An Immanent Fiction

[** There are several 'spoilers' here for those who care **]

John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath offers what I would call an immanent fiction. The guiding narrative exists entirely within the sphere of a 'natural order'. The Joad family is forced off there farm during the Great Depression and head west to California in search work. They are accompanied by an ex-preacher named Casey. For much of the story Casey constructs this immanent reality. He is insistent that he is no longer a preacher and throughout their journey gives insight into the world as he now understands it. When first asked if we was going to continue to preach and baptize he responds,

I ain't gonna preach. . . . I ain't gonna baptize. I'm gonna work in the fiel's, in the green fiel's, an' I'm gonna be near folks. I ain't gonna try to teach 'em nothin'. I'm gonna try to learn. Gonna learn why the folks walks in the grass, gonna hear 'em talk, gonna hear 'em sing. Gonna listen to kids eatin' mush. Gonna hear husban' an' wife a-poudnin' the mattress in the night. Gonna eat with 'em an' learn. . . . Gonna cuss an' swear an' hear the poetry of folks talkin'. All that's holy, all that's what I didn' understand'. All them things is good."

The journey of the Joad's across the southwestern U.S. is largely a litany of woe and disappoint as they begin to experience the severity of conditions both for themselves and for so many around them as food become scarce and jobs more so. In Casey' new posture new revelation is received. Casey reflects on this with Tom Joad,

[I] listen all the time. That's why I been thinkin'. Listen to people a-talkin', an purty soon I hear the way folks are feelin'. Goin' on all the time. I hear 'em and feel 'em; an' they're beating their wings like a bird in a attic. Gonna bust their wings on a dusty winda tryin' to get out. . . . They's an army without a harness. . . . All along I seen it. . . . Ever' place we stopped I seen it. Folks hungry for side-mear, an' when they get it, they ain't fed. An' when they'd get do hungry they couldn't stan' it no more, why, they'd ast me to pray for 'em, an sometimes I done it. . . . I used to think that'd cut 'er, used to rip off a prayer an' all the troubles stick to that prayer like like flies on flypaper, an' that prayer'd go a-sailin' off, a-takin' them troubles along. But it don' work no more.

At this point Tom chimes in adding, "Prayer never brought in no side-meat. Takes a shoat to bring in pork." Casey also comes to recognize sin deriving from want, "It's need that makes all the trouble."
It is actually quite early in the book that Casey lays out the framework in which his developing worldview emerges. Tom Joad just got out of prison as was walking back to his family's farm when he encounters Casey under the shade of a tree. They begin to talk and Tom realizes that Casey is no longer the preacher he remembers from his youth. Casey begins to talk about the Holy Spirit as love and says that he honestly can't say that he loves Jesus because he doesn't know anyone names Jesus. He does, however, love people so much that at times he is "fit to bust." Then he admits that he can no longer be a preacher because of "one more thing" that he thought out. And he says, "I can't be a preacher no more because I thought it an' believe it."

"I figgered about the Holy Sperit and the Jesus road. I figgered,'Why do we got to hang it on God or Jesus? Maybe,' I figgered, 'maybe it's all men an' all women we love; maybe that's the Holy Sperit- the human sperit- the whole shebang. Maybe all men got one big soul ever'body's a part of.' Now I sat there thinkin' it, an' all of a suddent- I knew it. I knew it so deep down that it was true, and I still know it. . . . You can't hold no church with idears like that."

This is quite an unnerving passage . . . as preacher (pastor). There are many ways to 'poke holes' in Casey's theoretical framework. His view of sin as deriving from lack is itself certainly lacking. However, what convicts me is his honesty and fidelity to the reality of his experience. If faith, hope and love are to emerge or exist I suspect they must emerge in intimate relationship with the lived world around us. Steinbeck's work continues to push on my thinking of the relationship between transcendence and immanence and I suspect within my tradition also the notion of the miraculous. In contemporary culture it is Hollywood that has the market on the miraculous. They depend on it to resolve crisis and bring order to conflict. This functions in contrast to Jesus' use of the miraculous. The miraculous was not the resolving of conflict in the human condition. In Hollywood miracles function as an 'invisible hand' that will always stabilize the desired economic balance. In the Gospels the miraculous encouraged the marginalized to know that there is another economy that is not grounded in the injustices of their current situation . . . they did not affirm and stabilize they priorities of health and acquisition of their present context as the Hollywood miracles do.
And so in The Grapes of Wrath there are no miracles. As this narrative began to take shape in my mind I was wondering how this book would end. As the pages in my right hand thinned there fewer and fewer opportunities for a 'happy' ending. The Joads were not finding work or rest in their travels. Towards the end Casey is killed for attempting to organize workers into a type of union. Another plot line is Tom's sister Rose of Sharon who is pregnant during their travels and births a stillborn child near the end. It was after her birth that their shelter in train car is beginning to be flooded out by the rains that finally came. What they waited for back home is now proving to be the final threat to their family's survival. One final act of desperation the remaining family sets out in the rain on foot to find shelter. They eventually come across a barn where the find a boy and his father who is almost dead. They recognize that only something warm and nourishing will possibly sustain him. As the closing the lines of the book unfold Rose of Sharon's mother speaks to her and then ushers everyone out from Rose of Sharon and the dying man. Then the book concludes,

