So-called left-wing Zionism is white nationalism

Jean Arp (Moderna Museet Serigraph poster, 1962)
Volume 39
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April, 2015
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I N T E R V I E W
7 A G A I N S T T H E N O R M AT I V E W O R L D
A S H O N C R AW L E Y I N T E R V I E W E D B Y S O F I A S A M ATA R
E S S AY S
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S T. C T H U L H U I N T H E A N T H R O P O S C E N E
BY QUINN LESTER
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M I R AC L E O N 2 1 4 T H ST R E E T
B Y J A N E YA G E R
20
A F O R M O F FA I T H
BY R AC H E L E L I Z A B E T H J O N E S
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H O LY L A N D B Y M O L LY O R I N G E R
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S M AS H I M AG E S F R O M A N T I Q U I T Y
BY IMRI KAHN
R E V I E W
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JUSTICE IN ONE COUNTRY
BY M A LCO L M H A R R I S
EDITORS’ NOTE
THE
first fact of the world is that people believe
in it. What and why come next, but no answer to those
questions shakes the primacy of creed as such. Our general disbelief isn’t so strong as to deny the fact that others
experience their world faithfully. And the less we’ve subscribed to institutions of faith the more we’ve felt #blessed.
Yet those who critique those institutions most loudly reveal
a faith in their faithlessness as intense as that of the fundamentalists they oppose. To leave the field of debate to such
extremes has meant neglect of the central forms of faithful
praxis so many of us rely on in the daily fight for survival.
There may never have been so much for us to doubt.
Historians of information claim that in the past few decades, our species has produced more data than in the entire prior span of our existence. Yet more data demand exponentially more interpretations. Keeping pace, belief in
the institutions that secure meaning has ebbed globally,
but there hasn’t yet been a concomitant collapse in their
power. The wager that force can be just as effective as faith
in securing submission will have, if nothing else, an interesting payout. In the meanwhile, beliefs proliferate.
For some people in some states, however, the right
to faith means nothing more than the right to exercise
God-given rights to property—above all, in the self. To
sell or not to sell, that seems to be the question. But faith
in another order entirely seems also to be on the rise. As
a force, faith is unique for its seemingly rootless origins,
a feeling innate to our navigation of the world for which
we’re constantly seeking a home. In this month’s issue of
the New Inquiry, we look into the practices of faith that
ferry people through a hostile world.
Many of the essays handle objects of faith that emerge
from the ground. In Molly Oringer’s essay on the television
series Dig, the question of Jewish nationalism resolves itself in archaeological excavation. The Israeli-adapted series
works to position the secular Israeli citizen as the proper
resident and bulwark against atavistic Palestinians or Orthodox Jews, the figure who can safeguard the ancient ties
of belonging to the land precisely because of her modernity. And Malcolm Harris reviews the political philosopher
Michael Walzer’s The Paradox of Liberation, identifying the
Jewish right to Palestine as the shaky ground on which Walzer’s entire ethical system is constructed. “In the name of
so-called left-wing Zionism, Walzer has attempted to smuggle white nationalism into the left,” Harris writes.
In Imri Kahn’s “Smash Images from Antiquity,” the
spectacle of the Islamic State destroying millennia-old Assyrian statuary in their propaganda opens up questions of
idolatry and value. The winged protectors of long-fallen city
gates challenged Western systems of aesthetic value from
the moment they were unearthed on imperial missions,
disrupting the symbolic progression of art from Egypt to
Greece in a crudely racialized fashion. Modern-day iconoclasts call into question the faith non-believers have in idols
believed both defunct and intrinsically valuable.
The question of faith is also bound up in the visible, as
it insists on the reality of what cannot be seen. Rachel Jones is
an artist and writer who lives in Los Angeles, taking pictures of
the vernacular shrines that dot the city’s landscape. Resisting
the placelessness of much internet-based curation, these altars
appeal to Jones as devout expressions of faith in representation.
The “altar can be seen as a passive disruption in the mechanisms
of capitalist visuality, one that paradoxically expresses faith in the
unseen while worshipping visibility itself,” she writes.
Another mechanism of capitalist visuality that inspired experiences of the divine was the Polaroid SX-70
Land Camera, which none other than Ansel Adams called
a miracle. Soon after its market debut, a Bayside, Queensbased movement began incorporating Polaroids into their
vigils and rituals, allowing the Virgin Mary to make her
presence seen in the self-developing photos. “The ‘ecstatic’ Polaroid is the perfect technology for miracle photography,” writes Jane Yager, and the camera’s inventor replied
to a letter from a devotee that “many things occur in our
daily lives which have no explanation, and we wonder if this
isn’t one of them.” Predictably, the post-Vatican II Church
couldn’t allow the increasingly apocalyptic visions to continue and asked the Queens DA to investigate. Some forms
of visibility threaten to exceed the authority of the world.
For those whose faith resides in the stability of the
world’s current order, any change is an occasion for horror. Quinn Lester investigates the current explosion of
horror in theory and popular culture, finding its equation
of the horrific with the unknown a bad legacy of its forefathers, H. P. Lovecraft and St. Augustine. Their engagement with the implications of their beloved universes—
white supremacy in North America and a beneficent God
who created the universe out of nothing, respectively—
was an insufficient attempt at denial, Lester writes, and
their insistence that what is truly horrible is what cannot
be known infects current horror’s ability to name the
readily knowable horrors of today.
Sofia Samatar interviews Ashon Crawley, a theorist of
the concept of the “Otherwise” who draws on Fred Moten,
Saidiya Hartman, and his experiences in the Blackpentecostal
church to identify the “otherwise,” a critique of the normative
world. Crawley places his faith in the Otherwise as a name of
already-existing resistance and the horizon of relief. “There
are Otherwise ways to think the concept of fleshly reality. The
Otherwise, as the elaboration of the alternative, presumes
that radically different relations have and do already exist,” he
writes.
Imagining the beliefs of others to be only imperfect
versions of our own would be to approach the world fundamentally in bad faith, the last standing cardinal sin for
those in our tradition of thought. But the ecumenism of
the “coexist” variety is no better than an unexamined faith
in the brainless imperialism of liberal secular modernity.
The essays assembled here argue collectively for an attention to the ways faith arises spontaneously in the interstices
of the given world, as a reaffirmation of faith in our collective power. Perhaps it’s for the same reason that the emoji
designed to represent a high five has been so unanimously
interpreted as hands pressed together in prayer.
7
ASHON CRAWLEY INTERVIEWED BY SOFIA SAMATAR
Against the Normative World
ASHON CRAWLEY interviewed by SOFIA SAMATAR
A theorist who left behind a position as a preacher in the Blackpentecostal
church returns to its practices for the potency of their critique
IN
his work-in-progress, Blackpentecostal Breath: The
Aesthetics of Possibility, Ashon Crawley draws on his research in black studies, performance theory and sound studies, black feminist theory, and queer theology to investigate
the relationship of aesthetic productions to modes of collective intellectual practice. One of the most powerful concepts
Crawley engages in his work is what he calls “the Otherwise”:
a way of thinking and acting outside dominant, violent ways
of being. The Otherwise is a “concept of irreducible possibility,” Crawley writes in his essay “Otherwise, Ferguson”: it
signifies our capacity “to create change, to be something else,
to explore, to imagine, to live freely, fully, vibrantly.” In this
interview, I asked Crawley about writings on the Otherwise,
resistance movements, friendship, and the future.
8
I’d like you to start with your book title: Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility.
It’s so rich—when I read it, my brain starts riffing:
breath, prayer, the communal, the possible, beauty,
collective desire. Can you riff on it for us a little?
The best way I can think to reply to this is to
talk about the personal. I grew up in a Blackpentecostal household in northern New Jersey. Both my father
and mother are clergy and at one time, my brother and
I were as well, all in the Church of God in Christ, the
largest Blackpentecostal denomination in the world.
In the church, I was a choir director, an organist (the
Hammond B-3 organ is a vital instrument in the place
of Blackpentecostal aesthetics, a very undertheorized
instrument to date) and was on the verge of beginning
what would have been a long, and perhaps very unsatisfying career as a preacher. I grew up very committed
to the church, loving everything about the world even
in its insularity, even in its enclosed, peculiar nature. In
fact, we relished being “a peculiar people.” Folks that
did not have to abide by the strictures of the normative
world, folks that repudiated going to the movies, drinking alcohol, and smoking. It was, of course, a world with
very rigid notions of sex and sexuality. However, there
was much rumor and gossip that proliferated in this life
world, lots of hushed conversations: so-and-so had a
child out of wedlock; so-and-so is funny. Sex and sexuality
were both central to the rumor and gossip economy but
were also rhetorically categorically placed on the outside of the lifeworld. Without belaboring the point, once
I accepted my own queerness and began to, in earnest,
interrogate theologies of sex and sexuality that were repressive and diminished folks’ capacities for flourishing
and vitality, I left the church almost wholesale.
Almost.
I kept listening to black gospel music, and still
do listen to that genre more than any other. And this
wasn’t just because I enjoyed it as a “style,” which is a
AGAINST THE NORMATIVE WORLD
term used almost always to denigrate and discard the
radical potentiality and edge of the music. I enjoyed
it, and enjoy it still, because the music still moves me,
still resonates with me, still causes me at times to cry,
still compels me deep in my flesh, still vibrates. And
I began to wonder years ago: If it were possible to
still be moved by the music, and still be moved by the
aesthetic practices of speaking in tongues, or listening to the Hammond B-3, or hearing the Saints clap
their hands and yelp and scream and cry out in ecstatic joy—if it were possible for the sonic force of this
lifeworld to move me still—could such movement
force me back into theologically violent, homophobic, sexist doctrinal thought? I began to wonder, and
try to figure out in earnest, what was the relationship
between aesthetic practice and thought. I was fearful
that I would somehow be moved to a sort of repentance, to begin again to consent to theologies of violence. But it wasn’t until I read folks like Hortense
Spillers with her notion of vestibularity and Saidiya
Hartman and her concept of terror, it wasn’t until I
read folks like Nathaniel Mackey and how he meditates on the remains of perfume even after the fact of
broken bottles, until after I read folks like Fred Moten
and his lingering on black performance, that I recalibrated concerns about Blackpentecostal aesthetics to
ask, also, what can such a world, what can such aesthetic practices make possible.
