Plato’s Dilemma:

Art, Religion and Amnesia

Donald Preziosi

UCLA

Synopsis - In an age witnessing the spread of theocratic

demogoguery in many societies, not least our own, and the

increasing devastation and death that seem permanently

endemic to most forms of state-supported and politically-

enforced religiosities, the most pressing civic task facing

all of us today is that of effectively defusing the

insanities so sadly being promoted everywhere in the name of

religion. But exorcising the terror generated by theocratic

religiosities requires more than replacing instituted

religions with ‘kinder, gentler’ spiritualities, for

virtually all of those currently on offer (from Rolfing to

Surfing to kabbalah to Rocky Mountain Buddhism) have proven

as pernicious and dangerous to civil and democratic society

as more overtly theocratic religiosities. A radically

different approach is needed today; one that engages

directly with what has engendered and enabled all forms of

spiritualism in the first place, and one that explicitly

addresses the most deeply-enduring fears at the heart of all

religion. These are fears that come less from competing

religions, faiths, or spiritualisms, and much more

importantly and much more seriously from what has precisely

engendered, enabled, maintained, and perpetuated all

religions in the first place – art itself. Every instituted religion is

above all an aesthetic practice in denial of the artifice of its own artistry:

amnesiac, ambivalent, or duplicitous with respect to its

foundations and origins as a product and effect of art; with

respect to the fabricatedness of its own fabrications; and

with respect to the artifice of what is promoted by every

religion as ‘real’ or ‘natural,’ or as ‘revealed’ or

authored or ‘designed’ by immaterial forces, spirits, gods,

divine persons, entities, or beings. This paper argues that

what are commonly differentiated in modernity as ‘art’ and

‘religion’ in fact constitute alternative perspectives on

the more fundamental philosophical problem of representation

or signification as such, of which what we term religion

(and art) are secondary products and effects. It is at this

more fundamental level that effective and enduring critiques

of religiosity and of artistry (and by implication, of art

history, art theory, and art criticism) will be developed.

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The following is about the ‘relations between art and

religion.’ But the simplicity of this phrase, like many

double-entry titles (‘art and revolution,’ ‘civilization and

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barbarism,’ ‘morality and capitalism,’ ‘politics’ and

‘gender’, ‘form’ and ‘content’) becomes immediately suspect,

for the terms can denote union, or opposition, or

dependency. So which of these relationships is meant here?

The following is divided into two parts: a first, discursive

discussion of the issues and their implications, and, in the

second part, a distillation of this into a series of

explicit theses and corollaries, and their implications.

What I’d like us to consider today is a different kind of

relationship (and thus a different sense of ‘relationship’

as such) by investigating what I’d like to call a differential

intricacy between ‘art’ and ‘religion’ - wherein the

involvement of each of these with each other constitutes

their only substantive reality or identity: art and religion

having a reality in terms precisely of that articulated

relationship. And I’d like to pursue this not by not

dragging you through a maze of two and a half millennia of

philosophical opinions and positions (I’ll keep all those

notes in my back pocket for the time being) but rather more

conversationally, through a series of propositions and

provocations with which we might jointly engage, the purpose

of 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 call

art and religion, and which is yet somehow more fundamental

than either? This is a problem that occupies the heart of

the modern discursive practices of art history and theology.

The basic hypothesis investigated by my talk is that what we

call art and religion are not distinct phenomena but are

rather variant responses to or perspectives on a common

philosophical problem – namely, the nature of representation

as such. I will argue that both have only circumstantial

independent existences as effects of something more

fundamental. Which of course is not to say that religion and

art do not have specific and distinct cultural and social

significances, even if the terms themselves as commonly used

today may have no real ‘essence’ behind them – or essences

so diffuse and slippery and historically so contingent as to

be in effect substantively or ontologically meaningless. It

is of course obvious that both forms of knowledge-production

(what I call epistemological technologies) have considerable

influence and power over citizens in many contemporary

societies. In the case of some religions, a direct and often

politically-enforced legal power over the life and death of

individuals or even whole populations: either one must

believe in specific sectarian hypotheses about existence, or

be ostracized, or be psychologically or physically

eliminated from the ‘body’ of the faithful - even to the

point of being murdered. Countless thousands have been

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eliminated or have perished over many centuries for

ostensibly ‘religious’ reasons.

While not so many have been murdered for explicitly

aesthetic reasons, I will argue that nonetheless, art is as

fundamentally dangerous and life-threatening as religion

continues to be, even if both art and religion may also at

times have had some well-documented redeeming qualities.

What exactly is at stake, then, in raising such difficult

questions today?

