The Courage to Persevere: Contemporary re-interrogations of faith and - PDF document

The Courage to Persevere: Contemporary re-interrogations of faith and their public implications Jorella Andrews PRESENTATION: Goldsmiths, University of London 13.11.2018 It is time, in the west, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations … a decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the west in our days. The western world has lost its civil courage. (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Harvard Commencement Address, 8 June 1978) Introduction: Public life, public space, ‘civic virtue’ This talk is in response to an invitation part of the Visual Cultures department to reflect on ideas that emerged from a public programme - and to consider lecture series on the topic of faith - their potential contributions to the topic entitled 'A Fearless Look at the of this series about 'the future of civil Unspeakable’ and convened by my society'. I will come back to the series colleague Jean-Paul Martinon and I in of faith in a moment but, by way of January and February of this year as creating a context with respect to the 1 J Andrews PRESENTATION The Courage to Persevere Faiths and Civil Society Unit 13 November 2018

‘future of civil society’ challenge, I site for a Forest School for toddlers. As a friend I’m part of a group of wanted to start by bringing into play two different contemporary volunteers that helps facilitate events expressions of public space with which on the Green (arts, theatre I’m involved. Fittingly, both are spaces performances, etc.) and I get involved that were established with the explicit in monthly plant management aim of promoting both human and non- workdays. human flourishing. All very idyllic – or so I thought! Upon becoming involved as a caretaker of the space a different or at least a more 1. complex reality emerged. On workdays, rather than focus on plant The first example (to which I will return management, my main activity at the end of this presentation) is involved extensive and at times quite drawn from the locality of Forest Hill in acrobatic litter picking of items SE London where I’ve been living including drug paraphernalia, used since 2010 and where, as well as condoms and beer cans and bottles being socially involved as an active thrown out-of-reach into bushes. From member of a local church, I’ ve also this detritus, and from information been involved (since 2016) as a friend gained from Friends’ Meetings and of Albion Millennium Green, a small AGMs and the flow of email area of urban woodland that was exchanges between Friends - often developed at the start of this century also involving exchanges with the local on the site of a disused tennis club. It police forces inadequately staffed was created under the Countryside Safer Neighbourhood team, it is clear Agency’s Millennium Greens’ scheme that, especially at night, the Green is a and also got funding from the London gathering place for drug dealers and Borough of Lewisham. It’s owned by a addicts as well as a base for local local charitable trust which is charged burglars attempting to break into with protecting and enhancing the surrounding homes. Indeed, over the space for the benefit of the local years, and despite invitations for local community. involvement and an inclusive ethos, what I have witnessed has not been a I first got to know it as a secluded and process of greater local participation glorious albeit also somewhat wild and and the creation of an increasingly in places unkempt retreat located safe, shared space but instead an about a minute’s walk from my flat, increase in various forms of traversed by winding paths, and aggression that have been enacted including areas of meadow, a couple upon the space, including vandalism of small ponds and the beginnings of a and several attempts to set fires – to community orchard. It is kept always the Green’s noticeboards, for instance! open and has recently also started More recently, local heroin addicts set being used by local schools and as the up a rapidly expanding squatters’ 2 J Andrews PRESENTATION The Courage to Persevere Faiths and Civil Society Unit 13 November 2018

camp, taking over a space to which, in radical and exploratory thought and on fact, they have as much right to use as the other hand there are the anyone else, but in such a way as to administrative realities of an make it unsafe and unwelcome for infrastructure governed by market other users. values which undermine those very ideals. But as noted this is nothing new. Reading Alfred North Whitehead’s 1932 book The Aims of Education one gets a shock of recognition - his diagnoses of the problems characterising then-current education in the UK apply just as well today. Nonetheless, today this situation is often experienced by educators and students as increasingly unworkable with several of us Having become actively involved in the wondering whether this is an care of this place, then, I discovered environment in which it is now possible that for all its promise, it was a to work (or study) with integrity. remarkably contested space constantly throwing up problems for which there But there is something else at issue were often none-too-obvious solutions. that I think is just as great an obstacle This interested me a good deal; it to the nurturing of free, open and – seemed to me as though it was crucially – sufficiently self-critical functioning within the locality, among thought in a place such as Goldsmiths. other things, as an intensified It has to do with the degree to which symptom (a microcosm) of broader our reputed intellectual openness is contemporary social dis-ease and thus only conditionally so, that is, as a space that needed to be paid conditional upon certain intellectual attention to. A space that required fashions being followed and upon discernment. But how? other, unfashionable topics being suppressed: like the question of faith 2. and the possibility of exploring questions of faith outside of the auspices of theological or religious The second public space is well-known studies contexts. Hence the series to most if not all of us in this room: Jean Paul and I put together and Goldsmiths. A place intended to named ‘A fearless look at the support intellectual flourishing for the unspeakable.’ benefit of society at large but which (as we know only too well) is operating Our aim, here, was to challenge the again as a conflictual entity. On the dominant modern and contemporary one hand (and this issue is by now (western) view that treats faith either well-rehearsed) there are the as obsolete and therefore unworthy of academic ideals of nurturing free, 3 J Andrews PRESENTATION The Courage to Persevere Faiths and Civil Society Unit 13 November 2018

critical debate or, more radically, as taking whatever approach they saw fit anathema and therefore vigorously to in the hope that they would develop be opposed – and certainly to be kept these ideas, hopefully in unanticipated private. directions. Nonetheless, we wanted to take as For the purposes of this presentation, what I’d like to do in the first place is non-alienating a route into the topic of faith as possible (to establish common extract, from the wealth of ideas that ground and shared thought) so we interesting ideas that were presented, decided to define faith not primarily in just two re-interrogations of faith that relation to a set of beliefs, religious or seemed to me to be particularly fruitful otherwise, but as a kind of orientation in terms of challenging dominant – specifically as an effort to persevere negative presuppositions and habits of in the face of what cannot readily be thought regarding this topic. I will then verbalised or indeed endured, however go on to look at two explorations of we might experience or define that. As faith more pointedly understood as an we put it in our promotional material, expression of and intertwined with the we wanted to hazard a look at how we capacity to persevere. I will end by interact with what stubbornly presents bringing in some material of my own, itself as already beyond words and is linked to my research interests in the therefore consistently dismissed as writing of the French phenomenologist unreal, fictitious, hypothetical, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, notably the irrational, dangerous, or false, the perspectives offered in a very short essay from 1954 called ‘On News argument for this series being that Items’. (In phenomenology, and very contemporary forms of incredulity with respect to faith are historically, much so in Merleau-Pontean culturally, and ideologically embedded phenomenology, the operations of within modern logocentric and faith, notably perceptual faith, are reductively rationalistic paradigms. central.) We also made the claim that faith, thus Faith experienced or defined, was something really rather familiar to most of us in our everyday working lives – our audience consisting mainly of researchers and artists working in fields of endeavour where, time and again, we find ourselves on the threshold of new or uncertain territory in which precisely the sorts of orientation that Jean-Paul and I were associating with faith are required if progress is to be made. And so we invited five speakers to reflect on faith 4 J Andrews PRESENTATION The Courage to Persevere Faiths and Civil Society Unit 13 November 2018