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Narrativizing Theory: the Role of Ambiguity in Religious Aesthetics

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Narrativizing Theory: the Role of Ambiguity in Religious Aesthetics University of Denver Digital Commons @ DU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Graduate Studies 1-1-2018 Narrativizing Theory: The Role of Ambiguity in Religious Aesthetics Benjamin John Peters University of Denver Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.du.edu/etd Part of the Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion Commons Recommended Citation Peters, Benjamin John, "Narrativizing Theory: The Role of Ambiguity in Religious Aesthetics" (2018). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 1418. https://digitalcommons.du.edu/etd/1418 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate Studies at Digital Commons @ DU. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ DU. For more information, please contact [email protected],[email protected]. Narrativizing Theory: The Role of Ambiguity in Religious Aesthetics ————— A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the University of Denver and the Iliff School of Theology Joint PhD Program University of Denver ————— In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy ————— by Benjamin John Peters March 2018 Advisor: Dr. Gregory Robbins Author: Benjamin John Peters Title: Narrativizing Theory: The Role of Ambiguity in Religious Aesthetics Advisor: Dr. Gregory Robbins Degree Date: March 2018 ABSTRACT This project expands S. Brent Plate’s “invented religious aesthetics” by bringing it into conversation with Umberto Eco’s theory of ambiguity. It articulates the space that ambiguity opens within the field of religious aesthetics when viewed as a liminal or interdisciplinary theory that neither privileges the starting points of transcendental aesthetics nor the “neo-arches” of theories of materiality. It hints at new ways of studying and describing religious worlds while also illustrating the porous borderlines between narrative and theory. It argues that a religious aesthetic rooted in ambiguity emphasizes both the provisionality of knowledge and the narrativization of reality. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction……………………………………………………………………………......1 Part I: A Theory of Ambiguity………………………………………………………….....8 Chapter One: Ambiguity and Religious Aesthetics……………………………...10 Excursus One: The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia………………………51 Chapter Two: Umberto Eco and the Matter of Texts……………………………63 Chapter Three: Limits, Surplus, and Contradiction…………………………….105 Part II: The Ambiguous Narratives of Reality………………………………………….144 Chapter Four: The Role of Ambiguity in Religious Aesthetics..........................146 Excursus Two: The Kingdom………………………………………………......188 Chapter Five: Narrativizing Theory in The Prague Cemetery………………….198 Chapter Six: The Narrativizing Theories of Ambiguity......................................235 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...274 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………283 iii LIST OF FIGURES Chapter One……………………………………………………………………………...10 Figure 1.1………………………………………………………………………...23 Chapter Two……………………………………………………………………………...63 Figure 2.1…………………………………………………………………….71–72 Chapter Four……………………………………………………………………………146 Figure 4.1……………………………………………………………………….165 Figure 4.2……………………………………………………………………….170 Figure 4.3……………………………………………………………………….174 Figure 4.4……………………………………………………………………….178 Chapter Five…………………………………………………………………………….198 Figure 5.1……………………………………………………………………….211 Figure 5.2……………………………………………………………………….222 iv INTRODUCTION “Many years later she does do that—pour an offering for Shen Liu—but only after the immediate past has become the distant past. How we remember changes how we have lived. Time runs both ways. We make stories of our lives.”1 —Guy Gavriel Kay, Under Heaven While I was writing about ambiguity in religious aesthetics, Philip Salim Francis published his 2017 work, When Art Disrupts Religion: Aesthetic Experience and the Evangelical Mind.2 Whereas his book approaches aesthetics from the social scientific divide of religious studies, mine is thoroughly theoretical. What is important about When Art Disrupts Religion, however, is that, at the outset of Narrativizing Theories, it offers an important reminder while also setting up the questions that I explore. Francis rightly points out that much of modern aesthetic theory focuses on what he calls aesthetic disruption. “The arts,” he writes, “possess a unique capacity to unsettle our entrenched ways of thinking and believing . When we are immersed in an aesthetic experience, it is argued, our conceptual, categorical, and binary ways of thinking give way.”3 This line of reasoning inevitably leads to questions of art’s salvific potential, 1 Guy Gavriel Kay, Under Heaven (New York: ROC, 2010). 