Much of what has passed for critical commentary on the

recent politically-motivated and media-driven phenomenon of

what used to be called a ‘return’ to or of religion or to

‘spirituality’ has avoided what is more fundamentally at

stake: namely, the artifice or artistry of religiosity, and

what has conversely been called the ‘divine teleology’ that

underlies the disciplinary attention to and practice of art

in the modern world: art history as a secular theologism.

Any critique of religion is necessarily connected to a

critique of art, artistry, or artifice. And vice-versa.

What follows is an attempt to clarify the mutual

entailment or co-constructedness of what we call ‘art’ and

‘religion.’ I keep using the phrase ‘what we call’ to

indicate that our modern and contemporary uses of these two

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terms are quite different from what, historically, has been

used to designate the phenomena referred to. Whatever we

understand art to be today - and by the term we usually mean

what has come to be called ‘fine art:’ art as a kind of

product or aesthetic commodity, designated for consumption

(consecrated, one might say) by portions or classes of

modern populations blessed with ‘taste’ - it was understood

and experienced radically differently not only prior to the

18th century and the concurrent foundations of modern

nation-states in Europe and America (which was what

disciplines such as art history were invented to service)

but also in European antiquity itself. What the Greeks

understood by tekhne and the Romans by ars were fundamentally

different from their common modern translation as ‘art.’

In order to understand what might be at stake in

critiquing religion or art today we need first to understand

how art might be seen as dangerous or even deadly. To do so,

we need to put aside the modern discourse on art and look

more extensively beneath what I might call the ‘glass floor’

of the modernist discourse on art. A decade ago, Giorgio

Agamben, 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], an

experience having little to do with disinterest and aesthetic enjoyment. The

power 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 was

forced to banish it, he did so reluctantly, “since we ourselves (in Plato’s own

words) are very conscious of her spell.”’

Art was clearly understood in European antiquity to be

among the most powerful, dangerous, and terrifying of human

phenomena, evoking ‘divine terror’ (theios phobos). While this

may seem incomprehensible today, understanding what was at

stake for Plato is essential to our own understanding of

what joins and what separates ‘art’ and ‘religion’ today,

since in our own modern understanding of art it is by

comparison so safely domesticated politically by the

institutions of art history, museology, and aesthetic

philosophy. Plato invoked an already ancient and persistent

ambivalence about the uncanniness of art; about its ability

to simultaneously fabricate and problematize the political and

religious power imagined to be materialized or ‘represented’

in a people’s forms and practices.

By which I mean the ambiguity of artistry or artifice

as such in not simply reflecting (or representing) but also

in fabricating the world in which we live, a problem

encountered in book 6 of The Republic. Art, especially what

Plato called the pantomimic or mimetic arts, problematized

seemingly secure oppositions between what we commonly

designate as fact and fiction; history and poetry; reason

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and emotion - all of which art threatens to reveal to be

circumstantial 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, or

commodity fetishism); he was quite clear that what artistry

created was the very real world in which we actually do live

our daily lives. The problem he attempted to address was

fundamental to philosophy, politics, and religion. If we

believe that a particular made thing ‘represents’ some

essence (either metaphorically ‘contained’ in some thing or

absent and elsewhere – for example, a ‘soul’ or a ‘spirit’

of a person, time, place), then it is obvious that the

essence purportedly ‘represented’ may also be represented in

other ways, problematizing the existence of that essence

itself. Leading one to imagine that the essence supposedly

represented is in fact a product of its so-called ‘re-

presentation;’ its epistemological technology. Such an

awareness obviously has the potential to undermine the

claims of any political or religious power to security and

truth. As Plato was perfectly aware in The Republic in his

attempt to describe what would constitute an ideal state. It

is this conundrum – the paradox of mimesis (what I’m

terming ‘Plato’s dilemma’) - that is precisely the problem

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that is the central and intractable conundrum of the

discursive practices of theology and art history.

The ‘god-like terror’ (theios phobos) that (exposure to)

art induced in the ancient Greek soul was simply and

precisely the terrifying awareness of exactly this: that works of art

don’t simply ‘imitate’ some imaginary essence or ‘idea,’ but

rather create and open up a world, and keep it in existence, as

Heidegger famously put it in discussing the ontologically

creative potential of artworks in his essay ‘The Origin of

the Work of Art,’ where the experience of art is taken to be

fundamentally religious in nature. Or more precisely, where

as he made clear, the common distinction between art and

religion was itself problematized and rendered

circumstantial rather than ontological.

