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Abstract
In Fredric Jameson's formulation it may now be “easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” What Jameson suggests is that our current preoccupation with the drama of the apocalyptic belies a deeper paralysis of the imagination, and with this the concomitant loss of actions conducive to a new politics. Jameson's comments here foreground a contradiction in our experience of late capitalism, representations of dramatic rupture which obscure fundamental political stasis. This paper takes Jameson's reflections and the contradiction of action which is also non-action as the point of departure to query the current state of Liberation Theology, particularly the work of Ivan Petrella, to defend the work of Gustavo Gutiérrez, and ask how our contemporary predicament might be illuminated by Danny Boyle's zombie film, 28 Days Later.
Notes
1 Taking the apocalyptic not as a “literary genre that introduces the meaning of history as divine destiny unfolding in time” but as a film genre concerned with “progress” and “catastrophe,” the “overturning of a given situation.” Skrimshire, “The End of the Future,” 325–38, at 326; Mousoutzanis, “Apocalyptic Sci Fi,” 458–62, at 458.
2 Lash is quoting Ulrich Beck. Lash, The Beginning and the End of “Religion,” 252. Like Lash, this paper intermittently uses the term “we.” Initially I use it to refer, as Eric Cazdyn says, to “the minority of the world's population who actually have access to [the] good and services” that have been made available by late capitalist development. Later in the paper I again refer to “we” or “our,” but in the more specific sense of those in developed and underdeveloped countries who continue identify themselves with the tradition of Liberation Theology. Cazdyn, The Already Dead, 79.
3 Lash, Beginning and the End of “Religion,” 255, 256.
4 Jameson, “Future City,” 65–79, at 76. Sigurdson, makes a comparable point when he says that “zombies represent the alien within us” for while “they confront us with a scenario where human life is threatened” they should not be understood “as a vision of a dystpoic future, but instead as an apocalypse of the here-and-now.” Sigurdon, “Slavoj Žižek, The Death Drive, and Zombies,” 361–80, at 373.
5 Cazdyn, The Already Dead, 61.
6 Ibid., 61.
7 Ibid., 5.
8 Cazdyn, The Already Dead, 7. Cazdyn uses a joke by the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek to illustrate this: two security officers are patrolling a city street after a military coup in Poland.
The officers have orders to shoot and kill anyone out on the street after 10:00 pm. It is ten minutes to ten and one of the guards sees a man hurrying along and shoots him dead. The other officer, perplexed and worried, turns to his partner and asks why he shot too soon. “I knew the fellow – he lived far from here and in any case would not be able to reach his home in ten minutes, so to simplify matters, I shot him now.”
9 I am indebted here to Stefan Skrimshire for his distinction of the immanent/imminent and his analysis of capitalism as a form of utopia. See Skrimshire, “Another What is Possible?” 201–19, at 204, 207.
10 The chimera of action obscuring an equally real inaction recurs in a number of theorists, and reflections on late capitalist experience. Widely cited authors like Adorno, Baudrillard, and Benjamin, for example, make comparable points. Adorno, in The Culture Industry, says that
what parades as progress in the culture industry, as the incessantly new which it offers up, remains the disguise for an eternal sameness; everywhere the changes mask a skeleton which has changed just as little as the profit motive itself since the time it first gained its predominance over culture.
11 Cazdyn, The Already Dead, 86.
12 http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/21/movies/critic-s-notebook-even-later-28-days-hedges-its-ending.html, accessed September 13, 2014.
13 Horn, Western European Liberation Theology.
14 The identification of “generations” of Liberation Theologians is to be found in Aguilar, The History and Politics of Latin American Theology. Sobrino, “Preface,” vii–xi.
15 Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation, 15. Italics in original.
16 Bell, Liberation Theology, 2, 3, 56–62.
17 Petrella, The Future of Liberation Theology, viii.
18 Gutiérrez, We Drink from Our Own Wells, 136.
19 Jameson, Postmodernism, ix.
20 Ibid., xiv.
21 Jameson, “Politics of Utopia,” 35–54, at 43.
22 Freeland, Plutocrats.
23 Jameson, “Politics of Utopia,” 38.
24 Cazdyn, The Already Dead, 7.
25 Jameson, “Politics of Utopia,” 48, 49.
26 Bauman, Work, Consumerism and the New Poor, 112. This link is also made in Sutler-Cohen, “Plans Are Pointless,” 183–93, at 183.
27 Bell, Liberation Theology, 16.
28 Bell quoting Giles Deleuze. Bell, Liberation Theology, 17.
29 Ibid., 17. I disagree with Bell's presentation of the state as impotent in the face of international capital. While the history of states may be marked this way, to theorise them only in this way, as Bell tends to do, is to foreclose an analysis those real gains that have been won through the mechanisms of the state, to limit the state's possible future importance, and to fail to adequately account for the continued political contestation, even in the most capitalist societies, over what role the state should play.
