2.6 Smith, Revelation, and Formal Indications
2.6.2 Smith and Economy
The formal indication in which we do not predicate anything of the divine but instead simply point, this is where Smith locates his hope. Of course, he does not mean that all we do is stand and point, surely not with our fingers and arms. We have to speak in order to formally indicate. God appears to us in a way we can receive God, and our reception of God is a formal indication of God. What do we receive when we receive God with our ‘concept’? Without predicating anything of God, the ‘concept’ can convey nothing about God other than an
invitation to others to see for themselves. Yet, that is surely not what Aquinas and Husserl meant by analogy. The logic of incarnation means that Jesus enters into our words and ‘concepts’ so that our speech indicates. The content of our speech, which does not predicate anything of God, points beyond itself to God. This seems to be a traditional apophatic theology. Our words cannot convey positive content – predicates – of God. They cannot tell us what God is. They can only indicate what God is not/like through negation.
128 As I stated above, in The Fall, Smith embraces a realized eschatology. He cannot accept that the fullness of revelation would come anywhere other than in the finite ontology of the now. His commitment to rescuing creation from being deficient, therefore, results in the necessity of a realized eschatology. With his absolute rejection of what he views as ‘original fallenness,’ how could his eschatology be otherwise than realized?
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However, in apophatic theology, God does not appear, and Smith is very committed to God showing up. In apophatic theology, we speak equivocally of God. God is good, yes, but God’s goodness is different from how we understand and use the term, ‘good.’ Here we find Smith’s semiology. Something is absent from our word, ‘good.’ That absence is God’s
transcendence. In this way, our word ‘good,’ is a sign and a formal indication rather than being predicative of God. Can this equivocation and non-predication escape the economic rationality of modernity? Can it escape the economic exchange? Bourdieu claims that “the relations of
communication par excellence-linguistic exchanges- are also relations of symbolic power in which the power relations between speakers or their respective groups are actualized.”129 Does an indicative ‘concept,’ one that posits no predicate, escape symbolic or economic power relations? Surely there is no necessity of an indicative ‘concept’ escaping economic relations. A formal indication remains a speech act. For an indication to function, there must be a social- linguistic capacity in place that recognizes the indication. At that point, the point that an indication or a sign becomes meaningful, the formal indication has become economic.
What of interpretation? Smith is committed to a plurality of interpretation as a manifestation of God’s good intentions for finite creation. Does pluralism escape economic relations? On this topic, Bourdieu suggests that “religion and politics achieve their most
successful ideological effects by exploiting the possibilities contained in the polysemy inherent in the social ubiquity of the legitimate language.”130 Of course, language is equivocal and polysemous. But that is already part of the economy of language, allowing some users to accrue value while others are devalued. Bourdieu’s point is that this polysemy is not extraordinary. It
129 Bourdieu, Language, 37.
130 Ibid., 29.
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does not rescue us from valuation or demands of legitimacy. Rather, it plays into those things.
Pluralities of interpretation play into structures of economic use and exploitation. Even in the attempt to cast down all standards of legitimacy, we establish standards of legitimacy. When we sanctify the ordinary, the ordinary becomes sacred.
Bourdieu provides examples of how different interpretations and meanings come to reflect economic structures. He identifies the French term, soigné, which suggests
conscientiousness, tidiness, or carefulness. Bourdieu notes that this became a term deeply approved of by the petit bourgeoisie. And precisely because of that economic association, it became a term “rejected by intellectuals for whom, precisely, it evokes everything that is petit- bourgeois, petty and mean-spirited.”131 Surely such a term is an exception. To dispel that potential critique, Bourdieu then turns to the language of mathematics and the term group. In order to maintain a univocal meaning for that term, mathematicians must control “the
homogeneity of the group.”132 The need for regulation brings to mind the scientific paradigms of Kuhn. Paradigms ensure that scientists will think alike by “agreeing to the same rules and
standards for practice.”133 Paradigms not only produce consensus, but they ensure ongoing consensus, not unlike the role of orthodoxy in theology. In other words, the marketplace of mathematics and science achieves something approaching univocity only through strict
regulations and interventions.134 They do so by rejecting the plurality of interpretations. Left to
131 Ibid., 40.
132 Ibid.
133 Kuhn, Scientific Revolutions, 476.
134 “Recourse to a neutralized language is obligatory whenever it is a matter of establishing a practical consensus between agents or groups of agents having partially or totally different interests” (Bourdieu, Language, 40).
