Toward a Second Theology

Literature & Theology, Vol. 35. No. 1, March 2021, pp. 40–54 doi:10.1093/litthe/fraa035 Petra Carlsson Redell* Abstract This article introduces the conceptual couple first theology and second theology as an answer to J. Kameron Carter’s call for a theopolitical approach beyond the proper practice versus malpractice dualism in Western political theology. In order to find sources to further renegotiate the relationship between the material, the spiritual and the political, the article turns East to Russian avant-garde artists and thinkers Liubov Popova (1889–1924) and Vladimir Tatlin (1885–1953), discussed in relation to Walter Benjamin (1892–1940). The conceptual couple according to which first theology is understood as theology is stuck in a representational logic where proper practice can be easily distinguished from malpractice. Second theology, on the other hand, is a performative approach to theology beyond the representational logic: theology that does and constructs rather than is and represents. Thus, second theology is theology that is political, even activist, without pertaining to truth claims or ideals regarding proper or improper theological practice. Keywords: J. Kameron Carter; Walter Benjamin; Liubov Popova; Avant-garde Art; Political Theology; Vladimir Tatlin. I. INTRODUCTION What is the role of theology in politics? Is it to be a reminder of the right way to act, a prophetic voice calling for a proper theological and political practice? When commenting on the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, USA, 2017, Reverend Bill Lamar argues for such an understanding. In an article in the Washington Post he suggests the event itself reflects as much a theological malpractice as a political malpractice, and he holds that the two are closely related. American theologian J. Kameron Carter is not convinced by Lamar’s view of the role of theology in politics, however.1 For Carter, the idea of a proper practice and its relation to a malpractice expresses the same theological *Stockholm School of Theology, Bromma, Sweden. Email: petra.carlsson@ehs.se C The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press 2021; Literature & Theology V All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/litthe/article/35/1/40/6188420 by petra.carlsson@ehs.se on 08 April 2021 TOWARD A SECOND THEOLOGY: AVANT-GARDE ART AND THEOPOLITICS TOWARD A SECOND THEOLOGY 41 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/litthe/article/35/1/40/6188420 by petra.carlsson@ehs.se on 08 April 2021 logic, making proper practice and malpractice two sides of one coin. Talk of malpractice depends on a logic according to which the proper is opposed to the improper, where correct theological thinking instigates correct political practice, and where, in consequence, thinking can be separated from practice. The reasoning, in other words, depends on a faith in the possibility to separate not only the true from the false when it comes to theological statements, but also theory from practice, hence, the immaterial from the material. Carter’s preference is to think in terms of a Black malpractice and a poetics of the sacred. Rather than separating the proper from the improper, the spiritually correct from the materially incorrect, he suggests a theology from within language and bodies alike, a theology arising as a malpractice from below, refusing the proper distinctions and hence the logic according to which the religious task is holding and having an understanding of the proper and the correct. With Georges Bataille, Carter explores the sacred as the unhavable and unholdable. Carter ends with W.E.B. Du Bois stating that ‘the religion of whiteness is the propertization of Earth’. To Du Bois, the religion of whiteness is about holding and having proper-ty and proper-ness, which is why Carter calls for an altogether different theo-logic.2 For Carter, then, there is a direct relation between having access to Christian truth and ideals and having the right to own and control—the right to execute power over others. Put simply, the idea of an immaterial plane of truth (and ideals that can say something about the truth and ideal on the material plane) is problematic because it allows for control over others. The present article introduces a conceptual couple that helps pinpoint the distinction between Lamar and Carter’s theopolitical positions: First theology versus second theology. In accordance with the terminology presented here, Carter moves away from an understanding of theology as first theology towards an understanding of theology as second theology. Theology understood as first theology deals with Christian truth and sees the task of theology to separate the proper from the improper, the true from the false. It also separates (in/correct) thinking from (in/correct) doing. Second theology, on the other hand, deals not with Christian truth as such but with the relation between humanity and Christian truth claims. Second theology focusses more on what truth does than what truth is. It is more interested in what Christian truth claims do to us, to our bodies, our souls, to our societies, than what truth they do or do not reflect. Hence, a second theology is not an archaeology digging to unveil Christian truth—whether progressively creative or traditionally conservative—but rather a focus on theology as mechanics. It is theology handling the relationship between us and the Christian truth claims, in theory as much as in practice. Consequentially, by not accepting the simple distinction between theory and practice a second theology acknowledges that it is 42 PETRA CARLSSON