Ministering among the Powers

I've at last finished -more or less- my article on Walter Wink's notion of the Powers, laying the foundation for conceiving of them in relation to institutional/organisational ministry.

In it, there is a brief review of Walter Wink's work on the Powers is related to an understanding of emergence, related briefly to Agamben's work on apparatuses and noting a congruence with Amos Yong's work on the Spirit in Creation . Then an outline is given of how this could begin to help those involved in Christian ministries to organisations and institutions by making appropriate analogies with other emergent creatures.

You can find it here. I'd be happy to have of comments and questions arising: they'll help me as I write further about the topic. I'm aware that there are various dimensions to what I'm exploring that need filling out. That's the next project.

An apparatus is a Power?

I'm back into more actively building on the notion of the Powers in a way that could or should help chaplains in institutional ministry (and others). Partly this is because I have 'a paper' to give on the matter in October. I have recently been reminded Agamben's little essay 'What is an Apparatus?' This blog post Faith and Theology: Introducing Giorgio Agamben: what is an apparatus?
gives a way into why I think it is significant:

Agamben uses Foucault’s concept of the apparatus to classify all beings in two groups: “living beings”, and “apparatuses in which living beings are incessantly captured”. In theological terminology, these two classes denote an ontology of creatures on the one hand, and on the other hand the oikonomia of apparatuses that seek to govern these creatures (13). Between these two classes lies a third class: subjects. Agamben understands a subject as that which results from the relation between living beings and apparatuses.

That certainly appears to me to be a fair statement of what Agamben is saying in this essay. It seems to me that in describing something that is a "creature" and that "captures" living beings and plays a part in governing them is very congruent with Wink's characterisation of the Powers. What is interesting is the idea that subjects are produced. I think this is important and true: that human beings are instated as subjects in part by the influence of these other creatures. Our subjectivity (if I'm right in interpreting Agamben's 'subject' as having something to do with subjectivity -I recognise I may be jumping the gun a bit there) is at least partly constituted by the social context which I take to be the constituent 'field' of apparatuses or the Powers.

It is here that the importance of the Powers /apparatuses in Fall and Redemption becomes apparent. They produce subjects (and, btw, are produced in turn by them) and so play a part in the production of sin. Thus they have to be dealt with in liberation from sin.

These apparatuses can be resisted – we can intervene in their process of subjectification – only through profanation.

Agamben's idea of profanation, I think, is a way of describing 'unmasking the powers': exposing their pretensions to usurp what belongs to God. It is interesting that Agamben traces this back to theologies of Trinitarian oikonomia; there is an even older kind of language available; that of principalities and powers.

Mental Complexity, corporisations and The Powers

I found myself with one of those moments of recognition -someone else has articulated something I've been thinking about albeit in a different arena. The recognition was in a couple of sentences here:

Mental Complexity and ‘The Astonishing Naivety of Policymakers’ : RSA blogs:

a growth in social productivity requires people to be able to disembed themselves from certain social and psychological influences that undermine autonomy, responsibility and solidarity, so that they can relate to those influences more flexibly and constructively.

This, I think, relates to one of the things I've been thinking in relation to the Powers or 'corporisations' as I've been labelling them. You see, one of my issues consequential on seeing corporisations as emergent beings arising from human (plus other 'stuff' -taking on board the insights of Actor-Network Theory) bounded complex interaction is whether humans or corporisations should be seen as more ultimate. The issue arises because if we recognise the dignity and agency of corporisations, then the question must arise as to whether they subsume individual human rights and dignities. A model for this would be the way that a brain or a human body takes priority over individual neurons or cells, or perhaps the way that the nest or the hive seems to with social ants and bees.

My reading of scripture, informed by Walter Wink, is that in God's economy humans are to be served by corporisations rather than the other way round. If that is the case, then the quote above captures also the ethical imperative in relation to the corporisations (that is the Powers). Indeed this seems to be part of what Paul is claiming for the gospel: that it enables human agents to do this -recognising that we are all to prone to ceding our agency and responsibility before God to the corporisations /Powers.