The fundamental issue here is that of the truth or

falsity of imitation or representation: is a work of

artistic creativity an ‘imitation’ of some ideal essence,

immutable truth, or ‘transcendent reality,’ a phantasm

systemically built into modernist discursive practices such

as art history or visual culture studies, or is it

mutability itself that is ‘transcendent’? This was precisely

the problem that so directly engaged later monotheist

religious thinkers such as Augustine and Aquinas (not to

mention Kierkegaard), all of whom knew exactly what was so

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dangerously at stake in the challenge of art to religious

faith. What, in other words, is the ontological status of a

text or an utterance or an ‘artwork’? Are they the effects of

a pre-existing ‘spirit,’ soul, character, or mentality, or

is that spirit or mentality an after-effect or product and

projection of artifice itself? (- precisely the unresolvable

conundrum of all art history, theory, and criticism; of

every investigation of ‘culture,’ ‘visual’ or otherwise)

There is a theological dualism inhabiting the heart of

the traditional critique of these problems, which is the

claim of a distinction or opposition between what might be

called ‘materialism’ and ‘immaterialism:’ the rhetorical

double-bind of ‘matter’ versus ‘spirit.’ A distinction, of

course, which is a specifically theological hypothesis

masquerading as an ontological first principle.

With respect to artistry, both Heidegger and Agamben

argued that in the modern age we are cut off from the

dangerous powers of art because our relation to it has been

subjectivized – and in a curious way secularized by the

(pseudo-) sciences of aesthetic philosophy, art history, and

museology. Artworks have been domesticated into serving as

mere reflections or exemplifications (re-presentations) of

hypothesized social-historical processes or identitarian

politics: as artifacts of individual or collective values or

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mentalities, and as objects for stylistic consumption and

the judgments of individual ‘taste.’ As commodified

exemplars of value, mentality, artistic ‘genius,’ or

personal or collective ‘style,’ artworks today elicit oddly

passive reading, appreciation, admiration, explanation, and

interpretation - rather than active engagement. Instead of

passionate engagement we have the absurdities of ‘art

criticism’ (whose very language is a thinly-veiled,

secularized version of ethical judgment itself floating on

the surface of a certain religiosity which takes literally

the ancient Greek conflation of the good, the beautiful, and

the true in the single word kalos). The art object is reduced

to being an historical, aesthetic puzzle eliciting cleverly

articulated solutions – the magisterial pronouncements of

the sanctioned critic, historian, museum curator, gallery

owner, or collector.

Such an ideology of re-presentation is in fact a kind

of secular theology, a point I’ll return to later.

But let’s return to Plato for a moment. We need to

understand specifically what was at stake in his banishing

of the arts – that enduring puzzle haunting every subsequent

art theory. Art history’s failure to deal effectively with

that issue is in fact analogous to the misunderstandings

surrounding the recent controversies of the so-called

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‘Mohammed cartoon’ affair ignited by the Danish newspaper

Jyllandsposten in late 2005. The failure by many to directly

deal with the underlying logic of the charge of ‘blasphemy’

made by some Muslims is itself very instructive, for it

ignored an issue that has underlain controversies about art

and religion in the West that antedated by half a millennium

the invention of post-tribal monotheisms such as

Christianity, or of Islam itself by a millenium. Plato was

writing about what would constitute an ideal city and social

order in the face of the very dangerous powers of artistry

to both create and problematize the manifestations of political

power. The mimetic arts, he argued, should ideally be

employed to give proper or appropriate expression to a city

and its social structures. Its hierarchies of individuals

and groups must be clearly mapped onto and into civic space

and time - the distribution of citizens and their

livelihoods as a map or ‘re-presentation’ of the ideal truth

of the city itself. A world in which what is materially

fabricated evokes a ‘true’ order believed (by those holding

power, of course) to constitute that world or cosmos, and

which moreover is imagined to have an existence prior to and

independent of its ‘expression’ or ‘materialization.’ As if

the human world were a simulation of some divinely-given

essence or truth or natural law, which is why Plato set a

infallible ‘philosopher-king’ as ruler of his ideal city: a

legal ‘representative’ (and enforcer of) a ‘divine order.’

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(The ‘Decider’ [to use a contemporary Bushism], whose ‘god’

‘speaks’ to him and tells him how to vote on the minimum

wage or about tax cuts for the rich.)

My point is that any piece of artifice is a witness

both to what it may be taken to represent and to its opposite, as

well as witnessing the arbitrariness of claims to

representational truth. This concerns the arbitrariness of

representation as such - the fundamental theological

problem; that which on whose basis the very possibility of

any religion is made possible or impossible. Religion, in

short, is an interpretative practice, an epistemological

technology, concerning the assignment of values to a set of

phenomena or characteristics that are claimed (by those

claiming and using power) to have ‘already existed’ in a given

community. This consists of the postulation by enforcement

of a social and philosophical decorum whereby material

phenomena are linked (as if ‘re-presenting’) their allegedly

pre-existing ideas, values, mentalities, truths, or

essences.

