Plato’s Dilemma:Art, Religion and Amnesia

Donald PreziosiUCLA

Synopsis - In an age witnessing the spread of theocraticdemogoguery in many societies, not least our own, and theincreasing devastation and death that seem permanentlyendemic to most forms of state-supported and politically-enforced religiosities, the most pressing civic task facingall of us today is that of effectively defusing theinsanities so sadly being promoted everywhere in the name ofreligion. But exorcising the terror generated by theocraticreligiosities requires more than replacing institutedreligions with ‘kinder, gentler’ spiritualities, forvirtually all of those currently on offer (from Rolfing toSurfing to kabbalah to Rocky Mountain Buddhism) have provenas pernicious and dangerous to civil and democratic societyas more overtly theocratic religiosities. A radicallydifferent approach is needed today; one that engagesdirectly with what has engendered and enabled all forms ofspiritualism in the first place, and one that explicitlyaddresses the most deeply-enduring fears at the heart of allreligion. These are fears that come less from competingreligions, faiths, or spiritualisms, and much moreimportantly and much more seriously from what has preciselyengendered, enabled, maintained, and perpetuated allreligions in the first place – art itself. Every instituted religion isabove all an aesthetic practice in denial of the artifice of its own artistry:amnesiac, ambivalent, or duplicitous with respect to itsfoundations and origins as a product and effect of art; withrespect to the fabricatedness of its own fabrications; andwith respect to the artifice of what is promoted by everyreligion as ‘real’ or ‘natural,’ or as ‘revealed’ orauthored or ‘designed’ by immaterial forces, spirits, gods,divine persons, entities, or beings. This paper argues thatwhat are commonly differentiated in modernity as ‘art’ and

‘religion’ in fact constitute alternative perspectives onthe more fundamental philosophical problem of representationor signification as such, of which what we term religion(and art) are secondary products and effects. It is at thismore fundamental level that effective and enduring critiquesof religiosity and of artistry (and by implication, of arthistory, art theory, and art criticism) will be developed.

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The following is about the ‘relations between art andreligion.’ But the simplicity of this phrase, like manydouble-entry titles (‘art and revolution,’ ‘civilization andbarbarism,’ ‘morality and capitalism,’ ‘politics’ and‘gender’, ‘form’ and ‘content’) becomes immediately suspect,for the terms can denote union, or opposition, ordependency. So which of these relationships is meant here?The following is divided into two parts: a first, discursivediscussion of the issues and their implications, and, in thesecond part, a distillation of this into a series ofexplicit theses and corollaries, and their implications.

What I’d like us to consider today is a different kind ofrelationship (and thus a different sense of ‘relationship’as such) by investigating what I’d like to call a differentialintricacy between ‘art’ and ‘religion’ - wherein theinvolvement of each of these with each other constitutestheir only substantive reality or identity: art and religionhaving a reality in terms precisely of that articulatedrelationship. And I’d like to pursue this not by notdragging you through a maze of two and a half millennia ofphilosophical opinions and positions (I’ll keep all thosenotes in my back pocket for the time being) but rather moreconversationally, through a series of propositions andprovocations with which we might jointly engage, the purposeof this paper, after all, being to stimulate discussion,rather than my simulating a discussion on your behalf.

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Is there something that is common to both what we callart and religion, and which is yet somehow more fundamentalthan either? This is a problem that occupies the heart ofthe modern discursive practices of art history and theology.The basic hypothesis investigated by my talk is that what wecall art and religion are not distinct phenomena but arerather variant responses to or perspectives on a commonphilosophical problem – namely, the nature of representationas such. I will argue that both have only circumstantialindependent existences as effects of something morefundamental. Which of course is not to say that religion andart do not have specific and distinct cultural and socialsignificances, even if the terms themselves as commonly usedtoday may have no real ‘essence’ behind them – or essencesso diffuse and slippery and historically so contingent as tobe in effect substantively or ontologically meaningless. Itis of course obvious that both forms of knowledge-production(what I call epistemological technologies) have considerableinfluence and power over citizens in many contemporarysocieties. In the case of some religions, a direct and oftenpolitically-enforced legal power over the life and death ofindividuals or even whole populations: either one mustbelieve in specific sectarian hypotheses about existence, orbe ostracized, or be psychologically or physicallyeliminated from the ‘body’ of the faithful - even to thepoint of being murdered. Countless thousands have beeneliminated or have perished over many centuries forostensibly ‘religious’ reasons.

While not so many have been murdered for explicitlyaesthetic reasons, I will argue that nonetheless, art is asfundamentally dangerous and life-threatening as religioncontinues to be, even if both art and religion may also attimes have had some well-documented redeeming qualities.What exactly is at stake, then, in raising such difficultquestions today?

Much of what has passed for critical commentary on therecent politically-motivated and media-driven phenomenon of

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what used to be called a ‘return’ to or of religion or to‘spirituality’ has avoided what is more fundamentally atstake: namely, the artifice or artistry of religiosity, andwhat has conversely been called the ‘divine teleology’ thatunderlies the disciplinary attention to and practice of artin the modern world: art history as a secular theologism.Any critique of religion is necessarily connected to acritique of art, artistry, or artifice. And vice-versa.

