Worship as Pure Means
Introduction
“The World”
I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm, as it was bright;
And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years,
Driv’n by the spheres
Like a vast shadow mov’d; in which the world
And all her train were hurl’d.
—Henry Vaughan (1621–1695)
The opening lines of this poem gave me the imagination and words to capture something about the enigmatic worship as pure means that I want to convey in this chapter. The poem in its entirety advocates for a life devoted to God, to worship of God as the best and worthiest of human existence.1 Henry Vaughan envisages a pure life—life stripped down to what he regards as its primary telos: worship of God. This is to him the greatest, most fundamental religious and moral truth most of the world has not recognized or taken seriously. Let me now capture in prose what I also saw the other night.
I saw worship the other night, like a great light of pure and endless waves; all ecstatic as it was glorious; all round beneath it, people, in their sexes, classes, races, driven by the spirits, like a vast body moved, on which the world and all her means and ends were hurled and torn. Great worship often follows the patterns of ordinary worship, yet the purposelessness of great worship suddenly transmutes those patterns into something that snatches up and delays the eternal in its desperate fleetingness, to an immaterial, “virtual” medium that has “an absoluteness, a purity, a beauty, which would not be possible in” an ordinary praise and worship.2 This is the great magic trick of pentecostal worship.
A worship service may be unstructured, disorganized, full of emotion, yet it has a kind of calmness that allows profound transfiguration and produces the form of divine-human relation in which abstraction of far-reaching importance is possible—provided that a particular condition is met. There is the abstraction of the changeable nature of worship during the collective exchange and mingling of emotions, and the abstraction of a concrete, individual, specific pattern of worship. In a worship service, the concrete, particular form of the individual worshiper is undifferentiated in the collective bowl of worship as incense, the lifting up of hands and prayers as effervescent sacrifice despite its specific qualities. Once its incense quality has been abstracted, then one individual’s worship has the “same value” as another person’s. For Pentecostals, the worship is what makes it possible to “measure” or “evaluate” the worth or social effectivity of all other interactions with God, all other forms of everyday divine-human (group-institutional) interactions, whatever their specific qualitative, tangible determinations might be. In the innermost core of the worship service is to be found the “transcendental” matrix (texture) that constitutes the a priori framework of a concrete, particular objective approach, medium to (relationship with) God. Worship constitutes the foundation for all objective-universal spiritual evaluation. This twofold abstraction requires another abstraction, the impossible possibility of purity, becoming worship as pure means. Worship-maximizing Pentecostals argue for “pure worship,” that is, worship as a means not subordinated to an end, not geared to specially calculated utilitarian interest. But this “hope” is only approachable, in my opinion, when worship is also not an end in itself, but a pure mediality without end. It is for this reason that in this chapter I philosophize pure worship as a sphere of pure means and gesturality, means without end, believers being-in-a-medium of divine-human relation, allowing worship to be shown as such and not constrained by a predetermined end. Put differently, worship as pure means makes means, the means of divine-human relation, visible as themselves in which the instrumentality of contemporary worship or Christian practices is suspended through the conception of religion as play. The notion of religion as play finds its apogee in worship as pure means. In its nature of purposelessness, play transcends the instrumental demands and constraints of the present given world in the direction of possibilities and not-yet-defined potentialities.3 Of course, the logic of play is the logic of grace.
As we have shown from the beginning of this book, there is always a twist, a convertible character to pentecostal philosophy. Here we attempt to grasp a dimension of convertibility by asking: Where cometh this uncanniest of all hope—the expectation of pure worship? Is this not a poignant expression of “will to power,” the “I can do it” of pentecostal subjectivity? Nietzsche’s madman and overman declared God’s death and deliberately willed the will to power. The pentecostal holy man and big man split God and wills to be the master, the lord of the earth. Perhaps, it is not from the benevolence of the worship leader, the pastor, or the bishop that we expect our pure worship, but of their own, not God’s interest. This story and analysis must wait for a later occasion; for now, we will confine ourselves to understanding worship as pure means. In exploring the uncertain territory of worship as pure means opened by Pentecostals, I do not promise to write a straightforward philosophy or history of pentecostal worship, nor do I elaborate on the genealogy of Pentecostals’ thoughts (practices) on worship. This is only an exercise, a theorein, a way of viewing the pentecostal practice of worship.
A Theory of Pentecostal Worship
The concept of worship was often located in either of two spaces: the production of substantial good or the utilitarianism of contingent empirical interests. There is an alternative to these two forms of thought. I propose that we consider worship as no longer (not always) passing through the production of substantial good (such as forming a particular people) or the settlement of contingent individual interests, but as going straight through to the evocation of a world from the circulation of emotional and spiritual energies, extracting value from the pure circulation of emotional energy. The performance of worship takes the form of parthenogenesis: meaning and value produce more meaning and value without any longer passing through the “substantialist” production or utilitarian settlement. This view of worship as producing meaning and value is only a starting point and it should be understood as such, a view we will refine as we go along because the process is only a pure mediality, not a pipeline that takes means and produces the end of meaning and value. Worship is not identified with meaning. Meaning is a possibility inherent in spirit, a possibility in terms of an interest. As per the third view we are advocating here, we go into worship without putting an “interest” in it and take nothing out of it. Worship wants nothing but to be worship. What worship aims for is that there is nothing to be aimed at. It is aiming that makes no aim to appear other than aiming itself.
