Having battled my way through John Milbank’s contribution to The Monstrosity of Christ, I was struck by three things (not having read Milbank since, well, Theology and Social Theory).
a. It really is the most audacious effort to absolutise theology, to which the answer must a radical relativisation of theology.
b. He’s become a warrior for the Counter-Reformation.
c. He exhibits that dreadful embarrassment of all Anglo-Catholics: if Henry VIII hadn’t had a wandering dick, they’d all still be snug and cosy with the bishop of Rome.
20 December, 2009 at 9:16 am
Žižek makes the very reply to Milbank which you suggest in (a). He might have been unaccustomed to the way in which theologians feel free to rest criticism on self-evident truths which they never even bother to defend. I reckon many people have the false, yet quite reasonable, expectation that a theologian is someone who thinks through theology, rather than being someone who is engaged in the practice of finding new expressions to assert boring old doctrines.
Here’s Žižek:
“… Milbank crticizes me simply for what I claim, as if my position is self-evidently untenable. Take the following passage from his reply: ‘… his Christ is a stuttering madman… if the upshot of the Incarnation is that we now see God as fully there in ordinary life… this can first appear to view only through an event which combines the extraordinary with the ordinary. This is exactly what Žižek fails to see…’ Of course I ‘fail to see’ this–not because Christ is for a mere ‘stuttering madman,’ but because, for me, there is no transcendent God-Father who dscloses himself to us, humans, only in a limited way.” (235)
Milbank’s section in the book was mainly just annoying reactionist bs.
20 December, 2009 at 9:34 am
Agreed. He seems to have become progressively more reactionary. I’m sure he would feel Vatican II was a massive error. I have found that even those deeply sympathetic to Milbank et al ended up cheering for Zizek. The lowest point was his excruciating ‘parable’ about the drive through the mists south of Nottingham.
29 December, 2009 at 4:37 am
Milbank does not think Vatican II an error in the slightest. And clearly his critique of modernity is directed especially at certain aspects of the Counter-Reformation. He has changed little at all and all his argumentative thrusts you seem to miss. Frankly these comments suggest a complete failure to keep abreast with current thought. I’m not suprized the mist had you so lost.
29 December, 2009 at 7:36 am
Ah, it’s always good to receive such affirmations first thing in the morning, although I must say I’m pleased to have missed Milbank’s ‘thrusts’.
29 December, 2009 at 8:30 am
Plenty of folks think he has shifted the emphasis in his thought. The recent support of Phillip Blond’s nefarious “Red Tory mood music”, which will help bring in unbridled Thatcherism (to the bridled Thatcherism of Labour) to power in the UK suggests at the very least an implicitly conservative move. Almost universally the reviews have been negative of the book as well.
30 December, 2009 at 12:04 am
Milbank has been at least glancingly critical of Vatican II. In a long piece which has been removed from the website of COTP, he said it was overall a very mixed bag, with good bits (generally the resourcement bits) and bad bits. There are errors, certainly more than slight ones. With regard to other RO authors, there is a lengthy section in Catherine Pickstock’s After Writing that criticises Vatican II liturgical reforms in detail.
With regard to your more substantial comments, you are basically wrong. If one think has been consistent in radical orthodoxy it has been that a empistemic break comes with Duns Scotus and his Francisian peers. This was well in force, and Scotus was well in the ground before any of the reformation, or counter-reformation began. At the very least you might understand where basically the RO critique of modernity begins, if one is to ‘keep abreast with current thought’.
It must be bracing to write such comments, assured you are right. It must however be irksome when you are in fact totally wrong in every respect.
29 December, 2009 at 8:20 am
[...] weird | Tags: polemic | 1 Comment In his comment to an earlier post of mine on Milbank, Alasdair Maclagan writes: Frankly these comments suggest a complete failure to keep abreast with current [...]
29 December, 2009 at 11:15 am
And the section on Catholic (without the necessary ‘Roman’) and Protestant meta-histories is excruciatingly bad. It reminds me of some conservative RC arguments that all that is bad with the world is due to the Reformation.
30 December, 2009 at 1:11 am
This one is certainly kicking along after Alasdair weighed in. And Alex, yes, the big break was with Scotus, at least for some of the RO crowd. In one of Pickstock’s pieces (I think), the strains of both modernism and postmodernism may already be found.
Not sure if this one’s directed at me:
‘It must be bracing to write such comments, assured you are right. It must however be irksome when you are in fact totally wrong in every respect’.
But if so, I’m more than happy to admit my errors, of which there are many …
But … it does raise an interesting question. If one searches for the root of orthodoxy, and if one has found it (or believes so), then what next? Are you boxed in, only to become more orthodox than radical?