2 Philip Salim Francis, When Art Disrupts Religion: Aesthetic Experience and the Evangelical Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 3 Ibid., 4–5. 1 secular aesthetic religions, and the universalization of aesthetic theories. Francis recognizes this and argues that modern aesthetic theory is “in dire need of a dose of its own historicizing medicine.”4 I could not agree more with Francis. Aesthetic theory assumes categorical rupture, universalizes it, and then foists it onto aesthetic experience. And yet, as the conclusion of Narrativizing Theories shows through Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human,5 this is not always the case. Art also has the frightening tendency to reify beliefs and practices that are unpalatable to the liberal, academic world. While Francis does not present a solution to this conundrum of aesthetic theory, he does, unwittingly, open a space for me to inject my theory of ambiguity. If art does not always disrupt, and there are alternate ways of moving in the world, then how does one choose between competing narrativizing theories? “It may be,” Francis writes: that much of the failure to understand ‘fundamentalism’ results from a refusal to place the structure of one’s own mind in familial relation to that of one’s relatively conservative cousins . Do we not all, in our different ways, maintain certain beliefs intractably? Shouldn’t we? Are not some beliefs worth preserving?6 He goes so far as to say, in fact, that some beliefs and practices are worth maintaining even amidst the defamiliarizing experience of aesthetics.7 4 Ibid., 9. 5 Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human (New York: Marines, 2012). 6 Francis, 140. 7 Ibid., 141. 2 The question that follows then is the question that governs much of this text. How do we “distinguish acceptable (or ethical) methods of belief and identity preservation from the unacceptable?”8 I answer this question, though articulated differently at times, in six academic chapters, two excursuses, and one short story embedded throughout the length of this book. These parts argue that a religious aesthetic rooted in ambiguity emphasizes both the provisionality of knowledge and the narrativization of reality. In Part I of this work I define ambiguity as coexistent incompatibility so that, in Part II, I can turn my attention to analyzing Umberto Eco’s theories and novels through that lens. Grossly summarizing both parts, I claim that ambiguity, seen as a coexistent incompatibility, is that which violates, questions, and challenges to expose the epistemological provisionality of any given narrativizing theory, which is an arrangement of a cultural encyclopedia. While that last sentence reads as if ripped from the jargon riddled text of a continental philosopher, I promise, I do define my terms and carefully unpack my argument. But the “Introduction” is a place of signaling, not arguing. It might be helpful to think of ambiguity as a boiling cauldron filled with the churning verbs: “violate,” “question,” and “challenge.” Whereas I do not add my definition of “coexistent incompatibility” to the pot, I paint it on the front of the cauldron in capital letters. It is important to remember that coexistent incompatibility is not a binary construction. It is, rather, an awareness of the plurality of equiprobable realities that can arise from any given encyclopedia. And before you accuse or dismiss my argument as something akin to a naïve relativism, know that Chapters Two and Three 8 Ibid. 3 deal with just that issue by tossing Charles S. Peirce’s “Firstness” and Eco’s “lines of resistance” into the boiling reality of ambiguity. In the excursuses then, I employ my theory of ambiguity outside the orbit of Echian planets. In the first of two, I engage Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia. In the second, Emmanuel Carrère’s The Kingdom. I show, rather than tell, the arguments of Parts I and II. The last part of this work is the short story, “The Composer,” which is hidden throughout various parts of this text. Though I run the risk of didacticism, I have my reasons for doing this. “The Composer” performs or shows the title of this work, Narrativizing Theories. If the arrangement of an encyclopedia is a kind of narrative that is embodied in the world, then this dissertation is the encyclopedia to the arrangement of “The Composer.” This interweaving of dissertation and short story might, perhaps, feel like didacticism, but only because the reader is confronted with the unique opportunity to encounter both encyclopedia and narrative simultaneously, which so rarely happens. The reader is oftentimes solely confronted with “The Composer” and is given the difficult task of working backwards to the matter of arrangement. The desire to reverse
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