[DISCLAIMER: This post has been in
my dashboard for a while and I just went ahead and actually turned it into
something today ... but it is a rough something. It says all the things I want
to say and says what I want to say in those things, but what exactly that is
may be discernible only to me and only because I know what I am looking to say
... not sure ... I think that if you pick apart things and re-splice
around the parentheticals, you can get to what I am saying, but it may be more
difficult to do than I think, and I already think it's not the easiest. It
would really need a lot of work to be really useful, but I am putting it out
there as is just to have it out, since the clean up to really get it to flow
and explain things well is more than I have time for at present. So if you
happen onto it and happen to continue out of interest, just be aware of the
choppy water ahead. END DISCLAIMER]
This is one of those things I don’t
bring up with certain interlocutors because, quite frankly, it’s just not worth
the frustration. Scientism has a very strong hold, as great within Christianity
(meaning the thinking of Christians, both individually and en masse, rather
than the actual objective historical core of Christianity) as anywhere else,
and it can process only unitary “factual” type meanings: “X” is a single and
isolated unit of meaning and clearly denotes one thing, as is “Y,” and the
system of “+” functions by which you connect “X” and “Y” is self evident, like
math (even though we now that even math itself, at its higher levels, becomes
more unstable and more ambiguous). And usually denotation is the only thing
anybody has any room for or ability to process. So if you start going into
language, they can’t handle it and instead get uppity and condescending (as if
they have actually studied anything that much), and it’s neither fun nor
productive for anybody.
But I will write this up here for
posterity. The post is about the use of the definite article in English as sort
of symbolic of but also the material mechanism of a fetishization, particularly
of Christian identity, and most especially in Amercian Evangelical and Reformed
circles. What I mean about the inability to process anything other than
denotation being a thing that makes attempting conversation often not worth it
is that this is neither strict literal denotation (such as: using the
indefinite article can be pinned down to mean exactly this) nor a nice “normal”
use of something poetic like metaphor.
What is Fetish?
Going into this, I just want
to note the definition of “fetish” with which I am working, since there are
quite a number of usages: attribution of religious or mystical qualities to
inanimate objects and attribution of sexual significance to generally
non-erotic parts of the body or even things not a part of the body but attached
to it, like clothing (leather and latex fetishes and all), but also used for
specific objects in some cultures for which there’s not so readily conceivable a
connection to those just listed, like the Imuit fetish (ancient Egypt: animal
skin tied to a pole by the tail) and “fetish priests” in West Africa as simply
intermediaries between the living and spirits (so basically a medium or psychic
in our Western terms), and even applied much more quasi-philosophically with
economics in something like the concept of “commodity fetishism,” the Marxist
concept of valuation in capitalist markets ... and those are just the big ones
listed on the wikipedia page.
I guess the way that I am using the
term would be a combination of the religious use and the Marxist, oddly enough:
I am talking about marking and value. As best as I can make of it, the whole
point of choosing inanimate objects for the religion and non-sexual
parts/elements for sexual fetish is that, since they have no intrinsic value in
themselves vis-a-vis the thing they identify, the use of them as a marking for
religion or sex is more emphasized. A foot has no intrinsic direct role
in sexual intercourse, much less leather clothing, as say a more fully personal
thing like emotions obviously does, and circumcision in Judaism is not
something intrinsically virtuous in the basic material practice, not like the
virtue a person can practice in acting justly or self-scrificially, although it
does get metaphorized into personal virtue more than it seems like usual fetish
objects when places in the Hebrew Bible like Deuteronomy 30 talk about a
circumcision of the heart. Because of lack of intrinsic value, the things stand
out more precisely as intentionally assigned markings, and that intentionality
(I am arguing as a ) creates a value.