Once I opened myself up, really made myself vulnerable, to the capacity for Blackpentecostal aesthetics
to offer something to the world in excess of the theological rhetoric from which we typically think such practices, such performances emerge, I found an entirely
otherwise modality of engagement with the very fact of
my own existence. That is, I began to gain clarity and
insight into things I did not at one time consider to be
intellectual. I did not at one time think whooping—the
intentioned elaboration and exaggeration of breath—
ASHON CRAWLEY INTERVIEWED BY SOFIA SAMATAR
during prayer and preaching were “intellectual,” only
“fleshly” practices. As fleshly and anti-intellectual, such
things were at one time unnecessary for pure theological
reflection. But today, I’m totally cool with such practices
being excessive for pure theological reflection because
I think the possibility for pure theological—and philosophical—thought emerges by repressing, by gathering
up and discarding, fleshly practices. And this is no more
true for whooping than it is for shouting (which is not,
curiously enough, vocalization and screaming, but is
dance; think of shouting as part of the Ring Shout tradition); and this is no more true for whooping and shouting than it is for speaking in tongues.
What became clear to me is that each of these
aesthetic practices is interconnected by breathing, but
breath goes so undertheorized in much work. So in the
book, I intentionally analyze breath as an aesthetic intellectual social practice. And after breath, I consider
shouting, singing and speaking in tongues. In each case,
I am simply asking: what can these aesthetics—discardable in the theological-philosophical thought of modernity, with its insistence on categorical distinction,
distinction that racializes, genders, and sexes aesthetic
practices such that the behaviors and performance I analyze are always already excessive because they are always
already black—what can these aesthetic practices make
possible as a critique of the curiously violent and violative normative world?
There are Otherwise ways to think temporality. There are Otherwise ways to think the concept of
fleshly reality. The Otherwise, as the elaboration of
the alternative, presumes that radically different relations have and do already exist. The black radical tradition is one space where I find the operation of the
Otherwise. And in my own research, Blackpentecostalism also produces—while it is produced by—the
Otherwise, the alternative. As such, it is a critique of
the given, a critique of the normative.
9
I want to ask you about vibration, the way it
holds both sameness and difference: movement and
echo; improvisation and pattern; invention and the
“ain’t nothing but.” There’s a productive tension between those two things in your work, it seems to me:
I’m thinking especially of the wonderful opening paragraph of “Between 4’52””, where you move from roughness and difference to smoothness and repetition. It
makes me think of jazz, and the relationship between
theme and variation, but I think there’s more going on
here. What’s happening with vibration in your work—
vibration as resistance, as relation, as social life?
Vibration is a fact of matter. What I mean is that
everything vibrates, whether at rapid or low frequencies. There is nothing—to my knowledge at least—that
does not vibrate, that does not move, that does not
make itself felt, known, in the world—this one or others—except through the difference that vibration requires. So vibratory frequency is something I constantly
obsess over: what does it mean that I vibrate, that my
computer vibrates, that water vibrates, that the earth
vibrates? What does it mean that the things we experience through sense perception are sensed because of
the different wavelengths and frequencies at which they
vibrate? For me, to know that vibration is a fact of matter, means that everything is sounding out, everything
is—to invoke Adriana Cavarero a bit—convoking, everything is sounding out with the assumption that some
other will detect such vibration. If matter vibrates as a
fact of existence, then all matter exists in an open-ended
antiphonal relation of desire. All matter exists in such
a way as to require being detected by something otherwise than itself to close the loop.
Think of the central nervous system and how it
is discontinuous. Susan Buck-Morss has an excellent
essay about Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” that really set
me on a path to think rigorously about the central
10
nervous system in flesh matter. Our sense perception
of the world is grounded in the fact of our flesh’s discontinuous nature: nerve endings are detached and
information must leap, must jump, must produce choreographies of encounter with other nerve endings;
our central nervous system’s discontinuity is what allows us to feel, to sense the world. This is all about
vibration, about how things move on and off each
other, about how matter approaches and is repelled.
It seems almost silly to say that we never touch anything, but we don’t. Electrons repel other electrons
such that whatever it is we “touch” is held in abeyance. Vibration, then, is what allows us to sense that
we are, in fact, touching, though such a fact is really
only ever a metaphor.
AGAINST THE NORMATIVE WORLD
I’m thinking of your essay “That There Might
Be Queer Sound” here, and the way it brings relation
and vibration together against a lethal normativity. It
seems to go back to the idea of an alternate temporality, a gently vibrating stillness: the queer couple in “the
thicket of the normal,” as you write, “biding time.”
I think it is important that we use our senses—in
whatever configuration they emerge for us individually—to consider the Otherwise as always just beyond the
horizon. One thing that has always bothered me is the
concern about the relation of one’s confessed or hidden
identity to the art they produce. Again, there were all
sorts of rumors and gossip circulating about the secret
and sinful lives of musicians and choir directors in my
conservative Blackpentecostal church growing up and
What became clear to me is that each of
these aesthetic practices is interconnected
by breathing
And it turns out that metaphor is important in
ways your question points out: sameness and difference held, contained, in the concept of vibration.
The productive tension you mention is a fact of matter, is the way we perceive the world through the configuration of senses we have. Vibration is grounded
in the perception of otherwise, the perception of alternative agitation, the perception of difference that
is always and everywhere around us.
I’d always wonder what the identity of the musician
meant for the music made. A more general way to ask: Is
a sound queer because the musician—the singer, songwriter, instrumentalist—is queer, whether out or closeted? The more I thought about this set of concerns, the
more they seemed to miss the point altogether, because
these questions emerge by grounding the concept of individual identity as that which is “real” and not something that is irreducibly on the move, irreducibly vibra-
ASHON CRAWLEY INTERVIEWED BY SOFIA SAMATAR
tional. Whatever we have of “identity,” it is always in
flux. To ask about the relation of sound to one’s identity
seems to reproduce the logic of theological-philosophical categorical distinction.
My students recently read José Esteban Muñoz’s
Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance
of Politics because I wanted us to think rigorously about
the generative ways one can inhabit normative worlds
while also, through performance, critiquing the very
normativity that binds. What I enjoyed about rereading Muñoz’s work was the ways he forced me to consider, yet and all over again, the ways I tried to inhabit
the homophobic and sexist world of Blackpentecostalism, given the rumor and gossip that made it apparent
that the official doctrinal position on the sinful nature
of queerness wasn’t binding. And noticing such clandestine, hushed, in some ways invisible behavior gave
me desire to know such life for myself. And I began to
wonder—and Blackpentcostal Breath attempts to speak
to this—where does the knowledge of disidentification emerge from, and how does one know to seek out
disidentificatory possibility? In another register, this
question could be asked using Fred Moten’s concept:
where does one receive a knowledge of freedom from,
having never had it? Either knowledge of disidentification, which is only ever the vibration of freedom and
liberatory praxis, is possible even in the most rigid and
conservative of spaces, or disidentificatory, liberating
praxis exists otherwise than through empiricism and
what is called, without much rigor, “experience.” Or
even further still, perhaps experience and knowledge
are given in otherwise modalities, on lower and higher frequencies than is generally detected. Perhaps, in
other words, we have to go to the excess, that which
exceeds the boundaries and strictures of normativity,
perhaps we need an otherwise way to detect sensuality
in order to think the possibility of disidentification, to
think the possibility of liberatory praxis, of freedom.
11
This recalls Baraka’s omm bomm ba boom, a vibration that’s sensed when you say it, felt right in the
lips. And the way Baraka’s poem (“Wise I”), which
you quote in “Against Water Shutoffs and Occupation: The Omm Bomm Ba Boom,” takes the form of a
traditional Gospel lyric. When Baraka says “they ban
your/ own bomm ba boom/ you in deep deep/ trouble,” we understand this “trouble” as historical and
collective. The omm bomm ba boom vibrates through
time and space—down the generations, and between
people. Like your work, it invokes community.
Each time I think about vibration and sociality, I
keep thinking of Michel Foucault’s interview, published
in English in 1981, “Friendship As a Way of Life.” In the
interview, two things stand out to me. Of friends, he says,
“They have to invent, from A to Z, a relationship that is
still formless, which is friendship: that is to say, the sum of
everything through which they can give each other pleasure,” and that “What we must work on, it seems to me,
is not so much to liberate our desires but to make ourselves infinitely more susceptible to pleasure.” Both these
are very important to me because susceptibility implies a
kind of vulnerability, an openness, a belief in existence as
radically undone, unhinged, unruly. It casts existence as
interstitial, as a circuit always waiting to be closed. This
closure comes through friendship, which is another way
to say sociality, another way to think vibration. The inventive impulse of friendship is in that it is not institutionally informed. People entering into such a relation must
be committed to figuring out what that mode of existence
will be, how they will behave, what rules to establish by
which to abide. Isn’t the establishment, the dance and
play of sociality, grounded in vibration, in how we move
with and against each other? Doesn’t such vibration open
us up to disidentificatory fugitive choreographic-sonic
force? Seems to me that friendship is one such thing we
are constantly after in the Otherwise, a mode of constituting otherwise ways of being in the world.
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ST. CTHULHU IN THE ANTHROPOSCENE
St. Cthulhu in the Anthroposcene
By QUINN LESTER
No matter how far they run, contemporary horror
writers can’t escape their genre’s racist forbearers
SINCE
the 2011 publication of Eugene
Thacker’s In the Dust of This Planet there has been an explosion in theoretical work on everything horrible and
horrific. Books such as Ben Woodard’s 2012 Slime Dynamics and Graham Harman’s Weird Realism, Dylan Trigg’s
2014 The Thing, several conferences and edited volumes
dedicated to the burgeoning field of “Black Metal Theo-
ry,” have all reinforced the feeling of horror through the
baroque theoretical architecture of their academic monographs. But horror seems to be having a moment not just
confined to the interests of goth-obsessed academics—or
goths. Such modern day inheritors of the pulp horror tradition as True Detective, The Walking Dead, Hannibal, and
American Horror Story are all enjoying adulation from
QUINN LESTER
fans and critics alike. Horror is having its day in the sun.
What is so horrific about the world today that draws
so many now to this theoretically repellent topic? Thacker describes the horror of contemporary life as sustained
by the eldritch abominations of the Anthropocene, neoliberal capitalism, runaway biotechnology, and oppressive states—that is, we live in inescapably horrifying systems. Other authors turn inward and see horror as firmly
rooted inside us, or identify reality as weird itself in its
apparent brute indifference to human concerns. But these
are all objects of horror, however, not horror itself, and as
such they still allow horror to escape definition.