REDELL Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/litthe/article/35/1/40/6188420 by petra.carlsson@ehs.se on 08 April 2021 impossible not to take part in truth production. It is impossible, as a Christian and a theologian not to add to the appearance of Christianity. For that reason, second theology is also about taking part in the ongoing construction of Christianity as construction; through liturgy and biblical interpretation; through creativity and activism, in the churches and on the streets as well as in academic writing. Or, to speak again with Carter, second theology is a theological malpractice where truth is unhavable, where Christian truth is that which will never get in formation. In order to rethink the logic critiqued by Carter as a religion of whiteness, and to introduce the basis for a distinction between first and second theology, the article turns away from the West and towards an Eastern Christian worldview where, as we shall see, the relationship between the material and the spiritual is understood differently from that of the West. The understanding of the material and the spiritual, in turn, affects the understanding of the political as well as the theological; for this reason, it can provide a basis for a renewed account of political theology. I shall engage with Russian art and thought from a time in Russian history that shares with our time a sense of desperation and a will to change. Russian pre-revolution thinkers and artists were struggling to find ways of thinking and practically enabling a just and equal society, and one where the material world would not be seen as property but as a companion on the journey towards a better common future. The thinkers with which I shall engage are not the ones who ultimately set the direction for the Soviet Union; instead, they were silenced by the brutal regime that took over. However, their ideas and their artistic expressions continue to inspire political thinkers and activists to this day. In what follows, I explore the relationship between the material, the spiritual and the political through Russian avant-garde artists and thinkers Liubov Popova (1889–1924) and Vladimir Tatlin (1885–1953) in discussion with Walter Benjamin (1892–1940). Both Popova and Benjamin, as we shall see, take the spiritual into regard when thinking material reality, thus making room for an ambiguity in our habitual understanding of the distinction between the material and the spiritual. Hence, the junction where the two meet opens a spiritual path between, or beyond, materialism and idealism. Through Popova and Benjamin, we reach beyond the choice between regarding material reality as passive and fetishised or, on the contrary, as an active political force at humanity’s service. For Popova and Benjamin, the material world is more than a mere given, more than a first nature, but also more than what may be captured by human reason, thus more than a means for a human political vision based on a plain distinction between proper practice and malpractice. After considering their work, I will return to the idea of a first versus second theology. TOWARD A SECOND THEOLOGY 43 II. A NEW EVERYDAY Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/litthe/article/35/1/40/6188420 by petra.carlsson@ehs.se on 08 April 2021 Broadly speaking, the distinction between public and private in Russian political thought differs from the way it is understood in the West. The major cultural opposition in Russia is not between private and public existence but between material and spiritual existence, between byt and bytie.3 Comparing the ‘American dream’ to the Russian dream (according to the philosophers of The Russian Idea), the former is more a dream of the private pursuit of happiness in the family home, whereas the latter consists of ideals such as heroic spiritual homelessness and messianic nomadism. Or, in Svetlana Boym’s words: ‘Unpractical daydreaming is not a part of the American myth of individual self-sufficiency. Privacy, on the other hand, is not important for the “Russian personality”.’4 The Russian notion of the material, byt, is connected to the repetitious, dull and heavy chores of the private everyday, which is why, for pre-revolution political thinkers in Russia, byt was habitually understood as the reactive, unchanging aspects of life that held the revolution back. Bytie, by contrast—spiritual existence—was connected with the public, with change, invention and progress. However, it was also connected with the emotional and the transcendent. Thus, bytie encompassed at once the possibility for change and the earlier impeding paradigms of thought, including Christian transcendence, the church and longstanding societal ideals. In consequence, in order to think society anew, the pre-revolution thinkers in Russia had to overcome the opposition between the material (private, byt) and the spiritual (public, bytie). For that reason, a campaign was introduced: The novyi byt, a new everyday life under socialism. The campaign and the ideas developed in relation to it was at the heart of the entire political renewal project. It was an attempt at elevating byt, letting the new spiritual enlightenment (spiritual in an ideological rather than a religious sense) take place on the level of the material and in the private spheres of the everyday. The campaign of the new everyday spurred intricate debates among Russian intellectuals, but I am more interested here in the artistic contributions that contributed to this rethinking of the material in relation to everyday life and the potential for change. The intellectual and practical work done in relation to this specifically Russian dilemma can, as we shall see, be of relevance to a Western