What follows is an attempt to clarify the mutualentailment or co-constructedness of what we call ‘art’ and‘religion.’ I keep using the phrase ‘what we call’ toindicate that our modern and contemporary uses of these twoterms are quite different from what, historically, has beenused to designate the phenomena referred to. Whatever weunderstand art to be today - and by the term we usually meanwhat has come to be called ‘fine art:’ art as a kind ofproduct or aesthetic commodity, designated for consumption(consecrated, one might say) by portions or classes ofmodern populations blessed with ‘taste’ - it was understoodand experienced radically differently not only prior to the18th century and the concurrent foundations of modernnation-states in Europe and America (which was whatdisciplines such as art history were invented to service)but also in European antiquity itself. What the Greeksunderstood by tekhne and the Romans by ars were fundamentallydifferent from their common modern translation as ‘art.’

In order to understand what might be at stake incritiquing religion or art today we need first to understandhow art might be seen as dangerous or even deadly. To do so,we need to put aside the modern discourse on art and lookmore extensively beneath what I might call the ‘glass floor’of the modernist discourse on art. A decade ago, GiorgioAgamben, in his book The Man Without Content, noted that ‘Plato,and Greek classical antiquity in general, had a very different experience of art[from the ‘art of art history’ of modern times- DPi], anexperience having little to do with disinterest and aesthetic enjoyment. Thepower of art over the soul seemed to him so great that he thought it could by

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itself destroy the very foundations of his city; but nonetheless, while he wasforced to banish it, he did so reluctantly, “since we ourselves (in Plato’s ownwords) are very conscious of her spell.”’

Art was clearly understood in European antiquity to beamong the most powerful, dangerous, and terrifying of humanphenomena, evoking ‘divine terror’ (theios phobos). While thismay seem incomprehensible today, understanding what was atstake for Plato is essential to our own understanding ofwhat joins and what separates ‘art’ and ‘religion’ today,since in our own modern understanding of art it is bycomparison so safely domesticated politically by theinstitutions of art history, museology, and aestheticphilosophy. Plato invoked an already ancient and persistentambivalence about the uncanniness of art; about its abilityto simultaneously fabricate and problematize the political andreligious power imagined to be materialized or ‘represented’in a people’s forms and practices.

By which I mean the ambiguity of artistry or artificeas such in not simply reflecting (or representing) but alsoin fabricating the world in which we live, a problemencountered in book 6 of The Republic. Art, especially whatPlato called the pantomimic or mimetic arts, problematizedseemingly secure oppositions between what we commonlydesignate as fact and fiction; history and poetry; reasonand emotion - all of which art threatens to reveal to becircumstantial and transitory effects of human artistry.

What artistry created for Plato, then, was not some‘second world’ alongside the everyday world in which we live(the modern fantasy worlds of art history, museology, orcommodity fetishism); he was quite clear that what artistrycreated was the very real world in which we actually do liveour daily lives. The problem he attempted to address wasfundamental to philosophy, politics, and religion. If webelieve that a particular made thing ‘represents’ someessence (either metaphorically ‘contained’ in some thing orabsent and elsewhere – for example, a ‘soul’ or a ‘spirit’

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of a person, time, place), then it is obvious that theessence purportedly ‘represented’ may also be represented inother ways, problematizing the existence of that essenceitself. Leading one to imagine that the essence supposedlyrepresented is in fact a product of its so-called ‘re-presentation;’ its epistemological technology. Such anawareness obviously has the potential to undermine theclaims of any political or religious power to security andtruth. As Plato was perfectly aware in The Republic in hisattempt to describe what would constitute an ideal state. Itis this conundrum – the paradox of mimesis (what I’mterming ‘Plato’s dilemma’) - that is precisely the problemthat is the central and intractable conundrum of thediscursive practices of theology and art history.

The ‘god-like terror’ (theios phobos) that (exposure to)art induced in the ancient Greek soul was simply andprecisely the terrifying awareness of exactly this: that works of artdon’t simply ‘imitate’ some imaginary essence or ‘idea,’ butrather create and open up a world, and keep it in existence, asHeidegger famously put it in discussing the ontologicallycreative potential of artworks in his essay ‘The Origin ofthe Work of Art,’ where the experience of art is taken to befundamentally religious in nature. Or more precisely, whereas he made clear, the common distinction between art andreligion was itself problematized and renderedcircumstantial rather than ontological.

The fundamental issue here is that of the truth orfalsity of imitation or representation: is a work ofartistic creativity an ‘imitation’ of some ideal essence,immutable truth, or ‘transcendent reality,’ a phantasmsystemically built into modernist discursive practices suchas art history or visual culture studies, or is itmutability itself that is ‘transcendent’? This was preciselythe problem that so directly engaged later monotheistreligious thinkers such as Augustine and Aquinas (not tomention Kierkegaard), all of whom knew exactly what was sodangerously at stake in the challenge of art to religious

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faith. What, in other words, is the ontological status of atext or an utterance or an ‘artwork’? Are they the effects ofa pre-existing ‘spirit,’ soul, character, or mentality, oris that spirit or mentality an after-effect or product andprojection of artifice itself? (- precisely the unresolvableconundrum of all art history, theory, and criticism; ofevery investigation of ‘culture,’ ‘visual’ or otherwise)

There is a theological dualism inhabiting the heart ofthe traditional critique of these problems, which is theclaim of a distinction or opposition between what might becalled ‘materialism’ and ‘immaterialism:’ the rhetoricaldouble-bind of ‘matter’ versus ‘spirit.’ A distinction, ofcourse, which is a specifically theological hypothesismasquerading as an ontological first principle.

