Dynamis of the Image: Moving Images in a Global World 9782735124282, 9783110528749, 9783110530544

Citation preview

Dynamis of the Image

Contact Zones

Editors Lars Blunck, Bénédicte Savoy, Avinoam Shalem

Volume 5

Dynamis of the Image

Moving Images in a Global World Editors Emmanuel Alloa and Chiara Cappelletto

Éditions de la Maison des sciences de lʼhomme

The book is published in cooperation with the Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme.

ISBN Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme 978-2-7351-2428-2 ISBN De Gruyter 978-3-11-052874-9 e-ISBN (PDF) De Gruyter 978-3-11-053054-4 ISSN De Gruyter 2196-3746 Library of Congress Control Number: 2020934247 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de © 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover illustration: Allan Sekula, Panorama. Mid-Atlantic from Fish Story (1989–1995). Courtesy of the Allan Sekula Studio Typesetting: Satzstudio Borngräber, Dessau-Roßlau Printing and Binding: Beltz Bad Langensalza GmbH, Bad Langensalza www.degruyter.com

Content Emmanuel Alloa and Chiara Cappelletto The Dynamis of the Image (and the Genesis of a Book) 

 1

Potentialities Gil Bartholeyns On the ‘Virtus’ of Images Medieval Practices, Contemporary Theories 

 15

Ticio Escobar Ta’angá verá The Power of Images in an Amerindian Perspective  Hans Belting The Migration of Images An Encounter with Figuration in Islamic Art 

 63

Linda Báez-Rubí Wanderstrassen Traveling Images — Moving Ideas Between Continents  W.J.T. Mitchell Method, Madness, and Montage 

 103

Philippe-Alain Michaud On Screen   123

Images at War, Images of Wars Georges Didi-Huberman Torrents and Barricades 

 141

Emmanuel Alloa ‘Just Terror’ The Visual Communication of ISIS 

 159

 37

 79

VI 

 Content

Susan Buck-Morss Visual Empire 2.0 

 175

Chiara Cappelletto The Dynamis of Fiction in the Globalized World On Walid Raad’s Images in Transfer   201 Angela Mengoni Visualizing Autoimmunity Gerhard Richter’s War Cut 

 235

Decentering Visual Studies Sunil Manghani Image Degree Zero From the Empirical Image to Image as Capacity  A.S. Aurora Hoel Images as Active Powers for Reality A Simondonian Approach to Medical Imaging 

 263

 287

Morad Montazami From Speculative to Heretical Orientalism The Paul Klee Syndrome in the Hamed Abdalla Archives 

 311

Avinoam Shalem The Transformative Museum. Why We Need an Other Museum for the Arts of Islam   329 Authors 

 353

Picture Credits  Plates 

 363

 359

Emmanuel Alloa and Chiara Cappelletto

The Dynamis of the Image (and the Genesis of a Book) Global Spectacle

What is the imaginary that we resort to when thinking of the world? What is the imaginary that carries us away? Let us start with the still frame that figures as a cover to this volume: gigantic cargo ships, flying flags from Singapore, Liberia, or Panama, which, like their freights, have themselves become indistinguishable. Crossing the Northern Atlantic, the Strait of Hormuz, or the South China Sea, these marine pachyderms are loaded with multicolored, albeit unified boxes made of weathering steel. Piled up by cranes, the towering stacks very much resemble massive LEGO bricks. Blue, red, brown, green, yellow: despite the astounding variety of colors, ultimately, the cargos are ‘black boxes’ and their whereabouts are inscrutable. We can only surmise what these containers, six to twelve meters long, each capable of holding up to twenty-four tons of cargo, are carrying along their transatlantic routes. We are left, as it were, with the medium as our only message. And yet these carriers, so crucial to the worldwide network of exchange, remain generally out-of-focus. In his 1995 photo-essay Fish Story, Allan Sekula decided to look at these new logistical realities, highlighting the extent of the hitherto unseen alliance between homogenization and portability:1 while rarely depicted as such, the cargo containers stand out as the ultimate icons of globalization, as unified isotypes of the generalized migration of goods (fig. 1). The subsequent film The Forgotten Space (2010), co-directed by Sekula and Noël Burch, from which the cover of the present book was taken, carried this investigation a step further (fig. 2). In their respective ways, the two works document the often-invisible supply chains of global trade, consisting of maritime routes, gargantuan super-harbors, dock warehouses, and intermodal hoists. In tracking the radical change to sea commerce over a period of a couple decades, Sekula was keen to understand how the sea, as this forgotten space afloat with a visual imaginary of seafarers, pirates and mutineers, had been replaced with standardized vessels of worldwide exchange. Thanks to ‘intermodality’—that is, the seamless shift from one mode of transportation to another (from ship to train to truck, and the other way around)—demarcations between land and sea have been lost, and the two realms have merged into a single giant transit zone. The old jigsaw puzzle of how to stow a ship has become a thing of the past, as fully automated cranes reach high above the hulls and hoist standardized containers onto the decks, while simultaneously

1 Alan Sekula, Fish Story, Düsseldorf/Rotterdam: Richter/The Center 1995.

2 

 Emmanuel Alloa and Chiara Cappelletto

Fig. 1: Allan Sekula, Fish Story, Düsseldorf/Rotterdam: Richter/The Center 1995, p. 57.

unloading other vessels that have just entered the land–sea terminal. Sekula remarks that if commodities, according to Marx’s view, are containers for ‘dead labor’, and the slave ship was arguably the first ‘container ship’ inasmuch as it yielded, qua floating means of transportation, potential labor in its hold, the cargo container could be considered a ‘coffin’ hauling already dead labor whose product is now being distributed throughout the world. This uncanny global playing field, while never fully completive, is nevertheless always already incubational and on the verge of realization. The containerized units that Sekula photographed epitomize the worldwide circulation and the new economy of ‘just-in-time’ production. While signaling, through the maritime medium, the reality of liquid capitalism, they also gesture toward the solid and sealed enclosure of the box as the ultimate unit of exchange-value today. In many respects, the cargo containers not only hide the process of their own making but also exhibit a pure exteriority via an endless series of color patterns, setting up an enormous screen onto which a fantasized content may be projected. What do these steel crates hold in reserve? Their exteriors offer no clues whatsoever, only iconic surfaces. While Sekula wonderfully demonstrates how these maritime cargomobilities serve as a proxy for the standardized, anonymous exchanges that increasingly make up today’s experiences, he strangely omits to draw the one conclusion that there is to be drawn: that all we are left with, to figure these ever-more complex phenomena of planetary scale, are images. What, if anything, do they hold in reserve? Indeed, Sekula’s cargo containers capture today’s processes of globalization in a compelling image that diverges from the usual depictions advertising the products and goods themselves. No doubt, globalization has gone hand in hand with new 

The Dynamis of the Image (and the Genesis of a Book)  

 3

Fig. 2: Allan Sekula, Noël Burch, The Forgotten Space (still frame), film essay (NL/AT, 2010).

visual hegemonies—with brands, icons, and logotypes that contribute to a unified world-picture—and such standardization has often been decried. However, images are not merely relays of meaning, shipped around the globe to achieve a unified spectatorship; insofar as their critical and subversive potential is recognized, they are also powerful forces of resistance against these hegemonies, and they can help shape alternative viewpoints on the real. In order fully to grasp the potential for addressing the global dimension and the overlooked conflict of forces at hand in images, the becoming-world of the image itself must be acknowledged. The Dynamis of the Image starts here: from the urgent need to provide an account of these modified frameworks that affect our thinking about cultural imaginaries and visual artifacts. It is imperative, at a time when the very idea of free circulation is true only for certain groups and certain goods, while insurmountable walls are erected against others, that we investigate the role of images in this new distribution of agency.

Images as Dynamos No doubt, images carry messages, and they often do so very competently. In quasi-logistical terms, they are often the shortest way to get a content from A to B. But this freight metaphor, facilitated by shallow theories of visual communication—and still too often dominant in discussions about ‘pictorial competence’ and visual engineering—misses the point, and certainly cannot explain the new forms of violence exerted 

4 

 Emmanuel Alloa and Chiara Cappelletto

against images. There is no denying it: images are static and need special devices, both material (true for digital and film media alike) and immaterial, if they are to be set in motion. In other words, they are not auto-mobile. But that does not mean that images do not move. Whether they consist of flickering images traveling at high speed around the globe or static Neolithic cave paintings, religious altarpieces or televised advertisements, these artifacts have an incontestable power to move their spectators, stir emotions, and provoke reactions. Visual scholars are indebted to one author in particular, Aby Warburg (1886– 1929), who recognized this power early on when he described images as “energy-containers”. Indeed, in his case, seeing the many ships entering and leaving the harbor of his hometown of Hamburg may well have fueled a maritime imagination and an interest in trade routes. Warburg not only devoted a specific article to flying ships and submarines as imagined since the Middle Ages2 but also studied the migration of forms between the Mediterranean, the Middle East and Northern Europe, documenting the specific “migratory routes” (Wanderstraßen) that were followed.3 Taking particular interest in the material infrastructure of the border crossings and the way in which visual devices, such as tapestries, came to serve as ‘automobile vehicles’ for this migration, Warburg was keen to understand images’ unique power for conveying forms through space and time. Rather than opposing shapes and drives, or forms and forces, Warburg invites us to consider visual forms as crystallized affects, preserved to facilitate transportation over geographical and chronological distances, but poised for reactivation when the time is ripe. The notion that Warburg puts forward in this connection—that of dynamo-engram (‘Dynamo-Engramm’)—is in itself noteworthy. On other occasions, Warburg refers to “dynamograms”,4 and he possibly even planned to write an “aesthetics of the dynamogram” (Ästhetik des Dynamogramms).5 Warburg thus conceived of images, against the backdrop of biopsychological theories of memory, not only as conserves or traces (gramma in the sense of ‘imprint’) that preserve a record of past affects, but also as the visualizations of these affects (after all, gramma can also refer to graphic symbolization). But more important, for Warburg, the image’s gramma is that of a dynamis, and this concept emerges as a common thread in the present volume.

2 Aby Warburg, “Luftschiff und Tauchboot in der mittelalterlichen Vorstellungswelt,” Die Erneuerung der heidnischen Antike. Gesammelte Schriften, Leipzig: Teubner, 1931, vol. I, pp. 243–249. 3 Aby Warburg, “Italienische Kunst und internationale Astrologie im Palazzo Schifanoia,” Die Erneuerung der heidnischen Antike. Gesammelte Schriften, Leipzig: Teubner, 1932, vol. 2, p. 466. 4 Notebook entry from June 2, 1927 (‘Allgemeine Ideen’). Warburg Institute WIA, III, 102.1.4.1: “Das antikische Dynamogramm wird in maximaler Spannung aber unpolarisiert in Bezug auf die passive oder aktive Energetik […] überliefert. Erst der Contact mit der Zeit bewirkt die Polarisation. Diese kann zur radikalen Umkehr des echten antikischen Sinnes führen.” 5 Notebook entry from May 18, 1927 (‘Allgemeine Ideen’), Warburg Institute WIA III, 102.1.4.2.



The Dynamis of the Image (and the Genesis of a Book) 

 5

In choosing dynamis as a common denominator for the contributions gathered here, our intention was to touch on all three levels of the concept in question. In Ancient Greek, dynamis (δύναμις) has many different meanings, but these can be grouped under three main aspects. The first is capacity. All beings are endowed with specific dynameis, that is, they are defined in terms of certain capacities. Having a dynamis is equivalent to ‘being capable of’ performing certain actions or causing certain effects. In that respect, it is closely related to the notion of power more generally, or to that of force. At times, dynamis stands for an intrinsic ability that a being develops by virtue of its own capacities (being able to speak, having the capacity for reasoning, being skilled at playing a musical instrument); at others, it refers to an extrinsic ability that is granted by others and exercised indirectly (such as political authority). Capacities thus have to do with potentialities—that is, with something that might occur. Aristotle distinguishes between weak potentialities and strong ones: a weak potentiality simply indicates a possibility (something that might chance to happen), whereas a strong potentiality indicates an inclination or a tendency toward its own actualization. The second aspect is movement. Strong potentialities already contain a sense of movement: there is a proclivity in the acorn toward becoming an oak; there is an orientation in the embryo toward becoming an adult living being. From this point of view, dynamis is more than an abstract possibility of something that might or might not happen; it indicates an already-initiated process. To the extent that people in modern times draw on the ancient notion of dynamis to stress the ‘dynamic’ side of things, they are focusing on this strong understanding of the word as an already ongoing (albeit not necessarily always perceptible) movement. Dynamis thus sketches an unstable state and anticipates what is on the verge of becoming, at the threshold of enactment. The third aspect is latency. By and large, dynamis indicates a propension or dynamics, never an actual movement. Strictly speaking, it is even at odds with the being-in-act. It does not denote an actual fact, or an actual performance; it is rather, and at best, a tension toward actualization. This might explain why Warburg, who is so often associated with a reflection on the power of images, insisted—through the very idea of the ‘dynamogram’—on their latency and inactuality. If images are containers, it is precisely because they keep energies in reserve, and deploy their forces only in very precise circumstances. Just as political authority is often measured by the non-necessity of recourse to physical force to exert power, some images may conserve their dynamis by not depleting the sum of their potential at once. Although images seem to have no secrets—after all, they are self-exposing surfaces that hold nothing back from their viewers—they often need time to reveal themselves in all their particularities. With today’s worldwide deployment of technologies, images are ubiquitous. As torrents of images came to stream around the world at unprecedented volumes and speeds, one could have reasonably thought—as some who saw the image as promising a visual esperanto did—that this would lead to a diversification of viewpoints and perceptions. And yet the opposite is typically 

6 

 Emmanuel Alloa and Chiara Cappelletto

the case, as we witness with the hegemonic domination of a given visual framework. Whether in consumerist visual culture or art biennials, the tendency toward unification can be seen everywhere. The critique of such a hegemony is itself part of the problem, given that it issues from the very same sites that once served the propagation of hegemonic claims.

Potential Threat: On Iconic Efficacy Martha Rosler depicted this paradox with clairvoyant anticipation in her photomontage work Cargo Cult from the series Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows No Pain (1966–72) (fig. 3). Here, the look ‘into’ the cargo boxes is thwarted all the more efficiently by the fact that the latter have themselves been made into projection surfaces for other gazes—namely, stereotypical representations of faces, and more specifically, women’s faces. Products need a human side to be ‘sold’ and human faces to impersonate them. Cargo Cult, with its standardized faces, most of which are in the process of putting on makeup, depicts a world where the woman’s face itself has become a commodified and interchangeable surrogate, a mask that can be put on and taken off at will. Beyond critiquing a certain type of spectatorship, however, Rosler’s work also aims at decentering the standard denunciation of commodification: the title Cargo Cult likewise effectively recalls that in Melanesia and on some Pacific islands, the arrival of cargo shipments loaded with Western consumer goods was associated with magical powers, which had to be diverted through particular cultic practices. In other words: even supposedly ‘dead coffins’ still contain energies that can be captured and redirected. Counter-ideological artists are not the only ones testing strategies of resistance to this worldwide network of unified (self-)imposed regimes of visibility, with its share of logos, brands, and visiotypes. Recent times, and probably especially the years since 9/11, have undoubtedly witnessed a surge in new forms of iconoclasm, ones often motivated by religion. In 2001, a few months before the attacks on the World Trade Center, the destruction of the Bamiyan statues by the Afghan Taliban patently proved that images cannot be reduced to mere commodities—with relative exchange values measurable within a worldwide flux of trademarked goods; rather, they have a power of their own, a kind of iconic efficacy, that needs to be addressed. More recently, with ISIS’s claim that they had erased the presence of ‘idols’ in the Mosul Museum, what is contested is both a unified Western world-image and the power of images as such. As is well known, iconoclasts are often people with the highest consideration for the powers of the image, albeit one geared entirely toward removing the potential threat that the latter pose vis-à-vis those who view them. A potential threat: this could be the starting point for the present collection of essays on the dynamis of the image. The destroyers of images, iconoclasts old and 

The Dynamis of the Image (and the Genesis of a Book) 

 7

Fig. 3: Martha Rosler, Cargo Cult, from the series Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows No Pain, c. 1966–72, photomontage.

new, from Ancient Byzantine times to ISIS today, should be considered those who have most recognized images’ power to move. Only that which poses a threat needs to be removed, and iconoclasts acknowledge the far-reaching power of images through their very acts of negation. By insisting on the removal of such ‘movers’, iconoclasts challenge the by now widely known motto under which Warburg grouped his fragments on the psychology of art: “You live and do me no harm” (Du lebst und thust mir nichts).6 The rivers of ink poured over this startling phrase, which strangely echoes many passages from the Old Testament on the impotence of the idols,7 has transformed it from a personal dictum to a rallying cry for a collective attitude, and a very Western one at that. It is as though Warburg recognized that images can have a life of

6 Notebook entry from May 18, 1927 (‚Allgemeine Ideen‘), Warburg Institute WIA III, 102.1.4.2. 7 See “They have hands, but cannot feel, they have feet, but cannot walk, nor can they utter a sound with their throats” (Psalm 115: 7) and “Like scarecrows in a cucumber patch, their idols cannot speak” (Jeremiah 10: 5); Also “They must be carried because they cannot walk. Do not fear them, for they can do no harm”; “neither can they do no harm” (ibid.).



8 

 Emmanuel Alloa and Chiara Cappelletto

their own while ensuring that their beholders are never subjugated to a greater extent than they would be willing to accept. Nonetheless, and irrespectively of Warburg’s apotropaic invocation, images often exert violence; they can do harm, and at times even wage war, either in the name of or against their makers. What does it entail to rethink the dynamics of images from the point of view of their dynamis, as the Ancient Greeks called it, or their virtus, according to the Latin translation, or their virtù, as it was known in the Italian Renaissance? What if the ‘virtue’ of the image is not so much linked to the opus operatum as to the opus operans? What if the major threat does not stem from the relations between images and their (more or less adequately) depicted reality, but from the interlocking of images among themselves? Images have long been considered inferior kinds of being, subordinate artifacts devoid of reason. In recent years, however, the development of visual studies and image sciences (Bildwissenschaften) has sometimes been associated with the idea that images indeed have a logic and a rationality of their own, which do not rely on support from verbal and discursive devices. Defending an autonomous domain of images has been necessary in the face of a plurisecular tradition of the denigration of pictures, but significantly, the insistence on the specific essence of images—that which responds to the question ‘what is an image?’—has also framed the discussion in a narrow way. By claiming the image’s self-sufficiency, the perspective is clearly a modernist one that advocates criteria such as medium specificity and autonomy. While by circumscribing the image within such a specific domain—the domain of artifacts that are capable of generating sense and conveying meaning without external support—we might indeed restore honor to an all-too-often disparaged kind of visual knowledge, this rehabilitation comes at the price of a drastically delimited field of investigation. Images often take part in complex and impure environments; they are cast in a web of practices and transactions that are rarely ever merely iconic. What is more, the question ‘what is an image?’ may be ill-suited to address the issue of what images do. Of all theorists, it is perhaps Louis Marin who most cogently emphasized why the traditional ontological ‘what is?’ question misses the ‘powers of image’. Rather than focusing on the being of the image—on its essence or underlying nature— the aim should be to examine the image’s forces, its latent or manifest powers, in short, its efficacy.8 Historians and anthropologists are well aware that the concept of the modernist abstract painting hardly fits with other pictorial realities, such as the Renaissance concept of the imago animata, which was associated with miraculous devotional paintings, or the phenomenon wherein ex-voti made of wax suddenly become animated by godly virtus and produce effects on the beholder, to say nothing of ritual practices from the Americas, Asia and Africa. Yet even within the Western humanistic tradition, there has been a strong link between virtus

8 Louis Marin, “L’être de l’image et son efficace”, Des pouvoirs de l’image: Gloses, Paris: Seuil, 1992, p. 10.



The Dynamis of the Image (and the Genesis of a Book) 

 9

and imago, dating back to the High Middle Ages, as authors such as Roger Bacon attest.9 In his commentary on Marin’s work, Jacques Derrida underscores the importance of this thinking in terms of dynamis, or as it might be called, ‘dynamo-logy’: such thinking is less concerned with what is or what is not than with the logic of efficacy. He adds: “dynamis here links in a most original way the ideas it has always associated, namely, force, power, and virtù, with the possible and the virtual as such, that is to say, with a virtual that has no vocation to go into action, or rather, whose going into action or whose enactment does not destroy its virtual power.”10 The ancient and medieval reflections on the virtus of the image, on the powers of this ‘immobile mobile’ capable of accomplishing events without ever moving, gain new momentum in an age when productivity has become the global imperative, and when images are functionalized to arouse programmed effects in their onlookers. In what ways can images point to the possibilities of an efficacy that is different from efficiency, a potentiality that is distinct from productivity? In what ways can images be not only vectors of identification and of compulsory needs for acting out but also domains for exploring as yet unthought-of possibilities? What if an essential dimension of the image’s power lies, not in the actualization of a force, but in the latency of its reserve, as Marin suggested? How can the flat surface of the picture become a space for the intersection of incompossible things and the visualization of contradictions? Furthermore, notions of agency must be questioned, and with them, the equation between efficacy and activity: does the fact that images manifestly produce effects mean that they are active entities? Can images serve as models for conceiving of plural modes of efficacy that are not necessarily fashioned on the model of human agency?

Thinking Outside the Box: Decentering Visual Studies Heeding the manifold inspirations of Warburg, Marin, and others who have worked in a similar vein to rethink the ‘dynamo-logy’ of images, The Dynamis of the Image brings together a collective of scholars around a shared desire to confront image theory and visual studies with some of their unquestioned yet decisive biases. While remaining aware of its own historical and geographical—and thus intellectual—locatedness in

9 Roger Bacon, Opus maius, pars IV, dist. II, chap. 1 (The Opus maius, trans. Robert B. Burk, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1928, vol. 1, p. 130): “For every efficient cause acts by its own force which it produces on the matter subject to it, as the light of the sun produces its own force in the air, and this force is light diffused through the whole world from the solar light. This force [virtus] is called likeness [similitude], image [imago], species, and by many other names. […] It causes every action in this world.” 10 Jacques Derrida, “By Force of Mourning,” Signature Derrida, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013, p. 330.



10 

 Emmanuel Alloa and Chiara Cappelletto

contemporary Western humanities, it aims to destabilize the all-too-clear distribution between center and periphery, and between actuality and obsolescence. One of the goals of the project is to show, through an insistence on tensions rather than essences, and on exceptions rather than canons, that globalization does not necessarily equal homogenization, and that a critical take on it requires a sensibility to both the heterotopias and the heterochronicities of today’s world. As Walter Benjamin famously claimed, in addition to what is actually the case, there are layers of disremembered pasts, but also strata of “forgotten futures”: horizons of possibility that must be unearthed because they have become inactual. The aim is to rediscover in the past the signs left by the future.11 Today, this task is not only a historical one: it calls for a seeking out of other, forgotten narratives that lurk in the margins and an attentiveness to alternative accounts of our visual realities. The tense proper to the dynamis is not the perfect, but the future perfect, gesturing toward a co-presence of what is and what is yet to come. Ultimately, if we are to take the idea of iconic efficacy seriously, there cannot be any ‘just-in-time’ production, for there are no image supplies to be stocked and sold. Images are granted a specific ability to travel, morph, go into hiding, and resurface where least expected. Martin Heidegger famously claimed that we live in the age of the world-picture, which saturates every nook and cranny. Today, every spot on the surface of the earth has been mapped, and the remotest areas of the globe can be explored with a simple mouse-click. Yet this conquest of ubiquity should not let us forget that images do not always fit into their frame and they often dislocate unified accounts. Visual studies would be well advised to keep up this attention to the margins. There is a need to decenter visual studies in three respects: first, by deliberately venturing into non-Western territories; second, by recalling that for centuries, Europe itself has harbored image practices that are far-removed from the modernist ideal of the autonomous artwork; and third, by trying to address the kind of images that have often fallen by the wayside— namely, non-artistic, technical, or operative images—owing to the art-historical bias in image studies. The blurring of disciplinary borders and the setting up of a dialogue between remote fields was deliberate. Surprisingly, several contributions to this volume deal with situations of images in war, where visual artifacts can serve as catalyzers for both progressive and regressive steps. The relative acceptance, both in terms of academic research and editorial policies, of what is now known more broadly as visual studies should not blind us to the fact that this recent research field is still very much determined by the biases associated with its geopolitical and disciplinary origins. The present collection of essays on the dynamis of the image is meant to address these blind spots. The aim is to broaden the scope of visual investigations, which is

11 Walter Benjamin, News of a Death: “There are words and pauses pointing us to that invisible stranger—the future—which forgot them at our place” (quoted in Berlin Childhood Around 1900, trans. Howard Eiland, Cambridge, MA/London: Belknap Press, 2006, p. 20).



The Dynamis of the Image (and the Genesis of a Book) 

 11

still far too narrow, and to look for what has remained out-of-focus. If Sekula’s cargo ships help us see that where things are in movement, lines become blurry, they also force us to reconsider where to fix our gaze. With regard to the visual environments that we are steeped in every day, our perspectives need to be decentered through an acknowledgement of the multipolar dimension of the contemporary world, a dimension that constantly gives birth to—and is kept spinning by—new images. Images today, cast in a movement that inevitably also moves their beholders, have a dynamic consistent with that of the world at large: one that is restless, mutinous, and defiant.

A Note of Thanks This volume is an offspring of the transnational European research project Dynamis of the Image. An Archaeology of Potentialities, which has been conceived and developed since 2012 on behalf of the joint program of the Collège d’études mondiales at the Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme (Paris) and the Gerda Henkel Stiftung (Düsseldorf). Meetings have been held in various locations, with two two-day workshops taking place at the Gerda Henkel Foundation in Düsseldorf in June 2014 and the NCCR eikones in Basel in December 2014, and the final conference Quand les images viennent au monde. Dynamis de l’image III being held at the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris in June 2015. Scholars from different academic generations, with varied disciplinary backgrounds, have generously shared their expertise, challenging the most established understandings of how images work. The lively and controversial discussions will be remembered by all participants—no book could possibly reproduce them. Rather, this volume brings some of the proposals made toward pluralizing the approach to images and their powers in the context of the pressing issues of a globalized 21st century together with contributions by colleagues who did not take part in the meetings. Our gratitude goes out to each and every one of our contributors for their handsome commitment and open-mindedness, without which no effort could be made to challenge the Western visual and cultural habitus. As with any collective enterprise, while institutions made this book possible, individuals made it real; we would like to express our gratitude to them. The whole project owes its existence to Andreas Beyer’s initial spark. Sara Guindani has supported this initiative from the beginning, in the name of the Collège d’études mondiales, with her infinite generosity and invaluable friendship. We are immeasurably grateful to Samuel Fleck, who, in the guise of the unflagging detective, tracked down any remaining imperfections, giving the manuscript its final form. Last but not least, we would like to extend a warm thanks to the “Contact Zones” editors for welcoming this volume into their forward-thinking series. An endeavor such as this could hardly find a better intellectual environment.



Gil Bartholeyns

On the ‘Virtus’ of Images Medieval Practices, Contemporary Theories A woman and a man come by car to the middle of misty countryside. An elegant citydweller, quite out of place in this environment, the woman rushes through the fields. She tells the man about an extraordinary picture, saying that she cried the first time she saw it (but did she, really?). She enters a small church, quiet and dark, lit only by burning white candles. Not a sound is heard except for the murmur of women in black, praying. She walks up to a wall where she has spotted a niche behind hundreds of lit candles. There lies the object of her desire: Piero della Francesca’s fresco of the Madonna of Parturition, the ‘Madonna of childbirth’, the masterpiece of masterpieces. No sooner has she feasted her eyes on the fresco than a voice from behind her asks her whether she wants to have a child or not. “I am just here to look,” she answers, troubled. The sacristan, ‘a simple man’, tells her that is a pity for she can ask anything she wants, though on one condition: she must kneel before the image. The beautiful woman in heels tries but cannot manage it. Unlike the ‘others’, she is not a believer. The sacristan detains her, for an interesting scene is about to unfold. A statue of the Virgin, probably Baroque, dressed-up, ornate, and surrounded by candles, is borne by a procession up to the Madonna of Parturition. There, a young woman kneels in front of it and prays for a child. She stretches her arm out towards the belly of the statue. Miracolo! Dozens of tiny birds fly out from Mary’s womb (fig. 1).1 This is the masterful opening sequence of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia (1983). The Madonna of Parturition is alternately a devotional image and a work of art. It all depends on how one looks at it. The woman says she cried at the sight of the image, yet cannot kneel before it. The question would then be: is the aesthetic relationship to the work of art as intense as the devotional relationship to the image? Can a work of art make us kneel, cry, or accomplish miracles? In short, does it possess a power? Does it inspire worship? Hegel answered this question in the negative: no work of art in a museum could make us kneel, as the elegant woman does in Nostalghia, even if we tried.2 An entire historiographical tradition, dating back at least to Kant, imbues

1 Gil Bartholeyns and Thomas Golsenne, “Théorie des actes d’image,” La Performance des images, eds. Gil Bartholeyns, Alain Dierkens, and Thomas Golsenne, Brussels: Éditions de l’université libre de Bruxelles, 2010, pp. 15–25. 2 “No matter how excellent were the statues of the Greek gods, no matter how we see God the Father, Christ, and Mary so estimably and perfectly portrayed: it is no help, we bow the knee, no longer [before these artistic portrayals]”: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik [1832], Aesthetics. Lectures on fine art, trans. Thomas Malcom Knox, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973, vol. 1, p. 113.

16 

 Gil Bartholeyns

Fig. 1: Behind the woman and the flowered Virgin Mary, we see the Madonna of Parturition, fresco by Piero della Francesca (ca. 1457). Still from the film Nostalghia, dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, 11’.

the work of art with the sole power of sparking a ‘disinterested pleasure’, in contrast to the devotional image, because the devotee’s relationship with the latter is based on self-interest, on desire. This broader narrative to which we are so accustomed is historicized by Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, for example, when the latter writes about “the autonomy it [Art] achieved, after having freed itself from cultic function and its images”, and identifies “the history of art as that of its progressive autonomy”.3 Aesthetics wins out over the realm of the gods. The art historian Hans Belting describes this in terms of “the fascinating process whereby the medieval cult image became the art work of the modern era”.4 In the long run, this takes the form of an immense opposition between faith and art, magic and rationality. Tarkovsky demonstrates an evident fact: in a given period—here, the Italy of the 1980s—the status of a single image can vary greatly. Conversely, not all similar images are (made) capable of accomplishing miracles. In other words, an image is not determined by its nature. Rather, it shows

3 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, eds. Gertel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert HullotKentor, London–New York: Continuum, 2002, p.  1, 7; and p.  13: “Indeed, as components of ritual praxis the magical and animistic predecessors of art were not autonomous; yet precisely because they were sacred they were not objects of enjoyment.” 4 Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990, p. 16.





On the ‘Virtus’ of Images 

 17

a potency or potential efficacy, which is its dynamis, to cite the exploratory concept developed by Emmanuel Alloa and Chiara Cappelletto, or its virtus, to cite the corresponding Latin and medieval form. Jean Hus’s criticism of those who go into raptures before “the beauty of an image” and forget “the horrific humiliation of Christ”5 advocates this openness, the intrinsic indeterminacy of the image, more than the triumphant history of the secular or aesthetic perspective. The Enlightenment has turned these attitudes, which are not mutually exclusive, into a chapter in the myth of civilizing processes. No such historical, cultural and aesthetic exchange took place among the great art thinkers of the 15th century. In his 1435 treatise De Pictura, Leon Battista Alberti writes that “painting contains a divine force (vim admodum divinam) which not only makes absent men present, as friendship is said to do, but also makes the dead seem almost alive. Even after many centuries they are recognized with great pleasure.”6 Furthermore, Alberti says, it is as if the spectator were compelled to feel the emotions of the people represented.7 Utterly divine force, almost living images, empathy by sight … what more could we say? Hegel knew this all too well: “This arousing of all feelings in us, this drawing of the heart through all the circumstances of life, this actualizing of all these inner movements by means of a purely deceptive externally presented object is above all what is regarded, on the view we have been considering, as the proper and supreme power of art.” Therefore, art consists in arousing strong emotions. However, Hegel adds that the power of art is no longer at stake; rather, “art’s vocation is to unveil the truth in the form of sensuous artistic configuration.”8

When the Image Awaits: A Short History of Activation Let me introduce a second example, one contemporary and personal in nature, to set out fully the terms of my argument. This is the first time this story has appeared in print.9 In January 2014, in a modest house in the High Fens (Belgium), a small plaster statue of the Virgin suddenly lit up, taking on a ‘moon white’ color. In the 15 years that it had stood in the kitchen, it had never done that before. Over the following days, the

5 Jan Lavička, Anthologie hussite de la scolastique à la Réforme, Paris: Publication orientalistes de France, 1985, p. 122. 6 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, book 2, § 1 [1435], trans. J. R. Spencer, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966, p. 63. 7 Ibid., p. x. 8 Hegel, Aesthetics, pp. 47, 55. Adorno’s thinking is also dual: the cult is historically opposed to the artwork, but the latter is ‘a force field’, a living entity that upsets the beholder (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 176 et passim). 9 I am preparing a book on this case: The Irresistible Phosphorescence of the Virgin of Jalhay. An Essay in Perturbography.



18 

 Gil Bartholeyns

neighbors visited the statue’s owners, a couple of pensioners, to witness the phenomenon and pray. As darkness set in, she appeared. Every night, more people came from farther away. The first recoveries occurred. Once the event was publicized, several hundred people lined up to see the statue and offer ex-votos (written prayers, photo IDs of children…). “Cameras [were] turned off”, otherwise the object would appear greenish on the digital screen (plate I). She was placed in a niche carved by a carpenter: “‘batches’ of people [came] in”, said the baker’s assistant, and the light was turned off. People came with their children, their cats … they saw it move! One person had seen it. “She is so beautiful!” said a female visitor who had come for her backache. In the queue, people would sing, bathed in the revolving lights of the police car—there were road markings, miraculously minor accidents, guards on duty until two o’clock in the morning. Thousands of people came to see it for themselves and meditate. Behind the scenes, strange visitors offered to take the statue to the sanctuary of Banneux. It was an intensely religious period, at the end of which the statue was taken to the University of Liège for analysis (using X-rays, a spectrometer and a GeigerMüller counter—a complete archaeometry), with the Church’s approval. During the press conference, scholars said that no trickery was suspected; it was ‘simply’ a luminescent phenomenon, the phosphorescence produced by a zinc sulfide coating. ‘Believers’ were ‘skeptical’. The way they saw it, the scientists had not given any explanation. The statue was safely hidden away in the vault of the local council, next to the seal, and moved here and there to meet the demands of the tourist board. Then, people started bringing their own statues to place next to the old one. They brought water bottles so they could ‘refuel’ before taking their statues back home. A woman who touched it would not touch anything else until she could lay her hands on her children’s heads at home. People wondered about a nearby wooden chapel that had been demolished a couple years back. A GPS route that should have led a visitor to the owner’s house actually took her into the woods, where she saw a bright light through the trees. Autumn was setting in. In September, with the owners’ consent, the statue was placed under a glass bell and a spotlight in the refurbished church tower, stealing the show from the large suspended Christ to her right. A couple of buses full of religious tourists stopped by. They came to touch the niche that housed the statue. Some left rosaries there, others commemorative medals. The story did not end there. N., the owner, had been in possession of another virgin since the previous summer: someone had bought it from a flea market. She held it in her hands: “and there it goes,” said N., “it lights up as well. But I told the journalists, this one won’t go to the university!” This is a perfect example of a ‘small image’ producing great effects. The statuette in question, brought back sometime after 1936 from the sanctuary of Banneux (a place of Marian apparitions at the time, some 20 kilometers away), is a by-product. Much later, it was salvaged from scrap by N. in the upper-middle-class home where she worked as a housekeeper. The statuette stayed quiet for approximately 80 years and was in no way predisposed to such a destiny. This is a perfect illustration of the potentiality of dynamis in the sense I intend to explore here. Suddenly, this image ‘without 



On the ‘Virtus’ of Images 

 19

qualities’ turned daily life upside down, accomplishing ‘miracles’ and mobilizing the authorities for weeks. There are several different elements behind its success and efficacy. Let us first mention the phosphorescent coating: in the darkness, the statuette looks ‘whitish’, ‘as if the light came from within’. However, it appears greenish in pictures and does not display on smartphones, as the cameras on these are not sensitive enough to capture the light. The impossibility of capturing this phenomenon—this ‘icono-resistance’—is part of what makes the image so remarkable. One has to see it to experience it. It does not matter that the explanation lies in the physiology of the eye. What is regarded as a technical inability of photography to capture a visible phenomenon, for some people, greatly contributes to the appreciation of the supernatural nature of the luminescence. This is even more striking than when photography is known for seeing what is invisible to the eye, such as in San Damiano (Italy) or Medjugorje (Bosnia-Herzegovina), where pilgrims take pictures of the sky, hoping to capture a sign of the Virgin’s presence, in the past in photographs, and now on the screens of their smartphones.10 Let us also mention the unicum quality of the statuette: no other example of this statue produced in the 1930s re-emerged during the media hype of the spring of 2014. The media brought this image to the national, if not international stage, drawing hundreds of people, by playing up the mystery and even the ‘apparition of the Virgin’. Physicians would claim that they could not explain their patients’ recoveries; others would advise their patients to visit the ‘Little Lady of Jalhay’. Faith and the horizon of expectations make up another element here: “I hope this is not something that can be explained,” one visitor, eager to (allow himself to) believe, told a reporter. An opportunity had arisen to commune with oneself outside the official places, which were considered as commercial. Visitors spent invigorating moments, tinged with mysticism, without necessarily being ‘believers’—much less ‘churchgoers’. The exceptional is best experienced in an ordinary living space. What is more, the capitalist order has engulfed the pictures through which we establish a connection with ‘something beyond’: objects cannot be mere things.

Potentiality as Anthropology, Potentiality as Event We could go on, but what has been said thus far suffices to illustrate that these effects are not merely products of their social context. Similarly, they are not a natural agency or reaction related to the functioning of the mind itself. The phenomena are neither entirely cultural nor entirely cognitive; they exceed this distinction. I will call this

10 Élisabeth Claverie, “Taking Pictures of Supernatural Beings,” Iconoclash, eds. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002, pp. 460–461.



20 

 Gil Bartholeyns

Fig. 2: Santa Muerte (Holy Death), 2009.

situation an anthropological one.11 The very idea of the potential of the image implies this approach. The critique of ‘presence’ and the ‘affective turn’, a trend some refer to as a “new kind of animism”,12 is as problematic as the cognitive and psychological explanations.13 According to the latter, when images provoke in us reactions that are primal and sensual rather than aesthetic in nature, we tend to repress them, as was the case for the educated woman in Nostalghia. These are reactions that other peoples, including Western civilization at other periods in its history, would not repress. Indeed, they still constitute a sociological or historical sharing based on reason and the idea of aesthetics as a pleasure of the rational mind. The people of Jalhay were called ‘believers’, ‘children’, and ‘provincials’. The media usually deals with this topic only after making a mockery of it, indicating that they are interested in it, but not in the same way the others are—the others being those ‘inner savages’ who lack common sense.

11 See Gil Bartholeyns and Jean-Claude Schmitt, “History of visual culture,” Debating New Approaches to History, eds. Peter Burke and Tamm Marek, London: Bloomsbury, 2018, pp. 247–275, in particular pp. 266–270. 12 Janet Wolff, “After Cultural Theory: The Power of Images, the Lure of Immediacy,” Journal of Visual Culture 11, no. 1 (2012), pp. 3–19. 13 David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989; David Freedberg and Vittoro Gallese, “Motion, Emotion and Empathy in Esthetic Experience,” Trends in Cognitive Science 11, no. 5 (2007), pp. 197–203.





On the ‘Virtus’ of Images 

 21

This approach is based on a logic of disqualification that Jeanne Favret-Saada14 has laid out effectively while discussing witchcraft in the Bocage (France). The logic takes two forms here: a folklorization of the rural (the little people of the uplands, remote from the city, dimwitted), and an emphasis on mystery (“when the night has come”), by way of a medieval aesthetic. And yet, every year, several hundred thousand people go to Lourdes (France), Kibeho (Rwanda), Fatima (Portugal) or Banneux (where the Virgin of Jalhay originated), and leave only after purchasing a statuette, an image that is also a body. In Mexico City, youngsters from all parts of the city bring offerings and ask for blessings before the figures of San Judas and the Holy Death, patrons of the hopeless and criminals (fig. 2).15 During Easter, in Granada, Malaga, and other parts of the world, massive processions of dressed-up Virgins, covered in flowers and bathing in incense, foster an emotional community between true believers and simple tourists alike.16 Amongst these practices, the phenomenon of ‘art’ appears to hold only a tiny place. How naive it seems to grant it such a pivotal role in the history of images in the West. On the contrary, what primarily shapes this history is the continuity of devotional attitudes, which has been given scant attention. Those images heal and fulfill wishes—they accomplish miracles—because one contemplates them, touches them, talks to them, or gives them offerings, and as is often said in such circumstances, nothing is more important than ‘putting an end to suffering’ and ‘protecting one’s own kind’. People take pictures of these images and bring home copies, which continue to act from their place on the mantelpiece or the bedside table. Sometimes they weep, bleed, or whisper a message. Sometimes, the Virgin Mary appears, in these cases mostly to children, as in Medjugorje in 1981, turning them into ‘seers’ who serve as intercessors.17 “It feels like the Middle Ages!” is a phrase I heard while presenting the Jalhay case. In those words, humanity as a whole was discredited. Indeed, what did the French legal system, constitutionally the most secular in the world, accomplish when in 2009 it condemned the manufacturers of a ‘voodoo’ doll of a former president? By declaring that the effigy causes harm to the president, the judiciary authority authenticated the belief in magic: sinking needles into an effigy of the president amounts

14 Jeanne Favret-Saada, Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage [1977], Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. 15 Caroline Perrée, “Mexico, de San Judas à la Santa Muerte. Logiques votives et rituels transversaux en milieu urbain,” L’Homme 211 (2014), pp. 17–39. Andrew Chesnut, Devoted to Death. Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. 16 Marlène Albert-Llorca, Les Vierges miraculeuses: légendes et rituels, Paris: Gallimard, 2002. Stéphane Manzone, Quid Esperanza, CJC Productions, 2006, documentary essay. 17 Élisabeth Claverie, Les Guerres de la Vierge. Une anthropologie des apparitions, Paris: Gallimard, 2003.



22 

 Gil Bartholeyns

to harming his person.18 Likewise, why would one wish to ‘primitivize’ particular modern attitudes, when one can note empirically that it is not easy to gouge out the eyes of an image? Why consider facts to be culturally irreducible, and thus incomparable, for fear of an ‘evaporation of the social’? Martin Jay, in a sort of nostra culpa, turns a critical eye on ‘cultural relativism’, suggesting that its historicization of vision (via the idea of visuality and the attention to techniques) has led to a neglect of ‘the integrity of the visual’.19 Not everything, Jay insists, is ‘constructed’ or ‘encoded’: does visual experience not necessarily exceed the prescriptions of cultural mediation? In any case, not all constructions are entirely the work of culture. I have just said that the history of Western images is characterized less by a break than a continuity of attitudes—although this continuity remains to be clearly defined—but I must add that this is because parts of these attitudes, though culturally determined, have a broader scope. We tend to make things the (grammatical) subject and imbue artifacts with intention or even personality, especially when they look like living beings.20 In the context that interests us, it just so happens that images look like their prototypes; images often look back at the people who stare at them. They are bodies that, just like any sign, make their referent present, yet never in a literal sense. The Incarnation paradigm tends to endow representation with an active presence in this world, while the contemplative posture tends to plunge the spectator into the image, and even deeper. An aspect of potentiality lies precisely in this dual movement and this ‘ambivalence’ of the sign, as defined by Jack Goody21. In this sense, bringing the past and the present together in the common framework of Christian visuality and the iconic efficacy of Western images does not go against historicization. Is the Virgin Mary or the saint embedded in the image, or does she/he act through it? Is the miracle of image animation the product of the believer’s perception or is it inherent to the image? Can the saint be present in several places at the same time? Why does one image and not another accomplish miracles or become the object of an immense cult? Questions of this kind are common to practices and notions across different eras. Essentially, the central question is that of activation, the state of latency, the potential for action, rather than the power to act: the image is ‘able to’. The accounts of a virtus of images prevent this power from being reduced to a theology of the image, or a mechanics of the acts of the image. On the contrary, they speak in favor of the event or occurrence: it did happen, but it could have not happened.

18 Jeanne Favret-Saada, “On y croit toujours plus qu’on ne croit. Sur le manuel vaudou d’un president,” L’Homme 190 (2009), pp. 7–26. 19 Martin Jay, “Cultural relativism and the visual turn,” Journal of Visual Culture 1, no. 3 (2002), pp. 267–278. 20 Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. 21 Jack Goody, Representations and Contradictions: Ambivalence towards Images, Theatre, Fiction, Relics, and Sexuality, Oxford-Malden, Blackwell, 1997.





On the ‘Virtus’ of Images 

 23

While virtus is the word that was used to express the ‘power of images’, let us note that it was never a matter of the virtus of the image. The virtus is something that happens to the image; it is akin to something that happens to us in our everyday lives that could also not happen to us. Virtually all instances of iconic virtus are temporary and autonomous: the virtus comes to the image and is almost always confined to the time of the miracle. The virtus is also linked to potentiality or capacity; it is one of the Latin terms chosen for the translation of the Greek word ‘dynamis’ (δύναμις) in the Bible and in other texts. The virtus puts us suddenly in a perspective of conceptual heterochrony. In this perspective, ancient or alien thoughts acquire a sort of contemporaneity in our reflections. How can virtus, understood as a concept, disrupt well-established ideas? The virtue of the virtus, if anything, consists in its ability to point out, through historical examples, the fact that integral constructivism and perfect naturalism are mere reductionisms. It also shows that the very idea of a ‘power of images’ and the fact that some express this power as a ‘belief’ are nothing but constructs of the mind, a combination of a fantasy and a disqualification.

The Nature of the Iconic Virtus and ‘Activation’ of the Image Found in the medical, philosophical, scientific and political fields, the Greek word dynamis has not been Latinized, with a few exceptions, primarily in the field of natural sciences: “dynamidis dicitur vis et postestas herbarum”.22 Indeed, the meanings that it encompasses can be broken down into four words: potestas (power as possibility); potentia (power as strength); vis (force); and virtus (quality, virtue). The first translators of the Bible chose virtus as an equivalent to dynamis. Over the centuries, virtus became the norm, while its semantic range broadened. Virtus first and foremost means ‘power’, understood as the quality of a substance or an individual. It is the physical energy of a person. It also means the ‘power’ exerted by something over another thing. In Old French, both vertu (virtue) and force,23 a word also found in modern English, are derived from virtus. Until the 17th century, ‘virtue’ remained synonymous with power: ‘faire vertu’ meant ‘to be efficient’.

22 Here Lexicon latinitatis nederlandicae mediiaevi, ed. Johann Wilhelm Fuchs, vol. 3, Leiden, Brill, 1986, D 496. See also Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, ed. R.E. Latham et al., London: Oxford University Press, 1986, p.  740. Du Cange et al., Glossarium mediae et infimae latinitatis, Niort: L. Favre, 1883–1887, t. 3, col. 120. Mittellateinisches Wörterbuch bis zum ausgehenden 13. Jahrhundert, Munich: Beck, 2000, vol. 3, c. 1068–1069. 23 Dictionnaire latin-français de Firmin Le Ver, 1440, eds. Brian Merrilees and William Edwards, Turnhout: Brepols, 1994, entry for “virtus”.



24 

 Gil Bartholeyns

In the realm of the sacred, and especially as concerns relics, virtus is the pre-eminent term. In medieval and modern Latin literature, virtus refers to miraculous power. For that matter, a medieval image specialist will talk of ‘the virtus of the image’. He will deliberately revert to the Latin word to avoid a less neutral term, such as ‘power’. This, however, amounts to a figure of speech, insofar as the genitive form is never used. The reason is a priori simple: claiming that a picture has a power of its own would be idolatrous; through the mediation of the picture, it would amount to endowing the pictures of saints (that is, artifacts) with a power, instead of attributing this power to the saints themselves. But the matter is actually much more complicated. First, as the result of a long-standing trend, Thomas Aquinas stated at the end of the 13th century that the image of Christ deserved the same worship as Christ himself, thus conflating the cult of the model with that of its image. He accounted for such image worship using a psychological argument diverted from Aristotle: it is in the nature of the human mind to mistake the picture of a thing for the thing itself, although this does not mean the picture is worshipped as the thing would be.24 Like others in the two centuries before him, Aquinas explained the holy blood relics by reference to the bleeding image of the Savior, implicitly relying on the Byzantine legend of the Beirut image pierced by Jews, whose renown began to spread in the West in the late 9th century.25 Something similar happened, according to the official story told by a canon from Waltham Abbey, when Tovi the Proud nailed a silver plate onto the arm of the Christ of Waltham.26 At first, relating the image of Christ to Christ Himself did not seem to pose a problem, but that would soon change. Thus, accounts suggesting that believers have a foolish tendency to mistake the image for the model, and therefore consider the virtus to be proper to the image, do not fall so much into the category of reliable testimonies as into the criticism of the cult of images, and especially of the ‘localist’ idea whereby the saint would be more likely to reside in one place or image than another. More generally, these accounts are elitist deprecations of ‘popular’ devotion, expressed by scholars from the Middle Ages up through contemporary historians.27 Why would anyone sleep at the foot of images, as in the Abbey Church of Saint-Foy, in Conques, hoping to have one’s request heard, if the virtus was thought to be permanent and free? Why is the veneration of Mary’s image a prerequisite for the Lord to fulfill one’s prayers? Is it not because this supernatural power is not inherent to the image, but on the contrary, is summoned

24 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, pars 3, q. 25, a. 3. 25 Ibid., pars 3, q. 54, a. 3, solutio 3. 26 Circa 1035: The Waltham Chronicle [1177], chap.  12, eds. Leslie Watkiss and Marjorie Chibnall, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994, p. 22. 27 Cf. Jean Wirth, “Théorie et pratique de l’image sainte à la veille de la Réforme” [1986], Sainte Anne est une sorcière et autres essais, Geneva: Droz, 2003, pp. 233–285.





On the ‘Virtus’ of Images 

 25

before an image that has previously also been blessed or consecrated?28 The ritual that consists in blessing an image shows that the image is not active per se, but is activated by means of a ritual comprising words, gestures, spraying, and sometimes anointing: in this way, the image is made able to repel “any diabolical power” (omnis virtus diabolica) “everywhere the image has been”.29 The Ambrosian liturgy (13th century) includes a prayer to be said on Good Friday to bless a crucifix before it is shown to worshippers: according to the text, the Lord thus imbues the crucifix with the virtus belonging to the wood of the True Cross.30 The virtus can happen precisely because this distinction is made. As far as I know, the texts never state that the virtus is proper to the image. However, this is not so much because clerics ‘purify’ facts and dictate good behavior as because the externality of the virtus should be obvious, along with the virtus as a potentiality of the image and an event, and all the linguistic or descriptive ambiguities entailed in the expression of the wonder and mystery of the time of the miracle. The frequent use of the word almost (and synonyms) is significant. The author of a Cantiga of Santa Maria writes: “God put such a tremendous power in her”, and right after: “the spiritual Queen would act through her image as though she was made of flesh”31 (fig. 3). Here are two examples separated by more than six centuries. In the late 6th century, Gregory of Tours tells the legend of an icon of Christ that was drilled through and stolen by a Jew. Once on the road, the picture started bleeding and the Christians were able to find it by following the trail of blood. Gregory says that this miracle cannot be doubted, for it originates in the ‘virtus Dei’, the power of God.32 In the 1220s, Caesar of Heisterbach wrote a dialogue between a monk and a novice: the monk explains that miracles are performed by saints “in and through their images” (in suis et per suis imagines), and not by images themselves. The novice is stunned to learn that a ‘living’ image of a Madonna carved in wood contains “a voice to speak, a hand to strike ... as well as other movements of life”, while no wood, stone or metal is truly alive. The monk replies that it is the work of the Divine Spirit (divinus spiritus), nested “by essence and by power” (per potentiam) in every created thing.33 The Council of Trent (1563) stated this with great clarity, using the word virtus:

28 The Pontifical of Magdalen College, ed. Henry A. Wilson, London: Henry Bradshaw Society, 1910, p. 145. 29 Ibid., pp. 144–145. 30 Enrico Cattaneo, “L’adorazione della Croce nell’antico Rito Ambrosiano,” Ambrosius 9 (1933), pp. 175–186. 31 Cantigas de Santa Maria [second half of the 13th century], n° 361, ed. W. Mettmann, vol. 3, Madrid: Castalia, 1989, pp. 232–233. 32 Gregory of Tours, Libri in gloria martyrum, 21, MGH Script. rer. Merov., 1, 2, 1885, p. 51. 33 Caesar of Heisterbach, Dialogusmiraculorum, VII, 45, ed. J. Strange, 1851, vol. 2, p. 64.



26 

 Gil Bartholeyns

Fig. 3: “This is how in Sardonay, near Damascus, Saint Mary gave life to her image painted on a tablet, which then oozed oil.” It is said earlier on that God protects the monk who brings this painting (from a lion, bandits and a storm). Version by José Filgueira Valverde. Cantigas de santa Maria, late 13th c., Escorial, T I1, f. 17, cantiga 9.

Mother of God, and of the other saints are to be placed and retained especially in the churches, and that due honor and veneration is to be given them; not, however, that any divinity or virtue (in iis divinitas vel virtus) is believed to be in them by reason of which they are to be venerated, or that something is to be asked of them, or that trust is to be placed in images, as was done of old by the Gentiles who placed their hope in idols (idolis); but because the honor which is shown them is referred to the prototypes (prototypa) which they represent.34

In the very rare cases where the virtus is intrinsic to the image, the model and its representation are still unmistakable. Such is the singular case of the consecrated Host and piece of the True Cross that Gero, Archbishop of Cologne (969–976), placed in the head of a crucifix to fix a crack: the image became one with Christ and the relic. Acheiropoieta (images that are not man-made), such as the Holy Faces of Jesus, were also believed to be permanently imbued with God’s presence.35 Bishop Gregory of Tours (an author who presents us with a significant variety of cases) entered the church of

34 Council of Trent, 1563, sess. XXV, chap. On the Invocation, Veneration, Relics of Saints, and Sacred Images, ed. Kl. Ganzer et al., trans. H. J. Schroeder, St. Louis: Herder, 1941. 35 Thietmar of Merseburg, Chronicon, 3, 2 [beginning of the 11th century], MGH, Script. rer. Germ, N. S. 9, 1935, pp. 98–99.





On the ‘Virtus’ of Images 

 27

Saint Hilarius and noticed oil dripping from a lamp. He blamed the abbess for her carelessness, to which she answered: “that is not what you think, my liege, it is the virtue of the Holy Cross.” As the dripping intensified, Gregory proclaimed “the virtue of the adored cross” (virtutem adorandae crucis).36 However, the cross is not an image, but a sign (signum crucis). It is unlikely that Gregory would have used this expression if he had lived in the 9th century, when the ‘cross-as-sign’ started to become the ‘crucifix-as-image’, namely the three-dimensional representation of Christ on the cross. In discussing the Polynesian mana, Roger Keesing rightly points out that Christianization and the ensuing European thinking have turned this stative verb, mana (‘to be efficacious’), into a noun (‘potency’, ‘power’). Originally, “mana [was] a condition, not a ‘thing’.” Christianity, followed by ethnologists, took the mana out of artifacts and ritual practices in order to give mana-ness a metaphysical existence, which eventually became God’s power.37 This transformation strikes me as highly significant for grasping the nature of the iconic virtus itself in the Christian context.

The Forms of the Autonomous Virtus and the Virtuosic Image The virtus is thus celestial, which means that the image operates on the level of transitus: the Holy Spirit comes down into the image, and the image is empowered by rituals. The virtus associated with an image distinguishes itself most plainly in the case of a monk from Ravenna, who saw the Holy Spirit materialize while he was praying before an image of Christ: the holy power manifested itself because the monk addressed his prayers to the image.38 A similar example has God casting His Son’s image upon a cleric who is assaulting a woman.39 The fact that the virtus is independent of the image is indisputable. However, one may wonder whether the image is independent of the virtus, considering that in the case of the images of saints, effigies were thought to acquire the status of an autonomous mediator relative to an energy that supposedly emanated from the saint’s tomb or from corporal relics. In fact, one can infer from the sources that the image takes the place of relics, not so much by a process of emancipation as by the logic of the celestial virtus—a logic that is inherent to both the crucifix and the image of the Virgin, and also applied to the

36 Gregory of Tours, Libri, p. 50. 37 Roger M. Keesing, “Rethinking ‘Mana,’” Journal of Anthropological Research 40, no. 1 (1984), pp. 137–156. 38 Peter Damian, Vita beati Romualdi, chap. 12–13, ed. G. Tabacco, Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il Medio Evo, 1957, pp. 33–36. 39 Gerald of Wales, Gemma ecclesiastica, dist. 1, 34.



28 

 Gil Bartholeyns

Fig. 4: The visitors touch or kiss the Globe (the universe) of the Morenata. 12th c., wood, 95 cm. Santa Maria de Montserrat Abbey, Catalonia.

images of other saints. In the same way, one cannot tell whether ‘reflexive’ miracles (when the image moves, talks, smiles, cries, or hits) precede ‘transitive’ ones (when the image affects something outside of itself).40 Nor can one accurately map the cultural transfers between the Greek and Latin worlds. As the sources become clearer, and the major phases appear less obvious, there is an understandable tendency to assign earlier dates to circumstances initially thought of as being closer to the present.41 Similarly, I am aiming to show here that the only break separating the historical cases from those of the present day is an epistemological one. To be sure, the growth of reliquary statues around the 10th century remains an important step in the cultural association of the image with the virtus; it is because the reliquary contains the remains of the saint that the contact with the image can be miraculous. However, relics were not required for this contact to be virtuous. In the 15th century in Spoleto, a little girl’s dislocated arm was put back into place after her aunt, who was to blame for the injury, placed the bare limb onto the image of Saint Bernardino; the aunt subsequently went to the healer to record the recovery.42

40 Bernard Flusin, “Miracle et hiérarchie,” Hagiographie, cultures et sociétés (IVe –XIIe siècles), Paris: Études augustiniennes, 1981, p.  305; and Richard C. Trexler, “Being and Non-Being...,” eds. Erik Thunø and Gerhard Wolf, The Miraculous Image in Late Middle Ages and Renaissance, Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 2004, p. 15. 41 One of the great contributions of Jean-Marie Sansterre; see among others “Omnes qui coramhac imagine genuaflexerint... La vénération d’images de saints et de la Vierge d’après les textes écrits en Angleterre du milieu du XIe aux premières décennies du XIIIe siècle,” Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 49 (2006), pp. 257–294. 42 Cf. Letizia Pellegrini, “I miracoli da Bernardino da Siena,” Microcosmi medievali, ed. Enrico Menestò, Spoleto, 2002, p. 135.





On the ‘Virtus’ of Images 

 29

Today, in Montserrat, the effigy of the Virgin that has been worshipped since the late 12th century is protected by a dome, but interestingly, this dome has an opening so that visitors can touch the statue (fig. 4). That the autonomy of the virtuosic image is not the result of an evolution is attested by very old accounts describing images capable of breathing a virtus into things other than themselves. In one of the first confirmations of a Christian image miracle, around the year 565, the poet Fortunatus and his friend Felix, both suffering from ophthalmia, recovered their eyesight by massaging their eyes with the oil from a lamp that lay at the foot of the effigy of Saint Martin. Although Fortunatus attributes the recovery to the saint, Gregory of Tours links the supernatural properties of the oil to the image.43 One curious case is that of a miracle accomplished by a bronze statue located in Paneas, Palestine. According to Eusebius of Caesarea (writing around 323), from whom the Latin authors later borrowed the story, the statue was made in the likeness of Jesus. A plant that grew at the foot of the statue could acquire the power to cure every disease, provided that it touched the hem of one’s garment. Here, we have an image that ‘looks like’ Jesus, but is not an image of Christ, and a plant that becomes ‘miraculous’ through contact.44 A parallel can be drawn between this legend and that of Rochester, which dates back to approximately 1140, and tells how the water used to wash the feet of Ithamar’s image became thaumaturgical. A substance endowed with an autonomous virtus is indeed produced, but the image here plays an intermediary role, since it is said to be attached to the reliquary. In Jalhay, some people would leave water bottles near the statuette, while others would touch it and then place their hands on their relatives. Around the end of the Middle Ages, we observe increased numbers of accounts of remote invocations to images renowned for accomplishing miracles, as opposed to ‘direct’ invocations to domestic or local images. This highlights the significance that an image-object can take on in terms of capacity and autonomy: what matters is that particular image and not another, as if the celestial virtus could not be conveyed by just any image. Conversely, the main image spreads its virtus through copies in various forms (leaves, medals, scale models, images of the effigy on altar candles, and so on) produced by sanctuaries, consistently gains in significance, and establishes a remote virtus via these copies. The virtus of the effigy is transferred to ‘small images’ and consequently reaches remote areas, while the mother image gains in power through its multiplication. Contrary to Benjamin’s theory, in fact, diffusion often enhances the aura of the original. Likewise, copies may acquire miraculous qualities through a kind

43 Venantius Fortunatus, Vita s. Martini, 4, v. 680–701, ed. MGH. AA, 4, l, Berlin, 1881, pp. 369–370. Gregory of Tours, De virtutibus s. Martini, I, 15, ed. MGH. Script. rer. Merov., 1. 2, 1885, p. 147. 44 Eusebius of Caesarea, Church History, VII, 18, eds. Eduard Schwarz and Theodor Mommsen, Eusebius Werke, II, 2, Leipzig 1908, pp. 672–673. Gregory of Tours, Libri, p. 50.



30 

 Gil Bartholeyns

Fig. 5: Our Lady of Deliverance. La Dévotion à l’Image de la très Ste Vierge dite Notre Dame de la Délivrance, Paris, Jean, rue Jean de Beauvais, ca. 1797. Hand-colored engraving, 48.2 × 38.9 cm.

of reticular magic. We encounter this ‘paradigm of the Eucharist’45 in the case of the 16th-century Our Lady of Montserrat,46 or that of the small icon of Soufanieh (Syria), which came to prominence in the 1980s:47 the number of images is divided and multiplied without any sacral power being lost. This situation is very similar to the “indefinite splitting up of relics” where “each fragment yet retains the whole virtus of the entire body”.48 All media and techniques seem relevant in order to active dissemination. Efficacy is not diminished in the transition from three-dimensionality to the flat image. Digitization has not resulted in the collapse of the truth regime of images, as

45 In the words of Jean-Claude Schmitt at the conference Religious materialities, Musée du quai Branly, Paris, 2015. 46 Recently, Jean-Marie Sansterre, “Images sacrées, reliques et sanctuaires en Occident. Notes de recherche 3–7,” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 94 (2016), pp. 443–469. 47 Cf. Emma Aubin-Boltanski, “La très petite image de Notre-Dame de Soufanieh (Syrie),” Archives des sciences sociales des religions 174 (2016), pp. 118–119. 48 Jean-Claude Schmitt, Le Corps des images. Essais sur la culture visuelle au Moyen Âge, Paris: Gallimard, 2002, p. 280.





On the ‘Virtus’ of Images 

 31

Fig. 6: “Bless you Virgin of Guadalupe for saving me from the Devil when he came into my house...”, Oaxaca, México 1960. Ex-voto, anonymous painting on a metal plate.

predicted by some scholars. Even in the haptic culture of Christian virtus, the pixel prevents neither devotion nor the possibility of a miracle (plate II). On the contrary, the digital allows for an intensification of prayer through the appropriation of the image and the self; one may seek and find on the screen, in a moment, the tangible signs of a celestial presence. The technical mediation of the virtus always ensures its expansion and extension:49 since apparitions of the Virgin are always authenticated by video recordings and can be experienced in this way, the images retain their ‘supernatural potential’ even in the home, by way of the screen. In the wondrous engraving of Our Lady of Deliverance, made in Paris around the year 1797, the effigy is surrounded by ex-votos (paintings of miracles, suspended limbs, crutches, and so on) and believers are overwhelmed (fig. 5); in another engraving by the same author, the Holy Spirit takes the form of a bright dove that flies down onto a man prostrated between two pilgrims. The picture story flanking the main scene shows how a shepherd and his herd (in the upper left-hand corner) discovered the statue and how the latter became miraculous after being unearthed by ‘Baron Dover’ (in the upper right-hand corner). Whenever a miracle occurs, even far from the sanctuary, the event is made tangible by the apparition, within a cloud, of the effigy of

49 Jane Garnett and Gervase Rosser, Spectacular Miracles. Transforming Images in Italy from the Renaissance to the Present, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pierre-Olivier Dittmar, “De la trace à l’apparition, la prière photographique,” Archives des Sciences Sociales des Religions 174 (2016), pp. 169–190.



32 

 Gil Bartholeyns

the Madonna and Child. At least four out of the seven scenes contain a Marian apparition. This formula is anything but an isolated case. In this connection, we may cite Alphonse Picard’s engraving of the Virgin of Vire, which dates back to 1831,50 or—a world away from Normandy—a Mexican ex-voto that was ordered from a painter by one of his clients (fig. 6). This formula is not an iconographic one, however, because of the way the Virgin appears. The apparition of the effigy dates back to the late Middle Ages: in one instance, Montserrat’s statue—or rather, the taking the form of the statue by the Virgin—rescued a child from the waters and took him to the sanctuary.51

Conclusion—and Back to Jalhay If we look past the variety of cases and oversimplify the matter, we can say that the virtus operates: – either via the power ‘of’ the image itself (the distinction between the representation and the model may be temporarily abolished due to the fact that in the worshipper’s mind the virtus obviously has a divine origin); – via the model’s ‘virtue’ passing through (transitus) the image (according to the dogma); – through the model temporarily, or more lastingly (a typical aspect of local cults) inhabiting the image; – by direct contact with the image, which is itself in contact with the virtuous relics (though the latter is not a requirement); – by imbuing an image with a virtus through the appropriate ritual; or – through the contemplation of an image by a believer (this relates to both vernacular and mystical experiences). Indeed, the anthropomorphic image, with its (sometimes enlarged) eyes and its own gaze, introduces a relation of reciprocity into the devotional act: the devotee looks at the saint, who looks back at the devotee. As others have stated, one can assume that the material and energetic notion of vision that prevailed at the time, and the idea that sight originated in a two-way flux connecting the observer and the observed,52 played a role in the virtuosic economy of the image, much as they did in the feeling of the saint’s presence. In other words, the ‘sacral presence’ resulted from the one-onone encounter between the saint and the believer. That is why the virtus of the image

50 Museum of Normandy, inv. 65.26.5. 51 Cf. Sansterre, “Images sacrées”, p. 447. 52 Patrick Geary, “Jalons pour une histoire de l’iconoclasme au Moyen Âge,” Annales. HSS, 5, 1995, pp. 1139–1140. On the theory of intromission, see David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision. From Al-Kindi to Kepler, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976, pp. 61–85 passim.





On the ‘Virtus’ of Images 

 33

Fig. 7: Miniature depicting the apparition of Child Jesus in the Holy Host as it is blessed by the priest. Paris, BNF, MS français 13342, f. 47.

is also a virtus before the image. The image catches the eye and shapes active mental images. For instance, Alberti recommended that feverish people look at fountains of fresh water to recover, and pregnant women look away from pictures of the devil to ward off birth defects.53 A series of miracles were witnessed in 1796 in the Papal States: over the course of several months, pictures, and especially those of the Virgin, opened their eyes and smiled. Abbot Giovanni Marchetti reported the various cases directly. He wondered whether God had “performed these miracles by causing a change in the figured material (material figura) of sacred faces, so that everyone could see this miraculous variation, or by causing this sensation in the optical organ (organo ottico) of every witness of the miracle”.54 Once again, let us note that the virtus of the image is that of the Altissimo, except this time it operates on the believer who before the picture. In the same way, in March 2014 in Jalhay, some people saw a statuette of the Virgin move. Some saw it more clearly in the dark than others, while some said they could not see it at all. It was said to depend on one’s faith. Did it move, or was it seen to move? The various explanations put forth could easily be mistaken for that of Marchetti in 1797, and even more so for the one given by Aquinas about a piece of flesh or a small child (fig. 7) that appeared as the consecrated Host was being raised before everyone’s eyes:

53 Leon Battista Alberti, De re aedificatoria, liber 9, cap. 4. 54 Giovanni Marchetti, De’ Prodigi avvenuti in molte sagre Immagini specialmente di Maria Santissima..., Rome, 1797, pp. XLII–XLIII. I would like to thank Jean-Marie Sansterre for drawing my attention to this case (Revue de l’histoire des religions 2 (2015)), and to many others.



34 

 Gil Bartholeyns

Sometimes […] it happens on the part of the beholders, whose eyes are so affected as if they outwardly saw flesh, or blood, or a child, while no change takes place in the sacrament. And this seems to happen when to one person [...] while to others it is seen as before under the species of bread; or when to the same individual it appears for an hour under the appearance of flesh or a child, and afterwards under the appearance of bread. Nor is there any deception there, [...] because such species is divinely formed in the eye. [...] But it sometimes happens that such apparition comes about not merely by a change wrought in the beholders, but by an appearance which really exists outwardly. And this indeed is seen to happen when it is beheld by everyone under such an appearance.55

In 1796–1797, like in Jalhay, the ‘atmosphere’ (the fear of the French invader, the opportunity for the clergy to promote a religiosity in decline, and so on) played a role. This aspect of the phenomenon must be understood as a historical event.56 However, miracles and moving images themselves can be understood from the point of view of what could be called an anthropology of the visual and the object. This focuses on ‘points of comparison’, such as presence, visibility, ornamentation, rituality, tactility, conductivity, signification (which ‘fuels’ the picture), and resemblance (“it works better when it looks like something”, though the existence of shapeless African figures proves this is not necessarily the case). It also focuses on questions such as suffering and gender. It has been said that the beauty of statues of the Virgin, and for men, their feminine or even erotic charge, have contributed to the development of the Marian cult.57 The statues arouse emotions and empathy because they are ‘beautiful’. Appearance determines the virtus. In Jalhay, the first healings—of eczema and myopia—were somewhat analogous to the phosphorescent image, which was a surface and optical phenomenon. The concept of virtus as a form would undoubtedly have been to the liking of the first champions of Art, if only as a means of condemning the way extra-aesthetic responses prevent the latter from being fully successful. The ‘functioning’ of iconic virtus, if anything, is peculiar in that the image, a visual being that is not quite an object and not quite a person, opens up a vast array of possibilities, yet this potential must be activated. Tangible elements, such as corporeality or the image’s gaze, fall within this mode of potentiality. The artifact has the ability to create a virtus, yet this virtus is always vague, expected, ritually prepared, or provoked. The lampooned, assaulted, or insulted image activates inhuman powers to contradict or punish—not directly, but through its representation. This is why the image is sometimes identified with the model and people are prone to ascribe a power to the image, to a single image. In Jalhay, the statuette was placed for a few weeks in

55 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, pars 3, q. 76, art. 8, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, New York: Benzinger Brothers Printers, 1947, my emphases. 56 Cattaneo, Gliocchi di Maria sulla Rivoluzione, Rome: Istituto nazionale di studi romani, 1995. 57 Katherine Allen Smith, “Bodies of Unsurpassed Beauty: ‘Living’ Images of the Virgin in the High Middle Ages,” Viator 37 (2006), pp. 167–187.





On the ‘Virtus’ of Images 

 35

a wooden niche with an opening at the bottom. Before leaving the garage, visitors would touch its base and the lower part of its dress, as if their visit depended on this slight touch—as if touching the statuette amounted to touching the Virgin Herself, yet without considering that what was standing there was the Virgin, in tiny form. Still, at this moment, the image was equivalent to the Virgin. It was like a double of the Virgin, despite not even being the sacred image of a sanctuary, but merely an object of pilgrimage. During a discussion with the parish priest, a down-to-earth man who did not really approve of this Marian zealotry, I asked about the healings. He told me that the power of the spirit over the body remains unknown and concluded that the phenomena at hand were the result of autosuggestion, to which I replied: “But thanks to the virgin: with a lower or upper case ‘v’?” Smiling, he allowed doubt to linger (on the question of virgin/Virgin). In the context of the Greeks, Jean-Pierre Vernant has spoken about the presentification of the divine. The figure is not a mere representation and its virtus not an accomplished presence, but an actualization.58 Within a few weeks, the statuette had become a mother image, the scene of a constant ambiguity between the model and its representation. This continues to this very day, since the statuette has been put in a church. It has become an image-strength, the ‘Little Lady of Jalhay’. And it has probably become too singular to renew its former connection to Our Lady of the Poor of Banneux, whence it originated, given the latter’s unique and enduring legacy. The variety of the virtus’s instances (of, by, in, with the image) does not exhaust the range of recorded situations. Indeed, the Virgin of Jalhay was made active by virtue of its owner: “it’s you, N., don’t you know,” remarked a regular. In the end, maybe it was not the Virgin who healed and soothed, through the image that N. applied on bodies. Perhaps it was N. herself who performed the healing, by means of a Marian image. This is indeed what happened between 2014 and 2017. In the beginning, the figure performed miracles, but then the hypothesis of N.’s virtus began to emerge. According to some interpretations, the Virgin revealed herself in order to take control of her fate. These interpretations have overshadowed another hypothesis: that the purchase of a nearby property in the woods and the resulting demolition of a chapel had led the Virgin to find shelter in this particular house, if not in this very statuette. Eventually, N. objectified this development by saying that her hands have “always” been “magnetic”, a talent that is not God-given, but inherited from her Russian father.

58 Jean-Pierre Vernant, “From the ‘Presentification’ of the Invisible to the Imitation of the Appearance,” Myth and Thought among the Greeks, New York: Zone Books, 2006, pp. 333–349.



Ticio Escobar

Ta’angá verá The Power of Images in an Amerindian Perspective

Introduction It has become indispensable to think through the effects of the image in the field of art theory as well as cultural theory more generally. This can easily be understood: the gaze collapses before the disproportionate avalanche of techno-images launched by the hegemonic system of information, advertisement and spectacle. It is thus a timely task to confront the impact generated by this metastasis of the image on contemporary visuality. It is also necessary to identify other regimes of the imaginary that either are blended into, pass through or move autonomously from the torrents that flood the contemporary visual scene. We must identify different images (whether they be poetic, aesthetic, critical or political). These images, whether artistic or not, can focus on the reality of facts or be perturbed by the distant rumblings of meaning, by the nocturnal regions that stretch beyond the purview of language. This text seeks to confront that task with perspectives made possible by radically different cultures. Given the vastness of the theme, I will deal with specific cases, segments of complex mythical-ritual formations by certain indigenous groups from Paraguay. Even though they are located on the margins of Euro-Western thought, such groups coincide with it on some unexpected points with regards to the capacities of certain images. The groups in question are two, the Guaraní and the Ishir, both of which are isolated from Paraguayan national society and are strongly conditioned by traditional conceptions of the world, sensibilities and ways of life. The Ishir and Guaraní are peoples, besieged by hegemonic cultural models, that have suffered the looting of their ancestral territories, yet they are groups of men and women who, at the very limits of ethnic survival, continue to illuminate their ebbing but still immense worlds with the flash of images that can sketch out possible paths of meaning. All the references to these groups that are not attributed to other authors correspond to information gathered by me in different periods of fieldwork.1 My intention, thus, is not to develop an anthropology of the image, but rather to emphasize certain figures whose analysis can add other perspectives to the discus-

1 Cf. Ticio Escobar, La belleza de los otros: Arte indígena del Paraguay, Asunción: Servilibro, 2012; and Ticio Escobar, The Curse of Nemur: In Search of the Art, Myth and Ritual of the Ishir, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007.

38 

 Ticio Escobar

sion of the effects of the contemporary image (plate III).2 Although the Guaraní and the Ishir3 know the term ‘image’, they employ it in a different sense and with different connotations. In general, the mythic, magic and ritualistic frames that condition indigenous figures and concepts generate a particular rhetoric whose exact translation would sound strange in Western terms. The problem generated by the meanings and purview of the words in foreign languages, or better yet, cultural systems, contributes inevitably to forced translations and equivalences. But the contemporary concept of the image, one that enables paradoxes, displacements and differences, also lends itself to being approached from sites and significations that are profoundly alien to each other. On the other hand, certain contingencies that are proper to a specific cultural setting result in random intersections between different dimensions of the contemporary. The indigenous cultures under analysis here lack the metaphysical ballast that weighs on the course of Western thinking; they are not organized on the basis of ideas of substance and ground, nor are they developed according to binaries that fatally oppose body and spirit, the sensible and the intelligible, matter and form, signifier and signified, and so on. Contemporary critical thought, constructed as it is on a split basis, makes an effort to rid itself of this weight, one which ultimately risks tearing language apart. In this sense, the theory of the image seeks diligently to leap over the disjunction established by the tragedy of representation (the controversy between sign and thing). In indigenous cultures that are alien to these foundational antitheses, the identification between opposite principles and the displacement or becoming between different levels (merely demarcated by unstable thresholds), only enriches the movement of forms or, in this case, of images. There is no such thing as paradox and, if there were, it would not block the route that, ruled by a mythic logic, makes contradictions fruitful. Therefore, these cultures do not suffer the anguish caused by the caesura of representation: the ‘fourth wall’ of the stage does not exist for them; characters move in and out of the scene and, while onstage, exchange places, roles and masks. In the Ishir ritual circle, for example, an officiant does not represent an animal or god: he is an animal or a god—or both at the same time. The images (the ritual attire, the body paint) render him god-like in the circle of representation. He undergoes metamorphosis and is given particular powers according to the context. It is no accident that Walter Benjamin based his definition of auratic distance on the cult images of ‘prim-

2 Insofar as the figure of a single contemporaneity (e.g. the imagined single Western modernity) is untenable, I consider traditional cultures to be contemporaneous so long as they remain active and their forms take on their own present as a horizon against which to struggle—for instance, by accepting challenges or rejecting designs—rather than a given to which they must adapt. 3 I follow the convention of employing the singular form for ethnic names, since the pluralization of such names should follow the linguistic norms of their respective languages.





Ta’angá verá 

 39

itive’ societies. The ritual and the practice of worship make certain objects gleam; they set them apart and modify the regime of representation. This can be expressed in Lacanian terms: rather than signs of the symbolic order (representation), such objects become pieces of the imaginary order that are capable, if not of revealing the impossible real, of offering traces that account for the real, traces that fleetingly illuminate the contours of its irremediable absence. Given the difficulties implied by confronting different worlds of meaning, this essay does not intend to present a methodically developed discourse, but rather to present particular figures, cases and situations that can be linked with current discussions on the power of the image. The image whose efficacy we pursue here is not the visual onslaught promoted by the global market but rather procedures, which may or may not be artistic, that point in the direction of meaning, even if vaguely. For the most part, they do so with splendor: their efficacy is buttressed by the ephemeral gleam of potentialities that disturb everydayness and suggest parallel dimensions. The Guaraní expression that I have chosen as the title for this essay, Ta’angá verá, means alternately ‘radiant image’ or the ‘radiance of the image’. The title is not alien to the Ishir culture, to which I also refer here: Guaraní, spoken by almost 80% of the inhabitants of Paraguay, is used as a lingua franca of almost all the indigenous communities in the country.

The Radiance of the Guaraní The Guaraní are geographically located in a region that includes zones of eastern Paraguay, northwestern Argentina, southern and southwestern Brazil, and southeastern Bolivia. They belong to the Tupí-Guaraní linguistic family that, in Paraguay, includes ethnicities such as the Avá, Mbyá, Páĩ Tavyterã, Chiriguano and Aché. Like other indigenous communities throughout Latin America, the Guaraní culture lacks public political protection and its ongoing survival is threatened by the overwhelming expansion of capitalism over their lands.



40 

 Ticio Escobar

Image, Beauty, and Flower I begin with three indispensable words; others will follow. The first, as may be expected, is ta’anga4 and means ‘image’. This term has connotations that are comparable to its use in Western languages, with the difference that, for the Guaraní, the image is an imperfect copy of a superior model. The image may, however, acquire great power insofar as it identifies itself with this model through prayer-dance performances and the allure of beauty. As a result, the model transfers its potency to the image, which becomes a force of exceptional efficacy over material objects, facts and the human condition. The second word is porã, which means simultaneously ‘beautiful’, ‘good’ and ‘well’ (as an adverb in this last case). Its use does not refer to the virtue of goodness, however, but rather to a state of well-being, in particular the state expressed when a process is brought to adequate completion. Things or facts that are qualified as porã are simultaneously beautiful and good. Beauty translates a mode of being well, in accordance with conditions, nature or mood. Pushing the concepts a bit further, beauty in Guaraní can be associated at one level with Kantian beauty, if this is considered as a finality without end and without concept, without a manifest objective; the beautiful form reaches its maximum splendor when it is interrupted at the limits of its conclusion.5 For the Guaraní, beauty also manifests, in a splendorous manner, an unfolding that moves towards an end, but an end with a possible consummation. The highest degree of beauty is that which marks the achievement of the genuine human condition; it has an ethical dimension, commits meaning and involves ontological questions (the use of such weighty terms, however, must be accompanied with the caution that words transplanted from one world to another are subject to perturbations) This superior level of beauty involves two dimensions: the first is constituted by the image, the aesthetic appearance; the second by the word, which implies the concept of song and dance, and is also traversed by the image. Both dimensions are

4 The following are the most common conventions of written Guaraní: the y indicates the sixth, guttural vowel; the diacritic (~) placed over vowels renders them more nasal; the h is aspirated, as in English, and the j is like the y in Spanish. On the other hand, in Guaraní, no accent marks the u in the syllables gue and gui; lastly, only unstressed words or words with stress on the third or fourth syllable are marked with an accent: all those that do not have a diacritic are read as if they had an accent on the last syllable. According to established convention, this last rule does not apply to ethnic demonyms (these are accentuated even if they have an accent on the last syllable: the Mbyá, the Avá, etc.). In order to facilitate the reading for those unversed in Guaraní, I have also foregone this rule in the title of the present essay. The puso is an orthographic sign used to indicate a phonetic cut between two vowels. It is indicated with an apostrophe (’). The proper names of the rites and characters are not rendered in cursive. 5 Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987, p. 85.





Ta’angá verá 

 41

expressed through a third word: poty, ‘flower’, whose name appears repeatedly to designate both the beauty of feathered ornaments as well as language. The power of this beauty, manifest in image and in word-song-dance, promotes access to plenitude (aguyje) on earth.

The Names of the Flower The word poty designates the real flower as well as its image (poty ra’anga): the bouquet of feathers that constitutes the principle of plumagery. When ‘flowered’, adorned with the poty, people and objects acquire a radiant beauty of divine origin. The term jegua means ‘ornament’, though not in the sense of a mere trimming or detail, but in the sense of a beauty that institutes meaning. The divinities are ‘adorned’: the earth, conceived of as a “murmuring body that extends and spreads itself continually”,6 is also ‘adorned’ (ára jeguaka). Searching for their real mode of being, beings “seek out an adornment and continue on their path, adorning themselves, until they realize in full what they are destined to be”.7 So determining is the force of jegua (expressed in the flower, poty) that the Guaraní Páĩ Tavyterã identify themselves ethnically as those who bear the sign of the flower; in religious language they are called ‘those who are beautifully adorned by the flowered crown’ (fig. 1). These crowns, called jeguaka or akangua’a depending on the particular ethnic group,8 concentrate religious and shamanic powers endowed with solar radiance. The original crown was formed by the Sun itself to strike down the demonic jaguar with rays launched by the ‘flowers’ that adorned it.9 The colors of the poty that embellish the crown are taken from the chosen bird, the macaw, whose feathers have the reddish or yellowish tones of the forces of creation: the Sun, corn and nature’s regenerative fire. These forces have four characteristics: vera, the shimmering shine of lightning; rendy, the light of flames; ju, the sun’s resplendent gold; and ryapu, the sound of thunder.10 The power of the crown’s beauty is affirmed in the depths of the

6 Graciela Chamorro, “Teología guaraní,” Colección Iglesias, Pueblos y Culturas 61, Quito: Abya Yala, 2004, p. 171. 7 Chamorro, Teología guaraní, p. 171. 8 The Páĩ Tavyterã and the Mbyá use the first term, whereas the Avá employ the second. While the crowns manifest certain formal differences, they share the poty pattern. Among the Mbyá, the feminine crown is called jachuka (León Cadogan, Ayvu Rapyta: Textos míticos de los Mbyá-Guaraní del Guairá, São Paulo: Universidade de São Paulo, 1959, p. 46). 9 Miguel Bartolomé, Shamanismo y religión entre los Avá-Katú-Eté, México: Instituto Indigenista Interamericano, 1977, pp. 37–51. 10 Bartomeu Melià, Georg Grünberg and Friedl Grünberg, Los Pái Tavyterã: Etnografía guaraní del Paraguay contemporáneo, Asunción: Centro de Estudios Antropológicos de la Universidad Católica, 1976, p. 43.



42 

 Ticio Escobar

Fig. 1: A group of Páĩ Tavyterã-Guaraní women during the female ritual called Kuñangue, which takes place one week after the ceremony of masculine initiation (Kunimi pepy). Photograph: Rocío Ortega, Jaguatĩ, 2011.

myth as a foundational principle created by Ñamandu, Our Last-First Father. Here are Ñamandu’s words in the central/most important Guaraní poem: By means of jeguaka, I made this land enlarge By means of the shine of jeguaka, I made this land enlarge; By means of the flames of jeguaka, I made this land enlarge.11 The image of jeguaka is embellished with poetic figures: On the divine and lofty head, the flowers of the feathered ornament were dewdrops. Among the flowers of the divine feathered ornament, the first bird, the hummingbird, flew and fluttered.12

Rhetorically emphasized, the figure of the flower, poty, configures an image of multiple successive reflections in which the representation of actual flowers is used to refer to the basic adornment of feathers and unleashes a series of dense significations that reverberate throughout Guaraní culture. The beauty of the poty is affirmed in the very process of flowering, a process whose phases and moments are linked to the movement by which the word emerges, by which knowledge opens up and by which the elaboration of plenitude aims for the exact point of a person’s maturation: that which

11 Augusto Roa Bastos, comp., Las culturas condenadas, México: Siglo XXI, 1978, pp. 266–267. 12 Cadogan, Ayvu Rapyta, p. 25.





Ta’angá verá 

 43

defines the ideal of exact beauty. The word unfolds like a flower; it acquires form just as petals bud and unfurl towards wisdom. On the other hand, the Guaraní define the word by reference to the soul; both ñe’ẽ and ayvu mean ‘word/soul’, a compound figure where each of the terms can be either adjective or noun standing in relation to the other.13 Thus, just as the word is the result of a process, “the soul is not already given but acquires shape with the life of the man (…) the history of the Guaraní soul is the history of its word, the series of words that form the hymn of its life.”14 The Guaraní concept of the word, identified with sprouting, is related to the idea of opening into a flower, to placing oneself in the position of being. Translated by Cadogan, the expression ‘to open into a flower [abrirse en flor]’ thus stands for the formation, the unfolding, the manifestation and evolution of certain fundamental figures that, like flowers, unfurl and separate their petals, aiming at their fulfillment. By means of beauty, this movement institutes existence and promotes the opening of these figures. It is therefore not a question of opened flowers or closed flower buds, but rather of the movement of unfurling towards a fulfillment, a contingent culmination, a finality without guarantees, a movement requiring hard labor that justifies and gives meaning to the effort in search of plenitude. In light of his knowledge that opens up, flowering, Our Father made (…) the foundation of the word that should be open up, flowering (….) Knowing already that fundamental word that should be, he came into the knowledge of the foundation of love (…). In light of his knowledge that opens up, flowering, he prompted a heartened song to open up and flower. When the earth did not exist, in the midst of ancient darkness, when nothing was known, in his loneliness, he made a laborious song open up for himself, flowering (…). Having given it profound consideration, he made those who would be the companions of his celestial divine being (the other divinities) open up and flower.15

According to another version of the Mbyá Guaraní hymn, Ñamandu created the other divinities: “by means of the reflection of his knowledge”16—that is, not in his image and likeness and not by means of his wisdom, but through the power of the image of his wisdom. As the poem expresses it, “as a function of his knowledge that opens up, flowering”, Ñamandu, before creating the secondary divinities, had already generated in succession the foundation of the word, love for others and “a laborious

13 Graciela Chamorro, Kurusu Ñe’ẽngatu: Palabras que la historia no podría olvidar, preface by Bartomeu Melià, 3rd edition, vol. 25, Biblioteca Paraguaya de Antropología, Asunción: CEADUCCEPAG, 1995, p. 23. 14 Bartomeu Melià, El guaraní: experiencia religiosa, Biblioteca Paraguaya de Antropología, Asunción: CEADUC-CEPAG, 13, 1991, p. 34. 15 Meliá, El guaraní, pp. 30–31. 16 The term Jechauka mba’ekuaa can be literally translated as ‘the visual representation of knowledge’ (Cadogan, Ayvu Rapyta, p. 35). According to Cadogan, this term signifies the reflection of the wisdom of Ñamandu (Cadogan, Ayvu Rapyta, p. 31).



44 

 Ticio Escobar

song”: the prayer-song. In its culmination in this song, the word turns into ñe’ẽ porã, “beautiful words” that, imbued with poetry and located before the threshold of divine knowledge, grow almost unintelligible until they become words without meaning, guided only by the incomprehensible intensity of signification. Hélène Clastres asked herself why these words were described, precisely, as ‘beautiful’ and not as ‘true’ or ‘sacred’ (even though they are also these things). She suggests the reason is that these words, which cannot rest on definitive truths, suppose a thinking that refers beyond itself, towards a “limit point that renders them simultaneously possible and impossible”.17 It is the faculty of beauty, of the splendid image, to cross this limit (and such is also the function of art in the context of Western culture).

The Paths of Total Knowledge On the basis of what I am presenting here we may conclude that beauty has an ontological dimension: it promotes being (the being of things, of language) and opens it, as if it were a flower (or better, insofar as it continues to be a flower), to its own becoming, which overtakes human knowing. The image of the flower that unfurls points to the possibility of plenitude as well as to the limits of the human condition— the beginning of everything. According to Guaraní thought, human beings “cannot reach (kuaarara, total knowledge); it is inaccessible (…) nevertheless, to those who dedicate themselves to praying with real fervor” the knowledge of “the flames and fog of the creating power” will be revealed.18 This passage allows us to assume that the knowledge of the ultimate or primordial power of things, like the enigma of the ground of the absolute itself, can be reached through a valiant effort sustained by the prayer-dance in search of the bright image of the flower. Unlike in Western philosophy, in Guaraní thinking, the equivalent of the thing-in-itself, of Being or the Real, can be revealed at the conclusion of a persistent search. Thus, through the arduous efforts of personal refinement, human knowing might attain not only the copies, but also the exemplary models of divine origin (fig. 2). According to Damián Cabrera, Pierre  and  Hélène Clastres had also considered that, through fervor and the mythical exodus, the Guaraní could make earthly copies reach the level of the original archetypes. Nonetheless, this access is marked by an initial tragedy: wounded by an unsalvageable distance, that which is reached on the terrestrial plane would not be identical to the ideal archetypes; they would be proper

17 Hélène Clastres, La tierra sin mal: El profetismo tupí-guaraní, trans. Viviana Ackerman, Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Sol, 1993, p. 138. 18 Kuarara tataendy tatachina, as well as the figure in the text, can be translated literally as the ‘flaming fog of total knowledge’ or ‘of sacred duty’ (Cadogan, Ayvu Rapyta, p. 41).





Ta’angá verá 

 45

Fig. 2: Men preparing to participate in the Chiriguano ceremony Arete Guasu. Photograph Ticio Escobar, Santa Teresita, 1993. Centro de Artes Visuales/Museo del Barro.

to the new land (ywy pyau). In this fashion, that which can be reached by mortals would be original and new; the encounter with the ideal would imply a creative act that would renovate the exemplary model.19 I understand this reading by Pierre and Hélène Clastres as based on the concept of the Land Without Evil (Yvy Marane’ỹ), one that Hélène worked on in particular. Insofar as it is constantly reanimated, the ‘earthly’ land enjoys benefits marked by the new fertility of its soils. The Land Without Evil is, without a doubt, a reachable utopia (and thus not strictly utopian), but is accessible only through human creative activity that would renew the model. While the fact of achieving this ideal model through human effort implies the wound of difference, this is implicit in Guaraní thinking and not subject to the self-conciliatory logic of identity. Agyuje, or plenitude, unlocks, and in a certain sense ‘humanizes’, the metaphysical fixity of the exemplar, which, being open to the contingency of its possible terrestrial fulfillment, shines as it is approached. When mortals achieve an ideal, this ideal is doubtlessly altered by the very fact of appropriation: it harbors a distance, a margin of creation, a principle of difference. The beauty of feathered flowers and of words plays a fundamental role in this movement through which humans can access plenitude: were such access to happen,

19 Personal correspondence with Damián Cabrera. Cf. Pierre Clastres, La palabra luminosa: mitos y cantos sagrados de los guaraníes, Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Sol, 1993; and Clastres, La tierra sin mal.



46 

 Ticio Escobar

humans would shimmer in splendor formae. (Aguyje rendy porã means ‘the beautiful gleam of plenitude’.) This is how the Guaraní poem describes such an instance: Chikú obtained perfection; from the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet flames sprouted; his heart was illuminated with the reflection of knowledge; his divine body became incorruptible dew; his feathered ornament was covered in dew; the flowers of his crown were flames and dew.20

Beyond Metaphor The metaphors of fog, flame and dew, as well as drizzle, lightning and smoke, constitute favorable foundational principles; these are prior to divinity and are concentrated in two figures of renewal, which appear in nature with the start of spring. One of these, tatachina, is the name of a light fog that burns off in the course of the day. It acts as the essential breath, the drive that antecedes the creation of the world; it imbues beings with living force and wards off omens of ill-fate that threaten humans. It also engenders words/soul and, thus, wisdom itself; for this reason, Ñamandu says: “First of all, you will set the fog on the crowns of our sons and daughters.”21 For the Páĩ Tavyterã Guaraní in particular, the other active principle of the universe is jasuka, the name of the spring of eternal water located at the center of the world, as well as the sap that renews certain extraordinary trees, such as the cedar. It takes the form of a “calm, clear unending rain” as well as fog and darkness.22 These potent figures—liquid, unattainable or vaporous—evoke instituting forces that, insofar as they act as the limit between the corporeal and intangible, belie the forceful oppositions between matter and form (or between body and word/soul). I have used the word ‘metaphor’—but at this point I want to introduce a digression that brings this term into question. In order to understand the effects that certain determined figures (flowers, fog, flames) produce within Guaraní culture, we might want to think of metaphors not as pure symbols, engaged in the order of the signifier, but instead as images, ones capable of introducing a short-circuit in the symbolic system and pointing towards meaning.23 In this fashion, one should not think along the lines of representation or likeness, but rather within the register of the image. Images are capable of articulating contradictory terms that cannot be reconciled according to a Saussurean logic of signs. For this reason, Chamorro says that in Guaraní thought, “metaphor is not a way of saying that conceals the meaning of

20 Cadogan, Ayvu Rapyta, p. 237. 21 Cadogan, Ayvu Rapyta, pp. 43, 55, 63, and 105. 22 Chamorro, Teología guaraní, pp. 22, 185. 23 On this point, I base my discussion on a conversation held with María Eugenia Escobar.





Ta’angá verá 

 47

things; it is the only way of saying what things truly are.”24 And so, running against the grain of language, Cadogan says “opening into a flower” (abrirse en flor), and not “to open as if it were a flower”; that is, he is not putting forward a comparison but rather the capacity for identification in metaphor. Furthermore, he is doing it outside the order of the signifier. The words open insofar as they are flowers, not because they resemble flowers. And they ‘are’ such not only in rhetorical but in real as well as imaginary terms: the images allow things to be and not be at the same time; they allow us to take on this ontological paradox of inserting words and flowers in the interstices of language. This is why they are powerful: they can activate forces that fall on both sides of the copula.

Beyond Models The theme of the supposed Platonism of Guaraní thought merits another digression. The Guaraní understand words, things and images to be inferior copies of exemplary models. But the very figures of the perfect vs. mundane world, of paradigms and their imperfect transcript, has a different meaning from the one given it by Platonism, because in Guaraní thought there is no hard and fast boundary between matter and spirit nor, in consequence, between the real and ideal plane: the latter can be reached through a broad process of development that flows into ethical and aesthetic plenitude. Tekoporã, to live in a good and beautiful manner, is still a terrestrial moment, but aguyje, human perfection, implies crossing the frontier between the factual and ideal orders. The consecration of certain objects also allows them to coincide with ‘real objects’; ceremonial equipment, located on the altar and embellished/blessed with feathered flowers, corresponds to a superior kind of incarnation. The feathers themselves used in the ritual carry with them their divine stamp, because they correspond to the originary bird, the macaw (gua’a), created and reared by the divinity (Ñanderuvusu rymba meme, ‘True domestic bird or mascot of Our Great Father’). Therefore, the bouquet of feathers (poty), like the feathers of superior birds in general that festoon the temples, wrists, waist and ankles of the participants, do not represent the models but present them. Chamorro writes that the ritual dance allows for the crossing of the boundary between the terrestrial and celestial: “The ‘children of the word’ adorn themselves ritually and, by way of dance and song, move closer to the doors of the paradises: they open them, they pass through them and enter into dwellings which are the place where the true liturgy is celebrated.”25 In this way, humans, crowned with flowers of true feathers, consecrated by the word and by their

24 Chamorro, Teología guaraní, p. 63. 25 Chamorro, Teología guaraní, pp. 54–55.



48 

 Ticio Escobar

own dance, and dampened with the originary fog, participate in the exemplary ceremony. While they dance on the ‘terrestrial dwelling’, their movements coincide with the circle of gods that dance the Guaraní topos uranos: they are the same steps and the same words. Beauty is not a copy of an exemplary beauty: it corresponds to a portion of the exemplary forms that are located in the terrestrial dimension. The true images show themselves in this dimension: they are ‘artistic’ (according to Western conceptions of art) insofar as the incarnation of an exemplary form makes them shine. The transit between the celestial and terrestrial dimensions allows mundane things, as well as images and words, to coincide with their respective divine archetypes: they then acquire the radiant appearance of completeness. In this sense, art (beauty, poetry, the aesthetic) has a mediating function: feathered ornaments, such as bodily paint, are the origin and effect of ideal perfection. “The divinities are adorned beings par excellence”, writes Chamorro: “Adornment, jegua, is not an accessory but rather something essential … to adorn oneself is indispensable in the process of perfecting and identifying oneself with the divinities.”26 For this reason, beauty (porã) goes further than the aesthetic function: it signals meaning itself.

