Mark Lewis Taylor | Professor of Theology and Culture, Princeton Theological Seminary

David Siqueiros - 1952 -La Protesta

Every part of life and planetary being is marked by modes of antagonism, and therefore agonistic. Even our more pacific natures and cooperative relations in nature and society feature the interplay of pressure, weight, friction. This antagonism does not mean that life is simply divided up between good and evil forces; rather, the forces to which we give those names, and the many pervading forces of antagonistic tension, are deeply complex, violence-engendering systems that are part of the complex emergence and unfolding of the oneness of all planetary being. This antagonism, though, can engender liberating spirit; the problem is how liberating spirit can undo – work “liberation” – amid such all-pervasive antagonism.

In human life, this antagonism is sustained by powerful systems of imposed social suffering. These systems spawn antagonism as exploitative inequality and violence among humans, and are integrally bound up with exploitation of earth itself. The antagonism is evident not simply in forces of opposition, but in the cries of lament and rage, of moan and tremor. Imposed social suffering is especially brutal as colonizing and neocolonizing forces, that are dependent on dynamics of economic exploitation, racism, gender and sexual injustice, as well as imperialism and nationalism. Many of these forces crystalize in U.S. mass incarceration today, about which I have written for over two decades – historically, theoretically and theologically (see The Executed God). Much of Christian theology, and many intellectual traditions, sustain a fundamental “abstraction” from this antagonism. This abstracting posture ignores antagonistic relations, looks above them, or loses focus of them in the name of a specious “complexity.”

Antagonism is no simple interest of jousting politicians, no concern limited to a few alienated people with “anger-issues” or “trauma-addictions,” no merely occasional topic for activists and peoples of conscience. More deeply, also, antagonism names the complex play of forces colonizing our pervasive ontological condition as historical and social beings. This is a political condition wherein human systems of imposed social suffering structure and weigh-down everyday being, life – indeed, increasingly, the earth’s ecological and planetary matrix. Violence, especially as shaped by U.S. geopolitical interests, also secures the everyday living of privileged groups, often making possible what citizens of the U.S. and the global North nations call their “freedom.” Nevertheless, systems of repression can become also sites of hidden and visible resistances. Antagonism can occasion the birthing and erupting of a decolonizing, liberating spirit.

Liberating spirit’s resistance amid antagonism is through its arts, perfoming its refusal in the face of imposed social suffering. This often occurs, first, with a reflexive artful action – a gesture, a pose, a facial expression, a gimmick, a scrawl. In more developed form, the arts that sustain and resist break forth in poem, graffiti, song, essay, novel, painting, sculpture, carving, dance. Maybe the artful resistance is a walk or a march, a way to dress or a vestment, home design, sewn textiles like quilts, serapes, murals and arpilleras – also stories, myths, legends and symbols. Even philosophical systems and theology’s doctrinal systems (having their own ruling metaphors, key symbols and tropes) can be seen as arts, even though they often become calcified strictures used by elites for ideologically reinforcing imposed social suffering. At their best, though, all the arts are means for “wieghing-in” amid the antagonistic structures and practices that “weigh-down” oppressed peoples. The arts are a dreaming of the future, re-presenting it, opening performance spaces, as it were, in which people in the present step forward toward liberating life, to forge movements, collectively arcing toward worlds of justice and love – human, natural, planetary.

Liberating spirit’s arts become a creative force in relation to social movements. Forming social movements is often implicit in the arts, because the arts can help wrench us free from constraining and repressive worlds, imaging and performing alternative ways of being and practicing. Social movements are both catalyzed by art’s imaginative performing of alternative worlds, and also focus the arts for coalescing toward revolutionary change. Social movements are collectivities of bodies and practices. People in movements organize coalitions to challenge the forces that impose and sustain social suffering. Social movements challenge their opponents, especially today’s virulent and ever-changing U.S. imperialism, the transnational neoliberal economics that U.S. militarism supports, patriarchies and heteronormativity, and the resilient signifiers and systems of whiteness and white power. To engage these and break their repressive holds, social movements nurture common purposes and new social solidarities. they are sites for thinking and re-thinking – yes, for theory! Thus, in all these ways, they redress the indignity, meaninglessness and the despair that often take over in routinized worlds of injustice.

Through practice and theory, like the liberating arts, social movements stoke memories of the past so that memories become subversive of oppressive orders. Movements are powered by specters. Sometimes social movements even themselves become specters. By “specters” I refer to forceful legacies at work in the present, a power of re-membered suffering, that can threaten, demand and create practices of liberation. The dead, especially the unjustly slain, represent a past that continues, inhabiting present life through this remembering, thus becoming a “spectral” power. In these ways, movement practices also spawn hope that other worlds are possible, that revolutionary futures can be birthed. Social movements are forged into practices of justice and love in coalitions of many peoples and groups. These move toward new life and planetary being as “the people” (translated with variable and always-changing meanings as “el pueblo” in Spanish, “altape” in Aztec, “amaq” in Maya, “sha’b” in Arabic, “mian” in Chinese, “minjung” in Korean).

Liberating spirit is not the opposite of matter. It is not outside earth and its relations. It does not abstract itself from the social and political, the natural and planetary. Instead, liberating spirit is the organizing energy within these relations and working among them. It creates freeing ways of being amid global structures and the daily processes that grind us down, that destroy humanity and earth – that oppress. Spirit, derived from “breath” (pneuma, spiritus) is the vitality of sensuous earth and its many complex bodies, the spaced breathing, pulsing – the always-somehow moving and resting – action in human practice and planetary being. Liberating spirit names a way of being “political,” in the broadest sense of engaging the powers around us. It is material life struggling and fighting (amid antagonism), sustaining and acting-up creatively (through the many arts), and organizing with a steady, relentless resilience (in social movements).

Liberating spirit defies sameness, persevering as different – always freedom and liberation, yes, but in modes critical or, often antagonistic to, the ideologies of “freedom” and opening up new spaces of liberation beyond the frozen, often predictable projects of many “liberation” agendas. Liberating spirit grows from the suffering, hope and resistance of peoples most in need of liberation, from “the part with no part” (Jacques Ranciѐre), the oppressed and excluded, who forge ever fresh and changing visions of what “liberation” is to be.

Liberating spirit, while it can be found in Christian forms, is at work in many religions, in alternative spiritualities, and often most powerfully among many secular movements and peoples of conscience.