This post was the title section of my initial dissertation proposal in the Spring of 2015.
Do titles matter? I think so. I have titled this project “a proximate bible” and in a way, this title says everything without determining anything. Three things have haunted my professional and academic work for the better part of the last decade - the cultural construction of this phenomenon we call bible, the infinite resistance to consumption in Emmanuel Levinas’s idea of proximity, and the role of technology in both. These questions of bible, proximity and technology have found their expression for me in the material life and afterlives of bible as book.
Most would agree that what we read shapes what we know and how we make sense of the world. There may not be a what more read over the years in the Western world than bible.
throughout this project, i will refer to bible without the definite article to remind us of the plurality of tradition that constitutes the cultural phenomenon we often call “the bible.”
bible as media I have spent the better part of two decades reading this bible what closely and reading others write about their reading of it. As important as the content of bible has been in the development and demise of culture, I wonder if how we read impacts meaning making as much as what we read? Here, I am unabashedly building on Marshall McLuhan’s prescient axiom from the 1960s, “the medium is the message” (McLuhan, Understanding Media).
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This quote and clip introducing McLuhan and pointing toward his notion of medium sets the stage for bible as a medium, a technology, even an extension of ourselves.
Thanks to Timothy Beal for the adaptation of the old reception history language of “bible in media” to the more material notion of “bible as media.”
book of books With McLuhan’s influence established, I’ll return to my title, “a proximate bible.” I’ll begin with the end, “bible.” With Emmanuel Levinas, bible is for me the book of books (Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, 23). Yet, it is the material lives of bible as book, bible as technology, that drive the questions and experiments of a proximate bible. From the early adoption of codex book technologies for Christian scriptures to the deep relationship between bible and the rise of print to the challenge of imagining bible in the age of mobile technologies, bible as book offers a fantastic window into how we read and how this impacts what it means to be human.
material bible This approach to bible as media forms part of a larger methodology I call material bible. Material bible approaches foreground the materiality of practices that construct the cultural phenomenon of bible. What we mean by bible is intimately shaped by the fact that it was drawn on the walls of underground burial spaces or inscribed on skin as tatoos, that we parade around ritual spaces holding bible, and that we read bible on a device with covers and bound at the spine or on a mobile phone.
Several conversations have helped push me toward this material bible perspective. Most formative for my thinking has been Tim Beal’s cultural history approach as embodied in his book The Rise and Fall of the Bible and his work as editor of The Oxford Encylopedia of the Bible and the Arts. Others include the iconic books symposia, material scripture discussions such as that fostered by the Institute for Signifying Scriptures, Manuel Vasquez’s Material Theory of Religion, particularly his questioning of the textualization of religion, and N. Katherine Halyes’s “media specific analysis.”
proximate an-archy The first question my close friend and colleauge Dr. Eric Smith asked me when he saw my title “a proximate bible” for the first time was “proximate to what?” Regardless of how I respond to Eric, it is this question that begs the project. Yet, instead of simply defining the terms in a spatially proximate relationship, I will ask how bible is proximate and approximate in its infinite afterlives as book and how might this impact human meaning making? Proximity provides a shorthand for a set of practices of anarchic meaning making that guide both my theoretical inquiry and my writing process in this project.
Anarchic is a loaded term and can mean many things. Contrary to some initial impressions of both my work and my person, I am not the least interested in a simple notion of anarchy as chaos or disorder. Along the lines of Levinas, I exploit the variability of the semantic range of αρχη in Greek and use an-archic to denote a practice of meaning making without recourse to the reign of an original (See Simon Critchley with Peter Atterton and Graham Noctor translating Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, 81). Levinasian proximity as an anarchic encounter with the face of the other will offer questions toward the role of bible in shaping nonconsumptive (ethical) meaning making. The spatiality of the term proximity invokes Edward Soja’s thirdspace as an anarchic meaning making practice that takes seriously the material spatiality of bible as media. Phonetically adding the indefinite article of my title to proximate, I hear a resonance with the explicit anarchy of Jean Baudrillard’s simulacrum, which questions the entire notion of original or real and sees all meaning as infinite simulation or approximation. See anarchic approximations for more detail on my relationship to anarchy.
So, a proximate bible, with its indefinite article and phonetic multivalence suggests that a close look at the material spatiality of the plurality of bible as media could offer a window into the possibility for anarchic, and therefore human, meaning making practices.