Worship is a pure means. A means is pure precisely because its in-order-to has not yet been decided. A decided means is no longer a pure means. For instance, worship as a pure means is a courageous openness whose validity defies all purposive articulation but represents the commitment of the participants whose self-realization lies in self-transcendence. When worship tries to be useful, placed in the service of utilitarian purpose or particular ambition, it falls to the level of profitability or ritual action, abandoning its openness to surprises. Pure means is not the opposite of means or ends, but a condition of their possibility. It is pure mediality.
Pure means does not speak or gesture to a result that we can point to before engaging in a process, motion, or quest. It is the motive process. The concept of worship as pure means gestures to the idea that the motive process of life in the Spirit, the born-again existence, the divine-human relation that unfolds amid gathered believers praising God, is not wholly determined, is not locked into an invariant network of causes and effects. To have an end-means relation presupposes a preexisting totality of possibilities out of which a possibility becomes actualized as an end at the instigation of means. But if one has a worldview in which the new, the event, cannot be accounted for by the known chain of causes, preexisting conditions, then the new can emerge, which retroactively creates its own possibility.4
Pure means is without goal and without goalessness. It is a world somewhere between end and means. Worship as pure means gestures to the idea that God is not conditioned by means programmed to reach him. Worship as pure means also points to this idea: God is not an end among ends, something we strive to grasp for the time being or for keeps. Somewhere between (beyond) the worlds of means and ends is God, the Unconditioned, and the spirit and truth of pentecostal worship lies in lurching into the liminal, marginal, and “mystical” wonderland between means and end. Worship as pure means is what we may call being-in-worship, and it simply means being in one’s spirit and being in intimate contact with the Holy Spirit. In its charismatic intensity, pentecostal worship is a pure intermediary between habituated bodies and possibilities of divine phenomena.
Worship as pure means is posited through the activities of the believers as its presupposition. Worship achieves its actuality in the subjective presupposition of the gathered believers, acting as if they are in worship, and it is a site of the Holy Spirit. They recognize themselves in it (worship) as worshipers, their point of reference. This worship is a means, a pure one insofar as the believers believe in it as a site of the Holy Spirit and act accordingly. The mistake will be to view it as a means to an end and not a pure mediality. The means is the media of the means. The means realizes itself as its purport, to use a Hegelian expression. It is in the finite process of the means of worship that the process of participating in worship takes place, and that the beautiful or sublime consciousness or feeling thus arises. Worship grounds itself in the very “foaming ferment” of the subjects acting as if they are worshiping. The foaming ferment is shot through with the facticity of the past (experience of past possibilities is reactivated, the fact of previous encounters with the divine is relived), the present bodily jouissance of God, and the coming future. In this ecstatic ferment there are no simple demarcations of time into past, present, and future. Time is an ecstatic temporality! It is in this character of worship as a virtual entity (or nonentity) that it represents itself as pure means par excellence.5
Under these circumstances and dynamics, the believer thus becomes the subject of worship—which means both that she becomes worshipful and that she enters into worship; she enacts worship and she becomes worshiper. “Both as an internal(ized) capacity and as an external(ized) identity; [worship then becomes the means by which she connects to God by uttering ‘I worship You Lord’ (or any other song)], as if in an infinite echo, in order to be reborn and replete with God’s grace, in an interminable (that is to say, quintessentially repetitious) dance of gestures that ensures God’s interminably (repeatedly) reauthorized power.”6 Worshiper and worship, grace upon grace, “are thus interlocked in a repetitive ritual display ad absurdum.”7
The idea of pure means indicates that the means is the end, displaced end. The connection is organic and permanent. It is becoming—one of means and end. The means is completely identified with the end. If you have seen the means you have seen the end, and yet there is a no difference. As pure means, the means does not purport to be an end itself, nor is it simply a means to something else or the end. Since it includes within itself both the exalted end (participating in the power of the end, referent) and the means, which conveys the senses, practices, and orientations in their journey to the exalted end, it is at once means and end. The object (worship) provides direct medium to Jesus Christ and participates in the power of God. The means is a symbol and hence pure means.
Another way of viewing worship is to consider it in terms of the relationship with the Holy Spirit. Pentecostal worship is about creating the context for the presence of the Holy Spirit, for the Spirit of Christ to move and work among his people. Worship is context, a milieu of the Holy Spirit. In this sense and to this extent, the Holy Spirit is really the pure means in the believer’s relationship to and with Jesus Christ. Being-in-Christ presupposes a being-in-the-Spirit. The being-in-the-Spirit is not an end itself; it is not just a sign of Christ but also a symbol of Christ (fellowship) with Christ. Being-in-Spirit is not a means to an end either. The Holy Spirit is not only a medium of fellowship with Christ, but an integral person of the Godhead; the Spirit is medium to the Spirit (Godhead). This means she is a means to means. The Spirit is pure means.
