by Valeria Vergani
On October 30th, 2020, the Holy Infrastructures Reading Group met to discuss the interplay of two theoretical essays framed around issues of economy, sovereignty, and sociality through the nexus of material religion. The first piece, “The Doctrine of the Image and Icon,” is a book chapter contained in Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary and authored by philosopher and art historian Marie-José Mondzain. Mondzain’s essay focuses on the debates around iconoclasm that took place in medieval Byzantium during the 8th and 9th century CE. Mondzain’s analysis is not only historical but also philosophical. She delves into the arguments for and against the use of icons by showing these arguments not simply as invoking sacred forms of authority for political ends; rather, at stake in the debates on the icon is the very meaning of the ‘theos’ and, conversely, that of idolatry as a form of corruption or distortion of sacrality and its connection to imperial power. The debate on the icon, as Mondzain reveals it, is thus eminently theo-political in the sense that it articulates theology as always enmeshed in politics, in the question of rule, and in the unfolding of empire. Starting with a theorization of the ‘natural image,’ meaning the mystery of Christ’s incarnation, Mondzain’s analysis proceeds to unpack the icon as ‘artificial image.’ Mondzain argues that, in iconic doctrine, the icon is not representational, but economic: it derives its force and meaning not from being a material and thus imperfect copy of invisible divine power, but rather from the relational movement that it enables, and which draws the viewer into the mystery of Christ’s incarnation itself. For Mondzain, in other words, the icon institutes “a gaze and not an object” (70); it is relational rather than representational.
The second piece is David Graeber’s 2005 essay “Fetishism as Social Creativity: or, Fetishes are Gods in the Process of Construction.” Similar to Mondzain, in this piece Graeber engages historical analysis through a philosophical angle, examining the ‘fetish’ as a nexus of sociality that bound together Europeans and West African traders in the 15th and 16th century, which also offers a window into theorizing the very possibility of social creativity. Graeber’s analysis starts with the contextualization of the fetish as a phenomenon that originated in Europeans’ conceptions of African ritual sociality through their encounter with African traders in the early modern period. Yet, after having reviewed William Pietz’ classic work on the subject, which, according to Graeber, skews social creativity on the side of Europeans’ interpretations of African customs, Graeber attempts an alternative reading of ‘fetishism’ – starting from the African cases of Tiv spheres of exchange and with BaKongo sculpture. What may have led Europeans to denounce the fetish as a form of idolatry from which they wanted to distance themselves, Graeber argues, might not have been from their total incomprehension of African rituals of sociality, but rather stemmed from a deep fear over the recognition of the arbitrariness of social value: in other words, Europeans trying to make sense of their own conditions of precarity turned to Africans as fetishists as a way of articulating their own difference from them. Yet, Graeber argues, if social value is indeed arbitrary and always the result of a form of ‘fetishization’ through which man-made objects come to both stand in for, and materialize, social relationships, then the ‘fetish’ is not so much a receptacle of misplaced faith, but rather a tangible material manifestation of the process of social creativity. Fetishes, argues Graeber, are in this sense “gods in the process of construction”: they are the material nexuses of relationality.
Both Graeber and Mondzain’s pieces take a historically circumscribed example of what might be called ‘material religion’ (although in Graber’s case, the epithet of religion is a much more fraught one), in order to theorize more broadly about forms of oikonomia: relational economies that both make and unmake subjects and regimes of sociality. At once deeply contextualized and expansively transhistorical, Mondzain’s ‘icon’ and Graeber’s ‘fetish’ enable us to think about the simultaneous substance and provisionality of relationships. And, while working at the intersection of similar questions, Mondzain and Graeber work with what might seem to be two antipodic examples of imperial material religion. On one hand, Byzantine debates on the icon are an example of imperial politics taken from one of the centres of imperial Christian power. The fetish, on the other hand, is an example of imperial theopolitics that takes place at the geographic and social margins of Christian empire. In this very sense, however, both pieces play with the margins, boundaries, and limits of empire: they index ‘territory’ not simply as the geographic boundaries of imperial rule. Rather, the imperial territoriality that both texts grapple with stretches both time and space, reaching back to the moment of Christ’s incarnation as well as forward to the possibility of social revolution.
