Thank you for joining us in the Critical Arm of the MMHTT. In the Critical Arm we subject objects out in the world to unfettered interpretation in an effort to soften those objects' edges, thereby moving objects that are falsely viewed as "outside" into residence inside our blessed, networked communion. We do so through what we call Radical Hermeneutics. Nothing softens the outer edges of an object like unrestrained exegesis.
In this essay, the MMHTT Critical Arm explores how to wreck a nice beach.
In many ancient wisdom traditions, it is said that a wise man builds his house on a rock but a foolish man builds his house on sand. After three millennia of house-building on mountaintops, up and down the Atlantic coast of the United States many of the world's most affluent and elite have been building houses on sand. But not just any sand-- barrier island sand. Barrier islands are landmasses that are constantly physically in flux and on the move. And so, though building on sand is always ill-advised, building your house on beachfront property on a barrier island is doing so on a moving target-- foolish indeed! Nowhere does overheated beachfront real estate markets and unheeded ancient wisdom entangle as much as the barrier islands of the Jersey Shore.
In the early days of Jersey Shore sand-building, 15 miles inland in Murray Hill, NJ at the historic Bell Laboratories, a group of engineers were working on an early form of voice transmission technology. As they ran tests on this new tech, they would input the phrase 'how to recognize speech'. Sometimes they would get the input phrase back intact, other times it would be an incoherent set of letters. But sometimes, the machine would synthesize the output as 'how to wreck a nice beach'. The engineers assumed that anything other than the intact input phrase was simply a failed test as a result of the machine not "hearing" them correctly. They never stopped to consider the possibility that perhaps the machines were trying to tell them something about the end of the world.
In this essay, the MMHTT Critical Arm asserts artist Chris Burden's final and greatest body performance piece was dying of malignant melanoma.
Chris Burden's final piece, titled Death, is an elegant elaboration on his earlier performance pieces that include being shot with a gun, stuffed in a locker for five days, crucified to the hood of a Volkswagen Beetle etc. In each of these early pieces, Burden collaborated with a non-human object—a gun, a locker, a car—which allowed his body to transontologize between body-as-object and body-as-art. For this final performance piece, Chris Burden collaborated with the sun.
​In this essay, the MMHTT makes the case that looking a Gift Horse in the mouth may not be the best hole in which to assess the significance of the gift.
In this essay, the MMHTT looks at the correlation between illegal Columbian gold mining and malarial infection and makes the case that this is a prime example of non-human objects exerting their intentions with agency.
It was originally thought that this correlation was a simple case of poverty driving illegal gold mining which in turn was unintentionally spreading malaria through these miners' process of: digging holes, filling those holes with water, extracting bits of gold, and leaving the pools of water which are of course perfect breeding grounds for malaria infected mosquitoes. It was expected the data would correlate between malaria outbreaks and areas of poverty. This wound up not to be the case however. Instead the data presented a correlation between malaria outbreaks and, not locations of poverty, but rather locations of alluvial deposits-- locations of the actual gold! This essay asserts that the Marxian read of economics as the driver of this malaria activity is an incorrect read. Rather, what we have here is a case where gold itself--a non-human object of tremendous worth and power--is the driver for this malaria activity. This is a case of reverse alchemy where, rather than humans attempting to sublimate base material into gold, you have gold itself trying to affect change in our biology through infection with malaria. Thus returning us to the dust of the earth and so forming us into a material of far less worth than gold.
In this essay, the MMHTT Critical Arm asserts that conforming to the image of Christ is the only way to survive this contemporary life.
Ask a cosmetic surgeon and they will tell you business is booming. The AP reports that the number of citizens electing to receive cosmetic surgery has been on the rise for decades. With numbers like this it is clear that more and more people are understanding and responding to the good news of the gospel: that being conformed and transformed into the image of Jesus is the best and only way to survive this contemporary life. Jesus's eyes were blue like the Mediterranean Sea, his lips were full like a bowl of Lebanese rice, his cheek bones were high and sharp like a scimitar held aloft ready to strike, his complexion was smooth, fair and without blemish like cumulus clouds high above and dissociated from the brown and bumpy landscape of the Middle East. The Bible implores us to be Christ-like which means to allow one's likeness to be transformed to that of Christ's likeness. Folks are finding that electing to reconstruct one's appearance to look like Jesus really does solve all of their personal problems. Going under the knife increases one's likelihood of landing that job, getting that home mortgage, avoiding getting shot by the police, etc. For almost two thousand years people have misunderstood being Christ-like meant doing as Jesus did: subversively upending value and power systems such that the poor and the disenfranchised are brought to the front of the line and the rich and powerful are like camels crawling through eyes of needles. However what people are increasingly coming to understand is that image is power and being conformed and transformed in the image of Christ is where true potency lies. This is taking "dressing for successing" to a whole new level— turning WWJD (What Would Jesus Do) into WWJW (What Would Jesus Wear). The answer to the question WWJW of course is Jesus would wear Jesus face-skin on the front of Jesus's head. Jesus was pierced, so must we be.