discussion in the borderland of theology and politics today. Both Liubov Popova and Vladimir Tatlin were related to what was named the Constructivist movement within the Russian avant-garde. Breaking with the old schema according to which an artist belonged to the public and transcendent (bytie) they aimed to renegotiate the artistic role in relation to the private, the everyday yet nonetheless shared societal life (novyi byt). To the constructivists, the artistic task was not that of depicting or representing reality or a transcendent Christian truth, but, rather, of constructing reality. In other 44 PETRA CARLSSON REDELL Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/litthe/article/35/1/40/6188420 by petra.carlsson@ehs.se on 08 April 2021 words, it was not about making artistic interpretations in order to say something about reality or about transcendent truths and ideals, but about performing and constructing reality through artistic practice. Their aim was not to paint a transcendent truth and present it to the public in a gallery, but to function as an artist from within the material reality and within the sphere of the everyday. The construction of reality took place not in the galleries—which was the place for representational art, art representing a transcendent account of reality—but in the home, in the practicalities of everyday life.5 Vladimir Tatlin explicitly took part in the project of transforming the everyday, novyi byt, as material and as social-material reality by, in his own words; ‘calling maximum attention to the simplest things that surround us’.6 He turned away from capitalist desires, suggesting we should distrust the eye and elevate touch—leave the plain aesthetic ideals behind in order to reconnect to our material selves and view objects from within our own materiality. In other words, we should place optical vision under the control of the haptic, of touch, and relate to objects as things that concretely affect our bodies rather than things to be viewed and valued at a distance.7 Consequentially, he stopped creating for the galleries and instead began inventing for the home: stoves, clothing, and pottery. Despite harsh words from critics deriding his new interest in ‘womanly matters’, he persisted in his project of turning byt (the material and private) into comrade in the public struggle.8 Tatlin’s shift from high-status art to household items was a conscious invention of an active material object through which the modernist principle of ‘truth to materials’—the will of the medium or the material itself determining artistic form—takes on social agency.9 In other words, things would not be admired for what they are (while hiding the reality of production) but would be active and valued for what they can do. If possessions and commodity in capitalism were regarded along the lines of Marxist commodity fetishism (things valued for what they are, say, a Rolex) in Tatlin’s vision the fetish would instead turn into comrade (valued for what they do, i.e. tell the time). Popova pursued a similar realm of thought. For her, though, this move went together with a renegotiation of the logic of representation, hence a renegotiation of the very concept of reality and of the material world. In papers she presented in 1921 at two art institutes in Moscow, the Inkhuk and Vkhutemas, a far-reaching renewal of the very notion of the material took place. The artistry of today, she reasoned, amounts to a transformation of the understanding of the elements that make up reality: a transformation of the understanding of what makes up the thing as thing—the volume, the colour, the lines, the weight.10 The move beyond representational art is key to her endeavour, because the constructive possibilities of the elements may only fully stand forth beyond ideas limited by habitual thinking, by notions of origin and truth, or by earlier styles or artistic ideals, she reasons. Art, she wrote, is TOWARD A SECOND THEOLOGY 45 III. ART, RITUAL, AND SECOND TECHNOLOGY Inspired by the constructivist movement in Germany, Benjamin approaches art history in a way that resembles the Russian constructivists; and through him, their reasoning also relates directly to a religious understanding. For Benjamin, art in the age of mechanical reproduction has lost its basis in the original; art is no longer grounded in the notion of authenticity but in action and in effect, or, to borrow Benjamin’s words, in being political. Art is what it does, what it creates and constructs. Thus Benjamin, though later than Popova, shares her move beyond the logic of representation and into the logic of performance and construction. In the article ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ Benjamin famously traces art back to its origin in ritual. The earliest art works, he writes, ‘originated in the service of a ritual— first the magical, then the religious kind’.13 The very notion of authenticity in art stems from this religious beginning in which the particular artwork—say the statue of a goddess or god—was the presence without which the ritual would lack meaning: a copy would not do. The early magical or religious function was later replaced by what Benjamin calls ‘the secular cult of beauty’, praising the original artwork by the original artist—an analogous notion of authenticity, now in new clothing. A copy would still not do. Then came the revolution of technical reproduction, however, and suddenly art could be Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/litthe/article/35/1/40/6188420 by petra.carlsson@ehs.se on 08 April 2021 moving from depiction to construction; towards the construction of concepts rather than the depiction of concepts. Art