With respect to artistry, both Heidegger and Agambenargued that in the modern age we are cut off from thedangerous powers of art because our relation to it has beensubjectivized – and in a curious way secularized by the(pseudo-) sciences of aesthetic philosophy, art history, andmuseology. Artworks have been domesticated into serving asmere reflections or exemplifications (re-presentations) ofhypothesized social-historical processes or identitarianpolitics: as artifacts of individual or collective values ormentalities, and as objects for stylistic consumption andthe judgments of individual ‘taste.’ As commodifiedexemplars of value, mentality, artistic ‘genius,’ orpersonal or collective ‘style,’ artworks today elicit oddlypassive reading, appreciation, admiration, explanation, andinterpretation - rather than active engagement. Instead ofpassionate engagement we have the absurdities of ‘artcriticism’ (whose very language is a thinly-veiled,secularized version of ethical judgment itself floating onthe surface of a certain religiosity which takes literallythe ancient Greek conflation of the good, the beautiful, andthe true in the single word kalos). The art object is reducedto being an historical, aesthetic puzzle eliciting cleverlyarticulated solutions – the magisterial pronouncements of

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the sanctioned critic, historian, museum curator, galleryowner, or collector.

Such an ideology of re-presentation is in fact a kindof secular theology, a point I’ll return to later.

But let’s return to Plato for a moment. We need tounderstand specifically what was at stake in his banishingof the arts – that enduring puzzle haunting every subsequentart theory. Art history’s failure to deal effectively withthat issue is in fact analogous to the misunderstandingssurrounding the recent controversies of the so-called‘Mohammed cartoon’ affair ignited by the Danish newspaperJyllandsposten in late 2005. The failure by many to directlydeal with the underlying logic of the charge of ‘blasphemy’made by some Muslims is itself very instructive, for itignored an issue that has underlain controversies about artand religion in the West that antedated by half a millenniumthe invention of post-tribal monotheisms such asChristianity, or of Islam itself by a millenium. Plato waswriting about what would constitute an ideal city and socialorder in the face of the very dangerous powers of artistryto both create and problematize the manifestations of politicalpower. The mimetic arts, he argued, should ideally beemployed to give proper or appropriate expression to a cityand its social structures. Its hierarchies of individualsand groups must be clearly mapped onto and into civic spaceand time - the distribution of citizens and theirlivelihoods as a map or ‘re-presentation’ of the ideal truthof the city itself. A world in which what is materiallyfabricated evokes a ‘true’ order believed (by those holdingpower, of course) to constitute that world or cosmos, andwhich moreover is imagined to have an existence prior to andindependent of its ‘expression’ or ‘materialization.’ As ifthe human world were a simulation of some divinely-givenessence or truth or natural law, which is why Plato set ainfallible ‘philosopher-king’ as ruler of his ideal city: alegal ‘representative’ (and enforcer of) a ‘divine order.’i

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(The ‘Decider’ [to use a contemporary Bushism], whose ‘god’‘speaks’ to him and tells him how to vote on the minimumwage or about tax cuts for the rich.)

My point is that any piece of artifice is a witnessboth to what it may be taken to represent and to its opposite, aswell as witnessing the arbitrariness of claims torepresentational truth. This concerns the arbitrariness ofrepresentation as such - the fundamental theologicalproblem; that which on whose basis the very possibility ofany religion is made possible or impossible. Religion, inshort, is an interpretative practice, an epistemologicaltechnology, concerning the assignment of values to a set ofphenomena or characteristics that are claimed (by thoseclaiming and using power) to have ‘already existed’ in a givencommunity. This consists of the postulation by enforcementof a social and philosophical decorum whereby materialphenomena are linked (as if ‘re-presenting’) their allegedlypre-existing ideas, values, mentalities, truths, oressences.

In other words, the essential ‘secret’ of religion isthat there really is no secret at all that is separate fromits alleged ‘expression.’ Being is not distinct frominterpretation, which is to say not distinct from artifice.

Few philosophers have been as powerfully clear aboutthis than Nietzsche, for whom (to paraphrase) thedistinctive invention of the founders of religions has been,first, to posit a particular kind of life and everydaycustoms that have the effect of disciplining the will and atthe same time of abolishing boredom – and then (secondly),to bestow on this life style an interpretation that makes itappear to be illuminated by the highest value, so that thislife style becomes something for which one fights and undercertain circumstances sacrifices one’s life. Actually, thesecond of these two inventions is more essential. The first,the way of life, was usually there before, but alongsideother ways of life and without any sense of its special

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value. The significance and originality of the founder of areligion usually consists of his seeing it, selecting it,and guessing for the first time to what use it can be put,how it can be interpreted.

The point is that a religion is a mode of artistrywhich is in denial of (or is duplicitous regarding) thefabricatedness of its own inventions, commonly attributingthat artifice to the ‘design’ of an immaterial - and (forsectarian ‘believers’) an allegedly ‘pre-existing’ andoriginating being or force.