“The oldest and
strongest emotion
of mankind is fear,”
Lovecraft wrote,
“and the oldest and
strongest kind of
fear is fear of the
unknown”
The vagueness of this horrific theory may be the
point. What unites many of these authors’ different approaches and interests is a conviction that the greatest
horror of all is the unknown itself. Thacker’s influential
definition of horror casts it as those moments where reason breaks down in the face of an unknown that humans
13
cannot rationally understand, the “absolute limit to our
ability to adequately understand the world at all.” While
some have tried to ground horror in concrete experiences, like Trigg’s focus on a phenomenological horror of the
body, most tend to emphasize this intellectual definition
of the unknown as the most frightening thing the human
mind can conceive. This might seem puzzling. How does
such a definition come to take hold, when the culture it
emerges from is filled with very explicit accounts of horror, from the zombie film to the serial killer? And where
do accounts of the horror of political violence fall under
this account, of genocide, ethnic cleansing, drone strikes,
prisons, policing, and other sites that mark the collision
of porous bodies with violent technologies of control and
dispossession?
No genealogy of the contemporary turn to horror
would be believable without the early American author
H. P. Lovecraft. Heralded today as the creator of the cosmic horror story, Lovecraft’s influence is all over recent
accounts of horror. Calling the inventor of Cthulhu the
patron saint of modern horror wouldn’t be wrong. Lovecraft took it upon himself to change the critical neglect
of horror stories with the publication of his 1927 Supernatural Horror in Literature. Sketching a lineage that included ghost stories from the Bible and Ancient Greece,
medieval fairy tales and the gothic, and the contemporary
writers that influenced Lovecraft the most, he used one
definition of horror to organize his monumental study.
“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear,” he
wrote, “and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of
the unknown,” a definition that Thacker also quotes and
others adopt.
It is debatable how closely this organizing concept
matches all of the works Lovecraft described in his study,
yet it certainly fits his own stories. His narratives are
dominated by encounters with unknown and malignant
forces that are constantly threatening the human world.
Lovecraft often shows men (always men) encountering
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beings and situations that defy their comprehension,
but the “unknown” in his stories isn’t really so much unknown as it is rooted in very particular and specific fears
of racialized and sexualized others. Even for casual fans,
Lovecraft’s racism is legendary. The last scion of an aristocratic New England family, Lovecraft was horrified at
a changing America filled with all kinds of new people.
Reading his stories it is difficult not to be taken aback
by his depiction of “genetically inferior” people, isolated
communities of incest, African-Americans described as
ape-men, and his careful delineation between pure Anglo-Saxons and all other kinds of “swarthy” and “mongoloid” peoples. These images extend to his alien creations,
often described as slimy masses of stench, abhorrent to
look upon, and often procreating with humans in gross
acts of miscegenation. Even Lovecraft’s most loyal contemporary critic S. T. Joshi admits that Lovecraft’s work
is preoccupied with “the decline of the West.”
While Lovecraft’s racism is often disavowed in considerations of his fiction, it cannot be distanced from how
he defined horror. Lovecraft was a master of describing
the horror of the unknown, but his own faith in the white
supremacy of his day prevented him from confronting
the actual objects of his fears as not the unknown but the
racialized bodies he encountered every day. His fantasies
are derivative of longstanding Anglo slurs against almost
all other groups of people, yet even Lovecraft’s definition
of horror may not have been as unique as he thought, for
the fear of the unknown has not only deep philosophical roots in Western culture but also theological ones.
An avowed atheist his whole life, Lovecraft nonetheless
shared a conception of the world and its horrors with
that of the founding father of the Church, St. Augustine,
whose own obsession with evil and all its horrors are visible in the fundaments of his influential theology.
Augustine spent much of his theological career trying to solve the problem of evil, or the apparent coexistence of evil with an all-powerful and just God. For Au-
ST. CTHULHU IN THE ANTHROPOSCENE
gustine, it was impossible for evil to be created by God
himself, for God can only create what is good. Evil acts
are not caused by God then, but are a side effect of human
free will that can in its pride choose to turn away from the
source of all good and so fall into darkness. This thought
process leads to Augustine’s rather ingenious solution:
Ontological evil is nothing at all, for it is “not a positive
substance.” Only mistaken human perceptions create the
appearance of evil. If we had God’s perspective and could
look at all of creation in its infinite movements then we
would see that the apparent existence of evil is just the result of a divine order that combines both perfection and
free will.
It’s in the definition of evil as nothing that we find
the link between Augustinian theology and contemporary horror. At first glance the idea that evil is nothing
seems like a linguistic trick. However, in Augustine’s writings it is clear that nothing is not just “nothing” for him
but instead something deeply terrifying. In his theology
he argues that God made the world from nothing, ex nihilo, for to argue otherwise would be to admit that something preexisted God. This nothingness does not seem
to go away either, but appears to always be corrupting
Augustine’s divine order through the presence of evil, for
only a universe “created out of nothing could have been
distorted by a fault.” Evil is not just the absence of the
good but also the admission of an originary lack in the
world, of a void that is barely suppressed by existence and
haunts the edges of reality. Ironically, Augustine’s divine
cosmology starts to look a lot like our post-Einsteinian
one, of a universe inextricably sliding towards the abyss
of nothingness. For Augustine, only faith in God’s love
keeps this nothingness at bay, but the horror of his theology is this nothing that continually threatens to undo the
Christian subject.
Set side by side, Augustine’s theology dovetails
rather nicely with Lovecraft’s atheism. Both conceive of
a universe haunted by the nothingness at its core, and
QUINN LESTER
Augustine creates the whole structure of Christian theology to protect against this nothingness. Yet both are
also united through their faith in structures that work to
obscure the everyday and horrific workings of violence.
Augustine and Lovecraft both likewise missed the reality
of violence in their horror: Augustine could not comprehend a God who was not good and could allow evil to
exist, so all other depictions of God were themselves evil;
he famously wrote several tracts against “heretics,” inaugurating a long tradition of Christian paranoia and persecution. Lovecraft’s horror often disavowed his actual fears
of black people, immigrants, and racial degeneration. On
one level Lovecraft seemed to recognize the horrors that
white supremacy created, such as in his vivid depictions
of New York’s immigrant and working class slums, yet he
was unable to ever critically reflect on it. Instead of writing about the very real horror white supremacy visited on
the world, he could only ever see white supremacy’s own
fears of horrific racialized bodies in fantasy.
Thacker and others, however, do not see a need for
building up such systematic defenses against nothingness, for it is just the condition of existence that we all
need to learn to get used to. In fact, staring into the nothingness may not be so bad for us every once in a while. It
reminds us of our essentially porous bodies and our connections to a planet that we need to start taking better
care of quickly if we truly want to avoid the abyss. In their
attempts to yoke horror to the Anthropocene, these writers often articulate clearly the stakes of the environmental crisis without retreating into nostalgia for a Edenic
Earth or the techno-capitalist dreams of geo-engineering.
Yet in uncritically adopting this long philo/theological discourse of nothingness they often miss out on the
very something that makes the world horrific today: the
violence and dispossession of neoliberal capitalism and
global white supremacy. People do not just experience a
horror of the unknown but also of concrete moments of
both everyday and extreme violence. The ubiquity of vio-
15
lence characterizes the Anthropocene just as much as any
conceptual or intellectual attempts to understand it.
What would it mean then for horror itself to critically reflect on violence? One thing that horror seems to be
unique at is highlighting those fears that unconsciously
persist in any system. What we fear in horror is not so
much the unknown but instead what we know and yet
wish we did not know. Both Lovecraft and Augustine register their true fears—racialized people and an evil God
respectively—yet cannot countenance that recognition
itself. Because they cannot bear the knowledge of their
fears, they instead replace it with a generic fear of the
unknown. It is the work of horror that brings forth these
fears that resist recognition. The most useful horror for
today then would not be one that uncritically shines our
prejudices back at us, or tell us the same stories of what
we claim we are afraid of. Instead it would reveal those
things that still now, deep in our bones, we cannot admit
we fear.
In short then, this would be a horror that troubles
our faith. Chiefly today this takes the form of a faith in
the stability of our world, whether that be the stability
of a liberal, colorblind police-order or of the very Earth
itself. This recognition of horror’s power to disrupt faith
is what I think draws Thacker and many others to it, and
their work has been valuable especially for connecting to
the horror of the Anthropocene. But it can still be pushed
farther. We won’t experience the horror of a changing
climate as an abstract concept, but instead as water wars,
mass migrations, and totalitarian attempts to impose order. Horror gives to us the worst possible world we could
be living in. Sometimes this can terrify us into inaction,
but deployed in particular ways it can also force us to recognize the horrors we already have with us and should
face. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu and Augustine’s evil God may
already be here with us in the Anthropocene. But the
scariest thing we could do would be to fail to set our faith
aside and confront it directly in all its horror.
16
Miracle on 214th Street
MIRACLE ON 214TH STREET
By JANE YAGER
The instantaneous apparition of Polaroid images
creates miraculous and apocalyptic visions
1. Bayside photo believed to depict the Angel of Death, date unknown. 2. Bayside photo interpreted as stairway to Heaven, 1981. 3. Bayside photo of vigil, 1983
WHEN
the Polaroid SX-70 Land Camera
debuted in 1972, it was the world’s first affordable and
commercially available instant camera, and was hailed as a
wonder. Ansel Adams called it, “an absolute miracle,” while
a LIFE magazine cover devoted to inventor Edwin Land
touted the SX-70 as a “Magic Camera.” The magic and miracle of the instant photograph was meant in an obviously
secular sense: the dazzle of an innovative consumer product; an experience of a technology that the user does not
understand.
But the instant camera also conjured a very different
sort of miracle than the Polaroid Corporation intended. In
a letter to the company, a devout Catholic wrote that he
had taken a photograph during a vigil at a site where the
JANE YAGER
Virgin Mary was believed to appear. The picture, which he
enclosed, showed inexplicable streaks of light and blotches of color. The pilgrim believed he had captured a “miraculous Polaroid,” a divine message written in a code of
distorted light. He asked the company whether it could
provide a scientific explanation for the anomalous light
patterns. Rather remarkably from the perspective of contemporary corporate communications, the camera’s inventor wrote back. Land said that he had no explanation for
the image, adding, “So many things occur in our daily lives
which have no explanation, and we wonder if this isn’t one
of them.”