is moving towards the organisation of the concept, hence the organisation of the thing because, she reasons, if we are to see the possibilities of this world we must liberate the elements from representational thought.11 For Popova, art is political simply because the political is material—the political is concrete because it finally consists of colours, lines, rulers, compasses, bodies and constructions for everyday life. Tatlin, for his part, aimed explicitly to renew the notion of the material, entering into the process of the novyi byt by elevating functionality over beauty, touch over eye. His aim was not a plain rationality as detectable in later functionalism but rather what Maria Gough defines as ‘materiological determination’. Tatlin sought to foster the volition of the material rather than to express his individual artistic will, reconfiguring himself as the material’s assistant.12 To that extent, both Tatlin and Popova aim to let the material, its inherent possibilities, aspects and levels, affect the constructions produced, and both aim to step back as artists, assisting rather than controlling the material. Popova, however, goes deeper than Tatlin into theoretical renegotiations which is why, in the following, I shall further explore her contribution in relation to Walter Benjamin. 46 PETRA CARLSSON REDELL Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/litthe/article/35/1/40/6188420 by petra.carlsson@ehs.se on 08 April 2021 anywhere: could be copied, carried in a pocket, printed on demand. Photography appeared, and what was authenticity in the art of photography? ‘At the time,’ Benjamin states, ‘art reacted with the doctrine of l’art pour l’art, that is, with a theology of art.’14 The art world reacted by proclaiming art an end in itself. Art, in other words, made itself holy, an apophatic enigma not to be scrutinised; hence, art once again took on the role of the fetish, veiling its material construction and historicity. Art for art’s sake was just a phase, Benjamin continues, before art became what it inevitably had to become after the loss of origin: political, performative, constructive. Art became political but in different manners, Benjamin observes, and he characterises two distinctive and even opposite expressions: aesthetical politics (the fascist expression) versus political aesthetics (the communist expression). The former, he argues, uses aesthetics to render the status quo attractive, to make misuse of power beautiful and to romanticise poverty and hard work, whereas the latter, by contrast, makes art political, using it to change the world, to create a better society. The two aspects of political art relate, in turn, to another of Benjamin’s conceptual couples (introduced in the second version of the essay): first versus second technology. Here, we get to the basis for first and second theology. Benjamin’s conceptual couple developed out of the Hegelian notions of first versus second nature, which Benjamin—like Georg Lukacs and Theodor Adorno—used to call attention to the illusion of givenness: the illusion of what is regarded as first nature. Benjamin wanted to emphasise the fact that nature as humanly understood always instigates a relation, a technology in one form or another, and so he complicated the conceptual couple.15 Influenced in part by a conversation with actress and theatre director Asja Lacis and by science-fiction writer Paul Sheerbart, Benjamin thus introduced the notion of first versus second technology in the second version of the ‘Work of Art’ essay. First technology, in Benjamin’s sense, is technology functioning as art did in its early ritual stage. By ritualistic use of the original it aims to master reality. First technology is used to control nature and humanity for the good of humankind, motivated by claiming access to the original—in the case of the earliest art, the true god figure itself. Second technology, on the other hand, aims at the relation, the interplay between nature and humanity. Second technology correlates to the role of art in the age of mechanical reproduction in the sense that the very idea of the original (the first nature) is lost. Second technology, in Benjamin’s use of the term, opens a possibility to make constructive use of the loss of foundation, of the technological gap between humanity and nature. Because, as Benjamin points out, the results of first technology are eternal simply by claiming access to an origin that serves as an absolute, whereas those of second technology are temporary because they are based not on an origin but on the possibility of reproduction.16 Second technology, therefore, Benjamin TOWARD A SECOND THEOLOGY 47 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/litthe/article/35/1/40/6188420 by petra.carlsson@ehs.se on 08 April 2021 states, originates in experimentality and play rather than in nature understood as a first nature. Benjamin’s reasoning in the ‘Work of Art’ essay resonates with the theoretical foundation for Popova’s artistry: the loss of an origin to represent coheres with her political-artistic imperative of material construction resulting from that loss. In Popova’s vision, art has embraced the loss of ritual as well as the loss of illusive authenticity and it has taken the possibility of technological reproduction as its starting point, artistically and practically. Having left behind the representational imperative, art is free to construct. Or, in the words of Benjamin, art is free to be political. The constructivists did not talk about themselves as artists but constructors. The artist, for Popova, is better understood as a constructor, of concepts and elements, and to that extent, the