Which might begin to explain the ‘logic’ of certainreligious strictures against representation, whether the‘representational’ image of a prophet, as in Islam, thecomplete spelling out of the Jewish name of its own spiritBeing, or a picture of what one might imagine one’s own‘sacred’ spirit to be. Of the three major monotheisms, itwas chiefly Christianity which came to tackle the problem ofrepresentation by engaging directly with the religiousimport of imagery itself, in no small measure because of itsown early growth within and evolution in relationship to(and at times reaction against) the more ancienticonophiliac cultures of Egypt, Greece, Rome.

Plato (and in this he was followed by Augustine and theliteralist branches of all monotheisms) would have banishedthe mimetic arts from his ideal city-state because of theirpotentially destabilizing influence on the imaginations ofits citizens, causing them to literally think otherwise thanwhat they are legally compelled to believe. The problem,again, is simply this: if the state is recognized for whatit is, namely, a fabrication; a human artifact; then otherkinds of states (and other modes of civic life, or evenother modes of being ‘human’) might be imagined and givenform, calling into question the ‘naturalness’ of the stateone has. Plato – who was no democrat - was very clear thatwhen it comes to the arts, everything including ouridentities and our very existence as social beings is

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radically and fundamentally at stake. Something thatAugustine, Mohammed, the iconoclasts of Byzantium or ofearly Protestantism clearly appreciated and attempted tolegally enforce, literally under pain of death.

The acknowledgement of the existence of art as artificeis thus one of the foundations of philosophy itself (as theancient Greek antidote and alternative to religion) ascritique and discernment; as a dialectical and dialogicquestioning of the ‘naturalness’ of nature; as ‘an incessantvigilance about how and why and what we tend to take forgranted.’ For philosophy, hypotheses are points of departureand of inquiry, of contention and negotiation – versussocially, legally, and politically instituted religiosities,where such hypotheses are on the contrary promoted andfabricated as first principles; as ontological ‘truths’ tobe obeyed.

For Plato (and for Augustine half a millenium later),politics, to be effective, sustainable, and lasting, must begrounded in ‘permanent truths’ that were believed to beabove and beyond the mutable world of daily life. Plato’sdilemma was thus a powerfully real one: how do you instill asecurely unquestioned belief in one’s city or state ornation or culture or ethnicity (and not so coincidentally inone’s rulers and lords) that is amnesiac with regard to itsfabricatedness. How do you design amnesia? - something therecent fantasists of ‘intelligent design’ have assiduouslyavoided addressing, since all of their rhetoric is designedto avoid the fundamental contradiction in the phrase itself.

Over the past two centuries, what we commonly refer toas ‘art’ has served as the site par excellence for theproduction of the fictions that, brilliantly woven together,make up the fabric of all our modernities and tamepostmodernities - the phantasms of identity, ethnicity,class, race, gender, nation, sex, indigeneity, andotherness, which we are induced to imagine as ‘re-presented’or ’ex-pressed’ in the products and effects of individuals,

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groups, ethnicities, genders, nationalities, races, etc.(the pen in my hand – or that painting on the wall –magically encapsulating the very ‘soul’ of X [a single Daneor all of Denmark, France, Italy, China, etc]…) The keymetaphorical conundrum of our post-Enlightenment modernities– replicated endlessly in the fantasy world of everyshopping mall - is that the form of your work and behaviorshould be legible as the figure or physiognomy of your ‘truth:’a symbol or echo of who and what you are.

It doesn’t take much reflection to appreciate that thisis a modern secularization of earlier modes of Christianpiety and of the care of the soul, where the state of one’ssoul is ideally to be manifested (re-presented) by its ‘goodworks.’ ‘You are your stuff’ is the corporatist inflectionof the religious belief that ‘you are as good or as bad asyour (good or bad) deeds.’ This amalgam of ethics andaesthetics manufactured by the industries of visualrepresentation and spectacle - the ‘subject-object matrix’of our modernities - is what institutions such as arthistory and museology have entailed and afforded: everyobject always ultimately staged as an object-lesson, and a‘lesson,’ moreover, with exchange value in the commoditymarketplace. You ‘are’ what your life-style appears to ‘say’about who and what you ‘are,’ which engenders the corefantasy of capitalist modernity that more and ‘better’ stuffcan ‘speak’ more and more ‘truly’ of your continuallyevolving selfhood. It’s not difficult to appreciate thatall of this is really a secularized theology – as indeedMarx himself made quite explicitly clear when he referred tothe modern commodity as fundamentally theological in nature:which was precisely the central point of his exhaustivecritical analysis of capitalism that (as Walter Benjaminonce put it), smothered 19th century Europe like a fog,obscuring the actual complex relations between people andthings, making of those relationships immaterial fetishes.Or, as Derrida once put it in a rather obscure essaypublished three decades ago called ‘Economimesis,’ it wasalways ‘[A] divine teleology [that has] secure[d] the

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political economy of the fine arts.’ My point here is thatDerrida’s observation (Itself a direct echo of Plato) wasonly half the story, and needs to be balanced by itsrhetorical converse: that it is precisely ‘Aesthetics thatsecures the political economy of all religiosities’ – apoint I’ll return to later.