30 December, 2009 at 6:00 am
Roland – it wasn’t aimed at you at all! It was aimed at our mutual friend Alasdair, who has bundered in accusing you of not getting Milbank, while displaying the fact he doesn’t seem to understand his positions himself!
30 December, 2009 at 6:30 am
Anthony Paul Smith appears utterly at sea with British politics. The fact is that Blond is seen in London as the first person seriously to have challenged Thatcherism in British political life by coming up with the glimmerings of an alternative. (This is to agree with Anthony that New Labour is merely Thatcherism continued — weakened in places though actually on the whole made ore extreme.) He is right that a Cameron govt. will likely mean yet more virulent Thtacherism ie neoliberalism. But Blond is the one person who could stop this happenening by weakening the influence of Osborne, the shadow-chancellor. Cameron as all concede has a real one-nation streak. Yet Blond’s ideas on mutualism in welfare have already been massively taken up by labour. Likewise his economic thinking is endorsed by Will Hutton on the left. Together they are trying to sace Cadbury’s from Kraft. Far more could be said. basically Blond lies close to Paul Hisrt’s asscoiationism as does Milbank. ow is tis simply ‘reartionary’? Milbank has been Ruskinian from square one. The fusion of socialism and Toryism was invented by Ruskin. Yet Milbank is clear in print he remains ‘blue labour’ and not ‘red tory’ — close to Cruddas and Glasman on the Labout LEFT. OK its religious wing — but Milbank has always insisted — see his very early Coleridge essay in the Future of Love that Christian socialism is not the same as secular socialism and the ‘tory’ strand is linked to this. He has not changed only become more developed and precise in hs political thinking. Thus he and hs freinds alone — including Zamagni and others near to the Pope — are coming up with real plans to end neo-liberalism. Meanwhile there is no non-liberal left to speak of………………
30 December, 2009 at 9:22 am
I always suspected the bishop of Rome was a (national) socialist.
30 December, 2009 at 10:28 am
I’ll now leave most of you to your wilfully decadent ignorance where everything is indicator and innuendo and nothing is position and argument. RO is fighting the real war againt liberalism already mutating into a new mode of totalitarianism — out there in the grown-up serious world. Like most people today, when you hear something new, all you can do is wonder which of your assumed eternal categorical boxes it fits into. As a result you’ve missed the way in which the entire terms of poliical debate are changing and the way in which a kind of new synthesis of Marx, Ruskin, Polanyi, Macintyre and Zamagni is generating a critique of capitalism that exceeds that of socialism so far and starts to explain why socialism has been so impotent in the face of neoliberalism. The same synthesis is already generating new practical alternatives. And the crucial mark of its success is that all this is better grasped by practical politicians, journaliss, businesspeople, trades unionists and community activists than it is by academic leftists stuck in sterile — and utterly non-intllectual slogansing. RO, RT and BL show the way out of the triple non-radicalism of ‘emancipatory’ (now such a silly, vacuous term) politics: 1. its seeking of merely small consolatory gains in the face of assumed inevitable tragedy 2. Its seeking of democratic power-balance as a substitute for the naivety of virtue — thereby committing the greater naivety of supposing one can dispense with virtue — of the masses or of the leaders who always re-emerge in any system. (The only non-naivety is to say we need both democratic power balance and virtue). 3. Its confinement to the pathos of seeing all power and inequality as bad and therefore to be limited as far as possible — instead of asking what power and what inequalities can be justified. If one answered — those that further virtue and education into virute, then we could have a far more economically equal society than any so far seen. If any of you find this hermetic then you have to take this as proof that you have no idea of the new political and theoretical horizons in Europe today. Start reading and researching. And talk to Milbank, Blond and Glasman.
30 December, 2009 at 11:08 am
[...] radical orthodoxy | Leave a Comment Much smoke over at on old post of mine called ‘Milbank in the Monstrosity of Christ‘. A certain Alasdair Maclagan is making some rather large claims for the way radical [...]
30 December, 2009 at 12:25 pm
I think I understand British politics pretty well, but you are entitled to your opinion. I wonder if, after the inevitable failure of a Tory government, with or without Blond’s influence (which will likely play out much like Giddens’ influence on Blair), there will be some kind of recognition of the failure.
There are, of course, non-liberal left movements. To say there isn’t shows a disconnect from the non-aspirational youth movements throughout Europe. That they don’t set any kind of mood music at the level of electoral politics is perhaps a problem, but I don’t see the answer adding some intellectual dressing to a broken party. Most of these movements are outside the purview of the State government, but this doesn’t seem to work as well in Britian partly because of its lingering feudal and undemocratic character. The attempt may fail, but it certainly is not eschewing power, but far more honest and rigorous in its analysis of what form that power must take.
