Contre l'Avant-Garde

Breakthroughs are rare by their very nature. If we see the intellectual capacities and norms of particular human groups throughout history, from prehistory until this very time that we live within, they are typified by the discordant collection of ideas that combine and produce a “discourse” which dominates the age. As the produced and reproduced mode of life that proceeds from this amalgamated discourse starts to tighten and constrict under the weight of its contradictions, the struggling presence of “common sense” or “received knowledge” starts to take on the characteristics of a demiurge that hangs over creation and applies pressure to those who would resist against it, if only they could find a way to manoeuvre around it. Face to face with “the limit” of the knowable1, the agent finds themselves contending with the episteme of the age and attempting to unravel the problem of knowledge itself, where only knowledge can suffice as a tool—it is, by its nature, a restriction imposed upon us.2

Of course, not all breakthroughs are always so grand. Indeed, prior to the point where the discursive reality around us crumbles to nothing (a veritable fantasy of the intellectualists, inverting the radical political manipulator’s desire for “The Revolution”3 into increasingly grating efforts to establish new intellectual foundations, the new territory on which Babel shall be erected4—regardless of whether such a thing is actually worth such high praise), there is a question of the minimal condition on which this breakthrough could emerge: in the mind and life of that single individual who turns around to see the world in a way as to yet unrealised.

For this author, my reader, I found Karl Barth’s unveiling of Christianity as not a civilising mission to the world5 utterly liberating: it is not the task of God’s elect to conform the world to its will, so much as merely to be and become the church in the world’s presence.6 And, unlike the accelerationist tendencies of the radical extremes of the world, I’m afraid that the aesthetic desire for revolution—for the violent upturning of academy or society—misdiagnoses the path forward and, as such, can only ever continue the logic of some preexisting state.

To expose this misdiagnosis, however, like exposing all misdiagnoses, is often a difficult task. As such, I start via negativa: how ought the church be, if not a civilising ...