Following Luhmann, “consider the rhetorical understanding of paradox as more fundamental than the logical one. It is simply a matter of communication that wants to use simultaneously what is incompatible…. For the communication of paradoxes, the operative effect is decisive: it causes communication to oscillate, because each position makes it necessary to assert the opposite, for which the same holds in turn.”
It’s a church. I belong here. This is my home. It’s my church. It belongs to me and I to it. It gives me myself.
It’s nature. It’s not me. It’s beyond me. It’s not my nature. It belongs to everyone and everyone belongs to it.
Flexibility? More efficient exploitation of the resources of logic? Having it all, or at least both ways? But why now and why in this way? Capitalism and greed have been around much longer than churchless cathedrals and barren fonts of life. The free flow of ideas, the ideological expression of capitalism, has never been bound by the dictates of reason. But this is different—a higher level of disjuncture; not a new page, but a page torn out of the narrative of progress and the increasing perfection of humanity through freedom. Is this the start of a new book? The destruction of an old one? Or do the two constitute a single expression?
For Andre Breton, surrealism was anything but an escape from reality. He saw it as a desire to “deepen the foundations of the real; to bring about an ever clearer and at the same time ever more passionate consciousness of the world perceived by the senses.” That world was two-sided, and not essentially but as a result of historical circumstance: “Interior reality and exterior reality being, in the present form of society, in contradiction (and in this contradiction we see the very cause of man’s unhappiness, but also the source of his movement), we have assigned ourselves the task of confronting these two realities with one another on every possible occasion, of refusing to allow the pre-eminence of the one over the other, yet not of acting on the one and on the other both at once, for that would be to suppose that they are less apart from each other than they are…, but one after the other, in a systematic manner, allowing us to observe their reciprocal attraction and interpenetration and to give this interplay of forces all the extension necessary for the trend of these two adjoining realities to become one and the same.”
When a church is a church and not a church and a desert is a desert and not a desert, then a desert can be a church and not a desert and a church a desert and not a church even as a desert is a desert and a church is a church.
How does paradox—in this case, the freedom to make a desert a church—constitute the form of contemporary society? What contradiction between interior and exterior reality thereby comes to expression? How does one understand such paradoxical unity without resolving the paradox?
A different man stood in a forest in northern California. He explained that his brother considered nature to be his church. I asked him if he would say the same thing. He said, “I’d call it my temple, just to be different.” The social references here are familial and communal: brother and church/temple. The identity of the first brother and the identity of the second (it does not matter which is which) are constructed through the paradox elaborated above: the church that is not a church and the (functionally equivalent) temple that is not a temple. But the form of society here expressed arises through the unity of the difference of the two contradictions: a church that is not a church is/is-not a temple that is not a temple—just to be different. This is how brother expresses unity with brother. The identity of each is here expressed in terms of difference (“to be different”) and community (“church,” “temple”) conceived paradoxically (church that is not a church; temple that is not a temple) and serially (“his church… my temple” and the “just” that indicates a unity limited only by the principle of difference itself).
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