To shop is to work on the artistry of one’s personhoodso that it would appear to ‘reflect’ (re-present) one’sinwardness; one’s inner character or ‘spirit.’ Themaintenance of this matter - spirit division required acertain predestined decorum; that is, a legally-designatedappropriateness or ‘natural order’ of things. In this way, theideal state would conform in its social system and ordering,and its separation of classes, races, or genders to a‘mapping’ alleged by those in power to be literally imposedby Nature (or the ‘natural’ forces of the ‘free market’ or‘human nature’), or by the ‘command’ imputed to someabstraction such as a god or spirit-being, literalized by alegal code, and personified by that abstraction’s humanrepresentative or manifestation, the king or sovereign. Allsovereignty depends on its enabling condition: itsconvincing artifice.

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I’d like to summarize my major points as a series oftheses and corollaries and implications, all of which areintended as provocations for discussion.

1. First Thesis. (First Provocation) All modes of religiosity may be distinguished by being either ambivalent,

duplicitous, or amnesiac with respect to the fabricatedness of their ownfabrication; their own artifice or artistry.

There are a number of corollaries that appear to followfrom this, chief among them being:

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(a)Religiosities are responses to circumstances perceived as prior or pre-existing or determinant; as the products or effects of some condition orexperience.

(b)Religiosities are subsequent to and presuppose artistry or ‘art’(religion is an artistic or aesthetic practice) whichsuggests further that

(c)Artistry and religiosity are either (1) alternativeresponses to some common or determining condition or (2)alternative ambivalences or amnesias with respect to someprior problem or circumstance.

Religiosity and artistry may thus be seen either asdifferent points on the same continuum rather than points indifferent conceptual spaces, or as indeterminate orcircumstantial and situational products and effects of eachother, or both. Some of these corollaries will be examinedfurther as we proceed.

2. Second Thesis. Religiosities are fundamentally invested in the problematic of

representation in that they constitute relative positions taken with respect to therhetoric, syntax, or semiology of signification: the nature of the relationships(structural and ethical) between an object or event and its assumed cause: thenature, so to speak of what it means to ‘witness.’ (All religions, inother words, are more or less formalized positions [andformally-enforced perspectives] taken with respect to thenature of the sign)

Comment: In the case of most religious traditions,this has entailed the declaration or instantiation of a(commonly masked) ontological dualism, and in particular aposited opposition between what might be termed‘materiality’ and ‘immateriality.’ This positing of adualistic ontology whereby a ‘material’ world is contrastedwith an ‘immaterial’ or ‘spiritual’ and ‘transcendent’ worldis not, however, except in the case of true Manicheandualism, an opposition between two equal states of being,

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but is rather marked by a hierarchy of value, whereby onerealm – the spiritual or immaterial - is normally posited astranscendent and primary, or even as the origin or cause ofthe world of materiality. The material world as the productand effect of transcendent, immaterial forces. The dualismis of course not neutral but is already articulated from theperspective of religious faith-systems themselves: afunction or fiction of religionist rhetorical categories.

Commonly a realm of the immaterial (the big Other) ispersonified or reified as an immaterial force, spirit, soul, ordivinity, in which (or in ‘Whom’) is invested transcendent andusually unlimited, immortal, or permanently enduring orrecurring powers or abilities. These latter are ofteninvested with interventional force; with a power tointervene in and affect aspects or properties or qualitiesin and of the (produced) ‘material’ or secondary world.Conversely, in some traditions, such reified principles orpowers are often also understood to be impossibly remote,unapproachable, or even indefinably and totally Other. Butboth conditions or properties of the immaterial principle orspirit-being are co-determined and co-constructed, and insome traditions oscillate and alternate: a double-bind ofabsolute Otherness versus transcendently powerfulinterventionism. In other words, any concept of animmaterial spirit or god as totally unfathomable Othernessis linked with and defined by an opposite completetransparency. Sometimes the immaterial being ‘hears’ one’swishes or ‘answers’ one’s ‘prayers’, sometimes it doesn’t.It is precisely on this point that the two principal globalmonotheisms, Islam and Christianity, are most commonlycontrasted, although they both share a common fiction: thata properly indoctrinated / invested believer can undercertain prescribed circumstances stand in for the immaterialOther as ‘its’ (usually gendered in monotheisms as ‘his’)voice, promoting or enforcing its ‘Will’ or Law. A situationuncannily replicating one of the major tenets of Lacanianpsychoanalytic theory, wherein ‘desire’ is always ‘thedesire of the Other.’ii

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What is traditionally masked in (or by) such ontologiesare both their hierarchical structure or systematicity andtheir articulation as a religiosity: in other words, the veryopposition between a ‘material’ and an ‘immaterial’ level ofexistence is defined from the position of that which it presumes(pretends) to articulate or investigate. The material / immaterialontology is not a conclusion but a preliminary philosophicalhypothesis masquerading as that which it ostensibly seeks toprove. Simply by evoking the ‘materiality’ of the world;that the world is characterized by a property of materialityor of the palpable or concrete, it simultaneously co-produces its ostensible antithesis; the ‘spiritual’ or non-(pre- or post- or extra-) material world.

This thesis suggests the following corollaries:

(a) the material / immaterial opposition is the ground ortemplate (or matrix) for positing equivalent orcomplementary properties in multiple dimensions: on the level ofthe scale of the individual, the group, the community, thefamily, the nation, the species, and so forth; and

(b) these scalar transpositions or postulates aredisseminated as (metaphorical) equivalences, which commonlyspecify (that is, are taken to justify) a certainappropriateness; certain proper or fittingly human (andother) behaviors which bear with them legal or ethical forceor discipline. A cosmological modularity or decorum.