The question of ‘idolatry’ becomes the theoretical node through which the limits of empire, and the very possibility of its subversion, are engaged in both texts. Idolatry is what European traders call African forms of ritual materiality; idolatry is also the name that the losing side of the iconoclastic debates will take upon defeat. Idolatry, in this sense, is a form of alienation or disconnection from the sacrality of empire. In Byzantium, the visual economy of the icon carries with it the ghost of idolatry as a form of ‘corruption’ of the purity of the incarnational image (of the Word into flesh). In West Africa, the fetish is articulated by European traders as a subversion of proper relationships of piety and devotion. The danger of the icon and the fetish is, in this sense, one and the same, even as each of these material forms epitomizes one of two extremes. In the economy of the icon, the danger, or the ghost of idolatry, is that of totalizing relationality, of fixity and stasis, in which the living God becomes trapped while its transcendental authority becomes corrupted at the hands of human power. On the other hand, the danger that European traders identify with the fetish is that of total instability, a total chaos of relationship: if the fetish can be any object at any time, then social relations are bound to be always unstable, always tenuous, always in the process of being undone. Attacks on the icon and the fetish as idolatrous might then be anxious attempts to fend off the possible instability of imperial power: at stake in the doctrine of the icon, and in the practice of the fetish, is the legitimacy of imperial power itself.
And in both pieces, imperial power is also linked to another connected sphere of relationship: that of the market as a space for the circulation of imperial power, but also a space of continuous social innovation. For Graeber, the connection between the fetish and the market further reveals the fetish as a form of pure value, because the fetish materializes the very possibility of sociality, and thus makes tangible the value of value. And, within the doctrine of the icon, the legitimacy of imperial power is also the legitimacy of the market as the arena for the negotiation of new social relationships. As Mondzain points out, “Born under the sign of relations, it [the icon] presides over all contracts” (91). At stake in the icon and the fetish, then, are the very limits of sociality.
Yet, as Graeber and Mondzain both make clear in their analyses, material religion is not simply metonymic of imperial power, but is foundational to any economy of relationship through its establishment of a link between the interiority of the individual subject and the exteriority of social relations. The fetish and the icon materialize pure relationality: they point out, make tangible, and ultimately enable, the process through which both ‘individual’ and ‘society’ are (un)made. For this reason, in Mondzain, an essential part of the iconic doctrine is the question of ‘interiority’: the fact that the icon is not only contemplated by the viewer, but also “contemplates us” (90). The icon, in other words, both inaugurates and participates in the interiority of the subject by drawing its viewer into the mystery of the incarnation: “Christ is not in the icon; the icon is toward Christ, who never stops withdrawing. And in his withdrawal, he confounds the gaze by making himself both eye and gaze” (88). In this sense, iconicity implies social directionality: by contemplating the icon, the viewer moves towards Christ while Christ moves away. The icon materializes the ever-shifting relationship between humanity and the divine incarnation of Christ. In a similar way, the fetish as described by Graeber is also a matter of social directionality: fetishes are ‘gods under construction,’ meaning that they are moments/objects of social innovation, in which social relations are transformed, established, or renewed. As such, for Graeber, ‘fetishes’ are not properly African, nor are they European: they are, rather, moments at which man-made creations become objects of worship, and thus core animators of sociality.
Having reflected upon the common themes that surface in Graeber and Mondzain’s analyses of material religion, the group continued by imagining possible bridges that might exist between the iconographic and the ethnographic as modalities of relation and of writing. We ended, then, with a few questions around the themes of interiority, withdrawal, and the politics of empire in contemporary visual economies. How does ‘flesh’ operate in relation to natural image and divine gaze in the fetish and the icon? What are the politics of containment of the icon and the fetish, and how are these containments radicalized and gendered, as well as imperialized in contemporary forms of sociality? How can kenosis, or divine withdrawal, index not only the economy of the icon, but also push us to think about contemporary moments of evacuation of power, and moments of social creativity at the collapse or crisis of state sovereignty? In closing the discussion, suggestions for further reading included the edited volume Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art and Bruno Latour’s “‘Thou Shall Not Freeze Frame’ or How Not to Misunderstand the Science and Religion Debate.”
References
Graeber, David. 2005. “Fetishism as Social Creativity: Or, Fetishes Are Gods in the Process of Construction.” Anthropological Theory 5 (4): 407–38.
Latour, Bruno. 2002. “What is Iconoclash? Or is There a World Beyond the Image Wars?” In Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art, edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, 14-37. Karlsruhe: ZKM and Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Mondzain, Marie-José. 2005. Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary. Translated by Rico Franses. Stanford University Press.
Weibel, Peter, and Bruno Latour, eds. 2002. Iconoclash. Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
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