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their own unregulated devices, the meaning of words will conform to economics, and even those that are highly regulated will experience revolutions.135
Left to itself, an unregulated society will expand the meaning of words. It takes a regulated, homogeneous group to fix the meaning of words. In other words, if Smith is worried about the truncation of concepts, perhaps he should be concerned with the expanding diversity of the community. In fact, that may be what he is concerned with when he seeks to impose
regulations and limitations on the community through the ‘concept.’ Essentially, for Smith to correct the violence of the concept by establishing the ‘concept,’ he needs to purify the
community – to make the community more homogeneous through the imposition of regulations (thereby leading to future revolutions). To maximize the plurality of interpretations of the divine, the ‘concept’ can be used only in certain legitimate ways. This approach is clearly the one he has taken tentative steps upon, though without recognizing the outcome of his approach.
Bourdieu refers to the position that Smith seems to have adopted as neo-Kantian, “which gives language and, more generally, representations a specifically symbolic efficacy in the construction of reality.”136 The ‘concept’ becomes a condition of speaking about God, which then avoids metaphysical violence. It avoids making God play roles in which God no longer recognizes Godself. It avoids truncating God. In so doing, ‘concepts’ limit transcendence by imposing a structure on reality, such as a reverse participatory ontology. Smith’s position authorizes a way of seeing the world, which “helps to construct the reality of that world.”137
135 We must note that the cause of these revolutions in science is precisely a result of economic factors.
136 Ibid., 105
137 Ibid., 106.
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Levinas, almost seeming to echo St. Paul, says, “In undertaking what I willed, I realized so many things I did not will.”138 Interpretation is a step beyond formal indication. Interpretation is necessarily predicating, and even if something of God remains absent in our equivocation and polysemy, something else becomes present. Interpretation is the occasion for the introduction of the invisible hand, the transferable logics, and the statistical regularities that structure economic epistemology. Levinas continues from above: “The worker does not hold in his hands all of the threads of his own action. . . . [Works] can be exchanged, that is, be maintained in the anonymity of money.”139 The question then becomes for us whether there is a return on our investment of speaking of God. Is there profit to be made here? In other words, the modern question is less about how words refer and more about their market value. Bourdieu states that it is “the intellectualist philosophy which treats language as an object of contemplation rather than as an instrument of action and power.”140 Signification is less about correlation and more about economics – power! This is an area Smith fails to address.
There have been those, like Auguste Comte, who offered a form of “linguistic
communism,”141 the idea that “language forms a kind of wealth, which all can make use of at once without causing any diminution of the store, and which thus admits a complete community of enjoyment.”142 We should notice right away the parallels between Comte’s claims and those of Locke regarding private property and the commonwealth. The notion here is that there is no
138 Levinas, Totality, 176. St. Paul: “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do” (Rom.
7:19).
139 Levinas, Totality, 176.
140 Bourdieu, Language, 37.
141 Ibid., 43-4.
142 Auguste Comte, System of Positive Polity, 2 (New York: Burt Franklin, 1875): 213.
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real cost to our words, perhaps meaning no ethical cost. No one is affected, benefited, or exploited through language. Smith would need a type of economically-neutral linguistic commonwealth for his position to hold. But if Locke’s position leads to imperialism and colonialism, can Comte’s do otherwise?
Whence revelation? What are we to say about revelation in this context? God
condescends to appear, but in a way that the person can understand. Dupré states that “revelation must be reasonable.”143 But if reason is a product of history, then it has no eschatology, no surprise, and no transcendence. Today, the reason and rationality available to us is economics. Is that how God appears? Does God appear economically? What would such a revelation reveal? Is God’s revelation “delivered over to the anonymous field of the economic life, in which I
maintain myself . . . through labor and possession?”144 We have already established that economic rationality leaves no space and no future for the Other. It has no apocalyptic eschatology; no future coming. Levinas describes precisely Smith’s revelation: “The Other signals himself, but does not present himself. The works symbolize him . . . it reveals only in concealing. In this sense, the signs constitute and protect my privacy.”145 Smith had argued that God was protecting God’s own privacy in God’s refusal to appear, but what if Smith was, instead, protecting the private property of the receiver? The private property that is their own interpretation? The private property that is our right as interpreters? This reason and rationality place a fence around the pasture of revelation, ensuring that revelation become productive and efficient. This reason provides security and profit.
143 Dupré, Enlightenment, 246.
144 Levinas, Totality, 176.
145 Ibid.
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Concepts are never private, but always social. The recipient of revelation does not receive a ‘private’ concept or ‘concept’ of God, which they then convey indirectly in a formally-
indicative way. Kierkegaard’s indirect communication is a mode of establishing a relationship rather than communicating content. Smith views the self/thinker/speaker as the origin of the
‘concept’ and fails to recognize that language is social. Because language is social, concepts or
‘concepts’ come from outside or beyond the self. Even when one is praising, praying, meditating, or reflecting, the concept is already economically formed. Signification is itself economic.
Consequently, a semiological structure offers no escape from conceptual violence.