PLEASE NOTE: If one is planning elective Christ-like cosmetic surgery, the manifold benefits expressed in this essay (job, mortgage, avoiding getting shot by the police) are only available if you conform your appearance to the image of white Jesus. Conforming your image to brown Jesus does not work in the slightest and should be avoided at all costs!
In this essay, the MMHTT Critical Arm seeks to walk the line.
When composer Charles Ives father, George Ives, conducted a historic sound experiment having two different marching bands playing two different pieces of music starting on opposite ends of Main Street in Danbury, Connecticut marching and playing their way toward each other, it was in an effort to think about limits: "what sprouts or grows at the limit, around the limit, by maintaining the limit, but also what feeds the limit, generates it, raises it, complicates it. It was not about effacing the limit, but in multiplying its figures, in complicating, thickening, delinearizing, folding, and dividing the line precisely by making it increase and multiply".
When Hurricane Irma presented its furious power in the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico, clobbering Caribbean Islands and the Florida Keys, it was a massive force that left untold devastation in its wake. Because hurricanes manifest both strong forces and weak forces, they can help us better understand what kind of force we would like to be. In this essay, the MMHTT Critical Arm makes the case that it is always better to be weak.
A strong force is one that exerts its will with brute actions to coerce objects to join or be flattened. It is a strong arm, boot-on-the-throat operation that pushes objects down and keeps them down. Alternately, a weak force elegantly exerts force through a solicitation which draws an object up and out into a realm of open possibility. The strong force of a hurricane is represented in the bands of ferocious wind that level and take out objects that stand in its way. It is the kind of force with which we are most familiar and whose effects are manifest most clearly across the wake of a hurricane's path of destruction. However, a far stranger and more powerful force is present within a hurricane which is the weak force of the low-pressure eye wall close to the center of the storm. This weak force solicits objects (small, midsized, and large objects) up and into itself and radicalizes these objects into a realm of open possibility. In the case of Irma, one such large object that was solicited was the Tampa Bay.
In this essay, the MMHTT Critical Arm suggests it has never been about what one says but how one says it.
There are two primary ancient narratives— both are in the Bible— that have shaped our misunderstanding in the West about how language works: the Tower of Babel and Pentecost. These stories, as two sides of the same coin, cohere around the idea that language "works" only when those participating agree on systems of grammatical syntax and terminological definitions. In the case of Babel, God frustrated the Israelites' efforts to build a tower to God by scrambling their language's surface features which sowed discord and confusion and caused them to immediately give up their tower-building activities. The Pentecost story essentially is the restoration of collective cooperation through the establishment of one language that rules the rest by relying on a transcendent syntax and vocabulary. (Recent innovations on the Google Translate platform seem to have tapped into this transcendent grammar.) These stories see language as a technology of only surface systems that can be rendered disabled when those surface systems are disrupted— or repaired when those systems are restored--rather than a technology that contains deep structures and systems that are always on the move, evolving, and reforming and is therefor indestructible.
Until as recently as the early 1980s, neuroscientists believed the left hemisphere of the brain was the only hemisphere that mattered when it came to language and meaning-making. In his 1981 Nobel lecture, Roger Sperry summarized the then prevailing view of the right hemisphere: "the right hemisphere is not only mute and agraphic but also dyslexic, word-deaf and apraxic, and lacking generally in higher cognitive function".
This MMHTT Critical Arm essay makes two important moves as we contemplate hemispheres of meaning (making whole the hemispheres of the brain, the earth, etc.): 1) it invokes the olde-time rap battle between the Rolling Stones and the Beatles and offers Bob Dylan's "word vomit" as the third and better way and 2) compares two ancient architectural plans— the Tower of Babel (never completed) and the Great Pyramid of Egypt— and suggests the fact that the design of the Great Pyramid was connected to the cardinal dimensions of our planet— aligned to true North, relative height (the polar radius of the Earth 43,200x), relative base-width (equatorial circumference of the Earth 43,200x), and key motion (procession of the Earth's axis 600 x 72= 43,200)— is the superior and more theologically sound architecture than that of a tower designed to ascend in a straight line up to heaven. In other words, looking down, around and at the whole gets us farther and tells us more than looking up and nowhere.