At the time, possibly inspired by the austerity of their Abbasid rivals to the south, Byzantine emperors and bishops were attacking the validity of images in a fury that wouldn’t be replicated in Christendom until the height of the Protestant Reformation. The Chludov Psalter was one of only three illustrated psalters to survive the iconoclastic period.

Juxtaposing John the Grammarian with Christ’s executioner makes a clear visual argument: iconoclasm is deicide. As classicist Mary Beard observes in her new book, How Do We Look: The Body, the Divine, and the Question of Civilization, “lurid stories were spread about the evil of the iconoclasts, which went so far as to suggest that the wickedness of those who destroyed images of Jesus were second only to those who crucified Jesus in the first place.” One of those wicked iconoclasts was the Grammarian, who in the Chludov Psalter wears a blood-red chiton with his brown hair disheveled. Having found himself the victim of poetic justice, entropy has ironically smudged the bishop’s features over the centuries.

The Chludov Psalter doesn’t appear in How Do We Look, but in many ways it’s a helpful encapsulation of Beard’s revisionist arguments. A gorgeously illustrated, slim volume, How Do We Look marshals Beard’s prodigious learning to derive an implied theory of art; the book being an opportunity for the celebrated classicist to present readings of art, canonical and obscure, ancient and modern, sacred and profane. Beard rejects the tired Great Man Theory, preferring rather to put “viewers of art back into the frame,” emphasizing with crucial ambiguity that the “history of art is about how we look.”

Rather than a predictable litany of (usually male) geniuses, Beard’s approach acknowledges that art is produced in its consumption, that our ways of approaching images are instrumental in interpreting them. Beard’s argument centers on “two of the most intriguing and contested themes… the art of the body… [and] images of Gods and gods.” To that end, Beard is also concerned with presence and absence, seeing in the theological debates between iconodules and iconoclasts an aesthetic dialectic that defines art history. In the Chludov Psalter we see the paradoxical tensions of this dynamic, an image of image destruction made in resistance to those very image destroyers, a claim that “even in the most radical cases of iconoclasm, art lives on – inextricably bound to faith.”

Beard’s book is a companion to the BBC/PBS co-produced documentary update of Kenneth Clarke’s classic 1969 documentary television series Civilization. More popular in Britain than it was in the United States, Clarke’s documentary introduced a generation of viewers to art, performing for the humanities a purpose not dissimilar to what Carl Sagan’s Cosmos did for science. This 2015 sequel, with the more ecumenical title of Civilizations, features Beard, Simon Schama, and David Olusoga attempting to extend the series beyond the patriarchal and patrician perspective of Clarke’s conservative original. They expand their gaze across cultures and feature a diversity of artists, including women, who’d been entirely ignored in the 1969 show. Viewers aren’t limited to the Apollo Belvedere, but we also consider Olmec heads; our conversation doesn’t end at the crucifixions of Tintoretto, but also includes the Hebrew calligraphy of the medieval Spanish Kennicott Bible. A certain type of viewer, with a condescension that often masquerades as rusticity, will label such expansive attempts as “politically correct.” To such anti-humanists, whether they dwell on the Intellectual Dark Web or in a dive bar’s dark booth, one can only respond with Terence’s injunction from the second-century that “I am human, I consider nothing human alien to me.” Civilizations takes part in that venerable, humanistic “art in the dark” method of pedagogy, where thoughtful strolls through the Louvre or Uffizi, contemplating a Michelangelo or Caravaggio, display education and curiosity. In their varying ways, this is the tradition of the tony historian Michael Wood, the delightfully eccentric Sister Wendy Becket, and especially Clarke. But more than any of those personalities, the new Civilizations is indebted to John Berger, and his 1972 series and companion of the same name Ways of Seeing, where he claimed that “Every image embodies a way of seeing.”

Beard is an ideal commentator; a public scholar who remains a scholar, embodying that sadly rare combination of erudition and the phrase finely wrought. For a Cambridge don whose dissertation was on the unsexy topic of Cicero, Beard is the only classicist to ascend to Steven Pinker levels of fame, but she’s deserving of her popularity. Classics are a particularly unlikely field to lend itself to popularization. Yet Beard, along with her upcoming acolyte Sarah Bond, is adept at letting her knowledge of the Greeks and Romans inform contemporary political questions without making the common error of figuring the ancients as “simply like us, but in togas.” Beard’s popularity is in large part due to her SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, which is the best, recent volume on the subject for a general audience, as well as for her incredibly popular blog “A Don’s Life” at The Times Literary Supplement. If you’re anything like me, then SPQR will help you finally keep the Julio-Claudian dynasty separate from the Flavian.

 Beard’s role as a blogger has endeared her to a public fascinated by complex scholarly debates but not content to see them dumbed down.  She has been a model of how to stand against online abuse, as well as an advocate for the bullied, particularly when directed against women in academe. Such themes were explored in Beard’s 2017 Women & Power: A Manifesto, and are congruent with the new Civilizations’ canon expansion. But Beard’s argument takes on a more abstract gloss as well, one which owes much to Berger’s aesthetics (though the critic isn’t mentioned in How Do We Look), but departs from his Marxism in favor of an archetypal methodology, one which dwells in immanence and transcendence, embodiment and faith, as a means of critique. As with Berger, Beard focuses “on the people who looked at this art as much as on the artists who made it.” The result is both unconventional and ingenious, and though at times Beard’s treatment isn’t as detailed as it could have been, her analysis is still illuminating.