The Powers of the True Time The Chiriguano, also known as the ‘Guarayo’ or the ‘Chaco Guaraní’ but who call themselves ‘Avá’ or ‘Mbyá’, are the descendants of the eastern Guaraní groups who, in the early days of colonization, initiated a long exodus towards the west. This displacement was prompted by a variety of complicated reasons: inter-ethnic conflicts, messianic-religious ideals, political reasons and even economic pressure (plate IV). Each year, during the time of the corn harvest, which coincides with the zenith of the Pleiades, they perform a ceremony called Arete Guasu, which means ‘The Immense True Time’. The ritual brings together a meaningful conjunction of characters that evoke the ancestors and that flock together to foster a new annual cycle by way of a long march lasting several months.27 In this case, what we can perhaps call the prodigious beings cross the essential threshold in order to arrive at the scene of the terrestrial dance, promote bounty and pass on powers of productivity to humans; they also carry with them risks and hazards, the inevitable counterpart of any gift granted to humans. These beings are not gods but ancestors—generally, specters, pure forces, or animals, native to the original Guaraní world, the zero degree of memory.

26 Chamorro, Teología guaraní, p. 172. 27 The long march represents the historical-mythic trajectory that the Guaraní undertook to establish themselves in the Gran Chaco and the neighboring Andean regions. In fact, the officiants who perform in the Arete Guasu dress and mask themselves a few kilometers from the stage, where they are awaited with rituals of salutation and celebration.





Ta’angá verá 

 49

The gods move in another dimension, immanent and transversal, that intersects Chiriguano culture; my essay, centered on the theme of the image, will not refer to them but rather to the visitors. The Guaraní language acquires particular modalities in the context of Chiriguano culture. During the times of the ceremony, the image of something is expressed through the repetition of its name; for example, the term jágua designates the jaguar, and jágua-jágua signifies the representation or image of the jaguar. For this reason, these strange annual visitors who appear with duplicate names are images that oscillate between the margins of a threshold that, as we have seen, can be crossed by the Guaraní. During the Arete Guasu, such visitors are also real beings that dance with the humans. What distinguishes them and marks their representational status are their masks. Depending on who uses them, the masks acquire not only different connotations but particular stylistic configurations. I will refer to four typical characters. 1. The Ndéchi-ndéchi leads the march and represents the most ancient ancestors; he appears escorted by a retinue of 15 or 20 masked people that repeat and multiply the same character and bear his name (also repeated). They promote abundant hunting, harvesting and gathering and, insofar as their appearance coincides with the flowering of the plant called taperigua, they also bring forth the Arete Poty, the ‘Flower of the True Time’ or the ‘Beautiful Adornment of the True Time’, the ancient Guaraní figure that embellishes the festivity, filling it with suggestive gravitas. The Ndéchi-ndéchi do not represent dead ancestors but the still living and true progenitors: they are living images. Thus, the ancestors are presented in the ceremonial scene as real beings, subject to physical wear and tear and presenting faces that are wrinkled and deformed by old age. For this reason, their masks are realistic: although they employ the exaggeration of caricature, the masks are intended to faithfully signify the infirmities of those who have lived a long time and undertaken a long journey. 2. The Aguero-guero also represent ancestors, but ones who are both illustrious and dead. They are called aña, ‘errant souls’, and correspond to the spirit of notable figures—powerful chieftains and shamans, intrepid warriors and skillful hunters. These souls must undertake a long journey after death and pass difficult and interminable tests.28 Riester says that these spirits, who belong to the category of ‘breathfire’, need to overcome obstacles through the spiritual force they have accumulated in their terrestrial life.29 The Aguero-guero are thus the spirits of great women and men whose actions, undertaken through an ideal voyage, reaffirm the valor of the Guaraní tradition and animate the community’s path. Their masks, also called Aña-

28 Cf. Branislava Susnik, Los aborígenes del Paraguay, VI: Aproximación a las creencias de los indígenas, Asunción: Museo Etnográfico “Andrés Barbero,” 1984–85, p. 111. 29 Branislava Susnik, Cultura religiosa-I. (Ámbito americano), Asunción: Manuales del Museo Etnográfico “Andrés Barbero” IV, 1989, p. 40.



50 

 Ticio Escobar

aña, emphasize their spectral character: they are extremely schematic and painted with Kaolinite white. 3. The Apyte Puku are the spirits of certain shaman-guardians. Converted into pure force, they are custodians of the voyage of the mythical ancestors and protect the dances and performances of the Arete Guasu. Instead of masks, their faces are covered with a black cloth with only slits for eyes and cover their heads in a cap or cornet. These tall conical hats are undoubtedly a result of colonial influences and include one or more mirrors in the front; these serve to annul the malignant sheen of the añaka rendy guasu, ‘the great splendor of the head of the errant soul’, which is neutralized by the incandescent lighting cast by the mirrors of the Apyte Puku. For this reason, they dance tilting their heads; they seek to randomly counter the invisible, noxious rays that can cut across the ritual space. It is a battle of glistening beams. 4. The great procession that arrives at the village after a journey of various months also includes numerous animals, the fundamental counterpart to humans in all indigenous cultures. Different zoological species appear, surrounded by their spirits and protective forces, ‘The Lords of the Animals’, but what is visible are only the representations of ‘real’ animals, covered with masks. These are made with a clearly realistic or even naturalistic intent: so much so that, in some cases, the pieces of wood include fangs, feathers, horns and bristles of the represented animals and, in other cases, directly use the animals’ very hides. Not only do these four kinds of characters have interchangeable positions when on the ritual stage but, given non-fixed representational conditions, they enter and exit the scene randomly. I have already said that the repetition of the character’s name is inscribed in his/her mask and designates his/her status as an image. The masks, the images of the Ndéchi-ndéchi, assume realistic representations of the aged ancestors. These continue in life but only by way of the power of the image: once the masks have been abandoned in the cemetery, and returned to this origin-destination, the wavering old ones disappear. The illusion of the image has been put aside. It is the power of the mask—an aesthetic, poetic, mythic, imaginary power—that produces the conjunctural identification between the dead and the living. If the life of the Ndéchindéchi is sustained in imagination by the mask, that of the Aguero-guero is cancelled out by the same means: their masks define them as archaic dead that gather, full of life, to bring blessings to the ceremony. When it is finished, the masks are put away and they re-acquire their death. The officiants who are masked as animals are images of examples of the Guaraní bestiary of the Chaco. The spectral forces of their protectors, ‘The Lords of the Animals’ do not have an image. According to Pascual Toro, a Chiringuano informant, however, they do in fact have an image, but their appearance is other; for example, they appear as wisps of fires, the flicker of luminous insects or distant lightning. The Apyte Puki are not images; for this reason, although they cover their faces, they do not bear the masks that duplicate their name, a sign of their imaginary status. They are real forces charged with destroying adversarial images with the radiant power of their mirrors (fig. 3). 



Ta’angá verá 

 51

Fig. 3: Apyte Puku, guardians of the Arete Guasu, Chiriguano ceremony. Photograph: Fernando Allen, Santa Teresita, Boquerón, 2011. Centro de Artes Visuales/Museo del Barro.

Once the Arete Guasu ceremony is over, the masks are deposited in the cemetery in a melancholy ritual. Sent on their way by their descendants, the progenitors return to the Region of the Dead, whence they will not return until the following year. The images have been put aside. Without their masks, the officiants recover their identity, at least partially: no one survives unscathed after having exchanged their image with their ancestors, their own ghosts.

The Dance of Gods and Mortals The Ishir, like the Ayoreo, belong to the Zamuco linguistic family. Located in the north zone of the Chaco Boreal, they are divided into two groups: the Ebytoso30 (who live along riverbanks) and the Tomráraho (who live in the forest); a third group (the Horrio) no longer exists, just as the Tomáraho were almost extinguished due to the invasion of their traditional territories. Today both groups survive in difficult situa-

30 As there are no normative conventions for the writing of Ishir terms, I use Spanish orthography, except for the following exceptions, which follow a Guaraní orthography: the h is aspirated; the y corresponds to the sixth Guaraní vowel, aspirated; the diacritic (~) nasalizes vowels and the j is pronounced like the y in Spanish.



52 

 Ticio Escobar

tions of intercultural friction with colonists, landowners and missionaries, neglected by a public politics that could safeguard their lands and ways of life. The Tomáraho, who under the oppression of the Carlos Casado Company were isolated from almost all contact with Paraguayan society until the 1980s, maintain their mythical ritual world, even as it wanes under the adverse circumstances that I have indicated. In this essay, I will refer to this ethnic subgroup, based on the relations I have maintained with them since 1986.

Foundational Power At the beginning of spring, the Ishir perform the Debylyby, a ceremony that traditionally lasted three months and is today reduced to a few weeks, according to the rhythms marked by the tough conditions that restrict the disposable time of the indigenous communities, which are forced to undertake new tasks that exceed their traditional economy (hunting and gathering). The Debylyby configures a complicated cultural architecture that articulates with precision different rites of masculine initiation, mourning and annual renewal through the presentation of divinities. In the auspicious scene that is opened up on this occasion, the blessings and auspicious-magical activities of shamans as well as gods come together, promoting healing, community harmony, favorable weather and an abundance of prey and crops. Lately, in the face of the growing ecological devastation, the Debylyby also promotes the conservation of the environment. During the ceremonial time, the society teems with images tasked with sketching different diagrams that bear the weight of many responsibilities, beliefs and exalted sensibilities. This impressive ritual montage coincides with other shamanic rites linked to them, although they unfold independently. The time of Debylyby is also the period when a parallel scene of competitive games takes place; these are endowed with their own highly ceremonial aspect (fig. 4). The mythic tale and the ritual representation are related, without a doubt, but the ritual should not be interpreted as merely the mise-en-scène of the tale: both have distinct representational logics and require particular rhetorical and imaginative dispositifs. The central myth narrates the introduction of culture by the anábsoro, Dema-deities who did not create the world, which pre-existed them, but who passed on the knowledge of language, the techniques of economic subsistence, the intricate reasons behind the social pact, the symbolic forms of mourning, the ways to heal physical and mental ills, the power of beauty and, finally, the always obscure path of meaning. They install the ritual representation, the circular form of a society that is both staged and then removed from the stage; the very gods are protagonists of the Debylyby, the nucleus and motor of the entire culture. The price of culture is death; before the anábsoro arrived, human beings neither lived nor died completely; they dragged forward, automatically, a pure biological existence without color or reflection. 



Fig. 4: Aligio Estigarribia (Ikyle), Tomáraho shaman. Photograph: Nicolás Richard. María Helena, 2002. Centro de Artes Visuales/Museo del Barro.

Ta’angá verá 

 53

Fig. 5: Túkule, dressed for the Debylyby ritual. Photograph: Ticio Escobar. San Carlos, Chaco Boreal del Paraguay. 1986. Centro de Artes Visuales/Museo del Barro.

By introducing images, rules and a mortal horizon for humans, the gods installed the perverse mechanism of desire and with it, the anguish that periodically crushes the community. They thus established, with severity, the limits of human freedom. When humans decided to emancipate themselves and began killing off the gods by striking them on their place of mortal weakness (their ankles), Nemur, the only surviving deity, hurled down a foundational threat: if the god-killers did not supplant the gods annually in the harra, the ceremonial scene, they would die at the hands of their adversaries. The Ishir decided that the curse of Nemur was beginning to fulfill itself: the circle of an intolerant system was closing in upon them, restricting the ceremony and hastening their extermination (fig. 5). The Ishir culture emerges from the foundational crime of deicide, an event that functions as the origin of a somber guilt, redemptive principle and threat of punishment. In order to convert themselves in imago dei and abide by Nemur’s ruling, the men cover themselves with intricate feathered adornments and paint their bodies with an exuberance of motifs and colors. Radiant, invested with the sacred image, with pure aura, they enter the ceremonial circle to supplant the gods assassinated by their predecessors. Once they have stepped onto the ceremonial stage, they turn into 

54 

 Ticio Escobar

Fig. 6: Ishir-Tomáraho dressed up as Nemur. Photograph: Nicolás Richard. María Helena, Alto Paraguay, c. 2002. Centro de Artes Visuales/ Museo del Barro.

Fig. 7: Ishir-Tomáraho dressed up as one of the Anábsoro. Photograph: Ticio Escobar. Péishiota, Chaco Boreal del Paraguay, 1989. Centro de Artes Visuales/Museo del Barro.

anábsoro: the image of the gods turns them into gods. In Ishir, cet is the principle by which the image and object become identified with each other in contexts of concentrated religious or shamanic density. During the time of the ceremony, the images link the anábsoro and the officiants with such force that they trans-substantiate. Despite the fact that the appearance of the character that will interpret (or incarnate) Nemur lasts only a few seconds, the preparation requires a long session in which bodily paint is parsimoniously applied, the body, as well as the face, is covered with a tunic made of caraguatá fibers, and the ankles, wrists, waist and head are emplumed. The outfit is completed with a crown that bursts with multi-colored feathers. The assistants hand the officiant an ook, a wooden wand that ends in a feathery mallet that Nemur carries on his shoulders: the ook promotes the equilibrium of the world and must remain strictly horizontal even when the character runs and leaps in order to prevent a cosmic cataclysm. Nemur appears like a lightning bolt on stage; the audience sees him from afar, obliquely; the non-initiates lower their gaze; frightened, the children throw themselves on the floor and cover their eyes. Nemur is pure presence almost without image or pure image almost without presence: the effects of the cet (fig. 6). 



Ta’angá verá 

 55

The anábsoro, the masculine and feminine divinities, today number around 30; they appear alone, in pairs, in small groups or surrounded by attendants consisting of their offspring or by duplicates of themselves, as if each character multiplied itself in others. The shamans are present in all the rituals that make up the Debylyby (the dance of the gods is only one of the dances, though the main one), but its realm, which is fundamentally magical, is circumscribed by the human and its limits; it does not involve liturgical activities nor does it cross into the dimension of the gods (fig. 7). Nonetheless, the manipulated images have a potent reach, not only because they sustain the powerful mechanism of cosmic concert, the equilibrium of people (as fortuitous as in any social group), the consistency of identities and the continuity of the social order, but also because they have propitious-magical effects: the bodily paint, the choreographies, the feathers, the cries and the words promote good hunting and abundant harvest; they attract or keep away rains; they cure or drive away bodily and spiritual disturbances; and they help stave off the dangers that capitalist expansion is bringing to the forests (in the Paraguayan Chaco, 577 hectares are deforested every day). The Ishir world is sustained in imagination through the Debylyby.

Contrary Images There is an obscure and overly intricate point in Ishir mythology that, centered on the figure of Ashnuwerta, is translated into ritual and resolved in the contradictory terms of the image. Ashnuwerta, the central divinity of the Ishir culture, incarnates the concept of opposition, which is central to the evolution of this culture. Opposition can be negotiated through dialogue (‘through words’, according to the Ishir) or through a combative confrontation that can have unpredictable consequences or unclear results. But it can also be faced through the device of cet, which produces transmutations, identifications and displacements. Ashnuwerta summarizes the mutant modalities of cet. On the one hand, she serves as an ally: she is the Great Mother of the Ishir and the Giver of Words. On the other hand, she is a threatening deity: insofar as she is the Mistress of Water and Fire, she can unleash pests and provoke fires, floods or other natural catastrophes. She is the beneficent Mother of the Birds of Benign Rain and Lady of the Milky Way, but also the Mistress of Destructive Storms. She is thus the supreme ally/ adversary as well as the great mediator between all possible worlds: she is the only goddess linked to an earthly lover (Syr, who gave her a hybrid son, Jolué) and one of the few divinities who, occasionally, intersects with the realm of the sky shamans. Ashnuwerta presents three different manifestations. The first belongs to the visual order and generates the opposition between red and black. Ashnuwerta is the Goddess of the Resplendent Red Power, the tone that defines her attire. But in certain moments, even as she remains herself, she is also the contrary figure, Ashnuwysta, the Goddess of Resplendent Black Power, adorned with blackish tones. According to 

56 

 Ticio Escobar

Cordeu,31 red connotes the ferocity of the supernatural order, whereas black represents its beneficent aspects. Without ignoring this parallel meaning, I understand the red/black opposition to be a logical-formal one in Ishir culture rather than one representing a semantic antagonism. The opposition between these central colors stages opposition itself, since the values of the tones fluctuate and depend on each one of the anábsoro and on each scene. In fact, both Ashnuwerta the Red and Ashnuwysta the Black simultaneously present aspects that are adverse and favorable to humans, and that can be reverted or affirmed through the action of the shamans. Among the Ishir, power has an ambivalent meaning: the woso is pure potential, a force that is in itself neutral, and whose positive or negative consequences depend on the uses given to it by gods, mortals and, particularly, the shamans. The shamans are specialists dedicated to giving impetus to, redirecting or reverting the favorable or harmful direction of drives where the same force can be helpful to some and injurious to others. Ashnuwerta and Ashnuwysta present themselves separately in the harra, the ceremonial stage, with each one surrounded by a retinue of daughters who multiply their image. Through their appearances (colors, attire and movements) they offset forces and meanings that confront each other in the context of the ritual. But they do not do so directly but rather through subtle sleights of hand and theatrical displacement. The second instantiation of Ashnuwerta opposes image and sound. When she acquires an appearance, the goddess maintains her name, but as pure sound she is called Hopupora; she is thus both the messenger of Ashnuwerta but also herself in another phase. The manifestations of Hopupora create disquiet in the village and announce distinct moments of the Great Ritual, as well as formalities that need to be followed in each case; she is the hidden master of ceremonies of the Debylyby (fig. 8). The Ishir explain that Hopupora lacks an appearance, but it would not be correct to call her invisible because she does not have a material body that is hidden from sight. Her figure thus does not straddle an opposition between visible and invisible but operates through the interplay between sound and silence: she acts through cries that are modulated in a thousand ways—whispers, alarming cackles, mournful laments and strange rudimentary chants. She also evokes ambient sounds; the brusque silences that she instills in the middle of the night allow for the perception of the resonances, howls, bellows and shrieks of the neighboring forest, as well as the barks, voices, chants and the reverberations of rattles from the wakeful village. Hopupora lacks an image but generates images. The ritual called Hopupora Mã, which means ‘the tracks of Hopupora’, consists in the application of vertical swaths of red, white and black, which the men paint on each other in order to testify

31 Edgardo Cordeu, “Aishtuwénte: Las ideas de deidad en la religiosidad chamacoco, Tercera Parte,” Suplemento Antropológico, Asunción: CEADUC 25, no. 1, 1990, pp. 119–211, p. 136.





Ta’angá verá 

 57

Fig. 8: Debylyby, Ishir ceremony. Puerto María Elena, Distrito de Fuerte Olimpo, Chaco. Photograph: Fernando Allen, 2015.

to the imminent presence of the goddess in them and so that their skins may carry propitious powers. The men’s bodies are marked with the indices of the goddess, but these signs cannot be seen either: the signs are hidden until they receive the resounding proclamation that they may be uncovered. Things become complicated if one considers that Hopupora is also related to the nocturnal bird with whom she shares a name and a song.32 In this way, her intricate character is also constructed by the migration of a natural fact into the realm of ritual, an operation that, as one might suppose, requires complex rhetorical and imaginary means and that is never a mechanical transplant. The third manifestation of Ashnuwerta is even more complex; it entails the transmutation of the goddess into a mortal figure, the Woman-Doe, which involves a human phase, Arpylá, and an animal one, loaded with mythical signification. Like other figures that bear symbolic weight, this one carries meanings that cannot be broached without the use of images. Arpylá consummates the mediating destiny of Ashnuwerta: she installs fronts of opposition between the sacred, the human and the merely

32 What the Ishir call hopupora is a nocturnal bird of the species caprimulgo parvulus, whose characteristic cries augur a temporal renewal.



58 

 Ticio Escobar

Fig. 9: Tomáraho man swinging the great feathered mace called the kadjuwerta. Photograph: Cristián Escobar Jariton, Onichta, Chaco, 1989. Centro de Artes Visuales/Museo del Barro.

organic. She confronts humans with gods, on the one hand, and with animals, on the other. The nucleus of this mythic passage prepares for the Ishir renaissance, even in the mythic stage. To this end, Arpylá, in her human phase, but with the grave power of Ashnuwerta, ordered the men to possess, sacrifice and cut up her body, which later reappeared, intact, in its divine incarnation. Each piece of her body gave rise to a new lineage, the beginning of a generation finally redeemed from the memory of deicide, but strongly committed to the tradition of continuing the dance of the gods, the basis of cultural identity, collective well-being and Ishir ethnic continuity. In this way, the gods, men and women are linked in a drama that is more than representation: it is an essential ritual that discharges images outside the circle of Debylyby along collective paths that multiply and renew meaning with every staging. In its last stage, called Tsaat, the Debylyby includes, among others, two counterposed rituals, which take place at different moments: the kadjuwerta and kadjuwysta, words that signify approximately ‘the radiant red power’ and ‘the radiant black power’. The first, more potent one, takes its name from a great mace made up of pink, scarlet and reddish feathers used during the ceremony as part of the officiant’s attire. This opulent mass condenses and then discharges, with the power of a lightning bolt, the woso: the teeming energy accumulated during the course of 



Ta’angá verá 

 59

the Debylyby (fig. 9). Throbbing with different forces, the kadjuwerta is mythically related to the Milky Way, and thus to Ashnuwerta. So much concentrated power makes the ceremony an auspicious sign as well as a cipher of calamity; it incarnates the Ishir idea that power always bears a promise and holds a threat. A representative of each clan takes the end of the rope and spins it over his head in circles, at first with extreme caution, but then by speed and progressive vigor. The great bundle of feathers cannot touch the floor because if it did, the entire land would receive the charge of uncontrollable powers; nor can it escape the hands of the officiant because, if it did, he would be dragged off by the momentum of the Milky Way. The bundle is then placed on a mat of vegetable fibers or a deer hide and, as the shamans sing with strength and shake their maracas, almost furiously, the men shower it with blows so as to liberate the propitious forces for the benefit of the community and expel the negative ones, which will be neutralized by the shamans. This ritual installs a relaxed pause in the dense unfolding of the Debylyby; the community feels relief and feels blessed. They are prepared for the final purification of the annual ceremony, which will instill, for a while, the always contingent calm of social cohesion. The feathered bundle used for the celebration of the kadjuwysta, ‘the radiant dark power’, is made up of black, grey and blueish feathers—‘nocturnal feathers’, the Ishir say. The kadjuwysta ritual is performed within the Debylyby only during significant droughts; in these cases, a strange magical-propitious protocol called Totila Teichu, which means ‘the ritual of the crazy woman’, takes place. As they whirl the dark artifact over their heads, the men enter progressively into a trance: their voices become louder until they emit unrestrained screams and they lose control of their movements and actions. These wild shrieks summon from afar Totila, who, in a craze, wanders at night among deserts, forests and palm groves. If the kadjuwerta is related to the clarity of the Milky Way, the kaduwysta is related to the meteorological order of the skies, which responds to irrational forces whose movements are influenced by Totila. The intersection between the madness of the officiants and that of Totila interferes with atmospheric behavior: it unleashes the echoes of thunder and images of lightning bolts that end up bringing real storms and much needed rain.

Some Possible Conclusions The examples touched upon in this article might seem as if they belong to worlds that are too remote from and incompatible with contemporary Western experience. However, the way in which certain indigenous cultures locate themselves in the present (in their own presents) coincides unexpectedly with a critique bearing an Enlightenment genealogy. Certain strategies assumed by indigenous cultures to con

60 

 Ticio Escobar

Fig. 10: Clemente López, an Ebytoso shaman, making a ritual costume for an exposition of indigenous art in the Museo del Barro. Photograph: Osvaldo Salerno, 1989. Centro de Artes Visuales/Museo del Barro.

front or refute time accord in their anachronisms and discordances with contemporary maneuvers: they constitute alternative ways of resisting the attempt to globalize every last corner of the planet (fig. 10). To resist hegemonic visuality requires mobilizing potent images, one that carry an extra charge that can allow them to circulate against the flow, or at the margins of the logic of commodities. Images that are capable of clouding the transparency of the theatrum mundi elude the circle of representation and obstinately launch themselves to illuminate possible indices of meaning. These images sometimes overlap with those of contemporary Western art with a contra-hegemonic vocation. In both cases, there is a clear political sense (a critical, poetic one), a defiance of the stability of the signs set up in a productivist key, a contradiction to the bland aestheticism of the total market, and, finally, a sought renewal of the incessant work of questioning (fig. 11, plate V). Images are capable of fleetingly articulating radical differences. The aesthetic regime, in Rancière’s sense, brings together dissonant, even incompatible, images. The plural images that resist the all-conquering expansion of hegemonic visuality make up uneven threads, ephemeral but resistant. Confronted with imaginaries globalized within the code of capital, the dissident images of Western cultures (central or peripheral) are as much survivors as those of indigenous cultures. Both aspire to impugn the leveling advance of consensus and commodity, and renew the disruptive potential of desire. They are surviving cultures, whose brilliance manifests at times like the flickering lights of fireflies, like “simple luminescences in the night” to put it in the words of Didi-Huberman, who asks: “Isn’t it necessary to search first among 



Ta’angá verá 

 61

Fig. 11: Debylyby, Ishir ceremony. Puerto María Elena, Distrito de Fuerte Olimpo, Chaco. Photograph: Fernando Allen, 2015.

the communities that remain—without reigning—the very recourse, the open space of answers to our questions?”33 The space preserved by resistant images, those that remain, are constituted by hollows, folds and interstices—small pauses where the event can resonate beyond all possible definitive inscription.

33 Georges Didi-Huberman, Survival of the Fireflies, trans. Lia Swope Mitchell, Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 2018, p. 80.



Hans Belting

The Migration of Images An Encounter with Figuration in Islamic Art

Beyond Aby Warburg, or the Issue of Time and Space Aby Warburg’s concept of ‘Bildwanderung’, or the migration of images, was closely linked to the idea of the survival (‘Nachleben’) of Greco-Roman antiquity as the source of migration.1 This meant migration took place in a cultural space where such images were inherited and remembered. While Warburg identified this space with Europe, he included in it the itinerary of Greco-Roman constellation pictures that re-entered Europe via Arab copies. The very notion of the ‘Renaissance’, or the rebirth of antiquity, was for him proof of such a hereditary situation. It is important to remember that Warburg did not have in mind material pictures properly speaking; rather, he conceived of migration as the transfer of single motifs, symbols and memories. As these had never been completely lost, they could be resuscitated and reused when needed. Change happened in time rather than space: the historical time in which the space was given. Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas was to be a late and radical application of this idea. What follows, however, is a somewhat different matter. It concerns Islamic cultures in Persia, and later at the Ottoman court. In both instances, images traveled from one culture to another, thus leaving their native space and reaching a different visual culture. Time is a matter of history, space a matter of culture. In our case, we are primarily concerned with space. When crossing a borderline, images would often change their meaning and aesthetic code relative to their original context. Generally speaking, where migrating images are concerned, the role images take on in a new setting can afford a deeper insight into both their original invention and what might be called their reinvention, a kind of translation into another idiom or medium. Such a remaking allows us to understand the relationship between ‘model’ and ‘copy’ in terms of translation and reinterpretation. Warburg himself remained open to such an approach, proposing that all his materials should serve “a still unwritten historical psychology of human expression” and thus allow for a new ‘iconology’ oriented in cultural terms (eine kulturwissenschaft-

1 In two texts from 1913 on constellation pictures, Warburg discussed ‘wandernde Bilderwelt’ and their ‘Wanderung von Süd nach Nord’; Martin Treml and Sigrid Weigel, Aby Warburg. Werke in einem Band, Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010, pp. 326, 349. For Warburg’s concept of the survival of images, cf. Georges Didi-Huberman, The Surviving Image, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018.

64 

 Hans Belting

liche Ikonologie).2 The vision of a “comparative approach to cultures” (vergleichende Kulturwissenschaft) has not lost its relevance. Warburg insisted on the need to extend “the intrinsic meaning of the phenomenon of an iconic orientation in space and time” (die dem Phänomen bildhafter Orientierung innewohnende Bedeutung in Zeit und Raum).3 ‘Iconic orientation’ is the key term here. It means an orientation through images that a given culture has produced and deemed important. In such cases, too, the copying of foreign models can result in a complete break with the models’ original rendering and meaning. A reconsideration of the migration of images as a cross-cultural phenomenon is warranted in our time. We are dealing with an expanded global space where cultures may have ‘clashed’ or, as in most cases, become entangled. For Warburg, cultural space was the space of ‘the All-European culture’ (die europäische Gesamtkultur) in the era of the Renaissance.4 He was therefore reluctant to see Europe as a local culture; never complete in itself, it was in a constant state of exchange with other cultures. But the Warburg Library, to quote Ernst Cassirer, was conceived as a collection of problems whose resolution was to remain a never-ending task. This claim is still valid in a time when cultural spaces have opened beyond the borders of the Western world. The experience of a globalized world opens our eyes to the interdependence of visual cultures. Historians have launched a new discipline called ‘Global History’ that changes the way we discuss the past. They have discovered an entangled history that is not strictly confined to Europe (pace Hegel) but involves other parts of the world. The migration of images has created contact zones that will be the subject of the following pages.

Migrating Images and the Role of Figuration in Islamic Cultures Two case studies from the 15th and 16th centuries will show us how the migration of images proceeded in relation to cultures where figuration was controversial. In textand scripture-based cultures, such as in the Islamic world, figuration—in Arabic, taswir, which means picture-making5—was a restricted practice and was often suspected of being dangerous and a tool of seduction. Gülru Necípoğlu speaks of “constraints imposed on figural representation”: this also included “mimetic figural rep-

2 Aby Warburg, Recommendation of E. Panofsky for a chair at Hamburg University in 1925, Erwin Panofsky, Korrespondenz, ed. Dieter Wuttke, Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 2001, p. 181f. 3 Ibid., p. 181f. 4 Treml and Weigel, Aby Warburg, p. 426 (cf. n. 1). 5 I owe this translation to the kindness of Kamal Boullata.





The Migration of Images 

 65

resentations”.6 Figurative images therefore needed to be accepted on the arrival side, and acceptance depended on the existence of a corresponding pictorial genre in the new context. Such a genre existed in the area of the illuminated book, best known from the Persian courts, where Persian poetry inspired pictorial narratives using this medium. There was also a designated place for collecting foreign models on paper and parchment. This was the Persian album, best known from extant examples dating from the 15th century onward. As David J. Roxburgh has shown,7 the album (Muraqqa), literally meaning ‘patchwork’, played an important role. It was here that one could store drawings, paintings and examples of calligraphy, both from abroad and produced locally, in a single place. The album became a highly characteristic item of a culture whose norm was the book page. Here, foreign models could be seen and studied without being submitted to local conditions—they therefore avoided possible censure. An album, like a private museum, made foreign images available to both artists and patrons, who may have received them as presents from abroad. The album was not the only space designated for such collecting, though it was the most durable and best-documented medium. There were also cabinets of curiosities, where luxury objects such as pottery, ivory caskets, textiles, glass and many other items were displayed for the benefit of visitors of rank. One surviving example is the palace collection of the Ottoman court, which is owned today by the Topkapi Saray Museum in Istanbul. In this context, there was a long tradition of using figuration to represent narratives with a courtly setting, for instance, involving dancers and court officials. Jonathan M. Bloom has recently published a brief history of such items in Fatimid times.8 It is worth noting that the decoration of pottery used calligraphy sometimes as an implied critique of figuration. Figuration never completely disappeared from Islamic cultures, despite the limitations imposed by the religion on the depiction of ‘animate’ beings. The Muslim world was itself culturally diverse, due to its geography, and it often competed with neighboring cultures, which provided models for artistic production. From Spain to India, the practice of figuration evolved over time. In one exceptional case, as we learn from a Fatimid source dating from the 11th century, figuration even found its way into a mosque.9 In the mosque of Carafa in Cairo, two painters from Bosra competed to create the perfect illusion of a dancing girl appearing to step out of (or disappear into) a flat wall: an ambiguous project that held an implied warning about the “errors of

6 Gülru Necípoğlu, “The Scrutinizing Gaze in the Aesthetic of Islamic Visual Cultures: Sight, Insight, and Desire,” Muqarnas 32 (2015), p. 23, 41. 7 David J. Roxburgh, The Persian Album 1400–1600, From Dispersion to Collection, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. 8 Jonathan M. Bloom, Arts of the City Victorious. Islamic Art and Architecture in Fatimid North Africa and Egypt, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. 9 Ibid., p. 113 (cf. n. 7).



66 

 Hans Belting

direct vision”, as described in the third book of Ibn Al-Haitham’s Kitab al-Manazir or Manual of Perception, which was written in the same place at around the same time.10 Such traces of evidence notwithstanding, figurative art—especially on a monumental scale—remained a disputed genre. This is one reason why foreign models and foreign artists encountered a problem whenever figuration was at stake. But here again, the near-total loss of relevant examples means it is difficult to make a case to fill this gap. Even a fervent supporter of a strong tradition of ‘Islamic figurative art’, such as Michael Barry, has difficulty arguing this point.11 This difficulty is due in part to the deep breaks that mark the history of the Middle East. When the Mongols stormed Baghdad in 1258, the imagery of Abbasid royal art was almost completely wiped out. The Mongol rulers, who went on to control three semi-independent empires in and beyond Iran and Iraq, inaugurated very different schools of art, which lasted a short period of time and exerted varying degrees of influence. They also seem to have promoted a strong taste for Chinese art, as textual sources and a few surviving echoes in illuminated books suggest. The Western Mongol rulers converted to Islam in 1295, but the Chinese capital remained the ultimate point of reference for artists and their patrons. Today, however, it is difficult to provide even a vague idea of what the art of that period looked like, and how the Chinese models were integrated into the local iconography. The wealth of Chinese picture scrolls in Iraqi royal collections has left only a faint echo in local adaptations from the 14th century. Extant models from China date back to the early 15th century. These scrolls were sometimes labeled as masterpieces of the people of Cathay, which is to say, as Chinese works, and valued as collection pieces. When the Timurid Dynasty took over Mongol rule—creating an empire that included present-day Afghanistan, with centers such as Tabris and the oasis city of Herat—emissaries from the Ming court began coming to Herat with greater frequency, in the hope of restoring the former state of relations with China. A contemporary chronicle records one such embassy in 1417.12 The Chinese emissaries “were accompanied by 300 horsemen and brought many gifts such as gyrfalcons, satins, silks, ceramics and a painting”. In return, the Timurid lord sent a white horse to the Ming emperor Yongle. The latter was so pleased with the horse that he ordered a painting be made and sent with the next embassy.

10 “Sight may err in much of what it perceives of visible objects,” Abdelhamid I. Sabra (ed.), The Optics of Ibn Al-Haytham, London: Warburg, 1989, p. 227ff. 11 Michael Barry, Figurative Art in Medieval Islam and the Riddle of Bizhâd of Herât (1465–1535): The Formation of Islamic Figurative Art. From the Eighth to the Fifteenth Centuries, Paris: Flammarion, 2004, pp. 49–132. 12 Roxburgh, The Persian Album 1400–1600, p. 160 (cf. n. 5). For China’s relations with the Muslim world, see Toh Sugimura, The Encounter of Persia with China. Research into Cultural Contacts Based on Fifteenth Century Persian Pictorial Material, Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology, 1986.





The Migration of Images 

 67

A fragment of this painting, likely taken from a picture scroll, appears to have survived as a cut-out piece in the Bahram Mirza Album, as we will see later. The scribe Dost Muhammad, who assembled the album, reminds his readers of the legendary “picture gallery of China which is known to contain images of all existing things”.13 This remark implies the belief of the existence of an unlimited art of figuration in China, compared with the limited practice found in his own culture. The scribe singles out portraiture, writing that “the custom of portraiture flourished in the lands of Cathay” (meaning China), though in this respect, he also refers to ‘the Franks’ (the Europeans) at the other end of the world.14

Greek and Chinese Painters in the Alexander Romance There was a long-standing literary tradition that distinguished between two peoples or visual cultures beyond the borders of the Muslim world involved in the production of figurative art: the Greeks or Byzantines, and the Chinese. It is significant that figuration was presented as a foreign affair, as images were indeed customary in cultures both to the west and to the east. This tradition is reflected in the Alexander Romance— written around the turn of the 12th century by the great Persian poet Nizami—which contains the ‘Contest between the Greek and Chinese Painters’.15 According to the legend, upon visiting the Chinese court, Alexander the Great held a competition to find out whether the Greeks or the Chinese were superior in making art (“fulfilled the rarest form of art”). The story that unfolds is well known, but its meaning is far from clear, as it varies from one telling to the next. “A high arched vault” is assigned to one Greek and one Chinese artist, and their facing niches are separated by a curtain to keep them from imitating each other. When the curtain is raised, the same image appears on both sides. At first, this wonder is believed to be the result of sorcery, and Nizami reminds his reader of the legendary Arzhang or Artang, the painted book of the ‘magician’ Mani. But the real answer to the mystery comes in a surprising twist. Whereas the Greek master has created a painted image in full color, the Chinese master has polished his niche and thus created a shining mirror. In this way, neither of the two ‘prevails’ over the other.

13 Wheeler M. Thackston, Album Prefaces and Other Documents on the History of Calligraphers and Painters, Leiden: Brill, 2001, p. 12. 14 Thackston, Album Prefaces and Other Documents, p. 12. 15 Evangelos Venetis, The Persian Alexander. The First Complete English Translation of the Iskandarnāma, London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd, 2017.



68 

 Hans Belting

In most cases, this story is understood as an allegory. For Nizami, its message was a warning not to be distracted by the mere surface beauty of the world. The mirror, a symbol of the pure heart, reflected an invisible world that was accessible only via spiritual exercise. Nizami took the story from an older source, the Sufi master ÂbuHâmid al-Ghâzâli, who lived in the early 12th century, in close proximity to Byzantium and its religious imagery. As al-Ghâzâli explains it, the Greeks take a rational approach to divine truth, while the Chinese, in their distant world, strive for the same mystical intuition as the Sufi. After Nizami, the 14th-century Sufi poet Rûmí reversed the positions of the two painters so that in his telling, the Chinese artist paints his wall and thus comes off as the master of the painterly technique, while the Byzantine artist, by polishing his wall, creates just a mirror image. This reversal may have been suggested by the new imagery of the Mongol empire. While the legend is ostensibly about competition and excellence, what distinguishes itself in all three tellings is a certain attitude of resistance to plain figuration.16 A Persian manuscript of Nizami’s Khamseh or Five stories in the Topkapi Library (H.753) contains an illustration of the contest between the Greek and Chinese painters (fol. 304) (plate VI).17 The picture, which has been dated to the mid-15th century, renders the story in the idiom and the spirit of the art of its time. The spatial situation has been translated into a beautiful surface composition. The two vaulted niches become a pair of windows, revealing identical garden scenes representing a poet and his beloved—the two images from the narrated legend. A luminous magenta sky with white clouds causes these images to shine brighter than the rest of the palace chamber. The strongest light hits the center, where the mirror, half covered by a dark curtain, appears in a dazzling white. King Alexander, enthroned below the mirror, lifts his head toward it and at the same time seems to compare the two images in a gesture of wonder. Such ambiguity beautifully renders the relation between image and mirror as the true secret in the story.

16 Cf. the translation of Barry, Figurative Art in Medieval Islam, p. 181ff (cf. n. 8). 17 Ivan Stchoukine, “La Khamseh de Nizami, H.753 du Topkapi Sarayi Müzesi d’Istanbul,” Syria 49 (1972), pp. 239–246, especially p. 243. For a color reproduction, see Barry, Figurative Art in Medieval Islam, p. 5 (cf. n. 8).





The Migration of Images 

 69

Chinese Collection Pieces in a Persian Album The Bahram Mirza Album (Istanbul, Topkapi H.2154) was compiled in 1544–45 by Dost Muhammad of Herat, a calligrapher and painter working for the second generation of the new Safavid dynasty at Tabriz. The album was dedicated to Prince Bahram Mirza (1517–49), the youngest son of Shah Isma’il, and a poet and calligrapher in his own right.18 Its collection of examples of calligraphy and figuration is arranged, for the most part, in chronological order. The single pieces are frequently accompanied by notes about their provenance or names assigned to them by Dost Muhammad. In addition, the album contains rare examples of Chinese art, which in some cases appear facing “response images” (David Roxburgh) in the Chinese manner. Only two specimens of ‘portraiture’, as Dost Muhammad calls it, introduce the ‘Franks’ as another people with a figurative tradition. A work by Gentile Bellini is among the materials that were separated from the album and sold by the Swedish-born dealer F. R. Martin in the early 20th century. The deal included the so-called Bellini Album, which was recently acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.19 The album is also significant on account of its famous preface, which seeks to explain the importance of the collected samples for the history of Persianate art from the 14th century onward. Here, Dost Muhammad turns into a kind of oriental Giorgio Vasari, whose contemporary he was. His patriotism, expressed as a preference for local traditions, matches that of Vasari in his Lives of the Artists. However, Dost Muhammad and Vasari were working from different premises. For the most part, the album pieces document script style and calligraphy, while figuration occupies a minor part, as one would expect. The preface is at its most precise in dating the single specimens of calligraphy, where it offers biographical information about the calligraphers. The author is eager to explain “the origin of calligraphy and to list the masters of the science of calligraphy who are so outstanding in the school taught by the pen” (Kor. 96:4f, my emphasis).20 He adds that “the embellishment of Koran manuscripts, which bespeak the glorification of the Word of the Necessarily Exalted, is connected to the pen and bound to the design and drawing of the masters of this noble craft.”21 But the preface, as Roxburgh remarks, is very selective in that it concentrates on the masters of the nasta’liq script while marginalizing other script styles. The part of the preface dealing with figuration opens with the famous claim that, in the reign of Ilkhanid Sultan Abu Sa’id (1317–35), “Ahmad Musa, a painter trained

18 Roxburgh, The Persian Album 1400–1600, pp. 245–307 (cf. n. 5); and David J. Roxburgh, Prefacing the Image. The Writing of Art History in Sixteenth Century Iran, Leiden: Brill, 2001. 19 Roxburgh, “Disorderly Conduct? F.R. Martin and the Bahram Mirza Album,” Muqarnas 15 (1998), pp. 32–57. 20 Thackston, Album Prefaces and Other Documents, p.  4ff., especially p.  7 (cf. n. 10); Roxburgh, Prefacing the Image, pp. 160–207 (cf. n. 15). 21 Thackston, Album Prefaces and Other Documents, p. 11 (cf. n. 10).



70 

 Hans Belting

by his father (...) lifted the veil from the face of figuration, and the figuration that is now current was invented by him.”22 Figuration is usually translated as ‘depiction’ but it refers both to painting practice and subject matter. The preface also discusses ‘portraiture’—treated as synonymous with figuration—opposing painting to calligraphy. As regards subject matter, it talks about painting and calligraphy, comparing the two, while also dealing with the genre of narrative, the depiction of flowers and animals, and portraiture in the Persian manner (full figure). In fact, Dost Muhammad attributes a series of full-page illustrations, inserted at different places in the album, to Ahmad Musa. These illustrations, which depict the prophet Muhammad’s Mi’raj (Night Journey)—his journey to heaven from Jerusalem—have been detached from their original text, and thus lack any attribution apart from that in the preface. It is interesting to note that the prophet is rendered with a visible face at every stage of the narrative. He is shown entering heaven in the company of Gabriel, where he is welcomed by a giant angel surrounded by a crowd of other angels (Istanbul, Topkapi Saray Museum, H.2154, fol. 31b) (plate VII). The monumental manner, which forces the artist to cross the frame of the page, may reflect the Chinese manner practiced in the 14th century. This example helps us understand what the preface describes as the origin of figuration, as seen from a local perspective.23 The foreign models included in the album mainly consist of Chinese paintings, mostly made on silk, with one example on paper. They include the bird-and-flower motif, a landscape and a gyrfalcon accompanied by a ‘response image’ by a local copyist. Some of these were originally part of large-scale scrolls in China. In order to fit the page format of the album, they were cropped and given with an ornamental frame that underlines the book’s connection to a new visual culture. Captions help us distinguish their Chinese provenance. A case in point is a double page with a white horse and two grooms depicted on silk (plate VIII). The solemn caption, which runs beside the heads of the two grooms, reads: “These paintings are from the collection of good works by the Chinese masters.” The double page may be the last trace of the gift of the Ming emperor, mentioned above, which was recorded as taking place in 1417. The transformation of the original scroll into a book has resulted in a violent adaptation where the horse has been cut in half and the reins in the hands of one of the grooms broken off. The original Chinese narrative must have dealt with a courtly ceremony, with one of the grooms serving as a dignitary who communicates with his neighbor. The rendering of the two grooms still reflects an open space with a continuous story. The full backward turn of one of the dignitaries must have impressed the Persian artists deeply as the same figure was copied as an independent picture in a new context, one that has yet

22 Roxburgh, Prefacing the Image, p. 160 (cf. n. 15). 23 John Michael Rogers (ed.), Topkapi Sarayi Museum. Manuskripte, Herrsching am Ammersee, Schuler, 1986, p. 74f, pl. 45.





The Migration of Images 

 71

to be identified (plate IX).24 For Dost Muhammad’s album project, if not before, the Chinese fragments underwent a complete transformation as regards both aesthetics and purpose—a change in which we recognize the appropriation of one visual culture by another. The double page forced the artist overseeing the project (Dost Muhammad himself?) to adapt the Chinese image to a double page and thus respond to a book culture in which the framed page was an overarching norm. The importance of the Chinese model for the album seems to have been reason enough to preserve it as a memory, even without its original setting. Another kind of appropriation is in evidence on the so-called Goloubew page, which, like the Bellini drawing, was removed from the Bahram Mirza Album and sold to an American collector, eventually finding its way to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (plate X).25 The reverse side contains a calligraphic assemblage of poems by Sultan Muhammad Nur and Hashim Mudhahbib, whose relation to the picture remains uncertain (plate XI). In this case, a local artist worked directly on the Chinese original, a silk painting with the common ‘bird-and-flower’ motif, which in China stands for the transient beauty of a blossoming tree. The tree’s flower lasts only a brief moment, and the time that the bird rests on the tree is even shorter. Below the tree, and on a different scale, a Persianate artist has added what seems to be a court scene. A precious frame added to the page probably dates from the time that the album was made. The narrative that has been added below the Chinese bird-and-flower motif shows a prince with his consort and attendants in a garden. The intimate couple is reclining on a carpet that is rendered according to the new ideal of the flat surface. A woman musician entertains the couple. It is a dream scene whose mood and duration point beyond space and time. For someone versed in Persian poetry, the subject matter may have followed a familiar formula. Viewed in relation to the garden scene narrative, the bird-and-flower motif of the original silk looks out-of-scale. Did this change of scale also imply a change of meaning for the new clientele? We can only speculate about such a possible reinterpretation. The Chinese picture, originally merely a beautiful study of nature in springtime, may have been transformed into an image seen in a vision. A Persian inscription in the upper right-hand corner identifies the picture as “a work of a master from amongst the people of Cathay”.26

24 Chinese Dignitary, Tabriz, 15th century. Istanbul, Topkapi Saray Museum, H.1703, fol. 6v; Barry, Figurative Art in Medieval Islam, color plate on p. 114 (cf. n. 8). 25 Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, 14.545; Barry, Figurative Art in Medieval Islam, color plate on p. 107 (cf. n. 8). Roxburgh, “Disorderly Conduct?,” p. 41 (cf. n. 16). 26 For quotation, see Barry, Figurative Art in Medieval Islam, p. 107 (cf. n. 8).



72 

 Hans Belting

A Western Picture of an Artist from the Ottoman Court The Bahram Mirza Album also contained the well-known picture of the Seated Scribe, which had been produced half a century earlier at the Ottoman court. The splendid watercolor was sold on the Western market in 1906 and today is part of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston (plate XII).27 The likely artist, Venetian painter Gentile Bellini, served as an emissary of La Serenissima at the Ottoman court for a year and a half, prior to the death of Sultan Mehmet II in 1481.28 He was invited to introduce the idiom of Renaissance art to the court school, where figuration was not the main concern. His greatest success there consisted of portraits of living persons, as we know from contemporary sources.29 In the case at hand, however, the situation was highly delicate as it involved the depiction of an Ottoman artist or calligrapher at work. Its subject is thus both a colleague of Bellini and a representative of a visual culture as seen through the eyes of a foreigner. The portrayal was not meant to be sketched from a living model. Here, in all likelihood, Bellini was expected to create an ideal representation of an artist whom he could not help but regard as ‘other’. He thus may have felt invited to formulate the difference and, at the same time, acknowledge his understanding of his native visual culture. The outcome is a highly unusual case of image migration. The image traveled through neither space nor time: it offers a cultural translation in situ since it uses the idiom of one culture (that of the viewer) to represent another culture (that of the viewed), with the aim of crossing a bridge and recognizing another artist as a role model. This aim gave rise to a hybrid character and a rare exception in Bellini’s oeuvre. The technique differs markedly from the one Bellini uses in his other drawings from the Ottoman court, which—as attested by the drawing (housed the British Museum) of a seated janissary who posed for the artist and was sketched dal vivo30 (plate XIII)—

27 Boston, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, P15e8. Cf. Caroline Campbell and Alan Chong, Bellini and the East, London: 2005, p. 122, cat. 32; Jürg Meyer Zur Capellen, Gentile Bellini, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1985, p.  125f, cat. A4; Tatiana Sizonenko, Artists as Agents. Artistic Exchange and Cultural Translation between Venice and Constantinople. The Case of Gentile Bellini, PhD diss., San Diego: UC San Diego, 2013, pp.  248–292; and Roxburgh, The Persian Album 1400–1600, p.  283 (cf. n. 5). Cf. also Barry, Figurative Art in Medieval Islam, p. 42f (cf. n. 8). For the modern history of the leaf, cf. Roxburgh, “Disorderly Conduct?”, pp. 32–57 (cf. n. 16). 28 Franz Babinger, Mehmed der Eroberer und seine Zeit, Munich: Bruckmann, 1953, p.  461ff; John Freely, The Grand Turk, London: Harry N. Adams, 2009, p.  104f, 151f, 224f; Campbell and Chong, Bellini and the East, p. 106ff (cf. n. 24). 29 For further details see Hans Belting, “A Venetian Artist at the Ottoman Court. An Encounter of Two Worlds,” Convivium 2 (2018). 30 Seated Janissary 1479–1481, London, British Museum, pp. 1–19. Cf. Campbell and Chong, Bellini and the East, p. 99f, fig. 25 (cf. n. 24); Zur Capellen, Gentile Bellini, fig. 118-E7 (cf. n. 24).





The Migration of Images 

 73

were done merely in ink and represent various courtiers. The Seated Scribe is instead a fully-fledged and carefully worked-out watercolor made with pen and brush and completed with gold. Its utter refinement served no purpose in Bellini’s working practice, where drawing existed only as a preparatory exercise. It thus clearly responds to the taste for miniature painting that prevailed at the Ottoman court, where the album was the customary space for collecting rare pictures as works on paper. The youth, seated cross-legged in a kind of green meadow, is propping an empty sheet of paper against a tablet on his knees while holding a stylus or brush. Bellini seems to introduce us to the secret of creation at the moment that precedes the emergence of any drawing or calligraphy on the paper. We get the impression that we are looking at either a poet or calligrapher at work. The figure is distinguished by its clothing, which paradoxically points to someone of high rank at the Ottoman court. This applies to both the kaftan, made of dark-blue brocaded velvet, and the silk sash that ties it. It also includes the voluminous scholar-turban, usually reserved for dignitaries.31 On the other hand, a ring in the youth’s ear identifies him as a ‘slave’ at the court. This is not necessarily a contradiction since ‘slaves’ with Christian backgrounds were often selected and trained for careers at the court. In a contemporary chronicle, such ‘slaves’ were characterized as being “of signal physical beauty and talent of soul”.32 The ambiguity of the figure’s rank, moreover, makes it unlikely that we are dealing with a portrait drawn from life. Rather, the picture represents the ideal of a poet or artist, someone who embodied the aspirations of the new Ottoman court school. For such a purpose, Bellini went to great lengths to offer a cross-cultural lesson in figuration. The profile view of the face was extremely rare in the East and could only be studied in Renaissance medals, which the Sultan commissioned from several Western artists, including Bellini. The placement of the youth on the page is a tour de force: it creates a fictional space in which a real body contrasts with the flat surface of the given material. The profile is connected effortlessly with the flesh of the face and with the voluminous and bulging kaftan. The body casts a shadow onto the sheet on the youth’s knees. The full-page rendering was traditionally reserved for rulers and mythical heroes. It is therefore important to understand the picture, not as a portrait, but as showing a role model. Bellini himself embodied such a role when he was sent by the Venetian senate on an official mission to the Ottoman empire. Mehmet was well aware of the novelty and honored his guest beyond measure; when Bellini returned to Venice, in January 1481, he did so with precious gifts.33 Bellini in turn left an unusual gift with the Sultan. This was one of the two model books he had

31 Sizonenko, Artists as Agents, p. 251f (cf. n. 24). 32 Kritobulus of Imbros, History of Mehmed The Conqueror by Kritovoulos, trans. from the Greek by Charles T. Riggs, Princeton: Praeger, 1954, pp. 85–86; Cf. Sizonenko, Artists as Agents, p. 257 (cf. n. 24); see also several remarks by Freely, The Grand Turk (cf. n. 25). 33 For Bellini’s sojourn at the Ottoman court, cf. n. 25.



74 

 Hans Belting

inherited from his father, Jacopo Bellini, as the older of two brothers (the younger being Giovanni Bellini).34 The Venetian album was entirely reserved for figurative art with a Christian subject matter. It contained designs and training materials for inventing novel compositions. Ottoman albums, however, concentrated on calligraphy and reserved little, if any, space for figuration. Bellini’s picture appears in a new light when we recognize it as a role model for an Ottoman culture that is based on a Western gaze and integrates Renaissance and Ottoman aesthetics into a single work. In this respect, the ambiguity of what the courtier is doing—is he writing or painting?—makes sense. Bellini seems to have left it open whether the seated youth is a poet, a calligrapher or a painter. In Muslim circles, a poet was more respected than a visual artist who merely illustrated poetry. We do not know what the youth is going to produce on the empty sheet. The resulting ambivalence characterizes the subject of Bellini’s picture. The equality of pen and brush is as important as the message the picture was intended to convey.35 Finally, the youth is not searching for a motif he could capture with a picture; it seems rather he is waiting for his imagination to guide him in his writing or drawing. In addition, the picture offers some important information about the treatment, or appropriation, of Bellini’s work by those who received it. Changes were made to it, but we do not know precisely when—whether at the Ottoman court or only after the work had reached the Safavid court, where Dost Muhammad included it in the Bahram Mirza Album. A small burst of flowers in the upper left-hand corner creates the impression of a flat surface and changes the spatial rendering of the original. A new frame accommodates the leaf for the album culture. An inscription labels the drawing as the work “of the son of a muezzin, one of the famous masters of the Franks”.36 This label has been much discussed, to no avail. The artist could not be the son of a muezzin (or Muslim caller to prayer) and at the same time a famous master of the Franks. Roxburgh has proposed that the label, to the extent that it was added by Dost Muhammad himself, consists of a play on words or joke. Whatever its meaning, it constitutes proof that the drawing was accepted, and valued, as a foreign work of art. There are records attesting to the enormous interest the Bellini picture generated among Islamic painters as a role model for their “self-fashioning” as artists, as Stephen Greenblatt would say. Although these painters reproduced the Bellini drawing, it would be misleading to speak of ‘copies’, because in these instances the model also underwent a thorough transformation in terms of conception and render-

34 Bernhard Degenhart and Annegritt Schmitt, Jacopo Bellini. Der Zeichnungsband des Louvre, Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1984; Mary Fournier, Drawing as Gift. Jacopo Bellini’s Paris Volume in Ottoman Istanbul, PhD diss., Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2005, p. 241ff. 35 Sizonenko, Artists as Agents, p. 279 (cf. n. 24). 36 I follow the translation of Barry, Figurative Art in Medieval Islam, p. 43 (cf. n. 8). Cf. Roxburgh, “Disorderly Conduct?”, pp. 41, 47 (cf. n. 16).





The Migration of Images 

 75

ing so that it could serve a new message. A work owned by the Freer Gallery in Washington (plate XIV) offers one such example. This amounts to a spectacular transformation of Bellini’s ambivalent attempt to approach a new visual culture.37 The seated youth appears, as though beyond space and time, against a luminous background in a strong yellow, into which the former setting disappears. The kaftan loses its textile rendering and responds to the yellow surface with an equally bright blue. The turban also stands out from the surrounding color with its brilliant white. The sleeves in dense green complete the translation of the model into another ‘language’, one where color and surface dominate. This is all the more impressive as the model of the figure has been carefully copied. There are two other changes that deserve attention. One is in the dress. The copy introduces a white scarf that is fixed on the sash. Like the mappa in Roman times, the white scarf or kerchief, now called dastarcheh, served as a royal attribute in Ottoman times and appears in 15th-century portraits as a distinguishing feature of the Sultan. This creates a problem since the ring in the ear is derived from the model. We witness here a reinterpretation whose meaning is not easily accessible. What seems certain, however, is that the change suggests an allegorical reading related to the artist’s position in a new environment. This idea is corroborated by the other change: the tablet on which the artist/scribe works is no longer empty but bears a painted picture, in a clear reference to figuration. As has been shown recently, the picture represents a court artist and serves as a self-portrait.38 This change ‘lifts the veil’, to use Dost Muhammad’s famous saying, on the former ambiguity of the artist by showing him to be practicing figuration. The Freer picture, whose origin is uncertain, may have been a response image (Roxburgh) rather than a copy. In its formal rendering and aesthetic conception, it differs markedly from the Bellini picture. These differences seem intentional and may indicate a rival project or translation into another idiom. The inscription, possibly added after later, identifies it as a work of “the slave Bihzâd who figuratively painted this”, in Barry’s translation.39 The pseudo-signature of Bihzâd (1465–1535), the legendary Timurid court painter from Herat and a contemporary of Gentile Bellini, introduces a fictitious genealogy that carries the appropriation of the model a step further. By postulating another archetype, it eliminates the derivation of the composition from the “famous master of the Franks”.40

37 Zur Capellen, Gentile Bellini, p. 126 (cf. n. 24); Campbell and Chong, Bellini and the East, fig. 47 (cf. n. 24); Barry, Figurative Art in Medieval Islam, p. 143ff (cf. n. 8). 38 Necípoğlu, “The Scrutinizing Gaze,” p. 42. 39 “Şūrat al- ’abd Behzād”. Barry, Figurative Art in Medieval Islam, p.  43 (cf. n. 8); for the copies, see Sizonenko, Artists as Agents, p. 289 (cf. n. 24); Campbell and Chong, Bellini and the East, fig. 47 (cf. n. 24). 40 On Bihzâd, cf. the monograph Barry, Figurative Art in Medieval Islam (cf. n. 8).



76 

 Hans Belting

An Epilogue in Mughal India The archetype bearing the name of a well-known Muslim artist that circulated subsequently was also adapted into a drawing, tentatively dated to 1489 (plate XV), which is housed today in the National Museum of Kuwait. Here again, the dress and the color scheme have undergone a spectacular transformation.41 The fact that the seated figure is mirror reversed cannot be easily explained and may be the result of a transfer of the model. Once more, the tablet bears a picture—this time a portrait of a princess amid golden clouds. Barry proposes seeing in “this fairy figure a celestial image”, by means of which the painter “spiritually meditates upon the mirror of his heart”.42 Whatever its meaning, the picture is another reference to figuration and as such serves the ‘self-fashioning’ of an artist in his own culture. The picture has been tentatively ascribed to the art of the Mughal court in India and dated to the early 17th century. The migration of Western images reached a climax at the court of the Mughal emperors, where the Jesuits arrived in 1580 and introduced religious images that served their mission. To elucidate their multifaceted transmission of these, Monica Juneja appeals to the concept of ‘braided histories’ (a term coined by Natalie Zemon Davis), envisioning a process where new balances are continually being negotiated through a dynamic of give-and-take.43 She speaks of a rivalry between “multiple territories of image production” at the Mughal court, where artists were invited to engage in a continuous experiment with transformation and reinterpretation. From an early date, the Mughal emperors were tempted to prove their cosmopolitan education through the patronage of Western religious images that were venerated by the newly converted Christians and admired by others. We learn from a contemporary source that “a beautiful picture of the Virgin belonged to the king” and was installed on a balcony of the palace where the ruler used to appear, expecting to be venerated himself.44 Such a picture likely belonged to the Mughal emperor Jahangir, who is himself shown in a half-figure, Western-type portrait. The album miniature is

41 I follow here the description of Barry, Figurative Art in Medieval Islam, p. 44 (cf. n. 8). Alan Chong, however, attributes the copy to Safavid Persia: Campbell and Chong, Bellini and the East, p.  123, cat. 33 (cf. n. 24); Esin Atıl (ed.), Islamic Art and Patronage. Treasures from Kuwait, New York: Rizzoli, 1990, pp. 221, 246, cat. 79. 42 Barry, Figurative Art in Medieval Islam, p. 28f (cf. n. 8). 43 Monica Juneja (ed.), “Braided Histories? Visuelle Praktiken”, Historische Anthropologie 16.2, Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2008, pp. 187–204. 44 Ebba Koch, “The Influence of the Jesuit Mission on Symbolic Representations of the Mughal Emperors,” in The Phenomenon of “Foreign” in Oriental Art, ed. Annette Hagedorn, Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2006, p. 117ff. and esp. p. 124.





The Migration of Images 

 77

dated to 1610–1614 in a museum label (plate XVI).45 The picture of the Virgin seems to reproduce an icon that migrated with the Jesuits to India and was there appropriated for the ruler’s state ceremonial. For the Great Mughal, the image was no longer a matter of faith but served to demonstrate his claims to universal power.

Conclusion This study was not written to offer easy conclusions. Rather, it is meant to reopen the old Warburgian discussion of migrating images using new materials that have not usually been considered outside the field of Islamic studies. ‘Survival’ or ‘Nachleben’ is not a very helpful guiding principle when it comes to crossing borders between visual cultures that differ markedly in their image practices. Survival is the main aspect within each culture—and has a meaning similar to tradition. The arrival of ‘foreign’ images that were understood, rejected or accommodated was an event that could not be foreseen, and each time triggered a new kind of response, prompting the culture to reconsider its own imagery. In the case of Islamic cultures, such encounters also had an impact on the practice of figuration or mimetic art. The ‘people of Cathay’ and the ‘Franks’ were considered ‘peoples of the image’ who challenged the existing concept of images. Moreover, the role of the ‘medium’ in which images were created proves to be an important aspect of the migration of images. In our case, the medium of the book and the album is essential for discussing the transfer of images to Islamic cultures. The Chinese offered images in large scrolls, which had no counterpart at the Timurid court. The same problem applies to Western oil painting, which was based on the idea of a ‘window’ open on the outside world. Likewise, the viewer’s ‘body’, as it is discussed in my attempt towards an ‘Anthropology of Images’, needs to be reconsidered. It is the body of the one who looks and understands—or misunderstands—what he sees. Migration was not only a matter of pictures in the sense of material objects. It also triggered mental images on the arrival side and implicated the imagination of a new user.

45 New Delhi, National Gallery of Art, 58.58/31 where I saw it exhibited in 2009. I thank Professor Monica Juneja, at the University of Heidelberg, for her kind advice. I am very grateful to Philipp Hubert for his assistance with my research.



Linda Báez-Rubí

Wanderstrassen Traveling Images – Moving Ideas Between Continents Las pinturas suplen la falta de escrituras Pictures fill the gap left by writings Francisco Florencia, La estrella del norte de México, México, 1688, p. 123. The works of Nature are prodigious. Whoever does not penetrate the reasons behind them, imagining it to be impossible, does not believe in them. Gioseffo Petrucci, Prodomo apologetico alli studi Chircheriani, Amsterdam, 1677, p. 143.

‘On the Shores of America’ When Aby Warburg’s journeying took him to the Pueblo region of the American Southwest, where he experienced what he understood as the ‘archaic’ strata of American indigenous culture, he penned in a letter from San Francisco, California, dated March 3, 1896, “I am writing an immortal manuscript that will truly be[…] the quintessence of my thoughts.”1 He took pains to document his voyage, charting the routes he had traveled, while sketching detailed maps of the regions he planned to visit, in order to understand their differing geographies and cultural environments. Throughout his voyage, Warburg identified geographical itineraries to develop an idea of how cultural manifestations migrated and affected configurations of images (fig. 1): a concern that would ultimately be synthetized by the concept Wanderstrassen (‘routes’) and revealed 27 years later in verbal expressions such as ‘Athens—Oraibi, all cousins’, the epigraph added to the manuscript Lecture on the Pueblo Indians three

1 See Aby Warburg to Mary Hertz, March 3, 1896, San Francisco, General Correspondence (GC), Warburg Institute Archive (WIA). Warburg was referring to the Symbolismus aufgefaßt als Funktion der Schwerkraft im geistigen Haushalt, a text written between 1895 and 1901, where he meant to develop his image theory, taking into account symbolic configurations and processes in the life of an ordinary man. The final version of Warburg’s title ‘Symbolismus als Umfangsbestimmung’ has been edited in three versions: Aby Warburg, Fragmente zur Ausdruckskunde, eds. Ulrich Pfisterer and Hans Christian Hoenes, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015, pp.  295–316 (Gesammelte Schriften, IV); Aby Moritz Warburg. Werke in einem Band: auf der Grundlage der Manuskripte und Handexemplare, eds. Martin Treml, Sigrid Weigel, and Perdita Ladwig, Berlin: WBG, 2010, pp. 615–628; and Symbol. Grundlagentexte aus Ästhetik, Poetik und Kulturwissenschaft, eds. Frauke Berndt and Heinz J. Drügh, Frankfurt/M.: 2009, pp. 75–89.

80 

 Linda Báez-Rubí

Fig. 1: Warburg’s drawing of the seven Moki Pueblos of Arizona. WIA III.47.1.1.

months after it was presented at the Bellevue Sanatorium in Kreuzlingen (April 23, 1923).2 Four years after writing this manuscript, Warburg was looking forward to a second journey to the American continent, a place that was supposed to play an important role in his research.3 Unfortunately, due to his feeble health, he never did make it back. As several scholars have noted, Warburg gained significant insight into the origins of the processes of iconic symbolization and their survival into the modern era from his impressions of and findings in America. Nevertheless, critical researchers cannot deny that he neglected important political and social factors affecting the Native American cultures he encountered. Like other European and North American scholars, ethnologists and collectors of his time, moreover, Warburg, who adhered to paradigms stemming from evolutionary theories about cultural development,

2 See “Reise-Erinnerungen aus dem Gebiet der Pueblos,” WIA III. 93.4.1, p.[1A]. The concept of Wanderstrassen was also visualized in the introductory panel A of the Mnemosyne Atlas. See El Atlas de imágenes Mnemosine de Aby Warburg, facs. ed., trans., intr. by Linda Báez-Rubí, México: Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas-UNAM, 2012, vol. 1, panel A, pp. 88–89. 3 See Aby Warburg to P. E. Goddard, 25 February 1928, GC, WIA, where Warburg outlines his interest in “Die Bedeutung der Amerikanistik für eine kulturwissenschaftlich gerichtete Kunstgeschichte” [“The importance of American Studies for a history of art based on intellectual history”].





Wanderstrassen 

 81

ignored ethical questions when dealing with other cultures.4 As a scholar of his time, he had the opportunity to meet and engage with the forerunners of modern American anthropology. To what extent would a further exchange of ideas, for example, with Franz Boas (1858–1942), have influenced the development of Warburg’s iconic symbolization theory? Warburg’s impact has yet to be fully identified and evaluated.5 Supposing the second journey to America had taken place, I suggest that Warburg would have delved deeper into the strata of space and time. On such an occasion he might have traveled further south, toward other parts of the Americas, perhaps to México. He might have followed millenary migration routes traced by indigenous cultures from the American Southwest to Mesoamerica and back, seeking a new way to understand the relationship between archaic and modern, between magic and science, while dealing with images. Warburg’s interest in the Aztec rain god Tlaloc provides us with a glimpse of what he might have been seeking when he turned south to delve into the ancient cultures of México (fig. 2). In this drawing, which he traced from the encyclopedic México a través de los siglos,6 his attention is focused on the deity’s clothes and insignia, that is, on the characteristic ornaments of the rain god. To Warburg, these are not simply ‘additional parts’; they are instruments serving as a means of expression that provide an account of the relationship between man and his environment. For him, the natural forces at work in the cosmos could be ‘grasped’ by means of, and within, ‘symbolic images’ of water, clouds, rain and lightning. This symbolization process, worked out during his journey, was one of the main aspects of Warburg’s image theory. We can agree that he was very interested in how the power of images was constituted, activated and transmitted in Puebloan com-

4 Claire Farago, “Epilogue: Re(f)using Art: Aby Warburg and the Ethics of Scholarship,” Transforming images: New Mexican Santos in-between worlds, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006, pp. 259–313, here p. 262; David Freedberg, “Pathos at Oraibi: What Warburg did not see” http://www.columbia.edu/cu/arthistory/faculty/Freedberg/ (original text for “Pathos a Oraibi: Ciò che Warburg non vide”), Lo Sguardo di Giano, Aby Warburg fra tempo e memoria, Turin: Nino Aragno, 2004, pp. 569–611; Peter Burke, “History and Anthropology in 1900,” Photographs of the Frontier. Aby Warburg in America 1895–1896, London: Merrell Holberton Publishers, The Warburg Institute, 1998, pp. 20–27. 5 The correspondence dealing with “Americana” has neither been edited in full nor critically evaluated, despite publications such as Photographs at the Frontier: Aby Warburg in America 1895–1896, eds. Benedetta Cestelli Guidi and Nicholas Mann, London: Merrell Holberton, 1998; Benedetta Cestelli Giudi, “Aby Warburg and Franz Boas: Two Letters from the Warburg Archive: The Correspondence between Franz Boas and Aby Warburg (1924–1925),” RES (Autumn, 2007), pp. 221– 230; and Schlangenritual: der Transfer der Wissensformen vom Tsu’ti’kive der Hopi bis zu Aby Warburgs Kreuzlinger Vortrag, eds. Cora Bender, Thomas Hensel, and Erhard Schüttpelz, Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2007. 6 See Alfredo Chavero, “Historia Antigua y de la Conquista,” México a través de los siglos, México Cumbre, 1953, vol. 1, p. 99.



82 

 Linda Báez-Rubí

Fig. 2: Warburg’s drawing of Tlaloc. WIA ZK 40/021103.

munities, whose existence was governed by religious beliefs and sacred thinking. The covenant that such communities observed with their environment, as expressed through gods, objects and architecture, helped Warburg explain what he sought to understand, and while planning his second trip, he reflected on the early life experience that first sparked his theory. What Warburg saw when he looked at the Aztec rain god, like what he found among the Pueblo Indians, reflected something he termed Geräth (‘vehicle’, ‘instrument’, ‘tool’, ‘artifact’), a concept that played an important role in the dynamis of iconic energy.7 For Warburg, vehicles are means of expression that amplify the possi-

7  In theoretical essays, Warburg explores the possibilities of agency for ‘Geräth’ in the cultural manifestations of human civilization (see, for example, “Symbolismus als Umfangsbestimmung,” Aby Warburg Werke, pp.  129–149. Korff, who has gone deeper in his research into the historicalanthropological meaning of the word, explains how Warburg, in using it, drew inspiration from the evolutionary and material culture-oriented paradigms from the end of the 19th century issuing from Edward B. Taylor, Carlyle, August Schmarsow, Rudolf Virchow, and Gottfried Semper. See Gottfried Korff, “Schmerzlose Körperteile? Volkskundliche Bemerkungen zu Aby Warburgs Anthropologie des





Wanderstrassen 

 83

bilities of images, that is, their Handlung (‘agency’). The manipulation and the usage of images, in turn, serve to establish what he designates as distance or Denkraum (space of reflection), namely, the conscious movement the human psyche undertakes toward symbolization.8 We can imagine why, when Warburg drew this picture sometime between 1895 and 1900, he was deeply attracted to the visual representation of the lightning bolt that the rain god carried; its undulating lines no doubt evoked the snake, and its serpentine movements were meant to function as a Geräth for seizing and binding the forces of rain. What might have happened if Warburg—maybe after catching up on Eduard Seler’s writings on Middle America, with plans to meet up later with old acquaintances such as Zelia Nuttal9—had fulfilled his intended second journey to America and reached México City? We might envision the scenario by consulting Warburg’s longstanding itinerant interests. The Wanderstrassen he recognized and might have returned to document and his further understanding of the cultural exchange between Europe and America would inevitably have led him to experience one of the most fascinating devotional cult images of the Ibero-American world: the Virgin of Guadalupe. He would no doubt have been gripped by the cult surrounding the Virgin’s miraculous apparition.

 ican Mopohua (Here Is Recounted): N The Apparition and Its Iconic Status It is recorded that around 1531, Our Lady of Guadalupe Tonantzin first appeared to an indigenous man named Juan Diego atop a hill called Tepeyac in México City (plate XVII).10 Speaking to him in Nahuatl, Juan Diego’s native language,11 the Virgin asked him to tell Archbishop Juan de Zumárraga (1468–1548) to build a church in

Geräts,” Werkzeuge und Instrumente, eds. Philippe Cordez and Matthias Krüger, Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2012, pp. 129–149. 8 See the Introduction to the Mnemosyne in El Atlas de imágenes Mnemosine, vol. 1, p. 27, 35. 9 Aby Warburg to Franz Boas, December 13, 1924, GC, WIA; Aby Warburg to Gladys A. Reichard, September 1, 1928, GC, WIA; Aby Warburg to Mary Hertz, July 10, 1897, Family Correspondence (FC), WIA. 10 For the collected testimonies of the apparition of the Guadalupe and devotion to her cult during the colonial period, see Testimonios históricos guadalupanos, eds. Ernesto de la Torre Villar and Ramiro Navarro de Anda, México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1982; Stafford Poole, Our Lady of Guadalupe: the origins and sources of a Mexican national symbol, 1531–1797, Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995; and for a list of sermons, see Alicia Mayer, Flor de primavera mexicana. La Virgen de Guadalupe en los sermones novohispanos, México: UNAM-IIH/Universidad de Alcalá, 2010. 11  Nahuatl was the lingua franca spoken by the Aztec people and all those under their domain at the time of European contact.



84 

 Linda Báez-Rubí

her honor. The first apparition was followed by several others, and in the fourth, the Virgin gave Juan Diego Castilian roses as proof of what he had witnessed. He wrapped these in his mantle, made of spun maguey fiber, called a tilma. When Juan Diego stood before the archbishop and unfolded his mantle, the roses spilled out, and the image of the Virgin appeared imprinted on the mantle’s surface for all to see. Several folios from a native manuscript entitled Nican Mopohua document the miraculous appearance.12 Written in a smooth, standardized Nahuatl that reflects minimal Spanish influence, the manuscript was compiled and annotated sometime during 1649 by Luis Lasso de la Vega, then vicar of the hermitage of Guadalupe.13 According to specialists of Pre-Columbian languages, it was probably written by Antonio Valeriano, a Nahua scholar educated at the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, which was founded by the Franciscan order in 1536.14 Before the publication of the Nican Mopohua, accounts of the Virgin of Guadalupe were solely oral, as no written reports concerning the apparition were available. Nevertheless, the cult gained greatly in popularity over time. The image of the Virgin of Our Lady of Guadalupe imprinted on a tilma became renowned throughout the Spanish Territory and México City, and at the beginning of the 17th century, it was transferred from the Bishop’s Palace, where it had been housed, to the newly erected Temple of Tepeyac. The Nican Mopohua states: “He took her beloved Image from his residence, from his private chapel where it had been, so that all could see and admire it. And absolutely the entire city with no exception was deeply moved as everyone came to see and admire her precious image. As no human hand in this world had painted her precious image.”15 In Nahuatl, the expression ‘precious image’ or ‘beloved image’, itlazoixiptlatzin or itlazoixiptlayotzin, contains the word ixiptla (image/representation). The use of this word in reference to the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe merits discussion. The term appears in colonial written documents, where it is used to describe events and episodes linked to the conquest and the evangelization of México. Its meaning seems to have evolved, through exposure to a new worldview with its own religion, language and alphabetical writing.16

12 For the structure and brief analysis of the Nican, see Poole, Our Lady of Guadalupe, pp. 110–126. 13 David Brading, Mexican Phoenix, Cambridge (UK): Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 342–360. 14 Poole, Our Lady of Guadalupe, pp. 83–84. 15 “Quihualmoquixtili in ompa itecpanchan in ineteochihuayan moyetzticatca, inic mochi tlacatl quittaz quimahuizoz in Itlazoixiptlatzin. Auh huel cenmochi iz cemaltepetl olin, in quihualmottiliaya, in quimahuizoaya in Itlazoixiptlatzin. Huallateomatia. Quimotlatlauhtiliaya. Cenca quimahuizoaya in quenin teotlamahuizoltica inic omonexiti. Inic niman ma aca tlalticpac tlacatl oquimicuilhui in itlazoixiptlayotzin. Huei tlamahuicoltiça.” Libro en Lengua Mexicana, que el Br. Luis Lasso de la Vega hizo imprimir en México, el año de 1649 ahora traducido y anotado por el Lic. Don Primo Feliciano Velázquez, México: Carreño e hijos editores, 1926, vv. 213–218. 16 See Emilie Carreón “Un giro alrededor del ixiptla,” Los estatutos de la imagen: creaciónmanifestación-percepción, eds. Linda Báez and Emilie Carreón, México: IIE-UNAM, 2014, pp. 247–274.





Wanderstrassen 

 85

The word ixiptla is intricate. Its main component xip, tied to the concept of skin, corresponds to the notion of a container, envelope, peel, wrapping or tree bark, and has been linked to the notion of the face (ixtli). The word ixiptla is related to semantic fields for the concepts of person, being or identity, as defined among Mesoamerican peoples, for whom conceptions of bark/skin and head/face merge with those of person, image and representation.17 From a historical-religious standpoint, the term was important in Aztec rituals, where it was linked to different manifestations of the sacred. It could be used to refer to the living human beings who impersonated and personified the god during the rituals, as well as to figures made of stone, wood or amaranth dough, and to arrayed wood assemblages representing deities. The term also underlines the manner in which the different presentations of the ixiptla could be juxtaposed in rituals.18 The physical form and ornaments that make up the ixiptla define the deity. As Emilie Carreón shows, each constituent part—face painting and clothing, and the other elements that adorn the deity—is carefully assigned. Taken in concert, they are not mere attributes: they conform to the image of the god and hold sacred power. They are the god, which, by taking a visible form, is invested, insomuch as the act of carving, modeling or painting creates a surface, transferring the vital charge and conferring power and sacredness upon the ixiptla.19 It is probable that certain members of both regular and secular orders versed in native languages were highly familiar with the meaning of the term and the broad semantic field it comprised, as well as with its relevance to the manufacture and meaning of images. For a long time, the orders had been curtailing native rituals and ceremonies, and adapting vocabularies and dictionaries to aid in this mission. I thus propose that scholars and missionaries took notice of the term, along with its link to person, self, image and representation, and particularly to the indigenous notion of sacred manifestation. In their effort to promulgate the cult of the Virgin surrounding the image and to amalgamate Catholic and native religions, Jesuit thinkers appropriated indigenous expressions and processes. To dissipate any doubt surrounding the Virgin of Guadalupe’s appearance, they linked her image to the sacred. They sought correspondences with indigenous ideas in order to connect the sacred manifestation of the Virgin to the Nahuatl oral tradition and establish its miraculous origin. The Jesuits strongly promoted and supported the forging of Criollo identity and saw the propagation of the cult of the image as a means of converting the indigenous population and consolidating the New Hispanic Society. Their impact on New His-

17 Stephen D. Houston and David Stuart, “The Ancient Maya Self: Personhood and Portraiture in the Classic Period,” RES 33 (1998), pp. 73–101, here pp. 75–77, 86. 18 Carreón’s useful study of the word ixiptla begins with a historiographical review that emphasizes Arild Hvidefeldt’s (1958) understanding of the term, linked to different manifestations of the sacred. 19 Carreón, “Un giro alrededor del ixiptla,” p. 258.



86 

 Linda Báez-Rubí

panic learned and scholarly circles was far-reaching. They carried out a thoughtful, well-organized program designed to spread Christianity and convert more souls: convertere per scientiam (converting by way of knowledge). In line with this motto, the miraculous apparition was explained using concrete, modern arguments originating from the natural sciences yet framed within a highly rhetorical and theological discourse. How was this accomplished? The most persuasive and reliable but nonetheless controversial testimony can be found in a 1666 deposition prepared by Luis Becerra Tanco (1603–1672).

A Perspectivist Model of Vision: Species as Vehicles of Images As a leading scholar who held the chair of mathematics and astronomy at the University of México, Becerra Tanco became one of the strongest advocates for the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe. His text Felicidad Mexicana constituted one of the most solid claims; it withstood the scrutiny of thinkers from illustrious and learned circles.20 His greatest innovation in this text, published posthumously in 1675, is the assertion that it was thanks to the indigenous population, “through the preservation of this memorable event in their writings and papers, amongst other stories and traditions of their ancestors”,21 that the apparition “remained more vividly imprinted in the minds of the native Mexicans, for it was to Indians that she had appeared”.22 Becerra Tanco relied on his knowledge of Nahuatl and other indigenous languages, as well as geometrical optics, to confirm the Virgin’s apparition. As a trained astronomer and mathematician, he was familiar with the science of catoptrics, the area of optics that deals with reflection. He applied the laws of the reflection of light by mirrors (flat and curved, concave and convex) to explain the visual phenomenon

20 Luis Becerra Tanco, a multilingual scholar (of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, in addition to his facility in Nahuatl and Otomi) was born in Taxco, Guerrero, México in 1603. He first earned a bachelor’s degree in the arts and canon law, and in 1672 was given the chair of Astrology and Mathematics at the Royal and Pontifical University of México. See Iván Escamilla González, “La Felicidad de México, de Luis Becerra Tanco, en la Biblioteca del Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas,” Históricas. Boletín de información del Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas 82 (2008), pp. 20–23. 21 “[…] así la conservaron como suceso memorable, en sus escritos y papeles, entre otras historias y tradiciones de sus mayores […].” Luis Becerra Tanco, Felicidad de México en el principio, y milagroso origen, que tubo el Santuario de la Virgen María N. Señora de Guadalupe, México: Viuda de Bernarndo de Calderón, 1675, 11v. 22  “[…] quedaron más vivamente impressas en la memoria de los Naturales Mexicanos, por haver sido Indios a los que se apareció” (ibid., 11v).





Wanderstrassen 

 87

that Juan Diego had experienced, as described in the indigenous people’s own language. On the one hand, by carefully studying the manuscript and analyzing fragments of the Nahuatl text on the natural phenomenon, and on the other, by comparing it with the indigenous and local oral tradition that he had collected and reviewed, Becerra Tanco reached an explanation. Taking into account the fact that the Nahuatl term used to describe the manifestation, Omomachiotinextiquiz, is made up of three verbs—machiotia, “to indicate or seal”; nextia “to show”; and yquiza, which is translated as “to come out”—the scholar sums up the matter thus: “[she] came out to be figured and imprinted.”23 Moreover, Becerra Tanco identifies three expressions used to refer to the moment in which Juan Diego unfolded his tilma before the archbishop and his congregants, revealing the imprinted image. The first is “Omocopintzino, the past preterite of the verb copina”, translated as “to segregate something or set it apart from something else”, and “understood as the most apt way to denote copying or transferring”.24 The second is Omomachiotitzino. This refers to machiotia, which means “to seal or imprint a sign, as in an image or in letters that are placed backwards in a printing press so that they come out correctly”.25 The third is found in the compound Omichuilhuitzino, which means “painted or drawn”.26 According to Beccera Tanco, this word contains the noun ix, which—as we have seen—is part of a semantic field linked to the “demeanor or appearance of something”,27 in the sense of a facial expression, look or aspect, and the verb cui, which means “to grasp somehow”.28 He also finds that the word cuilo refers to “making its countenance patent to all, or akin to something, because the vocation of he who paints, or writes, is to make it manifest to all”.29 At this point Becerra Tanco probably noted the ambiguous semantic field these expressions, like others such as ixiptla, encompassed. Translating Nahuatl concepts relating to the ‘practice of painting’ into Spanish would have led him to a troubling revelation. Because, in Catholic thought, ‘painting’ was generally understood as the outcome of human action, Becerra Tanco faced a serious theological dilemma: how to explain that the image of the Virgin impressed on Juan Diego’s tilma is not like the

23 “[…] locución compuesta de tres verbos, Machiotia que significa señalar, o sellar, nextia, que significa mostrar: yquiza que significa salir, conque todo junto dirá: salió a verse figurada o impressa” (ibid., 22r). 24 “[…] pretérito del verbo Copina, que significa segregar o apartar una cosa de otra, y en el modo aqueste más propio, para significar el copiar o trasladar” (ibid., 22r). 25 “[…] machiotia, significa sellar o imprimir alguna señal, como se haze en la imprenta con una Imagen, o con las letras, que se van poniendo al revés para que salgan al derecho” (ibid., 22r–v). 26  “[…] que significa pintóse o dibujóse” (ibid., 22v). 27 “[…] que significa el semblante o apariencia de algo” (ibid., 22v). 28 “[…] que significa coger como quiera” (ibid., 22v). 29 “[…] ser patente a todos el haz, o semblante de algo, porque el oficio del que pinta o escribe, es a todos hazer manifiesta la cosa” (ibid., 22v).



88 

 Linda Báez-Rubí

‘appearance of the sacred image’ (understood as prototype or exemplum), since the image venerated must not be confused with what the image represents: “for what the faithful worship is not the material of the images, but what they represent”;30 and how to distinguish the sacred image from the ‘materiality of the picture’ (the material copy). To curb and contain any misinterpretations that might arise, Becerra Tanco made use of “some principles of [optical] perspective” (algunos principios de la perspectiva): “The theorems, and suppositions, should be about the ways in which images of visible things are represented in mirrors, and other smooth or polished bodies. These principles are presented in a Treatise by Juan Arzobispo Cantuarense, who wrote about visual rays and the many ways of seeing, compiling those by Alhazen, Alchindo and other ancients.”31 To explain how the image of Our Lady appeared on Juan Diego’s tilma, Becerra Tanco refers to the laws of reflection and the study of mirror surfaces. He cites the writings of John Peckham (ca. 1220–1290), one of the best-known perspectivists of the time.32 Peckham’s work, the Perspectiva communis, which had gone through ten editions from 1482 to 1593 and two more in the 17th century, is a compendium of Classical and Arab optics, intended as an introductory account to Alhazen’s (Ibn al-Haytham, 965–ca. 1040) ‘theory of vision’ (dealing with reflection, refraction of light rays and ocular structure).33 The perspectivists were interested in how the eye perceives mirror images. They collected a body of theoretical knowledge (centered on geometrical constructions) which was in turn taken up by optical treatises of the 16th and 17th centuries that dealt with models of the perspectiva communis.34 Based on these precepts, Becerra Tanco explains that the impression of the image must have happened when Juan Diego, “having spread his mantle to gather [the roses] in it, as she had ordered, received them from the Virgin Mary’s hand”: “the bulk he had before him was drawn and represented, as if it were a smooth and polished body, just as in mirrors we see the species of the things that are in front of them”.35

30 “[…] pues, lo que adoran los fieles no es el material de las imágenes sino lo que representan” (ibid., 12 v). 31 “Los theroemas, y suposiciones, han de ser de los modos con que las imagenes de las cosas visibles se representan en los espejos, y otros cuerpos tersos, o pulidos. Mutuados estos principios de el tratado de Juan Arzobispo Cantuarense, que escribio de los rayos visuales, y varios modos de ver, compilando los de Alhazen, Alchindo y otros antiguos” (ibid., 22v). 32 The aim of medieval or ‘perspectivist optics’ was to understand vision, perception and cognition. See David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from al-Kindi to Kepler, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. 33 See The optics of Ibn al-Haytham: Books I–III: on direct vision, trans., intr. by A.I. Sabra, London: Warburg Institute, 1989. 34  For example, see the standard edition by Friedrich Rissner, Opticae Thesaurus, Basilea: Rissner, 1572. 35 “[...] habiendo aparejado su manta, a fin de recogerlas en ella, obedeciendo a lo que le ordenaba, la recibilas de mano de la Virgen Maria, se dibujo y represento el bulto que tenia delante, como si fuese





Wanderstrassen 

 89

Becerra Tanco incorporates the word species into his explanation of the process of visualization. He describes the Virgin of Guadalupe’s image as coming from her body, which was illuminated from behind, by the Sun.36 Following Peckham, he acknowledges that species issue from the observed object,37 a doctrine developed by Robert Grosseteste based on the 13th-century Neoplatonic concept of emanation.38 The basic premise was that every natural agent propagates power from itself to surrounding bodies. Such powers were called species and were believed to account for all efficient causality in the universe. In this optical model, every natural body, visible or invisible, diffuses its power radiantly onto other bodies. The reason is that it acts as a “natural cause, for a natural body acts outside itself through the multiplication of its form”.39 The nobler the body, the stronger its power. The perspectivists believed that every natural body, whether visible or not, sends its species in a continuous straight line, and radiates light (lumen) from itself. Based on this linear model of propagation, Becerra Tanco made a scientific case for the natural phenomenon at play in the Virgin of Guadalupe’s apparition, conceiving of it along the lines of an image seen in a mirror, since the species of the thing represented is separate from the thing itself, and the image in the mirror is not the same as the object.40 To strengthen his case, Becerra Tanco raises two important issues. First, he emphasizes that species are not corpuscular; they are not particles of the visible object being projected across space. Rather, species or forms are diffused across surrounding media by means of a self-reproductive process. The species is the vehicle used for this form of transfer and translation. The fact that Beccera Tanco understood and interpreted the Virgin of Guadalupe’s visual apparition in the light of physical optics using Nahuatl terms translated into Spanish underscores the importance of ‘translation’ itself (conceived of as the movement from one medium to another). Second, he

un cuerpo pulido y terso, según vemos en los espejos las especies de las cosas que tienen de frente” (Becerra Tanco, Felicidad de México, 23r). 36 Another reference: “Y aviendo visto de cerca la pintura, me buelvo a ratificar, en que fue pintada milagrosamente, y que fueron especies impressas del objeto, que tenia delante la tilma, o capa del indio” (ibid., 31v). 37 “Hoc patet quoniam cum species rei visibilis pyramidaliter super occulum oriatur, cuius pyramidis conues ymaginabilis est in centro oculi, si nulla essset dyaphoneitatis diversitas radii in centro illo concurrentes.” John Peckham, The Science of Optics (De perspective), ed. David C. Lindberg, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970, Propositio I. 33a, p. 118. 38 “Quod manifestum sic: Agens natural multiplicat virtutem suam a se usque in patiens, sive agat in sensum, sive in materiam. Quae virtus aliquando vocatur species, aliquando similitude, et idem est, quocunque modo vocetur: et idem immittet in sensum et idem in materiam, sive contrarium, calidum idem immittit in tactum et in frigidum.” Robert Grosseteste, De lineis angulis et figuris seu de fractionibus et reflexionibus radiorum, in Die Philosophischen Werke des Robert Grosseteste, Bischofs von Lincoln, Ludwig Baur (ed.), Münster: Aschendorff, 1912, p. 60. 39 Peckham, The Science of Optics, proposition I, 27, p. 108. 40 Becerra Tanco, Felicidad de México, 21v and 22r.



90 

 Linda Báez-Rubí

links his proposal to Pauline eschatology, which deals with human cognition of the divine and has important consequences for determining the status of images in visual and cognitive processes. Becerra Tanco quotes a well-known Bible verse: videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate (now we see through mirrors into the mystery) (I Cor. 13:12). He describes how human beings are unable to achieve direct vision of God (facie ad faciem)—and are thus required to grasp the manifestation of the divine through ‘mirrors’ (reflectors of what cannot be seen), or else images, impressions and seals—to make the case that the image imprinted on the tilma should be understood as a trace that makes the Virgin’s presence visible and ‘palpable’. For some skeptics, the image imprinted on the cloth seemed to clash with the laws of harmony and proportion of perfect bodies, which is perhaps why Becerra Tanco describes it as ‘imperfect’. To keep his explanation grounded in physical terms, he emphasizes the role played by visual rays in mirror reflections.41 Once the tilma is understood as a mirror, the mantle’s folds and curved parts can be conceived of as concave mirrors; accordingly, “if this curved side of the mirror, which represents the object, could be flattened alongside the imprinted species, it would grow larger, because what is curved, upon being stretched out on a plane, covers more surface space from end to end.”42 Mirrors and lenses determine the relationship between the visible and the invisible, and their perceptible power should not be understood exclusively in a metaphorical, religious sense. As Becerra Tanco explains, given their physical qualities, they are vehicles that make it possible to observe the formation of images. Divine manifestations can be perceived through them, due to the reflection of light and the diffusion of species, retained by the tilma in the case of the Virgin of Guadalupe’s apparition. Beccera Tanco’s questions as to how miraculous images appeared and how they were grasped by human knowledge—questions that Warburg might have shared, had he set eyes on the image of the Virgin—can be better understood by considering how ‘catoptrical vehicles’ became an objective locus where the prospect of catching or grasping ‘marvelous things’ and ‘prodigious experiences’ was made manifest to the human eye by means of optical models and devices.

41 “Las que han parecido inperfecciones en la Imagen santa, a los poco afectos a las cosas deste Reyno, son a mi ver, las que prueban con certidumbre Physica, el aver sido su pintura milagrosa” (ibid., fol. 20v). 42  “Si esta parte curva del espejo, que representa el obgeto, se pudiese estender con las especies impresas, se haría mayor, porque lo curvo extendido en plano ocupa más sitio de extremo a extremo” (ibid., fol. 23v).





Wanderstrassen 

 91

‘Things of Ingenuity, Science, and Artifices’, Crossing the Atlantic By the time Becerra Tanco wrote his physical theorems, an intense exchange of books and artifacts was taking place along commercial maritime routes across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.43 The discovery of the New World had resulted in knowledge that threatened the hegemony of the encyclopedic classification system. An epistemic paradigm shift had prompted a search for new ways of knowing, using innovative tools and vehicles. These were designed to confront and make visible an unknown and unexplored universe ready to reveal itself by way of newfound creatures (animals and plants), things (minerals and stones) and mirabilia (wonders of nature). The exchange carried on by Jesuit intellectuals traveling in the learned circles of Europe and New Spain—evidenced by the communications between Alejandro Favián (b.  1632), a scholar residing in Puebla de los Ángeles, México, and Athanasius Kircher (1602– 1680), the renowned Jesuit scholar teaching in Rome—testifies to the importance of such much-needed vehicles and instruments for visualizing and discovering, and for observing and contemplating the wonders of the great world machine: “And do not forget that specular reflection machine you sent me last time; And the spectacle of four glasses, like last times […] and if there were to be any other things of ingenuity, science, and artifices, curious for this museum, which is very poor in the matter and unaligned [...] I will correspond with what is rare and precious in these lands, for I have no other care than to be asking and discovering them; also those lenticular glasses, for the intentional species […].”44 Favián’s letter entreating Kircher to send more optical instruments embodies the rich debate around the scienza nuova awakened among naturalists, philosophers, theologians, polymaths, astronomers and mathematicians in the 17th century, when a new system of knowledge, based on the displacement of the space of vision, came to light. The scientific revolution ushered in by the breakthrough discoveries of Galileo Galilei, the observation of celestial bodies using the instruments of technology, and

43  The Chinese nao, also known as the Manila galleon, was used to ship goods from Europe to Asia and to accommodate the needs of missionaries from Jesuit schools within the Habsburg Empire who had settled in New Spain. Within this rich material exchange, intellectual ideas also circulated. See  Salvador Bernabéu Albert, La Nao de China, 1565–1815 Navegación, comercio e intercambios culturales, Seville: Universidad de Sevilla, 2014. 44  “y no se olvide de aquella máchina especular reflectora que la otra vez me mandó; y el anteojo de cuatro vidrios, como el de la vez pasada [....] y si hubiere algunas otras cosas de ingenio, ciencias, y artificios, curiosas para este museo, que está dellas muy pobre y desaliñado [...] que yo corresponderé con cuanto raro y precioso hallare en estas tierras, pues no es otro mi cuidado que andarlas solicitando y descubriendo; también aquellos vidrios lenticulares, para las especies intencionales […].” Alexandro Favián to Athanasius Kircher, Puebla de los Ángeles, 14 November 1667, in Ignacio Osorio, La luz imaginaria, México: UNAM-IIB, 1993, pp. 147–148.



