Holy Fools: Normativity, Existentialism, Place

"For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God's sight. As it is written: 'He catches the wise in their craftiness.' " (1 Corinthians 3:19)

"In this film it is my message that it is impossible to pass on experience to others or learn from others. We must live our own experience, we cannot inherit it." (Tarkovsky interviewed in "A Poet in Cinema")

"Beauty is in the balance of the parts. And the paradox is that the more perfect the work, the more clearly does one feel the absence of any associations generated by it." (Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, pg. 47)

Recently, watching some classic Soviet films, I was struck by the character of the holy fool. In the Russian Orthodox tradition, a holy fool is ignorant of worldly ways, and has been struck by dumb by God's grace. This sort of ignorance is a good ignorance, as these fools are blind to the corrupting ways of fallen man.

Unsurprisingly, scholarly work on the holy fool seems to be most prevalent in theology. I found research describing early Christian ascetics and how they trained to be ignorant (of corporal temptations) before God. Updating these discussions, there was an attempt to bring the holy fool before Foucault's theorization. Here the holy fool-ascetic learns a technique of self-discipline and self-control in their task of self-mastery before God.

These discussions are all very interesting, and I wish I had the time and the faculty to closely read them. In my own time, I got to thinking about the holy fool in a certain brand of Kiergaardian and Heideggerian existentialism and the relation of the holy fool to normative place. I discuss several theories on normativity and the individual in the face of society. Then I look at several holy fools from Russian cinema and their tactics (indeed, their lack thereof) in normative and emotive situations . Finally, I conclude on the relation of the holy fool to place.

Important to the power-knowledge theorization of Foucault is the bottom-up enforcement of normativity in society. An individual learns their place, or disposition, through the configurations of any given society. From their social disposition, they will appeal to a certain assortment of mentors - in family, church, education, literature, etc., who aid them in a particular moral cultivation. Eventually, this cultivation is turned inward, and thus we have the voice of God speaking directly into the mind of the Catholic of Protestant individual. This is governmentality writ large, or better yet, writ diffusedly and pervasively. The religious subject is both subjected and before the Subject of God - Althusser's dual subjectivity.

Now stepping back to Kierkegaard, we can see the individual as subject not only to a religious subjectivation, but also subject to a secular levelling. The modern age, with its press and Public, enacts a sort of secular-normative levelling on an individual, distracting and depriving them of a relationship to God. The reduction of the singular individual to the mass, of the religious subject to the civil subject, is a very sinister abstraction, as it leads one to in fact bow before the variegations of secular living. The best one can do is live an ethical life - a normative life - and re-utter the most complacent doxa about good living. The religious life, the life that a holy fool must live, before God and in awe of God at the expense of a human morality is cast aside.

For Heidegger, and perhaps in extension, Sartre, we find the normative individual living an inauthentic life, a life of bad faith. Making no significant decisions, a normative subject is resigned to a life, and a world, designed and controlled by others - by the averageness of the abstract mass. An authentic individual makes all the decisions that matter in the face of, and perhaps despite of, normativity.

What exactly is the role of a holy fool? A trained ascetic would be a subject to a discipline of asceticism and therefore a particular religious orthodoxy. The ascetic makes a conscious decision to assume their religious role, beginning the necessary regimen of preparation, and living out the conditions of hermetism. This would seem an authentic position, a singular turn to the eternal life before God, yet the decision is still adopting a normative orthodoxy. Indeed, following in the footsteps of other in any religious practice, could be taken as a move of the mass: reacting to religious opinions through particular religious conditions as any abstracted subject would: "... we shrink back from the 'great mass' as they shrink back." (Being and Time pg 164)

The sort of holy fool to whom I was initially drawn is the fool that cannot speak, as madness is forever relegated to silence - to being unheard. The holy fool has no voice and therefore no direction to share with others, as their life is indeed a silent singularity before God as others never moulded them, and they themselves have no intention or possibility of pedagogy. In distinction to the ascetic, the true holy fool has made no conscious decision to be authentic before eternity, but have been thrust by God onto the world as truly ignorant beings. They don't need to make a decision to be anything, as they are deprived of the decision altogether.