30 Ibid., 17, 18.
31 Jameson, Postmodernism, 25.
32 Lacan, who Jameson says moved Oedipal rivalry into “Name-of-the-father” as “paternal authority now considered as a linguistic function,” is illuminating to our contemporary disorientation in that “meaning” – generated in the movement from signifier to signifier – is lost when “that relationship breaks down, when the links of the signifying chain snap,” then, he says, “we have schizophrenia in the form of a rubble of distinct and unrelated signifiers.” Ibid., 26.
33 Ibid., 26, 27.
34 Jameson, Postmodernism, 27.
35 The continued usefulness of the “lack of cognitive map” metaphor can be challenged. Cazdyn argues that “only a few years ago, an accessible language did not exist to properly articulate what was going on in the world.” But, Cazdyn continues, the “lack of a cognitive map” does not fully express the current situation and our contemporary condition. He continues:
we can cognitively map the system and learn where our coffee comes from, how our shirts are made… Today, it is more about being bought off on the level of conscience, since it is impossible within commodity culture to be clean,
we don't want to have that commodity, because we know (and don't want to forget) how it's made and how the workers are treated. Nevertheless, we cannot conceive of how to get by without purchasing it (because we see no alternative option) and we cannot prevent feelings of guilt over our participation in a loathsome system.
36 Brown et al., Anglican Social Theology, 34.
37 Graham, Words Made Flesh, 310–28.
38 This can be seen in both the original Dawn of the Dead, and its 2004 remake, for example.
39 I owe suggestion into a mix of continuity and discontinuity to Neil Postman's reflections in Amusing Ourselves to Death, 101.
40 Ibid., 107.
41 Ibid., 109.
42 Ibid., 69.
43 This is based on Baurdrillard, The Illusion of the End, 4.
44 Jameson, “Future City,” 76.
45 The trustworthy Selena reports that the last radio and television shows had recounted outbreaks of the virus in Paris and New York, rendering the last shots, shown above, thematically inconsistent and at variance with the story's narrative so far.
46 http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/28-days-later-2003, accessed January 3, 2017.
47 Zombiewalking is a recent phenomena in which fans of the genre dress as zombies and process through the streets collectively.
48 Cazdyn, The Already Dead, 201.
49 Ibid., 202.
50 Ibid., 203; Sigurdson, “Slavoj Žižek, The Death Drive, and Zombies,” 369.
51 Jameson, “Politics of Utopia,” 48.
52 Ibid., 49.
53 As Adorno says of the culture industry more generally: “mass culture is not to be reproached for contradiction, any more than for its objective or non-objective character, but rather on account of the reconciliation which bars it from unfolding the contradiction into its truth.” Adorno, The Culture Industry, 81.
54 Petrella, Beyond Liberation Theology, 2.
55 Ibid., 9.
56 Ibid., 8.
57 Ibid., 9.
58 João Biehl quoted in Ibid.
59 Ibid.
60 Ibid., 6.
61 Gutiérrez, The Truth Shall Make You Free, 24.
62 Ibid., 24–5, 112–13.
63 Ibid., 113.
64 “Zombies are most decidedly a part of the proletariat,” Sigurdson, “Slavoj Žižek, The Death Drive, and Zombies,” Modern Theology, 369. See also Giroux, “Zombie Politics,” 1–7. I have explored this issue in relation to the policy, practices, institutions and norms concerned with “social exclusion” and contemporary British homelessness in Pemberton, “Charity, Homelessness, and the Doctrine of Creation.”
65 Gutiérrez, The Truth Shall Make You Free, 115.
66 In Gutiérrez's words: “death and injustice are not the final word of history.” Gutiérrez, We Drink from Our Own Wells, 1.
67 Gutiérrez, The Truth Shall Make You Free, 23, 24.
68 Gutiérrez, We Drink from Our Own Wells, 11.
69 It is important to note here that Gutiérrez's work builds on an understanding of theology as witness: a discipline which, at its best, is marked by inquisitiveness and faithfulness. This can of course be justifiably questioned. See the introduction of We Drink from Our Own Wells for a clear statement by Gutiérrez to this effect. Ibid., 1–5.
70 Gutiérrez, Theology of Liberation, 11.
71 Ibid., 111–13, 149–87.
72 Gutiérrez, Theology of Liberation, 168.
73 Jameson, “Politics of Utopia,” 50.
74 Petrella identifies the “canonical” methodology with a “four step” process that involves: (1) Praxis of and with the poor. (2) Socio-political analysis. (3) Theological stage of critical reflection. (4) Return to political praxis. Petrella, The Future of Liberation Theology, 24–46. For “praxis” in these relative theologians see Bonino, Toward a Christian Political Ethics, 37–53; Boff, Theology and Praxis; Boff and Boff, Introducing Liberation Theology, 22–8; Boff, “Method of the Theology of Liberation,” 1–21; Segundo, The Liberation of Theology, 66–97; and Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation, 3–19. This paragraph and the next repeat aspects of the analysis laid out in chapter three of my PhD. See Pemberton, “Charity, Homelessness, and the Doctrine of Creation.”