In just now mentioning circumcision
in Judaism, my “authority” justification is one that I cannot document as well,
because it was a Jewish scholar named Seth Schwartz who teaches at Jewish
Theological Seminary at Broadway and 122nd in Manhattan, or at lest he did back
in 2008 or 2009, when I took a class he taught going through parts of the two
books of Maccabees in Greek (Fordham has a doctoral consortium with JTS and
Union Theological Seminary across the street and some others, so we could take
courses at those schools and have it covered by our funding at Fordham), which
was where I heard him speak of a certain passage in either 1 or 2 Macc as being
claimed by some to be the beginning of the “fetishization” of Jewish identity.
And there it is interestingly the inanimate object posing as the animate: a
fake forsekin worn at the gymnasium (in Greek culture of the time, “working out”
was done in the nude) to pretend not to be Jewish. The point of bringing that
up is not just to bring up blush material; it’s to note that the goal is
identity verification. Marx (who was, interestingly, raised Jewish ... I read
an interesting student paper once tying out five main tenets of Marx’s thought
to five main tenets in Jewish belief as model, although radically different
interpretation with regard to God and religion, but still same structure)
talked about “value” of commodities in capitalism, but here it is what I think
it always of the most value is in some form when we get to the deeper levels of
human behavior, which is identity. Here in 1 or 2 Macc, the question of
identity is to save one’s own physical life by not being identified as a Jew
who cares about maintaining public distinction of Jewish identity (I’m sure
others could tell the foreskin was fake, but the point was that the Jewish man
implicitly obeyed by trying to disguise his circumcision in the first place),
but my personal theory is that verification of one’s own identity (particularly
to oneself) is always at the core of fetish.
Even in sexual fetish, I think the
point is to verify to oneself that one is a person who has sexual fun (has not
become a prude or boring, lost the spark, etc. etc.; and I’m talking of
fetishization here, not matters or orientation), not just release or
satisfaction of biological drive, but fun ... demonstrated by the fact that
this sheer unadulterated “funness” can even hijack things not intrinsically
connected ... or even the “opposite” thing, pain (that explanation is
stretching a bit in its formulation, but it’s mainly to get across the type of
thing that I mean, rather than the degree, so since it is kind of nuanced, I
have to do a little bit of hyperbole ... although Lacan has a concept of the thin
line between pleasure and pain, one based in Freud’s concept of “excitation,”
that would probably give a different explanation of pain fetish ... but I
actually kind of think both what he says and what I am talking about are in
play in this). In all of this, my position is that identity is always involved
in fetish in whatever can be made of a broad unifying definition of the term,
and that is where it has value for me, which is the fetishization of Christian
identity.
But I must be emphatic here:
I am not saying that Christian identity is itself fetish, but rather that
fetishizing of it happens in the preoccupation with making it a substantive by
doing to it what marking with the indefinite article does, which is not done in
the place in the New Testament in which most Christians think that it is (see
below for that).
So, long and short for this section
defining “fetish,” fetishization is about elements of marking, usually marking
emphasized by their original lack of significance in the aspect under
consideration, that generate value, and I argue, most particularly value for
self-identification.
The Definite Article
To my knowledge, English is the
only language with a distinct form for the definite article, the word “a/an,”
as distinct from the definite article, “the.” Now, it gets kind of complicated.
What I am contrasting English with is best seen, for English speakers, in
languages like French and German, in which “un/une” and “ein/eine” can either mean
the numeral or adjective “one” or be the indefinite article, but the important
thing for my discussion is that those words in those languages maintain the
same form
whether used as the numeral or used as the article. The English word “a/an”
also came from the numeral 1 in the Anglian dialects in Old English, whereas
the “on(e)” form came from the Normans. So, even in English, the indefinite
article came from the word for the numeral. But my point still holds: the other
languages do not use distinct forms for the distinct
roles (article creating indefiniteness and numeral giving specificity) like
English does; and even if the English “a/an” came from the numeral 1, it is
never used that way ... it is always used as the indefinite article; and “one”
is never used as the indefinite article. All this means that “indefiniteness”
must be really, really, really, really, really special to us modern, Western
English speakers. I would even dare to say that it approaches the level of ...
a fetish.