92 

 Linda Báez-Rubí

Kepler’s laws of planetary motion stimulated the Baroque New Hispanic science that the Jesuits had fostered. Human sensory perception was extended through the use of ‘glasses’ (a word denoting both mirrors and lenses); and insofar as the extension of space entailed the extension of the universe, it also meant ‘viewing’ new ‘wonders’ (mirabilia). Optical vehicles, mirrors, telescopes and microscopes, themselves intended to be displayed and admired, were essential to the visualization of mirabilia, understood within the epistemological parameters of natural magic (magia naturalis). The way these instruments were used to fulfill specific cultural aims resulted in a tension between the ‘scientific approach’ and ‘magical practice’.45 For example, Giambattista della Porta’s studies on vision (the anatomy of the eye and visual rays) and his geometrical demonstrations of image formation by concave and convex lenses were inscribed by della Porta within the field of natural magic.46 As a scientist and member of the Academia dei Lincei intent on discovering the natural laws at work in the processes of image formation—processes explained by mathematical and geometrical proofs—della Porta experimented with the telescope and perfected the camera obscura.47 Both of these well-known instruments became widely used in learned Jesuit circles. Under the motto propagatio fidei per scientias (‘the propagation of faith through science’), the Jesuits encouraged the production of mechanical and optical instruments while practicing experimental science and interpreting the results based on a religious and metaphysical logic.48 In accordance with these premises and the basic rhetorical principle that conversion is best upheld by the transmission of knowledge, scientific instruments played an important role in persuading and converting people, namely by appealing to their emotions.49 Within the configuration intention of docere (to educate) and delectare (to delight), they were used to show mirabilia, which in turn generated admiration and astonishment.50 As “artifacts meant

45 For Warburg, the tension between astronomy and astrology in Kepler’s thinking constituted a clear example of how the two fields were interrelated and present in the way of practicing ‘science’. See El Atlas de imágenes Mnemosine, vol. 1, panel C, pp. 92–93. 46  For example, see Giambattista della Porta, Magia naturalis sive de miraculis rerum naturalium, Antwerp: Plantin, 1560. 47 See Giambattista della Porta, De telescopio, intr. Vasco Ronchi and Maria Amalia Naldoni, Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1962. 48 Koenrad Vermeir, “Athanasius Kircher‘s Magical Instruments,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 38, no. 2 (2007), pp.  363–400; and Volker Remmert, Widmung, Welterklärung und Wissenschaftslegitimierung: Titelbilder und ihre Funktionen in der Wissenschaftlichen Revolution, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2005. 49 See Frederika Jacobs, The Living Image in Renaissance Art, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 134ff. 50 See Giovanni Baffetti, Retorica e scienza: cultura gesuitica e seicento italiano, Bologna: CLUEB, 1997.





Wanderstrassen 

 93

to re-stage the Creation, the moral or divine order of the cosmos”, these instruments presented a “way to convince apostates both to support the faithful and glorify God”.51 The frontispieces of several scholarly works by Jesuits offer evidence of this sophisticated project: Christoph Scheiner’s Rosa Ursina sive sol (Bracciano: 1626–1630) (fig. 3) and Oculus, hoc est: Fundamentum opticum (Innsbruck 1620) (fig. 4), and Athanasius Kircher’s Ars Magna lucis et umbrae (Amsterdam, 1645) (fig. 5) display helioscopes, telescopes, plane and flat mirrors, as well as obelisks with lenses reflecting solar rays onto screens—all technical instruments and tools needed to envision the mirabilia of the Creation. The correspondence between Favián and Kircher chronicles the exchange among scholars and their efforts to obtain and distribute optical instruments and other mechanical artifacts throughout the territories where the Jesuit missionary project had taken hold. The commerce and exchange between Europe and the New World marked a unique period when experimental progress and the development of optical devices provided new impetus for the propagation of Roman Catholic thought. Optical instruments and mechanical artifacts shaped the way things were perceived by the New Hispanic Criollo culture, and Becerra Tanco’s commitment to explaining the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe’s image as mirabilia, according to an ‘optical-physical’ schema, should not be viewed as an isolated effort. It is founded in a culture deeply influenced by Jesuit educational and missionary programs, which relied fundamentally on images and their instrumentalization.

Envisioning the Maravilla Americana In passing through layers of religious belief from the Modern, to the pre-Columbian, and in this case, the Vice-Regal era, Warburg’s hypothetical second journey into Mexican space and time would have surely steered him toward an attempted understanding of how this miraculous image was forged and toward an exploration of the fundamental role played by mirrors, lenses and other optical tools. We must recall that some of the fascination behind Warburg’s approach to symbolization stems from the fact that Geräth, in this case optical artifacts, can function as vehicles for attracting natural forces, grasping and seizing them, or for destroying them completely. In this sense, the symbolic process should be thought of as a pendulum-like movement, where the use of Geräth makes possible a tension between ‘magic’ (devotional handling) and ‘science’ (rational handling).52 This circumstance might help explain why, despite Becerra Tanco’s efforts, skepticism toward the

51  Vermeir, “Athanasius Kircher’s Magical Instruments,” pp. 384–385. 52 See Introduction to the Mnemosyne in El Atlas de imágenes Mnemosine, vol. 1, p. 27.



94 

 Linda Báez-Rubí

Fig. 3: Christoph Scheiner, Rosa Ursina sive sol (Bracciano: Phaeus, 1626–1630), 150. Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel, H: N 61.2° Helmst.

Fig. 4: Frontispiece. Christoph Scheiner, Oculus, hoc est: Fundamentum opticum.

Fig. 5: Frontispiece. Athanasius Kircher’s Ars Magna lucis et umbrae (Rome: Scheus, 1645).





Wanderstrassen 

 95

imprinted image of the Mexican Virgin persisted. From early on, for example, Franciscan missionaries had strongly opposed the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe, viewing the worship surrounding her image with mistrust.53 The opportunity to dissipate all doubt as to the image’s miraculous origins came in 1737, when a plague, matlazáhuatl, decimated México City,54 and ecclesiastical authorities named the Mexican Virgin the city’s patron saint.55 A waning of the outbreak shortly after this pronouncement served to strengthen the devotion to the cult and promptly encouraged new efforts to promote it by the Roman Curia of the Holy See and in papal circles. So as better to sway Pope Benedict XIV in favor of the Virgin of Guadalupe’s miraculous origin, the Jesuits sought to gather new testimonies. In New Spain, one of the period’s most celebrated painters, Miguel Cabrera (1691–1768), was asked to conduct another inspection of the image, to provide further testimony as to the “untainted duration of the admirable canvas as well as to the marvelous celestial artifice of the painting itself”.56 In 1751, Cabrera led a team of painters in assessing the Mexican Virgin’s image,57 the results of which were published in a small volume entitled Maravilla Americana y conjunto de raras maravillas observadas con la dirección de las reglas de el arte de la pintura en la prodigiosa imagen de Nuestra Sra. de Guadalupe de México, printed by Jesuit presses in México City five years later (1756). Cabrera’s opinion was extremely important to the Jesuits. As a trained painter of great renown, he was capable of proving whether or not “such wonders” (semejantes maravillas) were the product of “human industry” (industria humana), since the painter’s capacity for imitatio could emulate and even surpass nature to create an illusion in place of reality. Cabrera took the principles of painting as his point of departure. In inspecting the canvas on which the “Blessed Image is pictured” (Santa Imagen está pintada), he followed the “method regularly” used in the study of painting, which led him to focus on the absence of

53 The rapid spread of the cult fostered mistrust among the Franciscans and gave rise to accusations of idolatry. In their missionary quest, the Franciscans made a special effort to convey the idea that the veneration of the image must not be confused with the veneration of what the image represents. See the complaints in “Denuncias sobre la casa de nuestra señora de Guadalupe,” Testimonios históricos guadalupanos, pp. 43–141. 54 See Cayetano Cabrera y Quintero, Escudo de armas de México, ed. facs, México: IMSS, 1982, p. 11. 55 Ibid., p. 475ff. 56 “Descontaminada duración del admirable lienzo como sobre el maravilloso celestial artificio de la pintura misma,” Francisco Xavier Lazcano, Vida exemplar y virtudes heroicas del venerable Padre Jaun Antonio Gómez de Oviedo de la Compañía de Jesús, México: Imprenta Real, 1760, p. 365. 57 The inspection took place the on April 30, 1751. The other painters were José de Ibarrra, José de Alcíbar, José Ventura Arnaéz, Francisco Antonio Vallejo and Juan Patricio Morlete Ruiz. See the “pareceres” placed at the end of Miguel Cabrera, Maravilla americana y conjunto de raras maravillas observadas con la direccion de las Reglas de el Arte de la Pintura en la prodigiosa imagen de nuestra Sra. De Guadalupe de México, México: Imprenta del Real, 1756.



96 

 Linda Báez-Rubí

sizing (aparejo).58 He likewise observed that the drawing, colors and gold as well as the four painting techniques59—oil, tempera, gouache and worked tempera paint, each of which required a particular surface preparation—had been mixed in a “hitherto unseen combination” with such perfection and harmony that it strengthened the “marvelous force” of the painting. The lack of sizing, together with the simultaneous use of multiple techniques, confirmed the earlier judgments from 166660 that the imprint of the image was not made by human hand. Miguel Cabrera’s text is unique. It is neither an account of how to follow the principles of geometric perspective nor an explanation of how to mix colors, unlike many painting treatises of the time, which made extensive use of such schemes.61 On the contrary, it cultivates something new and astonishing. Cabrera, a painter writing as a theorist whose aim is to ascertain the immateriality of the image by way of its materiality, that is, to prove that the presence of something material (an image captured on a material support) is non-material (that is, of divine origin), emphasizes the painting’s non-material features by adopting what might well be termed an ‘apophatic’ stance.62 Based on the notion that God can only be described through a process of negation, Cabrera paradoxically uses the principles of painting to declare “what the portrayed image is not”, denying the “picture” its status as something tangible made by human hands. The fact that he cannot fully determine the color of the Virgin’s mantel, being unable to decide whether it is blue or green, together with his unwillingness to specify the origin of the pigment, underscores his point: “The canvas itself, and that which is the Painting is the Miracle’s most authentic testimony in such a sovereign and incomprehensible manner, that it cannot be explained by the materiality of our style.”63

58 See ibid., pp. 4–5. 59 See ibid., pp. 11–15. 60 For example, see Informaciones sobre la milagrosa aparición de la Santísima Virgen de Guadalupe, recibidas en 1666 y 1723, publícalas por el presbítero Br. Fortino Hipólito Vera, Amecameca: Impr. Católica, 1889, pp. 26, 33, 50. 61 Antonio Palomino’s treatise was a source for Cabrera. Nevertheless, the texts have different aims and vary in their structure. See Brading, Mexican Phoenix, p. 172. 62 See Dionysius the Areopagite’s concept of mysthica theologia in Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works, ed. Paul Rorem, New York: Paulist Press, 1987, pp.  133–142. In brief, negative theology (apofatiké) when describing the divine, employs propositions that run opposite to those of affirmative theology (katafatiké). The former entails a higher level that recognizes the impossibility of developing an objective and conceptual knowledge of the divine. As Amador Vega brilliantly put it in his proposal for an ‘apophatic esthetics’, traceable to the medieval Flemish-German mystics: “Even when the apophatic way sinks its roots in negation and presents itself as ascetic, it doesn’t deny the necessary perceptual character of sensibility; rather it develops a complete sensibility merged from the containment of the ascetic moment, with the sole intention of providing a more sensible expression to that which merges or appears before the senses.” Amador Vega, “Estética apofática y hermenéutica del misterio: elementos para una crítica de la visibilidad,” Diánoia 56, no. 62 (May 2009), p. 9. 63 “El lienzo por sí, y por lo que es Pintura es el más authentico testimonio del Milagro, en un modo tan Soberano e incomprehensible, que no se puede explicar con la materialidad de nuestro estilo” (Cabrera,





Wanderstrassen 

 97

The perfection of the portrayed image exceeds all human artistry and comprehension, and by denying the use of iconic material processes in the picture, Cabrera reinforces its mystic value while recognizing it as an impenetrable mystery of God’s manifestation. He states that the picture’s depicted light composition cannot be subordinated to chiaroscuro modeling or understood according to any light source, because in this case those rules do not apply.64 He finds that “its greatest artifice lies in the uncertainty of the lights” and that these are brought together as the source of light.65 He explains that the Sun’s rays at dawn illuminate the image’s apparition from within. The picture’s light does not come from some imaginary point outside it (as must be the case when light sources are depicted in a composition, according to the rules of painting), so “the entire Blessed Image is transferred, with the colors, which can be admired in the [light] beam”,66 an appraisal that evokes optical phenomena, particularly the camera obscura. What implications do Cabrera’s remarks have for further understanding the painting? By the time Cabrera was commissioned to write his treatise, Johannes Kepler’s revolutionary ideas about perspectivist optics had precipitated an epistemic paradigm shift. His critique of Witelos’s optical theory (Ad Vitellionem Paralipomena, 1604) ushered in a changed understanding of perception and image formation, based on a likening of the human eye to a lens. The distinction between ‘imago’ (suspended in the air) and ‘pictura’ (projected onto a tangible surface)67 would reverberate in the way painters thought about images and pictures. For example, Ludovico Cigoli’s (1559–1613) novel idea that the camera obscura, rather than the delineation of shadows, was the source of painting, “since shadows only reveal the boundaries of things”,68 would alter the mode of conceiving of pictures in paintings. For Cigoli, this

Maravilla americana, p. 29). He reinforces his position that no human could have painted it in other parts of the text: “en que por muchos años no se halló Artifice alguno, por valiente que fuera, que no quedasse desayrado en el empeño de copiarlo” (ibid., p. 9). He also includes a long quotation by José de Ibarra, a famous painter who describes how the best-known New Hispanic painters (Arteaga, Juárez, Becerra, Chávez, Juan de Rúa) were unable to reproduce the Guadalupe’s image owing to its perfection. He concludes “que no es invención de humano Artífice sino del Todopoderoso” (ibid., p. 11). 64 See ibid., p. 20. 65 “[…] que en lo incierto de las luzes está su mayor artificio” (ibid., p. 20). 66 “[...] se ve transportada toda la Santa Imagen, con los colores, que se admiran en el haz” (ibid., p. 5). 67 “non pendula in aere, sed fixa in papyro.” Johannes Kepler, Ad Vitellionem Paralipomena, Frankfurt: n.p., 1604, V, 3, prop. V. 68 The whole passage reads: “la Natura lo mostra, in que luoghi serrate, dove per un piccol’ foro trapassi il lume, a cui in debita distanza dentro sia opposta una superficie bianca, in essa tutti i simulacra che di fuori gli saranno opposti verranno dipinti, e di tanto più vivaci colori, quanto da miggor’lume saranno percossi, […] il che a più del verosimile di quello, che da Plinio vien referto, sopra l’ombre , e sbattimenti de corpi, poi che l’ombra I termini estremi solo dimostra, e questa non solo gl’estremi, ma le parti di mezzo, con ogni maggior’ proprietà, che in artifiziosa pittura.” Ludovico Cigoli, Prospettiva Pratica, Linear Perspective in the Age of Galileo, ed. Filippo Camerota, n.p.: Olschki, 2010, c6r.



98 

 Linda Báez-Rubí

optical device allowed for the materialization of the imago, that is to say, it succeeded in producing a picture (as in Kepler’s eye) by means of light itself. The divergence between imago and picture, as addressed by the Albertian rules of geometry, was resolved by means of an optical vehicle: the camera obscura.69 As Martin Kemp has rightly noticed, Cigoli “clearly adheres to the view that colours arise from differently proportioned mixtures of lightness and darkness, and he explains that things become visible by ‘contrary effects,’ that is to say by what we would call the ‘simultaneous contrasts’ of tone and colour”.70 Cabrera’s statement that “the image is transferred with the colors that one can admire in the [light] beam” resonates with the notion that paintings are founded on the camera obscura. In all likelihood, Cabrera would have been aware of this optical device. Optical treatises and frontispieces framing the functions of glasses, lenses, camerae obscurae and telescopes in a metaphysical discourse were probably well known to painters, just as they were among Jesuit scholars and in other cultivated New Hispanic circles. Although Cabrera never says so, it is possible that in scrutinizing the image of the Virgin, he was thinking about the rhetorical function that optical tools and instruments had acquired, as revealed in the pictorial compositions of frontispieces, since he, like other New Hispanic observers, thought of glasses and lenses as ‘converters’ insofar as they made visible the prodigious image of Our Lady of Guadalupe. This interpretation is supported by the approval that his testimony received in the Aprobaciones, a series of documents also included in Cabrera’s Maravilla Americana.

Mystical Converters of the Soul Out of these Aprobaciones written by Jesuits, a report drafted by Pater Xavier Lazcano deserves our attention. As an official censor, the Jesuit scholar, born in Puebla de los Ángeles in México, praises Cabrera’s treatise for its accurate examination of the image imprinted on the tilma. In his observations, Lazcano formulates two important analogies to uphold the painter’s testimony. First, he compares Cabrera’s analysis to Chris-

69 In his analysis of the ‘picture’ in Alberti, Kitao states that “Alberti’s aim to bring together imago mundi and its painted or drawn picture, theoretically, to the point of ideal identity has to be understood as a case of analogy and not of identity.” T. Kaori Kitao, “Imago and picture: perspective, camera obscura and Kepler’s Optics,” La Prospettiva Rinascimentale, ed. Marisa Dalai Emiliani, Florence: Centro Di, 1980, I, pp. 499–510, here p. 500. In other words, the Albertian picture itself is not a material projection (as in Kepler’s eye) but the picture constructed (illusion in space) by means of geometrical principles (on the surface). 70 Martin Kemp, “Lodovico Cigoli on the Origins and Ragione of Painting,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 35, no. 1 (1991), pp. 133–152, here p. 135.





Wanderstrassen 

 99

toph Scheiner’s experimental works, which were able to “silence those astronomers who discerned sunspots in the Sun”.71 He finds that, just as Scheiner had traced the picture of the projected Sun image (based on a drawing of it), so Cabrera traced the picture of the projected image of the Mexican Virgin (and made a copy of it). Second, he makes reference to Athanasius Kircher’s work Miraculis lucis et umbrae, “acclaimed by wise minds”,72 determining that Cabrera, by following the Jesuit scholar’s indications for reading the instruments as metaphysical visualizations of the invisible (like the camera obscura that prefaces his work), had revealed the “wonders of a superior hierarchy through the lights and shadows of the Guadalupe”.73 From Lazcano’s standpoint, Cabrera’s approach had gathered true evidence for the miracle of the Virgin’s apparition and image through the processes of tracing and visualizing, insofar as the painter had also established how this evidence resulted in a possible manifestation: “In reality, we can affirm that Miguel Cabrera has put well-calibrated glasses and heavenly optical tubes before our eyes so that we may admire the magnificent planetary conjunction, which can be observed in the zodiac signs of Guadalupe.”74 How are we to understand Lazcano’s statement? Is it a metaphorical approach necessary for understanding the potentialities of heavenly optical tubes? It can undoubtedly be understood in these terms, but its implications extend further. If a lens, glass or mirror is also understood as a ‘shifter of meaning’, it is clear that in the discourse surrounding the Virgin of Guadalupe’s apparition and image, Geräth played an important role in the acceptance of the cult by the Catholic Church’s hierarchy in Rome, as well as by Criollo and indigenous populations in New Spain. This was achieved by providing ‘scientific evidence’ of the truth of the apparition and simultaneously harnessing ‘magical forces’ to convert their potentiality into devotional impulses: an oscillation between a religious sense of inner vision and a catoptrical method that objectively probes nature. It is not simply that the telescope’s material qualities—needed for accurate vision and used for physical and optical experimentation—allow us to believe the wonder of the Virgin’s apparition: as Lazcano points out, the “well-calibrated lenses that the painter places over our eyes”75 help us grasp it. In many ways, Lazcano’s observation recalls the iconographic trend whereby telescopes are conceived of as ‘conversion vehicles’. This trend is embodied by Anton

71 “[...] hizo callar aquellos Astrologos que juzgaban manchas en el Sol”. Francisco Xavier Lazcano, “Parecer,” in Cabrera, Maravilla americana. 72  “[...] hubo de grangearse los aplausos de los Sabios [...] enriquecido el Orbe literario con aquel grande volumen de miraculis lucis et umbrae” (ibid.). 73 “[...] por habernos descubierto en el adjunto Opúsculo, milgaros de superior Hierachia, con las luzes y sombras guadalupanas” (ibid.). 74 “Verdaderamente podemos afirmar que don Miguel Cabrera ha puesto en nuestros ojos unos bien graduados cristales y celestiales ópticos tubos, para que podamos admirar la conjunción portentosa de planetas que se observan en el Guadalupano Signo” (ibid.). 75 See note 73.



100 

 Linda Báez-Rubí

Maria Rheyta (1604–1660), a Capuchin astronomer and optician, who was not only the maker of Kepler’s telescope but also the inventor of binocular lenses. Rheyta worked in Augsburg, producing telescopes—the most accurate of his time—and conducting astronomical observations and optical measurements. In 1645, he published Oculus Enoch et Eliae, siue, Radius sidereomysticus, which describes how to achieve the best image of an object based on the manufacture of the optical lenses and telescopes, their precise placement and the combination of pieces within the tubes.76 One of his leading contributions was a precursor to binocular lenses which helped improve the technical assembly of telescopes.77 As Rheyta was an adherent of Theoastronomy, biblical exegesis (literal, moral/tropological, allegorical and anagogical/ mystical) is present throughout his works on these technically precise artifacts. His writings span the practical use of lenses and their metaphysical speculative operation, covering practical knowledge as well as contemplative and religious thought. This explains why Rheyta describes his artifact as a “mystical telescope of the soul” (specillium mysticum oculus animae): “it converts the souls, by converting the creatures into God, the terrestrial things into the celestial ones, the temporal things into eternal ones.”78 In this sense, his mystical telescopes are vehicles for exploring the cosmos that work, according to the motto ad invisibilia rapiantur, by ‘redirecting’ the inner gaze (oculus interioris), or contemplation of the soul, into the vision of the external eye (oculus exterioris).79 Rheyta’s mystical telescope is evoked by motifs from the engravings of the Klauber brothers. Sebastian Klauber (1710–1768) and Johann Baptist Klauber (1712–1787) were based in Augsburg and were well known for their pictorial compositions and close relationship with the Jesuit educational program in the south of Germany.80 Their compositions incorporate the iconography of ‘Jesuit Catholic physics’, along with all the related subjects (geometrical optics, astronomical observations and theology). Rheyta’s Theoastronomy is visually reflected in the Klauber brothers’ topos of the contemplation of higher truths, revealed the glasses and mirrors of optical devices.

76 Antonio Maria Rheita, Oculi Enoch et Eliae pars altera sive Theo-astronomia, Antuerpiae: Verdussen, 1645. See Chapter 4 and its depictions of the instruments. 77 Rheyta worked on the building of Augsburg telescopes, the most accurate of his time. See Alfons Thewes, Oculus Enoch. Ein Beitrag zur Entdeckungsgeschichte des Fernrohrs, Oldenburg: Isensee, 1983. 78 “Quam vero insigniter hoc specillum mysticum oculus animae, mentis et intellectus armet, testatur David Psalm. 18 Lex Domini, ait, immaculata, convertens animas (scilicet a creaturis ad Creatorem, a malo ad bonum, a terrenis ad caelestia, a temporali bus denique ad aeterna) Testimonium Domini fidele, sapientiam (veram scilicet et in Dei servitio necessariam).” Rheita, Oculi Enoch et Eliae, p. 247. 79 Ibid., prol. ad lectorem, sig. 4r-v. 80 See Adolf Spamer, Das kleine Andachtsbild vom 14. bis 20. Jahrhundert, Munich: Bruckmann, 1930, p.  229 ff.; Werner Telesko, “Klaubers Eucharistie-Thesenblätter. Ein Beitrag zum Wandel der typologischen Denkweise in der Neuzeit,” in Augsburg, die Bilderfabrik Europas: Essays zur Augsburger Druckgraphik der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Roger Paas, Augsburg: Wissner, 2001, pp. 188–197.





Wanderstrassen 

 101

Fig. 6: Johann Sebastian y Johann Baptiste Klauber, Mater purissima.

In their engraving entitled Pulchra ut luna, the telescope is the vehicle that ‘redirects’ the gaze (our gaze) by converting the eye of sensible vision (oculus sensualis) into the eye of spiritual contemplation (oculus spiritualis), making it possible to envision the Virgin and Child (fig. 6). The two scholars depicted in the engraving represent examples to follow. They show the viewer how the human gaze should inspect and interpret natural phenomena made visible by technical devices. In addition, the Klaubers produced numerous engravings bound for the New World: images that traveled across the Atlantic to the viceregencies of the Spanish Crown in America and served as models for pictorial compositions.81 As evidenced by Lazcano, the ‘telescoping’

81 On this topic, see Jaime Cuadriello, Zodíaco Mariano: 250 años de la declaración pontificia de María de Guadalupe como patrona de México, México: Museo de la Basílica de Guadalupe, 2004; Luisa Elena Alcalá and Assumpta Roig i Torrentó, “In-fluencia de los grabados de los hermanos Klauber en la Capilla de La Mare de Déu dels Colls en Sant Llorenç de Morunys (Lérida),” Archivo Español de Arte 221 (1983), pp. 1–18.



102 

 Linda Báez-Rubí

topos was mirrored in sermons, writings and iconographic motifs, which sought to bolster belief in the Virgin of Guadalupe’s apparition. These examples broaden the scope of our understanding of the processes whereby images ‘come into the world’; they also begin to present the complex panorama surrounding the status of the Mexican Virgin’s imprinted image, attested by the many ways in which the process of the image’s manifestation is understood. Together they represent a testament to a New Hispanic Baroque culture characterized by the tensions between science and religion. These tensions can be further explored by following iconographic and literary trends relating to instruments, tools and vehicles, or Geräth, that were conveyed from one continent to the other—in other words, by following the Wanderstrassen that helped forge devotional cults across the seas.

Closing Remarks If Warburg had traveled to México City in 1928, seen the Virgin of Guadalupe’s image and studied the sources available to him to supplement his understanding of it, he probably would have discovered that lenses and telescopes—‘converting vehicles’ deployed as ‘catalytic energy converters’—were used to fabricate evidence of the Virgin of Guadalupe’s miraculous apparition, while redirecting manifestations of the indigenous peoples’ devotional cult. He would have identified the ways in which New Hispanic scholars such as Becerra Tanco and Lazcano, and painters such as Cabrera exploited these devices to create a complex rhetorical and visual discourse characterized by a combination of indigenous sacred beliefs, traditional Christianity and scientific modernity. Warburg would no doubt have found this combination fascinating; it would have provided him with abundant source material for his unfinished ‘immortal manuscript’: My experience in America gave me vivid experiences [for understanding] religious symbolism But in all, I have to wait long Until the [book] is finished, Well we have time.82

82 “Meine Erfahrungen in America gaben mir für den religiösen Symbolismus lebendige Erfahrungen, aber im ganzen habe ich noch lange zu warten bis das Dings complet ist. Na, wir beide haben ja Zeit” (Aby Warburg to Mary Hertz, March 3, 1896, San Francisco, GC, WIA).



W.J.T. Mitchell

Method, Madness, and Montage The Pathology of the Gaze The relation of madness and visuality has reached a kind of crisis point in our time, one that is registered across many different arts and media. Most obvious is the spectacularization of madness, its treatment as an object of display, performance, and theatrical representation. At the same time, the actual condition of the mentally ill in most parts of the world is abject poverty, incarceration, and despair. And this is something that few of us want to see. “No one cares about crazy people,” Ron Powers explains in his book of this title. (The line actually comes from an e-mail by an assistant to Scott Walker, who was trying to keep her political patron clear of involvement in a scandalous situation at a Wisconsin mental hospital.)1 When we encounter a mentally ill person on the street, the usual reaction is aversion and avoidance. We prefer our madness mediated so that we can secure a voyeuristic relation to it. We are happy to see the mad on screen or on stage without being seen ourselves. To see Madness herself, the demon goddess of Euripides, called up from the darkness to drive Hercules insane, is, like the virtuosic diva performing Lucia di Lammermoor, the height of aesthetic enjoyment. Even the clinical gaze has a touch of this detachment. An intake interview asks the formulaic questions, and the ‘client’ is quickly classified by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM); computer databases provide the appropriate medication. Take two tablets of Haldol and come back in a week. Or, conversely, there is the fascination of the researcher, particularly the neuroscientist or forensic psychiatrist. The client is a ‘case’ to be examined, tested, and experimented with.2 “Let’s try this and see how it works.” Sometimes the medications are effective, sometimes not. What is safe to predict is that they will make a handsome profit for the pharmaceutical companies that peddle them, alongside those other notorious palliatives, the opioid painkillers that surpass heroin in their addictive effects. The final frontier of the clinical perspective on madness is brain science, which aspires to make all mental activity visible in blood flows and synaptic connections.

1 See Ron Powers’s wonderful book No One Cares About Crazy People, New York: Hachette Books, 2017. 2 Forensic psychiatrists such as Drs. Flechsig and Weber were central figures in the observation and classification of Judge Schreber’s ‘nervous illness’, and their treatment of him turned out to be egregious malpractice. See Henry Zvi Lothane’s magisterial study In Defense of Schreber, Hillsdale: The Analytic Press, 1992. Charcot’s studies of female hysteria, accompanied by atlases of photographs and drawings, would be another salient case. See Georges Didi-Huberman, The Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of Salpêtrière, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003.

104 

 W.J.T. Mitchell

The mind seen as ‘nothing but the brain’, an organ that can be scanned, mapped, probed, sectioned, and altered with chemicals, is an efficient substitute for actually talking to the person who is suffering from a thought or mood disorder.3 Sometimes drugs can help, especially with schizophrenia, which seems clearly to involve a brain disorder, right alongside numerous other factors in the person’s environment, such as chronic abuse, poverty, and discrimination. Whatever we learn about human minds from the cerebral flow of blood and electricity, it does seem certain that the flow of financial resources will continue to surge toward the effort to ‘see madness’ with empirical, objective clarity, at the expense of the messy, qualitative work of paying attention to the mentally ill as human beings. So perhaps this is the moment to reverse our emphasis on mental illness as the content of the gaze, whether clinical or aesthetic, and ask some questions about the pathology of the systematic gaze of disciplinary knowledge itself. We could then see another side to the issue, one that might be called ‘iconomania’, the effort to create a total meta-picture of an event, a situation, or body of knowledge. This is a form of ‘seeing madness’ (or at least ‘seeing mania’) in which the emphasis is on the first word of the phrase, which becomes a participle describing forms of madness closely related to scopophilia, voyeurism, and a kind of obsession with total surveillance. We might call it ‘atlas fever’, a syndrome closely related to what Jacques Derrida called ‘archive fever’.4 Atlas fever focuses our attention, not so much on the archive, as on the interface that provides access to the archive—the index, search engine, or (above all) the visual array or atlas that provides the impression that we are able to see and comprehend a complex totality at a glance. This is a syndrome that is especially evident in the contemporary obsession with the database as a form of knowledge, and particularly with the database as something that needs to be seen and scanned as a totality, not necessarily ‘read’ in any detail. We are all familiar with examples of this phenomenon: Google Image search, arrays of statistical data, markup languages that claim to render complex analog information with diagrammatic clarity. The literary version of this is the knowledge project known as ‘distant reading’, pioneered by Franco Moretti, which renounces the tradition of ‘close reading’ in favor of scanning vast bodies of literature in search of patterns.5 The sociological-artistic version might be epitomized by Lev Manovich’s current project,

3 There are notable exceptions to the regime of ‘cerebrality’ that has rendered the human mind a phantom concept of no scientific importance, along with other obsolete notions such as soul, spirit, self, psyche, etc. Mark Solms has pioneered a new field of ‘neuropsychoanalysis’ that attempts to open a dialogue between neuroscience and the Freudian tradition (which itself originated in neuroscience). 4 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. 5 Franco Moretti, Distant Reading, New York: Verso, 2013.





Method, Madness, and Montage 

 105

Selfcity, which has recently won a ‘Twitter Data Grant’ in order to study millions of ‘selfies’ in order to measure the relative happiness of a selection of American cities.6 I am not suggesting, by the way, that either Moretti or Manovich are crazy. These are knowledge projects that aim to use contemporary information technologies to generate insights that would have been impossible prior to the invention of the computer. Whether they produce interesting knowledge is quite another question. I cite them merely to illustrate a tendency in contemporary research methods to aim at a totalization of data and a desire to provide arrays of data that emphasize visual comprehension. I am especially interested in Manovich’s project insofar as it promises to provide a picture of collective moods, the ‘happiness quotient’ of large masses of people gathered in cities. This promise is deeply resonant with my own aim of going beyond the question of individual madness—disorders of mood and thought—to investigate forms of collective madness, what used to be called ‘mass hysteria’, a phenomenon that might be located, not just in the frenzy of the crowd, but in highly institutionalized forms of knowledge.7 I take it, in other words, that Michel Foucault’s classic History of Madness could just as easily have been entitled a History of Reason in its relation to its various antagonists—folly, irrationality, emotional excess, obsessive compulsion. To put it even more simply, my inquiry is driven by a conviction that Nietzsche’s wonderful aphorism, “Insanity in individuals is somewhat rare— but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule”8 is nothing more than a plain statement of the facts. It is a statement, moreover, that should logically entail an examination of the ‘image operations’ that inform both disciplinary and informal modes of knowledge production. When images are displayed in any kind of multiple array, of course, there is always a prior question about the nature of the space in which they appear. Is it a highly regular and regulated space, like the grid that structures a Google Image search, or the array of selfies that constitute Lev Manovich’s Selfcity database? Or is it something more disorderly and mobile, a vortex that reflects the dynamic rearrangement and de-rangement of the senses that accompanies the attempt to survey multiple images simultaneously? This opposition might be seen in a pair of renderings of the T_Visionarium project, located in Karlsruhe’s ZKM, or in the same installation in Sydney, Australia (plates XVIII–XIX).9 The self-representation of this image array takes two forms: 1) a structured panopticon of multiple television screens showing real-time programs on numerous networks, all surrounding a podium from which

6 Lev Manovich, Selfcity: Exploring Photography and Self-Fashioning in Social Media, http://manovich. net/index.php/projects/selfiecity-exploring. 7 For a discussion of the ‘the wild’, see Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “Aesthetic Experience in Everyday Worlds: Reclaiming an Unredeemed Utopian Motif,” New Literary History 37 (2006), pp. 299–318. My thanks to Judith Farquhar for steering me to this article. 8 Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Natural History of Morals,” Beyond Good and Evil, § 156. 9 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T_Visionarium for a discussion of this installation.



106 

 W.J.T. Mitchell

Fig. 1: Combined stills from Crazy Talk. Crazy Talk, dir. Gabriel Mitchell, 2011.

control of the content and scale of images can be exercised; and 2) a vortex of images that expresses the vertigo of the beholder when confronted with an overabundance of images and information. This contrast between the grid and the vortex is rendered cinematically in the structuralist denouement to Gabriel Mitchell’s Crazy Talk,10 a film that aims to portray the internal experience of schizophrenia as an alternation between a rigid, measured order, and a chaotic process of dissolution and transformation (fig. 1). The grid and the vortex provide what Bertram Lewin calls the ‘dream screen’ of cinema,11 the spatial structure of the screen prior to the appearance of any image or figure, a phenomenon that corresponds roughly to the perspective of the fixed or moving camera. But these spaces are also foundational to other image operations, such as multiple screen technologies, control rooms, and tableaus of evidence, and of course to the phenomenology of the atlas, understood as a comprehensive image array that assembles (and often re-arranges) its elements. These practices point us toward the most fundamental ‘image operation’ in the discipline of art history, the one that we never show to an audience: the array of images on the slide table that is assembled prior to an academic lecture. This array is merely

10 This film is available on YouTube: Gabriel Mitchell, Crazy Talk https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=gJPna1pfMsM&feature=em-upload_owner. 11 Bertram Lewin, “Sleep, the Mouth, and the Dream Screen,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 15 (1946), pp.  419–443; and Bertram Lewin, “Inferences from the Dream Screen,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 29 (1948), pp. 224–431.





Method, Madness, and Montage 

 107

a ‘working arrangement’. It does not rise to the level of the artistic collage, which invites us to contemplate an array of images as a compositional whole. In its sequential arrangement it may suggest a relation to cinematic montage, and if an automated running of the images is arranged in either a mechanical or digital projector, it may produce the kind of effect created by Chris Marker’s classic film La Jetée, which is almost entirely composed of still images. But the normal practice in art history is not to automate the sequence of slides, but to control them in relation to a discourse, as illustrative material or targets for interpretation. The automated slide show never reveals its total, synchronic order, but (in the manner of artist James Coleman’s installations) unfolds them in a diachronic order to produce what Jacques Rancière has called ‘image sentences’.12 Art history tends to confine its moments of simultaneity and synchronic presentation to what might be called ‘dialectical display’, the practice of comparing two slides side by side, a routine that Robert Nelson has traced back to the Hegelian ancestry of art history.13 There are notable exceptions to this rule of concealment, the most famous being Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne project, the Bilderatlas he assembled in Hamburg during the last few years of his life, and the Musée Imaginaire of André Malraux, assembled during the 1950s as part of the editing process that would lead to the books of this title (fig. 2). But even these famous exceptions, it must be noted, were not understood to be final products for public display, but were intended as working assemblages for private study by professionals, subject to constant rearrangement. Any compositional order they displayed was understood to be provisional. They were not, in other words, an ‘end in themselves’, but procedural works intended for final realization in the form of albums or atlases. This has not prevented artists, of course, from imitating the form of the atlas, as in the well-known projects of Gerhard Richter and Hanne Darboven, which assemble a wide range of found images in a grid-like array with the aim of suggesting a total picture of a period or culture. Alan McCollum has perhaps taken this practice to its logical conclusion in his ‘surrogate picture’ arrays, assembling framed blank pictures on walls in parodic imitations of the traditional ‘salon hang’. In the realm of sculpture, one might adduce Robert Morris’s Scatter Piece as a three-dimensional assemblage of all the materials used in Morris’s work into something that has to be called a ‘piece’, not just a group of pieces. But I want to put to the side these attempts to transform the display of multiple images into a unified artistic composition and confine my attention to the humbler practice of the provisional assemblage, the image operations that go on ‘behind the scenes’ as part of the production of image knowledge, or Bildwissenschaft. At the same

12 Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, New York: Verso, 2007, p. 67. 13 Robert Nelson, “The Slide Lecture,” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 3 (Spring 2000).



108 

 W.J.T. Mitchell

Fig. 2: The Bilderreihe (image-series) on illustrations of Ovid’s works, set up in the Reading Room of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg in Hamburg in February 1927.

time, I want to broaden our attention to other disciplines and other practices of image display, from the high ambitions of the Warburgian project of a universal iconology, to the humblest display of randomly accreted images on the typical American refrigerator door. I will take this latter example as a kind of limit case at the lower end, of an almost completely random accretion of mementos, reminders, and relics, from precious infant photos and childish drawings to grocery lists and newspaper clippings. Even at this ‘lower end’, however, the refrigerator door reminds us of certain essential features: provisionality and impermanence coupled with synchronic array; contingency of relationships coupled with significant associations; and a mnemonic function that suggests the ever-present possibility of interpretation, of an overall reading that would give us clues to the personality of the individual or family that deposits its traces to be held temporarily in a magnetic field of memory.

Symptoms of Iconomania It is the concept of the image as a clue that helps us to see the Bilderatlas in a context that takes us beyond art history to other sciences. Carlo Ginzburg’s book Clues, Myths, 



Method, Madness, and Montage 

 109

and the Historical Method notes specifically the link between the forensic sciences and art history: “The art connoisseur resembles the detective who discovers the perpetrator of a crime (or the artist behind a painting) on the basis of evidence that is imperceptible to most people.”14 This resemblance operates on two levels. First, there is simply the realization that something is to be seen as a clue, that is, that it is a significant mark that, when assembled alongside other clues, will reveal something that has previously defied understanding. Second is the realization that when the hidden pattern has been discovered, it will be, as Giorgio Agamben has argued, “not a matter of signs […] not even a matter of anything that has ever been written down”.15 The artist, like the criminal, does not intentionally leave clues behind to aid the decipherment of the work. When the criminal or the artist does plant clues intentionally, the wily investigator must ignore them, or even better, recognize them as ruses intended to mislead. The detective, like the art historian, must learn “to read what was never written”, to echo Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s formulation of the work of the astrologer contemplating a constellation. If the astrological model for the array of evidence seems a bit too close to mysticism or pseudo-science, we might reassure ourselves with a sideways glance at the science of evolutionary taxonomy. The paleontologist Norman Macleod assembles virtual atlases of biological specimens to decipher the transformations within a species over millions of years. Thanks to contemporary digital technologies (enormous databases of scans, plus three-dimensional scanning and printing) it is possible for Macleod to trace evolutionary transformations that would have been unreadable from photographic or hand-drawn representations of specimens. Like all natural scientists, Macleod has to read what was never written, the patterns disclosed in the book of nature. From an iconological standpoint, the images of biological specimens are not just representations of them, but clues to the natural processes and operations that leave fossil traces behind. From the standpoint of genetic coding, images are not to be understood as reproductions of an original, but as something more like algorithms, or (given the proper beholder stimulus) self-executing programs that make reproduction possible.16 Giorgio Agamben has argued that the Warburgian Bilderatlas is best understood as a revival of the medieval doctrine of signatures or ymagines, the talismanic and magical understanding of significant marks as operations. “Whatever the matter of which they are made, the ymagines are neither signs nor reproductions of anything:

14 Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989, p. 106. 15 Giorgio Agamben, The Signature of All Things: On Method, New York: Zone Books, 2009, p. 56. 16 See Norman Macleod, “Images, Totems, Types, and Memes: Perspectives on an Iconological Memetics,” The Pictorial Turn, ed. Neal Curtis, London: Routledge, 2010.



110 

 W.J.T. Mitchell

they are operations through which the forces of celestial bodies are gathered.”17 Agamben goes on to associate these figures with Foucault’s notion of the ‘statements’ or discourses that accompany the strata of ‘visibilities’ in the archaeology of knowledge. The images arrayed in Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, as has often been noted, are not mere examples but something more like windows into ‘cases’ set in a vitalist, even animistic meta-picture of the history of art. Gertrud Bing thought of them as “psychic states that had become fossilized, so to speak, in the images”.18 The open secret in all of Warburg’s images is that they are never properly understood as still, but rather as snapshots of a pervasive motion and life that has left the image behind as a clue. In that sense, they are very like film stills, as Philippe-Alain Michaud has argued. And the lives of those images are, in their human forms, the signatures of passions or Pathosformeln encoded in ‘engrams’, which, according to Agamben, “are neither signs nor symbols but signatures […] The ‘nameless science’ he [Warburg] was unable to found is something like an overcoming, an Aufhebung of magic by means of its own instruments, an archaeology of signatures.”19 Why was Warburg unable to found his science of ‘art history without a text’? David Freedberg has argued that in the Bilderatlas the images have little of their original force, and in their servitude to a curious kind of genealogical encyclopedism, all are strangely and improbably drained […] What Warburg’s failed Bilderatlas, pathetic in its reliance on reproduction and multiplication, foretells is the etiolation of contemplation that is implicit in the modern multiplicity of images that can only be generated and made infinitely manipulable by the computer—which Warburg, schizophrenic as always, would have disdained and loved at the same time.20

Was Warburg “schizophrenic […] always”? What could that mean? Not that he was confined to a Swiss mental hospital, surely. That only lasted a few years, and he was lucid in the afternoons, taking tea with visitors. We must, I think, take Freedberg literally as claiming that Warburg was “always” schizophrenic, even when he was lucid and rational. The Bilderatlas, then, has to be read, not as a triumph of image science, but as a symptom of a certain iconomania, and a pathology that has now become endemic in the era of Google Images. This is a conclusion that Warburg himself might have endorsed, given his conviction that “all mankind is eternally and at all times

17 Agamben, The Signature of All Things, p. 55. 18 This is Georges Didi-Huberman’s paraphrase of Bing in his foreword to Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, New York: Zone Books, 2004, p. 16. 19 Agamben, The Signature of All Things, p. 57. 20 David Freedberg, “Warburg’s Mask: A Study in Idolatry,” Anthropologies of Art, ed. Mariet Westermann, Williamstown, MA: Clark Institute, 2005, p.  17, is the most forthright study of the problems with Warburg’s ‘ethnographic’ sojourn among the Hopi, and (more importantly) the idolatry that surrounds him in the discipline of art history.





Method, Madness, and Montage 

 111

schizophrenic”21—a conviction expressed, appropriately enough, in the notes to his famous lecture on the Hopi serpent ritual that he delivered as a way of proving his own sanity. “Schizophrenic as always” might also mean that Warburg understood himself as a ‘seismograph of the soul’ who had lived through the Great War only to witness the rise of fascism and the beginnings of the Warburg family’s flight from Germany. Warburg’s witnessing of the historical madness of his time would have been framed, no doubt, within the Nietzschean aphorism that runs like a refrain throughout these pages: “Insanity in individuals is somewhat rare—but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule.” Warburg spent WWI confirming this thesis in a chaotic and failed Bilderatlas that attempted to make sense of all the words and images coming from the Western front, where Europe was tearing itself to pieces. Like Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, the impossible and incomplete attempt to understand the entirety of modernity and spectacular capitalism, Warburg wanted to create an atlas of the Great War. The project now exists only in boxes of materials at the Warburg Institute. Warburg’s wealth allowed him to hire assistants to gather materials, but the enormous scale of the undertaking, both as a moral, political project, and a knowledge project, was overwhelming. One week after the Armistice, in November 1918, Warburg experienced a psychotic breakdown and attempted to kill his own family. He was committed to Ludwig Binswanger’s asylum, arguably the most prestigious psychoanalytic hospital in Europe. His emergence from that asylum was, as I have noted, achieved by a demonstration of his scholarly competence in his lecture on the Hopi serpent ritual. Freed from the hospital, with a liberating diagnosis of ‘incurable’, he launched the great Mnemosyne Bilderatlas that is so foundational to adventurous—that is, speculative and critical— art history. Warburg was famous for giving lectures in the presence of the Bilderatlas, gesturing to images and finding the patterns that linked them together. His unwritten ‘art history without a text’ never lacked for words while he was alive. Could Warburg’s iconomania be an occupational hazard of the discipline and profession he helped to found, namely, art history itself? Georges Didi-Huberman has suggested that Warburg’s effort to “set art history in motion” might have unleashed “something dangerous, something I would call symptomatic”: “To create a knowledge-montage was […] to reject the matrices of intelligibility. To break through the age-old guard rails. This movement with its new ‘allure’ of knowledge, created the possibility of vertigo […] The image is not a closed field of knowledge; it is a whirling, centrifugal field. It is not a ‘field of knowledge’ like any other.”22

21 Quoted in Ernst Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography [1970], Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986, p. 223. 22 Georges Didi-Huberman, “Knowledge: Movement (The Man Who Spoke to Butterflies),” foreword to Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, New York: Zone Books, 2004, pp. 12–13.



112 

 W.J.T. Mitchell

Didi-Huberman’s contrast between the ‘closed field of knowledge’ with its stable ‘matrices of intelligibility’, and the whirling vortex of Warburg’s mad montage might not be as firm as he would like it to be. Insofar as the Bilderatlas provides, not a fixed grid of interpretive locations, but an array of symptoms or clues awaiting diagnosis by the detective, psychiatrist, or art historian, it crosses the border between science and magic that the Enlightenment had sought to police. Or perhaps, more humbly, it bridges the gap between the symptom and the symbol, the clue and the message. This bridging operation opens up the field Carlo Ginzburg calls ‘conjectural knowledge’, as important to the natural sciences as to the humanities.23 This is the field of historical epistemology that links Morelli’s connoisseurship to Freud’s psychoanalysis and to Sherlock Holmes’s art of scientific detection, allowing us to read what was never written. The place of the Bilderatlas in this field where scientific method and madness converge is best captured in the medium that succeeds in actualizing Warburg’s goal of setting images (and art history) in motion, namely cinema. Sometimes the atlas plays the minimal role of preserving memory in the face of amnesia and psychosis. In Christopher Nolan’s film Memento (2000), for instance, the hero, Lenny, is a quasi-detective seeking to solve the murder of his wife. But the trauma of her loss has erased his ability to form new memories, and consequently he has to rely on an improvised atlas of images, texts, and locations pinned to the wall of his hotel room to keep a record of the recent past. Even Lenny’s own body becomes a kind of Bilderatlas, as he has himself covered with tattoos to provide a permanent record of his rapidly fading experiences. The cinematic form of Memento, moreover, re-doubles the effect of Lenny’s amnesia by unfolding the narrative in reverse chronological order, presenting a stiff challenge to the viewer’s short-term cinematic memory, placing us in the position of detectives who must treat Lenny’s own behavior as a complex mixture of rational investigation and psychotic symptoms. Or perhaps our position is more like that of a film editor, who must attempt to take all the thousands of sequences made during a film shoot and think about them synchronically, constructing from them diachronic pathways that unfold a narrative, or (in the central aim of montage) making meaning from surprising cuts and juxtapositions. In any case, the image atlas seems to appear with remarkable frequency in films about espionage or criminal investigation. A standard feature of crime drama is the scene of the improvised wall atlas, with pictures of all the suspects and their location in a corporate/familial structure. Or there is the cartographic wall atlas, which attempts to map patterns in the location of crime scenes. Or the array of victims displayed as trophies by the serial killer himself and imitated by the investigator in the array of evidence. In the recent HBO crime drama True Detective, the Nietzsche-quoting cop who obsessively persists in the investigation of a 20-year-old murder, and

23 Carlo Ginzburg, “Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method,” History Workshop 9 (Spring 1980), pp. 5–36.





Method, Madness, and Montage 

 113

Fig. 3: Spider web of yarn on John Nash’s evidence wall. Still from the film A Beautiful Mind, dir. Ron Howard (2000).

who is regarded as mentally unbalanced himself, constructs an evidentiary montage that mimics the symmetry of the ritualistic crime scene itself. In the espionage and terrorism thriller Homeland, a female CIA agent (who is suffering from bipolar disorder) assembles a color-coded chronological atlas of images and texts to track a Middle-Eastern terrorist’s behavior patterns over a 10-year period. The evidentiary ‘smoking gun’ that is revealed by the wall atlas is not to be found in the positive signs on the wall, but in a blank chasm that interrupts the chronology, and provides the clue to the terrorist’s mysterious withdrawal from activity, during which the ultimate weapon, a converted or ‘turned’ American soldier, is trained for his suicide mission against his own country. Given her history of mental instability, the agent’s ‘conjectural knowledge’ is rejected as fantasy by her colleagues—until, that is, her closest colleague suddenly has an intuitive breakthrough that allows him to piece the clues together in an evidentiary montage that reveals, of course, that she was right all along. But perhaps the most thorough rendering of the image atlas as a montage of madness is to be found in the film A Beautiful Mind (Ron Howard, 2001), in which the brilliant mathematician John Nash is portrayed as a schizophrenic code-breaker who believes he has been recruited by a secret U.S. military intelligence unit to detect hidden clues in American magazines and newspapers. Nash’s gifts for pattern recognition, having been established by his ability to intuitively grasp the form of celestial constellations, is transferred to the task of finding patterns in a seemingly chaotic array of ‘evidence’. The film conveys Nash’s search for patterns as a kind of cognitive searchlight effect that literally illuminates fragmentary verbal ‘clues’, and assembles them in what can only be described as the degree zero of madness and montage, when the walls disappear under a veritable forest of evidence (fig. 3). 

114 

 W.J.T. Mitchell

The specific clinical term for Nash’s delusive search for patterns is ‘apophenia’: “the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness of unrelated phenomena.” Coined by the German psychiatrist Klaus Conrad, the term is often applied to the early stages of schizophrenia when paranoid thoughts join with pattern recognition to produce an experience taken as a delusion by ‘objective’ observers and as a ‘revelation’ by the patient. My brief survey of the place of pattern recognition and evidence walls in detective and espionage films suggests a certain recurrent phenomenon—the epistemological uncertainty of the apophenic: are they just deluded, or do they have a real insight into the hidden pattern in the array of evidence? This uncertainty is dramatized quite conspicuously as a gender issue in recent police procedurals and spy thrillers, which all seem to have a talented, intuitive female detective or spy who sees a pattern in the evidence that is invisible to everyone else. The antique version of this is Cassandra, the mad prophetess who has the gift of foresight but the curse of never being believed.

The Dilemma of the Evidence The dilemma of the evidence wall, what we might call the ‘forensic atlas’, is embedded in the pattern that is found, discovered, or invented by the analyst/detective. And where do those patterns come from? Pictorial answers are provided by the following pair of cartoons from the New Yorker, showing the situation of the atlas maker and interpreter (figs. 4–5). In one, the question of the origin of the patterns is raised, and the answer is, “it all goes back to this ball of yarn.” In a brilliant pun, the cartoonist links the pattern (as a ‘yarn’ or story) to narrative, the moment when one sees the whole story. But at a literal level, the yarn is the material substance from which all the patterns and all the stories may be woven. The ball of yarn is itself a vortex of potential tales, structures, and syntactical relations; it could be shaped into many forms—a grid, a tree diagram, a genealogy, a constellation, a spider’s web. So, the cop’s comment amounts to little more than, “it all comes back to a story that we have yet to unwind, a labyrinth yet to be penetrated. It’s in that ball of string somewhere.” In short, they are baffled, but still convinced that the answer is out there, or (more disturbingly) in the ball of yarn itself. The yarn is supposed to be an empty, shifting sign, the index or indicator of syntactical relations between the images and words that make up the material of the atlas. Suddenly it has become confused with the images themselves, as if it were tangible evidence rather than merely a device for showing relationships among pieces of real evidence. A network theorist would recognize this as the syndrome of fetishizing the links in the network, rather than what is linked. The second cartoon shows us a more classic case of apophenia and detective work. The yarn is no longer a capacious reserve of potential links out there in the world; it is now wound around the body of the investigator, suggesting that the pattern he 



Method, Madness, and Montage 

 115

Fig. 4: “They all lead back to this ball of yarn.” Benjamin Schwartz.

Fig. 5: “Well, this is troubling.” Will McPhail.

perceives has absorbed his own subjectivity. He has become so obsessed with the perceived patterns on the wall that he has begun to be part of them, bound up with them and implicated. The familiar noir plot device of the detective who discovers that he was the criminal all along might be waiting in the wings, right alongside the psychiatrist who turns out to be the madman.24 For Warburg, the discovery was that he could create a ‘montage of attractions’ that promised a universal iconology, not of meanings, but of passions, as expressed in recurrent Pathosformeln.25 It was the movement

24 I quote from the report of Doctor Ludwig Binswanger in Kreuzlingen, where Aby Warburg stayed from 1921 to 1924: “The patient is preoccupied with a cult of moths and butterflies that fly into his room at night. He talks to them for hours on end; he calls them his little soul creatures and tells them of his pain.” Baert quoting Henri Maldiney: Barbara Baert, Nymph: Motif, Phantom, Affect, LeuvenParis-Walpole: Peeters, 2014, p. 40. 25 The phrase is from Kathleen Gough, “Between the Image and Anthropology: Theatrical Lessons from Aby Warburg’s ‘Nympha’,” The Drama Review 56, no. 3 (2012), p. 117.



116 

 W.J.T. Mitchell

of the images, not their static signification, that interested him, as if they were the phantasmatic residues of human souls. It is not surprising that, at the height of his confinement at Kreuzlingen hospital, Binswanger observed him talking to moths and butterflies all night, addressing them as fleeting souls. These two forms of the atlas—we could call them ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’—are united in Warburg’s Mnemosyne Bilderatlas. That is, Warburg finds his images in the world, but their affective charge is subjective, up close and personal. That is why he insisted on the technique of grisaille, a ‘graying out’ of the photographic reproductions, that would protect him from the full impact of the pathos embedded in the original. Wolfgang Kemp accordingly divides the mnemonic function of the atlas into voluntary and involuntary memory, linked in turn with the discipline of mnemotechnology and aids to memory, and the spontaneous, unpredictable upsurge of a ‘triggered’ memory. Barbara Baert links these in turn to the conscious and unconscious memories elicited by psychoanalysis, the categories of Gedächtnis and Erinnerung, and to Roland Barthes’s distinction between the studium and punctum of photographic perception.26 The paradigmatic figure of this phenomenon, what we might call the ‘onset’ of the image, is Warburg’s image of the nymph. Georges Didi-Huberman aptly summarizes these figures of young women “who, trailing their hair and garments, seemed to burst into the city dwellings of Florentine merchants; […] they seemed to him comparable to Proust’s Madeleine, something that […] befalls one and does not allow itself to be controlled or bound, and that sets free unsuspected energies.”27 This elusive, tantalizing figure is for Warburg a ‘meta-picture’ of picturing as such in its uncanny interplay of movement and stasis, living presence and fossilized absence. As Kathleen Gough puts it: “images that appear as singular are repeated across time and space and […] have a life of their own.”28 The image of the nymph was grounded in a very specific trope of masculine modernism, the figure of the ‘New Woman’ exemplified by Isadora Duncan’s dancing and Freud’s light-footed Greek nymph Gradiva, who, in the eponymous novel by Jensen, is both the cause and cure of a young German archaeologist’s mental illness. Warburg could have found this figure everywhere: in Charcot’s photographs of hysterical women; in theater, dance, the veiled women of Morocco, and the flappers of the Jazz Age. Probably André Breton’s deranged prostitute, Nadja, is a late version of the figure, along with the femme fatale of post-WWII cinema. But for the purposes of Warburg’s universal atlas of the world’s images, she is not merely another example, but the paradigm. Agamben argues that she is transhistorical, a-chronic, “neither archaic

26 Baert, Nymph, p. 40. 27 Quoted in ibid., p. 9; see also Didi-Huberman, “Warburg’s Haunted House,” Common Knowledge 18, no. 1 (2012), pp. 50–78. 28 Gough, “Between the Image and Anthropology,” p. 124.





Method, Madness, and Montage 

 117

nor contemporary […] undecidable in regards to diachrony and synchrony, unicity and multiplicity […] the nymph is the paradigm of the single image, and the single images are paradigms of the nymph.” She is the image of images—as seen by men of a certain age. Breton uses her and then abandons her. Schreber decided to become her so that he could have a child. Gabriel fantasized her as an ambiguous muse, lover, and enemy. If Warburg had been able to see one of the first (and, in my view, the greatest) films about mental illness, Teinosuke Kinugasa’s A Page of Madness (1926), he would have immediately recognized his nymph in the mad wife of a Japanese fisherman, who dances like a whirling dervish in her barred asylum cell. Confined for the murder of her children by drowning, the wife’s wild motions are overlaid in double-exposure against an Isadora Duncanesque dancer in flowing silk who elevates her hysterical dance29 into formal mastery, laminating involuntary symptomatic expression onto virtuosic symbolic performance. The window character is her husband, who has left his job as a fisherman to become a janitor in the mental hospital so he can keep watch over her. He (and we along him) observe her motions through the bars of the cell, which she sometimes seems to penetrate and dissolve. In this film, the grid is repeatedly overcome by the vortex, and then the vortex resolves itself in the stately motions of No Theater, with its enigmatic, iconic masks of the passions. If the nymph is the paradigm of the images that fly into Warburg’s atlas, what is the ball of yarn that he uses to organize them in a matrix, or to entangle them with his own subjectivity? Four basic principles have been latent in everything we have been observing about him so far. The first is the concept of the Pathosformel, which is both the specific form and the general formula for the passionate image of human desire and suffering. The second is the notion of Nachleben, or ‘afterlife’, embodied in the stilling of these moving images into ‘fossilized psychic states’ that await resurrection in the memoire involuntaire of the iconologist. The third is Polarität, the fundamentally dialectical and contrarious character of the image, exemplified by the nymph, and by the serpent as killer and healer in his Hopi ritual lecture. This may correspond as well to the alternative (and more tolerable) label of ‘bipolar disorder’30 that psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin assigned to Warburg, as opposed to Binswanger’s diagnosis of schizophrenia. And finally, there is the principle of the grid/matrix/spatial order of the atlas itself, the Orientierung that locates the image in a constellation and tracks its movements. As Barbara Baert puts it, “he kept asking the question, ‘where is the figure moving to?’” and “found himself following it across geographical space and

29 On “the silk mania of women as a form of hysteria”, see Baert, Nymph, p. 16. 30 It is worth noting the etymological echoes between ‘manic-depressive psychosis’—Kraepelin’s own term for the category of illness since reclassified as ‘bipolar disorder’—and the principle of ‘iconomania’, which interests us here.



118 

 W.J.T. Mitchell

historical times”.31 So Quattrocento painting connects to Greek Dionysian rituals, Native American ceremonies, and contemporary theatrical pageants, just as Mussolini’s coronation evokes memories of pagan rites. Warburg’s Bilderatlas is indeed a planetary project, anticipating the totalizing, global ambitions of contemporary art history in the age of Big Data and the international art world. The globe becomes that ball of yarn. Does Warburg himself appear anywhere in his atlas? I think the answer must wait until we have a more precise picture of his inner mental life, perhaps pieced together from Binswanger’s notes of their conversations. But in the meantime, I would suggest three identifications that are purely speculative, but grounded in my own somewhat involuntary set of mythic associations with his external symptoms. I would label these by their classical names, Cassandra, Thyestes, and Hercules. Warburg’s paranoid fantasies about the plot to murder his brother, and his visions of the oncoming wave of anti-Semitism link him clearly to Cassandra, a paranoid prophetess with real enemies. His eating disorder (he weighed just 50 kilos when he checked into Binswanger’s asylum) might be modeled on the dreadful myth of Atreus, who fed his brother Thyestes the flesh of his own children. Francesco Gori suggests that “to eat his own kin’s flesh was one of Warburg’s main obsessions, so that he often refused to eat.”32 But my candidate for the master archetype of Warburg’s identity is Hercules, the Greek demigod who brings order and civilization to the Mediterranean world, killing monsters such as the Python and cleaning out the Augean stables. Hercules also plays the role of a substitute for Atlas, the Titan who holds up the world. Hercules takes the burden of the world on his shoulders while Atlas goes to fetch the dragon-guarded Apples of the Hesperides. When Atlas tries to trick Hercules into taking on the global burden permanently, Hercules does him one better by asking the Titan to take over for a minute while he adjusts his cloak. Then Hercules runs away with the apples, leaving Atlas ‘holding the bag’, as it were, with the weight of the entire world in it. A different version of the story is perhaps more applicable to Warburg. In it, Hercules builds two great pillars to hold the sky away from the earth, liberating Atlas, just as he did Prometheus in an earlier labor. If Warburg’s atlas is, then, a ‘Herculean’ undertaking in the most precise sense of the word, his terrifying psychotic breakdown and attempt to kill his entire family is also a repetition of the ancient story. In Euripides’ play Heracles, the female figure of Madness appears as a character, called up by Hera to punish the great hero for the sin of his father, Zeus. Madness argues with Hera to no avail, and Hercules is driven into

31 Baert, Nymph, p. 27. 32 Correspondence by email, May 11, 2016. See also Chantal Marazia and Davide Stimilli (eds.), Ludwig Binswanger, Aby Warburg: die unendliche Heilung: Aby Warburgs Krankengeschichte, Zurich and Berlin: Diaphanes, 2007, which includes Binswanger’s correspondence with Warburg.





Method, Madness, and Montage 

 119

a manic frenzy in which he kills his wife and children. Was this too much for Warburg to bear, too close for comfort? The representations of Hercules in his atlas were mainly of the triumphant order-bringing hero, not Hercules furens. But as Didi-Huberman notes, “Warburg’s aptitude for the astra (concepts) always brought him in proximity to the monstra (chaos).” The other side of the elusive nymph’s identity is death and chaos, perhaps even Euripides’ female personification of madness itself.

Screens and Catatonia As should be evident, the pursuit of the Bilderatlas takes us across the boundary between symbols and symptoms, detective work and psychosis, clues and paranoid fantasies, science and magic. At one extreme, the atlas is a matrix for the display and interpretation of symptoms; at the other, it itself becomes a symptom, a clue to the pathology of the investigator, whether detective, connoisseur, or psychoanalyst. This is in keeping with Edgar Allan Poe’s first principle of the detective story: that the master detective is the one who is able to enter into the mind of the criminal, no matter how irrational. Psychoanalytic transference is perhaps just a reversed form of this process, and it explains the cliché of detective work: set a thief to catch a thief, think like a madman to catch a madman—as in the Silence of the Lambs, in which the FBI enlists a mad psychiatrist to catch a serial killer. The paranoid method of the Surrealists was simply the most melodramatic version of this conversion ritual between method and madness. There would be much more to say about the Bilderatlas as the interface between pictorial therapy and pathology, diagnostic instrument and symptomatic traces. Probably it played both roles for Aby Warburg if he was, as David Freedberg argues, “schizophrenic […] always”. The space of the Bilderatlas alternates between the gridlike structures of rational order (cartography, genealogy, taxonomy), on the one hand, and the vortex of motion and animation fossilized in the individual images, on the other. One might visualize this alternation in the contrast between the orderly atlases of Gerhard Richter, and the messy, violent montages of Thomas Hirschorn. When the images on the wall begin to move literally, as in the T_Visionarium in Sydney, Australia, which taps into all the world’s television networks in a simultaneous display, the grid itself threatens to spiral out of control. The security of the controller’s position at the center of this media panopticon gives way to the catatonic paralysis of the alien visitor trying to grasp the totality of the human world in The Man Who Fell to Earth. In this film, Aby Warburg’s project is continued in David Bowie’s marvelous performance of a global attempt to survey and understand the craziness of the human species. The alien assembles a panopticon of television screens telecasting all the news, advertisements, and entertainments, from sitcoms to cartoons to catastrophes, the media nightmare of American television culture. Smiling, laughing faces, 

120 

 W.J.T. Mitchell

Fig. 6: David Bowie as a catatonic alien, addicted to vodka and television. Still from the film The Man Who Fell to Earth, dir. Nicolas Roeg, 1976.

faces wreathed in cruelty, massacres, murders, all available in real or recorded time to the TV viewer. Foucault’s dream of the total surveillance of the human species is achieved—though it now all seems quaint in the era of complicity with total surveillance, when our devices are being programmed to produce addiction in the user, and consumption has become the new form of production (fig. 6). The alien becomes addicted to the screen (along with the vodka he consumes as a kind of grisaille to buffer his perception of disturbing pathosformel). He is reduced to catatonia, in a trance or lucid dream, which is a perfect mirror of the spectator himself. The corresponding contemporary figures would be the addicted gamers wearing diapers, and the drone operator. Madness uses and is used by its own equipment. The critical resistance to or exploitation of the panoptic tendency of the surveillance society, I believe, is one of the fundamental tasks of the art of the present, and I would like to conclude with a glance at a few examples. We have, of course, the canonical example of Banksy, who has pioneered the transformation of graffiti into an art of refreshing insolence, disrespect for institutions, and aggressive anonymity, coupled with acts of counter-surveillance against high-tech media. Like the hacktivists of Anonymous, Banksy has perfected a cult of the artist as unknown celebrity, an antithetical practice to the highly publicized trickster practices of Ai Wei Wei. It seems that the most important forms of artistic resistance to authoritarianism are to be found at the nexus of aesthetics and epistemology, artistic practices that are grounded in old-fashioned forms of research into the actual facts of political and governmental institutions. In this regard, my nominee for the greatest performance artist of our moment is Edward Snowden, now a refugee in exile in Moscow. Snowden is an artist of the found object, the discovered object, and the revealed object, in the form of 



Method, Madness, and Montage 

 121

the archive of the National Security Agency (NSA), for which he has provided a massive Bilderatlas in the form of the NSA’s own classified PowerPoint presentations. A quick survey of a few representative slides provides the most powerful access to the archive that Snowden unveiled. These slides expose the entire structure of the NSA’s activities, mapping the interlocking structure of state and corporate surveillance, a system that aims at nothing less than total global control of data flows. A slide of the NSA’s ‘Strategic Partnerships’, for instance, boasts of over “80 Major Global Corporations” that support state surveillance activities, including AT&T, Cisco, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, Intel, Verizon, Qwest, and Motorola. That is why Apple’s resistance to the FBI’s demand to unlock the cell phone of a suicide terrorist made such big news. Without Snowden’s revelations, it is very unlikely that this solicitude for customer privacy (or for preserving Apple’s brand, and proprietary codes) would have ever happened. But Snowden also exposed a striking paradox in the system. Not only does it involve an exponentially increasing volume of data collection, it also reveals a striking moment of self-awareness, as the NSA comes face to face with the self-defeating character of this project in relation to its official goal of stopping terrorism. In a rare moment of lucidity, an anonymous NSA operative articulates the problem (re-phrased in the usual euphemistic language of ‘The Challenge’): “Collection is outpacing our ability to ingest, process, and store to the ‘norms’ to which we have become accustomed.” The NSA has, in short, created a haystack in which it becomes increasingly difficult to locate the needle that the agency is supposed to be looking for. But we should not feel reassured by this admission of impotence. The real power of the authoritarian corporate-state complex does not lie in the goal of literally ‘keeping an eye’ on everyone. There is no need for that, as Foucault’s classic analysis of the panopticon showed. The real goal is to create the fantasy that a global panopticon is necessary to keep us safe, that we must cooperate passively in self-surveillance, and that the disappearance of privacy is necessary and inevitable. So, there is method in the NSA’s madness. And in the conduct of its political and media collaborators, who span the entire ideological spectrum in the U.S. The Democrats led by President Obama routinely lied, as their Bush-era predecessors did, about the practices of corporate-state surveillance. And they have mobilized the language of psychotherapy to discredit any form of dissent, any practice of anonymous counter-surveillance. Edward Snowden was routinely dismissed with psychiatric smears about ‘narcissism’ by American pundits, from The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin to the New York Times’s David Brooks.33 As journalist Glenn Greenwald notes, “attributing dissent to personality disorders is hardly an American invention. Soviet dissidents were routinely institutionalized in psychological hospitals, and Chinese dissidents are still often forci-

33 See FAIR August 2013, for a survey of the amateur psychologizing. FAIR, http://fair.org/extra/thesnowden-psychiatric-smear/.



122 

 W.J.T. Mitchell

bly treated for mental illness.”34 Could it be that the real mental illness here is the madness of the state and its camp followers? Or did we need to wait for Donald Trump to give us a paradigm of acute narcissistic personality disorder? A wonderfully penetrating insight into the sickness of the system is provided by the artist Trevor Paglen, with whom I conclude. Paglen is nominally a photographer, whose best-known works are large-format, low-resolution photographs of classified ‘black sites’ around the world, photographed, necessarily, from such a great distance that they become something like abstract paintings. Needless to say, Paglen has been accused of ‘aestheticizing’ his subject matter and producing what someone will no doubt call ‘counter-surveillance porn’. But the really salacious pornography is to be found in Paglen’s Bilderatlas of the surveillance state, Emblems from the Pentagon’s Black World. A quick survey of this microcosm (is it real or did he make it up?) offers insight into the lunatic adolescent world of shoulder patches and insignia that agents of the surveillance state (might) make for themselves: ‘Nothing is beyond our reach’ is the slogan that accompanies the emblem of NROL-39, the ‘National Reconnaissance Office Launch’, illustrated by the image of an octopus with the globe in its tentacles. Another image of the NSA’s hubristic fantasy of total global control appropriates a Chinese-style dragon with the globe it in its claws, its wings adorned with the Stars and Stripes. The magical thinking of the ‘Special Projects Flight Test Squadron’ is aptly illustrated by a wizard brandishing his magic wand. The US Air Force ‘Reaper’ operators (our new ‘drone warrior’) portray themselves as Death himself wielding a bloody scythe, above the slogan ‘That others may die’. But my favorite slogan, ‘Semper en Obscurus’ (‘Always in Obscurity’), tells us that the ‘Special Projects’ operation relies on the powerful effect of a magic mushroom to gain its intelligence. If this sort of iconomania is any clue to the madness of the national security state, perhaps there is hope after all for a counter-madness of some kind.

34 Glenn Greenwald, No Place to Hide, New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2014, Loc. 3218 in Kindle book. The slides discussed above are reproduced in Greenwald’s book.



Philippe-Alain Michaud

On Screen 1

In 2005, the artist Peter Miller shot a film entitled Projector Obscura in several historic movie theaters throughout the United States (the Biograph in Detroit, the Anthology Film Archives in New York, the Harvard Film Archive in Cambridge, among others), substituting the projector in the projection room for the camera—as the title of the work suggests, at the risk of incorrect grammar—in such a way as to displace, or even overturn, the respective properties of recording and projection. A 35mm negative film strip, loaded into the projector in the booth, was exposed by way of the projector lens: what appears is no longer the film projected on the screen, but rather, the empty surface of the screen printed on the film, where the vague reflection of the projection booth lights or the rows of seats float like traces of the deconstruction of the projection space converted into a film set. In the late 1880s, while working for Thomas Edison on the design of a machine capable of recording motion pictures, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson dreamed up an ‘optical photograph’, on the lines of the phonograph of 1877: the hand-wound roll was coated with a photosensitive emulsion and the needle, bell and diaphragm were replaced with a lens. The operator would aim the device at the model to be reproduced and turn the handle so that a succession of images would imprint themselves in a spiral on the gelatin-coated cylinder. With Projector Obscura, Peter Miller achieved the experimental fantasy of an identification between the functions of recording and reproduction, which Dickson had made the imaginary structure of the cinema apparatus. With each sequence, the same effect of superposition is repeated between the image of the screen and the real screen onto which the image is projected, whose disappearance normally determines the appearance of images. The screen in Miller’s film appears precisely when the curtain that covers it is lifted or opened laterally at the beginning of each sequence. As a relic of the theater stage with which the first movie houses were routinely equipped, this curtain shows us that the screen was structurally designed as a verticalization of the stage: here, however, the clearing of the curtain reveals no depth at all but merely an empty surface, while the screening turns into an exercise in deceptiveness. In this way, Projector Obscura reenacts the story of the contest between Parrhasius and Zeuxis, told by Pliny in Book XXV of his Natural History, where the curtain painted by Parrhasius inverts the values of what is shown and what is hidden, offering the view of a surface that prohibits sight: [Parrhasius] it is said, entered into a pictorial contest with Zeuxis, who represented some grapes, painted so naturally that the birds flew towards the spot where the picture was exhibited. Parrhasius, on the other hand, exhibited a curtain, drawn with such singular truthfulness, that Zeuxis, elated with the judgment which had been passed upon his work by the birds, haughtily demanded

124 

 Philippe-Alain Michaud

Fig. 1: Peter Miller, Projector Obscura, 2005, film 35 mm.

that the curtain should be drawn aside to let the picture be seen. Upon finding his mistake, with a great degree of ingenuous candour he admitted that he had been surpassed, for that whereas he himself had only deceived the birds, Parrhasius had deceived him, an artist.1 (fig. 1)

In 1976, a then 28-year-old Hiroshi Sugimoto set up a large-format camera at the back of the room of the St. Mark’s Theater, a run-down movie theater in New York’s East Village, and, using the beam of the projector as his only source of light, photographed the entire film projected on the screen in a single image, whose exposure time, which was inordinately long, corresponded to the duration of the projection. “My dream was to capture 170,000 photographs on a single frame of film. The image I had inside my brain was of a gleaming white screen inside a dark movie theatre.”2 For 40 years, throughout the United States and beyond, Sugimoto took pho-

1 Pliny the Elder, Natural History XXXV, 65. 2 Hiroshi Sugimoto, “My Inner Theater,” Theaters, Bologna: Damiani/Matsumoto Editions, 2016.





On Screen 

 125

Fig. 2: Hiroshi Sugimoto, Regency San Francisco, 1992. Gelatin Silver print, 42.50 × 54 cm.

tographs of the screens of the movie palaces of the 1920s and 30s, or the drive-in theaters of the 1940s and 1950s, all according to the same principle, creating a melancholy catalog of movie theaters, emptied of the audience through the exposure time (but also by television) in which the architecture becomes the variable, while the films projected, though different each time, are brought back to an equal brightness. As in Projector Obscura, nothing disturbs the sparkling whiteness of the screens photographed by Sugimoto—not because there is nothing to see on them, but on the contrary because too much appears, since the saturation of light restores them to a sort of original nothingness (fig. 2). In the period when Sugimoto was beginning to photograph screens, Wolfgang Laib created his first Milkstones, made up of rectangular white marble slabs, just barely sanded down, placed on the ground like horizontal screens. Each morning, a fine layer of milk was poured on them. As the hours passed by, a thin pellicle—that is, a literal ‘film’—would begin to form on the surface: like the photos by Sugimoto, the Milkstones are ‘Time-Related Works’, crossings of light and duration (fig. 3). It is, once again, a metaphor for the screen that we should see in the glass of milk that Johnnie Aysgarth (Cary Grant) slowly carries up to Lina McLaidlaw (Joan 

126 

 Philippe-Alain Michaud

Fig. 3: Wolfgang Laib, Milkstone, 1996–1999. Milk and Carrara marble, 85 × 69 × 6 cm. Carré d’art—Musée d’art contemporain de Nîmes.

Fontaine) in Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion. In the darkness of the stairs, where the shadows stretch out immeasurably, the glass of milk glows like the hieroglyph of a secret (Johnnie’s supposed desire to kill his wife) that is simultaneously hidden and revealed: the glass of milk, opaque and illuminated from within—by means of a lightbulb, as Hitchcock would later make known3—condenses the contradictory, dual function of the screen, which simultaneously reveals and conceals (fig. 4).

2 In a short text on the picture frame, George Simmel describes how, during the 15th century, the tavola quadrata, a mobile wooden panel or canvas, came to replace the architectonic frame of the medieval polyptych. This substitution allowed for the creation of the model of the transparent window, which, after shaping the history of figurative painting, went on to shape that of cinematographic representation as well. In the polyptych, writes Simmel, “the sides are often constructed as pillars or columns

3 François Truffaut, Hitchcock, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983, p. 143.





On Screen 

 127

Fig. 4: Still from the film Suspicion, dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1941.

which support a cornice or a pediment, such that each part and the whole is more differentiated and significant than in the case of a modern frame, any of whose four sides can be substituted for one another.”4 The modern frame must be hermetically sealed: it must not have any gaps or openings whereby the world might irrupt into the representation, or conversely, that might allow the representation to dissolve into the world—and that is what happens, according to Simmel, when the painting spills over onto the frame: “a fortunately rare mistake which completely negates the work of art’s autonomous being, and thereby the significance of the frame”. This remark is contradicted by the heterogeneous spatial constructions perfectly exemplified in Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Annunciation: in the painting, the rigorously symmetrical checkered floor is constructed according to the laws of perspective, without, however, showing the point at which the orthogonal lines converge; the latter is hidden by a column in bas-relief that lines up precisely with the axis of the panel, while belonging at the same time to the architecture of the frame and the space of the representation, with its base inscribed clearly within the plane of the picture. Hubert Damisch commented on this in The Origin of Perspective: “In its spatial ambiguity, functioning as it does

4 George Simmel, “‘The Picture Frame,’ an Aesthetic Study,” Theory, Culture and Society 11, no. 1 (1994), pp. 11–17.



128 

 Philippe-Alain Michaud

Fig. 5: Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Annunciation, 1344. Tempera and gold on wooden panel, 127 × 120 cm.

as a kind of mask or screen, this architectonic element is the lynchpin of an eminently contradictory structure in which the paving’s recession is in open conflict with the flattening effect created by the gold ground—within which the vanishing point is geometrically situated”5 (fig. 5). This deliberate abolition of the strict division between the space of the painting and its frame re-emerges unchanged in a work by Giovanni Anselmo entitled Qui e là (1971–1972), a black-and-white photograph printed on a canvas. The work represents a landscape outlined by a metallic frame that stops halfway up the picture and connects with the real metal frame on which the upper part of the panel is mounted. In such a way, the physical presence of the frame (‘Qui’) connects with the ‘là’ of the landscape, opening a movement within the picture between presence and representation that the modern frame, according to Simmel, was specifically designed to close off, that’s how Qua e là turns into a de facto assumption regarding this foreclosure (fig. 6). In a passage from De Pictura (On Painting, 1435) that has been the subject of much commentary, Alberti accomplishes the act of closure described by Simmel that shapes

5 Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994, p. 81.





On Screen 

 129

Fig. 6: Giovanni Anselmo, Qui e la, 1971–1972, Photographic print on canvas, aluminium.

the birth of the modern frame, thus seemingly averting the spatial ambiguity suggested by Ambrogio’s Annunciation or by Anselmo’s landscape: “First of all, on the surface on which I am going to paint, I draw a rectangle of whatever size I want, which I regard as an opened window through which the subject to be painted (istoria) is seen.”6 We cannot mistake the solemn tone of this passage: the setting up of the frame reproduces the imaginary outline, drawn in the sky by the oracle by means of his augural staff, the lituus, whose projection on the ground indicates the physical place where the templum is to be built. The window is therefore at once the origin of the surface of representation (of the picture, of the screen) and of the place in which the representation dwells ; as Gérard Wacjman writes, it is “the primal scene of all scenes.”7 Hence Alberti’s request: “Draw a rectangle on the surface to be painted”; it means that the frame is not the condition of possibility of painting, but within painting, that of the construction of a perspective space. This frame now might not be the window frame, but rather, as Sergei Eisenstein suggests in an article entitled

6 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting [1435], I, 19. Gérard Wacjman, Fenêtre. Chroniques du regard et de l’intime, Paris: Verdier, Philia, 2004, p. 87. 7 Gérard Wacjman, Fenêtre. Chroniques du regard et de l’intime, Paris: Verdier, Philia, 2004, p. 87.



130 

 Philippe-Alain Michaud

“The Dinamic Square” (sic), published in 1931 in the avant-garde journal Close Up, that of the theater stage, which, after determining the narrative frame of the picture, would go on to provide film with the model for the rectangular screen format. Thus film, by inheriting this system, turned away from formal questions relative to the construction of the surface in order to concentrate on the representation of the scene, whose square format, according to the filmmaker, alone could free it: “[We have been content to see excluded] 50 per cent, of composition possibilities, in consequence of the horizontal shape of the frame. By those excluded I mean all the possibilities of vertical, upright composition.”8 The rectangular-horizontal model of the screen was rarely questioned—except perhaps by Paul Sharits, who, in his installations of the 1970s, turned the projector on its side to obtain a vertical-rectangular image (Synchronousoundtracks, 1974), or turned the projected image over by using a mirror (Dream Displacement, 1976)—until film migrated from movie theaters into exhibition spaces at the beginning of the 21st century, and until the verticalization of the rectangle of the screen, freed from the constraints of the theater stage by digital technology, became common. Even though the De Pictura was dedicated to Brunelleschi, Alberti makes no mention anywhere in his treatise of the experiment with the tavoletta that the former conducted 20 years earlier, an experiment (since proven largely impossible9) whereby, according to his biographer Manetti, Brunelleschi intended to show off his talent for drawing in perspective. On a wooden panel ‘half a braccio square’ (some 30cm), Brunelleschi had painted the baptistery of San Giovanni in Florence, from the interior of the portal of the Santa Maria del Fiore cathedral. The upper part of the panel was covered in burnished silver “so that the real air and atmosphere were reflected in it, and thus the clouds seen in the silver are carried along by the wind as it blows”. At the exact point where the painted baptistery lined up with the visual axis, he had bored a conical hole (spiracolo), which was as small as a lentil on the painting side, and which opened pyramidally—“like a woman’s straw hat”, as Manetti curiously notes—on the back. The viewer, by holding the panel in one hand and a mirror in the other and placing his eye on the back of the panel, could see the painted baptistery appear in the mirror on the background of the cloudy sky: “With the aforementioned elements of the burnished silver, the piazza, the viewpoint, etc., the spectator felt he saw the actual scene when he looked at the painting.” As Manetti concludes: “I have had it in my hands and seen it many times in my days and can testify to it.”10 The rep-

8 Serge Eisenstein, “The Dinamic Square,” Close Up 8, no. 1 (March 1931), p. 4. 9 Dominique Raynaud, “L’émergence de l’espace perspective: effet de croyance et de connaissance,” Les espaces de l’homme, Symposium annuel du Collège de France, eds. Alain Berthoz and Roland Recht, Paris: O. Jacobs, 2005, pp. 333–354. 10 Antonio Manetti, The Life of Brunelleschi, trans. Catherine Engass, University Park and London: Penn State Press, 1970, pp.  42–44. Among the many writings on the tavoletta, see the analyses by Hubert Damisch in The Origin of Perspective, in particular p. 119.





On Screen 

 131

resentation closes upon itself: instead of the Albertian double pyramid whose base is located on the surface to be painted and whose two summits correspond respectively to the viewpoint and the vanishing point, there is a hole in Brunelleschi’s construction where the viewer places his eye and whereby he projects himself into the space of representation, producing a reality effect, even though, as Manetti points out, this effect remains an illusion. “There is something whose absence can always be observed in a picture,” wrote Lacan in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: “This is the central field […] In every picture this central field cannot but be absent, and replaced by a hole—a reflection, in short, of the pupil behind which is situated the gaze.”11 By flowing through the spiracolo that marks the blind center of the representation, the viewer, split from himself, becomes a thing among things, like the viewer with his eye stuck to the keyhole depicted by Sartre in Being and Nothingness, a construction that Rosalind Krauss analyzes in the following terms: For in this position he is no longer pure, transparent intentionality beamed at what is on the door’s far side, but rather simply a body caught on this side, he has become a self that exists on the level of all other objects of the world, a self that has suddenly become opaque to his own consciousness, a self that he therefore cannot know but only be, a self that for that reason is nothing but a pure reference to the Other.12

“To look at the story”, writes Alberti: the imposition of the frame does not open the possibility of accessing reality or its simulation, but rather determines the birth of the illusion.13 If there is no mention in De Pictura of the experiment with the tavoletta, it might be because the construction of the frame depended on the repression of the reality effect that the frame allowed. What, then, is the secret that is hidden, not a ‘secret beyond the door’ as in Fritz Lang’s 1947 film of the same name, but a secret behind the screen like behind an Apollonian veil spread out over reality, given that the appearance of the projected figures prevents us from perceiving this mechanism of concealment? We might suggest that what we are prevented from seeing is the body, by virtue of its transformation into a figure through the framing operation; herein lies the imprescriptible rule of representation. And it is only through the hole imagined by Brunelleschi, which abolishes the distance between the viewer and what is viewed, that the body can reappear in its reality and not as a fiction. In Une sale histoire (Jean Eustache, 1977) a viewer discovers an opening in the bottom of the door to the women’s toilet in the basement of a Parisian café and returns there obsessively

11 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, New York: W.W. Norton Company, 1998, p. 128. 12 Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993, p. 112 (emphases in the original). 13 Ann Friedberg, The Virtual Window, Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2006, pp. 32–33.



132 

 Philippe-Alain Michaud

Fig. 7: The Origin of the World by Gustave Courbet partially covered by André Masson’s mask panel, 1955.

to relive his fantasy, bending down in order to see in. He thus rediscovers the device imagined by Gustave Courbet in L’Origine du monde, which Jacques Lacan, when he owned the painting, covered with a wood panel commissioned from André Masson: represented on the panel, in white contours, was the very image of the body that lay behind it, as a demonstration of the double function of the screen, which simultaneously and inextricably shows and hides (fig. 7).

3 In Notes sur le cinématographe, Robert Bresson asks: how can we ignore the fact “that it all ends up on a rectangle of white fabric hung on a wall”? To this, he adds: “see your film as a surface to cover.”14 It is difficult to mistake the mournful tone of Bresson’s words: the projection of images on the screen is described as a vertical entombing and the screen as a shroud whose act of framing (“see your film as a surface to be covered”) makes up the bed. The cinematographic spectacle is a form of mourning, the memory or the commemoration of “what has been”, the performance of an

14 Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer, Los Angeles: Green Integer Books, p. 36.





On Screen 

 133

Fig. 8: Nam June Paik performing his Zen for Film, New Cinema Festival, New York, 1965 (photo: Peter Moore).

absence. Nam June Paik’s Zen for Film (1963), considered one of the first examples of expanded cinema, thus turns the process of the dematerialization of the body, or figurability, into a stylization of mourning. The 16mm film is made up of a mere transparent frame loop projected directly onto a wall on which the white rectangle delineated by the light of the projector draws the limits of a screen, so that the viewer, facing the projection, interacts with it. In 1964, for the second screening of the film, Paik himself stood in the beam of light, performing simple gestures in front of the screen, on which his shadow was projected.15 The scenography for Zen for Film rehashes another story passed down by Pliny, about the daughter of Dibutades, a story that in turn supplies one of the possible meanings of Paik’s work. According to the legend, the creator of the first figurative image was a young woman named Callirrhoe, the daughter of a clay modeler from Sicyon or Corinth, who drew with a piece of charcoal the outlines of her lover’s body (asleep, about to leave, or dead, according to the different versions of the story), and whose shadow was projected onto the wall by the lamp light, in order to preserve his image after he had gone16 (fig. 8).

15 The projected shadow could be analyzed in symmetrically reverse terms based on the passage in Purgatory in which Dante the pilgrim, upon leaving Hell, is recognized as living due to the shadow he casts: this is no longer a process of the body’s dematerialization, but rather a sign of its materiality (Dante, Purgatory, vv. 88–99). 16 Pliny, Natural History, XXXV, 12.



134 

 Philippe-Alain Michaud

This same representation of the link between mourning and the production of an image is worked out in Tintoretto’s The Finding of the Body of Saint Mark (1562–1566, Brera, Milan), which the historian of Venetian painting Marco Boschini described in the 17th century as “a scene of necromancy”.17 In the foreground, the saint’s body is spread out on the ground: all around, ectoplasms move toward the right-hand side of the canvas. Tintoretto’s painting is full of these figures whose transparency signals their immateriality; similarly, in the artist’s The Last Supper (1592–94, San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice), the ghosts hovering beneath the vault, as though in a magic lantern show, seem to issue from the billows of black smoke rising from the oil lamp that lights the room. In the Brera painting, to the viewer’s right, where the body of the saint is exposed is lined with sarcophaguses, from one of which a corpse is being removed. In the background, as though backlit, there is an open tomb where gravediggers are exhuming another body (or the same body, seen simultaneously in the background and in the foreground). On the unsealed lid of the tomb, which forms a kind of vertical screen, we can make out indecipherable shadows. We know from his contemporaries that Tintoretto would use small, artificially lit doll theaters in which he installed wax or clay figures in order to adjust his compositions. In The Finding of the Body of Saint Mark, he depicts the mechanism of representation, as though on a theater stage, and turns it around, showing in the foreground what the screen had been specifically designed to mask. During a ritual that is still performed in Madagascar, the dead are exhumed and their remains are wrapped in new shrouds (lambamena): this is how the saint’s body appears in The Finding of the Body of Saint Mark—shown plainly in one instance for what it is, perinde ac cadaver—lying on a rug used to roll it up for transportation from Constantinople, while the gravediggers busy themselves with transforming him into an image (plate XX).

4 In The Ontology of the Photographic Image, André Bazin defines the ‘mummy complex’ as “the preservation of life by means of the representation of life”. “The evolution, side by side, of art and civilization”, he writes, “has relieved the plastic arts of their magic role. Louis XIV did not have himself embalmed. He was content to survive in his portrait by Le Brun.”18 Bazin thus suggests that first photography, and later, cinema, inherited the magic role of representation, from which painting progressively freed itself. Like the wax portrait, photography, which entails a form of automatism and which

17 Carlo Ridolfi, Le Meraviglie dell’arte, 1648; see Sergio Martinelli, Il ritrovamento del corpo di San Marco di Jacopo Tintoretto, Milan: Tea, 1996. 18 André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” What is Cinema?, Los Angeles, Berkeley, and London: University of California Press, I, p. 9 f.





On Screen 

 135

Fig. 9: Antoine Benoist, Louis XIV, roi de France, Wax Effigy, ca. 1705. Wax, marble, plaster, textile, crushed egg, hairs, 52 × 42 cm.

Bazin compares to the mold of a death mask, is haunted by the question of indexicality. If photography is objectivity, then film is “objectivity in time. The film is no longer content to preserve the object, enshrouded as it were in an instant as the bodies of insects are preserved intact, out of the distant past, in amber. The film delivers the baroque art of its convulsive catalepsy.”19 Whether or not, according to Bazin’s intuition, photography and film have inherited the spell from which painting freed itself, it is not quite true that Louis XIV was entirely satisfied with his painted portraits, as evidenced by his wax effigy by Antoine Benoist, which was probably made from a direct impression of the king’s face and adorned with glass eyes and human hair (fig. 9). In his History of Portraiture in Wax, published in Vienna in 1911, which of course features the portrait created by Benoist, Julius von Schlosser suggests that the history of cultural practices is neither linear nor dialectical but rather follows a movement of decadence.20 Von Schlosser thus traces the history of wax sculpture from its ancient origins until its decline at the beginning of the 20th century, where he sees its traces in fairground attractions, in the windows of hairdressers (where the dummies used to display the wigs were still made of wax), or in wax museums, thus sketching out a ‘sedimentary’ theory of art history: like the popular song where, unlike in epic

19 Ibid., pp. 14–15. 20 Julius von Schlosser, “History of Portraiture in Wax,” trans. James Michael Loughridge, Ephemeral Bodies Wax Sculpture and the Human Figure, ed. Roberta Panzanelli, Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Trust, 2008, pp. 171–314.



136 

 Philippe-Alain Michaud

poetry, Nietzsche saw the trace or the perpetuum vestigium of the liturgy,21 modern wax sculpture retains, in a prosaic form, an ancient belief about the appearance of effigies, conceived of as intermediaries between bodies and images. In his essay, von Schlosser mentions the study published by Warburg in 1902 concerning the cycle of frescoes painted by Domenico Ghirlandaio in the Santa Trinità church in Florence, a study in which Warburg suggests that the figures painted by Ghirlandaio do not show the characters represented—Francesco Sassetti, the patron of the fresco, and his consorteria—directly, but as entities with an intermediary status between reality and its painted representation: the figures are represented on the fresco as though levitating in the space of the chapel, thus reproducing the scenography of the life-size wax effigies that the Florentine aristocracy was accustomed to hanging on the vaulted ceiling of the Santissima Annunziata—a church that Warburg, incidentally, compared to a wax museum:22 By the beginning of the sixteenth century there were so many of these voti at the Annunziata that space ran out; the figures had to be suspended from the entablature on cords, and the walls had to be reinforced with chains. It was not until worshipers had several times been disturbed by falling voti that the whole waxworks was banished to a side courtyard, where its remnants were still to be seen at the end of the eighteenth century. This lawful and persistent survival of barbarism, with wax effigies set up in Church in their moldering fashionable dress, begins to cast a truer and a more favourable light on the inclusion of portrait likenesses on a church fresco of sacred scenes. By comparison with the magical fetishism of the waxwork cult, this was a comparatively discreet attempt to come closer to the Divine through a painted simulacrum.23

Following the model of the Nietzschean will to power, Warburg identifies within the figurative process a desire to appear that determines the figure’s access to the space of representation: a fictitious body is substituted for the real body, with this substitution functioning as a delay or a warding off. The figures painted by Ghirlandaio thus appear like distant embodiments of the akrolithoi, those effigies covered in ceremonial garments that in ancient times were used to ward off death by reenacting it in a theatrical form.24 The resemblance is derived from the imprint, and the mimesis is a particular modality of presence. Expressionist cinema made this intermediary place—where Warburg and von Schlosser saw the formal and symbolic operations that lead from reality to representation and then from representation to reality—its rightful place, multiplying the effects of hallucinatory presence generated by the dissociation of figures and bodies. In 1936, in “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures”,

21 Friedrich Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, § 6. 22 Von Schlosser, History of Portraiture, pp. 181, 243, n. 21. 23 Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1999, p. 190. 24 Jean Pierre Vernant, “The Figuration of the Invisible and the Psychological Category of the Double: The Kolossos,” Myth and Thought among the Greeks [1965], NY: Zone Books, 2006, pp. 321–332.





On Screen 

 137

Erwin Panofsky reproached Robert Wiene for having stylized reality in Caligari:25 yet, if Expressionist filmmakers excluded all documentary conventions from their films, this was not to reduce the world to a graphic system like the hyper-Caligarism of Karl-Heinz Martin’s Von Morgen bis Mitternacht in 1920 might suggest, but instead to recreate it. Expressionism gave a morbid tonality to this demiurgic function, which appears in an initial euphoric version in the films of Meliès: in the figure of Cesare, the pallid ghost hypnotized by his master Caligari, “the magic of the portrait” continues to act, to borrow the words of von Schlosser, “through the utmost fidelity to the living model”.26 From Paul Leni’s Waxworks (1924) to Mystery of the Wax Museum by Michael Curtiz, filmed in two-strip technicolor in 1933, and to House of Wax by André de Toth filmed in 3D in 1953, in which the screen literally opens to liberate the wax effigies suspended between death and representation, the horror film was the place for the mise en abîme of the animist properties inherent in the film image. The plot of House of Wax is therefore set within a wax museum where the use of relief serves as an ecstatic description for the effects generated by the projection of images. In the first part of the film, Henry Jarrod (Vincent Price) produces wax sculptures by imitation (as he puts it, he cannot work without a model) in order to exhibit them in his museum. Jarrod’s masterpiece, or we should say, his mistress-piece, is a Marie-Antoinette with mannered and delicate features. The sculptor works on the bright side of wax, aiming to imitate appearances and the expression of beauty, which translates stylistically into a sort of classicizing kitsch. After an arsonist destroys his museum and liquifies his precious Marie-Antoinette, Jarrod builds up another collection of wax sculptures, but this time on the side of negativity: it is no longer a question of imitations but rather of molds; no longer a question of images, but of presence. The sculptor procures corpses on which he pours wax before exhibiting them, giving his morbid works a visible durability.27 The wax effigy has ceased to be a fiction and has begun to bear a certain kinship with the visitor to the museum (the viewer of the film). After the fire, Jarrod himself, possessed by his objects and disfigured by the flames, turns into a mold: hidden beneath the mask that imitates his lost features and takes the place of his face is a magma of formless flesh that looks like melted wax. When the mask bursts, the character’s identity disappears, following the lesson of the satyr who would appear on the tragic stage to reveal to the spectators, in a burst of laughter, that the subject was only an illusion and death a metaphor for representation. “Suffering creature, born for a day, child of accident and toil, why are you forcing me

25 “To stylize reality prior to tackling it amounts to dodging the problem. The problem consists in manipulating and shooting a non-stylized reality in such a way that the result has style” (Erwin Panofsky, “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures” [1936], Three Essays on Style, ed. Irving Levin, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995, p. 128). 26 Von Schlosser, History of Portraiture in Wax. 27 We find the same shift from wax imitation to wax imprinting in Roger Corman’s 1959 film A Bucket of Blood, only there in the context of beatnik culture.



138 

 Philippe-Alain Michaud

to say what is the most unpleasant thing for you to hear? The very best thing for you is totally unreachable: not to have been born, not to exist, to be nothing. The second best thing for you, however, is this: to die soon.”28 “To die soon”—in order to re-emerge as a figure, in the space of representation, which is reduced, in the quadrilateral space of the screen, to a mere arrangement of the surface closed on itself, whereby this closing on itself is the condition for the creation of fiction. For if the screen is the place where figures are actualized, it also functions as a cover. For a figure to appear on its surface, the corresponding body must disappear, by means of a kind of regressive dynamis that drives out of the visible what cannot be seen: this dialectic of appearance and disappearance is perhaps the last resort of an economy of projection.