constructing artist is replaceable. The apophatic expression—‘not an artist’—derives not from a theological analysis but from Briony Fer’s art-theoretical and feminist discussion of Popova’s use of lines. Yet the apophatic connotations of the expression concur with Fer’s point, as with the constructivist attempt to move away from the notion of the artist as creative subject relating to a passive object. The ‘not’ corresponds to the intention of replacing nouns with verbs in the creative processes which, in turn, corresponds to a similar move within apophatic and feminist theology.17 It is not the artist, the individual creative mind that creates, but the function, the constructor—whoever she is—at work in relation to the material.18 Anyone having studied and become deeply acquainted with the elements is thus free to approach them as such rather than merely in accordance with artistic ideals, norms or prevalent styles and can fill the constructor function. To the constructivists, the lost origin was not substituted by the artistic subject but by the artistic activity, which was situated in the very relation between the constructor and the material with which she worked—in the process of construction and the possibility of construction. From 1920 onwards Popova left the vocabulary of the spiritually oriented suprematist movement for that of the politically oriented constructivist movement, but her notion of matter was not a simple choice between art as ritual centrepiece and the art of technological reproduction as described by Benjamin. Rather, in Popova there appears to be an attempt to move beyond the dualism of the active ‘comrade’ versus the passive, admired ‘fetish’—beyond the political–versus–magical, the material–versus–spiritual. In her early painterly architectonics period, her treatment of space and planarity, colour and layering, resembled that of the Russian icon, which remained a source of inspiration for her.19 In her late paintings labelled Spatial Force Constructions, the spiritual dimension was still present. In what has been named her ‘rayic’ work, she used rays to materialise—to turn into building material— the cosmic infinity earlier treated by Kazimir Malevich, Natalia Goncharova, 48 PETRA CARLSSON REDELL IV. COMMODITY AS PHANTASMAGORIA Benjamin shares with Popova this sense of complexity bordering on mystery that the human–material relation manifests, and it this aspect of Benjamin’s thinking that comes to the fore in his notion of commodity as phantasmagoria.23 The phantasmagoria—the camera obscura theatre shows—were immensely popular in many European countries in the 19th century. The camera obscura Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/litthe/article/35/1/40/6188420 by petra.carlsson@ehs.se on 08 April 2021 and Mikhail Larinov in explicitly spiritual terms.20 Unlike in Malevich’s suprematism and Larinov’s and Goncharova’s rayism, however, Popova did not aim to capture an ideal truth of reality. The rayist movement was grounded in a certain metaphysics, in an idea of the radiant inner structure of reality. Malevich’s suprematism, in turn, was (like Vassily Kandinsky’s notion of the spiritual in art) grounded in an idea of the true forms of reality. Popova, on the contrary, did not aim to achieve reality but to construct reality in accordance with the constructivists’ slogan: ‘Life-building, not life-knowing.’ Still, for Popova the material with which to build life was not stable and lifeless, nor merely hands-on living, changeable matter. Her building material could just as well be rays, light, and when treating planes in her painted constructions, the planes appeared to affect each other by their very proximity. For example, in Painterly Architectonics with a Pink Semicircle (1918), a red plane shades into orange when approaching an orange plane, and a blue plane and a pink semicircle shine through a seemingly solid black surface. In her later Spatial Force Construction series of 1921, the planes relate to each other in a way that resembles at once the effect of intermingling rays of light and of solid material somehow turning fluid when colliding. Or even, as in the early cubist-futurist Portrait of a Philosopher (1915), she lets the figure (in this case her own brother) merge with the surrounding objects. The backdrop turns to surface, an uneven surface mixing, fusing letters with objects, background with foreground, human with matter.21 The potential for construction is for her as present in the material world itself as it is a constructivist artistic ideal.22 The material world is not simply there for humanity to dominate, to make useful for human purposes, not even if the purpose is to offer the material a role of ‘comrade’ in a human political vision. Nor, on the other hand, can the material world be placed within a human idea of the one origin, and thus offered the role of ‘fetish’. Her artwork indicates already this unhavable aspect of reality because, when one material body encounters another, their solid identities turn fluid. To return again to the language of Carter, reality is unhavable and unholdable for Popova, which is why a political artist needs to find another path to change than that of dominance or reference to truth that grounds the notion of a proper political and artistic practice. TOWARD A SECOND THEOLOGY 49 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/litthe/article/35/1/40/6188420 by petra.carlsson@ehs.se on 08 April 2021 projected imagery of what the audience feared as if it were there, present in the room. The audience was thrilled, scared, and fascinated, enchanted, not because they thought it was real (they knew it was not), but because its faux realism