The pilgrim who sent Polaroid the miraculous photograph belonged to a small but growing group of Catholics
known as the Baysiders, who were devotees of Veronica
Lueken. A white working-class Catholic housewife from
Bayside, Queens, Leuken began experiencing visions in
1968 after hearing on her car radio that Robert Kennedy
had been shot. As she prayed for the dying Senator, she
felt herself enveloped in the perfume of roses. Thérèse of
Lisieux, a saint known as “The Little Flower,” appeared
to her shortly thereafter. At first Lueken was terrified, but
soon she began to transcribe poems the saint dictated to
her during repeated visitations.
“Many people have reported having a mystical
experience at some point in their lives,” historian of
religion Joseph Laycock writes in The Seer of Bayside,
his 2014 book on Lueken and the Baysiders. However, certain historical and social conditions have to be
in place, Laycock argues, for a mystical experience to
be greeted as a visionary prophecy. A time of general social upheaval, combined with the specific anxiety
among Catholic laypeople in the wake of the sweeping modernization ushered in by the Second Vatican
Council, created the conditions that made an apparition movement possible in Queens in the late 1960s.
As a woman from a humble background with little formal education, Lueken fit the bill for a Marian seer.
17
Lueken’s visions took a public turn in 1970 after
the Virgin Mary appeared in her bedroom and instructed her to establish a shrine to “Our Lady of the Roses”
on the grounds of her parish church and hold rosary vigils there. If Lueken faithfully fulfilled this request, Mary
promised to use her as the “voice box” for messages
from heaven that would spread around the world. Lueken did as she was asked, and beginning in summer 1970,
growing crowds gathered for Saturday night vigils on the
church grounds where she received divine messages in
an ecstatic trance.
As Lueken came into her role as a seer, her visions became graphically apocalyptic. To the chagrin of Church authorities, she prophesied imminent cataclysm in the form
of a fiery “Ball of Redemption.” Floods, plagues, stock market crashes and terrorist attacks filled her visions, a doom
that could only be averted through prayer and a return to
pre-Vatican II Catholic teachings. In its wilder moments,
elements of popular culture infused her apocalypse—
UFOs, vampires, a “Soviet death ray.” While the content
of Lueken’s visions troubled parish authorities, the crowds
of pilgrims that gathered around her mortified the church’s
neighbors, middle-class homeowners who regarded Lueken as an interloper from the poor side of the parish and
feared for the vigils’ effect on their property values.
The Bayside movement coincided with the advent
of the SX-70, and miraculous photographs became a central part of the Baysiders’ devotional practice. The whirr
of ejecting film was as characteristic a vigil sound as the
chanting of prayers. Only Lueken could see and speak for
the divine, but every Baysider could take pictures. Over
time, the group developed a divinatory chart for decoding
symbols and colors that appeared on the photos: the letter
W, for example, signifies worldwide warning, while snakes
represent the forces of hell. The color blue indicates Mary,
often present in the distinctive “Polaroid blue” cast of SX70 prints. Folklorist Daniel Wojcik calls the Baysiders’ use
of Polaroids “photodivination,” comparing it to Ndembu
18
divination traditions in northwestern Zambia: like Ndembu diviners’ symbols, the symbolic system of miracle photos leaves space for the pilgrim to actively interpret the
image.
Vigil photography did not originate at Bayside. Pilgrims took pictures at Marian apparition sites as early as
the 1930s, and the oldest known Christian miraculous
photograph dates from 1905, just five years after the introduction of the first mass-market camera, the Kodak Brownie. Shot off the Narrows of St. John’s in Newfoundland, it
shows an iceberg with a large protrusion in the shape of
the Virgin Mary. The Archbishop in St. John’s approved of
the photo—so heartily, in fact, that he dubbed it Our Lady
of the Fjords and penned a sonnet in praise of the “Crystal
Virgin, from the frozen fjords/Where far-off Greenland’s
gelid glaciers gleen.”
In an era that saw the search for evidence of the afterlife as a scientific pursuit, the idea that a camera might
record supernature as well as nature was not much of a
conceptual leap. Nineteenth-century Spiritualists were
the first to use the new technology to capture and communicate with the supernatural. In spirit photography, an
“extra”—an additional human figure, presumed to be the
image of a dead person—appeared on the negative after
the photograph was taken. Though the comparison would
likely displease both sides, a Spiritualist medium had notable parallels to a Marian seer. Preferably a woman or child,
she was supposed to be passive in a particularly receptive
way: In Spiritualist language derived from magnetism, the
medium’s feminine “negative” charge enabled the spirit to
flow into her.
Spiritualists and Theosophists around the turn of the
twentieth century debated the mechanics of supernatural
photography: Some claimed that spirit photographs simply documented ghosts who happened to be present when
the photo was taken; others argued that spiritual forces
used images of the dead to imprint messages onto the photographic negative, or that the medium herself was a sort
MIRACLE ON 214TH STREET
of camera. The Baysiders likewise have a range of explanations for miraculous photography: some say the Holy Spirit enters into the camera to form the images, while others
believe that Mary or the saints draw the patterns and symbols onto the film as it develops.
According to a story that resonates deeply with
many Baysiders, Saint Veronica—whose name means
“true icon”—met Jesus on the Via Dolorosa on the way to
Calvary. Jesus wiped his face with her veil, and his image
was imprinted on the cloth. The cloth became a holy relic called the Veil of Veronica, which is now stored at St.
Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Like the imprint of the crucified
Christ on the Shroud of Turin and the image of the Virgin
of Guadalupe on Juan Diego’s cloak, the Veil of Veronica is
an acheiropoieton, an icon “not painted by human hands.”
Icons that come into being without human artistry are
seen to possess a special kind of authority; supernatural
photography is a technological variation on this miraculous image tradition.
In America, Jean Baudrillard wrote of the Polaroid as
a heightened form of photography’s uncanniness:
to hold the object and its image almost simultaneously as
if the conception of light of ancient physics or metaphysics, in which each object was thought to secrete doubles
or negatives of itself that we pick up with our eyes, has
become a reality. It is a dream. It is the optical materialization of a magical process. The Polaroid photo is a sort
of ecstatic membrane that has come away from the real
object.
The “ecstatic” Polaroid is the perfect technology for
miracle photography. “Our Lady has directed that the pictures should be taken with Polaroids or other kinds of instant self-developing cameras,” Bayside literature instructs.
Polaroid film has the same immediate quality as the imprint created in a traditional acheiropoieton and is less vulnerable than other photographic film to skeptics’ accusations of tampering with the development process.
This “optical materialization of a magical process”
was also a potential threat to institutional religious au-
JANE YAGER
thority. In The Seer of Bayside Laycock frames the Bayside
movement as a “dance of deference and defiance” by a
group of people who understand themselves as loyal Catholics defending the traditions of their faith, yet act in ways
that challenge Church authorities. The book’s account
of the struggle over whether the Baysiders fit within the
boundaries of Catholicism reveals the ceaseless process
of boundary negotiation in lived religion. While they are
not central to Laycock’s analysis, divine Polaroids fit this
dynamic of deference and defiance. Miracle photos continue the Catholic tradition that the sacred manifests itself
in matter and fulfill the call made at Vatican II for more
“external signs” of the Catholic faith. At the same time, Polaroid miracles subvert the Church hierarchy by giving lay
Catholics agency to receive divine messages directly and
providing them with physical objects that can be used as
evidence in arguments with Church authorities.
Ultimately, too many Baysiders defied convention
too loudly for the middle-class residential neighborhood
where they held their vigils. As the vigils drew busloads
of pilgrims from as far away as Canada, they attracted vendors selling ice cream, hot dogs and religious objects. Angry neighbors tried to drive the vigils out by running their
lawnmowers or singing patriotic songs to drown out the
rosary. In what the New York press dubbed the “Battle of
Bayside,” conflict escalated to the point of physical fights
between pilgrims and neighbors.
The Diocese of Brooklyn eventually sided with the
Bayside homeowners. Having initially ignored Lueken,
it now investigated her visions and declared them spurious. Bishops around North America issued statements to
their flocks that they should not attend vigils in Bayside,
as Lueken’s apparitions were the product of a “fertile
imagination.”
In what Laycock describes as “perhaps the only case
in which alleged miracles associated with a Marian apparition site were the subject of a criminal investigation,” the
fraud bureau of the Queens DA’s office—probably at the
19
instigation of the Brooklyn Diocese—sent nine miraculous photos to the Polaroid Corporation for analysis in
1973, even though “supernatural phenomena are generally
beyond the purview of the legal system.” A Polaroid corporate attorney responded with noncommittal explanations
of how various forms of manipulation could have affected
the images. No fraud charges were ever filed: “Because the
courts do not acknowledge the existence of miracles,” Laycock writes, “it is almost impossible to convict someone
for fraudulently offering a supernatural (and thus legally
non-existent) service.”
Though the miracle fraud case fizzled out, the courts
did end the Battle of Bayside in 1975, when the Supreme
Court of New York issued an injunction banning the pilgrims from Bayside Hills. Lueken then received a revelation that Mary and Jesus would now appear to her in
Flushing Meadows Park, at the site of the Vatican Pavilion
from the 1964-65 World’s Fair. The Baysiders moved their
vigils to Flushing Meadows, and continue to meet there
weekly to this day.
The pilgrims at Flushing Meadows still take Polaroids.
Many Baysiders have had their cameras blessed by priests.
Rose petals are taped onto cameras and rosary beads are
draped around them. In a digital era, the Baysiders’ anachronistic photographic practices seem emphatically embodied. Their use of Polaroid cameras has become an assertion
that a special miraculous potential resides in Polaroid technology’s combination of the analog and the instantaneous.
The development process occurs inaccessibly, yet within an
object that is tangibly present. An image “not painted by
human hands” takes shape before the Baysider’s eyes, rising
up through the chemical layers of the film sheet to emerge
into view on its surface. As with traditional acheiropoeita,
the miracle depends on the sense of mystery evoked by the
conditions of the image’s physical production. In the Baysiders’ Polaroids, a dissident form of direct communication
with the divine converges with the photograph’s physicality
and immediate creation to produce a miracle.
20
A FORM OF FAITH
A Form of Faith
By RACHEL ELIZABETH JONES
Memorial altars in Los Angeles offer resistance to the digital
ANYONE
can be a curator online, arranging image-objects and images of objects as they please,
even if they may never see these objects in person. In its
relationship to digital imagery, the trend in curation subtly
undermines awareness of the structures that deny true access both to material goods and space.