28 Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, §3. The passage is inspired by Theognis, Elegy, 425–428: “The best lot of all for men is never to have been born nor seen the beams of the burning sun; this failing, to pass the gates of Hades as soon as one may, and lie under a goodly heap of earth.”



Georges Didi-Huberman

Torrents and Barricades1 The iconographic and static idea of images as pure ‘visual’ documents, or mere ‘illustrating things’, has for a long time now been overshadowed by the much more dynamic idea of images as potencies: images as potencies of gestures, of acts, or of historicities. In France, this idea runs through the works of Bergson, Bachelard, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Gilles Deleuze. It was developed in Germany, on another level, through the work of Aby Warburg, Walter Benjamin, and, later, Horst Bredekamp. This dynamic of images, which stems perhaps from ancient Lucretian materialism, cannot be understood today without a dynamic of time and of history in which these images unfold, unfurl, surge, ‘dance’, and endlessly question the stable order of things. This dynamic is, above all, a fluid dynamic. We could say, here, that time is conceived through the rhythms and unfurling of waves. Through gusts of wind and tempests, and so through uprisings of the world. What happens in an uprising? Suddenly, a time comes when time returns, and where time emerges. The wave then overflows, and the dykes burst. The flow of pure presence, the ebb of memories, and the flow once again, the flow that is already there of future potencies. Time “comes [by] running out” [“vient en venant à manquer”], as Jacques Derrida would say.2 It is loss with uprising: loss, forever, and uprising at once. Time really only comes when we no longer have the time for anything else: when the wave carries everything away. This is what Battleship Potemkin shows (among many other possible examples) through its preliminary mourning and its great wave of insurrection that flows directly from a collective lament (fig. 1). In the oceanic and continually pulsating prose of his Memoirs, Sergei Eisenstein sought to underline the crucial role of his early readings on the French Revolution: “It was especially in my early years that I became passionate about revolutions, and about French revolutions in particular. Of course, this was due to my fundamental romanticism.”3 Among the most important of these readings, of course, was Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, with its “romanticism of fighting and barricades”, as the filmmaker wrote. Concerning loss and uprising: in the chapter of Les Misérables entitled “A burial: opportunity for rebirth”, Victor Hugo tells how, in early June 1832, the death of Jean

1 Extract from a work in progress entitled Désirer désobéir. Ce qui nous soulève. This work is an attempt to extend, on the level of political iconology, the ‘morpho-dynamic’ hypotheses I proposed in Ninfa fluida. Essai sur le drapé-désir, Paris: Gallimard, 2015. 2 Jacques Derrida, “Penser ce qui vient,” Derrida pour les temps à venir [1994], ed. René Major, Paris: Stock, 2007, p. 25. 3 Georges Didi-Huberman, Peuples en larmes, peuples en armes. L’œil de l’histoire 6, Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2016, pp. 169–395; Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein, Mémoires [1946], trans. into French by Jacques Aumont, Michèle Bokanowski and Claude Ibrahimoff, Paris: Julliard, 1989, p. 69.

142 

 Georges Didi-Huberman

Fig. 1: Wave surging over an embankment. Still from the film Battleship Potemkin, dir. Sergei M. Eisenstein (1925).

Maximilien Lamarque—a 19-year-old volunteer in the French Revolution, fighting at Wagram, who had become an army general, then a leftist deputy—sparked a great wave of uprisings, from the funerary procession itself that carried his body through the boulevards and the “countless multitudes, strange and agitated” of Parisians. “This death was a mourning,” wrote Hugo. “Like everything which is bitter, mourning may turn into revolt. This is what happened.” Elsewhere he wrote: “Insurrection is sometimes resurrection.” As in the great mourning of Odessa created and filmed by Eisenstein much later, the tears of the Parisians from 1832 are described by Victor Hugo in terms of their intrinsic power to propagate: they invade the space entirely, like an immense flow of sadness in which anger begins to boil. We can understand this more clearly in the following context: since March 1832, a cholera epidemic had been claiming as many as a thousand lives a day in Paris, but the inhabitants of the proletarian areas were outraged when they discovered how they were incomparably more affected than the bourgeois in the rich neighborhoods. Everything erupted on June 5, 1832: The dominant expression on the uncovered foreheads of most of those present was one of subdued enthusiasm. Here and there in this multitude, a prey to so many violent, but noble, 



Torrents and Barricades 

 143

emotions, could be seen some genuine faces of malefactors and ignoble mouths, which said “pillage!” There are certain agitations which stir up the bottom of the marsh, and which make clouds of mud rise in the water. […] At that moment the dragoons and the multitude came together. The women fled in terror. What took place in that fatal moment? Nobody could tell. It was the dark moment when two clouds mingle. […] There are no more words, the tempest breaks loose, stones fall like hail, musketry bursts forth, many rush headlong down the bank and cross the little arm of the Seine now filled up, the yards of the Ile Louviers, that vast readymade citadel, bristle with combatants, they tear up stakes, they fire pistol-shots, a barricade is planned out, the young men crowded back, pass the Bridge of Austerlitz with the hearse at a run, and charge on the Municipal Guard, the carbineers rush up, the dragoons ply the sabre, the mass scatters in every direction, a rumour of war flies to the four corners of Paris, men cry: “To arms!” they run, they tumble, they fly, they resist. Wrath sweeps along the émeute as the wind sweeps along a fire.4

And thus, each person’s tears have contributed to a torrent or a general wave that will carry everything away. The wave is not ‘pure’ at all: its origins are multiple, and its waters mixed with rubble (or its fire, if fire it is, is mingled with slag). There is sadness and holy wrath, but also the revenge of the malefactors, all those “clouds of mud” that, in the general movement, rise to the surface. What is striking here, in Hugo’s description of the uprisings of 1832, is that the movement of the insurrectional wave has no scale, no border: it runs from the folds of the visceral or psychological world to the farthest horizons of the physical or sidereal world. It touches the depths of each person’s heart, and in all it deploys a formidable collective emotion. And finally— since Romanticism or the memory of Lucretius demands it—it acquires the infinite dimensions of urban geography, of the air we breathe and the atmospheric phenomena themselves: Of what is the émeute composed? of nothing and of everything. Of an electricity gradually evolved, of a flame suddenly leaping forth, of a wandering force, of a passing wind. This wind meets talking tongues, dreaming brains, suffering souls, burning passions, howling miseries, and sweeps them away. Whither? At hazard. Across the state, across the laws, across the prosperity and the insolence of others. […] Whoever feels in his soul a secret revolt against any act whatever of the state, of life or of fate, borders on the émeute, and, so soon as it appears, begins to shiver, and to feel himself uplifted by the whirlwind. The émeute is a sort of waterspout in the social atmosphere which suddenly takes form in certain conditions of temperature, and which, in its whirling, mounts, runs, thunders, tears up, razes, crushes, demolishes, uproots, dragging with it the grand natures and the paltry, the strong man and the feeble mind, the trunk of the tree and the blade of straw. Woe to him whom it sweeps away, as well as to him whom it comes to smite! It breaks them one against the other.

4 Victor Hugo, Les Misérables [1845–1862], trans. Charles E. Wilbour, New York: The Modern Library, Random House, 1992, pp. 918–919.



144 

 Georges Didi-Huberman

Fig. 2: Anonymous French, Le Torrent révolutionnaire, 1834. Engraving published in Le Charivari, Paris, Carnavalet Museum.

It communicates to those whom it seizes a mysterious and extraordinary power. It fills the first comer with the force of events; it makes projectiles of everything. […] They said: “How will it end?” From moment to moment, as night fell, Paris seemed coloured more dismally with the fearful flame of the émeute.5

Whether or not it seemed like a fire or a tempest to those living at the time, the social émeute lends itself to all combined allegorizings of natural propagation and destruction. It is a tradition that stems from 1789 and touches all kinds of images—learned or popular—as we see, for example, in the recent work by Rolf Reichardt and Hubertus Kohle entitled Visualizing the Revolution.6 Consequently, the nobility was ablaze in 1790, just as the bourgeoisie, in 1834, bore the full force—an image of this was published in Le Charivari—of the people’s ‘revolutionary torrent’, one that no dyke could withstand (fig. 2). This is because the people are an element before they are a ‘class’, as Victor Hugo seems to understand in Les Misérables, or as Jules Michelet

5 Ibid., pp. 908, 909, 926. 6 Rolf Reichardt and Hubertus Kohle, Visualizing the Revolution. Politics and the Pictorial Arts in Late Eighteenth-Century France, London: Reaktion Books, 2008, pp. 59, 235 and passim.





Torrents and Barricades 

 145

does in Le Peuple. Michelet the historian may have tried to avoid the poet’s lyricism (the uprising as a storm), but he could not prevent himself, as we read at the beginning of his Histoire de la Révolution française, from depicting his own story of the Paris insurrection, on July 12, 1789, in a state of ‘storminess’ out of which blossoms the psychological-atmospheric metaphor of stormy turmoil considered as torment: “It was stormy, heavy, dark, like an agitated and distressing dream, full of illusions, and of disorder…” Michelet comes full circle when he describes the tempests of La Mer as visceral “spasms”, and the spasms of La Femme as prodigious waves in which life is able to be born.7 It would be wrong for us to attempt to consider these waves of images—or these eruptions, these blazes of images—to be mere lyrical procedures with little sensitivity to the ‘real history’ of political insurrections. Romanticism is never so overwhelmingly powerful as when its lyrical freedom reaches the most profound morphological truth, that of the ‘original phenomenon’, according to Goethe, or Lucretian materialism, according to Hugo. Indeed, the image of the child Gavroche dying on the barricade is lyrical, but Hugo’s description of it opens into a material poetics of the barricade that extends to the time of Rosa Luxemburg, as Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre have managed to show in their remarkable work on ‘revolutionary romanticism’.8 And then? It might seem obvious that the age of (‘realist’) photography, by contrast, brought an end to this great (‘romantic’) poetization of political uprisings. Yet this is far from certain. The first photographic images of an uprising are the daguerreotypes created by Thibault above the Parisian barricades of the rue Saint-Maur, before and after the attack led by General Lamoricière on June 25 and 26, 1848. As with almost all daguerreotypes of this period, our vision is obstructed by both the shiny surface of the metal and the blurred areas created by overexposure. In the first image (fig. 3)—taken on the morning of June 25, at 7:30 a.m.—we can see clearly the two barricades with their piles of paving stones and overturned carts. We see the insurgents from behind on the second barricade, at the far end. The no man’s land is striking, as General Lamoricière’s troops have not yet engaged in their violent charge. All the shutters on the surrounding buildings are closed. In the image taken of the next day, after the attack, we see vaguely that the first barricade has been opened on the right-hand side. The street is filled with soldiers and onlookers. The shutters have been opened. We

7 Jules Michelet, Le Peuple [1846], ed. Paul Villaneix, Paris: Flammarion, 1974, passim; Jules Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution française [1847], ed. Gérard Walter, Paris: Gallimard, 1952, I, p.  134; Jules Michelet, La Femme [1859], ed. Thérèse Moreau, Paris: Flammarion, 1981, pp. 43–53. Jules Michelet, La Mer [1861], ed. Jean Borie, Paris: Gallimard, 1983, pp. 79–96. 8 Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre, L’Insurrection des Misérables. Romantisme et révolution en juin 1832 [1992a], Paris: Lettres modernes, 1992, passim; Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre, Révolte et mélancolie. Le Romantisme à contre-courant de la modernité [1992b], Paris: Payot, 1992, passim.



146 

 Georges Didi-Huberman

Fig. 3: Eugène Thibault, Barricade de la rue Saint-Maur après l’attaque des troupes du général Lamoricière, 26 juin 1848, 1848. Daguerreotype. Paris, Musée D’Orsay.

cannot see any dead bodies, although the repression of June 1848 reached the level of a wholesale massacre (fig. 3). Here, the photographic image appears, true to its nature, as a trace, in the combined ‘strength’ and ‘weakness’ assumed by any trace: it is both productive of material evidence (qua power to record) and of formal indecisions (qua subject to 



Torrents and Barricades 

 147

the numerous hazards of light-sensitive chemistry, exposure time, light and shadow, etc.—things that the engravers from L’Illustration, in early July 1848, sought to correct or to ‘clarify’, as Thierry Gervais recalled at the beginning of his history of visual information, when images were being reworked as much as the times themselves).9 What we see on the silver surface of Thibault’s daguerreotypes are only the ghosts of history—but history’s irrefutable ghosts, always capable of returning to haunt our historical consciousness. Ghosts in the sense of poriv, that mysterious, transporting burst of revolution according to Trotsky or, before him, of the Gespenst—that ‘specter haunting Europe’—as defined by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto.10 Like the ‘specter of communism’ invoked by Marx and Engels in that same year of 1848, the barricades that we see vaguely in the images by Thibault appear like waves: spectral waves of an uprising that, at the very moment in which it fails—in which it ends, or dies—already begins to transmit itself, to survive, to haunt from within its own mourning, all desires for uprisings that the future will engender. A barricade is a sort of embankment, a hastily rigged-up defensive system, designed to prevent the police or the army from advancing. But it is also a wave, a potency in motion. Éric Hazan suggests as much, moreover, at the beginning of his work entitled La Barricade: “The use of the streets as battlefields is perhaps as old as the cities themselves. And since the very first instances of urban combat, people have sought shelter by piling up whatever they could find around them, including planks, rubble, and chariots. But the barricade is not an ordinary entrenchment. As a pile of disparate objects, collected in the moment, it has a sort of virtue, which is the ability to spread…”11 Like a wave, the barricade rises, rises up, and falls in a dispersion of foam: it forms unexpectedly, powerfully, and disappears here in order to take shape again there. In this sense, it has its ebbs and flows, it batters all space, finally deconstructing from the inside all urban grids. It is therefore not only defensive but also offensive; it is not just a barrier but also a war machine. Hazan emphasizes that it was the revolutionary object par excellence. But its potency comes from the fact that it is not simply an object in the ordinary sense: rather, it is a perpetual montage of heterogenous objects forming systems—systems that can always be modified and that, in this way, make up something like an organism of uprising. Its etymology points to a ‘pile of barrels’ and to temporary bric-à-brac, rather than to a permanent territorial fortification. Barricades accompanied the Parisian people throughout the entire 19th century and were as necessary to them as the city’s cafés and guinguettes or cabarets,

9 L’Illustration, n° 279–280, July 1–8, 1848, p.  276. Thierry Gervais, La Fabrique de l’information visuelle. Photographies et magazines d’actualité, Paris: Textuel, 2015, pp. 21–23. 10 Leon Trotsky, 1905 [1909], trans. into French by Maurice Parijanine, Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1969, p. 177; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Le Manifeste communiste [1848], trans. into French by Maximilien Rubel and Louis Évrard, Philosophie, Paris: Gallimard, 1965–1982 (ed. 2014), p. 398. 11 Éric Hazan, La Barricade. Histoire d’un objet révolutionnaire, Paris: Éditions Autrement, 2013, p. 5.



148 

 Georges Didi-Huberman

as Miriam Simon has shown in the context of the immense collections of the Carnavalet Museum in Paris. The barricades, therefore, were to the streets of Paris what storm waves are to any wave-battered port. As Mark Traugott showed in his study The Insurgent Barricade, we can say that their function was essential to the entire political and cultural life— on both the imaginary and practical levels—of the Parisian people and their cyclical uprisings.12 We should not be surprised, therefore, to see that 20 years after the 1905 uprisings in Russia, Eisenstein continued to be passionate about the great iconographic works of Armand Dayot published by Flammarion in France at the end of the 19th century: the Journées révolutionnaires [de] 1830 [à] 1848, and L’Invasion, le siège, la Commune [en] 1870–1871.13 In these large, oblong albums, all figurative sources— paintings, drawings, photographs, newspaper cartoons, medals, manuscripts, and everyday objects—contributed to producing the multiform historical image of the great Parisian uprisings, beyond even the large iconographic kinds created by Delacroix, Courbet, Daumier, Meissonier, and Manet. One remarkable characteristic of these images is precisely their tumultuous or tempestuous aspect, for example where the smoke of the cannonades invades the space entirely, as in a maelstrom, or when multiple objects of all kinds rain down on the police brigades, with the possible satirical commentary—in a caricature worthy of Hogarth—“March of Swiss troops in heavy weather”. In an uprising, it is indeed all space that rises up and batters against what we might call, if we conceive of it as a meteorological phenomenon, “the forces of order” [les forces de l’ordre]. It is striking, in the context of the revolution of 1848—before the last barricades were photographed by Thibault (figs. 3–4)—that the political pamphlet Salut public, in the two issues from February 27 and March 1, should have, in an obvious manner and beyond any conformity of artistic genres, brought together realism and Romanticism in the persons of Gustave Courbet and Charles Baudelaire (fig. 5). Courbet drew the frontispiece, which some say was engraved by Antoine Fauchery, while others attribute it to Rodolphe Bresdin: it shows a barricade, a scene that could conjure up a variation on Liberty Leading the People by Delacroix. The character raising his flag and his rifle above the barricade could be interpreted as a political-compromise formation: the shirt is that of a worker, but the hat is bourgeois (from the complexity shown in the minimal fashion in this image, Timothy J. Clark studied all the political

12 Mark Traugott, “Les barricades dans les insurrections parisiennes: rôles sociaux et modes de fonctionnement,” La Barricade, eds. Alain Corbin and Jean-Marie Mayeur, Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1997, pp. 71–81; Mark Traugott, The Insurgent Barricade, Berkeley–Los Angeles–London: University of California Press, 2010. 13 Armand Dayot, Journées révolutionnaires: 1830–1848. D’après des peintures, sculptures, dessins, lithographies, médailles, autographes, objets… du temps [1897], Paris: Flammarion, 1897; Armand Dayot, L’Invasion, le siège, la Commune: 1870–1871.  D’après des peintures, gravures, photographies, sculptures, médailles, autographes, objets du temps, Paris: Flammarion, 1901.





Torrents and Barricades 

 149

Fig. 4: Eugène Thibault, Barricade de la rue Saint-Maur avant l’attaque des troupes du général Lamoricière, 25 juin 1848, 1848. Daguerreotype. Paris, Musée D’Orsay.

and aesthetic tensions of the period in his two classic studies, Image of the People and The Absolute Bourgeois, the first chapter of which is aptly entitled “The Picture of the Barricades”).14 For his part, Baudelaire—not yet 27 at the time—simply exclaimed: “Vive la République!” He exclaimed with enthusiasm: “People! You are there, always present…” He showed confidence “in the leaders of the provisional government”. And he invoked love: “[The people] love those who love them. Therefore, don’t worry…” He railed against the destruction of mechanical presses by “some misguided brothers”: “Anything mechanical is sacred like a work of art.” He accepted the toppling of symbols of power but condemned vandalism against what he called ‘the products of the intellect’. An uprising, in his opinion, could not simply be a clean slate: Baudelaire rec-

14 Timothy J. Clark, The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France 1848–1851 [1973a], Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999, pp. 9–30; Timothy J. Clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution [1973b], London: Thames and Hudson, 1982.



150 

 Georges Didi-Huberman

Fig. 5: Gustave Courbet, Charles Baudelaire, Champfleury and Charles Toubin, Le Salut public, no. 2, March 1st, 1848, p. 1.

ognized better than anyone the link between desire—and particularly the desire for liberty—and memory.15 He paid homage, also, to the “painters [who] bravely cast themselves into the Revolution”, but stated that the “beauty of the People”, which he saw at every street corner in the outpouring of the insurrection, lay outside any aesthetic canon: “A free man, whoever he is, is more handsome than marble…” From April to June 1848, Baudelaire wrote lengthy pieces for the Tribune nationale, organe des intérêts

15 Charles Baudelaire, “Textes pour Le Salut public” [1848a], Œuvres complètes, II, ed. C. Pichois, Paris: Gallimard, 1976, pp. 1028–1039.





Torrents and Barricades 

 151

de tous les citoyens, in particular, a program regarding the “Means proposed for the improvement of the workers’ condition”.16 How strange, in this light, the cruel prose poem from the collection Spleen de Paris entitled “Assommons les pauvres!” (“Let’s clobber the poor!”) must seem. Yet it is only strange to the uninformed reader: if there is despair and violence in this later poem, it is firstly due to disillusionment with the books written by professional politicians, those “books that deal with the art of making people happy, wise, and rich, in twenty-four hours”. If the poet shows himself in the immoral act of beating a beggar, it is for the “satisfaction”, he claims, of being beaten in turn, thereby creating a principle of equality, but also something like an ethics of the freedom still to be won within existing social relations: “Only the one who can conquer freedom is worthy of freedom.” Spleen de Paris must be entirely reread in light of this political cruelty, which is illustrated perfectly in a sketch of a prose poem on civil war: (For Civil War) The canon thunders… limbs fly… the groans of the victims and the howls of those performing the sacrifice… This is Humanity in search of happiness.17

We can better understand what Walter Benjamin must have found fascinating about Baudelaire—on both the ethical and political levels, when the poet of Spleen de Paris seems to become ‘detached’ from the mass, just where Hugo or Michelet blended in— by taking account of the indelible imprint left on him by the events of 1848.18 Among the numerous works on the subject—those, for example, of Jules Mouquet entitled Baudelaire en 1848, or, more recently, Politiques de Baudelaire by Pierre Laforgue— the studies by Dolf Oehler brilliantly develop Benjamin’s analysis by focusing on a recognition of dialectical images of history and, above all, on an understanding of ‘spleen’ itself as a memory of the political rather than its forgetting. “The massacre of the Parisian insurgents in 1848,” writes Oehler, “shook the destiny of France and of Europe,” and “its memory is nonetheless lost by seeping into thousands of texts”: against this forgetting, even in its intrinsic cruelty Baudelairian lyricism reopened history, like a ‘return of the repressed’.19

16 Charles Baudelaire, “Textes pour La Tribune nationale” [1848b], Œuvres complètes, II, ed. Claude Pichois, Paris: Gallimard, 1976, pp. 1040–1059. 17 Charles Baudelaire, “Le Spleen de Paris” [1869], Œuvres complètes, I, ed. Claude Pichois, Paris: Gallimard, 1975, pp. 357–359, 371. 18 Walter Benjamin, “Le Paris du Second Empire chez Baudelaire,” trans. into French by J. Lacoste, Charles Baudelaire, un poète lyrique à l’apogée du capitalisme [1938], Paris: Payot, 1982, p. 98. 19 Jules Mouquet and William Thomas Bandy, Baudelaire en 1848. La Tribune nationale, Paris: Éditions Émile-Paul, 1946; Pierre Laforgue, Politiques de Baudelaire. Huit études, Paris: Eurédit, 2014, pp. 75–92. Dolf Oehler, Pariser Bilder I (1830–1848); Antibourgeoise Ästhetik bei Baudelaire, Daumier und Heine, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1979; Dolf Oehler, Le Spleen contre l’oubli. Baudelaire,



152 

 Georges Didi-Huberman

In Victor Hugo’s Choses vues, there is, on the fateful day of June 25, 1848, a ‘barricade scene’ that is so incredible, so unbelievable, that it never found its proper place in Les Misérables, nor elsewhere in his novels. It defies fiction. Only a madman, or a psychoanalyst, could find its allegorical value. It is so extreme, so horrific—particularly in the link that is described between sex and death—that it remains frozen in its single frame as a real-life account. It is a close-up of the barricades of 1848 that Thibault, with his focusing device and general shot, was incapable of creating. Choses vues, things seen: what Victor Hugo saw, at an impossible to imagine distance, on that day—like Goya, 30 years earlier, who wrote in the margins of one or two of his Disasters: “yo lo ví” (“I saw it”)—were two women on the barricade who dared to defy the army with their exposed bellies and genitals. The power of desire against the power to kill. But they were killed: The June insurrection, from the first day on, presented strange features. It revealed suddenly, to a terrified society, monstrous and unknown forms. The first barricade was erected on the morning of Friday, [June] 23, at the Porte Saint-Denis; it was attacked the same day. The attack was carried out by battalions from the First and Second legions. When the assailants, who arrived along the boulevard, were within range, a formidable volley was fired from the barricade and scattered national guards onto the ground. The National Guard, more irritated than intimidated, charged the barricade. At that moment, a woman appeared on the crest of the barricade, a young woman, beautiful, dishevelled, terrible. This woman, who was a prostitute, pulled her dress up to her waist and screamed at the national guards, in that awful language of the lupanar that one must always translate: “Cowards! Shoot, if you dare, at the belly of a woman!” Here, the affair became dreadful. The National Guard did not hesitate. A volley brought the miserable woman down. She fell with a great cry. There was a silence of horror in the barricade and among the assailants. Suddenly a second woman appeared. This woman was younger and even more beautiful; she was almost a child, only around seventeen years old. What depth of misery! She too was a prostitute. She raised her dress, and shouted: “Shoot, brigands!” They shot. She fell riddled with bullets upon the first woman. It is thus that this war began.20

This text is no doubt a cut-off point. It is no longer a question of ‘realism’ or of ‘Romanticism’. But elsewhere, everything happened as though poetic liberty in the face of history released, with respect to political freedom itself, a mode of survival that could exist beyond the vicissitudes—and first of all the failures—of the uprisings of 1830, 1848, or 1871. And it is here that the barricade appears, more than ever, like an imaginary horizon line—beyond a merely tactical one—of urban uprisings. The 1848

Flaubert, Heine, Herzen [1988], trans. into French by Guillaume Petitdemange and Sabine Cornille, Paris: Payot, 1996, pp. 11–22, 52–61, 283–334. 20 Victor Hugo, Choses vues. Souvenirs, journaux, cahiers [1830–1885], ed. Hubert Juin, Paris: Gallimard, 1972 (updated edition, 2002), pp. 566–567.





Torrents and Barricades 

 153

Fig. 6: Édouard Manet, Guerre civile, 1871. Lithograph. Paris, Bibliotèque nationale de France, prints and drawings department.

revolution can be recounted by referring only to the descriptions of the movements of its barricades, as is the case in the anonymous leaflet of 29 pages entitled Les Barricades de juin 1848, or in the description given by Mark Traugott of the same hostilities in his book Armies of the Poor.21 But Victor Hugo in Les Misérables, or Heinrich Heine in De la France22—who wished to describe the ‘thunder’ of the uprising triggered by the funeral of General Lamarque in 1832—launched a fundamental ‘poetic-historical’ tradition that we find in its full splendor at the time of the Paris Commune. In 1848, it was Gustave Courbet and Charles Baudelaire. In 1871, it was Édouard Manet—who provided some remarkable images of the barricades (fig. 6), not to mention the valuable accounts in his correspondence—and Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud, for whom the phrase ‘Je est un autre’ (from the famous “Letter of the Seer” written to Georges Izambard on May 13, 1871) goes hand in hand with the assertion regarding a common cause formed spontaneously with the Paris insurrection and the idea of a poetry that would not only “give a rhythm to the action” but would also place

21  Les Barricades de juin 1848. Récit des événements des 23, 24, 25 et 26 juin d’après les journaux les mieux renseignés et les documents les plus authentiques, Paris: E. Brière, s.d. [1848]; Mark Traugott, Armies of the Poor. Determinants of Working-Class Participation in the Parisian Insurrection of June 1848, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. 22 Heinrich Heine, De la France [1832], eds. Gerhard Höhn and Bodo Morawe, Paris: Gallimard, 1994, pp. 184–187.



154 

 Georges Didi-Huberman

itself “at the fore”.23 Even the Catholic aristocrat Villiers de l’Isle-Adam became the surveyor, in shock and awe, of the barricades of the Commune.24 These were opportunities, for all these witnesses, to feel themselves carried along by the torrent of history: opportunities to experience that uprising of emotions that would ultimately survive the military and political failure of the Commune, as Kristin Ross has shown in her work on Rimbaud and in L’Imaginaire de la Commune.25 It would seem that during this period a reciprocal movement of attraction continuously arose between lyricism and politics, between poetic flourishes and uprisings. On the one hand, Rimbaud wanted to be “at the forefront of the action”. But, at the same time, Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray, a direct participant in the events of 1871, let fly somewhat lyrical illuminations from his chronicle about his participation in the ‘revolutionary torrent’. Like Hugo before him or like Eisenstein after him, he began by examining the mysterious links that form between mourning and rebellion, and between loss and uprising: In order to give its defenders their rightful funeral, the Commune called upon the people. On the 6th [of April 1871], at two o’clock, a crowd ran to the Beaujon hospice where the dead were lying with their faces uncovered. Mothers, wives, bent over the corpses, cried out in fury and vengeance. Three catafalques, each containing thirty-five coffins, enveloped in black veils, adorned with red flags, pulled by eight horses, rolled slowly towards the grand boulevards, to the sounds of bugles and Les Vengeurs de Paris. Delescluze and five members of the Commune, bareheaded and wearing a red scarf, led the mourning procession. Behind them, the parents of the victims, today’s widows supported by those of tomorrow. Thousands and thousands, wearing the immortelle flower in their buttonholes, marched silently to the muffled beat of the drums. A dull music broke out from time to time like an involuntary explosion of pain that was too difficult to contain. On the grand boulevards were two hundred thousand, and one hundred thousand pale faces looked at the crossroads. Women wept, and many faltered. This sacred route of the Revolution, the bed of so much pain and so many celebrations, has rarely seen such an enflaming of hearts.26

L’Histoire de la Commune is thus presented both as a detailed chronicle and a chaotic montage of visions, or ‘shots’, that say a great deal about it through the very fact of their arising, along with their intensity, cruelty, and incongruity. Like the horse that Eisenstein shows stumbling in October, that of Adolphe Assi, in Lissagaray’s book “refuses to move: it has just slipped in large pools of blood”. Like the young woman

23 Arthur Rimbaud, “Lettres dites du voyant,” Poésies. Une Saison en enfer. Illuminations [1871], ed. Louis Forestier, Paris: Gallimard, 1965 (ed. 1999), pp. 83–94. 24 Auguste de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Tableau de Paris sous la Commune [1871], Pantin: Sao Maï, 2008, pp. 49–84. 25 Kristin Ross, Rimbaud, la Commune de Paris et l’invention de l’histoire spatiale [1988], trans. into French by Christine Vivier, Paris: Les Prairies ordinaires, 2013; Kristin Ross, L’Imaginaire de la Commune, trans. into French by Étienne Dobenesque, Paris: La Fabrique Éditions, 2015. 26 Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray, Histoire de la Commune de 1871 [1876], Paris: La Découverte, 1990 (ed. 2000), pp. 205–206.





Torrents and Barricades 

 155

in the same scene in October, “a young nineteen-year-old girl […], rosy-cheeked and charming, with black curls, fought all day long. A bullet in her forehead killed her dream.” Lissagaray would look also, tenderly, at how “the defenders of the barricades slept on their pavestones”. At the intersection of the Boulevard Voltaire and the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, he saw the efficient chaos of a barricade “made up of barrels, pavestones, and large balls of paper”. At Place Blanche he lauded the ‘women’s barricade’, showing the same attention to their courageous energy that Eisenstein, much later, was to give to the ‘mourners at Odessa’.27 When such tragic accents as these begin to mark the rhythm of the chronology of the factual account and the political analysis, it is as though a new literary genre were born: a journalistic lyricism that would continue, at least, until the Spanish Civil War. For the time being, it was Jules Vallès, the politically engaged journalist of the Commune—studied in Roger Bellet’s great book Jules Vallès journaliste28—who set the tone for the barricades’ surroundings: The member of the Commune is standing, his back against the edge of the barricade. His forehead is seen above the stones, and the bullets encircle him like a halo that is beginning to shrink. […] We have one piece served by the silent, valiant artillerymen. One of them is barely more than twenty years old, his hair the colour of wheat, his eyes the colour of blueberries. He blushes like a young girl, when he is complimented on the precision of his shots. […] The blond-haired gunner has cried out. A bullet has hit his forehead and looks like a black eye between his two blue eyes. —We are lost! Save yourselves!29

Louise Michel, who was imprisoned on the night of the Commune, and then deported to New Caledonia for almost ten years, mingled her own ‘memories’ with this grand ‘history’ in an extraordinary book that opens with a prison song (Chanson de prison) that she composed in May 1871: When the crowd, silent today, Will like the ocean roar, When ready to die it will be, Then will the Commune rise up. We will return, a countless crowd, We will come from every path, Vengeful spectres from out of the shadows.

27 Ibid., pp. 313, 324, 326, 329, 343, 355. 28 Roger Bellet, Jules Vallès journaliste: du Second Empire, de la Commune de Paris et de la IIIe République, 1857–1885 [1977], Paris: Les Éditeurs français réunis, 1977 (reprinted as Jules Vallès: journalisme et révolution, 1857–1885, Tusson, Éditions du Lérot, 1987), pp. 369–401. 29 Jules Vallès, L’Insurgé (Jacques Vingtras, III) [1886], ed. Marie-Claire Bancquart, Paris: Gallimard, 1975 (ed. 2009), pp. 320–323.



156 

 Georges Didi-Huberman

(Quand la foule aujourd’hui muette, Comme l’Océan grondera, Qu’à mourir elle sera prête, La Commune se lèvera. Nous reviendrons, foule sans nombre, Nous viendrons par tous les chemins, Spectres vengeurs sortant de l’ombre.)30

Louise Michel’s book La Commune is shot through with great losses and great uprisings. It talks of tempests that are sometimes liberating, sometimes catastrophic; it talks of “effluvia”, of “cyclones”, of “revolutionary torments”. At Victor Noir’s burial— as was the case at the funeral of General Lamarque before him, and that of the sailor Vakulenchuk after him—Louise Michel saw “death pass by on the air” and, at the same time, she saw desire rising up beyond every loss: “We could already see the triumphant republic”, she said amidst the crowd in mourning. The great hopes of the “vengeful spectres” evoked in the anarchist song were described by Louise Michel as an immense wave or surge. “The popular swell rose up everywhere; its tide beat the banks of the old world; it roared near us and could also be heard from afar.” And this to the desired point of an uprising of international scale, in a chapter that Louise Michel wanted to call “Soulèvements par le monde pour la liberté” (“Uprisings of the world on behalf of freedom”), where the spirit of Bakunin clearly resonates, but under the political marquee of the great Victor Hugo: Sound, sound forever, clarions of thought (Victor Hugo) There were, throughout the world, in 71, great uprisings of ideas. A tempest wind scattered them, and they ramified, growing in the shadows and through the cutting of throats they are today in bloom; their fruit will come. Around 70, before, afterwards, always, until the transformation of the world is achieved, the attraction to the true ideal continues. Can we prevent the Spring from coming, even if we cut down all the forests of the world? Around 70, Cuba, Greece, and Spain claimed freedom: everywhere, slaves shook their chains, and the Indies, like today, rose up for freedom. Hearts rose, thirsting for the ideal: while the most ruthless masters armed their unconscious packs, driving them after the human prey, always drowned in blood, the rebellion never ceased to be reborn; everywhere was a tide that rose towards the new and higher level, which was always within view though not yet reached.31

It would be easy, from the point of view of philosophical soundness, to mock the ideal found in the sentence “until the transformation of the world is achieved”. Does

30 Louise Michel, La Commune. Histoire et souvenirs [1898], Paris: La Découverte-Syros, 1999 (ed. 2012), p. 13. 31 Ibid., pp. 19, 38, 115, 174.





Fig. 7: Barricade of paving stones. Still from the film Cinétracts, dir. Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais and Chris Marker (1968).

Torrents and Barricades 

 157

Fig. 8: Explosions in the night. Still from the film Cinétracts, dir. Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais and Chris Marker (1968).

the transformation of the world not need to be perpetual and, therefore, perpetually unachieved? When she wrote these lines, Louise Michel must have known better than anyone that the 1871 Commune, like so many other uprisings, had ended in bloody repression and large-scale massacre. Yes, the Communards lost: it was a crushed uprising. But the energy of this text tells us something else: that loss is still uprising; that mourning is already movement when the desire for freedom glows, beats, or makes noise—something for which this text, albeit written under the sign of nonpower, is both the wave and the potency. It is as though the dismantled barricades in the streets of Paris were rising up again in the imagination and desire of the reader that Louise Michel was addressing. Thus, every page of this book is capable of making a tiny barricade—so thin and fragile, yet profuse and multipliable to the point of becoming thick—a tiny barricade that will call upon future barricades: those of the Spartacists in Berlin in 1919 (where some were made of newspapers, as we can see from Willy Römer’s photographs), or those of the anarchists in Barcelona from 1936 to 1937 (admirably documented, along with their day-to-day production, by Agustí Centelles), or else those of the students in Paris in 1968 (figs. 7–8). Today, it is entire squares—Tahrir in Cairo, Maidan in Kiev— that can become immense barricades, and form both connections between the insurgents and blockades against the forces of order. Like the hundreds of farmers’ tractors on the motorways, or the strategies used by hackers to block forced flows and unblock what is sealed, so that the wave of censored information rushes in …



Emmanuel Alloa

‘Just Terror’ The Visual Communication of ISIS

The Return of the Real? In 2005, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who was at the time Al-Qaeda’s second in command, addressed the movement’s leader in Iraq, Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, in the following terms: “I say to you that we are in a battle, and that more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media.”1 One of the greatest misunderstandings in recent history is the idea that, with the phenomenon of suicide bombers, reality has finally overtaken virtuality: that the screen of simulacra with which the Hollywood dream factory has encircled us has been breached once and for all by individuals ready to use their own bodies as weapons. In yet another rush to judgment, we were told that terrorist attacks sounded the death knell of postmodernism, which met its brutal end on September 11, 2001. It has been said that the attack on the Twin Towers in New York (fig. 1) consigned the reign of simulation to the history books and ushered in the famous ‘return of the real’ announced by Hal Forster.2 After decades of being inundated by the image-machine with disaster movies that offered the thrill of make-believe fear, suddenly the most extreme scenarios have been outstripped by reality. For a Western society that had ceased to believe in its own representations and in the matrix of its simulacra, those fanatical suicide bombers performed more or less the role played by the first Christian martyrs during the Roman Empire: whatever cause these people believe in, thought their contemporaries, it must be pretty powerful if they are ready to lose their lives for it. And yet there is something fundamentally mistaken in this judgment. If we take this return of real destruction at the heart of the generalized economy of images—the irruption of death in real time, so to speak—as the final farewell to the society of the spectacle, we are completely failing to register the mechanism underpinning such acts. Even today, however, it is still difficult or even prohibited to speak of an ‘aesthetic’ of extreme violence. Jean Baudrillard knew all about this, having analyzed the attacks of 9/11 (“the absolute event, the ‘mother’ of all events”) in terms of his purely

1 Letter from Al-Zawahiri to Al-Zarqawi, press release from the Director of National Intelligence in the United States, October 11, 2005, www.dni.gov/release_letter_101105.html. 2 Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996.

160 

 Emmanuel Alloa

Fig. 1: World Trade Center, September 11, 2001, New York.

imaginal logic, as a sequence of images endlessly repeated in a loop.3 This was taken as proof that the theoretician of postmodernism, who famously claimed in 1991 that “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place”, had completely failed to understand the page that had just turned (leaving aside his purported lack of empathy for the victims). The same accusations were leveled at all the artists and intellectuals who emphasized the ‘spectacle’ element in the collapse of the Twin Towers, such as the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, who saw these attacks as a ‘work of art’, or Boris Groys, who described Osama Bin Laden as a ‘video artist’.4 The indignation is understandable: this spectacular maneuver cost thousands of people their lives. Nevertheless, to argue that what was inaugurated on September 11, 2001 was a new reign of immediate, barebones reality would be a major mistake. Once again, it is to fall for a construction that is as comfortable as it is simplistic, with the modern (or rather postmodern) society of the spectacle on one side, organized along countless surfaces of projection, and on the other a raw reality that smashes through the screen.

3 Jean Baudrillard, “L’esprit du terrorisme” (2001), The Spirit of Terrorism and Other Essays, trans. Chris Turner, London: Verso, 2002. 4 Karlheinz Stockhausen in a press conference, September 16, 2011 in Hamburg (The full text can be found in MusikTexte 91 (2002), pp. 69–77, p. 77); Boris Groys, “The Fate of Art in the Age of Terror,” Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, eds. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, Cambridge: MIT Press 2005, pp. 970–977.





‘Just Terror’ 

 161

Jacques Derrida, who took issue with Baudrillard on a number of points, and notably in a public debate on the Iraq War in 2003,5 understood perfectly how dangerous such a reading of events could be. In line with his argument that terrorism was the result of an autoimmune pathology, Derrida stressed the fact that if the attack on 9/11 was so frightening for the West, it was because it was entirely a product of the West itself, and because it used the weapons of the West against the West. In this sense, it was an act of violence by modernity against modernity, and not of violence from the outside. The attacks on the World Trade Center were interpreted in terms of its imaginary by the victims (many of the survivors have said they felt like they were ‘in a film’), but the perpetrators drew on that same imaginary. From this point of view, there is no difference between the attacks on the Twin Towers orchestrated by Al-Qaeda and the more recent communications strategies employed by Daesh. And yet, how many times have we heard it said that Daesh is antithetical to all things Western, allegedly advocating a return to an archaic order? The barbaric vision, with its scaffolds and decapitations, is strangely familiar: if it must be seen as medieval, then it comes across more as a kind of macabre medieval reality show. Insofar as these spectacular acts are intended to make a strong impression, their power is as real as it is virtual. That is why hyperrealism is not external to the aesthetic but represents one of its possible forms. The importance of the aesthetico-sensitive dimension is something that the cadres of Al-Qaeda had already grasped, as we can gather from Ayman al-Zawahiri’s 2005 remark about the ‘the battlefield of the media’. But in ten years, from Al-Qaeda to Daesh, the progression has been stunning. We are a long way from the time when all we were allowed to see was the pixelated sequence shots put out by Al Jazeera, complete with preaching in an often hieratic tone. During those years, what was merely the Iraqi branch of Al-Qaeda was renamed: after the killing of Al-Zarqawi by targeted American bombs in 2006, the group became the Islamic State in Iraq (ISI). However, it only really began making headlines in 2013 when, with the help of former intelligence officers from the Saddam Hussein regime, its lightning campaign conquered large swaths of Iraq and Syria, leading to the proclamation of an Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS, or ISIL: Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant), the Arabic language acronym for which is Daesh. There is no need to labor the point: just as the Holy Roman Empire was, according to Voltaire, neither Roman nor holy, so the Islamic State is not a state and its Islamicness is dubious. But, of course, none of that matters. What the multiplication of names and the variety of acronyms does do, however, is complicate another, crucial side of things: the brand image needs to be perfectly recognizable, and communicable by the different media.

5 Jean Baudrillard and Jacques Derrida, Pourquoi la guerre aujourd’hui?, ed. René Major, Paris: Lignes, 2015.



162 

 Emmanuel Alloa

In this respect, there is no avoiding the effort Daesh has put into its communication strategies. Several witnesses have confirmed that the governing body of the Islamic State attaches the greatest importance to communicating its message via audiovisual media, and grants substantial privileges to members working in its media departments.6 One of these departments, the Al-Hayat Media Center, produced the videos that have made the group famous. Their format is exactly that of an MTV radio edit: 3 minutes, 30 seconds. From the rolling news networks, they borrow the technique of the ticker, as well as that of the window with live commentary. Using lavish resources, including multi-angle cameras, shot and reverse shot, and a soundtrack made up of anasheed (religious chants), the Al-Hayat Media Center repeats the same mantra, in a loop: believing in images is a sin. In one of the propaganda videos, put out on February 26, 2015, an IS fighter comments on the ongoing destruction of the archeological treasures in Mosul, Iraq, explaining that “The prophet Muhammad orders us to smash and destroy the statues.”7 The logic underpinning this communications apparatus is straightforward: the point is to combat the society of spectacle with the society of spectacle’s own weapons.

Filling the Frame: The Blinding Screen The images of the destruction of the Baalshamin Temple in Palmyra, in August 2015 (fig. 2), follow the principles of the Hollywood blockbuster: representational, referential logic shatters and is replaced by the abstract mushroom cloud of the explosion. The action is meant to be total, to saturate the picture plane and make the order of representation implode in favor of a kind of negative sublime. The whole screen is covered with another screen, one of smoke. Viewers must be dazzled, to the point of complete blindness. This is a ‘flash’, in every sense of the word, in which the representational regime is pulverized in a single instant, itself documented by a symbolic snapshot. It is a textbook demonstration of the power of showing in its pure state: as it happens, the power of showing is displayed precisely when there is nothing more to be shown, because the slate is wiped clean. Kickback: where Hollywood once borrowed its terms from military jargon—a blockbuster was originally a kind of bomb, used during WWII, that was capable of taking out an entire block of houses at once—

6 Abu Hajer al-Maghribi, a former IS camera operator, told The Washington Post he had been paid $700 per month, i.e. seven times more than the typical fighter, for his work (Greg Miller and Souad Mekhennet, “Inside the Surreal World of the Islamic State’s Propaganda Machine,” The Washington Post, November 20, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/inside-theislamic-states-propaganda-machine/2015/11/20/051e997a-8ce6-11e5-acff-673ae92ddd2b_story.html). 7 Propaganda video, published February 26, 2015, commenting on the destruction of the architectural treasures in Mosul, Iraq.





‘Just Terror’ 

 163

Fig. 2: Destruction of the Baalshamin Temple, August 23, 2015. Palmyra, Syria.

the movie industry now inspires military actions whose staging, thanks to social media, is disseminated worldwide.8 In terms of execution, these videos bear comparison with the expensive publicity shorts produced by the US Army, given their cleverly calculated dramaturgy, their sound engineering, and their camerawork, which makes use of drones, split screens, and 360° cameras (which Daesh, along with the porn industry, pioneered). The other production unit, Al-Furan Media, goes so far as to make proficient feature-length films, such as Clanging of the Swords IV. Produced in the grand style of film industry, with complex pre- and post-production, aerial shots, and a host of special effects, these films have numerous parallels with famous Western blockbusters, and even with Kathryn Bigelow’s film about the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, Zero Dark Thirty (2013). Just as one could read Bigelow’s film as part of an attempt to subvert the power of a global icon (so much so that Bin Laden’s remains were not even allowed the honor of a proper burial), so Al-Furqan Media seems to be aiming to fill the place of the place of Bin Laden’s effective communication methods, deplored by the US Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, in 2007: “It is just plain embarrassing that Al-Qaeda is better at communicating its message on the internet than America. As one foreign diplomat

8 On blockbuster logic in the general dramaturgy of terror, cf. Laurent de Sutter, Théorie du kamikaze, Paris: PUF, 2016, pp. 21–23.



164 

 Emmanuel Alloa

asked a couple of years ago, ‘How has one man in a cave managed to out-communicate the world’s greatest communication society?’”9 Here again, the very idea of the ‘man in a cave’ and the archaism associated with this image is misleading. Such was already the case for Al-Qaeda and is even more so for Daesh. Following his liberation, the journalist and former hostage Nicolas Hénin explained that his captors “have little to do with the local culture—Arab or Muslim culture”: they play the same video games as our children, they watch the same films as we do, from the Teletubbies to the Simpsons and Game of Thrones. These people are “products of our culture, our world”.10 For Nicolas Hénin, the essential element is to be found in the marketing dimension: Daesh has made “jihad a product of globalization”.11 All social media tools can play a role, and Twitter has a crucial one in this third generation of asymmetric warfare, which Gilles Kepel described as ‘3G jihadism’.12 Donald Rumsfeld, who was the US Secretary of Defense at the time, is to be credited with having observed this profound mutation that was starting to take place in 2006: “Our enemies have skillfully adapted to fighting wars in today’s media age.”13 There are downloadable smartphone apps that look like harmless software for teaching children to read Arabic, but that teach words such as ‘gun,’ ‘rocket’ and ‘tank’ (to give just a few examples). The climate of violence is subtly maintained via references to the world of video games, but also, of course, via the beheading films for which Daesh is notorious. Much has been said and written about these ultra-violent videos. Their style has been analyzed, their message interpreted, their effectiveness questioned (before the group splintered from the authority of Al-Qaeda, Ayman Al-Zawahiri had tried to ban them, fearing they would be counter-productive). They have been compared to certain TV series, such as Game of Thrones, and to other products of the West’s optical unconscious.14 But beyond the brutal tweets and the shock videos, the Islamic

9 Robert Gates, Robert M. Landon Lecture, Kansas State University, November 26, 2007, http:// archive.defense.gov/Speeches/Speech.aspx?SpeechID=1199. 10 Lucy Williams, “Islamic State ex-hostage Henin: Asking for pity is stupid,” BBC News, March 9, 2015, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-31806085. 11 Nicolas Hénin, Djihad Academy. Nos erreurs face à l’Etat islamique, Paris: Fayard, 2015, p. 219. 12 One episode in particular gives an idea of the importance of Twitter in Daesh’s communicational economy: in September 2014, Al-Mousra Al-Maqdissia, a group affiliated to the Islamic State in Israel, directly threatened Twitter after several caliphate-related accounts were closed down. 13 Donald H. Rumsfeld, “War in the Information Age,” Los Angeles Times, February 23, 2006, http:// articles.latimes.com/2006/feb/23/opinion/oe-rumsfeld23. 14 I will mention only a small number of the numerous studies: Simone M. Friis, “‘Beyond anything we have ever seen’: beheading videos and the visibility of violence in the war against ISIS,” International Affairs 91, no. 4 (2015), pp.  725–746; Steven T. Zech and Zane M. Kelly, “Off with their Heads: The Islamic State and Civilian Beheadings,” Journal of Terrorism Research 6, no. 2 (2015), pp.  83–84; Charlie Winter, The Virtual ‘Caliphate’: Understanding Islamic State’s Propaganda Strategy, London: Quilliam, 2015; John Staal, “Empire and Its Double: The Many Pavilions of the Islamic State,” e-flux 65





‘Just Terror’ 

 165

State also puts out a whole array of often underestimated publications. The Al-Hayat Media Center is known to publish about a 12 periodicals in several regional and international languages (Dār-al-Islām is published in French, for example, plate XXI), and their circulation is considerable, reaching well beyond the territories occupied by ISIS. Among these periodicals and magazines, one is of particular interest to us here: Dabiq, which began publication in 2014. Some ill-informed commentators have seen this publication as no more than a periodical with “poor” content and “clumsily written and badly structured” texts.15 On the contrary, it is an extraordinary example of Daesh’s mastery of the media, and a textbook example for analyzing its visual communication strategy.

Dabiq: The Strategy of Polarization Dabiq was one of ISIS’s main press outlets. Available in Arabic, English, German and French, this visually slick magazine went from containing some 20 pages to around a 100 pages per issue in its heyday. The content was varied: information on the different fronts where ISIS was fighting, photojournalism, history lessons, and interviews with jihadists, but also articles promoting the services that the organization claimed to provide, whether in health care or education. After the 16th issue in 2016, no further issues were released, and the contents of the publication were transferred to ISIS’s other magazine, Rumiyah, leaving commentators to speculate on the reason for its discontinuation. Some commentators see it as a consequence of ISIS losing control of Dabiq in northern Syria, since after all, Dabiq is first and foremost the name of a small town 40 kilometers northeast of Aleppo. According to a certain hadith rediscovered by ISIS, Dabiq has great symbolic significance: the town is said to mark the site of a decisive final battle with the infidel forces from the West, the malahim or Armageddon, where the fate of the world will be decided. While historically pointing to this legendary battle, the magazine Dabiq thus also pointed toward the future. Even if the organization of ISIS has been dramatically weakened on a military level, forcing it to change its structure and disperse into smaller cells, what remains to be understood is the ideological content, which has lost none of its topicality. Dabiq remains one of the most useful probes in that respect. As a matter of fact, the aim of the magazine was to hasten this eschatological confrontation, so to speak, just as the many attacks carried out in the heart of Western societies are meant to provoke an authoritarian

(2015), http://bit.ly/2baLbHt; Judith Tinnes, “Although the (Dis-)Believers Dislike it: A Backgrounder on IS Hostage Videos—August–December 2014,” Perspectives on Terrorism 9, no. 1 (2015), pp. 76–94; Aaron Y. Zelin “Picture or it Didn’t Happen: A Snapshot of the Islamic State’s Official Media Output,” Perspectives on Terrorism 9, no. 4 (2015), pp. 85–97. 15 Samuel Laurent, L’Etat islamique. Organigramme, financement, filières, Paris: Seuil, 2014, p. 118.



166 

 Emmanuel Alloa

reaction. This approach was previously theorized in a classic manual, The Management of Savagery, which some call ‘the Mein Kampf of jihad’.16 The goal is to cause disorder among the enemy, to wage a war of attrition by numerous acts perpetrated by independent cells. If it is repeatedly destabilized, the West will drop its mask and show its true face, which is one of barbarism and hatred.17 What comes back to the surface here is an old idea, one that was widespread among various factions of the European far left in the 1970s. The Red Army Faction in Germany, Action Directe in France and the Red Brigades in Italy hoped to shake the established order by a series of concerted actions and force the state to respond with indiscriminate violence. Through its repression, the establishment would thus prove that the liberal democratic regime was merely a mask, only imperfectly hiding a fascist nature. Horst Mahler, the activist lawyer of the Red Army Faction, neatly summed it up: “The strategy of the terrorist nuclei was aimed at provoking the overreaction of the state in the hope to stir the flames of hate against the state and to channel new recruits into the armed underground.”18 The key word during Italy’s Years of Lead was polarization, and this term also crops up frequently in the rhetoric of Daesh, as well as in the names of its operational units (we recall that Al-Furqan means ‘separation’ or ‘delimitation’). If we are to believe the many editorials published in Dabiq, no one is more contemptible than the hypocritical moderate who thinks that divine laws must be adapted to the circumstances. It turns out that the intended target of this Salafist thought (or ‘Takfirist’ thought, to use a term considered more exact by Islamic scholars) is not so much infidels as amorphous, indecisive individuals who take advantage of what the editorialists of Dabiq call—to use a highly significant term—the ‘grayzone’. Issue no. 7 of the magazine, aimed primarily at these individuals, employs the eloquent title: “The Extinction of the Grayzone.” But the communication is visual before it is textual. The cover is conceived as a montage of incompatible elements, a kind of Surrealist encounter between an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table: the layout design seems to be saying that it is impossible both to be a Muslim in a jellaba and to identify with Charlie Hebdo (fig. 3). Such are the ‘hypocrites’ mentioned in the title in white letters (“From Hypocrisy to Apostasy: The Extinction of the Grayzone”). They are hypocrites because they pretend to be something other than they are (like hypokritês, the term for an actor in Ancient Greece). Above all, they remain below the dividing line, the critical

16 Abu Bakr Naji, Management of Savagery: The Most Critical Stage Through Which the Islamic Nation Will Pass, published on the internet in 2004. 17 I could also mention The Global Islamic Resistance, published in 2004 by Al-Suri, a close follower of Osama Bin Laden. Privileging a slow undermining process, with scattered cells, Al-Suri argues for a war of positions with the aim of exhausting the targeted populations, which will eventually revolt. 18 Horst Mahler in an interview with the Minister of the Interior Gerhart Baum, Der Spiegel, December 31, 1979. Translation in Alex P. Schmid (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Terrorism Research, Abingdon: Routledge, 2011, p. 225.





Fig. 3: Cover of Dabiq 7, February 12, 2015.

‘Just Terror’ 

 167

Fig. 4: Cover of Dabiq 12, November 18, 2015.

demarcation—hypo krittein—and act as though one could pass indiscriminately from one position to another. The magazine contains a ten-page editorial explaining in detail the concept of the ‘grayzone’. Before it, different forms of life could coexist, and these forms of life even insisted on the importance of coexistence. However, as the editorial tries to assert, the etymology known to connect Islam to salâm (peace) is a pure fabrication: Islam, it is claimed, is the religion of the sword and not of peace. To insist on the plurality of lifeforms and interpretations is thus to go astray. The main purpose of the actions carried out since September 2001, and more specifically those carried out by ISIS in the West, such as the attacks in Paris, is not to crush the West, but to extinguish the grayzone. Thanks to such actions of ‘polarization’— the concept of istiqtab already put forward in the manual The Management of Savagery19—this intermediate space will disappear. Quoting Osama Bin Laden, the editorial states that, “The world today is divided. Bush spoke the truth when he said, ‘Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists’, with the actual ‘terrorist’ being the western crusaders.” Now, the editorial continues, “the time [has] come for another event to […] bring division to the world and destroy the grayzone.” The terrorist attacks forcing each person to choose a side: “This ampli-

19 Bakr Naji, Management of Savagery, n.p.



168 

 Emmanuel Alloa

fied impact will force the crusaders themselves to destroy the grayzone, the zone in which so many hypocrites and deviant innovators living in the West are hiding.” It is not just its flag that is black-and-white; ISIS follows a binary code in every respect. Mixing and confusion are its nemesis. Now let us consider an exemplary case of visual communication by Daesh (and its involuntary ambiguities). This may be found in issue 12 of Dabiq, which came out on November 18, 2015, only a few days after the attacks in Paris. As with previous issues, this one had a high-resolution layout showing a high degree of sophistication. The cover showed the immediate aftermath of the attacks, with emergency workers on a street corner in the 11th arrondissement trying to save some of the victims. The headline was a formidably effective piece of political communication: Just Terror (fig. 4).

Just Wars, Just Wars In 1991, George H. W. Bush was at pains to explain why the Gulf War met the criteria of the historical doctrine of the bellum iustum, the just war. Likewise, after 9/11 George W. Bush argued that the war on terror was not only legally permissible but morally necessary: “There can be no neutrality between justice and cruelty, between the innocent and the guilty.”20 We go here from a political argument to a universal moral tribunal, and from a local war to what has been described as a ‘cosmic war’.21 In both cases, the transition to a cosmic battle between the forces in play was justified by invoking a centuries-old tradition, the just war. When Dabiq appropriated the concept, therefore, it was speaking to the West. The tradition of the ‘Little Jihad’ (in the outside world: the ‘Big Jihad’ can only be internal) rarely uses the concept of justice; we must look, rather, to the West for its theorization.22 There is, indeed, a long tradition within Christianity of the jus bellum iustum, or more exactly, the jus ad bellum, the ‘right to go to war’. The bases of this doctrine were laid in the Middle Ages by Bernard of Clairvaux and Thomas Aquinas, expanded by Francisco de Vitoria at the dawn of the conquests of the New World, and later incorporated into the reformed Lutheran confession of faith.23 There is no need to lay out here the tortuous path of its doctrinal justification: the

20 George W. Bush, speech at the Military Academy of West Point, June 1, 2002, http://bit.ly/2bjM430, p. 3. 21 Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, pp. 148–166. 22 Reuven Firestone, Jihad: The Origin of Holy War in Islam, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999; Sohail H. Hashmi (ed.), Just Wars, Holy Wars and Jihads. Christian, Jewish and Muslim Encounters, New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. 23 Robert Kolb, “Origins of the twin terms jus ad bellum/jus in bello,” International Review of the Red Cross 320 (1997), pp. 553–562; Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, New York: Basic Books, 1977.





‘Just Terror’ 

 169

Fig. 5: Jihadist Facebook account, 2015.

legal notion of ‘just war’ has penetrated the West, and when Daesh refers to it, every Western reader immediately understands its significance. The difference, of course, is that the subject here is not ‘war’, but ‘terror’—just terror. Terror that is not merely random, but justified, even necessary, even if its collateral effects are regrettable. We are coming close to the arguments put forward by Robespierre and Saint-Just during the French Revolution: the prerequisite for the construction of a republican state is that the body politic be cleansed in a ‘just terror’ of all the forces that endanger it. But of course, the title of Dabiq 12 can be read another way too: just terror. Terror and nothing else. Dabiq does more than evoke the West’s legal imaginary; it also plays on the semantics of advertising. In this instance, the cover slogan, Just Terror, which is repeated throughout the magazine, is a nod to another set of references, not from the theologico-legal sphere, but from consumerist culture. What is probably one of the most effective advertising campaigns of all time was created in the 1980s when the sports shoe brand Nike (meaning ‘victory’) hired the marketing agency Wieden+Kennedy. The advertisers came up with an utterly minimalist slogan that is still used by the company today: Just do it. Today, this catchphrase is rightly considered one of the most effective taglines in the whole history of communication, a reduction of an idea to its purest essence. When Dabiq plays on this theme, it is appropriating that same symbolic efficacy. Terror: no more, no less. Just terror. And if we were to need further evidence of the obscure link between communications media and violence, it may be worth noting the incident that inspired the ad men in conceiving the Nike campaign. Wieden+Kennedy revealed that when working on the slogan commissioned by Nike, they remembered the last words spoken by the killer Gary Gilmore as he faced a Utah firing squad.24 Generally speaking, the jihadists, like Western consumers, seem to have a particular fondness for the brand with the famous swoosh logo. It appears on a number of its online recruitment sites, where it replaces the ‘j’ in jihad (fig. 5).

24 Marcus Fairs, “Nike’s ‘Just do it’ slogan is based on a murderer’s last words, says Dan Wieden,” Deezen, March 14, 2015, http://bit.ly/1GEWQFb.



170 

 Emmanuel Alloa

Fig. 6: Page 55 of Dabiq 13, January 19, 2016.

Returning to the magazine Dabiq, the slogan Just Terror reappears in the next issue, no. 13, published in January 2016 (fig. 6), on a photomontage showing the presumed participants in the attacks on Paris. In this new twist on the theme, the Eiffel Tower is metamorphosed into the letter A: the attacks in Paris were certainly foundational in terms of their scale, justifying the capitalization of the first letter of the alphabet (A), but at the same time they are simply one more link in the chain, ‘an’ act of terror (‘A terror’) to be followed by many more. “Let Paris be a lesson to those nations that wish to take heed,” adds the subtitle. 



‘Just Terror’ 

 171

Occultation, Negation, Denial This triumphant group portrait made by juxtaposing excerpted images over an aerial view of Paris occupies the lighter two thirds of the image. However, the lower register also warrants attention. Its darker tone seems to signify the space of suffering and grief upon which the triumph is founded. Looking more closely, we recognize a few tables and chairs on the street, and among them the bodies of the victims covered by Zaka bags. First-aid workers and police seem to be busy tending to them. As the pixels indicate, something has evidently been blurred—something that viewers are not supposed to see, yet that draws the gaze more than it signals its exclusion. This point at the center of the image acts as a kind of punctum, to use Roland Barthes’s term for something in an image that “pricks, bruises the viewer”. To be clear, everything we see in this visual was meant to be denied; these east Paris neighborhoods represent the ‘grayzone’ par excellence, with its cafés, its concert halls and terraces, a place of permeability and intermixing. Like all acts of violence, the terrorist attacks are gestures of negation; in this instance, this zone identified as the zone of all mixtures and confusion offers a choice target. And yet, in the midst of this great display of all that must disappear, there is something that must not be seen, and that draws the gaze all the more effectively by being blurred. The use of blurring is well known. Photo blur is used for reasons of security or in order to protect privacy. However, neither of these concerns applies here. We get more insight from looking at the original photograph. Taken by Thibault Camus for the Associated Press agency on the night of the attacks, it shows a crowd of people, policemen, a young man on his cell phone and, at his feet, barely noticeable, the crouched figure of a first-aid worker (plate XXII). The worker is a woman. That, in any case, was the interpretation made by the Daesh computer specialist. Although the figure is only seen from the back, and appears to have short hair, this could indeed be a woman’s hair, tied up. From the Daesh viewpoint, things are quite clear: her body must disappear. The female body is thus negated. While the bodies of the victims disappear into the Zaka bags, which take them out of the image, the female body must disappear, so to speak, in front of everyone’s eyes. What we are seeing here is what we could call a visual denial: a negative affirmation (to take the classic example from Freudian psychoanalysis: “You ask who this person [scil. in the dream] can be. It is not my mother”). But let us now come back to the cover of issue number 12. Upon even closer inspection, we may notice an incongruous detail: on the right, toward the bottom, someone has done a rather messy bit of photoshopping (plate XXIII). Quite evidently, they were trying to make something disappear, but what? Comparison with the original photograph—the Al-Hayat Media Center used an image taken by an Associated Press photographer Jacques Brinon—gives us an answer. In the original photograph, on the right, there is indeed an extra presence, that of a woman, leaning against a 

172 

 Emmanuel Alloa

wall, possibly trying to help in some way or other; perhaps she is simply a friend or relative of the person lying on the stretcher. Her figure has quite simply been erased, but the graphic designer’s shoddy work has left telltale traces of the operation. In the reworked image a second change has been made. The shading effect applied to the upper and lower fringe of the cover, which gives it a crepuscular quality, was introduced to highlight the name of the magazine and the headline (plate XXIV). But this effect of contrast cannot completely hide another, involuntary consequence, which is like a kind of visual lapsus. Right below the dramatic title (Just Terror) we can see traces of a boot sticking out from under the white sheets covering the victims. Is this an oversight on the part of the first-aid workers, who in their haste have failed to totally cover the limbs? We can imagine the Daesh graphic designer trying to figure out whether this is a man’s boot or, more likely, a woman’s? When in doubt, apply the same treatment as to the female body: dress it or blur it (we can still see the squares of the pixels). After that, however, shadow effect applied throughout the lower part of the image relativizes this differential treatment, and the whole lower register becomes indistinct, as if this unnamed graphic artist, deep in his lair in Raqqa or Deir-ez-Zor, had completed the unfinished work of the emergency workers and withdrawn the body from the obscenity of exhibition. Here Daesh, better known for its macabre miseen-scènes, covers the dead with a veil. The acts of denial and respect come together, becoming almost indistinguishable.

Beyond the ‘Propaganda of the Deed’ It was a mistake to see the triumph of suicide attacks as the symptom of a return of the real that has eclipsed the spectacle. Not only must we admit that, like it or not, these attacks have their own aesthetic—their “decorative brilliance”, as Stéphane Mallarmé once put it25—but also these destructive acts, however iconoclastic, cannot avoid the support of the image: the destruction of images cannot do without its own staging, its own imagification. Ayman al-Zawahiri’s 2005 remark about the media as the battleground was certainly premonitory: it is indeed in the field of visibilities that symbolic superiority is asserted (one need only consider recent efforts by several Western countries to create ‘deradicalization’ videos). The A321 attack was perpetrated using a Schweppes can packed with explosives, states an editorial in Dabiq, backing up its claim with a photo. The West is being fought by a kind of homeopathic principle whereby the refreshing drink administers death. The wound yields only to the blade that made

25 Stéphane Mallarmé, Divagations [1897], Œuvres complètes, vol. 2, ed. Bertrand Marchal, Paris: Gallimard-Pléiade, 2003, p. 268.





‘Just Terror’ 

 173

it, is how this message might be summed up. In any case, the combat is once again waged through the image. That is why it is absurd to say that the jihadist suicide bomber is the true realist, someone who has updated the doctrine of the ‘propaganda of the deed’. A wellknown anarchist principle formulated by Bakunin, among others, the propaganda of the deed is intended to do away with the regime of symbolic politics and move on to direct action. From now on, said Bakunin, “we must spread our principles, not with words but with deeds, for this is the most popular, the most potent, and the most irresistible form of propaganda.”26 To posit a strict opposition between action and representation is only a very slight help in understanding Daesh’s approach to communication, not to mention the fact that such an opposition stems from a reading of Bakunin that is itself distorted, since he did not really oppose deed and propaganda but made the former a tool for the latter. The father of Russian anarchism had clearly understood that in the war of communication, the rotary printing press was just as important as dynamite. At the very most, if, in the age of our retinal societies, there is a displacement, that is because discourse itself has become increasingly visual. But there again, the filmmakers, graphic artists, and other propagandists of Daesh are doing nothing new: the references are all Western and the images are sadly familiar in both their form and their content. To this can be added a new clue, that of the real itself (somewhat in the same way that the snuff film embodies the limit of what can be fantasized). Baudrillard was right: “Rather than the violence of the real being there first, and the frisson of the image being added to it, the image is there first, and the frisson of the real is added.”27 Faced with all those who are busy trying to produce polarization on all sides, it would be wise to reconsider our interpretative schemas. By reducing everything to an opposition between the fictional and the real, or simply to a civilizational conflict, we avoid the problem of the content: to face the images presented to us by Daesh is to face the products of our own retinal economy. To deal with ISIS images is thus, in a way, to confront an imaginary in which we ourselves are thoroughly steeped.

26 Mikhail Bakunin, “Letters to a Frenchman on the Present Crisis” [1870], On Anarchism, ed. Sam Dolgoff, Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1996, p. 195. 27 Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, n.p.



Susan Buck-Morss

Visual Empire 2.01 1 The Sovereign Image An image that arrests the viewer exerts power. In the normal course of perception, seeing is a relational guide to the environment, a tool for the realization of subjective intent. When perception is startled, shock induces a reaction of numbness that buffers the viewer; at safer moments, the experience comes back in memory-repetitions. But an image in the arresting sense is neither perceptual orientation nor shock. One might say such an image insists on transcendent meaning. Individual imagination is inadequate for its production. It overflows the individual’s world. It declares collective being. If, with Cornelius Castoriadis, we speak of a ‘political imaginary’, we presume this collective, involuntary nature of the image, in which shared social forms attain perceptibility.2 Form is to be understood here in a quasi-Platonic sense, as a product of the intellect that is in itself inaccessible to sense experience, and therefore in need of the mediating appearance of the image. Lodged in thought somewhere between a concept and an idea, the image is a conduit that connects the individual and the collective, the experiential and the metaphysical, as the visible embodiment that cancels out the difference. Or it takes on a life of its own, dominating society. Or it begins to unravel, pixelate, even explode. And we are left with multiple pictures, but no image. This last condition is symptomatic of societal disjuncture. The sovereign image in the field of the political imaginary is our focus here, at a time of unraveling. In the 21st century, the multi-faceted phenomenon of globalization is colliding with the imaginary of national sovereignty, and the consequent political tensions are widespread. Images are embedded in politics now more than ever, but their transcendent power is precarious. What the outcomes will be are far from clear. Predictions vary dramatically.

1 This essay first appeared as “Visual Empire” in Diacritics 37 (2008). Events in the decade since its publication have radically altered the perspective of the analysis, so that the argument of this revised version (2.0) moves in a different direction, while the historical material and section on Sokurov remain the same. 2 Cornelius Castoriadis, “The Greek and the Modern Political Imaginary,” trans. David Ames Curtis, Salmagundi 100 (Fall 1992), pp.  102–129. Castoriadis explicitly rejects the “specular” (ibid., p.  102 [vid. Lacan]) and insists on the “non-perceivable moment” of social ideality (ibid., p. 122); he looks to written laws of a society for the “incarnation” (ibid., p.  107) of the political imaginary. And yet he provides a brilliant description of the miraculous metaphysics of representative democracy that concerns us here (see below, note 3).

176 

 Susan Buck-Morss

Fig. 1: US soldiers at Fort Sherman, Ohio, create a living portrait of President Woodrow Wilson, December 18, 1918.

In 2005, two years after President George W. Bush’s ill-informed and arguably illegal deployment of emergency executive power in a preemptive war against Iraq, the English translation of Giorgio Agamben’s book State of Exception appeared, touching off a small case of collective hysteria among American academics. It claimed that by their intrinsic nature, democracies undermine themselves, that dictatorship is an ontological necessity of modern politics, and that the sovereign’s power to declare a state of emergency and with it, a state of exception to the law, places potentially the whole world under the sign of the concentration camp.3 But perhaps democracy is not so much in danger of being transformed into a dictatorship as it is threatened with the dissolution of nation-state sovereignty itself. Should the sovereign imaginary of the modern nation state be uncritically defended? Is there not something already suspect in the fact that democracies overthrow rulers and declare the sovereignty of the many, only to allow sovereign power to coalesce around new sacred imaginaries of founding fathers and heads of state?4

3 Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005. 4 Castoriadis describes this process as it takes place in the electoral politics of modern nation states: “What is this theological mystery, this alchemic operation that makes of your sovereignty, one Sunday





Visual Empire 2.0 

 177

Why has it proven difficult to cut off the head of the king so that it stays off? Why does popular sovereignty consistently resurrect an aura of quasi-mystical power around the sovereign figure, which since Hobbes’s Leviathan has been recognized as a human artifact, a merely mortal god (fig. 1)? More than the sum of merely empirical individuals of which Hobbes’s Leviathan is composed, the sovereign is an icon in the theological sense. It embodies an enigma—precisely the power of the collective to constitute itself. The sovereign figure, as a personification of the collective, demonstrates the power of the visible image to close the circle between constituting and constituted power, explaining why even the illegalities of an individual sovereign can be exposed without shaking the faith of the believer. As long as the circle appears closed, sovereign power remains intact; likewise, and counterclockwise, as long as sovereign power remains intact, the circle appears closed. The closing of the circle demands a miracle, and the icon of the sovereign figure provides it. Not always successfully, however. The iconoclast, who declares the icon to be fake, is believed at some times, but not others. Skeptical reason destroys the legitimacy of a power already shaken by empirical events.5 This raises the question of

or Tuesday every four, five, or seven years a fluid that spreads over the entire country, enters into the ballot boxes, and comes out again that same evening on the Television screen, on the faces of the ‘representatives of the people’ or on the face of the Representative of the people, the Monarch with the title of President?” (Castoriadis, “The Greek and the Modern Political Imaginary,” p. 108). 5 In Europe, more than a century before Hobbes, those events included the Black Death, which was followed by apocalyptic prophecy, and the consequent sense of a distancing of God from his believers. Through these experiences, the connection between belief and power became attenuated, setting the stage for the Protestant Reformation. Mediating rituals and institutions—liturgies, intercessions, and the sovereign figure itself—lost their capacity to knit belief and power together. New printing technologies brought the Bible to the layperson in vernacular translations. When confronted by the Word, the icons appeared deaf and dumb. Condemned as idols, power drained out of them. The relics of the bodies of the saints were exposed as fetishes: “a cache of wooden images, some rags, a skull, a large tooth, and a snail’s shell” (Carlos M. N. Eire, War Against the Idols: The Reform of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. 113 and passim). Fetish and idol, terms that circulated with the voyages of discovery to disparage as false the gods of infidels and barbarians (the Incas’ holy objects, stones worshipped by Africans), were turned back and applied within their European home. Faith in the relics was faith in the entire hierarchy of power relationships that entangled temporal and religious authority: “Iconoclasm is a revolutionary act. It is a direct act of violence against the accepted social myth” (ibid., p. 151). Martin Luther opposed the iconoclasts and advised treating the icons with indifference. If the images were powerless, he argued, then faith should not depend on their removal. He feared the political implications of iconoclastic acts as “preliminaries to riot, so that one fears neither order nor authority” (cited in ibid., p. 69n). And indeed, the Protestant Reformation affected all three orders—social, religious, and political. Revolts against municipal governments were incited by appeals to the will of God. The Roman Catholic Church was declared the Anti-Christ, polluting and profaning the true religion. Idolatry was a constant danger. A Catholic monarch would force false worship on the people (this is what was at stake in 17th-century



178 

 Susan Buck-Morss

whether we find ourselves today in a condition of iconoclastic potential, and if so, what the dangers are, as well as the possibilities that this new situation might entail. We moderns pride ourselves in having secularized political power. And yet the legitimacy of political power has continued even in secular modernity to maintain a connection to the ideal. The Platonic form that operates in US political experience is ‘the American people’, an imaginary collective to which individual presidents have habitually appealed. In Hitler’s Germany, it was the ethnic Volk. In the Soviet Union, the ‘proletariat’ was no less a metaphysical concept. The Bolshevik Party ruled in the name of the proletariat as an ideal, not an empirical reality.6 The truth of the matter is that politics and religion cannot be severed from each other so long as the figure of the sovereign holds sway. “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts,” writes Schmitt. None more so than sovereignty.7 It is in the realm of foreign policy that this theological residue is most persistent and most pernicious.8 The people must be defended against outsiders, be they immigrants, refugees, Muslims, or dark-skinned people—or, in former times, Jews. The anthropomorphized struggle of the political collective against its enemies is the

England). To expose the false god meant establishing the true one, whose orderly worship was the political program of the new Protestant sects. And when a Catholic monarch reclaimed the English throne and with it, absolutist power, he sought to reestablish legitimate authority by reviving the miraculous power of healing by royal hand. Auctoritas, non veritas (authority, not truth), Hobbes proclaimed, writing amid the throes of the religious conflict, and against it. For Hobbes, for the sake of order, the mere fact of possessing sovereign power was sufficient reason to proclaim the king to be God’s highest representative on earth (Carl Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol, foreword and intro. George Schwab, trans. George Schwab and Erna Hilfstein, Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1996, p. 55). Between May 1660 and September 1664, Charles II, reclaiming his miraculous powers, “touched with his royal hand approximately 23,000 persons, healing them by the sacred character of the person of the king” (ibid., p.  54). Schmitt comments on this apparent arbitrariness of divine politics: “A miracle is what the sovereign state authority commands its subject to believe to be a miracle; but also—and here the irony is especially acute—the reverse: Miracles cease when the state forbids them” (ibid., p. 55). 6 “The degree to which the workers themselves could be relied upon by the party became a divisive issue in the early years. Lenin made the statement at the Eleventh Party Congress (1922) that people coming to the factory as workers were often ‘not proletarians but all kinds of accidental elements.’ It led Shliapnikov, leader of the defeated Workers’ Opposition, to respond with irony: ‘Permit me to congratulate you on being the vanguard of a nonexistent class […]. We need to remember once and for all that we will not have another and ‘better’ working class, and we have to be satisfied with what we’ve got.’ Lenin’s position prevailed, however, that working-class control meant party control, and it was to be implemented ‘only at the state level.’” (Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000, pp. 26–27). 7 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. and intro. George Schwab, foreword Tracy B. Strong, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005, p. 36. 8 Castoriadis speaks of the “instituted duplicity of the modern world” that recognizes the sovereign “right” of executive power, undemocratically, to wage war (Castoriadis, “The Greek and the Modern Political Imaginary,” p. 110).





Visual Empire 2.0 

 179

favored playing field of sovereign power, its most visible stage as the iconic embodiment of the people-become-flesh. The antidote is not to rely on reason’s power of demystification. Rather, it is to return to the theological problem, and rethink it on different grounds.

1.1 The Economy of the Image Early Christian philosophy was formed within the context of a revival of Platonic metaphysics, which was centrally concerned with the relation between ideal and earthly forms, and the enigma of the connection between them—precisely the question we posed politically concerning the sovereign figure. The fundamental idea of Christianity is the Incarnation, the coming into visibility of the invisible and sovereign God. The veneration of icons became the practical manifestation of this idea, as the point of visibility of the relationships between divinity and humanity, Father and Son, Virgin Mother and Child, Redeemer and believer. The icon, wherein the Word (the idea, in our case the political collective) takes on flesh, provides direct, experiential access to these enigmatic relationships. The term used by the early Church writers to describe these relationships of the Incarnation was ‘economy’ (oikonomia), a discourse of practical belief rather than reasoned theological argumentation.9 A semantic warning is in order: our own times have developed a quasi-religious cult around the economy itself, a belief that it is the locus of invisible forces that produce a whole range of visible effects, necessitating its management by global institutions, and creating its own pragmatics of governance and hierarchy of power—an economy of the economy, if you will. In recovering this word’s sedimented, historical meanings, it is difficult for us to avoid anachronistic projections onto the past, whereas bringing the past Christian meaning into the present involves an act of translation that cannot help but suggest that today’s global belief in the economy is itself a form of idolatry.10 There is no easy access to

9 Mondzain writes: “From Paul onward, the economy designated not only the Second Person of the Trinity [the Son as the ‘economy of the Father’] but the whole of the redemptive plan, the purpose of his creation, revealed in the Incarnation, from the conception of the Virgin to the resurrection, including Christ’s evangelical life and the passion” (Marie-José Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary, trans. Rico Franses, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005, p. 21). The Church continued the religious use of this term, ridiculed during the Enlightenment by Voltaire, among others. 10 In today’s academic discussions, ‘economy’ is used outside of this realm (Poole’s ‘visual economy’ of Peruvian photographs; Derrida’s ‘impossible economy’ of the gift), but as a metaphor, to imply relational orders of reciprocity and exchange, or to make the point that meaning (value) is relational, dependent on context. In Derrida’s Given Time: Counterfeit Money, the gift is, in contrast, aneconomic. What is thinkable (a gift) is impossible (because of economy). My point is that the modern



180 

 Susan Buck-Morss

the Christian economy of belief from our own fetishized concept of the economy as an autonomous, self-regulating system, a modern-day Ouroboros. But this obstacle, while slowing the analysis, is a critical benefit of engaging in it. Economy has an earlier use in pre-Christian Greece, of course, more familiar and less problematic to modern readers, one that finds its classical formulation in Aristotle, who understands economy as a concrete and pragmatic science for the orderly governance of the ‘household’ (oikos): the fundamental, social unit of production, an agrarian homestead based on patriarchal relations of inequality and interdependence (husband–wife; parents–children; and master–slave, to which he gives greatest attention). Oiko-nomos–literally, “household law”–provides social cohesion as the precondition for political life. But even for Aristotle this law presupposes a historically prior moment: the original appropriation of the land on which the households are established.11 Land may be claimed or conquered, confiscated or colonized—the more violent means were a political reality in the expanding empire of Alexander, whose tutor Aristotle was.12 This original appropriation, the historical act that produces what Schmitt calls the nomos, the ordering law that legitimates all subsequent laws, is presumed, in household management, as are slaves as the trophies of war. Oikonomia accepts private property and human inequality, both of which precede the polis, and determine its form.13 It was the apostle Paul who, three centuries later, seized radical title to the nomos by an original appropriation of the word itself.14 In the Pauline epistles, oikonomia, through a stunning translation, morphs into the Christian order of God. The divine

meaning of ‘political economy’ was built metaphorically on the Church economy that preceded it, and the Christian idea of grace is the locus classicus of the an-economic gift. 11 Schmitt writes: “The fact that land-appropriation and nomos are related has not been evident since the Sophists”; and yet, clearly, “the rule of nomos for Aristotle is synonymous with the rule of medium-sized, well-distributed landed property. In this sense, the rule of nomos means the rule of the middle classes as opposed to the rule of the very rich, on the one hand, and the rule over the masses of the poor on the other. It is necessary to read these passages in Aristotle’s Politics very carefully in order to recognize the difference with respect to modern ideologies of the ‘rule of law’” (Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. and annotated G. L. Ulmen, New York: Telos Press, 2003, pp. 67–68). 12 Under Alexander, the founding of new colonies in annexed territory and the distribution of conquered land to the imperial army were examples of literal appropriation, but even if the land remained in the hands of the original owners, it was subject to new relations of power, taxation, and control. 13 Mondzain’s study complements Schmitt’s observations: “[T]he economy always supposes the considerations of ends” as a “science of relations and relative terms” that deals with the just preservation of a complex unity, governing it in a way that conserves the relations of power it contains (Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy, p. 20). 14 “From Paul onward, the economy designated not only the Second Person of the Trinity, but the whole of the redemptive plan, from the conception of the Virgin to the resurrection, including Christ’s evangelical life and the passion” (ibid., p. 21).





Visual Empire 2.0 

 181

economy inverts the earthly one: all are equal, including slaves; all are “brothers”, including women; church Church administrators are not masters, but themselves “slaves” who do God’s work. This household (oecumene) knows no territorial boundaries: “Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and of the household (oikos) of God” (Ephesians 2:19). The established nomos is suspended by Paul. “For ye are not under law (nomon), but under grace (kharis)” (Rom. 6:14). Paul is “against the law”, as Alain Badiou writes in excited affirmation. All light is placed on the historical event of the Incarnation, its dis-orderly power. Badiou announces: “Grace is illegal.”15 This historical event is the source of what can be called a new, Christian nomos— an antinomial nomos that disrupts earthly power and holds it in abeyance. But the disruption is virtual only: Paul’s nomos rules the realm of the spirit, leaving the material world unchanged. Obedience to the Roman imperial order is still binding; at the same time, the term oikonimia, deployed in the spiritual realm, reasserts its law-preserving function by commanding the “new man” (Paul’s term, used repeatedly) to live according to Christianity’s predestined plan. The revolutionary implications of Paul’s newly revealed economy are thus limited, and given his renaissance of popularity among critical theorists (Badiou, Žižek, Agamben, to name a few), these limitations need to be kept in mind. If for Paul there is no principle of exclusion regarding citizenship, if the Church’s equality includes women and slaves, their position as foreigners in the earthly city, and as women and slaves in the earthly household remains unchanged.16

15 Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 77. Badiou accepts here the standard interpretation (problematic for reasons that cannot be elaborated here, but see my forthcoming book: Year 1) that the “laws” Paul challenges are not Schmitt’s nomos of the original appropriation of land, nor the laws of imperial Rome, but Jewish customary law, “which has become obsolete and harmful” because it limits the universalism implied in the “Christ-event” (ibid., p. 15). Yet he is arguing that Paul is absolving Christians from the need to adhere to earthly law in all of its forms, insofar as they are particular as opposed to universal, and insofar as they are “unfailingly ‘statist’” in character: “If a truth is to surge forth eventally, it must be nondenumerable, impredicable, uncontrollable. This is precisely what Paul calls grace” (ibid., p. 76). Badiou is interested in the structure of Paul’s message, not its real-life historical effects. But such an abstract approach, particularly in the philosophy of religion, is extremely problematic, because it blinds the theorist to limits necessarily encountered by any self-proclaimed “universal” theory today. Badiou presumes that readers share a Western, Christian context, as if anti-Semitism were no longer a problem, and as if Muslim victims of Islamophobia were not European citizens. Of course, Paul’s universalism would not exclude them in theory, but it does in historical fact—and has from the beginning. Alexandrian Jews in the Christian era wrote of living in a sea of a-nomia, by which they meant Hellenic culture, which threatened to obliterate their identity (see Calvin J. Roetzel, Paul—A Jew on the Margins, Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003, pp. 50–59). 16 “Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands […] children obey your parents […] servants obey in all things your masters” (Col. 3:18–22). Regarding the veneration of Mary that figures so prominently in Christian iconicity, Mondzain refers to “the rest of us women” (Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 100), noting



182 

 Susan Buck-Morss

Fig. 2: Barberini Diptych, ca. 540. Emperor Justinian I (presumed) and Christ (Paris, Louvre).

Paul calls himself a slave (doulos) doing God’s work, but he chooses in life to be tried as a freeman and a Roman citizen. In Paul’s Christianity, God’s household coexists with Aristotle’s patriarchal one, just as His kingdom coexists with pagan Rome.17 The insufficiencies of Pauline Christianity as an alternative politics, neglected by the historical Paul, could remain unaddressed not because they were invisible, but because they did not belong to the economy of truth.18 Only by leaving the magically

that “real women […] do not share” in Mary’s power (ibid., p.  160). In contrast, Badiou finds the anomaly of women as equal “sons”, or slaves as equals of anyone, not worthy of theoretical comment or reflection (cf. the translator’s note, ibid., p. x, and ibid., p. 63). 17 Paul’s understanding is in opposition to the uncompromisingly anti-imperialist Christianity of John of Patmos, author of the Book of Revelation. For a political reading of this apocalyptic text, see Steven J. Friesen, Imperial Cults and the Apocalypse of John: Reading Revelation in the Ruins, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. 18 They existed, rather, in the register of profane history: Christian believers, scorning worldly wealth, bequeathed money and land to a Church that became wealthy. Evidence of early converts with wealth is derived from the establishment of Christian cemeteries (e.g., in A.D. 95 the cousin of the Emperor Domitian, Flavius Clemens, was buried in a Christian cemetery outside Rome). Through bequeathals of earthly fortunes, by the mid third century, the church in Rome supported “from its common purse” 46 presbyters, 7 deacons, 7 subdeacons, 42 acolytes, 52 exorcists, readers, doorkeepers, 1,500 widows and needy persons (http://www.vor.org/truth/rbst/hist-theology [Downloaded August 2017]). The spiritual salvation of humanity—remaining faithful to the event of the Incarnation—necessitated the material salvation of the Church, a mundane concern that depended on Christian acquiescence





Visual Empire 2.0 

 183

closed circle of belief, with its immanent logic, would these mundane contradictions become apparent. And only by the incorporation of the ruler’s temporal power into the Christian economy would they appear to disappear, which is exactly what happened in the early 4th century with the conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine to Christianity, and the latter’s elevation to official state religion by the century’s close (fig. 2).

1.2 Christian Sovereignty A Christianized Roman Empire fell within the mimetic logic of correspondences: one God, one emperor, uniting Church and empire into a single world, a single historical narrative, and a single visual economy. The folding of spiritual power into the religious economy finds expression in the public visibility of belief that reached a highpoint under Justinian I, whose image is depicted as mirroring that of Christ. Historians describe this development as the origin of Christian ‘art’, although ‘Christian visual economy’ might be a less misleading term.19 Its iconography was built on pagan precedents. Imperial Rome’s visual culture was already well developed before the adoption of Christianity, and there were “constant exchanges” between Christian and imperial imagery.20 Byzantine visual aesthetics, blending the iconicity of imperial Rome with that of the Incarnation, created an immense force field of affective power.21 What was new about the Christian imperial nomos was precisely the sovereign’s transcendent claim, which brought into an alliance the economy of belief and the

to temporal power. As managers of the household of the Church, the “slaves” of God had the duty of divine instruction, which legitimated their power over the imagination and affective life of the believers. 19 An icon, of course, was precisely not ‘art’. Ordering them within the discipline of art history tends to make invisible the crucial aspect that the Christian oikonomia reveals: the presence in the icon of divine truth as it shows itself to the gaze of the believer. 20 Besançon writes: “There was already an imperial pagan art: only a slight shift was needed to make it a Christian art […]. The theme of imperial apotheosis was transformed into the Ascension of Christ. The offering of presents [to the emperor] corresponded to the Adoration of the Magi, the adventus (the triumphal entrance of the sovereign) to Christ’s arrival in Jerusalem. In fact, court ritual provided a framework for Christian art. Just as artists represented the emperor and empress on their thrones, surrounded by their entourage, they depicted Christ and the Virgin among the saints and angels […]. There were constant exchanges between the Christian image and the imperial image” (Alain Besançon, The Forbidden Image: An Intellectual History of Iconoclasm, trans. Jane Marie Todd, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000, p. 110). 21 Similarly, to Besançon, “André Grabar, in his study of the imperial cult in Byzantium, maintains that the Christian cult imported wholesale the cult of the emperor in order to render it to Christ and the Theotokos, the Mother of God [Grabar, L’Empereur dans l’art byzantin]. Thus emperors and empresses had themselves represented in the company of Christ, the Virgin, and saints, both in the profane world and in holy places” (Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy, p. 156).



184 

 Susan Buck-Morss

economy of power, a “double discourse of spirituality and conquest”.22 The sovereign figure of the emperor became the iconic embodiment of Christian political legitimacy by bowing down before an enthroned Christ (the gesture of proskinesis).23 This act of submission, while in keeping with Paul’s inversion of servant and master, resulted in an enormous gain in sovereign power. The emperor’s obedience to God was evidence of the transcendent source of his power, which now spread to include the formerly profane economy of social and political life. Fowden writes that this involved “an entirely new understanding of the Roman emperor’s role, inconceivable except within the context of allegiance to a universalist religion”; the more the emperor “subjected himself to God, the more God subjected to him the whole world”.24 Protestants since the Reformation have pointed out that the New Testament never mentions the icon, nor does it deal specifically with issues of visual representation. This is true in regard to the icon as artifact, as an object of veneration. But scholars are right to insist that Paul affirms the foundational idea of the icon, the relation of the visible to the invisible, in his repeated assertions that Christ was born “in the image (eikôn) of the invisible God [tou Theou]” (Eph. 1:10 and 3:9; Col. 1:15).25 And it is Paul whom the Christian churchmen cited in defense of icons during the struggle of the Church centuries later against the imperial policy of iconoclasm.26 Mondzain makes a compelling argument for the centrality of the icon for what needs to be called the political philosophy of Byzantium, Christian and imperialist in nature, that is

22 Ibid., pp. 115, 223. 23 Triangulation through the institution of the Church was essential for this transformation. The Christianized emperor could aspire only to a mimetic relationship with God—by being “numbered among the apostles” (Garth Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993, p. 90). Cf. Sthenidas of Lokri: “God is the first king and natural legislator. The king only becomes him by imitation” (cit. in Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy, p. 165). 24 Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth, p. 93. “Constantine took a maximalist view of the emperor’s job; in fact, he aspired to conquer the world” (ibid., p. 86). “Constantine pursued this end, with regard to the Germanic nations across the Danube, through war, diplomacy, and support of the ecclesiastical mission. By piety, he vanquished the Goths and Sarmatians, claims Eusebius’s continuator Rufinus; the more he subjected himself to God, the more God subjected to him the whole world (universa)” (ibid., pp. 92–93). 25 This phrase is crucial in early Christian philosophical debates. See the discussion of Irenaus, Origen, and Gregory of Nicaea in Besançon, The Forbidden Image, pp. 86–108. 26 It was art historians who originated the terminological differentiation, reserving the term icon for a specific genre of portable artifacts, painted on wood, venerating the Virgin and Child, Christ and the Saints—whereas the sources themselves do not. Byzantine Christians applied ‘icon’ to all holy images, although it was not until the 8th-century iconoclast crisis in the Byzantine world that a theologically grounded defense of icons was clearly articulated. Until that time, it was the pedagogic value of the icons that was emphasized. The relation between God’s image and the material icon was understood as one of similitude rather than representation.





Visual Empire 2.0 

 185

expressed in the visual economy of the image.27 She describes the Christian economy as a “science of relations and relative terms”, a set of correspondences (rather than equivalences) among “disjunctive realities”, for which icons are the “structural relay”, weaving together the whole “like a one-of-a-kind cloth”.28 Mary, the Virgin Mother of God (Theotokos), as the untarnished, pure place of God-become-flesh, is the central icon of this economy, providing the pictorial equivalent of the entire New Testament message of the Incarnation (plate XXV).29 The icon is a key to political legitimacy in Christian society. It visualizes the Christian nomos, which in turn became the legitimation for world domination. We are not suggesting, nor is Mondzain, that the whole visual economy was a ruse deployed consciously by the authorities, an instrumental means of deliberate and cynical manipulation. On the contrary, from within belief, there is only piety and affective engagement. All believers, all venerators of the icons, benefit from the Incarnation, as they, too, are created in the image of God. The point is that this Christian economy needs no proof or reasoned explanation. The icon is instrumental not because seeing is believing (the divine itself remains invisible), but because believing viewers feel themselves to be in the presence of the Incarnation, which is in no way thereby robbed of its mys-

27 Every scholar knows the joy of having the right book come into your hands at just the right moment and appreciates the invaluable friendship of the intellectual colleague who places it there. I am indebted to Helen Petrovsky for suggesting Marie-José Mondzain’s book Image, Icon, Economy, which contributes uniquely to the topic at hand. The study is ostensibly about Christian iconology and the iconoclast crisis in the Byzantine Empire. But Mondzain is one of the, lamentably, rare scholars who refuses to use her specialized field as an escape from the most pressing contemporary concerns, specifically, issues of power and belief as they are mediated within visual culture. Like many of us engaged in visual studies, Mondzain deplores the meagerness of the modern philosophical tradition when it comes to providing insight into the problems of the visual. Her book demonstrates, in contrast, the “modernity of patristic thought” and “fresh thinking” provided to us via a reconsideration of early Christian writings of the so-called Church Fathers, who were deeply concerned with visibility and truth. Because “a very knowledgeable Byzantine specialist, religiously hoping to discourage me, declared [there was no Byzantine philosophy,] that only history, geography and religion existed in Byzantium,” Mondzain felt an “urgent” need to demonstrate that precisely history, geography, and religion in Byzantium were “the very stakes of philosophy itself” (Marie-José Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy, p. xi). Penelope Deutscher argues that historical critique for women scholars is itself a form of philosophy, citing Mondzain as exemplary, in the article, “Imperfect Discretion: Interventions into the History of Philosophy by 20th-century French Women Philosophers,” Hypatia 15, no. 2 (2000), pp. 160–180. 28 Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy, pp. 20, 22, 64. The prototype of the Virgin Mother with the infant Christ was alleged to have been first painted by the apostle Luke. 29 Ibid., pp. 109, 159ff. “The divine economy watches over the harmonious conservation of the world and the preservation of all its parts as it runs in a well-adjusted, purposive manner. The incarnational economy is nothing other than the spreading out of the Father’s image in its historical manifestation, which is made possible by the economy of the maternal body. That passage establishes the entry of the visible and the flesh into the concept of economy. In all cases, it concerns an organism or an internal arrangement whose visibility becomes accessible to us” (ibid., p. 21).



186 

 Susan Buck-Morss

tery.30 In a subtle but profound transformation, iconicity founds a new, visual order of power. The 6th-century Church of San Vitale, Ravenna, built to honor the reconquest of Italy from the Goths by the Emperor Justinian, who won it back from these Arian heretics for the orthodox Church, brings together the divine and human economies of power in a total iconic environment. It was a high-water mark in the merging of Church and State power manifested in visual form. The construction of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople dates from the reign of Justinian I as well. These structures are truly beautiful. But that which the art historian admires, the political historian warns us represents an enormous intensification of centralized power and ideological conformity. Justinian brutally persecuted the Arian heretics, who threatened his control over the Western provinces; he closed the philosophically renowned School of Athens in a campaign against pagan thought, and his famous consolidation of the imperial code eliminated local laws that had allowed for local autonomy and diversity within the empire.

1.3 Imperial Vision It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of the new visual economy for the vast imperial project that I have called the Christian nomos, and that Mondzain describes as the first ‘iconocracy’: “To attempt to rule over the whole world by organizing an empire that derived its power and authority by linking together the visual and the imaginal was Christianity’s true genius.”31 Although at first anchored in the church edifice as a microcosm of the Christian world, icons were also, and increasingly, portable, traveling on tour to perform miracles, and displayed in processions around cities to protect them from attack. Like the imperial coins, with Christ on one side and the emperor’s portrait on the other, which circulated throughout the economy of political power, they circulated throughout the economy of belief. There is, Mondzain writes, “no limit to the spread of the power of the image”;32 the icon “has no frame, no limiting structure surrounds it”.33 Indeed, the spread of icons exceeded the boundaries of the Byzantine Empire, which had radically shrunk

30 “Truth is in the image, there is no image of truth”: “It is because this image has power that it is necessary to defend and protect it. It is not because it is true that it has power. It is because it has power that becomes true, that it must be true” (ibid., p. 201) 31 Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy, p.  151. “By virtue of the economic unity of the system, an uninterrupted pathway between the spiritual and temporal worlds was made possible; they are one and the same when considered from the point of view of the economy” (ibid.). 32 Ibid., p.  162. The ecclesiastical nomos penetrates “beyond the barrier of time, borders, and languages” (ibid., p. 151). 33 Ibid., p. 162.





