Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
I was planning to write this post before reading the recently posted extract from Culture Making. Having looked at that, it’s even clearer that we must not miss this step out.
Both Andy Crouch and Kevin Vanhoozer don’t want us to read culture purely for the sake of reading. The reading has to be a springboard to being cultural agents in our own right.
I’ve quoted this from Vanhoozer before, but it’s worth repeating
The mission of the church is to witness to the truth of the gospel by participating in God’s building project, realizing the well-wrought world redeemed in Christ.
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The church is to be a glimpse of the new world in the midst of the old, a reminder that the old order is passing away and a standing witness to the new. Accordingly, it is charged with the task of being a permanent revolution to prevailing plausibility structures.
Crouch is even clearer on the need to make culture as well as analyse. A key point for him is that
The only way to change culture is to create more of it.
His contention is that the church tends to try to change culture one of four ways: either by condemning, critiquing, copying (forming a sub-culture) or consuming. None of these work in practice, the only way to change culture is
to create something new, something that will persuade our neighbours to set aside some existing set of cultural goods for our new proposal.
For the sake of this post, I’ll focus specifically on critique/analysis. Crouch points to the example that film reviewers are rarely able to influence the general trend of film production. In fact, they rarely affect the success of an individual film. Consequently,
[w]e may produce very sophisticated analyses of the cultural goods around us. … But the depressing truth is that critique and analysis rarely change culture at all. … The academic fallacy is that once you have understood something — analysed and critiqued it — you have changed it. But academic libraries are full of brilliant analyses of every facet of human culture that have made no difference at all in the world beyond the stacks.
Although both agree on this, it is notable that Vanhoozer’s book gets very close to the problem Crouch notes (as discussed in the last post):
you would think that the solution to disembodiment would be embodiment—the living out in the flesh of the transforming vision. … But the emphasis always somehow stays on perception and vision, on thinking, on analysis.
While holding a clear view of the need for performance, it is not clear from Everyday Theology what comes next. But that is probably unfair, since the book is not focussed in that direction and Vanhoozer does discuss performance elsewhere. On the other hand, embodiment is the focus of Culture Making, so it will be interesting to see how practical Crouch can be…
Tags: books, culture, Culture Making (Crouch), Everyday Theology (Vanhoozer), hermeneutics
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July 19th, 2008
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
Finally, in our comparison of cultural interpretation in Culture Making and Everyday Theology, we have consequences. Whereas Vanhoozer’s ‘cultural texts’ approach gave more depth to the content question, Crouch’s ‘cultural artefacts’ view gives more in the consequences question.
Consequences can roughly be aligned to Vanhoozer’s ‘perlocation’ — the outcome of the cultural activity. However, I wonder if the Culture Making questions are more productive, simply because they point to specific ways of thinking about this area: What is made possible by this artefact?, What is made impossible?, What new forms of culture are made in response to the artefact?
(I guess we should note that because Vanhoozer is less specific he potentially allows more consequences to be considered. For instance, he makes an interesting points around ‘culture as spiritual formation’, which doesn’t easily fit with Crouch’s questions, but I think guidelines such as those in Culture Making are a helpful start…)
The important point being that culture shapes the world around it. It isn’t just a description or picture, but is a key way that we affect the world. Andy Crouch, quoting Ken Myers:
Culture is what we make of the world.
So, we mustn’t just think of culture as simply some optional decoration that is attached to life. Culture changes and shapes our surroundings and us. And a complete reading of culture asks what the consequences are.
For instance, lets go back to cars. Possibilities opened up include rapid travel and connections to places that may have been almost cut off in the past. On the other hand, it is almost impossible to think of a slower pace to life, at least in part due to this ‘artefact’. And, of course, the cultural response includes an immense road system, petrol stations, road taxes, motor sport, etc., etc., etc.
It’s also important to realise that what the consequences of a cultural item are not necessarily related to the content or the intention of its maker. We discussed the ‘content’ of cars but at no point did we bring in the impact on the environment (nor, of course, most of the cultural responses we just listed). I guess a big part of culture making is that opens up unseen paths.