As to Blond’s ideas, the proof of their effectiveness as a State power play will be found in the policy analysis, not the political philosophy. We can talk about virtue and all that, but it fails to mean much unless you see how it will be put into practice. Most of what he’s suggested, in print and in person, seems wrong to me for a number of reasons. They seem like fundamentally old ideas that don’t get to the root of the problem. The policy initiatives suggested, and endorsed by Cameron, may likely amount to little more than the old game of pulling votes from the margins (like the suggestion made a few years ago by a Tory shadow minister that they would build TGV lines). No one is talking about what it would take to actually make trains more viable than flying and so one can only assume that the mainstream leaders of both Labour and the Tories have no actual interest in actually carrying out these policies. We also are witnessing the Tories turning the pre-electoral discussion into a battle of who can cut more with no one talking about the real problems here (neoliberal deregulation). If Blond could do anything, it should be that, but it seems to be more about some kind of vague family-centrist mutualism than stating the hard thing.
Seemingly less “big idea” groups like the New Economics Foundation are more radical in this area and far more clear what policy changes would actually happen. Blond’s discussion of economics is fundamentally blind without a much stronger sense of the environmental crisis (which he may or may not believe in, there have been moments that seemed to suggest an misunderstanding of ecological limits due to a metaphysical misunderstanding of what ecological limits are). There is also something nefarious about the lack of transparency of donors to ResPublica, noted by ThinkLeft amongst others online.
Now, if you could leave off the insults I would appreciate it. I may not agree with you, but I’m not “out to sea”. Obviously there are people who really believe this stuff, but there are also trade unionist and community organizers who find it repugnant. This sort of “my group is bigger than your group” does not constitute an argument, at least not without statistical data.
30 December, 2009 at 3:16 pm
Anthony, you’re boxing with a shadowy opponent, but it looks like you’ve realised that.
30 December, 2009 at 5:14 pm
Alasdair, can you please elaborate on what you mean when you say there is no non-liberal left. What about the student activists across Europe who have occupied campus buildings in opposition to the neoliberal Bologna process and seem to be working out practices of self-government, mutual aid, and direct democracy? What about the youth and workers in Greece who have been rioting, striking, occupying campuses, etc. to protest neoliberalism?
Would you call these developments liberal?
30 December, 2009 at 6:18 pm
Mamos, you might want to check who you’re challenging here. See http://stalinsmoustache.wordpress.com/2009/12/30/who-is-alasdair-maclagan/
Alasdair is not all he seems.
31 December, 2009 at 12:03 am
Ditto in the former Yugoslavia, where young people have changed the terms of the debate in a wave of student occupations which have brought the idea of direct workers democracy into the national debate.
30 December, 2009 at 6:46 pm
[...] … seems remarkably familiar, especially if you’ve been following the comments at Milbank in Monstrosity of Christ, or if you’ve read some of his works. Unless, of course, it’s a very, very clever ploy [...]
30 December, 2009 at 7:34 pm
S’s M. seems a little confused. Osborne is Blond’s Thatcherite *enemy*. Otherwise, from you lot — a little light social democracy, ecological piety (though to be sure, I share it and I’m sure APS will agree that finitism not infinitism is the metaphysical villain here)and some nostalgic ‘youth’ gestures. (Everyone knows that coralling of the young into ‘youth’ is what capitalism most desires.) I rest my case here. Otherwise much of what APS says is right. And yet, if he dug deeper he would find that the cross-party rise of mutualism goes deeper than the old Giddens-thing and as the power to outlast electoral fortunes. Read eg Jonathan Freedland’s Guardian report on encouragement of social visiting movement where he precisely adopts the insight that the old wish neither to be consumers nor welfare dependents. Or read Bruni and Zamagni’s Civil Economy (not perfect, not left enough, but still more radical than most of the current left) with its real suggestions for how to make economic exchanges also social and political ones realising equity. This is so much more than trains versus planes — though of course, I’m all for that. Over and finally out.
31 December, 2009 at 8:33 am
Roger, ‘Alasdair’.