Prince Myshkin in Dostoevky's "The Idiot," and Vladimir in Eisenstein's "Ivan the Terrible" are holy fools, but not to the logical extreme of the "true holy fool" I just described. These holy fools, in their regular practice, reflect the desire, designs, and moods of others. Myshkin can't distance himself from the partial loves he is implicated in, and can't deny himself the relations of cynical men. As a "positively good man," Myshkin is a product of the situations he finds himself in, never extending an ethical self outside of the ethical worlds others contain him in at a given moment. Vladimir covets what him mother, Efrosinia covets, but only during the radiant expression of coveting. Like the black body of physicists, Vladimir absorbs and emits the emotions and projects of others. Yet in moments of disjuncture, before others, usually his mother, react to a situation, Vladimir is clearly at a loss of how to react - he can't make his own decision.

Durochka from Tarkovksy's Andrei Rublev is a true holy fool. She exists in a state of eternal delight - playful in any setting, eats with the voraciousness of an animal, and can't discern or decide who ought to be friend or foe. Her innocence inspires the icon painter Rublev, she survives with him the sack of Vladimir, and is eventually led away by the very Tartars that have razed and slaughtered her community. Throughout the entire situation, she remains in a state of delight, and when the Tartars effuse more joy than the distressed Rublev, she follows them to her likely doom. Durochka's fate always lies in the situation, but she does not absorb and emit like Myshkin or Vladimir. Her childlike ignorance is a permanent disposition, the self-state of a being completely existing despite the levelling process and ethical situation of the world. She knows only the religious and the eternal, and is incapable of aesthetic or ethical pursuits (her pursuit of joy is that of joy before God and in spite of the world, and not joy in personal pursuit - note her animal-like unrefinements). Life is not a concern, and therefore when death does arrive, she will be completely unawares.

The position of the holy fool in a place as social milieu is that of complete detachment. The fool reflects the sentiments of others, or the mood of the world, but does not project their own designs upon it. Before God and outside of the world, the holy fool moves through the world without abiding by or contributing to its normativity. The true holy fool lives so despite the world that they are completely incapable of decisions within it, they simply go with the world. This going-with the world is entirely different from a normative inauthentic going-with the world because decisions, ends, and means are entirely irrelevant. No ethical dilemmas play out. One can imagine a society composed entirely of such fools and how quickly, and how without malice or even consideration of others, it would die out. Its death would be unimportant, however, because it was always and anti-society, a temporal arrangement of singular eternities.

Usefullness of Epochal Divisions

If in the beginning there was only one time, then that era would likely be referred to as A. We can also safely assume that no one who has ever thought of themselves as living in the one and only epoch of history would bother to cleave it from another epoch. If there was to be a division, it would likely only be made in juxtaposition to the past, and would require some sort of a clean break with it. The Christians broke with the Judaic calendar, itself fixed upon a starting point, before which there was simply nothing. A would have pre-A from which to define itself in opposition.

I want to interrogate a concept a bit more complicated then the BCE/CE split. Since perhaps the Enlightenment, writers have been writing of a break with the past, the era before people could fathom enlightenment and were groveling under the oppression of ignorance. We might consider this the Medieval/Enlightenment split, or A/B. As time goes on however, thinkers and writers begin to conceive of a modern era, an era built around the exacting forces of capitalism, international standards, the foreseeable death of primitivism, and a new dawn for human freedom and potential. Now we have a Medieval/Enlightenment/Modern split, or A/B/C. Such a division has been pursued in many literatures as the dark times before reason was known, the beginnings of rational thought and positivistic science, and when rational science matured and hit its stride ushering in “true” forms of modern science beyond mere rationalistic thought. Now, experts among us have identified yet another split, that of metastasized modernity: post-modernity is the condition of post-Fordist neoliberal capitalism, hyperspace, multiple identities, the death of scientific truth, plurality, and irony over earnestness. So we have A/B/C/D.

Is it all settled now? How can we move forward from this point? Historians and cultural critics have identified problems with these categories. World historians argue that medieval is not a suitable category for the pre-Enlightenment and pre-Westphalian system, neither in Europe nor outside of it. However, much of the world has exhibited a feudal system of some sort. Perhaps it would be best to insert a “pre-modernity” category before modernity to compensate for this discrepancy. This is an era marked by hunter-gatherers, advanced organic economies (AOEs), and capitalists anticipating industry. Now we have A/subB/B/C/D. By this point, A just means pre-rational, or pre-European rationality, which may or may not occur at the beginning of the Enlightenment or the beginning of the Italian Renaissance, or perhaps with Thomas Aquitaine (that would be a stretch). In any case, it starts to get messy when you try to figure out the exact extent of any of these global or local epochs.