It’s worth remembering also that one of the consequences is a shaping of our imagination. Again, this may not be directly linked to the intentions of the maker. Think about westerns. Movies in this genre may not have any intention of proposing anything about fire-arms, they are simply a component of the genre. But, it may be that, unintentionally, the viewers imagination is shaped to view them as a viable are a solution to problem, etc. Something to bear in mind both when reading and creating. (See also a
recent post on how we communicate what we believe).
Tags: books, culture, Culture Making (Crouch), Everyday Theology (Vanhoozer), hermeneutics
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July 13th, 2008
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
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…
Tags: books, culture, Culture Making (Crouch), Everyday Theology (Vanhoozer), hermeneutics
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July 12th, 2008
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
OK, so we’re trying to synthesise Culture Making and Everyday Theology by thinking of cultural items in terms of Context, Content and Consequences; the question is where do we put the different questions/considerations of each book?
Context is really what Vanhoozer calls ‘the world behind the text’. It consists of the assumptions and worldviews of the author(s), as well as things that are happening around at the time, the characteristics of the medium and the personal experiences of the author. It is what shapes the reason and character of the item/work/artefact.
Of course, we can also pull in Crouch’s first question here, which helpfully focusses us on one particular aspect of this — What is assumed about the way the world is? Perhaps, we can also see half of the second question: What is assumed about the way the world should be? or as Crouch develops this: What vision of the future animated its creators? As a background to creating it is likely that a ‘culture agent’ will have some assumption of how things should be and this will filter through to what they create and say.
I guess it is easy to jump straight to analysing the message, but in many cases we don’t understand correctly unless we listen to the context first. We need to slow down and understand what is going on around before we decide what is being proposed.
As a really simple example, think of genre films (and, as
Mark Kermode reminds us, there is nothing wrong with genre films): If you don’t understand the conventions of a genre, how are you going to understand the message? The message of a science fiction film may not be that we should expect life from other worlds to visit soon, even if that is what appears on the surface. The message comes in how the key components of the genre are handled or used.
Tags: books, culture, Culture Making (Crouch), Everyday Theology (Vanhoozer), hermeneutics
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July 11th, 2008
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
Two current books,
Everyday Theology (Kevin Vanhoozer et al) and the up-coming
Culture Making (Andy Crouch) both start with approaches to understanding or reading culture. I thought it would be interesting to attempt a synthesis of the two. Foolhardy, perhaps, but let’s try.
While trying this, it’s important to keep in mind that these two books have different models in mind. Vanhoozer is thinking ‘interpretation’, Crouch is thinking ‘making’. Both have similary goals: understanding as an aid to being a faithful ‘cultural agent’ and I think the two approachescan be complementary in many ways.
Before we try for full-on synthesis, here is a brief overview of the approach to understanding that each take…
Everyday Theology brings in two basic grids for thinking about culture. The first is looks at culture items as ‘texts’. With this in mind, we can consider the world behind the text (what is the context), the world of the text (what is displayed by the text) and the world in front of the text (what is the proposal for your world).
The second brings in speech-act ideas. In this case we can think of the locution (roughly, what is the content? For example, ‘a story about a wolf & a girl who likes wearing red’), the illocution (what are the speakers doing in speaking?, e.g. ‘suggesting that talking to strangers may lead to unfortunate consequences’), and the perlocution (what is the result of the speech?, e.g. ‘children become more wary of talking to strangers’)
Culture Making has a more straight-forward set of questions. It is focussed on culture as artefacts and the questions reflect this. So, Crouch asks ‘What is assumed about the way the world is?’, ‘What is assumed (or proposed) about the way the world should be?’, ‘What is made possible by this artefact?’, ‘What is made impossible?’, ‘What new forms of culture are made in response to the artefact?’
I wonder if we can synthesise these by thinking along three lines: Context, Content and Consequences (you see what I did there?