Visual Empire 2.0 

 187

as a consequence of expanding Islam, causing a disjuncture of power in the Christian nomos between Byzantine emperor and Byzantine Church that shaped the political context of the iconoclast crisis.34 Mondzain writes: “We are today heirs and propagators of this iconic empire.”35 With Byzantium began “the process of globalizing the image across the whole world”.36 At this point in her argument, Mondzain jump-cuts from the Byzantine iconocracy to the modern ‘empire of the gaze’, from patriarchal church management to the global media industry, from the first imaginal empire to our own. In an aside—which stands out to readers excluded from the charmed circle of experts on the Byzantine iconoclast crisis—Mondzain writes: “From the specific standpoint of provoking belief or obtaining obedience, there are no great differences between submitting to a church council or to CNN.”37 The French edition of Mondzain’s book appeared in 1996, when CNN was just becoming a truly global presence and satellite-fed media was not yet fully imbricated within political power.38 CNN’s global reach appeared to be solidifying a new iconic regime of US global power when, five years later, this regime and its central symbols were unexpectedly shattered from within by images of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. This sabotage of morning television seemed to prove the relevance of Mondzain’s observation. Was it not true that the greatest threat to political hegemony comes from challenges to just such iconic authority? If something is not seen by the media, it has no political existence; conversely, if the media does see it, the wound to hegemonic power can be deadly. What distinguished the attacks of September 11, 2001 from other instances of terror was precisely their destruction of the visual economy of power. Hence the conclusion: terrorism is the iconoclasm of our time. It needs to be remembered that historical outbreaks of iconoclasm are symptomatic of a disjuncture within the existing iconomic order; they reflect a division between divine sanction and earthly power that is already taking place. This was true of the Byzantine struggle in the 8th and 9th centuries, when three of the five Christian patriarchates (Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem) had been for generations in lands ruled by the new Muslim Empire.39 It was true at the time of the Protestant Reformation, when the centrifugal force of national monarchies pulled the Holy Roman

34 The Church’s victory over the iconoclast emperors was also a victory for the Roman patriarchate as the center of Christian belief. Mondzain’s book does not deal with these specifics of the political context of iconoclasm. 35 Ibid., p. 151. 36 Ibid., pp. 162, 174. 37 Ibid., p. 223. 38 The first Gulf War, in 1991, showed the importance of international CNN coverage for policy implementation, as army news briefings deceived the public in order to mislead the enemy. In the second Gulf War, embedded journalism was institutionalized, and the practice of planting news stories in the media became standard US government policy. 39 Mondzain’s account is scanty on this specific historical context of 8th- and 9th-century iconoclasm.



188 

 Susan Buck-Morss

Empire apart. It is true today, when two orders of power—the supra-national, global economy in which the visual industries now operate; and the rhetorical nationalism that politicians adopt domestically—both strive, at times as allies, at times as adversaries, for control over the visual economy. The iconic power of the news is its visual ability to close the gap between the sovereign as a person and the ‘people’ as an abstraction—or, alternatively, to widen that gap beyond repair. Are the rulers false gods, empty idols “not worthy of sovereignty?” Are the news iconocrats traitors to the republic, or defenders of the true belief? “Whoever monopolises visibility conquers thought itself and determines the shape of liberty,”40 writes Mondzain. “No power without an image.”41 When the 9/11 attacks were inserted into the television news, the shock to the US sovereign imaginary was profound. The economy of the televised image encompassed national and global audiences alike. Similarly, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, revolutionaries in the Eastern bloc countries globally signaled their capture of state power through the act of taking over TV stations. But were we really then witnessing the end of an iconic regime? Has the image already moved elsewhere? In the years since the 9/11 attacks, television’s monopoly of the visual field has been broken, not by violence from without, but by a transformation of the medium whereby images are produced and disseminated. Facebook was founded in 2004; YouTube in 2005; camera phones were uploading videos in 2006; the iPhone premiered in 2007. With the instantaneous dissemination of photographs taken at Abu-Ghraib, the US project of preemptive war was already subject to radical de-legitimation. Social media forms have democratized image dissemination, undermining the visual economy of empire so that no power can implement total iconocratic control. Live news is produced and circulated by ordinary citizens. Uploading images and streaming video are powerful iconoclastic weapons in the hands of the powerless. And although it is too early to know the full implications of this revolution, it has already irrevocably altered the sovereign image. The US provides two striking examples in terms of the two most recent presidents to hold office. While coming from opposite extremes, both illustrate a common challenge to the traditional iconic power of national sovereignty (plate XXVI). The image of Barack Obama was itself iconoclastic. In becoming the first black president of any Western state, Obama thrilled people worldwide, because his victory seemed to point beyond national boundaries to an embrace of difference, a transcendence of racism, and a possibility of realizing the utopian promise of a citizenry to which all people belong equally. I wrote in 2008 of the visibility in Obama’s image of a “new us, imagined in the reactions of schoolchildren in Indonesia, villagers in Kenya, taxi drivers in Dakar, and people, especially young people, in living rooms

40 Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy, p. 223. 41 Ibid., p. 158.





Visual Empire 2.0 

 189

and public places worldwide”.42 I still believe that a consequence of his being elected by American voters—and not only once, but twice—represented a new political imaginary. And yet the inclusiveness of his image was contradicted by the hegemony that sustains American global power.43 The power of Obama’s blackness was undermined by the power of the US sovereign icon—and vice versa. American sovereignty could not be both anti-racist and globally imperialistic at once. Now, in 2016, this same electorate brought to power Donald Trump, an individual who might seem like the antithesis of Obama. This about-face appears inscrutable. But in iconoclastic terms, Trump’s role is clear. More than any other candidate in 2016, he was prepared to destroy the iconomic traditions of the nation state. As president, this iconoclasm continues. There are moments when his right-wing populism and rhetoric of white supremacy seem dangerously familiar and indeed, fascist. He romanticizes authoritarian nationalism, opposes ‘political correctness’, and provokes hatred and scapegoating in the process. He champions the little man, while encouraging a global capitalism that runs the show from behind the scenes. At other times, however, his statements seem to lack even a populist ideological coherence. He has made no effort to use his office to unify the nation; he attends to no official ritual, no diplomatic patterns, no clear policy goals. Despite his expressions of nostalgia for a hyper-nationalist past, it is his own branded image that seems to command his highest loyalty. He personalizes power by using the most common form of social media, the tweet. Can we read these acts as symptomatic of a crisis in the very structure of modern state sovereignty, which he exposes and intensifies without being able to resolve? Are we witnessing, in the stumbles and thuds of Trump’s power, a larger issue, the dissolution of an entire iconic regime? His jarring actions scrape across the sovereign image of the nation and deface it. This is vandalism. But unwittingly, his destructiveness may hasten change. Will this era of iconoclasm open up a possibility of post-national, post-imperial collective imagination? Do self-made images of the Arab Spring, Indignados and Occupy movements provide glimmers of a different iconomy of the image, heralding a hope for democracy on a global scale? The dissemination of the image is fertile, generative, and proliferating.44 This is our new political situation, and it is global in scope—“the icon has no frame, no

42 Susan Buck-Morss, “Obama and the Image,” Culture, Theory and Critique 50, nos. 2–3 (2009), pp. 145–164, here p. 158. 43 “While the image of Obama may travel with ease and have global appeal, his office is rigidly determined by national sovereignty. He becomes President of the largest military power in the world. The color of his skin has not made this arsenal one iota less dangerous […]. He continues to stress the priority of national interests and national security at the same time that his image—multiracial, multiethnic, multi-national—might appear to contradict the words that he speaks” (ibid., p. 158). 44 “Power is nothing other than the appropriation of iconic authority and its symbolic fertility” (Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy, p. 115).



190 

 Susan Buck-Morss

limiting structure surrounds it”45—just as in Hardt and Negri’s influential account, ‘empire’ has no frame, and the multitude that inhabits it is itself a shadowy icon on the global screen, anonymous and amorphous, not yet an alternative to national iconocratic domination. It is with these considerations on a historical/metaphysical/political level that we turn from the iconomics of sovereign power to the cinema trilogy of Alexander Sokurov. This trilogy, whose production is coterminous with the recent political history we have been considering, allows for a reflection on global events that suggests an alternative: a destruction of 20th-century iconic sovereignty that clears a space within political vision for something new.

2 Sokurov’s Sovereign Trinity 2.1 The Cinematic Antidote The Russian director Alexander Sokurov has produced three films on 20th-century rulers who were icons of absolute power: Hitler (Moloch, 1999), Lenin (Taurus, 2000), and Hirohito (Solnze, 2004), a trinity of sovereign figures who ranged across the political spectrum from fascist to communist and to divinely ordained emperor, and whose cultural contexts were strikingly diverse. The film trilogy has aroused controversy. Hitler appears not to know about the concentration camps, Lenin is not responsible for his political decisions, and the depiction of Hirohito neglects the fact that he refused to sue for peace before the US nuclear attack. Sokurov has been criticized for his “contempt for politics and disregard for history”, and for contributing to a turn to the right in cultural production.46 Audiences have been baffled by the films, which appear as unconventional hybrids of documentary and fiction.47 Sokurov presents elements of the historical past with meticulously accurate detail, including costumes, props, sound, speech, and personal characteristics, but as surviving fragments in new and imaginary arrangements. The leaders are played by professional actors in the original languages: German, Russian, and Japanese (the same actor, Leonid Mozgovoi, plays Hitler and Lenin; Issey Ogata is brilliantly cast as Hirohito). While Hitler moves in the historically accurate setting of his Bavarian retreat, the same modernist-architectural structure is used for Lenin’s

45 Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy, p. 162. 46 www.wsws.org/articles/2005/mar2005/ber4. 47 Sokurov, who had spent the previous years working on a documentary project about Russian soldiers on the Afghanistan front, did extensive research for this trilogy in film and photograph archives, newspapers, journals, and private diaries.





Visual Empire 2.0 

 191

dacha and the Japanese emperor’s wartime refuge. Real history is the site of all three films (Hitler’s invasion of Russia in the summer of 1942; Lenin after his second stroke; Hirohito’s surrender to MacArthur), but the camera that once produced the iconicity of these rulers as public figures operates here on a private level. The point of view is that of the servants or guards. And what is there to see? These 20th-century leviathans, the iconic embodiments of monstrous power in the modern age, are presented to us as impotent, powerless, and dying. The audience is disappointed. We no longer expect each of them to be shown as the Savior of the collective but, rather, as the anti-Christ, the iconic embodiment of evil, a Satan who leads the people astray. We want to see these icons smashed. We might even have tolerated seeing them somehow, if perversely, redeemed, but we are given neither righteous judgment nor redemption. Sokurov provides no satisfaction for our iconoclastic desire, one met by conventional films about historically defeated leaders, and the effect is deeply disturbing. Every film produces its own economy, a relation of elements taken from reality montaged together as a meaningful whole, miraculously making visible the frameless and mobile world portrayed. The iconic power of images is essential for this miraculous effect. The industry is frank in acknowledging its stars as ‘idols’, venerated by a public whose affective engagement is extreme. But documentary film is supposed to operate differently. Here, the portrayal purports to use the iconic authority of the image to restore historical truth, which in this case means exposing defeated heroes as anti-heroes, thereby justifying the victors in history and vindicating those who have survived. In Sokurov’s trilogy, the iconic power of the cinematic form—the capacity to turn intensities, color, sound, and mood into a palpable experience of presence—is fully engaged, but the strangely crafted convergence between documentary detail and staged theatrical effects goes against the grain of documentary conventions, affecting us on a different level. Form—the cinematic economy—becomes content. These films are not about the sovereign power of national leaders; they are about the sovereign power of the visual, the experience of the image and how it relates to political belief: no power without an image. The iconoclastic desire is for evil rulers to be responsible for historical catastrophes, so that true sovereignty can be restored and humanity redeemed. Sokurov turns this logic inside out. The sovereign is not responsible. Absolute rulers are powerless. And the audience’s disappointment begins to set up its own economy. Our complicity in the construction of sovereign power is offered up to us for critical investigation.

2.2 Moloch Hitler as depicted in Moloch, the first of Sokurov’s trilogy, arrives with Boorman, Goebbels, and Goebbels’s wife Magda to join Eva Braun for a private get-away at his Bergtesgarten retreat. The staff, which includes Eva, lines up to receive him. The 

192 

 Susan Buck-Morss

camera brings us into the presence of Hitler during an unremarkable day of petty events. He ruminates on eating meat versus vegetarian soup, indulges in hypochondriac obsessions, defecates out of doors, and makes inane, if not insane conversation. He tyrannizes the group not by his will, but by the arbitrariness of his actions. Like living with a child on the brink of a tantrum, the most trivial moments seem precarious. It is not clear whether Hitler understands what he is doing. At an afternoon outing, the guards appear to be protecting the German people from viewing the silly antics of their rulers (while we look through their booted legs and observe all). We are interested in how the miraculous economy of sovereign power interacts with the miraculous economy of the cinematic image. We recall Leni Riefenstahl’s pseudo-documentary Triumph of the Will, in which the auratic potential of cinema is used to reinforce the iconic connection between der Führer and das Volk, moving the audience to empathic identification. Riefenstahl’s role as an iconocrat was to make the film miracle and the miracle of sovereign power converge. The contrast with Moloch could not be greater. Sokurov sets these miraculous powers against each other, so that we must give up either faith in the cinematic economy or faith in the economy of power. It is a critical strength of the film that it takes us away from the hero/anti-hero binary. “The illusion of heroism is to be avoided,” Sokurov insists: Hitler appears as a man you would barely notice if you passed him on the stairs.48 Sokurov believes in the importance of titles. Moloch was an ancient deity associated with the sacrifice of children. Hobbes refers to the Leviathan as Moloch, and absolute sovereign power as a human creation (a pagan idol). In Fritz Lang’s dystopian movie Metropolis (1927), the idol returns as the name of the infernal underground factory to which the lives of laborers are sacrificed. Sokurov says that in Shakespeare’s day, responsibility could lie with an individual sovereign, but now it lies with historical forces, and even Hitler only succeeded in playing a role within the latter, “taking out as much power as he needs” to act the part of the tyrannical ruler.49 But the abstract historical forces to which Sokurov refers are nowhere present in the work. The cinematic experience cannot be directly translated into the director’s political philosophy. We must ask what the movie says. The visual climax in terms of the economy of cinema comes in the entertainment room after dinner. Hitler watches a newsreel of war propaganda, a historically authentic document of die Deutsche Wochenschau depicting a Nazi triumph on the Eastern Front (the summer offensive into Russia that began on June 28, 1942 and led to the brutally devastating battle of Stalingrad, indicating the historical moment in which Moloch takes place). The camera cuts outside the viewing room to a real contemporary shot of the Bavarian landscape. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony plays faintly. Cut

48 Video interview with Aleksandr Sokurov in Moloch, DVD, dir. Aleksandr Sokurov (1999; Koch Lorber Films, 2005). 49 Ibid.





Visual Empire 2.0 

 193

Fig. 3: Layers of Cinema, Moloch (1999) dir. Alexander Sokurov.

back to the entertainment room, showing the newsreel of Knappertsbusch conducting a 1942 concert performance of this symphony, which contains layers of historical allusion: the Napoleonic Wars in Beethoven’s own time; the Nazi program of spreading German culture to the world; and in our time, the performance of the symphony at the official celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall (fig. 3). As Knappertsbusch conducts, the black-and-white newsreel pans the concert audience. In a striking overlay of cinematic elements, the women playing Eva Braun and Magda Goebbels squeal with pleasure when they recognize Joseph Goebbels’s life-size image in the audience and press bodily against the screen to touch the newsreel figures. From behind the screen, the shadow-figure of Hitler plays conductor, pretending to orchestrate the whole. This triple montage is brilliant cinema, the construction of an economy of affective engagement that superimposes archive and acting, real film and filmed real, audience viewed and viewing audience, a convergence of economies that leads us to want to ferret out our own positioning, as the film blocks the miraculous economy of sovereign power by means of the miraculous economy of the cinematic image. If not historical forces, then we are the source of dictatorial power. The finger of responsibility points to us. Sokurov connects the political icon to the religious icon directly. A priest visits. He comes as a suppliant before Hitler, whom he addresses as a holy man, begging him to spare a life, bestowing upon him the saintly role of intercessor. Hitler responds from the universal perspective of sovereign power that treats individual victims as totally irrelevant: “Millions of flies die, but there are still flies.” He then states slowly, 

194 

 Susan Buck-Morss

with sudden clarity, the secret truth of sovereign rule: “If I win, then everyone will pray to me. If I lose, then the most absolute nothing will treat me as a doormat.” Eva Braun acts the role of obsequious worshiper of Hitler but does not believe it. Hitler, who cannot hide his impotence from her, is relieved. As they tussle in his bedroom, she bursts out: “You are NOTHING. Zero,” and he appears delighted. The humanity of this sadomasochistic exchange is its redeeming honesty. In the film’s first scene, Eva fingers a locket that contains two images, Hitler and the Madonna and Child. Eva is all body, vital and athletic, yet virginal, and it causes her visceral pain. The women in all of Sokurov’s films are the redemptive moment, in the literal sense of the Theotokos, the Mother of God, accomplishing the humanization of a non-human, indeed inhuman force. But Eva’s destruction of the aura of Hitler’s power brings no salvation. In Moloch, the documentary fragments cannot be pieced together to create a human where a sovereign was once imagined.

2.3 Taurus In 1924, Mayakovsky composed a poem, Komsomolskaia, on the occasion of Lenin’s death: “Lenin” and “Death” — These words are enemies. “Lenin” and “life” — are comrades… Lenin — lived. Lenin — lives. Lenin — will live.

In the film Taurus, eternal life is precisely what we do not see. Lenin is shown, having already suffered two strokes, as failing, fading, drifting in and out of clarity and bodily control, repeating constantly to his caretakers: “R sam! I’ll do it myself!” But even physical autonomy is no longer possible. We are shown Lenin smashing objects and overturning the lunch table; Lenin dragging himself from the bed, being heaved into a car, and standing in a tub to be bathed. In Moloch the sovereign figure of Hitler acts the part of the human that he cannot be. The judgment of Lenin is less severe. The camera focuses on his all too human, mortal body, mere life, naked before us as before his servants. It takes great effort to move this natural body with its heavy, material force. But—materialism be damned!—Lenin has no desire to shake off this mortal coil. Soviet Marxism deified world history, declaring that its course would ensure the salvation of the masses. Revolution, wrote Marx, is history’s midwife, and Leninist voluntarism claimed the role of inducing labor. The Party was the superhuman force 



Visual Empire 2.0 

 195

capable of pushing history forward on a planetary scale. But in Sokurov’s film, nothing of sublime proportions remains. Isolated and alone, the naked Lenin personifies no collective meaning. No one telephones from Moscow. His country dacha is totally cut off from political power. This hero of the nation’s electrification lives in the shadows. Lenin comments that thunderstorms are the manifestation of electricity, not, as his mother believed, the result of angels fighting in heaven. Yet he refuses to accept heaven’s indifference, which his own philosophy insists is true. Lenin wills against history, against time, against his own material body, and these defeat him. Material history, transient and forgetful, trivializes human determination. In the film, only nature in its ungovernable and careless abundance—a field of white flowers, summer thunder, the forest in the wind, insistent birds at sunset—displays the potency of a metaphysical truth. Unlike Hitler, Lenin is all too human. Krupskaya’s affection and care for her invalid husband are authentic, maternal, comforting as she reads to him, takes him on a picnic, tolerates his violent outbursts against his own futility. We engage with the leader at a scandalous level of exposure. And yet his loss of aura is the opposite of degrading. Its effect is profound and even spiritual, precisely because it is anti-iconocratic. Natural images of the physical world, made timeless by the miracle of cinema, suggest a materialist metaphysics, where the detail of Krupskaya hiding a hole in her stocking carries more affective power than the entire mythology of the proletarian class. Stalin pays a visit. His posture of solidarity with the dying man does little to conceal his plotting as the self-proclaimed heir apparent of Lenin’s power. The figure of Stalin moves through the house like a shadow. We strain to make out the two sovereign forms against a murky background. This historic meeting is filmed without the illumination that might shower legitimacy on the figure of Stalin. For a revolutionary regime, the problem of succession is critical. And it is by revering the dead body of Lenin, setting his corpse up as itself the icon of materialist belief, venerated by the masses who make a pilgrimage to his sepulcher, that Stalin will provide for his own political legitimation. “Proshevsky! Are the successes of higher science able to resurrect people who have decomposed or not?” “No,” said Prushevsky. “You’re lying,” accused Zachev without opening his eyes. “Marxism can do anything. Why is it then that Lenin lies intact in Moscow? He is waiting for science—he wants to be resurrected.” —Andrei Platonov, The Foundation Pit, 1930

Lenin became an icon only after his death. His wife Krupskaya recalled that in the first weeks of Bolshevik rule, “nobody knew Lenin’s face [….] In the evening we would often […] stroll around the Smolny, and nobody would ever recognize him, because there were no portraits then.”50 She strongly opposed his mummification: “If you

50 Nadezhda Krupskaya, cited in Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe, p. 70.



196 

 Susan Buck-Morss

want to honor the name of Vladimir Ilich,” she wrote, “build day care centers, kindergartens, homes, schools.”51 Ernst Kantorowicz’s study of the king’s two bodies describes the symbolic double as the ideal form of the merely human king that can guarantee the perpetuation of sovereign rule after death and natural decay.52 But in the Soviet inversion of Christ’s resurrection, it is the flesh of the human sovereign that does not decay. The material body exists in perpetuum, as miraculously as a movie star’s image on the screen. Taurus, the bull, is the astrological sign under which Lenin was born. It is the name of the mythical, sacred bull sacrificed to appease the gods, and Sokurov suggests that this was Lenin’s fate in the sense that the sacrifice of Lenin’s natural body to iconic power allowed Stalin to develop a living cult of personality as his successor. In the 1930s, the inclusion of Lenin icons extended the economy of the socialist revolution to every part of the landscape of daily life. ‘Lenin corners’ replaced religious icons in the home. Cinema was recruited for the iconic task. In the 1930s, particular actors became recognizable as the prototypes of Lenin through repeated portrayals in hagiographic films. Statues of Lenin, busts of Lenin, Lenin pins—these “reiterations were meant to be material evidence that ‘Lenin is always with us,’ effecting the apparent elimination of historical transience by extending the recent past limitlessly into the future”.53 Against this myth, Taurus makes a cinematic icon out of Lenin’s living body in decay. The vulnerability of life is raised to a metaphysical level—a materialist metaphysics—suggesting a transformed vision of political legitimation.

2.4 Solnze You and I, we are cherry-blossoms of the same class, we fight for the army and navy air-wing Like the cherry blossoms which fall, we will fall, but we will fall in glory and in fashion. —Japanese military song54

Solnze, ‘The Sun’, the third of Sokurov’s films, released in Fall 2005, is a meticulously filmed account of Hirohito, the last divine emperor of Japan, at the moment of his

51 Krupskaya, cit. in ibid., p. 72. 52 Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957. 53 Cit. in Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe, p. 71. 54 John Borneman and Linda Fisher, http://cidc.library.cornell.edu/ dof/japan/captioned/god.htm.





Visual Empire 2.0 

 197

surrender to General MacArthur, and his abdication from power as the descendant of the Shinto Sun Goddess. The cinematic strategy adapts itself to the specific conditions of Hirohito’s sovereign power, portraying his defeat as a liberation from the ritualized existence that had appropriated his material body since birth. As he lives on the brink of falling into merely human being, the servants persist in investing his person with divinity. Their every physical motion is an act of faith, as they serve his meals, record his words, and dress him with precision—in military dress when he meets with his ministers, in a scientist’s white coat when he does his biological studies, in Western high-hat and tails when he is taken to MacArthur to surrender. When the emperor speaks frankly to his valet, telling him that his body is no different from those of the rest of humanity, the servant, buttoning his clothes with a ceremonial care that causes drops of sweat to appear on his bowed head, responds: “Everyone knows the Emperor is God in the flesh.” There could not be a clearer definition of the sovereign as icon, god-become-man, whom the people worship and love. The emperor reflects: “And because of this love, I could not stop the war.” Hirohito did not grab power. Divinity was not his choice. He has no stake in continuing the myth that has imprisoned him as tightly as the war bunker to which he is confined. This descendant of the Sun is exposed to natural light only when climbing up from the underground quarters to his science laboratory, where, with Allied planes still bombing above, he indulges in his hobby of marine biology. But it is more than a hobby. Natural life is his religion. “What a miracle,” he exclaims, examining under a microscope the body of a hermit crab, whose back bears the design of an angry samurai. “What heavenly beauty!” This reversal of roles, the divine emperor worshiping material nature, sets the stage for a cinematic revelation when, as Sokurov says, another reality shines through. In his meticulous filming, in the quiet care of the director for every detail of light, sound, gesture, pace, and movement, Sokurov’s reverence, echoing that of the servants, is for the material world, the beauty of which appears as transcending all historical legends of good and evil, friend and foe, destruction and triumph, victory and defeat. In both the content and form of the film, it is human care itself, carefulness, that Sokurov shows us, and we are deeply moved. Again, as in Moloch, the filmic climax is an interplay of visual layers without verbal commentary or concepts, a cinematic economy that approaches pure thought solely through the relationship of images. It happens when the emperor is alone—except for the servant who watches through a crack in the door, except for us. Hirohito lies down for his scheduled nap. We watch his sleeping body first agitated by bad dreams, then calm, curled on his side, eyes closed, and a smile on his face. It is after he awakens that, eyes wide open, he sees a vision, and we see it too, as a background noise of exploding bombs continues seamlessly into the dreamlike sequence: shadows, fishforms swimming in the sea, morphing, as the noise grows louder, into bomb-forms falling through the sky, and in the background, in the underwater depths, there shim

198 

 Susan Buck-Morss

mers the liquid fire of burning cities, the absolute material destruction by air attack of the fragile life and precarious nature below. The vision stops. There is silence except for the ticking of a clock. The emperor goes to his desk, sits, and prepares his ink. He writes to his son of the “terrible defeat”, explaining: “Our people had too much faith in the Empire […] and hated the Americans.” He composes a waka poem that speaks of the transiency of nature and fleetingness of time “the Sakura blossom…January snow…neither lasts long…frosty white… frosty whirlwind…death swallows both.” He takes out an album of photographs. The clock continues to tick loudly. The sequence of photos that we view—and view the emperor viewing—is archival, consisting of staged photographs that are themselves documentary facts: official portraits of Hirohito and of the empress on the occasion of his enthronement; the empress with their eldest son Akihito, mother and child, in the iconic mode of the Theotokos and Christ. The emperor leans down to kiss this icon, and then wipes the surface with a handkerchief to clean it of his touch. The photographs continue: Western movie stars—Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich. He bows his head close to these idols, but then shakes it in slight disapproval. Two loose photographs: Hitler and the German Kaiser, Hitler alone. Hirohito, who never met Hitler, puzzles over them. The servant announces the arrival of American soldiers, who will take him to MacArthur. When he exits the house, in high-hat and tails, the US photographers exclaim that he looks like Charlie Chaplin. He is pleased to be mistaken for a movie star (fig. 4). Here is a photograph that appeared in the American press. Sokurov has copied such visual documents meticulously, thereby achieving the look of the photographed original. A series in Life magazine, the first to show the Japanese emperor to the American public, contains formal and thematic elements that reappear in Sokurov’s images in ways too close to be accidental.55 At the same time, the conventional distancing of the documentary genre is absent. We feel the presence that only cinema reality can sustain. The official version of history, in Japan as well as in the United States, is that the American invasion and prolonged military occupation brought the ‘Japanese people’ democracy, liberating them—particularly their women—from the bonds of the imperial past (Hirohito’s willingness to acquiesce to this interpretation is a reason that his life was spared). But Sokurov’s portrayal of the towering, confident military commander MacArthur, as he interacts with the diminutive, frank, and worldly polyglot Hirohito, gives us pause. MacArthur’s smug assertions of the superiority of American democracy are hurled at Hirohito with a victor’s sense of right that can easily be read as racial arrogance. Whereas Hirohito speaks of the “burden” of his divine role (“the emperor’s life is not easy”), MacArthur describes people such

55 I am grateful to Yasufumi Nakamori, who discovered these images in Life magazine (October 1946: 75–79) during his own archival research.





Visual Empire 2.0 

 199

Fig. 4: Photo of MacArthur and Hirohito.

as the spiritually oriented Japanese as the kind who “send millions of others to their death”. He criticizes the “Asian reserve” of people “always inside” themselves. And there is no hint of apology in his matter-of-fact description of America’s special form of imperialism: “Do you know why the United States does not catch fish? Because we can buy all living creatures. We don’t need the territory of others.” More than once the film refers to the anti-immigration policies of the United States, and California’s 1924 statute excluding, specifically, the Japanese. MacArthur, who has set up his headquarters in the Sun Emperor’s palace, takes on the sovereign’s role (presumptions of sovereignty would cause President Truman to recall him from Korea in 1951). One does not sense that under the new command, the world will be more human, or that Hirohito’s gentle directness and lack of guile as he converses with his vanquisher can be dismissed as some funny quirk of national character. There is not a trace of orientalism in the filming. The figure of Hirohito transcends national type and allegorical meaning. His humanity is overwhelmingly present. This cinema document does not justify history. It does not take place within the register of historical time at all. The curious effect of our empathy with the figure of the defeated 

200 

 Susan Buck-Morss

emperor is to remove us totally from the economy of sovereign power, with its iconic order of good and evil grounded in collective identifications. We are able to see our liberation from sovereign power in and through the liberation of a human being from his sovereign role—something that the emperor’s own people do not want, because it makes their own historical suffering meaningless. In 1936, Stalin announced that the building of socialism was essentially complete. A man of peasant origins recalled that day: “I had just returned from my native village in the Viatka region, lost in the depths of the forest, cut off from the world by lack of roads. In the izbas there was mud […] I wouldn’t have thought anything of that—after all before us shone the beacon of the bright future, which we were building with our own hands. Maybe we would still have to labor for another five or ten years, straining all our forces, but we’d get there! And suddenly it turned out that this was socialism around me […]. Never, neither before nor after, have I experienced such disappointment, such grief.”56 What is being sanctified here? Sokurov says of his films: natural life. In Solnze, the greatest of the trilogy, there is no typicality in the treatment of those conquered or of the victors, whose triumph caused such material devastation. There is only the authenticity of actors and actions, the carefully recorded details of daily life. But it is precarious life, raw, already wounded, exposing the enormous, metaphysical responsibility of humankind. This is not an answer to the problem of sovereignty. It is a different articulation of the question.

56 Cit. in Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, pp. 262–263.



Chiara Cappelletto

The Dynamis of Fiction in the Globalized World On Walid Raad’s Images in Transfer1 WikiLeaks is a giant library of the world’s most persecuted documents. We give asylum to these documents, we analyze them, we promote them and we obtain more. Julian Assange, interview “We Are Drowning in Material” Der Spiegel, July 20, 2015 By the very fact of existing every story is true, and if we want to extract any meaning from it,  it suffices to take into consideration the fact that, in order to attain the form that is best suited to it, there is sometimes a need to produce in it, thanks to its elastic properties, a certain compression, certain displacements, and more than a few retouches of its iconography. Juan José Saer, The Investigation, 2012

Archives as Ego Chambers The dematerialization of documents, the displacement of people, the outsourcing of functions and goods, the decentralization of decision-making  processes, the shortterm news cycles, and the hacking of personal and public data all contribute to what we experience today as our globalized, inappropriable world. Is this really ‘the World’? Is the world actually so homogenous as to be a small theater with billions of spectators watching? Are there no margins left to look at, to be curious about? I am skeptical about the monolithic coherence of the current prevailing narrative, which smacks of a triumphant, and paradoxical, localism. But, as things stand, this is the established framework within which we struggle to find reliable public narratives. Meanwhile, personal witnessing is experienced as too individual to be trustworthy. I regard the difficulty one faces in taking responsibility in public speech as one form of the ‘logics of expulsion’, which Saskia Sassen has shown to be a major outcome of

1 I presented the third section of this article in July 2017 at the Kolleg-Forschergruppe BildEvidenz. Geschichte und Ästhetik at the Freie Universität Berlin, where I was granted a fellowship for the project Does Fictionality Enhance Dynamis? Performing Images in a Global World.

202 

 Chiara Cappelletto

our global political economy.2 We experience a short circuit between fact and fiction that exceeds forgery and falsification. Such unreliability of sources and accounts undermines the notion of history itself and challenges the power of the visual culture to shape historical knowledge.3 Can visual artifacts be trusted and shared when reality is blurring? Or are they shadows of our dreams and nightmares that we engage from time to time in purposeless conversation? The publicness of the image is at stake. The pervasive role played by the media in community building—Gustav Metzger began critiquing the world of newspapers in Mass Media: Today and Yesterday in the 1970s (1972–2015)—and the net capacity to recall and to censor—which, as Antoni Muntadas’s The file room (since 1994) has proven, is becoming increasingly problematic—should not mislead us. We are not dealing with the ontological question of the availability of evidence or the (im)possibility of its verification, but with the rhetorical bond between its presentation, its actual visibility, and our very idea of historical episteme. Are images still able to tell reliable stories? Images are conservative devices: they need ‘a’ truth, so as to endorse reality. Decades of iconology, genealogy, and postmodernism, and years of virtual reality, have not dismantled what over centuries has become an established—albeit not unquestioned—consensus for optical truth, based on a powerful cooperation of theoretical stances and material tools: images represent the world, however skeptical scholars may be. The present sense of living in an unintelligible reality undermines the very possibility of visual discourse. The temptation of the images’ realism is outdone by nostalgia for a knowable world. The most vulnerable stages in the construction of public narratives are therefore the storage and display—what rhetoric used to call the inventio and dispositio—of images. Storage and display indeed negotiate between (im)possible evidence and discursive (in)stability. This is why, even though Allan Sekula was correct in denouncing in his 1995 Fish Story the “self-congratulating conceptual aggrandizement of ‘information’”,4 in a time of deepfake technology, alternative facts, and doctored snapshots that go viral, we should not underestimate what Jacques Derrida wrote that very same year: “The technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future. The archivization produces as much as it records the event.”5 In light of such a methodological warning, enquiring whether a trustworthy

2 Saskia Sassen, Expulsions. Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. 3 See Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing. The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence, London: Reaktion Books, 2001. 4 Allan Sekula, Fish Story, catalogue, Düsseldorf: Richter Verlag, 1995, p. 50. 5 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever. A Freudian Impression [1995], trans. Eric Prenowitz, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996, p. 17.



The Dynamis of Fiction in the Globalized World 

 203

event can be faithfully referred to by way of its representations requires a changed set of presuppositions and implications relative to sources and their treatment.6 The archive is the main formula that has shaped questions about memory, media, and subjectivity over the last century. This has been increasingly the case since the late 1960s, and the form continues to evolve.7 The inquiries led by Aby Warburg, Walter Benjamin, and André Malraux at the epiphany of this process are well known, as are the coeval artistic practices with which they were matched, and which are in turn best explained using the very notions and arguments forged by these same scholars.8 An exemplary collection—no longer organized chronologically—of paintings and bas-reliefs, marbles and stamps, photographs and videos, along with objects of daily life, can be used to write and rewrite the past, drawing scenarios and pinpointing views that reverse present understandings and trigger new critical approaches. The archival apparatus has the ability to produce knowledge. The variety of its instantiations notwithstanding, an idea has long prevailed of the archive as a way of achieving established knowledge by compiling and systematizing materials, even if it were by the fragmentation of knowledge itself. The effective subject of this knowledge is collective: society and its intellectual capacity. Even Gerhard Richter, whose Atlas (1962–2013) depicts the ‘anomic banality’ of the consumer world, continues to think of the archive as an outcome of rationality.9 Despite their social power, however, archives are epistemic agents that need to be activated by single viewers. Over the past 40 years, several different archival formats have enhanced this individualistic feature as both a heuristic tool and display, to the point where current references to the atlas feel suspiciously metaphorical: these formats overtly expose the material of one’s biographical search. The dispute over Hal Foster’s diagnosis of an archival impulse “concerned less with absolute origins than with obscure traces”10 has already devalued the psychological aspects of archival practices in artistic and intellectual processes. Foster cites, as an example, Tacita

6 See Hayden White’s argument against the 19th-century ‘empiricist prejudice’, which pinpoints that “the process of fusing events, whether imaginary or real, into a comprehensible totality capable of serving as the object of a representation is a poetic process” in Hayden White, “The Fictions of Factual Representation” [1976], Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1978, pp. 121–134, here p. 125. 7 For a critical overview, see Cristina Baldacci, Archivi impossibili. Un’ossessione dell’arte contemporanea, Milan: Johan and Levi, 2016. 8 The affinity between Warburg’s and Benjamin’s historical understandings and avant-garde practices was first pointed out by Wolfgang Kemp, “Walter Benjamin und Aby Warburg,” Kritische Berichte 3, no. 1 (1975), pp. 5–25. 9 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Gerhard Richter’s Atlas: The Anomic Archive,” October 88 (Spring 1999), pp. 117–145, here p. 142. 10 Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October 110 (Autumn 2004), pp. 3–22, here p. 5; for Foster’s critics, see André Lepecki, “The Body as Archive: Will to Re-Enact and the Afterlives of Dances,” Dance Research Journal 42, no. 2 (Winter 2010), pp. 28–48, especially the first paragraph.



204 

 Chiara Cappelletto

Dean’s practice, which is said to be guided by a “will […] to probe a misplaced past”.11 But we must clarify what is to be considered psychological, whether this is Foster’s analysis or the artistic strategies on which he focuses. For, despite the unchallenged consensus that history, and not merely the past, is at stake in archival art, several archives suggest rather that the call for memory serves to bring out the voice in public narratives, to draw attention to private memories of what has been ‘simply lost’. They offer a masqueraded narcissism in search of the public’s complicity. We experience this personalization of the archive while looking at the things stacked by analogy (color, matter, form) in the closets of the Museum der Dinge (1973) in Berlin, where the visitor is made to recognize the disheveled Barbie she played with as a child, or that old model of computer that sat on her homework table for years: everyday, relatively marginal objects—mostly from the Deutscher Werkbund— function as sentimental madeleines of a past that each of us has lived through at first hand. Personal participation is required for this ‘museological laboratory’, which “continually reconsiders, refines, and develops its collection”, insofar as each of its viewers is summoned to adopt a thing by answering the Museum’s question: “Is this your thing?”12 We likewise experience such personalization while listening to the soundtrack of unknown and absent individuals’ heartbeats collected in Christian Boltanski’s Les Archives du cœur (since 2008), where the listener is invited to record her own heartbeat and leave with a copy of the recording. We experience it in Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence (2012), where common things found in flea markets and pawn shops are imbued with affective qualities and exhibited under a pretense of intimism: “The future of museums is inside our own homes.”13 The original function of the archive is thus subverted. The archive has become the ongoing transcription of our living activity. It has turned into something blatantly subjective. As Instagram attests, this process is far from elitist: the archival practice has become a commonsensical auto-archiving that vulgarizes the idea of self-exposure once critically questioned by Marcel Broodthaers in his show MTL-DHT (1970), where he “treat[ed] his personal, open-ended manuscripts as though they were final, almost like ready-mades”.14 The archive’s author, the archivist, and the user are all the same person.

11 Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” p. 21. 12 From the Museum der Dinge website https://www.museumderdinge.org/institution/aboutinstitution. 13 Orhan Pamuk, A Modest Manifesto for Museums, https://masumiyetmuzesi-en.myshopio.com/ page/a-modest-manifesto-for-museums. 14 Anne Rorimer, “The Exhibition at the MTL Gallery in Brussels, March 13–April 10, 1970,” October 42, Marcel Broodthaers: Writings, Interviews, Photographs (Autumn 1987), pp. 101–125, here p. 115.



The Dynamis of Fiction in the Globalized World 

 205

The alliance between art as postproduction,15 on the one hand, and self-expression as a cultural ‘hoarding syndrome’, on the other, is predicated on the idea of images, objects, and data being objets trouvés that unexpectedly allow us to recognize and reactivate our intimate life. Serendipity works as a historical criterion. The once nomothetic notion of the archive has become a passe-partout to legitimizing our everyday ‘organizing and collecting’, as we try to master the cultural anxiety stemming from the lack of sharable memories. It offers a lingua franca to people engaged in private deliria, personal stories, and public narratives as well. The archive form renegotiates the relationship between personal biography and collective history, which could not have been conceived the way it is without the ready-made as its matrix. Marcel Duchamp worked on this, so as “to make no changes in the physical appearance of the profane object […], because”, according to Boris Groys, “he wanted to show that that object’s cultural valorization was a process distinct from its artistic transformation.”16 It is a process in which everybody can participate. The ready-made elicits the auratic quality of the mass object, which is embedded in any current item because it could be mine, and its owner’s history could be my own. This is why, in Duchamp’s work, it suffices to have a few typologies of everyday objects to explain to viewers how spectatorship works, whereas Warburg gathered dozens of images for his 63 Mnemosyne panels to depict the historical trajectories and diversions of the human mind. Beyond displaying urinals in museums, it was Duchamp’s project to implant unique works of art in our daily life. This project of the ‘reciprocal ready-made’ (“what if I use a Rembrandt as an ironing board?”) has in the end become a reality. Works of art are appropriated for take-home items, for everything from postcards to soaps. We can engage with art that is on display: we can touch it, wear it, sit on it, eat it. A comprehensive example of such interactiveness is Rimini Protokoll’s Nachlass (2017), which develops a concept of archival projects as modes of preserving living sources from future loss—an approach encountered in several of the works chosen for Documenta XIV (2017).17 Nachlass invites no more than a handful of people at a time to gather for a few minutes in eight small immersive spaces. Once inside, they are summoned to listen to the recorded voices of deceased people who have prepared their farewells. They are told the story of the things left behind; they are authoritatively invited to stand, open drawers, unpack boxes, look at pictures, sit, and help

15 “Postproduction artists invent new uses for works, including audio or visual forms of the past, within their own constructions. But they also reedit historical or ideological narratives, inserting the elements that compose them into alternative facts,” Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction. Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2002, p. 45. 16 Boris Groys, On the New [1992], trans. G.M. Goshgarian, London–New York: Verso, 2014, p. 86. 17 In Journey to Russia (1989–2017), Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi decided “to meet the last living representatives of the Russian avant-gardes […] and record their human experiences before they disappeared forever”. Caption accompanying the work.



206 

 Chiara Cappelletto

themselves to sweets. Any object or event becomes effective by being archived and thus reinserted into collective discourse. Should we preserve these remains, or rather assimilate them? Are we free to disobey and reject them, to destroy them? The very possibility of inheritance is challenged. As Nachlass demonstrates, archives have stopped negotiating between the external, material supports of the past—texts, material traces—and the personal memories they used to convey and diffuse into the living world. They have liquidated their original functioning of being at once dwelled-in and dwelling. They have discarded their topological nature and become emotional environments. After centuries of preserving legacies of documents for the writing and re-writing of history, they have turned into performances. This is why archival apparatuses are now less centered on the act of being opened, and instead hinge on the practice of being re-enacted. The whole idea of a memory crisis is finally brought into question. Are we supposed to recall what is gone and lost, or what has survived? Is the issue at stake the recent and distant past (the lack of sources), or rather the present (the lack of claims)? These questions are taken up by what Carrie Lambert-Beatty calls parafictional strategies. Parafictioneers collect information from real life and use it as evidence for unmasking the ideologies of the globalized world and putting its rationale to the test. This ‘retelling’ process involves counterfeiting parts of widely-known data and official claims, along with the links between them, thus giving rise to incoherencies, paradoxes, and hyperboles, from which doubts emerge and unpredictable realizations ensue. Parafictional devices are flexible. They can be site-specific, broadcasted, or disseminated on the web; they can take the form of public speeches, shows, installations—an extraordinary precursor of this simulation game is, of course, the playwithin-the-play in Hamlet, where Hamlet uses a dramatic piece to expose his uncle’s guilt. Lambert-Beatty describes parafictions as “experiments in deception” that share the characteristic of being both ‘made-up’ and ‘real to me’: they are “strategies […] oriented less toward the disappearance of the real than toward the pragmatics of trust. Simply put, with various degrees of success, for various durations, and for various purposes, these fictions are experienced as fact.”18 The collective The Yes Men is one of the major exponents of the genre. Its members are known especially for pretending to be employees or officers of real institutions, such as the World Trade Organization; getting themselves invited to official symposia as their representatives, actually attending these functions and taking the floor; and designing fake-functional websites parodying the official ones.19 Through their mode of remaking reality, where generally accurate evidence is framed in a wholly fabricated story, they consider them-

18 Carrie Lambert-Beatty, “Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility,” October 129 (Summer 2009), pp. 51–84, here p. 54. 19 See The Yes Men, The Yes Men: The True Story of the End of the World Trade Organization, New York: The Disinformation Company, 2004.



The Dynamis of Fiction in the Globalized World 

 207

selves to be “[intervening] in the real. Using fiction very truthfully, is how they see it. Providing transparency through truth masquerading as fiction.”20 Parafictioneers would be surprised to discover how deep their faith in reality and speech-acts actually is. To rephrase Aby Warburg, parafictions live to do us harm. And yet the storytelling directed against the power of institutional agents in the globalized world ends up presenting what should be a scandal as a simple parody. It normalizes the situation as it is. Archives have proved to be anything but “value-free [sites] of document collection”, and archivists—far from being bystanders—are deeply implicated in power dynamics.21 However, the shift from the archive’s authority to the distribution of ironical images and arguments homogenizes cultural, economic, and personal differences. Data and lives end up being interchangeable. Hence, the website of the real 43rd US President—George W. Bush—parasitized by The Yes Men and the letters of the fictional Turkish-Jewish woman Safiye Behar function in similar ways. The latter was introduced by Sorbonne-trained historian-turned-artist Michael Blum in A tribute to Safiye Behar (2005) at the Ninth International Istanbul Biennial. Blum claims to have recovered Behar’s correspondence with Mustafa Kemal, whose reforms she is supposed to have profoundly influenced. Scarce surviving fragments of their letters are displayed as historical evidence for the benefit of the public, whose credulity is put to the test by only a few clues. By “splitting History into histories, […] [Blum is nodding] to the discourses on identity and hybridity of the 1980s and ’90s”,22 and he is pinpointing the fact that women were granted the right to vote in Turkey earlier than in ‘civilized’ France. But despite the fact that many artists participating in post-colonial strategies see the archival apparatus as a medium for emancipating their past from official neglect and an international lack of memories, the archival apparatus is the fitting art form for the globalized world—that is, the Western world. The agent of the discourse is the West. The narrator is the West. The counter memory that parafictional archives are intended to trigger is ultimately nothing more than a carnival in an A.D. year. The archive ends up re-marginalizing post-colonial cultures, standardizing minorities at the very moment in which it revives the hierarchy between truth and mimesis and its attendant heuristic strategy, in order to structure the relation between authoriality and collective memories and experiences, backgrounds, and actual heritages, between the center and its margins. Unethical behavior, misleading discourses, and political tyranny are “cited, quoted, framed, illuminated, encased in the shot/reverse-shot strategy of a serial enlightenment”.23

20 Stephen Wright, “The Future of the Reciprocal Readymade: An Essay on Use Value and Art-related Practice,” Parachute 117 (2005), pp. 119–138, here p. 122. 21 Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook, “Archives, Records, and Power. The Making of Modern Memory,” Archival Science 2 (2002), pp. 1–19, here p. 6. 22 Lambert-Beatty, Make-Believe, p. 52. 23 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London and New York: Routledge, 1994, p. 31.



208 

 Chiara Cappelletto

Decaying as the West may be, it survives, and the more it decays, the more it collects sources to portray its own past in its own way. Others’ memories, be they familiar or foreign, are integrated into its memorial strategy. Nada Shabout is right when she says that “in spite of aspects of deterritorialization, globalization is inevitably tied to imperialism,”24 because it produces the otherness of others for its own purposes. The (lack of) recognition of Arab art offers a foremost example of this process of cultural assimilation. Because the national identity of cultural process—an exquisitely Western idea—still plays a decisive role in our understanding of artistic development,25 the art of largely ‘nationless’ peoples is thought of as not deserving visibility. This view is galvanized by the fact that the standard Western art historian assigns temporalities to works of art to establish “a chronological system of networks”26 connecting objects to national histories, in the absence of which Arab items are historically conflated with a Western past, notwithstanding their properly attributed dates. Both temporality and identity are applied to visual artifacts according to intellectual patterns that impede the understanding of the other, the non-Western: “The West struggles to theorize the Arab worlds, while the Arab world only wants to ‘be’.”27 This opposition is likely to repeat itself endlessly, until we as scholars and artists stop reproducing an approach that polarizes what is worthy of being inscribed in the public narrative and what is not. This polarization is fruitful neither scientifically nor politically. It leaves us unable to answer the question that Homi Bhabha raised a quarter of a century ago, about whether transnational histories may become a world matter, and whether unhomeliness can “lead to an international theme”.28 To open up the discourse we need to profane the archive for real, by stripping down the “structure of the archivable”. Parafictioneers problematize the distinction between those who establish archives and those who use them; they question the

24 Nada Shabout, “Contemporaneity and the Arab World,” New Vision: Arab Contemporary Art in the 21st Century, eds. Hossein Amirsadeghi, Salwa Mikdadi, and Nada Shabout, London: Thames and Hudson, 2009, pp. 14–21, here p. 21. It is astonishing to see, in reading the presentation of the 2018 exhibition Oceania at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the extent to which her understanding is still highly valid today. The home page of the website states: “This exhibition includes many objects that Pacific Islanders consider living treasures. Some may pay their respects and make offerings through the duration of the exhibition. Please be aware that this exhibition contains human remains.” 25 Nada Shabout, “Historiographic Invisibilities. The Case of Contemporary Iraqi Art,” International Journal of the Humanities 3, no. 9 (2005/2006), pp. 53–64, here p. 55. 26 Avinoam Shalem, “From Object to Subject: Conceptualizing ‘The Future of Tradition—The Tradition of Future’,” Cultures of the Curatorial, eds. Beatrice von Bismarck, Jörn Schafaff, and Thomas Weski, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012, pp. 167–187, here p. 169. 27 Nada Shabout and Salwa Mikdadi, “Introduction,” New Vision: Arab Contemporary Art in the 21st Century, eds. Hossein Amirsadeghi, Salwa Mikdadi, and Nada Shabout, London: Thames and Hudson, 2009, pp. 8–13, here p. 10. 28 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 12.



The Dynamis of Fiction in the Globalized World 

 209

sharing of collective memory; they address the power both over and of information; but they cannot question what they are looking for: the missing element. Finally, no matter what instantiation of the archival formula we consider, no matter how ephemeral it has become, the archive’s general criterion is that it preserves things that happened, and the fact that they did happen, in a past that is gone, misplaced though it may be. Ruins survive destruction because what is lost occurred in fact. Traces remain of facts and discourses that can be proved. If we search a visual representation for a missing event that we have never witnessed, we might then reverse the question: how can we archive the negative events or things that have disappeared from our experience of history, but that have potentially occurred and existed?

Walid Raad’s Arcana Imperii Walid Raad is often considered one of the world’s foremost parafictioneers. This characterization notwithstanding, his artistic process and critical commitment consistently diverge from those of The Yes Men and other similar exponents of the genre. Devoting his life’s work to the uprooting of the Lebanese people and their culture owing to the civil wars that devastated Lebanon from 1975 to 1991, as well as to his own deracination, Raad uses fiction to emancipate reality from records, not to fact-check reality through records. His project is, in fact, much more akin to those of Gordon Matta Clark, Roberto Bolaño, and Sophie Calle, their anarchitecture, plots, and journals all challenging the sense of belonging to a community, the possibility of mutual witnessing, and the ‘I’ as the hallmark of a stable identity. When invited to contribute a text to the catalog for his personal exhibit at the MoMA in 2015, Raad selected quotations from art magazines, newspapers, and other sources, introducing himself via statements that “he wishes he had made himself or would never make himself”.29 The quotes were anonymous sentences melded together with some 50 indistinguishable faces—sketched as though they were drawing studies—in the collage I Thought I’d Escape My Fate, but Apparently. Raad’s work is driven by personal trauma. This is an understanding to which he himself subscribes,30 urging his audience to treat his material as ‘hysterical documents’— that is, as representations of events that produce their own causes: “they are not based on any one person’s actual memories but on ‘fantasies erected from the mate-

29 Walid Raad, “I Thought I’d Escape My Fate, but Apparently,” Walid Raad, ed. Eva Respini, catalogue, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2015, pp. 9–27, here p. 9. 30 See Sarah Rogers, “Forging History, Performing Memory: Walid Ra’ad’s The Atlas Project,” Parachute: Contemporary Art Magazine 108 (October 2002), pp. 68–79.



210 

 Chiara Cappelletto

rial of collective memories’,”31 for the most part referring to events that he has not— directly or entirely—experienced, because he was not present when they occurred, or because he was not able to glean information about them from people back home. Born in 1967 in Beirut to a Palestinian mother and a Lebanese father, Raad grew up in the eastern, Christian-dominated part of the city. He left for the United States in 1982, at the age of 15, as the fighting between rival factions was intensifying and becoming increasingly dangerous to a young man who by then aspired to be a photojournalist.32 Notable evidence of this youthful desire, which has continued to drive him throughout his career, can be found in The Beirut Al-Hadath Archive (1999). The project is claimed to be put on by Al-Hadath—a visual and cultural research organization—and developed in collaboration with Raad: one hundred photographers were recruited to shoot every street, storefront, building, sign, and piece of vegetation in Beirut during the civil wars. They were asked to supplement this would-be Borgesian 1:1 map with the exact time and street address of each image taken, so as to satisfy Raad’s enduring interest in the cooperation between topography and history. Barred from recounting events owing to his not being there, he shows the sites where these events happened. He cannot flag them. He inhabits them primarily from far away, vicariously. This is not a paradox. Our conception of geographical space has undergone a key change. The very stability of natural sites, their accountability—“there is a mountain here, a river there”—has been transformed by their mediatization. Visual and recording devices, along with apps, have disembodied our spatial experience: that is, they have taken away its ‘grounding on earth’. Maps are no longer conceived and used as objective depictions of the bourgeois geographia naturalis,33 but as subjective ‘environments to go through’. They pinpoint each person’s position and intentions—to go, to escape, to reach, to avoid. Therefore, it is not by fantasizing but rather by virtually displacing himself that Raad, barred from being a reporter, can be a geographer of traumatic landscapes. The formal resemblance that The Beirut Al-Hadath Archive bears to the photographs of Eugène Atget is acknowledged and explained by a historical comparison between Paris and the Beirut “gloriously”34 colonized by France during the years in which Atget was depicting the European capital. The project was re-enacted in Sweet Talk: A Photographic Document of Beirut (2002), officially hosted by The Atlas Group, again in collaboration with Raad (fig. 1): the same pictures were displayed, albeit reframed and rescaled, and re-labeled as property of different

31 Alan Gilbert and Walid Raad, “Walid Ra’ad,” BOMB 81 (2002), pp.  38–45, here p.  40; see also Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, “Walid Raad and the Atlas Group,” Bidoun 2 (Fall 2004), https://bidoun.org/ articles/walid-raad-and-the-atlas-group.  32 Janeth A. Kaplan, “Flirtations with Evidence,” Art in America 92, no. 9 (2004), pp. 134–139, here p. 134. 33 See Franco Farinelli, La crisi della ragione cartografica, Turin: Einaudi, 2009. 34 Walid Raad, “The Beirut Al-Hadath Archive”, Scratching on Things I Could Disavow: Some Essays from The Atlas Group Project, catalogue, Cologne: W. König, 2007, pp. 33–51, here p. 37.



The Dynamis of Fiction in the Globalized World 

 211

Fig. 1: Walid Raad, Sweet Talk_1997: RM:001, 1999.

people and institutions. No mention was made of the previous project. Any reference to Atget thus collapses. This practice of auto-archiving works differently from the one described above: Raad does not re-record personal knowledge, but rather metamorphoses his sources. Like the quotations in the collage, the images he produces do not purport to resemble the facts they stand for, because the person who took them was not there. Continuing his academic career, after briefly considering a degree in medicine, Raad began studying photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he graduated in 1996 with the thesis Beirut… à la folie: A Cultural Analysis of the Abduction of Westerners in Lebanon in the 1980s. For this, “he examined the proliferation of autobiographies being published by American clerics and aid workers who had been held hostage in Beirut.”35 He went on to pursue a doctorate in visual and cultural studies at the University of Rochester, during which time he started ascribing equal heuristic and documentary value to iconographic material and written texts.36 Raad

35 Caroline A. Jones, “Doubt Fear,” Art papers 29 (January/February 2005), pp. 24–35, here p. 30. 36 See Gilbert/Raad, “Walid Ra’ad,” pp.  44–45. On the relationship between text and images, see Mark Godfray, “The Artist as Historian,” October 120 (2007), pp. 140–172.



212 

 Chiara Cappelletto

continues to focus on the relationship between the two media in order to challenge “a critical understanding of what it means to ‘produce meaning’ through representations”.37 He is currently an Associate Professor at The Cooper Union—a job that has allowed him to finance some of his productions: he is a full-time teacher, that is to say, he fully participates in that very idea of tradition on which pedagogy is grounded by definition, while at the same time being an absolutely non-dogmatic artist. He also works at the Arab Image Foundation, a non-profit organization established in Beirut in 1997, whose mission is to collect, preserve, and study photographs from the Middle East, North Africa, and the Arab diaspora.38 He is based in New York and Beirut. His whole life questions the status of citizenship in a world where we experience a split between those who arrive without the obligation to leave—international scholars, multicultural families, refined globetrotters, tourists—and those who leave without ever arriving—many others: vulnerable people. Raad shows the defenselessness of the latter without making them into victims, as Sebastião Salgado, by contrast, does with his portraits in Migration. Humanity in Transition (2000) in which vulnerable people are depicted qua vulnerable all over the world. His last name admits two different spellings: Raad and Ra’ad. Two entries certainly interfere with archival classification. Both men and women can be counted among his avatars. The sought instability of his public identity is nothing but an exercise to avoid a psychological authenticity that most of the time fosters cultural epigonism. For “an artist is deemed sincere when he leaves his own cultural milieu behind and travels—in actual fact or symbolically— […] and creates absolutely artificial, bogus, outlandish, or even ‘false’ situations for himself there [scil. in the places where he travels].”39 Groys’s words oversimplify cases where departures are forced and caused by wars, but still the fact remains that “even when an artist exploits his own life experience in his art, he has initially to observe it, as it were, from the outside, from the standpoint of valorized culture.”40 This is the reason Raad’s images do not hypnotize spectators, bidding them to take an empathetic dip.41 He seeks to keep himself—the author—distinct from his spectator. He does not attempt an ‘absorption effect’, nor a theatrical one. He strives not to shock, not to harm. He does not trigger any iconography of suffering, nor display the cruelties of war. Neither admiration nor contempt is elicited. Neither victors nor vanquished are shown by these images, which cannot be

37 Walid Raad, “(Re)imagining the Orient. II. Notes on the Book Project, 1 January 1995,” Jayce Salloum, “… east of here … (upon arrival),” East of Here: (Re)imagining the “Orient,” ed. Jayce Salloum, catalogue, YYZ Gallery, Toronto, 20 November–14 December 1996, Toronto: YYZ Artists’ Outlet, 1996, pp. 5–6, here p. 6. 38 http://www.fai.org.lb/Home.aspx. 39 Groys, On the New, p. 134. 40 Ibid., p. 134. 41 See Emily Wroczynski, “Walid Raad and the Atlas Group”, Third Text 25, no. 6 (2011), pp. 763–773 for a discussion of the “viewer’s incorporation into the work”.



The Dynamis of Fiction in the Globalized World 

 213

blamed for arousing voyeurism, nor for protecting us from reality. For they establish a permanent negotiation between projection and reflection.42 Raad stages what in rhetorical terms is called aposiopesis: a figure for coping with the unsayable in historical discourse, a sort of reticence that shapes the structure of the ‘archivable material’ that he gathers. It is tricky to determine what his images, disinterested in us as they are, want from us. Surely, they do not aim to stop the war, denounce its cruelty, or ask for reconciliation. They challenge the dynamic between the presence and the identity of their spectators. Real or fictional, the sources Raad displays are always individuals, private people as well as representatives of institutions. His treatment of historical events elicits a chorus of voices, some still living and others dead, by undermining the established notion whereby images and citations have the autonomous power to make the absent present following a linear temporality from the past to the future. The question is instead how traces have feedback on their own genesis, on their causes and authors. This reflexivity is well exemplified in Mapping Sitting (2002), a small, thick book, with a red cotton cover, coedited by Raad,43 assembling individual and group portraits shot between the 1920s and 70s in studios or outdoors by Arab photographers of different backgrounds—Armenian, Turkish, Lebanese, Syrian—a range that reflects the variety of current Arab artists, recognized differently in the Western art world according to whether they are Lebanese, Palestinian, or Iraqi. It is less a taxonomy of persons than a documentary on the strategies whereby photography—a Western art—produces identities among Arab people. It is not a faces book but a survey of the routes that some faces and bodies took to reach us across the world, on stamps, documents, IDs, and portraits taken primarily for the pleasure of looking at them. Variously framed, they are not self-sufficient because the referent alone is speechless, as is the simple fact of having a life for writing a biography. This book is about editing and restoration. Raad’s capacity to produce archival documentation—meticulous, detailed, rich in footnotes, reporting dates and circumstances, and mimicking forensic practices—where a regular historian identifies none revokes the ‘reality effect’ that Roland Barthes described in 1968 as the “pure encounter of an object and its expression”,44 for which the “having-been-there of things is a sufficient principle of speech”.45 Raad

42 See Walid Raad and Achim Borchardt-Hume, “En quête du miraculeux,” Walid Raad, Miraculous Beginnings, ed. Achim Borchardt-Hume, London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2010, pp. 8–21, here p. 12. 43 See the colophon: “Mapping Sitting: On Portraiture and Photography, a book by Karla Bassil, Zeina Maasri, and Akram Zaatari, in collaboration with Walid Raad, Ford Foundation, 2005, first published by Mind the Gap and the Arab Image Foundation in 2002 to coincide with Mapping Sitting: On Portraiture and Photography. An Exhibition by Walid Raad and Akram Zaatari, Arab Image Foundation, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, May 4–26, 2002.” 44 Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” The Rustle of Language [1984], trans. Richard Howard, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986, pp. 141–148, here p. 148. 45 Barthes, The Reality Effect, p. 147.



214 

 Chiara Cappelletto

Fig. 2: Close-up of a wooden drawer from Photo Jack, containing 262 film rolls of 35mm format, stored in re-purposed medium-format film containers, 2017, 59 × 44 cm, photograph by Mahmoud Merjan.

is thus winking at Western historiography, which is based on chronological recording, and at the thorny sense of the authenticity of the handmade, which he himself experienced during his student days, while working as a chemical mixing technician. The pictures of people standing or sitting, officeholders and commoners, are, however, less salient sites on the map than the film stock boxes and the leather notebooks that the photographers have used to collect and classify them, and that Mapping Sitting reproduces (figs. 2–4). Raad shows these as visual objects in their own right and not as conveyors of the printed material. Images do not move through time and space the way ghosts do. Their spectral dynamis is in fact inconceivable unless their materiality is taken into account. This is, of course, obvious when considering analogical prints and paper books. The Studio Soussi notebook, whose layout Raad published, is notably presented as a dafatir. This term refers to “a new expression of artist’s book or art object with roots in Islamic manuscript production but given a distinct postmodern interpretation”, which has been used mainly by Iraqi artists to “transform a historically recognized and celebrated format of Islamic art expres

The Dynamis of Fiction in the Globalized World 

Fig. 3: Photo-Surprise portrait of an unidentified child on Sahat Al-Tell, Tripoli, Lebanon, 1953–1954, Gelatin silver negative on cellulose acetate film, 2.4 × 3.6 cm, photographer unidentified, Photo Jack Studio.

 215

Fig. 4: Photo-Surprise portrait of an unidentified man holding a toddler on Sahat Al-Tell, Tripoli, Lebanon, 1953–1954, Gelatin silver negative on cellulose acetate film, 2.4 × 3.6 cm, photographer unidentified, Photo Jack Studio.

sion into dissident art.”46 The corporeal relation is complicated, however, when pictures become digital, not because of the lack of physical impression on the film, but because digitization potentially admits the irrelevance of the referent, the complete an-indexicality of the image. While François Arago was convinced that photography was a medium “in which objects preserve mathematically their forms, even to the minutest details”,47 Raad conceives of the medium as an alchemical conductor. His conception of what constitutes the materiality of images, however, exceeds the simple understanding of their mediality and includes their physical and institutional milieu.

46 Shabout, Contemporaneity and the Arab World, p. 21. 47 François Arago, “Letter to Duchâtel [Minister of the Interior]”, Œuvres completes de François Arago, ed. Jean Augustin Barral, Paris and Leipzig, 1854–62, vol. XII, quoted in Helmuth and Alison Gernsheim, L.J.M. Daguerre. The History of the Diorama and the Daguerreotype, New York: Dover Publications, 1968, p. 91.



216 

 Chiara Cappelletto

As a student, Raad took interest in the way photographic film—black and white as well as color—produces colors and shades in the absence of a negative or an image ‘of’ something; as an artist, he set up the exhibit Yet Another Letter to the Reader (2017), which makes clear the necessity of understanding objects as environments. The exhibit had been put on twice before, first in a storage space in Beirut, and then on the racks at the Gwangiu Biennial in South Korea. We are told that in Rome in 2002 several wooden crates were discovered with their outside surfaces painted by Suha Traboulsi, a Palestinian artist who supposedly worked in the Lebanese Ministry of Culture. She had covered the crates with replicas of artworks by major Arab artists that the Lebanese state had acquired for the Museum of Modern Art in Beirut, which was supposed to open in 1975. The collection ended up being stored in depots at the Ministry of Culture in Beirut and appropriated by political figures, who dispersed the paintings. As Traboulsi herself testified in a 2012 interview, she shipped each painted crate to the country where she thought the original painting had traveled “in the hope that the painted crates would somehow attract the exiled paintings”.48 Some crates were damaged over the years, and in 2016 Raad asked Traboulsi to restore them. As for the paintings, “they have yet to be magnetized back into their crates.”49 Raad takes up the critique of institutional power of museums, not by ironizing as Andrea Fraser did when she masturbated against a pillar at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Little Frank and His Carp (2001), but by reversing the mission of the museum itself: from protecting sources from time and violence to embodying time and violence in dispersed sources. Insidious as he likes to be, Raad produces images against the background of the new visual strategy that Groys has described as informed by a worldwide terrorism. Terrorism entails a profound belief in images. It aims to intimidate us—world citizens and globalized spectators—via the seductive power of icons. Raad takes the floor at a time when memorials and narratives have ensured the remembrance of the Shoah, when “the act of war itself coincides with its documentation”,50 and when the collective imagination of war is produced by the fighters themselves, be they terrorists or soldiers, as Osama bin Laden’s videos and the pictures from Abu-Ghraib demonstrate. Neither an iconophile the way the terrorists are, nor an iconoclast the way scholars are trained to be, Raad avoids competition between images and reality, constructing images not as referents of facts to be presented or hidden, but as palimpsests of written and visual traces that have been erased and overwritten. This is why it is mistaken to refer here, as is frequently done, to Walter Benjamin’s philosophical thesis of history, and notably his notion of readability [Lesbarkheit].

48 Walid Raad, Yet Another Letter to the Reader, ed. Claudia Gioia, Rome: Fondazione Volume!, 2017, p. 28. 49 Raad, Yet Another Letter to the Reader, p. 28. 50 Boris Groys, Art Power, London–Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008, p. 121.



The Dynamis of Fiction in the Globalized World 

 217

The capacity of images to be seen and understood in a precise historical moment of conjunction between individuals, society, and time, prompting encounters with and recognition of past moments in the current present, is of no help in understanding Raad’s work. His artistic and political concerns indeed lie in addressing the existing unavailability of facts and images, and not their potential recognition, and in bringing forward a misplaced, inheritable tradition, and doing so without counterfeiting it: The Truth Will Be Known When the Last Witness Is Dead (2004) has quite a different meaning from Benjamin’s idea that “The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome incarnate.”51 No witness can account for the devastation of a physical and cultural environment, because this very devastation guarantees the exclusion of that witness. Jalal Toufic, a contemporary and major theoretical reference for Raad, with whom he became acquainted in 1992,52 elaborates the idea of the withdrawal of tradition past what he calls a “surpassing disaster” in a decisive work dedicated to Raad (who, for his part, regularly features Toufic’s texts in his artist’s books, further developing the idea of a collective authorship). A surpassing disaster is produced by wars and exterminations that cause the large-scale loss of material objects, together with the attendant immaterial cultural tradition.53 We experience it when our own language has become unspeakable, our references unattainable, the sites we have visited unreachable, the people we have known, hated, and loved impossible to reach—when we are expelled from our own history. What is physically preserved in the end still needs to be re-known. Therefore, the worst betrayal that can be committed against a withdrawn tradition is to return to it as though it were still available. Artists addressing the withdrawal of a tradition must expose the loss, so as to reveal that a surpassing disaster has taken place.54 Contrary to Adorno’s sweeping ethical claim, there will be

51 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, Illuminations. Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zorn, New York: Schocken Books, 1968, thesis XIV, p. 261. 52 As Walid Raad related to me, he was in Lebanon at the time working with Jayce Salloum on various video projects, including Up to the South. Salloum had brought several video cameras and an editing suite with him to help residents of Beirut make different kinds of videos: experimental, documentary, fictional. Jalal Toufic was among the people he met at the time. Toufic went on to make a video that featured Raad as an actor. 53 Jalal Toufic, The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster, Berkeley: Forthcoming Books, 2009. 54 See Part I_Chapter 1_Section 79: Walid Sadek’s Love Is Blind (Modern Art Oxford, UK, 2006) shown in 2008 at the Galerie Sfeir Semler in Beirut. Raad asked the Lebanese artist Walid Sadek to loan him his work Love Is Blind, in which descriptions and captions are provided for ten landscape paintings by the early 20th-century Lebanese painter Mustafa Farroukh while the paintings themselves are absent. Sadek only agreed to supply a photograph of his installation. “Raad then hired a trompe l’oeil painter to reproduce an installation view of Sadek’s project installed at Modern Art Oxford in 2006” (H.G. Masters, “Walid Raad, thosewholackimaginationcannotimaginewhatislacking,” artasiapacific 65 (2009), pp. 124–135, here p. 126).



218 

 Chiara Cappelletto

poetry after Auschwitz. Yet one cannot be a spokesperson for the dead. Any attempt to represent them counterfeits them. It makes them into a kitsch commodity. Raad has a non-consumerist understanding of the North American visual culture in which he was educated. He openly states that he studied the Arab world and the history of the Lebanese civil wars during his training in the United States, and not while attending school in Beirut.55 As for his visual education, in the 1980s, he often frequented the George Eastman House Museum in Rochester, where he taught himself through looking at photos by Eugène Atget, Berenice Abbott, Walker Evans, Gustave Le Gray, Man Ray, August Sander, and Carleton Watkins, among others, and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, where he saw paintings by Helen Frankenthaler, Barnett Newman, Arshile Gorky, Morris Louis, Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Frank Stella, and Clyfford Still.56 His apprenticeship took place during one of the worst civil wars in Lebanon, with him calling home “to get an idea of how [scil. his family] had experienced the most recent fighting”.57 He is then himself the instantiation of the fragmented Lebanese community, whose possibility of being narrated in art forms is further challenged by the fact that the 20th century “could be dubbed ‘the lost century of Islamic art’”.58 For Raad, as for many Arab artists, going to the West does not imply accepting indoctrination into its hegemony, because, as Toufic has plainly argued, such a hegemony is already perfectly evident at home. Rather, in the West there are people who cannot remember what happened without first forgetting it. They are not suffering from any kind of amnesia or trauma; they did not experience the past, and for this very reason they are not obliged to salvage it. They can therefore look for its traces and make them speak for what they are. This claim is disputable, based as it is on the unquestioned assumption that a complete ignorance is possible, that it guarantees freedom from personal and intellectual pain, and that we can be contemporary with the traces in question. What is true, though, is that ignoring something that was knowable while it was occurring puts one in the peculiar position of the researcher— which Raad himself, as both scholar and creator, is—who sets up a feedback loop for the culture under scrutiny. “To propose that the Orient is re-imagined invariably brings up the demand to point to whose Orient we are referring. […] Is it a particular Western (European, American, French, German) construction? If so, which one? Why do we care about this particular construction? Why do we think it exists in the first place?”59

55 Lee Smith, “Missing in Action: The Art of the Atlas Group / Walid Raad,” Artforum 41, no. 6 (2003), pp. 124–129, here p. 126. 56 Raad and Borchardt-Hume, En quête du miraculeux, p. 11. 57 Ibid., p. 12. 58 Avinoam Shalem, “Transition, Flow, and Divergent Times,” Int. J. Middle East Stud. 45 (2013), pp. 581–584, here p. 582. 59 Walid Raad, (Re)imagining the orient. I. Additional suggestions regarding the title, 1 January 1995, Jayce Salloum, “… east of here … (upon arrival),” in East of Here: (Re)imagining the “Orient,” ed.



The Dynamis of Fiction in the Globalized World 

 219

This reflexive performance makes one into the ‘inventor’, the one who invenit: the one who, as the Latin etymology of the word suggests, finds as well as creates. The tension between the ‘inauthenticity’ of Raad’s work with respect to Arab art, on the one hand,60 and “the resistance by the West to acknowledging modern Arab art as new and innovative expression, on the other”,61 is mirrored in the public’s perspective. In the Gulf and Middle Eastern countries there is no established spectatorial culture, nor is there diffuse curatorial expertise. Public and private institutions are fickle in their support of art, and English is the language spoken in the worlds of artistic production, art criticism, and scholarship.62 If Raad were a commercial photographer, no tension would arise, since photographic agencies would promote his pictures. But as this is not the case, he transforms his being misplaced into a never entirely reclaimed authorship that takes as its counterpart the untenability of Arab institutions. He conceives of collaborations as cover-ups and institutions as infrastructures. Each of his works—signed and declared to have been made possible or sponsored by multiple people and foundations—is the outcome of cooperation. This is why he works with archives, objects in transfer, and organizations. Thinking in terms of ‘networking’ rather than ‘works’ allows him to participate in the global culture, being at its margins but not marginalized. Raad thus alters the idea that an “increasing number of Arab artists residing and working in the West […] should […] be considered members of that art circle whose contribution could further enrich the experience of art and provide a cultural dialog between ‘self’ and ‘other’”.63 He alters the very idea of ‘self’ and ‘other’, the personal (home) and the public (out there), West and East.

Jayce Salloum, exh. cat., YYZ Gallery, Toronto, 20 November–14 December 1996, Toronto: YYZ Artists’ Outlet, 1996, pp. 4–5, here p. 4. 60 For the notion of authenticity in Arab art, see Stefan Winkler, Cultural Heritage—Authenticity— Tradition: On the Origin of the Exhibition’s Title “Mustaqbal al-asala—Asala(t) al-mustaqbal,” The Future of Tradition—The Tradition of Future, eds. Chris Decon, Leon Krempel, and Avinoam Shalem, catalogue, Prestel, 2011, pp. 53–59, here p. 57; see also Avinoam Shalem, “From Object to Subject,” pp.  167–187, and Robert D. Lee, Overcoming Tradition and Modernity. The Search for an Islamic Authenticity, Boulder: Westview Press, 1997. 61 Shabout, Historiographic Invisibilities, p. 62. 62 See Salwa Mikdadi, “New Trends in Arab Art: NGO’s and the Public Sphere,” New Vision: Arab Contemporary Art in the 21st Century, eds. Hossein Amirsadeghi, Salwa Mikdadi, and Nada Shabout, London: Thames and Hudson, 2009, pp. 22–29 for a survey of the way in which public and private institutions, governmental and otherwise, sustain the art world in the Middle East. 63 Shabout, Historiographic Invisibilities, p. 62.



220 

 Chiara Cappelletto

Visual Objects Are Dynamic Objects The public credibility of visual narratives about events that once occurred and people who once lived has yielded a moral economy of photographs, despite the fact that evidence to the contrary is eminent and well known. There is everything from forgery to censorship to misunderstanding: from Robert Capa’s staging of the death of a Republican soldier in Spain (1936), Yevgeny Khaldei’s Russian soldiers hoisting the red flag atop the burning Reichstag in Berlin (1945), and Robert Doisneau’s young couple ‘kissing’ in front of the Hotel de Ville in Paris (1950), to the image loop operating transnationally via cables and the press coverage of the Twin Towers—chosen in advance as the perfect set to record—falling on 9/11, to Joe Rosenthal’s factual picture, thought to have been staged, of American soldiers raising the US flag on Iwo Jima (1945). Nevertheless, we like to trust photographs; we do so despite the range of possible visual alterations—not to mention vulgar fakes, such as the images of buildings burning in Istanbul after the failed coup in Turkey in 2016, which turned out to be pictures of the Israeli army’s bombing of Gaza in 2014—and the fact that “all photographs wait to be explained or falsified by their captions.”64 Even though we know that photographs are fabrications, we like to take them seriously, as true believers. They wield the greatest possible authority at a time when the mechanical reproducibility of images is taken for granted: they are objective insofar as made by a machine, and personal insofar as taken by a fellow human being. In Raad’s mixed-media fictional display this authority is already dismantled, and the terms of the problem are reversed: photographs represent in fact what has been conceived for the camera; they actually present what has been composed for the observer. This is why Raad can document deracination not by shooting war pictures, but in the editing process, in the aftermath of war pictures shot of human beings, things, and buildings. Visual objects cannot be false; photo-work is realistic. Raad began his artistic project undercover as a representative of The Atlas Group. Performing less as an artist than as a teacher, with calm gestures, a steady tone of voice, and neutral facial expression, he has introduced The Atlas Group to the public in numerous lectures, such as The Loudest Muttering is Over: Documents from The Atlas Group Archive (2003). According to one of its many IDs: “The Atlas Group is a foundation established in Beirut (Lebanon) in 1967”—the year of Raad’s birth— “to research and document the contemporary history of Lebanon. The Atlas Group locates, collects, preserves, displays, produces and studies audio, visual, literary and other documents that shed light on Lebanon’s contemporary history. The Atlas Group documents are preserved in The Atlas Group Archive in Beirut (Lebanon) and New York (USA)”—the two cities in which Raad lives—“and are made public via mixed-media installations, public presentations and lectures, and literary and visual essays.

64 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, New York: Picador, 2003, p. 10.



The Dynamis of Fiction in the Globalized World 

 221

For additional information about The Atlas Group and The Atlas Group Archive please visit www.theatlasgroup.org.”65 The archived files have been received as donations, found or requested by The Atlas Group, for which slightly different credentials have been given at different times over the years. It is difficult, therefore, to establish when the collective was set up,66 though it was probably 1994, the year floated by Raad and picked up by catalogs and articles after the project ended. It definitively left the art scene in 2004.67 Since then, its files have been dated with both the fictional year attributed to the documents and the actual year in which they were produced. In 2005, the collective’s members were said to have included an architect, Tony Chakar, and a political analyst, Bilal Khbeiz—real individuals68 who helped bring together materials for My Neck is Thinner…, starting with the explosion in the Beirut neighborhood of Furn al-Shubbak on January 21, 1986. The Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs (1999) is the first project of the Atlas Group Foundation (not listed on its webpage).69 According to an Artist’s Statement from 2006, it appears that Raad has been progressively emphasizing his individual authorship. That said, his archiving is anything but subjective. The Atlas Group is a fictional archival apparatus. Private and public pictures are mostly anonymous—as was generally the case in times of war until the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), which was the first to be covered by the press—and they are organized neither chronologically nor according to any criteria related to their medium, but rather in relation to their inventors. To grasp its fictional power, we must shift the parameters of our thinking, from an ‘as if’ construction to a ‘what if’ clause: what would I know, if I could remember? What would I say, if I could know? The rationale of this apparatus is neither nomothetic nor fantastic, but poietic. According to the website, type A is for files containing documents that the group produced and attributes to named imaginary individuals or organizations; several of these documents are authored by the prominent and non-existent historian Dr. Fakhouri and have Beckettian titles. Type B is for files containing documents that The Atlas Group produced and attributes to anonymous individuals or organizations. Type AGP is for files con-

65 The Atlas Group, Zeina Traboulsi, and Walid Raad, “Sweet Talk or Photographic Documents of Beirut,” Camera Austria 80 (December 2002), pp. 43–56. Note that Zeina Traboulsi is one of Walid Raad’s avatars, entire portions of whose interview with Alan Gilbert are attributable to the artist himself. 66 See Gilbert/Raad, Walid Ra’ad, p. 40. On the different presentations given by Raad about the Atlas Group, see also André Lepecki, “‘After All, This Terror Was Not Without Reason.’ Unfiled Notes on the Atlas Group Archive,” TDR 50, no. 3 (2006), pp. 88–99, here p. 90, note 2. 67 “The Atlas Group (as a project, an imaginary foundation, as well as a set of documents) was the form that I gave between 1994 and 2004 to my explorations of the question of the photographic and videographic documents in relation to the possibilities and limits of writing a history of Lebanon.” “Artists’ Biographies—The Atlas Group/Walid Raad,” Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2006, p. 94. 68 Jones, Doubt Fear, p. 32. 69 See Walid Raad, “I Have Already Been in the Lake of Fire,” Framework 43, no. 2 (2002), pp. 42–63, here p. 42.



222 

 Chiara Cappelletto

taining documents that the group produced and attributes to itself. The files are most often presented as being the few remaining out of a larger volume of material that could have been made available, but has not been. We thus encounter the first major challenge of the standard archival apparatus: the dynamic between a considerable amount of material—whose quantity matters more than its authoriality—on one side, and the unreadability of samples, on the other. Order must triumph over disorder by making the totality of the samples intelligible through a principle of uniformity; there needs to be a positive common denominator. The photographic archive in particular has “the capacity […] to reduce all possible sights to a single code of equivalence […] grounded in the metrical accuracy of the camera”.70 And yet The Atlas Group’s archiving is based on a completely conjectural criterion. We also encounter the second major challenge of the standard archival apparatus: safeguarding must triumph over dispersion. Memories are cherished, and yet The Atlas Group’s archiving presupposes and facilitates the circulation of its material worldwide and adapts it to the specific locations of display. The Atlas Group ends up being completely dysfunctional. It stakes out a place between museums, seen as a ‘natural safe haven’ that protect items, and image banks such as Corbis that organize the use and re-use of the very same picture.71 In fact, more important than the events depicted is the way in which photographs have been uploaded. The Atlas Group is an album collecting postcards sent by unknown people whose having-been-there needs to be certified post mortem. It experiments with the possibility of building a tradition in the absence of a cultural and material heritage. Raad’s strategy has followed two main trajectories. In the first, still images depict a recomposed world that comes into play as a sort of historical maquette. I only wish that I could weep (1997/2002) is a five-minute videotape consisting of simulated footage of the sunset along the Corniche, Beirut’s popular seaside walkway. We are urged to believe what we are watching is real thanks to documentary conventions— choppy editing, low-resolution film and a surveillance-camera look—which bring to bear the visual markers of objectivity. Operator #17 was tasked with manning one of the cameras hidden in coffee shops on the Corniche to detect criminal activity, as residents of Beirut say Syrian secret agents were actually accustomed to doing during and after the civil wars.72 Disobeying the commands of the Lebanese security agents who set up the camera, the operator turned it in order to capture the sunset instead of the possible civil conflict. Missing Lebanese Wars: Notebook Volume 72 (1989/1998) was bequeathed to The Atlas Group by Dr. Fakhouri (fig. 5). The archive user is told how

70 Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (1986), pp. 3–64, here p. 17. 71 Estelle Blaschke, Banking on Images: The Bettmann Archive and Corbis, Leipzig: Spector Books, 2016. 72 Paolo Magagnoli, “A Method in Madness. Historical Truth in Walid Raad’s Hostage: The Bachar Tapes,” Third Text 25, no. 3 (May 2011), pp. 311–324, here p. 313 and note 5.



The Dynamis of Fiction in the Globalized World 

 223

Fig. 5: WALID RAAD / THE ATLAS GROUP, Notebook volume 72: Missing Lebanese Wars (Plate 134), 1989/1998; pigmented inkjet print: 13 3/8 × 9 3⁄4”, 34 × 24.8 cm.

in “race after race, the historians stood behind the track photographer, whose job was to image the winning horse as it crossed the finish line, to record the photo-finish. […] Each historian wagered on precisely when—how many fractions of a second before or after the horse crossed the finish line—the photographer would expose his 

224 

 Chiara Cappelletto

frame.”73 Sometimes the historians bribed the photographer. The pictures authenticate the moment in which the horse has not crossed the finish line. The horse-race photos were actually clipped years after the war ended from the Lebanese daily An-Nahar.74 The photographer is a fitting mask for Raad himself to practice at first hand the role of the historian vis-à-vis an inappropriable event. Civilization, we do not dig holes to bury ourselves (1958–59/2003) is the title of a collection of self-portraits—presented with an English translation of the original French preface, which is now unavailable to us—of Dr. Fakhouri between 1958 and 1959, during his only trip outside Lebanon, which took him to Paris and Rome. The historian’s iconic appearance is borrowed from Walid Raad’s own father,75 who died in 1993. Dr. Fakhouri had recently corresponded via letter with Tracy Davis, editor of the Provocations section of The Drama Review, who invited him to submit a text to the Spring 2016 issue; he accepted.76 Already Being in a Lack of Fire: Notebook Volume 38 (1991/2003) “contains 145 cutout photographs of cars. They correspond to the exact make, model, and color of every car that was used as a car bomb between 1975 and 1991” (fig. 6).77 The cutouts replicate the coverage by Lebanese newspapers, which dispatched photographers to record the location where each destroyed car engine had landed.78 These pictures document objects that have been destroyed before being photographed. The cars are accorded the same aesthetic and moral value as corpses in war pictures. Both vehicles and bodies are turned into things by force “in the most literal sense”.79 Miraculous beginnings (1993/2003) gathers photographs taken by Dr. Fakhouri every time he erroneously believed—and not because he believed—the war was over. His gesture is not lost on us today. It is worth recalling that almost every Western country is currently involved in neglected but nevertheless excruciating wars in some part of the globe, and we snap many such Fakhourian shots: do we like to believe that the wars are over? Raad’s works are memorial exercises on what did not happen, from when it did not happen.

73 Walid Raad, Notebook volume 72: Missing Lebanese Wars, Volume Plates: [cat. A]_Fakhouri_ Notebooks_72_131–149, 1989, by (attributed to) Dr. Fadl Fakhouri. http://www.theatlasgroup.org/data/ TypeA.html. Italics are mine. 74 Lepecki, “‘After All, This Terror Was Not Without Reason,’” p. 92. 75 See Fereshteh Daftari, “Islamic or Not”, Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2006, pp. 10–27, here p. 22, and p. 27 note 57: “In a conversation with the author in 2005, Raad would not confirm this rumor.” 76 Their correspondence is available in “Back Matter,” TDR 50, no. 1 (Spring 2006), p. 188. 77 Walid Raad, Notebook volume 38: Already being in a lake of fire, Volume_Plates: [cat. A]_Fakhouri_ Notebooks_38_055–071, 1991, by (attributed to) Dr. Fadl Fakhouri. http://www.theatlasgroup.org/ data/TypeA.html. 78 John Menick, “Imagined Testimonies. An Interview with Walid Ra’ad,” The Thing, March 25, 2002, http://johnmenick.com/writing/imagined-testimonies-an-interview-with-walid-raad.html. 79 Simone Weil, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force” [1940], Chicago Review 18, no. 2 (1965), pp. 5–30.



The Dynamis of Fiction in the Globalized World 

 225

Fig. 6: WALID RAAD / THE ATLAS GROUP, Notebook volume 38: Already been in a lake of fire_Plates Plates 69–70. 1991/2003; pigmented inkjet prints, each: 11 13/16 × 16 1/2”, 30 × 41.9 cm.

The entire iconographic material on display defies the indexicality of photography by sketching a visual history of the medium itself that runs from Man Ray’s rayography up through digitization.80 Secrets in the open sea (1994/2004) collects 29 photographic prints found buried under rubble during the 1992 demolition of Beirut’s war-ravaged commercial districts, six of which were sent by The Atlas Group to laboratories in France and the United States for chemical analysis. Small black-andwhite latent images showing group portraits of men and women were found. All the people represented are supposed to have either drowned, died, or been found dead in the Mediterranean between 1975 and 1990. As it turns out, these images are actually photos that appeared in Lebanese newspapers at the beginning of the 1990s, accom-

80 “Rayographs […] are produced by placing objects on top of light-sensitive paper, exposing the ensemble to light, and then developing the result. The image created in this way is of the ghostly traces of departed objects,” Rosalind Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America,” October 3 (1977), pp. 68–81, here p. 75. For the digitization process, see eds. Joanna Lehan, Kristen Lubben, Christopher Phillips, and Carol Squiers A Different Kind of Order. The ICP Triennial, New York: International Center of Photography and DelMonico Books, 2013.



226 

 Chiara Cappelletto

panied by captions identifying the subjects as, for instance, “attendees at an annual meeting of the board of the directors of the Gillette corporation”.81 They represent one of Raad’s major works fusing Western media and events in the Arab world. Two other works on this line are We decided to let them say “we are convinced twice”. It was more convincing this way (1982/2004) and Let’s be honest, the weather helped (1998/ 2006–7). In the first work, Raad, to whom these photos are attributed, claims to have looked back at the negatives he took of the Israeli air assault on the hills around Beirut in 1982 when he was 15, at which time he had wanted “to get as close as possible to the events”82 with his camera. The second work maps the participation of Western countries in Lebanese wars by marking bullet holes with colored dots so that each type of bullet can be linked back to its country of origin. Raad reverses the common visual praxis, whereby the faces of Westerners who have been affected by war in some way are not shown, while those of non-Westerners are, as most recently evidenced in the images of Syrian child refugees (since 2011). The colored circles on ruined walls usher in a long-overdue comparison with white crosses in cemeteries. In Oh God, he said, talking to a tree (2004/2008), Nahia Hassan presents watercolors of the plumes of smoke, debris, and fire produced by the missiles she tracked as a topographer in the Lebanese Army’s Directorate of Geographic Affairs. She painted them between 1969 and 1994, when she was dismissed. By evoking an outmoded medium (watercolor), the work dissolves what, for Paul Virilio, was meant to be an enduring synthesis: that between vision and visibility, predicated on the functioning of visual reproduction techniques able to bridge the gap between matters of fact and imagination. The second trajectory that Raad has taken focuses on the (mis)matching of fact and fiction. Hostage: The Bachar Tapes (English version) (2001) was presented in 1999 at the Ayloul festival in Beirut (fig. 7). In 1993, Raad produced the documentary Up to the South about the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, together with the Canadian-Lebanese artist Jayce Salloum. Their collaboration addressed the “role of the visual image in the construction of historical knowledge”.83 Raad went on to develop the last part of his thesis—focused on a chapter on Maroun Bagdadi’s film Hors la Vie (1991), narrating the story of a French photographer abducted by Lebanese militia during the war84—based on this collaboration. Salloum subsequently became interested in the infamous political prison of Khiam in southern Lebanon and interviewed one of its best-known inmates: Soha Bechara, “a woman who spent ten years for her

81 Kaplan, “Flirtations with Evidence,” p. 137. 82 http://www.theatlasgroup.org/data/TypeA.html. 83 Sarah Rogers, “Imagined Geographies: Diaspora and Contemporary Arab Art,” New Vision, London: Thames & Hudson, 2009, pp. 36–45, here p. 40. 84 “Significantly, in Raad’s thesis, fictional films like Hors la vie are treated as reliable sources of historical truth. Hors la vie, Raad writes, for example, ‘reveals political, ideological, and historical aspects of France’s intervention in the Levant’.” (Magagnoli, A Method in Madness, p. 316).



The Dynamis of Fiction in the Globalized World 

 227

Fig. 7: WALID RAAD / THE ATLAS GROUP, Hostage: The Bachar tapes_English version (still), 2000. Video (color, sound), 16:17 min.

involvement with the Lebanese National Resistance”, as Raad acknowledged in a seminar in Berlin in 2007.85 Hostage is based on a real Arab captive, Wajd Doumani, who was held together with the American captives during the Iran-Contra affair in 1987. One of the Americans, Terry Anderson, gave an account of his experiences and mentioned Doumani. Uninterested in any kind of psychological incursions and convinced that the Americans failed at representing their fellow citizens’ captivity, Raad ascribes a heuristic power to mistakes, and does not try to correct them: “in their failure they [scil. the Americans] have revealed much to us about the possibilities and limits of representing the experience of captivity. What I want to ask is: of all the ways the stories of captivity could have been written, why were they written this way?”86 As efforts to find Doumani failed, Raad created his persona, “who is played by a well-known Lebanese actor Fabi Abi Samra”.87 Raad used archival audio and video material from the

85 Ibid., p. 316, note 13. 86 The Atlas Group/Walid Raad, Civilizationally, We Do Not Dig Holes To Bury Ourselves, Tamáss. Contemporary Arab Representations, Beirut/Lebanon 1, 2002, pp. 122–136, here p. 136. 87 Vered Maimon, “The Third Citizen: On Models of Criticality in Contemporary Artistic Practices,” October 129 (2009), pp. 85–112, here p. 101, note 49.



228 

 Chiara Cappelletto

original American hostages’ tapes and “film[ed] Bachar in such a way as to suggest that the tape [was] a hostage video”.88 Hostage is his only work in which a human face is supposed to be looked at straight in the eyes. Bachar, interviewed by Raad as a character, made his will clear: “I have screened publicly all 53 videotapes but only in Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Sudan, Palestine and Morocco. Of the 53 video­tapes, I allow only 2 tapes, tapes #17 and #31 to be screened in North America and Western Europe.”89 Responding to Raad’s observation: “The English voice-over is not an accurate translation of what you say in Arabic. At times, the voice-over says the exact opposite of what you are saying in Arabic and at other times, it says something not related at all to what you are saying in Arabic. Do you translate the text yourself? And if so, why the difference between what you say in Arabic and the non-Arabic voice-over?”90 Bachar answers: “Yes, I do my own translations. I have nothing to say about the second part of your question.”91 It cannot escape notice that, according to Bachar’s instructions, the voice-over is female. This is intended as compensation for the marginal position assigned to the wives of the men abducted, whose accounts of that period have been considered ‘distracting’.92 The dubbing not only challenges the very idea of authoriality but addresses the archetypal question of the right to speak publicly, which takes us back to the very origin of the idea of citizenship. In ancient Greece, public speech was the defining attribute of maleness, and this is still too often the case, no matter how intensely we oppose the idea. When women were willing to argue their positions or denounce their abusers, they were either silenced or seen as possessed by demons that inhabited their bodies and spoke in their place. Hostage is a work based on a reverse ventriloquism, where the issue of gender offers a metonymy for dealing with the question of captivity in itself: who is possessed by whom? Why should a first-person account be more reliable than third-person ones? What makes us think that witness accounts are more credible than narratives? How can the biographies of others be transmuted into personal memories? The Atlas Group exhibits visual artifacts and recounts events that have not been witnessed. Hence, it personifies our present condition as inhibited storytellers. It is necessary, therefore, to provide a scopic regime for the non-witness: that is, to reverse the task described by Georges Didi-Huberman in Images in Spite of All (2004). Whereas

88 Magagnoli, A Method in Madness, p. 319. 89 The Atlas Group/Walid Raad, Civilizationally, p. 124. 90 Ibid., p. 125. 91 Ibid., p. 125. 92 “The matter of a male voice-over is for me central to the question of the particular kind of self that emerges from captivity. […] In many reviews of the books [written by the American hostages] in the US popular press, I was surprised that critics have characterized the contributions of the wives as ‘odd’ and as ‘distracting’. The question that I want to ask these critics is: From what does Madeleine’s or Carol’s account divert us to deserve this characterization as a ‘distraction’?” (The Atlas Group/Walid Raad, Civilizationally, p. 133).



The Dynamis of Fiction in the Globalized World 

 229

the extraordinarily brave Jewish photographer discussed in that book, known as Alex, chose to fight back against the Nazi extermination project and save a memory of the annihilation perpetrated—such that his four out-of-focus images taken at Auschwitz in 1944 demand to be looked at as evidence of factual reality—the history that Raad wants to call to mind has been experienced insomuch as it is unachievable. Raad instead shows the aftermath of a surpassing disaster. Images must be taken in spite of nothing. The floating authorship of the files amounts to the whole question of their technical (re)production, for the very reason that these images do not depict what they are images of and dispute the very possibility that a living onlooker has shot them. At the dawn of the photographic era, Charles Baudelaire augured that photography would “rescue from oblivion those tumbling ruins, those books, prints and manuscripts, which time is devouring, precious things […] which demand a place in the archives of our memory”.93 Photography as reality’s ancillary. Raad reverses this idea by altering what fulfilled it most effectively, namely press photographs. Despite the forensic quality of the visual material, its inquiring tonality, and the role played by measurements, chronologies, and statistics, these images are useless for any purpose of inspection; no recovery is possible. Not a single particle of factual reality can be retrieved from the archived files. No chronicle is permitted. Pictures—printed on different supports, variously edited, framed, and presented, and published in journals and books, and on websites as well—are conceived as temporal collages: they violate the filmic surface and a variety of chronological sequences overlap. They are neither memorabilia nor memento mori. Raad overcomes the difference between ‘living archives’, whose documents are still in use, and ‘dead archives’, whose documents are purely informational94 because The Atlas Group is not a database in any way whatsoever. It is a laboratory. This is how and why mixed media are so important for Raad’s work: there is neither aesthetic competition nor mutual exclusion among them and his major medium is fiction itself, which makes us grasp the inner complexity of visuality and history. For the media he makes use of are the documents on display. Index XXVI: Red, blue, black, orange, yellow (2010) shows the misspelled names of Lebanese artists of the past century, sent to Raad telepathically by artists from the future. A local dancer blamed Raad for the misspelling, accusing him of neglecting his own tradition. The dancer painted over the mistakes with spray colors (plate XXVII). Raad is convinced that the future artists misstated the names on purpose, as they were interested in the colors that would be used to correct them. They need these colors because they do not have them at their disposal. Fiction is not unrealism. Fiction is what impedes masquerades and misappropriation, both personal and collective, sentimental and historical, as well as

93 Charles Baudelaire, “The Salon of 1859.—The Modern Public and Photography,” The Mirror of Art. Critical Art, trans. Jonathan Mayne, London: Phaidon, 1955, pp. 225–231, here pp. 130–131. 94 The distinction is Hans Haacke’s, reported in Baldacci, Archivi impossibili, p. 169.