Some of that focus on looking is literal, since in her short volume Beard gives virtually no detail on artists themselves – that material being abundantly available elsewhere – rather providing brief sketches of exemplary viewers. For example, Beard considers the first-century Roman poet Julia Balbilla, who accompanied Hadrian’s imperial retinue to Thebes. There, Balbilla inscribed verse upon the monumental statue of Amenhotep III, the Romans having misidentified it as the mythic king Memnon. Famed at the time for a structural irregularity which caused a mournful whistle to be emitted every dawn by the statue, Beard examines how Balbilla interacted with the work itself. Still visible upon the base of that statue, Balbilla wrote that “Memnon the Egyptian I learnt, when warmed by the rays of the sun, /speaks from Theban stone. /When he saw Hadrian, the king of all, before rays of the sun, /he greeted him – as far as he was able.” Whatever the statue of Amenhotep “actually” was, it’s in viewing that a meaning for the work emerges. Beard argues that Balbilla’s epigrammata, a type of “extraordinary high-end graffiti,” is a record of interaction with the colossi. The classicist provides similarly adroit accounts of other viewers, such as the Victorian patron Christiana Herringham examining the Buddhist cave murals of Ajanta, and the 18^th century German historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann whose influence Beard describes as a “distorting and divisive lens that is hard to escape.”

By refocusing from the viewed onto the viewer, Beard’s readings of those figures render certain conclusions that might be obscured in a more traditional account. Beard hypothesizes that “plenty of ancient Egyptian viewers, or ancient Romans, may have been just as cynical about the colossal statues of their rulers as we now are about the parade of images of modern autocrats.” We assume that monumental architecture implied monumental regard, but Beard convincingly claims that such statuary could equally signal profound insecurity, where the anxious authoritarian becomes “one target audience of these colossal images,” a telling argument when the commercial equivalent of televised state propaganda bases its programing on the president’s reactions. Beard’s point that the “person who needs to be convinced that he or she is preeminent, above the common herd, is none other than the ordinary human being who is masquerading as omnipotent ruler” is well-taken.

Iconoclasm is a method of radical critique; one which Beard says “may indeed reflect an artfulness of its own… [for] images of power are only as powerful as those who view them allow them to be.” Arguments on behalf of iconoclasm, from Plato’s The Republic to the Second Commandment, don’t deny the aura of images. Beard explains how in the third-century BCE rebels destroyed some of the terracotta soldiers of the Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang, indicating not simple vandalism, but the “clearest sense of the power of those images.” Examine a chipped mosaic from ninth-century Byzantium, or a decapitated statue from sixteenth-century England, and you’ll notice that for iconoclasts it was often “only heads and hands” marked for removal, “leaving the body in place.” When John the Grammarian makes his argument that an icon is not Christ, it’s not the ass that he’s aiming for. In rupturing the most human aspects of representational art, the iconoclasts are admitting to the enchanted power of the image, for if such enchantment weren’t present there would be no pressing need to disrupt it, because “images often did something.”

It’s easy to figure the iconoclasts as the bad guys (and often fair enough). If you’ve spent Sundays at the Met or the Frick it’s hard to harbor much sympathy for the disheveled Grammaticus, or Oliver Cromwell stabling his horses under the white-washed walls of Ely Cathedral after the stain-glass windows have been struck, much less the Taliban levelling the Buddhas of Bamiyan with dynamite, or ISIS taking sledgehammers to the treasures of Palmyra. But at the risk of overextending my reading of How Do We Look, Beard does seem to be saying something about how a dialectic between iconodules and iconoclasts, between presence and absence, propels the history of images and doesn’t always literally entail stripping altars and smashing reliquaries. Both iconoclasm and iconodulism are intrinsically related, a continual debate over the distinctions between likeness and presence, sometimes a type of deconstruction more than barbarity. As Beard explains, “Civilization is a process of exclusions as well as inclusion.”

Boxer at Rest, c. 330 to 50 BCE

As an example of how iconoclasm can also work as a mode of aesthetic critique (and creation) and not just the taking of a sponge to an icon, consider Beard’s interpretation of Boxer at Rest, a celebrated bronze found in the ruins of Constantine’s Bath, a Greek or Roman sculpture from between the third and first centuries before the Common Era. As with The Dying Gaul from roughly the same period, Boxer at Rest challenges the “cult of youthful athletic prowess” which dominated Hellenistic standards of beauty. Beard writes that there was an “intense investment in the youthful, athletic human body, almost as if that was a physical guarantee of moral and political virtue,” and yet the bruised, battered, and torn body of the flabby middle-aged boxer is an iconoclastic assault on that cult. This is a civilization critiquing itself, the aesthetic dialectic in play. Beard writes that the anonymous caster “focused on a wreck of a human being,” where artistic aptitude has been put into the service not of golden ratios and carved pectorals, but a “broken nose and cauliflower ears,” where the fighter is “still bleeding from fresh wounds.” In a radical victory of brutal realism, whoever created Boxer at Rest was able to depict the fighter’s blood in copper and bruises in bronze alloy, so that what entropy and violence can do to a human body was clear. Boxer at Rest isn’t a depiction of iconoclasm; it’s iconoclasm itself caste in bronze.

Images such as that of the boxer take up full and even double pages in How We Look Now. This is a beautiful book, not unlike an exhibition catalog or artist retrospective that you might see for sale in a museum gift shop. Only a cynic would argue against just a little bit more beauty in our broken and fallen world. But the gorgeousness of the volume can also lend itself to an occasional superficiality. Perhaps a result of How We Look Now being tied to a television show, but sometimes the language can be uncharacteristically cliched for Beard, and exciting concepts are often not fully fleshed out. There’s a disappointment in that, especially since Beard is such an evocative guide. The ideas in How We Look Now – from the desire to move the gaze back to the gazer and placing questions of representation and religion at the center of art history – are novel enough that the brevity of the volume feels like a missed opportunity.

Then again, a collection of beautiful things doesn’t always have to be organized in a comprehensive way. If Beard is anything as a writer, she’s a master of the arresting historical detail, from Balbilla composing on the foot of Amenhotep to Muhammad’s argument with Fahima over a set of tapestries. If How We Look Now is the sort of book sold near the museum cash-register, then reading her book feels like strolling through a great museum. What Beard’s approach lacks in systemization, it makes up for by encouraging the reader to draw their own hypotheses and conclusions. That way Beard’s account does precisely what she says it will do: it puts the focus on the viewer rather than the artist, the reader rather than the writer.