Of course, part of the issue (not really touched on by Paul) is that unlike neurons or other cells, we can 'belong to' or form part of more than one corporisation. I sense I need to consider this more fully too...

The Concept of Form of Life

I've been making some very intriguing connections between Agamben and Wink. Something of it can be seen on my more fully theological blog. If you're interested.

Conversion and its Discontents

One of the difficulties of living human life and spirituality is how the corporate/institutional interacts and takes on a life of its own which may pull across or against the values or objectives we most wish to espouse. In Christian terms this shows itself most flagrantly in the awareness that people may be attracted to Jesus but find the Church a huge stumbling block. As churches become social, political and cultural actors and artefacts, they gain identities in those terms which may or may not speak well of Christ.
This quote from India puts it well:
"'Conversion, instead of being a vertical movement toward God, a genuine renewal of life, has become a horizontal movement of groups of people from one community to another, very often backed by economic affluence, organizational strength and technological power. It also seriously disrupts the political life of the country by influencing the voting patterns of people. Why then should Christians be surprised when the very words mission and conversion provoke so much anxiety, suspicion, and fear?'"
The issue can be looked at from the other side too. The social, cultural, economic and political dimensions of another religious identity can make it hard for someone to really engage with Christ and then to consider changing a whole cultural (even civilisational) identity. To what extent do we think it right or desirable to allow Christ to become so identified with provisional human structures or to be identified against certain provisional human structures. This is an issue that touches on the Powers. Hopefully I'll be able to develop that thought more fully at another point ...
We're probably all aware to some degree how our desire for peace or justice is made turbulent by the cross-currents of being citizens of a particular nation and wanting to preserve the goods of democracy, welfare and liberty
Conversion and its Discontents:

Our brains build social worlds

The basic kinds of 'mechanisms' in the brain which help build rapport (exploited by NLP practitioners, among others) are becoming evident.

During any kind of social interaction people unconsciously imitate each other, or else show the appropriate complementary action and reaction. When this happens, the parts of the brain that unconsciously respond to the actions of others create a form of resonance. We are not usually aware of this, but when it occurs we feel 'on the same wavelength' as the person with whom we are interacting

This is important, because if I'm right about the emergent and unitary nature of social organisations such that they can be regarded as spiritually significant entities and be regarded as principalities, powers, thrones, dominions etc as per NT epistles, then this gives us a biological basis to the unification of human individuals into coherent /resonant entities. This in turn may be analogous to the way that neurons plus feedback-sensitive interactivity build a brain and mind emerges. Human individuals plus feed-back sensitive interactivity build organisations or societies and Principalities emerge. Human minds are significant spiritually to God, is it really plausible to suppose that the emergent entities of human interaction and co-ordination are not also significant? And being significant would not be represented in scripture somehow?

Originating article: How our brains build social worlds - opinion - 02 December 2009 - New Scientist:

Of egregores and angels

A little while back, Steve commented on a 'Powers' posting of mine to link the approach I tend to take to the concept of egregores. I think it could be helpful.Notes from underground: Of egregores and angels

The post Steve pointed me back to raises interesting questions and issues. I think part of my response is to say that I believe at this point that we should think of these entities as emergent and therefore as also defined by their 'worldly' forms. For me the parallel is in anthropology: just as mind and soul are emergent properties of our physical arrangement (I know that some will want to disagree with this, but I think it perfectly consonant both with Hebrew wholism and contemporary science and probably a modified Aristotelianism/Thomism) so are the Powers emergent from human institutions.