230 

 Chiara Cappelletto

participates in denouncing the West’s incapability to recognize the autonomy of Arab history and its artistic practices. Fiction works against obscene forgery like a mirror in a vampire film. It has done so in Raad’s entire artistic project from the very beginning, both institutionally, insofar as authenticity is a question of authority grounded in collective habits, and materially, insofar as visual objects are supposed to require authentication.95 The split between authenticity and fakeness will not relieve the anxiety that The Atlas Group addresses, which is the anxiety felt by 21st-century citizens observing broadcasts of far-off events. As for the institutional level, in the context of Arab art, “The Atlas Group should be seen […] redirecting its gaze inward, making its own work, its own audience, and its own institutions—like the Atlas Group.”96 Raad indeed states that the fiction of the Atlas Group “creates a position that you can speak with authority about”,97 so as to surmount the polarization between theorization and the call for recognition that foreclosed any mutual understanding between the West and the Arab world. The dynamic between being local and moving globally is the theme of Pension Arts in Dubai (Part I) (2012), which I read as a detective story. Written in four languages—English, French, Italian, and Arabic—and subsequently re-enacted in two articles published on e-flux, Walkthrough (Part I) and Walkthrough Part II (both 2013) have been displayed in images and were voiced by Raad himself in 2015.98 The text is said to be “(here and there) a work of fiction”.99 Here and there, but not everywhere, because in 2007 Raad was actually asked to join the Artist Pension Trust (APT). The APT is a real player in the global art world “that finds curators, financial consultants, tech startups, and former members of Israel Defense Forces, elite military intelligence units linked with artists willing to donate their work to the Trust with the promise of later receiving a

95 Raad has made clear that “The Atlas Group produces and collects objects and stories that should not be examined through the conventional and reductive binary of fiction and nonfiction. We proceed from the consideration that this distinction is a false one” (Gilbert/Raad, Walid Ra’ad, p. 40). In other words, “It’s not about treating the details as either real or fictional. […] That is not the point of the project” (Kaplan, Flirtations with Evidence, p. 169). 96 Smith, Missing in Action p.  129. Smith continues: “[Raad] recognizes both the impossibility of putting limits to a local art and a need for, to borrow a term from geopolitics, nation building. For Raad one of the more exciting tasks Lebanese artists and intellectuals have undertaken is the development of a critical language in Arabic, a language distinct from Arabic’s biographical, political, or arthistorical vocabularies and one capable of encompassing culture and politics. A critical language, presumably, like Said’s, but in Arabic and about the Arab world, not just Western constructions of it.” 97 Smith, Missing in Action, p. 129. 98 The audio is available at https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/21/427. 99 Walid Raad, “Walkthrough (Part I)”, e-flux #48, October 2013, and “Walkthrough (Part II)”, e-flux #49, November 2013.



The Dynamis of Fiction in the Globalized World 

 231

percentage of whatever money the company generates via the sale of the artwork of its members—nearly two thousand in total”.100 The APT, of course, acts as a worldwide archive that oversees retirement plans for artists, because consumerism is the glue of the globalized word, and image-making is at its service. But retirement is what happens when markets pull back; when lines, colors, and shapes hide themselves and hibernate in who knows what letters and numbers, as attested to in Appendix XVIII: Plates 22–257 (2008–); when the whole collection of The Atlas Group shrinks en route from New York to Beirut, as in Section 139: The Atlas Group (1989–2004) (2008).101 Retirement is an affection: to retire, to withdraw, is to be affected. Scratching on things I could disavow (since 2008), to which all these works belong, helps us understand to what extent Raad’s strategy reverses that of Duchamp, notwithstanding the specious similarity between this work and the Boîte-en-valise. While ready-mades were thought of as being a-historical, since they were arbitrarily extracted from the continuum of everyday reality in order to be implanted in the art world, Raad ascribes a new place to cliché in the narrative of the past. This new place is based on physical transformation. The physical transformation extends far beyond the hybridization of aesthetics that he has nonetheless performed over his whole career—for example, by mixing a certain Western sharpness into printed images and using the collage technique with Arabic writings. Archiving is metamorphosing, not collecting, and Raad is certainly not a serial artist. He raises the issue of how evidence can be provided within a performative apparatus, a question worthy of being asked by a teacher as well as by an artist. There is no progression, no addition or augmentation of data and information in his work, which is constituted by iconic variations, anonymous quotations, and implantations that repeat themselves. Cultural images evolve like natural organisms. Raad’s path is opposite the one taken by, for example, Bill Viola in The Greeting, where Pontormo’s Visitation is re-enacted, or even by the French artist JR, who in 2016 covered the Louvre Pyramid with the anamorphic image of the wall that has been hidden since the end of the 1980s. Instead, he plays the making of Western visuals against Western visual culture, wholly enacting that natural process that Oswald Spengler, in his 1918 book The Decline of the West, called ‘pseudomorphosis’: when a mineral, for instance volcanic material, infiltrates a mold left empty by another mineral and thus solidifies into an alien shape. Having experienced the period of time required by the chemical processes for developing film, Raad recognizes the importance of the relation

100 Alan Gilbert, “Walid Raad’s Spectral Archive, Part I: Historiography as Process”, e-flux, #69, January 2016, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/69/60594/walid-raad-s-spectral-archive-part-ihistoriography-as-process/. 101 “It [scil. Scratching] is, in effect, a meta-curation, a performative restaging of the elusive artifacts, histories, practices, and spaces that it engages, with Raad as choreographer [and] impresario.” Finbarr Barry Flood, Staging Traces of Histories Not Easily Disavowed, Walid Raad, ed. Eva Respini, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2015, pp. 161–173, here pp. 163–164.



232 

 Chiara Cappelletto

between time, space, and transformation. This is evidenced in numerous connections. We observe it in the re-framing of Beirut Al-Hadat in Sweet Talk; we encounter it in the following passage referring to We can make rain but no one came to ask (2006): When we photographed this area of Beirut there were quite a number of people in the streets; it was a busy time of the day. But when we developed the film we were surprised to find that none of them appeared. We didn’t know what to make of this situation, especially since it happened time and time again. […] The same thing happened in a different neighborhood where we filmed cars on the streets. When we viewed the videotape, we noticed that the cars were also disappearing. After a while we came up with the notion that maybe time and place are operating in this neighborhood in ways so that this universe exists.102

We likewise see it in the three sections of Mapping Sitting—published as the Atlas Project was coming to an end—that have a retroactive effect on previous works: Itinerant on Operator #17, Portraits of winning horses. 1945 Sunday Races, Beirut racecourse on Missing Lebanese Wars, and Group Portraits on Secrets in the open sea. We find it at work in the Preface to the third edition (2013) (plate XXVIII), where the captured images are printed to overlap, and in Better be watching the clouds (2000/2015), whose plates are an herbarium collage with the faces of comrades grafted onto plants (fig. 8). And we see it, of course, in the Hostage ventriloquism. Les Louvres (Départements des Arts de l’Islam) (2015) is the apotheosis of this pseudomorphic process. It documents the unexpected reciprocal alterations of 28 objects shipped from the Paris Louvre to the similarly named museum in Abu Dhabi: in the process of being displaced, each work has approached, touched, and ultimately fused with another. Objects cannot be false, but they can change. In Raad’s words: “they trade skins.”103 They exchange dimensions and aspects; they melt their colors and fuse their lines. These artifacts, living cultural bodies that cast shadows,104 produce their own genesis. Their displacement from the West to the Middle East implies and provokes aesthetic mutations that modify our Eurocentric understanding of what Western and non-Western art are. The West has promoted a ‘universal’ canon whereby ‘the rest of the world’ arises locally, and is therefore localized, which is to say marginalized. By deepening the idea of a traumatic mapping, Les Louvres calls into question this binarism, along with the very idea of a globalized world. Just like Raad’s images, museum objects travel around the world to be exhibited in different locations that are wholly implicated in the works themselves. Their authenticity

102 Lepecki, “‘After All, This Terror Was Not Without Reason’,” p.  98, which refers to the video documentation of My Neck Is Thinner than a Hair, presented at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, in 2004. 103 Phillip Griffith, “Walid Raad and Andrea Geyer,” The Brooklyn Rail, December 9, 2015, p. 33. 104 Raad gives specific attention to shadows, which are objects of metamorphosis. See his installation Letters to the Reader, first exhibited at the 31st São Paulo Biennial in 2014.



The Dynamis of Fiction in the Globalized World 

 233

Fig. 8: WALID RAAD / THE ATLAS GROUP, Better be watching the clouds_X, 2000/2015; pigmented inkjet print, 36 × 24 in., 91.4 × 61 cm.



234 

 Chiara Cappelletto

is an-identitary. They are site-specific, and at the same time, moving all over. In so being, they sensibilize the idea of ‘out-of-body movement’ elicited by Google Earth and drones—which invite us to place our avatars anywhere on the globe without displacing ourselves—and present material bodies as authoritative vehicles of damaged memories. Les Louvres gives a public forum to the material and immaterial traces that remain after “the deterritorialization of the original, its removal from its site by means of bringing it closer [that] represents […] an invisible and thus all the more devastating employment of violence”,105 because it leaves no evidence behind. The pseudomorphosis of visual objects overcomes the ethnographic idea of art that assigns a cultic value to the object and the Western idea of art that frames the work as a unicum to be reproduced and referred to. It disqualifies the very idea of a polarization between the West and the non-West, and finally, it questions Shabout’s interpretation of globalization as inevitably tied to imperialism. The visible materiality of the object is the real substratum on which fiction intervenes, because the historical understanding of the object is not a theoretical process distinct from its physical transformation. The fact that objects are displaced and displaceable impedes us from appropriating them, from digesting them. Raad’s images disqualify any all-encompassing, global speechless spectatorship and recast the logic of expulsion as a logic of adulteration. They set into movement the very world forged by the moving images. Images do not need reality. They need imagination.

105 Groys, Art Power, p. 63.



Angela Mengoni

Visualizing Autoimmunity Gerhard Richter’s War Cut 1 In the regimes of visibility at play during what is known as ‘preventive’ war, the field of forces and forms that we call image paradigmatically activates the dual branches of its dynamis: in this context, the modes of the circulation, dissemination, and interaction of pictures are crucial; but so are the potential and dynamism that are ‘internal’ to the image, its visual ability to reinforce the indistinctness necessary to the discourse of threat, uncertainty, and risk. A specific visual ‘dynamology’ not only accompanies such conflicts, but is one of their distinguishing features. Indeed, the plasticity, malleability, and dynamism of the image take on a strategic role during the construction of risk that characterizes preventive wars; it is actually in reaction to a threat—be it chemical weapons or other potential aggressions—that the need for its prevention and, therefore, for military action, is created. Art is an exceptional lens for analyzing these mechanisms if we assume that works of art can produce genuine visual thinking about forms of historical experience, not through mere topical references—works ‘on’ war or ‘on’ history—but rather through their own means, that is, through their own complex articulation capable of taking into account the exceeding horizon of the real. This is what Hubert Damisch meant when he called the work of art a ‘theoretical object’: a specific, historically situated object that is also a place of theoretical development, of a thought in visual form.2 This is even more significant when works of art deal with events that are massively ‘represented’ by media images, where a factual intent leads to a relationship of the image to the world that is transitive and ‘transparent’—given that art can hint at the features of inassimilability and resistance of those events to mimetic representation.3

1 I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Teri Wehn Damisch for her valuable help with the final version of this text. 2 “A theoretical object is something that obliges one to do theory; we could start there. Second, it’s an object that obliges you to do theory but also furnishes you with the means of doing it. Thus, if you agree to accept it on theoretical terms, it will produce effects around itself. […] Third, it’s a theoretical object because it forces us to ask ourselves what theory is. It is posed in theoretical terms; it produces theory; and it necessitates a reflection on theory. But I never pronounce the word theory without also saying the word history. Which is to say that for me such an object is always a theoretico-historical object. Yet if theory is produced within history, history can never completely cover theory. That is fundamental for me. The two terms go together but in the sense in which each escapes the other” (Yve-Alain Bois, Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Hubert Damisch, “A Conversation with Hubert Damisch,” October 85 (Summer 1998), p. 8). 3 This is the perspective that Michael Diers articulates at the beginning of his essay on War Cut and press photography: “To these pictures, that just represent [bedeuten] the world, art answers with

236 

 Angela Mengoni

A work of art by the German artist Gerhard Richter will thus be the main object of this essay by virtue of its paradigmatic status, since its very form is also the field of a new readability for several features specific to ‘preventive’ conflicts. This work dealing with materials related to the Second Gulf War explores, through its specific formal choices, the two types of dynamis already mentioned. On the one hand, there is the incessant circulation of ‘anonymous’ images that, as we shall see, was the trademark of the Second Gulf War; on the other, there is the figural potential, or what we might call the dynamis of the image itself—its strategic opacity, its ability to react to discourse, texts, and other images. In other words, Richter’s artist’s book War Cut— whose pages are sometimes displayed on walls as plates from his Atlas—explores, through its layout, the strategic features of the media representations and textual strategies associated with a conflict that changed the very definition of war. Here I use the word ‘readability’, as it is used in political iconology and image critique, in reference to Walter Benjamin’s idea of history’s Lesbarkeit, implying that artworks are a crucial field of readability for the forms of historical experience. For Benjamin, this process is above all tied to the dialectic temporality of a present moment (Jetztzeit) in which the past “reaches readability”, implying “that the readability (Lesbarkeit) of history can be articulated in relation to its concrete, immanent, and singular visibility (Anschaulichkeit)”.4 The paradigmatic status of War Cut consists precisely in the fact that the articulation of its form constitutes a place of understanding and a working through—not a mere representation—of other systems and regimes of visibility. To quote Diers again: “by turning to the structure, culture and politics of the ‘other’ images, art analyses their dispositifs and aesthetic strategies and allows the emergence of—to reference Cézanne’s famous quote—an art parallel to (image-) culture.”5 War Cut is a montage of texts and images assembled in an artist’s book published in German by Gerhard Richter in 2004.6 Richter selects 216 excerpts from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of March 20 and 21, 2003, the first days of the war in Iraq,

pictures that interpret [deuten] the world, including the world of ordinary pictures”, so that the “images on images” can highlight and help raise awareness of the “media-specific peculiarities and deficiencies of the ordinary images” that invade the media on a daily basis. Michael Diers, “Über das Verhältnis von zeitgenössischer Kunst und Pressefotografie,” Fotografie, Film, Video. Beiträge zu einer kritischen Theorie des Bildes, Hamburg: Philo & Philo Fine Arts/EVA Europäische Verlaganstalt 2006, pp. 83–84, my translation. With regard to the “testimonial power” of the visual arts with respect to historical events, and the crucial role of intermedial montage, I will return several times to the key contribution of Pietro Montani, L’immaginazione intermediale. Perlustrare, rifigurare, testimoniare il mondo visibile, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2010. 4 Georges Didi-Huberman, “Image et lisibilité de l’histoire,” Remontages du temps subi. L’oeil de l’Histoire 2, Paris: Minuit, 2010, p. 14, my translation. 5 Diers, Über das Verhältnis von zeitgenössischer Kunst und Pressefotografie, cit., p. 84, my translation. The author refers to the famous quote by Paul Cézanne: “L’art est une harmonie parallèle à la nature” (“Art is a harmony parallel to nature”). 6 Gerhard Richter, War Cut, Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter König, 2004.





Visualizing Autoimmunity 

 237

and combines them with as many photographic details from his abstract painting Abstraktes Bild (CR n.648-2), from 1987.7 The photographic images—in the classic 10 × 15 cm format—are juxtaposed with texts on the volume’s double pages, always divided visually into four zones that can accommodate a portion of the text, a photo of the painting, or an empty space. Richter lays out the process at the end of the book, in a brief note under the only complete reproduction of his painting: “I took 216 excerpts from the 1987 Abstract painting n. 648-2, photographing each detail in the summer of 2002 and combining them all one year later with texts that were published in the New York Times on March 20 and 21, 2003 as the war on Iraq was launched.”8 The artist had photographed the details of his painting at the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, without knowing how he would use them. In fact, those photos would remain in his studio until the attack on Iraq and the discursive proliferation that accompanied it: “When this war started, I heard all these conflicting opinions, the images and the reports. I found it enormously complicated…”9 Faced with the complexity of what was happening, Richter continues: “I thought newspaper reports were salutary—impotent and ineffectual as everything else in the face of catastrophe—but their plain presentation of the facts consoled me. They brought something normal to the event.”10 The artist emphasizes this distancing ability by eliminating the title and author from the articles selected and by removing their mediatic enunciation marks and all paratextual references (the texts, moreover, are transcribed in a neutral font and not reproduced from the newspaper): “I like to think that maybe by removing the headlines I contributed toward having these texts read as literature.”11 The articles are thus broken down into blocks of text and combined, in the four-part space of the double page, with photos and blank white spaces of identical format, without following any criterion concerning the meaning of the texts, their chronology, or their relationship to the images. Indeed, the double page layout throughout the volume is rigidly organ-

7 In the catalogue raisonné, the abstract painting is identified with the number CR 648-2. It is an oil on canvas that measures 225 × 200 cm and is part of the collection at the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris. 8 As in the English edition: Gerhard Richter, War Cut, Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter König, 2012, p. 328. 9 Dietmar Elger and Hans Ulrich Obrist (eds.), “Interview with Jan Thorn-Prikker on the work WAR CUT, 2004,” Gerhard Richter. Writings 1961–2007, New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2009, p. 456. This is a partial translation of the interview in German: Jan Thorn-Prikker, “Je dramatischer die Ereignisse sind, desto wichtiger ist die Form”. Ein Gespräch mit dem Künstler Gerhard Richter über seine Arbeit War Cut, “Neue Zürcher Zeitung,” May 29, 2004. Complete English translation: Jan ThornPrikker, A Picture Is Worth 216 Newspaper Articles, New York Times, July 4, 2004. The quotations reference the book publication, but, where necessary, are modified and supplemented according to the original German text or the complete version from the New York Times. 10 Ibid. (translation slightly modified by the author according to the original German text). 11 Ibid.



238 

 Angela Mengoni

ized according to rules of mirrored symmetry—from a completely blank double page to the increasing presence of texts and images halfway through the book, which are then thinned out again. The neuter quality that the artist ascribes to the texts and their randomly arranged montage recalls the anti-authorial, unintentional, and anonymous quality that Richter explicitly took credit for at the beginning of the 1960s.12 Moreover, even the painting was chosen for its Stimmung, which is not clearly determined, as the artist himself affirms: “TP–Did you know what you were looking for? GR–No. I wanted to explore it, because I really couldn’t understand what the image says […] Some of my other abstract pictures are less ambiguous. Their atmosphere is either very agitated or tranquil or almost storylike in their narrative flow […] This picture had none of that. It was close to being uncommunicative,” a term that, Richter adds, “I don’t mean negatively”.13 This ability of the painting to ‘say nothing’ actually preserves the possibility of ‘exploring’, that is, of seeing something unexpected emerge from the combination of images and texts. Richter claims to have read most of the texts only after placing them next to the pictures, because only then could “chance bring about wonderful combinations [wunderbare Kombinationen]”.14 This process of random placement— marked only by formal criteria regarding “a connection in terms of colors, structures and other characteristics”—was reconstituted for the English edition of the book, with excerpts from the New York Times, which will be the object of our analysis.15 The site-specificity of the sources not only makes each edition an autonomous work that produces specific meaning, but also suggests that the mediation and discursive construction of the event in a specific context are at play here. Moreover, each edition implies the involvement of the viewer in the creation of meaning itself through random combinations, so that the aesthetic space becomes a place where one can truly exercise one’s faculties of interpretation and perception—the word aesthetic thus regaining its full etymologic meaning of aisthesis.

12 The artist’s practices and statements, especially those on the use of photography, were in those years close to the anti-subjective position of American pop art: see Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Gerhard Richter’s Atlas: The Anomic Archive,” October 88 (1999), pp. 117–145. Later on, Richter amended his assertions in a conversation with Benjamin Buchloh: Dietmar Elger and Hans Ulrich Obrist, eds., “Interview with Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, 1986,” Gerhard Richter. Writings 1961–2007, pp. 170–174. 13 Elger and Obrist, “Interview with Jan Thorn-Prikker,” p. 456 (translation completed by the author with the missing text from the German version: “TP: Wussten Sie, was Sie suchten? GR: Nein, d. h., ich wollte es erkunden, weil ich nicht so ganz verstehen konnte, was das Bild sagt”). 14 Ibid, p. 461. “I read most of the texts only after I placed them with the pictures. I read them as literature, which was very pleasing. I was not looking for straightforward narrative, which is maybe also why I chose that particular abstract painting” (ibid, p. 456). 15 Richter, War Cut, Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter König, 2012 (this is not true for the French edition, which keeps the layout of the German volume and opts to translate the texts from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung).





Visualizing Autoimmunity 

 239

Richter’s explicit claim that there were no semantic criteria for the juxtapositions in War Cut raises the crucial question of the relationship between form and content. The removal of authorial subjectivity should not in fact be confused with meaningless, “irritating formalism”,16 although the reader might wonder about “the relationship between the concept and the content of the volume—the view of the war, the first military attacks, the expectations and fears of the public opinion” and might even ask whether “it is not simply obscene to compare the war to nothing else than one’s own self-centered artistic production”.17 Michael Diers actually poses this question, only to refute it: when “one begins to read and to combine” texts with images, one also experiences an oscillation between the facts described in the text and the possibility for imagination and aperture conveyed by the abstract images, so that the experience of the gaze becomes “an aesthetic experience that also encloses a (visual-) political knowledge”.18 When it is pointed out to the artist that the juxtaposition of the fragments was done “almost blindly”—insinuating that ultimately this absence of intentionality compromises meaning—Richter reiterates his faith in a form that is able to take charge of the chaotic complexity of the real, not as a stabilization of it, but rather as a result of interaction with it: “Form is all we have to help us cope with fundamentally chaotic facts and assaults. Formulating something is a great start. I trust form, trust my feeling or capacity to find the right form for something.”19 This link between the articulations of the artistic form and the horizon of “chaotic facts” evoked by Richter makes it possible, and even necessary, to investigate—as we are preparing to do—War Cut as a place of critical development and reinterpretation of another montage of texts and images: the one at play in the media’s treatment of images in regimes of preventive war. Studies of the media’s representation of the Second Gulf War have identified a certain opacity of the image as a strategic element of that visual-military context: “War images seem to be, like stealth bombers, hard, sharp-edged, and opaque, designed to evade all forms of radar, physical and cultural. Their immunity to criticism is in part

16 Guido Meincke—who actually proposes a detailed analysis of several pages of War Cut, completely recognizing the role of the formal articulation of the work in the articulation of meaning—records this sensation and recalls Richter’s answer to Thorn-Prikker, who has just mentioned the trauma of the Second World War: “Yes. Those experiences are present, like an underlying theme. […] But the greatest pleasure was to complete this book. Then it was fun to have produced something beautiful” (Guido Meincke, Gerhard Richter. Zeitgenossenschaft, Munich: Verlag Silke Schreiber, 2013, pp. 127– 128). Following his analysis, the author emphasizes how the work on form itself is not a liquidation of content, but rather a way of investigating how meaning originates “in the signifier itself” (ibid., p. 160). 17 Diers, “Über das Verhältnis  von zeitgenössischer Kunst und Pressefotografie”, p.  104, my translation. 18 “Eine ästhetische Erfahrung, die zugleich eine (bild-)politische Erkenntniss in sich einschließt” (ibid., p. 105, my translation). 19 Elger and Obrist, “Interview with Jan Thorn-Prikker,” p. 461.



240 

 Angela Mengoni

a function of their sheer proliferation.”20 Such opacity concerns the media’s circulation of war images and does not contradict the process of the “enlargement of the military field of perception” tied to the evolution of military visualization techniques and increasingly sophisticated forms of telescopic sight—from the first cinematic photogrammetry to radar.21 All the same, if the “improved pictures” of new military technologies lead to a widening of the field of visibility during war operations, this also takes place in response to the opacity of the visual display produced by new weapons, visual effects that have always played a “major psychological role”, as in the case of the WWII bombings: “a son-et-lumière, a series of special effects, an atmospheric projection designed to confuse a frightened, blacked-out population”,22 words that recall the astonished reports of the bombings in Iraq in the newspaper texts gathered by Richter. The opacity of the media images from the Second Gulf War is, nonetheless, also the visual symptom of a cognitive indiscernibility. It has been said that such images developed an immunity to scrutiny, through an effort “to reduce [the war’s] visual impact by saturating our senses with non-stop indistinguishable and undistinguished images”.23 The proliferation, interchangeability, and indistinctness of this unprecedented mass of “relatively anonymous”24 images and, at the same time, the absence of “memorable” images, would have paved the way for, in the case of the Second Gulf War, a specific kind of media saturation founded on a continuous circulation of images. This media space of perpetual circulation, Jacques Rancière notes, is no longer a space that can be explored and reconfigured by subjects, but rather has the features of a police space where “there’s nothing to look at on the street, nothing to do but circulate”.25 The opacity of war images—the “intense white flashes with shades of orange” that saturated the screen at the beginning of the ‘shock and awe’ military campaign—goes hand-in-hand with their infinite circulation.26 These images possess the uncertainty typical of what Hito Steyerl called the ‘poor image’, the low-definition picture that is perfectly suited to this kind of incessant movement because of its

20 Nicholas Mirzoeff, Watching Babylon. The War in Iraq and Global Visual Culture, New York: Routledge, 2005, pp. 13–14. 21 Paul Virilio, War and Cinema. The Logistics of Perception, London-New York: Verso, 1989, p. 69, 71. In the chapter “A Travelling Shot over Eighty Years”, Virilio retraces the history of what he calls “the deadly harmony that always establishes itself between the functions of eye and weapon”. 22 Ibid., p. 78. 23 Mirzoeff, Watching Babylon, p. 67. 24 Ibid. 25 Jacques Rancière, Aux bords du politique, Paris: La Fabrique, 1998, p. 177, my translation. Mirzoeff refers to this conception of the relationship between time, space, and visuality on several occasions in his text: see Mirzoeff, Watching Babylon, pp. 16–19, 26–32. 26 Ibid., p. 1.





Visualizing Autoimmunity 

 241

non-specificity: “The poor image tends towards abstraction, it is a visual idea in its very becoming.”27 War Cut operates nothing short of around this uncertainty of the image, which, in the case of the war in Iraq, is a strategic visual element and not a random or incidental feature. The spectator is placed before the malleability of the low-definition image: his or her gaze bears witness to the reactivity of the abstract—and often blurred— images to the journalistic text. We find an example of this image plasticity on pages 73–74 (fig. 1). The text that takes up the entire right page, divided into two blocks, analyzes in detail the question of chemical weapons in Iraq, which, as we know, was a deciding factor in the legitimization of the attack. The article sets out a long series of hypotheses about the Iraqi arsenal, whose presence is uncertain: “Iraq also still seems to rely on ‘wet’ versions of biological agents like anthrax, which lose effectiveness in sunlight and in hot water. The story will be very different, however, if Iraq has developed anthrax in the form of dry micropowders […] This danger would be compounded if Iraq has built a cover delivery system.”28 Nonetheless, the function of these hypothetical holdings is described in detail, setting up a rich figurative scene and developing narratives that are full of perceptually vivid qualities that ‘activate’, so to speak, the abstract photographic details next to the text. This is the case, on the same page, for the description of the chemical agents that Iraq would have in its possession: “The most efficient way to use chemical and biological agents is a lowfly, slow-flying system that releases just the right amount of an agent in a long line over a target area or that circles in a spiral. Iraq has been working on sprayers for two decades.”29 The pictorial detail, with its long yellow blotch of paint, resonates with the trail of chemical sprays described in the text, so that stories, figures, and territories seem to emerge from the abstract painting (all the more so because the blurring at the edges of the photo creates an impression of depth, as in a perspective view of a landscape). What Richter calls “wonderful combinations” are, in effect, the emergence of figurative possibilities from the mass of the abstract painting. The material mixture of the painting—modified by the photographic medium, with its blurs and close-ups—is activated by the narratives and objects reported in the verbal text, especially in the case of the articles that describe landscapes. As Thorn-Prikker again says to Richter: “There are aerial photographs [in the abstract details]. Oil fields on fire. Pools of oil, blood—all this enters the images. You did not paint that, yet it’s there. Sometimes ghosts, death heads, hideous faces emerge from the images.”30 This relationship

27 Hito Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012, p. 32. 28 Richter, War Cut, p. 74, my italics. 29 Ibid. 30 Thorn-Prikker, “A Picture Is Worth 216 Newspaper Articles,” translation completed and modified by the author.



242 

 Angela Mengoni

Fig. 1: Gerhard Richter, War Cut, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter König, 2004, pp. 73–74.

between text and image has often been noticed and interpreted in different ways. If, on the one hand, the image, in contact with the text, takes on the “function of a sign” and lends itself to a representative role, on the other hand, “continuing the reading, the images lose any conceptual reference, they develop their own dynamics and regain their polysemic quality” and, in doing so, “disqualify the language as a medium of definitive interpretation”:31 this specific relationship between the newspaper articles and the photos would therefore imply a certain inadequacy in both mediums. Others have emphasized how crucial that very experience of non-correspondence is: Richter asks his spectators to explore and confront this gap, calling on them to “read, observe, and imagine” thanks to a systematic comparison between text and image that “follows the idea of a radical cut, that resonates with the book title and its multiple meanings”, from the aesthetic practice of montage to the idea of wound.32 This experience of “conjunctions and collisions” would embody a new politics of the gaze with respect to the media image, in particular those press photos

31 “Die durch Betextung etablierte Zeichenfunktion kann sich aber nicht dauerhaft stabilisieren. Bei fortschreitender Lektüre losen sich die Bilder aus der begrifflichen Vereinnahmung, entwickeln eine eigene Dynamik unhd erobern ihre Vieldeutigkeit zurück. Die begriffliche Tätigkeit wird dadurch auf sich selbst zurückgeworfen, die Konsistenz des Textes wird unterwandert, und die Sprache als Medium der abschliessenden Deutung disqualifiziert” (Meincke, Gerhard Richter, p. 142). 32 Diers, “Über das Verhältnis  von zeitgenössischer Kunst und Pressefotografie,” p.  105, my translation.





Visualizing Autoimmunity 

 243

of war indirectly evoked by War Cut. The spectators’ exercise consists in continuously activating their own imagination before the images (thanks to the suggestions made by the texts), to then find themselves “brought back to the realm of facts”. This seems to suggest—although Diers is not explicit about it—that the spectators make use of an interpretative gesture typical of their media experience: “one sees what one (already) knows and one acknowledges what one wants to see,”33 only to be confronted to the failure of this gesture. The activity of the spectator’s gaze is crucial here. I have used the word ‘montage’ because here the juxtaposition of texts and images allows the production of new meaning between the different fragments, and it is precisely this productive feature that is typical of the operation we call montage, beyond any medium specificity (as was already clear to the authors of classic theories of montage).34 The perceptible texture of painting starts, so to speak, to produce figures before our eyes in War Cut: it is as if we were witnessing the moment in which the purely material dimension of the picture is segmented according to a figurative logic that anchors the visual matter to the content of verbal language, that is, to the nameable elements we call figures.35 This moment of insurgence of object-signs in the image is inscribed into the structure of War Cut itself and renewed, page after page, under the exploratory gaze of its spectator/reader. All the same, what is fundamental is the role that the picture’s malleability assumes in the media discourse related not to war in general but to the kind of war whose legitimacy is founded on the construction of a danger that justifies the conflict and, consequently, on a discourse that attempts to make a threat appear, to extrapolate it from the image’s opacity. An example of this strategic opacity of the image in the context of ‘preventive’ military operations is the article in which the reporter John Burns36 describes the first night of attacks on Baghdad, a crucial moment with regard to the regime of visibility and media coverage of that military campaign (fig. 2). The abstract forms that cross the night sky—unreadable and incomparable to any pre-existing representation of bombing—are, significantly, described by the journalist in primarily aesthetic terms. At first “the building exploded in a fireball and a series of secondary explosions”, and

33 Ibid. 34 Antonio Somaini, Ejzenstejn. Il cinema, le arti, il montaggio, Turin: Einaudi, 2011. Meincke— quoting Diers—brings together the word ‘cut’ in the title with the idea of “selection, fragmentation and montage (Selektion, Fragmentierung und Montage)”, and interprets the juxtaposition of fragments and media materials as “a media deconstruction not in a polemic-critical sense, but in the form of a model, exemplary analysis” (Meincke, Gerhard Richter, p. 152). 35 On the difference between such a figurative semiotics and the non-figurative logic of a so-called ‘plastic’ visual semiotics, see Algirdas Julien Greimas, “Figurative Semiotics and the Semiotics of the Plastic Arts,” Greimassian Semiotics, New Literary History, vol. 20, no. 3 (Spring, 1989), pp. 627–649. 36 The final pages of War Cut list the first lines of all the passages, with the authors and original titles of the articles indicated; the one by John Burns, on p. 295 of the English version of War Cut, is taken from his article “In Iraqi Capital, Sirens Precede Two Direct Hits”.



244 

 Angela Mengoni

Fig. 2: Gerhard Richter, War Cut, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter König, 2004, pp. 295–296.

then the counteroffensive began, with “at least 10 minutes of antiaircraft and tracer fire in the night sky, a mesmerizing but apparently random fireworks display of white and yellow and red. Still, there was no sound of high-flying jets, no roar of missile engines or whisper of falling bombs […] and a breeze cooled the springtime air.”37 The opaque images of the bombings and the city skyline are indistinguishable and confusing: “When explosions finally rang out in Baghdad […] General Haig drawled on Fox News, which, like other news channels, scrambled to interpret an image of the Baghdad skyline, ‘It might be just be a flock of bats.’”38 The visualization equipment of new war technologies is the producer of these abstract, indiscernible images that are ready to back up a discourse where ambiguity and indiscernibility are fundamental. War Cut invites the spectator to witness personally the reactive dynamics between text and image—a relationship facilitated because the text, besides being a linguistic expression, is also a graphic element visualized in the same format as the photos. The spectators are thus invited to perform what the media calls on them to perceive on a daily basis, and they are somehow confronted with the strategies typical of the media’s treatment of the 2003 conflict: the summoning of opaque images that, because of their uncertainty, are ready to reinforce and sustain both the journalistic and institutional discourse, widely present in the texts

37 Richter, War Cut, p. 295. 38 Ibid., p. 100.





Visualizing Autoimmunity 

 245

chosen by Richter. The montage thereby constitutes a new space of readability for the media construction of the ‘preventive’ military action; War Cut is a reflection, with the tools and in the space of the art form, on the economy of the image in the media regime of preventive war. This critical gesture is not carried out thematically. Media images and texts are not selected by virtue of their topics; instead, War Cut offers the spectators a field in which to explore and experience the semiotic strategies that take place every day in the media discourse. At the same time, it induces the viewers to experience the resistance of the image to any figurative illustration of the text. In fact, this process of anchoring indeterminate abstract forms to object-signs is never fully carried out, since the material consistency of painting resists and holds the image in a state of open figurability.39 These images are malleable and are ready to support and confirm the discourse; one sees figures and narratives arise due to the text nearby. Yet their total transparency with respect to the scene described by the text cannot be fully achieved since their feature of opaque resistance remains.40 Once again, Hito Steyerl has emphasized how the ‘poor image’, with its constituent opacity, is not devoid of a legitimizing role, especially in the realm of news: “in some cases images with lower resolution also appear in mainstream media environments (mainly news), where they are associated with urgency, immediacy and catastrophe—and are extremely valuable.”41 This availability and simultaneous opacity of the image seem to be entirely co-essential for a strategy of risk construction, and crucial for the military action of the Gulf ‘War’. The idea of the construction (or production) of a danger is linked to what has been defined as the ‘immunitary paradigm’ that underlies preventive war. It consists in ‘inoculating’ the political body with a threat (producing it, as with a vaccine) to stimulate the latter’s defenses, a process nevertheless exposed to the risk of an autoimmune drift:

39 Louis Marin widely explored the operations of figurability intended as “puissances du figural”, the force at work in the presentation and opacity of the work of art, rather than in its accomplished figurative elements. See Louis Marin, “Le concept de figurabilité, ou la rencontre entre l’histoire de l’art et la psychanalyse. Entretien avec L. Marin par Odile Asselineau et Marie-Jeanne Guedj”, Nervure, Journal de Psychiatrie, vol. 3, n.  1, 1990, pp.  52–62; Id., “Figurabilité du visuel: la Véronique ou la question du portrait à Port-Royal”, Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse, vol. 35: Le Champ visuel, 1987, pp. 51–65. 40 Again, the works of Louis Marin have brought to light the tension between the transparency and opacity of the image as a constituent feature of representation and its links to the strategies of the visual construction of power: Louis Marin, De la représentation, ed. Daniel Arasse et al., Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994; Louis Marin, On Representation, trans. Catherine Porter, Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2002. 41 Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen, n. 5.



246 

 Angela Mengoni

If during the Cold War the immunitary machine still functioned through the production of reciprocal fear and therefore had the effect of deterring catastrophes that always threatened (and exactly for this reason never occurred), today, or at least beginning with September 11, 2001, the immunitary machine demands an outbreak of effective violence on the part of all contenders. The idea—and the practice—of preventive war constitutes the most acute point of this autoimmunitary turn of contemporary biopolitics, in the sense that here, in the self-confuting figure of a war fought precisely to avoid war, the negative of the immunitary procedure doubles back on itself until it covers the entire frame. War is no longer the always possible inverse of global coexistence, but the only effective reality.42

To inoculate the social body with a threat—in other words, to create the fissure that will allow a better sealing of that body (this is the ‘doubling back’ of the immunitary procedure discussed by Esposito)—media and visual strategies are fundamental, and their effectiveness cannot be underestimated if we think of the self-destructive results of the autoimmunitary apparatus. The article mentioned above on chemical weapons—along with its image represented in fig. 2—lists a series of hypotheses about the Iraqi holdings, none of which are certain—all are introduced by hypothetical phrases: “one of the possibilities” that the Pentagon most fears is the smallpox vaccine, although “there is no evidence that Iraq has smallpox and soldiers were vaccinated—thus the serious threat would be to civilian workers at tour ports and military bases.”43 These chemical weapons, whose existence is hypothetical, are nonetheless described in detail, as in the case, above, of “anthrax in the form of dry micropowders that are coated for wide dissemination and resistance to the sun”, except that the author later specifies: “this is possible, but we don’t have enough evidence to say it’s probable.”44 The après-coup confirmation of this process of fabrication of dangers occurred in July 2016, when the British government’s official investigation, conducted by the Chilcot commission, declared that Tony Blair’s government had “deliberately exaggerated” the danger of the threats coming from Iraq and that it had no proof of the presence of chemical weapons. What is crucial for the discursive strategy of risk production is that weak assumptions, expressed by hypothetical phrases, are nonetheless often accompanied by very perceptually detailed descriptions about uncertain phenomena. It is said, for example, that “the drone with no pilot that was shown to reporters outside Baghdad could look like a flimsy toy” but “Iraq may have developed more sophisticated craft and they can be very dangerous.”45 This risk, entirely potential, is described with

42 Roberto Esposito, Immunitas. Protezione e negazione della vita, Turin: Einaudi, 2002, pp. 160–161; Roberto Esposito, Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life, trans. Zakiya Hanafi, Cambridge, Eng–Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2011, p. 148. 43 Richter, War Cut, p. 74, my italics. 44 Ibid., my italics. 45 Ibid., my italics.





Visualizing Autoimmunity 

 247

great precision, as we saw in the text on the techniques of spray-spilling chemical substances, so much so that the opacity of the abstract painting next to it cannot help but react to the subject of the verbal text, supporting it, albeit in a paradoxical way: it is not an illustration of the text, but more of a support sensitive to the indecisiveness and ambivalence necessary for that discourse. In this way, the evocation of the possibility that the Iraqi army could “set the oil fields ablaze” or that “Iraq could also use its dams and waterways to create a limited flood plain in the south and around Baghdad”, or that the smoke could hinder the operations of the American army, finds a correspondence in the oily consistency of the painted material captured by a close-up and in the smoky opacity of the blurred point of view.46 Territory is the privileged object of this process. The detail of the painting on page 176 shows the overlapping of successive strokes of color typical of Richter’s abstract paintings; the lens even captures the light that falls on the subtle contours, proclaiming their material thickness (fig. 3). In the Abstrakte Bilder that Richter painted from the late 1970s on, this temporal process involving the successive layering of brushstrokes is indicative of his idea of abstraction. Although the metaphysical foundation of the “abstract painting” seeks an “overcoming of contingency”, setting up a visual composition that is an autonomous universe, his abstract works also strive for a blending “between contingent detail and compositional integration”, in a quest for “a pragmatically attained rightness”.47 This happens by integrating the contingency of color application with palette knives and huge doctor blades—a gesture that takes the production of form away from the hand’s control—with the composition that is developed over time in layers. In War Cut, this almost geological stratification, magnified by the photographic close-ups, is related to landscape, or even a historically determined form of landscape. On a double page, the painting detail is placed next to a long text that describes the desert landscape as a territory to be explored and sifted through: Unlike the northern borders with Iran and Turkey, or the south with Kuwait, this western border with Jordan is far calmer: it is largely empty and thus carries little potential for uprising or infighting among Kurds or Shias. Still, the region is expected to be a target for American operations since United States officials have said they believe that the western desert may contain weapons of mass destruction, just possibly missiles pointing at Israel as in the Persian Gulf War of 1991.48

The text describes a borderland in which refugees set up their tents, struggling against sandstorms that ‘whip up the desert’. The material consistency of the photographed

46 Ibid., pp. 74–76. 47 Ulrich Look and Denys Zacharopoulos, Gerhard Richter, München: Silke Schreiber, 1985, p.  87, my translation, see also the pages that Meincke dedicates to the matter of abstraction and balance between composition and contingency in relation to War Cut: Meincke, Gerhard Richter, pp. 131–137. 48 Richter, War Cut, p. 175.



248 

 Angela Mengoni

Fig. 3: Gerhard Richter, War Cut, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter König, 2004, pp. 175–176.

detail does not literally depict a landscape (although there is a mild reference to the rippled, “whipped” sand); it rather sets up a surface-territory that is opaque and resistant to any univocal identification, but ready to be striated, in the Deleuzian sense of the term: in other words, ready and forced to welcome the inspection of a gaze capable of unearthing the hidden figure and extracting evidence from the formless desert.49 The painted material actually seems to offer up an equivalent of Deleuze’s ‘smooth space’ (espace lisse), which is unmeasurable and consists of the infinite repetition of its shifting, fractal-like surface. The text seems to recall precisely that ‘nomadic’ space of circulation, not one yet classified: an unmarked place that stretches ‘between’ the various refugee camps, but that is also ready to be organized, marked, and passed through the sieve in search of signs of the Iraqi arsenal. According to Deleuze and Guattari, ‘to striate’ means to partition space and capture movement, which is the main function of the State;50 more generally, however, it indicates the logic behind

49 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille Plateaux. Capitalisme et Schizophrénie, Paris: Minuit, 1980, especially: “1440. Le lisse et le strié,” pp.  474–500; Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, especially: “1227. Treaty on Nomadology—The War Machine,” pp. 380–387. 50 “One of the fundamental tasks of the State is to striate the space over which it reigns, or to utilize smooth spaces as a means of communication in the service of striated space. It is a vital concern of every State not only to vanquish nomadism but to control migrations and more generally, to





Visualizing Autoimmunity 

 249

every superimposition of the structures of an organism upon the undifferentiated energy of a ‘Body without Organs’: “Smooth space is filled by events or haecceities, far more than by formed and perceived things […] It is haptic rather than optical perception. Whereas striated forms organize a matter, the smooth materials signal forces and serve as symptoms for them. It is an intensive rather than extensive space, one of distances, not of measures and properties. Intense Spatium instead of Extensio. A Body without Organs instead of an organism and organization.”51 The reconnaissance gaze searching the “largely empty” desert at the border with Jordan for signs of a secret arsenal is an operator of striation. The numerous texts in War Cut describing this optical striation point to the strategic role of a gaze capable of building a threat and making it perceptible, since this is the element that legitimizes any preventive action and establishes the need for it.52 In fact, preventive discourse justifies military action by using an element that is found explicitly worded in the articles several times over: the need “to remove a threat”. This interdependence between threat and preventive action is the very distinctive feature of the ‘immunitary paradigm’ mentioned above: the inoculation of a threat in the social body triggers its protection against a danger, while at the same time exposing it to the possible destructive results of any autoimmunization.53 In this regard, the visual construction of any evidence that is proof of a threat—and the English word ‘evidence’ makes the perceptual root of the proof explicit—takes on a strategic role both in the construction of an external threat and, even more, with regard to internal security. This subject is markedly present in the journalistic texts selected by Richter, in many accounts of ‘surveillance missions’ in the United States. Different excerpts describe the security measures activated in

establish a zone of rights over an entire ‘exterior’, over all flows traversing the ecumenon. If it can help it, the State does not dissociate itself from a process of capture of flows of all kinds, populations, commodities or commerce, money or capital, etc. There is still a need for fixed paths in well-defined directions, which restrict speed, regulate circulation, relativize movement, and measure in detail the relative movements of subjects and objects” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 385). 51 Ibid., p. 479. 52 Giorgio Agamben opens his reflection on the state of exception by emphasizing that this need based on risk is the linchpin of emergency laws, and that it is in fact the founding moment of the ‘exceptional’ suspension of the state of law by virtue of its own uncertainty and undecidability: the emergency suspends the habitual regulatory legal framework not so much to break from the law as to “reveal another legal element in absolute purity”, the element of decision. In a state of exception, the law is withdrawn to allow the emergence and legitimization of the bare decision that is the reverse founder of the law. Giorgio Agamben, Stato di eccezione. Homo sacer, II, 1, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. D. Heller-Roazen, Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 1998. 53 “Just as in the most serious autoimmune illness, so too in the planetary conflict presently under way: it is excessive defense that ruinously turns on the same body that continues to activate and strengthen it.” (Roberto Esposito.  Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy Campbell, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008, p. 148).



250 

 Angela Mengoni

sensitive locations, from public transportation to zones that are more symbolically vulnerable, such as the area surrounding Ground Zero or Wall Street, as in the following description of the unease provoked by the limitation of freedom of movement in a public space (plate XXIX): ‘There’s a general malaise in the whole city’, one ticket agent said. How could it be otherwise, given the sense of watchfulness and the suspicions? There are warnings from Washington; the possibility of new terrorist attacks; the Police Department’s new Operation Atlas,54 its wartime security plan. ‘Everywhere you look there’s a New York City police officer’, said Nicole Orrell, a college student who was visiting Rockefeller Center with her family. […] Throughout midtown the police are on streets, in subways, at bridges, at tunnels, they dominate Times Square. […] At the checkpoint nearly every car and van was stopped for a brief examination by the officers, who checked licenses and registrations as well. Another member of the team said in two months of working at the checkpoint, he has found some expired registrations, but nothing more. Is the effort worth it? ‘It’s a precaution’, the officer said. ‘We could find anything at any time. I hope we don’t.’55

The two images on the page beside the text—a repetition of the same close-up with yellow streaks on a green background—do not offer any clear representational footing, but expose the opacity of an unfocused frame of polychrome and painted stratification to the exploratory gaze evoked in the article: a gaze ready to probe the materiality of the world, to dig up what is resisting visibility. Among other things, it is to the perceptual construction of insecurity and threat that Gilles Deleuze links his idea of a ‘new fascism’: “The new fascism is not the politics and the economy of war. It is the global agreement on security, on the maintenance of peace just as terrifying as war. All our petty fears will be organized in concert, all our petty anxieties will be harnessed to make micro-fascists of us; we will be called upon to stifle every little thing, every suspicious face, every dissonant voice, in our streets, in our neighborhoods, in our local theaters.”56 Many passages describe the effects of security measures in different regions, from New York to California. The preventive relationship that is established here between the perception and construction of risk, on the one hand, and the controls and limitation of personal liberties legitimized by that same ‘danger’, on the other, introduces the same structural node that underlies the military operations described in War Cut: an entanglement of perception and fabrication of evidence that is reactivated by the montage of texts and images when the splotches of abstract color, exposed to media discourse, trigger the emergence of figures. This structure is comparable to the hypo-

54 Author’s note: ‘Operation Atlas’ was the name of the security plan enacted by the New York City Police Department following the outbreak of the Second Gulf War. 55 Richter, War Cut, p. 67. 56 Gilles Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews, 1975–1995, Los Angeles, CA and Cambridge, MA: Semiotexte (MIT Press), 2006, p. 168.





Visualizing Autoimmunity 

 251

thetical formulae omnipresent in the presidential speech: “Mr. Bush underlined again that Mr. Hussein posed a grave threat for the United States and that he would attack the country and its interests whenever he gained the weapons and the strength.”57 Preventive action thus bases its legitimacy on a threat that is efficaciously produced; we use here the term ‘efficacy’ in its anthropological and semiotic sense as the ability to produce somatic and passionate effects thanks to perceptive qualities.58 In War Cut, the montage of text and image mimics, through its own articulation, precisely this effective stimulation of visibility. Yet the daily media discourse regarding the specific typology of late modernity that is preventive war59 is not limited to news about war (from the question of Iraqi military holdings to actual military action), but extends to discussion of security, economy, and even popular culture, as the texts Richter has gathered indicate. The “wonderful combinations” mentioned by Richter mimic the strategy of risk construction by the media: the scrutinizing gaze of the spectator sees previously unperceived elements emerge from the abstract mass of the painting. Media discourse seems literally to shape perception and channel it toward expected meanings (again: “one sees what one already knows and one acknowledges what one wants to see”).60 Nonetheless, the spectator also experiences the resistance of the image to this channeling of perception. The practice of relating a range of elements—narratives, places, different registers, images, and texts—remains an open exercise of exploration. The juxtaposition reinserts these fragments in a plural relationship. Above all, War Cut calls on the spectators to engage in a kind of working through that explores an irreducible heterogeneity; it invites them to experience an open and multifaceted process that evolves over time. This exercise is an aesthetic experience that—in the etymological sense of ‘aesthetic’—forges a form of perception, a form of aisthesis that is in fact opposed to the media space in which we must incessantly “circulate”—to quote Rancière—rather than working through. This latter kind of media discourse happens when media images are made image-symbols, assigned to an illusory autonomy and

57 Richter, War Cut, p. 161. 58 For a reformulation of the Levi-Straussian idea of the ‘symbolic efficacy’ in the methods of constructing a subject of enunciation in the discursive practices, images, and beliefs of war, see Federico Montanari, Linguaggi della guerra, Rome: Meltemi, 2004, pp. 44–51. 59 As mentioned, Roberto Esposito ascribes to the attacks of September 11, 2001 a crucial role in the configuration of the autoimmunitary paradigm (see n. 37); Giorgio Agamben also believes that the USA Patriot Act, President Bush’s Military Order and, more generally, the practice of preventive war show that “the state of exception increasingly tends to present as the paradigm of the dominant government of contemporary politics” (Agamben, Stato di eccezione, p. 111, my translation). If it is true, therefore, that “the state of exception has reached […] its maximum planetary deployment”, Agamben considers it the very basis of sovereignty, whose originary foundation in modernity is the object of his survey (“Brief history of the state of exception”). 60 See n. 31.



252 

 Angela Mengoni

transparency, and plucked from the plurality of perspectives and temporalities that always spins the meaning of a specific event. This point is crucial, since the loss of a plural horizon is precisely one of the possible destinies of the media image if, due to its textual construction and mode of circulation, it becomes loaded with the illusion of self-sufficiency and absolute transparency with respect to the event to which it is meant to bear witness. Then the gesture of visual montage in Richter’s work also addresses the question of why a media archive, having achieved a particularly intense circulation and technological potential, could paradoxically fail in witnessing the complex realm of ‘events’ and the ‘real’. This failure is bound up with the incapacity of the image to render the real’s intrinsic transcending of the image itself. The media narrative of September 11 has often been regarded as a paradigmatic example here, and as a symptomatic starting point for a broader reflection on the problematic filling of the gap between the image and its referential horizon, whose mark of alterity and excess should be taken into account by the image itself, in its attempt to witness the complexity of the event.61 The widespread comment made by those who have viewed the sequence of the attack—“it looks like a film” —has been regarded as the condensation of both the risk of a superposition between the image and the real, and of the assumption of their necessary gap. This gap is pointed out by its being like, but not the same as: the gap signals and calls for a necessary kind of processing, one capable of tracing the distance between these images and the sense of the event they take into account, thus pointing out “the implicit consciousness of the hiatus between an imaginable fictional and an unimaginable real”.62 The weakening of the witnessing potential of the image is, in fact, always possible, when media discourse assumes—and, at the same time, constructs—frames and sequences, such as the collapse of the towers, which in the end become a single iconic image, acting as a symbol for the entire event. The image-event would appear to be a transparent image capable of showing ‘everything’ (what else is there to show beyond the event at the very instant it occurs?). It does not inscribe itself with the need to look out-of-field, that is, toward the plural network of elements nec-

61 This annihilation of the gap between the image and the ‘real’ was addressed—from the perspective of the so-called pictorial turn, among others—in terms of ‘idolatry’ or ‘cloning’, terms that would point to the non-distinction between an image that has come alive and its alterity (W.J.T. Mitchell, “Chapter  1: Vital Signs, Cloning Terror” and “Chapter 2: Totemism, Fetishism, Idolatry,” What do Pictures want. The Lives and Loves of Images, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005). In this discussion, rather than referring to an unproblematized idea of a ‘referent’, I will address that relationship in terms of the capability of the work of art to point to a referential horizon, taking its radical alterity into account (which from here on will be referred to as ‘referential performance’, to use Montani’s term). 62 The opposition between the atrophic ‘image-event’ of the media discourse and the attempts—of works of art—to witness its traumatic core is explored by Marco Dinoi in a way that is particularly consistent with the perspective of this paper: Marco Dinoi, Lo sguardo e l’evento. I media, la memoria, il cinema, Florence: Le Lettere, 2008.





Visualizing Autoimmunity 

 253

essary to understand, process, and witness the event. Such an image would not bring about any actual working through—either cognitive or perceptive—but would “directly install the image of the event into the field of the imaginary”.63 What is at stake here is atrophy, conceived of in both a perceptive way (the reduction of points of view, the repetition of a single scene) and a narrative one, since the image-event in the media is often framed by a ‘narrative numbness’: that is, the use of set phrases, repeated like mantras (“nothing will ever be the same”, “why do they hate us so much?”), instead of a plural, discursive texture. This would lead to the atrophy of the so-called ‘referential performance’ that the image is called upon to fulfill, with respect to the transcending and often traumatic ‘real’ it is related to.64 This kind of media image, extracted and isolated from the necessarily plural network of meanings, paradoxically misses the event, if we conceive of the latter (as the authors mentioned do) in terms drawn from Michel Foucault. In 1978, he wrote: “several times, several durations, several rates of change get entangled with one another, crisscross and precisely form events;” therefore, “an event is not a segment of time. Basically, it is the point of intersection between two durations, two rates of change, two evolutions, two lines of history.”65 An image capable of witnessing an event envisioned in those terms is thus an intrinsically partial document, part of a wider and polysemic discursive network, one that combines multiple points of view. This is where art can play its decisive role, since it reflects on this potential to bear witness through its forms and articulations. In fact, it is precisely by assuming its incompleteness, its opacity, and its partiality, that the image can point to the need for an actual work that encompasses the complexity of the ‘real’ toward which it is turned (‘work’ must be understood here as a process, as in the analytical meaning of the Freudian ‘working through’ or Durcharbeiten). In this respect, various forms and strategies of montage can assume a crucial role, paving the way for the regeneration of the ‘witnessing function of the image’ and for its authentication of the event. The latter term indicates a relationship between the image and the event that goes beyond the illusory idea of an unmediated representation of the ‘real’ and grasps the necessary constructive feature of that relationship.

63 Ibid., p. 44. 64 The idea of ‘prestazione referenziale’—referential performance—is proposed by Pietro Montani in his work on the relationship between the image, its witnessing potential, and the media archive: Montani, L’immaginazione intermediale, pp. 8–9; Pietro Montani, “La funzione testimoniale dell’immagine,” ed. Tullio Gregory, XXI secolo. Comunicare e rappresentare, Rome: Edizioni dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 2009, pp. 477–489. 65 Michel Foucault, Dits et Ecrits. 1954–1988, vol. 3, eds. Daniel Defert and François Ewald, Paris: Gallimard, 1994, p. 581, as quoted and translated in Thomas Flynn, Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, Volume Two: A Poststructuralist Mapping of History, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005, p. 75; See also Judith Revel, Le vocabulaire de Foucault, Paris: Ellipses, 2008, “Événement” ad vocem.



254 

 Angela Mengoni

The idea of authentication is thus grounded “in a blinding feature which, instead of neutralizing the artificiality of the mediation, discloses how the ‘real fact’ can—as much as possible—be grabbed anew in all its blatant evidence, only by virtue of a supplement of work on form”; one such privileged form of plurality being montage, both intermedial and not.66 It is therefore not surprising to discover that the media icon of the Twin Towers in flames was inserted by Richter into one of the montages on the boards of his Atlas, the collection of plates on which he has been assembling heterogeneous visual materials since the early 1960s.67 Richter thus appears to reflect on the very event at the origin of the escalation that led to the war in Iraq in 2003, once again through visual montage. On plates 737–754 from 2006, he looks back to the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. On plate 744 (Bandes, WTC) (plate XXX), we find, in the top right, a newspaper clipping with the photograph of the exact moment at which the second airplane hit the tower: an image repeatedly spread by the media that has become iconic. On this plate, the picture is subject to a process of modification and repetition. Beneath the newspaper clipping is a slightly enlarged color digital print of the same image and, further below, two more versions of this print: the first is horizontally reversed and slightly out of focus, and the second marks a return to the original orientation, but with the chromatic range modified—it displays an orange sky—and the digital resolution significantly reworked. Alongside these media images, Richter juxtaposes several sketches from his 1970–71 series entitled Rooms, in which we can see the walls of several indoor spaces entirely covered in patterns of horizontal lines. It is true that the rectangular form of these horizontal patterns might recall a sort of reversal of the towers and that the last, particularly fragmented collage could suggest “a collaged version of collapse”.68 However, in addition to these figurative analogies, the montage of the media icon, with its deconstructions in the color prints and the abstract patterns on the left of the plate, also offers up to the spectator’s gaze different degrees of recognizability of objects, scenes, and figures. Richter places 18 plates alongside this explicit reference to the attack on the Twin Towers. A large number of these are in fact taken up by

66 Montani, L’immaginazione intermediale, p.  9. Commenting on the collective photographic exhibition that took place after the Twin Towers attack, Clément Chéroux underlines how the display itself can be an effective way to reinsert the singular image into a random network formed of multiple viewpoints, thus taking into account the complexity and irreducible contingency of the event (Clément Chéroux, Diplopie. L’image photographique à l’ère des medias globalisés: Essai sur le 11 septembre 2001, Cherbourg: Le Point du Jour, 2009). 67 Helmut Friedel (ed.), Gerhard Richter. Atlas, London: Thames & Hudson, 1996. This project, still in progress, and now amounting to more than 800 plates, has been regularly exhibited and displayed on walls in blocks of plates since the early 1970s. 68 This hypothesis is found in Kate Palmer Albers, “Reading the World Trade Center in Gerhard Richter’s Atlas,” Art History (February 2012), pp. 152–173, quotation from p. 160.





Visualizing Autoimmunity 

 255

Fig. 4: Gerhard Richter, Atlas, plate 745 Strontium, 56.2 × 73 cm, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München, Munich, Germany.

microscopic views of different materials and by their graphic elaborations in abstract patterns in rectangular formats. The plates laid out immediately above and below the one with the pictures of the towers include newspaper clippings of the scientific images, which are at the origin of the abstract patterns. These consist of hypervisions of the materials silicate and strontium: on plate 743 Various Structures and Silicate, there is a view of silicate from an electron microscope, while on plate 745 Strontium (fig. 4), a clipping from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung shows a photo of the atomic structure of strontium, with its pattern composed of regular rows of microspheres. Around these clippings, Richter assembles printouts and drawings that rework those patterns in a vertical format; these patterns are also reproduced, in large format, in the 2003 series of abstract paintings Silicate and in the 2005 installation Strontium. The patterns included in the Atlas montage echo the historical incident of the attack and its treatment by the media in many ways: strontium is, for example, an extremely reactive material that bursts into flames on contact with oxygen; moreover, one of its most common applications was its use in manufacturing cathode ray tubes in television sets. These are indirect relationships that can be traced semantically back to the themes of destruction and death (because of the use of strontium in nuclear tests, for 

256 

 Angela Mengoni

example), of memory (because of its use in computer RAM), or even of relationships more directly linked to the context of the attacks: for example, the contamination of the surrounding area of the World Trade Center after the explosion, which presented high levels of both materials.69 Independently of such thematic references, the montage of Atlas reintroduces first and foremost the media icon of the towers into a plurality of relationships. Rather than linking silicate and strontium to their contexts and uses, I am more interested in the fact that Richter deals with both of these deeply connected events—the attacks on the World Trade Center and the preventive war that resulted from it—through a reflection on gaze and point of view. The textures of these materials seen through a microscope are, in fact, the result of a hypervision that, on the one hand, promises an internal and therefore more profound knowledge of the material, and on the other, implies such a close-up view as to cause the loss of any possible phenomenological comprehension of the object of vision. Seeing too much paradoxically suggests the impossibility of capturing the very object of that vision. And it is strange that while highlighting the paradox of these atomic visions and recognizing that the painting compensates for that loss with the possibility of experiencing the image’s presence,70 their relationship with media depictions of the events of September 11 was not underlined, although Richter himself juxtaposed these deceptive hypervisions in his Atlas. Is the incessantly repeated media image of the towers, in its turn, not an example of illusory hypervision—an image that promises to catch the event red-handed, showing ‘everything’? And is it not this ‘seeing too much’ that paradoxically atrophies the network of relationships of an event that begs to be captured in all its excess? As in War Cut, the operation of montage visually depicts this paradoxical loss of grip on the world by virtue of hypervision. I am thinking, for example, of the many pages of War Cut that contain hyperdetailed and hypercloseup descriptions of military operations, with their plethora of tactical information and their endless technical details about weapons, military holdings, and army movements.71 This sharp focalization finds a perfect correspondence in texts containing economic microanalyses that register the effects of war on the markets and carefully follow their dynamics. All these texts imply a point of view that proceeds along an accumulation of details gathered from an extreme proximity of gaze, an enunciatory position typical of what is known as embedded journalism and of media reports during the Second Gulf

69 Ibid., p. 162. 70 “Strontium offers and promises a view of a chemical substance, and thereby promises to let us see one of the major elements out of which the universe is made. What it offers, in other words, is a glimpse at and a view of physical reality […] This promise, however, and this is the main thought worked out in this print, is disappointed as soon as we realize that seeing this element turns into its own opposite, namely, into not-seeing-it” (Christian Lotz, The Art of Gerhard Richter, London–New York: Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 98–99). 71 There are numerous examples; here we might cite Patrick Tyler’s article (Richter, War Cut, p. 260).





Visualizing Autoimmunity 

 257

War: we are confronted with a kind of enumeration in which the syntactical addition does not correspond to a perceivable whole capable of organizing its parts.72 The quantity of details, or data, has the same legitimizing and objectivizing status typical of all enumerations, which nonetheless prevents us from grasping the relationship of those elements to the whole of which they are parts. The details photographed by Richter resonate with the descriptions produced by a gaze so close as to scatter the objects of the world. The abstract details of the painting now appear to rediscover their status as fragments, but also—with their saturated colors and seismographic topology made up of waves, peaks, and stripes—recall the visualizations of data and statistics that have a legitimizing role, as in the field of economics. On pages 92–93, for example, two details of the painting with similar colors—the one on the left very sharp, the other blurrier—are placed alongside an article on automotive market support in the United States. The article consists of a precise list of data but at the same time makes clear the link between economic aid and political crisis when it mentions the financing that the auto industry benefited from after the September 11 attacks.73 These articles list the data—in both the military and economic realms—without mentioning their context as a whole and, therefore, their meaning. Although the blurriness of the photographic details impedes the transparency of vision, we need to remember that a kind of blindness can also result from an opacity that is created “not by vagueness” but “by the operation that ‘consists in destroying sharpness with sharpness [detruire la netteté par la netteté]’” as Gilles Deleuze puts it, quoting André Bazin. The latter, while discussing the films of Jacques Tati, stresses the special link between excessive accuracy and insignificance: “The soundtrack is rarely indistinguishable: all the genius in Tati consists in destroying sharpness with sharpness. The dialogues are not incomprehensible, but meaningless, and their insignificance is revealed by their precision itself.”74 In the face of two of the most traumatic events in recent decades, the operations of montage in Richter’s War Cut, as well as in his Atlas, expose the ‘documents’ that bear witness to those events—newspaper articles and media images—to the relation-

72 Jacque Geninasca has highlighted the feature typical of those strategies of ‘enumeration’ in terms of a peculiar relationship between the parts and the whole: Jacques Geninasca, La parole littéraire, Paris: PUF, 1997, p. 55 ff. 73 “Some car dealers said this week that the manufacturers might again inspire shoppers if they brought back the across-the-board zero percent financing offers that were widely available for months after the Sept. 11 attacks. ‘Zero percent for 60 months on a whole product line is very different than what’s been out for the last few months,’ said Michael Maroone, president of AutoNation, the country’s largest chain of dealerships.” 74 “Rares sont les éléments sonores indistincts: toute l’astuce de Tati consiste à détruire la netteté par la netteté. Les dialogues ne sont point incompréhensibles, mais insignifiants, et leur insignifiance est révélée par leur précision même” (Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon. Logique de la sensation, Paris: Editions de la Différence, 1981, p. 12, my translation).



258 

 Angela Mengoni

ship with other media on an editing table. This atlas plate—be it an actual board or the double page of a book—ceases to support the sequentiality of the reading or illustrating process to become a space of pluridirectional relationships, a cartographic field explorable through a plurality of paths.75 The operation of montage, nonetheless, occurs here also in the form of a remediation, as it does for the painting re-mediated by the photographic framing in War Cut, for the photo of the structure of an atom treated as a painting, or for the reprinted, digitally developed cutouts of the Twin Towers in flames. In all these cases, the intermedial character is a decisive feature, since it allows us to experience the constituent need of the image that intends to fulfill its own testimonial duty, by pointing out something other than itself: “the observer is invited to carry out a task involving the comparison of the different forms of the image. A task […] that if need be can trigger the relationship between the media forms according to their differences—or rather according to their differential cooperation— thus exercising a fundamental referential performance.”76 This practice of ‘intermedial imagination’ aims at a restoration of that horizon of the real whose exceeding quality can be captured precisely in the clash, the gap, and the montage between heterogeneous media forms. In the case of War Cut, however, the visual form of such a ‘working through’ does not so much explore the subject of war in itself, but the media strategies that, in the regime of preventive war, participate in the construction of that event in a constituent and strategic way. War Cut sets up a dynamic space for a critical exercise, inviting the viewer to examine and explore the strategies of media discourse, not through a cognitive understanding of them, but through an embodied form of gaze. That is why Richter also used a cartographic arrangement for these pages, when he laid them out on the wall as plates of his Atlas,77 emphasizing the importance of a ‘surveying gaze’ for this critical exercise: The intrinsically dynamic gaze implied by visual presentation in the atlas-form is never to be considered explicative (…) [but rather] operative and heuristic: visualization opens, in fact, an analytical space (…) [which is] neither narrative, nor explicative, neither contemplative nor mute.

75 Georges Didi-Huberman defines the features of the plate as a fundamental support of the atlasform, an operating field for the relationships between fragments that every atlas suggests visually. Such features are also investigated through their semantic implications and the etymological roots of the words used to designate this ‘field’: table, tableau, tabula, Tafel, tavola (Georges Didi-Huberman, “Tables for collecting the parceling out of the world,” Atlas. How to Carry the World on One’s Back?, Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2010, pp. 37–43). 76 “L’osservatore viene invitato a effettuare un lavoro di comparazione tra le diverse forme dell’immagine. Un lavoro […] che all’occorrenza può interrogare la relazione tra le forme mediali dal punto di vista della loro differenza—o meglio della loro cooperazione differenziale—nell’esercizio di una fondamentale prestazione referenziale” (Montani, L’immaginazione intermediale, p. 9). 77 Friedel, Gerhard Richter. Atlas, plates 697–736.





Visualizing Autoimmunity 

 259

It is not explicative […] because it allows only a surveying gaze, a simple Übersicht. It is neither mute nor senseless […] because it allows, and even convokes, a gesture of conceptual criticism.78

It is precisely this kind of gaze that is found in the pages of War Cut, in the montage of the Twin Towers media icon with the atomic structures, as well as in the pictorial remediation of these pictures. It is a reflection achieved in and through the artistic form and its sensitive articulation. It is therefore no accident that Richter responds to the question about the matter of ‘form’ in War Cut with a statement that explicitly highlights the crucial link between the status of the event to be addressed and the ability of the artistic form nevertheless to point out its excess: “My approach to form is very simple. Whatever is real is so unlimited and unshaped that we have to summarize it. The more dramatic events are, the more important the form.”79

78 Didi-Huberman, Atlas, p. 173. 79 Elger and Obrist, “Interview with Jan Thorn-Prikker,” p. 461.



Sunil Manghani

Image Degree Zero From the Empirical Image to Image as Capacity It is a fact that over recent decades particular focus has been placed (and is being placed) upon our conception of the image. Yet, arguably, not a great deal of change has occurred in our thinking. The use of the definite article is typical of how we refer to images. We worry about the power of the image, and invest in getting the right image, while news reports will warn that we may find some of the images disturbing. These are all instances of what, for the purposes of this essay, can be considered the empirical image—that is, images that we can point to, distribute, and analyze. They are all too plain to see. Putting aside the usual problems of such images (that there are too many or too few, or of a general crisis of representation, and so on), the main problem of the empirical image considered here is that, in the end, it leaves us with very little more to say. Pushing this logic a little further, we may contend that there is no such thing as the image. It has been suggested, for example, that while we can cut a picture in half, we cannot reasonably cut an image in half. Semantics aside, this essay puts forward a skepticism of ‘the’ image, and instead seeks to understand Image with a capital ‘I’, as a virtual site/sight. If it were not for the restrictive vocabulary and grammar that relates to our use of the word ‘image’ (certainly in the English language, but in others too), we might prefer imaging to image, or perhaps imagement, to capture the plurality, the movement, the handling of Image. In her study Image, Icon, Economy, Marie-José Mondzain uses the word ‘imaginal’ to refer to a domain of images that straddles the conscious and the unconscious, the perceived and the imagined.1 It is the ‘imaginal’—as a dimension, as a capacity— that underlies the argument to be made here, suggesting that we turn our attention away from the empirical image toward a theory of Image. Mondzain traces the force of the image in contemporary culture to the Byzantine iconoclastic controversy of the eighth and ninth centuries. Her case is that “the image is still a sacred cause today only because the fate of thought and liberty are at stake in it.”2 As she explains, “[i]n order to be able to envisage a world radically founded on visibility, and starting from the conviction that whatever constitutes its essence and meaning is itself invisible, it proved essential to establish a system of thought that set the visible and the invisible in relation to each other.”3 It is this same relationship that lies at the heart of this

1 Marie-José Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy, The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary, trans. Rico Franses, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. 2 Ibid., p. 3. 3 Ibid., p. 3.

264 

 Sunil Manghani

essay. In the Byzantine period, the need for a system of thought stemmed from a need to qualify the Holy Trinity, which Mondzain re-writes as “the Father, the Image, and the Voice”.4 “The incarnation”, she writes, “is not an in-corporation but an in-imagination […] The image is everywhere a figure of immanence, absolute in the one case, relative in the other. In one it concerns presence, in the other an absence.” The lines are drawn between the Image as invisible and the icon as visible; these must be brought to an accord in some way to allow for the mediations of the Trinity. The crucial third term in her account is ‘economy’: “The image is mystery. The icon is an enigma. The economy was the concept of their relation and their intimacy. The image is eternal similitude, the icon is temporal resemblance. The economy was the theory of the transfiguration of history.”5 It is important to note that, for Mondzain, the Greek system of thought underlines the new doctrine of the icon, a ‘philosophy of the image’ that manages to overcome certain theological prohibitions. She summarizes the Greek (Aristotelian) position as follows: “an economic conception of the natural image founds the artificial image, and an economic conception of the artificial image, in turn, founds temporal power”6 (here ‘natural’ image equates to Image, just as ‘artificial’ image equates to the empirical image). With reference particularly to Aristotle, this essay was originally prompted by a consideration of the Greek term dynamis, which, as outlined further below, can be understood as ‘ability’ or ‘potential’ (as opposed to the ‘actuality’ of energeia). Thus, it is the idea of a potential, capacity, and/or ability (or operation) of Image that works across everything considered here. The reader will need to forgive the fact that the frames of reference range widely, incorporating philosophy, image studies, aesthetics, neurobiology, and theoretical physics. Rather than trying to contain what we mean by ‘image’, the point is to destabilize our account of it. It is to be attuned to the various ‘economies’ of the image, of that relationship between the invisible and the visible, the virtual and the real (a problematic, as will be seen, that ranges across all fields of knowledge). In the first two parts of the essay, the problem of absence/ presence is highlighted, destabilizing what we think the image is, which is followed through with reference to competing epistemological accounts. This begins to set up the notion of the image as medium; indeed, we are continually led back to the body as the ‘site’ or ‘living medium’ of the image. Yet, as suggested by Mondzain’s reference to ‘economy’, there remains a more structural question of ‘where’ the image resides, which must present as a continual operation or capacity. The image is then examined in terms of infinitude, here drawing specifically on Aristotle’s term dynamis. There is a need to understand a more ‘theoretical’ physics of the image, rather than simply leaving it to the suggestion of a ‘living medium’—this relates to an understanding of

4 Ibid., p. 77. 5 Ibid., p. 3. 6 Ibid., p. 2.





Image Degree Zero 

 265

Image as not just temporal but also spatial (though not necessarily existing within the simple four-dimensional model of the universe). In turn, the possibility is opened up of Image as something external to ourselves, more akin to the poststructuralist account of the Text. Questions of authorship are challenged, despite our penchant for maintaining the force of the empirical image. Finally, in a brief coda, the varying accounts are brought to an accord of sorts that reminds us that to understand the Image we must equally make (or be in the making of) the Image. Again, we are never far from the fact that the Image is of an economy and capacity, rather than a thing in itself. The theory of the Text is an important point of reference. Specifically, this essay inhabits another essay: Roland Barthes’s “From Work to Text”,7 which was one of a series of canonical essays from the late 1960s and early 1970s that epitomize the intellectual shift to poststructuralist thought. In Barthes’s essay we are left with the idea of the ‘practice’ of theory, or at least a practice of writing. The position that the practice of writing is itself the Text is a somewhat enigmatic one to hold. However, his argument for a shift from a static text (the work) to the dynamic and networked notion of the Text is akin to the shift presented here, by which we understand images in terms of an overarching notion of Image (with a capital ‘I’). Barthes explicitly characterizes the Text in relation to ‘network’, his metaphor particularly extending to “current biological conceptions of the living body”. As such, “no vital ‘respect’ is due to the Text: it can be broken (which is just what the Middle Ages did with two nevertheless authoritative texts—Holy Scripture and Aristotle)”8. There is here a certain textual approach being taken, both by inhabiting Barthes’s essay and by working through the texts of others, not least those of Aristotle. However, the ‘play’ of the Text is not trivial. On the one hand, it allows for the bringing together of different ideas, different threads, but it is also a means to open up a somewhat imaginary account of the Image, which is otherwise hard to put into words. Barthes’s shift to the Text has been aptly described with reference to Einstein’s theory of relativity; it allows for the “relativization of the relations of writer, reader and observer”—a contrast with the “traditional notion of the work, for long—and still—conceived of in a, so to speak, Newtonian way”.9 Today the detection of gravitational waves only further weighs upon our understanding of Einstein’s theory, and crucially his notion of spacetime. (Of course, as we know, the scale on which spacetime is curved is large, thus accounting for substantial, observable bodies in the universe. Yet, still, the theory breaks down when we turn to the smallest elements, that is, when we try to relate to the uncertainty of quantum mechanics). If we are to understand Image properly, it is like concerning ourselves with a

7 Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text,” Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath, London: Fontana, 1977. 8 Ibid., p. 161. 9 Barthes, “From Work to Text,” p. 156.



266 

 Sunil Manghani

relativization of relations. But, more than that, we need to consider Image (as we did with Text) in such a way that is perhaps analogous with the still unresolved tension between gravity and quantum matter. It is often forgotten that Einstein’s Nobel Prize was awarded for his work in relation to quantum physics, not relativity. It is perhaps no coincidence that this work involved demonstrating the photoelectric effect (which forms the basis of modern light detectors and television cameras). If we are to understand Image at its ‘quantum’ level, we need to go beyond the fixed, resolved image or picture, and instead approach it more as an epistemological condition, or, as it were, image degree zero.10 If, in places, this essay is impressionistic (and heterogeneous in its sources), that is because it is seeking to speculate upon an alternative account of the image. Equally, it does not purport to be definitive, but rather heuristic. In setting out various problematics (and letting them impinge upon one another) the aim is to propose possible avenues for future research. It is all too commonplace to remind ourselves of the fact that we can hold to an image of something (the empirical image), but that we cannot hold the image itself. It is still worth enumerating just what that might mean. As Roland Barthes wrote: “I should like to remind myself of the principle propositions at the intersection of which I see the Text [or in our case, Image] […] ‘proposition’ is to be understood more in a grammatical than a logical sense: the following are not argumentations but enunciations, ‘touches’, approaches that consent to remain metaphorical.”11 Here then equally is a set of imagined propositions; they concern diagrams, genres, pictures, infinitude, technics, efficacy, and event horizons.

10 Roland Barthes makes references to ‘degree zero’ in his early text on literature, Writing Degree Zero. In trying to secure writing as a defining feature of literature, as something that can outplay the strictures of language and style, he turns our attention to neutral, colorless writing, exemplified at the time by novelists such as Camus and Robbe-Grillet. According to Barthes’s own thesis, ‘zero degree’ soon becomes its own genre, subsumed within the ‘culture industry’ of art, literature, and other such forms of entertainment. It is not until his penultimate lecture course, published posthumously as The Neutral, that he returns critically to this phrase of the ‘zero degree’. It is not that specific examples of the Neutral can hold, but akin to the edge of a black hole (which is otherwise undetectable), their presence clusters around a point in spacetime, a point of significance, that can lead us to renewed questions about how we make meaning in the first place. Image degree zero, as evoked here, means suggesting a structural concern for the Image. The structural property of the ‘zero’ in ‘zero degree’ marks both a presence and an absence in our counting system. Zero is both within the domain of numbers (e.g. 1 – 1 = 0), yet simultaneously stands apart as a meta-sign, signaling that which stands outside of, or prior to, number and ordering. Image can similarly be viewed in structural terms, though arguably its structuration is more complex than Text (going beyond our intuition). The latter we might think is something we can learn to divide (unlike the image). Yet the moment that writing becomes re-writeable—as the words lift from the page to swarm with our own gathering thoughts, history, and sensations—the Text is then in fact arguably Image. Either way, we refer to that which is both there and not there as the very condition of Image. 11 Barthes, “From Work to Text,” p. 156.





Image Degree Zero 

 267

The Image is Not Something The image is not to be thought of as something that can be computed, nor can the image be schematized. Building on the ubiquitous diagram of second-order signification in semiotics, Cultural Studies had its ‘diagram moment’ with the publication (in various books) of a diagram known as the ‘Circuit of Culture’. The efficacy of such a diagram fits with an account of our contemporary ‘semiotic landscape’,12 in which images now frequently carry the argument. Nonetheless, Cultural Studies, as a field, largely stayed within the bounds of structural analysis and the linguistic turn more broadly. However, we might ask why the more visually aware field of Visual Culture failed to produce its own equivalent diagram. Gillian Rose offers one attempt in her book Visual Methodologies, but with copious labels (many of which are written upside down), the circular diagram is not a sufficiently workable ‘tool’. Perhaps it is useful in slowing us down, helping us to think more critically, but it does not really take us any further in understanding what (and where) the ‘image’ is, specifically. Inevitably, with the specter of the image never being anything in the singular, but always involved in movement, process, and imaging, it is hard to comprehend how (and to what end) we might ‘fix’ image analysis. My own diagram of an ‘ecology of images’,13 for example, is really only offered as a means to comment upon how difficult it is to think in purely imagistic terms: it is a form of meta-diagram, as it were. Alternatively, we might suggest that there already exists a suitable diagram, but that it is just that we hardly know what to do with it: Magritte’s enigmatic portrayal of a simple pipe, the one we know is equally nothing of the sort, as its convenient label suggests. It is little wonder that, of all W.J.T. Mitchell’s examples of the metapicture, La trahison des images is the metapicture—the one that most eloquently marks out the challenge of the Image as plural. With ironic didacticism the painting reveals where the image is, where it is not, and other possibilities besides, all in a single instance. As Mitchell puts it, “[m]etapictures are all like pipes: they are instruments of reverie, provocations to idle conversations, pipe-dreams, and abstruse speculations.”14 The metapicture is not one thing or another. It is more like an event. It reminds me of a photograph I have before me: a picture of a wall in front of a house in the city of Kochi, India. Stenciled across the whitewashed wall, in large black letters, two simple words, ‘Absence/Presence’, are brought into each other’s orbit. Like a logic gate, these words bear the history of India’s first art biennale. They are a marker of an art event, and a wry comment or ‘image’ on the biennale as a globalized ‘platform’ for contem-

12 Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, “The Semiotic Landscape,” Images: A Reader, eds. Sunil Manghani, Arthur Piper, and Jon Simons, London: Sage, 2006, pp. 119–123. 13 Sunil Manghani, Image Studies: Theory and Practice, London: Routledge, 2013, pp. 29–42. 14 W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994, p. 72.



268 

 Sunil Manghani

Fig. 1: ‘Absence / Presence’ graffiti. Fort Kochi, India, July 2014.

porary art. As I hold the picture between my fingers, it is an image from a city, but it is also a picture of an image in that city. And, like Magritte’s pipe, it is none of these things; indeed, the writing is on the wall for this image. The cunning text both is and is not what it says. We might liken it to ‘data’, a set of coordinates (distinguishable by the barre oblique, as if a form of coding). As set of relational properties ever-ready to unfold, we are reminded of the need to break from the ‘empirical’ image as presence: to shift to Image as mode, condition, or capacity.

The Image is In/Visible Image does not mean simply the visible; it cannot be contained in a hierarchy or maintained by any one definition or disciplinary setting. An initial (and arguably interminable) problem with the empirical image is the sheer diversity we encounter. Or to re-state the problem: what we mean by image is not held in any systematic sense, nor do all the things we refer to as images necessarily have anything in common. Mitchell tells us to consider images as a ‘far-flung family’, to eschew a single, universal 



Image Degree Zero 

 269

definition. He presents a ‘family tree’, which we can be forgiven for thinking delineates filiations, when in fact it is designed to mark differences. Each branch of the family tree identifies different types of imagery as defined by specific intellectual disciplines: “mental imagery belongs to psychology and epistemology; optical imagery to physics; graphic, sculptural, and architectural imagery to the art historian; verbal imagery to the literary critic; perceptual images occupy a kind of border region where physiologists, neurologists, psychologists, art historians, and students of optics find themselves collaborating with philosophers and literary critics.”15 In each case, a discipline will define and problematize the image in its own terms, rarely looking across to other disciplines and domains. Furthermore, the tendency is to divide up commonplace definitions of the image between ‘proper’ images and their more ‘suspect’ counterparts. The ‘proper’ image is most frequently thought of as being the empirical image, which we can hold up, capture, or pass around. And yet it matters little if we understand the image to be a picture upon the wall or the trace of a dream; either way we are no closer to grasping Image in itself. We come to the same conclusion: “an image cannot be seen as such without a paradoxical trick of consciousness, an ability to see something as ‘there’ and ‘not there’ at the same time.”16 Unlike the birds pecking at the grapes painted by Zeuxis, what we see (even if astonished) are only their uncanny image. And, like money, Image has only virtual value—it is a form of mediation or currency. Likewise, we tend not to look at the currency itself, but rather what comes of the exchange. Either we want what we think images can provide (their fantasy) or we take pleasure in the fact that they never arrive (speculation). We focus, then, on the effects of the image (how they seemingly impinge upon us) rather than considering Image as our own means of mediating. It is worth noting, in Mondzain’s account of divine ‘economy’, characterized in the introduction as the negotiation between the real and virtual, between the icon and the image, that there was a need to quell suspicions around idolatry, yet equally to circulate imperial iconography. The circulation of coins (showing the portrait of the emperor) was of course a significant technique, one literally combining a real image with a virtual, exchange-based value. Here, the ‘image’ (of the emperor) is not ordinarily given any great scrutiny, yet is crucial in validating the value of an exchange. All images, whether material or immaterial, are seemingly born of their own virtuality. This is true of Mitchell’s ‘family of images’ diagram itself (which purposefully is not shown here). (It is difficult to say whether or not we mentally see the diagram before it is on the page; whether or not a mental picture enables the diagram to be drawn in the first place). We might suggest that it is only through discussion and consideration of terms such as ‘boundary’ that we help to fashion the image. Arguably, then, we “cannot regard the diagram as something mental in the sense of ‘private’ or

15 W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, p. 10. 16 Ibid., p. 17.



270 

 Sunil Manghani

‘subjective’; it is rather something that surfaced in language […] a way of speaking that we inherit from a long tradition of talking about minds and pictures. Our diagram might just as well be called a ‘verbal image’ as a mental one.”17 There is a problem surrounding the rhetoric of the image, that is, the language and grammar we can use. But, like Text, Image is that which we can never exactly grasp, but is nonetheless revealed to us by its changing states. To use Mondzain’s term, it is through its ‘economy’ (its negotiation of what is there and what is not) that we know the image. The significance of Mitchell’s family of images is that it shows only one line of descent. It is a genealogy of one, for the diagram draws out only a single root meaning of the image, identified as ‘likeness’, ‘resemblance’, and ‘similitude’. Yet it makes little sense to read this as the origin of the image, rather it returns us to Image, not as occurrence, but as capacity. As with breathing, we do not enquire after its origin. Instead we accept it as a perpetual originary force. Again, we reach toward a sense of economy or circulation, which is not so much a defined (and divine) plan as something that comes to fruition because of its execution. Just as a central bank can print money in order to balance the economy, there is no absolute root, only constant exchange and economy (which, of course, only holds true when all parties trust the flow and ‘promise’ of a redeeming value).

Picturing the Image The Image can be approached, or experienced, in ‘relation’ to the picture. While a picture is “a material object, a thing you can burn or break. An image is what appears in the picture, and what survives its destruction.”18 Victor Burgin, for example, refers to the sequence-image to describe the image that is neither still nor moving, but instead is of a ‘psychical reality’.19 And Hans Belting describes how “[i]mages are neither on the wall (or on the screen) nor in the head alone. They do not exist by themselves, but they happen; they take place whether they are moving images […] or not. They happen via transmission and perception.”20 The suggestion that the image comes to attention when captured upon a material support (when pictured), which might include simply as pictured through the body, leaves open the quandary of where images go when we are not looking at them. As the neuroscientist Semir Zeki argues, Plato was not necessarily wrong to postulate a realm of archetypes where

17 Ibid., p. 19. 18 W.J.T. Mitchell, “Visual Literacy or Literary Visualcy,” Visual Literacy, ed. James Elkins, New York: Routledge, 2008, pp. 11–29, here p. 16. 19 Victor Burgin, The Remembered Film, London: Reaktion Books, 2004, pp. 7–28. 20 Hans Belting, “Image, Medium, Body: A New Approach to Iconology,” Critical Inquiry 31 (2005), pp. 302–319, here pp. 302–303.





Image Degree Zero 

 271

forms and ideas can manifest. His mistake—at least according to Zeki’s reading of Plato—was to consider this an Ideal realm anterior to the realm of physical human experience.21 In the Republic, Plato spoke of ideal, universal forms and their existing, empirical manifestation. He writes: “Does a couch differ from itself according as you view it from the side or the front or any other way? Or does it differ not at all in fact though it appears different, and so of other things?”22 Plato asks the question in relation to mimetic art, such as painting. He holds the view that a single image, in this case the depiction of a couch, is not representative of all couches; it could not be a universal representation. From Zeki’s point of view, “Plato was really comparing the ‘phantasm’ of painting to the reality of perception, a function of the brain, where there is no problem with a particular facet or view.” This is because the brain has typically been exposed to many different views of an object and is able to combine them in such a way that “a subsequent single view of one facet is sufficient to allow it to obtain a knowledge of it and to categorize it”.23 Plato’s theory of the Ideal form is an abstraction, apparently beyond our empirical engagement with things in the world. From a neurological perspective, the Platonic Ideal is the brain’s stored representations of essential features, which is to suggest that “there are no ideal forms that have an existence in the outside world without reference to the brain.”24 Zeki’s account equates more readily to Plato’s student and colleague Aristotle, who explored the idea that ‘universals’ depend upon repetitive exposure. As Barthes writes: “the metaphor of the Text is that of the network; if the Text extends itself, it is as a result of a combinatory systematic.”25 Similarly, the many points of view (real and imagined) that make up our ability to see is a ‘combinatory systematic’. Here again, we come back to image as potential, as a sense of economy. Without explicitly acknowledging a transcendental argument, neuroscience raises important (and largely unanswered) questions about how and where images form and/or how and where image concepts are stored in the brain. The workings of the ‘brain’ (that is, neurobiological mechanisms located both inside and outside of the area we call the brain) provides a means and power of calculation that goes beyond our conscious comprehension (the latter being only the 10% of our non-autopoietic brain activity, dependent upon the other 90% of our autopoietic brain26). The billions of neurons in the brain “resemble trees of many species and come in

21 Semir Zeki, Inner Vision, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. 22 Plato cited in Zeki, Inner Vision, p. 37. 23 Ibid., pp. 38–39. 24 Ibid., p. 40. 25 Barthes, “From Work to Text,” p. 161. 26 Barbara Maria Stafford, “The Remaining 10 Percent: The Role of Sensory Knowledge in the Age of the Self-Organizing Brain,” Visual Literacy, ed. James Elkins, New York: Routledge, 2008, pp. 31–57; see also Barbara Maria Stafford, “Thoughts Not Our Own: Whatever Happened to Selective Attention,” Theory, Culture and Society 26, no. 2–3 (2009), pp. 275–293.



272 

 Sunil Manghani

many fantastic shapes”, and crucially it is the totality of their connections, or connectome, that makes us who we are. The first thing any connectome reveals is that it is unique.27 To date, we are still only able to observe a very limited subset of our neurons; we are unable, then, to see how we relate from one moment to the next and how we retain distant memories. When William James wrote of the ‘stream of consciousness’ he referred to the flow of thoughts in our minds. For the neuroscientist, “every stream has a bed. Without this groove in the earth, the water would not know in which direction to flow. Since the connectome defines the pathways along which neural activity can flow, we might regard it as the streambed of consciousness.”28 Our ability to image relates both to a fast-moving stream of thought (neural activity) and the stable ‘grooves’ we hone over time to ensure that we look the ‘right way’.29 As Zeki remarks: “a picture cannot represent an object, only the brain can do that, having viewed an object from many different angles and having categorized it as belonging to a particular class.”30 In effect, our ability to image is not so different from the mathematical coding that allows the 360-degree ‘frames’ of 3D CGI imaging, in which we can model any conceivable angle without actually having been there. Of course, unlike computer modeling in which the variables are pre-set within a closed system, we maintain an input and feedback system that presents a fluid sense of reality yet is equally prone to error (as with optical illusions and effects born of cognitive impairments). Nonetheless, this is ‘zero degree’ seeing: a world in which the ‘camera’ can inhabit all points of view at once and provide impossible perspectives—out of which we gain a semblance of a shared ‘reality’—a navigable space of the Image (as referring to an interconnected and pieced together ‘experience’ of Image, not so dissimilar from the post-structural Text).

27 Sebastian Seung, Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are, London: Penguin, 2012, p. xi, xiii. 28 Ibid., p. xix. 29 It is striking how contemporary neurological theory, in referring to a so-called streambed of the connectome, echoes Freud’s analogy of the stratified mystic writing pad. In this earlier example, inscription was ‘distributed’ through the mechanism and thus its ‘violence’ dissipated between the layers. The consequence is that “perception is never present to itself. The structure of the Mystic Pad excludes this, since inscription upon the surface of the celluloid will disappear […] it retains no permanent trace” (Christopher Johnson, System and Writing in the Philosophy of Jacques Derrida, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p.  97). Freud, of course, was interested in the final, wax resin layer, which he viewed as retaining the (unconscious) trace. Yet, were we to look long and hard at this piece of biology we would see no such ‘thing’ (we must beware of the metaphysics of presence). The connectome does not exist in isolation. Derrida’s re-writing of Freud focuses on the Mystic Pad as machine, as that which transmits a force, dynamis. In doing so, he postulates “a ‘writing’ more fundamental to signifying practices in general, a writing that is the condition of all forms of expression” (Johnson, System and Writing, p. 66). 30 Zeki, Inner Vision, pp. 37–49.





Image Degree Zero 

 273

Neurological accounts are often criticized for an inherent solipsism, but the underlying materialism enables our rethinking of Image as both internal and external (as both material and procedural). If we shift from the brain per se, to the body more generally, we find that Belting, for example, adopts the terms ‘medium’ and ‘body’ to refer explicitly to the movement and plurality of the image. He reminds us that images “have always relied on a given technique for their visualization. When we distinguish a canvas from the image it represents, we pay attention to either the one or the other”31—this again takes us back to the problematic encapsulated in the story of Zeuxis’s painting of grapes. Crucially, for Belting, “[i]t is our own bodily experience that allows us to identify the dualism inherent in visual media. We know that we all have or that we all own images, that they live in our bodies or in our dreams and wait to be summoned by our bodies to show up.”32 Thus, our bodies are ‘living mediums’, whereby we “perceive, project, or remember images, and that also enables our imagination to censor or to transform them”.33 Perhaps we can more readily relate to the idea of the body being a medium for spoken language, since the voice is a bodily, acoustic phenomenon. Yet the mediality of images goes beyond the visual realm. Language itself, for example, can serve as a medium for images, though equally this is a bodily experience. Nonetheless, the description of our bodies as ‘living mediums’ is, if left without deeper explanation, really only reductive of something like cinema (as if we are forever ‘at the pictures’). And there is still no clarification of how the bodily medium works, or ‘where’ images reside. A broader account of the sensorium is no doubt beneficial (if, ultimately, we find that there is no such things as the image, only a capacity across regions, domains, and planes). There is growing evidence, for example, of how our bodies ‘sense’ beyond the standard five senses. Interoception, for example, the awareness of the internal body, whereby we detect regulation responses, such as respiration, hunger, and heart rate, is a form of sensing that triggers prior to brain activity and is linked to empathy. Also, our combined senses are key. Smell, sound, and sight alter how we taste. The fluid in our ear canals affects how we see (for instance, when we sit in a plane our field of vision does not change, yet during take-off we ‘see’ the front of the cabin lifting due to the changing state of equilibrium sensed by our ears). As Whitney Davis has argued, a ‘general theory’ of visual culture must allow for the succession of vision to visuality. We can accept that in order for an observer to use and interpret pictures they must be able to see them, yet “it is more difficult to demonstrate that these depictions […] organize the seeing itself.”34 In fact, the various

31 Belting, “Image, Medium, Body,” pp. 304. 32 Ibid., pp. 305–306. 33 Ibid. 34 Whitney Davis, A General Theory of Visual Culture, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011, p. 6.



274 

 Sunil Manghani

recursions of vision succeeding to visuality “are not well understood analytically, let alone neurologically, as actual or functional operations of the visual cortex and of higher (cognitive) processing”.35 Arguably, however, the ‘body as medium’ has to date only led us to define image as something tangible (that needs mediating or is archived by the body) rather than a capacity to mediate more generally. The latter need not preclude the former, but importantly leads us to both a structural and biological account. It is just such a condition of Image that we need to clarify.

The Image is Infinite The Image is infinite—which is not to say that image extends indefinitely, but that as capacity it is inexhaustibly infinite. Like Text, it “is not a co-existence of meanings but a passage, an overcrossing; thus it answers not to an interpretation […] but to an explosion, a dissemination”.36 We need to consider not so much the ‘media’ image (namely, as something that is mediated), but more a medial image—the notion that it occurs through many points at one time—such as we might say of the connectome, or as we know of wave—particle duality. As Einstein once expressed it: “We are faced with a new kind of difficulty. We have two contradictory pictures of reality; separately neither of them fully explains the phenomena of light, but together they do.” Of course, this difficulty is not so new. We can draw back to Plato and Aristotle’s accounts of dynamis and energeia. The former is typically rendered as ‘ability’, ‘potential’, and ‘potency’, and also ‘power’, while the latter, energeia, refers to ‘activity’ or ‘actuality’. It is easy to see how these terms can be read as temporalities, as if a future and a present tense; but equally, if we think in terms of wave and particle, we might just as well consider a spatial reading. Nonetheless, understanding dynamis as dimension seemingly requires us to think beyond our ordinary dimensions. Just as imaginary numbers are a serious pursuit, which we imagine as “a new kind of number at right angles to ordinary real numbers”,37 perhaps we need a new conceptualization of Image as perpendicular to the ‘reality’ that brings empirical images to our attention, to the surface of our ‘membrane’ or existence. In the early 20th century we identified quarks, with lengths of a millionth of a millimeter. Today, with the Planck length, we have reached a smaller scale by a factor of a billion. The smaller we go, the more structures we uncover and can imagine. One way of unifying current observations is to suggest that we live in a four-dimensional ‘brane’, which in turn sits within ‘higher-dimensional spacetime’.38 “From the viewpoint of the positivist philosopher,”

35 Ibid., p. 8. 36 Barthes, “From Work to Text,” p. 159. 37 Stephen Hawking, The Universe in a Nutshell, London: Bantam Press, 2001, p. 59. 38 Ibid., p. 180.