One of such arresting details concerns the legendary first portraitist, Kora of Sicyon, the daughter of the sculptor Butades. According to Pliny the Elder in his Natural History, Kora was in “love with a young man; and she, when he was going abroad, drew in outline on the wall the shadow of his face thrown by a lamp.” Following the lead of his daughter, Butades sculpted a relief of this dark outline, the first portrait inspiring the first sculpture. Beard presents the anecdote as another fascinating fragment, but I think in the account of Kora’s invention of art there is a synthesis of all of How Do We Look Now’s crucial themes. The dark outline of a silhouette marked by charcoal on a wall is both a presence and an absence; the former because it’s literally a representation that had not been there before, the later because nothing is more of a lacuna than the darkness of a shadow. Kora’s sketching of this anonymous lover’s silhouette is the rare ancient account where it’s the man’s name that is unknown, and in his shadow caste by a living human there is evidence of the body, but there is something sacred, holy, and divine about the lack of detail. Kora’s is an iconoclasm of feature, as Beard writes, this is “a story of loss: not in this case of death but of poignant absence of another kind.”

Dibutade ou l’Origine de la peinture, Jean-Baptiste Regnault, 1786

Art is the process of enchanting and disenchanting, of stripping altars and gilding them once more. Aesthetics must always be spoken of in the language of via negativa; its true subject is what Paul in Acts 17:23 called the “Agnostos Theos,” the “Unknown God,” which the Athenians still prayed to, and whom the apostle associated with the one, true God. Such is the nature of divinity, always impossible to depict with any absolute accuracy, that the Athenians in an act of uncharacteristic iconoclasm anticipated the Second Commandment and depicted the Agnostos Theos as an absence, as a nothing. A little less than a century before Paul delivered his sermon at the Areopagus, and the Roman general Pompey completed his siege of the Jewish capital of Jerusalem, and with hubris he stormed into the Temple’s Holy of Holies. There Pompey hoped to find gold and jewels upon the statue of the Jewish God. He found no treasures; rather, Pompey came upon the greatest, holiest, most beautiful representation of divinity ever made, all shadow and darkness like Kora’s charcoal on her father’s wall. Pompey found an empty room.

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Ed Simon is a staff writer at The Millions and the Editor-at-Large of The Marginalia Review of Books, a channel of The Los Angeles Review of Books. He holds a PhD in English from Lehigh University, and is a frequent contributor at several different sites. His collection America and Other Fictions: On Radical Faith and Post-Religion was published by  Zero Books in 2018. He can be followed at his website, on Facebook, or on Twitter @WithEdSimon.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post Charcoal in an Empty Room: On Mary Beard’s How We Look Now appeared first on The Revealer.

A detail from the base of a statue of Thomas Jefferson on the campus of UVA.

On April 29^th, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom will hold an event rolling out its annual report on the state of religious freedom in the world. Mandated by the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act, the annual report documents global infringements on religious liberty and designates “Countries of Particular Concern” that allegedly violate religious freedom. The message at these rollout events is simple: The United States has religious freedom. Other countries do not. America is uniquely positioned to give religious freedom to the world.

Similarly triumphalist accounts characterize “Religious Freedom Day,” the January 16^th anniversary of the 1786 Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom. Since 1993, presidents of both parties have used this anniversary to reiterate the founding myth of America as a land of religious freedom. In his 2019 statement, for example, President Trump recalled the heroic travels of religious minorities who crossed the Atlantic to escape religious persecution.

This transatlantic story of religious freedom makes America a star in the global drama of religious freedom. It suggests reassuring progress from Anglican religious oppression to American religious freedom. It also implicitly privileges whiteness. Recapitulating this story year after year places the origins of the United States in Europe rather than in the vast and diverse civilizations that predated Europeans’ arrival on the American continent. It also erases the abhorrent transoceanic passage of enslaved human beings like my African ancestors, who crossed the Atlantic as cargo in the holds of ships rather than as pilgrims in pursuit of freedom.

If we are going to reflect on religious freedom year after year, then there is a different transoceanic story that we can and should tell. This alternate story is no less patriotic. But rather than looking east across the Atlantic to the oppression “we” left behind, this story looks instead at what settlers did with the concept of religious freedom once they arrived and moved west.

When we shift attention away from the Atlantic and consider the Pacific, as scholars such as Tisa Wenger and Anna Su have done, we see that religious freedom has a long, sordid history as a tool of American empire. Simply put, settlers who called themselves “white” weaponized religious freedom. On the American continent, they used religious freedom as a legal tool to dispossess Natives of land. Moving west across the Pacific, they used religious freedom to snap up lucrative real estate in the sovereign Kingdom of Hawai`i, to establish unequal treaties with the sovereign state of Japan, and to establish discriminatory practices in the colonial Philippines.

As I show in my new book, Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan, this imperial project continued well into the middle of the twentieth century. Americans stationed in Japan at the close of World War II claimed to bring religious freedom to the occupied nation. In their account, they came to emancipate Japanese people from a theocratic state that confused religion (Shintō) with politics. But some Americans at the time, including Supreme Commander Douglas MacArthur, made the Occupation into a theocratic project of their own by suggesting that Japan’s democratization required the Christianization of the entire population.

The situation was rife with irony. Officials in charge of promoting religious freedom decried Japan’s politicized shrine rituals as inimical to religious freedom. In the same breath, they touted “the guiding tenets of our Christian faith” as the basis for Occupation political reforms. These Americans were either unable to see how they engaged in the very sort of sanctified politics that they accused the Japanese of, or they saw the similarities but did not care. As former occupier William P. Woodard later drily noted in his 1972 memoir, “the Japanese extremists did not have any monopoly when it came to using religion, including Christianity, for the achievement of political ends.”