In other words, the essential ‘secret’ of religion is

that there really is no secret at all that is separate from

its alleged ‘expression.’ Being is not distinct from

interpretation, which is to say not distinct from artifice.

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Few philosophers have been as powerfully clear about

this than Nietzsche, for whom (to paraphrase) the

distinctive invention of the founders of religions has been,

first, to posit a particular kind of life and everyday

customs that have the effect of disciplining the will and at

the same time of abolishing boredom – and then (secondly),

to bestow on this life style an interpretation that makes it

appear to be illuminated by the highest value, so that this

life style becomes something for which one fights and under

certain circumstances sacrifices one’s life. Actually, the

second of these two inventions is more essential. The first,

the way of life, was usually there before, but alongside

other ways of life and without any sense of its special

value. The significance and originality of the founder of a

religion 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 artistry

which is in denial of (or is duplicitous regarding) the

fabricatedness of its own inventions, commonly attributing

that artifice to the ‘design’ of an immaterial - and (for

sectarian ‘believers’) an allegedly ‘pre-existing’ and

originating being or force.

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Which might begin to explain the ‘logic’ of certain

religious strictures against representation, whether the

‘representational’ image of a prophet, as in Islam, the

complete spelling out of the Jewish name of its own spirit

Being, or a picture of what one might imagine one’s own

‘sacred’ spirit to be. Of the three major monotheisms, it

was chiefly Christianity which came to tackle the problem of

representation by engaging directly with the religious

import of imagery itself, in no small measure because of its

own early growth within and evolution in relationship to

(and at times reaction against) the more ancient

iconophiliac cultures of Egypt, Greece, Rome.

Plato (and in this he was followed by Augustine and the

literalist branches of all monotheisms) would have banished

the mimetic arts from his ideal city-state because of their

potentially destabilizing influence on the imaginations of

its citizens, causing them to literally think otherwise than

what they are legally compelled to believe. The problem,

again, is simply this: if the state is recognized for what

it is, namely, a fabrication; a human artifact; then other

kinds of states (and other modes of civic life, or even

other modes of being ‘human’) might be imagined and given

form, calling into question the ‘naturalness’ of the state

one has. Plato – who was no democrat - was very clear that

when it comes to the arts, everything including our

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identities and our very existence as social beings is

radically and fundamentally at stake. Something that

Augustine, Mohammed, the iconoclasts of Byzantium or of

early Protestantism clearly appreciated and attempted to

legally enforce, literally under pain of death.

The acknowledgement of the existence of art as artifice

is thus one of the foundations of philosophy itself (as the

ancient Greek antidote and alternative to religion) as

critique and discernment; as a dialectical and dialogic

questioning of the ‘naturalness’ of nature; as ‘an incessant

vigilance about how and why and what we tend to take for

granted.’ For philosophy, hypotheses are points of departure

and of inquiry, of contention and negotiation – versus

socially, legally, and politically instituted religiosities,

where such hypotheses are on the contrary promoted and

fabricated as first principles; as ontological ‘truths’ to

be obeyed.

For Plato (and for Augustine half a millenium later),

politics, to be effective, sustainable, and lasting, must be

grounded in ‘permanent truths’ that were believed to be

above and beyond the mutable world of daily life. Plato’s

dilemma was thus a powerfully real one: how do you instill a

securely unquestioned belief in one’s city or state or

nation or culture or ethnicity (and not so coincidentally in

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one’s rulers and lords) that is amnesiac with regard to its

fabricatedness. How do you design amnesia? - something the

recent fantasists of ‘intelligent design’ have assiduously

avoided addressing, since all of their rhetoric is designed

to avoid the fundamental contradiction in the phrase itself.

Over the past two centuries, what we commonly refer to

as ‘art’ has served as the site par excellence for the

production of the fictions that, brilliantly woven together,

make up the fabric of all our modernities and tame

postmodernities - the phantasms of identity, ethnicity,

class, race, gender, nation, sex, indigeneity, and

otherness, which we are induced to imagine as ‘re-presented’

or ’ex-pressed’ in the products and effects of individuals,

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 Dane

or all of Denmark, France, Italy, China, etc]…) The key

metaphorical conundrum of our post-Enlightenment modernities

– replicated endlessly in the fantasy world of every

shopping mall - is that the form of your work and behavior

should 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 this

is a modern secularization of earlier modes of Christian

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piety and of the care of the soul, where the state of one’s

soul is ideally to be manifested (re-presented) by its ‘good

works.’ ‘You are your stuff’ is the corporatist inflection

of the religious belief that ‘you are as good or as bad as

your (good or bad) deeds.’ This amalgam of ethics and

aesthetics manufactured by the industries of visual

representation and spectacle - the ‘subject-object matrix’

