Issue No. 1

Architectonics of Truth

By Eric Hancock ⋅ March 21, 2008 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print this article ⋅ Post a comment

The other day at church, I noticed that everyone was worshipping towards a worship team that was in turn singing songs in the appropriate genre facing towards the audience, stimulating in me a feeling of incongruity. The more rigorous of the bunch were arduously proclaiming and pumping hands with charismatic fervor towards what was essentially an empty stage. This ostensibly strange scene is normal when compared to the throngs of concert goers who do the same thing, albeit, admittedly, with far triter intentions. I am especially reminded of bands whose lyrics and presentation are less than worthy under closer scrutiny, should such an unlikely occasion present itself. Audience members swoon over bands singing saccharine lyrics; and not to exclude their indie counterparts, lead singer of Bell and Sebastian and indie musician par excellence has admitted that the lyrics that populate his compositions are at best bad poetry. The strangeness of the scene described reminds me of the Altar of Tukulti-Ninurta I from 1244-1208 B.C., an artifact that displays the shifting religious beliefs of Assyrian and other ancient cultures. Scholars assert that the image on the altar reflects the anti-anthropomorphic idea of God taking hold in ancient cultures at this time. History classes teach us that this kind of resistance to images of deities represents a type of iconoclasm; however, such rules only apply to a Christian history. In fact, the the history of icons and images prior to the onset of Christianity in the ancient world explains the impetus for Christianity itself. In fact, In his sweeping theories on the Bicameral man, Julian Jaynes purports that Christianity itself is an effort by the great civilatsations of ancient times to compensate for an essential devolving of the propensity for a religious mindset. More than that, Jaynes recommends that consciousness, religious and otherwise, itself was changed by the burgeoning metaphors inherent to population growth. With the onset of subjective consciousness and the diverging away from a bicameral mind, a mind whose hemispheres were divided between the god side and the human side, the structure of religious spaces as well as the complexion of human form making radically changed. With a change in the mind comes a correlate change in the metaphoric space of presentation. Empty space, like that depicted on the Tukulti-Ninurta altar, becomes the default. Strangely, until Roland Barthes, in all of his post-modern savvy, posited the uncanniness of the empty text in his “Death of the Author”, the world of cultural criticism was without the explicit and theological implications of acknowledging this historically rooted nihilism in the history of literary and iconic production. This empty space can be related to the contemporary disposition towards irony. Irony is a placeholder for real experience. Consider Eric Havelock’s theories about Plato. Havelock contends that the ever- eironeaic Socrates was an essentially fictional account fabricated by Plato in order to transmit his own ideas. Socrates becomes a placeholder that signifies both infinitely regressive and infinitely progressive according to the readers leaning. It is not surprising that at this same time the artificial category of literary began to take on meaning via its transformation into a place of non-meaning and progressive meaning, somewhat akin the the Western traditions borrowing of the Hindu notion of zero.