For a minute Rose of Sharon sat still in the whispering barn. Then she hoisted her tired body up and drew the comfort about her. She moved slowly to the corner and stood looking down at the wasted face, into the wide, frightened eyes. Then slowly she lay down beside him. He shook his head slowly from side to side. Rose of Sharon loosened one side of the blanket and bared her breast. "You got to," she said. She squirmed closer and pulled his head close. "There!" she said. "There." Her hand moved behind his head and supported it. Her fingers moved gently in his hair. She looked up and across the barn, and her lips came together and smiled mysteriously.

The possibility of hope and healing lie within the plane of the human body. There is no guarantee of health or happiness but the possibility of those things cannot come from a vending machine in the sky, to do so would be to utterly disrespect the reality of life and humanity as God created them. These final words also unnerve me and I am not entirely sure how to appropriate them . . . or whether I can or should. I do feel like I should respect them and that in them there may be a beauty and truth and I have not fully acknowledged.

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The End of Theory (as the Goal of its Beginning)

In my second year of college likely in winter (though seasons held little relevance in my basement apartment with its single subterranean window funneling indirect light) I sat at my study table in my bedroom. The memory now is void of my initial purposes. I remember simply looking forward when out of the corner of my eye I saw something fall. Perhaps it was something hanging on the wall or leaning somewhere on my desk. Nothing immediately perceptible caused that object to fall. In my mind it just fell. The only sense I could make of it at the time was the phrase, "everything is moving". This was long before I understood the significance of movement in the work of theory and philosophy.

Of course from an atomic level this statement makes perfect sense as even a dead or inanimate object continues to "move". Orthodox theology (as well as deists I suppose) also has had no difficulty in its positing of an Unmoved Mover who has set the world in motion. I am encountering more and more discussion around the question of movement and source, particularly in terms of the theoretical explanation of or impact on society. How has change happened and how can change happen. Hollywood has resolved this in much the same manner that most theoretical or religious thought has. The change comes from the miraculous "outside" source or from some hitherto unknown "inside" source. Appealing to any "outside" source remains highly prone to suspicion. What good is rigorous critique if the impassible "outside" knocks our house of cards down with a single stroke.
Very well, let's remain on the inside. I am tempted to ask where the currency and origins of the immanent sources being applied to are from in posts at Rough Theory and Now-Times but that tends to lead towards an impasse. I suppose it can remain un-addressed in many contexts. I proceed with some hesitation given a recent comment NP made on her own post. I am not an expert in their field of study but I enter in as someone concerned with the questions being asked and a belief that truly inter-disciplinary discussion (as should reflect the best of blogging) would be helpful.
What troubles me in their posts is the notion that substantive social change, transformation (group or individual), can come as the reslut of public awareness or the formation of "critical thinking". These are not insignificant pursuits, do not get me wrong (why else am I carrying the illusion that someone may be reading this). I am also not reaching for the miraculous "outside" though I also have no essential problem with it. And I can most certainly sympathize with talk about a "moral, first person reflection" if I understand that correctly. And while I am qualifying myself here I should also mention that I can recognize that "change" certainly occurs through the process I just criticized. However, I would be careful before I viewed these changes as being qualitatively different than a recent advertisement I saw. Turn your change into cash. It was pasted on a machine in which you dumped your spare change in a grate in order to receive your money back in higher denominations (at a cost of course). The end result is positive but not substantively different in the larger play of relations.

I am moving towards the position that theory and moral formation is only as good as it postures the individual towards what I can only describe at this point as death. As I observed in my early college days their is movement to be observed and engaged but our participation in it remains elusive to much theoretical grasping. Stay tuned for more on "death" (see Ralph Stanley on IndieVision for now).

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The Great Dead-End in the Sky (revised)

After taking my crash course in transcendence and immanence via Blog U I finally gave myself just enough time to reflect a little on what I was talking about. I came quickly and securely to the conclusion that there is no "outside" but of course many outsides. There are many boundaries to cross and many mysteries of many more boundaries.
I always wondered as a kid whether some astronaut would travel so far into outer space that they would encounter a wall. I pictured this wall overwhelmingly black and monolithic. The problem was that there was always an unconscious question of perspective when imagining this wall. If it was indeed a wall in the grand sense of dead-ends then to what extent did it spread out and how it could not have already been visible from every perspective in every place? It seemed to me that if you encounter this wall of immanence than you will at once be surrounded by it forced into the realization that there never really was any space. But if there is no immanence and no wall to encounter then we remain exploring the outsides of this great inside and the question of God sheds it coat and stretches its arms . . . outward.

And then of course there was the more pressing question for me as a child. If I encountered this wall was there anything with which I could dig through it?

To finally get back to one comment made by N.Pepperell from Rough Theory made below.

The debate then comes down to whether meaning can be grounded only by a reach "outside", or whether something immanent and relational is instead possible.