In short, what the foreskin is for
the Jewish man in 1 or 2 Macc and the leather or vinyl or whip is for the
sexual/pain fetishite, that kind of marking is what the indefinite article is
for the Western Evangelical Christian preoccupied with talking about how they
are “a Christian” or how so and so is “a good Christian” but another person is
not. There might definitely be something distinctly un-Christian in actions
taken and a valid need to say “these actions go against the Gospel of Jesus
Christ and we need to make sure that our children learn not to emulate them”
(and, actually, coincidentally, I will examine one of these toward the end ...
concerning a statement made about a person for whom a lot of Evangelical
Christians voted in the Republican primaries of the 2016 presidential election
in the United States), but that is a practical matter and not
the same thing as the identity politics that I have seen going on with the
whole “being a Christian” thing.
[SIDE NOTE1: This all is
conceptually connected to what linguists talk about in “marking” in language,
because a distinct language form is used to do the identity marking of which I
speak. But the two things, what I am talking about as identity marking
and the simple issue of “marking” in language, should not be conflated.
For language studies, marking is simply when a word undergoes morphological
change to mark a change in function. So, with proper nouns, meaning names, we
do not, at least in modern English, mark the difference between subjective case
and objective case: “Mark hit me” and “I hit Mark” both use “Mark.” Whereas,
with pronouns, we do mark the difference: he/him, she/her, we/us, they/them.
SIDE NOTE 2: This can be
only a side note here, otherwise it gets way too distracting to a reader and
might result in needless expenditure of mental energy trying to fit it into the
larger exposition, and I usually tax my reader unfairly in that regard as it
is. But I like to note a certain ironic pun: because “Christian” begins with a
consonant, “a” must be used rather than “an,” and “a” can also be
the “alpha privative” prefix, as in “atheistic” meaning denial of the
existence of God and “amoral” meaning not having morals ... so, by way of the
ironic pun (a subset of what I like to call the “loaded pun” .... get it?),
being “a Christian” is actually being “a-Christian.” END SIDE NOTES].
“In Antioch the disciples
were first called ‘Christans’“ (Acts 11:26)
So, Acts 11:26 is the passage I
spoke of above as being the place people would expect to be the indefiniteness
that facilitates the fetishization I am criticizing. Greek, in which the New
Testament was written, has no indefinite article as a form on the page at all,
even using a form of “one” (there are lots of interesting things in the ancient
languages: Latin has neither an indefinite nor a definite article form; Greek
has no indefinite article but it does have an inflected definite article that
it uses kind of like an HTML tag ... in 4D ... on some pretty serious uppers),
so the issue is not straight forward word-for-word translation. But I argue
that there is a mistranslation here or at least a distinctly unjustified
narrowing of usage. “Christians” in the plural, in English, must be a noun ...
it cannot be an adjectival because we do not decline our adjectives according
to number (singular or plural), they are always singular ... but
Greek does decline its adjectives according to case, gender, and number.
So
it is possible for “christianous” to
be just an adjective in the Greek (Antioch is the first place they were called “Christian”).
And while the grammar and syntax there is complex to understand (“called” is an
active infinitive, so the subject is probably a broad implied “they” of people
in Antioch? but not given on page as a grammatical subject ... probably an
obscure idiomatic usage of the infinitive that I used to know in the days of
being so good at Greek in undergrad but have now completely forgotten ... so, “disciples”
and “Christian” are both in the accusative/objective case, although the best
translation is to put them into the subjective case with a passive verb: “the
disciples were called ...”). The difference is between “Christians” in the
sense of “so and so is a good Christian, and that other person is not” and
saying “that man is Republican” in the sense of being an official member of
that party. There is a difference between public creedal commitment and a “Christian
heart” in the sense that some commentators I have heard seem to mean it when
standing around in “fellowship” after the Sunday service (which as where I
spent many 15-minute stints on Sundays waiting for the rest of the family to
head home before becoming Catholic, although, unfortunately it happens there
sometimes too, but usually more in settings other than the actual sacred space …
at least in the Protestantism in which I grew up, it happened in both places
quite a bit).