Altars resist this erasure. As installations, they are
inherently site-specific. Sometimes, as with memorial altars, the reasoning behind the site is obvious, and other
times it may seem more arbitrary. They very often incorporate photographic images, but they just as frequently
rely on photography’s predecessor, the icon. They are
adaptable and porous, fitting simultaneously with histories of folk religion and paganism as with narratives of
postmodern hybridity. They are almost always recognizable in their form, but no two are alike. Each unit is an individual expression of its maker’s intention to remember
something that cannot be seen, because it exists first and
foremost in their own mind. In this way, the altarmaker employs visuality as a manifestation not only of their
faith in what’s being represented, but in the personalized
act of representation.
The tempting slippage between altar and alterity has
been expanded upon by at least one scholar. As a condensed, physical unit of curation, the altar can be seen as
a passive disruption in the mechanisms of capitalist visuality, one that paradoxically expresses faith in the unseen
while worshipping visibility itself.
RACHEL ELIZABETH JONES
Thai Plaza,
Hollywood, 2010
Luck Thai Cuisine,
MacArthur Park, 2014
21
22
A FORM OF FAITH
An altar to Guadalupe among Mexican kitsch
marketed to tourists on Olvera Street, 2014
Mural painted by David A. Lopez
in 1973, East Los Angeles, 2014
RACHEL ELIZABETH JONES
23
Altar by Jennifer Gutierrez-Morgan at Hollywood
Forever Cemetery’s Dia de los Muertos festival, 2012
House altar,
West Adams, 2013
24
A FORM OF FAITH
Altar to Trayvon Martin,
Silverlake, 2013
The altar form employed by Rik Martino, the “Birdman
of Silverlake,” at a corner in East Hollywood, 2012
MOLLY ORINGER
Holy Land
By MOLLY ORINGER
Zionism excavates its secular justification from the Jerusalem dirt
RECENT
articles and analyses of Jerusalem’s ever-changing landscape have suggested that archaeological digs, sponsored by government agencies, are
replacing state security apparatuses, substituting exhibits
and visitors centers for walls, fences, and checkpoints. In
the wake of the recent election that further solidifies Israel’s “same-same-but-different” policy—that is, the continuation of a legal state of exception for Jews and, for all
intents and purposes, an apartheid system for Palestinians,
African migrants, and other select minorities—it is necessary to consider how infrastructural and cultural mechanisms of control are shifting and deepening alongside such
political retrenchment.
Archaeology as a face of settler-colonial projects,
however, is not at all a new phenomenon—think of
pith-helmeted British scientist-adventurers pillaging
25
Poster for Dig, 2015
26
Egyptian tombs—and is hardly limited to making systems
of population and territorial control in occupied Palestine
look humanitarian and friendly. In exalting Jewish history
above the city’s myriad layers of conquest and civilization,
Jerusalem’s settler/archaeological organizations continue
archaeology’s colonial legacy of shaping a history through
faith in the “facts” legitimated by antiquities. The historical certainty embodied in antiquities is then projected in
official state narratives, tourist sites and excursions, and,
as is the case with projects like USA network’s popular
mini-series Dig, to international audiences through media
ventures.
Dig’s storyline centers on protagonist Peter Connolly,
an FBI operative recently relocated to Jerusalem following
the apparent suicide of his daughter. To solve the murder
of a young archaeology student working at a site located
HOLY LAND
in the tunnels below the Temple Mount (a project that
seeks to locate the highly-sought Arc of the Covenant),
Connolly must weave the seemingly disparate threads of
a variety of religious zealots making preparations for the
end-of-times. To do so, he must discover the role of an ancient breastplate—once used by High Priest of the Second
Temple and recently stolen from the city’s Rockefeller Museum—all while balancing the stress of a recent divorce,
losing his daughter, and letting go of his past as a seminary
student. Stories detailing the pursuit of an all-red calf by a
group of ultra-Orthodox Jews, the rearing of a “pure” boy
to be summoned to his destiny through a Bar Mitzvah by a
Christian sect in New Mexico, and a Palestinian-American
fugitive entwine to create an image of messianic, cult-like
religious actors who, despite doctrinal differences, threaten to collectively change the course of humanity.
In addition to its narrative mystery, Dig’s mass appeal depends on its ability to produce an image of Jerusalem that posits the city as a potential site of social
salvation. The means by which this is achieved are twofold: through a captivating narrative with Jerusalem so
central an element that it goes beyond simple backdrop,
and through creating an image of the “good Jew,” an integrated citizen who aligns his or her activities with the
interests of the Jewish state. By depicting ultra-Orthodox
Jews as dangerously religious, secular Jews—both within
the show, as embodied by the character Golan Cohen, a
brusque Israeli detective, and those working behind the
scenes on production, like the Zionist-nationalist organizations contracted to oversee dig sites—are idealized.
The historic Land of Israel, thus, is positioned as a place
of origin, and the Jewish nation-state is illustrated as the
future’s deliverance.
Dig is not the first project created for American audiences in tandem with Israeli broadcasting. Following the
deregulation of Israeli television in 1993—which, until
then, was composed of a single state station—Hollywood
has looked to Israeli media with fervor. Post 9/11 anxiet-
MOLLY ORINGER
ies ensured further resonance of plotlines tested on Israeli
viewers and tweaked by American media companies. The
most ubiquitous of these programs is Showtime’s Homeland, premised on Israel’s Prisoners of War, which follows
the reintegration of Israeli soldiers—one a recent convert
to Islam—after returning from capture in Lebanon. When
asked to muse on America’s watching Israel for up-andcoming concepts, the Israeli writer and director of Dig
(and Homeland) Gideon Raff noted the commonality of
the two countries’ political concerns, social grievances,
and “sacred values of storytelling.” Keshet, the company
responsible for the Israeli portion of Dig’s development,
is so committed to strengthening the Israeli-American TV
pipeline that a subsidy concerned solely with the Israeli
production of American shows is in its early stages. American actors and TV personalities are frequently offered expense-paid excursions to Israel, coordinated through state
agencies, in the hopes of molding future media in a manner that speaks validity to the actions of Israel.
The television show as propaganda medium is not
unfamiliar in the scope of Israel’s international branding
campaign. Partial state sponsorship of Israeli hasbara, or
internationally-aimed cultural soft power, can be seen everywhere from government-sponsored tours of the Batsheva Dance Company to Zionist advocacy groups that
work under the banner of “peace organizations” putting
on cultural events on American campuses. The mundane,
seemingly apolitical nature of this entertainment aims to
show Israel as globally relevant, innovative, and progressive. Simultaneously, Israel’s neighbors (and the Palestinians it controls) are positioned as, at best, out of touch
with liberal transnational culture and, at worst, undeveloped and reactionary. By promoting Israel’s creative and
artistic output as apolitical cultural endeavors, detached
from the militarization of secular society, hasbara projects
aim to create a legitimate face of the Israeli state, thus justifying the occupation of Palestine.
In the popular imagination, archaeological remains
27
conjure images of the past as a museum, history as relics
behind glass. As a nationalist movement premised on the
return from exodus, however, the Zionist use of archaeology goes beyond that of cultural appreciation or historical
romanticization. Political Zionism relies on connecting
archaeological fact-making to present-day narratives in
order to provide scientific evidence for indigeneity and,
thus, land expropriation. As anthropologist Nadia Abu ElHaj explores in her seminal book Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli
Society, relics are seen as proof of Jewish belonging to the
land, and are used as political evidence of rightful control
of Jerusalem. Archaeology is seen in Israel to be a science
that trumps current realities; discoveries of important artifacts, however dubious the claims, provide impetus for
state land-grabbing and the construction of infrastructure
that caters to the private needs of Jewish Israelis. Archaeology thus sets the stage for what is considered a continuation of the glorious rule of ancient Israelites rather than a
modern project of colonization.
Though not mentioned explicitly in Dig, excavation
in Jerusalem falls under the purview of the Israeli Antiquities Authority (IAA). Rather than directly supervising each
site, the IAA often contracts oversight to private organizations. In the case of Dig, producers work closely with the
Ir David Foundation, a settler organization that controls
the ostensible site of the ancient City of David and promotes establishing a Jewish majority in its vicinity, which
is a present-day Palestinian neighborhood. Archaeology as
a seemingly innocuous setting for a primetime drama, then,
acts as a method of making Israeli claims to land politically neutral, using the science of archaeological exploration
as cover for expansion and expulsion. The show, of course,
does not include the private security, land appropriation, or
settler-instigated violence that is as much an aspect of the
archeological site’s daily life as the discovery of relics.
Beyond terror-centric plotlines, one can see why Jerusalem makes for a particularly intriguing setting for a
28
pre-apocalyptic whodunit mystery. In the act of unearthing biblical antiquities, archaeological endeavors function
to bind a venerable past to future possibilities, whether
these are religiously significant or politically driven. Dig’s
narrative relies on the present-day relevance of a specific
antiquity—the aforementioned breastplate—as a precondition for control of the city and its future global influence.
As the series’ first episode notes, the artifact in the wrong
hands has the potential to unleash unknown havoc.
In addition to
its narrative
mystery, Dig’s mass
appeal depends
on its ability to
produce an image
of Jerusalem that
posits the city as
a potential site of
social salvation
By demonizing the ultra-religious as those “wrong
hands,” Dig implicitly counterposes an image of the good
Jew: one who cooperates with the workings of the Israeli state, whether through civic duty or through advancing
nationalist expansion by way of state ties. Dig’s producers
play heavily on the image of threateningly messianic ortho-
HOLY LAND
doxy. Ultra-Orthodox groups, who have long held strained
relations with the Israeli government over issues ranging
from military service to legitimacy of the contemporary
nation-state, are positioned as primitive, superstitious, and
dangerous through their participation in “barbaric” activities designed to bring about the coming of the Messiah. By
portraying the ultra-Orthodox as fundamentally at odds
with and in the margins of Israeli society, Dig distances the
Israeli mainstream from the “excesses” of the ultra-Orthodox settlers, producing a reasonable liberal Israeli subject
who is just as threatened by these apocalyptic rubes as the
Palestinians whose territory they illegally settle.
Israeli hasbara projects need not be explicit in their
political aims. The construction of Dig’s storyline, like
other Israeli/American entertainment ventures, favorably
packages Israel’s reign across all aspects of its occupation.
Archaeology streamlines a narrative of Jewish precedent
of control and a flourishing Israeli culture. Dig not only
showcases Israel as an ideal backdrop of entertainment,
but subtly posits its present-day reality as the locus of a
struggle against messianism and ultra-religious fundamentalism.