One of Steve's interlocutors raises the question of moral responsibility. I think that is where it gets interesting: because it seems that responsibility is 'smeary'. Actually we know this from experience. The thing is to recall that we remain individually responsible for ourselves even while we may participate in the Powers to varying degrees. Part of the point, it seems to me, of Paul's forceful language about the Powers is to make sure that Christians realise that we do not need to be subject to them; we can resist and we remain/become, therefore, moral agents even embedded in a socially-constructed reality. The aim here, it seems to me is to prevent the Powers (egregors) from subsuming human beings totally or to make sure we don't give ourselves over to them (a kind of fascism, I suppose). The Sabbath was made for humans not humans for the Sabbath; so with the Powers.

The interesting thing beyond this with regard to sin is that we would do well, I think, to recognise that part of the mechanism for the emergence of the Powers from human corporisations is our mimetic nature. That is we are 'programmed' to learn from one another and that learning is kicked off by imitative ('mimetic') behaviour even as babes in arms (and probably earlier). I have a hunch that this fact enables us to see a mechanism for human participation in the fall which isn't prey to the difficulties presented by, for example, Augustinian accounts of original sin. We have an account which does justice both to the 'given-ness' and 'participation in something prior to us' of sin and also to personal responsibility.

Steinbeck and the powers that be?

Confession time: I've never read the Grapes of Wrath. I know lots of people will think I'm the kind of person who would have, but I've not; where other people were reading Steinbeck I was reading Sartre, Camus, Lorca, Cervantes ... So it's that my education developed a bit differently to many other 'cultured' people. One effect of this is that I'd never, therefore, come across this passage which is a really helpful reflection on the nature of principalities and powers, imho. The article discusses that a bit: the Jesus Manifesto � Are we the people? and perhaps the salient bit is: "What is this great beast? What is the monster that Steinbeck describes? An institution, a social structure created by human beings. With no actual reality, except in the minds of the people who believe in it. Yet, as more and more people gather, believing in and submitting themselves to its order and purposes, it gains power in men�s minds, great power, seeming to become something much greater than ourselves. Those who believe and serve it become dependent on it, dependent for their very lives. And it grows in complexity and influence until it eventually reaches the point where no human leadership seems to be in control of it; it seems to have taken on a life of its own."
Where I think I disagree somewhat is the idea that the principalities and powers are different from human-created institutions: I don't think we can make that distinction or that the Bible does. What I think we can do now, though, is analyse them more fully with the tools of science (including social science) and see that we are dealing with emergent properties from complex dynamical systems. Steinbeck's passage, without that language, identifies that very nicely.

Evolution and 'superorganisms'

A report in Wired News alerts us to new thinking about evolution which takes account of organisations, complexity and symbiosis. It's also relevant to the ongoing project of mine linking principalities and powers in the New Testament with emergent properties of social organisms/organisations. Biologists Take Evolution Beyond Darwin -- Way Beyond: commenting on social insects like ants and bees, "until recently, scientists thought the division of labor had a genetic basis, but after scientists sequenced the honeybee genome, they couldn't find a trigger. Hyper-specialization seems to be an emergent property of the collective. 'That's a specific example of how a new pattern can be thrown into play,' Amdam said. 'You have an ordinary life cycle in an individual, but in a social context it's exploited by the colony.'
The superorganism is still shaped by mutation and natural selection, but only recently have biologists, accustomed to thinking of evolution at the individual level, applied the superorganism concept to insects. It may very well have even broader applications."

Our Flock Mentality

This will be no surprise to anyone who has attended a march where the SWP have been active and seen what they do in order to try to lead a crowd towards their preferred outcomes. The research is mentioned in this article: Sheep In Human Clothing: Scientists Reveal Our Flock Mentality: And "The findings show that in all cases, the ‘informed individuals’ were followed by others in the crowd, forming a self-organising, snake-like structure. “We’ve all been in situations where we get swept along by the crowd,” says Professor Krause. “But what’s interesting about this research is that our participants ended up making a consensus decision despite the fact that they weren’t allowed to talk or gesture to one another. In most cases the participants didn’t realise they were being led by others.”"
The SWP agitators clearly try to achieve a critical mass of people who lead chants and so infiltrate themselves, unobtrusively, as leaders and then up the stakes in terms of participation until they are able to lead off a significant crowd into more disruptive activities. This is, of course, significant for my writing on the Powers and emergence.

