An Overcoding God
I recently finished reading Toshikazu Tawagochi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold.
The novel - really four self-contained vignettes - centres on a mysterious cafe located in Tokyo, famed for giving customers the ability to travel back in time, provided of course, certain rules are adhered to, the most famous of which is that the time traveler returns from the past before the coffee they are served with turns cold.
While the time limitation was the most well known, largely due to it being emblazoned on the novel’s title, it was another, less well known restriction, one I learned about it in the first chapter, that I found the most intriguing. If anything, it called into question the whole point of travelling back in time: the person traveling back in time cannot change the present.
At first, one would think that this would “kill the vibe” of the whole book, as it were. What is interesting about the novel however, is the way in which this restriction, more than any other, shines a light on that traveler’s true desires and real motivations for traveling back in time.
Without giving any spoilers, I was even more intrigued by the way in which the present, while structurally remaining unchanged, also became overcoded.
In semiotics, overcoding is the phenomenon whereby an established sequence of symbols and signs take on new meanings and significations. Though structurally remaining the same, they nonetheless are able to point someone in new directions, see things in new ways, see a new meaning in otherwise the same event, and even open up possibilities that a previous reading was not able to furnish. Critical theory in the tradition of Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin and Alain Badiou, have also furnished what Adorno calls a “standpoint of redemption” on which history can be viewed with new liberatory perspectives not previously available. This comes through what Badiou calls “the Event”, an intervention that completely changes the rules of a given situation, and in so intervening unlocks what he calls “the multiple of the situation” in his Being and Event.
There is another - theological - layer of meaning to overcoding which, like Adorno and Badiou, uses the language of redemption and event respectively, though applied in a way that is different. I have written before on the essay Metanoia: The Theological Praxis of Revolution by Aaron Riches and Creston Davis, in which the event breaks into our material situations and takes those situations to their very beginnings, a new genesis, you might say. This new genesis is redemptive because, as a 1995 document on redemption by the International Theological Commission suggests, it brings us to mind God’s creativity and freedom, which in turn renders the reality created by God as irreducible, that is, limited by our own perspective. Because it is irreducible, God’s endless creativity is also capable of overcoding the events of our history which we might see as self-enclosed realities, and bringing to light new redemptive possibilities we have not noticed before.
Within Catholic dogma, one example of this theological overcoding is the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, in which Mary’s conception free from sin comes - not in spite of Christ’s redemptive work - but precisely because of it, even if it chronologically comes after her own birth. As the declaration on the Immaculate Conception makes clear, not even the seemingly enclosed events of the past are beyond the endlessly creative work of Christ’s redemption.
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