The occupiers’ triumphalist narrative also overlooked a simple historical fact. They claimed to be bringing religious freedom to Japan, but Japanese people had been vigorously debating the meaning and scope of their own constitutional religious freedom guarantee for decades before the occupiers even arrived. Japanese citizens used their constitutionally guaranteed freedom of expression to deliver speeches, write impassioned op-eds, lobby elected representatives, and protest legislation they found unfair. When the situation demanded it, Japanese lawyers and diplomats proudly defended Japanese religious freedom policy on the world stage. Japanese expatriates called the United States to account when they suffered religious discrimination on American shores. And until war broke out between the two countries in December 1941, periodic reports from American foreign service officers stationed in Japan explicitly stated that Japanese practices of religious freedom were hardly different from those in the United States.

To be very clear, this is not to say that things were fair for all. In both countries, minority religious groups were surveilled. In both countries, policy makers and police justified suppression by designating minority groups as not really religious and therefore undeserving of freedom. Examples include the incarceration of Japanese American Buddhists in the United States and the violent attacks on groups like Ōmotokyō and Sōka Kyōiku Gakkai in Japan. But the occupiers’ narrative only accounted for the Japanese side of the story. America had religious freedom, Japan did not.

Despite their confident assertions about how they were bringing “real” religious freedom to Japan, the occupiers vehemently disagreed with one another about what religious freedom was. The bravado in the occupiers’ rhetoric masked their anxieties about how to properly draw the line between religion and politics. For example, the occupiers were internally divided over whether postwar democratization necessitated stripping religion from public education altogether, or whether preparing Japanese citizens for democratic life required formal religious training in public schools. These anxieties matched debates then raging in the United States regarding the constitutionality of the flag salute, confessional education programs, public tax expenditures on parochial schools, and school prayer.

Another irony concerns who actually constructed the concepts that undergirded Occupation religious freedom policy. In the rare moments when the occupiers did speak in a unified voice about protecting religious freedom, they did so with the help of terms provided to them by Japanese experts who served as their local advisors. For example, scholar of religion Kishimoto Hideo and legal scholar Minobe Tatsukichi helped the occupiers position “State Shintō” as a foil for “real religious freedom” by writing op-eds and accessible pamphlets describing the postwar legal regime. Illustrated Japanese-language primers on Japan’s new constitution depicted “real religious freedom” by showing three members of a family practicing three different religions.

In this sense, the Americans did not bequeath religious freedom to the Japanese people. Rather, Japanese elites helped the Americans reinvent religious freedom as a timeless, innate, universal human right. By collaborating with the occupiers, local elites aligned themselves with political authority and positioned their ideas as essential to social progress. By borrowing language provided by these local experts, the occupiers were able to make religious freedom seem theologically neutral (not god-given) and culturally odorless (not exclusively American). These collaborations created the intertwined notions that all people are naturally religious from birth, that each individual must choose just one religious affiliation, that some religions are better choices than others, and that some ritual practices do not count as “religion” at all.

This coercive model of freedom, created under the circumstances of military occupation, presented a paradox. In a country where most people had previously held pluralist understandings of religious affiliation and practice, now they were not only able to choose their religions. They had to. And when they chose, the occupiers and Japanese elites told them they needed to choose well: Personal, not collective. Peaceful, not violent. Rational, not superstitious.

We therefore have to ask: Whose purposes did the triumphalist account serve? Who did it make look good, and who bad, when the occupiers and their elite Japanese informants claimed that America “had” religious freedom and Japan did not?

We are reminded of the American story of religious freedom year after year. This national narrative certainly deserves careful, ongoing attention. But perhaps a more patriotic account would be characterized by humility rather than hubris. Instead of assuming that Americans naturally know what religious freedom is, we might look at moments like the Occupation of Japan when people of other nationalities have helped us think about how everyone might be free. Instead of assuming that religious freedom made the America that we know today, we might ask how Americans have made—still make—religious freedom into a weapon of choice.

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Jolyon Baraka Thomas is assistant professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan. His Twitter handle is @jolyonbt.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post Religious Freedom, Weapon of Choice appeared first on The Revealer.

The Italian autonomist Franco “Bifo” Berardi once made the controversial claim that the twentieth century would have been better if Lenin had never existed. Berardi’s statement wasn’t literal, but it was diagnostic. In his reading, Lenin and his depressive episodes echo through the twentieth century as the utopian energies of revolution (exemplified in the Italian futurist manifesto) collapsed into authoritarian socialism and the long century of leftist defeat. Sunk as it was into a miasma of leftist melancholy, the century that started with the fire of revolution and the hope of a better world came to a close under the thrall of what the late Mark Fisher called “capitalist realism” — that pervasive sense that there can be nothing other than capitalism, no better world or anything new to hope for.

And so, we must say now: the twenty-first century would be better if Aaron Sorkin had never existed.  

Sorkin’s most famous work, The West Wing, has already been well-analyzed for its influence on politics. The show effectively presented politics as a matter of form, not content. It didn’t necessarily matter what characters said, as long as the people saying it were smart and could dominate whoever they were arguing with facts and logic, preferably while walking and talking through the halls of power.

It was a show that revealed a kind of neoliberal politics that, while vacuous, had the appearance of coherence. This, in itself, is not necessarily a problem — the problem emerges in how mainstream critics and cultural institutions adored it. It was held up as a fantasy of what politics would be like if the best and brightest of us  — the ones with degrees from the right schools and the rhetorical chops to show for it — could be in charge of everything. Fittingly it was a show that started in the late 1990s, the era when the neoliberal consensus was forged in the crucible of Reaganism and Thatcherism, when the grey curtain of capitalist realism began to descend and the ideas of a socialist project became less of a possibility and more of a myth.