Why speaking truth to power is hard

An intriguing piece of research, this: When People Feel Powerful, They Ignore New Opinions, Study Finds which indicates that "The best way to get leaders to consider new ideas is to put them in a situation where they don’t feel as powerful, the research suggests. “If you temporarily make a powerful person feel less powerful, you have a better chance of getting them to pay attention,”"
I think that this probably indicates that if you want good thinking from leaders, they need to feel a little insecure, or you need self-aware leaders who actively put structures in place to offset this psychology of power. It does suggest that distributing power and accountability are important for the health of a society. And it's intriguing, therefore, to think about God's apparent preferred governance option in the Hebrew scriptures which seemed to be decentralised without a king...

Social Change Relies More On The Easily Influenced Than The Highly Influential

This may be significant in considering the behaviour of human social entities, research shows "that it is rarely the case that highly influential individuals are responsible for bringing about shifts in public opinion." Rather it seems that sufficient numbers of influenceable people is more significant.
Social Change Relies More On The Easily Influenced Than The Highly Influential:

The Technium

Interesting thought: that a technology is like an organism so what is the ecosystem of technologies? This article from the Edge explores a bit further
"Specific technologies are like individuals, or species, and the society or ecosystem of these individuals is the technium. I'm especially interested in how the technium works at the system level — how it operates as an ecology of technological species, as a complex web of interacting agents each with their own biases and tendencies.

The emergent system of the technium — what we often mean by 'Technology' with a capital T — has its own inherent agenda and urges, as does any large complex system, indeed, as does life itself. That is, an individual technological organism has one kind of response, but in an ecology comprised of co-evolving species of technology we find an elevated entity — the technium — that behaves very differently from an individual species. The technium is a superorganism of technology. It has its own force that it exerts. That force is part cultural (influenced by and influencing of humans), but it's also partly non-human, partly indigenous to the physics of technology itself. That's the part that is scary and interesting."
It is actually strangely redolent of Walter Wink's characterising of the Powers and definitely links to the thinking I'm attempting on emergent structures in human social interaction.... And a bit later on is a quotable bit which pretty much sums up why I like scifi and counterfactual novels: "Hollywood and science fiction authors are the new theologians. They've been asking these essential existential questions way ahead of the rest of society."
And here's a really intriguing thought about the way that technology has been 'symbiotic' with human culture for ages and its been positive because it has opened up freedoms and opportunities: "These opportunities, these freedoms, are a very powerful force. Imagine a great artist like Mozart born before the possibility of a piano, or orchestra — what a loss that would have been. Or if Hitchcock had been born before the technology of film had been invented. Or Van Gogh before cheap oil paints. Undoubtedly those giants would have done their best with whatever they had — perhaps Beethoven on drums, Van Gogh with charcoal. But we honor them in part because in some unfathomable way they were able to realize their true genius by finding a perfect match with their tools — tools that are possibilities and choices manifested."
Edge 217:

accountability and bureaucracy

A good question from an amusing and insightful essay.

There can be bureaucracy without accountability, but can there be accountability without bureaucracy?

An important question way beyond the Higher Ed community it's written from. It's a principalities and powers sort of question, and so has interested me. Is bureaucracy a necessary evil or can it be a kind of nervous system? And what distinguishes the two cases? I have to say I have come across instances of benign bureaucracy and, off the top of my head, would say that they have been to do with putting welfare of people first and balancing the needs of users and workers and have been marked by a humane approach rather than the petty form-filling jobsworth attitude. So I would add bureaucracy to my list of principalities, theologically understood to be part of God's purposes for good but capable of fallen behaviours.
Jonathan Wolff on accountability and bureaucracy | comment | EducationGuardian.co.uk