induced shock and emotion. The phantasmagoria shows thus suggested that even in the age of technical reproduction, things seem to have a life of their own; they enchant, fascinate, frighten, and enthral. For that reason, Benjamin used the phantasmagoria concept in order to render possible a deeper understanding of the function of the commodity in a capitalist society. We buy things knowing they will not give us the happiness they promise. We even know the production processes often take part in degrading the environment through emissions while also heavily exploiting the workers who produce them. The magic of the camera obscura, the phantasmagoria, does not take one back to the ritual presence, the fetish, the pre-Enlightenment god-statue. The modern human–object relationship is more intricate than the question of reality versus non-reality, more intricate that the question of proper practice versus malpractice. Desire, enchantment and fascination cannot be eliminated by reason. The notion of the fetish, in both its critical and affirmative versions, depicts subjects and social collectives as passive and powerless admirers, whereas the notion of the phantasmagoria by contrast renders subjects visible by evoking the complexity of their reason and consumer responsibility. Moreover, the technology of phantasmagoria places objects and human–object-relations within the confines of this world as constructions with an innerworldly genealogy and material reality. In other words, the technology of phantasmagoria is beyond magic but nonetheless offers a challenge to reason. It expresses the unhavable and unholdable aspect of reality without pertaining to premodern religious truth claims. As an expression of a profane paradigm, the phantasmagoria illuminates the specifically modern—rather than modern versus premodern—tension between enchantment and disenchantment, between irrationality and the rational. Thus, it illuminates the unhavable aspect of modernity. In their effort to rethink the material, to rethink the distinction between byt and bytie, Tatlin and Popova both aim for an art that is political in Benjamin’s sense of the word. Both aim, moreover, for an art understood along the lines of second technology—art that is not used to master the world but rather to handle the relation between humanity and matter. Popova’s move away from the galleries and towards fabric and clothing design (in 1921) indicates, however, an awareness of the intricacy of modernity’s relation to objects that goes further than that of Tatlin. An awareness that can be described along the lines of Benjamin’s notion of commodity as phantasmagoria. If Tatlin risked moving into an historically female area of design, Popova risked her entire status as a respected artist for the same transition. She designed 50 PETRA CARLSSON REDELL V. TOWARD A SECOND THEOLOGY This article started out with Carter’s call for a theological black malpractice beyond the proper practice versus malpractice dualism in Western political theology. In order to find sources to renegotiate the relationship between the material, the spiritual, and the political, I turned away from the theopolitical discussions of the West, and towards the East. Popova, Tatlin, and Benjamin offer a way of thinking political activity as material presence in the elements Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/litthe/article/35/1/40/6188420 by petra.carlsson@ehs.se on 08 April 2021 textile fabrics that, unlike Tatlin’s, were mass produced, affordable and practical, with optic, nonobjective patterns.24 The patterns were to point towards the production process, hence to strengthen the ideal of transparency of construction, while also being at least in theory able to be fabricated without an artist’s hand touching the material. Popova designed dresses in accord with these ideals, with an express aim to appeal to women’s desire, while simultaneously offering alternative expressions of femininity. Popova’s dresses set up a deliberate confrontation between what Kiaer describes as ‘the rational product of socialist industry and the commodity fetish’.25 With her flapper dress, for example, Popova aimed to create a dress that women would desire yet would be affordable, and would allow women to move freely and give them a sense of beauty that was not an objectified or sexualised beauty.26 Whether she succeeded or not is up to the wearers to decide, but the attempt as such indicates that Popova’s outlook comes close to Benjamin’s complex account of commodity as phantasmagoria. After Popova’s death in 1924, an issue of Lef was dedicated to her legacy; in it the editors’ description of her late fabric-design work is telling: ‘Popova was a Constructivist-Productivist not only in words, but in deed . . . attempting, in one creative act to unite the demands of economics, the laws of exterior design and the mysterious taste of the peasant woman from Tula.’27 In a famous quote, Popova says she has never been as happy as when a peasant woman freely chose a fabric designed by her for her dress.28 Considering the intricacy of her artistic aim, there is reason to believe she actually meant what she said. Desire is enigmatic, which is why design must meet consumers as the mysteriously desiring creatures they are, even when the designers’ goal is to free consumers from being fetishisers of the things they own. Popova thus acknowledged the complexity of the material, immaterial, politics relation, and recognised that it was beyond the reach of plain reason, an intricate web of material–immaterial connections. Human reason is not simply sensible but driven also by opaque desires, by intricate material and immaterial forces