I can't imagine a non-relational possibility.

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Further Thoughts on Immanence in Response

In the world of high-stakes blogging there are the quick and the dead. I am amazed at the speed and depth of post discussions that I have come across. I am beginning to realize that much of what is written feeds directly into or out of published or taught material. I thought I would pace myself and respond to helpful comments directed towards my questions and observations. The firs series of responses comes from the discussion that I directed you to earlier (see here).

Following this I will address the comments made directly in the below post.


The first quote is from Larval Subjects who responded sharply to my thoughts that perhaps notions of the sacred (or at least theologically sensitive aesthetics) may be helpful navigating some the issues being raised.
LS responded by saying that,

Philosophy has abdicated itself when it follows this path [of assuming or requiring transcendence] or ends up in a pious crypto-theology suitable to the needs of priests, despots, and demagogues– immanence, which is philosophy’s vocation since Thales’ declaration that the world is sufficient to itself, requiring no mythological explanation or transcendent beyond, always rejecting any sort of obfuscatory and hypnotic sacred.

I find it difficult to respond to this quote. I also find it hard to be defensible. Either position (assuming or defending either immanence or transcendence) desires a superior perspective; an ability to see behind the assumptions of the other. I will leave further commentary until later.

In a number of respects, I draw my distinction between theology and philosophy from Jean-Luc Marion who rigorously tries to define the limit of philosophy. I differ from Marion in holding that theologies that posit transcendence ought to be left behind. I read the history of philosophy as the history of attempts to think immanence. These attempts can be deployed in a variety of ways, can be more or less successful, and the question of whether or not immanence has ever been fully thought is entirely open. By immanence I understand the thesis that we don’t need to refer to anything beyond, or to any intervention outside the world, to explain the world or to account for value. Consequently, when Thales says “all is water”, he is appealing to a principle of explanation that is strictly immanent to the world and is breaking with mythos or narrative explanations of the world such as those found in Greek mythology.

LS desires to discard reference to anything "beyond" the world. This is a very problematic statement. Again, I can't help notice such a position assuming an indefensible perspective; a seeing of the other side of immanence. I appreciate the example of Thales saying that "all is water". But is the Christian doctrine "God is love" any less a statement of immanence? Or conversely is water the "strictly immanent" principle LS takes it to be? Certainly the use of "water" as ontologically basic differs from speaking of there being "turtles all the way down" though perhaps not by much.
What I hope to clarify in my own articulation is that my using words such as transcendence and sacred are not to be pictured as portals to another dimension. Though I do not have a clear concept of a personal God I also do not consider God and spirit to be somehow "outside" of reality. Speaking of the sacred refers to the relational nature of truth and our inability to control or manipulate it. Transcendence refers to the movements and possibilities of "presence". We are boundaried people but that does not exclude the possibility of communion (and also the transgression of boundary).
What I am wondering is if LS's notion of immanence requires "truth" to always be clean, clinical and reproducible. To be scientific in the most modern sense of the word. I would find this much more frightening that the subscription to fairies and goblins as clinical dissection always requires the death or manipulation of the object and not a relationship with her.

Stay tuned LS had much more to say on the matter.

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Transcedence, Immanence and the Sacred

Much of my thinking and reading lately has come to a head over the issue of immanence and transcendence. In recent blogosphere ventures I encountered several posts on the issue (Larval Subjects here and here, Rough Theory, Transcendental Enquiries). There is understandable criticism over forms of transcendence which need to appeal to something outside in order to explain things or solve things. This of course is the common domain of much religious expression as well as Hollywood plot making where a miraculous visitor or event intervenes to change the course of someone’s life. This is part of the overall criticism of the weakness of religion, religion as a crutch.

My interest in transcendence does not grow out of a need to appeal to something beyond what we can see, experience or explain. However, I also do not assume that humans have the resources or senses to bring all of reality under a loosely scientific model of inquiry and explanation. That may lead some to view my thinking or theory as weak. I am beginning to understand that what I am concerned with is the relational aspect of reality. To paraphrase Nietzsche, “Suppose truth was a relationship – what then?” This is definitely a structural approach to reality. Meaning arises in contextual relationships.

I am however not satisfied with the view that this leads to an evasion of meaning, that meaning is endlessly deferred. This is I suppose where people explicitly or implicitly appeal to a transcendent source to stabilize or deliver meaning. This is where I begin to move towards what may be viewed as an incarnational (any other terms available?) view of reality. What I mean by this is that all of reality, reality as such, has its being (ontology) in a certain potential which as of yet has not bowed and submitted to human colonization. This is where the poetic and aesthetic become most helpful. The poetic respects the possibility of reality. My guiding quote in the header is becoming more and more significant for my thought, “There is another world, and it is the same as this one.” Beauty has not yielded her secrets but she still invites. This is not some plea for something “outside” to clarify or correct. This is the eternal task of relationship, of taking ourselves out of a perceived centre and hovering around the sacred absence necessary for relationship. This in turn leaves not a deferral of meaning but honouring its abundance.

Criticize where necessary. This is certainly a work in progress.

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