Image Degree Zero 

 275

as Stephen Hawking reminds us, “one cannot determine what is real. All one can do is find which mathematical model describes the universe we live in.”39 Similarly, we cannot determine Image, so much as model its potentiality, which, like the Text, is seemingly infinite. We have long been troubled by the notion of infinity, and if only because it denies any purpose to ourselves as finite (as the unsung heroes of our universe). Aristotle famously sought to settle the matter by describing two types of infinity: the potential infinite, which he acknowledged; and the actual infinite, which he denied. A potential infinity is one that occurs over time. An actual infinity is one that must be present all at once. We can potentially count up numbers infinitely, but this must take place over time, since it is not possible to encounter all such numbers at once. The difference is between process and object. For Aristotle space cannot be infinite because it is there all at once. Yet, we ask, what limits it? Beyond space is more space (and space that need not be of only four dimensions). It is just that we would need infinite time to traverse infinite space. Here, then, space becomes time; it becomes horizon. Historically, the development of the perspectival system of representation has been an important technique of imaging, since it provides a ‘rational’ point of origin. It has a point of view. Yet, of course, this always stops short (at its singular point of origin) of a complete account of the image as a medial physics—of a ‘zero degree’ image, or of a spatializing of the image through all matter that surrounds us when actualizing the image. We can think of Dürer’s drawing of Albertian perspectivalism as showing that ‘the image’ can be cut at any point in our line of vision. This account changes our reading of static media images. It is not about the ‘power’ of the image (as forms of representational magnitude and potency), but rather about the capacities and resistances of imaging: how seeing is formed of a continuous medium and continuous calculations. Even our whole universe might be thought of an illusion, as one ‘cut’ in the lines of incident rays. Holographic theories of the universe have been around since the 1990s, but a recent study claims to present the first proof that what we perceive as three dimensional emanates from a two-dimensional field. Looking back as far as 13 billion years, the new holographic modeling (derived from quantum, rather than classic theories of gravity) shows how the developmental structures of gravity and the universe draw upon thin, vibrating strings of an initially flat, two-dimensional universe. The holographic universe is a very different model of the Big Bang (unseating its ultimate metaphysics of presence).40 It is as if imaging in fact goes the other way around. The flat plane that we see in Dürer’s drawing (which we take to be derived from the 3D world around it) is in fact the plane upon which the structuring

39 Ibid., p. 59. 40 Niayesh Afshordi, Claudio Corianò, Luigi Delle Rose, Elizabeth Gould, and Kostas Skenderis, “From Planck Data to Planck Era: Observational Tests of Holographic Cosmology,” Physical Review Letters 118 (27 January 2017), pp. 041301-1–043101-6.



276 

 Sunil Manghani

of our universe takes place. While we fixate on the image, upon the single plane (the one that Zeuxis’s birds peck at, and the one that Dürer ‘frames’), Image encapsulates (and makes possible) all images. As a counter-thought to the ‘gravity’ of perspectivalism (as a means to re-frame our ‘way of seeing’), we might ponder Eastern painting traditions, such as liubai, the Chinese landscape inks, which are typically viewed as a form of escapism, in a similar way to Japanese ukiyo-e, the ‘pictures of the floating world’. Yet these washed inks give rise to a ‘radical’ blankness (or Xu to adopt a Daoist notion), intermingling trees with mountains, mountains with mists, to give a ‘unidirectional fluidity of relations’,41 or, we might suggest, the gaze in an ‘expanded field’.42 Norman Bryson recounts Sartre’s and Lacan’s accounts of the gaze, which both critique the Cartesian self-enclosure of the subject and break the rigidity of subject/object. Yet these accounts still lack the more radical field of vision of Xu (or the alternative account of the holographic universe). For Sartre, the subject–object relation remains in “a kind of tunnel vision in which all of the surrounding field is screened out”. Lacan’s account of the gaze is perhaps closer. His reference to the anamorphic imagery of Holbein’s The Ambassadors is emblematic of an expanded field of vision—as if looking (calculating even) across ‘branes’. Yet why the ‘downcast eyes’? Why, as Bryson asks, do we remain with just one model of vision, “that of a regime or terrorizing gaze”? Here again lies the ‘trap’ of the empirical image, not the Image as capacity. He turns instead to the writings of Kitarō Nishitani, and in particular his use of the concept of śūnyatū (translated as ‘emptiness’, ‘radical impermanence’, ‘blankness’, and ‘nihility’). Like Xu, which ‘regulates’ luibai painting, Bryson refers to the Japanese ink painting technique of ‘flung ink’ as a way to describe an omnidirectional field of vision. He equates this to an undoing of the divisions between subject and object, a taking away of any sense of ‘frame’—a visual rendering equivalent to the ‘imaginary numbers’ of the Image and its field of ‘vision’. It is referred to as ‘radical impermanence’: “It cannot be said to occupy a single location, since its locus is always the universal field of transformations: it cannot achieve separation from that field or acquire any kind of bounded outline.”43 This is—if only by analogy—the infinity of Image, its boundless field of transformation. At stake is a politics of vision away from the ‘terrorizing gaze’—away from the empirical image, and instead toward the plane(s) of the Image, as its capacity. Within this ‘space’, when Davis argues that “vision must succeed to visuality through a historical process” (so taking account of processes of recursion and feedback),44

41 Peng Yu, “Zones of Indeterminacy: Art, Body and Politics in Daoist Thought,” Theory, Culture & Society 33, no.1 (2016), pp. 93–114. 42 Norman Bryson, “The Gaze in the Expanded Field,” Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster, Seattle: Bay Press, 1988, pp. 86–113. 43 Ibid., pp. 97–98. 44 Davis, A General Theory of Visual Culture, p. 8.





Image Degree Zero 

 277

we need pay heed to the fact that we still know little about the visual process as a means of amplification. Unlike the infinitude of Image, light consists of a finite and small amount of energy, of photons or quanta. Indeed, the ‘ingenious amplifier’ that enables us to see, to image, remains an unsolved puzzle: “The energy of a photon is sufficient to disturb only a single atom or molecule. With this energy alone, the information that a photon [is mediating cannot] be transmitted beyond the point of absorption, let alone to some central nervous system.”45 Furthermore, nature does not work in an orderly fashion. The quantum mechanics of photons mean their excitation places them at random times and places, giving “rise to a fundamental graininess of any image”.46 Given the stochastic process and the inherent need to amplify photonic energy, it is a wonder that we see at all. The signal-to-noise ratio is such that we hardly see what is before us, but rather somehow, someplace, we fashion the finite world around us through potentially infinite means (the Byzantine quandary of the mediation of the Trinity does not seem so distant a problem from that of describing our physical realm).

Avisuality Images are all too readily caught up in our own sense of authorship. In order to accede to Image, we need to envisage a different kind of ‘authorship’ or site of production. When Maurice Merleau-Ponty evokes Sartre’s account in Nausea of how the smile of a long-dead king remains and continues to reproduce itself on the surface of a canvas, he wants to claim a total or absolute vision: an image degree zero. Yet this anthropomorphic form is seemingly no accident. As the phenomenological account has it: “We see only what we look at.”47 However, the prevalence of imaging technologies allows us to think, and of course ‘see’, outside of ourselves. As an unintended consequence, the way in which these technologies intersect with (and alter) our lives tends to add to our rhetoric of an image culture (namely, that somehow ours is a visual culture). But increasingly, these technologies offer ‘ways of seeing’ that go beyond our own intuition. Like the alternative dimensions that can be used to model our universe more effectively, we can comprehend all manner of imaging technics, but we cannot intuitively see as they ‘see’. Whether it is X-rays, computed tomography, magnetic resonance imaging, positron emission tomography, or ultrasound, we have been able to reconstruct the insides of our bodies without even touching them. In astronomy the

45 Albert Rose, Vision: Human and Electronic, New York: Plenum Press, 1973, p. 2. 46 Ibid., p. 6. 47 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, trans. James M. Edie, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964, p. 162.



278 

 Sunil Manghani

radio telescope has long superseded the use of optical technology, with ‘Deep Field’ imaging bringing back pictures of the further reaches of the universe, full of galaxies fainter than have ever previously been seen. And looking the other way, the electron microscope enables us to resolve single atoms. The scanning probe microscope is not simply an imaging device; it is a tool for the manipulation of matter at the level of the atom. By moving to the actual surface of the atom, these devices have been able to ‘observe’ the so-called Corral Wave—as if a stone has been dropped into a pond.48 This signature of electrons is our witness to quantum mechanics. But, of course, the ‘image’ we see from the microscope, like any other digital image, is a series of ones and zeros. It is mathematical data converted into an empirical image. What these images show is a physics we cannot begin to see. The X-ray, established over a hundred years ago (but now commonplace), alongside cinema and psychoanalysis, gave us a new way of imagining interiority, a secret visibility, which in turn altered our ways of thinking about ourselves. Akira Mizuta Lippit describes these technologies as offering “not an access or opening as such, but a mode of avisuality”.49 We are introduced to our alien self, “secret and distant in its proximity” to ourselves. Such a vision is what Derrida refers to as ‘in-visibility’, “an invisible order of the visible that I can keep secret by keeping out of sight”.50 Weapons in an underground silo, a part of the body under a veil, or even just our internal organs, are all “naturally said to be invisible, but they are still of the order of visibility: an operation or an accident can expose them or bring them to the surface.”51 Derrida also refers to ‘absolute invisibility’, that which falls outside of the “register of sight, namely the sonorous, the musical, the vocal or phonic […] but also tactile and odoriferous”52 (which echoes the earlier remark of a more broadly understood sensorium). Lippit suggests that this is a “visibility that takes place elsewhere […] it is seen in the other senses, as another sense. To see in another register, to hear or smell an image, to touch it.”53 For all the visibility of the empirical image, we need to respond to Image in terms of a more far-reaching avisuality. Take, for example, Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI), the computational photographic method that reveals surface information that is otherwise undisclosed through direct empirical examination. RTI generates information from a series of photographs using a stationary camera, with the

48 Philip Moriarty, “Ripples in an Electron Pond,” Image Studies: Theory and Practice, ed. Sunil Manghani, London: Routledge, 2012, pp. 210–213. 49 Akira Mizuta Lippit, Atomic Light (Shadow Optics), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005, p. 30. 50 Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995, 90. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid. 53 Lippit, Atomic Light, p. 32.





Image Degree Zero 

 279

Fig. 2: Ian Dawson, MJ Unstable RTI [single frame], 2016.

light source projected from multiple but known directions (typically using a small black reflective ball as a fixed control measure). Lighting information is mathematically synthesized to create a model of an object’s surface. Each picture in a sequence is a form of data, encoding the image-data per pixel; thus, when synthesized, the RTI ‘image’ provides information about how light reflects off its subject matter. In dedicated viewing software, each constituent pixel is able to control aspects of interactive ‘virtual’ light. Through RTI, then, we control the light from an object, not the object itself, and in doing so we disclose fine detail unseen by the naked eye—as if an absolute invisibility turns to in-visibility. However, when we look at these images, we are hardly equipped to see them for what they are. We think of them as empirical images, not as light reflectance information. Sculptor Ian Dawson disorients us even further. By inverting the process, using a static light, but affixing the light control to the camera and moving it around the object, he has recorded a dynamic form of RTI. No single ‘image’ does justice to what Dawson reveals, but as we watch a succession of pictures, to see the movement of imaging, we begin to discern the ethereal world of imaging itself, as if we can indeed not just see the image but touch its cloudy effervescence (as if the air that surrounded Dürer while he worked is brought to our attention, imaged). 

280 

 Sunil Manghani

Image Efficacies Inevitably, despite our ability to imagine the Image as a further dimension or capacity, we still readily think of images as succeeding or failing. In this respect, Dawson’s RTI imaging is emblematic. We cannot help but see the single image, when in fact it shows the shifting planes of Image. Just as we can write the Text, but never witness it in full, Dawson’s modified use of RTI is a tantalizing glimpse of imaging the Image. All too commonly we refer to ‘the image’ as a static concept, as if our very concept of the image is akin to a photographic snapshot, rather than a capacity to image. A seemingly unwavering fascination with so-called iconic images (for instance, the fall of the Berlin Wall, 9/11, Abu Ghraib) is testament to this problem and of course none of these so-called iconic images are singular. Take, for example, one failed image: an X-ray showing a fetus with a bullet lodged in its head. This image was released to news media via the aid agency Syria Relief. British vascular surgeon, Dr. David Nott, who regularly volunteers in war zones around the world, spoke of the release of the X-ray image as a deliberate attempt to raise consciousness.54 Yet he expressed his frank disappointment with the lack of any effect. He had thought carefully about releasing the X-ray image and possessed a deeper understanding of its provenance, making him well placed to provide its fuller context. The mistake, however, was to think the X-ray image was the image. In fact, it was never anything so static, but instead came through a richer ecology, of which Dr. Nott himself was a part. Later the ‘image’ reappears with a painting at the Royal Academy in which the artist Bob and Roberta Smith painstakingly painted the complete transcript of Dr. Nott’s radio interview onto a series of large-format canvases. These transcriptions and transpositions are a further reminder of the fact that the image is never singular and is never simply what we ‘see’. This is not to say that the image of the bullet in the baby’s brain in itself fails to shock. It is shocking (it is the index of a deep trauma, after all). Yet what has failed in this case is its imaging (and our imaginations)—our ability to take up the picture as part of our wider accessing of the Image. The error we make is to think there might be a ‘right’ image and a ‘right’ way to view this. The problem is that we cannot help but make images (for the image ‘is’ constantly in flux). As per Belting’s account, we are image beings. Or rather, images occur only because of their recursion, without which the image has no presence, no potentiality. This brings to mind an ‘image’, as mentioned in Julian Bell’s What is Painting? in reference to iconoclasm: “In 1996, the Taliban in Afghanistan, taking control of Herat, stripped the city of its televisions— its image-machines—and skewered them in great scarecrow towers, festooned with

54 Reference to Dr David Nott’s account of the Syrian X-ray image relates to a radio interview given for the BBC Radio 4 ‘PM’ current affairs program, transmitted on December 31, 2013.





Image Degree Zero 

 281

Fig. 3: Bob and Roberta Smith, Interview with David Nott by Eddie Mair, 2015.  

fluttering videotape, at the city gates.”55 I recall this ‘image’ vividly. I remember the BBC’s world affairs correspondent reporting in front of one of these ‘totems’. Ironically, I could not help but read it as an artwork (an idol) fluttering defiantly behind an establishment journalist. Significantly, this image cannot be found on the Internet, and indeed no physical evidence remains. Yet in being denied this singular empirical image, we are of course reminded of our capacity to form images. As with most iconoclastic gestures, one image is replaced with another (but, as is also typical, the two cannot help but evoke each other; as with the Golden Calf, iconoclasm means admitting and even rendering an iconophilia). When we look at Bob and Roberta Smith’s painting, we confront the futility (if only from the sheer effort required to

55 Julian Bell, What Is Painting? Representation and Modern Art, London: Thames and Hudson, 1999, p. 16.



282 

 Sunil Manghani

paint the transcript) of putting Image into empirical form. And simultaneously we must acknowledge that the image is always elsewhere; its true matter is further afield. This is the critical ‘power’ of such a huge painted text: as viewers stand before it, we can only suppose that they are looking the wrong way, if pensively. A shift can be noted from ontological lines of enquiry to operative ones, to consider the image in terms of efficacy and activity. By efficacy we can mean the ‘capacity to produce an effect’. But we might turn that around to consider the effect of Image as capacity. For Aristotle, the term ‘capacity’ stands in relation to potentiality, and crucially between active and passive potentialities. An agent of change has an active potentiality, while the object of change is passive. When we try to ask what an image is, depending on how we cut it, the question can point to us as active subjects (in that we form the image, for example, neurologically), or as passive subjects in relation to the ‘power’ of the image. Even the failing image, as in the case of the Syrian X-ray image, has a way of acting over us, to show us as unable to attend to the image. But, analogically, let us ponder for a moment the case of the capacitor in an electrical circuit. Its basic property is that it stores energy electrostatically; this is achieved through an insulating component (dielectric) held between two plates with opposing (and thus attracting) forces. It oscillates. Unlike a resistor, the capacitor does not dissipate energy, and crucially, it blocks direct current, while allowing alternating current. Capacitors are used to smooth the output of power supplies and to tune radios to particular frequencies. In this regard, we might consider Image a form of ‘tuning’. The neuroscientist makes this analogy: “Engineers know that a radio is constructed by wiring together electronic components like resistors, capacitors, and transistors. A nervous system is likewise an assembly of neurons, ‘wired’ together by their slender branches.”56 In fact, the connectome was previously described as a ‘wiring diagram’. Metaphorically, we might be inclined to think of the empirical image as a resistor, a point in the circuit that slows everything down, being an instance of framing. The capacitor, however, is closer to Image in the general sense. It is the movement, or oscillation of image, it is of imaging: image as capacity. In Potential Images, Dario Gamboni examines how artworks often foreground this process.57 We might say that these potential images have their corollary in the writerly Text. It is to this ‘space’ that Dr Nott’s X-ray image needed (but failed) to attend. In Metaphysics, Aristotle considers the question of unity, and of being greater than a sum of parts, asking why we refer to a unity and not a plurality (as we do with the writerly Text). It is intriguing how this ancient argumentation echoes the structuralist’s account of language, with langue (as potential) and parole (as actuality). We need to be mindful of Image as potentiality, as having a capacity of/toward empirical images. We tend to get stuck on the latter, yet

56 Seung, Connectome, p. xii. 57 Dario Gamboni, Potential Images: Ambiguity and Indeterminacy in Modern Art, London: Reaktion Books, 2002.





Image Degree Zero 

 283

the former is more critical, more capacitive—suggestive, for example, of pensiveness, as in Barthes’s enigmatic line that “photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.”58

Coda: New Dimensions of the Image This leads us to pose (to propose) a final approach to the Image that is akin to an event horizon or boundary around which images emerge and escape. We can take a cue from Jean-François Lyotard’s account of figuration (as against language or discourse). He describes the figural as carrying within it “an exteriority it cannot interiorize as signification”59 (thus being of ‘something’ that cannot be reduced to code). He reminds us of the writing of Paul Claudel, who, with a description of traveling through a landscape, recounts watching as two trees at some distance come into accord in a single line of vision: “here we move, searching for composition, constituting the space of the picture, relying on that plastic space where the eye, the head, the body move or swim, buoyed as if in a bath of mercury. It is the juxtaposition by the eye that guarantees the agreement of the pine and the maple, agreement fulfilled because total, a harmony of silhouette, tone, value, and position: desire momentarily satiated.”60 Once the visual is ‘read’ or placed within a rational order (recognized, comprehended), we lose its ‘truth’, by which Lyotard means its ‘event’, which “presents itself like a fall, like a slippage and an error, exactly the meaning of lapsus in Latin. The event clears a vertiginous space and time; untethered from its context or perceptual environment.”61 The figural—as event—discloses a dimension of visibility that comes before we see, before we make sense of things. This can be taken as a ‘thick’ description of the Image (the moment/movement of imaging). “The goal of attention”, Lyotard argues, “is to recognize; and recognizing does not go without comparing. The eye darts here and there, weaving its familiar web.”62 Even the basic Gestaltist distinction between figure and ground, he argues, is “itself the outcome of secondary rationalization”.63 Paul Klee, whose dictum is that “art does not render the visible but renders visible”, gives further insight (again the definite article is significant). It is not a question of reproducing what is already empirically visible, but of rendering things visible.

58 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography [1980], New York: Hill and Wang, 1981, p. 38. 59 Jean-François Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, trans. Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011, p. 7. 60 Ibid., p. 3. 61 Ibid., pp. 129–130. 62 Ibid., p. 152. 63 Ibid., p. 153.



284 

 Sunil Manghani

Werk ist weg: the pursuit of the visible for Klee is through making; it is a form of genesis in itself (which is the only way to break with the codes and conventions of significations). Klee’s wish to create a Zwischenwelt or in-between world (might we say to cross branes?), between an objective, external world, and a subjective, internal realm allows for deformations of the familiar, thus forcing us into the “field of sensibility, indeed of sensuality”.64 The argument, then, is for two ontologically distinct spaces: a coded textual space; and figural space “unmarked by the coordinates of a regular dimensionality, of a fixed up and down, left and right, foreground and background; its objects defy ‘good form’, ready categorization, or denomination; and its time is that of the event”.65 However, while the figural can be disclosed (such as in deformations), it remains itself unrepresentable. It is Image degree zero. The black hole of signification: “Only the trace of its action appears, and the function of the artwork is to reveal its effects and thereby open up an interworld between an objective, codified world and a subjective fantasy world.”66 These discrete propositions obviously cannot be said to constitute the full articulation of an Image theory. Indeed, hopefully, it becomes apparent that any such theory can hardly be the proffering of one individual, or one perspective (and, of course, much of what is suggested here is simply to pick up on the existing, on-going debates). As we know from the theory of the Text, it cannot be resolved through a metalinguistic exposition. To recall: “the discourse on the Text should itself be nothing other than text, research, textual activity, since the Text is that social space which leaves no language safe, outside, nor any subject of the enunciation in the position as judge, master, analyst, confessor, decoder. The theory of the Text can coincide only with a practice of writing.”67 Similarly, in keeping with Klee’s rendering of the visible, we can say that the theory of Image coincides only with a practice of imaging. It is through our making of images, indeed our very capacity as image beings, that we explore the nature of them. However, where Text is described as a ‘social space’, suggestive of language as a network or intertext of significations that generate meaning beyond any original utterance, we might be more inclined to refer back to the analogy of spacetime when considering Image. Rather than ‘space’ as a conceptual descriptor for the formation of a ‘text’ as greater than the sum of its parts, image can be thought of as another order of capacity or structuring (even subsuming the operations of the Text). Beyond the deconstructive account of ‘writing’ as a condition of all forms of expression, ‘imaging’ is the figuring of that condition, which, to put it in Claudel’s words, is a kind of traveling through the landscape (or ‘space’) of significations. There is a physical, sensual dimension to Image (being of pictures, of the gesture of

64 Ibid., p. 232. 65 Ronald Bogue, Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts, New York: Routledge, 2003, p. 115. 66 Ibid., p. 115. 67 Barthes, “From Work to Text,” p. 164.





Image Degree Zero 

 285

mark-making and biological vision), but also a virtuality, which arguably places an understanding of image beyond the structures of our own minds, or at least presents a complexity and malleability far beyond that of text. As with advances made with imaginary numbers and multiple dimensions in theoretical physics, alongside our understanding of the neurobiological accounts of vision, we need to attend to Image through an extended imaginary—perhaps even to start to imagine Image as forming (from) a whole new imaginal (to borrow Mondzain’s phrase). That is to say, we need to look beyond the empirical image to which we are all too closely tethered, and rather ask questions about Image as capacity. Of course, like time, as a dimension we experience but cannot possess, we may find, despite our capacity for imaging, that we lack—at least based on current modeling—a means to comprehend properly the full dimensions of the Image.



A.S. Aurora Hoel

Images as Active Powers for Reality A Simondonian Approach to Medical Imaging1 Medical images are an intriguing test case for image theory. As the products of advanced technologies, they are highly artificial, yet somehow indisputably real. Medical images inform real-life medical decisions on a daily basis, providing support for diagnosis and therapy. In operating rooms, they provide guidance to surgeons, assisting them in planning and performing surgical procedures. Medical images are epitomes of utility images—images made to perform mundane tasks (in this case, the central task of medical care). Even so, they are more than docile instruments for carrying out human intentional actions. Medical images have a dynamic of their own. Highly artificial yet somehow indisputably real—the nature and role of medical images are not properly accounted for by mainstream image theory, whether the classical or the more contemporary strand. In the history of medicine, medical images have moved from pictures giving general ideas about the appearances of objects to the promise of registering reality itself, in all its singularity.2 Like photography, medical imaging methods such as radiography and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) have come to be associated with certain beliefs about their privileged, unmediated access to reality. These draw on a set of interrelated cultural ideas, including what in recent scholarship has been identified as the scientific ideal of ‘mechanical objectivity’,3 or else as the ‘myth of transparency’.4 However, in contemporary studies of visual representations, these ideas, which belong to the classical strand of image theory, have come under criticism. As W. J. T. Mitchell points out, the commonplace view in today’s image theory is to understand images as a kind of language: instead of providing a “transparent window on the world”, images are now regarded “as the sort of sign that presents a deceptive appearance of naturalness and transparence concealing an opaque, distorting, arbitrary mechanism of representation, a process of ideological mystification”.5 But what is a medical practitioner, say, a surgeon, to

1 Thanks to Emmanuel Alloa, Annamaria Carusi, Asle H. Kiran, and Sarah Diner for their thoughtful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. 2 I mean singularity here in the sense of contingency, as the notion is discussed, for example, in the context of photography, such as by Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard, New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. 3 Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,” Representations 40 (Autumn 1992), 81–128. 4 Kelly A. Joyce, Magnetic Appeal: MRI and the Myth of Transparency, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008. 5 W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, p. 8.

288 

 A.S. Aurora Hoel

make of such a generalized claim about the arbitrariness of images—a claim that, if it were to be taken at face value, would entirely undermine the widespread practice of image-guided surgery? Medical images, it seems, are neither transparent nor opaque in the terms of mainstream image theory. In recent years, some scholars have suggested that medical images are not to be considered as representations or signs at all; they should be approached, rather, as instruments that do things,6 or else as instances of what have come to be known as ‘operative images’:7 images that “do not represent an object, but rather are part of an operation”.8 These approaches, centered on the idea of image-instruments, resonate with current attempts to develop alternative conceptual frameworks that differ from established ones in providing a positive account of the active dimension of images. Avoiding the tendency to identify activity on the part of images with deception, distortion, or delusion, the approaches in question typically revolve around the idea that images have an agency of their own.9 This chapter contributes to the current efforts to rethink images in active terms. To this end, it draws on the thought of the French philosopher Gilbert Simondon (1924– 1989), whose work is a rich resource for conceptualizing the active roles of images in knowledge and being. While he has long been a marginalized thinker, Simondon is currently receiving renewed critical attention. There are at least two reasons for this. First, his thinking strongly resonates with contemporary approaches that emphasize the involvement of technology in processes of becoming.10 Second, and closely related to this point, it resonates with approaches that in various ways explore agency beyond humans.11 As Simondon sees it, a machine is a ‘being that operates’.12 This

6 Don Ihde, Expanding Hermeneutics: Visualism in Science, Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1998. 7 Aud Sissel Hoel and Frank Lindseth, “Differential Interventions: Images as Operative Tools,” Photomediations: A Reader, eds. Kamila Kuc and Joanna Zylinska, London: Open Humanities Press, 2016, pp. 177–183. 8 Harun Farocki, “Phantom Images,” Public 29 (2004), pp. 12–24, p. 17. 9 Gottfried Boehm, “Jenseits der Sprache? Anmerkungen zur Logik der Bilder,” Iconic Turn: Die neue Macht der Bilder, eds. Christa Maar and Hubert Burda, Cologne: DuMont, 2005, pp. 28–43; W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005; Horst Bredekamp, Theorie des Bildakts: Frankfurter Adorno-Vorlesungen 2007, Berlin: Wagenbach, 2015. 10 Bernard Stiegler, La Technique et le temps, 3 vols. Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1994, 1996, 2001; Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007. 11 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005; Joanna Zylinska, Nonhuman Photography, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017. 12 Gilbert Simondon,“Un être qui fonctionne”, Du mode d’existence des objets techniques [1958], Paris: Aubier, 2012, p. 192. The French verb ‘fonctionner’ can be translated in several different ways, including as ‘to work’, ‘to function’, and ‘to operate’. While in the English translation of Mode d’existence the verb is translated as ‘to function’, I will mostly use ‘to operate’ to emphasize the overall operational orientation of Simondon’s philosophy. See Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence





Images as Active Powers for Reality 

 289

implies that to firmly grasp technology in its entanglement with humans and nature, we need to consider technical objects in their ‘operational functioning’,13 and not as things or artifacts with fixed characteristics. Likewise, when he turns to images, the originality of Simondon’s theory lies in his operational approach: images, too, are beings that operate. While Simondon is primarily known for his theories of individuation and technology, he also makes a significant contribution to the theory of images, setting it off on an altogether new path. Simondon’s theories of individuation and technology were developed in his doctoral dissertation, which he defended in 1958. The part of the dissertation focusing on technology, presented in a supplementary thesis entitled On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects,14 approaches technical objects as ‘individuals’ in the terms laid out in his main doctoral thesis.15 This implies that technical objects are beings that undergo an ontogenetic development—a process of becoming that Simondon refers to as ‘technical individualization’ (more about this term in section 1.1 below). However, in the same work, technical objects are also seen as ‘intermediaries’ that participate in the individuation of beings and realities other than themselves. It is here, in his account of the active, mediating roles of technical objects in knowledge and being, that Simondon’s theory of technology intersects with his theory of images. This latter theory was developed in a lecture series on imagination and invention held at the Sorbonne University during the academic year of 1965–66.16 While Simondon’s theory of images begins as an investigation of the role of imagination in psychological activity, it soon turns out that, for Simondon, the prototypical examples of images—the kind of images that most perfectly realize their role as intermediaries—are images that exist materially and independently of their creators, such as machines. Let me pause here for a moment to make a remark: it may seem strange to enlist machines as examples of images, and as paradigmatic examples at that. The theoretical alignment of machines and images, however, is not as whimsical as it may first appear. Rather, it follows from Simondon’s operational approach to mediation. As already mentioned, machines and images are both seen as beings that operate, and in both cases, the operational functioning is further specified in terms of ‘transduction’—a key Simondonian notion that implies that machines and images form part of larger systems, that individual machines and images occupy a certain phase of such systems, and that individuation involves a change of phase in the system in question.

of Technical Objects, trans. Cecile Malaspina and John Rogove, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017, p. 151. 13 Simondon, Mode of Existence, p. 252. 14 Original French title: Du mode d’existence des objets techniques. 15 Gilbert Simondon, L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information, Grenoble: Millon, 2013. 16 Gilbert Simondon, Imagination et invention, 1965–1966, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2014.



290 

 A.S. Aurora Hoel

As should be clear from this, Simondon’s theories of machines and images are deeply informed by his theory of individuation, which accords to machines and images a non-trivial role as adaptive mediators between humans and the world. Moreover, approaching machines and images as ‘mediators’ in Simondon’s sense of the term serves to bring out the image value of technical objects, and—just as importantly—the technicity of images.17 The first part of this chapter explores the theoretical alignment of machines and images in Simondon’s thinking. The second part probes more deeply into these theoretical connections by focusing on how machines and images relate to their environment—or as Simondon puts it, to their ‘associated milieu’.18 This implies focusing on the moments in the mediation process where machines and images, in the words of Simondon, “become effectively and directly operative”.19 I proceed to relate Simondon’s ideas about machines/images and their environment to the example of MRI, more specifically to the image-acquisition process. Approaching image acquisition as a more-than-technical process, I call attention to the operational and transductive dynamic that is playing out already at this stage—a mediate process that provides conditions for visibility and intelligibility even before there are any images (in the more conventional sense) to look at. In this way, I hope to show that Simondon’s ideas about machines and/as images mark a new and remarkably promising direction for image theory, one pivoting around the insight that images are active powers for reality.

1 Machines and Images as Intermediaries On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects has two main concerns, which Simondon summarizes as “the essence of technical objects and their relation to man”.20 Despite his frequent use of the term ‘essence’, Simondon’s approach is anything but essentialist.21 On the contrary, the very motivation of his entire philosophy is to provide an alternative to the received ways of approaching being. The problem with the received ways, whether informed by the ‘substantialist’ or the ‘hylomorphic’ view-

17 Another highly exciting implication of this alignment is that there is also a technics and technicity of living bodies, which resonates, for example, with Mark B. N. Hansen’s calls for theories that can account for the “originary technicity of the human”, Mark B. N. Hansen, Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media, New York and London: Routledge, 2006, p. ix. 18 Simondon, Mode of Existence, p. 59. 19 Simondon, Imagination et invention, p. 19. 20 Simondon, Mode of Existence, p. xii. 21 For a more elaborate argument on why Simondon is not an essentialist, see Aud Sissel Hoel and Iris van der Tuin, “The Ontological Force of Technicity: Reading Cassirer and Simondon Diffractively,” Philosophy & Technology 26, no. 2 (2013), pp. 187–202.





Images as Active Powers for Reality 

 291

point, is that they tend to neglect the stage of individuation, granting ontological privilege to the already constituted individual.22 In contrast to the deeply entrenched tendency to treat the constituted individual as a given, Simondon seeks “to understand the individual from the perspective of the process of individuation”.23 In line with this overarching intent, Mode of Existence offers a genetic ontology of technical objects, approaching the being or mode of existence of technical objects through a study of their genesis—hence the focus on technical individualization. Seeking to grasp the genesis of technical objects in its entire unfolding and in all its variety, Mode of Existence includes considerations of the “relation which exists between nature, man, and technical reality”.24 In Simondon’s view, the philosophical significance of this relation has not been sufficiently acknowledged in the literature dealing with social impacts of technology. The treatment of technical objects as economic realities, or as mere instruments of work and consumption has prevented philosophers from realizing the depth of the challenge posed by technical objects to thinking.25 The philosophical significance of technical objects resides in their power to institute new systems of reality, and hence, in their power to shift the relation of humans to the world. It is misguided, therefore, to consider technical objects as artificial beings that exist in separation from the human and the natural worlds. Having entered into a reciprocal relationship with its environment, an evolved technical object is no longer artificial and disconnected. It exists, rather, “as body, as milieu, and as ground for other structures”26—hence the focus on technical mediation.

1.1 The Mode of Existence of Technical Objects: Technical Individualization Much of the originality of Mode of Existence lies in Simondon’s ontogenetic take on technology, which involves a shift from static being to processes of becoming. Simondon considers technical objects on three levels: as elements, individuals, and ensembles.27 For reasons to which I will return, he gives most attention to technical individuals, which he refers to interchangeably as machines. The individualization of technical objects is conceived on the model of the development of living organisms. This implies that even if they owe their origin to human acts of invention, technical objects—as soon as they are inserted into the world and put

22 Gilbert Simondon, “The Genesis of the Individual,” Incorporations, eds. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, New York: Zone Books, 1992, pp. 297–319, here pp. 297–299. 23 Ibid., p. 300, original emphasis. 24 Simondon, Mode of Existence, p. xiii. 25 Ibid., p. xiii. 26 Ibid., p. xv. 27 Ibid., p. xv, 20.



292 

 A.S. Aurora Hoel

into operation—continue to be invented and evolve in ways unforeseen by their inventors. Technical individualization is further explicated as a process of ‘concretization’ through which technical objects move from an ‘abstract’ to a more ‘concrete’ mode of existence.28 Since, in Simondon’s view, the paradigmatic example of a concrete being is a living organism, concretization is seen as a quasi-organic process through which technical objects come closer to the mode of existence of living beings.29 An evolved technical object, therefore, is more ‘concrete’ than a primitive technical object, first, in that its technical elements have become more integrated, approximating the integration of organs in a living body; and second, in that it has entered into a system with its surroundings, approximating the vital, reciprocal linkages between a living organism and its environment. Hence, through the process of concretization, the technical object loses some of its artificial character. In Simondon’s words, it “frees itself and becomes naturalized”.30 The idea of an evolved technical object implies that there have been previous, less evolved versions of the ‘same’ object. This means that a technical individual, such as an automobile engine, is not this or that engine, given here and now, but an entity that evolves over time. A technical individual is a ‘unit of coming-into-being’,31 which progresses toward specificity by multiplying itself. To invent a technical object is to initiate an open-ended, evolutionary series of related technical objects. The technical individual, in other words, develops by engendering a ‘family’ of technical objects, all of which have the primitive technical object as their ‘ancestor’.32 The deciding factor, then, in whether two automobile engines—say, one from today and one from 1910— are the ‘same’ technical individual (that is, belong to the same evolutionary series) is not the mere fact that both are used as a propulsion system for automobiles. In Simondon’s view, definitions in terms of utility alone will always remain superficial.33 The deciding factor is, rather, to what extent the two engines in question operate by, and have adapted themselves to, the same ‘regime of causality’34 (more about such regimes in section 2). This focus on regimes of causality is yet another indication of

28 Ibid., p. 25, 29. 29 Ibid., p. 49. 30 For all that, Simondon never goes so far as to conflate technical beings with living beings. While technical objects “tend toward concretization”, they will always differ from living beings, which are “concrete to begin with” (ibid., p. 51). 31 Ibid., p. 26. 32 Simondon, Mode of Existence, p. 46. This is why, as noted by Jean-Hugues Barthélémy, the genesis of the technical individual “is already an entire phylogenesis through a ‘lignée’ of technical objects” (Jean-Hugues Barthélémy and Andrew Illiadis, “Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of Information: An Interview with Jean-Hugues Barthélémy,” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 23, no. 1 (2015), pp. 102–112, here pp. 103–4, original emphasis). 33 Simondon, Mode of Existence, p. 25. 34 Ibid., p. 26.





Images as Active Powers for Reality 

 293

Simondon’s operational approach: that which truly defines the specificity or individuality of a technical object, and which allows us to recognize it across its evolutionary lineage, is a distinctive ‘scheme of operation’.35

1.2 T  he Role of Images in Knowledge and Being: Technical Mediation Simondon’s analysis of the mode of existence of technical objects and the conditions of their genesis has implications far beyond the domain of technology, narrowly construed. To appreciate the full scope of ‘technicity’—Simondon’s term for technical being considered in its efficacy or operational functioning—we need to consider its repercussions on other realities, including on human existence and the attitude of humans toward the world.36 When it comes to human existence, Simondon’s point of departure is that human and world form a vital system comprising the living in its environment. This is to say that the relation between human and world is not fixed but is itself subject to development. Technicity, then, is seen to impact human existence by participating in the evolution of this relation.37 The technical object, in other words, takes on a broader philosophical import because it “intervenes as mediator between man and the world”.38 In Simondon’s view, we are concerned here with three types of reality, namely, “the world, man, and the object”—the ‘object’ being further characterized as an “intermediary between the world and man”.39 Later, when he discusses the role of technics in science, Simondon goes further, emphasizing that the technical object does more than simply create a mediation between human and world. He now characterizes the technical object as a “stable mixture of the human and the natural,” which “allows for the integration of this human reality into the world of natural causes and effects”.40 The intervention of technics builds an intermediate, structured world through which the relation of human to nature “takes on a status of stability, of consistency, making it a reality that has laws and an ordered permanence”.41 By so doing, technicity provokes a change of level in the human—world system, preparing a new ‘readiness’42 for action that was not there (or at least not in the same way) in the primitive or less evolved system.

35 Ibid., p. 39, 45. 36 Ibid., p. 167. 37 Ibid., p. 169. 38 Ibid., p. 183. 39 Ibid., p. 183n. Note that Simondon uses the terms ‘mediator’ and ‘intermediary’ interchangeably. 40 Ibid., p. 251. 41 Ibid., p. 251. 42 The term used by Simondon is ‘disponibilité’, which in Mode of Existence is translated as ‘availability’ (p.  251). I prefer to translate it as ‘readiness’, to retain the connection to related



294 

 A.S. Aurora Hoel

It is this idea of mediators bringing about new relative situations of human and world43 that is further developed in Simondon’s theory of images. Intermediaries are now defined in broad terms, and further characterized in terms of their ‘image-value’.44 After having considered the way that clothing and styles of dress serve to stabilize the relation between the human and the physical and social world by mediating it, Simondon maintains: “In this sense, everything that intervenes as an intermediary between subject and object can take on the value of an image and play the role of prosthesis, at once adaptive and restrictive.”45 This quotation directly shows the connection between Simondon’s account of technical mediation and his account of images: to be an ‘intermediary’ in the sense established in Mode of Existence is to be an ‘image’, and vice versa. This idea implies that Simondon’s theory of images, as developed in the course of his 1965–66 lecture series on imagination and invention, essentially is a theory of mediation. This claim requires some qualification. First, the development of Simondon’s account of technical mediation into a theory of images— and by implication, into a more general theory of mediation—involves a broadening of the term ‘technicity’ beyond technical objects in the customary sense (beyond the realm of hammers and automobile engines, so to speak). Simondon’s theory of images concerns the mediating role of a broader range of ‘apparatuses’46 than technical objects proper, including living bodies, on the one hand, and cultural artifacts (such as artworks and clothing), on the other. Second, it is important to bear in mind that the terms ‘image’ and ‘mediation’ are taken here in an operational and transductive sense, and not in the established, representational sense. It is the operational and transductive take on machines and images that warrants these conceptual developments—that warrants, we could say, the conceptual dedifferentiation between machines and images, which in turn paves the way for further conceptual inventions. But why does Simondon use the term ‘image’ at all, when what he means is so far removed from the more established notions of images in terms of visual (re)presentations? A clue to this is found in Mode of Existence. Individuation is conceived by Simondon in terms of structuration. The process of individuation consists of “successive stages of an individuating structuration”, where the individual progresses toward specificity in a step-wise manner, moving from phase to phase, or from one state of

philosophical ideas, such as Martin Heidegger’s notion of readiness-to-hand (see Martin Heidegger, Being and Time [1927], Oxford: Blackwell, 1962, which concerns the way humans encounter entities as equipment. 43 Or, alternatively, of living being and its environment, since humans are not privileged in Simondon’s account of intermediaries. This becomes even clearer in his work on imagination and invention, large sections of which are concerned with the mediating roles of images in animal behavior. 44 Simondon, Imagination et invention, p. 12. 45 Ibid., p. 12. 46 Simondon uses the term ‘dispositifs’ (Simondon, Imagination et invention, p. 141).





Images as Active Powers for Reality 

 295

the system to the next, by means of “successive inventions of structures”.47 As a living being, a human already forms a system with the environment, implying that the relation of human to world is always already “rich in implicit organization”.48 The technical object, then, is seen to intervene in this relation by making it more concrete (in the sense established in section 1.1). In this way, technicity is seen as a force that appears “in a structuration that provisionally resolves the problems posed by the primitive and original phase of man’s relationship with the world”.49 Technicity, in other words, is seen as an inventive force that intervenes in the human—world system by reorganizing its energetic and material forces, temporarily resolving the initial incompatibility. It does this by instituting a “middle order of magnitude” (an intermediate, structured world, as discussed above) that overcomes the initial absence of interactive communication between the disparate parts of the system.50 The institution of a new order that allows the heterogeneous parts of the system to interact and communicate initiates a new phase in the system, which in turn releases new potentials for action—which is why Simondon characterizes individuation as a ‘mediate process of amplification’.51 However, there is more to be said about how technicity, in its role as intermediary, takes on the value of an image. In Mode of Existence there are more explicit hints that foreshadow Simondon’s theory of images. Technicity, it turns out, has a figural dimension. In its mediating role, technicity serves as a ‘force of divergence’.52 But, as Simondon reminds us, technicity is not the sole organizing and structuring principle in the universe, nor is it the first. Zooming out from the domain of technology, he now characterizes technicity as heir to a more primordial ‘capacity for evolutionary divergence’—as heir, that is, to a mediation that exists functionally “in the most elementary of all structurations, which is also the first: that from which erupts the distinction between figure and ground in the universe”.53 In this way, technicity is explicated as a force that, in its mediating role, enacts a figural divergence—a targeted, differential ordering of the world where certain features are delineated and made to stand out as figures, while other features are pushed into the background. Technicity is explicated, more precisely, as a force that ‘specializes’ the capacity for performing ‘figural functions’.54 The figural dimension of technicity, then, has to do with the way that the intervention of technics institutes new, more evolved (differential) regimes of visibility—or else of intelligibility or action, since for Simondon, these terms are intrinsically linked.

47 Simondon, Mode of Existence, p. 169. 48 Ibid., p. 169. 49 Ibid., p. 169. 50 Simondon, “Genesis of the Individual,” p. 301, 304, original emphasis. 51 Ibid., p. 304. 52 Simondon, Mode of Existence, p. 170. 53 Ibid., pp. 169–170. 54 Ibid., p. 169.



296 

 A.S. Aurora Hoel

Interestingly, however, instead of presenting a hierarchical model, where technicity is conceived as a mere extension of a more basic, natural force, Simondon proceeds to characterize the mediation responsible for “the most elementary of all structurations” in terms of an ‘original technicity’.55 As we shall see in the coming section, the lecture series on imagination and invention sheds further light on the figural force of technicity, including the notion of original technicity.

1.3 The Technicity of Images Simondon’s notion of images differs markedly from established approaches—including the notion put forward by Jean-Paul Sartre, the leading theorist of the imagination at the time.56 The key difference between the two approaches is that, while Sartre connects images with unreality, Simondon sees them as powers for reality—more precisely, as powers for amplifying the system of reality. Simondon further distances himself from Sartre by refusing to identify images with consciousness. In fact, he opens his lecture series on imagination and invention by warning against the very term ‘imagination’ on the grounds that attaching images to a subject who produces them tends to “exclude the hypothesis of a primitive exteriority of images relative to the subject”.57 It is, above all, Simondon’s insistence on the primitive exteriority of images that marks a new direction for image theory, since it is only by virtue of their exteriority that images become active powers for reality.

1.3.1 Motor Images In Simondon’s view, images are not on the side of the subject. This is the case even for the images involved in psychological activity, such as perception. Images are seen, rather, as an ‘intermediate reality’ between subject and object—and also, between concrete and abstract, past and future.58 To underscore their relative autonomy, Simondon characterizes images as “secondary organisms within the thinking being”, alluding to their capacity to develop in relative independence from conscious, intentional activity.59 Images are mediators, not in the sense of representing, presenting,

55 Ibid., p. 171. 56 Jean-Paul Sartre, The Psychology of the Imagination, London: Routledge, 1995; Jean-Paul Sartre, Imagination: A Psychological Critique, trans. Kenneth Williford and David Rudrauf, London and New York: Routledge, 2012. 57 Simondon, Imagination et invention, p. 7. 58 Ibid., p. 7. 59 Ibid., p. 9.





Images as Active Powers for Reality 

 297

or intending some external object, but in the sense of facilitating a ‘real coupling’ between living being and environment, allowing them to form a joint system.60 Thus understood, imagination is not opposed to perception.61 Instead, imagination is seen as implicated in perception, as something that prepares the living being for its encounter with the environment. The living being does not passively await stimuli from the environment. Drawing on studies in ethology, Simondon maintains that motricity precedes sensibility: the reactions observed in a living being interacting with its environment are preceded by spontaneous behaviors that exist before the living being receives signals from the perceptual object.62 The life of images, in other words, does not start with experience. It starts, rather, with the anticipation of experience in the form of spontaneous, organized initiatives on the side of the living being. In the phase of anticipation, the image is an “embryo of motor and perceptual activity”, which is not yet “controlled by the external reference to experience of the environment”.63 In this phase, the image shows “preadaptations but not adaptations”.64 Examples of such primitive ‘motor images’ are instinctual behaviors in animals, which tend to play out even in the absence of the relevant environmental stimuli. A case in point is the young honey buzzard (a bird of prey that feeds on bees and wasps), which, when held in captivity, exhibits behaviors appropriate for catching bees even in the absence of honeycombs to dig out.65 However, in its undeveloped phase, an inherited motor image is but a partial program of behavior, one that is imprecise and in need of refinement. It is only in the second phase of its development, experience, that the image becomes “a mode of receiving information from the environment”.66 This is the stage where the living being interacts with the environment, and where the image, as a consequence, becomes directly operative. In response to this interaction, the intra-perceptive images “organize and stabilize themselves into internally correlated groups according to the dimensions of the relationship between the organism and the environment”.67 The adaptation and concretization that come with experience lead to a third phase, systematization, in which the images become more integrated and develop into stable dispositions for action. The fourth phase, invention, effects a change of level—a transductive leap, we could say—in the evolved image system. Thus, as con-

60 Ibid., p. 92. 61 At this point, Simondon’s account differs markedly from Sartre’s. For Sartre, perception and imagination are distinct acts of consciousness, which implies that to exist ‘as imaged’ is absolutely opposed to existing ‘in fact’ (Sartre, Imagination, p. 4). 62 Simondon, Imagination et invention, p. 29. 63 Ibid., p. 19. 64 Ibid., p. 19. 65 Ibid., p. 33. 66 Ibid., p. 19. 67 Ibid., p. 19.



298 

 A.S. Aurora Hoel

ceived by Simondon, the evolution of images takes the form of an amplification cycle: by installing “new anticipations in the long run”,68 the change in the organization of images leads to the emergence of a new relative situation of living being and environment—the evolved anticipations releasing new potentials for action, which in turn lead to more evolved adaptations and systematizations, and so on.69 The originality of Simondon’s account of images and their transductive dynamic can hardly be overstated. It is important to note, first, that Simondon’s motor images are not mental in the sense that Sartre’s images are mental. Being connected to motricity, images are not a kind of consciousness. For Simondon, they are connected, rather, to the material apparatus of the body, and more precisely, to the living body’s potentials for action. Nonetheless, images are mental in a different sense of the term mental, namely, in that they have an intellectual or logical aspect, which manifests itself in their structuring activity through which they organize intermediate worlds of a middle order of magnitude. Images are endowed with specific operational logics, which is why Simondon refers to them as ‘schemes of behavior’ or ‘schemes of action’.70 Furthermore, the choice of the term ‘scheme’ indicates that there is a general aspect to images, which manifests itself in their tendency to settle into stable dispositions for action—to materialize themselves and become institution.71 Thus, in Simondon’s view, the most elementary of images are motor images, behavioral dispositions of the body (or parts of the body) that facilitate the establishment of vital, reciprocal linkages between the living being and its environment. This means that already in the context of motor images—before the intervention of technical objects proper—we can talk about a technicity of images. There is a technicity of motor images, first, in that they are always already embodied in some material apparatus—in this case, the apparatus of the living body—through which they obtain their primitive exteriority relative to the subject, which in turn allows them to take effect and become powers for reality. There is a technicity of motor images, second, in that they are endowed with operational logics that play out in their characteristic ways of forging linkages between living being and environment, giving rise to specific regimes of reciprocal causalities (more about such regimes in section 2). However, while motor images for Simondon are the most elementary of images, they are not the most exemplary. For Simondon, the paradigmatic examples of images are object-images: externalized images that exist independently, such as artworks and machines.72

68 Ibid., p. 62. 69 Ibid., p. 19. 70 Ibid., p. 32. 71 Ibid., p. 13. 72 Ibid., p. 14.





Images as Active Powers for Reality 

 299

1.3.2 Object-Images As we have seen, mediation for Simondon is connected with the resolution of a problem that arises in the undeveloped phase of the human—world system. Yet, in some cases, the problem cannot be resolved by the resources of bodies alone but requires recourse to ‘heterogeneous mediations’—mediations where external objects serve as ‘adaptive mediators’.73 There are, for example, tasks for which the human body is not directly effective, such as carrying water. The successful accomplishment of this task, therefore, typically involves some solid intermediary, such as a barrel.74 In situations that necessitate heterogeneous mediations, the adaptive mediator could be an object in the environment that is recruited to serve as an instrument, such as a rock used to smash open an edible mollusk; or it could be a fabricated artifact, such as a winch used to move a heavy load. In both these examples, the intervention of the adaptive mediator enables the human to act as if s/he were much stronger than s/ he is, accomplishing a task that would be impossible without the adaptation accomplished by the intermediary. When using a winch, the human is enabled to handle the load as if the heavy load belonged to an order of magnitude homogeneous to her/his own.75 Thus, by intervening as an adaptive mediator, the object-image (in this case, a winch) amplifies the human—world system by inducing a change of level—a change that can now be further specified as a transfer between different orders of magnitude. Both in the case of motor images and in that of object-images, Simondon talks about invention, transductive leaps, and changes of levels in the system. Moreover, in both cases, invention retains its functional role as a “transfer system between different orders”.76 However, in the latter case, which involves situations that necessitate heterogeneous mediations, the problem can be resolved only by instituting “an order of magnitude that is very different”—implying that, in this case, the transductive leap is greater and the inventive effort more considerable.77 Besides this, Simondon has more principled reasons for considering object-images more exemplary than motor images. Interestingly, while discussing the mediating role of object-images, Simondon points out that the transfer function is manifested in the very structure of the image and materialized by the apparatus in question.78 However, from what we have learned from Simondon’s treatment of the more elementary kind of images, this would also apply to motor images, even if in this case the apparatus materializing the transfer

73 Ibid., pp. 141, 142. 74 Ibid., p. 142. 75 Ibid., p. 142. 76 Ibid., p. 141. 77 Ibid., p. 141. 78 Ibid., p. 141.



300 

 A.S. Aurora Hoel

function would be the living body (or part of the body). If we follow through these ideas, there seem to be two ways for images to become active powers for reality: either through incorporation, that is, through the development of new bodily habits and dispositions; or through externalization, that is, through the recruitment, or more characteristically, through the production of some detachable object that serves as an adaptive mediator. Images, in other words, become real (efficacious) by materializing themselves, either through incorporation or through externalization. Furthermore, through incorporation or externalization, images become institution: by materializing themselves, they prepare a readiness for action that is general in the sense of having effects that go beyond the resolution of the original problem for which the images were first adapted or invented. Thus, in contrast to most received accounts, including Sartre’s,79 the process of formalization is not seen as a movement away from materiality or away from reality. On the contrary, in Simondon’s view, images become real through materialization, which in turn leads to formalization. Throughout their development, both motor images and object-images tend to integrate and consolidate themselves into a “materializing and idealizing recurrence”.80 Yet when it comes to formalization, object-images have a critical advantage over motor images in that they exist independently. As detachable objects, object-images can be used by others far from the time and place of their creation.81 Object-images, in other words, are the most exemplary of images because they realize the transfer function (and hence their role as mediators) more perfectly, allowing for cumulative effects that also have a collective, world-building dimension. The transferability and shareability accomplished by object-images are absolutely crucial, not least to science and medicine, where repeatability and comparability across time and space are key. Against the backdrop of this exploration of the theoretical alignment of machines and images, the operational and transductive approach to images can be further specified by testing its applicability to an example of an object-image that Simondon could not have anticipated: MRI.

2 MRI as an Intermediary in Simondon’s Terms MRI is widely celebrated as one of the most important breakthroughs in the history of medical imaging. When MRI is treated in the context of image and media theory, the discussion typically centers on the images obtained through the scanning process.

79 See, for example, Sartre, Psychology, p. 58. 80 Simondon, Imagination et invention, p. 13. 81 Ibid., p. 164.





Images as Active Powers for Reality 

 301

However, if we are to follow the approach suggested by Simondon, there is yet another image to consider, namely, the MRI machine itself. For very good reasons, humanities and social science research on medical imaging tend to focus on the analysis and interpretation of image data, that is, on the processes through which the data obtained in image acquisition come to carry meaning. Yet the widespread tendency to start from the technological output, and to treat this output as ‘raw data’, or in the case of imaging, as ‘raw images’, obscures the most important contribution of the technical object, namely, its role in instituting and sustaining the very environment that makes these observations possible in the first place. It obscures, in other words, the most significant aspects of technical mediators, which relate, as succinctly summed up by Simondon, to their existence “as body, as milieu, and as ground for other structures”.82

2.1 Machines and Their Environments As already hinted at, in his analysis of the three levels of technical objects, Simondon privileges technical individuals (machines) over technical elements and technical ensembles. This priority follows from his operational approach, because it is on the level of individuals that technical objects can be properly described as beings that operate. While technical elements play a crucial role in transporting and transmitting concretized technical realities into new periods, the technicities they express and preserve have to be combined and incorporated in an individual to take effect.83 In this respect, the elements are comparable to the organs of a living body.84 Crucially, however, as Simondon makes clear, the integration of elements and their compatibility in a machine presupposes an ‘associated milieu’.85 Indeed, the necessary coupling to an associated milieu is the very characteristic that distinguishes technical individuals from technical elements, on the one hand, and from technical ensembles, on the other.86 Thus conceived, concretization consists in an act of adaptation to an environment. The machine is situated at the meeting point between two heterogeneous environments, the technical and the natural (‘geographical’), which are both evolving— the machine having to be integrated in both at once.87 Adaptation here is not a mere defensive reaction to a pre-existing environment. Instead, adaptation-concretization

82 Simondon, Mode of Existence, p. xv. 83 Ibid., pp. 73–74. 84 Ibid., p. 66. 85 Ibid., p. 74. 86 Ibid., p. 63, 66. 87 Ibid., p. 55, 56.



302 

 A.S. Aurora Hoel

“is a process that conditions the birth of a milieu rather than being conditioned by an already given milieu.”88 This implies that the modifications that mediate between the two environments call forth the creation of a “third techno-geographic milieu”—a ‘mixed’ environment that is simultaneously both technical and natural.89 It is this new environment—a structured, intermediate world of a middle order of magnitude— that Simondon terms the ‘associated milieu’. Simondon’s account of the machine’s necessary relation to, and peculiar dependence on, the associated milieu, is the crux of his whole theory of technical objects (and, we could add, of his theory of images), since it is what secures the relative autonomy of machines. The machine’s dependence on the associated milieu is peculiar because although the machine depends for its existence on the associated milieu, which exists as a condition sine qua non for the machine’s functioning,90 the associated milieu, on its side, depends for its existence on the machine. Simondon puts it as follows: “The technical object is thus its own condition, as a condition of existence of this mixed milieu.”91 Hence, to the extent that machines are free to evolve in an optimal way, their development is characterized by “the phenomenon of self-conditioning”.92 The associated milieu, then, is an environment “wherein each modification is self-conditioned”.93 Adaptation-concretization, therefore, can be further specified as a process by which the machine “creates its own associated milieu from itself and is really individualized in it”.94 The machine is a being that conditions itself in its becoming, and it does this by instituting and sustaining its own environment of individuation. There is a sense, then, in which the associated milieu is called forth and created by the machine. Even so, the associated milieu “is not fabricated, or at least not in its totality”.95 This is a point that Simondon is emphatic about, since an entire new epistemology springs from it (see section 3). The associated milieu is not fabricated because it “incorporates a part of the natural world that intervenes as a condition of functioning, and is thus part of the system of causes and effects”.96 Thus, by conditioning the birth of an associated milieu, the machine gives rise to a recurrent regime of ‘reciprocal causalities’,97 where the technicities contributed by natural as well as technical elements come to be concretized in their mutual reactions. It would be a mistake, therefore, to characterize the associated milieu in terms of a ‘humanization

88 Ibid., p. 58. 89 Ibid., p. 58. 90 Ibid., p. 58, 63. 91 Ibid., p. 58, original emphasis. 92 Ibid., p. 58. 93 Ibid., p. 58. 94 Ibid., p. 59. 95 Ibid., p. 59. 96 Ibid., p. 49. 97 Ibid., pp. 26–27, 59.





Images as Active Powers for Reality 

 303

of nature’ since the process of concretization “could just as well present itself as a naturalization of man”.98 The technical operation accomplishes, more precisely, a “convertibility of the human into the natural and of the natural into the human”.99 This, then, is why Simondon emphasizes that an evolved machine is no longer artificial, and that the system made up by the machine and its associated milieu is more than a mere system—it is a system of reality. The implication of all this is that the associated milieu is not a dispensable appendage to the machine. As the condition of possibility of the machine’s operation, the associated milieu is integral to the very mode of existence of the technical individual as such. This means that the machine is not an isolated reality, since it forms part of a system that is always more-than-technical. As such, it is a “partial reality and a transitory reality, both the result and principle of genesis”.100

2.2 The MRI Machine and Its Environment Simondon’s seminal insight that technical individuals or machines operate by instituting an associated milieu, which in turn serves as an environment of individuation, can also be brought to bear on machines in their role as mediators—in which case the associated milieu serves as a targeted environment of individuation for other beings and realities. MRI is a medical imaging method that is prominently used as a diagnostic workhorse in day-to-day clinical practice.101 In neuroradiology, it produces highly contrasted brain images that are used to diagnose tumors and other lesions of the brain. One of the reasons why MRI has become a major diagnostic tool in contemporary medicine is that it enables “excellent soft tissue discrimination”.102 MRI relies on the magnetic characteristics of hydrogen atoms, which abound in the human body, especially in water and fat. Since the magnetic behaviors of hydrogen nuclei vary systematically depending on the tissue or lesion, MRI is used to map out the boundaries between different tissue types, and also, crucially, between anatomy and pathology. Different tissue types, in other words, have different signal intensities, which show up on MR images as differences in brightness—areas of high signal appearing bright

98 Ibid., p. 58. 99 Ibid., p. 251. 100 Ibid., p. 170. 101 Ed Bullmore, “The Future of Functional MRI in Clinical Medicine,” Neuroimage 62 (2012), pp. 1267–1271, here p. 1270. 102 Catherine Westbrook and John Talbot, MRI in Practice, fifth edition, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2019, p. 24.



304 

 A.S. Aurora Hoel

in the image, and areas of low signal appearing dark.103 These differences in signal intensity and/or brightness are referred to as ‘image contrast’.104 In their natural state in the body, the magnetic moments (or spins) of hydrogen nuclei are randomly oriented. Yet as soon as the patient is placed inside an MRI scanner, the behaviors of the nuclei change dramatically. Now under the influence of the external strong magnetic field of the scanner, the magnetic moments of the hydrogen spins line up parallel or antiparallel to the direction of the main magnetic field, that is, along the center of the scanner (termed the longitudinal plane or z-axis). To generate the signal, a second, time-varying magnetic field is applied at 90 degrees to the main magnetic field (termed the transverse plane or x-y axis). The second magnetic field is transmitted in short radiofrequency pulses that ‘excite’ the hydrogen nuclei, making them absorb energy and forcing them to spin in a new direction— the magnetic moments of the spins now precessing around the x-y axis rather than around the z-axis.105 Each time the excitation pulse is turned off, the hydrogen nuclei start to ‘relax’, releasing their excess energy as they return to their baseline alignment with the main magnetic field. The released energy induces an electric voltage—the MR signal—which is picked up by suitably tuned receiver coils. At the same time, gradient coils are used to produce deliberate variations in the main magnetic field on the local level, spatially encoding the position of the MR signal and determining the localization of the image slices. Upon reception, the analog MR signal is converted into a digital signal and represented as a series of numbers.106 The differences in signal intensities are subsequently converted into gray-level intensities for each picture element (pixel) in a cross-sectional image, high signals having bright pixels in the image. Each pixel, then, is a number that represents the MR signal from a small volume element (voxel) within the patient’s body.107 The contrast characteristics of MR images depend on many factors, which in the MRI literature are sorted into two categories: intrinsic contrast parameters and extrinsic contrast parameters. The intrinsic contrast parameters are those that “cannot be changed because they are inherent to the body’s tissues”.108 The inherent factors include what is called ‘T1 recovery time’ and ‘T2 decay time’, which refer to two independent ways of measuring the time it takes for hydrogen nuclei in a certain tissue to relax after having been subjected to the radiofrequency excitation pulse.109 While T1 recovery time relates to the time it takes for the magnetic moments of hydrogen nuclei

103 Ibid., p. 31. 104 Donald W. McRobbie, Elizabeth A. Moore, Martin J. Graves, and Martin R. Prince, MRI: From Picture to Proton, second edition, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 30. 105 Westbrook and Talbot, MRI in Practice, p. 14. 106 McRobbie, Moore, Graves, and Prince, MRI, p. 47. 107 Ibid., pp. 57, 58. 108 Westbrook and Talbot, MRI in Practice, p. 25. 109 McRobbie, Moore, Graves, and Prince, MRI, p. 31.





Images as Active Powers for Reality 

 305

to recover their magnetization in the longitudinal direction, T2 decay time relates to the time it takes for the magnetic moments of the spins to lose their coherent magnetization in the transverse direction.110 Since T1 recovery and T2 decay processes occur at different rates in different tissues, the time constants associated with T1 and T2 relaxation are highly relied-upon measures in the generation of image contrast. Interestingly, however, despite the fact that the T1 and T2 times are presented in the MRI literature as ‘inherent’ in the tissues, the differential behaviors exhibited by the magnetic moments of hydrogen nuclei as they relax at different rates in different tissues— the very behaviors, that is, that form the basis of the MR signal—are not found among hydrogen nuclei in their natural state in the human body. It should be clear already from this rough sketch of the inner workings of MRI that there is a quite literal sense to which the operation of the MRI machine conditions the birth of an associated milieu, which in turn gives rise to a highly specific regime of causality where a “part of the world” (as Simondon puts it) is allowed to intervene and form part of the system of interdependent causes and effects. In what sense, then, are the T1 and T2 times to be considered ‘inherent’ in the tissues? Drawing on Simondon’s approach, the short answer would be: the inherence of these time constants in the tissues presupposes the specific associated milieu created by the MRI machine. Still, the time constants are not to be considered mere fabrications of the machine. How are we to make sense of this? An exciting implication of Simondon’s theoretical alignment of machines and images, which is made possible by his operational and transductive approach, is that there are ‘technicities’ on the side of nature. This is more than hinted at in his discussion of the associated milieu in Mode of Existence and is made explicit in his notion of motor images developed in his lecture series on imagination and invention. ‘Technicities’ are to be understood here as “stable behaviors, expressing the characteristics of elements”.111 Rather than properties or simple qualities, they are “powers, in the fullest sense of the term, which is to say capacities for producing or undergoing an effect in a determinate manner”.112 What I am suggesting is that hydrogen nuclei should be regarded as ‘elements’ in the Simondonian sense, expressing a certain behavioral potential. In this respect, they could also be regarded as micro-scale ‘motor images’. However, it is only when the technicities of these elements have been appropriately modified—concretized, we could say—by being placed in the external strong magnetic field of the scanner, and hence made compatible with the technical elements and forces that constitute the MRI machine, that the hydrogen nuclei become susceptible to the systematic manipulations by which the MRI signal is generated. Thus, it is not until the hydrogen nuclei have been integrated into the mixed environment instituted and sustained by the MRI machine

110 Westbrook and Talbot, MRI in Practice, pp. 26–28. 111 Simondon, Mode of Existence, p. 75. 112 Ibid., p. 75.



306 

 A.S. Aurora Hoel

and made an integral part of the recurrent regime of reciprocal causalities prevailing in this environment (which, critically, includes the dynamics of excitation and relaxation) that the behaviors of the magnetic moments of hydrogen nuclei become sufficiently stable to produce the law-like characteristics that allow them to serve as reliable measures in the generation of image contrast.

2.3 Figural Functions When it comes to differences in T1 and T2 times, the two extremes are fat and water— fat having short T1 and T2, and water having long T1 and T2.113 Even so, the way fat and water appear in the resulting MR images also greatly depends on ‘extrinsic’ factors, which comprise those contrast parameters that “can be changed because they are under our control.”114 The extrinsic contrast parameters include the choice of pulse sequence and the timings of these sequences. Typical examples of MR images acquired in a routine clinical MRI examination are shown in Figs. 1–4. In this case, the images reveal a tumor in the right hemisphere of the patient’s brain. As we can see from these examples, the visibility of the tumor differs from one scan to the next since, depending on the choice of repetition time, echo time, and other extrinsic factors, different features of the patient’s brain are accentuated. For example, a pulse sequence with short repetition time and short echo time tends to enhance the T1 differences between tissues. The images that result from such a sequence are thus referred to as ‘T1-weighted’ images. In a T1-weighted image, as shown in Fig. 1, fat-based tissues are bright, while water-based tissues are mid-gray and fluids dark. T1-weighted images are often thought of as ‘anatomy’ scans, since the boundaries of the different tissues tend to stand out clearly (fig. 1).115 Another sequence, this time with long repetition time and long echo time, enhances instead the T2 differences between tissues, resulting in a ‘T2-weighted’ image. In a T2-weighted image, as shown in Fig. 2, fluids are bright, while water- and fat-based tissues are mid-gray (fig. 2). Brain tumors and other brain lesions are typically associated with abnormal accumulation of fluids, which on T2-weighted images stands out clearly against the darker normal tissue. T2-weighted images, therefore, are often referred to as ‘pathology’ scans.116 While T1- and T2-weighted sequences are the most common, clinical MRI examinations may also include other sequences that allow an even more subtle manipulation of image contrast. The MRI sequence known as

113 Westbrook and Talbot, MRI in Practice, pp. 32–34. 114 Ibid., p. 25, original emphasis. 115 McRobbie, Moore, Graves and Prince, MRI, p. 32. 116 Ibid., p. 33. This, however, is not always the case, and the extent to which a brain lesion stands out on a T2-weighted image also depends on the pathology in question.





Images as Active Powers for Reality 

 307

Figs. 1–4: Four axial MR images acquired during the same scanning session, showing a tumor on the right side of the patient’s brain:

Fig. 1: T1-weighted MR image.

Fig. 2: T2-weighted MR image.

Fig. 3: T2-weighted FLAIR image where the signal from the cerebrospinal fluid has been suppressed.

Fig. 4: T1-weighted MR image acquired after a contrast agent (gadolinium) has been administered to the patient.



308 

 A.S. Aurora Hoel

FLAIR (fluid-attenuated inversion recovery), for example, is similar to a T2-weighted sequence, except that the repetition and echo times are very long, serving to suppress (‘attenuate’) the signal from cerebrospinal fluid (a clear, colorless body fluid found in the brain and spinal cord). In this way, abnormalities remain bright while normal cerebrospinal fluid is made somewhat darker (fig. 3).117 While in general MRI is very sensitive, with many pathological conditions showing up easily,118 it is not always sufficiently specific—different pathologies frequently have similar appearances. To improve specificity, therefore, the administration of contrast agents is sometimes necessary. In the case we are dealing with here, the contours of the tumor are hard to distinguish from the surrounding edema. For this reason, a compound based on gadolinium (a metallic element with a strong paramagnetic susceptibility) has been injected into the patient’s body before undergoing a T1 scan (fig. 4). This contrast agent has the effect of shortening T1 in the tissues where it accumulates, selectively enhancing the signals from these tissues on T1-weighted images. Leaking into areas where the bloodbrain barrier is disrupted, gadolinium enhances highly vascular tumors by making them brighter in the image.119 So far in this consideration of the workings of the MRI machine, the term ‘image’ has been used in the conventional way, referring to the output of the imaging process. It is telling, however, that in the MRI literature, the discussion of image contrast centers on weighting, on the selective enhancement or suppression of the MR signal through modifications of the acquisition parameters—a term such as ‘T1-weighted image’ refers just as much to the T1-weighted sequence as to the resulting visual display seen on the computer screen. This preoccupation with acquisition methods resonates with Simondon’s notion of image, which is not about the visual (re)presentation of pre-given realities, but about a structuring intervention where a certain divergence between figures and backgrounds is enacted. The figurations seen on the screen are born out of tensions—out of technical and natural technicities in their mutual reactions. This blending and dynamic exchange of technical and natural technicities, however, does not result in confusion. It consists in a highly regular intra-action120 of elements and forces, which results in a targeted, differential ordering of the world where certain features stand out as figures (high signal) at the expense— there is always a trade-off—of other features, which are pushed into the background (low signal) or not shown at all (no signal). The image proper in Simondon’s sense, then, is not what is seen, but the underlying, figural function in accordance with

117 Ibid., pp. 41–42. 118 The ease, however, also depends to a great extent on the experience of the clinician as well as on the pathology in question. 119 Ibid., pp. 42–43. 120 The notion of ‘intra-action’, which is borrowed from Karen Barad, signifies the “mutual constitution of entangled agencies” (Barad, Meeting the Universe, p. 33).





Images as Active Powers for Reality 

 309

which some features are enhanced (made visible), while others are suppressed. It is in this sense, then, that the machine, in its role as intermediary, exists “as ground for other structures”.121 Moreover, in line with Simondon’s ideas about technical individualization, the MRI machine evolves by multiplying itself. The development of pulse sequences has for many years been a vibrant area of MRI research, giving rise to a veritable “zoo” of new sequences where the “inhabitants keep multiplying and providing new hybrids”.122 The MRI machine, then, being multiple, gives rise to an open-ended range of regular and law-like ways in which the differences between tissues can be expressed—to a family of images, we could say (to keep to Simondon’s metaphor), each of which enacts a figural divergence in its own characteristic way. But which of these images become instituted and made part of clinical routine very much depends on the context of use.123

3 Concluding Remarks Medical images are an intriguing test case for image theory because they push the problem of the image to its extreme. At once artificial and real, medical images do not fit the commonplace distinctions between natural and arbitrary signs. More than signs and representations, they are instruments. Yet, again, they do not fit the conceptual mold provided for them, resisting our inclination to treat them as mere means to an end. While the invention and use of medical imaging technologies such as MRI are certainly purposeful, the patterns revealed by these methods are still not exhausted by human intentions. Certainly, MRI sequences are developed and used with specific purposes in mind—in many cases, targeting specific pathologies. Nonetheless, when the MRI machine is put into operation, enacting a figural divergence in accordance with its particular scheme of operation (which, as we have seen, is partly determined by the choice of extrinsic contrast parameters), it always reveal more and less than those features that, say, a radiologist is interested in (which is why it takes considerable medical and visual skills to properly interpret MRI images)—the differences in signal intensities in the end being nothing but indirect measures or proxies of tissue borders and pathologies. There is always a gap between the distinctions that the MRI developer or user wants the machine to draw, and those that it actually draws. For

121 Simondon, Mode of Existence, p. xv. 122 Matt A. Bernstein, Kevin F. King, and Xiaohong J. Zhou, Handbook of MRI Pulse Sequences, Amsterdam: Elsevier Academic Press, 2004, p. xv. 123 For an account of the complex process through which a certain sequence comes to be established as part of medical routine, see, for example, Sophie van Baalen and Annamaria Carusi, “Implicit Trust in Clinical Decision-Making by Multidisciplinary Teams,” Synthese (2017), DOI 10.1007/s11229017-1475-z.



310 

 A.S. Aurora Hoel

this reason, there is always an inherent inscrutability in the machine’s operation, in this case, in its articulation of anatomy and pathology. This inscrutability has to do with the image’s primitive exteriority relative to the subject—but then again, and as paradoxical as it may sound, this is precisely why the machine is useful: it is useful because its operation is not reducible to utility and because the patterns it reveals are not reducible to human intentions. If there were no such primitive exteriority, the image would be tautological (as it continues to be, for example, in Sartre’s account124), teaching nothing and revealing nothing but what is put there by design. The promise of the operational and transductive approach to images relates to the way that it pushes beyond the familiar conceptual landscapes of mainstream image theory. Indeed, as already hinted at, there is a new epistemology germinating across Simondon’s theories of individuation, technology, and images. In the concluding parts of Mode of Existence, Simondon explicitly addresses the epistemological dimension of his approach. He now emphasizes that since the technical operation leads to a new relative situation of human and nature, instituting an intermediate, structured world, we are not dealing here with “pure empiricism”.125 At the same time, Simondon seeks to avoid, at all costs, an epistemology that results in a “relativism in the order of knowledge”.126 He keeps insisting, therefore, that “the technical operation is not arbitrary”.127 As touched upon in section 2, the new epistemology hinges on Simondon’s observation that the associated milieu is not fabricated (or at least not entirely so). To return to our example: in its mediating role, the MRI machine does not provide a transparent window into a reality that precedes the imaging process, but nor does it fabricate distinctions. It operates, rather, by instituting a mixed, crossover environment, where technical and natural elements and forces come to intra-act and mutually influence each other in a law-like manner. The technical operation, in other words, is not arbitrary because the machine (depending as it does on its environment for its very operation) is always more-than-technical. The associated milieu, on its side, while it includes natural elements and forces, is always more-than-natural (having been conditioned into existence by the machine). Hence, machines or images are active powers for reality in and through their capacity to institute and sustain such genuinely transversal worlds. The problem, then, is that if we start from the technological output, we may come to overlook the extent to which the machine or image, in this case, the MRI scanner, institutes its own associated milieu of visibility, and hence, its own field of investigation.

124 See, for example, Sartre’s discussion of the ‘essential poverty’ of images, Sartre, Psychology, p. 8. 125 Simondon, Mode of Existence, p. 251. 126 Ibid., p. 260. 127 Ibid., p. 260.



Morad Montazami

From Speculative to Heretical Orientalism The Paul Klee Syndrome in the Hamed Abdalla Archives1 You thought you found figures in my paintings that look like Klee’s. The explanation is that Klee has derived from the same sources as me. Also Matisse and many others among the great modern artists in the West have been inspired by Oriental art. I did the same, but without Western detours. Handwritten note, Hamed Abdalla Archives 2

Western Detours/Back to the Sources In a 1958 handwritten note, the Egyptian painter and scholar Hamed Abdalla (1917– 1985), who was at that time accustomed to showing his work in the great art capitals, such as Paris, London, Copenhagen, and Amsterdam,3 explained his relation to Paul Klee (and to Western modernism) in nothing if not a succinct manner: Klee’s source lay in the ‘Orient’ (more precisely in North Africa and Egypt); from then on, the Oriental artist, who was equally smitten by modernity, could not do otherwise than share his original visual culture with the European avant-gardes, who were merrily ‘inspired’ thereby, with the slight difference that the Egyptian artist exonerated himself, de facto, from the detours peculiar to those avant-gardes in their extra-occidental eclecticism. Among the figures featuring in the Hamed Abdalla archives whose relation to ‘Oriental’ sources he was most interested in studying, we find Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Henri Matisse, Van Gogh, and Henry Moore. Born in Cairo in 1917, a year before the fall of the Ottoman Empire and on the eve of the great 1919 Egyptian revolt against British colonialism led by Saad Zaghloul, Abdalla developed his artistic language during the time of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s revolution and arrived in Paris in the 1960s (after ten years spent in Denmark), where decolonization and emancipation movements were beginning to be reflected in European social struggles. ‘Abdalla’ is thus more than just a signature, more than the mark of a person vouching for his own subjectivity, tested by exile and utopia; ‘Abdalla’ is also the name of our urgent contemporary need to decolonize modern European and American art history. The official story contains the seeds of other stories, chiseled by

1 This essay could not have been written without the kind collaboration of the Abdalla family, in particular Samir and Kirsten, nor without access to the Hamed Abdalla archives in Paris. 2 My italics. 3 On this, see the book Morad Montazami (ed.), Hamed Abdalla: ARABECEDAIRE, Paris: Zamân Books, 2018.

312 

 Morad Montazami

other masters and artisans, other aesthetic strategies (other ‘I’s and ‘we’s), and those who would have participated but whom we have preferred to keep in a geographical and cultural enclosure—at the risk of no longer being able to read the names of our own ancestors, let alone decipher their secret dreams and map their detours. It is now up to us to transform the stories of the exiled, the displaced, and the uprooted, to build a structure for art history in exile, on the move and free from ideological ties. One of the archival experiences that led to the writing of this essay happened as I perused Hamed Abdalla’s in-depth study of the transcultural dynamics of late 20th-century Orientalism (his archives also include studies of early Orientalism in the 19th century)—in other words, the scattered but thematically organized notes that led him to single out the major visual clues whereby the great names of modern art re-appropriate the ‘Orient’. Let us mention three, which are probably the most structural, and the most capable of summarizing Abdalla’s research on this subject: first, the arabesque and the underlying dialectic of the text and the image, or of the figurative and the abstract (which we know were used by Matisse and his inferior Tachist imitators); second, the ornamental/ornamented space (of sacred and popular architecture) and a certain geometrization of the gaze (suffice it to mention the hallucinatory power of the decorations of the Alhambra in Granada, which created an irrevocable shock in many European artists, from M.C. Escher to François Morellet, who visited the Alhambra in 1936 and 1952, respectively); and third, the phenomena of cosmogonic representation, over and above any decorative grammar, which, by combining them, exceed animal, vegetable, and human categories in favor of metamorphic effects and hybrid formulae, as can often be found in works dating back to the 11th century.4 Out of all these issues, Hamed Abdalla produced a one-of-a-kind tool kit, a non-exhaustive inventory complete with case studies, archaeological sources, and an amazing wealth of illustrations (or ‘atlases’)—while at the same time putting his theoretical discoveries to the test of his pictorial praxis.5

4 Specifically studied by Abdalla, the cosmogony of Zakarīyā Ibn Muhammad al-Qazwīnī (ca. 1203– 1283), Kitāb‘Ajā’ib al-makhlūqātwa-gharā’ib al-mawjūdāt (The wonders of creation, or, literally: The wonders of created things and the curiosities of existing things) was extremely popular in the Arab world and many copies were handed down over the centuries. 5 See the artist’s archives in a critical and commented publication (Hamed Abdalla: ARABECEDAIRE). On issues associated with writing, see the chapter “Lettres d’amour/Love Letters”; on issues involving space, see “Grottes/Caves” and “Italie/Italy”; on metamorphosis, see  “Oriental eclecticism” and “Occidental eclecticism”.





From Speculative to Heretical Orientalism 

 313

Klee in the Footsteps of Abdalla For his part, Paul Klee absorbed all these questions, one by one, with the virtuosic versatility that art history recognizes in his works. It was in fact Carl Einstein who, in the 1920s, saw in Klee the artist of cosmic metamorphoses, incarnating the revolt against rationalism.6 To underpin his thesis, the anti-colonial theoretician of art (the inventor of the notion of the psychogram, which is associated with certain works by Paul Klee and André Masson) divided into three ‘forces’ the principles guiding the authentic epistemological break of modern art. These he wishfully called ‘mediumship writing’, ‘tectonic forces’, and ‘the metamorphic force’.7 These three directions, if only by analogy, call to mind the three great clues brought to the fore and singled out by Abdalla, albeit a few decades later, in particular to frame better the relation between Klee and ‘Oriental’ sources. They thus complicate the question of the late Orientalism symbolized by Klee’s trips to Tunisia (1914) and Egypt (1929), and broach it with an autonomous theoretical approach, one too often summed up using the notion of ‘influence’ or ‘borrowing’.8 Klee’s paintings, which, in the strict sense of the term, represent Tunisia and Egypt, matter little. It is rather a question of grasping the dynamics in question, and the deep traces left in his visual language by those journeys ‘afterwards’. To this end, we can compare, or rather sequence (without being strictly chronological), the following three works, which, while not produced during Klee’s Mediterranean travels, enable us to see the three patterns at work. Lady Apart (Dame Abseits) (fig. 1) produced in 1940, exemplifies the ‘medium-inspired writing’ that we might describe as hieroglyphic; its voluble and contrasted layout, which seems without beginning or end, is subject to unresolved forces and other bifurcations between the figurative and the abstract, and above all between writing and drawing— like an untimely refrain between the announcement of the title and the ambiguities of the image. Lady Apart and its clearly calligraphically inspired line includes within it a pharaonic eye (a reminiscence of the deity Horus), placed there ‘unseen

6 Carl Einstein, L’Art du XXe siècle [1931], trans. Liliane Meffre and Maryse Staiber, Paris: Jacqueline Chambon, 2011. As noted in the book’s introduction, “announced since the early 1920s, the book appeared in 1926, published by the Propylaën-Verlag, in Berlin”. 7 See ibid., p. 353. By limiting these principles to the frequentation of ‘oriental’ sources, Einstein tends rather to have recourse to a kaleidoscope of eclectic influences covering a north–south spectrum: “A new tectonic art would awaken often repressed memories of earlier tectonic currents: thanks to the present, Sumerian, ancient Greek and Byzantine art would draw closer to us. This is how present-day art enters history. A psychographical current would awaken ornamental memories and those of the Neolithic period, as well as the primitive art of northern Europe” (ibid., p. 351). 8 Hamed Abdalla did not read Einstein; on the other hand, their connection can be traced in an intertextual way through a whole body of writings on art, and in particular on Paul Klee (by Werner Haftmann, Gualtieri di San Lazzaro, Will Grohmann, and so on).



314 

 Morad Montazami

Fig. 1: Paul Klee, Lady Apart (Dame Abseits), 1940. Pigmented paste on paper on board, 64.8 × 50.2 cm, MoMA, NYC.

Fig. 2: Paul Klee, Monument im Fruchtland (Monument in Fertile Country), 1929, 41. Watercolor and pencil on paper on cardboard, 45.7 × 30.8 cm. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern.





From Speculative to Heretical Orientalism 

 315

Fig. 3: Paul Klee, Dynamisch polyphone Gruppe (Dynamic-Polyphonic Group), 1931, 66. Pencil and colored pencil on paper on cardboard, 31.5 × 48 cm. Private collection, Bern. Depositum in the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern.

and unknown’, well removed from any ostentatious symbolism. Monument in Fertile Country (fig. 2), produced in the same year as Klee’s Egyptian journey in 1929, acts, for its part, as a catalyst of ‘tectonic forces’, reminiscent of the many bas-reliefs, and pyramidal and stair-like structures observed by Klee in Egypt. The Monument, put beside Lady Apart, demonstrates the artist’s versatility, switching between linear composition and plane-based composition, which is to say, between the calligraphic gesture and the architectonic construct (a versatility peculiar to Arab-Islamic architecture, which includes calligraphic script on its walls). Lastly, Dynamically Polyphonic Group (fig. 3), produced in 1931, played a synthetic role—through its ‘metamorphic force’—precisely by combining the ubiquitous powers of the lines with the expansive powers of superposed planes; here again, however, while the composition cannot fail to call to mind the arabesques9 noted by Klee in the great mosques of Kairouan or

9 See Markus  Brüderlin, “L’art abstrait du  xxe  siècle, autour de l’arabesque,”  Perspective 1  (2010), http://journals.openedition.org/perspective/1238 (accessed December 4, 2018).



316 

 Morad Montazami

Cairo, it bears their anamorphic more than their geometric traces. It is indeed in this sense that, in Dynamically Polyphonic Group, Klee made it a point of honor to let a whole host of interlaced hybrid beings soar, like a floating signifier.

Abdalla in the Footsteps of Klee An artist hailing from Egypt and the Arab-Muslim world—mirroring Klee—would have proposed the most eloquent re-interpretation of this synthesis, underpinned by research that would have helped us to re-grasp—with hindsight and from an Egyptian viewpoint—the above-mentioned theoretical operations. At stake here is the invention, by Hamed Abdalla, of the ‘word-form’ (or ‘creative word’), like a scribe-alchemist composing through his paintings a half-scriptural, half-anthropomorphic alphabet. Each sign is generally displayed in the middle or at the heart of each canvas, and is deliberately confused between an Arabic word, a body in motion, and a purely abstract form (the 1975 painting Tamazuq represents the word ‘torn’ in a gestural form calling to mind that of a torn body, akin to the ellipses of Klee’s Lady Apart) (plate XXXI). It is as if the sacred message—and even more often with Abdalla, the political message—of the writing were hidden or curled up (in the most erotic sense of the term) in the speculative and hallucinatory outlines of bodies dancing, praying, groaning, and exulting beneath the outpourings of color and the rhythms of the paint. These latter create their own vibration against a background with complex textures speckled, folded, and cracked—a way of linking up with the ‘tectonic forces’ kindled in the 1920s with Klee, which with Abdalla were awaiting a reincarnation of their own origins in the visual Arab-Muslim and Mediterranean (as well as African) culture. But precisely where Klee’s Cryptogrammes (1934) cultivated pure esotericism, preferring the production of signs (and geometric variation) to meaning, Abdalla’s were made to be read in Arabic, and what is more, they tally with the great chapters of the political history of the Arab world (such as the Suez crisis, the Six Day War, and the Palestinian intifada). These are all echoed in paintings such as Al Harb (War) (fig.  4) from 1963, a highlight of this Arab Lettrism (called Hurrufiyyah in the Arab world) that symbolizes, through the word ‘War’, a bull or a god of war (which Abdalla associated with capitalism, imperialism, and Zionism), abandoned, in the immensity made of ashes and ruins—a reminder of the Palestinian Nakba of 1948. Between Abdalla and Klee there emerges a shared history of a form of dance, somewhere between writing and drawing, which through transcultural modernism found an initial synthesis with Klee, then another with Abdalla, implicitly revealing an almost ageless conflict between secularization and sacralization of the sign as a linguistic unit and a motif of cultural migration. Biographically speaking, Abdalla had already traveled a great deal, well before his more or less definitive departure for Denmark in 1956, and also just before Nasser 



From Speculative to Heretical Orientalism 

 317

Fig. 4: Hamed Abdalla, Al Harb (War), 1963. Mixed media on tissue paper and masonite, 130 × 250 cm. Hamed Abdalla estate.

took power in Egypt in 1952, dethroning King Farouk and symbolizing the affirmation of Cairo as the cultural and political center of the Arab world. It is from a purely local, or at least refocused, viewpoint that we can grasp what both connects and distinguishes Klee’s Egypt and Abdalla’s Egypt (which was not necessarily free of fantasies), which also means the Egypt of the 1930s and that of the 1950s. More precisely, we can do so by raising the question not of how Egypt was known by Europeans, such as Klee, who decided to travel there, but rather how Egypt became internationalized from within. If Klee clearly must have felt the colorful cosmopolitanism of Italians, French, Greeks, and Americans passing through Cairo, Abdalla for his part would have experienced the city’s rise and fall. He would have seen how that cosmopolitanism gradually buckled under the effects of pan-Arab nationalism and the Nasserite revolution, which worked for land reform for the peasants (fellahs) and against the feudal lords, but also led to the gradual impoverishment of the working classes, rural migration, full-on urbanization, the consolidation of the Arab League on the international scene, and, especially, the emergence of the anti-colonialist movement of non-aligned countries, in which Nasser took a leading role (alongside Tito, Sukarno, and Nehru) from the time of Bandung Conference in 1955. This was followed by the triumphant economic plans for the nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956 and the construction of the Aswan Dam, but also the cultural break with the West, the censorship of journalists and writers, and the opening of political prisons. All were so many milestones and markers in a transcultural history, opening up exchanges between ‘third world’ countries and European centers. Considering Klee as a ‘center’ seeing many re-interpretations overlap, as well as questions about his centrality by artists of the next generation, dispersed, it so happened, across different Arab territories. 

318 

 Morad Montazami

Those who summoned a cosmopolitan, internationalist (even in the militant sense of the word) imagination, but nevertheless reverted to Klee and to the context of late Orientalism, were often the same who were committed to clarify the challenges of signs and letters, and drawn writing.

The Plastic Letter as a Motif for a Transcultural Genealogy of Modernism Abdalla took inspiration from the letter and from writing—a symbol of civilization if ever there was one—a sensitive area with extraordinary visual power. This writing is the opposite of that which, under cover of a ban on images, tried to establish rules for the meaning of words. Abdalla’s writing was the product, in painting, of several registers of writing, from the most tangible to the most metaphysical (calligraphic writing, choreographic writing, talismanic writing), themselves conditioned by extremely (dizzyingly, we might say) varied visual media (from paint on papier mâché or on tissue paper to combustion as a principle of composition, and from relief print to watercolor). The essential point and more crucial issue for the ‘Abdalla’ chapter in the history of modern art, we might say, is henceforth the emancipation of writing. By this we mean writing not only as a gesture, but also as a social and symbolic activity (in a circular movement, writing is always both for oneself and addressed to a recipient). Through the celebration of writing in all its visual and plastic power, but also the freedom to take over writing, re-appropriate it, and demythologize it, the better to sublimate it, Hamed Abdalla joined a cluster of peers who were also concerned by this problem and this malaise in civilization: seeking a new language while linking up with ancient roots; a problem that might, to some extent, be limited to the so-called ‘primitivist’ tendency of the European avant-gardes. Apart from Klee, we can mention Jean Dubuffet and Henri Michaux in Europe, as well as the painters Charles Hossein Zenderoudi, Shakir Hassan al-Said, and Ahmed Cherkaoui, who, in countries as diverse as Iran, Iraq, and Morocco, dealt with a very different status of writing from the one experienced by their metropolitan counterparts: namely, one rooted much more strongly in a tradition of the book (the Koran and, more generally, calligraphy as a symbolic form). The book was an ever-lively and widely propagated source, one considerably more standardized and codified than Dubuffet’s engagement with the art produced by mentally unbalanced people, and the mescal-induced roaming of Michaux—though, in the end, no less digressive and transgressive. Hamed Abdalla’s case in this ‘Lettrist’ and ‘bookish’ art history (a cosmopolitan history, capable of a geographical dynamism that transcends national and colonial divisions) is undoubtedly one of the most exemplary, because of his pioneering character: he was a contemporary, in particular, of the Parisian Lettrist movement, whose founder, Isodore Isou, we might recall, was a Romanian exile during the Second World War. 



From Speculative to Heretical Orientalism 

 319

But even though Abdalla cultivated an intimate knowledge of sacred and mythological texts, backed up by a mastery of calligraphy, which he had practiced since childhood, his investigation of the letter was no less liberating and experimental than that of the heirs of Dadaism and especially Surrealism, with which Egyptian artists had been familiar since the 1930s (the generation of George Henein, Ramses Yunan, Kamel el-Telmessany, etc., and the activities of the group Art et Liberté). The difference was that Abdalla’s ties with Western modernism were closer to informal abstraction and the Cobra movement, probably the most intense (and transnational) seat of analytical deconstruction, one that refused to choose between figurative and abstract art (in this connection, we might highlight the importance of the letter and the bookish paradigm in the paintings of the artist Pierre Alechinsky, who was affiliated with Cobra). In the specific context of the post-Second World War avant-garde and of a Europe in ruins, this presented the risk of division between an increasingly open (progressive) definition of abstraction and an increasingly closed (conservative) definition of figuration. In the Egyptian and Afro-Arab context, it would take on a different connotation.

The Return of the Colonized, a Shared History It is clear yet the handwritten note, referred to in the introduction to this essay, has a more than slightly peremptory tone. By implicitly but gallantly asserting that it is not the ‘Oriental’ artist who undergoes the influence of Western modern art, but rather the European artist who draws on the sources of the ‘Orient’, it has the merit of radically upsetting the idea of the ‘Orientalist’ way of looking at things (the Orient created by the West) from a post-colonial perspective—the one adopted by the colonized subject to re-appropriate a cultural legacy with his own subjectivity—without being labeled as such. This is the source for a proposal that is once again more complex than it might seem, put forward by Hamed Abdalla, opposing the ‘detours’ through the Orient made by the Western artist, a form of return to sources per se: the Egyptian, the Arab, but above all the cosmopolitan artist. A return to sources intended to be neither naive, nor sanitary, nor even fetishist, but on the contrary, takes place in the sweat of his dialog with Klee ‘the Egyptian’. It is as if Abdalla—in search of the ‘true’ return to sources—were using Klee to rid himself of certain fantasies that he might cultivate with regard to his native land and his Egyptian culture, the better to realize that the return to sources is one of the (extremely malleable) methods of a return to self. Its primary virtue is to transform his own visual tradition into a ‘modern’ language, because it is transcultural, precisely where European Orientalism presents us with his tradition as ‘immemorial’, ‘folkloric’, and futureless. At stake here is a return to sources as a paradoxical process or twofold cultural transfer, where the subjectivity ‘rediscovered’ by artists hailing from colonized 

320 

 Morad Montazami

and westernized lands no longer proceeds by way of re-centering the same toward the other, but rather of the same toward the same (by way of the other): a process that many Arab artists and intellectuals, contemporaries of Abdalla—Abdelkebir Khatibi, Mohammed Khadda, Rachid Koraïchi—very clearly assume, by their deep-seated concern with freeing themselves from European schemes, while maintaining a dialog with them. It may be postulated that, for many artists hailing from North Africa, the post-independence and more generally post-colonial turning points involved negotiating a twofold system, one pedagogic, the other aesthetic: on the one hand, that of academicism and its ‘School of Fine Arts’, imported from France or Spain (to Cairo in 1908, and to Tetouan in 1945), which also spread through painting salons and ‘connoisseur’ circles, most of them colonizers, readily relegating local artists to the domain of folklore and so-called ‘naive’ painting.10 Hamed Abdalla, for his part, incarnated this factor all the better because he was not trained at the School of Fine Arts in Cairo, where a certain local artistic elite came into being, formed in the Western style. Instead he took the more marginal path of the autodidact, despite a solid training in calligraphy as a teenager, as well as a degree from the School of Decorative Arts in 1935; images of modern European art and Klee reached him mainly by way of the books filling the shelves of Cairo bookshops. The other system to be negotiated was that of late Orientalism; this stemmed, a fortiori, from the avant-gardes and not the elites, and not from the ‘Orient’, strictly speaking; and could also be found in Josef Albers’s fascination with the Aztec civilization. This is an Orientalism that was at once formalist and introspective, often resulting from self-analysis (especially in the case of Paul Gauguin and Paul Klee, for very different reasons); a way of collecting signs and translating the chromatic ‘palette’ of the country, its signs taking refuge in the nook of a gesture or a fragment of a myth, a sun’s ray slanting through a window, a plot of architecture (one thinks, in literature, of how Roland Barthes ‘reads’ Japan in his L’Empire des signes). In short, we could talk of a speculative Orientalism (to redefine the expression ‘late Orientalism’), which, once and for all, is no longer used to present and objectivize ‘the Arab’, ‘the Islamic’, and other fantasies of the Orient, but to explore subjectively the fluidity of a certain geo-cultural—or, to borrow Guy Debord’s term, psychogeographical11—boundary.

10 Let us, however, mention that in the case of Egypt, the local elites played just as significant a role as non-Egyptians in the origin of the salons and certain artistic circles. 11 This speculative Orientalism, in the visual field, loudly echoed the phenomenon of hybridness studied by Abdelkébir Khatibi in the literary field. Encompassing Aragon, Duras, Barthes, Ollier, Genet, and Segalen, he perceives in these authors a hijacking of the usual exotic clichés by way of an initiatory relation to the journey, bordering on self-analysis. See Abdelkébir Khatibi, Figures de l’étranger dans la littérature française, Paris: Denoël, 1987.