The show is an expression of the general historical shift in the practice of politics, particularly in America, towards a supposedly non-ideological ideology. As Wendy Brown and David Harvey have each shown in various ways throughout their work, the neoliberal project was one of privatization, collapsing systemic politics into the individualized logic of the market, which makes its way into every aspect of our lives.

Think of the famous scene in The West Wing where a homophobic talk radio host doesn’t show the correct deference to the President. Fretting over the small success of a long-vanquished political rival, the President of the United States goes to a mixer for talk radio propagandists. When one particularly religious Biblical literalist (who publicly denounces homosexuality) refuses to stand while he is in the room, the President impugns her credentials, and then reels off Biblical commands asking after each increasingly defunct edit if it, too, should be obeyed.

It’s a performative moment beloved by the show’s fans as a supposedly Biblical homophobia gets mercilessly shown up in public by superior Biblical knowledge. But, in reality, it does nothing but privatize the larger antagonisms of religion and politics in American public life, reducing them to the hypocrisy of one individual. For this kind of politics there is no worse sin than hypocrisy. This isn’t surprising as without an understanding of the political importance of historical and social conditions, all that matters is whether someone is a hypocrite or not, rather than the wider, systemic forces which produce such noxious politics. If such an encounter were to happen now, it would end up on YouTube, with a clickbait title, to further reduce the idea of politics into a single, shareable moment —  politics reborn as viral content — “President eviscerates hypocritical homophobic quack.”

Bradley Whitford, who played Josh Lyman on “The West Wing,” on the campaign trail for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Another way of thinking about this is to see neoliberal politics as a means by which the market becomes the central mechanism of politics. What that means, then, is that the ideal politician is not someone who has any kind of strong conviction or who acts from any kind of axiomatic starting point, but is someone who can perform the role of the ideal politician. As long as the candidate looks like a politician, and as long as the market delivers on the promise of eternal growth, then it should be possible to combine capitalist success with socially liberal policies. This depends, of course, on a complete denial of what underpins capitalist profit (the extraction of surplus value, the exploitation of labour in the global south etc) and upon believing that capitalism is never prone to any kind of crisis — a belief which requires both colossal historical amnesia and a willful denial of the current state of capitalist political economy.

West Wing politics reached its apex with the election of Barack Obama. Not for nothing did Matt Tiabbi refer to him as an ideological universalist, a cipher onto which we could project our own beliefs and hopes. Here was the fantasy of Matt Santos — Jimmy Smits’ upstart senator-cum-presidential-candidate from the show’s final season — made flesh, a smart and handsome orator who could appeal to our highest aspirations, while brutally maintaining American hegemony abroad and appeasing the Republicans at almost every turn. After all, another sign of West Wing politics is that a political fight doesn’t depend upon anything so vulgar as a mass movement or grassroots organizing, it depends on a media spectacle, a speech, an impressive moment that can be breathlessly reported on and shared, combatting right wing political militancy with viral clickbait. Obama’s first presidential campaign was less of a popular movement and more of sales pitch — it even managed to win a marketing award, which led to an an advertising site describing him as one of the nation’s brand builders. Like President Jed Bartlett, his politics didn’t concern itself with detail or policy, but with spectacle and signification, without any real content.

What this reveals is that this West Wing politics isn’t concerned with anything as inconvenient as the material impact of actually doing anything to make people’s lives better. We see this reflected in the people who  work towards a West Wing politics in the real world too. Nathan Robinson, in his review of three Obama staffers’ books, talks about this obsession with symbolism, with spectacle, and with an utter disconnection from real people. But what accompanies fondness for the spectacle is a libidinal investment in the aesthetic of the individual as the endpoint of political praxis — in this case getting Obama elected.  One only need look at the relationship to journalists — Obama was feted at the White House Press Club dinner, could pop up on Buzzfeed or “Between Two Ferns” — but serious scrutiny was something that journalists generally had little interest in. Not for nothing did a report from the committee for protecting journalists argue that the Obama administration was as bad as the Nixon presidency in it’s attempt to control the flow of information and access. Once he was in office, what more was there to do — Obama “made our union more perfect simply by entering the White House,” to quote one of the books Robinson reviews. Really then, for the acolytes of the Sorkin style politician, all of this is a matter of belief — a matter of faith. Not for nothing does Adam Kotsko argue that neoliberalism effectively operates as a theology — what matters is not what the West Wing politician stands for, but whether you can believe in him (and it’s always a him) or not.

To put this another way, West Wing politics is not about the exercise of political power but rather the distribution and normalization of neoliberal hegemony on the level of culture. West Wing politicians are familiar because they speak in the terms which TV and film have conditioned us to expect a politician to speak. It’s no surprise that Obama era politics was marked by its cozy relationship to media institutions that responded to the performative symbolic politics with positive coverage in the main, and with vicious racially inflected paranoia from the political right. A paranoia that reached its apotheosis in the election of Donald Trump (something which I’ve written about before) wherein the technocratic liberalism of Obama was revealed as merely disguising a deeper set of antagonisms, which a bloviating protofacist could use to sweep himself to power.

So, one would think, that the reasonable response from a political class with even a modicum of nous would be, firstly, a degree of introspection, and secondly, a recognition of change. Which would, necessarily, mean a shift away from the patterns of the past

And yet … Pete Buttigieg is doing Sorkin style walk and talks to show off his slick new campaign headquarters. Just like the walk and talk shots from “The West Wing,” it’s a well choreographed bit of exposition that manages to both create the image of activity, without giving any insight into what kind politics this person has. Unsurprisingly, the replies to his video tweet are full of self-congratulatory West Wing reaction gifs, turning his social media presence into a liturgical call and response of political marketing feeding off of neoliberal culture and back again.

And yet… Beto O’Rourke is desperate to turn himself into another spectacle, climbing onto every piece of furniture in the hopes that giving a really great speech will be what makes him a serious political figure, without the effort of developing attractive political positions or even winning elections against a staggeringly unpopular opponent.