To which may be added that the effect of themaintenance of this duality is the possibility ofimagining (and in instituted religions the legally-enforced belief, commonly under pain of death) that

(d)the ‘immaterial’ has an ‘independent’ existence of itsown (a ‘transcendental signified’ exceeding the chain

ii See Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, p. 300.

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of [material] signs), and thus prior to its ‘material’antithesis, constituting the essence of religiosity.iii

This semiological or epistemological artifact is themost important and powerful implication ofreligiosity.

(e)All of which suggests a further conclusion, namely that

the maintenance of this core dualism generates an uncannily‘oscillating ontology,’ whereby ‘materialism’ and‘spiritualism’ (to use the most common terms) fantasized asperpetually struggling in a cosmic Hollywood battle for aposition of primacy or transcendence, neither everpermanently secure.

Comment: In general, then, the maintenance of thematerialism / immaterialism dualism – the belief in a realmof spirit or immateriality and its (from certain religiousperspectives) lower or ‘derivative’ antithesis, a realm of‘pure’ (or ‘mere’) matter – or vice-versa - allows for thepossibility of each perspective imagining its antithesis. Each is the ghostperpetually haunting the ‘body’ of the other; the system ofits otherness. Each ‘realm’ or mode of being is essentiallyunstable or fragile, as its essence always contains its‘opposite,’ each opposite (each ‘elsewhere’) being whatgrounds and makes possible the first ontological realm.

The extraordinary fear - the terror endemic to allmonotheistic religions in the face of possibleiii Which recalls the observation by Derrida that ‘The maintenanceof the rigorous distinction…between the signans and the signatum,the equation of the signatum and the concept, inherently leavesopen the possibility of thinking a concept signified in and of itself, aconcept simply present for thought, independent of a relationshipto language, that is, of a relationship to a system ofsignifiers… leaving open this possibility…accedes to theclassical exigency of…a ‘transcendental signified,’ which in andof itself, in its essence, would refer to no signifier, wouldexceed the chain of signs’ (Jacques Derrida, ‘Semiology andGrammatology,’ in Derrida, Positions, ed. Alan Bass (Chicago: Univ.of Chicago Press, 1981): 19-20.

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‘disobedience’ (with respect to ‘visual [or other modes of]representation’), more often than not leading to ostracism,corporeal punishment, or at times in all ultra-orthodoxiesor fundamentalisms violent death - is in fact a perfectly‘logical’ and consistent application of a systemic need toforestall or prevent even the imagining of difference. As I noted earlier,this was precisely Plato’s dilemma - that if it were to beadmitted that, for example, the structure of a certainsocial, political, or economic system were an artifact ofhuman artistry (rather than having been ‘pre-ordained’ by areified immaterial force or divinity or deified ancestors,or by ‘natural’ law), it would allow for the possibility ofthinking otherwise: of imagining other forms of community,organizations of cities, economic or political systems orways of life, even of different forms of human society:different ways of being ‘human.’

This was the essence of Plato’s prescriptions for anideal city-state,iv which in the terms I am using here,resulted in what can be called a political or civicreligiosity – itself a central foundation of Augustine’sdistinction, many centuries later, between an ideal ‘City ofGod’ and a ‘City of Man.’ Both Plato and Augustine werebeing perfectly consistent in articulating an equationbetween religion and politics. Ideally for both there wouldbe a non-distinction between politics and religion, asituation echoed today in the strenuous movement by anti-democratic and counter-revolutionary fundamentalists in theUS to erase the separation of church and state and establisha theocracy.

Of course the terror at the heart of many religiositiesattests to the fundamental fragility of instituted and enforcedsystems of thought (established ‘religions’ in a strictsense) in the face of possible evidence of alternative

iv Plato, Republic, trans. Paul Shorey, Loeb Classical Library(Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1953), esp. 1: 243-45 and 2:464-465. Much of the bulk of the discussion is carried out inbook 6, esp. at the end, with a consideration of the contrastbetween the intelligible and the visible (511 ff).

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‘realities.’ If a faith community’s members might be exposedto the awareness of the artifice of its religion or ‘wisdomtradition’ – the possibility of it being not ‘created’ by animmaterial (and thus unassailable and unaccountable) sourceor force or law of ‘nature’ but rather has its origins orsources in (‘mortal’) human invention – then the possibilityalso exists that other realities, beliefs, social systems,cosmologies, reified immaterial forces (gods), or even ideasof what is ‘properly human’, might be imagined with equalcogency. The deeply dreaded result – at least in the fanciesof those holding religiously-enforced social and politicalpower - would be the patent ‘destabilizing’ of a givencommunity or social contract, and the loosening of its legalbonds, leading to a vision of chaos. The reality; the veryontological cohesion; of an entire universe really may verywell hinge on the amount of female flesh exposed by abikini. And what if it were to be admitted that the landyour people now occupy really wasn’t the ‘gift’ of animaginary immaterial being but was taken from its previousinhabitants, whose ethnic ‘cleansing’ justified in the‘name’ of the colonists’ immaterial divinity (as in so manycases past and present)?