I have a friend from grad school
who spent a year on Mount Athos in Greece at the Eastern Orthodox monastery
there. I was discussing this general subject with him about a year ago or
something like that over breakfast at a diner near his and his wife’s (and
beautiful and lively two-year-old daughter’s) place in the Bronx. We both
already knew that biblical Greek, like Latin, does not use even the spelled out
“one” for an indefinite article. As with most all human understanding, there is
going to be an aspect of indefiniteness possible, a function of the indefinite
article, but in both ancient Greek and Latin, it must be inferred from context,
and therefore is not so emphasized as in English, where, beyond even just using
any marked form on page at all for it, there is a unique dedicated form for its
presence on the page. The thing that my friend added is that they still do not
talk in the “substantive” way of “a Christian” (and there are ways it can be
done in language without using an on the page form of an indirect object, just
as a good translator of Latin can discern where to put an indefinite article or
a definite one even though there is no Latin for either on the page, or as is
done in the English translation above, where the indefinite article is not used
but the meaning must fit that because the adjectives do not decline in
English), but rather in the adjectival way only. Obvioulsy, that is a nuanced
matter of language. But I am going to go ahead and trust the word of my friend
who was studied a lot of Greek and other languages and spent a year straight in
present Greece, rather than the word of most Evangelicals whom I would meet who
would say that it must be the noun rather than the adjective in Acts 11:26 but
who probably have never really studied.
Your average scientism-saturated,
literalist, fundamentalist Christian (including some Catholic stripes) will
completely miss this point and probably even challenge it, especially those who
have not studied other languages, but even some who have “studied” them. They
will probably say that “called them Christian” (adjective) and “called them
Christians” (noun from the substantive use of the adjective, arriving at the
same meaning as would using the indefinite article if it could be pluralize,
which it technically cannot be … “some” always winds up being ambiguous) come
to the same thing, and that is the detriment of the “scientific” approach to
language (although it is often not anywhere near as close as it likes to think
to being scientific and is really more scientistic). The difference is
precisely the possibility for identity politics of which I am speaking here as
a fetishization of Christian identity.
A Modern Example:
During the 2016 US presidential
election time, Pope Francis said (paraphrasing) “A person who thinks only about
building walls and not building bridges is not Christian.” Basically, this
fetishization has left American Protestants (and really, quite a number of
American Catholics) completely incompetent to processes anything beyond
judgments of “that person is going to hell.” First, it’s what they expect
of Pope Francis or anybody else because it’s what they do themselves (as I say,
I have sat in their churches in the days before I became Catholic, milled
around in their “fellowship” after the services because my family wasn’t ready
to go home yet, listened to their conversations, always “in charity and
humility” but also always about how so and so is a good Christian, and so and
so is not a Christian). But even beyond that, even if they do develop some
actual humility ... their minds simply cannot handle it, can’t process it.
Brain’s start buzzing and smoking when they even try. My personal opinion is
that they have gotten so used (really, addicted) to the substantive,
indefinite article fetishization of Christian identity that it is all
that they can hear.
What the Pope meant was that a
candidate pushing this agenda is a candidate pushing an agenda that is contrary
to the heart of the Gospel. Is that a statement that that candidate is going to
hell? Francis knows that only God knows that. But he also knows that if one
sees an agenda being pushed that, from what one can tell, is contrary to the
Gospel, then one should speak up and note that one sees the message as contrary
to particularly the Gospel. You may disagree with him on whether the wall
actually is contrary to the Gospel, but if you take the meaning to be that
Francis was necessarily saying that the candidate is going to hell, all you
have done is demonstrate your own inability to get beyond the fetishization of
Christian identity that is embodied in the use of the definite article in
English, the only language of which I personally know that has dedicated form
for the indefinite article, making it particularly apt for this kind of
identity politics (and the kind of imperialism that Tolkien descried when, in a
statement in a personal letter, he rejected “all this cant of the ‘language of
Shakespeare’“ as a justification for pushing English as a universal language
... and Tolkien loved the English language with a more pure love than any
alt-righter, and with more actual knowledge of it than probably the whole of
the alt-right movement put together).
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