Thus, archeology is used to transform Israel’s religious claims to the holy land into wholly secular ones.
Rather than some biblical gift from God to His chosen
people, the Israeli state has a scientific and secular historical claim to the land, which one need only excavate
from underneath the feet of all those poor misguided
Palestinians. In the liberal Zionist imaginary, Israel’s
modern-day “secular” state maintains the ancient historical and religious importance of its phsyical site while
simultaneously protecting the world from catastrophic
religious fundamentalism, be it Muslim, Christian or
Jewish. Rather than the largest source of ethnic and religious tensions in the region, archeology is used to imagine Israel as a modern bulwark against apocalyptic madmen and murderous fundamentalists. Just don’t look too
closely at what’s happening above the ground.
IMRI KAHN
Smash Images from Antiquity
29
By IMRI KAHN
Idolaters and iconoclasts share an unshatterable faith in the value of the image
A
man stands in front of a half-destroyed statue. Its
paws are almost the size of the man. The front side of its
body is missing. It has no head. Like an art historian or a
tour guide, the man is giving us information that the creature cannot give itself. The creature is only a stone sculpture; even when it still had eyes it couldn’t see.
“These ruins that are behind me are idols and statues
that people in the past used to worship instead of Allah,”
says the man. The camera pans across more sculptures.
Some seem to have been recently damaged. The man con-
tinues, in voiceover: “The Assyrians, Akkadians, and others took for themselves gods of rain, of agriculture, and
of war, and worshipped them along with Allah, and tried
to appease them with all kinds of sacrifices.” It is unclear
whether the ruined sculpture has recently lost its upper
body or has looked that way for a long time. Archeological
finds are always in different states of ruin; some forms of
ruin are enacted by nature, some by men. Ruin is part of
the aesthetic.
The man is some kind of spokesman for the Islamic
30
State. He is standing at the Nergal gate, one of the gates
on the northern side of the city of Nineveh, the oldest
and most populous city of the long-gone Assyrian empire. The creature sculpted in stone is a Lamassu, a winged
and bearded human-headed bull; it was meant to protect
the city from destruction. It is almost 3000 years old, and
though headless, still standing.
Cut. Men are standing in a museum. Music starts
playing: the sound of men singing in unison. The men in
the museum topple sculptures to the ground. They fall in
slow motion, disintegrating on the floor. Cut to men hitting a sculpture with sledgehammers in slow motion. The
thumps of the hammers interfere with the music. Cut to
more of this. Are we the believers who must be shown that
our gods are powerless in front of sledgehammers, even as
they are looted away off camera? When the Bamiyan Buddhas were denounced as idols and damaged by the Taliban
in 2001, a spokesman claimed the reason they were being
destroyed was not for the danger they posed of being worshipped in religious practices, but rather because they had
become idols for the West, who had poured millions of
dollars into Afghanistan for their preservation. Is the Lamassu a Western idol too?
The man goes on: “Since Allah commanded us to
shatter and destroy these statues, idols, and remains, it is
easy for us to obey, and we do not care what people think,
even if this costs billions of dollars.” But he is lying, or maybe he is misinformed. It’s true that IS have released videos
of acts of violence performed on these ancient stones, and
razed ancient cities. But they have also looted intact archaeological artifacts from the Mosul museum and other
sites, selling them to finance their activities. In cases where
the sculptures have more value than others, Allah’s commands are being ignored. The sale of some idols funds the
destruction of other idols; the value that resides in them
can finance war, murder and ethnic cleansing. Do the gods
of war demand much else?
These official IS videos of men punishing stones,
SMASH IMAGES FROM ANTIQUITY
with added slow motion for maximum effect, are what
the scholar of iconology W.J.T. Mitchell has called “secondary images.” These acts of “creative destruction,” while
claiming to destroy images, provide new images that are
just as potent. The destruction of idols, when staged as a
media spectacle, becomes itself an idol, a mute image of
violence that is projected back to viewers as a call for outrage and more violence. The destruction of the Assyrian
artifacts does not happen in a different world from ours;
it is grounded in the realities of global modernity. But of
course it also feeds into a popular narrative of the racialized and pathologized religious other, the enemy of modernity, desiring to drag us all into a new medieval age.
In his book What Do Pictures Want, Mitchell describes the first two laws of iconoclasm, the first one being
“the idolator is always someone else.” “My” images are always merely symbolic, in Mitchell’s formulation. I may use
images in my worship, but I worship through them, not
to them. The second law of iconoclasm is the iconoclast’s
belief that “idolaters believe their images are holy, alive
and powerful. It is a belief about other peoples’ beliefs,
projections of a kind of imperial subject, inseparable (in
fact, constitutive of) systems of racial and collective prejudice.” An idol is a name you call an icon when it isn’t yours.
Idolaters supposedly can’t tell the difference between the
animate and the inanimate, they are gullible and weak, and
they should be swept aside to make room for our empire.
Mitchell links monotheism to imperialism using Joseph Schumpeter’s definition of imperialism as an “objectless disposition on the part of a state to unlimited forcible
expansion.” Much like monotheism, imperialism cannot
be reduced to a specific material object or base. While
many cult-sculptures served as symbolic access points to
spiritual deities, or as temporary embodiments, many of
these deities were linked geographically to temples, cities,
and regions. To get rid of a god you had to get rid of its
infrastructure. Monotheism, ideally not reducible to its
infrastructure, doesn’t have this problem. “The figure of
IMRI KAHN
the invisible, transcendent law-giver”, Mitchell writes elsewhere, “whose most important law is a ban on image-making of any kind, is the perfect allegory for an imperial, colonizing project that aims to eradicate all the images, idols
and material markers of the territorial claims of indigenous
inhabitants.”
Under the term idolatry, generally speaking, two
very different concepts have been meshed into one. The
first concept is idolatry as the worship of other gods. The
second is idolatry as a false practice. Moshe Halbertal
and Avishai Margalit describe “idolatry as betrayal” (the
wrong god) and “idolatry as error” (the wrong practice).
In “idolatry as betrayal,” destroying the infrastructure of
the wrong god (temples, sculptures, practices) gets rid of
the god itself. In “idolatry as error”, the mediation between
worshipper and god is the problem. An incorrect representation or practice is unholy and as such must be stopped.
There is no god to get rid of, only dumb objects.
Both accusations have political uses, but the conflation of these two kinds of idolatry also confuses the status of the images and objects involved. Do idols invite destruction or deserve preservation because they are potent
or because they are impotent? The drawing of a line across
the throat of an image or the blotting out of its eyes can be
seen as both an indication that it is powerless, and as an
attempt to deprive it of its power. But does the power lay
inside the idol, or is it somewhere else?
For theologian and philosopher Jean Luc Marion, it’s
the way you look at an image that turns it to an idol. Marion’s work interprets the experience of icons and idols in
terms of the relationship between gaze, image, and invisibility. Asking what makes an idol is a question that is less
invested in the idol itself, and more in the gaze lent to it. In
Marion’s conception, we cannot speak of icons and idols
in themselves, only of iconic or idolic gazes. When you experience an icon, you are experiencing something through
an image; something is looking at you, but it remains invisible and not reducible to its object, “It shatters the aims
31
of the observer and reverses intentionality,” writes Marion.
The icon transcends its materiality and allows the viewer
to encounter something invisible behind it. In a manner of
speaking, it is not “flat” even if it is only a picture. The idol,
on the other hand, is a visual representation designed to
cater to your needs. An idol doesn’t exceed your expectations, but fulfils them: “It mirrors the limits of the observer.” It represents the invisible and displays the properties
of the invisible to you. An idol is flat. An icon is looked
through; an idol is looked at.
If we take Marion’s formulation at face value, recalling Mitchell’s second law of iconoclasm—a belief about
another’s belief—we could say that an idol is what an icon
feels like when it falls flat, is unconvincing, and doesn’t
work; a failed icon. Paradoxically, when an image is experienced as flat, you can finally “see through it”: the purpose
it is meant to serve and the power it is meant to hold becomes explicit when it fails. This is the difference between
the teenager conjuring Justin Bieber’s desire by plastering
images of him on their bedroom walls, and their parents’
vision of the posters as “what they truly are”: images of
youth, of desire, of sex, photoshopped for maximum effect. The parents are unable to experience Bieber’s gaze
from the other side of the image, so they can only see the
captivated gaze of their child as irrational and idolic.
In the IS video, music and slow motion effects
point at the possibility of seeing through the footage into
something powerful that lies beyond it. The experience
of watching the destruction of the idols is reminiscent of
YouTube videos of skateboard accidents replayed in slow
motion to show the precise moment of “fail,” only to reveal
that it cannot be reduced to a single moment, moving us
to watch it again. In the video, the slow motion promises
to reveal the decisive moment of the idol’s destruction, the
precise frame where its power evaporates, but the promise
isn’t fulfilled. The power may have never been there in the
first place, or it may be that images are unable to show anything definitive about power. The slow motion allows us to
32
see that some sculptures have metal poles running through
them: they are modern copies. These idols are fakes; we
can finally see through them.
The question of the right way to look at Assyrian sculpture is not new. This is not the first time the relics of this
long-gone empire find themselves at a threshold between
a preconfigured us and an overdetermined them. In fact,
these winged bulls, even before being discovered in the 19th
century, straddled this imaginary divide. “I had the first revelation of a new world of antiquity,” wrote the excited Paul
Emile Botta, the first excavator of Mesopotamia, in 1843, on
unearthing an Assyrian palace complex in a mound in Khorsabad. “A new world of antiquity,” a new standard against
which the achievements of modernity could be judged. This
new antiquity was a complement to the idealised fantasy of
modernity, itself produced through violently opening up
“new worlds.” In the following years there was a competition
between Botta and Austen Henry Layard, and by extension
France and England, over who was entitled to take more of
this new antiquity back to their respective museums, and
who could do it sooner. The first value of these new idols,
and the reason their excavations were funded in the first
place, was as imperial trophies.
Up to this time, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, in what is modern day Iraq, had been seen by
European travellers as a remote and unwelcoming desert befitting of the notable evils ascribed to its ancient populations
in the bible, and proof of the divine punishments said to have
befallen their ancient kings. “What was not there was taken
to prove what had been,” wrote the art historian Frederick N.
Bohrer. “Here, then, is the first and most obvious binary involved in the constructed image of Assyria, in which Western
achievement is contrasted with Eastern ruin and taken as an
index of the morality of the former versus the immorality of
the latter.” Before its discovery and excavation, Assyria itself
was a destroyed idol. Its absence was proof of its valuelessness—it was iconic.
