I can’t live without it, I can’t imagine my life apart from such work. There is no future for this, and indeed, it is probably better that the whole thing burns to the ground. But I want it, I desire it—not just the desires of ego but the people, the friends, the conversations, the books, the sheer audacity of it all. I want to know why I feel this way, why this work makes me feel so complete and alive and so empty and sad.
~
Alright. I did warn you this reflection would be insufferable.
Let us describe the material conditions of this work, the work of a “scholar,” or, better, the work of an educator. Such a person spends their day reading books, taking notes, writing papers. They also prepare lectures, deliver them, meet with students, answer questions. They do this to educate: this is what education is, so conceived: 1. reading texts and 2. gathering bodies.
We engage texts, mainly written texts (books) but also others (music, story, art). We also read texts about texts, we (primarily) write texts that analyse the other texts we have engaged. We coalesce texts around their authors, developing canons, and becoming apprenticed to them. (This, I think, can be a morally neutral process—our reading of texts and our arrangement of them by a canon instead reflects the prior visions of life we imagine ourselves to have, ones which themselves are almost always morally compromised and so cause us problems.)
We also gather bodies. Texts require bodies as a prior necessity—texts only ever arise out of bodies. But we also gather bodies to discuss texts, to learn from them, to debate them (in classrooms, study groups, etc.). Texts themselves can create bodies, repositories in which they can be stored. Yet the whole enterprise just is embodied; it is flesh and blood meeting together to engage in common meanings and common texts. (This happens in formalised and more causal ways, ones which, again, reflect prior visions of who we understand ourselves to be.)
There are many ways to parse out to the relationship between texts and bodies. Reading texts often requires time away from other bodies (children, neighbours, animals). And yet a text also requires all sorts of bodily effort to create, materials to write, labour to produce—much of which is sustained by other forms of “non-textual” bodily work (cooking, childrearing, housebuilding, etc.) A text only ever comes about because of the author’s own bodily engagement with it: sore wrists, stiffened back, tired minds. Texts themselves are therefore never abstract, even if many of them deal with abstractions.
These two tasks—reading texts and gathering bodies—intersect with an array of other types of activity. But primarily, whatever way we are inclined, this is the work, at least the work required to come to conferences and get PhDs. And such work seems increasingly impractical, increasingly frivolous, and not without good reason! This work requires excess—an excess of time and labour. But as such, it may therefore even require a type of exploitation, at least it always has within the actual conditions in which it’s taken place. Nothing in my participation in this conference was untouched by this reality of exploitation: the plane ticket to get here, the purchasing of food to sustain my being here, the land which has been put aside for the conference market itself (land stolen, terraformed, etc.). Graduate students themselves are a type of exploited agent in this process: driven into a system with little future prospects, paying their own way to get there. This is probably why modern universities hate students so much: they get in the way of what they really want to do (make money).
The work of education—of reading texts and gathering bodies, of gathering texts and reading bodies—takes place in a world largely indifferent to texts and the bodies that reproduce them. Not simply this, but the work takes place in a world hostile to education as such, hostile not merely because of ignorance but because of the very real way such texts can hide, rely upon, even support the exploitation required to sustain the work. There simply are better things to do than read texts and gather bodies—much more urgent, much more pressing tasks. So why do I want to keep doing it?
~
Let me attempt a (highly corrigible) justification.
Human beings seem to be just that type of creature that reads texts and gathers bodies. And this, I think, is because we are just that type of creature ordered towards something “else,” grasping at it through the materiality in which we have (texts and bodies). Human beings have always told stories about who they are and passed down those stories to the next generation. People have always sung songs, written poetry, painted murals, developed canons and sacred texts (the textual medium of written language is a recent development in this sense). People develop texts, collect them into bodies (libraries, schools, wānanga), pass them on.
Human beings have always done this work, and this work has always been tenuous. We’ve always read texts and gathered bodies while things burn. It’s certainly not the only thing we should do—our reading of texts should drive us to question the conditions of this burning and so, where possible, put out fires. But I also think this work (maybe) is an end to itself, an end which anticipates the eschatological overabundance of world created by an infinite God for creatures who really like texts, precisely as a way to enter into this dazzling infinity. This is why theology is closer to the arts than to science—not because it should be careless in its presentation or fail to account for observable things. It is instead because theology draws its bodily subjects into something else, a type of great “beyond” which Christianity calls the God of Jesus Christ.
This, I hope, goes some of the way in accounting for the cause of my insufferable desire to do this work. This cause, we might say, is a cause that comes from somewhere else. As such, it’s a cause that creates our sadness, my own sad-happiness, that creates desire: that is, the longing for another world.
~
Peace and grace,
Andrew
More links/books/thoughts
This was all very vague and overly affected. As I wrote this reflection, I was reminded of something Linn Tonstad wrote that is perhaps more concrete:
We need to find that there is an alternative, that the current economic order has fractures and locations in which alternative economies may be built, so that we learn to identify with a ‘we’ that does not yet exist … As theologians and biblical scholars, we need to learn to speak our own desires for such transformation ... The practices of legitimation in our various subdisciplines offer little reward—and often punishment—for the experiments in genre, form, and life that most benefit our abilities to tell such stories, though, and it may well be true that (at least some of) our subdisciplines and institutions teeter on the brink of disappearing—not that we are allowed to forget that for even a moment! Perhaps our time is short, whether measured by the time until tenure denial, until death, or until ecological catastrophe. In the interim, though, it seems to me we must use the institutions we have to experiment with alternative temporal forms—in ways that have the power to seduce, to allure, to make desirable.1
The “interim” seems to be the very generative ground in which theological study takes place, the innately teleological feature of reading texts and gathering bodies. This interim seems to be, to put in the terms of my own textual tradition, the “staggering eschatological space” in which we contemplate God.2
Linn Marie Tonstad, “The Entrepreneur and the Big Drag: Risky Affirmation in Capital’s Time,” in Sexual Disorientations: Queer Temporalities, Affects, Theologies, ed. Kent L. Brintnall, Joseph A. Marchal, and Stephen D. Moore (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 234.
See: John Webster, The Culture of Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2019).