The emergence of worship as pure means in pentecostal circles involves or marks a slight adjustment to the interaction of the sacred and the secular. If originally, historically (that is, pre-Pentecostalism) worship was aimed at the sacred, as a means or conduit to the “transcendence,” then when it becomes a pure means it also becomes profanatory, to use Giorgio Agamben’s word. Worship instead of remaining as something separated unto reaching the divine, as a veritable means to the sacred, is taken back from its confinement as a means to an end, as a heteronomous site of holiness that exceeds the collectivity (the people) and put (restored) into playful use that neither honors nor abolishes its “sacredness.” In this way, worship as pure means “deactivates the apparatuses of power and returns to common use the spaces power had seized.”8
The Pentecostal movement in this act of profanation also exhibits secularization tendencies. The act of transforming worship into pure means not only makes it profanatory, but also makes it contemporary with the current times (secularum, of this age). Herein, we see the huge desire of contemporary pentecostal worship music and habits to invert notions of “sacred taste,” inherited rhythms, to knowingly transgress the line separating the sacred and the secular. It is neither religious nor secular—a quintessential figure of the profane.
One characteristic of pure means or profanation is that it frees objects and behaviors from generic inscription within given their spheres, and this is what capitalism and its ally, secularization, do well, especially when seen from the standpoint of the sacred sphere. “The activity that results from this thus becomes a pure means, that is, a praxis that, while firmly maintaining its nature as a means, is emancipated from its relationship to an end; it has joyously forgotten its goal and can now show itself as such, as a means without an end.”9
If academic theologians conceive worship as a creative process that constitutes free persons to become the body of Christ in its practices, then everyday Pentecostal believers may have joyfully forgotten this goal in the immediacy of their jouissance or enjoyment of God. Worship is not for the production of communion with Christ. This is left for the habits, virtues, and vigor of the Christian life. Worship is not geared to express the mystery of Christ or the real nature of the true church. This is the prerogative of the Holy Spirit who knits the community of Christ. The worship is not designed to bring about anything but create the context (that has no predetermined end) for the Holy Spirit to work and to move. Worship is context; precisely, worship itself is the context.10 It is a mediating presence. It is a multisensory skin of transimmanent divine-human play, the erotic veil of sublime intimacy teased by the wind.
Worship is pure means because it is not about transforming believers into something, not about becoming a people. They believe they are already the children of God, a born-again people. Worship is about a community that is continually doing something, “perfecting” the kinetic existence and experience of being and doing in the Spirit of Christ. The epistemological problem in pentecostal worship lies not in creating or identifying a community but in believing and seeing that this gathered, already identified community is in spirit and truth. Jesus says those who worship God must worship him in spirit and truth. The matter with Pentecostals is not with the “those” but one of “spirit and truth.” In their worldview, spirit and truth is about access and context.
Thus, to repeat, worship is about a community that is continually doing something, “perfecting” the kinetic existence and experience of being and doing in the Spirit of Christ. In the being and doing that is worship in spirit, the barrier between the indicative and imperative, of means and ends, is breached and transformed into the fluidity of simple means. Worship is indicative and imperative. It indicates the kinetic reality of God’s divine presence breaking forth into the alternative community and making possible the imperative of a being-in-communion, which is the working of community, potentiality, and participation.11
In the next section, we shall endeavor to highlight certain features of the pentecostal worship service that I have noticed as a participant-observer that drove me to conclude that pentecostal worship is a pure means. I want to consider six features of everyday worship and reflect on them to craft a pentecostal philosophy of worship. I want to show, as I see in a mirror dimly, what worship as pure means looks like. Hopefully, one day when you the reader come face-to-face with pentecostal worship as pure means you shall know fully even as you are completely grasped by it.
Worship as Matterization of Grace
Watching Pentecostals in intense, fluid praise and worship has often filled me with the idea that worship itself is a “sacrament” of grace; sacramental not as in imparting grace but as grace phenomenalized, materialized, as a visible reality, grace as corporeal, or grace as real presence. Let me unpack this by elucidating it in four ways. First, worship is the mirror-play of grace. Grace is purposeless. It is not coded to well-defined goals. The whole idea of worship as pure means is about seeing grace from the human side. God graces human beings and they in turn grace God. It is like God seeing us and God is being seen by us, as Nicholas of Cusa formulated the vision of God. When properly understood, worship is the self-coincidence of grace in itself. In worship the active shedding of grace on humanity is identified with the passive reception as grace comes together, condensing into itself. Indeed, worship is the coincidentia of giving and receiving, outflow and inflow of grace. The logic of worship is the logic of grace.
Second, worship as pure means is a pure gift. The Spirit’s presence (and gifts) and human presence (and capacities) are pooled together and distributed between the two parties. The worship is arising only from a principle that is interior to the Spirit-believer relation. The worship is a complete gift and there is no need for reciprocal counter-gift. It is not possible to accumulate worship to be later used or enjoyed by one of the parties. The two parties generate it and both participate in it at the same time. If anything is to be stockpiled, it is not the worship itself, but the memory of it, and that is not what we are talking about here.
Third, worship is an institution. It is the institutional embodiment of responses to grace that are enacted or performed by individuals in their relationships with God. Individuals respond to God in various ways; they cooperate with one another to voluntarily express, celebrate, affirm their relationships with God. The network of responses that emerges out of this affirmative, cooperative process, the institutional framework, is called worship. This framework is not a means to accomplish any goal. It is rather a site of cooperative actions, which remains perpetually as a cooperative arrangement not restricted to determined goals. Worship is always a collective, collaborative, composite endeavor, and isolated performance is not part of the framework, as worship requires the gathering of two or three persons. In its composite, aggregative nature, it is a pure means like the “market.” This does not mean that the individuals whose collaboration creates worship have no motivation.12 The accent is on the collaborative.