that the human mind cannot fully understand or fathom, much less control, which is why humility is needed in relation to the physical as well as the nonphysical world of politics and theology. TOWARD A SECOND THEOLOGY 51 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/litthe/article/35/1/40/6188420 by petra.carlsson@ehs.se on 08 April 2021 that make up reality—a constructive presence in the material reality of the everyday. The avant-garde artists paved the way towards understanding the political as an activity beyond a representational logic according to which proper practice can be easily distinguished from malpractice with reference to an original truth or ideal. In a final step, I now return to the notion of first theology versus second theology and reflect on its relation to Benjamin’s writing about first technology versus second technology. In parallel with Benjamin’s conceptual couple, a first theology would be a theology that in one way or another understands Christian truths and ideals as its origin and as its grounds for motivating political engagement. First theology would be like the representational art that Popova leaves behind in order to function not as an artist but as a constructor in relation to the elements of reality. By contrast, second theology would be a theology of construction motivated by the leaving behind of the true and ideal, yet motivated also by the possibility to act and the impossibility not to take part in the construction of reality that comes with the loss of the origin. To speak with Benjamin, it would be grounded in play, not striving for access to any origin and not believing in humanity’s ability to dominate reality. With reference to Carter, it would not even believe in the simple distinction between proper practice and malpractice since it would be a theology for which nouns would be verbs, functions operating in relation rather than a practice relating to a theory. In accordance with the avant-garde renegotiation of the relationship between theory and practice, between the immaterial or spiritual and the material, it would be a theology that does and constructs rather than a theology that refers to a transcendent reality or ideal. In consequence, it would motivate its doing by the inevitable partaking in the construction of reality, rather than by referring to a Christian truth or ideal. From the point of view of second theology, there would be no untouched or innocent aspects of reality. A second theology would acknowledge that theology is the mechanics of ongoing construction—it is not a realm for archaeologists, uncovering a truth hidden beneath the surface. A second theology would recognise its task not as pertaining to Christian truth tout court but to the relationship between humanity and the idea of Christian truths. Thus, it would be a truly political theology in Benjamin’s sense of the word. Just as art turns political when it has realised its loss of the original and become function rather than depiction, in Benjamin’s reasoning, so a second theology would be a political theology—a theology that does, a theology that acts. Accordingly, a second theology would not believe that clear thinking can free the mind from dreams and desires, not even from longing for an Eden that never was. Our relationship to reality is too intricate, too enigmatic. Benjamin’s notion of commodity as phantasmagoria instigates a certain humility in relation also to religious artefacts—whether, say, kitschy Jesus images created by artists like Uhde or the bread and wine of the Eucharist. We know the bread and wine are not flesh 52 PETRA CARLSSON REDELL REFERENCES 1 2 J. Kameron Carter, ‘Black Malpractice (A Poetics of the Sacred)’, Social Text 139 37.2 (June 2019), p. 67. Ibid., pp. 71, 96. 3 4 Svetlana Boym, ‘From the Russian Soul to Post-Communist Nostalgia’, Representations 49 (1995) 133–66, p. 133. Ibid. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/litthe/article/35/1/40/6188420 by petra.carlsson@ehs.se on 08 April 2021 and blood, and that a Jesus image in a wallet will not protect us, but neither are they just bread and wine, nor is the image inactive. Matter is more than reason may capture, but also more than what is suggested by the very distinction between the spiritual and the material. Second theology would, to that extent, be neither immanent nor transcendent, neither purely secular nor purely sacred; it could be all of these because it would approach theology at the level of the appearance of reality rather than the level of truth claims and ideals. The distinction between first and second theology would not relate to where the divine is situated—in or beyond this world—but to how the theological task is understood, which in turn affects how theological knowledge is regarded. To second theology, theological knowledge is constantly constructed, materially, with or without us—not something we discover. Thus, second theology is also a form of activism, politically, ecologically, socially, and academically. Its purpose is not to throw out the old traditions and prompt a new utopian order, but to critique and reconstruct with the conviction that the mystery of the material world always surpasses what we think we know. Second theology could be performed on the streets, in the trees, on the seas, in churches, and town halls—pragmatic and playful. Second technology, in the words of Daniel Mourenza, ‘is based on testing and scientific procedures, that is, on experimentation and play (Spiel)’.29 Second theology is playful, experimental, unhavable, unholdable, it is a malpractice that never claims the last word but, rather, always adds yet another. For Carter, the idea of a proper practice