Antitheses to fundamentalist religiosities are whatreligionists have characterized as ‘secularist’, or, as withthe case of the current pope, a ‘postmodernist’ condition,although once again, secularism is a co-constructedrhetorical artifact of the non-secular (i.e., time-independent) spiritualist orthodoxy itself being threatened:its co-produced and co-determined other, which inhabits thesystem as the very possibility of its existence in the firstplace.v

v The notion of the ‘postmodern’ not as modernity’s aftermath butrather as its co-constructed and co-present Other is at the heartof the argument of the text by Jean-Francois Lyotard which gaverise to the ‘postmodernist’ thesis in the first place. SeeLyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. GeoffBennington & Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Univ. of MinnesotaPress, 1984 (La condition postmoderne, Paris, 1979)

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The point is that religiosity is thus dangerously fragile atevery point in its system, if the flesh of an improperlyslaughtered animal were to be served at a dinner table, orif the consequence of enjoying ‘unapproved’ sexualitiesmeans that you will be stoned, raped, or burnt to death, orif the utterance of a disrespectful or even incorrectlypronounced or written word in connection with a sanctifiedor hallowed person or divinity, could instantly incur theimaginary wrath of that divinity or prophet or minister,whose enforcement will by no means be merely imaginary.

In fact, what is specifically and literally evoked insuch instances of terror is the threat to the propriety ordecorum of a social or civic order or code of behavior – inother words, precisely the stylistic consistency and aesthetic harmonyand cohesion of a social or cultural fabrication. The ‘truth’ of anyreligion is a rhetorical property of its effective artistry.Such ironies are not ‘merely rhetorical’ but are in factdeeply structural - which is to say ethical, suggesting themutual entailment of aesthetics and ethics; more on this ina moment.

3. Third Thesis. (The ‘chiasmic’ mutual entailment of thecritiques):Any effective critique of religiosity will be linked to an effective critique of

art, artistry, or artifice, which in its own right constitutes a perspective orposition taken with respect to signification and representation which is ostensiblyantithetical but in fact more specifically complementary to that of religiosity.

Among the principal corollaries of this thesis are:

(a) Art (in the modernist sense of ‘fine art’) is asecondary effect of a position taken with respect tothe problem of representation; there is no art assuch except as a reified (culturally sanctified)modernist commodity;

(b) Art is not a what (a kind of thing) but a when anda how (a position or perspective on things) whosereification and commodification constitutes an

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idolatry of a certain religious or spiritualistontology, with scalar or dimensional consequences (the‘artist’ genius, for example, as a metaphor of a‘divine’ creator or artificer, the obverse imaginaryof the world as ‘designed’ ‘intelligently’);

(c) The modern discourse on (fine) art, which is notconfined to an academic profession such as arthistory or visual culture studies, but isdistributed across a massively interwoven network ofdiscursive practices (art history, art criticism,art theory, aesthetic philosophy, and a variety orrelated modern disciplines and industries [tourism,heritage, fashion, etc.] (this entire matrix ofdeponent professions, practices, and institutions)comprises in fact a secular religiosity legitimizing amultidimensional coordination of social behaviors inconnection with the evolution and maintenance of themodern nation-state; of the idea and practice of thenation.

Comment: The discourse and critique of religiosity isessentially connected to and simultaneously an effect andartifact of the perspective on signification andrepresentation (and of an ethics of the relations betweensubjects and between subjects and objects) of that which itdenies – the discourse on and of art, artistry, andartifice. Art and religion are fundamentally interdependentupon each other and mutually defining, and the critique ofeither remains superficial and incomplete apart from or inthe absence of a coordination with the critique of theother. But the point is that there are not, strictlyspeaking, ‘others;’ as if these (religion and art) were twoautonomous and distinct entities rather than being facets andproducts of a common underlying philosophical, ethical, andpsychological problem.

Far from being distinct or opposed domains ofknowledge-production or behavior, artistry and religiosityrather constitute epistemological technologies which are the

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products of different perspectives on (and alternativeresponses to) a common fundamental problem – the problem ofrepresentation (the relations between subjects and objects)as such. Art and religion are opposed yet mutually-definingand co-determined answers or approaches to the same questionof the ethics of the practice of the self; of how self-other relationsare to be civilly and socially managed and co-ordinated. Therelationships between art and religion are not relationshipsbetween two random or incidental cultural phenomena; theproblem of that relationship is precisely what defines anddetermines our most fundamental understanding of each. It isin that relationship – how religions deal with and makepossible art and artifice, and how artifice simultaneouslydeals with, produces, and makes possible religiosity in thefirst place – (what I called at the outset their differentialintricacy) that the essence of each can be articulated andunderstood. Note, however, that by saying ‘each,’ onealready is in danger of reifying each perspective onsignification – which in fact is the more general point:neither what we call ‘art’ nor ‘religion’ exist except asreifications of perspectives or positions taken on a common, more fundamentalphilosophical ontological phenomenon: the nature of the relationship betweenentities, and, ultimately, the question of otherness in its co-construction of sameness. All of which leads, then, to a fourthand final thesis (and final provocation):

4. Fourth ThesisAll the relationships considered in the first three theses constitute

alternative ethical positions or implications for individual or collective behavior,as ethics is itself a consciousness of the nature of relationships (of any kind) assuch: a topology of self and other.