of our modernities - is what institutions such as art

history and museology have entailed and afforded: every

object always ultimately staged as an object-lesson, and a

‘lesson,’ moreover, with exchange value in the commodity

marketplace. You ‘are’ what your life-style appears to ‘say’

about who and what you ‘are,’ which engenders the core

fantasy of capitalist modernity that more and ‘better’ stuff

can ‘speak’ more and more ‘truly’ of your continually

evolving selfhood. It’s not difficult to appreciate that

all of this is really a secularized theology – as indeed

Marx himself made quite explicitly clear when he referred to

the modern commodity as fundamentally theological in nature:

which was precisely the central point of his exhaustive

critical analysis of capitalism that (as Walter Benjamin

once put it), smothered 19th century Europe like a fog,

obscuring the actual complex relations between people and

things, making of those relationships immaterial fetishes.

Or, as Derrida once put it in a rather obscure essay

published three decades ago called ‘Economimesis,’ it was

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always ‘[A] divine teleology [that has] secure[d] the

political economy of the fine arts.’ My point here is that

Derrida’s observation (Itself a direct echo of Plato) was

only half the story, and needs to be balanced by its

rhetorical converse: that it is precisely ‘Aesthetics that

secures the political economy of all religiosities’ – a

point I’ll return to later.

To shop is to work on the artistry of one’s personhood

so that it would appear to ‘reflect’ (re-present) one’s

inwardness; one’s inner character or ‘spirit.’ The

maintenance of this matter - spirit division required a

certain predestined decorum; that is, a legally-designated

appropriateness or ‘natural order’ of things. In this way, the

ideal 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 imposed

by Nature (or the ‘natural’ forces of the ‘free market’ or

‘human nature’), or by the ‘command’ imputed to some

abstraction such as a god or spirit-being, literalized by a

legal code, and personified by that abstraction’s human

representative or manifestation, the king or sovereign. All

sovereignty depends on its enabling condition: its

convincing artifice.

TWO

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I’d like to summarize my major points as a series of

theses and corollaries and implications, all of which are

intended 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 own

fabrication; their own artifice or artistry.

There are a number of corollaries that appear to follow

from this, chief among them being:

(a)Religiosities are responses to circumstances perceived as prior or pre-

existing or determinant; as the products or effects of some condition or

experience.

(b)Religiosities are subsequent to and presuppose artistry or ‘art’

(religion is an artistic or aesthetic practice) which

suggests further that

(c)Artistry and religiosity are either (1) alternative

responses to some common or determining condition or (2)

alternative ambivalences or amnesias with respect to some

prior problem or circumstance.

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Religiosity and artistry may thus be seen either as

different points on the same continuum rather than points in

different conceptual spaces, or as indeterminate or

circumstantial and situational products and effects of each

other, or both. Some of these corollaries will be examined

further 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 the

rhetoric, syntax, or semiology of signification: the nature of the relationships

(structural and ethical) between an object or event and its assumed cause: the

nature, so to speak of what it means to ‘witness.’ (All religions, in

other words, are more or less formalized positions [and

formally-enforced perspectives] taken with respect to the

nature 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 a

posited opposition between what might be termed

‘materiality’ and ‘immateriality.’ This positing of a

dualistic ontology whereby a ‘material’ world is contrasted

with an ‘immaterial’ or ‘spiritual’ and ‘transcendent’ world

is not, however, except in the case of true Manichean

dualism, an opposition between two equal states of being,

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but is rather marked by a hierarchy of value, whereby one

realm – the spiritual or immaterial - is normally posited as

transcendent and primary, or even as the origin or cause of

the world of materiality. The material world as the product

and effect of transcendent, immaterial forces. The dualism

is of course not neutral but is already articulated from the

perspective of religious faith-systems themselves: a

function or fiction of religionist rhetorical categories.

Commonly a realm of the immaterial (the big Other) is

personified or reified as an immaterial force, spirit, soul, or

divinity, in which (or in ‘Whom’) is invested transcendent and

usually unlimited, immortal, or permanently enduring or

recurring powers or abilities. These latter are often

invested with interventional force; with a power to

intervene in and affect aspects or properties or qualities

in and of the (produced) ‘material’ or secondary world.

Conversely, in some traditions, such reified principles or

powers are often also understood to be impossibly remote,

unapproachable, or even indefinably and totally Other. But

both conditions or properties of the immaterial principle or

spirit-being are co-determined and co-constructed, and in

some traditions oscillate and alternate: a double-bind of

absolute Otherness versus transcendently powerful

interventionism. In other words, any concept of an

immaterial spirit or god as totally unfathomable Otherness

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is linked with and defined by an opposite complete

transparency. Sometimes the immaterial being ‘hears’ one’s

wishes or ‘answers’ one’s ‘prayers’, sometimes it doesn’t.