In this collaborative ambience it appears that each person is sharing his or her energy collaboratively and that collaboration itself is “sharing” him or her. Worship appears to play itself, becoming a result of itself. When a man plays the piano so often and gets very good at it, at some point or moments of play he does not feel that he is playing it, but rather the piano is playing him. The player has passed on some aspect of his spirit to the piano, or as the Japanese (as per the philosophy of “Renri”) will say, the tool has acquired the identity of its owner, has harmonized with the owner, or has appropriated the spirit of the owner. When this happens the piano is also “giving” back something of itself to the owner. This is the becoming spiritual of the play. The play is a network partner with the player and the piano and it exists and functions as long as the other partners are together at their ownmost and utmost best and in the harmonious identification with one another. The play is the spirit/soul of the encounter. This spirit is only born, only lives, dies, and resurrects in the encounter. In a moment of intense encounter, the spirit can “possess” the player as if it is a separate power all of its own. With this spirit the play is graceful, a transformation of difficulty into appearance of effortlessness, nonchalance. When worship begins to play the worshipers—as it often does in pentecostal worship services—it becomes being-with.
Fourth, worship is the intensification, the ecstasy of the state (dynamics) of being-with. It is the stretching out and the opening of space between (which is beyond connection and disconnection) worshipers (one with other) and God.13 Worship is not an immanence in which the one is collapsed into the other or a milieu (or essence) in which a set of persons are immersed. It is a being-with that does not collapse and erase the “between” through which syncopated energies are generated and pass through the persons who are always one with the other, being singular-plural.
This between-ness, singular-plurality bridges the duality of subject and object, human beings and God, and between human beings themselves. Worship is both the subject and/or the object of divine-human relationship in an assembly. As a subject, it shows what the Spirit (or human beings) desires and what the relationship desires. As an object, it shows relationship at work.14 As such it bridges the subject-object divide. It is always a relation. Worship as pure means is an expression of Romans 8:26: the Spirit of the triune God who helps us pray is the same one who receives our prayers. Jesus Christ said, “whenever two or three are gathered in my name I am there in your midst [as the Holy Spirit]” (Matt. 18:20 NIV), and worship gestures to and marks the presence of the Holy Spirit in the community of believers.
Worship, however, is not the model of the divine-human relationship, but of the intensity of denuding it of end and calculation. What worship as a pure means models or presents is not the relationship but rather the stripping bare of the tension within it. In worship the relationship seeks and loses all aim, grasps itself. Worship is exactly this exit from instrumental use of relationship that embodies the divine-human relation. Worship embodies the relation in its infinite coming from this is to that is, and into presence in which time seems to have completely collapsed. Time appears to have become a mode of eternity, the place or point when it seems the temporal chain of reasons or the invariant network of causes and effects is momentarily broken up or suspended. It is not only time that seems to collapse, as if it is nothing for those in the ecstasy of worship, but the divine-human relation “collapses” into a skeletal airiness, into its pure form.
Worship as Pure Signifier
The emphasis of worship as pure means or pure mediality foregrounds the divine-human relation not as a signifier of anything other than itself or also posits it as not signified by anything in its livingness. At best, it is an empty signifier; it is nothing except a pure mediality, the thereness of a relation, a pure presence, and therefore it can stand for everything. This is very much related to the unstructured nature, skeletal airiness of pentecostal worship itself, or rather spirituality.
The ritualized, structured worship is chock full of semiotic meanings and signification, which limit its capacity to be made into popular use as it anchors and defines the divine-human relation. Worship as pure means concretizes the divine-human relation as a means without defining, limiting, its purpose and meaning. Worship transgresses the separation between means and ends, even as it refuses to be anchored by either of them. “There is something playful, irresponsible, carnivalesque about [pentecostal worship] that refuses rationality and the discipline of the everyday: it is there to escape, to vacate; it is liberatingly empty.”15
It is, indeed, a pure signifier. Worship, not the sharing of the Word or deliverance, is the unary point that “quilts” the whole pentecostal service, the multitude of individuals. But this worship is empty, representing the gulf between the human beings who must worship according to their capacities and abilities and the Divine who is the pure point of grace. This gulf or scission is precisely the passage of the divine, the way of grace coming from “heaven” and journeying back from earth to “heaven.” The gulf is the field of mediation between human capacities and free grace, their point of unity. Human capacity to worship and coursing grace occur, entangle in the scission and not in the Divine. Worship is most empty or the gulf biggest when it is at its best. At this point it is purposeless.
When worship is the crown of a pentecostal gathering, people do not stoop to the level of making it instrumental or purposeful. On the contrary, the orientation is to maintain to the greatest extent the distance between purpose and purposelessness, relegating the position of worship to a point rejected from the whole commodity exchange logic, where it matters little if it makes no rational (means-end-circuit) sense. There is now something beyond its presentation in reality, something beyond its descriptive properties. There is now an “unnamable thing” in worship that is more than the worship. Without purpose and with only an unfathomable trait in its core, worship becomes self-referential; it is its own sign. Worship as a pure means is the pure signifier, the master-signifier with no signified.16 Thus, it is empty.
