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
&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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