It is precisely on this point that the two principal global

monotheisms, Islam and Christianity, are most commonly

contrasted, although they both share a common fiction: that

a properly indoctrinated / invested believer can under

certain prescribed circumstances stand in for the immaterial

Other as ‘its’ (usually gendered in monotheisms as ‘his’)

voice, promoting or enforcing its ‘Will’ or Law. A situation

uncannily replicating one of the major tenets of Lacanian

psychoanalytic theory, wherein ‘desire’ is always ‘the

desire of the Other.’ii

What is traditionally masked in (or by) such ontologies

are both their hierarchical structure or systematicity and

their articulation as a religiosity: in other words, the very

opposition between a ‘material’ and an ‘immaterial’ level of

existence is defined from the position of that which it presumes

(pretends) to articulate or investigate. The material / immaterial

ontology is not a conclusion but a preliminary philosophical

hypothesis masquerading as that which it ostensibly seeks to

prove. Simply by evoking the ‘materiality’ of the world;

that the world is characterized by a property of materiality

or of the palpable or concrete, it simultaneously co-ii See Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, p. 300.

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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 or

template (or matrix) for positing equivalent or

complementary properties in multiple dimensions: on the level of

the scale of the individual, the group, the community, the

family, the nation, the species, and so forth; and

(b) these scalar transpositions or postulates are

disseminated as (metaphorical) equivalences, which commonly

specify (that is, are taken to justify) a certain

appropriateness; certain proper or fittingly human (and

other) behaviors which bear with them legal or ethical force

or discipline. A cosmological modularity or decorum.

To which may be added that the effect of the

maintenance of this duality is the possibility of

imagining (and in instituted religions the legally-

enforced belief, commonly under pain of death) that

(d)the ‘immaterial’ has an ‘independent’ existence of its

own (a ‘transcendental signified’ exceeding the chain

of [material] signs), and thus prior to its ‘material’

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antithesis, constituting the essence of religiosity.iii

This semiological or epistemological artifact is the

most important and powerful implication of

religiosity.

(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 as

perpetually struggling in a cosmic Hollywood battle for a

position of primacy or transcendence, neither ever

permanently secure.

Comment: In general, then, the maintenance of the

materialism / immaterialism dualism – the belief in a realm

of spirit or immateriality and its (from certain religious

perspectives) lower or ‘derivative’ antithesis, a realm of

‘pure’ (or ‘mere’) matter – or vice-versa - allows for the

iii 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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possibility of each perspective imagining its antithesis. Each is the ghost

perpetually haunting the ‘body’ of the other; the system of

its otherness. Each ‘realm’ or mode of being is essentially

unstable or fragile, as its essence always contains its

‘opposite,’ each opposite (each ‘elsewhere’) being what

grounds and makes possible the first ontological realm.

The extraordinary fear - the terror endemic to all

monotheistic religions in the face of possible

‘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-orthodoxies

or fundamentalisms violent death - is in fact a perfectly

‘logical’ and consistent application of a systemic need to

forestall or prevent even the imagining of difference. As I noted earlier,

this was precisely Plato’s dilemma - that if it were to be

admitted that, for example, the structure of a certain

social, political, or economic system were an artifact of

human artistry (rather than having been ‘pre-ordained’ by a

reified immaterial force or divinity or deified ancestors,

or by ‘natural’ law), it would allow for the possibility of

thinking otherwise: of imagining other forms of community,

organizations of cities, economic or political systems or

ways of life, even of different forms of human society:

different ways of being ‘human.’

This was the essence of Plato’s prescriptions for an

ideal city-state,iv which in the terms I am using here,

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resulted in what can be called a political or civic

religiosity – itself a central foundation of Augustine’s

distinction, many centuries later, between an ideal ‘City of

God’ and a ‘City of Man.’ Both Plato and Augustine were

being perfectly consistent in articulating an equation

between religion and politics. Ideally for both there would

be a non-distinction between politics and religion, a

situation echoed today in the strenuous movement by anti-

democratic and counter-revolutionary fundamentalists in the

US to erase the separation of church and state and establish

a theocracy.