30 December, 2009 at 11:26 pm
Youth is only nostalgia for the old. I hardly see why one should denigrate these movements but support a very old-fashioned think tank model, full up, I notice, of aspirational youth. What’s the criteria for evaluation here? And, no, I don’t agree that finitism is the enemy, or rather I don’t think the enemy of my enemy is my friend. There arises a certain confusion I’ve noticed amongst people who, in many ways rightly, reject the notion of a finite universe. That confusion leads to statements like, “When oil runs out there will be something else” or the idea that any ecologically damaged system (which is infinite in itself, but finite in terms of allowing human beings and other animals to survive) can simply be replaced. It isn’t as simplistic as White’s thesis, but the point still remains that the Christian faith leads to a certain confusion about nature. I’ve spoken with all these people and the disregard/ignorance regarding environmental issues and its relationship to political economy and social relations was troubling. One gets the sense it is more of an add on, rather than recognizing it as the very condition for a good and just society.
The only thing I see with folks like Blond are a pilfering of ideas from the non-State/non-ruling class Left mutated through conservative (and modern!) family values. I would be willing to gamble my student debt that it doesn’t last through the failure of a Tory government and that it is a distraction from the real task, which is to rethink and enact a new form of governance that gets to the heart of all this.
30 December, 2009 at 11:32 pm
In short, I want a real Left, not a version of family values fascism that overdetermines a Left response to contemporary problems with old answers and concepts (not to be confused with being against the family as such).
31 December, 2009 at 1:40 am
After all this banter, as well as a few revelations, I feel the need for a final comment. Hopefully we can discuss this like adults, who can disagree without it becoming over personal.
1. As someone pointed out above, there is a non-liberal left as someone pointed out above. It is very much extant in mainland Europe, specifically resisting the idea of the university as neoliberal space and the Bologna process. They emphatically reject the liberal social democratic consensus and as I said, in Croatia, have influenced the national debate and made significant alliances with workers groups who have managed to extract themselves from the corrupt unions there, who like most other unions, are basically the human face of the bosses orders. They are ridiculously well organised, directly democratic and ‘communitarian’, in the sense that they have created a new form of social organisation based on solidarity and mutual aid – for example, they sign all their public statements collectively (much to the frustration of the Croatian media who want the politics of personalities) having authored them collectively, often with hundreds of people in the room. I know this because I have talked to these people as well as having been involved with my own agitation where I can on campus, which is horribly neoliberal. The currency of these students, as well as most activists globally (those opposed to climate change, those farmers fighting for land rights in South America, indigenous peoples fighting for self-determination etc – hardly middle-class left academics, mostly the poor and the dispossessed) is something new, and empathically non-liberal. The tradition here is a combination of social anarchism, with various currents of left communism that rejected both Leninism and were onto Stalinism before Stalin recognising the revolution having gone quickly sour etc, each with their local flavour (be it religious or ethnic etc) while having global networks of solidarity. There general remit is anti-state, dual-power, workers democracy, solidarity, participatory democracy and mutual aid including elements of gift economy. And it is far from only the ‘youth’ that are involved, they are cross generational groups, though, necessarily, there is a lot of energy in them coming from young people. I tried to make this point at the conference on Christian social teaching and the politics of money at Nottingham, when someone said it was the youth who were to blame for the financial crisis as well as saying much the same to Milbank, who I hope won’t mind me saying, told me that I was naive and trapped too much in the romantic legacy of ’68 where the youth were able to effect some change, whereas the fact is the ‘youth’ are essentially a consumer market. While there is some truth in this in the UK, I’ve met with loads of people involved in the above . Plus they are far from tied to being romantically attached to ’68 (seeing as it has been readily commodified) or to a sense of defeatism – far from it, they are overwhelmingly brisk and upbeat, optomistic, and unlike UK kids face down real, often violent opposition – Italian police make the UK G20 protests look like child’s play.
2. Given what Blond, Milbank and Glasman (RT + BL) are after has many similarities (though some important differences which would need negotiating) to these groups, as well as to parallel religious groups who are probably closer to them than RT + BL (Catholic Workers, evangelical house churches with strong emphasis on social justice, engaged Buddhist cells like the Order of Interbeing etc) I personally think they should be reaching out to such movements rather than saying they don’t exist or are irrelevant. I’ve made this point to Adrian Pabst numerous times and he replied that they were irrelevant which was quite disheartening. This is particularly the case when the RT + BT are saying stuff about the Pope’s Zamagni influenced encyclical is that what Benedict is saying there in terms of critique and sketches of recommendations is similar in many ways to what these groups have been saying for years in both critique and recommendation, since, say, the start of the anti-globalisation movement in the mid-90s: market not necessarily benevolent, economics too reductive, race to the bottom of globalisation, need for solidarity as opposed to competition and some measure of gift economics, need for renewed international democratic bodies like the UN, a revival of civil society. This package used be called global civil society and still has widespread traction in these circles. Don’t forget, the anti-globalisation activists were the ones who first were very interested in Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation – Naomi Klein was where I first came across it – and it is probably the most cited text of the movement. In short then, there should be a reaching out to these movements rather than saying ‘no non-liberal left exist’ – I believe it was one of the most cited books in the academy in a recent survey. In part because such a thing would connect RT + BL with movements in the global south rather than concentrating on UK issues, since if RT + BL are serious about seeing the end of neoliberalism, then it would be necessary to connect up with those on the sharp end of it – those in the global south – away from the traditional narratives of development (for example, the idea that peasants must necessarily be made non-peasants, which is even found in CST).