Now someone may intervene by arguing that by defining worship as a pure means I have drained it of all effective contents, all “pathological” objects or particularity. Not exactly, there is still something that is “less than nothing” in pentecostal worship. The very point where the worship is purified of all instrumentality or particular purpose, its empty form appears as objet petit a (Lacan), the object cause of desire. Pentecostals act pentecostally when the content of worship becomes the form of worship itself; that is, when worship becomes empty. This is an emptiness that separates the “true believers” from the false brethren, an emptiness that drives the desire for God. The empty form of worship becomes a source of jouissance. The worship (the singing, the moans, the clapping, the dancing, the jerking, and the “slaying”) is best enjoyed when it is in its neutral, empty form. This is the imperative to “enjoy!” hidden in the pentecostal worship in its supposedly best form. The Pentecostal is a Christian who, when she is among others of her kind, requires a free worship (allusion to Kant here). You know you are freely worshiping the Lord when you raise yourself to reject all “pathological” purposes of the “worships” out there in the name of Spirit-filled worship. It is precisely when Pentecostals distance themselves from others and pathological particularity of worship that they fall under the sway of the inflexible imperative to enjoy.17 Let us continue with our philosophizing of pentecostal worship by further examining its “emptiness” and the object cause of desire that seems to emerge from it when it is nothing, a mere void.
Worship as Heidegger’s Greek Jug
The more I think of worship as pure means and the void at its center, the more my mind is drawn to Martin Heidegger’s analysis of the Greek jug (vase). Worship as pure means is like an empty shell made of music and spiritual gifts and wrapped up in emotions and intersubjective focus. If you are able to unwrap it and crack the shell, you will only find a material void, site of purposelessness, pure means staging a play between form and emptiness. Praise and worship as means—with its panoply of exultations, thanksgivings, music, song, dance, tongues-speaking, prophecies, silence, and slaying in the spirit—can hold the communion aspect of religious life. But the holding that constitutes the means “is not so much the function of the means as the void the [panoply] surrounds.”18 It is as if worship as pure means always retraces “the outline of Heidegger’s thing,” which is actually no thing.19 As Heidegger describes the jug:
The emptiness, the void, is what does the vessel’s holding. The empty space, this nothing of the jug, is what the jug is as the holding vessel. … Sides and bottom, of which the jug consists and by which it stands, are not really what does the holding. But if the holding is done by the jug’s void, then the potter, who forms the sides and bottom on his wheel, does not, strictly speaking, make the jug. He only shapes the clay. No—he shapes the void. For it, in it, and out of it, he forms the clay into the form. From start to finish, the potter takes hold of the impalpable void and brings it forth as the container in the shape of the containing vessel. The jug’s void determines all the handling in the process of making the vessel. The vessel’s thingness does not lie at all in the material of which it consists, but in the void that holds.20
When pentecostal worship is viewed through Heidegger’s account of the thing, the worshipers are the potters; they shape the void. And to quote Mark C. Taylor, “Whether form brings forth void or void brings forth form remains obscure. What does seem clear is that the thingness [pure mediality, materiality] of every [worship as pure means] is the no thing of the void.”21
There is no surefire way for worshipers-potters or worship leaders to immediately grasp the importance of form or void in a praise and worship service in order to transform it into a pure means. They can start with panoply (the usual materials) and the void forms around the space in between the materials. Or they can start with the void (instrumentality, calculations, purpose drained off from the outset, total openness to the Holy Spirit) and then form the materials from the emptiness—this is an impossible possibility. If void produces worship as pure means as much as the panoply produces worship as pure means, then worship is in an important sense about nothing, to paraphrase Taylor. “Nothing, it seems, is the generative void or creative emptiness in and through which things [worship in spirit and truth] arise and pass away.”22 May we say that just as the Greek potter in the strict sense does not make the jug, as Heidegger argues, the worshiper-potter does not ultimately create this nothing?
Before we proceed to discuss the object cause of desire as promised, let us examine one of the ways the void of pure means appears in worship; that is, how ends fall off from means in worship to generate worship as pure means. Here I want to draw from the thought of F. W. J. Schelling as it relates to the state of no conation. In his third draft of The Ages of the World, Schelling makes the point that a person can arrive at this state of no willing through two routes.23 On one hand a person can withdraw from all desires in the worship service and thus strive toward no particular purpose. On the other, another person who abandons himself to all desires, obsessions, and cravings can unwittingly reach the state of no conation. Schelling explains that this occurs, “Since this person too only desires the state in which they have nothing more to will.”24 But this state of no conation flees from both types of people, “and the more zealously they follow it, the farther it distances itself from them.”25 This is why the second option of starting with a void and working toward worship as pure means is an impossible possibility. It presupposes “the will that wills nothing, that desires no object, for which all things are equal and is therefore moved by none of them.”26 This is not attainable by human beings.