75 Petrella, The Future of Liberation Theology, viii. Bell goes further than this, rather than see the social sciences/theology as distinct but related disciplines, Bell argues that the first generation of Liberation Theologians “have acquiesced to the separation of religion from the socio-political-economic spheres of life, which entails depriving the Church of a forthright political presence, and have turned to the state as the principle agent of resistance to the capitalist order,” meaning: they advocate “an apolitical Church.” While Bell is like Petrella in his conclusion that the project of Liberation Theology as it was originally articulated has been stifled, and I have already draw on some of his analysis in this paper, I think these further claims by Bell are, at the least, insensitive to the real gains, impact and intentions of these early Liberation Theologians, especially considering his endorsement of the BASE communities only one page earlier. Bell, Liberation Theology, 43, 44.
76 On the compartmentalisation of theology and the social sciences see Gutiérrez, The Truth Shall Make You Free, 58, 61, 62. For another example of this delineation, see Bonino, Christian Political Ethics, 43; Petrella, Future of Liberation, 29.
77 Petrella, Future of Liberation, 28.
78 Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation, 10. Gutiérrez says that “to believe (life) and to understand (reflection) are always part of a circular relationship … orthopraxis and orthodoxy need one another, and each is adversely affected when sight is lost of the other.” Gutiérrez, quoted in http://www.quodlibet.net/articles/gillingham-Gutiérrez.shtml, accessed July 20, 2014.
79 With the fall of real existing socialism, Francis Fukayama argued that we have come to the end of historical progress, neoliberal capitalism is the only political order left available to us practically or imaginatively. A position he later renounced. See Fukuyama, The End of History; and Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future. Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation, 26; Bell, Liberation Theology, 74.
80 The following literature picks up on limitations, and potential, of these respective forms of political and theological action. Petrella, Beyond Liberation Theology; Žižek and Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ, 200; Milbank, The Future of Love, 197–207; Cooper, Controversies in Political Theology; and Shannahan, A Theology of Community Organising.
81 Petrella, Beyond Liberation, 101. Petrella's analysis can help us to illuminate the mixed current status of Liberation Theology in the British context. On the one hand, Liberation Theology was very popular in the UK during the 1980s, around the time of the publication of the Church of England's Faith in the City. According to Malcolm Brown, it was the association of Liberation Theology with Faith in the City that lead a conservative minister to lambaste Faith in the City as “pure Marxist theology”; and the book itself, given such an outstanding and unusual commendation, to go on and become a (theological) best seller. Malcolm Brown's assessment of Liberation Theology now, however, is it that “if not a blind alley” it did in retrospect constitute a “rather unpromising turn.” His assessment is qualified, by reference to British ecclesiological conditions in the UK, and late twentieth century American foreign policy in relation to South America, but it is interesting in its suggestion that Liberation Theology, while promising much, was unhelpful in formulating renewed forms of political and ecclesiological praxis. It promised something, but led nowhere; leaving “socially active Christians … almost naked.” Brown et al., Anglican Social Theology, 10, 11.
82 Petrella, Future of Liberation Theology, 39, 40, 104.
83 The separation of the “theological” from the “liberative” is clearly stated in the “Coda” to Petrella's Beyond Liberation Theology, 148–50.
84 Bell, Liberation Theology, 141–2, 151.
85 Ibid, 144.
86 Bell does later re-introduce “justice” into the argument, justice after forgiveness which is full and non-violent justice. Arguably this move is consonant with the complex and contradictory form of Liberation Theology that this paper is exploring. However, Bell attempts no comparable re-integration of either the economy or the state (the key spheres he argues are defined by concepts of justice at variance with the Christian tradition of forgiveness) and his account of theo-political theology is, on these grounds, still significantly lacking. See Bell, Liberation Theology, 186, 187.
87 Jameson, “Politics of Utopia,” 47.
88 Ibid., 50.
89 Ibid.
90 Ibid.
91 Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation, 15.
92 Ibid., 14.
93 Gutiérrez, We Drink from Our Own Wells, 136.
94 Ibid., 136. My emphasis.
95 Lash, Beginning and End of “Religion,” 256.
96 See, Lash, Theology for Pilgrims. Strategically, this theo-political vision is comparable with aspects of the “Bartlebian” politics of refusal advocated by Žižek, as it will also value the power of refusal, of saying “no.” Žižek, Violence.
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Charles Samuel Christie Pemberton
Charles Samuel Christie Pemberton is currently the William Leech Research Fellow at the Department of Theology and Religion, Durham University. He obtained PhD at the University of Manchester on the Christian doctrine of creation, homelessness, and charity, and is now writing a theo-political reflection on the rise of British foodbanks.