and its relation to a malpractice expresses one theological logic. His response is to suggest a theology arising from within language and bodies alike, finding inspiration in an account of Blackness that can challenge the religion of whiteness—the religion that inevitably encompasses a propertisation (both an aspiration to property and a concern with what is proper). The present article has complemented Carter’s contribution with a political thinking appearing in Russia in a time of need and despair. Through avantgarde art, I have suggested another theo-logic, one that would leave behind the aspirations of first theology and move towards a second theology. This new theo-logic would leave behind the kind of representational thinking that is motivated by property and properness, by owning, having and holding material reality as well as the ideal: it is a theo-logic that would embrace the loss of representational thinking by turning theology to action and construction. TOWARD A SECOND THEOLOGY 5 6 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eiland, and others (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 26. Feminist theologian Mary Daly described God as a verb in Beyond God the Father (1973) to avoid gendered conceptualisations of the divine. In her later work she even replaced the word God with Verb. Laurel C. Schneider, ‘The Courage to See and to Sin: Mary Daly’s Elemental Transformation of Paul Tillich’s Ontology’, in Sarah Lucia Hoagland and Marilyn Frye (eds), Feminist Interpretations of Mary Daly (Harrisburg, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), p. 61. See also Catherine de Zegher, ‘A Century under the Sign of Line: Drawing and Its Extensions (1910–2010)’, in Cornelia H. Butler and Catherine de Zegher (eds), On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), p. 47. Zegher underlines both the industrial and the laboratory connotations in Popova’s use of lines, indicating a relationship between the artist and her work in which the artist discovers rather than designs, then constructs with the material at hand—not in order to express her own intention but in order to make the material functional. Dmitri V. Sarabianov, ‘Painting’, in Dimitri V. Sarabianov and Natalia L. Adaskina (eds), Liubov Popova, trans. Marian Schwartz (New York: Abrams, 1990), p. 137. Ibid., p. 142. M.N. Yablonskaya, Women Artists of Russia’s New Age: 1900–1935 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1990), pp. 103, 109. Liubov Popova, ‘On a Precise Criterion, on Ballet Steps, on Deck Equipment for Warships, on Picasso’s Latest Portraits, and on the Observation Tower at the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/litthe/article/35/1/40/6188420 by petra.carlsson@ehs.se on 08 April 2021 7 Laurel Fredrickson, ‘Vision and Material Practice: Vladimir Tatlin and the Design of Everyday Objects’, Design Issues 15.1 (Spring 1999), pp. 49, 60. Tatlin, quoted by Christina Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), p. 44. Fredrickson, ‘Vision and Material Practice’, p. 52. Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions, pp. 70–1. Ibid., p. 46; Fredrickson, ‘Vision and Material Practice’, p. 59. Liubov Popova, ‘The Question of the New Methodology of Instruction (first discipline of the basic department of the Vkhutemas Painting Faculty)’, Dimitri V. Sarabianov and Natalia L. Adaskina, Liubov Popova, trans. Marian Schwartz (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990), p. 375. Liubov Popova, ‘The Essence of the Disciplines’, in Dimitri V. Sarabianov and Natalia L. Adaskina (eds), Liubov Popova, trans. Marian Schwartz (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990), pp. 369–71. Maria Gough, ‘Faktura: The Making of the Russian Avant-Garde’, Res 36 (Autumn 1999) 32–59, p. 52. Benjamin, Walter, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), p. 6. Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art’, p. 6. Daniel Mourenza, ‘Dreams of a Better Nature: Walter Benjamin on the Creation of a Collective Techno-Body’, Teknokultura: Revista de Cultura Digital y Movimientos Sociales 10.3 (2013) 693–718, quote on p. 701. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version’, in Michael W. Jennings, Bridgid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (eds), The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological 53 54 24 25 Military Camouflage School at Kuntsevo (a Few Thoughts that Came to Mind During the Vocal and Ballet Numbers at the Krivoi Dzhimmi Summer Theater in Moscow in the Summer of 1922)’, Dimitri V. Sarabianov and Natalia L. Adaskina (eds), Liubov Popova, trans. Marian Schwartz (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990), p. 380. Christine Blaettler, ‘Phantasmagoria: A Profane Phenomenon as a Critical Alternative to the Fetish’, in Image and Narrative 13.1 (2012), p. 38. Fredrickson, ‘Vision and Material Practice’, p. 63. Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions, p. 125. 26 27 28 29 See image in Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions, pp. 128–9. Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions, p. 89. Christina Lodder, ‘Liubov Popova: From Painting to Textile Design’, Tate Papers 14 (Autumn 2010), https://www.tate.org.uk/ research/publications/tate-papers/14/liubo v-popova-from-painting-to-textile-design, accessed 13 June 2019. Daniel Mourenza, ‘Dreams of a Better Nature: Walter Benjamin on the Creation of a Collective Techno-Body’, Teknokultura: Revista de Cultura Digital y Movimientos Sociales 10.3 (2013), p. 706. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/litthe/article/35/1/40/6188420 by petra.carlsson@ehs.se on 08 April 2021 23 PETRA CARLSSON REDELL