From Speculative to Heretical Orientalism 

 321

Arab Klee It is no coincidence that Hamed Abdalla’s attention, from this viewpoint, was focused more on the case of Paul Klee, whom some of his biographers have been pleased to nickname the ‘Little Arab’ with ‘deep Moorish eyes’12 or ‘brown Bedouin eyes’, despite the fact that he had a Swiss mother and a German father. Among these interpreters of Klee—read, underscored, and annotated by Abdalla in his library—some even use radicalized descriptions of Klee’s morphology to explain how a ‘distant Mediterranean origin’13 exaggerated the sensibility of this ‘half-Arab’ artist during his travels in North Africa: trips to Tunisia and Egypt anticipated by the Oriental tales read to him by his maternal grandmother to help him fall asleep.14 The monographs published about Klee in the 1950s and 1960s almost confront us with the construction of a myth about the ‘Arab Klee’. Far from taking these biographical mythologies at face value, Hamed Abdalla seems to have taken them as so many fictional levers to upset the Orientalist way of looking at things in favor of the Arab unconscious of Western modern art. In his research notes, he also highlights one or two Klee quotations, invariably reported by his interpreters, from the most famous to the most unexpected: somewhere between an Orientalist topos and speculative utopia based on a self that, for want of re-finding its deep-seated origins, learns how to give up its Western education—or, as we would say nowadays, ‘decolonize’ itself. If we usually recall his initiatory exclamation, alleged to have occurred when he visited the mosques of Kairouan in 1914: “I am possessed by colour. I no longer need to pursue it […] me and colour are just one. I’m a painter,”15 we should also not forget the lines from his diary, written in 1902: “I want to put myself in the position of the newborn baby, the most ignorant possible about Europe, nothing, no image, no expectations, in a state close to the origin.” Before long, Klee’s attraction to several iconographic cross-sources would be revealed, containing, for him, features of non-stereotypical creativity: children’s drawings, ethnographical objects, and popular art. Needless to say, he was not an isolated case, trying to approach a certain outsider art,16 although Klee was one of the few who seems to have demonstrated a capacity to orientalize himself rather than dream of the Orient—

12 Gualtieri di San Lazzaro, Klee, London: Thames and Hudson, 1964, p. 1, 80. 13 Ibid., p. 1. 14 Werner Haftmann, The Mind and Work of Paul Klee, New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1954, pp. 20– 21. 15 Will Grohmann, Klee, Paris: Flinker, 1954, p. 54. 16 In the 1910s, Kandinsky discovered the paintings on mirrors produced by Bavarian peasants; Picasso, Matisse, and Braque collected ‘African’ masks in flea markets and in small bric-à-brac shops; and Franz Marc was influenced by sculptures at the Ethnographical Museum in Berlin.



322 

 Morad Montazami

in the integration of transcultural dynamics—which explains his status as a fetish artist for a mind like that of Hamed Abdalla.17

Hieroglyphs, Talismans, and Tattooed Memory Abdalla invented—and never stopped using—many ways of extending the power of writing to the power of the image (and vice versa), instead of opposing or separating them, as was done by certain orthodox modernists who were in love with purity and minimalism, or by those who fetishized either the image or the text. His unlimited repertoire of mobile signs, spirit words, and other talismans overcame that border. It was as if the sacred message of writing were concealed or nestled (in the most erotic sense of the term) in the speculative, hallucinatory contours of a body dancing, praying, mourning, or rejoicing in the effusions of the colors and rhythms of the paint. The profane body of a dancing child or drunken individual (or even of a bent-over peasant or a couple making love) joins its contortions to the Arabic letter like a fingerprint— engraving and suspending the meaning at the same time. This is why Abdalla’s alphabet is also related to a bestiary worthy of writers such as Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino, who wanted to break down limits on language (to the point of mysticism) while bringing together encyclopedic knowledge, combining a taste for nomenclature with a taste for collections (or series). In this sense, words are treated as moving bodies that retain and reveal meaning, which also moves, since the word/concept (or the idea) is integrated into the mainly visual dynamic force field that Abdalla called ‘word-form’. This shows with renewed eloquence how the painting of signs or the art of Lettrism, as practiced by Abdalla, is close to the original collision of text and the body found in ancient memory games, which we could call, as Abdelkebir Khatibi did, the emanations of a ‘tattooed memory’, a memory that goes beyond the spoken word by turning writing into a rite of passage between the here-and-now and the hereafter, between desire and mourning, a bodily memory (we might even be tempted to say that Abdalla created a kind of Kama Sutra of the Arabic language). The Egyptian painter seems to be reflected perfectly in the words of the Moroccan writer, as if the two had known each other well: I wrote, an act without despair that was meant to conquer my sleep, my wandering. I wrote because it was the only way to disappear from the world, to cut myself off from chaos, to accustom myself to solitude. I believed in the destiny of the dead, so why not unite with the cycle of my eternity?

17 See also Michael Baumgartner, “Le Voyage de Paul Klee en Tunisie: un mythe de l’histoire de l’art,” Le voyage en Tunisie 1914. Paul Klee, August Macke, Louis Moilliet, Berlin: Zentrum Paul Klee, Hatje Cantz, 2014.





From Speculative to Heretical Orientalism 

 323

If Abdalla said “I painted ...”, as Khatibi said “I wrote ...”, it would not be so much an analogy between the painted image and the literary text as an analogy between the act of painting and the act of writing: in both cases, there is the same desire to find a higher consciousness amidst the drifting of the mind and the passage of time, to make oneself the tattoo artist/witness of a collective memory that lies under our feet and would be like the symbol of the separation between a Me-body and a Me-word. Imagine Abdalla having exactly the same dream as Khatibi: “I dreamed the other night that my body was words.” There is no more dazzling equivalent in the work of the painter/tattoo artist than his monument to dreaming and wandering—Al Sharida, a word that can be translated as ‘lost’ (in the sense of ‘lost in thought’) or ‘escaped’ (in the feminine) (plate XXXII). This imposing work with its outstanding conception consists of a system of wooden bas-reliefs with an architectural stature that allows the letters of the word ‘AL SHARIDA’ to be arranged like a dismembered body or a couple whose bodies are entwined (or sitting on each other), as Abdalla often suggested in many of his works. Al Sharida is a fine example of this research into the hybrid and the third sense, beyond the visual form and the form of language. It is even more evident here since the wandering or sleep of the spirit refers to what we do as readers/interpreters looking at the painting: we recognize the word written out ‘in full’ while letting ourselves wander through untold, unpredictable ramifications, as if the moment when we read the word and the moment when it escapes us (the moment when the letters seem to let go of each other or break free of their own meanings) were basically the same. For Abdalla, the only meaning is nomadic, like human nomadism, beginning with his own discontinuous journey across Africa and Europe. Al Sharida dates from 1966, when the artist left Denmark for France, a turning point marked by the return to forms even more ingrained in Egyptian and Arab identity. Edourad El Kharrat, in a remarkable text on Abdalla, was the first to speak about them as ‘Arabic hieroglyphics’, observing with keen insight the “expressionist treatment of Lettrism […] the dynamics of the letters, their inner movement and the incessant waves of their exuberance”.

The Body of the Letter Abdalla was a fine observer of major avant-garde advances, such as the ‘free words’ dear to the Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, but he was more concerned with encircling words with a halo so they would regain their lost aura—another way of expressing the purpose of his talismanic modernism. The talisman is an invisible grid that gives the word its plastic relief and metaphysical depth. It is activated as a spiral inside the word, darting into the impure space of ​​the material and the ideogram, an ideogram that is transformed under our eyes, abandoning calligraphy for a blind task and discontinuous, dismembered, even atomized writing. From 

324 

 Morad Montazami

that same radical movement, consisting of distorting the links between the letters of a word, stripping the language for the benefit of torn symbols, Abdalla foreshadowed many typographical innovations in relation to the Arabic ‘alphabet’. Typography is not just a given repertoire of symbols representing a language; it is also a reserve of meaning (and sounds) awaiting reincarnation. In this respect, the Arabic alphabet—which differs from the Latin alphabet in that it is foliated writing with letters that are joined together and no capitals (in the sense of the Western printing press)—goes against the very idea of ‘typography’ or detached letters. This is why Abdalla’s contribution to typographical and spatial uses of the Arabic letter goes far beyond the confines of the fine arts and the avant-garde, with which it is usually associated. The least one can say is that ‘typography’ for Abdalla is more about shapeless organic matter than a defined, recognizable symbol. Thus, Abdalla’s first act—beyond choosing a support for his work, which is rarely an entire canvas but more often surfaces and layers of paper put together or extended—is the act of separating the letter from the language (or separating the word from the sentence), as if to give it a new aura, a new space for expression. It is the act of excising language to emphasize a particular event or one that is imperceptible to the naked eye. If Abdalla’s greatness lies in his proposal to merge the being and the letter, like two sides of the same coin, it is to reveal better the function of the mirror, meaning that being can always find its salvation in the text, the source of all interpretations. And interpretations of the text themselves will win over minds when they also open to body language, the language of symbols, meaning in motion, which can operate on an architectural surface, in the ornamental grammar of Islamic traditions, in tapestry and mosaics, but also in musical composition or mathematics—related areas Abdalla used with an economy of means and a variety of admirable procedures. Ultimately, this sacred union of being and the letter is perfectly situated beyond the formalistic games of the European Lettrist movement, but it is close to the vitalist and political (or even anti-colonial) concerns of the Cobra movement. It perfectly represents Abdalla’s uniqueness in a trans-history of modern art beginning around the 1930s and that can be traced back to Klee.

Speculative Orientalism The hypothesis is not a new one, although it is subject to various reservations, whereby the great figures of the European avant-garde (Henri Matisse, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky), not content with having experienced the enormous influence of the Islamic arts and decorative arts stemming from other civilizations, such as Iran





From Speculative to Heretical Orientalism 

 325

and Egypt, drew on them, just as much as from the mainsprings of ‘abstract art’.18 It is a two-edged hypothesis, thus, in a way, implying that the revolution and tabula rasa peculiar to Western modern art came into being, in reality, in the arabesques from the other side of the Mediterranean (even from the Far East). The revolution of abstract art resulted from an essentially anachronistic and anatopic process in which, to borrow the words of the Moroccan artist Farid Belkahia, “tradition is the future of man.” The hypothesis made ahead of the co-writing of a modernist language between East and West is as intangible as it is revealing of possible worlds in a multi-vernacular history where the Mediterranean, but also the Silk Road, play the role of purveyors of animal, phantasmagorical, and political forms—where ornament, over and above being a simple graphic and ‘decorative’ arrangement of moveable images, is intended as a marker of intensities and penetrations of the human consciousness by way of plastic and cultural dynamics. Such a hypothesis, which again links up with the idea of speculative Orientalism, does not result from a simple network of influences still to be discovered. Here we find a remarkable fact that has not hitherto attracted a great deal of attention: in reality, it has its counterpart in the philosophy of (especially Anglo-American) Western art with authors such as Herbert Read, Clive Bell, and Roger Frye, who are all very present in Abdalla’s library and deserve to be re-assessed from this viewpoint. Supporting an existentialist philosophy of art, which simultaneously questions the history of techniques and that of subjectivity, their books written in the 1950s and 1960s (at the same time that Abdalla was engaging with Klee) present a rather colorful iconography for the post-war period, and the confirmation of Western modernism and its dominance. Informed by transversal transgressions, running counter to admitted historical periods and iconographic traditions, this iconography might call to mind Malraux’s Museum Without Walls project and his more or less colonial universalism. It does not hesitate, for example, to present a 10th-century BCE Chinese bronze animal with motifs of Egyptian pottery and an abstract painting by the American artist Mark Tobey produced in 1953—a painter close to the calligraphic gesture and a certain ‘Oriental’ unconscious that might easily prop each other up. But it stands apart from Malraux insomuch as the iconological transfers involved stem less from a fetishism of human genius, inherited from the Enlightenment, than from authentic genealogical research where the concepts of ‘life’, ‘experience’, and ‘consciousness’ are all catalyzed by medium-inspired, tectonic, and cosmogonic dynamics (closer, in this sense, to Henri Focillon, Aloïs Riegl, and Aby Warburg than to Malraux).

18 “In the end, Islamic art was to have a huge influence on early 20th-century painters, such as Auguste Macke, Wassily Kandinsky, Henri Matisse, and Paul Klee; after playing the part, for many decades, of decorative props in pictures, it would lie at the root of abstract painting.” Notes made by Abdalla in Lynne Thornton, The Orientalists: Painter-Travellers, 1828–1908, Paris: ACR Edition International, 1983.



326 

 Morad Montazami

The status of the ‘Orient’, both in this literature and this store of images, still needs analyzing. Once light has been shed on this ‘library secret’ (as Michel Foucault would say, in relation to the works consulted by Flaubert to create the bestiary of his St. Anthony), in order to complete the whole journey, it will still be necessary to grasp these challenges from their rootedness in the thinking and praxis of pioneer modernists, in Iran, Morocco, and Egypt. This is the case with Hamed Abdalla. His whole oeuvre, as well as his archives, attest to these transcultural genealogies, made up of studies about the European avant-gardes (but also about the writings of Herbert Read and Roger Frye), forays into a historiography of the modern art of Arab and Mediterranean countries, the political history of post-colonial independence, and genealogical research into formal kinships from antiquity up to the present day—where ‘abstract art’ works almost like the interface between all these fields.

Archival Gestures, Reediting Modernism Let us take an example that is at least unusual in the Paul Klee ‘file’ in Hamed Abdalla’s archives, where the German artist and the Egyptian artist are hand-to-hand. In fact, Abdalla carefully kept a reproduction of Klee’s work The Drummer, 1940 (fig. 5). But when Abdalla looked at the drummer, that monocular figure, ‘in the eye’, what precisely did he see? He saw one eye, not two; he possibly thought he saw two arms, dismembered and arranged rather like two armless sticks, like a mummy-drummer (in the same sub-file Abdalla also kept reproductions of cat mummies, from ancient Egypt, dating to about 700 BCE, held in the British Museum, London). Abdalla probably heard the sticks beating with or without arms. But could he say that the sound of the drum was that of jazz drums rather than that of an Egyptian derbouka? On a loose sheet of paper, where Abdalla photocopied the reproduction of The Drummer so as to be able to handle it more easily, he therefore endeavored to ‘retouch’ Klee (fig. 6). By partly erasing the image with white paint, blue-penciling it to keep just a congruous part, but nevertheless trying to reveal to himself the kernel of the work, Abdalla reworked the drummer like a letter of the alphabet; the sound of the drum seems from now on to pass through the mouth. Furthermore, it draws close to the mummy while continuing to suggest a certain swing-like motion—drawing a monogram, a secret formula, buried in Klee’s initial work like its tattoo. Then Abdalla proceeded to make a second experiment, on another sheet of paper (fig. 7). In this new variation, involving the removal of the drummer, the arm-eye is rendered suppler to suggest the appearance of an arabesque; the eye is dilated and ‘re-becomes’ Egyptian and Pharaonic. In parallel with the work on this writing-drawing in which he re-arranges Klee, Abdalla passes by way of the study of a diagram of decorative motifs, from the Amerindian Haida people, living between Canada, the United States, and Alaska. As is explained in Leonard Adam’s book Primitive





Fig. 5: Paul Klee, Paukenspieler (Kettledrummer), 1940, 270. Colored paste on paper on cardboard, 34.6 × 21.2 cm. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern.

From Speculative to Heretical Orientalism 

 327

Fig. 6: Reproduction of Paul Klee’s The Drummer, reworked by Abdalla, 1950s. Hamed Abdalla archives.

Art,19 found in Abdalla’s library, the Haida Indians are past masters in the art of hybridization and imaginary beings. Diagrams kept by Abdalla show depictions of fur seals and eagles, composed of dismembered physical assemblages (arms, legs, jaws, heads, and ‘eye-ornaments’) that in every way resemble the surrealists’ cadavres exquis. We can see that it is this cultural diagram, on the face of it a very long way from Abdalla’s Egypt, that gives the latter the clue to re-Egyptianizing Klee—as if Klee had traveled along the shores of the Pacific and Alaska, before plunging from the banks of the Nile and the shores of the Red Sea—one detour begetting another. From these geo-cultural ambiguities and these phenomena of formal ambivalence, Abdalla seems to derive an almost clinical picture of the Orientalism peculiar to Western modern art; by way of a reformulated/re-appropriated image of this Orientalism, Klee’s Drummer, according to Abdalla, seems to be telling us not about his ‘authentic’ origin, but rather his origin in the making, and in decline. This phe-

19 Leonard Adam, Primitive Art, London: Penguin Books, 1954. Hamed Abdalla archives.



328 

 Morad Montazami

Fig. 7: Reproduction of Paul Klee’s The Drummer, reworked by Abdalla, 1950s. Hamed Abdalla archives.

nomenon of the return to self via the mirror corresponds to a whole genealogy of artists from the Arab, African, and Asian continents: artists of the succinctly named ‘modern’ period (by the ‘We’ of Western museums), who have learned about the strategies arising in their European alter egos when they happened to appropriate the elements of their culture. The plastic and theoretical experiences resulting from these transfers, which are only partly unconscious, perhaps show precisely where modern art studies would benefit from being re-directed—toward this phenomenon that still remains to be completely defined and studied, and that we could provisionally call heretical Orientalism.



Avinoam Shalem

The Transformative Museum. Why We Need an Other Museum for the Arts of Islam1 From that twofold root participation and fiction—art draws its power to enlarge our vision by carrying us beyond the actual, and to deepen our experience by connecting it with the real, but it brings with it a persistent oscillation between actual and vicarious experience. Words broadcasted by the Oxford art historian Edgar Wind (died September 17, 1971) in one of his acclaimed lectures forming part of a six‐part series given on the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1960.2

Setting the Stage In 1957, Josep María Castellet wrote his famous book La hora del lector (‘The reader’s hour’),3 in which he put forward the creative role of the reader. This innovative text reformed the field of literature and literary criticism. Castellet shifted our focus. He suggested that our vein of reading, searching for meaning in, and interpreting aesthetic works should be focused, first and foremost, on the position the reader takes. A few years later, in 1962 (the year Castellet’s book was translated into Italian), Umberto Eco took up the same approach and further crystallized it in his Opera aperta (The Open Work).4 Moreover, Eco strengthened the idea of the ‘open text’, an idea that goes beyond the traditional search for the absolute and single strand of meaning to suggest that texts are fields, in the sense of spaces, that activate society, mind, and life. Taking the field of semiotics and literature as my point of departure, I would like to argue in this chapter for the need for a radical and revisionist action: namely, for a rethinking

1 I would like to thank Chiara Cappelletto and Emmanuel Alloa for their inspiring discussions and exchanges of ideas, all of which contributed tremendously to this chapter. I would also like to thank the Getty Research Institute at the Getty Center in Los Angeles for providing me with excellent source material for the writing of it and for creating the ideal intellectual community in which to develop the topic. Special thanks goes to Dr. Boris Hars-Taschachotin, who read and commented on the first draft of this article. 2 “Edgar Wind Dies; Art Historian, 71,” The New York Times, September 18, 1971, https://timesmachine. nytimes.com/timesmachine/1971/09/18/79707379.html?action=click&contentCollection=Archives& module=LedeAsset®ion=ArchiveBody&pgtype=article (accessed January 18, 2019).  3 Josep María Castellet, La hora del lector, Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1957. 4 Umberto Eco, The Open Work [1962], trans. Anna Cancogni, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.

330 

 Avinoam Shalem

of museum collections and displays, and for a reframing of art historians’ investigations in the post-semiotic age.5 My concern here is to move beyond (if only for a while) art historians’ tendency to abandon their urge to suggest a specific time-and-space-related meaning for objects (a concern that has dominated semiotic discussions in both art history and literature for the past century or so) and to rediscover the tangible and emotional worlds of objects—the worlds that produce presences and feelings.6 Consequently, I would also like to move beyond the contemporary discourses about the agency of objects: namely, those based on and ‘regulated’ by Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency,7 which I think have contributed to an idolization of artifacts, and prompted art historians to focus on the animation of objects and their efficacy. Moreover, I would like to highlight the dynamic whereby objects of art invite their beholders to participate in them. In this sense, my aim is to move beyond the intrinsic ‘object’ quality of the object and to deal with the object’s relational quality. Building upon the idea of the ‘open’ work of art and accentuating the artifact’s polyvalent character—namely, its ability to operate differently within and according to the changing settings of its display or the different loci of its beholders—I would like to return to reading meaning in art. But my use of the word meaning as related to art operates in the sense of the importance and values of art as a trigger for evoking memories and thoughts, which contribute to our understanding of the past, the present, the existing environments, and who we are now. In addition, I would also like to downplay, to some extent, the prominent role artists, artisans, and patrons have played in making meaning from artifacts, and to add temporality to the so-called absolute presence of objects, namely, their seemingly unchanging physical character, which is usually linked to the specific materials from which they are made. In other words, I would like to suggest reading art as an unending process that is fully aware of the constant, albeit slow, changes that any work of art undergoes, and of the possible changes, from marginal to radical, in its immediate surroundings. This in-flux state of art collides with the ever-changing condition of the beholder’s cognitive and emotional state. Indeed, as Wind says in the passage quoted

5 Avinoam Shalem, “Epilogue: The Salerno Riddle. Some Reflection on Artifacts in Post-Semiotic Age,” The Salerno Ivories, Objects, Histories, Contexts, eds. Anthony Cutler, Francesca Dell’Acqua, Herbert L. Kessler, Avinoam Shalem, and Gerhard Wolf, Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2016, pp. 241–245. 6 On critical semiotic approaches, see Georges Didi-Huberman, “Before the Image, Before Time,” Compelling Visuality: The Work of Art in and out of History, eds. Claire Fargo and Robert Zwijnenberg, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003, pp.  31–44; W.J.T. Mitchell, “What Do Pictures Want?” and “The Surplus Value of Images,” in W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994, pp. 38–82; Hans Belting, “Image, Medium, Body: A New Approach to Iconology,” Critical Inquiry 31 (2005), pp.  302–319; on the presence of the object, see primarily Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004, especially pp. 1–20. 7 Alfred Gell, Art and Agency. An Anthropological Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.





The Transformative Museum 

 331

above, the aesthetic experience constantly moves between participation and fiction, thus creating a “persistent oscillation between actual and vicarious experience”. And yet, within these miscellaneous flows of different vectors, several intersections occur. These meeting points are moments of collusion and mark the sites of sudden collapses, in which we, the beholders, become responsive to the seemingly ‘motionless’ world of things that exists around us. Like Eco in his collected essays The Role of the Reader,8 and Roland Barthes in The Death of the Author,9 I wish to place the beholder in the foreground and in the focus of art interpretation, while keeping other aspects, concerning objecthood and the histories of making and techniques, in the background, so that the latter may be called to the fore when and if we, the active beholders, need them. Histories of art could be summarized briefly as the histories of us looking at ourselves while we look at art. Thus, art history can record the long path of our encounter with and our meaning-making of the visual because the conscious act of seeing cannot and should not be explained solely by optic science and theories of perception that focus on the anatomy of the eye. To some extent, this approach, which valorizes the beholder’s experience over other methodologies, recalls Wölfflin’s argument that the history of art is the history of seeing or, as I would put it, the histories of various seeings. Like Wölfflin, I would argue that seeing is a social and acquired habitus usually linked to cultural factors. Moreover, a change in seeing habits suggests a change of point of view.10 And, as Heinrich Wölfflin also warned us almost a century ago, “it goes without saying that seeing is not a mere mechanical act, but rather always emotionally contingent. A new meaning of the world crystallizes in each new mode of seeing.”11 I would like to widen the spectrum for giving meaning to works of art by rethinking artifacts through the eyes of their varied beholders; I would also like to underscore the importance of the in-flux state of objects and beholders in setting the stage for meaning-making with art. In this respect, it is important to ponder upon questions such as how this notion of ‘in-flux’ could bring about or revise curatorial practices and

8 Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. 9 Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author [1977], trans. Richard Howard, https://writing.upenn. edu/~taransky/Barthes.pdf (accessed February 6, 2019). 10 I am interested in seeing this from the standpoint of anthropological behavior and not as a neuroscientific, anatomical phenomenon. For the latter, see primarily John Onians, Neuroarthistory: From Aristotle and Pliny to Baxandall and Zeki, New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2007; see also Whitney Davis, “Neuro, Neuro, On the Wall: John Onians’s European Art: A Neuroarthistory,” Art History 41, no. 4 (2018), pp. 783–791. 11 Heinrich Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Das Problem der Stilentwicklung in der neueren Kunst, 5th ed., Munich: Hugo Bruckmann, 1921, p. xi (“Daß das Sehen nicht ein bloß mechanischer Akt ist, sondern seelisch bedingt bleibt, darüber ist doch kein Wort zu verlieren. ‘In jeder neuen Sehform kristalisiert sich ein neuer Inhalt der Welt”).



332 

 Avinoam Shalem

museum displays today, and which stories and histories should be told. And since, generally speaking, the museum as a public institute for art is squeezed between two main notions—the displaying of an artifact qua aesthetic object and the presenting of the object qua identity-marker and storyteller—it seems crucial to ask whether the museum can navigate between the two, and if so, how.

The Art of Beholding: Moving Between and Beyond Form and Content? We are discovering little by little all over again that what a thing means is not more important than what it is; that expression and form are equivalent challenges to the historian; and that to neglect either meaning or being, either essence or existence, deforms our comprehension of both.12 George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things, 1962.

Although in most of the world’s museums, the objects accumulated in depots outnumber those on display in showrooms, the architectural space that we call a ‘museum’ is more than just a room for the collection and careful storage of the artifacts of the past. As Svetlana Alpers argues in her groundbreaking article from 1991, it is a space that suggests “a way of seeing”.13 She goes on to say that the rationale of the museums was—and is, I might add—to create a space that encourages our attention to objects.14 Indeed, going to a museum is a deliberate choice, one in which we choose to invest time in looking at objects of art and reading the informative texts provided next to them. It is therefore time spent activating our attentive and observant gaze. It is true that our gaze directed at the visual world does not start or stop upon our entering or leaving the museum. But the public exhibition room is a space deliberately set up for this particular visual experience because it directs us to exercise our faculty of focusing (usually) on a single work of art, and to improve and refine our careful and attentive gaze on objects. In a museum, then, the gaze appears as an intensive, complex action involving our attentiveness to our senses and mind. In pulling together visual information originating in the artifact displayed and adding to it prior knowledge, memories, and even associations issuing from our particular interaction with this specific object, we ‘think’ the vision on display and rethink our thoughts.

12 George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things [1962], New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008, p. 115. 13 Svetlana Alpers, “The Museum as a Way of Seeing,” Exhibiting Cultures. The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, eds. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Levine, Washington D.C.: The Smithsonian Institution, 1991, pp. 25–32. 14 Alpers, “The Museum as a Way of Seeing,” p. 26.





The Transformative Museum 

 333

The art of curating exhibitions and organizing objects for display is about suggesting ways of seeing and knowing. The isolating of artifacts, their placement on pedestals, the transparent glass walls that keep them from being touched yet allow them to be clearly visible, and the spotlight directed at them, are all designed to support our assessment of their visual merits. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to comment critically on the museum effect that frequently divorces the exhibited object from its original cultural setting and transforms it into an art object susceptible to our own desires. I would like to leave aside the heated debate on the display of history and culture in museums and instead probe the consequences of the museum’s exhibiting praxis, specifically for the manifold and layered characters of the aesthetic experience in museums. Unpacking the aesthetic experience as it relates to our dialog with the exhibited object shows us the dynamic between the relational qualities of objects. Moreover, I would like to emphasize that although the whole sensuous process called aesthetic experience takes place within the cognitive domain of the active beholder, this activity is instigated by qualities embedded in the displayed object. Additionally, in bringing into discussion the act of reading the specific caption attached to each object—a further practice of the museum, about which less has been written—I would like to call attention to the enduring instability between form and content and to suggest that this unsteadiness also contributes to the in-flux state of the museum’s visitor and affects his or her aesthetic experience. While strolling through the rooms of any museum, we encounter hundreds of objects. Our eyes wander along the walls where objects are displayed, either hanging or arranged in groups on shelves behind glass. And yet in each room, a decision is made. In a matter of seconds, we decide, sometimes unconsciously, which object we want to approach first and to which object we wish to devote our primary—or at least initial—attention. What determines this course of action? What role do we play in the decision, and what role does the exhibited object play? Specific objects seem to beckon. Something about their material, shape, color, texture, or surface shine seems to provoke a reaction in us. The gamut of options of the object’s competence to induce is broad and can range from our familiarity with it to our feeling of alienation before it. At any rate, an attraction emerges. The objects want us to approach them, come close, and pay attention to their visual lure and understand their possible message; at least, it seems that way. And we, in an apparently free choice, choose a specific object in the room. We approach it as it lies there, silent in the showcase. When possible, we circle the display case or tilt our heads at different angles while collecting visual data about the different sides of the object. Then we turn our gaze to the caption. We read the written text in order to gain more information about the object. Part of this information, such as the description of form, material, and technique, confirms the knowledge gained through looking. But there is other information to be gleaned from the text on which the object remains silent. This information usually concerns the social and historical context of the object, and even its impact, artistic genealogy, and provenance. These labels usually take a descriptive or factual and informative approach 

334 

 Avinoam Shalem

to the object, as do the audio guides we might carry with us while viewing objects in the museum. In their sometimes exhaustive and detailed descriptions, they present the concept or method of controlling the visual power of objects through ekphrasis, the literary device for describing visuality. The text attached to the exhibited object thus belongs to our desire to order things within the system of social knowledge—or in other words, power. The processes of measuring, classifying, describing, drawing, or photographing objects, though totally restricted to the tangible aspects of the observed object, endow the viewer with the semblance of a scientific approach and with the feeling of control.15 At the same time, they establish the object at a fixed point within a series of degrees, such as its size, its point in time, and the aesthetic trend to which it belongs, all of which constitute a hierarchy. But here lies a paradox. On the one hand, there exists the museum’s educational wish to present the ‘real’ object as authentic visual-cultural evidence of a particular Zeitgeist, and to create, through our encounter with it, the sense of immediacy of a direct effect and a direct link to another place and time. On the other hand, there exists the curator’s wish to present the object as an object of observation, in which the beholder is kept aware of the objectiveness and the detached gaze that have been created around the displayed object, mainly through the image-making process that the object undergoes in the museum context. The image-making usually reduces the object’s three-dimensional presence to a two-dimensional one. This flattening act is often produced by hanging textiles, carpets, ceramics and even jewelry on walls like paintings, or arranging objects along a wall in an elongated display case so that only a frontal view is provided. And yet I would like to turn back to the form-and-content paradigm. Looking at objects and reading captions in museums fosters the creation of a specific zone between the text and the tangible object. The reading of labels and entries on each object in the museum cultivates an additional field of cognitive knowledge around artifacts. This knowledge is obtained by reading a text, or sometimes by hearing it transmitted by the audio guide. I am fully aware of the prevailing opinion among many art historians that the text–image grouping consists of two completely parallel vectors and that the object is guaranteed against any danger of flattening that the text may impose. But my interest lies in the dynamic between the text and tangible object. Metaphorically speaking, it is as though a membrane, a porous spongy substance, through which reflections seep, has been placed between caption and object. Thus,

15 It is beyond of the scope of this chapter to discuss the musealization and the making of objects into objects of observation and carriers of the burden of history. See Kavita Singh, “Material Fantasy: The Museum in Colonial India,” India: Art and Visual Culture, 1857–2007, ed. Gayatri Sinha, Mumbai: Marg Publications and Bodhi Art Gallery, 2009, pp. 40–57; Jenny Kidd (ed.), Challenging History in the Museum: International Perspectives, Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2014, especially Kidd’s introduction, pp. 1–17 (with useful bibliography).





The Transformative Museum 

 335

our aesthetic enjoyment results from a desire to collect these leaky constituents, especially those that escape the matrix of the sponge, because we tend to believe that the mystery of the object’s nature and identity is revealed in them.16 The different examples that I present below illustrate various levels of curatorial success achieved toward the creation of a productive zone between text and object in museums. Let me start with the worst-case scenario, namely, the total vanishing of the in-between zone. This is typified by the scenario in which the beholder encounters an object in the room of a museum, reads its associated caption, and then simply moves on to the next object. In this case, the caption appears to explain the object that we are looking at in such a manner that no further observation is required. This is the worstcase scenario because it underscores the commonly accepted priority of words over image for transmitting information. The caption should serve as a trigger, calling our gaze back to the object, so that we may glean further knowledge by looking. Is it not the museum’s objective to transmit knowledge via the visual path? Another possible scenario is one where the caption transmits information that does not explain the visual force of the object—for example, its puzzling shape or the odd image depicted on it. This situation usually arises when the caption is limited to scanty details about the artifact’s material, measurements, technique, and date and place of manufacture. This type of information, which I tend to call the ‘travel-document file’, functions in exactly the same way as our passport at the immigration desk. We read the information attached to this object and thus confirm that the object described is the one that we are viewing. I emphasize this notion of the museum’s ‘travel-document’ caption because I think that even information about date and place of origin are simply checked and confirmed by comparing the data given with the object’s veneer and/or its particular shape and décor. Thus, the possibility of suggesting more context for the displayed object, a context that could enlarge our understanding of the object’s long history or the aesthetic impulse that it triggers, is reduced to a quiz-like exercise of checking and approving text and object, of validating the latter’s credentials. In the last example, I would like to illustrate a productive caption–object situation. In this situation, the ‘tension’ between the (silent) object on display and the (informative) text attached to it can open a zone for contemplation based on the elasticity built up between the physical and cognitive domains of explanation. The museum appears, therefore, as an important space that nurtures our relations to objects and enriches our visual experiences of ‘reading’ objects and texts in a dual manner. Furthermore, elaborating on the object–caption dynamic, I would like to call attention to the largely forgotten fact that visiting any museum always consists of two activities: looking at objects and reading texts.

16 Shalem, “Epilogue: The Salerno Riddle,” p. 33.



336 

 Avinoam Shalem

As I argued above, our first encounter with objects in museums is normally a visual one. It is rooted in the object’s aura and the magnetism of its specific material or form, which, as I have said, correspond to the specific interests and desires of the beholder. The object seems to activate a form of sensory memory that produces thoughts and associative links, and that enhances a sort of pleasant reverie. Responsiveness is established between a beholder and a work of art. However, at a certain point, when our curiosity about the object can no longer be satisfied from attentively looking at it, we turn our gaze to the caption. Our first reaction when reading the information provided involves confirmation. We tend to experience satisfaction upon confirming that the facts given about the object’s materiality, technique, or even place and date of manufacture match what we had surmised. But then further information in the caption prompts an added level of interest. It provides us with something that we have not yet considered, and, more importantly, it compels us to view the object a second time. In frequent cases, the text clearly instructs us to look at a specific detail, thus directing our gaze back to the object. This movement back and forth between text and artifact contributes to the sense-making activity that the beholder performs in relation to the aesthetic experience in the museum. This activity, in turn, ensures that while we experience sensation bodily, we retain an observational and analytical stance in our (rational) mind. One of the great advantages of any museum for the arts of Islam is the fact that many of the objects housed in them carry inscriptions on their surfaces. These inscriptions can prove as informative as the museum’s captions. They often tell us the names of the patron and the artisan, and sometimes even the date and place of manufacture. In some cases, they cite poetic texts, aphorisms, or sacred verses from the Quran. Whatever the case may be, these inscriptions form part of the object’s overall decoration pattern.17 Thus, no clear division seems to manifest itself between text and image, nor at times even between text and form.18 The aesthetic experience involves the act of looking, as well as that of reading. The eye of the beholder travels along the lines of

17 On calligraphy in the lands of Islam see primarily: Franz Rosenthal, “Significant Uses of Arabic Writing,” Ars Orientalis 4 (1961), pp.  15–23; Annemarie Schimmel, Islamic Calligraphy, Leiden: Brill, 1970; Martin Lings, The Quranic Art of Calligraphy and Illumination, London: World of Islam Festival, 1976; Yasin H. Safadi, Islamic Calligraphy, London: Khalili Gallery, 1978; Yasser Tabbaa, “The Transformation of Arabic Writing: Part I, Qur’anic Calligraphy,” Ars Orientalis 21 (1991), pp. 119–148, and vol. 24 (1994), pp. 119–147; Sheila S. Blair, Islamic Calligraphy, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006; and the work by Alain George, The Rise of Islamic Calligraphy, London: Saqi Books, 2010. 18 I refer here to specific objects that are designed as words; see, for example, the Sufi derwish staff (datable to 18th- or 19th-century Iran) crowned by the words Allah and ya ‘Ali (Oh, Ali) at the Museum of Five Continents in Munich: for the image and a discussion of these type of objects, see Avinoam Shalem, “If Objects Could Speak,” The Aura of the Alif, ed. Jürgen Wassim Frembgen, exhibition catalogue, Völkerkunde Museum, Munich, Munich: Prestel, 2010, pp. 127–147, for the image see fig. 75.





The Transformative Museum 

 337

Fig. 1: 10th-century Nishapur bowl, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, Rogers Fund, 1965 65.106.2. Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

the elegantly designed letters. The curves and angular corners of the letters dictate a particular tempo for the reading and observing of the object.19 In some cases, vegetal motifs and figures feature alongside or even inside these curved letters, lending the inscription a sense of vividness and vibrancy, so much that it seems alive. A case in point is the 10th-century Nishapur bowl housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City (fig. 1).20 Located in the room at the very entrance to the galleries devoted to ‘Islamic’ art, namely, the Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia, the information plate ‘welcomes’ all

19 Sheila Blair, “Why Read Inscriptions,” Islamic Inscriptions, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998, pp.  3–17. For the idea that the reading of inscriptions on objects dictates our holding and turning of the objects in our hands, see Sheila S. Blair, “What the Inscriptions Tell Us: Text and Message on the Ivories from Al-Andalus,” Journal of the David Collection 2, no. 1 (2005), pp. 75–99. 20 Rogers Fund, 1965 65.106.2. See Masterpieces from the Department of Islamic Art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, ed. Maryam D. Ekhtiar et al., New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art Press, 2011, pp. 108–110 (cat. no. 67).



338 

 Avinoam Shalem

visitors to this space.21 The ceramic dish is covered with a thin white and shiny glaze, which possibly imitates the fine white texture of Chinese porcelain. Our gaze, by following the curved and angular lines of the various Arabic letters, also retraces the slow and confident movements of the calligrapher’s hand. The aesthetic experience of reading and following the fine lines of the letters appears to disclose the process whereby the inscription was painted. We thus follow the hand of the calligrapher, as though taking part in the decoration of the dish. The inscription encircles the plate, accentuates its borders, and carefully encloses the central inner space. Our eye wanders along this script, moving from right to left as we read it. For those visitors who can read the inscription, a silent voicing of the Arabic words adds to the pleasure of the eye as it completes its journey along the contours tracing out the plate’s circular silhouette; it is as though the sounds of words are capable of drawing a circle. Sound and vision are artistically intermingled, and the poles of the image—text relationship, usually understood in terms of meaning and form, are united. One of the more creative approaches to the display of the arts of Islam in a manner that transgresses the common Western aesthetic experience of looking as a divided modus operandi was taken by the German artist Berkan Karpat (born in Istanbul in 1965). In his exhibition “Ich esse Licht” (‘I eat light’), which ran from November 2006 through February 2007 in the museum Kunst-Palast in Dusseldorf,22 Karpat was able to move beyond the common visual praxis of museum displays and present the holy book of the Quran as a device that can be sensed through touch, sound, and even taste. The Qurans were displayed inside transparent hemispherical domes and placed on circular metal plates, positioned slightly above floor level. In a manner reminiscent of the Quran reciter’s lowered position in a mosque, visitors were directed to sit on the floor while looking at the Qurans. The sound of the specific verses shown in the open pages of the Qurans was transmitted into the hemispherical containers, enabling the visitors to hear and sense the vibrations of the ‘voice’ of the Quran by resting the palms of their hands on the dome-shaped covers. The vibrations of the recited verses were then transmitted into a mechanical apparatus, which incised the words of the Quran onto transparent Perspex (figs. 2–3). At the same time, these vibrations were

21 On the specific detailed and geographically oriented name of the galleries dedicated to ‘Islamic’ art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, see primarily Nasser Rabbat, “What’s in a Name,” Artforum, January 2012, http://artforum.com/inprint/id=29813. Michael J. Lewis, “Islam by Any Other Name,” http:// www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Islam-by-any-other-name-7225. Jörg Häntzschel, “Nicht jede Glaskaraffe hat religiöse Bedeutung: Umbenannt, umgebaut: Die ‘islamische’ Kunst im Metropolitan Museum in New York in völlig neuer Präsentation,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, November 21, 2011, p.  12; Wendy Shaw, “The Islam in Islamic Art History: Secularism and Public Discourse,” Journal of Art Historiography 6 (2012), pp. 1–34, especially pp. 10–13, see https://arthistoriography.files.wordpress. com/2012/05/shaw1.pdf. 22 See https://artmap.com/museumkunstpalast/exhibition/berkan-karpat-2006 (accessed January 24, 2019) and http://www.karpat.de/portfolio/museum-kunstpalast/.





The Transformative Museum 

 339

Fig. 2: Berkan Karpat, “Ich esse Licht”, Kunst Palace, Dusseldorf, November 2006–February 2007, Quran enclosed in a transparent dome.

also transmitted to a large water basin, which caused the water to vibrate according to the rhythm—or, rather, the pulses—of the recited words. The water would start to tremble as soon as the recitations were heard, causing perfectly concentric waves and soft undulations to appear on the fluid surface. The visitors could then drink the water if they so desired. Beholders were thus presented with the sacred aspect of the holy Quran as the ‘transfiguration’, or rather transubstantiation, of the words of Allah into human voice and its systematic codification into Arabic letters. In addition, the sense of sacredness of the Quran, which is usually transmitted by bodily touch and in some cases even by digestion, was also achieved.23 Karpat says: “I believe that we find an approach to the aesthetics of Islam— perhaps even a new aesthetic—as we listen to its poetic power; if we explore the

23 On this aspect, see Travis Zadeh, “Touching and Ingesting: Early Debates over the Material Qur’an,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 129 (2009), pp. 443–466; Finbarr Barry Flood, “Bodies and Becoming. Mimesis, Mediation, and the Ingestion of the Sacred in Christianity and Islam,” Sensational Religion Sensory Cultures in Material Practice, ed. Sally M. Promey, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014, pp. 459–493; Heather Coffey, “Between Amulet and Devotion: Islamic Book Miniatures in the Lilly Library,” The Islamic Manuscript Tradition: Ten Centuries of Book Arts in the Indiana University Collections, ed. Christiane Gruber, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010, pp. 79–115.



340 

 Avinoam Shalem

Fig. 3: Berkan Karpat, “Ich esse Licht”, Kunst Palace, Dusseldorf, November 2006–February 2007, words of the Quran being incised on Perspex.

sound-substance out of the works again and listen to it in a poetic and not binary, dialectic sense, otherwise its spiritual humanity breaks down, the bridge, which one proceeds in this way over the hearing, is as thin as a hair and so sharp as a sword.”24 Karpat’s words are interesting. He is fully aware of the crucial need for a new curatorial technique for transmitting what may amount to a new aesthetic, which exceeds the usual binary and dialectic sense of things. This is exactly the point of collapse between object and text, form and meaning, around which certain artifacts from the lands of Islam are aesthetically situated. These objects embody a particular agency that transcends the dialectic between form and meaning; as such, they actively call for other ways of seeing. Karpat’s last remarks also deal with the poetic and metaphoric aspect of display. His imagery, which portrays our movement along the bridge connecting the senses to the mind as being thin as a hair and sharp as a sword, is an

24 “Ich glaube, dass wir einen Zugang zu einer Ästhetik des Islam wiederfinden—vielleicht sogar zu einer neuen Ästhetik—, wenn wir seiner poetischen Kraft zuhören; wenn wir die Klangsubstanz wieder aus den Werken explorieren und ihr in einem poetischen und nicht binären, dialektischen Sinne zuhören, sonst zerbricht seine spirituelle Humanität: Die Brücke, die man auf diese Weise über das Hören beschreitet, ist dabei so dünn wie ein Haar und so scharf wie ein Schwert.” See https://artmap.com/ museumkunstpalast/exhibition/berkan-karpat-2006.





The Transformative Museum 

 341

allusion to Muslim traditions about scenes from the apocalypse on the Day of Resurrection (yawm al-Qiyamah) or Judgment Day (yaum al-Din).25 In putting forward these visual examples, what I would like to emphasize is how the distinction between form and meaning triumphs and how it decisively dictates our way of seeing and thinking about objects in the museum. My point here is by no means a revisionary claim, nor a radical request for revision. I simply would like to make us aware of dichotomies in our thinking about objects.26 Like Kubler, I would argue that “what a thing means is not more important than what it is” and that “neglecting either meaning or being, either essence or existence, deforms our comprehension of both.”27 The ‘Islamic’ object, whose surface bears calligraphic text, poetry, and historical data, seems to blur this dichotomy; it seems to upset the hierarchy that regulates the power of meaning over form, and to unite meaning by presenting a possibility in which meaning takes form and form is meaning. It is tempting to conclude this excursus by citing the reflections of Benedetto Croce on form and meaning: “It is true that the content is that which is convertible into form, but it has no determinable qualities until this transformation takes place. We know nothing about it. It does not become aesthetic content before, but only after it has been actually transformed.”28 But lest we forget, our experience with the museum’s widespread mode of display, which mainly concerns education and the transfer of knowledge, keeps us in a state of flux by virtue of the movement between object/ image and words. This instability, or rather this mutable state, in which we, the beholders, might find ourselves when standing before the object and its caption/text, should provide the ideal space of inspiration for sensing and thinking about artifacts.

Poetics of Display The poetics of display mentioned briefly by Karpat is, of course, a subject that goes beyond the particular display of the arts of Islam. This notion underscores the need to supplement the exhibition praxis that we tend to encounter in museums today with further components. This might involve outfitting these public spaces with additional

25 See also the work of Berkan Karpat, Quranic Installations, http://www.karpat.de/portfolio/ weitung-2/ (accessed January 24, 2019). 26 This point is deeply rooted in our fundamental division between material and ideal, and was crystallized in the early modern era by philosophical discussions of the sublime. Tempting though it may be to delve into these discussions, they are beyond my area of expertise. 27 Kubler, The Shape of Time, p. 115. 28 Benedetto Croce, Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic, trans. from Italian by Douglas Ainslie, London: MacMillan and Co., second edition, 1922, p. 16.



342 

 Avinoam Shalem

agencies that go beyond the scientific, detached gaze, and other attendant aspects of subjective interpretation, in order to encourage or evoke more refined emotions. Let me open this discussion of the poetic display with a quotation from Muhammad b. Zakariya al-Razi, a 9th-century Arab philosopher (854–932 CE): “When beautiful pictures also contain, apart from their subject, beautiful, pleasant colors—yellow, red, green and white—and the forms are reproduced in exactly the right proportions, they heal melancholy humors and remove the worries to which the human soul is prone, as well as gloom of spirits. For the mind is refined and ennobled by the contemplation of such pictures.”29 The idea that particular colors and substances can heal or provoke specific feelings and sentiments is too broad to be discussed here.30 The history of medicine is full of examples that support this belief. Moreover, I am inclined to add to this aspect the numerous examples of beholders crying, feeling transported or elevated, or even falling in love while looking at specific works of art, such as the 12th-century poem by Nizami about Shirin looking at the image of Khosraw, or Oscar Wilde’s story about Dorian Gray falling in love with his own image.31 It is clear that the gaze is something that transcends the biological realm of optics and defies investigations conducted on a purely physical basis.32 The gaze affects the body and influences the mind and behavior. It can, indeed, transform one’s way of thinking. The power of the gaze is perhaps best exemplified in the strong effect it can exert on the body in the context of the pornographic image, a visual phenomenon still largely neglected by most art historians.33 Although it mainly concerns the art historian’s gaze, the following quotation might help us sharpen our inquiry in relation to the emotional and sensitive gaze, and thus enrich our discussion about two general modes of gazing at art. The quotation appears in an interview with Willibald Sauerländer published in The Brooklyn Rail in

29 Franz Rosenthal, The Classical Heritage in Islam, trans. Emile and Jenny Marmorstein, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975, p. 266. 30 On colors in Islam, see Jonathan Bloom and Sheila Blair (eds.), And Diverse Are Their Hues: Color in Islamic Art and Culture, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011; see also the medieval account about the power of golden pictures to bring relaxation to those looking at them, in Franz Rosenthal, Four Essays on Art and Literature in Islam, Leiden: Brill, 1971, p. 7. 31 For Nizami’s poem, see primarily Christoph J. Bürgel, Chosrou und Schirin: Nizami, Zurich: Manesse Verlag, 1980; Julie Scott Meisami, Medieval Persian Court Poetry, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987; Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray [1890], London: Dover, 1993. 32 For other medieval examples on the transformative power of looking at art, see Franz Rosenthal, Four Essays on Art and Literature in Islam, Leiden: Brill, 1971, especially p. 7. 33 See Milton D. Heifetz, Sexuality, Curiosity, Fear, and the Arts: Biology of Aesthetics, New York and Washington, D.C.: Peter Lang, 2001, esp.  pp.  15–24. On distinguishing between art, eroticism, and pornography, see Hans Maes, “Drawing the Line: Art Versus Pornography,” Philosophy Compass 6, no.  6 (2011), pp.  385–397. See also Mitchell B. Merback, Perfection’s Therapy: An Essay on Albrecht Dürer’s Melancolia I, New York: Zone Books, 2017, especially pp. 77–120; Desmond Collins and John Onians, “The Origins of Art,” Art History 1, no. 1 (1978), pp. 1–25.





The Transformative Museum 

 343

2010: “We have to ask ourselves what is looking? Is looking a strictly visual process or is it a deep, emotional process? We should test and totally absorb the emotional process in front of a work of art and then, as art historians, we should undergo the critical task of asking ourselves whether the emotional impact of the art is identical with the historical, or original, mission of the object. One must ask oneself what the tension between these two things is and then bring them together.”34 Sauerländer clearly distinguishes between the emotional and the critical gaze. Of course, his particular point of view as an art historian interested in the specific historical moment of the art object’s production dictates his focus on the assessment of its emotional impact vis-à-vis its original mission. But whether or not we accept Sauerländer’s reduction of the act of looking to a checks-and-balances system of comparison with emotions arising from the original mission of the artifact, his position is to be questioned because it valorizes the specific method of art historical inquiry. Yet the art historian’s aesthetic experience is similar to that of any beholder in the sense that the emotional gaze dictates our initial behavior in front of the object. It is empathic behavior that initially creates a bridge between us and the object of our gaze. It is rooted in our emotional memory and personal associative world of images and feelings. The second stage, which according to Sauerländer involves the art historian’s critical gaze, provides the space for the beholder’s contemplative observation. The establishing of a primary emotional bond between beholder and artifact is a refined moment. It is as if our entire rich, complex world of emotions is purified, as if it is cleansed and distilled through a fine membrane into a specific disposition. Like the purification ritual performed by the priest before the altar, this filtration process prepares us to participate in the particular aesthetic adventure that the art object offers. To some extent, the impact of this emotional moment can be compared to the enchantment of poetry—the power of truthful words and precise metaphors to capture moments of fleeting visions and feelings in literary expression. It is interesting to ponder on the strong link between the visual and the poetic found in the arts of Islam. In addition to the many poetic inscriptions, which form part of the decorative programs of objects, the courtly habit of presenting artifacts as gifts also usually involved the rhyming of specific poetic verses.35 Let me illustrate this link with a few examples. The following verses are inscribed on an ewer dated 1181–1182, now housed in the National Museum of Arts of Georgia in Tiflis. These poetic verses illustrate the joy of looking at the beauty of the object and incite the beholder to look at it, and observe its

34 “In Conversation: Sasha Suda with Willibald Sauerländer,” The Brooklyn Rail, February 3, 2010, https://brooklynrail.org/2010/02/art/willibald-sauerlnder-with-sasha-suda. 35 Avinoam Shalem, “What Do Inscriptions Do? Beyond Calligraphy and Textual History,” Pearls on String, Artists, Patrons, and Poets at the Great Islamic Courts, ed. Amy Landau, exhibition catalogue, Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, Washington DC, 2015, pp. 15–21.



344 

 Avinoam Shalem

specific parts, while it is in use. In this way, poetry structures and navigates aesthetic experiences. The verses read: My beautiful ewer, pleasant and elegant, In the world of today who can find the like? Everyone who sees it says “It is very beautiful”. No-one has found its twin because there are no others like it. Glance at the ewer, a spirit comes to life out of it, And this is living water that flows from it. Each stream which flows from it into the hand Gives each hour new pleasure. Glance at the ewer, which everyone praises; It is worthy to be of service to such an honoured person as you. Everyone seeing how moisture flows from it Is able to say nothing which is not appropriate to it.36

The poem seems to provide the beholder with considerable information about the uniqueness of the ewer, including its aesthetically inspired form, its function, and its ownership. The fact that the beholder is addressed twice by the repeated command “glance at the ewer” accentuates the activating character of the poetic verses, which call on the viewer to interact with the artistic object. The verses develop a dynamic between the viewer and the object, establishing intimacy between the two and bringing into action the seemingly dormant intermediary zone between word and object, which is similar to the zone activated between caption and artifact in the exhibition hall of the museum. A comparable maneuver that directs the beholder’s mind in relation to the object can be found in the poetic verses carved in Kufic script on the lid of the cylindrical ivory pyxis dated 966 and made by Khalaf.37 The verses address the beholder as follows: “The sight I offer is of the fairest, the firm breast of a delicate maiden. Beauty has invested me with splendid raiment that makes a display of jewels. I am a receptacle for musk, camphor, and ambergris.”38 The cylindrical pyxis seems to address the

36 Cited in Rachel Ward, Islamic Metalwork, London: British Museum Press, 1993, p. 77. 37 For this casket, see Ernst Kühnel, Die islamische Elfenbeinskulpturen, Berlin: Deutscher Verlag für Kunstwissenschaft, 1971, pp. 36–37, cat no. 28, plates. XII–XIV; Richard Ettinghausen and Oleg Grabar, The Art and Architecture of Islam 650–1250, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1987, p. 152; see also Doris Behrens-Abouseif, Beauty in Arabic Culture, Princeton: Markus Wiener, 1999, p. 130; Kjeld von Folsach and Joachim Meyer (eds.), Journal of the David Collection 2, no. 2 (2005), p. 322, cat. no. 14; Heather Ecker, Caliphs and Kings: The Art and Influence of Islamic Spain, Washington, D.C.: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and Freer, 2004, pp. 125–126, cat. no. 18, and the recent article by Olga Bush, “Poetic Inscriptions and Gift Exchange in the Medieval Islamicate World,” Gesta 56, no. 2 (2017), pp. 179–197. 38 This translation is taken from Werner Caskel, Arabic Inscriptions in the Collection of the Hispanic Society of America, translated from the German by Beatrice Gilman Proske, New York: The Hispanic Society of America, 1936, pp. 35–36.





The Transformative Museum 

 345

beholder quite directly, identifying itself as ‘I’, vis-à-vis ‘you’. By establishing this dialog between object and spectator (or user), it directs—if not dictates—the train of thought to be followed by its intended male beholder, even pointing him toward the erotic associations of ivory, which probably derive from the white, spotless color of the material, the box’s smooth surface, and perhaps also its curved domed lid. Indeed, a rich imaginative space is opened for the beholder of this ivory container. The playful space between the concrete object and its meaning, which many captions in museums fail to establish, is deliberately created through the looking at and the reading of the decorative program on this ivory pyxis. The sensuous material of the object transports the viewer into a parallel and imaginative world full of erotic fantasies. But then the dream of the maiden’s skin abruptly ends, and the aesthetic experience is finalized with a rather more matter-offact sentence about the object’s function: “I am a receptacle for musk, camphor, and ambergris.” Poetic verses were also composed by the court’s poets on the spot where the gifts were presented. In some cases, poems were composed for rituals in which artifacts were donated. The custom of adding a poem to an object transferred the whole event to a unique moment in time and endowed the object with enduring meaning. The poem—a set literary poetic modus—crystallized in words the act, or the moment, of giving presents. In fact, the poem ‘iconized’ the scene. Like the iconic images made today by photographers capturing the very public moments of donating or displaying art, the poem is the verbal iconization of the scene. Like the iconic image, which is usually a condensed form, easy to remember, and devoid of minute details, the iconic poetic verse is rhymed in a manner that makes it easier to remember, possibly also allowing it to embody a hidden tempo or melody that facilitates the memorizing of the whole event. The poem, like the icon, though very much anchored in a specific moment, namely, the moment that it aims to capture, succeeds in merging itself into the timeless space of repetition and copying. Artifacts attached to the iconic verse gain quick access to their past, and the specific memory of the moment of their donation is never lost. A good example can be found in Ibn Khallikan’s Biographical Dictionary, in which the Abbasid vizier ‘Aun al-Din ibn Hubayra (1117–1174) received a carved rock-crystal ink pot inlaid with precious stones. This present was greatly admired for its remarkable beauty, and the vizier ordered two poets to compose several rhymed verses on the object. Ibn Khallikan provides us with the following account of the incident: The vizir ‘Aun ad-Din received the present of an inkstand made of rock-crystal and inlaid with coral. Seeing at his levee a number of poets and, amongst them, Hais Bais, he observed that it would be well to compose a piece of verse on that object. One of the persons present, a blind man whose name I have not met with, then recited these lines: “Iron was, by divine favour, rendered soft for David, so that he wrought it at will into coats of mail. The crystal, though a stone, has been softened for you, yet bending it to one’s wish is hard and difficult.” Hais Bais here observed that the poet had spoken, not of the inkstand but of the maker; on which the vizir said: “Let him who finds fault change (it for the better).” Hais Bais did so in these lines:



346 

 Avinoam Shalem

“Your inkstand was made of your two days, and these have been mistaken for crystal and for coral. One is your day of peace, which is white and pours forth abundance; the other is your day of war, which is red, like red blood.”39

These examples make it clear that the poetic spirit became part of the act of beholding fine works of art. Either the poem was carved or painted on the artifact itself or it verbally accompanied the moment of the artifact’s public presentation. In both cases, a fusion occurred between the poetic words and the aesthetically pleasing qualities of the object. The exquisite calligraphy of the text depicted and the fine, pleasant sound of the poem set the particular emotional mood in which the art was initially observed. The question of how these medieval aesthetic practices can help us rethink the exhibition of the arts of Islam may baffle us and is worth exploring. What potential advantage could be gained from combining the poetic sound with its proper image/ object, in instances where poetry accompanies the display of arts?40 A quotation from a poem written by the 9th-century court poet Al-Buhturi, who was at the service of the Abbasid caliph al-Mutawakkil in the city of Samarra, might add an entirely different ‘way of looking’ to some decorative panels from the Abbasid palaces of Samarra. Al-Buhturi gives us the following verses: The wind effects its passage through its regions, And stumbles from weakness and fatigue, Drawing along a stream of flowing waters, Like a sharp, burnished blade: When it settles in the center of the green Lake, the latter casts over it the hues of marble. You’d think it the waters of a sea Which plays tricks on the eye; for it is the water of clouds.41

39 See Ibn Khallikan’s Biographical Dictionary [1842], trans. Mac Guckin de Slane, Beirut: Librairie du Liban, 1970, vol. 3, p. 121. For the Arabic text, see Ibn Khallikan, Wafayat al-A’yan wa-anba’ abna’ al-Zaman, ed. Ihsan Abbas, Beirut: Dar Sadir, 1968–1972, vol. 6, p. 236. 40 My use of the term image/object is deliberate and aims at emphasizing the great importance that ‘Islamic’ objects have as meaning-bearers. In fact, the rank that objects enjoy in the lands of Islam can be compared to the scholarly focus on the importance of images in Western art. On this topic, see Oleg Grabar, “An Art of the Object,” Artforum 14 (1976), pp.  36–43; see also the edited volume dedicated to objects: Sheila Blair and Jonathan Bloom (eds.), God is Beautiful and Loves Beauty: The Object in Islamic Art and Culture, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013; and Avinoam Shalem, “The Discovery and Re-Discovery of the Medieval Islamic Object,” A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture, eds. Barry F. Flood and Gülru Necipoglu, Hoboken, N.J.: John Willey & Sons, 2017, vol. I, pp. 558–578. 41 The English translation is taken from Julie Scott-Meisami, “The Palace-Complex as Emblem: Some Samarran Qasidas,” A Medieval Islamic City Reconsidered. An Interdisciplinary Approach to Samarra, ed. Chase F. Robinson, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 74.





The Transformative Museum 

 347

The display of the early 17th-century audience room of the Christian merchant Isa ibn Butrus from Aleppo, the so-called ‘Aleppo Room’, in the Museum for Islamic Art in Berlin, puts this possible exhibition praxis to the test.42 Visitors are provided with the specific sound of the singing of the poem inscribed on the room’s painted panels. The sound of human voices singing this poem fills the Aleppo Room with a atmosphere typical of its time and place; the melody of this song is in fact a well-known 17th-century melody from Aleppo. Thus, the rhythm of the song, as sung by a chorus, influences the rhythm of our gaze. It synchronizes hearing with seeing and imposes the tempo, whereby our eye travels along the various scenes depicted on the panels. The sung poetry thus functions as an image processor—a device for regulating the viewer’s mechanism of seeing.

Things Seen from Here Cannot Be Seen from There: On Site Specificity and Museums Here was a proof that there was no such thing as a unified tradition. Instead, there were many pasts within the past, and some that might be useful in the present.

This quotation is taken from Robyn Creswell’s article “Hearing Voices”, which appeared in The New Yorker in December 2017.43 The article discusses the particular stance that the famous modern Syrian poet Adonis took vis-à-vis moments of panArab and national aspirations—moments in which adjectives such as ‘unified’ and ‘monolithic’ seemed crucial for shaping the multicultural society of Syria. My intention in the last section of this article is to highlight the museum’s capacity as a space of experiences—a space that nurtures reflections on art and engagement with texts.44 While keeping to the concept of the beholder’s share in interpreting objects of art, I would like to elucidate some issues related to the importance of site specificity for

42 For this room, see http://islamicart.museumwnf.org/database_item.php?id=object;isl;de;mus01; 39;en (accessed January 30, 2019); see also Julia Gonella,  Ein Christlich-Orientalisches Wohnhaus des 17. Jahrhunderts aus Aleppo (Syrien), Mainz: Von Zabern, 1996; Claudia Ott, “Die Inschriften des Aleppozimmers im Berliner Pergamonmuseum”, Le Muséon 109, nos. 1–2 (1996), pp. 185–226. 43 Robyn Creswell, “Hearing Voices,” The New Yorker, December 18 and 25, 2017, pp. 106–109 (citation from p. 108). 44 Without suggesting the primacy of experience over the agency of the object, I would like to call attention to this specific museum’s curatorial method of transforming museums into participatory observation and experience spaces. On this subject, see the discussion in Alexander Nagel, “History Lessons: How Medieval Art Can Help Us Rethink the Exhibition Industry,” Frieze Masters Magazine, New York: Frieze, 2013, pp. 44–51; see also Nicolas Bourriaud, “L’art des années 90 participation et transitivité (extrait de « esthétique relationnelle »),” Sociétés 72, no. 2 (2001), pp. 99–101.



348 

 Avinoam Shalem

museums for the arts of Islam and the nearly impossible challenge these museums face in granting access to vanished pasts. Although most historians conceive of, or rather imagine, history as an immanent, unending process and argue for interpreting history on the rudimentary grounds of cause and effect, namely as a succession of consequences, it is noteworthy that the concept of the beginning or end of a specific era, be it historical or aesthetic, usually requires scholars to seek a rupture. It is likely that historians and art historians alike, concerned as they have been with the taxonomy of time—and namely with the segregation of the temporal flow into varied epochs—unavoidably feel obliged to construct firm and clear borders between epochs, as if the periodization of time were analogous to the construction of identity and the building of borders on the unstable basis of affinity.45 Indeed, the archaeology of our knowledge of the past is, metaphorically speaking, a vast graveyard, a field of ruins, and we gaze at it with a strong desire to reconstruct a whole, to transform it into an intact landscape, a view that might reveal the complete and entire story.46 Our restitution of the past is heavily dictated by the specific relationship between concepts of the fragmentary and partial, and of the intact and comprehensive. The art object, even if in a fragmentary state, appears then as a particular physical element into which human histories solidify as an intact whole.47 Or, as Kubler claims, the art object appears as the shape of its time.48 Indeed, the human-manufactured object seems to become a storyteller of bygone histories, an aide mémoire. More important, by being rooted in a particular time and place, objects are tangible evidence. They create a “world that produces presences”, as Gumbrecht claims,49 and one that, I might add, promotes identities. Artifacts are therefore

45 On rupture and modernity, see primarily Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1985; Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993; Shannon Lee Dawdy, “Clockpunk, Anthropology and the Ruins of Modernity,” Current Anthropology 51, no. 6 (2010), pp. 716–793, especially pp. 762–763. See also Avinoam Shalem, “Intersection Iconographies: The Cases of Ernst Herzfeld and Henri Pirenne,” Comparativism in Art History, ed. Jaś Elsner, London and New York: Routledge, 2017, pp. 109–129. 46 On the past as the field of inquiry for historians, see David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985; Siegfried Kracauer, History: The Last Things Before the Last [1969], Princeton NJ: Markus Wiener, 1995. 47 See Hito Steyerl, “The Language of Things,” eipcp 6 (2006), http://eipcp.net/transversal/0606/ steyerl/en/base_edit, (accessed September 22, 2015). 48 George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things [1962], New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008; see also Suzanne L. Marchand, “The Rhetoric of Artifacts and the Decline of Classical Humanism: The Case of Josef Strzygowski,” History and Theory 33, no. 4 (1994), pp. 106– 30, esp. p. 110; see also E. S. Chilton, Material Meaning: Critical Approaches to the Interpretation of Material Culture, Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 1999. 49 Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004, esp. pp. 1–20.





The Transformative Museum 

 349

social agents that bear messages to their recipients. Their agency is directed to us—the beholders.50 So let us turn our gaze back to the beholder, to his or her right to look at and make sense of art. I would like to shift our focus from the primary significance invested in the messages of objects to the no less significant act of beholding, especially in its specific setting, in ‘real’ space and ‘now’. What I aim to do is emphatically shift the notion of pulling the past into the present toward an introduction of the present into the past, in the context of the museum display.51 To some extent this shift toward the beholder’s share might seem like a turning back to the middle of the last century, revisiting John Berger’s eloquent ideas of ‘how to look’,52 reflections expressed by Merleau-Ponty on the primacy of perception,53 and approaches to the beholding of art presented by Gombrich and Goodman.54 And yet I am not concerned with isolating the beholder or downplaying the role of objects of art when dealing with aesthetic experiences. On the contrary, I am strongly interested in the dialog between the beholder and his or her object of observation. But

50 For the agency of objects, see Alfred Gell, Art and Agency, especially p. 14ff; see also Lieselotte E. Saurma-Jeltsch, “Introduction. About the Agency of Things, of Objects and Artefacts,” The Power of Things and the Flow of Cultural Transformations. Art and Culture between Europe and Asia, eds. Lieselotte E. Saurma-Jeltsch and Anja  Eisenbeiß, Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2010, pp.  10– 22; Alessandra De Angelis, Celeste Ianniciello, Mariangela Orabona, and Michaela Quadraro, “Introduction: Disruptive Encounters–Museums, Arts and Postcoloniality,” The Postcolonial Museum. The Arts of Memory and Pressures of History, ed. Iain Chambers et al., Surrey: Ashgate, 2014, pp. 1–21. 51 I am referring to Sunil Kumar’s excellent book The Present in Delhi’s Past, Gurgaon, India: Three Essays Collective, second edition, 2010. 52 See primarily his BBC series Ways of Seeing (1972), and his famous article on Grünewald’s Isenheim Altar, republished in John Berger, Portraits: John Berger on Artists, ed. Tom Overton, London and New York: Verso, 2015, pp. 49–55; see also John Berger, About Looking, London: Writers and Readers, 1980. 53 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception [1945], trans. Colin Smith, London and New York: Routledge, 1962; Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The primacy of perception, and other essays on phenomenological psychology, the philosophy of art, history, and politics, ed. with an introduction by James M. Edie, Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1964; see primarily Merleau-Ponty’s article “Eye and Mind,” trans. Carleton Dallery, in The Primacy of Perception; online: http://www. biolinguagem.com/ling_cog_cult/merleauponty_1964_eyeandmind.pdf (accessed February 8, 2019). 54 Ernst H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, London: Phaidon Press, 1962; Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1968, especially pp. 225– 265; see recent discussions on the beholder’s share by John Kulvicki, “Beholders’ Shares and the Language of Art,” Meditations on a Heritage: Papers on the Work and Legacy of Sir Ernst Gombrich, ed. Paul Taylor, London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2014, pp. 127–138 and Whitney David, “‘ReadingIn’: Franz Boas’s Theory of the Beholder’s Share,” Representations 114 (2018), pp.  1–33; see also Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality, Durham: Duke University Press, 2011, pp.  1–34, and the excellent article on the site specificity of the beholder by Richard A. Etlin, “Aesthetics and the Spatial Sense of Self,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56, no. 1 (1998), pp. 1–19. (I would like to thank Darby English for calling my attention to several articles concerning the beholder’s share.)



350 

 Avinoam Shalem

Fig. 4:  Visitors at the newly-opened Louvre Abu Dhabi looking at Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleon Bonaparte Crossing the Alps, 1803. 

I would like to emphasize that whereas the object might set off the initial impulse to respond to art and begin conversing with the viewer, it is rather the viewer who decides what path this conversation will take, that is, the route whereby sense and meaning are bestowed on objects. To be clear: it is, first and foremost, the physical space of the exhibition hall that governs the course of our interpretations. But thereafter, the beholder’s body-and-mind stance and his or her position before the object of observation in the exhibition hall will determine the framework within which art objects are given meanings. I would like to illustrate the importance of the sites and stances of beholders in their interactions with art by discussing Cotter’s critique of the display of the equestrian image of Napoleon Bonaparte Crossing the Alps at the Louvre Abu Dhabi, published in the New York Times (November 18, 2017) (fig. 4). While critically reviewing the opening of the new museum, Cotter ponders how the meaning of this painting, once exhibited in the Louvre Paris, has dramatically changed in the Louvre Abu Dhabi’s space. He concludes that “in an ‘Arab World’ museum, the presence here of a 



The Transformative Museum 

 351

hagiographic image of Napoleon, colonialist invader of Islamic North Africa and pilferer of non-Western art, is ripe with political irony.”55 And indeed, the lieu de mémoire attached to this painting in the capital city of the French Republic cannot be compared to the specific associations this image carries in the Middle East and throughout the whole Arab world. The irony is almost embarrassing; to some extent it recalls the participation, in 1999, of King Hassan II of Morocco in the official Bastille Day Military Parade, an event celebrating the end of monarchy. The site of art gives rise to our reading of art and charges works of art with particular meanings linked to the collective memories of the space of their display. Moreover, as Cappelletto argues in her discussion of Walid Raad’s Images in Transfer in this volume, the objects seem to have undergone a process of pseudomorphosis, whereby they have appeared to retain the same form, while their meaning has changed dramatically. In consequence, any museum that ignores the specific site nature of display is doomed to failure or criticism. The museum cannot be an innocent place in which histories and memories are simply displayed for the sake of public education purposes. The Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York can at best tell us of the histories of the collecting of these various arts in North America. However, it cannot simply tell us the history of the different visual cultures of the worlds of Islam.56 Moreover, since most of the national museums of arts in general and of the arts of Islam in particular are largely made up of private collections, at most, they usually tell us the stories of their collectors.57 What I want to underscore here is that the individual point of view that the beholder brings to the different rooms of the museum can also apply to the site specificity of the museum as a whole. Looking back to ‘medieval’ Arab thought

55 See https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/28/arts/design/louvre-abu-dhabi-united-arab-emiratesreview.html (accessed February 1, 2019). 56 Avinoam Shalem, “Histories of Belonging and George Kubler’s Prime Object,” Getty Research Journal 3 (2011), pp.  1–14; see also the different articles that discuss similar issues concerning the display of objects in museums for the art: Benoît Junod, George Khalil, Stefan Weber, and Gerhard Wolf (eds.), Islamic Art and the Museum: Approaches to Art and Archaeology of the Muslim World in the Twenty-First Century, London: Saqi Books, 2012. 57 See the documentary film by Michal Shabtay ‘Islamic’ art treasures in Europe, made in 2010 as a four-episode TV series (production: Nederlands Islamitische Omroep); see the articles published in volume 30 of Ars Orientalis (2000) entitled Exhibiting the Middle East: Collections and Perceptions of Islamic Art. For further articles on the question of European collections of the arts of Islam, see Andrea Lermer and Avinoam Shalem (eds.), After One Hundred Years: The 1910. Exhibition ‘Meisterwerke muhammedanischer Kuns’ Reconsidered, Leiden: Brill, 2010; Priscilla P. Soucek, “Building a collection of Islamic art at the Metropolitan Museum, 1870–2011,” Masterpieces from the Department of Islamic Art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, ed. Maryam D. Ekhtiar et al., New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art Publication, 2011, pp.  2–9; Sugata Ray, “Shangri La. The Archive-Museum and the Spatial Topologies of Islamic Art History,” Rethinking Place in South Asian and Islamic Art, 1500-Present, eds. Deborah S. Hutton and Rebecca M. Brown, Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2017, pp. 163–183.



352 

 Avinoam Shalem

on this aspect of the beholder’s stance, one cannot help but think of the remarks of the literary theorist ʿAbd al-Qahir al-Jurjani (d. 1079) on what he terms the ‘situational experience’—an experience that engages all the senses in meaning-making before the visual image.58

Do We Need an Other Museum for the Arts of Islam? Yes, we urgently do.

58 Kamal Abu Deeb, Al-Jurjani’s Theory of Poetic Imagery, Warminster, England: Aris & Phillips, 1979, 29ff. The idea of shifting centers of narration has been taken seriously by historians who aim at reducing the euro-centric mode of narrating the past and the provincialization of Europe. As far as the history of the lands of Islam is concerned, this initiative is discussed in Amin Maalouf, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, trans. Jon Rothschild, London: Al-Saqi Books, 1984; Carole Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives, New York: Routledge, 2000; and Mir Tamim Ansary, Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes, New York: Public Affairs, 2009.



Authors Emmanuel Alloa has been Professor in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art at the University of Fribourg since 2019. Previously, he worked at the University of Paris 8, the Collège international de philosophie and the NCCR eikones – Center for the Theory and History of the Image in Basel. A past Fellow at the IKKM Weimar, the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America in New York and the University of California, Berkeley, he has held Invited Professorships in México, Brazil, France and Austria. His research has won various awards, including the Latsis Prize (2016) and the Aby Warburg Wissenschaftspreis (2019). His books deal with issues in aesthetics, phenomenology, image theory, media philosophy and social theory. His latest book is Partages de la perspective (Paris: Fayard, 2020). Linda Báez-Rubí is a Research Professor at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas (IIE) of the National Autonomous University of México (UNAM). Her research interests include rhetoric, optics and image theory in the cultural exchange between Latin America and Europe (15th–18th centuries), and Aby Warburg’s Bildwissenschaft. She is a member of the Sistema Nacional de Investigadores and has been editor-in-chief of the journal Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, UNAM, since 2012. She has held fellowships from the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, and collaborated as a scientific researcher at the Warburg Institute, University of London, where she worked on the project Bilderfahrzeuge: Aby Warburg’s Legacy and the Future of Iconology (2014–2018). Among her publications are El Atlas de imágenes de Aby Warburg, 2 vols (México: IIE-UNAM, 2012) and Mnemosyne novohispánica. Retórica e imagen en el siglo XVI (México: IIE-UNAM, 2005). She co-edited The itineraries of the image: practices, uses and functions (México, IIE-UNAM, 2010) and Los estatutos de la imagen: creación-manifestación-percepción (México, IIE-UNAM: 2014). Gil Bartholeyns is Associate Professor in History and Visual Studies at the University of Lille, where he is in charge of the MA and PhD programs in visual humanities. His recent research has focused on domestic cultures, images from the Middle Ages to today, and experiences of the past in contemporary societies. He is the author of Image et transgression au Moyen Age (Paris: PUF, 2008) and editor of Politiques visuelles (Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2016); Adam et l’astragale. Essais d’anthropologie et d’histoire sur les limites de l’humain (Paris: Éd. de la MSH, 2009); La performance des images (Brussels: Brussels University Press, 2010); Cultures matérielles: anthologie raisonnée (Paris: Éd. de la MSH, 2011); and Images de soi dans l’univers domestique (Rennes: PUR, 2018). He is co-editor of the journal Techniques & Culture. Hans Belting is Professor Emeritus for Art History and Media Theory at the Academy for Design in Karlsruhe, Germany, where in 2000 he inaugurated the research

354 

 Authors

program Anthropology and the Image: Image-Media-Body as an interdisciplinary project. With Peter Weibel, he initiated the research project Global Art and the Museum at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medien in Karlsruhe. He has held the European Chair of the Collège de France in Paris, a Getty Visiting Professor in Buenos Aires and an Honorary Chair at the University of Heidelberg, and has been Chairman of the Anthropology program at Karlsruhe. His numerous books include: Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); The End of the History of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Florence and Baghdad. Renaissance Art and Arab Science (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2011); Face and Mask. A Double History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); and An Anthropology of Images. Picture, Medium, Body (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). With Andrea Buddensieg, he edited the volume The Global Art World. Audiences, Markets, and Museums (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2009). Susan Buck-Morss is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at CUNY Graduate Center, New York, and Professor Emerita of Government at Cornell University, where she was a member of the graduate fields of Comparative Literature, German Studies, History of Art and Visual Studies, Romance Studies, and the School of Art, Architecture and Planning. Her publications use images to make philosophical arguments. Her books include: Revolution Today (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019); Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009); The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School (New York: Free Press, 2nd ed., 2002); Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2000); and The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1989). Her latest book, YEAR 1, will appear in 2021 (Cambridge: The MIT Press).  Chiara Cappelletto is Associate Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Milan, and an associate member of the CRAL – Centre de Recherches sur les Arts et le Langage at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Her research interests include morphology, aesthetics, neuroaesthetics and rhetoric. She has held fellowships at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America in New York, the Institut d’Études Avancées in Paris and the Kolleg-Forschergruppe BildEvidenz Geschichte und Ästhetik in Berlin. She has also been a Visiting Scholar at Princeton University. She participates in the project IdEM – Identification, empathie, projection dans les arts du spectacle, and runs the permanent research seminar PIS – Performing Identities Seminar at the University of Milan. Her published work includes numerous articles on visual and performance studies, along with three books that deal with visual art and theater, focusing mainly on the notion of fiction. She is currently working on a book entitled Fake (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020). 

Authors 

 355

Georges Didi-Huberman is Professor of Art History at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He has been Guest Lecturer and Visiting Professor at John Hopkins University, the Université de Fribourg, Northwestern University, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Toronto, the Courtauld Institute in London, Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung, Kanazawa College of Art, the Freie Universität, Berlin, and the NCCR eikones – Center for the Theory and History of the Image in Basel. He has also curated several exhibitions, including L’empreinte (Centre George Pompidou, Paris, 1997), Atlas (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, 2010) and Soulèvements (Jeu De Paume, Paris, 2016). He pursues three issues in his work: a critical reading of the tradition of art history; the location of an alternative philosophy of images in the work of Sigmund Freud and Aby Warburg; and studies in the poetics of contemporary art. The prizes he has been awarded over the course of his career include the Adorno Prize (2015). He has authored more than 40 books, most recently Désirer désobéir. Ce qui nous soulève, 1 (Paris: Minuit, 2019). Ticio Escobar is the co-founder of the Centro de Artes Visuales/Museo del Barro in Asuncion, Paraguay, and the actual director of Centro de Artes Visuales. From 2008 to 2013 he served as Paraguay’s Minister of Culture. He has curated numerous exhibitions and biennials in Latin America, and directed the program Identities in Transit and Espacio/Crítica from 2000 to 2008. The author of more than ten books on Paraguayan and Latin-American art and culture, the relationship between anthropology and art theory, and democracy and post-dictatorship, Escobar has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Prince Claus Prize, and the Bartolomé de las Casas Prize. His books in Spanish include: La invención de la distancia: cuatro ensayos (Asuncion: Fausto ediciones, 2013); and Imagen e intemperie: las tribulaciones del arte en los tiempos del mercado total (Madrid: Clave Intelectual, 2015); as well as an essay translated into English, The Curse of Nemur. In Search of the Art, Myth and Ritual of the Ishir (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007). A.S. Aurora Hoel is Associate Professor of Media Aesthetics at the University of Oslo. Her research focuses on the mediating roles of images and technologies in knowledge and being. She has published widely in the overlapping fields of media philosophy, image theory and science studies, and has been the Principle Investigator of several large grants from the Research Council of Norway and the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 programme, which have allowed her to conduct projects on brain images and image-guided surgery. She has published several books on these topics, including Ernst Cassirer on Form and Technology: Contemporary Readings (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and Visualization in the Age of Computerization (New York: Routledge, 2015). Sunil Manghani is Professor of Theory, Practice and Critique at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton (UK), and directs the School’s Associate Pro

356 

 Authors

gramme with Tate Exchange. He teaches and writes on various aspects of critical theory, visual arts and image studies. He is author of Image Studies: Theory and Practice (2013), and editor of Zero Degree Seeing: Barthes/Burgin and Political Aesthetics (2019); India’s Biennale Effect: A Politics of Contemporary Art (2016); Farewell to Visual Studies (2015), Images: A Reader (2006), and the multi-volume sets Images: Critical and Primary Sources (2013) and Painting: Critical and Primary Sources (2015). He also curated Barthes/Burgin (John Hansard Gallery, 2016), and Building an Art Biennale (2018) and Itinerant Objects (2019) at Tate Modern (London). Angela Mengoni is Associate Professor of Visual Semiotics at IUAV University of Venice. She was a post-doctoral fellow at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and a full-time researcher at NCCR eikones – Center for the Theory and History of the Image in Basel. Her research interests in the field of semiotics and image theory concern the relationship between image and memory, with special reference to the European art of the post-war period; the plural temporality of the image; and the visual strategies of montage in contemporary art and photography. On this last subject she has co-edited Interpositions. Montage d’images et production de sens (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2014); and Sul mostrare. Teorie e forme del displaying contemporaneo (Milan: Mimesi 2016). She has also edited Berlinde de Bruyckere (München: Hirmer, 2014). She has also written a book on the representation of the wound in late modernity and its relationship with a biopolitics of the body: Ferite. Il corpo e la carne nell’arte della tarda modernità (Siena: SeB, 2012). Philippe-Alain Michaud is the curator of the film collection at the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou in Paris, and teaches history and film theory at the University of Geneva. Michaud is the author of Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion (New York: Zones Books, 2004), Le peuple des images (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2004), Sur le Film (Paris: Macula, 2016) and Âmes primitives. Figures de film, de peluche et de papier (Paris: Macula, 2019), and has written numerous articles on the relationship between film and the visual arts. He has curated a number of exhibitions, including: Comme le rêve le dessin (Musée du Louvre/Centre Pompidou, 2004); Le mouvement des images (Centre Pompidou, 2006); Nuits électriques (Moscow House of Photography Museum / Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow, and LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación, Gijón, Spain, 2007); Tapis volants (Villa Medici, Rome, and Les Abattoirs, Toulouse, 2010); Images sans fin, Brancusi photographie, film (Centre Pompidou, 2012, with Quentin Bajac and Clément Cheroux); Beat Generation (Centre Pompidou, 2016); and L’œil extatique: Sergueï Eisenstein à la croisée des arts (Centre PompidouMetz, 2019). W.J.T. Mitchell is Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago. He has been the editor of  Critical Inquiry  since 1978. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Founda

Authors 

 357

tion, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society and the Clark Institute for Art History. While his texts have appeared in numerous venues, Mitchell’s work is primarily focused on the interplay of vision and language in art, literature and media. The range of his research interests covers general problems in the theory of representation, as well as specific issues in cultural politics and political culture. His recent publications include: Cloning Terror: The War of Images, September 11 to Abu Ghraib  (Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2011); Critical Terms in Media Studies  (Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2010, with Mark Hansen); and Image Science: Iconology, Media Aesthetics, and Visual Culture (Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2015). He is currently working on a book entitled  Seeing Through Madness. Morad Montazami is an art historian and critic. Until 2019, he worked as Adjunct Research-Curator at Tate Modern (London); he lectures in various art schools in France and abroad. His research interests are cosmopolitan modernisms and the histories of the avant-garde in the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean, and North Africa, on which he has written extensively. Montazami curated the exhibitions Fugitive Volumes and Faouzi Laatiris: Catalogue déraisonné (2016) at the Mohammed VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rabat, and co-curated the exhibition Unedited History: Iran 1960–2014 (2014) at the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris and MAXXI, Rome. He is the director of Zaman Books Publishing and its related journal, Zamân, which deals with Middle Eastern studies, visual culture and contemporary art. Avinoam Shalem is Riggio Professor of the Arts of Islam at Columbia University in New York. His main field of interest is medieval artistic interactions in the Mediterranean, medieval aesthetics and the modern historiography of the field. Prior to his appointment at Columbia University, Shalem held the professorship of the history of Islamic art at the University of Munich and taught at the universities of Tel Aviv, Edinburgh, Heidelberg (Hochschule für jüdische Studien), Bamberg and Luzern, and at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He has published extensively on varied topics concerning intercultural exchanges within and between the world of Islam and Europe. He was Andrew Mellon Senior Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2006 and Guest Scholar at the Getty Research Center in 2009. Between 2007 and 2015, he was the Max-Planck Fellow at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence. His current book project, When Nature Becomes Ideology, critically explores the varied approaches to the ‘landscaping’ and curating of the rural landscape of Palestine since 1947.



Picture Credits Alloa and Cappelletto Fig. 1, 2: Courtesy of Studio Sekula / Estate; fig. 3 Courtesy of the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York.

Bartholeyns Fig. 1 Sovinfilm, RAI 2 and Gaumont, 1983; plate I Free of rights; fig. 2 Washington Post accessed November 26, 2014; fig. 3 Public domain; fig. 4 Creative commons; plate II CNS photo/Mike Crupi, Catholic Courier; fig. 5 Public domain; fig. 6 Collection Jonas/Kharbine-Tapabor; fig. 7 Public domain.

Escobar Plate III CAV/Museo del Barro; fig. 1 Photograph: Rocío Ortega, Jaguatĩ, 2011; fig. 2 Photograph Ticio Escobar, Santa Teresita, 1993. Centro de Artes Visuales/Museo del Barro; plate IV Photograph: Arístides Escobar, Arroyo Ka’a, Amambay, 2008. Centro de Artes Visuales/Museo del Barro; fig. 3 Photograph: Fernando Allen, Santa Teresita, Boquerón, 2011. Centro de Artes Visuales/Museo del Barro; fig. 4 Photograph: Nicolás Richard. María Helena, 2002. Centro de Artes Visuales/Museo del Barro; fig. 5 Photograph: Ticio Escobar. San Carlos, Chaco Boreal del Paraguay. 1986. Centro de Artes Visuales/Museo del Barro; fig. 6 Photograph: Nicolás Richard. María Helena, Alto Paraguay, c. 2002. Centro de Artes Visuales/Museo del Barro; fig. 7 Photograph: Ticio Escobar. Péishiota, Chaco Boreal del Paraguay, 1989. Centro de Artes Visuales/Museo del Barro; fig. 8 Photograph: Fernando Allen, 2015; fig. 9 Photograph: Cristián Escobar Jariton, Onichta, Chaco, 1989. Centro de Artes Visuales/Museo del Barro; fig. 10 Photograph: Osvaldo Salerno, 1989. Centro de Artes Visuales/Museo del Barro; fig. 11 Photograph: Fernando Allen, 2015; plate V CAV/Museo del Barro.

Belting Plate VI Istanbul, Library of the Topkapi Saray Museum, H.753/K.470 fol. 304, in Michael Barry, Figurative Art in Medieval Islam and the Riddle of Bizhâd of Herât (1465–1535): The Formation of Islamic Figurative Art. From the Eighth to the Fifteenth Centuries, Paris: Flammarion, 2004, p. 5; plate VII Istanbul, Topkapi Saray Museum, H.2154, fol. 31b, in John Michael Rogers (ed.), Topkapi Sarayi Museum. Manuskripte, Herrsching am Ammersee: Schuler, 1986, pl. 45; plate VIII Istanbul, Topkapi Saray Museum, H.2154, fols. 33b–34a, in David J. Roxburgh, The Persian Album 1400–1600, From Dispersion to Collection, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005, pp. 296–297, fig. 163; plate IX Istanbul, Topkapi Saray Museum, H.1703, fol. 6v, in Barry, Figurative Art in Medieval Islam and the Riddle of Bihzad of Herat (1465–1535), p. 114; plate X Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, 14.545, in Barry Figurative Art in Medieval Islam and the Riddle of Bihzad of Herat (1465–1535), p. 106; plate XI Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, 14.545; plate XII Boston, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, P15e8, in Caroline Campbell and Alan Chong, Bellini and the East, London: 2005, p. 124, pl. 32; plate XIII London, British Museum, Pp. 1.19, in Jürg Meyer Zur Capellen, Gentile Bellini, Stuttgart:

360 

 Picture Credits

Franz Steiner Verlag, 1985, p. 168, pl. 117; plate XIV Washington, Freer Gallery of Art, 32.28, Campbell and Chong Bellini and the East, p. 125, pl. 47.

Báez-Rubí Fig. 1. WIA III.47.1.1. Warburg Institute Archive, London; fig. 2. WIA ZK 40/021103. Warburg Institute Archive, London; plate XVII Plate 1. Collection: lnsigne y Nacional Basilica de Santa Maria de Guadalupe, México City, México; fig. 3. Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel, H: N 61.2° Helmst; fig. 4. SLUB Dresden, Optica.135; fig. 5. Rome: Scheus, 1645; fig. 6. Francisco Xaverio Dornn, Litaniae Lauretanae ad Beatae Virginis, caelique reginae Mariae honorem, et gloriam, Augsburg, 1750.

Mitchell Plate XVIII and plate XIX Front and back from brochure for an art installation by Neil Brown, Dennis Del Favero, Jeffrey Shaw, and Peter Weibel developed through the iCineman Center for Interactive Cinema Research at the University of New South Wales in co-operation with ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany; fig. 1 Permission of the Author; fig. 2 © The Warburg Institute; fig. 3 Public domain; fig. 4 The New Yorker, May 12, 2015; fig. 5 The New Yorker, May 16, 2016; fig. 6 Public domain.

Michaud Fig. 1 Courtesy of Peter Miller; fig. 2 Courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery; fig. 3 Courtesy of Wolfgang Laib; fig. 4 RKO Pictures, 1941; fig. 5 Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena, Italy; fig. 6 Courtesy of Magazzino, New York; fig. 7 Rights: adagp; fig. 8 Rights: RMN; plate XX Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, Italy; fig. 9 Château de Versailles, France.

Didi-Hubermann Fig. 1 Still from the film Battleship Potemkin, dir. Sergei M. Eisenstein (1925); fig. 2 Engraving published in Le Charivari. Paris, Carnavalet Museum; fig. 3, 4 Paris, Musée D’Orsay; fig. 5 Gustave Courbet, Charles Baudelaire, Champfleury and Charles Toubin, Le Salut public, no. 2, March 1st, 1848, p. 1; fig. 6 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, prints and drawings department; fig. 7, 8 Still from the film Cinétracts, dir. Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais and Chris Marker (1968).

Alloa Fig. 1 Source: AP; fig. 2 Source: Al-Hayat Media/HIMS; plate XXI Dār-al-Islām April 3, 2015; fig 3. Dabiq 7, February 12, 2015; fig 4. Cover of Dabiq 12, November 18, 2015; fig 5. Jihadist Facebook





Picture Credits 

 361

account, 2015; fig 6. Photo: Thibault Camus/AP; plate XXII Cover of Dabiq 12, November 18, 2015; plates XXIII, XXIV Photo: Jacques Brinon/AP.

Buck-Morss Fig. 1 Aerial photo by Arthur Mole and John Thomas. Courtesy of Chicago History Museum; fig. 2 © Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikimedia Commons; plate XXV Moscow, Tretiakov Museum; plate XXVI Montage by Susan Buck-Morss; fig. 3 Public domain; fig. 4 Photograph by Gaetano Falliace.

Cappelletto Figs. 1, 5, 6, 7, 8 plates XXVII, XXVIII © Walid Raad. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; figs. 2, 3, 4 FAI collection. Courtesy of the Arab Image Foundation.

Mengoni Figs. 1–4, plates XXIX, XXX. Courtesy of Gerhard Richter Archiv, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden.

Manghani Figs. 1, 3 Photograph: Manghani; fig. 2 Courtesy of the artist.

Hoel Figs. 1–4 Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Thomas Picht.

Montazami Fig. 1 MoMA, NYC; fig. 2 Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern; fig. 3 Private collection, Bern. Depositum in the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern; plate XXXI Barjeel collection, Sharjah; fig. 4 Hamed Abdalla estate; plate XXXII Tate Modern, London; fig. 5 Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern; figs. 6, 7 Hamed Abdalla archives.

Shalem Fig. 1 Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; fig. 2, 3 Photo: Courtesy of Berkan Karpat; fig. 4 Photo: Public Domain (Reddit).



Plates

Plates 

 365

Plate I: The phosphorescence of the statue photographed (CCD sensor) in the dark under UV lamp. Optics laboratory of the University of Liège, March 19, 2014. 

366 

 Plates

Plate II: “A woman lays her hand on a traveling image of Our Lady of Guadalupe during a visit to the replica in St. Louis Church in Pittsford, N.Y., Oct. 28.” Digital reproduction of an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the image left on Juan Diego’s coat (tilma) in 1531.

Plate III: Wood carving in cedar. Representation of the Virgin Mary. Avá Guaraní. Acaraymi. The piece was requested from the sculptor of the community by two priests but returned to the sculptor because it did not correspond to the Catholic representation of the figure. 

Plates 

 367

Plate IV: A group of Páĩ Tavyterã-Guaraní youth, crowned with their jeguaka, garlands, after the ceremony of masculine initiation called Kunumi pepy. Photograph: Arístides Escobar, Arroyo Ka’a, Amambay, 2008. Centro de Artes Visuales/Museo del Barro.



368 

 Plates

Plate V: Nemur. Ceremonial Ishir Dress. CAV/Museo del Barro.



Plates 

Plate VI: The contention between the Greek and the Chinese painters, Khamseh of Nizâmî, manuscript copied c. 1445.



 369

370 

 Plates

Plate VII: Mohammed and Gabriel in front of an angel, Tabriz (attr. Ahmed Musa), c. 1360–1370, gouache on paper, 28 × 24 cm.



Plates 

Plate VIII: Double-page painting of grooms holding a horse, China, Ming dynasty 15th century, opaque pigment and silk, 19 × 30.4 cm (horse) and 39.9 × 28.2 cm (men).

Plate IX: Dignitary, copy from Plate VIII, Tabriz, 15th century.



 371

372 

 Plates

Plate X: Page from an album made for Prince Bahram Mirza, China, Ming Period, with Persianate figures added in Herat, c. 1420–1440, ink, color and gold on silk, 44.2 × 30 cm.



Plates 

Plate XI: Calligraphic and illuminated specimens on obverse by Sultan Muhammad Nur, Hashim Mudhahhib, Mahmud al-Mudhahhib and Mawlana Yari al-Mudhahhib, early 16th century, ink, color, and gold on paper, 44.2 × 30 cm.



 373

374 

 Plates

Plate XII: Gentile Bellini, Seated Scribe, 1479–1481, Pen in brown ink, watercolour and gold on paper, 18.2 × 14 cm.

Plate XIII: Gentile Bellini, Seated Janissary, 1479–1481, Pen in brown ink, 21.5 × 17.5 cm.



Plates 

 375

Plate XIV: Seated Painter, response image to Plate XII (attr. Bizhâd), late 15th century.

Plate XV: Portrait of a painter (Bizhâd ?), response image to Plate XIV, Mughal India, c. 1700.



376 

 Plates

Plate XVI: Jahangir holding a portrait of the Virgin Mary, ca. 1620, opaque watercolor and gold on paper, probably Agra, Uttar Pradesh (India).



Plates 

Plate XVII: Virgin of Guadalupe, 16th century.



 377

378 

 Plates

Plate XVIII and XIX: T-Visionarium as panopticon and T-Visionarium as vortex.



Plates 

Plate XX: Jacopo Tintoretto, The Find of the Body of Saint Mark, 1562–1566, oil on canvas, 396 × 400 cm.



 379

380 

 Plates

Plate XXI: Cover of Dār-al-Islām April 3, 2015.

Plate XXII: Attacks in Paris, November 13, 2015 (Photo: Thibaut Camus).



Plates 

Plate XXIII: Cover of Dabiq 12 (detail).

Plate XXIV: Attacks in Paris, November 13, 2015 (Dabiq Cover & detail of original photo by Jacques Brinon).



 381

382 

 Plates

Plates XXV: Virgin Orans, Great Panagia, Kiev School, twelfth century (Moscow, Tretiakov Museum). 



Plates 

 383

Plates XXVI: Photos of reactions to the global announcement of Obama’s electoral win in 2008. Top row: Sidney, Manila, Obama’s Relatives in Kenya; Middle row. Israel, Indonesia, Greece; Bottom Row: India, Japan, Chicago (Jesse Jackson).



384 

 Plates

Plate XXVII: Walid Raad, Scratching on things I could disavow: Index XXVI_Red (detail), 2010.



Plates 

Plate XXVIII: Walid Raad, Preface to the third edition_Édition française: Plate I, 2012; pigmented inkjet print, 16 1⁄2 × 13”, 41.9 × 33 cm.



 385

386 

 Plates

Plate XXIX: Gerhard Richter, War Cut, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter König, 2004, pp. 67–68.

Plate XXX: Gerhard Richter, Atlas, plate 744 Stripes, WTC, 56.2 × 73 cm, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München, Munich, Germany.



Plates 

Plate XXXI: Hamed Abdalla, Al Tamazuq (Torn), 1975. Acrylic on paper and canvas, 92 × 73 cm. Barjeel collection, Sharjah.



 387

388 

 Plates

Plate XXXII: Hamed Abdalla, Al Sharida (Lost), 1966. Mixed media, wooden relief on isorel, 116 × 89 cm. Tate Modern, London.