From Means to Means: The Pursuit of the Real of Worship
The route to worship as pure means, pure void, or desubstantialized self-relating negativity is the search for the unfathomable object cause of desire, precisely objet petit a, to use Lacanian terminology. Pentecostal worshipers are often looking for that mysterious X that accounts for the most-anointed, out-of-this world worship. So they go on stripping down the worship of positive symbolic features, yet that exhilarating worship cannot be pinned down to a specific feature. Nonetheless, two worship services, which are alike in all positive features, can exhibit palpable differences in the experience of anointing. The unfathomable X is what accounts for the unmistakable difference, the gap between the two worship services. Whether the gap exists or not does not matter; either way it must be presupposed or fantasmatically constructed if the believers are to make sense of the structural (emotional, connectivity) gap between the services. The object that makes all the difference when there is no perceivable or conceivable positive difference is the objet petit a. To get this nonexistent difference that exercises great powers of effectivity worship is desubstantialized. Is this not exactly the process of the emergence of the Cartesian subject? The subject arises from the desubstantialization of the human being (through the process of universal doubt and momentary passage through radical madness) to the point where what is left is a self-relating negativity of a pure cogito.
Here it appears that worship and subjectivity in their kernels are characterized, as it were, by a Schellingian violent gesture. The disappearance of “pathological” content in worship as pure means, far from signaling the end of worship, does something else. It gestures to the emergence of subjectivity, a new pentecostal subjectivity, the “barred” subject. WPM in itself suggests that for those engaged in it there is already a split in them: between the human person (with wealth of substantial content) and subject qua the void. It appears WPM is the musical (praise-and-worship) counterpart of the believer’s self-emptying for Jesus Christ. The two forms of subjectivity are connected by (impossible) pure desire, not a desire for something, by direct desire for the void of worship by a subject of God. All this is to say that there is an intersection between subjectivity and worship and the intersection takes the shape of “pure desire,” that is, “a desire which is not a desire for something, a definite object, but a direct desire for the lack itself. (Say, when I truly desire another person, I desire the very void at the centre of his subjectivity, so that I am not ready to accept any positive service in return.)”27
The pentecostal believer who approaches the void of WPM by stripping off all specific positive symbolic features from the worship also strips bare herself. In fact, the desubstantialization of worship is also the desubstantialization of the believer. It is the believer’s desubstantialization (the removal of all personal and social features from the self that may hinder the move toward WPM) that “transubstantiates” an ordinary worship into WPM. Or at least the desubstantialized subject (worshiper) is the libidinal foundation of WPM or the minimum idealization needed to support WPM.
In a self-reflective way, this foundation is “always already mirrored back” into the worship itself.28 This can be witnessed in the songs and abject positioning of the body or bodily remainder (after desubstantialization, self-emptying has done its work) in the worship service. The Holy Spirit is asked to melt and mold the self in total submission to this transimmanent power. When the Spirit is felt to be doing this work you might hear “Yes!,” “Once More!,” or “More!” This verbalization stands for the ever increasing desubstantialization of the believer. “It indexes the attitude of actively endorsing the passive confrontation with the objet petit a.”29 This is where the song about “melt me, mold me” continues. It says “fill me,” meaning “let me have that unfathomable X that makes the difference where there is no difference.” But the subject cannot be filled with objet petit a. The objet petit a cannot fulfill desire. Desire is not caused by objet petit a, it only sets desire in motion and cannot bring it to its full satisfaction. The best that can happen is ecstatic rupture (with shaking bodies, closed eyes, moaning and shouts, speaking in tongues, tears falling from the cheeks to the garments and to the ground, and so on), whereby the subject identifies with the object cause of desire.30
There are other reactions in moments of intense worship. While one face is displaying ecstatic rupture, the other may seem to be provocatively staring at the invisible Holy Spirit as if to say, “Give me more before I will ever be moved or hit the floor.” There is another with an instrumental attitude, working too hard, highly concentrated, engaged in a hard task as if such techniques will lead to the expected breakthrough to ecstasy. And yet there is still another person who looks at all that is happening with indifference. The hands are clapping, the lips are moving with the rhythms of the songs, but there is a bored stare.31
Worship as Kantian Duty
We have emphasized WPM as desubstantialization of ordinary worship, the removal of “pathological” content from ordinary service. We have talked about worship as pure means, reminding the readers of the act of doing something for its own sake, but then our notion points beyond the notion of end in itself. Let us examine three types of means-end relationships. First, when something is a means to another thing, means and end are externally related. The means is present for the sake of the end. Second, instead of an action being means to something else, it is an end in itself. So we are told human beings must be treated as ends in themselves. In this second case it cannot always be argued that cause and effect are internally related. More importantly, means and ends are not reciprocally interchangeable. The third type of means-end relationship brings us to a case where means and ends are reciprocally related. There is an inner teleology that binds them together in an autopoietic being, emergent self-organizing system. This being, system, or organism is self-creative. In this kind of system “every part is reciprocally both end and means.” For “the parts of the thing combine of themselves into the unity of a whole by being reciprocally cause and effect.”32
The notion of WPM goes beyond these three types of mean-end relationships. In this last case, end is separated, split, severed from means, and ends and means become an apparatus of pure means, creating and capturing means without end. In the worship, drive, goal is separated from aim (the path toward the goal). Or rather, the goal becomes the experience of the path, the aim itself. Here there is a permanent failure to achieve the “finite” goal as the aim itself becomes somewhat “infinite.” As Žižek puts it, “In the very failure to achieve our intended goal, the true aim is always achieved.”33 It seems WPM has become a partial object, means severed from the body (symbolic order) of ends, and an “organ without body” emerges.