Of course the terror at the heart of many religiosities

attests to the fundamental fragility of instituted and enforced

systems of thought (established ‘religions’ in a strict

sense) in the face of possible evidence of alternative

‘realities.’ If a faith community’s members might be exposed

to the awareness of the artifice of its religion or ‘wisdom

tradition’ – the possibility of it being not ‘created’ by an

immaterial (and thus unassailable and unaccountable) source

or force or law of ‘nature’ but rather has its origins or

sources in (‘mortal’) human invention – then the possibility

also exists that other realities, beliefs, social systems,

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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cosmologies, reified immaterial forces (gods), or even ideas

of what is ‘properly human’, might be imagined with equal

cogency. The deeply dreaded result – at least in the fancies

of those holding religiously-enforced social and political

power - would be the patent ‘destabilizing’ of a given

community or social contract, and the loosening of its legal

bonds, leading to a vision of chaos. The reality; the very

ontological cohesion; of an entire universe really may very

well hinge on the amount of female flesh exposed by a

bikini. And what if it were to be admitted that the land

your people now occupy really wasn’t the ‘gift’ of an

imaginary immaterial being but was taken from its previous

inhabitants, whose ethnic ‘cleansing’ justified in the

‘name’ of the colonists’ immaterial divinity (as in so many

cases past and present)?

Antitheses to fundamentalist religiosities are what

religionists have characterized as ‘secularist’, or, as with

the case of the current pope, a ‘postmodernist’ condition,

although once again, secularism is a co-constructed

rhetorical artifact of the non-secular (i.e., time-

independent) spiritualist orthodoxy itself being threatened:

its co-produced and co-determined other, which inhabits the

system as the very possibility of its existence in the first

place.v

The point is that religiosity is thus dangerously fragile at

every point in its system, if the flesh of an improperly

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slaughtered animal were to be served at a dinner table, or

if the consequence of enjoying ‘unapproved’ sexualities

means that you will be stoned, raped, or burnt to death, or

if the utterance of a disrespectful or even incorrectly

pronounced or written word in connection with a sanctified

or hallowed person or divinity, could instantly incur the

imaginary 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 in

such instances of terror is the threat to the propriety or

decorum of a social or civic order or code of behavior – in

other words, precisely the stylistic consistency and aesthetic harmony

and cohesion of a social or cultural fabrication. The ‘truth’ of any

religion is a rhetorical property of its effective artistry.

Such ironies are not ‘merely rhetorical’ but are in fact

deeply structural - which is to say ethical, suggesting the

mutual entailment of aesthetics and ethics; more on this in

a moment.

3. Third Thesis. (The ‘chiasmic’ mutual entailment of the

critiques):

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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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 or

position taken with respect to signification and representation which is ostensibly

antithetical 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 a

secondary effect of a position taken with respect to

the problem of representation; there is no art as

such except as a reified (culturally sanctified)

modernist commodity;

(b) Art is not a what (a kind of thing) but a when and

a how (a position or perspective on things) whose

reification and commodification constitutes an

idolatry of a certain religious or spiritualist

ontology, with scalar or dimensional consequences (the

‘artist’ genius, for example, as a metaphor of a

‘divine’ creator or artificer, the obverse imaginary

of the world as ‘designed’ ‘intelligently’);

(c) The modern discourse on (fine) art, which is not

confined to an academic profession such as art

history or visual culture studies, but is

distributed across a massively interwoven network of

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discursive practices (art history, art criticism,

art theory, aesthetic philosophy, and a variety or

related modern disciplines and industries [tourism,

heritage, fashion, etc.] (this entire matrix of

deponent professions, practices, and institutions)

comprises in fact a secular religiosity legitimizing a

multidimensional coordination of social behaviors in

connection with the evolution and maintenance of the

modern nation-state; of the idea and practice of the

nation.

Comment: The discourse and critique of religiosity is

essentially connected to and simultaneously an effect and

artifact of the perspective on signification and

representation (and of an ethics of the relations between

subjects and between subjects and objects) of that which it

denies – the discourse on and of art, artistry, and

artifice. Art and religion are fundamentally interdependent

upon each other and mutually defining, and the critique of

either remains superficial and incomplete apart from or in

the absence of a coordination with the critique of the

other. But the point is that there are not, strictly

speaking, ‘others;’ as if these (religion and art) were two

autonomous and distinct entities rather than being facets and

products of a common underlying philosophical, ethical, and

psychological problem.

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Far from being distinct or opposed domains of

knowledge-production or behavior, artistry and religiosity

rather constitute epistemological technologies which are the

products of different perspectives on (and alternative

responses to) a common fundamental problem – the problem of

representation (the relations between subjects and objects)

as such. Art and religion are opposed yet mutually-defining

and co-determined answers or approaches to the same question

of the ethics of the practice of the self; of how self-other relations

are to be civilly and socially managed and co-ordinated. The

relationships between art and religion are not relationships

between two random or incidental cultural phenomena; the

problem of that relationship is precisely what defines and

determines our most fundamental understanding of each. It is

in that relationship – how religions deal with and make

possible art and artifice, and how artifice simultaneously

deals with, produces, and makes possible religiosity in the

first place – (what I called at the outset their differential

intricacy) that the essence of each can be articulated and

understood. Note, however, that by saying ‘each,’ one

already is in danger of reifying each perspective on

signification – which in fact is the more general point:

neither what we call ‘art’ nor ‘religion’ exist except as

reifications of perspectives or positions taken on a common, more fundamental

philosophical ontological phenomenon: the nature of the relationship between

entities, and, ultimately, the question of otherness in its co-

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construction of sameness. All of which leads, then, to a fourth

and final thesis (and final provocation):

4. Fourth Thesis

All 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) as

such: a topology of self and other.

