My video essay, “Antinomian Americana,” is part of a larger project on antinomianism in American religious history. Antinomianism, translated literally as “against law,” is an essential category for understanding the history of religion in America. The first major religious controversy in colonial American history was the New England “antinomian controversy” of 1637-1638, where the banishment of Anne Hutchinson from Massachusetts Bay Colony for her radical interpretation of the Christian doctrine of “free grace” signals the inauguration of a certain dialectic that will run through the entirety of American history. On one side, there is the movement of antinomian resistance that claims access to a higher truth of divine justice against the theo-political machine of the state. On the other side, the state and its nomos have thrived on identifying antinomian resistance as a threat that enables it to shore up its claims to legitimacy and authorize its deployment of regulatory violence.
In its most prominent historical expressions, antinomianism is about grace. “Demurral as a covenant of grace.”[1] While many of the most famous examples of American antinomianism link grace to an expression of Christian salvation (and supremacy) that refuses the Mosaic law as a stipulation of eternal justification, I read antinomian grace as the unity of distinction between nomos and its outside (both “within” and “against”), as the basic condition (or “impulse”[2]) of resistance that keeps nomos open to the very possibilities it seeks to foreclose. One of the main threads of this video essay (and the larger project on antinomianism) is a heretical conception of grace informed by black studies and found within what I call “antinomian flesh.”[3] On the threshold of the constructed and captured body that grounds nomos’ operations of law and order, the flesh is the hidden and open-ended site of immanent contingency on the edge of all individuated bodies marking their common unity of difference. Becoming flesh is becoming all. Forget yourself. Forget your body. Abandon everything to the grace of flesh-in-common, “the mystery of life … the miracle of the world.”[4]
“Antinomian Americana” explores the concept of antinomian flesh through the juxtaposition of dramatized excerpts from the 1637 trial of Hutchinson (played by Summer Fuss) and a visual and sonic montage of music, the wilderness, a dog, the poetry of Fred Moten and Adrienne Rich, photographs, documentary footage, painting, text, sound, and the free jazz of Cecil Taylor and Albert Ayler, supplemented by the music of the composer Matthew Kline and the bassist/composer Matt Nelson. Following the Godardian imperative of exploring the “montage of disparate phenomenon in poetic imagery,” the video is an attempt to follow a contingency of image, text, and sound into the wilderness of a certain American tradition of political and musical radicalism. In this montage, I find a generative connection between the radical free grace of Hutchinson’s 17th century theological and political heresies and the 20th century musical experiments of Taylor and Ayler, both musicians whose own radical, antinomian approach to music generated entirely new musical vocabularies and expressive possibilities.
In the video, Hutchinson’s own poetic resistance to Governor John Winthrop’s interrogation is a kind of mystical refusal of the violent mediations of orthodoxy and patriarchy. Her’s is a union with God that is immediate and unconditioned, an experience of radical grace that I imagine not as the basis of a salvific resolution, but as an enfleshed movement of fugitive escape through the wilderness of an open future in excess of Winthrop’s brutally controlled economy of salvation. Hutchinson gives herself over to a radical grace that cannot be touched by the power of nomos: “you have power over my body, but the Lord Jesus has power over my body and soul,” she says to Winthrop. On the same antinomian path but in a different key, Cecil Taylor and Albert Ayler give themselves over to the grace of an enfleshed passion sounding out an absolute music beyond any pre-fixed form or musical orthodoxy or propriety. Taylor says that “one thing I’m trying to achieve is a genuflection to the music itself.” By giving himself to the music, Taylor becomes the music, which is life itself. To find life is to find the grace of the flesh within a world built around a nomos of bodily capture and control. What is the world? It is not the earth. It is not “reality.” The world is an ordering principal. The world is a distinction. There is the side of the world, of nomos, which structures our sense of reality and makes experience coherent, and there is the other side. There is no world without the negation of the other side. Many refer to the other side as “nothing.” Some call it “environment,” others call it “God.” Whatever names are conjured, antinomianism is what happens when the other side is taken as the path of a truth irreducible to the world. Resistance is music. Being against the world is a gnosis.
[1] Susan Howe, The Birthmark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (Wesleyan University Press, 1993), 1.
[2] See Colby Dickinson, “What Christians Need no Longer Defend: The Political Stakes of considering antinomianism as central to the practice and history of theology” in Crisis and Critique, 2, 1: 115-149, 2015.
[3] See David Kline, “Antinomian Flesh,” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory (Fall 2021) 20:3 https://www.jcrt.org/archives/20.3/Kline.pdf
[4] Michael Hardt, “Exposure: Pasolini in the Flesh,” in Brian Massumi, ed. A Shock to Thought: Expression after Deleuze and Guattari, Routledge, 2002), 586.