By detaching ends from means, life-in-the-Spirit can be detached from the various instrumental ends, “pathological contents,” and move toward non-capitalist, non-prosperity-gospel profanation, engaging in the very difficult task (the impossible possibility) of resisting late capitalism’s gigantic apparatus of pure means, which separates everything from itself and is exhibited in its separation from itself as a spectacle. Thus WPM as a pure means opens up pentecostal worship with its profound connection to instrumental logic, relieving of its connection to ends of prosperity gospel, logic of exchange and commodification, reciprocity, and ideals of late capitalism. This is how Giorgio Agamben describes the activity that results from freeing an object or behavior from its genetic inscription within a given sphere: “The activity that results from this thus becomes a pure means, that is, a praxis that, while firmly maintaining its nature as a means, is emancipated from its relationship to an end; it has joyously forgotten its goal and can now show itself as such, as a means without an end.”34
The movement from three types of means-end relationships, I thought, would take this whole analysis of WPM beyond the force field of Kantian philosophy. Moving beyond Kant actually brought us back to him in a way that illuminates a crucial aspect of pentecostal spirituality. Paradoxically, WPM ends up looking like a Kantian duty. When worship is stripped of any “pathological” interest, goods, or motivations, it is transformed into a Kantian ethical act. Worship now overlaps with “doing one’s duty.” The pentecostal commitment, unconditional commitment to pure worship, turns into the “law of worship,” which stands beyond the pleasure principle. This “transubstantiation” of worship into duty does not mean that Pentecostals are caught in a pseudo-concrete act of purity. It is simply that the very “transubstantiation” bears witness to the freedom that ultimately defines life-in-the-Spirit. Is not a Kantian ethical act the ultimate exercise of freedom? Freedom is an act grounded only in/by itself. It is the predicate of a subject who is not bound by the chain of “pathological” interests/urges or who breaks up the network of causes and effects.
Limit and Excess of Worship as Pure Means
In order to end this section of the chapter characterizing WPM, let us examine its limit and excess. The limit of worship as pure means is worship itself, that is, the pentecostal mode of worship. We can read this statement in two ways: there are instrumental and playful relations of worship. First, WPM will be done in, or can never really take off, in Pentecostalism because of the regnant nature of the prosperity gospel and other calculative interests that are fostered by or inhabit the movement. This is to say the generative forces, the factors that propel worship in the first place for many Pentecostals will not take a back seat to a serious commitment to worship as play. From this perspective worship as its own limit means that the most formidable obstacle to the further development in any group’s or individual’s spirituality is ordinary worship. This reasoning assumes an evolutionary schema; ordinarily, people grow from ordinary worship to WPM. At some point in their spiritual growth and development they realize that the generative forces of worship have grown too big, leaving the playful relations of worship (the divine-human relations) etiolated. So some dialectics of forces and relations move in a way to elevate relations above forces, but then they maintain that the frame of relations never really catches up in the consumerist-desires-all-things pentecostal world in late capitalism.
This is indeed a simplistic way of examining the dialectics of generative forces of worship and the playful relations of worship. The relationship between these two forces is not evolutionary. The playful relation of worship can formally subsume the instrumental, generative forces of worship as it meets (founds) them in the nave of the church or the common space of the storefront church, and then change the generative forces here a little, there a little, in such a way as to gradually bring both in line. In doing this, WPM does not need to drive ordinary worship as if they are both bound by some teleological divine mandate.
No one can exactly say for any one group or person when the internal contradictions of ordinary worship have become an insurmountable obstacle to WPM or predict periods or a specific time when relations and forces will come in accordance. Ordinary worship is capable of transforming itself through its very inadequacy and impotence, so to speak. At any moment the excessive failures of instrumental worship may well lead to WPM because ordinary worship is constitutive of WPM. This is what I meant by WPM meeting ordinary worship in the nave or common space. WPM emerges only from the surplus failures of instrumental worship. If we subtract the excessive failures or aim to directly choose purity (the Kantian duty of worship), we lose WPM. This is the coincidence of failure and success, limit and excess, sinner and saint that disruptive grace enacts as the impossible possibility of worship as pure means.
Let me expatiate on what I mean when I say any direct choice of WPM will constitute a fundamental blockage to attaining it. While it is true that worships that are not pure means are failures, it is truer to say that failure is the only path to the truth of worship as pure means. We must repeatedly fail in reaching toward the goal of WPM and sometimes experience worship as a nightmare. The path opens up from here only if we recognize our failure as the form of success. If we remain faithful to the goal of WPM, after the failure we can discern a way forward. In the failure we can discern the perspective for overcoming it. In trying to actualize WPM it often first changes into its opposite and it is by passing through the failure itself that the ideals of WPM become actuality. There is no direct path to WPM. In the worship service the believers are not directly confronted with a choice between bad worship and WPM. The only choice is between no worship and bad worship, and what tips the balance in favor of WPM is the realization that non-WPM is human instrumentality, purposes, and hubris in the guise of true surrender to the Holy Spirit. The so-called bad worship is the solid material base that allows fleeting WPM to shine through.