The entailment of ethics and aesthetics (artistry) hashad a number of consequences in legitimizing moderndisciplines such as art history,vi aesthetic philosophy,established religion, and the political economies ofmodernity, which concern the virtual ‘superimposition’ ofobjects and subjects wherein the object is seen by a subjectthrough the screen of an erotic fetishization of anothersubject. The object – and in particular the (modernist)

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‘artwork’ (viz., art under capitalism) - is invested witherotic agency (every object a potential love-object) anddeployed as an object of sublimated erotic desire.Aesthetics (and fine art) are historically entailed with anethics of what (from the perspective of religiosity) isframed as idolatry and fetishism, a situation where incertain religious traditions, artistry and religiosity areheld in uneasy balance, recalling that of an opticalillusion, perpetually oscillating between alternativegeometries; alternative realities. It is precisely here thatwe can see most clearly the mutual entailment of artistry,fetishism, religion, and capital, an effective critique ofwhose differential intricacy necessarily begins where Derrida’sinterrogation of the ghosts or specters of Marx left off.

* * *But that’s another paper, and now it’s time here to

pause and open up these provocations to discussion. The mostbasic question around which what we call art and religionrevolve is what an object or entity may be said to be awitness to – precisely the core of the issue addressed byPlato, and which still determines and generates debatesabout idolatry, fetishism, and blasphemy today, 2500 yearslater. So we must be very clear about what grounds andenables all current religious debates – their completelysimultaneous aesthetic and philosophical presuppositions andbeliefs, which were prefigured in the philosophicalvi With respect to the development in the West of art history andaesthetic philosophy during and since the 18th century, see D.Preziosi, Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science (New Haven &London: Yale Univ. Press, 1989, 1991); id., The Art of Art History: ACritical Anthology (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998; 2nded., 2009;Chinese ed. 2011), esp. ’The Art of Art History,’ pp. 507-525;id., Brain of the Earth’s Body: Art, Museums, and the Phantasms of Modernity: The2001 Slade Lectures in the Fine Arts at Oxford (Minneapolis: Univ. ofMinnesota Press, 2003; and D. Preziosi & Claire Farago, eds.,Grasping the World: the Idea of the Museum (London: Ashgate, 2004). Seealso Giorgio Agamben, The Man without Content (Stanford: StanfordUniv. Press, 1999 [L’uomo senza contenuto, Quodlibet, 1994]): 4.

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controversies exemplified by Plato’s discussion about whatconstituted an ideal community: Plato’s most fundamentaldilemma, which of course continues to be our own in thestruggle for civil democracy and against theocracy.

I’ve tried to foreground the uncannily comparable (ifconvoluted and chiasmically reversed) enchantments attendingthe fabrications of ‘art’ and ‘religion,’ which I’ve arguedwere in essence secondary effects of essentially ethicalpositions taken – responsibly or irresponsibly - withrespect to the nature of the sign, of signification, and ofrepresentation or witnessing as such: in the case ofartistry and religiosity not equations (fetishisms) butadequations, hypotheses, or mootings of possible worlds whichalternately acknowledge and deny their fabricatedness. Inconclusion, then, I will reiterate that what you’ve heard isnot a claim for ethical responsibility on the part of ‘art’in contrast to an ethical irresponsibility on the part of‘religion’. Rather, what is being claimed by this critiqueis a reciprocal intricacy of artistry and religiosity ascontrastive ethical positions with respect to thearticulation of relationships between subjects and objects.Assumption of responsibility for the fabricatedness ofartifice is what corresponds to what I’ve called artistry,(in the sense of ars or tekhne); abrogation of thatresponsibility is what I’ve called religiosity (whosereification is what is known as religion or idolatry). So myinterrogation of ‘the relationships between art andreligion’ has resulted in a deconstructive critique of theputative distinctions between these two reifications ofethical perspectives, resulting in a call for theirreplacement by a new discursive practice attentive toaspects of the ethics of our social and disciplinarypractices.

What you’ve been hearing were a series of openings inan ongoing critique of some very ancient questions that longantedate both what we call art and religion – problems andconundrums that remain unresolved in many contemporarydiscussions and debates in art history and theology, in nosmall measure because of a systemic unwillingness to

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explicitly engage with the implications of the ethics of ourpractices. All of which applies directly to what remains ofour own mode of academic disciplinarity still disingenuouslypromoting itself as articulating art’s (or ‘visualculture’s’) putative ‘history.’ Regarding which it’snecessary to say: Enough already. Too much is at stake todayto continue business as usual; to continue riding around adisciplinary carousel which perennially holds out the hopeof yet another brass ring which if firmly grasped willdeliver one more new methodology to deliver up the illusionthat the carousel we call art history or visual culture (orfor that matter theology) is not going round in circles.There is no new art history after ‘the end of art,’ and notleast because we’ve not yet fully engaged with artistryitself. We should ask ourselves who or what is benefited bypromoting and perpetuating such gaming.

The point of critique is to change the world, not re-upholster it.vii And the only way forward, as always, is tocontinue to think otherwise.

© Donald PreziosiDepartment of Art History

UCLApreziosi@ucla.edu

&Visiting Professor,

Dept of History of ArtUniversity of York, UK

vii If, as Deleuze & Guattari claim in the Introduction to theirbook What is Philosophy, p.2, ‘ … philosophy is the art of forming,inventing, and fabricating concepts,’ then it must also be saidthat (what we call) religion is the art of evading authorialresponsibility for the fabrication of concepts; an art ofduplicity, amnesia, or ambivalence with regard to its ownartistry and fabricatedness, of attributing authorship to animmaterial shadow Other.

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