It should be noted that in doing this, we’re almost certain to lose something in translation (especially for Vanhoozer’s ideas), but I think it helps as a framework to start with. At least, for me to collect my thoughts. Maybe for others too.
Tags: books, culture, Culture Making (Crouch), Everyday Theology (Vanhoozer), hermeneutics
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July 10th, 2008
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
I’ve been meaning to write something about Everyday Theology: How to Read Cultural Texts and Interpret Trends (edited by Kevin Vanhoozer, Charles Anderson and Michael Sleasman) for a while. Having mentioned Andy Crouch’s book Culture Making, I’m encouraged to get around to doing this.
I thought this book was superb. The basic idea is to present a method for interpreting culture texts and then exemplify the method through a number of ‘cultural text’ readings. Apparently, it came out of Kevin Vanhoozer’s Cultural Hermeneutics course and the essays are the best examples of ‘cultural exegesis’ that were produced in response.
I guess the background explains the amazing variety of subjects covered. Certainly it is one of the strengths of the book that the subjects addressed are not limited to a particular area of culture, but give examples of how to view many different aspects of life from a Christian perspective. It is a premise of Vanhoozer’s method that all parts of our cultural life constitute texts that can be ‘read’. Consequently the book includes essays on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Mega-church Architecture and Supermarket checkouts, as well as more obvious cultural product like Eminem’s music and the Ridley Scott’s Gladiator. Although some essays caught my imagination more than others, they are are all of a very high quality and manage to avoid simplistic analyses or cliché responses. I guess that is a tribute to Vanhoozer’s method.
The book is top and tailed with chapters that help understand the exegetical method. The first is an essay by Vanhoozer discussing ‘how and why Christians should read culture’; the last is an essay by Anderson and Sleasman leading the reader through a test case (American wedding ceremonies), showing the steps to using the method in practice.
The final chapter is important — it’s not unusual for this type of book to present the theory and leave you unclear how to start for yourself. However, it is really Vanhoozer’s opening essay that makes this book so good. I guess it is a summary of the essential parts of the course. Certainly it covers an immense amount of ground in not-too-many-pages. It starts with a discussion of what culture is and what it does, leading to answers as to why we should learn to interpret. As well as needing to understand our neighbours to love them, it is important for a faithful life:
In order to be competent proclaimers and performers of the gospel … Christians must learn to read the Bible and culture alike. Christians cannot afford to continue sleepwalking their way through contemporary culture, letting their lives, and especially imaginations, become conformed to culturally devised myths, each of which promises more than it can deliver: “Do not be conformed any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Rom 12:2)
The essay then moves on to methods of reading and interpretation. A key component of Vanhoozer’s view is that ‘understanding cultural discourse demands a thick description of what has been wrought…’ and consequently his method takes a number of approaches to understanding the ‘texts’. He borrows ‘speech act’ categories from linguistic philosophy and ideas from Mortimer Adler’s ‘How to read a book’. The idea is that by coming at the subject from different angles and asking a number of different questions we can build up a good picture of what the ‘text’ is assuming, saying, doing, proposing, etc.
I started by making a connection Crouch’s up-coming Culture Making. Although Vanhoozer is primarily interested in analysis, he is very clear on the need to be cultural agents (and for this reason, I am hopeful that the two books will be complementary).
Faith’s search for understanding of our everyday word is not merely theoretical. Everyday theologians must demonstrate their understanding in practice by becoming cultural agents. Indeed, if the church is a community of interpreters — of Scripture and of culture — it is for the sake of becoming an effective community of cultural agents. This involves, first, interpreting culture in light of a biblical-theological framework and, second, interpreting Scripture by embodying gopel values and truths in concrete forms. The mission of the church is to witness to the truth of the gospel by participating in God’s building project, realizing the well-wrought world redeemed in Christ.
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Christian cultural agency is the art of being “in between” Christ and everyday culture.
Tags: books, culture, Everyday Theology (Vanhoozer)
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May 21st, 2008
A random walk over culture, art, christianity, etc. with occasional photographs...