3. Now, Blond, who I have certainly talked to on many many occasions and I enjoy arguing with, though I disagree with him a great deal on many things. I’m not sure he is “seen in London as the first person seriously to have challenged Thatcherism in British political life”. For one, ‘Alasdair’, mentions Jon Cruddas and Will Hutton. Both, particularly Hutton in his The State Were In books, have had a long-term serious challenge to Thatcherism in British life, ditto practically all the leader writers in the left newspapers. And less we forget, in rhetorical terms, much as it is difficult to swallow, New Labour was premised on a kind of communitarian response to Thatcherism. Gidden’s stuff was a critique of market-Thatcherism and classical British socialism. Indeed, there are many, many persons challenging Thatcherism since it and more vitally at the time, the miners who paid with their communities and numerous other left wing groups and some good-hearted paternalist Tories in Thatcher’s ‘wet’ camp, who realised the social chaos Thatcherism was going to cause. So Alasdair’s statement viz. Blond seems a bit hyperbolic. If you mean ‘recently’ challenged it, or ‘challenged it within the Tory party’ in the latter case we could be onto something, though from knowing Tory activists I am very very dubious – they mainly see Cameron as necessary to get the votes in before they let rip with Thatcherism 2.0. But as Cameron has written time and time again, he sees no reason to refuse the Thatcherite legacy, Thatcher was the woman who got him into politics in the first place for one, and if you read the statements he makes to groups like the Centre for Policy Studies (Thatcher and Keith Joseph’s very own think tank!) he is very much still on board with it all. Without going into too much detail, I think people see Thatcherism as too much free market (which, of course, she was emphatically) but forget how she won the votes – a large dose of homespun moralising. Thus, for all his good intentions and attempts, I think that Blond’s influence on Cameron won’t be that large. For one, it clear that Cameron-Osbourne is a team – Osbourne has spoken about a ‘progressive conservativism’ along precisely the same lines as Cameron on numerous occasions. There is none of the tension there was between Blair-Brown.
I’ve said enough probably.
31 December, 2009 at 8:39 am
Brilliant. Thanks Alex. From the little I’ve seen of the anti-globalisation activities (mainly in the IIRE networks), the most creative alternatives in both thought and action are to be found there.
31 December, 2009 at 2:49 am
[...] a way that evinces an intimate knowledge of even the most obscure of Milbank’s texts (see a sample). What’s more, the e-mail address he uses in WordPress appears to be the same as [...]
31 December, 2009 at 10:43 am
Excellent analysis Alex. You’re right on about the ideological currents that are percolating and fermenting in the renewed campus and rank and file labor struggles against neoliberalism: ” The tradition here is a combination of social anarchism, with various currents of left communism that rejected both Leninism and were onto Stalinism before Stalin recognising the revolution having gone quickly sour etc, each with their local flavour (be it religious or ethnic etc) while having global networks of solidarity.”
This process of ideological recomposition is beginning to happen among students in the U.S. as well, most notably in the California student-worker strikes (see, for example: http://advancethestruggle.wordpress.com/2009/11/24/occupations-spread-across-california/). My friends and I are a small part of this recomposition: (http://gatheringforces.org/2009/10/19/building-worker-student-militancy-against-cuts-to-california-higher-education/). We are young people but we are most definitely more than a consumer market and like the Croatian students we are reaching out to older rank-and- file workers who are trying to break the stranglehold of the union bureaucracy: http://www.democracyinsurgent.org/. 10 years after the anti- WTO uprising the anti-globalization movement is still strong here in Seattle, it’s just refracted through labor, immigrant rights, and education-justice organizing.
Many of us take seriously practices of virtue, community, reviving traditions of struggle and resistance, etc. and a number of us are Christian, Buddhist, and Muslim. But we are generally wary of think tanks that advise bourgeois politicians.
1 January, 2010 at 1:11 pm
[...] (which become brand names for tired old positions). But others, especially those in response to ‘Milbank in Monstrosity of Christ’, set out to defend Milbank, accuse others of ignorance, insult people and make plenty of typos. [...]