Bradley Whitford, who played Josh Lyman on “The West Wing,” with Pete Buttigieg. Whitford and Gwyneth Paltrow are throwing a fundraise for Buttigieg.

We’ve been here before it seems. Facing a xenophobic liar in office and with clear evidence that a socialist agenda would have been hugely successful, the Democratic political discourse is dominated by throwbacks to West Wing politics desperate to slow the emergence of a social-democratic alternative. A reasonable response from those to the left of the mainstream in American politics would be to question the inability of these politicians to learn from the catastrophic failure of 2016, but this is where the nature of West Wing politics and current electoral politics slam into one another. If we see the pre-2016 Democratic politics as a theology, as spectacle of belief, then the election of Donald Trump was not simply a defeat politically, but is both spiritually and psychologically traumatic, and thus, the choice to shower so much attention and so much energy onto empty ciphers like O’Rourke and Buttigieg is less a conscious choice and more a compulsive repetition. After the undeniable, public, and spectacular defeat of Hillary Clinton, it’s no surprise that there would be a repression of that trauma, and a refusal to confront it. And now, at the next available electoral opportunity, there is a restaging and repeating of the failures of the past, in the political present.

For the great interpreter of neurosis, Sigmund Freud, this kind of compulsive repetition (which is also how he saw religion) represents something of a problem. At the opening of his short work Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he wonders that the subject of analysis “is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of, as the physician would prefer to see, remembering it as something belonging to the past.” Freud notes this seemingly irresistible desire to repeat what must be hugely painful experiences. Glib media-focused spectacles and rhetorically slick campaigning were shown just three years ago to be completely ineffective against Trump. In a neat moment of reality colliding with fiction the cast of the West Wing even campaigned for Clinton, all to no avail. So, if we think of a basic psychoanalytic drive to be one of seeking to avoid pain, the question for Freud is how to explain the desire to repeat that which can provide no satisfaction:

But we come now to a new and remarkable fact, namely that the compulsion to repeat also recalls from the past experiences which include no possibility of pleasure, and which can never, even long ago, have brought satisfaction.

The appeal of Pete Buttigieg and Beto O’Rourke is an exercise in repetition. Given the traumatic loss of 2016, a loss which American centrist liberalism has yet to reckon with or move on from, it’s a compulsive repetition which includes no possible enjoyment. Freud then, as the title of his book suggests, moved beyond thinking about motivation in terms of pleasure before solving the problem by an appeal to the drives: Eros, the drive to life and Thanatos, the drive towards annihilation.

While there might be some understandable reluctance to apply a psychoanalytic theory to the world of politics, it’s worth bearing in mind that the French philosopher and psychoanalyst Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari extensively mapped the libidinal and political economies as essentially one and the same thing (Donald Trump supplies ample evidence for that hypothesis in his own well-documented ways). Seen this way then, it’s perfectly possible to read the resurgence of the centrist West Wing politician as a thanotic drive towards political annihilation, as well as an irresistible restaging and repeating of their last great disaster. Given the extent to which the centrist West Wing politician resists the actual murky business of politics for a highfalutin rhetoric of faith and belief, there is an almost liturgical element to the familiar banalities of compromise, bipartisanship and the ever more perfect union. Centrist liberalism is a cult of sorts that worships political failure, and its high priests are breathlessly referred to as “frontrunner” and “viable” for the nomination.

Pete Buttigieg and Beto O’Rourke and the centrist wing of the Democratic party are in need of analysis. The aim of any good analyst is not to get the analysand to give up their fantasies, but rather to recognize them as such. Instead of, as is common for a leftist, treating their claims of working for justice and a progressive political agenda as mere cover for their lust for power, perhaps what’s needed is to take those claims seriously. Bourgeois American politics stands at a crossroads, and the desire to see a better world is one well worth clinging to. Yet what we need to get there is not another restaging of trauma, but the courage to shatter the theological pieties of political failure and pursue a more positive vision of political praxis. With that in mind then, a reasonable starting point would be to give up the faith of centrist liberalism and cast down the idols of the West Wing into the dust. Sorkin must be destroyed and his disciples must give up their fantasy, in thrall as it is to the death drive of political disaster.

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Jon Greenway is a writer and academic from the north of England. He writes and teaches on popular culture and cultural theory. He is the co-host of the Horror Vanguard podcast and tweets @thelitcritguy

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post Sorkin Delenda Est appeared first on The Revealer.

(Veronique De Viguerie/Getty Images)

On the warm summer days of 2009 and 2010, while conducting research in Paris, I would often meet friends along the banks of the Seine River surrounding the Notre-Dame Cathedral. The structure’s awesome presence and enticing shapes—the rounded curve of its apex, its pointed roof, its solid square bell towers, and the finesse of its flying buttresses—made for an extraordinary backdrop to what amounted to a public happy hour. With a bottle of rosé and plastic cups in hand, my friends and I would weave our way through the crowds to find a patch of grass or pavement. The atmosphere was congenial and relaxed and would last well into the evening and night. At times, however, I found this backdrop more unsettling than idyllic. I spent some of my days engaging in discussions about heritage spaces in France, speaking with architects and urban planners who lamented conservative resistance to their bids to design a more sustainable city. I was becoming cognizant of how protecting a certain “image” of France could also serve to support rather exclusionary politics. At times, informed by these conversations, in an unusual mode of ethnographic inquiry, I would find myself inspired to approach those around me, enjoying their drinks along the Seine, to ask them why they thought Paris had to look the way that it did, and what it was that made the Cathedral so central to the Parisian landscape.[1] Friends who accompanied me did not always enjoy this portion of the evening when, admittedly, a few glasses of that rosé may have helped to fortify my courage and loosen my tongue, but I quickly learned that passions surrounding the Catholic space that stood at Paris’s city center ran deep.