The entailment of ethics and aesthetics (artistry) has

had a number of consequences in legitimizing modern

disciplines such as art history,vi aesthetic philosophy,

established religion, and the political economies of

modernity, which concern the virtual ‘superimposition’ of

objects and subjects wherein the object is seen by a subject

through the screen of an erotic fetishization of another

subject. The object – and in particular the (modernist)

‘artwork’ (viz., art under capitalism) - is invested with

erotic agency (every object a potential love-object) and

vi 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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deployed as an object of sublimated erotic desire.

Aesthetics (and fine art) are historically entailed with an

ethics of what (from the perspective of religiosity) is

framed as idolatry and fetishism, a situation where in

certain religious traditions, artistry and religiosity are

held in uneasy balance, recalling that of an optical

illusion, perpetually oscillating between alternative

geometries; alternative realities. It is precisely here that

we can see most clearly the mutual entailment of artistry,

fetishism, religion, and capital, an effective critique of

whose differential intricacy necessarily begins where Derrida’s

interrogation 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 most

basic question around which what we call art and religion

revolve is what an object or entity may be said to be a

witness to – precisely the core of the issue addressed by

Plato, and which still determines and generates debates

about idolatry, fetishism, and blasphemy today, 2500 years

later. So we must be very clear about what grounds and

enables all current religious debates – their completely

simultaneous aesthetic and philosophical presuppositions and

beliefs, which were prefigured in the philosophical

controversies exemplified by Plato’s discussion about what

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constituted an ideal community: Plato’s most fundamental

dilemma, which of course continues to be our own in the

struggle for civil democracy and against theocracy.

I’ve tried to foreground the uncannily comparable (if

convoluted and chiasmically reversed) enchantments attending

the fabrications of ‘art’ and ‘religion,’ which I’ve argued

were in essence secondary effects of essentially ethical

positions taken – responsibly or irresponsibly - with

respect to the nature of the sign, of signification, and of

representation or witnessing as such: in the case of

artistry and religiosity not equations (fetishisms) but

adequations, hypotheses, or mootings of possible worlds which

alternately acknowledge and deny their fabricatedness. In

conclusion, then, I will reiterate that what you’ve heard is

not 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 critique

is a reciprocal intricacy of artistry and religiosity as

contrastive ethical positions with respect to the

articulation of relationships between subjects and objects.

Assumption of responsibility for the fabricatedness of

artifice is what corresponds to what I’ve called artistry,

(in the sense of ars or tekhne); abrogation of that

responsibility is what I’ve called religiosity (whose

reification is what is known as religion or idolatry). So my

interrogation of ‘the relationships between art and

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religion’ has resulted in a deconstructive critique of the

putative distinctions between these two reifications of

ethical perspectives, resulting in a call for their

replacement by a new discursive practice attentive to

aspects of the ethics of our social and disciplinary

practices.

What you’ve been hearing were a series of openings in

an ongoing critique of some very ancient questions that long

antedate both what we call art and religion – problems and

conundrums that remain unresolved in many contemporary

discussions and debates in art history and theology, in no

small measure because of a systemic unwillingness to

explicitly engage with the implications of the ethics of our

practices. All of which applies directly to what remains of

our own mode of academic disciplinarity still disingenuously

promoting itself as articulating art’s (or ‘visual

culture’s’) putative ‘history.’ Regarding which it’s

necessary to say: Enough already. Too much is at stake today

to continue business as usual; to continue riding around a

disciplinary carousel which perennially holds out the hope

of yet another brass ring which if firmly grasped will

deliver one more new methodology to deliver up the illusion

that the carousel we call art history or visual culture (or

for that matter theology) is not going round in circles.

There is no new art history after ‘the end of art,’ and not

least because we’ve not yet fully engaged with artistry

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itself. We should ask ourselves who or what is benefited by

promoting 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 to

continue to think otherwise.

© Donald PreziosiDepartment of Art History

UCLApreziosi@ucla.edu

&Visiting Professor,

Dept of History of ArtUniversity of York, UK

2011-12

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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