In Orientalism and Visual Culture: Imagining Mesopo-
SMASH IMAGES FROM ANTIQUITY
tamia in Nineteenth Century Europe, Bohrer charts how the
reception of Assyria, a “new world of antiquity,” both challenged and illuminated structures of power and knowledge active at the time. Entering into discursive landscapes
governed by a progress-oriented chronology supposedly
representing the whole of humanity, from crude Egyptian
beginnings to Greek refinement, Assyrian sculpture got
caught somewhere in the middle, “connected to both but
belonging to neither.”
In France, though displayed in the Louvre, the new
finds were shared only among a very small number of elite
authorities. In England the reception was completely different, since the finds were, from the beginning, championed by the popular press for their aesthetic appeal, even if
the British Museum, meant to mediate between the sculptures and the public, felt differently. The British Museum
revealed its new Greek revival architecture in 1827, and
presented the neoclassicist narrative of the time before the
arrival of Assyria to its halls. All the arts of antiquity were
seen in terms of ancient Greek art, perceived as the origin
of European culture. In a chain of art leading from primitive darkness into light, Greek sculpture was one end of the
spectrum, the highest form of art, possessing ideal beauty
and holding intrinsic value, while Egyptian sculpture held
the other side of the spectrum, as its binary other: certainly not art, and not meant to be experienced aesthetically,
but of interest to antiquarians.
What of the new antiquity revealed by western Europe’s discovery of the Assyrian statues? Where did it belong on the spectrum? Austen Henry Layard wrote from
the scene of excavation in 1845:
To those who have been accustomed to look upon the
Greeks as the true perfecters and the only masters of the
imitative arts, they will furnish new matter for inquiry
and reflection… they are immeasurably superior to the
stiff and ill-proportioned figures of the monuments of the
Pharaohs. They discover a knowledge of the anatomy of
the human frame, a remarkable perception of character,
and a wonderful spirit in the outlines and general execution. In fact, the great gulf which separates barbarian
from civilised art has been passed.
IMRI KAHN
Layard’s views on the aesthetic qualities of the new
finds were picked up and circulated widely through popular media. The representatives of the British Museum,
receiving the crates arriving one after the other, as well
as the people who funded Layard’s excavations, were less
than impressed. The British ambassador at Constantinople wrote to Layard, “I still think the Nineveh marbles are
not valuable as works of art. Can a mere admirer of the
beautiful view them with pleasure? Certainly not. … your
winged god is not the Apollo Belvedere.” To the ambassador and others like him, Layard’s vision of the sculptures
was “idolatry as error”; these ruins were not meant to be
experienced aesthetically.
British bureaucrats disparaged the Assyrian sculptures, but the British public loved them. The arrival of the
Assyrian art in England prompted the biggest growth in
general admissions in the history of the British Museum.
The number of visitors was held by the popular press as
proof of the value the objects had, the power they yielded. The press promoted aesthetic appeal as democratically
empowering, allowing a viewer with no special expertise to
enjoy and appreciate the statue without the mediation of
antiquarians or art historians. But what was this new kind
of value to be found in experiencing non-Greek art?
The emergence of “age-value” at the beginning of the
20th century seems to have consolidated this new shift in
worship in a way that is still felt in museums today. In his
influential essay “The Modern Cult of Monuments,” Alois
Riegl, an Austrian art historian, parses out the kinds of values that monuments hold. Riegl distinguishes between “artistic value”, “historical value” and “age value.” The first two
are self explanatory, but the third one is a new kind of value
embedded in idols. Riegl defines age-value as the result of
nature working over time to disintegrate an object. Age-value is found in “the dissolution of completeness as a symbol
of an equally necessary and lawful decay.” Age-value is special, in that “it claims to address everyone.” Age-value can
be defined by its immediate accessibility to perception. It
33
embodies “an immediate emotional effect which depends
on neither scholarly knowledge nor historical education
for its satisfaction.” As such, “it can be appreciated even by
people whose minds are otherwise absorbed completely
with constant worries about their physical well-being and
the material production of goods.” It’s for an everyone, or
for an us. “Even the most limited peasant will be able to distinguish between an old church tower and a new one.” If
art-value and historical-value are outside of the object but
accessed through it by the specialized few, age-value is in
some way embedded within it as an experience available
to all.
Project Mosul, an electronic preservation project aimed
at the protection of cultural heritage, has been digitally restoring the artifacts damaged by IS, creating 3D models based on
photos taken before the objects were damaged. It goes without
saying that a 3D rendering of an ancient object, though perhaps
more useful in many way, does not hold the same value that the
original object has, even if both are representations. Though a
3D model of the repaired Lamassu will live online forever, it will
not be able to guard the gate where its paws still stand.
Breaking an object in slow motion on camera might
be one way to make its age-value fully visible. Walter Benjamin described aura as “the distance of the gaze that awakens in the object looked at.” He could have been thinking
of age-value as he described the decline of aura in industrialised society, with its mass produced objects of newness.
Just as Benjamin’s aura can only be grasped at the moment
of its historical erosion, the same contradictory logic falls
on the object imbued with age-value. While art-value and
historical-value are dependent on the preservation of the
object embedded within their discourses, age-value grows
the more the object that holds it disintegrates. This is the
value in the aesthetic of ruin, in flattened stones everywhere where neither art nor history find any value. In the
IS videos, it is what is meant to disappear from one frame
to the next. It is the power that idols hold that is most difficult to destroy, the icon that’s made of their rubble.
34
JUSTICE IN ONE COUNTRY
REVIEW
Justice in One Country
BY
MALCOLM HARRIS
So-called left-wing Zionism is white nationalism by another name
Michael Walzer, The Paradox of Liberation. Yale University Press. 2015. 192 pages.
MICHAEL
Walzer is an unlikely nationalist. Where many political philosophers, especially
on the center-left, tend to think of nation-states as temporary and unfortunately parochial compromises with universal ideas of justice, for Walzer they’re at the center of
what it is to form a just community. “To give up the state,”
he writes in his most famous book Spheres of Justice, “is
to give up any effective self-determination.” But countries
have disappointed the public intellectual. In his new book
The Paradox of Liberation, Walzer wants to know why the
secular and secure states we were promised in the 20th
century have failed to appear. This, he laments, is not our
beautiful end to history, but a stumble on the way there.
In the current dying generation of American leftwing political philosophers, few have engaged with what
passes as the American lettered public as much as Walzer has. Starting at the age of 27, he logged over 50 years
teaching at Harvard and Princeton. He spent more than
three decades as the editor of the socialist journal Dissent,
and remains a contributing editor at the New Republic.
Add in dozens of books and hundreds of public essays
and academic articles, and he’s as close to a true public
intellectual American social democrats are going to get.
But since 9/11, his support in principle for the War on
Terror (and in particular for the invasion of Afghanistan)
surprised readers who had taken him for just another anti-imperialist lefty. Instead, he scolded the left for failing
to oppose political Islam and “blaming America first.”
Close readers of his literary output might not have
found this strange. For decades Walzer has been committed to the nation-state as the only plausible structure
for the communal exercise of ethical behavior. Universal
standards sound nice, he says, but trying to get everyone
to agree is more trouble than it’s worth. In his conception,
a country is like a family, tied to one another by common
heritage and willing to tolerate, admit, and assimilate the
occasional outsider. Rejecting a Rawlsian one-size-fitsall model of just governance, Walzer believes that only
as nations can groups of people agree on a hierarchy of
goods and distribute them fairly. And as nations of people
35
MALCOLM HARRIS
self-determine into nation-states, they’ll tend toward secular democracy as the best way to incorporate different
beliefs within the community.
In The Paradox of Liberation, Walzer is curious about
why some countries seem to be going in reverse. He focuses on three nations (Algeria, India, Israel) where an original commitment to secular democracy is losing ground
to a renewed religious fundamentalism. From these cases, he generalizes a pattern and the titular paradox: To
liberate a nation, to bring it into being, leaders need to
call upon a common heritage and historical values, but
to progress into secular democracy, they need to create a
new, modern citizenry, one dedicated to a certain level of
procedural pluralism. If their dedication to secularism is
too inconsistent, if leaders lapse into easy appeals to religious nationalism, they’re liable to bring about a return of
the repressed in the form of right-wing Orthodox Jews or
Islamic fundamentalists or militant conservative Hindus.
When Walzer writes of a nation of people, he doesn’t
just mean a country’s population. For him, a nation is a
historical community, an in-group that shares a relationship to a territory. National belonging is communicated
by blood, but there’s no way to test for it; it’s something
you have to feel and believe in. Throughout his books,
Walzer doesn’t outright say that everyone should go back
to where they belong, but the model he has developed
over decades suggests they probably should, and if they
do, they should be welcomed back by their “own” nation-state. At the very least, he claims, every country owes
its minorities the right of safe exit and return to their native land. This formulation echoes Victorian-era ideas of
race and nationality, in which blood links one not only to
land but to a national cause. In George Eliot’s novel Daniel
Deronda, for example, an English gentleman discovers his
hidden Jewish roots and decides to follow a vague proto-Zionist move “East.” Or Eliot’s poem The Spanish Gypsy, where a princess discovers she’s also Gypsy royalty and
attempts to bring her nation into existence in its “home-
land,” the African jungle. Although Eliot’s narratives solicit sympathy, the idea that people have a place on the earth
they “belong” according to their identity is as dangerous
as it is inconsistent.
Walzer explicitly endorses this idea of national-territorial belonging. In 1983’s Spheres of Justice, he writes,
“Nations look for countries because in some deep sense
they already have countries: the link between people and
land is a crucial feature of national identity.” That “some
deep sense” is the vital element that ties people and territory, but it’s hard to explain without recourse to Victorian fictions about blood-based yearnings for homelands.
Buying into these narratives allows Walzer to imagine, for
example, that the Convention Concerning the Exchange
of Greek and Turkish Populations after World War I was
proper, even desirable, despite resulting in the forced
displacement of two million people to territories where
they had no historical or present ties. “What else are such
states for?” he asks. But only a page later Walzer argues in
general against forced transfer of citizens across national
borders, implying the he regards the aforementioned deportation of Macedonian Muslims to Turkey and Anatolian Christians to Greece as something else entirely. Here
Walzer conceives of national belonging as a function of
religious identity, not by name, but as a nebulous ethnic-territorial link.