The research I conducted during those years set out to ask why ostensibly secular Paris still seems to need Catholicism. In posing this question I did not aim to explore why people continue to be religious in a secular age. Such questions tend to be motivated by a secularization thesis long ago dismissed as irrelevant. Rather, I was interested in the politics surrounding desires for and attachments to Catholic practices and material forms in a nation that famously imposes strict limits on signs of Islam. In other words, why did those I met along the banks of the Seine—most of whom admitted to rarely entering a church—insist upon the centrality of Catholic material forms in their city’s skyline? I primarily came to see these attachments as an expression of the privilege of Catholicism in France. While signs of Islam are maligned as excessively religious and, thereby, deemed inappropriate in the public sphere, Catholic material forms are able to stand in as cultural, historical, heritage, and even secular. But it is not only the privilege of Catholicism that is maintained by the affections surrounding its material culture. Catholic material forms, such as the Notre-Dame, are also used in service of maintaining and reproducing other forms of privilege in France, including class privilege.

The continued relevance of these questions struck me when, having just returned from my annual trip to Paris (where I stayed within easy walking distance from the cathedral), I watched in shock from a Manhattan doctor’s office waiting room as fire ravaged the cathedral’s pointed roof and nineteenth century spire. Reactions to the blaze reiterated many of the claims I heard throughout my time in Paris, as pundits equated the Cathedral with French culture and European civilization. In order to understand the full implications of Notre-Dame’s symbolic importance in France, however, I argue that the shocking sums promised by the families owning many of France’s luxury brands to restore the widely beloved site may be even more significant than the unsurprising ease with which commentators fell back on familiar tropes. Among the innumerable references I encountered in numerous global media to the Notre-Dame as an “icon” of every from Paris to civilization itself, was a New York Times article published the day following the fire, calling these wealthy families “another symbol of the country, thanks to names such as Dior, Louis Vuitton and Saint Laurent.” Nations are, of course, multi-faceted, but in the aftermath of the fire it was intriguing to see how the central symbols of a country widely admired for its Revolution and its laïcité (secularism) appeared to be medieval Catholicism, luxury brands, and startling wealth inequality.

While François-Henri Pinault, the chairman of luxury brand company Kering, was the first to announce his support to the tune of 100 million Euros, in a seemingly purposeful attempt to upstage his rival, Bernard Arnaut, who chairs the LVMH group, announced the next day that he would provide 200 million Euros toward efforts to rebuild the Cathedral. The Times listed the icons associated with the group with easy familiarity:

LVMH is the largest luxury group in the world. Its fashion holdings include Celine, Dior, Givenchy and Louis Vuitton. The group also owns drinks [sic] brands including Moët & Chandon, Dom Pérignon and Veuve Clicquot, as well as the landmark Parisian stores Le Bon Marché and La Samaritaine. The group reported revenue of 46.8 billion Euros in 2018.

Beyond eliciting admiration for their goodwill and charity, luxury brands have other more concrete benefits to glean from a monumental reconstruction of the Notre-Dame. Maintaining the pristine beauty of central Paris does much to help buttress the connection between the brands held by these families and experiences of luxury. Images of Paris abound in their advertising. The coherent architectural forms imposed under the Second Empire and the efforts of Baron Haussmann—which included the construction of numerous neo-gothic churches—help to make the city the most photographed and visited in the world. Many donors will also be eligible for a tax cut equivalent to 60% of their donation. In response to a public outcry about the hit to public coffers, Arnault explained that his family had already maxed out on deductions. He also complained about the problem of “jealousy,” and suggested that, rather than being critiqued, “in other countries we’d be congratulated.”

France’s Catholic material forms, however, may also contribute to reproducing the socioeconomic inequalities that uphold the market in luxury items and experiences. I argue that the city’s innumerable Catholic spaces aid in aestheticizing the inequalities that France failed to overthrow with its Revolution of 1789. The extraordinary distinctions between lives of privilege and wealth and those of labor and poverty in France—not to mention between its citizens of different religious faiths, and between black and white citizens—constantly belie the regime of equality that was supposed to follow from the Revolution. These inequalities were even more amplified in France’s colonial empire. Protests held in France d’outre-mer (the former colonies now included in the French nation through various modes of limited sovereignty) in the past decade have pointed to the immorality of extravagant profit of a few in the face of the poverty of many.

Some of France’s national inequalities are inscribed in more literal terms upon the façade of the Notre-Dame itself. In a recent visit to the Strasbourg cathedral museum, I read one of the information panels about the figures of Synagoga and Ecclessia that frame the entrance to that medieval edifice. Describing the sculpture as the “Vanquished Synagogue and the Church Triumphant,” the museum acknowledged that these had been recognizable Christian symbols since about the eighth century, but it was only in the early thirteenth that they began to adorn the portals of numerous French cathedrals. Describing the Strasbourg Cathedral’s version of this sculpture, the museum lauds the beauty of these symbols.

Synagoga on the facade of the Notre Dame Cathedral

On the left, the Church Triumphant, wearing a crown and holding in her hands a chalice and a banner surmounted by the cross, fixes her self-assured gaze on the Synagogue. The latter, blindfolded and holding a broken lance, averts her head, expressing her inability to recognize the Messiah in the person of Jesus. She appears to let fall the tablet of the Law of Moses, symbolizing the supplanting of the Old Testament. But the extreme humanity and beauty of the young woman’s features suggest an awaited revelation rather than the stigma of blindness.

In the version on the Notre-Dame in Paris, a serpent rather than a piece of cloth blinds the synagogue.