So now we are in the era of post-modernity that is endorsed by many in the social sciences. Solid identity, permanent dwelling, the traditional family, and the worker/capitalist system were so very modern, and have come to pass. The shift can be traced back to the Bretton Woods accord if you are a political economist, or simply to the new domination of America if you just want to look at politics. Though you would have to disregard the decades of the 40s and 50s and 60s (except for the bit at the end), as they still belong to the modern era. During the modern era, most people believed in the power of modern art, the TV, and the infallibility of science. But then came the terror of the Atomic Age, the art of the Dadaists, HG Wells “War of the Worlds,” the Bloomsbury group, and Hip-Hop with its self-conscious appropriation of random bits of the past. But these things didn’t all happen at once, so maybe a new category should be added to meld these two latest epochs together. A/subB/B/C/CD/D.

Already, I feel that this description isn’t enough. Think of all the alternate cultures to ours in the world. In fact, in post-modernity, “ours” is unstable. I don’t know you any better than I know myself. And surely, I can’t agree with you, because to agree with you would be to approve of you, and to do that, I would likely have to judge you, which requires cognition of your acts. An inseparable gulf lies between us and within me. Schizophrenia. Multiplicities. Let’s scatter the categories. Everything is now contingent on particular cultures and societies which themselves are contingent on the whims and fancies of those reading them. However, to keep things partially clear, it would be good to try to redefine at least the last two of these categories (and their modifications) for the colonized world. So we might as well restate the equation as preC/Cm/CDm/Dm. No one is beyond Dm because it hasn’t been theorized yet, and likely, only turning into a vaporous ether could possibly describe this state.

Finally, a suitable set of categories for analysis within the social sciences has been established. Now we can discover meaning on the borders between or within these multiplicities. Like a merchant from subB Venice, we can again encounter the Other in a fashion that will not inspire us to wonder not about origins, but only [micro-]evolution, because we are no longer burdened with the staged [macro-]evolution of time and the oppressive weight of place. Home is nothing. The Highway is everything. We can dispatch with the abusive categories that reasonable thinkers have erroneously established in the past so that we can again analyze them using similar vocabulary, but devoid of anything but political economy and distrust. And we are back in the Medieval Era, looking only to our redemption by the cynical forces of post-modernity.

"Ruin Porn" in Detroit

I've done my fair share of "abandoned place" exploration. There is a special draw the decayed, which can be traced all the way back to the enjoyment of Roman ruins in the 15th century, and then to the medieval castles, and then to Eastern ruins, and so on and so forth. Besides reflecting nostalgia for the (mis?)remembered, they also live on in the landscapes of post-apocalyptical science fiction (eg. 12 Monkeys and Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles").

A whole host of websites have sprung up to follow Detroit's decline, and blog entries as well. It is easy to access many of Detroit's ruins, because there are too many of them for the police to evict you. Hell, it might even draw tourism these days. I was just thinking about what a cool photo trip it would be. Once you're in, the more the decayed, the better the photo. Abandoned photography has been around for years. But Abandoned Detroit has drawn quite a bit of media attention.

This writer thinks that "ruin porn" is just a cop out for "lazy" journalists. I've seen the same accusations leveled at journalists that explore chatroulette. Journalists devouring journalists? But there is a real draw to these places. I think it reflects an anxiety about the decline of America. The last 50 years has seen the first thinning outs of heavily settled places. As Rust Belters fled to the Sun Belt, the Midwest changed from the America's future to the ghost in the attic. Remember Horace Smith's Oxymandius:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

[courtesy of Wikipedia]

Michigan is the Babylon of Midwestern manufacturing; Detroit and Flint are its neighborhoods. Perhaps the push to save Detroit's Michigan Central Station is more than civic pride, but the desire to rejuvenate America. An attempt to cover up a symbolic blight that speaks less about neighborhoods and cities and more about our civilization. To deny the relics that could one day speak of the beginnings of America's decline. But does destroying the past to prevent its future recovery really insure anything besides complete erasure?