“Bad worship” is like what Hegel says about the phallus: it is both an instrument of urination and insemination, a conjunction of the high and low, when he is illustrating the two readings of “Spirit is a bone.”35 If we see only failure in the failures, then we are like those in Hegel’s reasoning who can only discern the phallus as the organ of urination. But to see a possible path to success from the failures is to be like those who can also discern the phallus as an organ of insemination, the higher functions of generation. Hegel’s point is that we do not directly go for the best option or proper result with our first choice, but only through repeated failures. The choice of “insemination” comes only through repeatedly choosing “urination”; we arrive at the true choice via the wrong choice. If we tried to directly choose worship as pure means, we would infallibly miss it. WPM emerges through repeated ordinary worships, instrumental worships, or purposeful worships as their aftereffect.36 But is there a fundamental obstacle to WPM that failures and preliminary “wrong choices” cannot fix?
Concluding Thoughts
What really separates Pentecostals from worship as pure means today? Is it just about an inadequate number of failures of ordinary worship? Of course, it is the instrumental logic, the symbolic economy of exchange in today’s pentecostal worship and lifestyle, you declare. But I say unto you, the gap that separates Pentecostals from WPM is inherent in worship. Worship is itself split between purpose and purposelessness. As Giorgio Agamben taught us in The Kingdom and the Glory, worship (glorification) is always needed as a support of power, as a cover for the crack between being and praxis in the conception of God, which the concept of oikonomia introduced into the Christian understanding of God. For Agamben glorification is the “glorious nutrient of power.”37 Doxological acclamation (the praise that human beings give to God, glorification) is, Agamben argues, “perhaps, in some way a necessary part of the life of the divinity.”38 What Agamben is saying, precisely, is that glory is the substance of God’s power and God depends on glorification. “Perhaps glorification is not only that which best fits the glory of God but is itself, as an effective rite, what produced glory; and if glory is the very substance of God and the true sense of his economy, then it depends upon glorification in an essential manner.”39
If glorification plays such an important function, as Agamben demonstrates in his book, then worship, which produces glory by glorifying, cannot be totally rendered as purposeless. Worship definitely serves a purpose in the divine-human economy. Yet, we should be careful to note immediately that the process of glorification reveals the theodoxological inoperativity of the power machine. Inoperativity, as we saw in chapter 1, is at the heart of and an internal motor of glorification.40 The tension in worship, its split character, seems to be well captured by the following statement by Agamben, from his comment on the empty throne of power (referring to Ezekiel’s vision of God’s kabhod and the Western democratic system):41
The empty throne is not, therefore, a symbol of regality but of glory. … The throne is empty not only because glory, though coinciding with the divine essence is not identified with it, but also because it is in its innermost self-inoperativity and sabbatism. The void is the sovereign figure of glory. The apparatus of glory finds its perfect cipher in the majesty of the empty throne. Its purpose is to capture within the governmental machine that unthinkable inoperativity—making it its internal motor—that constitutes the ultimate mystery of divinity.42
Note well that the purpose, the instrumental value, of glorification is to produce inoperativity, which is precisely to end the instrumental functions of glorification; that is, to have a utilitarian glorification “whose functions are not executed but rather displayed.”43 With this apparent coincidence of purpose and purposelessness it is obvious that the gap that separates Pentecostals from worship as pure means is inherent in worship itself. When we think worship has been delivered of all “contents” and is now nothing we then discover that there is something that is less than nothing in it.
We have come a long way from the introduction where I made a case for the notion of split God in Pentecostalism and proceeded to deepen our knowledge of this notion as it operates across and between various spheres of social practice. The discourse has portrayed the notion of a split God as an apparatus.44 Agamben defines apparatus as “anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings.”45 In what remains of the chapters of case studies, I will examine the interactions between the pentecostal apparatus and West African believers. I have chosen West Africa as a site for the last case study because I have some deep knowledge of the regnant form of Pentecostalism in the region. Besides, I have already published a scholarly work on Pentecostalism in one of its major countries.46
I would like to quickly add that to consider West Africa, or any other place for that matter, as a site for the pentecostal apparatus is to assume that it is a place where the apparatus achieves actuality. But this assumption should not be construed to mean that the investigator can simply match features of the apparatus to extant practices and then declare how the apparatus imposes itself on believers. The apparatus does not have an independent existence apart from the practicing Pentecostals; it is not a mega-entity, a transcendent substantial reality, aware of itself and controlling them as puppets. What we expect to see in chapter 7 is the dialectics of the interaction between the apparatus of split God and Pentecostals. What this means is that while the apparatus has the power to ground pentecostal activities, it is a virtual/ideal entity (nonentity) that can only exist as the subjective “presupposition” of engaged or pentecostally subjectivized West Africans. Borrowing from the words of Slavoj Žižek from a different context, let me end by stating that the apparatus
exists only insofar as subjects act as if it exists. Its status is similar to that of an ideological cause like Communism or the Nation: it is the substance of the individuals who recognize themselves in it, the ground of their entire existence, the point of reference which provides the ultimate horizon of meaning to their lives, something for which these individuals are ready to give their lives, yet the only thing that really exists are these individuals and their activity, so this substance is actual only insofar as individuals believe in it and act accordingly.47