The apparent viscerality of the Notre-Dame’s medieval forms—as well as numerous other medieval Catholic structures in Paris, such as the neighboring Collège des Bernardins (the core subject of my research)—allows Parisians to imagine they remain materially connected to the medieval past. The distance between the past and the present is not entirely overcome, however. Revering and preserving these buildings allows for two contradictory relations to the encounters with the past. First, as a relic of a history now passed, visitors are able to note the differences between the past and present and celebrate the historical inequalities overturned by the Revolution. Second, however, by encouraging awe and admiration of its forms, Catholic heritage spaces forge a connection to that past and provide an aesthetic ground for the distinctions that remain. They allow inhabitants to prefer some forms of inequality, such as those between Muslims and Catholics, or rich and poor, over others, such as those between priests and the laity, or kings and peasants. The grounding of France’s distinctions in material and aesthetic forms thereby refuses the need to push toward greater equality.

The political work accomplished by the enormous gifts made in support of the Notre-Dame becomes all the more evident when one remembers the event that had to be canceled the night of the blaze: President Macron’s belated response to the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests), the leaderless movement made up of tens of thousands of primarily poor and working class people who are demanding a more equitable distribution of wealth in France. According to reports in the centrist paper Le Monde, the President of the Fifth Republic had prerecorded the speech and, instead of airing it as planned at eight o’clock in the evening—or at any point since—simply tweeted “Notre-Dame is beset by flames. The whole nation mourns. Thoughts go out to all Catholics and all French. Like all our compatriots, I am sad tonight to see that part of us burn.”

A Gilets Jaunes protest passing Notre Dame in January 2019.

On the day before the fire, Macron had offered a few hints about his Gilets Jaunes speech. When compared to the speech he gave on the parvis of the Notre-Dame just before midnight as firefighters finally managed to subdue the flames, those hints suggest that Macron might see the burning of the Notre-Dame as an opportunity to forego the far more significant national reconstruction project imagined by the Gilets Jaunes.

At a government meeting on Sunday, April 14 (the day before the fire), according to the article in Le Monde, Macron explained that he hoped to address the Gilets Jaunes “not by multiplying ‘categorical or individual’ measures,” which he described as “an impasse.” Instead, he aimed to “redefine” the “national project. The time we are entering is that of redefining the national and European project.” By Monday night, in front of the dramatic backdrop of a Notre- Dame still aglow, however, Macron emotively explained that another national project now demanded the nation’s attention. “And so I say to you tonight, with great solemnity, we will rebuild this cathedral. All together, it is without a doubt a part of the French destiny and the project that we will have for the years to come.”

In a speech the following evening, the President clarified that now—in a moment when, with remarkable ease, several of France’s most profitable companies managed to gather together nearly $1 billion to support Macron’s “new” national project—was not the time to ask questions about inequality. “I will return to the subjects with which I was engaged with you in the days to come so that we can act collectively following our Great Debate,” Macron glossed.[2] “But today is not the time; tomorrow, politics and its tumults will take back their place, we all know that. But the moment has not yet come.” In his brief speech, he even went so far as to suggest that such inequality was necessary to the national project, insisting that “the rich, like those less rich have given money, each according to what they could give, each in their place, each in their role.” Such statements ring of the Catholic theology of personalism, a mode of viewing the human person as a member of a community in which a variety of differences and inequalities are not only acceptable, but also desirable.

As Macron implicitly acknowledged, the critiques made of his neoliberal government—by far the most committed to a pro-business agenda in France in recent years—are unlikely to be so easily dismissed. Indeed, the following Saturday the Gilets Jaunes were in the streets again, expressing their disgust that such enormous funds could so easily be accessed to support an ailing building but not a suffering population.

And yet, that Macron’s attempt to replace the reconstruction of French society along more equitable terms with a national project to reconstruct the Cathedral appears even momentarily plausible suggests that those of us interested in the place of material religion in contemporary life need to more fully address the kinds of politics such forms can support. Material religious forms are not only a means by which to make God present, they are a means by which to make certain fantasies about the past present. As its destruction during the Revolution and massive reconstruction in the nineteenth century reveal, this has been one of the primary functions of the Notre-Dame Cathedral—and many other Catholic spaces throughout Paris—since at least the nineteenth century.

I do not want to argue that the Cathedral should not be fixed. What will be fascinating to watch in the years to come, however, is the kind of debates its rehabilitation or reconstruction provokes. As the restoration plans develop, we should watch to see if maintaining the Notre-Dame as an icon of the medieval period remains a priority. What kind of political will would be necessary for those interested in reconstructing the Cathedral to take this opportunity to rethink the inequalities both forged into its stones and maintained by its privileged place in the Parisian landscape? If such questions were to be posed might they open the way to others? If the Notre-Dame is indeed the icon of France, its Kilometer Zero, the use to which the renovation project is put—as a means by which to reproduce or to confront the inequalities and privileges it symbolizes and maintains—may indeed have a great deal to say about the nature of France in the present.

The kilometer markers on all of France’s highways allow travelers to know how far they are from the Notre-Dame–kilometer zero–at all times.

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[1] These questions are related. The Cathedral as well as the city underwent extensive renovations in the nineteenth century, allowing the Cathedral’s monumental status to be amplified, while also making it appear more at home within the remarkably coherent architecture of the city center.

[2] In response to the Gilets Jaunes protests, in the early months of 2019 the President held a number of listening sessions throughout the country, which he entitled the “Great Debate.” The speech on Monday was to include a list of policy and political measures to address the concerns that arose in the “debate.”

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Elayne Oliphant’s scholarship explores the privilege of Christianity in France and Europe. She rethinks the evolutionary tale of religious to secular by examining the ongoing (and ever-transforming) dominance of Christian signs and symbols in the public sphere. She has published essays exploring the privileged circulation of Christian signs in contemporary art exhibits, museum displays, and European Court of Human Rights rulings. She is currently completing her first book entitled The Art of the Unmarked: The Privilege of Catholicism in 21st Century Paris. Her current research projects include: developing a political theology of the “commons” as a means of addressing the debts that forge the social; researching various “commons” projects in the United States and France, including the Gilets Jaunes protest movement.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post The Notre-Dame Fire and France’s National Reconstruction Project appeared first on The Revealer.