If you want to stay somewhere you don’t belong,
Walzer thinks the people living there probably do owe
you something like hospitality, but not as much as you
owe them. To describe the process of assimilation, Walzer
uses a shocking metaphor. The state with immigrants, he
writes, “is like a family with live-in servants.”
That is not an attractive image, for a family with live-in
servants is is--inevitably, I think--a little tyranny. The
principles that rule in the household are those of kinship
and love. They establish the underlying pattern of mutuality and obligation, of authority and obedience. The
servants have no proper place in that pattern, but they
have to be assimilated to it. Thus, in the pre-modern literature on family life, servants are commonly described
36
JUSTICE IN ONE COUNTRY
as children of a special sort … when servants come to
be seen as hired workers, the great household begins
its slow decline. The pattern of living-in is gradually reversed, erstwhile servants seek households of their own.
To be clear: this isn’t written as a description of oppression, but as a model of how things should be. It’s hard
to say what’s most wrong with this idea of the national
family and its racialized servants, but Walzer gives a hint
with another couple misguided books. In Interpretation
and Social Criticism and The Company of Critics, Walzer
outlines his conception of the “connected critic”—the social critic who interrogates his own society’s flaws from a
position near the center of his nation. These are the figures who put a check on nationalist zeal, with special attention to the fate of people on the periphery. They share
a common conflict, possessing a legitimate and faithful tie
to the nation, as well as a critical drive to question it.
Radicals, who want to pull up rather than replant
a nation’s roots, are not connected critics. The connected critic’s targets are his own people, not an outside oppressor. Those whose fate is not shared by the rest of the
nation cannot be connected critics unless they’re able to
stake a national claim. One who Walzer names is Breyten
Breytenbach, an Afrikaner poet who was exiled and imprisoned after he married a French woman of Vietnamese ancestry, violating apartheid codes against inter-racial
fraternization. But what claim does Breytenbach have to
the territory of South Africa? Does he not “belong” in
Europe where he was exiled? If he is a connected critic,
then forming an ancestral nation is as easy as a few generations of colonial settlement. Walzer confirms as much:
“The Afrikaners,” he writes, “have become one of Africa’s
tribes, hybrid like all the others.” Breytenbach’s claim is
not only legitimate, but as a white victim of apartheid, he
is uniquely connected to the nation.
Why, when looking for an exemplary critic of apartheid South Africa, would Walzer go out of his way to pick
a white guy? The reason is simple: Black people can’t be
connected critics. He writes in Interpretation and Social
Criticism:
Marginality has often been a condition that motivates
criticism and determines the critic’s characteristic tone
and appearance. It is not, however, a condition that
makes for disinterest, dispassion, open-mindedness, or
objectivity… Marginal men and women are in but not
wholly of their societies. The difficulties they experience
are not the difficulties of detachment but of ambiguous
connection. Free them from those difficulties and they
may well lose the reasons they have for joining the critical enterprise. Or, criticism will look very different than
it looks when it is worked up on the margins by “alienated intellectuals,” or members of subject classes or oppressed minorities, or even outcastes or pariahs.
For Walzer, a critic without full social rights within a
nation cannot truly do critique, because their objections
are insufficiently separate from their personal interests. It
is too easy for a black person to criticize apartheid South
Africa; they aren’t connected to it. This is a white-supremacist inversion of W.E.B DuBois’s “double consciousness,”
in which the marginal are compelled to see everything
(including and especially themselves) through the eyes
of their oppressors. DuBois saw this as part of a national
claim to America: “He simply wishes to make it possible
for a man to be both a Negro and an American without
being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having
the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face.” Double consciousness is an affliction, but also a second sight
into the nation’s center and its relationship to the margins.
For Walzer, however, a connected critic must be detached
from the state (he must not be a member of the ruling
party, for example) and also “detached from his own marginality.” But in a world where, as André 3000 puts it,
“across cultures, darker people suffer most,” detaching is
easier for some than for others.
What is the nature of a national claim if the children
of settler-colonists like Breytenbach have one but indigenous North Americans do not? Returning to Walzer’s
notion of the “deep sense” of connection to a country, it’s
clear how it might be easier to develop a deep sense of be-
MALCOLM HARRIS
longing to a country where you and your ancestors have
been treated like equal members than if you’ve been enslaved, murdered, raped, robbed, humiliated, and terrorized for centuries. The Walzerian solution might very well
be a Garveyite “Back to Africa” move, but according to
Walzer’s formulation, the children of white colonists have
a—if not the—legitimate claim to those countries too.
Breytenbach has
a claim to South
Africa because the
Afrikaners “are
there to stay,” and
so too, presumably,
are the Mormons.
Reading The Paradox of Liberation with this earlier
work, it becomes clear that Walzer’s “deep sense” of ancestral attachment to territory is the basis for his entire
ethical system. Without this intangible link, there could
be no spheres in which to pursue justice. All we would
be left with are spheres of domination, where claimless
groups fight to maintain their hold on territory though
force. Of course, in such a scenario, the dominant groups
would probably invent historical rights as part of their
37
ideological justification, as is the conqueror’s wont. How
then, do we distinguish a legitimate ancestral claim from,
say, Germany’s invasion of Austria, or Russia’s invasion of
Ukraine, or Japan’s invasion of Korea, or the Mormon settlement of Wo’tééneihí?
The Mormons are a good example: Before settling
the land that would become known as Utah, they had been
driven from the eastern states despite an ancestral attachment to New York, where their prophets had buried golden plates with the word of God millennia before. Luckily,
in the mid 19th-century, God awarded his wandering disciples a large parcel of incorporated (but not unoccupied)
desert land. Only 150 years later, how would Walzer adjudicate a dispute between the Mormons of Utah and the
children of the land’s indigenous population? Both have
claims to North America that stretch back thousands of
years—one is very obviously a modern fabrication, but
no doubt Mormons feel nonetheless a “deep sense” of attachment to the territory. Here Walzer gives us a geopolitical rather than a historical standard: Breytenbach has a
claim to South Africa because the Afrikaners “are there to
stay,” and so too, presumably, are the Mormons.
Walzer puts a lot of faith in the nation. In The Paradox of Liberation, he clarifies his position on nationalism
versus the left: “What was probably most important in
the failure of Marxist internationalism was the widely
shared belief that only sovereignty guaranteed the cultural survival of national and religious groups (and perhaps
also the physical survival of their members), and only sovereignty could bring full equality in the already existing
society of states.” It’s crystal clear that Walzer’s primary
agenda is conservative, to maintain and justify what are, in
effect, racial nations. Within these nations, it’s up to connected critics to push the community toward just dealings
with outsiders. In Walzer’s model, most people go to or
already live where they belong, and the rest choose to rely
on the decency of their hosts.
As a work of modern history, Paradox of Liberation
38
is thin and cursory. The sections on the dynamics of Algerian and Indian liberation struggles are worthless. As
a work of political philosophy, the book is only notable
because it points so directly to the contradiction at the
foundation of Walzer’s thought, a contradiction perhaps
best expressed in the Israeli flag. The disappointment at
Paradox’s core is Israel’s failure in Walzer’s estimation to
fulfil its secular promise. “Zionism was,” he writes, “at its
center and in the years of its greatest achievements, overwhelmingly a secular project.” Now, authoritarian-minded Orthodox Jews are insurgent within the state, and they
seek to replace democracy with religious law. Despite
setting out to establish a just, secular, democratic Jewish
nation, that trajectory is now in danger.
But how genuine was this possibility in the first
place? If the “Jewish” in Jewish state doesn’t refer to Talmudic law, then what exactly does it mean? Under Walzer’s formulation, it refers to the race (in the Victorian
sense) of Jews. Israel is our homeland, to which I and
all other Jews have an ancestral claim. But not all Jewish
claims are equal; the Israeli state has pursued a policy of
population suppression among Ethiopian Jews by means
of non-consensual sterilization. Racial states are based
on stories that are always already entangled in histories
of colonialism and wealth extraction justified by white
supremacy, and this has affected the legitimacy (that is,
plausibility) of every modern national claim. The Zionist
fiction, that the race of Jews is entitled to the territory of
Israel, can never be the foundation for a secular state. Racialism is a particularly pernicious form of faith.
As a social-democratic connected critic of the Zionist project, Walzer places himself between Israel’s aggressive conservatives and left-wing solidarity with Palestinian liberationists. He endorses Israel’s right to exist,
while questioning the “by any means available” that usually follows. But a close reading of his theoretical work
reveals a rightward collapse in Walzer’s thought, indeed
in all left-wing Zionist thought. Without the messianic
JUSTICE IN ONE COUNTRY
narrative (which Walzer rejects), Israel is a Jewish state in
the modern mode. There will always be non-Jews in Israel—as Walzer cites in Paradox, an early Jewish criticism
of Zionism was that observant Jews could only operate
the state’s machinery six days a week. But Israel as such
simply cannot assimilate non-Jews as equal citizens. It is
condemned, like all of Walzer’s gated ancestral nations, to
continue as a “little tyranny,” a theocracy of blood, myth,
and guns.
Walzer misses the religious aspect of ethno-nationalism in an inexcusable fashion. In the postscript to Paradox he takes on the United States, which, in his telling,
never had a national liberation movement because (Mormons aside) there was no ancestral claim. America’s was
a political, rather than a social revolution, which made its
secularism especially resilient. “The self-confident activism of the new Americans led to a very harsh engagement
with the indigenous peoples of the continent,” he understates, “But it set close limits on the internal harshness of
the secular-religious encounter.” Why, without a religious
conflict, couldn’t secular democratic America assimilate
the indigenous people? For the same reason Ethiopian-Israeli is a contradiction: As a self-consciously white nation,
the United States could only ever include native people as
“live-in servants” on their own ancestral land.
The possibility of a secular and democratic Jewish
state is so hard to incorporate into any consistent system
of ethics that Walzer takes it as premise and builds from
there. It’s not a bad strategy: if you can’t resolve a contradiction, bury it in the foundation. But the consequence
is that Michael Walzer has developed decades of theory
on indefensible ground. It’s as if he constructed a whole
system of ethics predicated on the Roma nation’s claim
to the African jungle. In the name of so-called left-wing
Zionism, Walzer has attempted to smuggle white nationalism into the left. But, as Walzer himself might remind us,
the Zionist claim to the left is only valid if they’re “here to
stay.” Let this not be the case.
Susan J. Barnes, The Rothko Chapel: An Act of Faith (Menil Foundation, 1989)