Anticipation as Intoxication: A few thoughts on the epistemic necessity of miracles

In the Gospel according to St. Mark (8:22-26), we have an account of Jesus’ apparent failure to heal a blind man. At least, his first attempt to restore the man’s sight doesn’t work. Only on trying again does he overcome the man’s blindness. There’s a lot going on here that a casual first glance would miss. A casual first glance would, in fact, leave us blind to what is happening, and the point is to cure our ignorance. The writer wants us to take a second look.

There are two episodes involving the healing of blind men in the same book (8:22-26; 10:46-52). These act as bookends for a section of the story in which Jesus and his followers are heading to Jerusalem, where Jesus will be executed. In this section, Jesus predicts his own death three times (8:31; 9:31; 10:32-34). And, following each prediction, his disciples fail to grasp his meaning. Their blindness remains.

This looks like a plot.

The miracle involving failing to restore sight then succeeding to restore sight is a message with so many meanings. But considering St. Mark’s strange literary intention, I want to look at just one interpretation. I want to focus on the shift from the unmiraculous to the miraculous as it relates to how we interpret the world.

Meaning, in general, is a process in which resonance is found and created. It has a setup-payoff structure. A perfect image of this is Chekhov’s so-called gun. Chekhov’s gun is a dramatic principle that insists that everything in a story should be necessary. The writer Anton Chekhov, after whom the idea is named, says the following:

“Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.”

Elsewhere he echoes this idea as follows:

“One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off. It’s wrong to make promises you don’t mean to keep.”

The setup-payoff structure of meaning follows the intentional structure of consciousness. There is an expectation and the fulfillment of that expectation, or at least an answer to the questions raised by that expectation. A thing feels meaningless or nonsensical when there is only a setup but no payoff, or when something happens randomly without being preempted in some way. This structure depends on our natural receptivity, our natural openness to the meaning-world.

We are made for what is not us. We are built without any hope of being self-sufficient, where every dimension of our meaning-finding and meaning-making requires going beyond what we inherently possess. In fact, everything in this world is dripping with contingency; everything calls out beyond itself for an answer that it cannot provide on its own.

We feel hungry and go look for food. We yearn for companionship, so we seek others out. We feel that we’re made for a particular kind of work or role, so we aim to do that rather than some other thing we have no aptitude for. We desire transcendence, so we look for ways to fulfill or suppress that desire. We’re made for so much and we are naturally dependent on what is not us to fulfill how we’re made.

We are meant for meaning. There is simply no way to escape this.

But what this story of a failed healing and the subsequent poor understanding of the disciples shows us is that it is more than possible for us to work according to particular expectations and anticipatory structures that turn out to be wrong. Think of Aesop’s fable of the boy who cried wolf. The shepherd boy plays a trick on everyone around him, screaming at the top of his lungs that danger is near. But there is no danger and the joke is on them. He does this again, but again he is lying. Then, when a real wolf approaches, the boy calls for help, but this time no one believes him.

Their expectations have become set in stone. They now expect only one answer, such that when a different answer presents itself they cannot see it.

The thing that fascinates me about St. Mark’s telling of the story of the failed healing is that he is throwing light on the way that a particular setup or expectation is held. It becomes a kind of mental prison. He is, following Jesus here, questioning the way we anticipate things. Mark’s Jesus speaks to his disciples as if they are a bunch of morons—because they are (8:17-21):

“[P]erceive ye not yet, neither understand? have ye your heart yet hardened? Having eyes, see ye not? and having ears, hear ye not? and do ye not remember? … How is it that ye do not understand?”

I’ve been thinking about this a lot around what happens in the realm of the digital, where the simulacrum frequently replaces the real or proves that there is no reality behind pixellated virtuality. In the Markan story and the one of the boy who cried wolf, the people there had access to realities that could call their expectations into question. But in the hypermediated digisphere, access to the real is often blocked. We have, for all we know, ideas without realities, representations without reference.

This makes us all particularly vulnerable to a kind of anti-phenomenology: a mindset that is set up to constantly deny what we experience by reconfiguring our expectations along false lines. In daily life, people are (mostly) calm and earnest and even (mostly) kind. They live ordinary lives with a fair sense of responsibility, a desire for truth, and neighborliness. But in the mediasphere, goodies and baddies are everywhere. There’s a lot of ussing and themming. There’s a lot of side-picking.

Trouble is, this simulacrum sets up a particular set of expectations, and if we’re not careful, expectations ossify and, like the man in Mark’s story, our blindness remains. Then the things we don’t expect can’t happen.

They can’t happen. They can’t happen. Right?

Anticipation can function as intoxication. It’s no wonder that ours is an age in which ideology runs rampant. When embodied realities are granted less legitimacy than (hyper)mediated ones, there can be no miracles. Expectations can’t be thwarted when your side has been picked ahead of time.

Ideology functions along the lines of deciding beforehand how the world works. Ready-made opinions are dished out, vilifying some, glorifying others, and splitting the world up into teams. But at least one of the lessons of that story in the book of Mark is that if you play stupid games, you will win stupid prizes. Your blindness will remain. Thankfully, though, a further lesson is that reality acts as autocorrect for those who play stupid games. We can fight the real only for so long.

At some point, we’ll see the wolves.

At some point, hopefully, we’ll have to notice the miracles too.