Instamatic Theology

Still comparing cultural interpretation in Culture Making and Everyday Theology. We’re now on content…

Content is what the cultural item is trying to communicate and/or do. Roughly we could think of this as making a proposal about how the world should be (Crouch’s third question) or about what it all means. Very likely this won’t be through propositional statements, but by showing or implying. Vanhoozer puts it this way:

cultural texts convey their propositions — their proposals about what it means to be human — not by offering explicit arguments but rather by displaying them in concrete forms.

I think Everyday Theology is the stronger of the two on this point. Remember it is concerned with interpretation, which obviously has a big content focus. Following Vanhoozer then we can say that to get a rounded view of the content we need to look at both what it is trying to do (in Vanhoozers terms I think this is roughly the illocution) and how it is doing it (the locution?).

The ‘how’ is the surface content or the medium, etc. It’s not really covered directly by Crouch’s questions; but perhaps it comes out in the questions that ask what a ‘cultural artefact’ makes possible/impossible/etc. — the ‘how’ comes out in the way that the ‘artefact’ alters the world around us. Perhaps the medium is (in some ways) the change that results.

When you are thinking in terms of ‘cultural texts’ there is room to think more widely (although, I think change-as-medium is a good thing to keep in mind). Here we can bring in narrative points, visual aspects, genre-conventions, as well as the details of the story, etc.. Again, considering the ‘how’ is an important part of listening, to ensure we truly hear what is being said. This reminds me of a quote from Bart Gavigan: “The problem with Christians is that they love theme more than story.” We must be careful not to jump too soon to the ‘message’ before hearing the story.

The ‘what’ is (eventually) the point that we might naturally run to first. What is this item trying to say? We can link this in with a number of our proposed questions/considerations. Within this we can think Vanhoozer’s questions: what is the world of the text? — what is being displayed — and what is the world in front of the text? — what is being proposed about/for your world. As we said, this is related to Crouch’s question asking what is the artefact’s assumption about how the world should be? Or alternatively, What new sense does
it seek to add to a world that often seems chaotic and senseless? 

Let’s try an example to avoid getting bogged down. What is the ‘content’ of cars (to take an example off the top of my head)?

The ‘how’? Well, it’s an artefact, so it is proposes/displays/does by being a functional object, by being something that can be used in a particular way. More specifically by being a technological object. And by changing what we can do, our abilities, the parameters of our world. 

The ‘what’? I guess we could start by saying it displays a world where constraints can be overcome by technology. From a specifically Christian point of view, it displays a world where we are given the ability and flexibility to alter things; a world where resources are placed at our disposal. It proposes a world where rapid travel is a virtue, where distances should not be constraining, where people should not be tied to a particular locality, and (in comparison with public transport) where individuals have only a limited reliance on others in society or societal structures, etc., etc.

Well, that’s a start. By no means a full view, but I guess that gives the idea…

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